When I say identity
smacks of mass
psychosis, I
don’t mean one
should simply be
some spectral succession of sun-
sick yoga poses sounding out
flowery rounds of old
MacDonald, the
farmer and governor squared
in an apprehensive astigmatism un-
bent twixt half-baked quaker wedding and
taciturn maritime square dance skirmish. I
think of the Asco kids,
bent screaming but
what I want to
be will be and
not what is will be,
will be, forever, by
god, ad nauseam, doddering
long past cows come home to the monolith
salt flat,
whilom wired with wild
and virulent thistles. I think
of the folk lore epistles unpinned
and the grin of a grandly disparaging
narrative
nettled back into what merits
an hourglass merit, what
ferreting looseness lending its
noble purpose to be
but over-
turned, to be
in perpetual dream-dense movement milling us
homeward, headlong, evermore
into the salt-packed,
weed-wracked
cracks cut—crackling
film stock stuffed in the armour-
brand meat tin peeper, perfecting,
as bones heal any which way they’ve long been braced
(like an elbow bent back black in echoing crab legs),
what some mean by perpetual personage, reeling but
wiry wrists and legs in place
in a serifing heritage, chutes
and ladders lining the pie-
crimped dynasty’s dry-
ly stylized, blood-
ruffled ermine, pared
to a stridulent zip tie—why,
how i heard a young
poet go on and on about how a horse was born
a horse, born walking or trotting or
cantering even; though humans,
you see, are a touch more
malleable maybe, less
hoof-honed glue than finicky
giftwrap tissue,
muscles
percussing a
mold, perchance. You’ll see.
At a glance, it seems so easy. I
‘m bent down-
ward-dogging each
rebar dream and memory
into a stitch of
inf-
in-
it-
y. E
I
E
I—oh, again, going on only say
nothing as plump
as a muttering hunch, or
how many more bribed lives swung
over the smoldering shoulders in-
censed with a crick or the hiccupping quickening,
clenching—
