The Standards Board prohibits angular projections
It’s a beef therefore to parse my earliest memories
Chess for example evinces subterfuge
What they call a spanner we call enlightenment

My uncle was a better dry cleaner than I
I can vaguely perpetrate his arrival at the gates of Salerno
Site of the cannery and of traumatic brain injury
My stitching and unstitching fall a little short

It’s never a simple matter of unmotivated pool shots
Nor of settling accounts with a slipstick
A uniformed schoolgirl stacking the aphorisms
A priest releasing the lasso

Possessive with the gerund you dolt
The commission prohibits peering above the transom
The reef is deadly but beautiful
How did they do that trick with the traffic cop

The assessments are wildly disorganized
A poodle imitates a pear
Salesmen’s wives apply calipers to printed circuit boards
Wild swans negotiate the battlements

Regulations prohibit allusion to the Eiffel Tower
The conjunction belongs in the next echelon they say
But Frederick Douglass is more than an assemblage
A pistol more than merchandise

Will somebody please catalogue these receipts
The albatrosses the colorful neutrinos
Will somebody help that man with the twisted neck
Never mind his attempt to scoot in an Alfa Romeo

I want to divest myself
But I’ve forgotten the decrypter
I’ve inscribed a million signatures
Daily riposted a ten-foot sphynx

I want to tour the shores of Illyria
To see the immemorial portico
To engage the factors of the digital drive
I’ve always wanted a real cape to fly with

A young wastrel died unremembered
Or in memory lasting but as long as the flames
24 FPS is an illusion
Men in overcoats smuggle medication

Like printed fields overlain with gestural paint
The forests of symbols lie within the temples
She asked but deflected the propositions
You don’t look for the absence of traffic cones
It just comes to you
She jacked the prettily purloined
She sealed the monstrous reticule
That she had won in the DOT raffle

They don’t fold these things on television
They don’t detach them from the hospitals
Rabbits and termites ingest their appointed burrows
As a lemur allows to escape its inveterate yawp
Or a distributor its formalities

The smokers my people assemble on the patio
You don’t look for the absence of enjambment they grumble
The nation is seized by a mania
Checking for pain in the lymph nodes

She bemoans the decay of the serviette
Surely he must have meant the objective world
The sounds are confounded the words confused
Surely he meant

For Jason Thibodeau

The nothing of the jug
The nothing of the window
Are said to make the window and the jug

The scar beneath his chin
Where at the age of five
He struck the side of the swimming pool

The more abstract concavity
Evident in the remodelling
Of the jugular foramen

The residence elsewhere of the father
Occasioned by his career
In some distant city

The baleful knowledge
Of a million prohibitions
Against for example self-pity

The Tables of the Law
The recipes for self-improvement
Hiatus in the manuscript

How would it be if scavengers
Never dismembered the corpse
Saprophytes from Arlington to Thermopylae

Niagara the Grand Canyon
The ordinary sunset
Scooping beauty from decline and fall

Words color the interstices
Mark the dim fringes
And never fill them full