Poems
Travel for Beginners
All summer, the trappings of navigation
by the door, the waiting
cooler, weighed heavily
down. Clothes, books not yet
exceeding limits. Van inexorably
filling until it’s time to go. First,
go find the missing half-
heart, because you can’t leave
it lonely, can’t leave without
juicing your leavings.
Kinesis compels you to
learn and relearn the lesson of everlasting
motion. Second, remember all the
new rules of travel:
only stop for the stars,
pause after eating, accelerate
quickly, and quickly
reenter the atmosphere. All
summer you’ve mapped the route,
tallied spacial distortions, temporal
upheavals--now it's time to
vector out and away, or else placidly
wait for another era’s
x-out. Unstick yourself from
your seat: what the hell begins with
Z, anyways? Don’t think, go.
Third Law of Motion
I sing on into tomorrow await the morning’s
bracing fire always a tomorrow for our woes
sometimes sound lags I sing of crowd control
a half-second pause befouls our senses splits
our very selves our voices disperse like air
the morning’s baseless ire a good morrow
for the gallows splits our very cells voices
carried on puffs of air I sing on into a box
it echoes: I sing into a box of twilight
its violet diffusion for every action sometimes
it lags but for every action there is reaction
I open my mouth & out comes fever I open
my mouth & that is propulsion I sing of equal &
opposite the violent delusions of order
our vices split into camps of force & frailty
you put matter behind you to move forward
I open my mouth & that is the problem language
like rocket exhaust accelerating our understanding
fueling our recoils I sing on through the night:
await the morning with dreadful inertia