North American Taoism is a quad divided.
We never come across it.

Yet a parabola intersects its pedigree that was.
Gestures are precise. Bright eyes,

sparkling motions. Climbing down the outside
there’s a new quad mainstream-underground

— we — some of us — avoid it. It’s hardly objective,
but a big tantric realignment is authentic now,

the hyper-rufflers juxtaposed by the advanced milieu.
So let’s start with the rectangular coordinates,

understand pleasures the eyes, neck and chest.
There. Got it.

You may have noticed I write to your head,

Flash my badge. Home is test patterns,
7 rooms (usually) with clay-toned physiques
fighting the relative fight for sheer falsetto

— everybody under anesthetics, lunar waxing
credited to a whipsaw. A foot of sleet
from the window, the surf comes to mind in
reverse as if it were one long eyebrow, roughened

Like your wingspan & oh, wait we did this already.

I’m on the side of fuzzy & discontinuous oooomphs
nibbling torque adjusting zest into gonzo —
I’m spry on my motives

Holding out to you
my coat with the fired bullet in it, effluvia.

Conditions look gray — wanting you (I do),
not out of calculation, & how far & vast connivance
liberates us to oppose the other ingredients.

Or plans change. Pandering to guess, we might
replace active similes & what’s in a line or two,
set off controls to lose my footing (clop directional
blips) on the oily tarp, perplexed, taking it outside
a Rubik of profane, denatured octagonal gloom.

To outtake a thing is ample. The ecstatic that’s crap,
scrunching it up is everything for breakfast.

The pond plays Schubert like a bouclé, searing,
puffy, relaxed, succinct. Hold my earrings.

I’m drunk on history, empathy, bounce. I’m sick of nice things. Now it’s daybreak —

For my doctoral research I followed joy, the top two percent of delusion that swell and swell. I also prefer free, motorized speech that’s dissipated but purring put aside.

Government is not that difficult. I’m reviewing the lab egg whites in their spare, bubbly zeal to outpace the apparatus (not properly issued to commentary), a colorful PROCESS shot. Bliss was the verb. Scary Movie was a date flick. A private-public bond like Klee and Ibsen wearing bluetooth up to their shoulders, smiling but neither laugh.

“My regrets.” Switching phones, I look up to the crazy guys waiting to take me to the parturifacient facility.

There were other, subtler indications you just wanted to cry, and it's not such a bad smell, it’s just sad with a slight lifting in the dimness when I wake up. Anyway, it all goes well. You and I will be taking off, though. One by one, I suppose. Reasons are weather related, the paleness this morning and a similar wash of fog coming back, lilac-dark in the air and offshore atmospheres yesterday and the day before. The winds exchanged directions, and it barely pertains, and why should I? What I have in mind is low on your list, even lower than that, it’s off the list. So it's contradictory to insist I’ve won in a runoff of longing and gratitude. Your taking time to sift through any, even the slightest, part of what I think is the spoils of coincident poses. That’s what poetry does. I cherish your placing a tag on mine, yet I have said nothing, foundering and tongue-tied, handing our fortune over to that first letter of the alphabet where you lived. You want back in, me too. It’s my off-centeredness alone that excuses maintaining a safe distance. I'll let you go then. I was hoping you would rhyme over me.

Are you sitting in the apparatus while listening there? wearing nothing but a motive for eagerness to do what we were afraid to be?

The back office is its eyesore, assembly required. It
makes itself think...lets itself think... (It’s a coin flip.)

All personnel, yes, everyone has to be shifted or fired
yet we come to work anyway due to the flywheel effect
that turns colloquy over to science and greed.

My views are compatible with yours, that’s the idea, only
I’m leisure-loving. It’s that easy so I’m leaving you
a saddle in your extrication from hallucinatory delirium

tho you’re still at the front, vulnerable in all good faith
that ushers in anti-radiance and the prototypes that mess
up the visual cortex with paste-ins and luxury goods.

I’m not anxious unlike its first aircraft that drift in there.
How did they hang through the duration (how is the easy-
hard part) multiplying in dark, making more inventory?

The back office is its eyesore, assembly required. It
makes itself think...lets itself think... (It’s a coin flip.)

First I wore quadratic status in my smasher
area, spoke Marxian argot, fighting amid effluvia

yet morphine-ghosted, Starsky’s tongue in my ear
& all the bobwhites in the Appalachia hush... off

we whiz to getaways & then — second — noise
of collared, greening hospitality where Hellenic

banter might calm the tax credit havoc.

                                                       Third, I’m
worshiping on a magnum while service precincts

are doing sex here with a hen of steam, as verdicts
are trifles beyond Krishna's achieving reproduction

pouring kerosene to kindle tomography, the bliss of
ex-ambience for having brooked the Toscanini kind.

Everything belongs. The rest is stress related.

Her eyeballs are all they need, not what they are. It’s a classic knife-in-the-back suicide.

Part of the world faces the street to whoosh by... looking outside and still walking through it adhering neatly to nothing, a science-fiction flushed hollow just passing, but also taking root, ornamenting impurities of state.

The carport is perched high above subatomic beings. We use photographs for subject matter, like this of a garland arched over people who are sweating their existence.

I polish the text and hand it in.

Conceptual strategies are at the top of the poetry game. There you go again. Tax and spend. Death panels. Toxic algorithms infuse ideology and organize perception. Political samples predict behavior.

Play along or sue.
You guys go ahead.

I’m going to take my inside voice and ...and turn around and walk away.

Outdoors I pledge you a wholly hidden idiom of renderings, highlighting themes out-of-focus, left to twist in the hot leafy acreage.

Pears and Fuji oak, null passages in fog. (The cracks should be bridged with glass fiber.)

Like conceptualisms and other forms of mild poetry, poll-taking is largely implemented rhetorical solutions.

I’m always wrong
to prolong my appeal.

So a redraft: Bafflement is tentative, one mountain clinic after all of the above. Herding cocktails, we sleep with a relationship. Rough seas but you’ve been in the field long enough, you know how we leverage the social graph to miss you. How long have you planted thoughts without a gender balance?

See this pigeon? He’s a true antihero. Incandescent.
And it’s hard to get foreign sports equipment
or the meaning of structure, a table for the couturiers,
along with the varmints in the shortness of thought
indexing suspicion and objurgating.

There’s efficacy in speaking clearly, gesturing, knitting your own brow.
I’m happiest procrastinating. When stairwells mesh to go nowhere,
           tiny, hidden wriggling strings
between you and expulsion, the hole is closed. Turn here.

Like all of the above and the rubber suits going in and out of buildings, climbing stairs, you’re one hundred percent normal running up debt to keep devotees heartbroken.

Music up.

I promised you a ham for painting bombast.

There’s transactional friendship, and it’s a job (like sloganeering) and, more elevated, craft (making a sign for consciousness to observe). To illustrate, job is to craft as sport is to theoretically or astronomically kicking a sign. Don’t get me wrong, unattempted sound is cool and we’re for it and against any impingement unless it hurts the transaction. What’s it? There’s no work-around to the observer influencing the observed except later, much later.