Third Nude
We could be nothing but interruptions
moon-colored snow
if class can belong to a body
you mentioned the moral debt a mother incurs
when making a parenting error
(through each entry)
her specter pursues me its supreme-indifferent-fiction
notes pass between moon & snow
where sunslits graze the bedroom wall
your hand colors a body
it’s the health of a nude, not her convention
(vocabulary is torturous)
to attend her modesty she’s a child-at-play
we fail to sow Olympia
in my unposed limbs
fragile achievements of uncertainty — pleasure — make her a man
my breasts pulled out of shape because
dank background that maintains our compliance
a breast, a photograph of a breast & the meaning of a breast
yet, beneath my open
arms nothing but shadows
Chaucer used ‘aspen’ to mean trembling
& I see my hair fail with allowed disorder
near you
disarm my most comfortable belief…
earth is not your orphan
what are these people in my life if not
comes and goers of an outside world
Nude at Dusk
You hang yourself for the lady
of the house not its guest
like a guest, I wrought
cash cradle revises the world
leitmotif of our universe
domestically, incompletely,
the courtesan was thought a main representation of modernity
sunshine and shadow show her in shade and sun
cooing your tired mystery solicited from privacy…
pale-lumps of earth in my pocket where rent
where your hand should be
so spoke the decent voice of trade
money’s defensive dignity
like Gramma swears Elvis lives
how the bourgeoisie believed in Desire
and none of these anxieties are new
desperation, a rope ends it
… I believed the pastels sung your voices up my thigh
new pessimisms?
A redhead is of a perfect ugliness
bad-luck-baby in Italy hither
the het-up
prostitute, the category
desire or guilt as aspects of each other
I left you I felt you
necessary twin in myth of social
fear and money tugging pains in the foreground…
with my body already lost,
I’m scared of my mind wandering off
tears of clear and simple
teeth, soft-bones around contention
where a margin of error takes its place for the system
stakes the sphinx without her riddle
how to call it wise and foolish virgins
Left Nude
Flexible architecture of belonging to someone
we disinter ourselves as the moon
what does the moon do
sudden-improbable-sequins where illusion, reigns, strike us
my body is BOOMING
boxed vegetables appear on the porch because I live in California
& wilt because our janky-rented-house
…skills let me navigate you…skills tell me to abandon self
when asked about imaginary you say the daily world is strange enough
yet
nothing mediates our convention
or, the main ability of a nude is how her body triumphs…
when earth rehearses her irrelevance
how the city people warned me against
flung its taut-heart for me
flexed its dim-horizon
yet, the painter tangles
feeling’s color as it brims from pores
you got to give it to shadows, muddy without relief
these odd-blinking-limbs stymied-drunken-glee
I haul my typical, tapered holes to
our little convent,
housing the form of