WOMAN CAVE
Even at my most primitive
I can’t be the sort of violent
I long to be, clubbing ideas
for sustenance. What’s savage
is the way I knife
through a house without
children. Shut the blinds
and wait all day for the basest
self to arrive. The basest
self is old, can carry the dead
in her teeth. What else
could be out there at the end
of my days? An open channel that
won’t stay open. A noology of no
thought, just the whir in the brain
that undoes the central
idea of the woman, inserts
itself, snaps a little
musculature. My mouth bloodied
by the scruff I haul. That idea
is the reigning heavyweight
champ of my day. If I speak
the carcass will fall. I can’t say
without ventriloquizing
a man. Pow. Bam.
Right in the kisser.
MODERN ORIGAMI
That just-born hue of spring is post-
human, a color that does not belong
to the systems of green or the holy;
engineered meta-data of the new
Kino Eye, pixels of an aftermath
aware of its plasmal potential.
You’d think the unfolding
of a mind would be more like an apple
blossom, but it’s a bloom of non-
memory with its strewn residuals, embers
from those tipsy dragons
of the crease who held us captive
and for no reason set us free.
To think. And to think, you like to stand
at the window praising
tulips which has the thrill of exalting
a death star, the place where all deaths
get their start. As Dickinson
keeps telling us: a leaf is a disaster —
it unfurls from the navel of the hydrogen
bomb; possesses the sophistry
of the tip jar. Belief in our knowing
lends cool distortion
to what we see. Mostly, we’re oxygen
deprived. These are uneasy
folds for the modern
scholar to enter. Folds with no
mathematical cuts or platonic.
The secret, it turns out
was only a pocket. Escaped
we may find ourselves at podiums
in brightly lit rooms, red faced
rubbing sweaty palms on our slacks
while the knowledge producers
chant hermeneutic, hermeneutic
like a duck call brought too far
out of the reeds.
