The best way to eliminate guilt
Is to have nothing to feel guilty about.
Thus spake my surrogate father

Like the bells
That could be ringing out of heaven now
For all my ears can tell,

A large unpleasant woman
Is chasing a songbird around the kitchen
With a broom shouting

Then he deflowers her, pulling away the greenery.
Then a blue vein thinning into a hollow.
Then it is the hollow between her neck and lower jaw.

Maybe enough light    •    to score a wave    •    reflecting moonlight, sand    •    reflecting
moonlight and you    •    spotting from shore    •    what you see only    •    as silhouette
against detonating bands    •    of blue-white effervescence    •    when the crown of the
falling    •    swell explodes upward    •    as the underwave blows through it    •    a flash
of visibility quickly    •    snuffed by night    •    the surf fizzling and churning    •
remitting itself to darkness    •    with a violent stertor    •    in competition with no other
sounds

I finger this vagabond cloth to numbness.
I can't even capture your hands
or what carries us limb by limb.

1. After years away I was back in London visiting a friend who lived in Kensington in one of those cheap council flats that  in my day poor people like me fought for. He had a few people  in; some I knew; some I didn’t. They sidled between the furniture and the stacked books. A bitter smell came from marigolds in a vase.

Smoking a cigarette in a classroom
a woman is copying sentences from
a book called Our American Way of Life

Are you listening? Mommy takes care of you.
She’s writing this letter with her pen dipped
in the milk her nipples won’t stop streaming

I have come often to this forest,
home to these never not green trees.
Now, in a grove of auburn bones