business reply mail

my own skin til the nietzche
wears off      breakfast alone
                   reflected in bottle
of bordeaux snagged a night
before undrunk out of a reading
w/ friends           in background
a worry of rowhomes the body
aches out of        paean to place
lives in the mouth           gets me
out of the house             today’s pages
are milk        over coffee    down
the street      october        the wind
makes me weak     i blow away
                            like a leaf
suicidal thing to say always
it’ll be like this          the money
to make it so            squatting
all around me—         am i tired
of carrying out a prescribed social
function               for a world i don’t
believe in              is it time to bull
doze a tent           i mean what all
are you if more than mind and taxes
a state like texas                 a little
united states w/ a chimney, general
assembly, general assembly—
it’s hard to make a bedroom too
empty              yet hard to fill
oneself w/ the absence of a public
while one is that absence
a number          the other day
in a notebook: easy to love all
the whackjobs from a distance
       your mother
       your father
       your brother
       your body
                       more foreign than
i think       & outta sorts push
the thought     a whole feeling
of what threads      form a bus
thru a life                 bus that hangs
from the noisy people i march
with     a thread coming home
to a holler not pissed on      a bus
the thing         inside         out there
         DEMANDS NOTHING
no pit bull, for example, hung
dead on the door to the moneyed
white bar squatting
in a poor black pocket
of the city itself