As if you were counting,

counting your pearls

on a strange shore

and could not be moved.

A great wind has swept me empty.

I linger in the halls

of battered frames

and ailing family portraits.

Here is a web that glistens

with evacuated mind.

Here are your chess-carved

partners.  Play.

No thanks to the chain of talking rectangles

regurgitated from some geek's

delirium, no thanks

to the scum with lipstick,

weak snips of a turning wheel.

I'll take the path between

the fallen piles, pick out

the twisted logs

that interlock.  And watch

the light curve

around many Earths

to grow its shape

in your corner,

little woman from the faint towns

who resounds without clamor.

If I could swim to you

through the air of Oglethorpe

through the rocks of Chickamauga

if I could perch on your wing

and grow to kiss you

while the petals clap

on their opposing shores

we'd bounce around fern-clad ditches

with feet of sweet

anti-gravity

and the lightly woven

bows of cloud

would drift their way back to you

all articulate cells

and bell pull rope

so deep in my hands

The vise grip of beauty

on a broken man

long days lit only by the parking lots

and uninhabited fields

reflecting a crazed sun

are we moles in our cozy blindness

do we shine where the linoleum bright

drops off

or hang glide

into a time rift laughing

Is there resurrection for the punks

for the freaks rejected by the new freaks

will there be a rebirth for disfigured heroes

and neglected spawn

will there be a light that shifts the burden

or just these gravity suits of inertia

does the soul breathe

can it find me

can we meet in buried history

and halve the galaxy's collapse

or put it right like printed tin

and go under it

regardless

So many wild ones gone.

The chairs filled with their light

recede and fade.

The darkness under time

has taken them far

now.

Oh to be in their midst

for another hour.

To withstand them once

was not enough--it never is.

Only to hear them howl

and subside,

rage and slumber,

only to live in the labyrinth

of all their breathing

for a second more.

I draw myself out

on the electrified hillsides,

waiting for you.

Draw myself

tight as a drum,

ready to resound and

touching nothing.

Pretty as glassy embers

put to bed on ash,

resonant as

a whole choir of females

in your solitary breathing,

you pass me by like the light

on a bale of hay, again and again.

Your circuitry is the moat

that protects without armor

these fences painted

with my patient blood

in the shadow of your perfect longing

where I will go like scattered rice

or be cast aside.

Lest we contemplate

the strange humanity

lurking beneath Darth Vader's mask

and know ourselves unknowable

for the small and bitter gods we are

try stacking lists, try

the smell of desire try

the smell of money on money

and wherever it runs out

hope for a happy chair

to sit in like a dummy

carve the insides of the mask

with fervent strides of color

from the beds of bones

let green yellow the air

and the svelte throng care.

When we met

your young beauty

was already old

As old as anything gets

in this world,

as old as the salt in the sea,

older than me.

You slayed the reflections

of fallen arrivals

at the pageant

of pride that fades.

You raided the bones

of desert royalty

for DNA

And I waited

like a cave of geodes

for your fingers

that arrange the stuff of life,

for your braids of light

that hold up the dead sky.

In its tendrils frozen

your light returns

with its shining warmth,

its rescue of the moon's

turbulence.

I am the rock that waits

for your tough little feet

cells answering cells

in the web where there is no answer

save the shuttered water

and its ageless thirst

to swell without eyes

for your skin,

to yearn without features

for you casting glances,

the eggs that I catch like seeds

from all the reeds that bend

a chandelier's pen.

You glue my twin soul

to a tower of scorpions.

I waver in its grip

until your gown appears

in the window of

a neighboring lighthouse.

Our masks

and their wires with diamonds

have fallen to a valley of silk.

I walk around you

like the skirts

your shadows flare.

Billie Holiday sings in my veins

when you step so lightly

on autumn scales that suit you

in the rugged dark torn blue

by a relentless moon.

I hear prophecies of you

in David Bowie.

The madness of the radio

is silenced by your breasts.

In the crux of crossing shadows

I see you are the trees

that cast them.

I walk beneath your body

through the sky

and then back in

over platforms of laughing soil.

The atmospheric curtains

thrust me out

to the senseless stars

and airless majesty again

I long for your talk of butter

of small grains and earthly things

that blossom in the flame of your hands

imperfect devourer

sweet fount of braids and chains

where I give up my wandering

and you send me into ashes

waiting for a pin to prick my soul

for you to pipe my longing

deep to be the water of my air.

Pelt me with red eggs from hell,

be my grim transcriber.

Let me not stray

from your frail and square

hourglass,

take the libraries from my heart

with a drag on your cigarette.

Let's watch the rivulets

carved in this hillside

run with restaurant milk.

Already you are blooming

under the lights

that scalp some.

Havoc is breeding

the central diamond

in your eye of eyes.

The soil's life reaches up

into your fertile web.

Sanctuaries cluster

all around you in a bright

stone-tapped mosaic

where I am

falling over.

I am the swelling

above your ribs,

the tigress heat

that makes tigers.

As the cliff blades

find my fur

my bones

will not let go.

The green rows open up

when you close your hands.

Palm leaves crack

when you avert your eyes.

Nets fling a harvest

of empty armor.

But the one who has

walked the longest

will not be clothed.

The sky gnashes

and impersonates

a purple wreath.

Thorns write on my pillow

and retreat into my veins.

The journey

is a smashed grain of sand

where the gardens

ripped a man.

The yellow flower trembles

on its patch of scrub.

My blades are careful

but her scowl

obtrudes the air.

I'm alien here

but the veins have got me.

I plow down the green gulf

into the holy river.

A cloud spits hail

on my dive

and the wake

retracts my eyes

to be born green

in the garden of sodom

one more blinking time.

A crescent there in black blue,

the sinking earth,

the fates of ice in current

like dying letters.