Word Lumber
An intermission here to mention my book, 'Word Lumber: 80 Poems" available from amazon.com:http://www.amazon.com/Word-Lumber-Eric-Simpson/dp/0557049687/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258507288&sr=1-4Thanks!Eric

A Covenant
I split your condo in two sparse quarters,living room, kitchen, bedroom, bath and sink,And walk the narrow hall between.If you do not cleave together then cleave to me.Dying is not the ultimate, the worst thingthat can happen, though by reflex you think it is.I could patch you together a breathing beingof rubber bands and used popsickle sticksin lieu of sand. There are evils worse than death,any of which might come to you if you call it.What tongues you have to bring down shame,burning from the hatred of Cain, lodged thickin your gut. And easily you condemn, your ownashheap piling up. Every mout

Talk on Poetry
Whatever I may tell you about poetryI mostly overheard, and that in fragments,through a locked door, or chanted from the lipsof children shouting in the street, playing war --or maybe one or two notations accretedin the margins of someone else's textbook,Or from Richard Speakes, who lit the most dubiousclassroom bulbs, local legend, rantingin the back of police cars, drinking doubtfulwords from plastic cups in class out under a tree,obsessing over pale print from a bad copier,who said to me "this is my religion": epode.I found it in theology, Charles Spurgeon, whosought to mimic the throat

Runaway
Let me show you how this works,a coin is falling in a slot,a girl is giving birth to wordsin a pink notebook at a table,the ghosts of missing childrenhaunt the trees along the edge of town;you wake to hear the cauterwailin the long distance of an earthbound bird, canine shouts that markthe now eerie morning quiet;a name scratched on a woodpost,another scratched out, a brokevalentine, styrofoam cups drifitngon a stream, a rusted red tricycletipped-over in the weeds.

Street Woman
Shoot, she said, not only an accusationbut a summing it all up, forgiveness in there too,a twin to man, what a word! but here nothingto connote the heavy scratchy blanket of being,or the gendered isolate, nor the four-armedsymbol rendered in full measure by Da Vinci--all she could say, maybe, except for a non-fecundfuck, a verbal space-bar, like shit, too, ordinaryto her as breathing hello (replaced by yo), herworld all muscle, all cord and tendon, all desirestretched to the intensity of addiction, everyeye a focal point of darkness: shoot, man,every day i