by: Mark Wallace
Who can
support the lovers
in fresh need for each
touch and look, each
stare across the apparatus
whereby people
remove themselves from
their own scenes
scrambled
devices for upbringing
each to our own
unique loneliness
sending letters
from a cubicle to the
hidden wealthy
patrons of “the arts”
or administrative celebration
statistical achievement lunches
vision of a man passed
out on a stairwell
until who knows
what anyone has
left XXXhow to hold
up one’s tired regard
kicking back at
subway shutdowns, construction blockage
putting the close-by
city two hours away
instead of saying I want
you to
listen carefully to
my pulse, my shaking
hands, allergic eyes
I couldn’t
dream a city away
I could only
live here and ask when
you might next
see me and take
my hand in
the city
removal scape
*
How to see the world and
not categorize its
component ecstasies and
material pushback
against the dream mind
this present breaking
into what
happens after,
dividing
the house from the lot from
the fence from the sidewalk
from the road from the neighbor
hood from the district from
the city from the country from
the state from the nation
from the world
Up close, the physical
opens at no
remove
I hear your voice and
watch you close and watch
you slip away
Paint-peeled silver
roof behind the bending
tree and black
electrical wire
curved and criss-
crossed at angles
learning to see any
thing not
as systematic calculation
I think I never
knew breathing
before you taught
me to listen
its slow uncertain ragged
unclaimable instant
*
Where
can a licensed
citizen get a structured
payment plan the Pacific
crashing
onto natural assets, sum
retrievable
with the right performance media
how do I keep
on living?
Rash flaring
red on skin
my wrist, my chest,
I push people
away
to keep them distant
in the name there
is no name
burning butchered out
of my body, stranded
where I don’t
want to be rescued
Achievement scores registered
at the bank drop
I’d pet you, find out
if I could, quiet
any unrest
caught inside
my own finite
unowned
association strings and a theory
don’t try to fake
myself in complete
—what complete self—
Devise a desktop double
rampant battered
sometimes all I want:
to be beside
a calming caress
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a novel, Crab, and book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. Selections of his multi-part long poem The End of America, which he has been writing since 2005, have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in San Diego, California.
