for esme

"Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

--Dostoevsky

mr. beeps

one tiny note

One philosophy thinks
happiness must be
birdstyle, built
one twig
at a time.

Another thinks:
there is no nest.

So much is possible
with so little.

David sang
his song to Goliath
with one tiny note.

The Same Dumb Run

1. The bathtub is grayed at the temples.
   
2. The pigeons asleep in their chair.
   
3. Twice hideous, once loved.
   
4. A raw feeling at dinner.
   
5. Red knuckles.
   
6. The faint strains of roadwork.
   
7. Pistol whip chorus.
   
8. You speak only in striations. Obligatory turbans and you don't have to see me.
   
9. The bearded croissant.
   
10. Cleanliness rarely equaling happiness.
    
11. Along the ________ edge of my knife.
    
12. Given up to perfect hair.
    
13. An unlikely confusion.
    
14. If you believe it's the same you'll never make it.
    
15. By radiant bus drivers.
    
16. Everywhere, everywhere a peach.
    
17. Grandstanding the pipe.
    
18. From many years ago a letter.
    
19. Oh, god.
    
20. The checks inadvertently in the checkbook.
    
21. The horrendous nature of ink. Of thinking.
    
22. Four orange flowers and nothing is better.
    
23. Volumes of Tolstoy and nothing is solved.
    
24. To argue at length the proper placement of the bookcase.
    
25. The love of you never rising above my hands.
    
26. The hue.
    
27. Dogs in the doorway; don't bother.
    
28. One day we'll walk an imaginary wheel.
    
29. An ever-increasing canto.
    
30. You might be less sad if you listened to Pavarotti.
    
31. You would like to pretend there was a first time.
    
32. Do you have a favorite bird.
    
33. Is your favorite bird the one you both loved and murdered at some frequency with BB guns.
    
34. Too much fabric at the ankle.
    
35. You imagine you whistle and they hear it.
    
36. You imagine they understand.
    
37. "Fashion Coat."
    
38. Every day write down the song you'll die to.
    
39. Math for the meter.
    
40. So much discussion.
    
41. We drove in one sitting to Pittsburgh.
    
42. Between gargantuan movements of light.
    
43. Who wins whose insanity.
    
44. A more complete recollection of scraps.
    
45. The collective holding of breath.
    
46. Legs crossed and waiting.
    
47. We came upon a clearing and within the clearing lay _______________.
    
48. Oh come on. What doesn't lie within a clearing, somewhere.
    
49. Some's and every's and an's and the's.
    
50. All the power to possess it.
    
51. Drive fast in white heels.
    
52. The one bass note that will win you.
    
53. It's impossible to predict what happens next.
    
54. To make the bed or pack a picnic lunch.
    
55. We walked out into the clearing on the tips of our half-ripped shoes.
    
56. There must be a scientific term for saying very little.
    
57. There is a term, like a shirt, for everyone.
    

jurgen, jurgen, rectify torpedoes
the lack of turtledoves in your thin little world
tears popping balloons as they float upwards
coming hard gloom to surface
and then not stopping, you rose
a different dive, like the kind you drink

captain captain, stroke your movie star beard
your imaginary charming sister
who finally falls apart when she hears of your demise
your own face as the thing you wanted most
sinking in shallow water

kitten, kitten, you went down as well
chronicled
damaged film in salt water
over you, and yours

prochnow, prochnow, did you ever milk a cow
in the large hum
boys in the road scrum of your listening eyes
until the words arrive
irrelevant
dead
migrained in barracks
these are my ears, and they have a nice house

over cocoa

The if I go becomes when. Do you want to spend the last ten years differently. Do you want to live in nickel slots, corrugated housing, bad manners. Dust bunnies and fingernail moons the color of old grease. The happy face of the parabola, but you've got that upside down. Well. Shit. The words bedded by pins to black velvet. Everything about you a fashion accessory. The retaught way to walk. It was neither the temperature nor the season for a scarf, but you went there anyway. The stupid places I would never have dreamed of stopping. Idiotsville. Fucktown. The shitfaced sidewalk. You awaken from a dream into another dream. You rise from a dream of water into a dream of walking. Madly populated by willows. Unsympathetic tigers. Seconds to live, seconds to live.

whiskeyface, I saw you in the face of three-fucked up kids, in a softer amulet, softer than the bones we were born with. they trailed out lying about things they liked in phrases learned on the voyage to the new world. where did they learn those words. who taught them to say “I love that boy” as if someone else felt that love, as if the way we try to walk was a distance in itself, four walls for every room calling out incantations unlit, a small bladder, and the door to the café letting in the coming cold. are you like them whiskyface, or is that the command you hear in some voices, a repeated sample, a regurgitation, a liquid sacrifice that helps us from the lunch table to the cement to the car to the chant that says this is monday, an extraordinary best seller which is always ending just to come around again gone.

