Wandering, and the Echo of Wandering

I don’t love music and neither do you.

Neither does anybody. You prefer

to create vacancies. You prefer to take

all the street sound, wind scraps, engine barks

and press it down. You prefer to sweep

over its smoothness with the back of your hand.

You prefer company you can count. Each song

is a blanket you can clean and change

and snap across the bed so it drifts

lightly downward through puddles of air

which you love because it’s as if

your gesture created them.

You love to expose oceans.

You love to cruise a finger

over long splits in glass.

You love to rest your hand

in the old shallow prints

of the sidewalk.

You love to touch the stereo

while it plays. Both vibrations at once

or neither.

The city is not a jungle and neither are you.

Not anymore. The jungle burned down.

The government planted new trees in its ashes.

Territories of shade in nice rows.

Perpendicular lines have learned

to intersect without ever forming a corner.

History and engineering are the same,

and until I started traveling barefoot

I never noticed how much of pavement

is dressed in glass crumbs.

I never noticed how all shadows

fall toward their light.

Antithesis of Caves

If the oil-slick gulf as a mosaic of bruises. If the black

crude licks the shore. If we walk there anyway at dusk.

If the water feels heavy between our toes. If it doesn’t.

I forget that the street is only a membrane over sewers.

I forget that today was a series of looks. I forget that you

are a burning cigarette, your gaze a careless curl of smoke.

I forget to trust blank expression. I forget to trust the wild

life.

The beach is either good carpet or national periphery,

a place to examine our edges. The sediment slips

from beneath our bodies. Beneath seasonal skin grafts.

Beneath the first moments of sleep. The beach is either

a meandering wasteland or an inspiration for pixels.

The beach is either full of people. The beach is ether.

It must be. The ocean is television. Point your body

at the blue and close your eyes. Dream of television.

The hotels nearby are either full of expensive mammals

or a festival of floors and stories: The relationship of surfaces

to what goes on there. The barroom conversations are either

recipes or shrapnel or dark seeping alien sludge or a family

of garden snakes getting butchered by the electric tiller.

Chattering motor. Spray of reptile guts. I forget bar codes.

All these lips are volcanic. All these people ape disasters.

I am interested in the assembly of Christ, especially

the first assembly of Christ. I am interested in bodies

of water. Also, the precise point which is exactly between

a shoe being worn in and worn out. Also, chlorophyll.

Also, the antithesis of caves. We cave. We cave in, and under

pressure.

The beach is a workshop for bad capitalism. Not because

the oil laps at our heels. Not because of the delusional ocean.

The beach is either a program for rapid eye movement

or a program for sleep. Not because the sand doesn’t grow.

Not because of errors in tidal judgments. The beach is either

an amphitheater for outer space. The ocean is either

a window whose plane we can’t help but to stare over.