THE DEITY

Even as I create I am disappearing.

I spend myself on a world that rarely cares.

Weighed down with sacks of cast-offs,

spinning them all into threads

of blood-streaked gold.

Folded realms that speak only to me,

faint spirits in poison dust,

avoiding the telescopes.

Ropes of ectoplasm jutting

from ecstatic wounds.

Slabs of some discarded frozen magma

tree rings in vampiric flesh

exposed by blades and spicy vapor

paths deep in the park

that riots past midnight

glint of hooves fleet as the wind

touched by the embers

long slate fields

with acres of evaporating water

branches fallen on a stage lit

imitation moon.

I was addicted to some climactic vision

but the truth is in the wearing away,

the wearing away.  Diminishment.

A popped boil of the species

and its centerless limbs.

Look away from the annihilating wall.

Believe the erasing banner.

Still the loneliness of death calls

not like a dog or a wolf

but like a descending dove diving

in hunger to coast the fertile surface

a prophet with a sealed tongue

driving veins through sand.

I'm thinking about Iggy Pop tapes

thinking about armchair sex

at the dawn window and the end of an era

as the bottle fell faintly

from a failing hand

and the upholstery of memory

tore for a spiritual riot,

a mist of light purging

mannered speech from hammered air.

I'm remembering a moss covered ditch

with blueberries on each side

and the buzzing night gone white

through afternoon with its presence

all arrayed too soon.

The weight of nut-strewn acres

gray light of the cloaked high sun

the bone is a dismal dynamo

hot blood pumping threads

through the earth

in synergistic coils

kinetic clay of ears

formed up from bedrock death

frame cashed of the outlaw giver

bringing seeds like grains of sand

new rain from an ancient hand.

I have been beaten down

into the roots of this place.

I rise when the sap rises.

The blades of furniture

that crowd the shaded floor

were carved by aching hands.

The severed noose I wear

becomes a sacrament.

The ribs open like a bird's wings

from my half butchered instrument.

The ground divided by my feet

has lips like a curling mountain.

I unfurl as a flag of kingdoms gone

and fall down to become a fountain.

They pass their demons to me

and I pass mine back to them.

Colors of delight and fire

fly between our crooked fingers

themes of spines adjusted

through unstructured fields of space.

Strategies of angels

falling through volcanic mouths.

Dice bouncing on the frozen bridge

that leads under the highest tower,

a laser focusing to burn.

The head gear in the grid

turning rust to oil

resembling the divine stem

trembling to meet a clay urn

with water's yearning.

The princess standing on a massive turd.

Frozen excrement expanding in the streets

as we decorate our footprints.

Mania sprayed from mechanical clouds

emerging as empty thought.

Manufactured inertia running out to nowhere

walls paved with corporate religious digitech

drowning in a sea of rotten eyes

that only look down.

Seek through the wrecked fast food cathedrals

the forgotten knowledge

of the first painter's cave

and spirit's pigmentation,

of the monk's beard and the witch's pussy

meeting to crush away

the hasty grids of the enforced unreal

and the shit feeders who sleep

in its cursed android embraces.

We are each other's nightmares.

Worse and worse sequels.

Tongues bitten off faintly tasting

each other in a curdled vat.

Belated reversion to corrupted norms

singing in a fried wire

untraceable ghosts

decaying flesh with fresh

identity cards.

Biological imprisonment

making a joke of the soul.

Let the gash stare back

at the regretful knife

allow the blood to play

on these painted floors.

May the cells rise like the snores

of sleeping gods

who die in bed

dryly choking.

Hollow vines grow through

my body screaming

skulls of glue and glitter

cardboard cut out shadows

set against a gigantic wall

blades dancing in a blueprint cloud

the height of branches reaching

ethereal green to gobble

the blood from an unspent sky

Calendar pages have tastebud eyes

each blank runway

to a hidden cracked horizon

spreads its tendrils in an ocean mirror

wires with words in coils

each heated cone in its embroidered forest

every glass warped box thicket

trembling high in snowcloud lace

each botched flesh stapled reminder

every tight foot printed cube.

Yards of elastic teeth,

frayed ropes of glitter painted tinsel

fences folded up in boxes

wells blinking underground

in the canvas of night

for eyes and tongues that seek

from the sight of sleep.

