and we slit its belly down with a plastic camping knife.
Feathers settled like tickertape all over the dry yellow lawn
and we threw its head to eddy slowly in the sinking street,
dissolving into soft bubbles like magic eight-ball fortunes,
like tarnished BBs stuck through old reflections in the road.
All we found in that pigeon was navy blue aquarium gravel,
two folded magic cards, and a little spool of copper wire.
...in the stain of moonlight on the old patchwork quilt that hung over the hearth, the words shaped the profile of a vast head wearing a face on each side. The ivies clinging about the window frame rustled in the wind and their shadows sawed on the patchwork, and one face seemed creased with bitter anger while the other held a saintly vacuity. The wind fingered the dead ashes in the hearth and the monsters’ play of shapes moved to the charcoal fragments there, so that as the ashes flicked both faces seemed to exhale the shadows of leaves all about the room, tumbling against the walls until they reached the parlour door and dissolved there burning...
THE OTHER EDGE
Goro Nyudo Masamune folded the law of Heaven
ninety-nine times in each blue sword he forged
so that each steel’s quenching trapped ferrite grains
like dark and spattered constellations praising nothing
and hanging hungerless as any star.
As to the red swords of Senzou Muramasa
that would abide no sheathing unblooded
their grain had exactly the striation of muscle.
Now a traveller from the south provoked Muramasa
by esteeming the edges of priest Masamune’s blades
renowned for splitting violent throats yet skimming
like dandelion-down over the skin of the desireless.
Leaving his forge in the care of a mute apprentice
a tethered crow and a clay image of buddha Monju
Senzou Muramasa rode three nights hard south
with a red katana riding steady at his hip.
Within the scabbard pouch its red ceramic whetstone
cracked with no keening laughter under Heaven’s vault
and the hilt of ceramic did not spin and never sweated
nor dreamed blood for Heaven’s laws prohibit aberration
but no more than planed granite admits mercury
could that katana ever have a name.
When the smith Muramasa flung down his spent map
before a quiet riverside and ramshackle shrine
the blade at his belt split its bullhide sheath apart
and he smiled that the sight gave him no wonder
then cried the name of Goro Nyudo Masamune
who rose smiling from his nap beneath a maple-tree.
At once Muramasa waded the river’s slow shallows
to stand his sword’s hilt between river-stones
where in the clear water each turning maple-leaf
only whispered like ash upon meeting the blade.
Each leaf came apart one hundred feet downstream
like half-leaves split in breaking mirror-glass
and Muramasa shouted his edge’s perfection.
The priest laughed toward his mountains soundless
then produced from the shrine a katana blue as milk
and pale as the thunder that hung in far cloudtops
even as he waded to balance this swordpoint.
Ninety-nine steps downstream from the gray sword
before the wounded leaves could split apart
they crossed the other edge’s flowing reflection
and continued hail-struck to the long bright sea
passing into the sea whole.
The smith untied there his ruined sheath
and he made an oath in his right hand
drawing from split river-stones his beaten sword
which could abide no sheathing unblooded.
The priest Masamune with eyes so empty of victory
who meant perhaps to speak had barely turned halfway
before his lifeblood crashed spooling in water
turning both edges’ reflection a momentary plum.
Senzou Muramasa looked out to the mountains
and frowned to see only mountains there
so setting his own blade for the current to wash
he slit his thumbprint red with the other edge.
Now he rides the pathless mountains under hooded skies
riding scabbardless and sleeping with blue hilt in hand
and constantly a silver hail drives the smith Muramasa
striking him like forge-sparks and like cast prayerbeads.
His beard lengthens and grays with his seeking
as he challenges each patron of his ravenous forge
and holding his lifework in contempt for failure
casts those blades to rust unblooded in obscure gullies.
The apprentice was crippled at duel with his master’s creditors.
Senzou Muramasa’s death on the hill called Kanarazu
is recorded as suicide in Annals of the Chained Tigers
without reference to the cessation of a meteoric hail.
The crow took up a piece of wire and picked her tether free.
In truth the ronin Bizen with morale shattered
had drunkenly fled his red-eyed antagonist
who never once permitted his blade a sheath.
