R y a n S k r a b a l a k —

Double Sissy

A melody beyond its drug

Where the dandelion halts your look

In a town at the center of the false other world

we enter night's tournament with more to say,

speech as far deeper

length than proof. You

lubricated with forgiveness

but something inside me must be unsold

the dream kept alive in the playplace.

Looking up I guess

I'll chance trial on this poor star

Enriched I'm gone overture

But I do catch drink of rented past

I believe I should I say, dauntlessly,

sumac in the median plays with the wind

the cars kick up, men's navels, heat

from a motor, yes and no, many times

per diem. Sundown ekes

this bliss therefore the stone

has sight. What a man might forget

to profess. Titrate, symmetry. A fort

of logical progression. Wings

so need the sky, where then is the sky?

Double Sissy.02

You'd citied for reasons baroque,

Oh boy. And eyes from greendark oil

Rainbows which come to an ecstatic level,

Meeting past with bruised movement.

A glitch from the liquid pale dude

Told lies to the morning patrol

And that is the suddened miracle.

This door goes nothing

But you may stay and wait.

I think I get it now, etc.

The living and the flowers.

Double Sissy.03

We live close to and miraculously

Hung like faith or whatever

You set your mind to, spiral notebook

Slacked faces in the ongoing deception

Ink stuck to the air like a code

the hue a jewel mustered. Upon us ever

lasting like silk we ate the lesson before its

understanding. I met this guy, licorice sedan

across his twitch in midheaven wheat-night,

afraid again like Virgo me, who so said in days

I looked too far ahead, am very fucked

up, on the porch I want to be the wind

the dog “picks up” on.

Amish synthesizer, preamble

In the painting he turns slowly in the bourgeois ether

Undenied then lands in glossy meanwhile swallow

a shine of orchard fruit splashed upon this jangle

Whipped flowers

Then you recall the roadside berries. The arctic brightness

And you remember the smell of the split Kirby cucumber

Looking spun up, office chair nauseous in goodbye phthalo

outside the jailbroken pox of now, an October detonated

orbits joy outside the locked book. Implanted syllables dangle

between waltz away snooze and radiant emptiness

these decisions, this residue

what the orbit orbit

small orbit realized

outside the cage. As in a sabered field

is innocence a river then? Like custard

pronouns gathered night drift guitar shed faces comma faces

Ajar nudes went the portal on its half-life drum solo

of pixels, in reality

scabs over just a kernel,

a sort of Northern New Jersey of “the times.”

Amish synthesizer

for Cole Heinowitz, memory eternal

Refuse the union and the thirst when the god fate goes out

Discernable shadow of its barium vocal. The invisibility of that

insomnia, muscular structures in oiled imperial acoustics

before the image. Tiny arias of antisecurity in taken light

coerce the form so we can comprehend the “just before” animal.

I didn't own what I thought I'd reasoned, irises, quartz my hatred

all righteous and unexplained to those who mattered. Dreams

come to see you again, glass the limousine of river, there must be

some mistake, these initials scored in the bark, face the motions, tho

my duration wants alone. And tho crude empty hallways, submission

reverse to bent melody, unflatten life we did try, must there be I. I turn

away from it when I can, howsoever it pours into you, wet corners all among us.

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