I have decided that ostracism should be
sought after so that we do not displace but
buy into suffering along the lines of deep fault
durably secured by Constantine and yet

this occasion does not bear the right history
to legitimate the transfer although some
of them share our beliefs. For example: that it's
good for the stone rim to have such a turn out

of your body though its soft and calcinous grime
is only a derivative of the main
holiday resorts and the capital. At that
barbecue in Manor House when my neighbour

abandoned the aniseed spirit which had gone
cloudy upon dilution to prevent the
two Cypriots from getting too close, none of the
mortar wailed not to be part of the house but

dry off polemical spit still in full mouths
instead and how could clay aspire to such things
when the application of electrodes cannot
be quantified in Euros but must look back

to natural disasters like the dollar? Crowns,
heels, goatherds, difficult questions about a
little purse for time in the hills like I did at
Christmas when they hadn't paid the paper bills,

why it should matter to them two minutes before
my alarm and the red cross were called off by
the government as if suddenly awoke the
whole community of ruin to stretch its

limbs. An industry quickly emerges out of
the heaviest tolls, even the changes of the
Cambridge surprise make the armpit sinews hang with
denunciation. Lilly should be here to

place questions in all the margins and beyond
the page and to invite them back to the urn,
hissing, buried three days to make the best Armenian
coffee for Nadezhda. The odour was marked

in most of the respectable newspapers, the
tourist industry was hardly affected
by the potentially erotic nature of
the expulsion. They turned up the intercom

in baby's room but could not make out the objects
beneath her breath and were irritated that
not even the most intense analogical ear
could make forms of care for people have to do.

Tom Jones has had poems published in QUID, CCCP 11, and the Prague Literary Review.  He is interested in the effects talking about language as economy has on political responsibility, and in poetical equivalents for musical structures.  He teaches in the university of St. Andrews, mostly on eighteenth-century and literary theoretical topics, and is working on a book about Alexander Pope and George Berkeley.