Slapped into gear by mad epiphanies,

watching ditches revealed

as rivulets to the ocean,

lured into ringed heat

by the depths below.

Painted edges crackling with erosion

hooked highways towed

by incomprehensible matter,

trees fawning for the wet spasm

energy reacting without verbiage

ferns clustering on spider feet.

Worlds in pockets

of the wounded sanctum

cells vested in the strength

of mysterious death.

AFTER SIGNING OURSELVES INTO BIRTH

In the storm of bones

too tiny to be seen

by naked eyes, something

with human curves adorns itself

with machine blossoms

and the typeset of altered letters

that make mute cells

simulate speech.

Water isn't reaching as it flows.

The plastic cage that flashes

around the sun is mostly

in your mind.  Nor was it made

like a corkscrew or

the doll that represents

a ballerina.  The scenery is brass

in your museum of dying thoughts.

I'll polish it for you

until it erodes all the way through.

I'll let the light come hard

from bitter corners.

Your prison immunizes me

against its own seductions.

My existence is not its eruption

or its end.  As the body has many contacts

and the soul has few friends: we share

only our contract with death.

One by one my lives all

came to an end, each phase

was torn from the canvas.

I was left like a sterile tank

creaking faintly in an empty room.

I looked for the mountains of snow,

for the lots made magic by bicycle tires,

for galleries written in steam

and dried by sunlight.

The moments of mercy and grace

were all used up, I was hung

like a smoking fuse

from flickering rafters.

Now this world is frozen shit,

but it still blooms.

It is stricken with isolation,

yet it flows throughout.

Yearning is the only doubt.

You can seal the quartz doors

within walls of smoke

string a beauty together

with animate rags

and goat blood soup

still she goes floating

over the disco habitats

like a winged eel

in frills of eternity's preview

a butterfly pinned to a plate

doesn't watch from magnetic earth

the teeth of ethereal gears deprived

of hide made to be eaten

bones achieving in a naked dream

Valleys extended around a willing planet

glinting with volcanic light

paths of glass blood fogged

from the turgid interior

kite strings of a laughing series

trailing over plateau green

When highways trail off

and blood handprints in the moss

become separate gardens

hinges creak in many fortress walls

I am walking with a drifting forest

strutting backwards on its locked lakes

letting the sky's choruses pour

wrapping bones in frayed reels

a grid of gilded frames descends

on blank paved lots

and painted concrete elves

the scraping of chain tied steel boxes

all the egg weight of swivelling hips

gone to dispersing space

the veins of thicker doors

seed flung talking like skulls of water

fumes aching to make skin grade

deer's bed beneath a cone bright pine

Disarmed at the halo

fallen by the wagon in the sand

drinking rivulets of daylight

stripped down to merciless angles

phantoms rocking on the wall between eras

mocking ecstatic agony

bricks march on ant legs

to be one with the putty

stages set with yellow blades

forming agitated furniture

histories that harmed the name of God

a veil sliding down resurgent towers

thorns branching from the kink in a written circuit

falling star in a plastic spoon.