Siggy Freud urinating
on the fire to create civilization—
urine and the primal horde of guys,
low POV shot of incest campfire
with urinating Ur-Fathers—
I’m three years old
looking up at civilization’s
hoary, full-bladdered originators

Freud almost ran
me over with his station wagon
outside the sunny café
where the man who can’t walk
eats his breakfast every day
and at lunch holds court
over the lascivious typesetters

be more open-minded, egalitarian,
generous toward the non-hot—
don’t hubristically
strive for hotties

would rather get a Pulitzer
than be a dom—but I'll never
get a Pulitzer so
might as well be a dom—
an easy way to be victor
in my triumphal carriage,
faux-Napoleon of the moated grange

fathers retaining their fatherly
voices when they speak
to their young sons

what are the creeds
of the babysitters’ cult?
where do they worship?
what sacred provisions
do they stockpile?

apology for demanding
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
and then spitting it out

Julie Andrews in The Boy Friend,
1954, eating a matzoh
piled with cheese

Gidget
makes water a tournament
of Gidget-refinement, becoming more
pop, more watery, more Gidget-
like—she isn’t really Gidget
and she wants to become
Gidget, so she has to pretend
to be Gidget trying to become
more Gidget, when in fact
she is an imposter with
no relation to Gidget

is she his mother or is she just
ogling him while she waits
to pee? I ate the Brie

we discussed Adriana
Caselotti, Snow White’s
voice in 1937

shrimpy guy in North
House bed sophomore year,
my foot on his crotch
or his foot on mine
led to nothing more

Trump bombs Syria

kid singing about marigolds
in tenth grade when marigolds
were a fad—everyone
was singing about marigolds

his arm hair had grown back,
obscenely demonstrative rivulets
proving their unparaphrasable point—
I didn’t finish my pirogis

YouTube is the torn
place—a movie theater can
be the torn place—how to
tear is the question—rip,
shred, diversify, make
a single object two objects
by tearing it—don’t tear it
completely, make
the tear superficial

kid’s orange plastic button
lying orphaned on the floor—
kid doesn’t even notice
the orange plastic button—again
I become through repetition
the only one
alive to love the orange
plastic botton abandoned
publically on the agora
floor—worthless
place to roost

piercing we
are the impossible
fog—are we impossible
or is the fog
the culprit, if impossibility
is a crime?

“I want Mommy now”
the little kid says
and the father says “you could die”

appalling force the air
maintains—how
is smoke torn?

difficult buttocks
in a balmy spring

differentiate
celestial
protuberances

the promiscuous unseen—
cuit means cooked—
is promiscuity the
uncooked promise
or the cooked promise
or the raw Prometheus
or the umami Prometheus?

gloaming, says Didion—
brown weed-plain, desolation,
as if my grandfather had given
me this river-book

tittering
falls or Titticut Follies

dreamt of being nude
in a bath with father—
skinny waist, butt pre-
dominating, strangely
S-shaped body, green sludge

hillside house I rhapsodized
when my ideals were high

tunnels
and cumquats, my reflection
in ashtray’s closed lid—
smoke cloud and then jumpcut
to suit, tie, rope,
zebra, the stripe foregone
and babysat for—

to babysit a stripe with no
intention of aiding the stripe,
to lie bleeding on the pavement
because your stripe is amiss

columbarium
grotto divests cloud

surge of desire for arm
video the drowsing
neighbor watches

the school
bus’s attitude toward
destruction it causes

river hut,
ignored by wild rose—
hut, eager for flower’s mute
accolades, rose's identity
stronger than mine

the unseen afterlife
is promiscuous, or the fringes
of consciousness are promiscuous—
tomorrow, say more about why
the unseen is promiscuous

some mystic
in a New Haven
backyard spotted
the God personage suddenly
materialized—a ficus
beneath a sky too late
to qualify as ultramarine

why characterize sight
as aggressive and curious?
why not imagine
sight as passive, expectant,
accepting whatever
bounty is thrown
to its cur-soul?

notice now I’m calling
our plight a cur’s

cur incurious
because to seem
too curious would
offend the sky
we hope will return
to the ultramarine
that precedes absolute
night

a thousand
stars puncture
your misgivings,
pierce your distrustful
sight-sickness,
and provide pinched
apertures for wording
everything differently
the next time we
make this voyage