Scheduled outage.

From now until next month the 14th. Happy vacation-days.

Hangedover

She had black satin sheets, what the hell? A south-facing window too, on the second floor, where the low-angled winter sun was coming in across my feet, which I always keep outside the covers so they don't sweat. She was all curved and pale pinkish Irish Catholic and quietly dozing with a lopsided swollen self-bit drunken lip. Everything smelled of sex and whiskey breath. When my eyes focussed, which they did occasionally, as I tried to look at the pebbled plaster ceiling, they still hurt, and I spent a good portion of my time that morning wondering why I'd ended up at her place and not mine.

I had to spit out about six of her various hairs. She approached me the night before, and I knew her, I guess, at least well enough to get into her unmentionables, or whatever. More like she got into mine, now that I think about it. We were talking for far too long before I made a move, or she did, maybe. Is a shirt a move? She told me the same story every night. She told me the same and I listened because I heard the same thing I want you in her same story every day. And those sheets, with her body standing out, it was pretty tacky let me tell you. Like one of those black velvet Elvises except maybe with Miss America 1922 on it. She tasted like no-flavor, her mouth did, and I liked that.

The rest of the bottle we never got around to finishing, thank god, was on the night stand. How it made it through the night I don't know but it'd have to go anyway since the cap was off. Off-brand anyway. I never met anyone so open, she fucked like a man, that is, whenever wherever. Just slip in, practically. I was spoiled and I didn't really want to talk to her that much anyway because she told the same story every day when we clinked our knives in swordfish steaks at Casa Nostra. And because I didn't talk to her there was no problem taking advantage of her low self esteem, which manifested itself in those black satin sheets, where like Madonna she told bedtime stories, the same ones every night. She refused to touch her clit though, because she thought like all good catholics that pleasure is evil, but she wasn't thinking any such thing at the moment with her Irish Catholic hair in her blissfully unconscious eyes and her smooth curving arms tuck up under her pillow.

Probably she was thinking about her boss who she had wanted to fuck but didn't because she refused to have more than one lover at at time. Probably a paternity thing. I was thinking about my ex-boss who I'd fucked right before I fucked her over on the last project I worked on at that place over on Templeton, you know, that interior enginerring place with the unreasonably low ceilings and the superold rould clear incandescents like gaslight and ancient metal desks under which rolled those metal armed office chairs from before the second World War.

I tried to sit up but felt the blood rush out of my skull and into my esophagis, where it lodged and made me choke a bit as it was replaced by what must have been baking soda and maybe some insult to add to my injury. I hoped my liver was still intact anyway. She had this habit of giving me playful punched under my ribs and she was a lefty and she wasn't a little woman either which is one reason I'd liked her, because it didn't feel like nothing when I was humping away, let me tell you. I'm not a small dude, and a lady who doesn't move around, and she didn't, needs to make herself known one way or another. I guess physical, what do you call it, stature is one way. Besides it was strangely appropriate with that Irish Catholic skin on those black satin sheets with my feet freezing and the low-angled sun turning toward my eyes in a way that was going to become a problem pretty soon and the smell of sex in my nose mixed with old aired open whiskey, and everything so still. Even with my inner ear slopping about like I'd twirled in one of the ex-boss' office swivel chairs and tried to come to a rest and knew I couldn't stant, like you can't when you're dizzy. Like a still life in three dimensions. But I tell this story every morning.

oh... (!)

so i walked in on you
tonight
with your arms around him
(y)our son
about six months old and passed
the fuck out
like a drunk
on Xmas.

and i stopped quick and caught
my breath
in
holy
shit
stop and
think
you drunk
i thought.

i turned into the hallway to look at my
sorry ass in
the mirror
showing my
ugly personality
to the
world
like Moses
in the
reed basket on
High Holy Day.

or, at least, I
saw everything Dad
never wanted me
to be because
he was the one
who was ust
like what
whe never wanted
me to be
which is to
say: i saw a drunk
with a flacid cheese sandwich
and a Natty Light
and a belly button swollen to Tangerine
size, winking
bulbously from beneath your
wattling wings.

