
Tenor and vehicles
Fact: things are like other things. Supposition: liking
tweets is like a simile. A house on fire. Like
an inconsequence. My love
is like a rose. A daikon radish. Birdsong
like a car alarm. My love is like
a transuranic element. Or a glass half full
of milk five minutes
from the refrigerator, suspended
between palm, floor,
and the condensation that coats it.
Fact: some things are something
else. A thought is a single
-celled organism. Supposition: to speak
is a rhizome. My
love is a vowel sound. An assonance. A
round mouth’s red. Fact: the poet tells
me my bones are already ninety
percent cold
war detritus, which is to say
the act of telling bears the fact, not
the bones. Fact:
a prophet is always a poet, but not the reverse. A prophet
is an apocalypse. An apocalypse a sheet
pulled off a rear-view mirror. A moment’s
sun is days, minutes, or millirems. Accumulation
a spending. My love is a spatial category. A semiotic
decomposition. A childhood is a Kodak film
canister, or
a rawboned calf
muscle in white knee
socks. My love is
a poet. My love
is the face of a poet really which
is the face of the hunter half
transformed into stag or wounded
dog. A doe is a laurel tree. My
love is a baseball bat. My love is a wound
-up clock spring, a temporal
dissonance, a metaphor
is conceit, my love is like my beloved
is the species of dark
and warmth that closes
over hands
in coat pockets in
an air-conditioned room.
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