My Unwell Thermonuclear Radiance

sounds like a poem by James Tate. The trees
are stunted with foreknowledge,
washed in amber laxative,
& there's always a dwarf in the corner of your eye.

Someone's borrowed my pen
& I don't know who.
I can't take my mind off it.
I can't take the window away from the room;
such elongated foreshortening! I whisper
to the last pine forest of my eyebrows.

Imitation is the sincerest form of typing
said Edison, who dreamt of starting a company
called Edison but couldn't invent the name.
Yet here he is again, with tambourine.
He's got a battery powered Paul Klee. Amazing.
And is that my pen he's using to hose down
the riotous bureacrats?
Holy coyote! It is.
Let's pray the pot is empty.

Sigmund On The Seoul Subway

Lightblue the bridge above the Han river
-we are full of windows at sunset,

repositories of imbalance.
There is a narcotic young woman he'll never know.

And suddenly the river is gone.
I enters a tunnel.

Poem

He died. She died.
In that particular order.
We wept. Some of us
went swimming afterwards,
some of us went home.
All of us wanted to.
But without them
what was the point?

We were.
It was daunting
& after a suitable period
-or an inappropriate one-
we realised
that we always had been,
& we'd always known it
-but it was so hard
to tell our children that.