Mark TARDI

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Mood Indigo


To be idiot-awkward, to take care.
To particle without.
To merely hold your cell, stainless.

Jar-faced, my grey, my left of elegance.
The viewshed an illegible math.
Red clefts.
Permanently dead. Possibly.
Also hotel.

Also lift machinery overhung
in summer. Arvo.
The open box
open.

Implacable, kinetic.
Why this symmetry. This distrobe.
This tea might do the trick.
Also almonds.
On the spindle side.
My back to your fidgeting.

Explicitly, no.
To pitch, to interior.
Under the compulsion of your.
To cut square.

Also the actual mountain.
Blind radius, the static field.
Threaded.
Light-safe if not repose.

A bathroom above it.





Fifth Postulate


If he spoke, if he stared, if the chest a harpsichord

if from any magnitude, if ratioed,
if deployed in exhaustion,

if undid, if asked, if drawn out to an
endless right

if Erdos with only two suits

if on a bed, if a napkin, if an exponential
hotel, if in four languages

if not the answer, but before

if a bucket by definition, if
on rooftops, if yes, one always forgets

if the numbers at any party





These Manners—


I simply ask that you stop breathing so much,
explain the arrow in your head, change the lighting,

because it's grown cold, ghost flat, the little incidents
having slipped while you watched on, when

dinner was a roadrunner, Turkish sweater, smoke poem,
the wrong coat in the wrong weather, a spark that bled

two simple truths: skip a vacation and your shit sinks.

I'm not inclined to apologize for pluckings, the hot water
running out, surrogate snow, tax refunds or a steady supply
of chocolate,

but at a distance, this tea might do the trick.





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