on the way to my room you walk through a refrigerator
you walk through a graveyard of mice and a ballroom
floor covered in golden ribbons
you punch out the lightbulb in the refrigerator
you make the mice into quiet necklaces and drape
their little gravestones in grey silk
you stir the golden ribbons with your feet
until the uncovered spaces are dancing

I'd like to do something nice for mister sidewalk
make every one of his squares a different color
put smiling children on several
and fell a bright green pine in his middle
make people notice how nice he is to walk on

I'd like to put some sparkling dust on mister sidewalk
and throw glue in certain grey places
for people to get stuck on
where they can look at each other and decide
whether or not to kiss each other for a long time

he's felt so many unfeeling feet
he's been lying down
for so long surely he's hungry for a new world

We're kissing each other under a huge porch
There's a family reunion being held in the house
that's attached to the porch, and the footsteps
of a huge and disorganized family
move around in casual rhythms
on the boards above them.
The gentle sound of drinks being poured
merges with the happy sucking of our lips.
Is that your family above, or mine
Perhaps they belong to neither of us;
we certainly don't belong to them.
But somebody's uncle looks familiar:
he's walking down the steps onto the lawn,
with a dumb grin on his face, drunk.
He rips a car door off of some other relative's sedan
and props it up against a tree. We've stopped kissing
and we giggle in delight; he begins to paint
the door with a brush and some cans taken
from the garage. He paints the scene on the porch
with every member of the family as standing crocodiles,
sipping drinks from glasses that have been cracked
by their huge sharp teeth. And a landscape
of mushroom clouds with tree branches
lurks behind the porch railings.
On the other side of the yard, a radiance--or maybe
a crowd of blonde children--is crawling up a tree
and crawling down a tree simultaneously.
Long yellow whiffleball bats fall out of the tree
and make a mellow clatter on the artificial grass.
Either the children are picking them from the branches,
or they are falling from the rectangular heaven that (our?)
drunk uncle has painted on the window of the car door,
above the crocodile family. The flesh of the children
is turning into butter; the butter covers the bats
and they turn into snakes, snakes that slither
through the artificial grass and turn
the green blades they touch into real grass.
Sometimes one of the snakes will raise its head
to peer at a car-window heaven and to see
if the contents of the porch are human;
and we share an orgasm whenever that happens.

The jagged lines in the blueprint
of your experimental force field
are creeping imaginary things moving
across state lines to be with me.
That which you had sent out like a shield
has become a net.

The spaceman flying through the forcefield
gets a coat of metal covering his pores,
and can only smash it off
by crashing into your door.
And by never flying through the forcefield,
since it doesn't actually exist.

The blueprint of your experimental force field
lies atop a bouquet of burning candles
whose hot white brains are starting to show
through the paper. There's no meat heart,
but the air inside a clenched hand;
no mere familiar function, but a starfish
made of darkness in your vulnerable
hallways of hours.

The spaceman flying through your forcefield
is trying to get up from where he crashed
through the roof of an indoor basketball court;
he is trying to peel himself like a dark starfish
off the wall of a local restaurant.
He's trying to stop the barnyard blades
to hear your helicopter music
through a labyrinthine ceiling.

Now that we are strong enough for this desire,
let the fingertips that dragged the city walls
come in like humbled invaders. And let the lights
built up so robotically on the sides of our valley
become like bioluminescence, and be moved to glow
by the passing of a lover's craft.

Our ship of canvas numbers has been turned
into a soft black hole with jellyfish tentacles.
How did the crushing suck become a trailing mess
of ladyfingerslinked by darkmatter, aching
with celestial honeypot? The universe of hardness
punctured itself and threw us out into its sister.

We both stand in the prow and put our black dress-coats on,
me with my chest hair flaring out of a rigid brassiere
and you with a velvet bowtie above your barest nipples.
The multiverse without space for angels
is with us now.

For people who hate each other,
there are plenty of things to do.
They have warplanes and missiles,
they can alter the air. They can
communicate with one another.
The whole world seems devoted
to the production of things
for them to fight with.

But if two people
living in such a world
should fall in love with each other
where are their big machines?
What factory devotes itself
to making the massive things
that they might use to impress one another?

But I forgot that love
does not need too much power.
Love is timeless, and makes
no demands of the future;
it does not need to be seen
and heard all the time,
it does not need to win everything.
And there are no contests of blood or fire
that could prove it worthy.

