Austerity Measures and other poems by Addison Bale

without for an abscess

conversations after ellipses

a side-long glance flouting its prolonged piss burn

a bashing spring leaves a cortisone subscription
opportunistically / a travel guide. Opposite me looking at
myself looking at our chat history

a side-long curl of the words coming out / your lips
celloed like sickles in the morning star

flouting its prolonged piss burn
make me an angel for someone
who needs an angel / who

fled already and is paying doors in Mytilini

emptying out, in all senses, is thick of home & teeth

whatever shores took whatever shores / in his own way
enlightening the artist as a young man with ouzo / & bone dancing
in the cross-roads of the universe

without for lifejackets losing flight / whiplash tricks
the traveling coin slots who jerk you around

& all the passion of crashing

i haven’t left yet / the copy of night fertilizers smear with me

the tide parks its removal on the rocks / “my friend
from syria” holds his court on a new planet / this is how the horizon
disrobes the sunset / with pink sickly emerging like fellows
who turpentine their own ephemeral conduct

they are blots / like dancers they can be blinked away

just like dancers

---

SUNDAY, JUNE 4th, 2017

loving you never leaves / doomsday never came

this I realize is why life feels like something

this we know is everlasting occupation
six-day / world stage / embargo / sex-life

dusted lip-scars peel off the wall

reasons beneath visas & bowls of sinai

days full of possession / I make the mistake
of thinking this is keepable this is reasonable
this is June we don’t know what summer will end

summer’s end / will stand like labour swaying
too far over its toes

leaving corrupts us every day to scorched socks
a strip curvature of a young desert formed

where you first let me undress you far from home

shallowed in the dunes & reluctant grass

Addison Bale is an artist and writer living in New York City. He is the founder of the ongoing reading series Lit Club at the Light Club in Burlington, Vermont.