with all the circuits of the universe
still starting at zero decide; what comes now?
where will you be in relation to
those medicine men learned in the
uses of a beating
heart and where does this
silk and crimson life you wake up in
go in between the night and another where
will we be tomorrow, with it all,
it all collapsing & alive?

fell too asleep for training in my warm stale
festering sheets gone unchange for too
long but who cares? I woke groggy
after dark and staled up my mouth
with coffee an apple to be healthy,

and TamsonCat growls her incantations to
night pressing on our lit-up toy
box house, I drink a glass of water
and write emails where I'm upbeat
& creative, change into
black checkered PJ pants and think about

ethics - Toby lives by a code of
ethic he devised for himself and that
makes him a very good man, my
boss won't hire anyone with a name he
can't pronounce and sees my pinkwhite
Euromutt skin as 'Australian.'

I sit online for a bit and look
at novelty t-shirts, fed the fish still
overcome by inertia in their clean bare
tank, collect TamsonCat from the bed
and strip the warm sheets & there's
a fading reflection of me in
the window I don't recognise and

outside the door
I can hear my dog's claws ticking
at the floorboards
although
she died months ago.

making noise coming in all burning with a
quick soothing cigarette taken for courage outside
in the rose garden, perfect bell clear birdsong &
men in flannel shirts browsing the flowers where
Rebecca & I found intimidating white & blue
nuns floating feet above the ground one time
years ago but I came inside now with two
full metres of ball chain wrapped around my wrist around
all the full-faced tattooed ladies, earnest lot, with their
white tablecloths and wineglasses refracting
across the room.

it
is
good to
leak nightly
outwards to
something
grander.

this
is.

must look very serious here with my pile
of books and thick
black pen held to my fat chewed lips -
hey, man, keep it
down can't you tell I'm
thinking? - mainly,
thinking into the thick lingering cloud of
promises and dreams spoken out last
Thursday with Joe & Leon
& sweet taciturn Emily. must look
tormented with my neck bent and
bitten like this but - hey, wanna
know what happened? it was
a ferret, I can't lie, a ferret
I held like a long wriggling stinking
baby diging through my throat &
shoulders for a way
out of perplexing sunlight. I know,
there's a certain trend amongst young
inkstained writers of love and sorrow
to compare every bright thing to the
miraculous body breath & life of
a lover,
and the ferret-bitten romantic
squeezing out this teabag agrees but, praise be,
I've been baptised.
I've been born again into
stone,
I've been born again,
cold,
and miracles now restrict themselves
to the chaste acts of saints,
virgin-tight women at church fairs,
that kind of thing, yeah,
that kind.
so I don't want you to get the wrong impression,
girl smiling in my direction.
I want you to save that dear hopeful smile
for someone more lyrical,
less evangelical.

I find cat fur in this book reading
Frank O'Hara and screaming ahead
to his lovely literary turns, I
also came her eto be alone I catch on
that word while ten thousand books behind
me rustle in the wind

ducks speak a foreign tongue -
all consonants, curious grammar -
on the lawn outside where there
is a predatory bunny, I saw it,
truly I did.

My companion packs up his books to
leave, dreadful nibbling sound of it
nudging us to move along.

And I don't write at lunch or
in a good cafe breathing light into
cigarettes but I do

write comfortable now with my good old
pen staining porous hands ("little")
as though they could be big,
and my companion is leaving, walking
his sneakers down the restless aisles and I
think,
no,

maybe I'll stay here and pull a bed from
old Frank I'm sure he wouldn't mind,
rest my head on airy things said by Hillaire
Belloc, got to sleep as
ducks outside discuss the sunrise.

imagine! she wears that face all the time, what must it feel like a sensational rubbery mask approximating the form of the bones beneath she's wearing it now trying smile after pout after James Dean squint
you know you've seen her walk like that wearing that head on top of a real spine - real backbone! imagine! there's something
between those legs of hers there's something can't quite put my finger on
some kind of power there it takes a man to make a woman women make women men it doesn't
take much

(cross posted to As/Is - after I saw Bill's poem I thought, meh, fuckit. Why not clone some content?)

This poem by William Allegrezza on As/Is breaks my heart. Wonderful work, Bill.

now sleepy in the library resting toes on
the jelly-basalt windows punctuating
the public parts of the building, old tourists naive
in the eyes like turtles stretching
necks out to the exhibits - butterflies
and dragonflies and stick insects,
dried out dusty bright pinned onto
something white I'm reminded of
slick bronze ladies pinned to the
covers of women's magazines -
but I move on to the guts
of he place a bundle of books
is bound up and waiting for me
easy to forget the concrete bunkers
books come from, I imagine camphor
yellow light and exposed wiring and
long converging rows of steelrimmed
books, proving we are a repository for something
worthwhile, something worth protecting.