People say that love is free, and perhaps
there's still a truth ensnared in that cliche.
But love is surrounded by myriad things
that are not free, and these things
restrict its movements. And those who insist
that love is free are often most imprisoned.

Love wants greatness, lovely architecture;
love wants a good government.
For love wants everything to love;
love wants the post office and the sidewalk
and the education of children to be
impressive and beautiful experiences.
Or maybe love is just a crowd of monks
making beer together
and forgetting their religion in their labor.

But those who have the most love
often have the hardest time
putting it into practice; their
love wants a whole world to run free in
but too often is forced
to settle for a smaller space
where it can easily become frustrated,
distorted, turned into fear and even hatred.
And so the greatest lovers
often lose.

How terrifying the world is.
And how few good people we have;
and how hard it is for them to remain so.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen.
I dreamt my hands onto your waist,
I dreamt your arms over my shoulders.

I even dreamed a chandelier
made of beercans and candles
to light our sweeping progress
across the room. And I dreamt
the walls covered with your paintings;
a ballroom for your greatness
(a whole world for your greatness)
that made the Sistene Chapel look
like a rusty thimble in comparison.
And an elevator coming down from the ceiling
to take us to a high bed in the great city
where we could make love and breathe
the hidden matter of the universe
into each other forever.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen
to a velvet revolution. I dreamt your life
into my life; I dreamt my strange tuxedo
next to your startling dress
at a ceremony the world has never seen before.

When you walk into Paris, I will feel
my shoulders jump off of my body
into a raining sky. I will have airplanes
in my bedroom; I will cling to the sheets
to avoid being sucked into their blades.

When you walk into Paris your scorched prettiness
will dismay the air
and make people drop things
that they are trying to eat
and you'll have to help them
pick those items up off the bricks
so that they can chew to keep quiet
and astonished in your presence.

When you walk into Paris I'll be walking
into another dimension; a dimension
where every little plant looks like your red hair
and frogs worship your reflection
in a wet saucer. When you walk into Paris
my passport will lose its labia
to a searing wind, but I'll stamp it with kisses.

When I say I love you, I mean that I want
all the authorities of this world
to tiptoe politely when they are around you.
I mean that I want violence to melt away
in your presence; I mean that I want
you to eat good food and breathe clean air,
always. I mean above all
that I want the media and the music
and the airports and the theaters
to stop insulting you; I mean that I want them
to shrink with shame in your beautiful presence.

So I pray to nothing
for the systems which are not built on love
to come crumbling down
leaving love standing naked and needless of defenses
in the wreckage, preparing to rebuild
a better form. I'm afraid it won't survive
the demolition. But I want for my love and its world
an unprecedented freedom.

And since I cannot provide these things,
I become crazed with a thwarted passion.
Love wants power; power to produce,
power to heal, power to help. And lack of money
gets in its way constantly.

We put a picnic blanket down
on the scrubby lawn
in front of the supermarkets.
And we lay there
exchanging squares of cheese
and small goblets of red wine.
We arrange live electrical wires
around the blanket
so that nobody will bother us.
We take your wide black scarf
and wrap it in a silky mess
around our heads
to soften the smell of car exhaust.
The highway just a few feet away
and the moving sidewalk roamed
by puzzled travellers.
The movements in the parking lot
are like a swarm of beetles
moving on the outside of the scarf;
we can see the world's smallness,
and feel its brittle rhythms recede
to give way to the massive rhythms
of our blood. I do something strange:
I duck out from under the black scarf,
run into the parking lot, kicking up
chunks of sod as I dash away,
and I grab the payphone in front of the store
and I call your cellphone
and you pick it up, bewildered.
I watch you from the storefront,
thinking I might see something different
from a distance, might pull some monsterous
tragedy out of your voice and stomp on it
before it kills me. You slowly peel
the black scarf from your face
and see me staring from across the parking lot
as silver automobiles move across my body
and my eyes glow with the terror
of the distance. You warn me that you'll hang up
and I ask you, please, if you're going to take
your voice away, not to cover your eyes.

I must have stepped on a current in the wires
as I was running away from you; I know
some force revealed my brokenness,
and you were frightened. Now you can't
move toward me without stepping on those wires
that I mashed into the ground with my fleeing feet.
And the phonelines in the air
sag like clotheslines grabbed by children
who want to climb them onto the clouds.