from an end is the towards to
Hugh Behm-Steinberg
A gold wing, a redemptionary, there’s only
so many ways you know how to start that
doesn’t disperse what you’ve already begun.
Going to lead up to, going to be more metallic
next time, going to need different alphabets
to keep track of your rocks. You could stand
to lose a few, to lose a few, to lose a few rocks.
With your neck you could lose a few rocks. Always
standing up, always shaking, coming up for,
just invent telepathy and get it over with.
Scar path crookedness all the luck is
bad change your tactics renounce
capitalism start getting lower in your
grooves, in your back and forth doing as
some doors, arms up like the ancient bomb
arms down like the king of plumes, broad
space you have to go there quitting tomorrow
adjustable in those deals quitting now and
be the next smart guy, not like the other
smart guy, the one that got it in the neck.
Hurled late blooming hawthorn berries off the
steps and down to the antlers good for your heart
that’s a train who’s so distrusting doesn’t choose
without thinking about, keeps thinking the same
thoughts until they’re right, inventor of dreams,
crocodiles blocking the way, protecting their kids;
there’s so much tall sweet grass to go through:
sing backwards, never going to do this again, never
going to do this again, never letting anyone know
how many of what you got in your pocket.
Climbing central with landscape. Their leaves
their lookback it’s all so fucking so. Dial upon
the droning tendernesses the mostly other. These
tugs, their rare absences, it was simple like the way
time moves boats against, you have to stop living
in dread, have to stop hearing it all the time so
washed away hearing it all the time then light is
a part of the rest is dark ticking, contractions,
unknown nerves that signal through parts of
the body that don’t belong to you.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery, Good Morning! and The Sound of Music. He is a steward in the Adjunct Faculty Union at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where for ten years he edited the journal Eleven Eleven.
