Hairline Approaches Recession

The state walks away
& says coolly, “ I’ve got
your number pal.”

(& other assorted issues
with losing your hair)
It can be yesterday’s

headquarters for revolutionary
activities& tomorrow’s
pleasurable cold brew front.

It can be Scandinavian white
& wood peeling out your scalp
in clumps or before that when

it sprouted suddenly. This
world system affect seems
like the problem of another

class to sort out. These
long investigations into
the color of midnight

can’t seem to tell me
what time it is. But we
both know y’all have given up

on clocks, them having chained
the liminal to mathematics,
which contains no -thisness-

so must be our enemy.
Thisness such as: day
breaking in the Workman

cottages of my reprobate
childhood in a shiny new decade
of real estate speculation

& colonial refurbishment
(shiny old decade on its
second wind) I suppose

I’m writing from my
third wind, third rail,
third shift mind. Among

my cohort the sun haunts
us. Temporality & insomnia
interplay (the Boss put the bags

under your eyes so you couldn’t
see the clock) Back to hair loss
in a way the night takes the hair

too, bit by bit, until one day
like Jeb Bush, your face becomes
the ghost mask of your father

(Accident after hereditary accident)
what’s the difference between self
immolation & “political” art?

are we not wasting the theater on
our “selves”? (which is still,
in my mind, an unproven phenomena)

Our selves, wasting & theater
respectively. I’d like to do to
the state & capital what winter

does to sycamore trees. I’m sorry
I forgot to say, this is a love poem.

Brendan Joyce is a staggering work of vulgarity & ineptitude in cleveland, Ohio

bird