Autobiography.

in the shell of an exploded human head
scenes from my life are taking place
peacefully. I'm barely involved.

from now on it's going to take
something downright extreme
to make me smile. Sunflowers filled with teeth
instead of seeds, though I wouldn't
want to eat them, might do the trick,
or a girl with three backs.

I won't be putting any of these things
on my Antichristmas list

but I have advertised my preferences
I have made my desires known to America
and if you look through my bedroom window
to see my bed floating in water
surrounded by penis-shaped electric eels
and freshwater seals carrying
little mountains of crayon in their teeth
don't you fucking dare interrupt
my 41st century

insanity is speaking
in the vacancies
between shopping carts & cars
life was a parking lot
some supermarket left behind--

slept, leaving the aisles full
and the eyes empty
oh my people
my people are a pile of sticks
no matter how perfect
the blue geometry of their roads
no home waits for them anywhere
when the key turns the ignition
the hand is already elsewhere
slitting its throat
eternity's touch
is lighter than a feather
a glacier in the belly
a field of broken stones
souls stuck in bodies that are lost souls

I'll smack your face until paint
spurts out of your eyes & ears
I'll revive you
the horizon's ember-red
look at it
burn your eyes out on it
your body
is eternity moving like a worm
lower yourself into me--hurt like a surgeon hurts

Kelly & Mina

The rabbit's ears open like little wallets as Kelly cleans them.
Mina (she's a girl-rabbit) fights and tries to squirm away.
If she lived
with other rabbits, they'd lick the lint out of her ears
more pleasantly, instead of Kelly with a Q-tip,
jabbing like a vicious cloud while Mina squirms.
She lifts the long downward-pointed ears like limp leaves
that need encouragement. She doesn't love you, I explain
to Kelly, who throws a bloody Q-tip at me in response.
I persist: Mina only tolerates you because you feed her.
She knows you are not an ideal roommate. Kelly insists
that this is the difficult part of their otherwise idyllic relationship.

Later that night, after making love(to Kelly, not the rabbit)
I saw another rabbit (without a Q-tip protruding from its ear,
to my relief) sprinting over the sidewalk in front of the video store.
It didn't stop to check out the latest releases.
It may have been searching frantically for a mate
to lick its ears, but I think it was simply trying to escape
from the supermarket parking lot, a frightening place.
I had just returned a movie about a futuristic post-apocalypse world
in which no invasion of supernatural forces had saved the earth
from human intrusion. Not one rabbit had appeared in the movie.
The few remaining human characters spent a lot of time
throwing colorful explosives at each other
and never stopped to lick one another clean.

In the heart a mountain.

In the heart a mountain, in the soul seven glowing stones.
There once was a time we relied
on these numbers and codes;
thankfully that time is gone.

When this city was still a woman, I fell in love with her.
When she tried to become more like a man
I fell out. I didn't want a mirror to crack.
Earth is a place to pretend
it doesn't hurt.

There are so many lives of the party that the party gets tired.
When, still in your twenties, you've already had
too many girlfriends, you know it's time
to swim Egyptian rivers
looking for a sacred cat
to love you and live stiffly by your side. But
all the holiest pussycats are already kept in tombs.

Some say nobody ever walked on the moon, some say
no man ever made love. If you take off your shoes
and let go of the chord
while walking a lunar
parking lot surface
you might find it's all miserably true.
Many sacred things
can be staged on TV.

A jukebox floating through space
from a wounded flight
might have one last message for us.
Let's hang onto the trees upsidedown for awhile.
Let them climb us while we wait
for a country music meteorite.

Trying not to live

Keep a calm face and a calm body.
These ornaments cannot handle
the weight of a full soul. Hold tears within
when a war is passing. There'll be no arms
to catch your fallen body if you walk
on the grass of other timid feelings.

There's a blackbird tied up in guitar strings
near the doorway that is a barroom ceiling;
there's a captive in red at the top of the stairs
in the house where all bill-collectors are slaughtered
and grace has rudely conquered karma.

The imprint where a cherished body lay
is glowing with a slow-growing flame.
The coals on the blanket & a baby's softest hair.
Surrounding shelves stripped empty
of everything you've ever read.
What was once the rough charcoal sketch of a life
violently about to be painted in.

Sadness is something you can kill with your hands

Sadness is something you can kill with your hands.
Sadness is something you can lick when you're old.
You can maul it like it's a chicken, with a hatchet,
you can lick the twitching stump as if it were
a beloved sexual organ.
And watch sadness run around the yard brainless,
spurting blood, until it's just a stupid word
among other emptinesses.
You're getting ready to drink a beer.
You're preparing to murder your sadness.
You're about to throw the dead bird at the jukebox
and watch it slide down the songs.
It's finally stopped running around the yard.
And the light behind it is a chalkboard now.
Sadness is something you can kill without love.