Wasps dug their house’s clay from the cheek of buddha Monju.
In pursuit Muramasa’s ankle slipped between rocks
and in falling he gashed his belly to the spine
on the heaven-moted edge named Tender Hands.
Years ago he rode away from a burning shrine
and another sword propped among river-stones.
That night the river split in half.
HEY JUSTINE I WROTE YOU A POEM
we’d sneak Dragonlance books under our desks.
How there’s three wizard guilds, distinguished
by the pigment in their robes, their rigid faction
moralities, and their chromatic totem moons.
Good, neutral, and you-know-what. But all those
common-ass herders and teamsters just figure
Krynn’s got two moons. One ivory, one rust:
whatever people see. That other moon, though,
Nuitari? It knows what wizards really want.
How red and white archmages can’t even tell
it’s there, shaded out exactly like the night.
How all those dark robes biking out for midnight
spell component runs, they’ll stop to take it easy
against some headstone carved like a baernaloth,
spread out scrolls, maybe, if the turf’s wet,
and trip out on the secret black moon.
I mean today I did two pickle jars’ worth.
Started this thing ten AM your time, when
you said you did first pour. All things can be
handled, but freaking out’s protocol. We stare
down the philtre. How coffee’s actually red.
A wagging wheel
welcome to the smoking
industry.
it’s not what you
think. it’s worse.
ever since youtube
got started we’ve been making
like zero money.
nobody pays anymore
for smoking.
all those
iphone 6
motherfuckers
at the bus stop
doing streaming
video,
and white
clouds in the office
windows
overhead
clearing up
one by one.
now we’re working in
rented port-a-
potties. the
big ones you can drive
a wheelchair in.
your bachelor’s degree? it’s
a piece of paper.
welcome to the smoking industry.
four, five of us smoking
in a green plastic
shitter
behind a horse stable
only we’re still
artists,
artisans.
in these suffocating
boxes there’s
no lights
ventilation
water
or electricity.
you can’t see your hands.
you vomit.
the office tips sideways.
and when the cheques
come they’re typed
on the thinnest paper.
basically kleenex.
pissing blood
after a long day’s
smoking
and the cheque’s ripped,
you can’t
read the numbers,
then plus there’s the
sixteen-year-olds
who hitch here in freight cars,
all clown paint and
brandishing cleavers,
they show up
around sundown
like a teen vampire movie
and they don’t stop singing
the same song.
WHEEL, ROCK ME, MAMA, ANY
WAY TIME TO FEEL, HEY, MAMA,
WAKE UP AND ROCK ME
ROCK ME MAMA LIKE A WINTER’S
TURNING OF RAIN, ROCK ME
MAMA ALL DAY IN A TRAIN, HEY,
MISTER, YOU GOT A SMOKE
and every one
of
them, in between
the checkings
of their phones,
will ask
to bum a smoke.
they got on emergency
psychiatric welfare by
cutting
GODSPPED U BLAKE
EMPREOR
into the ikea coffee
tables
of their mothers,
and they say they stopped here
to bum a smoke.
they say that’s the only
reason they stopped here.
well fuck,
rookie,
this is it,
the smoking
industry. and
fuck youtube and the world internet,
fuck not being able
to read
cause you had one ordinary stroke, fuck
mirrors cracking when
they look at you,
fuck dropping bread in the toilet,
fuck
warning labels
getting bigger every morning,
fuck
trying to use
a toothbrush when you
have oral
cancer, fuck the
exchange ratio,
fuck
burn marks on my air
fresheners, fuck the emergency
tracheotomy industry,
fuck
being forcibly restrained
and prevented from
smoking
at your own child’s sleepover,
fuck tar sticking your eyes shut,
fuck
stepping outside
for one minute
and birds hitting you in the chest,
fuck whoever came up
with the name noam chompy
for a dog,
FUCKING KIDS
GET OUT OF MY OFFICE
WITH YOUR RUBBER BAND
TOILET PAPER
TUBE
GUITARS.
okay?
okay.
welcome to the smoking industry.
here’s
your gun.
it probably won’t even go off.
