It's really a gigantic amount of self-control for me
not to cough.
I'm not used to it.
And I'm not succeeding at it.
Dear Aaron in South Africa, et cetera.
Installment number one: condition.
You are on a bus.
There's no speed like the present.
Yes, well, you might think.
Or you might think of the man at your side,
spooling his clutch of fingers in tight, cursive loops
through the slate air.
Or your own knees, you might think
of them balled up in your jeans like the understudy waiting
for someone to twist an ankle.
A paradigm shift like the sound of a creaking duck.
But on this instance, you cannot think at all.
Technology requires great effort.
On this occasion, you conform to the accepted guidelines.
You accept the guidelines without thinking.
If someone were to offer you food, would you take it?
What is the purpose of a toy?
What costs is the outcome, not the effort.
A woman who is not a geisha pats a garden of white powder
onto her crimped, bloomless face.
She is practicing.
She has practiced.
Installment number two: investment.
In Dallas, where the lights never dim or illuminate,
land flat as a doorbell, unanswered, water poison,
but mercifully tasteless.
Doubt unveils, veers inches into exposure over the faint neon
twitch of horizon like the six-masted Chinese junket
you dreamt of in a hotel room you
had no intention of paying for.
This ardor, so many iridescent fish
bellied onto the sand, red tide unkempt,
warranted, standing with anvil feet on your neck.
This persistent black cat, or affection, or railway station,
things clatter and converse, ties and spikes
littered with speed, with unopened mail,
where the train doesn't stop, doesn't
slow, filters and hurdles, it's one blind,
inclusive eye dagger towards the night.
Installment number three: property value.
Thunder muffled as the sound of spinning, a certain livid amber
whir unnoticed until its absence.
What is the difference between radiation and radiance?
My most insistent tremor, my most tremulous ruler,
as in measure, in inches, or letters, or hands.
Hands in memory flutter smaller, don't you
think, than hands that tap the forehead absently, the absent
forehead?
Today, the sun is on your side of the world.
Do you get enough sleep?
Memory can't be jarred into radiance.
And with no one to catch you in the lie, you make yourself,
again, utterly human.
And what is the difference between proper and property,
between missing and gone?
Every day seems to adhere to the same forgetful alphabet.
And will we ever, my dear unsigned
lease, my miter box, my orange cat,
will we ever tire of waking up?
Installment number four: inheritance.
The sound of one caught in the penetrating green illness
of compulsion or propulsion, the hum sound
of hospital fluorescence in a body,
otherwise desirous of flowers in the morning.
The phone rings off the hook as if it could ring off the hook,
as if saying hello were the same thing as greeting a body.
Tell the slant and tell it true, the true slant
is your leg, penetrated by brash blue light, sunlight
without heat, full of the numb expanse of sky expanded,
as a leg expands in infection, as a leg refusing to succumb
to arthroscopic suggestion.
When you said faint, you meant fret, and when you said meek,
you meant honeycombed or residual,
as a person is residual who won't leave
the bedside of a body asleep hours ago, a body you inherited
as you might inherit sleep.
Installment number five, earned respite.
Insofar as love, my dear extreme Pueblo, my fraught sensor,
my dim, necessary fear, dear.
Insofar as antidote promises antidote.
Tremor and terror both in the window,
through the window, where the body ends
and the world's body begins.
A slant light indicates day where a scant night resists me.
Wrists bared like plastic neon dolls,
the auction table crowds into my parts.
What is there to say, really?
The bird picks and guts at one spot under her wing,
beak swollen with color the way raindrops become
fat and fallopian, the way the day wanes slowly,
as if without resistance.
Isn't cloudiness a kind of inherent eclipse?
And don't we use our eyes like bludgeons, like vacuum cleaners
or tire irons?
This day pocked with tiny, spicy failures,
gingered gasps hushed with their own bounded selves.
Dear antidote, as if the yellow gauzy membrane of debris that
coats my body like a body could shudder, could remove,
could by excess alone retract, recant, fall away.
Installment number six, it costs.
More than, more than, more than terse teeth
or obtuse, nubile remorse, so many stutters.
Adolescence incomplete as panties round knobby ankles.
More than breathless sleaking up against, nibbling the body down
to capable necessity.
There is a toll.
Dear alphabetical amphetamine, dear hydrangea, dear artichoke.