and I smoothed back
my hair, though really
there isn't much there to slide
back over my
scalp.
then i hiccuped.
and i stalked in then
ninja like
i tip
toed toward
your mattress
and his
and stole
beneath sheets
i paid
49.95 for
when i was thinking about him instead
ouf you
the one who betrayed
your simplistic les
on the night of our "wedding"
when you said you
would love me
for as
long as you
knew i would be safe
for your child to
grow up around even
though i was the one
who encouraged you to
"acquire him" in the
first
place.

oh i looked at you in that
bed tonight
when i walked
in
and boy did i think i could have
made this life
go another way but
that wasn't
in
the cards
so i
let it go and in one moment
of clarity i gave
up.

so thank
him
for
that, would
you.

remember

remember how 2 lose, yo. u do that 'n u know why u hold on so hard. "bird stealing bread":

tell me baby tell me
are u still on the stoop
watching the windows close
ive not seen you lately
on the street, by the beach
or places we used to go

ive a picture of u
on our favorite day by the seaside
theres a bird stealing bread
that i brought out from under my nose

tell me baby tell me
does his company make
light of a rainy day
how ive missed you lately
and the way we would speak
and all that we wouldn't say

do his hands in your hair
feel a lot like a thing you believe in
or a bit like a bird stealing bread
out from under your nose

tell me baby tell me
do you carry the words
around like a key or change
ive been thinking lately
of a night on the stoop
and all that we wouldn't say

if i see you again
on the street, by the beach
in the evening
will you fly like a bird stealing bread
out from under my nose

thx sam beam.

when u turn 2 malt liquor

u be chillin' wif my freund j-gold:

it's going alright
it's going alright
i just wait by the phone
it's going alright
it's going alright
more insane by the minute

fake outs, yo

sum hella badass hardcore band hella down emo type shizzle (but not really emo 'cuz that is teh laem):

You never loved me.
now i cannot lie down in that bed,
i cannot lie down in all of those old fears.
i haven't slept,
singe the colors from my glances.
If i was bleeding,
would you tell me?
If i was saying,
would you hear me?
You asked for everything but never loved.
If i was praying,
would you kill me?
you never loved me.
dead.

thx converge.

teacup circles Neptune

while looking up for the first time in a long
time i noticed the other day (tuesday?)
empty bright clouds like cheesecloth
straining the day into an overcooked porkchop
of a day: gristly and mean.
it was a day when Apollo, hungover, pissed
his mushroom pissings back down
into the nightsoil cities
glowering
and head wobbling cursed mortals all.

it's a deliriant, we delirious danced and screamed
"Oh God of Gods and God of Man, kill us
dead and make our bones
dance this three-step,"
but redcap magics kept everyone
gray and awash in uisce beatha

(we're in high lattitudes these days,ion
waterfalls above us make the colors
our pale skins soak in
our eyes see suddenly within pines)

and the empty clouds cried out in
our minds, or we imagined in those cities
we'd built to defy the goat
that a great minde entity looked down swiftly
choosing and separating the vulgar and
infested from the clear righteous but
really it was
only us
after all.

Weather Report

Fully autumnal drafts do not permeate into top-floor hideaways or personal relations over the next week or so; we forecast a sweet melancholy of promises and loss, hopes and the expectation of unfulfilled expectations; 40% chance of bad decisions across the region; a low-pressure system in the area will be displaced, through loss of a friend, with a high-pressure system, bringing the kind of icy clarity that distracts the mind from the slowing metabolic functions of the body; long term projections indicate that there may be no perihelic solstice this fiscal year.

Nonreferring ontological terms: drop them.

Frege distinguished sense from reference. But what might a sense be, given that it is what is supposed to determine the reference (if any) of a term or sentence, and what kind of thing is it that "presents" bits of the world in one way or another? The mirror of the telescope stands in some relation between observed and heavenly body; yet we cannot allow the relation to be characterized as such since we will be led on a regress trying to explain the relation of the relation, mirror, body, and star, and so forth... The thought is that we refuse to trat predication terms as terms that have sense when taken alone... which is to say, things like 'red' in English do not refer, and this is because they present nothing at all--and the move in the other direction is to make 'function' do something (philosophically) unusual, as well. (If you have trouble reading this, get the code2000 font.)

