Conny Plank
I like to take myself skinny-dipping.
To liken skinny-dipping to likening,
I like parting algal runs like moiré’s
subtle purples. Bold shame free-styling
out towards air taken with itself. Air
taken for what it is underneath itself,
that splay of old toes carpeted over
by fracture’s cockeyed herringbones.
Like all the forms of self-pleasure
I like, I wriggle myself into hating myself
or at least my most vigorous strokes.
I like surviving the drummer’s night shift.
I like how molting goes, I like thinning
those crankcases until their assorted
vulnerabilities lock into their soft spill.
To rub pans already shimmering with
oily nudity, that strikes skinny-dipping’s
chords. Like 3 in the left hand and Spanish
factions of some 7 underfoot, I like them. I like
them poly-. I like them to hang back. Skinny-dipping
vanishes, like bodies into tempos, or daytime
whitening on a diver’s water. I like water
to be captured, to be basined, to be
murky and mostly quieted. To take myself
into the undifferentiated depths of fun,
I’d like that. To loosen the denser thicknesses
of higher arms, the calories of knees
and dug-up muscles. Skinny-dipping stills
likening’s lapping, like libido, whatever thrums
through me. Skinny-dipping isn’t as wide
as the sea, or green. To be as transparent as dance,
I have to be as what? A what all at once, submitting
at my elbow, submitting like a structure dropping
its couplings. To submit, what is that? Like
a belly-button unbellied? Splashing big like that,
shallow like some “ahhh”-ing never minded? A hole
whose might is anybody else’s, drowned in teases
and bubbles. And helpless, like a tickle, like far.
Palindromes Are The Fascistic Imagination’s Anagrams
I.
patriarch of tailless jays detail
every section 8 asphalt
stall
swooping creek-crossed
fluorescent vest choruses
—
(you can yes and
if you can be)
—
some opera of squabbles starring
police the weary won’t keep
in their pants
sidle
off the ground
on foils onward
,
auto-reverse
dubbed heavy metal in the doppler of
wolfing oud
and whatever
repossessed installments rhyme
pedestrian
:
limp exercise trailing
the mad pudge of gesticulations
tracing
the glutinous curl
:
deficits
opening “cool”
onto neighborhoods onto
II.
where we started
—
foundational unboxing
shriking at brown tape like
black bread
,
the bawds and cream of
hostage faces
beside the want of what you get
in how it all works
the roof over each desire
leaks
the weak ink pursuing hidden
stacks
,
nested puddles (I’ll leave you here) where asking is
absolved of favorites
watermelon
salmon
bamboo or nursery fowl
while building
,
the all in what you handled was that you were handed
—
a frame of diaphanous
patent control
skies of clicking casements instant
reaches of irremediable culminating now truncated
blue of draping escalation adequate and clear
of any “whatever”’s point