Anxiety is its own prolonged unreckoning

Out today at Social Text Online is a poem sequence called Meals that I completed at the end of 2019. Here’s the first part:

Anxiety is its own prolonged unreckoning
this visionary script moves
like an old hand shaking
wild playtime kissed
into the layers of muscle
at home base
no less than being
still, we press on into the night

earnest garbage confession is its own reward
the pure mask of the total dream makes credits
for having big dreams credits for simulation
of dreams you did not want and now have
media vengeance lower than expected
but now with crying
tell me again how ends find origin
another spittle of meat enters the conversation

I see an array of husks just fucking there
in this featureless expanse below the stars
nerves make the song of themselves
trite by true purchase
they move out into forests and oceans
seeing nothing but the limit of our mutual touch
no growth within the object of mutual desire
held by letting pass, another down and away

in its container you appear
as an imitation of memory
steady without blinking
oh, that face marks us for easy words
I see a buttery knoll inside the shadows
it calls our name
it makes a famous town and a town famous
it forms against our special chance

it is behind whatever lifts the eye
already turning inward
it is a cutscene
breaking into regular light
at home base where
citizens of god listen to earthlings
sweating out the shining blue
pulling the sky from the directory

each from each recoiled in multiplex
nonviolent and understood
oh, lucky lung filled with oil
make an instant vanishing of this solar heave
and build from the coherence of crime
disexpressive notes for the future
there are lots of angry theory boys
crawling on the perimeter.