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—