Tonight the cicadas are deafening. / Nothing to do but lean into despair / the way one leans into a mirror.

What’s the first thing you do / in a house you suspect haunted? / You sing.

I touch your chin and throat, the pit / There, and the hard bone of your chest. // The birds observe us from the wire / And pass their comments back and forth.

Nobody removed the excrement collecting around his or her thoughts / I was the detective in the book no one put down / The sky offered a different testimony / You were different, even when you crinkled your nose

I love everything: / the man in the bar who says he builds boats, / plastic bags that catch in the branches, / rattling. Sometimes the city / shuts me out, or else I’m split, / or the things that I am are / stacked, I sing them out.

My wife leaves the room when I see the moon / because she knows we’re about to lose / some more furniture. Leave the moon alone. / Give us your head; peeled, colourful, half-asleep.

"He pushes his fingers into pulsing temples. When you get like this, / he says, you’re not the person I fell in love with. She thinks / Cleveland could get another chance if people would only / live here. She undresses with her back to him."

"And since you already have a street in mind and perhaps a breed of dog, / a colour of lead, or the kind of coat the man is wearing, why not become / the man dragging a dead dog on a lead behind you? Why not try..."

In every movement there is always stillness: / bear in mind the arrow is transformed in flight...