To warm up we walked
       to the ravine;
              we could both wear my father’s
old running shoes.

You wanted to talk
       about us and if
              I’d stayed with your mom,
what we’d of done?

We started to run
       into the ravine,
              we jostled and touched,
“I would’ve done this…and been more tenacious,”

— you’d already heard,
       so we horsed
              on the narrowing path
until you disappeared.

I caught you up
       the last twenty steps out
              of the ravine,
you smiled: “Old man,

you’re going down,”
       and we raced the half-mile
              back to the house, where you turned
to watch me return;

how I lost
       with all of my heart,
              so far behind;
I’d thought

I seemed more than I was,
       but you weren’t surprised
              how easy
you’d put me to rest.

(com)Putaré.
Roman in spirit, I reckon:
pure, amputation,
standing, Greek-still,
numb, counting our infinite
orders. Ordaining but mainly
still, metastatic: a system,
a yes and a no.

More relation than thing,
pure burning forge, binary
burnt to instruction constructs a prosthetic,
so here:
clamour and rattle, flutter and struggle
requiem whistler, your Kyrié Eleison!
Strap up the tap shoe: Hop ! Step ! Brush ! Slip Off!
fall crawling, follow the echoing absence,
of world?

O, there are worlds for this:

Charles Simonyi sang in a soft tiny 'C',
reserved for himself, tautologically,
the in and the out of it:
[#defineNEARnear] and
[#defineVOIDvoid]  I
swear it is true
(parenthetically) to itself,
otherwise go
wherever
you get two.

Virtualis.
Rootless, I reckon:
(hu)Man, reflected (my pidgen) in
vir/us, nest fetid (putére)
Stinking like poison, our
pigeon Kingfisher, the bob and the strut,
picks at its nits, an ubiquitous flutter
inside our openings,
pigeon souls digging
deep pigeon holes.
Souls: Log On.
Infect space in between
system and structure. Logged or afloat
in the time-slice,
the churn smoothing bios (for us!),
to be construed:
Basic Input Output System or Breath,
(Soul, to you)
You know the drill,
down to the psukos, I reckon,
some zoon logon, so
pass a word over: Are we on?
We are off!

We the prosopopoetic (figure it out)—
Warm mask on the dead.
Dead? No. New (at long last),
some thing no older
than its own name:
(declare:
[NAME]
"remember this fire"
*the step was always downhill
(PROCLAIM:
“here we are again”
Here we are again
A£¶šÌ & oÊ°ÔìŨÙ;–
again and again
<…ÚYš„¦ú•¥Ûµ¸e=Â:
a mask on a masquerade.

It hit me while running,
staring down at my feet without thinking,
how in much the same way
two overlapped squares, idly sketched,
resolve into a cube, or
a wine goblet will turn into faces,
this well-worn path in the grass
I believed I’d been sharing all of these years,
was only, in fact, the one I had beaten
into the ground by myself.

I tell my daughter winter killed the wasps
and throw a well-aimed stone, we both jump back

as the nest falls, as if it wasn’t true
and wait—for nothing. She wants to go,

but I say, “Look! It’s broken!” On the snow,
entombed, dead wasps, the great plan gone awry,
                                          
she won’t come near, she looks away,
she points out a new bird, but I still need

to make her wonder if the sleeping queen
survives, woven into the maze of her children.

We bring the broken nest back to the car,
it rustles in my hand, it’s only wind

inside the ruined walls, and I pretend,
like her, that I don’t notice.

On the north tip of Bahia Banderas
there is a point with long crescent beaches
called ***** de Mita, where villas loom
behind massed manzanillas, where
half-asleep guards with sleepy machine guns
slump on plastic chairs under hibiscus
beyond the driftwood that marks the high tide.

There, on a bed, in this cabana, where
I know the pelicans, the names of the waves
and the sound your feet make on the sand, when
it's too hot beneath fluttering canvas
to do more than stretch out, as if on the rack,
staked under the sun and slathered with honey,
eye-lids sewed open, awaiting the army
of fire-ants....
                     except your feet are too perfect
for me to be eaten by ants,
toe-nails too pink, crazy sand blooms
on your wet shoulder blades: O instead,
I'll sit up and stare at your nose.
I've seen it before on a totem pole
in Chapultepec Park: inscrutable Aztec,
cempazuchitl, I've been waiting for you
to devour my heart.

On your last solo,
you had six matches,
a tarp and a rope,
a bag of granola
on a tiny island,
afraid of the bears
on the mainland;

without any birch bark,
to kindle a fire,
you waited for dark
crawled into your tent
to sleep for the morning
that never comes,

once that full-moon is high
above the black lake,
and you hear them set out
over the water.

Deep in the Amazonas,
two bugs with long legs and horrible wings
bounced up and down, eating each other, I guess,
beneath this enormous leaf that you lifted
with the tip of your broken machete
in feigned curiosity.

This was after the worms you called serpents
squiggled in our ankle-deep mud,
after your so-called jaguar tracks, after that tumour was chopped off
of the tree trunk and the termites poured out,
even after the green-eyed poisonous frog,
but well before dusk when, Clarindo,
you told us to turn on the light.

Clarindo, Clarindo, you ******* artist,
those tracks were the village dog's
and it was our light that attracted the Cobra Grande,
who rose from the shadows and fell on my back,
pressing its fangs through my chest then listening to hear
if I breathed, while all you could do was bang
your machete on the great Ceiba tree,
which (as you knew) was provocation not remedy
in such a darkness, the one we now know
overtakes us.