Mark Yakich, p.2
HUMAN RESOURCES
O sure Knowledge & Truth & Reason, they can get me
through the day—but who, if I cried out, would hear me
among the angels’ cossocks? An eager reporter, a pimply staffer?
The priest makes his gesture, one last wafer on the tongue.
The Body: a minor atrocity. The Soul: thousands of lost
lost thousands. For the big B-S split, the better minds have
already sent in specially designed cranes and derricks, a slew of
lap cats with a slew of girls’ necklaces, and a little old couple
with tickets to a baseball game. But no one has heard a word
from any of the dead. And I can’t sleep either. I’m never sure
of anything as long as one member of a couple is asleep
and the other is not. So much for all this being an instant
swat on the back of an ant. A red ant who looks for home inside
every orange peel. What it might be to be wrapped as tightly
as the rind wraps the orange. Stretched to breaking. For what is
love but a heroic pain in the ass: the wrecked body inside
the wrecked ship. Or yet another humungous fish to battle. Bumpy,
bumpy ride. The headlights dip. The map mounts from the lap.
All rise for the projection of plenitude. Come clean with it.
A collusion in watching a woman wash her foot. How is it
possible to trim the backyard hedges without looking at the naked
girls in the neighbor’s pellucid pool? Between a finger and a
thumb is it. Decreasing time. O to be done with There’s-A-Limit.
The barbed-wire fence around the old Paris of the heart. O sure
what’s a petite lie. What’s a bigger word. A puff of tobacco, a real
feather shuttlecock, a bit of resistance from the finger to the trigger.
Let the lowest bird lay, I say, the lawn is soft and loose. Pity
its unrehearsed embrace. The O of the bottom is O so long.
O sure Knowledge & Truth & Reason, they can get me
through the day—but who, if I cried out, would hear me
among the angels’ cossocks? An eager reporter, a pimply staffer?
The priest makes his gesture, one last wafer on the tongue.
The Body: a minor atrocity. The Soul: thousands of lost
lost thousands. For the big B-S split, the better minds have
already sent in specially designed cranes and derricks, a slew of
lap cats with a slew of girls’ necklaces, and a little old couple
with tickets to a baseball game. But no one has heard a word
from any of the dead. And I can’t sleep either. I’m never sure
of anything as long as one member of a couple is asleep
and the other is not. So much for all this being an instant
swat on the back of an ant. A red ant who looks for home inside
every orange peel. What it might be to be wrapped as tightly
as the rind wraps the orange. Stretched to breaking. For what is
love but a heroic pain in the ass: the wrecked body inside
the wrecked ship. Or yet another humungous fish to battle. Bumpy,
bumpy ride. The headlights dip. The map mounts from the lap.
All rise for the projection of plenitude. Come clean with it.
A collusion in watching a woman wash her foot. How is it
possible to trim the backyard hedges without looking at the naked
girls in the neighbor’s pellucid pool? Between a finger and a
thumb is it. Decreasing time. O to be done with There’s-A-Limit.
The barbed-wire fence around the old Paris of the heart. O sure
what’s a petite lie. What’s a bigger word. A puff of tobacco, a real
feather shuttlecock, a bit of resistance from the finger to the trigger.
Let the lowest bird lay, I say, the lawn is soft and loose. Pity
its unrehearsed embrace. The O of the bottom is O so long.