Foraging for paperclips
On the moon
The clerk alphabetizes
Piano concertos
By tone.
Enumerates the asteroids, some standing like an upright bass.
Makes a note: a foolish nostalgia for the 1980’s is the hobgoblin for neoliberalism.
All the while on stilts with a telescope, the clerk bird watches.
Clouds in the distance like the blushing of elbow smashes.
And so foolish are these ledgers
Chances are
They’re true.
I’m thinking of a hoax
The size of the sun,
But like the size of the wind.
I’m thinking of tenderness
Soaked in starry I-don’t-knows, how
Pretty Emily Dickinson must have been
Staring out her window at
Tarantula stars
Beauty is jest
Is simply gross
Beauty is the long legs of evening
But for an overcoat of dreams
Joy begins to fill in
Where there are no lines
We are left naked
Except for the sea
I carry the clouds and sky
In my beard beneath my
Fingernails
If the canopy of sky
Is too small for your skull
Try a list of hammers
Numbered by the throes
Moon dog starry on a rust belt road
As sophisticated as the rain
This simple commotion
Ample in regards to brevity
Staggers like lightning
Down its short fuse
Quickly but I remember
The walking part of the soul
And the distance it must succeed
I carry a paper bag of flowers, the petals are blue, yellow, and orange,
Early flowers, the bag is a sandwich bag, it’s dawn,
I put the flowers in a basket and bike home, the sky is blue, orange, and yellow,
My wild face, in momentum, how is the dawn somehow starry after all the stars are put away?
How is it, just for a second, this wild face among the stars, on a bike, with flowers
For the dining room table, to be with books, and pencils, and to have breakfast with,
Encourage me to open the windows, they are the better part of me, for a few days,
In which time, I’ll write what seems to be stream of consciousness poems, better yet,
I’ll put on my canvas shoes and walk till my stomach growls
For the fire and fever of tasteless stars.
There is a shape
When nothing’s there.
Open it
Or close it.
It’s just as round.
Leave it
Or carry it with you.
You cannot spend
What it does not lack.
There is a shape
When everything is done.
And you will know that.
You will know.
What the wind uses for thread
And needle.
The last of the moon’s scribbled light
In the bowl
Like a broken guitar,
A mini golf course for
A syllogism.
Why are beginnings so important?
Why is a broken guitar a disaster?
Is the grave coming up short.
And though I think all of this is folly
I am glad of its sometimes kindness.
A poem
Is a belly flop
In handwriting
By an angel doing a handstand
While going backward in time
In a simple sweater, a jawline like a lyric, is the ambition of dusk.
Against the aquarium of stars.
A simple ghost, like a pair of bashful feet in the corner.
The high wires of power lines, the moon like a spool with no thread.
Words in a notebook, coil bound, from the drugstore, do angels tattoo humans on their arms?
A jawline like a stampede, an aquarium of ghosts.
naïve haircuts 