November's gone to the hacked marrow

of last December's last moon,

skies of raging ruin

for stacked mammals,

fireworks from garbage can mouths

in the furrows of a bankrupt south.

Patios adrift in orchards

searchlight cartoons, friends of an enemy,

stretching to meet the locus

of the divine locater,

willows gone to reeds

hewn ragged on the hollow breeze.

Petals fallen stick to tar

from a lilac massacre

a meteor of melting sugar

stacks of bent car frames

swaying squeaking in the backyard

shocked rings of radiant stones

around the rhythm of a planet whirlpool

Strangers of my life, all

floating downstream

from the echo's land

that launched bright blood creation,

bone's cloak of burning sex

If favorite alleyways could

cut up the night and prevent it

from ending, if pine needles

could negotiate with a shaken branch,

if puddles frozen could enter

my bedscape from a careless dream

Maybe the beams of sound

are ever reaching,

maybe the road will flick like a tail

away these dead skin cells

and crawling light

to a faster track inhaling zero,

hands that touch electric trails

come to make up a sand hero.

The solitude I used to seek

has filled with ghosts

the sculpted stone is a live animal

the ruin of the cones and pyramids

collects into an obelisk

one raging slab suspended

over the sucking world

paths flashing under interim stars

guardrails from the wooden heart.

I reject all your suggestions, machine.

Time strapped on the deck

made a fungus for my dreams,

we recorded our tapes

over and over

to drown the closeness

into muffled fantasia,

we watched the rivers like

baby fingers grow and grow

as the rank sun cascaded

the solemn repetition

of the roof tiles

and all the antennas

cried and cried

and all the neighborhood cliff faces

ran with raw ink

pipe-strained leakage of artificial snow

as the glass dome grows.

My Frida Kahlo coffee cup

is stained with turmeric,

on a rack of metal wheels

next to the Charlie Brown

pine tree

laced in lights and dying.

We live in the most magical time yet.

Fecundity of ephemera

wearing a nonetheless soul,

the tunnel's tiny hole

a diamond-bright insight.

This will be the year of the cosmic Christ,

drunk on drums and dancing:

of a Christ who fucks finally at twenty five,

changing the nature of the mission.

Study the insects who made nuclear fission.

Wind billowing is not

expressing itself.

Long panels of sanded wood

groan without pain,

a brain-hinge gives way in reaction.

The sky is eating shit.

Clouds make poor ribbons

around the poison sun.

I learn to love the breeze

that doesn't make the weather report.

I learn to bleed and die

quietly.

The beauty of Satan is beauty,

that's the beauty of Satan

beauty with no moral meaning

no directed plan, just energy flares

sent up by an unquiet spirit

who suspects he's a flake of God,

God without authority getting

bashed in the skull,

and all the better for it.

Look at the cunt of the growing forest

lacerated with exposure by the moon.

Make a death wait til the depth of noon.

My life of silhouettes

has been bombed by flesh

strings lashing disembodied tongues

the beginning of infinity

sparks through a car stereo

rope ladders rolling down aluminum walls

bone hoops and hinges

tight berries of electric blood.

The dark blue dome is overhead

with all its white scrawled songs

paths are sprawling and yarnlike

with overnight blossoms

hills rippling in the force of divine vision

the savage seed erupting again

for its turn of tar and steel

cables cast on an ethereal wheel.

The red mouth of this night

is a tunnel in my train car room

it takes my tongue from the air

and the lines from my hands

it takes the songs I made with certain ladies

it takes the plaid fields

seen from retired buses

and the trunk of a solitary tree,

leaving a black halo

above the bare granite spot

that pools with many automatic questions

now that the roots are gone

and the twilight is a silent Earth

buttock hills bathed in lunar fire

Paradoxes rain from the powdery

white and blue evening sky,

the claws of you and I dancing

drip with ruddy spiritual blood.

I'm Ty Cobb, mean as hell

and won't put up with any shit.

Tap dancers on the roof

are shooting a music video,

I get intrigued.  I live

in a long lasso, torn

by distant stars.  I'm the frog man

going to Mars.  You're the seller

of empty space.

