Hats

 

Places a face previously was not
are filled by skin, visible from the eye down

Pink eyes sheer down from it, this, the black rota, a gap
exiting from the cut neck in a bubble

           Neck impacted as the body suddenly goes out

The chest cavitates in a slow crush, say 40 years
of the chin lowering to a point in the moon's callus

Breath, in itself not nothing, no speech, in the glass tube
a finger occludes, pih, pih, pih, spat outrider

           To print with a thumb on the polyp with no face
           a yellow sun and say, Smile

Strangely recuperative knee effect (saddle, saddle) -
it drops out and is overwritten.

When he has been dead only a short time
the shilpit pip, screened this A.M. for adjunct
switches the distant filters back to black for iron

Not to walk
                   -
                       then again
                                       -
                                           finally to become a third loss of walk
                                           as more tension cannot erupt

---

From 'Birth Windows', Barque 1999.
Also published in the anthology Word Score Utterance Choreography, Writers Forum 1998.

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