Thursday, August 19, 2010

Published on "No Tell Motel" (2008)

--for Huidobro



I was born at the age of eight on the cut of no Christ,

gin and tonic met the equator of my hairless pines.

Under the geraniums of my Lugan piano, a cuddy

beneath bergs, I had the blank stare of a victim,

a relentless bicycle. I breathed in my next blind

father, upon a trapeze bar. I loved the daylight,

the veil of my grandmother's hat. My mother spoke

with larks coming from her mouth, she embroidered

buttons to my breast. On the first day, I asked the larks

to unbeak these buttons to show the nudes of the gallery

that I could collect the broken shells of rational hearts.

Then I created my tongue and braided my grave.

A poem is something that never is, but ought to be.

A poem is something that never has been, that never can be.


I constructed my development from my grandmother's

slips, the Russian tombs, and the retinal failures.

Speeding gold chessboards of sight: perhaps they

preferred disconnection so as not to see the disconnected;

perhaps when disengaged, the last sigh of vision delivers

untangled tropes. One should write in a language

that is not the mother tongue. If I didn't do something crazy

at least once a year I'd go crazy.
I looked at my fists, angled

as accordions, a horse upon each girl, extracted from the stain

of sleep, the illusion of savagery. Where my tongue slipped

across my father's glass and burned me; where phone cords

and moons each end the summer, a blister of stone, I,

a soldier of children. All of my throats the planets, money wired

to each snowy renewal of skin, more skin, all the skin I could grow.

I drank the hunters, the waterfalls of bile, each hammer of my selves

a bitter astronomy. There is a secret to my vertigo, my only fish scales

in a sea of hankerchiefs. I was born at the age of eight on the cut

of no Christ, gin and tonic met the equator of my hairless pines.

True poems are fires; its conquests lit with shivers of pleasure or pain.