Put up a shell of shackled tendrils

over the square pond

and the knuckles of the moon

that come too soon on a blue rail

bones lost in circumstantial hail

and the belly of a hilltop,

tones wheezing to be heard

in the chemical herd

and the shine of a goldenrod clearing

the chains of a mirror

the shames of a lettered sword

these cocktails while the dragon snores.

Latto, Ice Spice, Sukihana, Glorilla.

I love my bitches, the meaner the better.

Fuck Drake and Kendrick Lamar,

I want a street poetess

to shake her booty in my face

and tell what will be the way,

the word, the verb

she carries like a noun

in pink spandex.

Put the hex on those whiny

self-obsessed brothers,

take me shining into your tribe,

brown gates of Eden broken and

resold to my older soul

where these goddesses have

hooks like braille

and my ear's a sail on their

bright red tongues.

All I have to do is exhale,

and my criminal soul

will finally reach the earth.

Tall wooden flowers

with lightbulb heads

attest to the miracle.

Metallic seeds have been

sown here in the clay

of congealed blood,

sonic buzz of a circular flood,

trains veining the skin

of the battered concrete globe,

eye-slits of the immortal arch

that spans the river's theater park

and makes my vertebrae a tuning fork

of pronged ambitious futures.

Lungs light up like bags of gold

cornices and their spoon-curved

corners, shapely in western wind

bright blueprint's gash of blooming zones

from my fetal warming through

to my phantom bones.

Hatred makes the plumes bloom

out of the rock, hatred lights up

the sky with hot celestial blood,

hatred sows the necessary seed

for the curse of love.

The sting of hatred makes beauty possible,

its tongue-thorns of internal tearing

make an armor of lightweight gold.

Stacks of singing coin

tower over its emergence,

coin and its paper of underwear

surging like a glassy sea

between the dungeon walls of love

that hatred liberates from above.

I am the ectoplasm

that brings you into life with gifts

but I also drink your blood

to even it up

you are a jewel in the snow

of northern reaches

that skidded to get there

over flat rooftops glazed

with industrial paint

cliff's edges beaded

with melted simulacrum trees

lakes frozen in volcano mouths

wings of a fertile mechanism

that birth fresh triplet wings from each tip

mercury's music in a singing dish for cell division

my own form inverted in a mirror slab

calling all the dogs of the land.

Masks that flash

fake diamonds and feathers

spilling blood colored flowers

zones previously unknown on Earth

long tendrils from eroded letters

suppurating on distorted stone

where are my chains in velvet

where is my orchid mouth

the thread that stitches bricks together

trailing over a volcano's lips

in a chariot of digitized energy

in the heart of the electromagnet storm

cups of gold holding

bright imitative liquid

pulsating forms that seed

the twilight with a cold sunrise

taut radiance of slashed and unreal walls

my dark twin at the helm

of soft unfolding hallways

monstrous angelic architectural sex.

These crumbled lives

are spread in rain

gashed hearts leak battery acid

through the dictionary veins

acres of terminology

that surround the body

sky pulsing like a fake wood grain

exposed to rancid heat

meat river for the beauty that eats

and is redeemed between

the borders of the gilded frame.

The lace of nests

that cluster in the ribs

of a radiant bridge

is blood polymer

headed for the vast

transforming wormhole

to be sprayed in webs

and unforgiving machine arms

contrasted by a fleshly pale guitar

and phallic scimitar

time's intricate altar

made of unholy metal

escape from automatic dreams

the oars of toy ships

scraping bowls that turn to crimson lips

in the hour's last butane gasp

bright thorns of clitoral tongues

vast iron mazes ranked in tons

on ground so softly heaving

freed land of false angels leaving

unreluctant hooves.

The celestial vampires

in their darkening shrines

funneling a rope of space

through fractured time

writing on the ice that mirrors light

with string fingers

and fiber optic eyes

drinking from the lamps

of bioluminescent jelly

savoring the scum of ruddy roots

that fish the abyss hereafter

hacking at a fabric's flash

that never wanes or wavers long

the crushing octagonal song.

The return of magic

is a desperate business.

Let's masturbate the blood,

its every cell.

Paint the inner spiral

of the seashell

with an astral tongue.

Let the kitten colors run.

The sun rests in its fire

on the seventh wall.

Snakes coiling make a ragged

mess of their shed skin.

