Tithing

This building’s architecture
resembles my mouth how it closes
around my tongue, makes room and echoes

The hollowed arches, vaulted ceilings
I’ll bet this place is expensive
to heat in the winter. Words left in my mouth

stifle in worship
which we will colloquially call “distilled silence.”
From behind my whiskey face I ask

if you like this year’s vintage of your martyr’s
restraint. The way my jawbones break,
reset, become reliquaries. The arches of the roof

how many of you died to raise them? Is this worship,
to make me the hypocrite, my mouth's roof
built of all the words that I buried

in the tomb of my throat?
Jesus. What it must cost to heat this place.

Tourist, to a store clerk. Amitchka; 1996.

We burned them
their beautiful language
all those words for snow
burned their tongues, eyes, and ears
blind men in a snowstorm have
only their hands and
Snow melts quickly. There is no way home.

And I suppose you think an apology enough
if it’s written on a 75 cent postcard.

Greyscale Rending Of Habit

I grew up holding tight
my wrists, out of habit

to keep my hands quiet.
I grew older, and needed

something to hold them
for me, when I couldn’t

keep still my bones

inside. White

and black for balance,
bound tight at all times.

Fieldwork

The cut worm forgives the plow.
Drive your cart over the bones of the dead.
William Blake


In the time of your
harvest: Your
plow. Their fields,
their bones. Your
cart, your
seeds. Their forgiveness.

Now fallow fields, cut
worms hallowed
in celebration and hunger.

Build your
cities, turn forward
drive over and on
into the night. The dead
will understand.

Commuted

Muted footfalls
soled in flexible cleats

like declawed soccer shoes,
longing for the rigid spikes

they never had. They make do
with friction, itself insecure

and poorly miming
a simple machine of violence:

the deathgrip tenacity of multiple punctures.
I think on this for a week

while my right eye is bloodshot,
the other still white. Things

that resemble teeth
too soft to bite, not cleaving

but cleaving to. A grip intimate
at the level of molecules.

I call my right eye
my Rage eye, like I’ve that virus

in the movie that makes
people tear each other’s throats,

but I don’t tear.
I just hold on, running.

Souvenir

The Holy Mary’s Face seen
in cheese sandwiches in those trees
caged within concentric iron circles
in sidewalks in a metonymy of forests
on a dirty window in Hartford, thinking
of those consecrated dirty fingers

and was it mischief or desperation,
did they solve something
at the intersection of God
and loneliness. Is it this, the why
that calls crowds back each day
despite their own doubt praying

the next time they came back
they’d see it too in a Reformation
of eyes finally able to see God
without asking where to look?

Music For Marcel Duchamp

the waiting slits open each minute, protracts
the angles of incidence from the emptiness

inside-a portrait of knives
in sound, edges

of others’ lives Dopplering past;
A fountainhead of envy drowns me.

I will be seen a man with something to say
but cut off, as in conversation.