The Sleep That Changed Everything. Lee Ann Brown

If one more guy tells me they like that song, I’m going to Crown Him (in not a nice way).

      Hot nights in the summer bedroom astrological Grand Central Station. Fox Point Kitchen Dance. Mingus was a Big Band trying to affect my body with some immediate gravity. Sex do to me one’s catalogue and while you’re at it Rimbaud. The cats had better but fewer houses. Let all mortal flesh keep silent over that one. The seraphim with ceaseless eye knew their metempsychosis was incomplete.

      So formally, she was nowhere yet. But the dream takes its own form, organically arranged like a bento box, that is, organic within the waking grid.

Whitman Poem “Come…”

      See the many blossoms of the field:

      Each blade shines with an infinity of flowers,

      each blowing its life away—

      Pollen carried in the wind, Sing!

      To the wind, Clover, wild rose, sturdy Mullen,

      purple Larch and Dog violet, twiny Jute,

      tiny Pipsissiwa all connected underground,

      Pokeweed’s vivid juice on my skin:

      To all the plants, flowering weeds and grasses:

      Cinquefoil, Wild Columbine, Rue, Bergamot:

      All Gorgeous Companions,

      Let’s lay our warm bodies down on the warmer earth.

      Let me lay my head on your chest and feel your breath …

      All around us the grasses are blooming as we are,

      entering and mixing, one into another!

      ESTIVATION

       The way flower petals lie in the bud

       or

      to pass the summer in a state of torpor—compare HIBERNATION

      this vegetal pregnancy

       Faces and forms, I would write

       you down

      In a style of leaves growing.

      (Louis Zukofsky)

      Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,

       Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or

      cubic inch,

       Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping

      (Walt Whitman)

       I want certain

       words

       more than a thousand flowers

      (Cibo Matto)

Convolute

      all our hypertridimensional lives

Involute

      Curling heart

      You’re all wrought up

      But any to open

      at ready given moment

      A byzantine course description

      A wild menu moves the feast to violet

      blue

      milky

       We must curl in reverse

       We must curl in cruelty

       We must eat

      (Lyn Hejinian)

      O my little Contradiction what terms

      like Cover and Sleeper

      can’t rejoin broad daylight over

      a former part of life

      now seen as mystery data via the

      departmental arts

      I mean to vie for

      Being a Sleeper

      The idea cringes to be called that.

      What if paper were longer?

      Wincing, he winges, so winged.

      An involute trip through

      in search of your own part

      Forms of unfinished estivation

      Flip in as in Neuromancer

      the floral clock

      sidereal

      Available light

      or light while there is light

      Why privilege any one

      bead of the necklace

      or borrow a boring music?

      50 curls

      then

      The sidewalks of Winesburg, Ohio

      roll up in a spiral

      having been wound so closely around their axis

      His Insulators are of the varigated lingerie variety

      We bake screw muffins in the sun

      Everything seems real decadent as the decade rolls up

      In botany flowers continue to bloom

      In the country, same thing

      In geometry a curve is traced by the end of a taut string

      when it is wound upon or unwound from a fixed curve

      on the same plane with it

      like the bright green bean vines wildly crawling up

       An involving or being involved (entanglement or complication)

      As when he said I had

      “Byzantine ideas of human sexual relationships.”

      I had to look it up when he left the room.

      O you involute poets, yelping and mating

      with your own kind on the rocky crags:

      Don’t do the Poetry Slam!

      Turning in on one’s self.

      Think I’ll turn in now.

      Turn into what?

Obvolute

      Two lips link

      in overlapping margins

Quincunx

      Sucking on Mary’s Spoon

      I was

      Cat mound rests her place

      What will happen next

      a pregnant curl of a bloom

      not new but

      referencing other flowers