It's been two years, one of grief and sort of inarticulate rage that

I saw as being something I could say. The first was the breakdown,

the second of talking. I'm at my best I know when I have something to praise,

The leafless trees, the treeless leaves, the wind that animates them both

Is my great secret and I sometimes think the source of the mystery at my core

That still allows me friends.

A year and a half, I've had the same

Phone number, reality, non-redeeming guilt and redeeming sense of self.

I don't have the same friends, or same craving to love and be loved beyond

Those trees, that sky, these keys I know. I've forgotten the best lines

In writing back to students, but can picture students in my head

And think of how I know them now. Better with names, worse with faces,

I met some people whom I ought to know

And then forgot.

Triangles

I. Unbounded triangles from a single line.

II. Concentric triangles from a single line.

III. Overlapping visible lines.

IV. I have separated a line into its triangles.

V. Seeing the iris, I assume the triangles.

VI. Two opposing noses, formed Romanlike triangles.

VII. Lines that do not meet cannot form triangles.

VIII. How can I form a face without triangles.

IX. Should they become clocks or triangles?

Pastoral

Or the huddled difference in degree between

The wind turbine and the settled land

An ideal sunset like afterbirth across the sky.

shared space apart from semantic

space, apart from semantic chains

Nothing but the reality of the image

No coffee cups, cigars or plow

Fields with no manure or labor.

The image lacks the smell of semen.

Doc Martin V. House

"Pain is boring" can be reconstituted, but not actively.

"We like watching what is boring" is better. Transitively,

"We like watching pain," hence the rise of the awkward doctor

Who plunges his hands into a gaping stomach,

The unmediated agony of an emergency surgery making up

For what we watch as the televised doctor fucks up

His unmediated life.

"The best response is the purest," thus we take what we assume

We would like to do in any situation as the most painful,

The interpersonally agitating fellow who doesn't, on the BBC,

Come off as handsome, or cool. Do actors who must play

The lethally uncool regard it as some ironic post-hip assertion

Of how cool they really are? Or is it a thought?

A thought: I have done a lot of cool Hunter Thompson stuff

And don't know why. Not why I did it; why it was cool when he did.

Acid was awesome and worth the friends I lost on the phone that night.

Worth nineteen hours of wakefulness as the world restored itself.

And so when Martin Clunes becomes a pedantic, everyday ass

Who saves people in the most boring ways, who are gratefully non-contemptible,

But can't afford a second of kindness not because he's damaged in any cool way,

I like him a lot better than Laurie.

Notebooks

First I'd like it if you could understand that I was born

Through a cut that slashed my mother's womb.

Second, even if you told me twice,

Sex would still be all I'm good at,

& I could could calculate to half-degrees which

Things you thought I should learn and keep.

Third, I don't remember the way you moved

But how hot you were against my thigh.

I awake alone sometimes but still

Can feel you hot against my thigh.

Fourth, even if if you asked me now

I would still be jealous.

& I can can count the even sum

of ways I thought we could combine.

In time we won't have memories. I'll forget then

the easy grace with which I learned the things I still half know,

Of how I read across across the pages of absorptive skill,

That my hands could change an engine, my body swim,

Sleek and strong, against and up a current.

When I forget they'll be gone. No funeral

For the gifts I've given up.

We create ourselves by what we must forgo.

Memory begets children.

I am thusly barren.

Cliff Jumping

I stood upon the cliff and thought

Of how I loved the smoothed-down stone, the sudden air,

Horizons growing smaller,

Of plunging in until I find and read

The bottom of the river,

The curves and silt.

This will not be my highest cliff, and will not be my last.

I see in dreams the shattered child I once held,

Once felt the heartbeat growing still beneath the gloves that should have stopped

The feeling of the ebb: it takes the slap of stinging water to escape the memory of my hands,

The depth of cut geography among the silt and sand.

This will not be my highest cliff, and will not be my last.