cage of knuckles
around bruised flower, eyes
wide enough to inhabit
more than one set of orbs,
clench of cold bodies
in the beam of a warm movie

snakes on the deck bending phrases
whole alphabet of silken scales squirming,
the queue at the cloud's open mouth
calling hellos to friends who perish
together, vertical acres in air
above the pancake breakfast

the town dies, the mayor fucks
the sidewalk, mountain paths
take on tar coats for beer-fed walkers
sizzle of the melted peach in their mouths,
ferment of fresh spring
upon long-dead bodies

syrup staining snow under maples
thick tall ghosts of elms
inhabiting guitar-moved avenues,
white paper skinwrapped
on scorched birches
paper-mache buttcracked,
twin alleys run past the same
black-lit restaurant, plant smoke
on the lips of tired cooks,
french fries inside beckoning
a crowd drunker than Christ,
newspaper machine openmouthed
to the violence of the dawn sun
on tiny corner of wide country.

long-pelted ladies walk upright
out of the swamp, lashes flick
from eyes and wrists, lace together
forming stretchers for my charcoaled brothers
and I to lay down upon,

the sky's new hum, tangerine skins all around
in the moonlight, milky hammers
for pelts to fetch home to the tides
far under the swamp now boiling,
twang in their own caged shadows.
I enjoy the song that the ladies aren't singing

it's coming from a crack in the ground.

Together we have killed the earth,
let us hold hands in hands in hands
around the metallic sparrow,
let us look with carelessness
on the death we have lovingly created,
nip at the scorched tiny wings
with engine teeth. We'll ask each other
if we can still inhabit this local orb
between flagrant supermarkets
and the sound of burning salts,
we'll taste the shell
of the all-containing thing
that crawled far away,
dragging its dark protections
and a portion of our race,
movement of dung skinned soldiers
serving nothingness' sweet advance

universality of sleep, sleep of all species,
the beautiful gun barking lacks of oxygen
for all lovelies breathing

thank you soldier, policeman of our concerned
deadnesses, our state-sanctioned violins,
I hope all my friends die like airless pianos
in the huge grip. Your talons, I speak
world of newest evil, plastic whole
through the half-melted visor of my own.

we ran in drag dresses
from the surging authorities--
ran through time, the public highway,
our mouths outfitted with lemon peel teeth,
you could guess we were laughing--
official screams of anger flickered out
on tar behind our high-heeled evasions

when a servant steps out of place
the circuits of time are not jammed,
gardens brighten in the artificial
aftermath, against the backdrop
of thickening pollutions, that bloom
their own flowers over the freer ways

of birds, swimming above the human epic.
We ran highway centers back to each other,
strangely abandoned this time, no cherry lights
broadcasting hate to the pines,
no voice to run the big computer.
Time winked from our pockets,
we ripped off our dresses and became genders,
and the police were out there, like the stars.

bristling panorama overtake me,
neon'd snowbanks sprout thawed species
for the death spores of modern mail,
two pigeons awkward of footclaw
upon the turntable of black glass,
the slow song of icicles
the red hair churning into a taffy
as she turns her orbs suspended in the world
like a bloody tongue looking for candy
in the rust cartridge of the oldest phone booth
of this rotting lemonade district,
search my lungs with a hammer,
touch down into the recreational areas
with tube nostrils of bacteria overthrow cancer,
sprout from stumps like nuclear salad,
cause my limbs to hang a bundle of black susans
on every one of her doors, neon my surroundings
down to purple dust, let the sellers hawk

organ behind the head is frequently disturbed,
times the fabric self a fraud reported
the ectoplasm of choice for him give it a ghostly glow
to be the consecration visit emergency departments
of the near-death a dazzling exit
the aggressive brilliance of white grave
buildings lining the sea front; and red spots,
long-term functional, cosmetic, soft tissue injury
iridescence of the silvery blue
nectar from the flowers of the host
cool blues have disappeared.

