ORNAMENTAL FIRE

Adorned with the drapery that gunlight caught,
 form cast on an orb ship galaxies fucked
  into transparent existence, planet lands on planet,
   screens form in the witnessed sky,


 my nymph with an axe cuts the anti-umbilical
  cord to the wax church pumped with slime
   that rides barren hills in a scaffolding of dried white shit,
    and has no tower


and in ornamental fire, love comes blazing without a framework
 to fuel wells with earthen water, cannot be held, cannot be kept,
  granted in time, it ties the knots inside the climbing fists, amusical wrists,
   that cause music


In tumbling neverthelessness, chords throated through a tapestry of cells
 in the goblet of broken atmosphere, lovers of earth for new earths,
  to ferret around on lank cages, through tubes from infinity's plastic,
   to gather on fiberoptic rafts and burn calendars, to minnow past faulty suns
    in a death-copped instant.

.....

The form's silhouette,
 and the magic nature of dissolving
 which we crave and surrender
 to grey light, to waking
the molten black, the cooled figure


a huge cat, looming on floorboards,
 chest-bones rippled by outward light
fails to recline on my horrible memory;
 a hangover, a woman


puts me at the terrible crest of my illusion
 and it sticks to nothing, then riots
within everything that is barren,
 parsed out by inexorable sadness


the total terror of white afternoons
 where nobody is watching
  with eyes, with eyes that have broken totally


 and to see

    taken by a gliding feeling,        reeling in a lot


       ass on a stump of years spreading               chained open






            every tank of light is closed off       by     lashes of money


hurt the self, fall on a wire      new to the only sun          the dripping of


 blood on glass     the singed piano     striking up the rhythm of the floor tiles




        taken by a striped and impenetrable feeling,      hands on a long row of metal carts




 for the money that wafts from the sky      for those who lovingly control it


   for the chlorine grin at the pharmacy counter telling a lie to the air


 sting the self's shadow, taste its resemblance          fall down in the depths of


     grandma's garden

.....

She paints in purple and tan the tearing of a body
psychotic lovemaking in a tunnel of leaves
smashed sirens lost in their hardware
staring elements into the river computer;
and stunned by their own laughter,
a wing-caress
a janitor's cardboard fortress
and he was her father of wide grey thirst
endless yellow pink  red
a free wind over the old neighborhood
where a nude is fighting another nude
and nobody is welcomed into the crystallization
but it glows to happen
atop every periphery shining
their hearts are making blood move and that's all

.....

The moon is a sash on the hearth of a dead map
The sun blazes under a cemetery
Out in the world of jobs and harnesses they bottle reason
I'm hanging from a ceiling's corner in a sling of catgut
The mirrors won't leave me alone or float
An imaginary uncle shares my face for years
I forgot how to get up unfold and make lunch
I cringed in a chair of dust
Imaginary governments kept an eye on the less interesting
The orifice of bright and dark multiplies in celestial gaps
No newspaper of the future shows the faces of my telephone's grandchildren
Tiny prophets scream pop in the fireplace
I am undiminished by history
My future's with unanalytical manwomanman
Don't touch the brick's glow until it blips its replicas into existence
Or melt into sex information on my doorstep
We are waiting in the nuclear ballpark
For intergalactic teams to fumble points against a gel bulletin
For the gods of meteorology to finish their cones

.....

Snow-sun, irreparable earth,
limbs linked in leather
driven with eyes to the banks,
the bowl-sides of town-planetarium
to the bulk of larger planets,
searing through thin layers of lesser stars
tin forks of battered cities
alleyways of accidental warmth
in the mess of civilization
where our bellies heat blood
for one another


Micro-town, a cell's existence,
tremulous to split the botched highway
where life makes way for murder
and a smashed hotel divulges one vibrating bed
nudged electric down the avenue
where we lay down and ride
to be rented by light
to be born from water


roads lower than the ocean
where our motors choked on music
we stepped out of antique doors


and took sight of each other, moon leaf wing
the pause of unstoppable things

.....

