Instructions
This is how you stay together:
tap your fingers against something 
inane and ambiguous, something
inanimate

Linger in your memory
and let it whisper
against your skin like the silhouette
of a man in a photograph, a shadow
dark and drab and compromised

Pry out your language
shovel, pick-axe, bothersome hatchet-
any tool will do.
Just levy that stick and raise the roof
you are up on top of,
gleaming.

Some days will not be easy.
Some days won’t even be right.

Shoop, shoop
doo wah diddy
yakety yak
don’t talk back


This is how you stay together, this is how it stays so long:
don’t depend on the fragile 
vocabulary built from silence
Don’t break out the bricks until
the cavity lets loose the gizzards:
heart, liver, anus and other visceral
organs
Rough, tough, tangled firm

Lay down against your lions, contrary
Let the drift outlast, lie fallow

Shoop, shoop
doo wah diddy
yakety yak
don’t talk back


This is the record you make:
of an event, of a smolder, of any simple 
stilted sweep of the hip to a beat
Solid, unsanctioned 
in tiny rooms with little sounds rasping against shrunk-up stones.
Your heart cannot get bigger, only
it does.

You bet you would
You bet he would
You bet the sky won’t be blue
He bets it will,  he bets 
he won’t, he bets
you would


Shoop, shoop
doo wah diddy
yakety yak
don’t talk back


He does it,
you do it,
loudmouthed,
in spite of each
other.
09.24.2009