Sitting and writing on the dining room table,
I want to tell you what it is to be alive,
the yellow oilcloth table takes the imprint

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopped

My father raised me to know
that I am not different
from anyone else. This knowledge

impossible to pick it up. the oily outer coating catches on the kitchen
counter and begs to grow, even where there’s no soil, the ones I did
manage to plant lived for three years—never trees, but the flat leaves

My morning cereal can’t contain my hunger.
I ask my wife for more. As usual, she refuses.
For once I’m undaunted and I eat the empty bowl.

He feels the catheter as penis,
is pleased with its sudden growth,
and goes to great lengths fondling

A girl reclining by an open window
I do not say this was
the only thing one saw that day.

Leona heard the engines again, the great
cranes outside her window breaking up the old history,
the bulldozers striking layers of rock that ran

The things that I habitually say
are obvious. Why repeat them? Besides,
they are never what I meant to say.

1.
Technically it was liquid asphalt:
MC, RC, or 85/100—
nothing very far removed