TED REES has worked as a legal researcher, model, barista, teaching assistant, music journalist, brand representative, camp counselor, radio station manager, booking coordinator, desk clerk, landscaper, and dog walker. He has never smelled better. 
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from Endless/Revolt


ii.
Elasticity foregone, I am halted in steam distillation swirlings,
 the brutal certainty of mercury vapor. So tethered to swell repetitions,
footfall scrapes on my retinal dagger tips,
boundless conflagration of axis and atlas billowing
into occasion's corpse. Fuck it,

the pipeline I prefigured isn't mine. My cool reserves false,
a shadow arcs to the upper right. Its stoicism bristles
viewing the sublimation of snow heaped along the tracks
severing the valley. Spruce bleeds my hands, a continuous trickle
making its way further in, to the rut's end and a thicket, season barbed.


iv.
Jaw vibrating allegro in the ever­mounting glass tract,
at issue is my glistening in pseudoscorpion litter and viola odorata,
an undocumented stabbing related by fabulist neuronal fires
sparked by clean lines' aggression and interrelation.

The eternal lure is cabin­like, or half of a yellow wood structure unroofed,
an economy of feet following back paths' contortions along charred detritus,
around logistical curves, over the suckle of does at riverbank.


v.
Allowed at one of my doors is a taking, abscission's toll small
sullying decoration's absence and the lappings of dogs.
Another forgives slickenings and turds, a scape loosed
by lack of jingle­jangle combined with rubber on cement,
dead engine revs.

So delirium sits on my face in imploring weather.
I can dig it, though, as rustication placates my taste
for alkaloids shagged in blank and icy wine chugs
through lava caverns. There is also the unforgiving
crystalline nose of a burg in higher altitudes, a purling
over stones, chatter in blue beginnings of flame.
Choking on it, how ringing the bells.


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Notes:
The preceding poems are part of a larger sequence investigating the oppositional relations between my wage labor and my actual desires, whether they have become real or not. Mostly not, as such is the case for most of us in this late capitalist matrix. My frustration grows daily, but my desire to feed myself is a constant, too.

All have been written through or borrowed from sentiments and images contained in the songs that Lee Ranaldo wrote and crooned for the band Sonic Youth.