Free Samples from Formland

​All that time I was forming, I rarely thought about form-ness
put my body places, put things in it, inserted myself, retreated

seeking only sensation, good enough? It was glorious,
calibrating experience vis-à-vis chemical compulsion

or run to the ends of yourself, that locked door fading
in the distance. Not infrequently the call was coming

from inside the synapse

*

I made divisions of it, I bumper-stickered, I planted
government-grade capsules they came strongly recommended

in the student-care clinic: such delightful customer service:
give the disappearing girl a little speed, a little anterograde

amnesia, staple the white bag, of course we all smiled
it was an ice-skating play, something Chekhovian, those seeds

so small and latent in their plastic sunset cylinders locked
and loaded

*

This one elicited the sky’s faint yellow, this one the green
of the highway shoulder, this one tilted the staircase

a troubling angle that day of requiring assistance this one
its superlative filter short-lived by erythema multiforme

major disenchantment, to settle eventually on a hyperspeed
prophylactic and panic button, the upshot being frenzy

what the culture would call SuperFuckingProductive™—I suppose
that’s when form-ness began in earnest: eyes too much eyes,

sweat too much sweat, legs weak and heavy
like what happened to standard locomotion, the years

of bathwater and shapeshifting, not a thought for the signified
gesture of I am here for the content, goddamn it, and it better
deliver with the fury of this spare twenty bucks

*

raised as a wasp for the quaint town stretch of it
back when I didn’t know what the term meant
double-crossing myself or the outside cut in
when the towers fell I sat in the driveway
lit tealight in hand
repeating the silent prayer
let us be good to one another

of course we know how that went

and afterward in the interregnum
the long climax of the liquidity pirouettes
things happened, someone went missing, someone shot dead
form now a tad unresponsive, someone put their form where they shouldn’t have
a house disappeared, its ghost address stored deep in the hippocampus
so that’s where I went, quick-stuttering along the quad, shoeless in the rows of desks
while the clever ones with their safety nets were out getting rich

*

the things you did to it
offered up like transubstantiation
a good host for pliancy for shock-absorption
keep at this she said you’ll end up so much
white trash