This is more than less.
This is a venti no water Americano.
This is a lemonade.
This is without respect.
This is a poetry of abuse.
The abuse poem. The nirvana poem. The well poem, the ill poem.
This is a leap out of poetry the false well.
This is a heartstring.
This is a spoonrocket (K. Prevallet)
This is a landfish (Sam).
This is incapacity.
This is the rest of the beggars.
This is the consistent.
This is the technical.
This is your sip, these are your glasses,
this is your mirror, this is your window.
This is your sudden face,
this is rabid dog fear in the night,
this is jumping flea ukulele.
This is Mr. Killbug, this is a Burgher. This is a Beggar.
This is air, this is male pattern baldness,
this is a reduction, this is avoiding getting organized.
This is not a gnat, this is not a note.
This is the scent of your sweat and a sharp pain behind the eyes,
this is code, this is a tangerine, this is over but not over,
this is ooh and aah
this is lipsynch, this is lip stuck

this is father daughter day
and after all that okay

This is my life what has it come to what I am learning is something different I must say it is draining it is lanced I am lanced and oozing after Canyonlands and  Arches Park. I am teetering on the edge and struggle to make something when there’s the skyline halfway clothed with leaves and a suburban brightness in the air with sounds of water gurgling and a morning goldness in the air and a suburban cheeping with a hum of traffic while the dog rests and the flying bee whirrs by.

I am unwilling at this point.

Unwilling on campus. Irrational fears. There is no healing balm for everything. So just get used to it. The most unpleasant thing of all is—heart dropping from fear. If I could avoid that automatic heart-drop from now on, I would. Do egrets have it? Flamingos, herons, other long birds? Birds with hearts that beat so fast and so unknown. Birds with eyelashes and bird dogs, slim.

A herd of movement in the gray-brown out the window. Deer move carefully in suburbia. I can count four of them, standing in their places, flicking the itches in their ears, shaking their heads, chewing. They look thin, their tails seem shaggy. One has settled down to rest, more relaxed in the wetland preserve than a human or a dog would be. I can see the tips of the other’s ears, flicking, shifting. White tails, brown tails lined with white fur, lined with black. Now two are lying down.

The absolute arrogant daring of a teacher. The heartbreak of the curious student. The value of curiosity is discounted. Do not examine. Do not look in. I know what I think, I know what I feel. All is different, the lamb is a dog, the horse is a louse. House. The mercury, the mystery. Free write disjointed. What’s going to sell. Hyperaudience, overengineered society. Leading to exhaustion. Aspire to humility. What do you hear here? What do we hear here? In the giant auditorium filled with five poets. Oh my god. How much compassion do you need?

Questions overflow. Abounding, then melt away like fields of snow. Flocks moving wrestling through the heavens. Harbingers of arbeit. After all, it’s mesh, how much is mesh? I refuse at some point. Stop. Step.

I am tremendously interested in going into the mountains. The place where I will sit down to dinner with Arabs, my combed hair glistening. The charred fox on the platter, mistaken for dog, shot through the heart. The chorus of cousins solemnly uninvited, but still in attendance. The rugged rapscallions, the host with his lions, the pair eating onions, the service of truncheons. The bat is a velvet mask.