Who or what is trying to kill you?

When you feel heated
storm-bound on a pastoral
I look for your call on the day the world ends—

where did this poem come from? What is its ancestry? heritage lineage

the place is slippery, remembering a place through what is there no longer

—

actually 
the walk even 
crunches a sound

spiralling

like a seagull, laps

for money
Banks like a windfall

i feel distracted by you
and your obsession with wheels
scraping the sidewalk roof

scraping, and it’s a beep of a reverse
and how it felt to have to convince you
i liked this city and how you didn’t want to have to convince me you liked me and
how they both felt the same when the rocks won’t be here anymore one day

yeah
thank you
and i wait
keep walking

—

its seems as though a compulsion 
you might find inadequate, incompatible 
but the animation feels natural on the day
the world ends—
oh an illness, or a turning off
from the landscape, almost a forgetting
of all came before, the thud 
of my hand landing on your arm
even brings disgust, and I try to laugh
but the tank is coming, or looming, or maybe
on the way out, although I cannot tell
in the midst of it—

—

Who or what is trying to kill you?
Everyone in the country will

be a Republican one day, microdosing
each face like the next set of plays

a mirage of coin presidents, Walmart
cashiers, gentle look in the crowd

or the TV screen warheads, the puppet
masters, the people’s candidate

all witness to the passing day, the stolen
glance, the grimace, and it was you

in the next bared grin, i wake in terror
like i am sleeping in an empty lot in

the back of some other street, a
clone on my bed

throwing the war away without
profit, as un-American as,

the white girls of Nashville all agree:
out of a poem comes a passport aporia

i mean, the problem isn’t ownership,
the problem is dying, I ask myself

why I pull so much weight, like dark
moths to light, buzzing humming screaming

into night, some times incomprehensible
you, everybody,
the wealth!
Explosions

I broke the poem, I broke it.

—

yet I love the clouds, and your stories—
making me peek into idyll—as if it doesn’t
matter what you do to me, I even like that—
the not knowing, the clack of your teeth
or a sleepless sigh in the night, as if
this may sound like a bad thing, but 
it is only most natural: we cannot be
for each other all the time, as if! I let
you rest—I let, you rest.

—

Sometimes it’s like once imagining an absence haunts you for the rest of your life, like not having something is the reason for it to have to then exist—but it can’t because then it would not be an absence any longer. I find myself failing to let go of something I never had instead of seeing each new thing as witness. As a wound implies having already happened, having once been hurt, I hurt again. But rather by not saying it, I refuse it to happen to me. Then I ask myself should I say it, or are there some things that are best left unsaid, maybe not quite experienced but somehow still yet to be understood.

Listen:
almost a witness means to think of other things, to never be able to stop thinking of other things, and to do so would be unnatural. To stop. To give up. Instead, to witness might mean to rewrite, to wander off into the bush, to worry if someone you love would hurt with you—or wound you in turn for telling them.

—

disturbed by the fact that no one is moving

this is when you realise the only thing separating bugs from
humans is their DNA

—

I am writing a book about a car

Here is the road on all fours,
driving the car beyond the state line—
I want to run out of gas,
to stop the time as miles on the dash,
to really think about your hands.

But the car has places to be or to lose
its purpose, to run through the road almost,
its hands like a steering wheel or
the feet on the dash, somewhat at rest,
without even pressing hard on the gas.