a want (illusory)
a glob of fig jam dropt
a hundred ants or a
veritable coven
swirls elliptically
dense with pinching spells
a feeding frenzy
an archaic wish to clothe
Eve’s pudendum
as fig must signify
with their brittle bodies
in the garden eternal
it lives in my clumsiness
with fruits
(desires for all species)
to pluck and to taste
one by one
what comes to be called
pleasure
(to some, sin)
***
it’s all about the father
a colorless cocoon
straddling the underside
of an oak leaf
the sexless euphony
of moths
who enter the abyss
without parricide
we are different
simple hatred
where no one is to blame
throws the die
their one flesh
erases a boundary
it is there for us
we are the mortal ones
separate by day
a single pronoun
economy hours bed
there, a wet stain
an inland sea
seems the only thing
in the room
and millennia
try to efface it
***
purity
texts not used
dispossessed
in a lost and found
wanting an owner
to meet
at the landfill
someone to pout on
a pinky ring
and say it’s mine
it fell off the shelf
the gem I’m looking for
perfect to set
in an ode or sonnet
...
if meaning is
a sensed relation
it isn’t a heartbreak
to be repurposed
pulpwood
swished in a chemical
wash
for another day
to breed
like the young and beautiful
each shred admiring
its own ghost
whispering falsetto
no no no no
until the word means
anything at all
an auto-reset,
stupid
***
David Appelbaum has worked in the university and in publishing, and is an author. His most recent books include notes on water: an aqueous phenomenology [Monkfish, 2018].
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