SPENCER SELBY's publications include House of Before (Potes and Poets), Sound Off (Detour), No Island (Drogue), The Big R (Angle Press) and Task (Zaesterle). In 1993 he created The List of Experimental Poetry/Art Magazines, a non-copyrighted, freely circulating document that tracks small press publications throughout the world. His work has appeared in magazines including New American Writing, Ribot, Chain, First Intensity and Talisman. PROTEST 1 Listen and far away you hear the edge dripping among bright pools. Speeding low like green flakes thinner where you look. Awake ground, cross swinging bridge again to fall flat on a pile of stone. Come to nail fear you must forget, and try the dust clearing as you sleep. Dream aside talk wise, change focus beneath plain sight. Divert madly if your clothes are damp. Past gate knowing it's too late. From father's house to music on the road below. In fragments of a limb burning in grass empty. Another dog wounded with supper waiting. Question tool to fresh circle. Move superfluous through gap negative. Tomorrow tall and pale, ready for grave opening with a name on lips of gold. 2 Touchy subject by consideration of status, by social class fraught with unpleasing associations. Sublime thought down a rung or two, mixing rote behavior with experience defined by money. Division street you live on as equal, as fable of equality come to grief in the middle. Like choice made bogus by something never chosen. Satisfaction, no satisfaction without punishment. Hunger all-pervasive in old English. Tradeoff down the freeway based on social approval where everybody drives the same car. Hope blasting out the back in a large city filled with those less fortunate. Arriving when it gets dark at a house you're proud of till you get inside. 3 Small patches contain wildness, push power to the very animal hurt by showing electric. Each foil flush from book to floor, from wall to rock to cool your throat through terse announcements broadcast overnight. Wind to smoke bedding, water for potential journey, take this pill before moving overlay address. Relax info close or far away as a person not listening. Relief station crawling through neural habit. Notion of true heritage torn from eyes and hands. Played by memory during its own trial. Crowd messing with law to finger innocent. Right angle weeping, exchange value blaming all persuasion. Written down the better part of speech will answer no one. Regret nothing at bottom of a miracle trapped in flesh. 4 Spirit against control, broken by all the ways you know. From every office in the land, cut to heart with rage and turn away the gift of those who see and don't struggle. Full employment age of abundance dripping with imported blood. Glory of hard work climbing up a stairway. At the top a door painted over by abstract art. Bright weapons on a bed of plastic. Polished faces living in the future. White sheet thrown across each word laid bare to nothing you remember. Flashing in the corner as you sleep. Returning all your thought of what went wrong at the beginning of this protest, what went wrong two minutes and two thousand years ago.