Shadows of birds moving over me, Marcel
sucks on himself like a childmint.
I walk on the grass next to the path
litter-picking wrappers marked Albertine.
Every rheumatic knows the spoiled grass
is an aisle for dogs and bad joints,
spongy and tolerable. Knees bobbing,
I dodge the little turds as I go. My thoughts
are crass as genetruthers, trucking in gaudy
sensations like nostalgia for mud
and pig consciousness. Soon the dogs
come sniffing at my sensibility hole –
those childmints are irresistible.
Dogs and rheumatics smell them
on my breath. My bad knee says
we were once diagnosed with a father,
so isn’t everything a symptom in waiting?
My other bad knee snaps and sings:
the clover is the one who cleaves,
the clover is the lover who leaves.
Stinking of pink hawthorn I quite
literally make myself sick. Stashing
the Albertine wrappers
for an essay I shouldn’t write,
on ‘selfish’ as the -ish
of an approximation, as in
the self-ishness of a hedgerow
that gets confused with your thoughts
as you think them, and is now
forever creampied as a receptacle
of obsession. Any hole’s a goal
was my initiation in the theory of presence.
Bridges mount the path like a poorly
executed hookup, lopsided as cheese.
It begs the question: What is a nice
infrastructure like you
doing all alone all the way out here?
There is some water, I can’t describe it,
water is its description. I fail
to smile at the cyclists,
I fail to describe the water.
I am a traitor to identity’s ditty.
Marcel prefers the pink
to the white. As with mayflowers,
freckles and cream cheese, so with fillettes.
Like that time I found beetle larvae
sucking on the biscuits spilled
from my cat’s bowl, sleek and brown
as hairclips, and later saw them by the litter
box, feeding on a speck of dried shit.
They were eating her from both ends,
the pink hawthorn and the white,
and I wondered which
they preferred? Since everything
is entitled to a favourite –
that’s ethics. O my knees.
Wholly sensibility. I cross my throat
and sin with my eyes.
