m a t t h e w h e n r i k s e n

I

I am here at home
in a suit coat that spent a fortnight

on the back steps
collecting among other things

rain and a dusting of orange pollen
I can’t place with any tree

Out in the backyard
resumes the foundation for my possum dream

I confuse algebra
with ancillary needs

Better to have shoved at all costs
love into a closet for a couple of years

Better to dance benthic
and grossly without child ache

I am beginning to let myself believe anything
if it fits on a coat rack or has antennae

and why should I not disturb my chin
from the violin and try the pick ax

What is better than violence
won’t come back today

The lunch counter never truly empties
The night is full of jars

Once a child like you I would snort
at a whip as a rose and a car horn

The wrong door rigged my name
I am taller than some Greeks

My mother knew not to storm
but some of us die without imagining

any great tradition to riff off
and that’s a bad thing

as it’s a bad thing not to moralize
as a moral platitude

but for your honeyed words
And it’s worth it to ruin yourself

a nation for that face that wakes
hell dreams into a room empty of you

My wife sleeps without a net
above the chaos that holds for now

II

Understand my name has no beginning
Lest you shall become a moral figure

squeal until even the spiders
veer from your destination

You get anywhere get there on all fours
and remember that your trigonometry

retains also the logic of Sodomites
and firemen out in the driveway smoking

We still smoke in this great country
Some of us kill our relatives

Who doesn’t deserve style points
when the moon points to a broken magnet

In reality you did not see a pool of blood
Life is ordinary and proud

and you are a worthless people
my people in love

with the emptiness of your navels
You cannot read and warfare

does not become baleen whales
but suits you to your socks

You can only rejoice
It is the zither

It is the ouzo
It is the dance

gets us out of predictable gravity
and down into the confession of the body

	Crow Bar Dearest East River
	I Payment hasn’t come up yet I can dwarf the loan With my fingers tied behind My absent cuticles WE DELIVERY My favorite mistake To read over as I crossed Clay Street onto Clay Street Having walked north from India Street on the G I give you specific directions Because I refuse to explain Why I want you to go there I left an object On the stones under a warehouse on Newtown Creek You will find the apple blossoms On the length of crowbar I did not grab the axis with II I want you to go there Because I would like To stop looking at the crowbar On my toe The object I would like you to see Before I move this foot left The other idea that requires specific directions Is sitting on my left toe Under the crowbar I will tell no one I told you so III You ain’t gone This kind of light Have Mary walk me out Onto the roof half a dozen or more times In the week before my death So I can imagine myself spitting on strangers Who clearly scorn the sun off the pavement Off the clouds off the water Let Marie bring me one last book To hang my head over My head about to slump on that window Let me hold myself up I have done this almost all of my life None of it has been a struggle Don’t you see suggesting
next
MATTHEW HENRIKSEN’s first book, Ordinary Sun, will emerge from Black Ocean in 2011. He is the author of the chapbooks “Another Word” (Double Cross Press) and “Is Holy” (horse less press). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Sink Review, So and So Magazine, Realpoetik and Ink Node. He edits the online journal Typo and lives far from where he used to live.

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