Cannanes - We Drink Bitter

The 30-minute train and the 30-year blow

Crosswalk boots. The lost collar. Excuse me
may I. He sits and shortly thereafter it's his twin.
At some point in the steady fill
you reconsider your decision.
If you were a roof what color
would be your shingles.
The words fly up the mountain.
I love you like copper.
Like rungs nailed into telephone poles.
Equal divisions of light.
In the bird's flight
a heavy reliance on feathers.
You told me you didn't believe in the distance.
I countered with window bars,
the compost box,
an interpretive charley horse in the sheets.
Three blocks to the wind and everyone a brown garage.
The old woman moaning in pain:
The __________, she explained.
Light sockets and eyes.
The world a retarded symphony.
The largest conceivable saxophone and no chance of reeds.
But! Plenty of step ladders and hats.
If you are the car, I am the yellow medallion.
And exactly what good is the yellow medallion, you ask.
Exactly no good whatsoever, I reply.

Shyness is nice

Plastic gray shoes.
Cinder block smiles.
I never asked to be cognizant.

All this wanting flutters around like a moth.
All this sleeping keeps
making me awake.
I never asked
to be the woman in the hat,
the dog in the bag,
the mouse on the cat on the dog.

I never asked to have bones.

I asked for two tickets, Eddie Money style.
I asked for two tickets and a wonderful life, although not necessarily
in that order.
I asked for a slight cessation in stupidity,
a better blender, or lacking that, a
better blended drink.
A woman to love me forever. Snap!

I never asked for wings, although if
given the opportunity I
would like to revise my list and
ask for wings.

Yearn upwards, yearn down.

I never asked for a good haircut, nor the hair
in pair to inform it, bigger muscles, a more dashing
line to my spine.
But we may safely take that as a given.
Much like: human
avarice, artifact worship, and termites.
AKA the overwhelming desire
to gnaw.

Against rising water we built the ark.
Against obliteration we capsule-pack seeds.

I never asked for double-edged tape,
fingerprintless glasses, life
without smudge.

Why is the idea of an apocalypse not
completely distasteful to me?

In another life you
are the samurai, the
inventor of the light bulb, the best
stone-skipper to come out of Derry in the
last 50 years. In another life I am the
housewife, a hang glider, the undisputed master
of the abacus.

I never asked for what wasn't.
I never asked you
to masturbate away hope.

Switzerland (Unmixed)

The door opens up
and in walks the
angel of death
looks just like a friend.

I took the pills
I took the pills
I took the pills
so why can't I sleep?

(Hope & Suicide, 2007)

we wore band-aids on our nipples for the pheromone tour because you’ve got to give some to want some. we went down below sliding on the banisters of shown skin. we sang with the unwashed clothes of the pips formerly of “and the pips” fame. we rediscovered the short life, the long night, the hourly bells, the way old watches used to move the air in overhead vent shafts where mice knew of cities done, of the light that blocks out the light as she fixes her hair with one last look in the bathroom mirror, the way our genes make the overhead fan turn and noise the wires to spark and chew mouths full of large organs, of less words in the thread, unraveled.

Thanks, Allen

Body I lose faith in you still.

Body the crestfallen have come back to you. Unlikely prodigals in the shape of a shoe.

Body I lay with you and overhead the satellites are wistful.

Why is it no one steps forth and announces us free?

Body we've been together a long time, and although the relationship has been fruitful, perhaps we should consider parting ways.

Body we've had a good run but the door is open.

In the night we waited under pillows and even then there was fear. The fear was black. The night was black. Black, black, black.

Body why the attitude.

