Objects are arguments.
But bodies are feuds.
Sardonic allegories
No longer suffice.
The bodies
Were corralled, divided, and
Ransomed at the borders.
Those that couldn’t be
Evaporated before arriving.
Bodies are sign systems,
Several, in fact, that must,
To be in order, read in tandem.
Bodies align.
*
And so they wander off
To that canopied forum
Only to learn the nature of the evidence
Of that must is sullied but conscience cannot
Bolster iffy testimony. Empathy can’t lie. Suspense
Sits with its sheepish careen at every angle of the rotunda
*
(now we atomize a gesture
now we intercept a glance
altogether
either
with boozy humor
or with grey solemnity
poached from one another
with the authority of a preposition
derived from the lexical status
of things
ignorance is another partner to normal
drunkenness
the liquor won’t
let you forget
the liquor itself forgets)
*
You can tell when
you pout that
novelty needs
innocence. Has it
to mean that? I think
it has.
I think it has
its tedium.
It has that aspect.
For example,
is every
chauvinism
a cliché?
How can
you tell I
think it has
to be that way?
*
A responsive system
Almost is the
Name it gives.
No one says
What everyone knows
No one has to. No one has
Met any one.
If, while, break.
Midst from a distance.
A ghastly sacral zero.
Motif for a poem or a picture.
The sky is
Simple; there is
Only one.
to be that way?
*
It is the irreparable
Fundament, the genocide,
The flaccid adjacency of our
Best intentions—not amnesia—
That will have to be settled.
You get a poem, maybe you do
Just to say it.
No meaningful decision
Has ever been taken
Without options.
The problem is not a lack
Of options. It is a poetics,
Another way of saying affordances.
A system of cooperation, one
Or the other. Conscience is as good
As hunger a reason to disobey
Or invent, one or the other.
The nature of evidence is
Already botched, since everyone
Is more or less conscientious.
How can a system of cooperation
Compel a decision that
Surprises anyone? Who cooperates
With someone else’s conscience?
Who can imagine universal migration
As a system of cooperation?
Because that is as close to
Your only option as you now have
To decide among.
