Second Honeymoon….................................................

……………1
Copyright 2016, Christopher Robley Brigham & Women’s………………………........................……….3
Book layout, design, and typesetting by Chicken 3000 (www.chicken3000.com) Yip........................................................................................………4
Printed at Wing Club Press
Semitone Étude (diminuendo)..……………….................………..5
Nano………………...............................................................………7
XXXX.
eschatology…………………………………..........................……..8
hopper’s lighthouse at two lights………....................…………..9
Semitone Étude (pianissimo)..…………....................…………..11
Much thanks to the editors of the following publications in which the poems in tin can telephone……….......................................................……13
this collection first appeared: Thirteen Ways of Tweeting About the 2013 VMAs………….15
North……………………………………….................................…16
Boulevard argumentum ad internetum…………..............................……..17
Beloit Poetry Journal Konami Code………………………………………........................19
The Cincinnati Review Displacing Keeps the Thing……………….....................………23
POETRY Magazine Semitone Étude (recessional with 12 fermatas).…….....…….25
Prairie Schooner
Port City Poets Anthology
Arsenic Lobster
Poetry Northwest
Magma
RHINO
Pacifica Literary Review

“Konami Code” debuted at the 2014 Belfast Poetry Festival as a multimedia

work with animated GIFs by Doug von Werssowetz.
 For all lovers, unwritten hours.

For these two, watching catspaw breezes soothe a tousled sea,

walking hand-in-hand to where dark green shadows dusk on a plum tree,
touching bark where once he carved initials in the broad afternoon —
Resembling himself, Tony sips the cool blue of an hour is its own consummation.
his wife’s Electric Lemonade through a curly straw
and her lust pulses once in recognition. Black-skinned plums.
How close is rupture to rapture.
Here he is, four months home from Kandahar, How far fruit grows from the ground.
refashioned from the silence of days beyond accounting for.
Scholars point to different endings in The Odyssey, and why not?
Scholars point to four different endings in The Odyssey. Memory too is a mud-caked epic of bite marks and abatements.
There’s the vendetta; Athena’s intervention; a covenant of peace.
Each unsatisfied century tacking on its own two cents. Tony sips the cool blue of his wife’s Electric
Lemonade through a curly straw, while the streetlights,
But how the original tales end: his bow bends back, turned on, will burn uniformly for hours. Fixture. Filament. Fuse.
a dozen soon-dead suitors awed at the snap of that true arrow.
And how like the singed edge of old papyrus,
He never doubts his queen’s devotion. Never sniffs after rumors impossible to choose which future
like a dog through swamp grass. Or we never have to see it. knuckles on the door
Never have to see her test him, half-stranger, in the mysteries of her need. at the midnight of this final line.

1 2
 This day the gods of the Interfaith Chapel made do
Without the usual offerings of grief and praise.

My father’s tolerance to pain has carried him this far.

Momentum will do the rest— healing, as if by himself.
Betamax yaks taxidermied actress;
appetites chitchat factual ka-ching!
Wheelchairs outside, lined up like a clearance sale.
Someone between revolving doors wipes the glass with Windex.
Rainforests talk Toblerone through
Google Translate’s fluent cuneiform.
A guard halfway through the latest Car & Driver
Looks up while nurses hurry past by habit.
Some glib bullet grazing razor-grass
either whispers scripture or it won’t.
Extra chicken cordon bleu in the café. Extra pie too.
Gravel on tarpapered roof like an untouched Zen garden.
The Om of State breaks moonlight
on the bent bars of its big-ass cage.
Early Spring impatient for Summer. And my father,
Who can come home tomorrow, still up there on the 7th floor
Pre-verbal
lip service
In isolation one last blesséd day, his own lonely witness.
avers itself.
How sad some miracles can seem when so few are there to see them—
Invisible Christ
Empty elevators. Stocked shelves of quiet storerooms.
hanging on
A thrush rustling a sapling’s branches near Entrance 2.
the sniper’s crosshairs.
How waiting inside each car across the way
Was a warmth that could hold you like sleep.