Our Inheritance

The blood of slaughtered women is running through my veins.
There is too much of it.
It bursts my arteries. It pounds in my head.
It chokes my heart. My father shed this blood.
My grandfather shed this blood.
I've drawn some of it into myself.
My mother put her hand through the telephone
and opened a wound in my neck.
I'd been hurting her with a jagged voice,
demanding to be rid of this blood.
A little girl lowers herself from a treebranch.
The tree is planted in a fog.
I'm there to catch her but I don't know what I'm standing on.
She trusts me. She doesn't know what I've done to her mother
or what her mother's done to me.
A beam of red light comes blazing
from the tear duct in her left eye.
It heals the gash in my neck. My arms go limp
and she tumbles into a pile of leaves
rapidly materializing. She is giggling and glowing like a light
from under the ocean.
She rises on her tiny feet and says into my eyes
"again, again. Pick me up and drop me again."
"It's fun." She's turning into a woman before my eyes.
Forgive me before I hurt you again, I beg.
She laughs at me and says "I want to play"
but the child in her face is growing confused.

grey squirrel running across a powerline
traffic-light dangling beneath you

the distance & the rushing cars
the hardness of the tar, don't frighten you

you carry a small rotten crabapple in your teeth
a brown fragment falls off onto a windshield as you

scramble over a red light turning green--
the man behind the windshield looks up

to see you suspended by electricity
drives into the sun & burns to a crisp

you reach the telephone pole on the other side
of the street and climb down to stand

upright on your tiny hinges, stuffing your cheeks
while people scream and the wreckage smolders;

a heap of black roses covering an ember

Nerve-ray fragment

I saw a swirling red lake
through the window of a mental hospital
scared waterfalls were pouring in from every side
massive logs turned in the nervous gush
never moving toward the center's
mysterious whirlpool
and a waterslide beckoned with
diamond-bubbles of sun
leaning against the sky's veil
an afternoon moon lit it all up

I could see the childish feet
of spirits climbing
up metallic ladders
fire-escaping towards the sun's reflection
on a meteorite made of sidewalk chalk

All our stupid horses

All the head in my water is clean
from being laser-scrubbed when the temperature's low
plastic futures in an android's hair
lead me to believe my fortune's not here.

Taking a sponge to hotel-room walls
in a hologram world there's no rise and no fall
a floating brain in formaldehyde jar
isn't something appealing to kiss.
And the unwound circuits in a pretty girl's wrists
are no place for a man to stop and drink.

Double vision leaves one deadly road, the other
faint heaven where mirages touch
like couples groping feverish in the mist.
An upright beaver in a cinema world
cuts its teeth to pieces on a telephone pole.
The kisses in the forest unheard still exist.

Inwood, New York, September 1957

On a back porch in partially eclipsed light
a little boy is playing with a wounded chipmunk
who sits trembling in a clay bowl on broken haunches
licking his paws as the sun is blotted out.
The little boy puts oatmeal and baby oil
into the bowl; soothing things. He'd put salt
to cleanse the wounds but he doesn't have the stomach
or the sternness to be a healer.

The chipmunk's cheeks twitch but it suffers quietly.
A car's tire caught it running.
The boy's face is grave as he gently splashes water
trying to wash the pain out of the little animal.
The chipmunk's face is really a face for the first time;
he looks humanly worried.
The water is pink with blood, not dark
with the gush of the heart.
But the legs may have to come off when Dad gets home.
Mom is slipping into another dimension.

Flames of fall lick the edges of the porch.
A green and orange fire crashes on the steps.
A sinew comes apart in both; the chipmunk
breathes heavier and the boy's breathe corresponds.
Scared teeth nip stigmata into five-year-old hands.
The sun goes purple-white and dims on their interaction.
From overlapping discs (the world is smaller than that touch)
the holy spirit pours down into this.

scrap of bright
spirit battered clean
comes clattering over waterfall
tense bodies shimmering below
descent turns into scar
water drained through quiet skin
rock opens rock
gashed landscape fills with moss
speech dulls thought

ruined sidewalks
lichened fingers
red leaf falling through grey world
hands turn into babies
nothing screams to hold

dick-sucking tree
wavers at cliff's edge
branches make nervous notation
between spores aglow

planetarium sky
shattered
curved glass raining broken dome
paradise's circuitry in fingernail
what was the body is a hurt nerve
twanging in an outstretched arm
Milky Way cancelled
solar sheep ambling
coats glowing with
raindrops of transparent sand

Looking for a nymph in metaltown

claw feet picking at the leather floors
of waterhouses
(to save a soul
you must drop an audience)
a word that has never been painted
a tongue to fill the dryest mouth
skyscrapers of chalk
standing, waiting
eternity
standing, waiting
in those windows
whose eyes are always eager for shattering
littlegirl hold my hand
all the ferns and flowers turn bright red
littlesister ride my shoulders
into a twilight that comes
for only one of us
this body falls like a rag
hair soaked blonde in gasoline
souls walking atheistic corridors
bewildered by academic vomit
stung by a rose's cliche, lashed clean
by the fingers of a forest's first branch