Different Yesterday, Same Smoke (Sonnets)

1


in the apartment down the hall
a baby wailing or maybe laughing
down on Claremont in front of the building
where this side of paradise was born
a winter ambulance wails or maybe
laughs to remind me of commutation
since losing a hundred forty odd pounds
inside a victim tethered to a drip
clawing ether for some authentic scope
or a chop but the bits are priceless evergreen
mother not dying of cancer
father crying into his air rifle
imagined assholes essential to her oeuvre
the miraculous recovery from autism



2


the miraculous recovery from autism
or was it ridiculous hands?
dumb echo in the shadow of the mittens
apoplectic can anyone have said that?
the difference between a crippling birth
and a fortune cookie collection
is the difference between “you” and “you
will scale the Sierra Pintas strapped to the back
of a saddle bound corn borer.” between “I am
the words myth” and a flailing dwarf shrew
missing all three of its better halves
from a village that produces populist stiffs
and the odd suckered passer through
you get taken for a buggy ride, very



3


you get taken for a buggy ride, very
entertaining a walleyed cubist princess
which of you is the swayback?
the goat I saw slamming into a low bar
in a kazoo on the piscataquis
or monobrow dancing with fish
nitro pea beneath her transmitter mattress
it’s weirder the longer you’re dead
in my dream the barricades held
outside it there was writing in a room
actual with actual air
but the hole decomposes the lily
I walked past the Brooklyn library today
you were right it is much too big



4


you were right it is much too big
for you the breadth of a nut free world
Christmas Eve with nothing to revile
no visible end of the line at St. Pat’s
where the attempt to blow my cherry failed
I huddled in the rock smiling
your belfry cracked a bloated confession fell out
borrowed without permission like the title
and I warmed awake from you
a clown strolls past singing “share the coke
and snort” to the tune of silent night
another delirious ex-dependent?
it’s spoils, not spoiled
the freezer bags



5


the freezer bags
what it cannot get on paper
I can no longer contain my latent violence
so I frightened a shit beetle up a stall wall
the products of zero meat
on the bones of a spiny amusement
where we leave the sedan and come back
to its outline entirely in pecking
all of the feeling in the face of it gone
every trace of eyeliner shavings
hoovered the toy dolls sing one about this
a fit the same as a shoe to a blind annoyance
but we have a serious space concern
I’ll have to have ripped you off a horizon