surrealestate

responde responde is god’s word- people mistake it for man’s. at five a.m. on a tuesday we became responde. the bus could’ve killed me-- that was responde. the gun-grey silence of softened pavement was responde. one guy yelled, that’s what you get for speeding. we pushed the fender. it didn’t resist. there was a man driving to work who didn’t stop. we watched him fade into the mist, sliding like a black alligator. responde! god only knows peace, perfection. never innocence-- the fist of time is not young. i keep my silence, i say no responde. god is not the one who must speak.

poem for anne oh kill it, kill it! kill it! you lift your skirts: you dance your joyous pirouettes on top of your chair. i’ve done everything i can, anne. i filled the well you drowned in, i muffled your death in sand. kill it! oh, your voice indelible, your vindictiveness pageant sweet. you’ve been dead for years. what pity, dancing anne, brought you alive again in my eyes? what pity--kill it!--brought you into my home, smiling down like some detergent commercial? i’ve done everything i can, anne. your heart is a clenched fist next to my heart. i boarded up the windows where you used to live inside me;

The Biggest Thing In the Universe "My dear," he said, "you'd best come here." and with a face all terse he announced to me cosmology had found the Biggest Thing in the Universe. "That's great," said I and with a sigh I added: "How'd they find in all of space that tiny trace of your momma's fat behind?"

bethlehem Fuck this. Let's go disco in Bethlehem where the dry grasses will soak up my blood. I'm done with speaking this sour smoker's poetry, done with syphoning the tar out of my own soul: let's go down to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born and the wine is plentiful and cheap. Let me find myself in a corner, along the side of a road heaving like a fish, tearing myself out of the sand on meathooks and worms. Let me find myself without having to look. Let me find myself in Bethlehem, disco of our Lord, and above us and above all that exists, let that strobe light flutter like a single distant star about to implod

dharma the day after the Christmas lights came down, I saw holes from the twin spear-ends of my ladder frozen into the ground. Quietly I rejoiced: all mine, this spider-bite into the thick brown neck of the earth.

killer sing cold long down dark song. forget you? never do. But incandescently-- magnificentatentically-- true blue through.

two symbologists die, fall in love, and turn into metaphors on a rainy day in january all the bits and pieces of you peeling back like foam peels from an ocean, block of you taken slowly out of the hole in me, finding the shibboleth we built in shambles, no longer the fascist temple of love and no love, a pile of dirt and ashes, a forgotten feeling: your hand's ghost is the last departed, showing up in fog on window panes as a ghost of myself, a lorn and lost form barely alive on a fat square of rain, as I am neither bit nor piece, and your fragments are home only in me.

I drove over them at night, the hills with their pregnant bellies: swollen and prepared to birth the know-nots and shriveled monsters of memory that haunt the middle of this state. What groans the past gives don't scare me, but there is this. A cold breath of air, a handful of leaves, a wolf hovering by the interstate, his haunches high dots of bone. A bus ride at midnight, and underfoot the hills murmuring protests and spreading their bony knees. A guttural string of pushes, infinite with sour pasts and the ghosts who claimed them. This I fear; the hill music.

Gone for too long, she said: gone into the silence of grey sheets. You and I slept for years and yet! and we remember the blue starched sky, the powdered skin of ladies promenading on the beach. You and I remember before the silence of grey sheets. Gone, she said: gone to earth like foxes on a winter night. We were bold and russet too. We dashed to earth when the ceiling quaked and hid from the searching lights of bad jobs, taxes, landlords afraid to rent to we, a couple of kids. We have had hard lives but we remember going to earth like foxes on a winter night. God: she said. Gone for too long! Remember how the cold held o