.....

When she first clapped eyes on a light field (say a button) a vanishing art
down in britches and boots the long, curving collarbones,
compressed air, and fresh breath, blood, urine and saliva
a clock with hands of clouds and gilded shell forms,
crystals suspended in magnetosphere's eggplant living room

all leaks, stand in our safelight
leaf through tiny lilacs and dahlias,
layers of plants and animals
to paint its walls black glaze with her decorator

no drunkenness, no rapture
no one knows what makes it red

a light trap burned up in the day
clicks to give him a precise voice, a birdcall

MS. FIRESTONE

Dreams do not make melody career
you see your cartoon breakfast in the dawn sky
through an android window
and cannot reach over the hill rise.

The noise of satin uniform
falling on the floor of a trashcan
alerts genius to the presence of murder, in the self,
on the apartment precipice, forcing music
into fire escape and wires
the aridity of loneliness accepted
an orchestra of nerves that have
no homes in other nerves.

To abandon abandonment, the arctic heart,
spreading tendrils of frost across the skeleton leaves
of human cities, to open a mystic dresser drawer, to
see a metropolis of burning numbers, in which one
is a letter transfigured.

A crucifix older than history
nudges its indecipherable plaque
against the underside of the lounge rug
and strains against it until the floor becomes
a wave of tumblers, children prepared to play,
who'd not begun.

FIVE FORMS OF LIGHT

To add wonder to message
all these subjects were taken out
in raccoon territory
they raged and raged at dumpster fires

in the fiery dark, they learned a lesson over and over again
their mattresses were soaked in tears and all their agony was music
they moved like dowsers, navigating a slight deception in the breeze
they turned a mess of corner, dragging a train of eyeballed kerchiefs,

moving their mandibles around candy bars with famous names,
stalling the traffic with a murmur, blades loose on their back pockets,
who know about the errors of childrearing, and the sanctuary of the wounded
who know about the handwringing of the dead, which is imaginary

SILENT TAPS

I am turning into a houseplant that watches you.
In the past we are dancing; close your eyes and smell
the soil I grow from. The radiant nowhere, silently
opens up, from the sun on a beer coaster
or a napkin scrawled with alien alphabet,
closer and closer to multiverse, the fibers of our beings
stretched tighter and tighter in the refining blaze of theory.

You are a drumskin whose under-air I live with.
This is the apartment where we plot the smokeless end
of the known world. Genetic material sprayed in laughter
across the flowerets, the sound of many bicycles
passing huge, closed windows. Make me closer to both
death and life, in the music of your refusal to analyze;
root in me behind my hilt, show me the infinity
backwards.

This coming bloodletting, a history of love-blips,
will not be enough. Things must fall short somewhere,
to keep the steps worthy until the great until.
What is meant for the eye, the ear, the nose,
the other tendrils, is meant in profound ambience,
is meant in the bloodlessness
of closely studied blood.

This is the first door to the house
with the most doors, where a fart waits in denim
laughing kettles to a stove with feet
that print linoleum and forget. Drink your tea
with tumeric and let the ceiling's whir of caged beings
turn into a planetarium helmet over your head.
Soon we will not remember ourselves, much less each other;
soon we will out in the wide tiny,
be feeding ducks who are already done eating.

.....

The blue door, opens on white-streaked
fruitful sky, it looks like the ultimate window, then
it is closing

cruising the ocean's glow, nervous in the international air
spiritual loopholes closing up like sand
broken light in the head
wiring

a call is coming from the tree-wall
a siphon is sucking down the marrow of a field,
somewhere skeletons buy tickets, on a narrow highway's
eaves of authority running with piss

deep in my dreamt house
a woman in a plant-dress is always passing
from detachment to detachment
the veil of letters fits her like a leaf
and her snore issues
from the valley of unpublished music

.....

