Do You Smell Smoke?

Apply this soothing gel made from roots and branches
to your forearms when you wake up warrior style
and run fist-first to the kitchen in your sleep.
I'll buy you almond croissants and hum
to you in my pretty good pitch. You are falling asleep
and chuckling sweetly when you think of me
I'm taking pictures of you sleeping and posting
them on Facebook. I know you don't mind
so I break into your house while you're out
and teach myself the bass.
Don't worry about that smoke smell
it's just my gentleness you're loving.

Dream Amelia

If there's a word for Listen
meaning taken aloft and calm

A sinuous mechanical straightness
All the close-set statuary below

Help

Freight Train, Elizabeth Cotten

Buffy Sainte-Marie on Sesame Street

Good night, Inwood

Good night remembering to bless my toast and jam.

Good night trees out there in upper Manhattan where Jim Carroll used to be. Good night one tree in Isham Park that spreads its branches out benevolent like that, so that I greeted it the day after he died and said, "And goodbye, Jim. I feel you there."

Good night lit-up dark in my bedroom.

Good night noise under my sink. Whatever you are, you'd better git.

Good night perfect pitch.

Good night imagined photographs.

Good night "poems or prose poems or prose?"

Good night ringing ear.

Good night traffic noise.

Good night Kronos Quartet.

Good night boy I saw being bullied on his way to the library. (Going to the lie-bary again? You're always going to the lie-bary.) Good night library boy. Good night.

Postdoc, lunch

(Or, I spent my lunch half-hour trying to get a good quasi-religious
iconic baby carrot photo of myself in my new temporary office.)

Ruth Stone!

Ruth Stone

Autumn now

My body its own
sleep
*

First the well
of me-not me
coming full and then
bare tree
of goodness
rising
*

Found us here
swapping slow light
breath like very
small children
their soft bones
and looking

Skater

The Female Gaze

This exhibition is excellent.

Joanna Newsom

elimae

A very short poem of mine has just been published in the recent issue of elimae. Also check out poems by my friends Douglas Piccinnini and Mary-Catherine Jones in the same issue!

From the High Line

Clif's like, "Stereolab."

I would like to offer myself a free reading

1. Whether or not to take the white fox pup to the beach will be unclear. But squat down and look unassuming and the creature comes right to you.

2. You will wake to the sounds of cars and 1 train moving inexorably forward. You will think, "It sounds like the ocean. But not as good as the ocean."

3. You will be rated on enthusiasm, clarity, and appropriate difficulty. Those doing the rating will have work of their own to do. Alchemical shifts all around.

4. Where's your savoir faire now, ma chère?

5. Strap on your aging black Pumas and go.