...a sense is importantly like a function. It might just be a function, on the obvious understanding of how functions operate which consists in bringing objects into definite relations–‘bringing’ here abbreviating the process of our noticing such associations. The relevant notion is this: Some function following the form ⌜ƒxy⌝ is such that what we might substitute in for ⌜‘x’⌝ and ⌜‘y’⌝, say sets or ordered sequences or the members thereof, or numbers, or names, are necessarily in the background of any understanding of this function, so that function-ness cannot be explained without essential reference to arguments and values: we shall say it is incomplete. For example, where ‘ƒ′’ is interpreted as a standard addition function we must explain what it does using the notions of number; viz. something like ‘ƒ′xy: x + y = … ‘ where our ellipsis is filled by an appropriately defined successor-function-dependent syntactic relation. Keep in mind how handily the active “does” fits the function notion, as opposed to a more static “is.”

Things like sets, numbers, colors, categories, laws, natural kinds, these have all been taken more or less platonically across the history of philosophy, and it has only been relatively recently that reductionism has attempted to do away with the jungles of nonphysical odds and ends various theories generate. Even the most parsimonious, however, have often felt it useful to adopt at least sets, and usually numbers into their ontologies. Once one has sets in hand, functions are a short step to reach. I will now argue that “a sense” is not an abstract object in the usual (philosophical) understanding. And here is the question, to begin: what is “a function” to be?

I pose the problem this way in light of Donald Davidson’s posthumously published lectures on predication, in which he argues persuasively that any account of predication in which predicates standing alone are taken to denote cannot escape inherent vulnerability to third-man arguments. Say we see ⌜R(a,b)⌝, as usually understood. The expression ‘Rab’, for instance, appears to consist of three names, that is ‘a’, ‘b’, and the name of some relation ‘R’. But this is a result of losing sight of the fact that the relation-term, a two-place predicate, is supposed to do the work of unifying the other terms so as to form a sentence (here one thinks of Russell’s claim that every sentence requires a universal ). One cannot just stick these terms together (if they are names) as 〈R,a,b〉 or the like, for then one merely has three names to one another: something else is needed to make this collection of names into a (unified) sentence. , The same problem will happen with 〈Q,R,a,b〉, 〈P,Q,R,a,b〉 and so forth, in infinite regress. Davidson takes this ubiquitous failure to be a reductio of views of predicates holding them substantial. Since any function ‘ƒ′′(ϕ)=ψ’ can be recharacterized as Fϕψ, functions do not stand much chance as objects.

I have followed Joan Weiner’s exposition and called senses of sentences thoughts. Further, a thought is not what a sentence means: that is its truth-value, on the Sinn und Bedeutung view. ‘Concept’ I hereinafter reserve for those things associated with noun-phrase terms, which present objects in various modes. Words for concepts act like words for objects, insofar as we are able to discuss what concept words denote when used in oblique contexts. While to say ‘Superman = Clark Kent’ is to say something about an object and to say ‘‘Superman’ ≡ ‘Clark Kent’’ is to say something about terms (i.e. that their denotata are identical), to say ‘Superman ≡ Clark Kent’ is to say something about senses. One says in this example that an object is presented in two modes, while what one means is true. , But must an object be substantial? No: “an object” need not be substantial to fulfill the roles a quasi-Fregean semantic theory needs senses to fulfill.

In order to elucidate, we take a detour into terms for other nonphysical “entities.” According to the well-known “Slingshot” argument, which has been attributed to Frege, every true sentence denotes one thing, and every false sentence denotes another, if sentences denote. Sentences express thoughts that map them onto truth values. But truth and falsity are not objects. The truth of a sentence, for Frege, is derivative from the truth of its sense, for only thoughts are such that the question of truth “arises” for them. Thoughts are the intensional entities, then, and it is expressing a thought that connects sentences via reference to truth or falsity. But truth and falsity are not concepts (functions), either, on that view. They are not things, to borrow a figure, but not nothings. So the cognate terms of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ are serviceable even though properly speaking they are irreferential.

So far we have seen that predicate terms may be characterized as functions. (A one-place predicate is a degenerate case: it takes only an argument, and when it does it expresses a thought, which is true or false, but one may say that in predicating an atomic sentence consisting of a completed one-place predicate functions as a two-place predicate with truth or falsity as its value.) Thoughts are also, in a way, functions. So when we talk about them we may characterize them as such, e.g. a thought about a sum, as expressed by ⌜ƒ′′′(+,x,y,z) = V⌝ where V∈{T, ⊥}. Similarly, when we discuss senses in terms of functions like Fxy, we implicitly treat the senses as incomplete in the fashion that functions were said earlier to be incomplete. As objects or entities, this could be problematic. However, functions constituting senses (and thoughts, but let us leave that discussion for now) are not objects, as I have indicated, though we must needs use language in a way that assumes they are such. As a first approximation to the idea, contrast what one understands by ‘It is a red coat’ with ‘∃x(Rx∧Cx)’.