Once when I was five I held my hand to the sun and I swear I could hear you through my bones.

Body don't look now but I think I've had a vision.

Bodies everywhere and why do they do it.

A massacre of thumbscrews. Televised canings and precision holographic nightmares. Three old crones still singing around the fire.

Body no one's forgotten oblivion but it's just not polite to say.

Cheat codes unlock the magnificent weapons.

Body up up left right down.

Body we shall recalibrate the soulless and toast victory with green tea.

Fifty-two years and what have we gained.

Body I don't think of my father. But when I do I think he was a good man. This is the softness of later life.

In purple fur we took to the streets to lay the new empire. Aloft the purple flags.

Body I don't believe in Rome or in anything.

Body where will it end.

oh my god my goodness

i will never be right again.

Sept.-Nov.07 Fiction/Non-Fiction Releases

NEW RELEASES FOR FALL 07

 

September fiction

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (FSG); Sebastian Faulks' novel Engleby (Doubleday); Zakes Mda's novel Cion (Picador Original); Jesse Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness (Vintage Original); and Library of America's Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 and On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking).

Percival Everett's novel The Water Cure (Graywolf); Valerie Martin's novel Trespass (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Brock Clarke's novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Algonquin Books); David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury); Xiaolu Guo's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); and Edmund White's novel Hotel de Dream (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift's novel Tomorrow (Knopf); Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Irene Nemirovsky's posthumous novel Fire in the Blood (Knopf); Paul Theroux's collection of novellas, The Elephant Suite (Houghton Mifflin); and Jim Shepard's story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf).

Vincent Lam's novel Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books); Gina Nahai's novel Caspian Rain (MacAdam/Cage); Northern California writer Peg Kingman's first novel, Not Yet Drown'd (Norton); Ann Patchett's novel Run (Harper); and Bay Area author Gail Tsukiyama's novel The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin's Press).

Berkeley resident and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass' Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins); Michael White's Civil War novel, Soul Catcher (Morrow); David Peace's crime novel Tokyo Year Zero (Knopf); Oakland writer Erika Mailman's first novel, The Witch's Trinity (Crown); Adrian Tomine's graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly); Michel Faber's story collection, Vanilla Bright Like Eminem (Harcourt); Davis artist Spring Warren's first novel, Turpentine (Black Cat/Grove); Berkeley writer Don Waters' story collection, Desert Gothic (University of Iowa Press), Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Psalms (Norton); and Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon novel in six years, Pontoon (Viking).

September nonfiction

Robert Reich's Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (Knopf), Michael Hoffman edits The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words - Stories, Poems, Drafts, Letters (New York Review of Books); Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (Grove); Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (Norton); and Gordon Johnson's Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports From the Rez (Heyday/Baytree).

John Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches of Survival and Resistance (Pantheon); Edie Kerouac-Parker's You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, edited by Timothy Moran and Bill Morgan (City Lights); George Saunder's essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead); and John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think) (Viking).

Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown); Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf); David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion); and philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press), winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's essay collection, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Knopf); Janet Malcolm's book on Stein and Toklas, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press); James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (Knopf); and Bliss Broyard's memoir, One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race and Secrets (Little, Brown).

John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (Random House); James R. Gaines' For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions (Norton); and Sports Illustrated senior writer and Northern California resident Austin Murphy's ode to college football, Saturday Rules: A Season With Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) (Harper).

Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (Walker), whom van Onselen contends was Jack the Ripper; Charles Fleming and San Jose's Howard Dully's book on Dully's troubled life, My Lobotomy (Crown); Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt); San Francisco's very own Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions); and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (The Penguin Press).

October fiction

Wanda Colmeman's story collection, Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales (Black Sparrow Books/Godine); San Francisco writer Diane Vadino's first novel, Smart Girls Like Me (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's); Bay Area author Alice Sebold's novel The Almost Moon (Little, Brown); and Millard Kaufman's first novel, Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's).

Richard Russo's novel Bridge of Sighs (Knopf); Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin's); Philip Roth's final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin); Fadia Faqir's novel The Cry of the Dove (Black Cat/Grove); Michal Govrin's novel Snapshots (Riverhead); and Bay Area poet Adrienne Rich's Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems: 2004-2006 (Norton).

