I Always Wanted

to be a drunken pole-cat out in the yard preachin' to the hogs.

Ready Made

Here is the Black Dahlia’s body,

the two halves of her corpse split

into a darkness upon the field.

It is not you but the poem

whose face is invisible behind her hair,

as though it has been erased. Tutelary

image of a True Crime world.

It is not you but the poem

whose mouth goes on smiling too far.

Thus what seems like nature is cracked

skin upon a stretched armature.

But see? Her starfish is shaved. As sure

as the Mona Lisa’s moustache.

We go from a bright room to the dark

and feel the light creep close for a touch.

This is the mouth of the poem.

There is only the idea of seeing. The body,

field-dumped, framed in grass and road side.

See her turn over, minotaur to the grain?

This is the poem getting up, coming through

black and white history, her two halves

tortured by memory, the same way love

goes on, if we remember. It is not

you looking through the peephole, but

the poem, posed for the show. See?

It is the poem who is eating you.

::

A Useful Illustration

from John

Nike A Go-Go

Behold He Is Risen

postzombie

The zombie is the zombie that always ever was

the zombie. To have any less of the zombie is

an erasure if the zombie and the self that imagines

the zombie, thus an erasure of all of this, the bees

and the begonias too. This zombie is the different

cities of the zombie that are required of the zombie

always ever after the city of the zombie, upon

the island of the zombie. Not to worry. This

confusion is built upon the reaction of a body

slammed against a wall. Only this wall, indeed,

always ever after this wall. This zombie, which

always ever was is a force of violence that also

was always there, reviling, mutating into vast

flung functions, a killing of the without from

the within, inside time which contains the this

which is what I am inside of and vastly mutating

out of with a violence of categorical patterns

which is the survival of history. Thus is the zombie

which was ever in a city always in this city,

this Midwestern, Atlantic calm mountainous

deserted seaside of a cancer upon history. Always

ever wasting the potential for violence upon

the icicles dispersing parades of forever zombies.