broken basketball courts sprout ferns
nosefaces swim in the hard candy of being
to the streets and sad bones
to the roadlit electrocution
antimatter ultimate,

this is nothing you, elephant belly
on yellow backs of old phone,
salamander dew-flecked
on the hull of a dead soul,

view from your slit
the one hill lump head
of your mailbox holocaust,
slashing hologram throats
while the curtain worlds are all falling
bus stop fences all gasoline fire

the waves of a lake hoisted spiked
into a swimmer with apocalyptic mind
who'd just jacked the soda machine,
left clothes on shore pinned
down by piles of quarters
he'd spent a month asleep
in a tent under the goldenrod
shredded underwear shielding
the sun from his face
while houses turned frail as green tents
he roved the golf course, left spunk
like silver dollars in sand pits
whose smell salted by the moon
reminded his nostrils of girls'
rearmost slits & stars, hopeless
happiness he thrashed backwards
into moss embankments his mouth
shaped like a can of beer,
and feeling like a cash register
then became a pine branch
arcing over the home
of his nemesis, the normal population.

in the orbs around no world
my head buzzing full of flowers
rents each core
to be crushed by its orbit

until the tin on the moon turns
to the glint of a girl's eyes
her machinery draped in green silk
the eyes of her breasts angry
at the orbs, for not orbiting closer

and the eye of her vulva growing
pineal in sucked-out light
departing from the last hotel room
on this crater's curve
where she makes her home small and sharp
and dark on this divorced planet.

WHAT MAKES ICE AGES?

The man who tore out his throat
and was given a new one
the girl who wanted to be made love to
by a deer
the boy who wanted his torso
to turn into a boiled swordfish
the husband of a wisp of smoke
who wanted to turn into a single tear

the many dark brown mouths,
their bright red kisses
and the small orange and pink cat who wanted
to play on the windowsill, and accomplished this

are all gathered here, in the memory-hole left
by a shotgun blast that echoed for centuries
over ceaselessly chiming cash registers.
Their voices rise with happiness
to greet the commands of a song

the song is catchy, the air is catchy
the pulse of blood catchier and catchier
the vision defeated, the reality exultant,
oyster eyes and oyster tongue
and corriders of off-white library android mind,
with no circuitry wound into the spines of the books
that they slam shut again and again
in the absence of a drumset

waiting for the monks to arrive
with cymbals decorated in pubic bush
waiting for the unimpressed to be impressed
to the point of inevitable heart attack
waiting to be entered in every sagging pore
by a computer

waiting for the campfire in a mop bucket
and magnetic sticks that rearrange
the invisible graffiti on a neighborhood's only glacier
waiting for you and me to shut up
and the universes and multiverses
and houses to go on all without us.

PARANOID ORCHESTRION

I'll climb with flies in your radio wires
trying to take the earth back into space
fingers of pine search the radio parties
for a girl in a cube of ice

she'll hang brains on powerlines all round
the quiet neighborhoods, and stare like
watermelons ball back from the paintings
on a nursing home's wall

time will be interrupted by time

blackmouth, unkissed eyelids
seeking the clover of lawn ceilings,
swallowing pills of children's teeth,
pushing the tiny engine through gravity,
two new bodies embrace on an inherited bed,
their fondness an ancient fondness
found among amusing holograms, she faints,
my body takes dictation from
lightpoles in the trembling harbor,

bright legs before the bomb, levels built
where she falls, elevated to floor
after floor, the rugged escapes
of gone movies, all that's left
tinkling in his skeleton is the voice,
frame tinted by patina of passing
half nothings, the hotel's early breakfast
brightening a month of vacuumed
stomach's heat of lungs, legs strung
always in the jeans of last year,
a river's only wagging memory.

soft horns ooze up the straw
and the roof of the world is far away

waterfalls, pink champagne
newborn gourds and the feet of children
beat a trembling path

tiny pebbles from a shingled roof
pray the shell shields the salt all away
from the coils of your body

wild strawberries can't find the mouth
of the king of the snails as he climbs

and the front door of the human house
who cast the garden down is the mouth
of a vast guitar