310. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Night

Gotta find out just why
there comes up out of the gut the whole of it
in a great mess, the black and slime
and unholdable masses, what
can’t just be held back or in, and

Gotta find out just why
the body is oiled but gritty
filled with hoarded bits of sand
and twigs broken off once-live branches,
all of it knitting itself into a moist and stringy web
catching all these things

I just can’t lose. Busted

bellies of each guitar, there is
no music to them, but their strings
swing into it. Maybe only hope
holds their music together or the breathing
of the wind pushing from the east

where snow comes from and we

pull back from. Can’t live through
the history of the Atlantic anymore.
Need something drained of history,
something unknown and wretched,
my neck cracks when I turn to see it,
moving west to where the sun goes black.

Seems this car can’t run itself
even though there is no car and I am dreaming
except that I haven’t dreamt for years
and live always awake or waking
or resting from

wanting to wake. Engine is a block

like my brother or the brick
that’s kept the door open so I’d pass through
as if there were no door but
only the mention of door whispering at me as
I pass through

the scanners and they see my body. Am I

naked? or clothed? or close to
getting far enough away that it wouldn’t matter
if either I were running through

(the branches cutting me in little places and ways)

the woods leafless and wet
before a real spring and my haughty gaze

King of the Skunkweed, King of the Oak

or standing in a two-piece suit,
piercing pink tie against a pure white shirt against
a black coat, the black of the pants close and snug
against my small waist
and I am held in

and I wait

for it all to begin, music of the morning,
pieces of shadow the afternoon falls into,
the turgid layered ways of the evening.

It is all so quiet

perhaps because I have fallen
asleep and over the couch as I walk
through the night trying to write
for someone I can’t find

somnambulanamanuensis

but whose voice I hear
and repeat
in ink. What if, I wonder if, there were an engine to it,

something that could run it through
and through, a way to make it seem mobile,
kinetic, not static, vibrant,

vibrating

or just alive. Engine like a heart, heart
like an engine, heat and motion, but the metal
beneath your hands, the warmth of the engine beneath
the metal, beneath the hands, a body in bed at night,

and to sleep into it
would be to sleep into warmth

to suck all the heat out, to let
or lease or steal, to feel the seep
of the heat all out

but, because of it, into

the body. It is a transfer of properties, a brightness
kept in darkness and close to the body, the scent
of cloves the color of the room at night, and it pulls
it together, over the head, and the body thinks

of itself

as the body as the heart as the eyes
which don’t blink with these sunglasses over them

night made into night by nightshades

(such a sweet taste)

and the body moves as itself
as a body beside a body and a berth
as a body beside a body and a birth
as a body beside a body

it is a mind
or
there is to it
a
mind in the body

that doesn’t break but is twisted

like metal and you cannot twist it back into shape
by the portion of a version of incursion
into the senses and the sense of the night
as something warm and cold and dark

and we don’t know what that light is
or like
and we don’t know what it is.

We never know what it is