. The basic motivation for moving away from characterizing senses as objects is to avoid the regress problem with accounts of predication. If one wants senses, they just cannot be entities. If the predicate does not stand for an object, there may not need to be a relation between what it is predicated of and something further in order for predication to happen. More generally, if one avoids taking terms’ concepts to be objects (in that ordinary sense) one may avoid similar third-man difficulties arising from relating senses to objects and utterances. Another motivation, for those who like it, though not justifcatory, is ontological parsimony. Further, the obscure nature of these entities, concepts and thoughts, can make them seem like stop-gaps rather than important and central features of a semantic theory.

Indeed, it seems to be the obscurity of Frege’s intensional entities that led Davidson to reject the idea that predication consists in anything further than satisfaction, which is taken to rest upon the simple notion of truth. Whether or not his view is correct I cannot say, but I have adopted some of this method, a sort of “deflation” of certain intensional entities. One needs an “aboutness” relation, in order to connect parts of the world: what’s “in the head,” what’s said, and the bits of the world answering to them, if any. Terms that act like names, such as predicates taken in isolation, would seem to be about something. Each meaningful term in an expression, predicates and names , would contribute to the sentence what it was about and the structure (or something) would unite these pieces into an expression of a thought, with a truth value. Here follows an example (failing) account of senses by which they are not entities.

To avoid the regression problem, predicates must be meaningless when taken in isolation—or to be more precise, concepts must be insubstantial. Though things may be red, there is no “color red.” ‘R’ does nothing by itself, but ‘Rx’ is useful, e.g. in ‘◊∃xRx ∧ ~∃y(Cy)’. So our senses occur in predication, that is, when something is predicated of something, the noun phrase or sentence thereby created has a sense (under normal circumstances). A term, for instance a complex term like the noun phrase ‘the black cat on the mat in the den of my uncle Charlie’s cottage’ presents a particular object(s) in a certain way, but it associates the cat also with other objects which are presented along with it. The phrase will be satisfied if certain circumstances appear, otherwise not. If one wanted the phrase to stand by itself as a sentence, one could insert the copula between ‘cat’ and ‘on’, and the truth-conditions of the resulting sentence would be the satisfaction conditions of the presentational phrase. The thought expressed by ‘The cat is on the mat’ functions to give some truth condition or other through the utterance. Which one is a matter best explored elsewhere. The upshot is that presentation of an object, e.g. by predication, just is the function—a presentation through concepts.

(Now some bold conjectures.) A predication is a syntactic activity, a singular event whose effects may persist, but only through the syntactic act does the semantic value of a syntactic object appear. Ostention is a primitive syntactic and semantic activity: the object and the term appearing together serves to introduce, roughly, satisfaction conditions for terms while establishing the syntactic identity of terms. (Homonyms and synonyms being complications of natural, which is to say non-ideal, languages.) Saying “‘Black’ ‘cat’” gets one nowhere, nor does “Black, cat,” as these are again mere concatenations of names (or name-like terms). Saying something along the lines of “That cat is Black” or “Black(Tabby)” is predication. The predicative act does not occur in the mind, as on Russell’s sometime view. Predication occurs in the linguistic act (on the model presented above, whole sentences could be treated as multiplace predicates per impossibile). The act expresses a thought, which is related as mentioned above to ideas one has; the ideas are “in the head” but the thought is not. A thought expressed by a sentence has to be “somewhere” however. I say it is in the world. A thought expressed by a sentence is some arrangements of spatiotemporal and abstract objects (like numbers). What is expressed, on this view, is not the ideas in the head but parts of the world itself. Expression and presentation are the same. Grasping the meaning of a sentence is not taking hold of an extraphysical object (usually ), but rather it is contacting the world through language. One can see through language to the world behind it. And this is because language names (presents) parts of the world.
Now for a moment imagine that all physical objects (including events) are labeled and put in sequence. Then primitive sensory information could counterfactually tell one about (the (indirect) effects of) those objects, whereby satisfaction of any utterable sentence could be ascertained. Since the whole world is sequenced, the sequence either satisfies a sentence or it doesn’t. Every satisfied sequence, on the familiar Tarskian model, is true if and only if satisfied. A sentence is about, on ordinary conceptions, regions of the world; but here we see that sentences are about the world in so far as they are satisfied by it, which is to say in so far as they are true. So if sentences are about anything, they are true or false. (On this view, however, we have not so far said that sentences mean truth or falsity.)