Genius has no memory
and the soul registers from the mundane, from the purging that
begins to look schoolmarm


slugs into his face slugs into the officer
fragments of a creature now called little pear, then


rock shows forms of man that the murder occurred
replacing the chord called spirit


each interglacial period--the time body they came from
bones of a child killed by the religious frenzy of the ghost dance


water consciousness flat-faced, fuzzy-cheeked, but he commanded
suckle their young change to a vertical face


cemented on the slide with balsam electron

.....

From a bulb or underground as otoliths in the inner ear
even in cracks between stems and on leaves high
from his mouth and it was bright the body of the legend
strips of light on temple walls, in the colossal, belted globe


The flattened claws from the grave of 400, 000 kinds of sound
to rest in crow fashion to overthrow his father


A slitted disk was attached to the scribe's arms
and made the dead person come alive again
lean, tireless, and striking an electric arc


A cord of tissue extends from a small water pocket
his bullet-mould, ball-screw, wiper, awl & with a gun-stick
when blood has delivered tight ovens called retorts blood cannot return
blasting garden flowers and grasses and dulling razors


Spells fall from septa, or walls, holes or cans or chambers
horsetail black-eyed susan deerhorn ferns
subkingdoms in the center between the corolla

.....

Light-years light-years
cuneiform wrapped in smoke
the blush in your eye
the water in the steam tubes, waves in the open ocean
rounded and pitted rocks nested
the chugging engine, before a rail broke the cloth that covered


there is a thin band of green, of lapis blue, and of indigo
bones, shells and teeth fingers to man-made brains
the beasts of lightning in higher layers
for the ballet, fine silver in the solar wind


on the drilling deck iron colts tore up rails, exploded, set fire
this group this night is a golden-white light golden-white light
the head is crowned coins rest on the eyelids--two to three earths
dashes and various matrixes as sacramental tokens of
stored on magnetic tape and replayed
the water becomes too great

SHE SLEEPS WITH A HAMMER UNDER HER PILLOW

She sleeps with a hammer under her pillow.
Her son was a small torpedo.
When she releases her ponytail her eyes grow three sizes.
Networks of electric re-creation are all her ceilings.
She knocks them closer to the sky every time she sits up in bed.
Her mattress is a little airport abandoned by civilization.
Phantom mechanics make threatening noises in musicless hangars.
Her solo office faces a molten seaboard.
Her keypad smokes under small intelligent hands.
Once a month we visit her shower and she melts me back into my height.
I can see her nibbling a cool sky-corner that has fallen from the wallpaper.
It turns into the skin of an unknown fruit when we press it between us.
The walls cocoon and bristle as the bones of airplanes crumble like salt
in the unheard outskirts.  And when we part like lovers
she strides our reincarnate sight through the alien city,
my eyes shining out of her.  And her breath fills my prisoner legs
until my history is mute with gladness
she reclines on the light in my head.

.....

In man-made rigid hulls would you taste the roar
Of a fold within the rearing tanks
With a slow flow of airstone
With a silvery sheen to the eyes and abdomen
Through which a pulse of light flashed more zones of the grey scale
Orange blossoms and buzzing bees raspberries and clover
The thermometer expanding in wood


If someone called to you, would you hear him make models of water?

THE RED ROAD

From the roots to the floodlight meters
through the stems to the near-by buildings to the human face
yesteryear dined on an oil well in the earth
any air-breathing animal a prism compressed by the surrounding


by the sphincter muscles of some sunlight
antistatic rubbing and biting lasting many hours
to swirl about your fresh-cut sound waves in the enlarger's egg
pressed by her luminous, averted turbulence-damping shapes and doing no injury


the tinted glow gone from the sky of honey
colors disappear; the world including an adult pair
becomes a pattern of black butter.