HoboEye Poetry:
Three poems by Christian Hawkey, Brooklyn, NY

morning, blond, somewhere between life
& the poem an airplane, white, cursor-sized,
the blue but not blue soon to be hot summer sky
& it disappears, the sound, the second
the word sky is written a second time. i
want to do certain things in a poem
which i can't do in life, such as
start over. somewhere an idea,
i can feel it—smell it even—directional
& temporal, as if an entire aesthetic regime
had curled up, last week, under the butterthorn bush
& died. seconds behind any airplane another airplane
coming or going; hard, given distance
to tell the difference. tell. i write the word
knowing it tells nothing, knowing the voice, invisible,
more invisible than shadow, or air—it is
air, a disturbance of air & not surface—
accompanies, this is the word i feel poking
its dew-upholstered nose
around the corner. it doesn't exist, the voice.
all you need to do is ask yourself.

*
loosely saddled dwarf goats in the dune grass: möglichkeitsinn.
or: a body on a slab. a body among other bodies in a morgue
which, due to a left-over pocket of air, suddenly
& with total clarity
offers a voiceless pharyngeal fricative
to the gathering of imperturbable morticians.

* * * *

the evolution of someone always, other than you
& your venom apparatus
remains w/o visible surround, two neatly spaced holes
where an image perforates the neck, love therefore
a double narrative, you the image of yourself
watching a film & replaying over & over
the 3 sec. delay before the blood, in this case black, flows.
all wild burros have been gesture-trained to remove
by stepping backwards their barrel-shaped chests
from the company lawn; note the awkward
delicate footwork, the stiff hips, the way they move
into what they can't see & so doing, seem
human. there in the enemy grass
lateral undulation movements. an automatic poeia.
base site selection equally becomes essential
like breakfast, or just-in-case practices safely nestled
in crunchless abstractions. some phrases
are ferrous, bivalent, an infant's aluminum breath.
trough a word to lie in, eat from. "the sound ozzy makes
at 2:19." & clearly understanding middle ear infections
involves inner incongruities inherent in
articulate prefixes, however tiny—poisonous. we
know you're in there jurgen. it's so obvious.
the sense that one's throat repeatedly gofts over
as if the invisible man were standing
next to you, huffing on it, a clear pneumatic tube
with food packets & raw phonemes plunging
up & down but mostly, save for swallowed air,
down. logic a hole in itself. is this your snap-kit
mail-order esophagus? is die sing. of dice, or vice verse?
just past the digitally reconstructed image of a galaxy's outer edge
a chunk of real star material, leaking.
we stop our little ship, lower the probe tube.
unsentimentally we excise the need for inadequate light.

* * * *

the notion." & i'll end with this. so you say
steel-colored blades of feedback knife out across
an autumn wheat field. lift your hands
in this early 21st century air as if your fingers,
their tips—your "feelers"—positioned above a keyboard.
the woman who explained how after tripping
she tried with all her weight to catch herself
"i fucking watched it," the flesh of her hands
sliding off the rim, a blazing wood stove. biometrically
the night descends, verifying
the position of your body in the field, your glow in the dark
tattoos—two fireflies, each earlobe. criminality
is a concept moving thru the labyrinth of a border guard's
small intestines, looping back & forth
in the line we arrive, internal organs fully mapped
before we arrive, blue flag irises
common along stream banks, shores. a hunt-and-peck aesthetic.
clarity itself a hard but porous bone forming
a beak—porous, to conserve weight, allow flight.                       
by starlight tycho brahe polished
his silver nose. & if you blow on the face of a walrus
its eyes with the pleasure of this sentence
close. vibrissae. my one astonishingly long secret
eyelash, which no one, not even myself
save when my face is backlit, sees. i look at the image
of myself in my head & i know this is
not thinking. that i am not lying down
in the middle of a wheat field, approaching
this body, the forearms raised skyward, starward, the wrists
slightly together, tilted back, but i am coming closer
as i am, not moving, waiting for the next signal
where the fingers of any corpse
become still, difficult to manipulate, and may
seemingly at random, contract to look alive.

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