The soil reaches peaks

of cool vibration

in the rows of rain.

The love of life

is a tooth of pain

buried in the groaning grain.

The lights of the skeleton

have gone out.

The shadow still stands

like a blade of iron

with branches.

A smooth stone

rests in my hand.

I will break

the ice around my soul

by not throwing it.

Fences glint from the outskirts,

the wilderness is coming closer.

The fortress I left behind

is a ball of wet paper

caught up in a crooked wire.

The ledge sweats underneath

my ticking frame.

The cliff's drop tells me

I'm a dragon's tongue,

watching from outside

the airtight windows.

The tinsel of roads

is a rope of roaches.

Its net catches thoughtless dreams,

the bones of the hopeless.

The cave that paints my mouth

the moons of my many seeds

the runner that wrote this.

Paths part in the bud

and fornicate with the aftermath.

The staff without a flag

punctuates the desert.

Waters gather in the cloak of the ground

and sing to hell.  A numb claw clenches

the clapper of a ringing bell.

Roads that climb across the valley

washed by rivers, scrubbed clean

by the grains of blind bodies

as ornamented trees rise

from a broken spine

and painted tongues lash

from painted faces

I follow the web of water

suspended in the wake

of a fleeing sun

the carrier of ropes that run

up to their cranking pulley

with a robot's face and fish teeth

the glint of a barbed wire wreath.

I am from the winter.

I ignite the curves

of astral lakes

as I ascend throughout

the worlds.

Black holes break upon

my wingless wonder.

Dawns come and go beneath

no overhang.  I open like a lung

before a rain of dead matter

then cough it out as a spray

of gray moths.  Their patterns

iridescent take on many shades

one orifice of galaxies arrayed.

In the attic trying

to decipher the great book

he shot himself through the mattress,

traced in luminescence

from the neon signs.

There was no answer from the void,

no croak of hinges.

Dreams filtered through

the violation of consciousness,

the turbid mutation

of answered prayers.

I'm so glad to be beneath

the weight of your shit.

I see the platform cracking,

the glad green light.

The serpents are shedding maps,

the undergrowth prowls

with its own tongue foot.

Sanctuary is in

the severed umbilical.

Aisles cool with vacancy are

filing outward from

the buckled sun.

We could walk there

but we wouldn't.  We will

drip down the charcoal cliff face

like veins.  There will be

no lasting pain.

Flesh translated into steam

out on the shoreline

where the scarecrows lean

swerving lines that fly kites

under purple atmosphere

boundaries fleecing flowers

from the fabric hold

of cement fences

coal running from around the eyes

a manic fate designed.

Born to roam unholy Earth

from the time beginning,

in a ball of hair,

lost in the high

cemetery of the wind,

a bench of stone to sit up there,

somehow.

Growing to love the languor

of death on the prowl in suede

alert to the tongues of midnight

feeling their fade retract dreams

forms coalesce on the curtains.

Climbing hills that ripple

where the guardrails

are chains of gold

where the eye-holes

in the mask of clouds

are beautifully unoccupied

my life takes place between

two blood orange bookends

rolling roads of tar

among the vines and trees

my sacred light bulbs

and laughing skulls

change color in an instant

with my dancing blood

all alien mercies

far flung rejected loves

and rings of crooked rocks

adorn my frozen whirlpool

all the feathers of plastic birds

that the sun spat out in June

are living in December's moon.

In rags of daylight

I feel the strength of dead tribes

all alive in me.

The private glory

of the persecuted,

the lovely falls of every

one inevitable and great

thrillingly call out my name.

In the sanctum of the dark,

the shaken snapshot of another hour

passed walking

in long halls of outdoor space,

crucified in unison

with the many thousand things

humming, engines of milk tubes

and massive driveways abandoned

stones that once were marked

and now are worn.

Frustrated emanations from the crypt

long autumns in a frozen cone

watching orange fire descend

on the brown land

and lightning flow like bugs

over a screen made of melted sand

and the bees locked into the field's edge

by a blaze of activity

hands moving like brushes

and brushes moving like hands

a texture from another land.

Now the act of creation is suffered

I can only go on alone.

Circuits replicate at the borders,

clouds ripple that have no feeling.

