"My Daughter Shout Pouch."
Shout pouch fashion, a most beautiful necklace
of human ears on a rawhide string.
Over 52 Mexican men arrested since Sheriff Barton's killing,
20 left alive in custody, want to look sleepy and rich.
Still night across this house, left
it stripped of claims, a stone mix for industry.
It's getting harder to say, no, I won't buy your magazines.
Are peddlers being pissed?
Such a quiet Earth, distributed as we are.
Buildings echo one another across the office park.
Desires do react, draw doors on everyone.
You break space and enfold it, cut through the sea as a 12
sail clipper, I said.
Be the sea to eel, virus, gaze.
Swirl into a bowl of ocean for what was said.
Your shoulder remembers itself from its impressions.
Grass, then air, then Coloma, then Sacramento, then us.
Sweat, straw smell, heavy stage curtains,
not what was said in the nose or the good foot
settles on the plastic bits.
Cheap, pretty, bright red beads loosed.
The dead lean into a parade above our roof.
Roll a disaster.
This way, Los Angeles, Bodie, unspecified.
Toward my stepping off the strain of new thought,
can go to your house one day.
I'll be in a state, in a lost place, in a tent city.
You will be left to talk for us, and I
will see the tree of purple flowers,
the vinyl sheet pitched for a roof, plastic gasoline jugs
with water hurried across hands.
But today, along our row of cubicles,
sun staff in the blue recycle bin
shows its walls as a slight blue coalescent plastic.
Place a jawbone on my grave.
Give something to the nuns to hold.
Have them weave your sheets.
Burn us after doing something with your piss.
But it's not that easy to step off the dock.
Manic babies in sulfur, and Mercury and stars coming.
Let Yoko Ono be curious.
Let David Byrne be alive in work.