CLAIRE BECKER
Apparent Scruples, Obvious Fuss
Human is Animal, Animal is Back
HELIOGRAPHY
___
What
you bought in packages
at American-style colleges
were high-priced portions
of the sun.
They
kept you
distracted, which was youthful,
like the sun.
___
Forget
grown people talk
with sweaty letters
on concrete slabs behind apartments.
Talk
of hotness falling.
Let
it win.
___
Becoming
misincorporated
in American-style packages
you identify, remember & forget.
___
Remember
the sun’s
lies.
___
Becoming
misincorporated
means you can
want what you got.
You
hear a fountain,
want to hear a fountain
on the sun.
___
Inner
arm on autumn day
acquires a tick.
Dark matter. You are led
from la
misa
for a root beer
(mass).
__
The
idea
is idea’s opposite.
Procession
of
machines,
backs.
APPARENT
SCRUPLES, OBVIOUS FUSS
Today
I made choices. Today I chose
jaw stretches; my back has shrinking pains.
I
suffer surface irrelevance
yet mean much to silence.
I’ll
tell you, if I know, that the two men didn’t
walk away; they danced away and left
her.
But
staying, dancing, she left them.
All
attitudes lost to the stagehands.
I’ve
got a serious loss of amplitude,
stemming from a slowing stream of water.
The
river’s the answer, easy, and
ease is not an allegory for time.
Time
is a mixture of gases
displaced during parallel parking.
I
used to ride in this van
in
on the Russian black market.
One
kiosk keeper pulled out a saw.
This
is my imitation poem.
I
am not nice.
Pretend I repeated one word throughout.
THIS IS BRAIN
I
have a public feeling
in my legs.
I
ask, Is it a germ
or the Captain of Germs
in my legs?
These
are the limbs
of tomorrow, stretching
from a celebrity,
assistant or pelvis
in the park.
This
is the brain
of tomorrow,
feeling like a face.
I
know the germ.
I
hear the germ
in radio interviews, in
talking hallways taking
me my way.
human is animal, animal is back
I
leap from a subway car to a bathtub
which floats in the dirty water
that connects one city to another.
That
is a wish that precedes an earthquake.
When
we are going to be all together,
we take a special pill. The pill makes
sure we separate. I am blue inside.
A color that dissolves in water.
The
earth fucking delicately
under the bed is the product of wrath,
I
thought, sleeping. The product
of the radical, when I woke up. Plates
should get shuffled in the hearth. The little pill
obeys its gadfly. It loves its sinking car.
The
pill reminds us: clouds. We’ll stay
apart like particles, parade as smog.