Practiced Negation

   You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.  –Mario Cuomo

No never did this.  Against denunciation of one’s neighbors, against denunciation in general.

No, his books were negatives. Missing imprint that washes out all perception.  With this rock I do – nothing negative.  Lost in amplitudes of disrespect, sincerity as a pen withholds intent.  No longer accumulating in the margins of opera programs, on laundry lists, on the palms of hands, in the litany of words inserted here.  

No never did this.  Indestructible, it’s as if charm schools you.  Grabs your lapels, shocking with an electronic leash.  Yearning for a proper collar, to seize the power that deforms us.

If resistance is surrender, I denied myself to you as a joke – unable to comply.  The job is to check and recheck – to suspend the negation our bodies insist on.  At bottom, written in the paths of disputation, stealing asides from adjacent pages.  A nomad life lived between black and blue.

Surveilling daylight, I become indistinguishable from an image.  At night, out of sequence, I savor the bite of each strophe, and conserve the itch to push for more.

We’re told to obey the crime.  We’re told it’s our vampire – rising from the depths. Earth’s disgorgement cached my clock.  Each moment pre-owned – underwritten as a hedge against the past.

No never did this.  After the cognitive dissonance of work
In pursuit of the next enslavement – King George
Rethroned by alternate verbs (quote)
I love and love the treble
Damage – the fear that oversees
bypassed Meaning
Simplicity of some other angel
Better in margins arguably amassed
We manufactured crisis
embodied symptom
Misfortune as good as it gets
Ornament that refused collapse
Bottletop weave that skirts the eye