Near to the Savage Heart (close to the wild heart)

I thought, if there are horses left, (or even heroes) their soft hooves will hurt on the field trip to the moon. And if there is memory left, I'll use it to forget the auburn horses quivering from flesh to shield, lift, if there is shelter left, not the shelter to want it but the turn. The end of wit will be a good common subconscious and the white fell out of they sky like ripple fruit, a fist, for stillness, for the cradles in my legs that they may continue to cause themselves the way words do away with wit and get me to a submarine

The Territory (The Big Room)

You play the changes. You make up new changes. And we'll play all-night, all day, all night, all day.

You can disremember what the hard stuff be. The territory. The adventure. Tender things we push toward the big room.

Velvet Fog (ain't it)

A fig tree in the rank of lucky things, nears oneness and soft thanks to the moment meant sifted ginger and we skipped church, played hooky, hurry, they'll see when the bells hurt of togetherness that every sound means language and language means nothing-- (hubcap, lapdance, fat Saturday) that music, that lucid shrug of fresh fruit in the ready weather polished into the surface of a song hallucinating its past lives onto the voice of, by-now, shrines, witnesses, fastcared Vesuvius went rolling into its duty like a youthless spouse and the aged future Now, the new lavender comes in fog and matches the shape of just saying it together in the same phrase and then backing away creates echoes and those are sold separately and kept behind the glass, glass, glass, selling-out, which goes on breaking bills into tickets, entrances, trances, trenches and so-forth

Then we snap out of it, back to be-bop like nothing ever happened

First Position

A negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick

O'Hara wrote it first but what gives me the right--

I once repaired a man's idea of himself, to have him

What was typically a limp anthem, became... you're shattering all my myths

replacing them with falcons, reasons, come to think of it, another way, I am really a

woodcarver and my words are, come to think of it, another way, sand houses and floorplans to swing from like uncandid archetypes, daguerreotypes, the first thing you picture, the last thing you see, and, to rid ourselves of symmetry, dandy/dandy, a head pitched down a little makes you sound like a canoe in calm water, or masks to ward off manufacturers, damn the thieves, destined to get there just in time and face it all: all the thresholds, all the soldiers, all the silver thinking which aches with freedom and soothes with silver falcons, falcon, kinship, action scene, cut.

A negro stands in a garden with a toothpick.. he loved him madly... the lady nearby looks appreciative in headlights, she looks like she grows more beautiful the more weary he reads her face as lyrics and that is all the silence between them and all the noise and news of what's next

Susserating Minimalism

Do the words, do the lovers' bodies, do they confer, if you were an interpreter, if that were your task

You, Radical (you have beautiful hearing)

Roll Call of Returning Troops (Cruciform)

(Manifests weariness) Both personal and national

None of the sadness was surreal

Some of it was a fashion. Walk that way in this dress, on some prairie home companion

Some of it was a way to listen: ecstatically, but not let him notice just how happy

She was aloof

She was me, professionally, her. He was her, lucky (manifests what-if I never came back

Which crosses you, which covers you, fret, fact, a useless question, here I am again

Leadership. Code, for run. There I ran again

Every man in the shape of a cross, misses it at the last minute, crumples, takes a pill or hilltop for how they say don't mistake the moon for the finger you use to keep pointing at it. Telescope, telepath, tattered repetition

For the pleasure of never knowing exactly what it is, in the shape of a calling that lets a prayer mean everything but its reason

The sheet was blank a document, proctored by (no regrets) to stop itself before becoming a record

To be drawn toward.. What is a public space anymore, what ways we stay home