Interrogator needed
must fail to understand
the simplest things
in a vault of goo —
Platitudes generated
by electricity
falling into a source
it troubles us to consider
even once,
whispering to solvent after solvent —
is this the visual
you redirect your password from,
are there other kinds
of sympathy you act
out about?
Do you inventory
your playing cards
routinely.
What I’m telling you
is none of your business
and business is good.
*
The book of
how’s that going to work:
Like aliens,
their flitting pincers
storming across the stacks.
Supervision for the loneliest,
and architecture
made of composure and
lidocaine.
There is this long waiting period
before it makes sense to talk.
It’s fine that you want
a reservoir of tenderness,
but you should know
it comes with conditions
your character
tends to oppose.
*
A chaos familiar enough
I experience it as valuable,
clinging sideways
into its reason
and misread the story
the way anyone would
from underneath the letters.
Giving down its lesson,
the fear electrifies
a plateau for breathing
the sour lonely soup,
a glittering cassette
blowing in the brisk
aftermath.
Sympathy we dissolve
is nevertheless available
later for unknown newcomers
with even a dime —
in this system
wanting both
is rubble roulette, sweetie.
You have to be that slippery
and no more.
Come on, already,
it’s unbearable how you
refuse
this dialogue without borders,
these dependable changes
while the world considers
what it really wants,
the drift of feeling
in a crisis —
After the earthquake
the ceiling leaks,
the layered presence
parted like a bead curtain …
Not, more light:
Lighter.
Lighter.
Jordan Davis is a former Poetry Editor of The Nation. His most recent collection
Gullible eggs (reprise)
My mother lied with tenderness, sweet
aplomb, and range;
she’d seen a century, our crooked sea-swelled house
cost a million, and all babies were born with feathers
that softened the world’s edges
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 