3 4
 Living things don’t all require
light in the same degree —
the famed anglerfish for instance
makes its own cold light.
Chimera of shimmering
& shadow in the belly of the sea.
Or the dim green glow of foxfire
deep in forests.
How the stick-on stars
above the empty crib emit
that same decaying shade.
Lynne supine upon the nursery floor
regards her useless work.
These plastic heavens
half asleep.
She eyes the real moon through
a slit in the blinds.
Stuck there like a lead ball
in a musket barrel.
Will she wait up again till morning
deepening night by night the roost
beginning she’s made of all this phosphorescent dark?
with [Sure the base of the word
privacy means privilege but also
a line to deprive.]
by louis glück Wait here again
feeling those adjacent
rooms like phantom limbs
falsely pulse with bustle —
no it’s only of course her husband clacking
feverishly on his keyboard.
Killing something down the hall
in a video game.
How even with his headphones on she hears
its final shrill brilliance.
What cry won’t turn she wonders
the shape of idle air?
All night the moon
punctures the sky.
All night the night
drains out.

5 6
 “… insects are small, they already know how to fly, and—best of all—they power themselves…”
- Emily Anthes

In an air-conditioned trailer, three geeks

barely beyond boyhood fist bump and high five in half-filled
web fields
at a job well done. With the click of a key a dozen
soundless screens flutter. Now in the shallow in amazon’s abandoned
shopping carts
of a cave near the Khyber Pass, a stack of glow sticks
activated in the blast steeps the darkness green: as dust in dedicated servers
yer yip lives on [
two cans of pineapple; a mangled can of beets
bleeding juice; some boy streaked black, his burns you who were
a person’s habits
wrapped in torn canvas tent flaps. He must hear the ]—a ghosted lil’ history
cyborg beetle’s brains buzz like a circuit-bent keyboard
(shrink-wrap a coin
above his Pashto prayers. But we know enough to
leave the live feed low; audio is for the analysts. it’s the same
damn coin)
Our weapon : witnessing — : wired that way.
Somewhere in Texas or California or Kentucky rise again forgotten

Taco Bell is on the table where too the kill-list rests usernames!
quietly satisfied, and so its discord folds inward

like an origami acorn nestled sharply in the heart.

7 8
 sweet jack & moxie on
the roxy whose drink
is this whose stiff drink
& how many & whose
hundred icy eyes stare
back from the broken
black mirror inside
the glass bright black
whose eye whose hand jack & moxie & whose glass
rendered steady shade
against the windward leading w/ the
tower walls caught the broad wing of her actual
wisps of cirrus daubing shoulder she pivots
deep sky-blue w/ white on the pole swings
so that tattoo at her scapula stretches
whose pen inked flesh & the shadow of two hands reaching for her is a pair of birds
adding his signature bee is a pair of little brillo pads a pair
a dead bee its twiggy of storm clouds lodging
legs still hooked to upon the headlands & this is not that painting
scotch broom wings
a breath away from dust — what sort of man was
or was it dried salt
in the small of her back whole economies upon
making women unreal
whose fingers powdered
the soft plums of her two & whose ear turns the
new bruises dark silver pop & clink of cold beer
under gel-filtered lights — bottles to a dibble-dop
whose palm moussed up of rain & sniff sniff
her blonde mohawk whose perfume [ that re
that sways when she sways membered strain of siren song along the rocky cliffs ]
like wheat empurpled at whose perfume whose
the edges by early perfume scents you still
summer sundown…. w/ a trace of this possession

9 10
 Katherine misses her son strangely now—in landscapes.
Where a red pail in a sandbox needs no asterisk or explanation.
 
in which Half full, its ordinary stillness serves. Bare-stem buckwheat
you skip scratches summer’s naked edge. Shadows of another season
angle on the yard until it yields. This afternoon moves darkness
alternating notes  
like a lullaby. Tomorrow, she’ll spend the day omitting him;
what gives hope hurts. Sadness needs no signifier here.
Every stroke is a resistance: his shape, his shade—
 