Alan Lightman's novel, Ghost (Pantheon); Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (Grove); Ursula Hegi's novel The Worst Thing I've Done (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster); Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Bad Girl (FSG); Joshua Henkin's novel Matrimony (Pantheon); Caryl Phillips' novel Foreigners (Knopf); and Iain Banks' novel The Steep Approach to Garbdale (MacAdam/Cage).

Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey), first serialized in the New York Times Magazine; William Trevor's story collection, Cheating at Canasta (Viking); W.G. Sebald's poems, accompanied by lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp, making up Unrecounted (New Directions); Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to the Practice - a Collection of Great Writing About the Law (The New Press), edited by Thane Rosenbaum; and Walter Mosley's new Easy Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (Little, Brown).

October nonfiction

San Francisco author Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Jonathan Miles' The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century (Atlantic); Judith Jones' memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf); and University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein's revisiting of where the Internet has taken us thus far in Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press).

Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt); Edmund Wilson's Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America) and his Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (Library of America); and Oakland's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin).

Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont edit Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion (MacAdam/Cage); David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper); Shalom Auslander's memoir, Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead); and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Half Moon Bay author Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf); Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf); Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Harmony); former Chronicle religion reporter Don Lattin's Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne); and Julie Kavanagh's Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon).

Award-winning Russian historian Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Knopf); John Updike's Due Consideration: Essays and Criticism (Knopf); Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (Knopf); and Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark's Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Walker).

Orland Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Bob Drogin's Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Intelligence Nightmare That Led to America's War in Iraq (Random House); Imam Sayid Hassan Al-Qazwini's American Crescent: A Muslim Cleric's Struggle for Islam in America (Random House); and Berkeley author Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Doubleday).

Amy Silverstein's medical memoir, Sick Girl (Grove Press); Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton); Gary Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (The Penguin Press); UC Davis history Professor Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books); John Lukacs' Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill and the Speech That Saved Civilization (Basic Books); and Dana Frank's Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments (City Lights).

Venture capitalist and Hewlett-Packard board of director member Tom Perkins' memoir, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (Gotham Books); The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G . Sebald (Seven Stories Press), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon (Scribner); David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer (Heyday Books); and KQED "Forum" host and San Francisco State Professor Michael Krasny's Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press).

November fiction

Michael Rothenberg edits The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press); John Ashbery's Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins); and Ha Jin's novel A Free Life (Pantheon).

Ronan Bennett's literary thriller Zugzwang (Bloomsbury); Peter Ackroyd's novel The Fall of Troy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Peter Hoeg's first novel in more than 10 years, The Quiet Girl (FSG); and Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Datebook: Vol. 2 1995-1999 and ACME Novelty Library No. 18 (Drawn & Quarterly).

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta), edited by Richard Ford; The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Stories From the Pulps During Their Golden Age - the '20s, the '30s and the '40s (Vintage Original), edited by Otto Penzler; Andrea Barrett's novel, The Air We Breathe (Norton); and Steve Erickson's novel about Hollywood, Zeroville (Europa Editions).

Stewart O'Nan's novel, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking); the anthology The Book of Other People (Penguin Original), edited by Zadie Smith; and Yannick Murphy's novel Signed, Mata Hari (Little, Brown).

November nonfiction

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (The Penguin Press); Silvana Paternostro's My Colombian War: A Journey Through a Country I Left Behind (Henry Holt); Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Norton); Lachlan Whelan's Contemporary Irish Prison Writing: Writing and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan); John Richardson's third volume of his Picasso biography, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf); and novelist and story writer William Boyd's Bamboo: Essays and Criticism (Bloomsbury).

Ed Sikov's Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (Henry Holt); San Francisco writer Alex Frankel's Punching In: My Unauthorized Adventure as a Front Line Employee (Collins); Thomas Hines' The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG); Umberto Eco's essay collection, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (Harcourt); Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (The Penguin Press); and Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon).

Alicia Castro and Ingrid Kummels' Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba's First All-Girl Dance Band (Grove Press); The Paris Review Interviews, II (Picador Original), edited by Philip Gourevitch; The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper), edited by Charlotte Mosley; Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press); and Conrad Black's (yes, that Conrad Black) Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs).