“We are more every day. And they do rely on us, Great-grandfather. But I don’t want the humans to pass into some further order. I want their dominion to fall, and the parts of the world to not be parts and work as one again.” Breathing, the Rabbit caught his sullen thoughts one by one on a cushion of breath, so that they would line up in each other’s company. He had learned the trick of breathing his mind from watching a wise old rabbit die, and it was still a great comfort to him without lungs.
“The Boy used to press my face to the attic windowpane at night so that my button eyes would clack, telling me what he had learned in books of the night sky. He would trace constellations with his finger, as though they weren’t Real enough without him pointing out all their beginnings and ends. And now I wonder if it was for his sake not mine. If he could see the constellations at all as they crawled across the dark, burning, making their pointless wars. Perhaps humans have forgotten how, and only their books remember.
“He whispered in my ear the Real stars were suns so far distant that their light was born before Rabbits or Boys ever were. And by the time their faces reached the world they’d all flown elsewhere in space, he said, and half had died to coals. So the stars weren’t even there; but if he was ever a grown man he’d call back their places. He’d use a book called Mathematics, which was far more Real than anything else in the world, and read backward from their light.
“The stars needed him, he thought. I was a plush toy with boot-button eyes who’d barely been outside the house, and that shook me, even then. That the Boy, whose Nanas or Mother would carry him to bed under one arm, thought he’d do a favour to the night sky. To living eyes the stars are no more than cold little grains, but even then they’re enough to drive a boy’s dreams before him. The birds and beetles and moths, too, and all navigators; they take direction by the stars they see, not some stars behind the stars that cause them. And everything’s like the stars: only the least part of us is ever inside us. What makes a thing Real, it runs like the finest spider silk through every other thing.”
The Rifle only wished to herself that she had been propped at a different angle, envying the Rabbit his position hung facing the window and the wide night. A rifle looks through her sight, of course; being a daytime toy, she could barely envision the stars. She was wishing to have been set toward one star or another, to better imagine shooting everything from the night in gray fire.
...and as though come to a sudden decision, more than half the words slipped down at once to gather in the nap of the rug. Their shapes were like a carnival of rotted things washed out of the sea’s deepest trenches with flesh so elaborately ragged that they seemed not at all degenerate but to have evolved in death along new principles of organization. Some seemed entirely built around gills and fronds, as though they breathed the air of their own decay; others were like the sacs of membrane and blubber that rise when the bones rot loose from the fallen corpses of whales, accreting tusks and scales and banks of jointed legs on their long spiral to the light. Treading shadow, they flapped and twisted and all those with faces stared up, desperately trying to meet the Rabbit’s gaze...
SONNET FOR THE LAST FOLKFEST
i ll spread your
drumhead with a
palm of
sand and wait
there in
the night
&
nbsp; and there
inside in the night
soft ripples where
your drumhead
listened
answered pounding
echoes echo
pulse and bound and
echo
echoes rouse the
tautened air
my skin
inverts against the dark
tonight our knuckles
know a deeper
rhythm shuttle snap
than eardrums
ever go
my shoes
can stay
behind to gather
blown leaves on
the stair i m downhill
down already far
i m looking i
m looking
ghost i m looking
for you there
before the tide
returns i ll lay
your
drumhead lay
your drumhead
down
in kindling
blaze
and flickerhard and
red upon
the strand
we ll stand across
its cracking rim
and burn
the ocean
dry and run
and downhill down
the cracking sand
and rattle shattered
drums
and we will
dance and
we will dance to
what we will
become
the wind
will smoke
with dust and
everclear and blow
our knuckles
cross the empty sky
and never
sleep
and
blow down
every
year
TO RED INK
poets don’t kill each other
at all anymore and
it’s been way too long since lord byron
—his buggering to death
i mean,
by h wadsworth longfellow—
and i believe in credit when due,
but
that one
was an accident.
and i just keep thinking you, Bukowski...
yeah,
that bottle opener in
seventy-two. such an incisive reading,
how
you bifurcated
that beatnik’s sternum, and the ribs
swung open like hands about to clap.