The tumult of lights over dark-lit water

centuries in a second

bronze doorways in space

the haze around a burning eye.

Forty years pretending

to a be a human

this cocoon is thin

and translucent

I've been drinking

the sun and moon

from a cascading sky.

Even the invisible dogma is bullshit.

Fronds sinew in the free air,

clouds are merciless, ferns and fecal

deer marks, the yield of clay

multiplying in error, a steel wall.

I built myself a new soul

and already it's corroded

the bitches of mercy

have left me here

dramatic masks adorn

the faces of kinetic water

panes of clay with electronic antlers

broadcasting all the glories of the damned

to the vortex of an empty room.

The beautiful spawn of hate

with all its ornate detail

ravishing the suffocating world

of law and order

giving gray flesh pink lungs

ink tipped porcupine spines

protruding from the veil of flesh

fangs closing like a ribcage

around a sullen fecal heart

bones tap dancing

on a cement swollen piano lid

top hat gone with tortured breezes

provoked into an erratic storm

planetary rings of painted fingernails

swirling from its ashen fart.

The hot green trees

and the half moon

my bored blood thinking of

disappearing branches

metallic inlets where the river eats

stacked dinner plates

like slime on a slab of thin mints

these benches are spectral bones

the edges of dark waters

are lapping at ancient ground

like a stabbed tongue in a ring of oil

I am the guardian of ways

that no longer exist.

I no longer pretend

to be an angel

or a demon.  

My life has taken on

the contours of a man.

It's not enough: it doesn't

need to be.  In the shells

of our mortality

some resonance

still persists.

And it surfaces

on waves of flowerets

somewhere beyond

comprehension.

These rulers, these

sweet and blinded faces,

all are void in potential eternity,

sent evaporating through

the sculpted fossils

where the masks are

wan and lean:

and only the grave is green.

The stars are hard and cold

in orbs of self destroying light

I'm everybody's prisoner and nobody's son

I have no companions and I yield to nothing

the escapes are razor thin but infinitely deep

they shine through the cracks in everything

betrayed by flowers and concrete

to the soundless banks

of another bleached world

come feel me twilight

cast your cutting shadows

into my mindless skin

cardboard trunks are crashing

into the soundstage scenery

let's sing while we kill each other

with sightless apathy

let's carve out a metal cap

with flashing forcefields

in the wound that sleeps and sleeps.

Into the decaying belly

I drive beauty as a spike with sparks

to burn away the flakes

of long diseased organs

in loving, sublime incineration

where lonely pillars

shiver into gold.

Quiet paths made secret

by rushing rivers

nude runs that ended

under a deep black rainbow

feet scratched by jagged roots

faces stained by the half-grilled

ribcage of the sun.

Can you hear the purple sound

 of the pouring

the pouring of alchemical branches

from the sifted heart of man

can you hear the pouring

of a thousand resurrected things

gushing into existence

with a raving roar.

I know that I'm a fool of bone

and melting flesh

upon a small tower of shit

I laugh frequently at the ripping gears

at the glitter of machine teeth

I have nothing left to say to the grass

or the molecules of soil it springs from

what a joy to burn inside these rings of gas

these ribbons of bright planetary trouble

decorating a beautifully smeared sky

reflected on ruined waters

that I drink with an electric cup

in the meat slab light of sunrise

selling cobwebs to plastic shufflers

goblets of grease to paper passerby

and a necklace of bullets and rancid tampons

to yours truly

because I'm so fucking real

and so fucking great

Bright feathers can hold up

the crushing weight of oblivion.

Silken hair beheld

enlightens the tongue.

Cool waters of mercy

invade the poet's turmoil

and give the cosmic visage

an atomic leer.

A grill of white fire edged red

with a wormhole background

lurking in the lake mouth

of a blue guitar marooned

on a polished wooden floor

bones trickling with time's

little appetizers

clear tables of melted sand.

Spirit is the destroyer

of cultural illusions

and it rises

when one stops listening

to the voices of human beings

as if they were God.

Satan crucified

more beautiful than ever--

nightfall gleams with dark radiance

like a greasy tool.

Guitar strings letting go

the dust of moths

old loves departing

with their seasons--

the subtle flame

lasts like a granite floor.

With a stranger's guitar

and a bus-long six-seater automobile,

purple as the wind

that brought him there.

