even with a passport, I must
stand at the back fence
of lost desires.

Are angels jealous of birds
because they can fly without having to carry God?

We put an ad in the local paper, but no one has any interest in purchasing our Franco-Austrian cloud machines.

What kind of violator are you?
The world is a ridiculously human place

that wounds forever.
I want to be hungry ‘til I die.

The great lone Spanish words, like a Castilian ship
come into full view when the air is still.

A woman in my workshop
Once told me that the way in which

I had adopted you & Al Copeland
For my poetry was convenient

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  There is a time and place for falling safes,
another for pianos. Wake up with a horse's head and
fall asleep with bees...

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if/when glass enters the bloodstream try not to panic you can cry you can
drink detox tea phone a friend take the call in the tub go to urgent care...

I’ve tried to make West Virginia home:
the crunched-up shacks that pock the avenues,
the narrow roads that vault down hillsides like ceramic crazing

Let the ballerina find relevé on

Soft surfaces of migrating meteors

in Louisiana and Haiti, a hat is a hat
is a hat? bitter? is the ash of the ghost  

of Ophelia?   we taste it now.

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i even went to college. but i studied African American Studies which is not
The Law or The Medicine or The Business. my mom still loved me.
so i invented her sadness & asked her to hold it like a bouquet of fake flowers.

My lover is a furry beast, except at the tail.
I want to skin him and make myself a coat
before the harmattan gets here. The cold is
always curling in, claws becoming a fist.

every day in your absence,
I take less comfort in the growth of living things.

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Were you there that groggy afternoon

I crawled inside a playhouse in my

childhood city?

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