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1967-1980 (Atria), selected and edited by David Hilliard; Bill Boyarsky's Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (University of California Press); Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner); Adam David Miller's memoir of growing up in the Jim Crow South, Ticket to Exile (Heyday Books); and a book not likely to be sold next to where you pick up your Frappuccino, Taylor Clark's Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (Little, Brown) .

 

 

Louie's

To delineate
To encircle
To congratulate and
to weep.

Whenever anyone adverbalizes
uncontrollably
it always to my mind
brings the bowels,
the exploding wanton
love
of the bowels, of all the parts of you,
nether
or otherwise
even those alien and
antithetical, the hummingbird
or clockspring
that took you last Tuesday
to Louie's,

the bar I never
go to, on
the street I care always
not to see.

Louie's, where
you stood
two drinks too long, through
two too many
glasses
of wine.

I don't want you
to tell me
his name,
or at what drink it was
he paid
instead
of you,
or how
beyond
the basic
physiological
structure
his cock
worked differently
from mine.

I spend entire
evenings
considering
those differences.

Considering
a yellow
car ride,
a purple
stairwell,
bedspreads,
Tuesdays,
Louie's,
the end.

ordinarily

Ordinarily
the empty.
Ordinarily
the blank.
The finger-smudged
convex, the perfect
eyebrow, and tell me
what is
older: the shotgun
or the mouth? the heart
seen only
as a bird's nest
of ink. the realization
of one forty three,
of thirty five zygote
and egg.

"for miles the city"

for miles the city
for inches the night
for centuries the ice
for five years the fingernails,
your face

for miles the night
for miles the knife
for miles the trees
for miles your belt
for miles the question
for miles an answer,
the right

for centuries the ice, the highball, the glass

for miles the wind
for miles the thinking
for miles the sent

for miles the insinuation
for miles the grief

for miles your fingers
for miles the ringing
of the telephone

for miles the photograph
for miles the gray

for miles the ending
for miles the end

for miles the ringtone
for miles the bend

featherbound

Featherbound
Oraga
Gypsum and moss
Clevinger post

Why did I
walk away from you

I wasn't happy then
and I'm not happy now

The daylight cuts into the water
The ocean swallows the sunset
The minnow swallows the whale

Why did I
walk away from you

In a thousand blank rooms
and your breasts I can barely
remember

Transfer slips
Drink rings
Fingerprints

There used to be breathing
in the blackness
The morning
you dropped your scooter
There will be
no more omelets
There will be no more
tea

All the people here wouldn't
fill a glass of you
If I could
be anyone I'd be
the man who told you different

Why did I
walk away from you

Twitter

1. A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.); a state of agitation; a flutter, a tremble. Now chiefly dial.
1678 BUTLER Hud. III. I. 83 The ancient errant knights Won all their ladies' hearts in fights, And cut whole giants into fritters, To put them into amorous twitters. a1734 NORTH Exam. I. iii. §31 (1740) 141 The Attorney-General..was in a Twitter; for some of his Friends told him he would certainly be questioned for it in Parliament. 1802 G. COLMAN Poor Gentleman I. i, If I ben't all of a twitter to see my old John Harrowby again! 1825 J. NEAL Bro. Jonathan II. 151 A leap of the heart..and a sort of tingling twitter through all his blood. 1861 THACKERAY Four Georges iv. (1862) 198 In a twitter of indignation. 1869 TROLLOPE He knew, etc. xxxi, [She] was in a twitter, partly of expectation, and partly..of fear. 1869 L. M. ALCOTT Little Women vi, Beth hurried on in a twitter of suspense.
b. A suppressed laugh, a titter; a fit of laughter. dial.
1736 LEWIS Isle of Tenet Gloss. s.v. (E.D.S.), He is in a mighty twitter. 1847-78 HALLIWELL, Twitter,..(2) A fit of laughter. Kent.
2. An act or the action of twittering, as a bird; light tremulous chirping. Also transf. a sound resembling this.
1842 BROWNING Waring I. vi. 35 As pours some pigeon..her melodious cry Amid their [swallows'] barbarous twitter! 1849 W. S. MAYO Kaloolah v. (1850) 40 The hesitating twitter of the sleepy birds. 1871 BLACKIE Four Phases i. 43 A mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon. 1902 J. C. SNAITH Wayfarers xvi, The ceaseless twitter of the rain on the road