A Hopeful Young Man on a Job Interview

I’m broke and eating chocolate ice cream out of a novelty helmet
I’m sweating because I’m wearing a sweater in the heat
to cover up the insane poison ivy on

Just that instant
when thinking becomes
too much

Drive-in movie theater, Merrillville, Indiana, 1989

Field of Dreams on a screen bigger than every building in Merrillville,  

my brother and I eating chocolate sundaes from mini Dairy Queen

In Praise of Hands

I miss hands. I miss their flimsy, awkward quality –

the way one looks when offered while still searching

for a reason. I miss being young, lining up after the

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In the middle of
the street is everyone
you know.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost. 

Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
 

There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit

I made a call
and I lived. 
It was the longest
life of my life.

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

One of your axolotls has eaten the other
and every week you clean its twenty-litre tank
of cannibal excrement.

i look like eurotrash
in your red sweatshirt
and blue sweat shorts but

tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes

A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.

doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
                        otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her

there was no fiddle, but let’s say there was.

Most planets are probably so
much quieter than ours.

I'm waiting for influenza in Virginia. Or the taste of something metal.

Tracey, what am I meant to do with all this shit?

Party snacks
platters of them
orange and puffed up
Moloko rasping from a corner

          there’s an awareness of space, of bug spray

Girls with blue hands

I
Psychopathology
in the woods
Naked snow
Cold, bare thighs
keep the snow white.
Tie around a tree
Hide your ruby
ring in the dirt
Rub your hair
against the

Why Everything Is Everything

          for my daughter

Because earth is spinning
     and spinning and circles
a yellow star. Because
     gases burning, flaring
above the poles we spin