It's a solid gold dodge, like no one you'd call.
It's a definite diamond coyote.
A voice we've all sought lodging in, that throws its own dice so to speak.
Grain elevators to high-rises, the water gets no clearer, the waves no nearer.
Build to about here: a pose and then a poise and then exchange.
Then I always want to say collapse.
The dancers fizzle out like Atlantis and become traffic: “data crosswalk.”
Don't know what a dynamo is.
A dance called THE INGROWN FERN.
We become pure perusal, find the joints in this summer's stiffness.
There are tall grasses and complicated waters and culverts ingeniously ribbed.
Unison cobbler: waters, lights, noises and anfractuosities.
Colloquies of subwoofers down alleys twined like honeysuckle.
Everybody and their orchestra.
Who loves who and their dog.
The feet are the seat of elation, caught up in jackrabbit time.
We quail, we demisemiquaver.
Shoehorned in admiration.
Like a filibuster of cattails.
Till there's nothing to administer, nor any to minister to.
Municipal bells run through their names
a dance called POSSUM TRAFFIC
that tenses and gathers up.
The promise and joke of a topographical map: dry yourselves off, the sun can't see you.
Speculative realism of Mt. Tabor (facing west) vs. speculative romanticism of Eastbank Esplanade (facing north).
Keep your sunglasses on, the music can't hear you.
Your steps lead away from the spirit and letter of
a dance called HARDLY ANYTHING BUT STUMBLING
into nothing but markings like freeway rationalism, late pleistocene hollowed-out optic stomping, now tiptoeing, now tearing along.
If you can't touch everything, don't go around feeling deprived of everything.
If some people look you in the eye, it doesn't make you public art.
We're literally writing a map, but a map is never literal.
Living by a river we get it coming and going,
a dance called DODGY DOSSIERS,
a little fate of perpetual smiting we do, mutual dodgers on backyard terms.
So I walk till I trip and scramble to avoid everyone as I slide down a mudbank, leaving a slick dark line to a U-shaped tumulus.
And you're there to read it, to step past everyone across the rocking plank supported by two stones.
And seeing you go, I do a graceless half-bow half-shiver starting at the heels and bucking upwards.
Once it starts it just goes on,
a dance called ALLIGATORS IN THE TINY WORLD.
The world gets tinier and rounder.
The alligators stay rambunctious and rectilineal.
The war's humbug melody sticks in our heads.
Many days it makes us sick but it gets lighter after a while, or makes its own light, so we see the city is burning gristle, a popping and tripping from door to door we all maintain.
The alligators rub elbows with a sound like frying eggs, they lock toes with a squeak like tightened screws.
Let's do some other dance.