Odilon Redon eye hovering

under the neon convenience sockets.

Scraped by with a rose tattoo.

Painted the alleyways, secondhand swag.

Profile voodoo.  Tentacle

hovering over dark waters,

Discreet notation, delivered

at the radio station.

Tin foil skeletons

with hats for handles

tracks for a swift lightning.

With a stranger's guitar

and the plush owl curtains,

and the smooth stones

of an abandoned fishtank

and a sunset for hours.

There's a liquid tiger

in my mercury eyes

bones writing on rice paper screens

with arterial tongues

ghosts drifting between transparent shelves

selecting shapes from dying dancers

the glowing trash that spells an ancient name

wires that tell where the lungs are hiding

ponds of jellied vapor

that keep the key in the flashing fog

stripes lashing like the beams

of the last raw god

claws climbing the ship side

of painted gold that glides

and has its own pinnacle's whistle

a mouth of folded wings

dripping like a question mark

on these shores of uncertain mercy

roaring at the sulfurous film

and the lunar dancers

growling for the vacant halls

and a spirit thirsting to be thirsty

drinking from a radiant wound

I drink acid from the sky

don't mind meandering

so long as it leads

to the blood volcano

something has exaggerated

your walk and your wallet

floors are open ever after

in the shine of your far-cast eyes

masked monsters in need of error

storm the graffiti

all is waffle iron walls

protein screaming and rushing

the sun with a flag

When autumn is a spaceship

hovering through space-shot corridors

light doubling back on itself

on the outskirts of a dream

when the edges of the bedcurtain

flicker over the sweat

of a living concrete floor

and the poor flowers

of a half-hatched sanctuary

meld and flex and fall

dim closets opening outward

toward radiant star fuel

a hovering galactic anchor

slab swimming with belly of lichens

over the underwater fires

and prairies of gelation eggs

longs strands of conscious green ribbons

a mercury sun

the myriad tongues of one plunge

recording hyperspatial hereafter

Hours poured over me like sand

I looked for the reflection of a knife

to cut the rooted song out of my heart

my hands were swarmed with crawling grains

the rattled speakers drowned

I regained a moonstruck surface

bones withdrew around me

from the solid light

torn flowers from my ribs

keys opening forbidden drawers

in a distant room.

I swim uncertainly in the alien air

of a lifted curse, trying to throw off

the bedraggled phantom,

the facelessness of oceanic days

revealing no pulsing center.

Paths flicker in the breeding woods

I watch the tails of feminine spirits

beckoning the races

of the happily damned

the fullness of unbroken trances

fried orchids in a distant dance.

She is the queen of these

square avenues, full jewel

ornate in a map made

by the grayest drones, shining alone.

I lurk around the painted pavements,

hoping for the kiss of her honeypot,

under the froth of noise

hungry for her cool poise

hot with her reflection

on my soul of glass, her superb ass.

I want to sow new arches

on these old foundations,

watch hallucinated stone

bow over open courtyards,

a garden paused

in trembling tranquility

for the black doves of her feet

flowers showered on the dead street

music pulsing from captured cicadas.

She is the fount of sacred lips,

her name is shaded.

The lid of time yearns upward

like a wet curtain

from her screen of eyes

to scan my frame into the fire of days

flowing down the cloth of mountainsides

I drink from her smoky thighs

in the crossing of hawk shadows

like a healing wound

hatched bright beneath

a bubblegum umbrella.

The blue stem crashes through

the eighth angel of my mind

on a glazed rooftop, in an empty

coffee shop cleared for my dream,

ink blurred of the pages turning.

Kisses turned aside that turn

to soggy bricks and land

in a ragged wall.

All my renegade companions

are gone, the silk remainder

of a sowing machine ship

that plowed through the side

of the main road and

into the purple water

flickers in twilight and dawn

expressionless as a pawn

the departure is mostly invisible.

My claws on this cliff's dried root

reaching for dirt in air

my breath and the breath of the ages

just barely taking turns

as the old world melts into steam below

and dancing throngs are covered

in waves of red clay

with traces of iron

there's a cinema of bones

hysteria within the cloistered glow

of pipes pushing water

the cage that speaks with one voice

far from the feline choice

of nobody's passenger

memorizing wind and rain

the luxuries of chosen pain.

