For 2006

The still of what you’re doing now is not the same
still of what you did to me
& others while your curls hung low & dry amongst laundry,
battered narratives (in comic book print, & then dark),
fans of both kinds (electric & hand-held), not the still
containing moonshine or the still we felt once under the moon
which was not shining, but concealed behind
a grim blue cloud that forecasted what we had & hadn’t
up until that point. When I say it is “still” I mean that
it is quiet & that it is & will always be unfinished.

To still the morning air or to be still in a copse or still
as a corpse to remain here still without another “again”
to calm the air—to be in the midst of these things
is to remain wide & open like flowers & legs & mouths
of children receiving medicine or sugar, whichever
would suffice for whichever ailment or wonderment,
what we needed in the woods. What we needed on the
cougar-lined road that was nowhere near the middle
of our life, which is to say lives—apart, rectilinear,
blossomed up from blood, hair on the bed, the floor.

What is now needed is tiny oil portraits, bits of lint,
small women & large women & men I long to kiss
off the end of piers I smell sea-worthy for and against
a whole bunch of, well, boards, and splinters that might
pierce my no-longer tender flesh. Oh, to be pierceable!
To be a passerine bird with silky plumage! To still
want the things most stopped wanting sometime during
the last decade of the most recent passed century,
to walk apron-clad with a “typewriter martini” & shout
each proud glyph from altitudes exceeding one hundred feet.

Passing by disciples with aerial photographs, each new
type of gimmick presented clearly on mylar screen, it be
comes apparent that we are open slit wide & acrossly,
past credit card debt, past scissored bits dotted with social
security digits & furry, bloody clingings, past this new
year & the last old year, my recounting of each annum
somewhat anal in its capacity to touch someone out there,
past what is always: this cold steel, this stillness wombed
in violence & glittering openings: encrusted would be
the wrong word: crystalline, glistening, torn to fucking shreds.