.....

Careening to heights, dizzy with rapture, I try
to pull all the aching eyes into it with me;
surprised at how much shows up,
in the radar of my chances.

This is the glinting scrap-mountain
of discarded dreams, where another vision
can still be assembled, painstakingly atop
with a wide bell, and a feather pen
with an electronic heart,
ringing from the anus to the tips of the eyes.

.....

Earth knocks on my door, as it knocked
early on the door of my father.
For now it's just a trickle; I let it in.
Geraniums are clamoring somewhere
outside.  I too am caught up in that false prophecy
of a world that will never end,
of a consciousness that lingers.
I can barely lie still to watch
the sun pass over me.
So impatient to live, that I make death
come a little closer, so this thing
that is not an entity and I
can check each other out,
fumble around the limits.
Like a parallelogram collapsing
into an escaping sliver of light,
what they call my soul
has eclipsed itself, and I am
already free.

.....

When you were fucked in love for the first time,
egging your chances, over the dry hump of a whole existence,
breaking in the radio, late night of the buttocks,
staring under the mirror, we are changed for reality,
there is no sensible end to this feeling, this peculiar disaster,
this and that run of wine and wildly radiant colored circumstances,
changed aching to combine, vaulted from a forested childhood,
unwillingly moving.

.....

Weeping-burnt alongside a river
a heron swept through my ribcage
and the clouds were a gauze between my bones
I saw a crushed pharmacy spilling medicine
on white-hot twilight tar
and the gift of the sunrise
cracked into lava's rivulets
by fleets of minnows scattering

reassembled around the eruptions of history
the blandness of human tyranny went on, troubling a few
and we gathered around a fountain of dream-glinting coins,
then going to buy things to clean our bodies, scour our homes
for an empire of thin wishes, a rain of spears
on the roof of the planetarium.

Agape

I can feel the human heart beating with fear, in the supermarket;
how we are suspended in the gossamer of each other's lives,
so nervously.  In the steps of these people I know the shuffle
of my own bedraggled shoes, how we are besieged by threats
of guilt-cancer, of guilt-cleansing and the promise
that every one of us will be nailed to these fucking walls,
well before the opening of all outer space.  And to think
of the many instants, when tenderness breaks out
in a glance or a clasp, of flesh on real flesh,
from our harried natures, pummeled by time,
is a violent caress, then a cooling lava,
and the growl of a lost leopard.
Until the very nucleus of one's being,
sabotaged again and again by love,
grows firm in love, defiantly;
until all the fragments of one's being
are suffused with love, and their circuits are bathed
with the holiness of its knowing sorrow.

Bartenderess

Your fragrant cool, how did it happen?
And the ear-curls, how did they descend?

If the orchard gave form to its shining technology,
if it went hot for cold, where would it sprout
and its productions land?

They'd thud on the moon, let the cycles vibrate,
where they fecund and move
dust into sculpture, that has eyes,
that has alien culture in its most familiar echo,

carving carving
and they love the blood of what
they will fall amongst, a teeming vacancy of cells.

.....

To become a realtor of star maps
hawking trails to the infinite
from a light-pierced kiosk
in a barren airport
eating the phonebook
a carnival and rubbed-out addresses
human neighborhood bulbing out
from an alien socket

.....

I am watching you burn yourself down,
and I can see how I am doing it, too,
in our own ways we go faltering,
time is dismembered by us;
and we follow it, very angrily, laughing

Whole bodies flung to the geodes
photographed, to the fictional solar system

body, body by death and body by life,
fighting without moving

I'm fucked up enough now to treat
my friends like angels
in the deranged way I love them
following a mantle I've never worn
through a dark I know better than
the specter who follows me, wearing
the horn of an idiot, being a human

Because you can't trust your own life,
because your own life is a stranger trapped
inside you; or because you can't talk, properly
without being seen, and are not
under any circumstances allowed
to fall over.

.....

This serenade must shiver the lilac bushes
blur the rings of elms within within
and haul late-night clouds aside
from celescopes their vapors cannot touch;
it must reach only one woman,
and her name is the sea,
and it has been said.

There is no ache in time
to abandon her tiniest doings
the light on her fingers is universal
and the song around it
needs to breathe the air of all time
through this time
bring stone together with stone
a bed of moss at the foot
of the life of a fountain
falling of cold water on matted rock-path

The cleanliness of it, and her place
so far along where it flows
where it meets salt and is overwhelmed
by the sadness around the earth
on the skin and in the radiant unseen
fire at the fire's center.