OwlOutlier

Some Churches

Putting sugar
down for the ants
Putting dry leaves
down for the ghosts
Putting nails
out for the children
with unarmed nail guns.
It’s the Giving Season.
Now putting sugar
down for the addicts
who follow the ants
to the sweet salvation
of the Giant Right Molecules
in the Giant Right Order

New Releases

The way your yellow leaf fills with interior light
drifts in seeming this autumn seemingness

intermittent denial of service
when the leaves turn away into darkness

you want to call the leaf company to complain
you corny human tabernacle

resist foresting urge
the funny machete of your emotion

it’s so particular changing colors
like a leaf you hold / batter in moments

the funny machete of an emotion
hold it like a fig leaf resist the urge

you want to tell someone else
how you just d-listed an emotion

like a movie where humans battle machines
make love unexpectedly-expectedly foreplay killing things

my review said corny human tabernacles
said expect blood forest of humans

the audience ninety-nine percent darkness
watch them drift in their weird flickering seems

and later turn to sugar water
when your body walks out of the theater into sunlight

Another /Of Poem

The indifference of bread is/to being bread.
Sustenance. Furtherance.
The shadows of language inside you: sunflowers.
Dark sunflowers turning inside your tongue.

The circumference of bread in the dark morning.
Your mind takes a walk in the abyssal years,
for the first time the colors will hum,
but hum weakly like the ichor of feelings

that are no longer feelings. Paintings
are not photographs, nor do they misguidedly want
to be. The way you aspire to darkness set out,
little bowls with the blood of gods my offering,

like a chair set out in the night
next to the railroad tracks. You stare
at the chair to become the child astronaut
again, unbelonging, again, fog freedom.

At the Grocery Store

You overhear two young lovers chewing chewing something.
They are happy as two worms in a rotten apple. You overhear their kisses,
followed by chimp sounds and vaguely dolphin-like expressions of love.
You listen to the sandals of a lonely woman clop-clop
down the Kubrickian eternity of the cereals aisle.
You hear an invisible young man on the other side of these pickles
tell an invisible young woman that honey never goes bad,
it can last for thousands of years, even better than mummies,
that they should submerge their bodies in it ASAP,
do it in bee slop, sleep together in this amber ocean,
learn to breathe it. He tells her she’d make a lovely honey mermaid.
They giggle in the stoned beams of the light of their moon
circling the earth at a height somewhere between five
and six feet, and when they turn the corner, you see then
they are singularly unattractive and gorgeous astronauts
from another world, which will probably eventually collide
with our own, so BE NICE.

Train

Let the body come into itself and its itineraries.
It arrives like a train to the perfect little station,
the photos of which you will want to revisit often
in later years, when you have traveled past the perfect public selfie,

far into the fields of nature which always remain the same,
wearing the same changes of weather on their beautiful laps,
as your decorated vessel becomes quainter, then eventually
an image of the past. Yet, you could not leave the rails,

and the regular journey was so pleasantly rote. So many views!
Think of all the people you have gathered and are still carrying.
How important it is that they should continue the ride with you.
But one day there is that dark tunnel and nothing comes out

the other side. It’s so strange that no one even comes to look
for all your passengers. No rescue party is ever organized.
It’s not so much yourself you grieve. You sensed the parts wearing
out. But all these expected travelers will sit here in the young dark abyss.

Obit

Something returns to the playground at last.
Is it late enough in the body to remember
that everything happens in the mind
to a personage the mind has crafted or finagled

from the falling rain, the cold slant of it,
or the snow, the way it lays up against the house
like sheaves of music no one will ever play?
Is it finally okay to remember you,

putting yourself away somewhere in a tall cupboard
of years and their fears? It was a version of you
that stayed when you left. Can he finally come out
to play again, now that you are safely dead?

Psalm

Death, and we are the imagined.
We are the immigrants.

We’re sun miles of lives
that become muscle memory at the end.

Telling the tired pope something
that makes you tired to tell. (No thanks.)

The Real is like thousands of theme parks now.
It takes so much money just to replace yourself.

I just want to sit at the desk of the unnoticed
and enjoy tree shadows running my life.

The grass alone is a gorgeous radio, mostly.
Sleepiness. The smoke somethings something.

The stores unconscious at night are holding you.
Eyes too are gyrations.

Birds, miracle us out of the alphabet
we charred again this year.

vampire mode

How strange!
I was thinking of you
while I shaved my potato in the shower,
blindly, eyes closed,
my face a military terrain,
and suddenly the razor
swerved and I nearly
gave myself a brow piercing.
I refused to open my eyes
to see the blood
you drew from me.
We had only one conversation
about the joy of pillbugs,
the slightest of small talk
in an elevator going down
a skinny minnie building to earth
where you probably live
since you stepped off there.
You will never occur
again in this lifetime.
Ghosts
are real.

Nilnilnilnil

This is not ground
though you do tread it now
tread me out in feet of sound
ensounding me, you leave utter space
for your own voice to say Stop
Echo that I may know this tunnel
what place this is
by what strangeness surfeit does my voice
go from dark to darkness
as the psalm of human shadows
bodies swap furiously in a subway

Human Curfew

All the nameless things in the night

Here is something to love sweetly uphill, at last

The dark houses have abandoned this kingdom of wrong turns

Only here and there, you will see clothes blowing on a line,
pinned by those who have forgotten to gather the witchcraft
bodies wear to greet each other

You crouch and watch the flickering shapes of families fill with wind

Through backyards the quietest beasts go

Such psalms of hunger
Doll tracks in the snow
where a lonely child has distorted images

Following the railroad tracks the trains have forgotten

A sort of crushed white stone glows as you walk on it

You want to please the night the way these dark leaves do

Whispering over themselves in the millions you hear

The desire for the night to become one endless thing

Not a being, but frustrated, it creases shadows until they disappear

Every time you look at your hand, its skin coating a pulsing web

Lies brightly, says, you could probably live here