On the example view just expounded*, senses occur in physical locations, supervening on expressive utterances, and the senses are the onstention-based connections between syntactically developed names of objects and objects via presentation (“here is how one finds out whether the world satisfies the sentence… ”). This amounts, apparently, to a functional competence. There are sentences which are terms arranged in such a way that they express a thought, and the thought is some purported region of the world. This of course begs the question how it comes to be a unity, but apparently merely existing as an expression is enough to make it so. There are thoughts expressed by the sentences, as it turns out they to are physically located.

That view is unsatisfactory for any number of reasons, but let me mention two straw parts. First, the explanation that the very act (or event) of predication creates the intensional state is opaque as far as explanatory potential goes. Second, it is not clear what it would mean to express part of the world.

...and so forth.

*In order to show that it is possible for someone to hold a view with the desired consequences, and also to make clear which moves a subsequent positive view won't make.

(Those who care can email us for bibliographical information.)

Scheduled Outage.

Until 17th November.

...Except McFly

How come it is that people think vandalism is funny? I have no damn idea but I will tell you this IT IS NOT ALWAYS FUNNY. MUTHAFUCKAS. In fact there are times when you know you should like recognize that destroying shit isn't so cool. Like Wikipedia. STOP FUCKING IT UP OR I WILL PUT AN ARTICLE ON THERE ABOUT YOU AND HOW YOU ENJOY SYPHALITIC WIENERS. & Have I mentioned that there is a time and a place for vandalism, because sometimes defacing some supposedly serious thing is hilarious? Because I'm doing it now. So, "people," why don't you take some good advice from a canadian--yes, he is REALLY A HUMAN I SWEAR--and just mess up one thing that if it were serious would be absurd but vandalism of which is even more hilariously absurd and wrong because everybody already has a pretty damn good idea of what stuff is true about it. I.e. edible farm fowl. with beers.

ahhh... hh. ahh. er. hhh. ahh--mm.

the ache of tired muscles after sleep is the xylem to pleasure's phloem while stretching early in mornings after an accomplishment or a job of work, warm honey running both directions from scalp to shoulders, wrists to neck, spine to ass, glutes to toes, crotch to pectoralis, is the ache and bracing comfort of living.

Vote!

Well, that's all I've got to say.

notable kwoatz

fr. tha lair o tha main proety man harold chinaski: Dinosauria, we

born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

born into this
walking and living through this
dying because of this muted because of this
castrated
debauched
disinherited
because of this
fooled by this
used by this
pissed on by this
made crazy and sick by this
made violent
made inhuman
by this

the heart is blackened
the fingers reach for the throat
the gun
the knife
the bomb
the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god

the fingers reach for the bottle
the pill
the powder

we are born into this sorrowful dealiness
we are born into a government 60 year in debt
that soo will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
and the banks will burn
money will be useless
there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
it will be guns and roving mobs
land will become useless
food will become a dimiishing return
nuclear power will be taken over by the many
explosions will continually shake the earth
radiated robot men will stalk each other
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground

the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
trees will dies
all vegetation will die
radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold

the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
and the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
the petering out of supplies
the natral effect of general decay

and there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

born out of that.

the sun still hidden there

awaiting the next chapter.

fr. 'last nigh of the earth poems', ecco 2002. thx old man.

haik**

careful darling, sharps
must be disposed of properly.
i will help you.

why do bruises come?
was it a tussle, in the wine
before we screwed?

washed in report ink
ties and pinstripes underground
wish London ill, now.

and two short stories:

teen boy loves cock, boyfriend doesn't.

Rabbi: "Abel left everything to Cain!?"

