Catherine Wagner

A Rose for George

If you don’t have any control over your life and being happy

If you don’t have any control over your life and be happy

 

A family in the wall

Mouse avenue in kitchen

A piece of cake

Looms oozing

Men and women are signs of life

Children are signs of life

 

When they put the cap on the oil well

I thought my life pollutes

Reading lamp = coal burn

My failures to love

To be friend family

 

When are we given the right to control

Fantasy?

 

Sixty-eight is a little bit of

Time in the world

To be more sentient

Kinder and “get up try again”

Body ow

 

I pretend if I were in New York

I could choose friends as I did in school

Fork into flesh of animal

 

Work all your life

Not hard enough! there are things undone

 

I was thinking you were my father

I wasn’t here, then I was

Through you

 

Through an internal externalized

Spill

 

It bumps around the world

Tries not to be stupid

 

When Dad you grew up

Trying to intentionalize

Family back of you

George, young and into the continents

With problems

 

I already have what I desire

I just have it in the future

The structure of being is wanting

And like a fountain I suck up

Later

My excesses

A little evaporates

One day it’s dry and drying

Means I’m done

Oh whatever you’ll always be there no?

 

I can say when I die

“I was agent of clock”

 

They call it an alarm

I stopped having time to weed, friends

 

Started in dark

Light housed me

 

The TV is so loud I can’t think

I’m sorry I can’t be in that room

 

Nobody has yelled at me for a long time

Thank you

 

You exist because your dad and mom

And you tried to go away

 

Continuity sweepstakes

Freed under the cap

 

Get up orderly   loving

Catherine Wagner, “A Rose for George” from Nervous Device, City Lights Spotlight No. 8. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine 

Catherine Wagner

 A Box for Zachary

Gleam red lips eyes look

sat on your breakfast bar

speak thinking Cache please

Brilliant shadow Lincoln

Runs through populous rooms

Play secret throat language

Catherine Wagner

 

Air Envelope

A skylight stippled
Wet, scatted
With translucent brown maple seedwings

I'm under that

I wrote it as if it were a poem
And my handy margin
Would profit me.

The notebook margin
Lends to me
Its frugal axis, asking
Nothing, determinist
Of route, but blandly so.

"I didn't know."

Push forward
The bag of skin
Scaffolded animated
And house at the same time

The hinge we turn on
Wrap around night
Becomes day, same page
We're on it.

Catherine Wagner

from Impersonal Lubricant

Live jellies have no brains,

float blindly

but they can fall asleep, can shed 

nerve toxins to defend the colony

and triggered by light

at dawn or dusk

their see-thru pump-domes

simulcast eggs and sperm

into tolerant solution.

Sexual jellies. Some jellyfish

invisible by day

do phosphoresce in darkness.

They could [be] hurt [you]

if you mined them

for the phosphorus

that burns the skin in war.

Catherine Wagner

 

Poverty, when defined by income.

Creates only one solution:

working for someone else. So

change the form of the for

for animals and problem-solving

plants. I have borrowed

for the inside of my life

the inside-out of

enslaved people and workers

who made the seen.

What are you going to do without your

underclass, where you going

to go, what are you

going to

do without your

woman.

If a nail is unison

entering into unison is violent.

Thus will I cheat

the rich out of my life.

Catherine Wagner

 The Divinity of Man

Roseation, spreading, yeastily beering up, the white soft legs and the golden hair.
The slits in the chest and the fur skirt. The mountain, the desert.
Sleep for a long time and a thrust of activity: log rolling, fall off a skyscraper,
phenomenologues, cigarettes, korn, seeding herpes lip to lip.
Why LSD in the seventies, why coke in the eighties,
why Ecstasy in the nineties, why Ritalin.
To bolster the wandering mind; to bolster the wandering heart;
to bolster the glamour; to glamour the wander.
The glamorous self and its story: no can do.