I.

Intercalary bands, gneiss, a single
gesture. EP pays H to render him
in stone. Somewhere he sleeps in
Circe’s ingle. “thkk, thgk,” states
he, “Circe’s tisane,” “Circe’s tisane,"
mutters he on, all in a “house of smooth
stone.” And with “fucked girls
and fat leopards” the story clinches.
I think you like her, dearest Ezra.
What number is XXXIX, O Ezra?
Hot that you’d be so female yourself:
“his rod hath made god in my belly.”
Shame me into writing real music,
teach me to be erotic: 1272 25 1297.

II.

We met on a floor, we resume on a floor,
we remain on a floor, and go to sleep on
a floor, and work on a floor. We are of
the ground, the earth, the tangent plane.
Even the flatness of screens mimics what
it is like to be us, asses hard against the
grain. Do you remember the dust and grit
of the linoleum on some October night?
I would prefer to meet you in that darkened
partition of gymnasium, in a lavender dress,
a laptop mouthing green against black glass.
Send me a letter now, and I’ll fold it into a
little house, and put my pen inside it, sitting
in text, and never write back. But you'll place
me here on your floor, your letter. And wanting
so badly to be here, you’ll come, and I'll write.

III.

Anxiety could etiolate, and that would
mean the etiolating being die, though in
some happy case the plant may learn to
take up life from a kind mycelium. You
who tread the soil know it, so speak truth
to the hapless being! A white leaf should know
that such livelihood becomes from chance,
made over evolutionary time, in pairing.
“Do not strive to revivify the shortness
of your weeks. Wait, and you will die waiting.”
Then its sponsor asks: “What shall it do with
this cruel knowledge? May it still attempt to
gain some brief green? And if this etiolation
is a conceit of parts, what is left when its paling
leaves hang off my dark and thickened heart?”

IV.

A cage and a band rely on us, we who rely
on such references to co-exist in less than
crushing ways. I do not know what we were
dragging, only that it felt good to drag
something so well-packaged and heavy.
The pain in my fingers brought me close to a
thrill of feeling while I dragged some hefty
burden with your hard rope, tense and
unmodified, both loose and tense in muscle.
The burns on my hands and the flush of my
cheeks are not visible to what I grasp, but I
to you attribute cause and source and everything.
When the sun burns bright, I admit to being
burnt, while you lie in the shade of my skin.

V.

Blank wavelets of nothing touch the shore.
Brief wavelets of presence break light into
pebbles. The moon determines moods by
instigating missives, which produce high tides,
then low. I think of you as a stone, a kidney
stone, mute payment for progress made with me,
a sfumato of pebbles. The moon pulls water
over stones which rub you and me together, or
separately, thereby converting stones to soft sand,
where I rest my head. In the sand grows a stone,
on the brink of flower, moved by blades of sun.
The pebbled self you once admired now lives on
as the spiracles of mating insects slipping out of
hands. An irritant becomes breath, oil, skin.

VI.

I woke from the dream still sleeping.
I did not believe what I saw, so I woke
up twice. Truth came disclosed when I
woke the second time, rotating until I could
see a blank screen unmoored from its charger.
I had left it there last night, in an unplanned
attempt at sleeping. I did not need to check
to know that you had not, in fact, updated
your website. An ode tumbled forth in a
glitch-like fervor, words splintering along
the vertical, among its words my name.
You had repossessed it in all its childlike
failure to be anything but what it is and what
it shall be: reduplicated phonemes, yours forever.