if you want to journey to ithaca / call ahead

my children look to me / and grasp after / absolute truths.

it’s still raining / as it did at the beginning of time

the flowers of war / open at night / on boulevard Saint-Laurent

a man standing on the tracks / stares at a train as it advances / with a moan of metal and night

On the banks of the Prypiat a devil is sleeping

Joyful relatives poured vodka for themselves / and for the dead

The whole soldier shrugs off hurt.

How to explain / the heat a language exhales

Have been syntaxed and stirred into a purple.

I open my eyes and see the world

I plugged my poem into a manhole cover

I will paint my death on a canvas of autumn

The blooming petals: a navel.

I would like to hide in your kiss.

One folded like a switchblade, one open like a book

They told you / That your feet should be nailed to the household!

Water in the blood, bread in the flesh, vows in the bone

I was eyemate to a blind one

The world made no promises to anyone

here sentences must disrobe

my swollen tongue twitched / in my dry mouth.

The world has become a graveyard.

. . . the world shimmers / everything unimaginably possible . . .

don’t remember how we ended up watching Rambo / but it was a disappointing experience.

I will remain unwritten.

What’s the deal with your face, Dad?

thus it is proven once again that / luck is a swallow on a telegraph wire

The captain guides the wheel to the debris / to slice clear through, but the steamer sticks fast.

having composed this pure paean / at the expense of all other arts, she gleamed.

I wish there was the sort of god / who would preserve us from a god / we invent for ourselves

Turnips and time, pork and posterity, man and his life on the road between day and night.

There is the transition of land into sea, there is the unsettled sea that spits foam and kelp.

about love, I answered. / there isn’t anything else, is there.

I neared a branch heavy with snow / bending under the grip of one of the crows.

Only a sign like a silent hiss remains from that time

Nights close / inside / my palm, / I touch you / and you are ink.

Thus the world is all coal and ashes. / My pots and pans don’t feed the hungry.

I must imitate my sister in order to be her mother

I’ve got no desire to erect a childhood.

. . . the letters are reluctant to sound out / voices i knew / voices i memorized

I heard the singing and dancing / In the village square / Suddenly fall silent.

Call me Beatrice, she says. I wasn’t sent by any god.

lower the needle each time only in the verysame spotspot

Has justice disappeared? / Has man turned animal?

There will be no more wolf on the vast schoolyards.

There is a false time / set in motion when we fall

Funeral paid for by the daughter, a lesbian.

Let me / help you / said the ape.

The dark kaiser’s ship, / deep-keeled, cuts the water

Bums roll around broken-legged in the grass.

You are the main man, Mister Brown / I am just a victim of circumstance

There will come a time when / the planet will have had enough

the blue planet swam in the half-twilight of evening

Each shared bus ride was like a ritual

One day / I’ll tear off my lips / and eat them / like candy.

Their poems reach me from their temple

A Stone-Age hand a paperback Koran

A snowstorm flings down / a million, million needles.

The wretch was standing there / in a Che Guevara T-shirt and sunglasses—