12 Short Poems Michael Gottlieb THE SOFT TISSUES which will have been noticed by now a prompted disarray, setting its cap for us chalk, baffle and glen, quarter-sawn, hailed, scuppered, from the bowels of, a complete derangement worrying the stitching, the ardor of the refrain, previously sourced domestically one day people, just like us, will consider this offal no-go areas, the hind quarter, the bit above the waterworks, the whole topic of that two year gap in his c.v. the arguments, by some lights, were conjoined in such a manner that one of them could not be answered, or even much aired, without the other, roused like a guardian of some storied, gated promise, looming up, bedecked in all the awful regalia of its delusion suave main force the soft tissues, ghastly         next