Prey, what could I want revolting,
talk to eating all, thoughts rotten with sleep,
no will to imagine the future, pulled by a light,
angels over the parking lot, filaments dropping from clouds

the mind of a snake in a garden,
all warring with conquered earth,
burnt civilization, lingering in its laws,
surrounding the frenzied desire,
owned by a failed monk, failed millionaire.

Nothing stilled by thought, coming up molten and alive,
will silver the landscape with what rides atop blood
until the fiber in flesh breaks with what is tired of words

I will come down in rivulets from party mountain
singing purely.  Nothing that has touched me
in oblivion or waking will go to waste.

.....

Young woman, I fear the grief of old men
as it enters my being without a shout,
I find the core of where old selves clamor with chisels
and you are a lightning's root in the overbecoming ephemera,
you slant the landscape with eyes, with footsteps under your footsteps
smoldering, you hoist me with gravity from my ceiling bed,
I withhold only what cannot break loose from the wall groaning calendar

Young woman, I never ascended like a prophet to paralysis
because we are living matter, undirected by words to be shaken,
let this hymnless abandon light up the vaulted cobweb
blueprinted into life by those dying, who pretend eternity,
take my carcass of moss, vibrating with song, to your lip's crux
one final perseverating time, be my salve's looping station,
repeat and repeat me, you are the hourglass emptied of atlas
 

.....

Stilts high above grass and shrubs in a wet woods
the colorful king stood at the earth's center, linking it
allowing it to flash the rig over one man's head

he saw rings around the faint wash of blue light
he saw four moons near tree-ripened fruits
he saw stars that had never been power to a bone
from a ring of fragments on the retina in profusion

the machine in games of ticktacktoe the shadow of phases we see
some cordlike long thick draping vines
cool, shadowless white flowers
an apple, the apple's thin skin

.....

Flesh is more expensive on this disc; the heart on a screen
tiny polyps which are the folds and garments that will fall
from twigs, dead leaves clouds of ammonia snow
light-years across their eyes close to the windows,
soft tissue of the body is bathed in bulge of stars
that has the same colors and each window
need not be bigger than a man's face
eggs or fledgling birds vast swirling city of
acorns, berries, lichens, an inner-halo-ring
is even fainter, spinning off each of the discs
is a steady crescent-shaped golden mist
from the blue sky, first light sucks it clean, then returns it
and morning blots out the building, leaving only the water

.....

That the nights and days of society do not belong
to the hearts of the passionate
and how the illusion that my eyes are changing the light
puts my days in a bubble where I break

but toward the rainforest's blankets
of life-giving death, lost medicines
and this cloak of fiber-optic snakes I wear
to frighten away all the armies and how at times
it lights up their blades and their cannons
and the technology of silent time travel

love that brings to the abyss
its desire to inhabit all the milliseconds
as the trains rush past the tree trunks
and into the valleys of concrete
covered with patriotic tarps
and the sweet nonsense of sellers

that the passionate cannot sit still long enough
to be shot into space, but build stages
from the threshold of their nerve
decorated with face-paint of burnt forests
charging and laughing with fists
full of berries and bushes
stained by the night life that is growing like a vine
while a girl dances to Al Green on the tiles of a bakery
and a buyer laughs
the myth is what actually happens

.....

If I go with the fire of my destiny
through unsilent corridors
and speak there with mirrors that deepen
into alternate selves, sending their eyes into me,
if I multiply existence, only the time-blossom
can breathe these creatures scented onto my path
and take what it produces roaring
down the nearest wormhole

you keep a gauze over your world
and it includes me, and I am exhausted
behind it, it makes a total shield on my skin,
and I can watch it form from a new distance,
harmonizing with thin water

when the earth found me
I'd finally stopped suffering in her grasp

.....

You have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to be your Humphrey Bogart,
your good wolf and the guardian of your river's heart,
and the autumnal apocalypse is shivering and falling
all around me, it brings my tropical soul
in color to the fore without a temperature to match it,
the tilt of your mouth to the gleam of your gaze
broadcasting over valleys and hills through black & white
the heat of your being, you have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to walk into an old diner to be awed by
you inhabit classic skin.