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            Music. Order. Tenderness. Without brutality yet instructed by an emptying
    cause for a word like “love” unrefined

            Unrefined, where I too fit approximately so. Who made you simple—
    pure as an organ that way

            In a crisis, in a vision, in an act of desperation to foment the banal—to say
    “love” like a word so coarsely defined—

            Or the pattern-making of how do you go on without a “story”—to hit
    return, rethink and again begin to cancel a sound

            The exercise in sleep—in a day the pattern makes—less the story of how
    to mine a kind of pre-war-time belief in “life”—

            What the project is made you begin to focus the sun in a mirror to light
    the corners of the room—

            And in green output, a bloom beneath the blinking of I too want to feel
    a void reversed—in you: think over an inheritance—of elections, of convictions,
    of evictions and victims

    *

            Laying in bed, blind and playing the feel-up of out there—you: “you”
    somewhere
    —I turn—I keep turning facts of unmade shapes

            So, the problems of industrialized civilization drop you suffering—
    in existence and in suffering beget a kind of “dismissal”—

            Green to add you and green to leave you let-down-feelings in the national
    ring—in a pastime of absence

            If you can’t hear, listen: that’s my sexuality: how I lean over me in my own
    way, in my own embrace: I kiss you. You kiss me. You is me.

    *

            Obsessed with slaughter, preoccupied by crime—I am as masculine as you
    think I am—I turn off a signal, I pivot toward you like a weight put down

            My songbird begins and the plain material of pre-shame spells a shadow
    on the trees and the trees are bright green trees full of no shade the same

            What future then to disarm the senses—to unharm this texture, as in every
    face is a face of discovery and every face: a face of past—

            A song redoubling, receding into weather and a song chalking out
    the apple-colored sun, drying in the horizon

            A mute song for the headless statue and a squint song for false “release”
    and a queen song for my spinal column

            Notes for the coming catastrophe and auctions of emotions of what could
    be done for doing something “wrong” and what part of “right” play is paid for

            In adoration the display makes an arrangement as light and pink and wet
    and tongue-colored as any tongue

            Some necessity for the shoreless song of difficult sun that lights the waves
    of the black-green sea

            “Unreasonable” in love—to be like “music” in anyone else’s song—
    is everyone together, diamond cutter? am I only fingering singularity

            Just to over-make a day in an outpouring of silence and just to single-
    handedly command oneself

            By the bywords of a generation—by a sequence of beginnings—
    to telephone oneself is to find oneself in a meme of wind sounds

            Life and times. Life and death. Life in debt. And the bloodgold crowns of
    the past pushing back

            The back road of my commuter’s sentence. The footsore carry-me-further
    from-my-own-body-thoughts—I think between parallel wants

            Poor thought for one “seeing” or one single “waking”—night and dawn
    and the prowl around self-exacted discord, looking in on you, “you”—

            Rose-colored, overexposed feeling: the mouth is ready: I am ready:
    secrete this slowed-down moan

            In the bug-house of authority, in the can of attachment, in my turbulent
    drink—I can’t think

            A crowd of people. An anxious crowd trying to talk me down, trying to feel
    me up

            And all the phone-glow wash in your eyes, and your mind full of your own
    tackle, stuffing your own tackle into your palm like hot silk

            Requisition. Medication. Saving myself the teaser of a full year of
    yesterday’s life

            To order the tiny gold hairs for broadcast in get-off fuel and time out
    a single gesture: to bring love that type of petition

            Brown hair. Blonde Hair. Black Hair. Green light beneath the skin
    builds the analog show

            I’d write a chapter and you’d write a chapter. Inhaler practice. Sleeping it
    off. Getting healthy and moving on—

    *

            Cautious of the late, huh, I sat down: time. I stood up: star—a star as
    deadbright as any star

            And yet, no show. No ist, no ism. I loved watching you. Crushed by a
    moving car, ramped into each new day. I left space to unroll myself, the original
    scroll—

            In affectionate frustrations: remember me negative acceptance,
    remember me crisis, remember me consequence

            The bridge I feel in the sheets shortened. Young defenseless, young
    touchlings—young vibrations

            I haven’t been home tippling “mutiny.” I’ve not been burning old
    notebooks, “suffering” “visions”—

            When they were young, I was young and too hush to report to this world,
    “truly.” You could “feel” it:

            Their “freedom” standing over my “freedom” to define it, though I defy a
    word to define it

     

    Douglas Piccinnini is the author of Blood Oboe (Omnidawn, 2015) and Story Book (The Cultural Society, 2015). His poetry has been anthologized in The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books, 2012) and recent work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Elderly, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Prelude, The Seattle Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse, and The Volta.

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