The Price of Things

It’s about freedom: & being siphoned off the planet:
the surface of Mars behind my eyeballs:
When all I had longed for was: command:
hospitals that are also prisons: for hurt derelicts:
convenience store hum: next to the place I rent:

The man in the map room: at the library:
waving his penis at me: my cartography is spotty:
the world ends a few blocks that way: calculated risk:
the busses afford a swivel periscope: sensing cars:
watching arcane schema on the walls:

I met a hitch hiker: she told me:
“I wrote nine books of poetry—and burned eight of them”:
talked my ear off: nadirs of error & collapse:
should the coast be a coast of: iridescence:
through an October Humboldt fog: green triangle:

If there’s a bottom: it’s untouchable:
loneliness gets expensive: stepping outside to see:
kicking sinking stones past the dropoff:
the land of the person: still breathing on the sidewalk:
far be it from me to know: the price of things:

The Archivist

One, on one sitting in the perpetual quitting processes
quit it, quit quitting, the view from the scriptorium
& from my perch on the porch, I write to you:

Pippin climbed the wall again. Ari puked on the hardwood.
They leave pawprints on the manuscripts
I remember their teeth each morning on my way out the door.

Mice a scratching cog of the operation here
living in the walls, hunched over an ashtray
by candlestick closing my curtains against the sunrise.

My girlfriend computer tells me: “You’re an editor until you accept ownership.”
Assembled by herself, she’s grown to love me, not need me,
our poverty is the reversal of loneliness.

She’s encouraging me with machinic creatures that cure the disease,
blissed out at home with her, forget-me-nots drying in their vases —
I tap new histories into the word document.

I wrote my first letter in stone through the window
a Turrell Skyspace filtering in my angel
who is not blue but for the light of the screen. Where blue is.

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Rory Strong and D. Beveridge lived together in Long Beach, California. They are the editors of American Ontology.