She could shut both eyes tight as a tomb and render him
from memory, call him from that darkness when he doesn’t
call for her. But a playful wind is whipping up Mount Tabor
 
and she wants to catch a dandelion’s ghost seed in mid-air:
I remember everything. I promise, I remember.
She seeks him now in elision. When time blinks open:
 
a deeper red, a rougher sand, a stillness made more still
by the blur of windborne seeds—deaf to color—flurrying
like a first snow, settling on cars parked along the street like punctuation

11 12
I.

lillyanne lillyanne lillyanne tra-loo,

from campbell’s can to campbell’s can
we’d transmit things along thin lengths of

thread stretched taut from house to house.

from house to house, lillyanne tra-loo, resistance
compensates for what’s between two campbell’s cans,

II.

your window spangled in the distance with ordinary sunset.

& once, a songbird perched upon our handheld line for a heartbeat —
then plucked a low twang, lillyanne tra-loo tra-loo tra-loo, as it flew as it flew.

in class we’d learned how tension kept the signal true across a certain range, half
an acreage of air, for instance; learned how sometimes even slightly slackened strings
conveyed a near-translation, strange & voice-like; but when that line went limp, tra-loo…

III.

our last collusion—loose & lose; the simplest kind of science : silence;
to learn it well, mess around on how sound travels first, the ways
suspension strengthens secrets; then tackle how wound twine

unravels as it breezily descends, tra-loo; thin white curlicues

snarled in grass, scrawled cursive on that canceled check
of dusky lawn; lastly try to trick the fluttering bird of

your heart into beating its wings backwards;

don’t choke on broken blue-notes lodged
in your throat : tra-loo tra-loo tra-loo.

IV.

look, quick, lillyanne, look!

see how I’ve turned our
estrangement into

art, which now

will likewise
dwindle to

a single
loose
line:

apart.
 I watch, it seems as if for years, that grove
of wind-whisked ash against which moonlight proves
itself. Within the soft perimeters
of night all that never happened matters
most and won’t be tamed. It spreads like hoarfrost,
or the quicksilver shine of milkweed floss
I wintering the grass. Some unplanted seeds
root deepest—ghosts of worlds we almost worried
Among twenty snowy appropriations, into bloom. Contingencies? No less to tend,
The only moving thing no less fruitful their debris. Untouched lands
Was an ass. need naming too. Whole continents of grief
stretch inside these hours until I’m drowsed beneath
III the same blue light that’s tangled in the bowers.
Dawn’s blue light. Quiet furious to flower.
*NSYNC twirled in their autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV — “Blurred Lines”

A man & a woman

Are one.
A man & a woman & the patriarchy
Are one.

IX

When the jet fighter flew out of sight,

It marked the edge
Of one of many Syrias.
15 16
 Rubbing a seed-pod of my silver dollar plant between two fingers,
I know now why a people such as ours inherited the phantom limbs
of fortune and futility. I did it again. I tried to change someone’s mind

on Facebook, hoping that in this daily Chauvet Cave of aloneness

and belonging, in which the rituals of self echo with small change,
there’d still be a little room to really change another person. But lo,

how the comments section racked up tangents. I’m the Sisyphus

of status updates, the vulture-picked Prometheus of social media.
Get two people to agree on disappointment in exactly the same way

and you’ll find that one of them has tortured the confession from the other.
Dear Brother, I am this way, and you are that. Let us not get all our chosen
facts mixed up for want of love. Hashing out hot-button issues is a bit

like how, at night, clouds in the city make the city brighter; clouds
in the country make the fields and forest darker. A little like how this
houseplant has half a dozen names; the English call it “Annual Honesty,”

the way the pods show through in winter with a gossamer translucence.
Americans say “money tree” or “silver dollar plant.” It’s what the Dutch
call judaspenning, querying the price of hell. And who agrees on that?

