Tree made a living. Most artists who'd made it through the conservatories did. A majority worked for verts. The logos were damn well-wrought, and the number needed was astonishing. Since the corporations changed/tweaked them every few months for maximal consumer effect (keeping every icon recognizable yet fresh), the work was a steady stream of theme and variation. Perfect for OCD types, a substantial portion of her peers. The stars of the conservatories received governmental patronage upon graduation. They worked independently... then showed their work to the funding boards and, if deemed worthy, they exhibited.

Tree was just finishing her preparations for her fourth show in twice as many years. Today was the day she would gesso over her final canvas. Two days from now, her erasures would be on display in the gallery district. The funding board had paid her amply this time around for her withholding. She knew the work had been good--that she had been onto something.

She woke up. Her eyes met her sheets, pulled over her head to block the digitals. Her sheets were digitized, of course, as well. But their pattern was mellower. No Doz and SleepWell tablets were major sponsors of the linen manufacturers, and ENLarge was also there, not to mention Lubrific, and Tide and Tied-Up and Downy--but all these logos were in small-font-low-wattage form, not like the verts on her ceiling. A decade ago, when verts had picked up all her utility costs, she'd been pleased. But that was back in her first dark apartment (remember dark?), and now only the richest private citizens could afford to have a semi-blackout during the night. Forget days--they'd become a non-negotiable since verts took control of congress this last election. She supposed the constant barrage was okay, that she could turn the switch off somewhere inside of her--though she didn't know where--because supposing otherwise was to invite insanity. She wasn't about to do that, not quite yet.

She was an artist, and her name was Tree. It was a blue collar name her parents had chosen for its evocation of status... last century it would have been Diamond or Tiffany or Krystal, but now it was the organic stuff that cost. Her little brother had been Algae, but he'd changed it to Chip when he'd gone to college-- the blooms all but perished from the oceans, he'd felt the name depressing and backward-looking as well as indicative of the poverty they'd grown up in: a single car, a single home, a shared computer. It was downright amazing that they'd made it out of their slumurban compound and back into the city at all.

I tan myself.
I am hide.

This happens for sand.
I'd like to think I am

immune. I'm moon
not sun, but then...

I think: Kittyhawk
where hawks swoop

down and eat the kitties.
We fly kites because of

wind. Two brothers
grazed the dunes

here. To tan is not
my friend Sam's tan.

No closer am I to
brown. Earth. Sun.

Icarus me--burn
me down from this.

This me, drowning
in this me. I am hide--

so gull-unlike, so
flightlessly white.

Nightwools in magnetic fields
yet I lack all spark. Wheatgrass
blooms with seed the men--
sad with me--call grease.

I am glad to undress for slutting up
and then not--blinded with far
smells, I stand blank in the life-midst
a glutton for morning.

In halfsleep the black
minutes lengthen their spines
womanly as bread.

They sigh, rise and fill
vacuous hours with dream... a fog
of other-kissings. All is somehow
wrong--literary, or whoreplay.

The manheart frames me
and I attend its disease.

Occasional is
never the what
we want from before
or the what it is but
what is made by
photograph
cameraphone
runner

A naked
man on my doorstep
from 1865. The war
he said is over.

Because he was naked I didn't
believe him. I also have a time
believing God
that he is. Today
I was embraced
alongside the faithful. We
were together addressed.

Many parts
still cry out to be
cynical as is my nature.

Nature I have
manufactured
from words, paralysis, the type
of thought which follows
from those places although not
perhaps from a jete.

In my
house three boys
chatter about snow, more
than anything happening in a mall
this is real. We do not
have a yard of size. The
angels possible
in our yard are smallish
angels for everyday use
angels of bitter
bread, thread
and pencils. I think I may
dislike angels if they are
a cold negative of boys.

The naked man died
soon after.

sick on a sunday

is to not be working. Sunday is the day of work, of hotred reading, of notes in notebooks because the children are fathered. If the children were feathered they could fledge on sundays, denest, etc. Instead they are cabinbound even in this relative heat because their mother can not bear the outside--it is too far from amenities. Specifically a vomitbucket. And because on this particular sunday they are unfathered. Imagine. I use a movie as mother but a glass shatters upstairs and I must rouse from my fetuscorpse to vacuum. Nothing cd be less profound than protecting them from sharps, and I am less than profound. I drink my frenchroast even as it makes the cramps more intense. That is how strong I am.

pre-work semi-cirques

By, we pass--deft patterns worn
into floors parenthetically amiss,
inter-arced, un-touching, sore
from sleep in and out of comfort.

I get coffee, jam the bread.
You have shoes to tie. You pour
milk, grow stern. Beyond our bed
we swerve--our parallel tracks,

chores. All we do, we divide
into crossings. Wired domestic acts.
High risk--contact in this tight
time--so, dare we defy? kiss?

What has dance to teach us about language? A simple question. Dance and word each were developed with music along their one side, and history along their other. Hand to hand these four circled the originary fire of human community. The fire--the intellect that required its audience to keep spiraling its embers up into the heavens--it drew to it both information (history/narrative/data/content) and beauty (art/joy/non-sense/form). Between these two were the body and the body's language. They stared across the fire once, in love. They are no longer.