Ames Progressive

when space eats the sun,
we will try to make sense of our hero: ourselves.
i am going to clone myself and then kill and eat the clone.
i will kill my hero with my eyes open the whole time.
and i know
that where there are holes in the ground,
water will fill when it falls.
an open hand, the same […]

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There’s a picture on the mantle
Names carved in the shiny wall
Bones in the pasture skulls in the riverbed
And there’s a peat fire smoldering
Slow and steady underground
Spontaneous combustion no one really knows for sure
Natural selection atavistic kind of thing
Force of nature like the scream of the wind
Mother of invention original sin
No peace dividend
There’s rumors from the […]

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I will fill in my trail.
No one will find me.
I will burn the wallpaper
and with it all the laughs it has absorbed.
I will bury an eyelash in drying concrete-
and cut my finger on a book at the library.
Surprise!
I am now immortal.
And the horror of a minute alone is mine all mine.

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I am a magician.
I turned my house into a grave.

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Breath makes contact with blood
And joins the rush of the flood.
What air once contained
Now rolls through my veins
And will one day flow back into the mud.

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Composing fragments of photographs
Reflections of light
Color dances across our faces
In these streets
These streets where we are so small
From up there
Blank faces on the subway
Seeing no one
But they all must know what it feels like
To capture light
To capture time and decide
That it was real
Rambling through the avenues
Neglecting humanity
The girls who sweep the leaves from the streets
To […]

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It began as an impersonation
of a TV actor’s oration.
But that original choice
infected by my voice
until it achieved transformation.

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Bolshevik tart
You smudged your revolution across the face of that boy.
You sent him stumbling out of the bar
Like a child scattering his sweat out of the ruined village.
Years after, he’d feel phantom pain in the center of his chest
when it rained or snowed
or broke out a few splinters of sunshine.
He’d feel your words like shrapnel.
You […]

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A group is an army or a dissembling cause
&
A leader is a demagogue or the first defector
&
A cause is a leader or an army
&
Its employment is armed or vocalized
&
The wasps are an army
&
Their leader is a lung alive with air
&
They don’t dissemble they assemble
&
Cohesion is the hand—always bite
the hand that feeds you if you’re hungry.

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