Stretching

Here I am in the morning sitting leftward spine curled in a swivel chair typing avoiding. The work, that is, I'm avoiding it. Here with the computer age equivalent of a tiny leather fake crocodile narrow lined with no dates pocket notebook, scribbling in tiny type of ink from a rounded tin nibbed fountain pen in sweat greased fingers. Cry out, fingers, as I lean into you and strike these plastic letters like Bukowski advised in the title of a book of poetry I saw once while acquiring another rough paper board bound paperback well glued floppy bright colored big lettered new poems volume of his. The other day. In a well known bookstore, while drinking one oz. of free complimentary may I please entice you to spend money at our in house coffee shop strangely (syrup) flavored latte or mocha or whatever in a tiny cup that could not possibly have been Dixie, waxed, or reminiscent of the bright wide avenues of libraries in childhood with books so wide as to be hard to hold all around amongst gigantic comfortable chairs, when in fact I was looking–I swear–for a volume on tensor analysis, I came across the poetry section which I like to visit sometimes when I am waiting for the mall shops to open at the shopping mall two blocks down from this one. I can't wait for LED lighting to become a reality even if I do have to pay U.S.$50 per bulb just because they are more efficient still than flourescents and do not have the drawback of buzzing, which is what I'm hearing underneath the sad morning music I put on to get in the mood to work when it is a dreary Saturday or Sunday or Thursday and I must study and memorize something or else compose something or evaluate something and need to be appropriately somber instead of stripping down to my skivvies and running manic wet through the rain while my soles are torn on concrete sidewalks. Today, I need to write a creative composition of not more than 500 words.

For the H monstar.

butt
what.

for what's falling.

Twins

It rains.
The sky is like ground-out cigarettes.
It's heavy and slow, sloppy
like last night's leftovers,
like last week's sullen laundry,
like a quiet whispered lie.
I buried my sister today.
I haven't eaten in two days.
My skin: brown, worn, weathered.
Thick.
The malamute it sniffing for rats
in the leftovers of the back porch.

The old machine–
stolen from the high school–
with the brand name on the plastic–
sign glowing to advise everyone soda–
is reasonably priced–
lies on its side obscured–
in the turkeyfoot and thistle–

cozying up
to empty forty bottles.
I'm guilty, unashamed. She
focussed on others and I focussed
on my plate
its contents decided before our
births, wichtig in Jupiter's light. No,
in Europa's light.

I'm wearing what she would've
told everyone in her video
before martyrdom
to don. A quiet knit, a
shawl, a cap against rain.
Her stone was born this morning
while I stood over shoulders
of thickwristed women
who spelt, excellently,
her life.
The great trunk's, branches
blooming like its vines, outlasting
over our tattered roof.

These, these, these are October flowers.
These are November seeds.
Like a necklace strung with rusty
potted meat tins swarming
–overloaded and doomed–
with larvae. It's possibilities
she saw in skies like these.
Eyes like these. Thighs like--

Drives by, the dark sedan,
the young man who
chose the beautiful one.
Looks at me his lips her name
silent in the oilblack engine
noise and the overflowing gutters,
and the malamute follows–
baying–
like she knows curses to say
on her mother's behalf, in
her way. Plastic bags
dangle hanged upon maples'
empty arms in its wake.

I've got
this bit of silver mirror,
from the ancient clapboard on Jackson Street,
from when we broke in
because of a dare; she
coveted it. I took it for
to give, and now its given
back, like a letter with its address
washed away, by the page scrawled out
for a paralegal in the living room
last March. Equinox. Oh will
she kiss me from the
other side just one more
time? I know the Red Queen's
journey in my barefoot bones.

Creak away, ghost of mine,
in Momma's rocker–
under the kitchen window where
you put it–
with its busted seat you don't need.
Love, it's streetlamp time.
Well say to the malamute,
"Come!"
So I can go before that boy
comes by to take her
tomorrow morning.

hm. cold out.

bicycle. check.
scarf. check check.
gloves. flexed.
goggles in place,
boots strapped 'round in seven strong buckles with nickel tongues.
check.

leaves on the hoods of dusty hoopties. check.
empty flasks of
backberry schnapps. check check.
cobblestones negotiated casually. check.
creak trees--ten-four.
fly, gray rolling banks above.
done and done.

it's november. it's december.
it's Ultima Thule in reverse, ascending into
a cold cave's heart in the sky
where i spy la lune peeking
. check. flexed.