Suddenly we can be erased out of a tunnel like a sun sung someone implants the wrong cornea to see cities of coins where eyes should be, each notion indexed to a corresponding night-bus with its moving waiting-room filled with loose words.
A car we are lost in is as if it is in the same place we believe it to be. Later on the phone but coincident you motion the school we drove past. A sense of a word ended, here, and nothing marks this.
Surrounded by stuff we cannot name, miles of air where harassed newspapers spread their wings and the colours run behind.
We slow the car to listen to the rotten song and work as interpreters of capital.
I turn to the wheel and I say but my tongue was not in I tell the car radio to fuck off twice on the way home.
Pond
Hey what made so hectic the light pulse on the pond after the thrown stone when we stood in the bodies of children counting on the banks holding, there still being a glass that both contains frogspawn and us, we were after a container to hold only as much as could be thought, no more
when called on by our living parents to make pronouncements about our far future, what could we say but the kind of blankness we would later discover daily at work, and rub ourselves
out, the pond erases itself or is it that just like an eye it needs to close from too much world, from the falling of nights, the way objects keep looking and carry a few ideas at a time, until emptiness comes as clear as next day.
Drivers
Road was spent fuel, smelled like cherries from dead mouths into the nets of the rain we drove, the doors of the city unhinging behind.
I can piece together what it means to pursue a road to conclusion. We were blue light and striped distance, I held a stumped wheel a chewing-gum gummed map.
There was delirium in the way and into the air’s void a sense of passing, trees cried turn this into language later.
We arranged a barrier against dream called being awake but never held up for long. A lake lunged at us, it was full of dark the shape of a full stop
puddles will still break when we are old
under the tongues’ tip was a word so powerful it could unplug the past. The weather never said a word as storms can’t be measured, the broken-free chassis moved us apart.
Bag of Bones
The I of the poem moves its lips into mine like pale reflections of a word too drunk for work it pushes some bones into a leather pouch and bids them dance they cast you as a shadow playing a small part behind the printed ruins of the child in her cloth urn.
We felt our tongues at the root, the head filling with human words that become harder, they grind in geological time
perhaps in a playground the child overheard something I said as I turned the clock to the wall a worm confirmed silence, verbs clustered against the face.
The Tablets
On each statement the weight of language rusting in books, under a light. I shall come down bearing the prints of a clay city on friable earth, a bed among rippling structures, where an outlet pipe snuffles particles of us shifted some dust inside this skin to pick from the floor a broken syntax and set it on edge as one does when we know it is beyond repair, not the language but the idea that there was something suspended that might fit the silence. Inside the marble feels only stone and reoccurs in night’s catalogue. The children sleep on the rafts we made for them out of words as stars realize their shapes. O god of finding the word for the elusive picture screened in nameless cinemas, each one the size of a cell: languages will speak to you in your sleep.
