The star within the star

pours its red milk of fire.

Shores recede from bathers

who are making love, their light

enters the water.

I see a whole ancient temple

at the bottom of my coffee cup.

It is not yet in ruins,

cornices shine like daggers,

altars in front of circular thrones

conjure faint electricity,

a blue fog wraps around

my crown of paper reborn as metal.

Soil is sweetened with feverish seed,

dripping from a dark valentine

skin jeweled by honeysuckle

and bronzed by a lunar beam.

The trees blown back rattle

like tinfoil and ripple like cream.

The map of happenings

is silent and distilled

inactive as an unobserved electron

all the roots in one fallen petal.

I walk back and forth

in a house of ice

trembling at the blades

of electrode rays

that come through the floorboards

casting all my dreams

upon the wall

taking me to ships

that cross the caverns of the earth

the soul speaks in old books

lost in the rhythm

of a classic record

all the tombs are turned inside out

a voice flies up like a flag

above the colored waves of sand

above the sheets of metallic paint

the ghost of my bones is in

these harvested hills

nestled in their question mark green

around their wearying waters

what flourish do we bring

to the dance floor of all erased rails

black lights on a blood blue door.

Curves of light breaking

on my body,

lifting me into the realm

of the remembered dead.

A sidewalk paved straight

through a celestial sky,

birds of sound without bodies

scattered from the throat of God.

To where the blade is speech,

and me in acid rain

the lonely remainder, bereft

of all companions in the glow

that our kind make of night.

What happened to my grace, my

sweetness, my love of people?

They were lost to a field of bones.

Lost to the glint of pearls before swine,

to a hot burglar within my blood,

to aisles laden with mirage

the shine of disinfected substance.

Drifting in mercury letters,

cursed by black sand

on the back of a battered dove.

Beads of worn ivory teeth

trickling over sheet mail gloves

and the milking of barren guts.

Glaze of daylight like a fist

above the green waters.

Vinyl moon above a cliff curve

all the fire this tongue deserves

poured down through nets

of hot galactic nerve

through piercing seeds and eggs of rain

veins dancing with a chill

sublime monstrosity

decked out in prophylactic frills.

I am always drawn into darkness

always with the diseased and dying

in their decay,

staggered by foggy lights from beyond

our far-off outskirts.

All agonized things with claws,

all feathered blades that turn,

long neon hallways

where an unfamiliar muse

goes looking backward,

docks of dashed boats and jagged

tongues of broken pottery

reels of time lashed

to a revolving door,

cracked souls that sing to the ceiling

of their common tomb.

What was I chasing through kingdoms of spirals

shimmering walls of glass that sing

lip-struck edges of stacked pages

canyons of metallic string in coiled rows

kisses that cracked paint

the flicker of electric eels

ticking from the buckets of the damned

and the rags that refine a highway

all resolved into a lucid shell.

Black soda in a fractured room

day dim through painted windows

I see the sea-scraped bubbles of light

that are aloft in evidence

I sweep myself away

with a redheaded eye

when all the deaths have not killed me

I will not be able to find

the chamber of solitude

having vomited my reptilian mask

on the silk-screened mountains

out of control through solar shafts

that bisect a circular door

and eject a worm god

allegiance to the ember

of a winning fraud

and a blade of restoring mercy

cuboid temples

to the dancing days of an electrode

frocked by a praying mantis strobe

the glory of souls that sail alone

hot playlist in a flying car

the grid's pulsating neon

void of sound

for a hot tub moment

marooned against these

puritan millennia, this sweetly waning

mirror of days.