THERE AREN'T REALLY ANY RULES

You've felt 

this coming—
as a kid, it

drifted

towards you, 

then pulled away, lifting 

the little hairs on your bare arms 

and legs as it retreated. It

waxed

and waned like this 

for years, but it always 

remained.

Now that you're 

old enough,

the full consequence

suddenly surges 

to smack you, exactly 

like an orgasm would—

on some spot 

on your body 

that you can't 

really locate. For about 

four seconds, 

there aren't any

any rules. And

at first, you feel 

vulnerable, then 

emboldened by the waves 

of brave coolness 

prying wider 

and wider

this ecstatic invisible 

wound deep inside you,

and then, finally, 

there's that combination

of relief and 

moderate disappointment

in the familiar pithiness

of its fizzle. 

Another betrayal—

no sound, 

no visual,

nothing 

demonstrable. 

Just a 

sucking feeling. 

An implosion

chased fast

by the usual aftertaste

of rusty imitation

vanilla.

NONE OF THIS IS MADE UP

You don't
have to

pretend anymore.

Blink once,
twice,

whatever—boom.
You're in a

grocery store, you're in some
all-night

diner smoking and
bull-

shitting, you're
at the gym, sitting

in a movie
theater—it doesn't

matter. Everything
overlaps.

Music is being
piped in already—"It's a

long way
to the top

if you wanna rock
and roll." Everything is

measured,
labeled, neatly

chunked,
temperature-

controlled
and manageable.

And you're afraid
even to

cry—tears
so real

and so
artificial

as light
as flavored

CO2 bubbles,
but lacking

that fizzy
pizazz

and pressure

of the
real thing:

constant one-
upmanship.

HANDY

After a rush, 

a little initial 

blush 

of enthusiasm, 

this dream—

like so many 

of your other 

ideas—

sucks 

itself 

inside out

and becomes the color

and the vague 

shape of everything

it's not.

You've got no choice but to

lock this one up in a drawer

with those others,

you tell 

yourself;

this map

which calls 

such attention  

to its own utility 

and to the

fact of its 

having been manufactured.

The harder 

you stare,

the more it looks

like the sort of 

manicured and 

captioned thing kids draw 

after they realize 

they ought 

to show someone.

MUSEUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

If you knew
something,

but you
couldn't do

anything,
did you

really?

*

That rose—over
there is (probably)

a galaxy
of furtive milky white

feathers, gently
nodding

in sympathy
to Newtonian Mechanics.

Over here are planet earth's
most likely

artists and writers in residence,
all getting bored

into—
chewed mechanically

to pieces—
by scores of little syphilitic bacteria.

*

Take these tiny gold insects,
a thousand brain-

dead bees—
too busy (making honey)

for cosmology.
Epiphanies

bore too deep,
the cavities

they made
were too huge

and disrupted
the surface

tension.
Most things

nowadays
are

too profound-
ly simple

to be misunderstood so
spectacularly.

A EUCLIDEAN SPACE

X.

Things would just
be so much

easier
if this whole thing

was flat
and boring. I mean—

a little kid
can hardly be expected

to use
trigonometry every morning

when he has
to determine

where in the world?
his whole

world
keeps going.

Y.

Day after day,
hurtling
through space—

just the dizzy thought

of that
accelerating effort, so

unfathomable
that it made you go

crazy
with certainty

that everybody just went around
lying

to you
about every-
thing
all of the time.

Z.

I watch your car pull away
every day,

I see
spinning tires, hear

them groan,

but think—
about how the dead center

of a wheel
doesn't go anywhere,

and I know
there must be

something clever

about us
in that idea somewhere—

not because
it's a metaphor, but because it's

a thing
which doesn't mind being seen,

but which
doesn't ever want to be

known.

THE THREE COMMANDMENTS

Imagine knots of greenblack

caterpillars 

writhing

in filthy jealousy—

beneath the neat 

arc of a mango 

and orange- 

cream colored paper 

butterfly—

because 

they don't even

know they don't

know.

* 

What is your body,

if not 

a temple—and 

what is 

a temple, if not 

a tomb?—or maybe 

it's more like

a life-

boat? A tent

that gets
pitched?

Portable
flimsy and temporary

housing—

to droves 

and droves—of pilgrim 

abstractions.

* 

Think about it—

One single person

cannot be a 

revolution.

BOTH

Weird thing is, when he
fucks her, it really
is like

he's
tunneling into her,
desperate to escape, disappear

so deep into what she holds,
the space she controls—
to become her child.

For her,
it only works
backwards—it's

afterwards
when he's
asleep next to her

that she feels
the most
motherlike,

the most
afraid that she's
penetrable.

But time, being
cruel, insists on barreling
forward

always in the
direction
of increasing

entropy,
giving both of them
no choice

but to compromise.
And so
they will

continue tearing
themselves
in half.