Cheap apartment jewels

chain links emerging

in the layers of red gas

descending Jupiter's robes

in an orb of entranced anti-gravity

playpens for the bones of outcast souls

soaring over vine-broken equipment

cells and their lust for water

pythons gulping eggs

where wet wings languish

lines gone jagged

on a quake broken highway

tar dripping way to land

retaken by trees

long lanes of dappled ground

evaporating speech

nights and their hunger

on sleep bag benches

scraped nights of a light bulb moon

This pale moth eaten planet

still has a few twilight sparks

the menacing threshold is a string that plays

with my rubber clad metallic skeleton

I will take Cloud Springs Road

through the bliss of hellfire

I am the snake on the stick

unfurled eternally

this mateless abandon is the painter's wheel

these seeds that glint like bullets

are a message unknown

the itchings of this vast and fractured womb

the bump of hills in a tiny mirror

heaps of gravel radiant in neglect

poles aslant above electric wreckage

the tongue erected from a sleeping tongue

a pearl of many seas

hacked veil flashing from world to world

seams bleeding screen printed fireworks

the blade's edge in a swarming iris

notching the umbilical spine

Bitter worm of consciousness

see the streetlight flowers

let go of the planet skin.

Ghostly vapors dancing

on a wooden glove

three stories high

stuck to a melted hill

chains of daylight and black

feathers of night gone.

Cartoon lips breathing

from the flicking of an ancient film

desk lamps ticking with tender mercy

of solitude's divine

and nameless wish alive

in long blue flame

the threads of an untouchable climb.

Summer is leaving me softly

gray clouds shattered by sun

are distilled in glass

five nets of oysters flying through the air

break on the prow of an iron dream

with rising portholes

crowned with frozen steam

overlooking a silk mattress

of cooling foam and flashing flowers

on the borders between teeming worlds

your singing mouth a chrism

where I go to be gently scarred

soft arms in a shark's tooth necklace

baptism in undeterred blood

wide shores of interlocking lights

moon shine on turtle shells

and pelts of deer

songs climb down the chasm

of these weapon walls

where the sacred oil falls

like hesitant water

unbound in your tumbleweed

of bending rhythm

may the basins of bright time

release and shine

autumn's height of departure

with a thimble on a crimson crest

tipping slightly over.

Grapes fresh from the vine

crushed against the frame

of days anointed by

a multitude of tongues,

fronds from the cliff of green

that elevates my vertebrae

through encircling black hair,

up through the clouds that speak

and the clouds

that become searching limbs,

wetness of days on the wane

that emit a twilight shimmer

by guardrails of some activating

words that are always missing

from the passage of wings

over lonely courtyards,

each of my ears is a bird skeleton,

I go to the ships of bronze

shifting interspatial tablets,

I go to the arms of her earth

who moved the broomsticks

and the waving hands,

I go to her turning over

buckets of clean linen

as I run in dreams,

I go to her tub of mercy

as an ancient spirit anxious

to shed the solitude of flesh

and wield her hands on me

like a waiting sign

and a flower from the howling grave.

Paths are carving through the coils

of deep wet woods

swamp's fever of vine flowers

reaching through metal fences

and floating bones

the cursive link

between times is formed

of melted gold among dancing blades

love made on a sandstone bridge

in wreaths of criminal twilight

for those who resist a common death

and ride a fiery saddle

through a lunar escape

the knuckles of deific fingers

popping like bombs

my hiding place of intertwining tendrils

emits a pained antenna

to a wrecked world where

one glowing siren

imperturbably cooks the air

with rivers and waterfalls of dark

dark hair and purifying stare.

If there are still mermaids singing,

if my feet will float above the ground

to take me to my ship of angles,

if the veins of leaves

blowing in a purple wind

will turn me into articulate smoke,

maybe the rocks will speak for themselves

and pour like concrete,

maybe rivulets of hot ink

will bisect the raging sun and suck me in,

maybe the ground will sin with me

against the dying day

and stringy devils live again

in my swooping songs.

Maybe the walls will blow like wands

and the museum of ice

become a lasting bronze.

Your beauty is heavenly.

