By Lisa Samuels

Chapter 1: We hold ourselves eventful

In those clouds figures ignite, shadows are visitable outlines at the back of
rooms—I have a club and pointer holding them upright, or I am
ill-dressed and need to be given a blue shirt, a red shirt, something deep
offsetting the plain strangeness no one ‘has’ (but betting it) any plans nor I
fixate on a tromp de l’oeil can tell you

A dog barks in the patio, he is stuck forever in a moving position;
seeming delicate wings on the sky tip-top, the lit approaches gather up
their meanings to take them home or canvas tells itself without dementia,
though I stand looking like a crazy without wheels

All the patio given to itself without reprieve, the nice ones smiling you
know it’s really sincere, the caustic ones wheeling and twirling intention
on their fingers: from the corners where the dancers
have no experience – you will be swallowed up in dark ideas of art

She of the falling down has a box of half-done paints, a man called Ah-
very gives you—he is old and safer that way, though longing fetches
through his latches

Sorrow, it is sorrow to get somewhere you don’t efface nor half-belong
—to soft-formed people moving in their shadows, they know ‘how to be’ there,
company procured

Chapter 2: In medias res

Finished with nothing, distended on the float balloon, we’ll ball the floor in wax
to make it ‘ours,’ little tree, little somnolent fixing the posh names, bobble-
headed experimenters toggling back their throats to song ravishing the air with a
what-you-will of having lived, setting up their own  distended consequence—it
isn’t ‘fair’ that it should be so obvious, evidence brought in to make the social
scene dismayed

here is a red house, here a blue the white manifest, staves in the arms hold
down, the legs apparent stimuli for walking, me on a sidewalk boat,
floating whereness to its gradual display: ‘come see!’
that the evidence is impressive you will surely grant, and me, and
something obvious and green

Chapter 3: Orthodox squinting

Or clay or ice or snow—mixt it is forestalled for an honest plan
adventure, the girly figures racing through the streets in ties, in
moxy scrambling, duked and inadmissable

To the play!, where we will randomly admit ourselves reversed, the
silly people wholly to the side without coincidence they can sludge
on us, we’ll find curtains lace and symbols to drape over the statues
of consequence leering on the scene—
the flesh-eating ideas are making me dizzy, underlying first principles
with messy admonitions: do! this thing or do not awaken, that is
a mistake I tell you to forestall your disappointment

Chapter 4: Blur

You’ve made a place for scrupulous delay, the fulsome bite of syllables, mouthy
extras, the ‘what we do not need’ printed pack-wise on your parts

People gathering to look are soft walls made to mirror what they allocate for
anyone listening as the loudspeaker conjures its own display, a scene of
variable postures, the sound of protest wafting sideways over
an air we haven’t traced so carefully this time—

disembodied voice-making, little throats leaning backward
to make a pointed distribution of something valuable or ‘valid’
a plain tinkering we’ve done with dismay—from far away a will subscribed
to our importunate adventuring; they must or ‘we will . . . we will . . . we will . . .’

Having said with forcefulness the voice looks wet-eyed to its fortress: don’t tell
anyone, a coeval exchange with particles we’ve got hammered
in our throats cancer-like, lid-like, some forest symbols all around our minds— the
time is tipsy-top, hivsies havesies about it really, location being what
it is and your resistance down, the frowns inside your lashes finally fixed or
‘finally’ enduring their own temperance

You see with a fine-boned distribution over other girls who listen to—
the ship overboard, a promise to someone who isn’t even here
as though disparagement were ‘to answer to’ the clouds whether or no  you have
obeyed—while laundry-like cycles spin just past the birds gathering to
announce outside the city, a lone dolly parading up and down with all the
answers inapplicable to questions you know

---