You said I was to imagine a great thirst, and then to slake it. But I think “back at ya!” – instead why don’t YOU imagine you are the sea itself with salt in your throat, waves rolling off your tongue tasting the brine of last night’s sleep – the great deep trenches deep as the pathways of your lungs, as if we could name your breaths Mariana, Tonga, Aleutian – And you cannot imagine thirst because you are nothing but thirst, the way a fish cannot imagine water. And you cannot imagine drinking, because you are nothing but drink, the way a glass cannot imagine empty or full – In this way you, the reader, and I break the fourth wall of the sea – the stone jetties and dikes, the levees and breakwaters, give way. Our tsunami comes then, beyond imagination.
Category: Miz Quickly
Blue Horse Thing
“blue hoof ice – the kick of frozen air – stepping outside breathtaking me for a ride” – qbit bobbleheaded blue breaker bray into the blue blue blue blue blue maker, blue taker haymaker, rain slaker, name saker cawing like a horse-crow yawing like this raven knows to saddle up your win, for the floor fight raven-ation and its food biters, Foo Fighters flightline sighttime nightrhyme signal towers, wedding bowers, Croesus flowers slow rolled into morning in barney stones, blarney homes floors were made for falling there goes the topple-ganger neighborhood arch-top flat-top baby baby fabled barking nonstop harking into blue blue into blue into starkly raving madly craving rinny tin tin tin tin tin tin tin saving into blue into blue into blue
Subjective
| Subject is | Precarious |
| Subject is | Predicated on beginnings |
| Without end | |
| Subject is | Contemplating **-a-cide, you |
| Fill in the blanks | |
| Subject is | Beyond repair, beyond |
| Contempt | Beyond |
| The pale | |
| Subject is | Excruciating |
| Subject is | Subject to further revision |
| Subject is | WM, 6’3″, no prior record |
| Subject is | Exhausted, the horse is still dead |
| Subject is | Trigonometry, you pale, OK, fine |
| Subject is | History, 3rd period |
| Period | Without recourse |
| Subject | To indifference |
| Subject | To theorems of poems |
| Proving | Love by first solving Poe’s |
| Tintinnabulation | Of the bells bells bells bells bells bells |
| Plotting like the grave | |
| Sub plots | Sub sub-terranean |
| Sub sub-woofer | Is a dog under the |
| Table | |
| Sub voce temperaments | Frayed as old socks |
| Subject to | The Queensbury rules |
| Subject of the Queen | |
| Subject | Of the Queen, essay of no more than |
| 500 words | Subject to |
| Subjection | Sub-ecstasy |
| Sub-liminal | Underneath limes and lemons, covered |
| With citrus | Subject to |
| Approval | Withholding |
| Weather | Hay Fever |
| Subjectivism | Subjectivity |
| Subjection | Precedes |
| Dejection | Precedes |
| Precludes | |
| Occludes | |
| Submission | The mission |
| To wend it all | To begin under |
| A cloud | To begin no matter |
| What | Finally begin |
| Before | All is said |
| And Done |
What the hell.
TSM 132
writing my friend's eulogy dead man dead man his body double shot of bourbon casket strength in AZ asks are the leaves here where I am all high in the treetops in skin tight red and yellow camo like floozies like his groupies like light line dancing as they fall baby baby baby hit me one more time death in the air Halloween in the bag man he said it was hard to die the music hard rock pulverized to grit like chips off the old block his skin lost to grindstone the sky's wheel towards granite and gypsum the hard times ahead hard in the ground
TSM 117
now I think the instructions to perform a CAT Scan didn't mean I wave a cat over you while you slept as I looked to your body for poems my love, not scratch and struggle and Howl in shamanic pain or the dog doggerel barking frenzied free verse waking you my dear I'm sorry for the caterwaul, the catafalque of poems I've scrawled, their jagged arrhythmia ECG monitor boop boop hooked up to arterial dreams scanning and probing for heart murmurs
stfu ode #12: to my morning coffee
oblivious my coffee speaking to me too early while I am bleary as cold cream no I don't want to hear your stupid story again about the mezcalero and the jumping bean playing poker all night in the back of the truck on the way from the Yucatán you so poor nothing to wear but sackcloth the men in the fields stripping sugar cane with their machetes toothless from sucking cane all day rotting their teeth and no I don't buy the beautiful girl in the factory had eyes only for you picked you only you your anguished parting your torment like an oven from hell I want only lightning or silence between words the way I want only lightning or silence between buttered slices of toast lightning or silence in the interstices of morning storm and wind to wake to the smell of ozone the smell of burnt air zapped alive and cupped in the rain
Atomic Dog w/ Whitman
every day, second or third hand, the dog gets a new name: "Bismarck" say, or "Windham", or whenever I peel a clementine – the skin fragrant and loose as a nom du plume – my lingering mind confuses the prerogatives of gods and poets right now she's "Walt" because someone said to sniff the grass and that is for sure her dominion, the adoration and open door of scent, and what she assumes I too will assume, breathing atoms of the restless and faceless tide then checking her for ticks and tocks, and time's re-reading of the leaves before they curl and fall and blow and I forget what I most needed to say, what was meant as song now more like the growl of a lawn-mower, the madness of wild seeds cut down to size
Rooted
You sniff and snuff for me next to your pillow like a sleepy truffle pig rooting for your prize even in dreams Maybe love grows best in darkness – loamy, unseen – a carrot say, or turnip tapping our longing In the morning, all we can eat is before us among vases of daylilies, begonias, the table set for two
TSM 112
waking again with hair sticking up like antlers, my COVID doo and don't, pillow wet where dreamwater leaked from the corner of my mouth now the grass-fed belly of clouds and thinking to gut them – slice them open with the knife edge of my palm, hang them to bleed out then salt and dry or better my hair is a field of antennae scanning for life, where Heaven plays its Top 10 hits on the radio telescope in my skull
Ode til Torsk
3AM lying in the bottom of our boat drunk as fishwives strung on hooks of Everclear we'd brewed with midnight sun brighter in our eyes than any moonshine, singing hymns to the cod in Norwegian Gunstig fisk! Utgaven av havet Eldste sønn av havet Flott fisk av havet! (Beneficent Fish! Issue of the Ocean Eldest son of the Ocean Great fish of the Ocean!) and the fish would rise to our voices, to our lures on ropes barely tied to the oarlocks Dde rolige og rene herlighetene Av havets dusør gitt Omrøring gjennom vår dødelige ramme Vend jorden selv til himmelen! (The calm and pure delights By ocean's bounty given Stirring through our mortal frame Turn Earth itself to Heaven!) Which we thought was hysterical as the fish would hammer the line 2-3 hits at a time and we'd haul them in I'd remove each hook pinched between thumb and forefinger laughing too at the blood from steel stuck in my palm I'm grateful to be the man Jesus taught to fish, grateful for the smell of fried cod with a pinch of salt and pepper
qbit 