Poem

Poem

For Anne Boyer


The ones who wash.
The ones washed.
The ones who wash the washed.

I am washing the ocean
With my golden eyeballs because

I live across the street from it
And now, you see, I’m filling

My golden eyeballs with the washed
World because they

Are goblets and this is
A medieval poem

And you are my hide,
My manuscript, so I’m going

To erase the glyphs
And write over you oh

Apocalyptic pile-up
Of cars. The car wash would you

Like a car wash no I said
I don’t want a fucking car wash today

No. Press
The ‘no’ button is red fill with

Gas. They believed the
Glyphs, the script was

Nonsense, that the letters
Were pictures of eyeballs

And so everything written
Was staring at you like

you were an erased animal in
Surveillance in
Passports we cross—the poem

Slop, I don’t want this poem
To be bought, it can’t

Ever be bought OK
So I’m posting it here in

The sell zone—if you touch
This poem

I will die
Without knowing

What the words were
Selling to you

In the eyeballs
The eye wash mine are

Open to the passport picture
Is this you

Ezekiel?

Are you there?

In screen? Inshallah?
In real time? In “The Scream”—

The stealing of it—the zone
Of the ‘what isn’t’

The ‘is’ zone
Separated by wing

air washing above and below
aerodynamic lift

In the half-life
That decays once it begins

Where nothingness
In tin
tandem
toss

In community that props
Up corpses

Where are you?

We’re here in this
Tube of oxygenated atmosphere

above

Some countries—a son—
He is composed of

Cameras now.
Or tubes.

Or clicks. Is he clicking?
Does DNA

Make a sound
When it’s pulled apart?

I can’t tell if I’ve made
Cells or

Wires or tubes or
A language coming

Together like
Drops of water.

Wash
The toast. He says
“Wash mama”

So I do and now
The toast is all soggy.


An old writer—we say he’s ‘washed out’—a
Corpse ‘washes up.’

To be watched and opened
like a passport
Or woman.

The beautiful women
Of poetry posing

On a page of poetry. Do not buy
Me anymore.

Or sell my face
Is being washed because

It’s tired and I want
to stop. The sons

Of the beautiful women
Of poetry—the only

Place where once you
Could be beautiful

Or ugly or neither one—to want

to be ugly—

To reign, transcend— match
The ugly modern world

In the face mirror.

To transcend
A nation like a passport or surveillance

Or clicking on the posing
Images

That have been washed
Like fruit.

To be deposed.
Deported.

To be a son.

There are consequences, my lovely darling.

In ethic in shall uh in cleansing nick
In son of Israel in scrolls

That roll up around
The child’s foot—

The sun cupping them in
Like golden eyeballs.

In clicks of photographs
The beautiful women of poetry,

Their legs longer than
The horizon

The poems sold
Like the old world forever

Being sold I can’t tell what
I’ve made no I can tell

I’ve made cells

That are flying above
The ocean
Of horrors—the middle part

Where nothing can survive
Where the organs are supposed

To be pumping and digesting
and filling with joy

but now in the middle of the ocean
There are mirrors
And there is seaweed and a young girl

Is being wrapped up
With a white sheet

She is your sister
And you must remember that forever

And her feet have not
Been washed

By God or by anyone
How dirty the feet

And though they will end up
At the center of the sea

Two feet without a body
Walking half life

They will always be dirty
Because even the sea can’t

Wash this away. The sea’s

Defiance. The stars milk

Mothers and then the mothers’
Milk rots and that’s

What we have to work with.

This event. That one.

Those ones too. All of these events.

These times.