The world is too expensive and far.
Using false identities, I called companies to find employees who haven’t forgotten,
what a terrible life.
Once I had a prospect, I called as myself, read from a script,
“Hello, I’m a recruiter with Eagles International.
What if I told you I can put your career on a flight to Europe?”

We shall never again be as we were.

You, for instance, are missing an ear;
I wring a kitchen towel for my conscience.

The tiny, bankrupt kingdom
            of our secret has disappeared from maps.

Sadness a gap in the sky

                        where truth clawed through.

From knowing to ignorance,
            a secret’s track of smoke
     is a letter eaten by fire

                          or the path of a bee

…and though I knew I possessed the vanity necessary to run
a marathon, practicality would never allow me to endure
the task without turning a profit. That’s the issue: I was
a man attempting to paint a world in which he believed
he had no stake, earning humility with the kind of humiliations
that only vanity had to offer. I was another man
maxing out his 401(k), deriving a sort of pleasure
from cross-checking volumes of weekly specials grocers
were wont to offer, convinced that he wouldn’t spend

Grab the blankets,
The whiskey and palinka.

I’ll build us a boat made of money and warp.

Honey, and the dark fugue
Of foreboding.

Pack the song, dirty in its drone,
Its filthy doom

In a jar of black
Blood, and crushed
With snow.

Please
Don’t let me go.

The boat,
It will take us

To the sweet
And filthy water,

The murky
Forever

Of death’s
Endless slumber.

We harm
our stunning bodies. We repent

every time. Forever climbing out
from our mud into your mess

of feathers and music, everything
ringing of angels,

we reek of borrowed lovers.
We shift toward you

if only to rinse our filth
                                    in glory.

Welcome us at your will.
But if you ask us to praise you

beneath your minced stars
and sky flat with artifice,

show your blistering face.
Unlock

our stubborn mouths. Force
the worship rumbling from our lips

If it’s meaning you’re beating
about by betting your mug
will look handsome on camera,
gumming up, if not hammered
by blurring by murmuring loops:
not birdbrained not mammal’d
not memo’d nor mannered not
rationed as breast-milk or gruel’d
as some lumpenprol sipping cold
soup: remember, the pain only stops
for a-linger, a zinger, then one finger’s
bummed as a thumb from a nail hit
askew of its head, and you’re a-wonk
as any working stiff, why—one step,
you can look up any iffish word, hot-

              “living room”

In America, we say
                       manifest destiny

                        which means inherent right
            god-blessed / anointed

and providential / ordained
             by the very fabric

blown out
                         at that first moment

of hydrogen / of carbon
              and confusion. Who first named it

time? And what caused the name?
Hunting / maybe. When the animals

*
Even before you touch
it has lift, rushes more air
over one hand and not the other

though once at the controls
spin is what you cling to
letting the knob drag the door

the way moonlight never leaves
has nothing to do with skies
closing in on each other

half rivers, half mountainsides, half
whatever you hold in your arms
is stone, counts the turns and when.

*
A jacket could trick my arms
help me forget once they leave
though what I become

I have hung our dwelling with enormous
nets, crackerjack feeler though you are.

But nets don’t help us in the awful
enormity of the emotion of thinking.

The electrifying interiors keep
turning their faces from the light.

/

The moon’s passionate disinterest.
Stage blood.
Contrails overhead.

The dynamic properties of will
elude us.
Feeling is clawing out of her hair.

/

Thinking through the feeling, yet

the body won’t comment on this event,
refuses to draw a moral from itself.

Rauan mocking the border as his way to emerge.

I’m the border of Rauan, I draw the lines.

Rundown Rauan who hasn’t been updated, surreal and awful Rauan full of purples and
blues, moving away to Cornish, not for the benefit of hope, for the benefit of revival,
Rauan as a dead language, we were traveling to a place called His before we got called
away to Algebra, a few yards into the border we reach the town of Bird Call, neighboring
the Decapital.