Netizens! Here is our new system of little judgments and remission.

Where billions dartle briefly, bright fish piercing the air, then descend
into those cold depths, leaving only an indeterminate poke, pinch, wink,

ping, to register presence. As if like were some prehistoric handprint

of red ochre on limestone, a double language in the torchlit dark
to speak of origins and longing. Bantam marks, bears, or elk

which blaze across the rocks when given notice. I am this way,
you are that. I say potato, you say apocalypse. You say fire,
I say bring it. The blush of oppositions is what ignites

this world, so that for whosoever dwelleth in the darkness

of our separate solitudes, any friction’s flinty spark could
spell life upon the wall; likenesses of life upon the walls.

And we’ll forgive each other because we have to, won’t we?
like — the bridge of a simile; like — a bridge back to you; like —
where previously all signs had read “You can’t get there from here.”
17 18
 Whatever happens, panic
Watch the young
Approaching

We expected
Everything to be
Something
No one had expected

Now something was happening The young

Approaching
Damage

Those who have a dim appreciation

A button on a joystick gives them

A few seconds to

Launch a missile Consider David

And what you have Is a parable about
A single ghastly act
All significant
Unfair Pinpointing
Innovation Dusk
Distance
Advantages From either side
It’s
Best to have God on your side Whose past
As anyone who has ever been in
The Bible knows Patrols the edges
Of this hour
Am I a dog that thou comest to me
A smoking crater on the dirt road In a single act
You are pulled together —
Consider David
Being summarily
Anything something was

Continents away
Consider David

19 20
 Ignored spirit

Rendered
You The last

Has-been Tilting
An entire
Tangled lifetime

Essentially There is no Moral

The thing you want is a fair Opportunity —a crowded café, the finish line —
Annihilation
I was born into
It is done Arguably
A single target Often a single individual
Deliberately
If anything But one can understand
Consider David
The marathon justification for
Force

Any enemy

Can be perfect

As
Parts

Husband father brother : How

Should we In our restraint

Consider David

21 22
 The hull’s displacing
keeps the thing afloat;
what could sink a boat
stays it. You’re lashing

long lines to the dock;

a box for the catch
is set out. I watch
to see if you look

home and back again.

When you walk the steep
climb here, each quick step
Without you, I wake is, I imagine,
to watch the day’s slow
debut through windows its own erasure.
veined by quick, oblique What will go away
you bring with you. Why
rivulets of rain is it our desire
that run together
where they touch rather needs some kind of lapse
coolly on the panes to return? New light
sharpens shadows’ flat,
like nothing happened. shapeless touch; perhaps
On the cove, you strike
sail and rinse the deck. love’s like an eclipse.
How you’ve upended The mast is naked,
sails stowed. A manic
us. The difference clang of metal clips
between bilge water
and the slack water against the spar stays
beneath? Scant distance. ringing on like bells.

23 24
 Legislate against promises—
For instance, fail at something and be OK with it.

Listen to credible sources’ suggestions:

Beware the World of Ideas.

Moonwalk on the tarmac of sequential tedium.

Bulk-purchase those intricately miniature machines which shield us from
disgrace.

Put pen to paper until the blank page blushes; thrash it

For a confession. This book can’t be called Prudence at Work.

But recommend boring books as a form of revenge,

Like, say, Prudence at Work.

People do not disconnect; they fall prey to assumptions

& spiral off in lush patterns of “Are-you-listening’s?” Use this to your advan-
tage.

When you can’t finish something,

Give it the freedom to finish itself.
in which synched keys
are struck Need more;
Suffer less.
with each checked-off item
on Emily’s to-do list Dream sleep’s dull darkness like it’s some dumbness
From which you’ll be stricken into shattered like.

Then wake up, wake up, wake up from

Your gum-mouthed sleeping on planes

& reclaim your gate-checked interest

In the unnamed conditions for requited love.

Make long lists that grow like beards

In the wild biblical wilderness of what comes next.
25 26