The Brooklyn Rail

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Can I do that again?
I did before a button
sow on a schism.
I should clean
so much. You
might forget the same
trinkets. A microwave
flooded with blight.
A floor a waste
land of gum. Kneel
to pick at it.
Strawberry skin
in muddy linoleum.
Houses like store sets
and mine a mix.
I can’t keep up with myself.
Once I had a circle
a block away. Once I
had a way of smiling.

Liberty

I admit I used my girlfriend
to forget
credit card debt.
It’s not me
it’s the coming days
of liberty.
A robin swallows
insulation
from the garage gutter
for their home.
I want to assist the Lord
of Rain on a dread mission.
It’s boredom, to break
the silent sheets
because it is easy
one time and a hundred.

from PAY OFF

To post is healthier than to scroll. The feed
is a kind of nap, a curative power which you might enforce in a museum by walking one way
and not another, while posting feels like flying
through the night to deliver an important message to someone else’s lover. I did not understand
what people meant when they said he “flailed for banker
pussy” and didn’t learn no car loan means no and gave up hunting with a bow. While Pa was an
expert salesman, the contemporary version of a successful
shaman, he belonged embedded in a forest, stoned in the woods in a deer blind, becoming more
like an aspen than a Kia. To Pa all income is learned, you get
what you pay for is not a tautology. Keynes said financial rentiers should be euthanized. I drive
the capitalist road east and take it for public transportation, tolled
the cost of a subway ride to ride a mortgaged tank, not to mention wearing tears when the engine
totals zero, even as the road draws what can be taken. I too would pay
premiums for your hip-to-asset ratio if that didn’t turn you off. When my labor triumphs through
your arch I declare a Jubilee Year, wagies freed, death and sin abolished,

the private expenditures of daily grief expensed to the temple where all suffering is made to
correspond to a unit of one. Pa taught me the kind of work you can do drunk,
how to hold down a job to stave off a career, used charred sales, how to drink yourself to death
not out of sickness but destiny, how to leverage the assets of your popsicle stand,
according to the current babble of the brook of goods. As Heraclitus learned you never step into
the same economy quarterly, you avoid tax-bracket gap relationships, and give up
monitoring the price of gold for Lent. You might notice the natural power of closed circuit
growth, like the might of cons dry a power house of cellular service reserves, to buy
Treasure and Secretaries with fine-ass instruments, to finance berserk wars, charge rent, which is
the transfer of funds of one’s expenses to another without production, I mode, the rentier
Merely calls contractors to produce maintenance, but fear of death is always the cost of a free
lunch, which is what my Mom means when she insists the rulers suffer, but then she does mean /
the wooden, measuring kind she means the mother of all trusts, the mineral soaps and monopoly
boards of directors of the chain of beings, the indivisible ones with the will to do so, the invisible
three

I wear the cross of gold,
not the men of WhiteFish Bay, who instead wear their credit default swaps on their boats, whose
collateralized debt obligations bundle loans to pay out mortgage payments, who perform
financial goods such as collecting
late fees, declaring waste management to make a peace, loving whom they have injured as a
shadow eats a body. I’m a rubber man and stand for my planet with arms long, gait proud, hands
sprawled and ears cocked to strings
as a paralegal, say what I must to keep you from trouble, peace with a cursed sword in the
unprogrammable hilt, purple lighting, Mr. All Right, the points of my favorite host of then view
spins, reveals the potential for an unsubtle
transformation, and a capacity to end What I can do for you?What ego? What indomitable
human spirit? What malice lies at the heart of baby? Automatic Time Machines, you mold my
industrial pencil, Lock-On to Zap Cannon, you
are not even weak enough to challenge my boss, to work my pace, to spend my tax return on
unpaid back taxes you may have and a dent. When your mother was your age credit card
payments were tax deductible. Nothing ever happens

all at once. Storms are foretold by the squirrels nuts economy. Guitar solos by cardinals. Glasses
to see better by, to write blind. You can have me for two trillion bronze pieces, enough perchance
for two Guinnessi, four good times call frankly, say the French
lost at Austerity, as Oda-Sensei says mother is the antonym of adventure, and as Emerson says,
“Matter pays her debt” and a half ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and a merchant carries
that which abounds to where it is costly. We require power, not candy,
to become born to be rich, with dry itches, help with all problems most desperate, where others
failed, to push away unwanted loved ones, deal with difficult children business, ongoing spiritual
protection from prayers against you, donate only after results, my company
handles all the tri-state. I will be level Twenty Five by Milwaukee with my daily bride, and say
enjoy the ides of march you in the temp position, I tap my pencil on the page to account the
syllables, I bank shot stanzas with a 50% failure rate, have drafted Affidavits
in Support of Orders of Reference when homeowners abandon themselves and with each breath I
make a payment in the center of the world of humanity, I drink five dollar beer shots in FiDi and
write down the debt