COVER

 PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGN

Live from somewhere—

anywhere— oh shit— help us—

Bring finales! Brattling swords!

Bleaker prospects!

Blunt force!

Window-less in this theater

(fastidious merchandizer

of malodorous

meanderings of

malformed leeches +

rambling thoughts: sunflower wrecks

worm-like wax

the weeks

of usury travel filled w/ extortions

+ columnar falsehoods

+ colloquial distractions

denting the armor’s thick skin.

The fields are gnawing

w/ cold

+ we have arrived

at the superfluous

structure of failed

dialogue (lighter fluid

mistaken for

compassion.

Check the gritting teeth (the last self-portrait

the dash crash rabble running up

tabs + talk-talk—

the world’s a word

too expansive for the small cuts

on my finger

but it’s still

a world evolving.

To pull the line from the syllables

I see bobbing

on the horizon

half-sleep

my fish mouth

finds dangling in the brackish

swimming pool

of my hopes where I forward

matters displaced by a loose survival

mechanism.

The levity of simple breezes

(new shelter “an eyelash lining

a cheek like a prayer”—

is the morbidity

that comes from breathing for one more minute.

FIFTY-NINE MINUTES

The next campaign is a wave—

a wanton window

into the old century’s viciousness.

As we arrive

the same omnipresent questions

once worn in brocades

on the chest remain (the republic.

We still continue

to fall slowly into embellishment +

the stains of years

punctuating the decorated gangway

of hallucinations

in faulty promise.

Our stooped shoulders

form a means to an end—

a canvas of scars penned

w/ the kinds of anxieties

only night words can bring.

To comprehend

creeping loudness

+ sickness colored-in at the edges—

the hollow skins + parentage

singing in glorious techno-babble.

It’s all pulled from

the demagogue garbage collection.

It’s pushing along

malignancies in a pandemic of papercuts.

We love the romance

we fabricate under false justice

embedded in constituency—

we lay disarray like art into

ad campaigns

+ re-design our vessels

into pigeon calls— an electric bleakness.

We are a heated condition

of tiny hand

blowhards brandishing hate as commodity—

dressed up as affection for the consumer—

a remuneration

collected in votes.

We now build

simple fishbowls

in seconds +

new fevers + seraphim

w/their plucked-out wings

(cracked + violent.

We melt into strangers.

We step up

the soft tissue wounds

conceived in sewn-up

languages.

Onward we are the march

of clipped wings—

steered by a lost navigator

+ we become inquiries + a blueprint

for the new mourning

where the faces

we hang in the closet

fail to ever settle our overrun life.

We continue to nurture

iniquities running

up the clock face—

waiting out the period

for fifty-nine minutes

to end.

DEVELOPMENT

I hold the dear brilliance of my shining anxiety

in the waiting room: familiar line in tow:

I am teetering (don’t slip

office: a familiar worship room: I plant

my irritation in an upright chair I can trace

w/ my eyes closed:

Roughly: an affirmation on a coffee mug

is towing a familiar freeway +

the desire for the first night: a kitchen song

latched in a moribund envelope of necessity:

into spin cycle high-end programming

for all of my imagined dramas:

the violence of skins

gate closing/a protection:

unspent measure of molar grinding

The decay of my teeth: the sculpting

of dereliction + sporting cardigans:

I imagine a small balloon

of sex nests next to me slumbering down:

(two lines I skipped I yield to false images

a million miles: a love a silence of desire

that needs to shriek yes: progress