she died this past summer; she nearly died. awakened by imaginary portrait preciocity, like something forming the heart, like a necklace of insights; it makes her feel as if she were in a straitjacket.

she pulls away from the hoi polloi of doomed, dreamlike strangeness like an echo. a sound cuts a complex swath through the world, a kind of fissure or rupture, artfully decrepit, cluttered, so close to the surface.

from the work to the life she emerges, imaginary. the phrase seems odd, active only in the discrepancy, in the register of the hyperreal.

she is too busy juggling lives and is discomfited; this is a gap that observes and records. a secret about a secret, issued from a past life; she seeks to make visible the relief she expresses. it should be dancing.

chaos has been stealthily creeping up.
a hundred year flood, a hundred year drought,
a calamitous dust storm. she won’t go
anywhere but worse.

skies blacken and scud over,
collapsing exactly like rebuilt
menaced cities.

commie reds, nazi browns, hippie greens
turning chanel bottles into molotov cocktails,
women drawing lines up the backs of their legs
so as to mimic nylons, dressing for the fight
because they have to.

nobody dares to try to hide from
a ruined sky inside a building
while it’s collapsing. they want to survive
the betrayal in the low-lying southern marshes,
slogging in the swamp.

empty solutions and body counts, peculiar urgencies; these people are going down the drain. bodiless bodies that helped (or didn’t help), references to ruins and misguided discoveries.

a gnarled tree, now hung with a reed of light slivering between drapes. an emphasis on the surfaces, the negative space that erupts; a kind of wily perversion between means and meaning, between something and nothing. a bit like a head, a bit more like a sort of generic waiting room.

we live in a moment, in the generous silence that a mouth or a scrawled word completes. this desolate landscape is naked and shivering, the people huddled in hushed tones.

i begin to see images, faces as irreducible mystery images, an abstractionist’s trifecta. a man carrying another man, drawing and redrawing a nightmare of catastrophic colorless hues of memory. at once winsome and brutal, a recast version of an unrealized, old, already dusty something.

the nobodies have perceived summary, elegiac reckonings, tied together reaches of empty space. the mirror, the rhyme of every moment made up of the sum of solitudes. decisions are made intuitively. decisions are keyed to unspoken feelings. we must learn to live with low-density hope.

one telling moment that reads like a diary entry, like a neon relief: the silence before uncertainty.

every woman will be walking double steps, ambiguities whose imaginary trust one girl remembers. in order to be visible she sees, she awakes in pessimism and despair, each one insufficient to keep her at a certain remove from the ultimately arbitrary symbols who scavenge every last scrap. something of hands and knees, her utter incapacity to imagine. the desperate hand and the insufficient body.

she sees uncertainties, moving one step toward making the word a picture and the picture a word. material witnesses invite her to some hope, some desire. she can hardly move.

the diaristic nerve will not be able to continue. the ghost of this impossibility confines her inside the word, frozen in such bizarre postures, collapsing where life in the real world is an earlier manifestation of doubt. movements of the human body remind her of a mere machine, an identity that is not discrete, no different from the lowly mannequin.

a dead body who from a distance is clumsy will rake up the mummified elite with a pair of black wings, with dynamic bundles of urban detritus now utterly devoid of significance. nebulousness and becoming, the disjointed flowability of the inky eye, the desperate hand of popularity. automatic gestures of remaking machines. she draws herself as half demented, a masked gunman. the body appears in words, endlessly vacillating; a peachy pale palette, a grey-tinged nightmare, a symphonic poem.

a schoolgirl’s crush on utopia, world-weariness and fashionable despair. ghostly grisaille, the skein of impossibilities that confine her. the air of incomprehension becoming a disjointed approximation, transience like an open wound.

schoolchildren have constructed
a sort of ruin, the desire to
preserve life unchanged;
forever forgotten by impressions
that refuse to be dislodged.

a new story, the corpse of
a collapse; it is not touched,
becoming disjointed,
dependent upon unexpected
tenderness.

the head is destruction of the
blankest kind, the blankest and
emptiest part-time sort of demolition.
---



an alert, profiled face stares
out of a porthole; red-rimmed
eyes difficult to give my heart to.

the half-lunatic looks at purpose and
opens his rictal grimace, gaudy
repetition assembled from
the mismatch of various moments.

a lost genius, a nihilist with
an unconscious voice,
unreconstructedly heroic,
untouched and unmoved.

his mathematical objects,
rows of vitrined objects,
reflect and break.

the glance oscillates to
the flat gray field of the sea,
forgotten movement turned into
grudging conversation.
---



to climb, to put my head
into the elements, to bang out
tuneless rhythm, i made
a loose fist with my right hand.

the repeat was repeated,
constructed from the discords of
light made manifold.

frozen momentariness and
punctual oddity are
not reproductions of things
but an empty variation,
doubly embalmed.