Poet Not Speaking for the Seasons


The workmen are to break and smoke
then vacuum the leaves from my bed.
Do you re-hash the terms of building
a smokestack and tying the sash to
your lap, an easy starter, a gaudy marauder
in Dasein. Just to recount original
intention fails the inferences among us.
They fall from a hand-shoveled heaven.
My counterfeit is never ashamed.
Where I am deskbound, I was bound
to my desk, paper-fed. During the third
interlude, he lit his cigarette supplement.
His clarity aged into modernization.
I am he, a man in the body of God’s incarnate.
I take your trespasses and work them over,
filling the smell of your voice, the shoe
of my bones, the water of sight. Cleanse
the gender palate. Every thirty six hours
a day, the descent into skin color mars.
Not convention or law, these cookies
need baking. The bus on route wants
stealing. Ink-bound distractions would
otherwise fade from your memory. I name
your quickest page-bound preservation.