The Life I Want

In the red garden

Above the buried bird

December’s ever worsening throat

Dirties our whispering

The day 

Is just beginning

To be winter

We’re only just starting

To be old

So much newness

To throw our dumbness

Around in like lambs

Now I have to go do something

With anger in it 

Years pass

Our particles persist

As they must, rearranged

Into many important pains

One day 

We run out of tiredness

So we make do with sleeping

In just the sighs our raincoats make

One day we run out of sleeping

So we make do with whispering

Back the thunder our raincoats make

Rumble rumble

Goes the butterfly

In the giant attic 

Of the underpants. Imagine

Our embarrassment

Its ancientness

Armless

Comes nighttime to bring us more birds

A javelina in the garbage 

Which we frighten

Now we’ve about almost made love

Back into a mammal let’s pretend

That this is how words once were

One time I stop on the stairs

The reasons are obscure

My hands are as dirty as songs

People come from everywhere to hear

Saturday

Look at my daughter

who is the living

Starlings

you have sad news today

which is all one really

needs to have

Outside our window rage

the windows of the aged

cluttered 

like the stomach

of Geppetto’s whale 

The curtains and the trees

look almost alive 

The sea green metallic

colored Cutlass Ciera 

1985 Holiday Coupe

with unique vinyl roof

She takes my hand 

which will rot

so interestingly

Let’s have science eyes today

which means kind

For example

here is a man

The man is an idiot

His atoms are old 

and hard, like rain

His earlobes 

are soft as evenings

Daddy

I wasn’t asleep

I was having an idea

with nothing inside

Google the moon

is following us around

Examine sunrise

for sign of fever

Danger

to imagine the earth

turning

her father turning

stupider, terror 

of the dumb animal

of distance

She buries her fists

in its mane    

Ride she says 

whispering 

There are violets in the air

There is error

There are gnats

We are trapped

in immensity together

Ride

The Ancestor; December

A man mistakes his friend for crows

So many things are true

Good night good night good night

There’s no such thing as repetition

The notebook is open the lamp burnt out

The winter is dangerous as always

The window is dangerous as all joy is

Count the pennies count the movements

Of the bowels, of the people

There’s no such thing

As repetition I am drunk 

And I am not 

I am not I am not I am not Blessed 

Art thou who inside me has formed 

So many openings and holes

(So the notes

Of the asher yatzar fall 

Like disappointing pears

On the chore list: finish this prayer

On the page: winter streetlight

I’m a failure like the horizon

Asher yatzar: blessing to be recited each time the excretory functions are used