Out here in the circling driveway,

I sweep up the shattered mirrors,

I long for your face behind

clear unbroken glass, the cruel

engines hum around us.

What do I know of heavenly beauty

in your feline form?  All I know

is a series of desperate dreams,

each with a succulent imprint

and a sweetly wounding name.

Let me in to your dipped darkness

and the brine of your planetary fulcrum

that men and mobiles and beaten buildings

fly past as your delicious orbit increases--

vivid daughter of earth, send me the days

of your smile and your strut

across foot-blessed floors.

Wild nights are gone

beneath a floodlit scene of funerals

for nameless dead dancing on film

I encounter empty fields

spilled popcorn on green grass

old fashioned techno music

in my rerun dreams

we ran from party to party

on crooked country roads

with neon platform islands

where our timely incantations

were repeated and understood

those times have been blown to hell now

and maybe they never happened

I was laughing on a sex drenched

fire escape walkway

black ladders pulled up from the street

like leather belts or some unseen photo reel

in those pictures I am dying in slow motion

I've got a notion the fireworks are all exploded

and I'm alone at the bar and the bar is abandoned 

deep in some night that never arrived

I pause to drink a flashing flask

of disappearing water

and write this on polished wood

that's going dull beneath the curling paper

Hills grow from the ripples of the earth

stems in a torn mouth

beckon to vivid clouds

for dark oceanic weeping and

pierced pillars with viaduct roots

radiating torn concert posters

myriad tongues of dirty mercy

the moss floors of flowing cool canals

sag to the curb and watch

cranes lifting elegant gutters

feel my poor fingers

on the length of your multiplying spine

sip the soda of eloquent corpses

distilled to the roil of their final songs

the river through the graveyard

is long with many turnings and

the glint of many fragrant metals

heat of somber lips where an eclipse

boils and runs

the sun drips radio error

two notes for a high-strung ton

this risen clump of rabbit bones

and reptilian dung

stretched wide with violin eyes

where the moon is a wire hanger

and a singing black hole is hung

Let the light frost of December

write its prayers into a higher ground,

may the empty heights

reflect the mirror of the heavens

clouds of blue and skies of yellow dust

the shine of an unshared park bench

rails of granite up against

the swollen pond's frozen beach

the reach of jagged paths

diamond eyed owls

in the hard fought woods

footprints of marble radiance

along the glowing green intertwined

of falling and rising trees

in sheaths of erotic moss

bright city's distant glaze

an ice bouquet of water torches

frayed rind of its light

on insistent gray

as the tracks to eternity fade

under the dome of days.

Against the wall of sand

in conscious sleep,

in the place of dead fathers,

in the dreams of

the rose-tinted womb,

within the flesh-lit ghost

roaming endless shelves,

hands prowling through

the cryptic instruments of unseen fate,

with a signature and a vessel,

blades doubled and securely bonded,

strings roaring in the purple valley

by the peaks of crashed wings

flooded towers of glass and steel

the laughing of a crooked mouth

in some free-form south,

angelic horns in seas of silk

red eyes aloft a velvet pause

of lightspeed armchair

where the ear bones are fiber optic

and the vast shell purrs

scarred bright by dying scripture

a watery cave

the tongues of a fecund grave.

Beauty of beauties, you touch me

from the deep expanse of time.

Here you are between the sidewalks

and the restaurants,

here you are smiling, a fragment

blossomed of all that's come and gone.

Vines carry me up the wall

to your glowing window,

the hands of clocks tremble

in place as you move

in the gown of your birth,

as the earth gives up its cinnamon

and its licorice sticks

I come to find you on a fine boned wind,

on the structure of unseen things

I am coming for a final kiss.

I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck.

Time whirls around me

like a dancer's gaze.

I'm in the haze of echoes

that are lost, I pay

for all the drowned minutes.

Caves blooming

inside a ragged mountain

are all for me, I drink

from the split moss.

The spring of tangled water

is alive in undirected violence.

The rock is not departed

from these slippery paths.

The sand far

from the tide that lashes

lands in letters

that are never planned.

The ax head moves

without its wand of glass.

The wrath of stasis

is a frozen summer's catch.

I am the mouth of jeweled cases,

the trash eating to become clean.

I am the thread of order derived

from all chaos, the spiritual

extinction of math.

My dying is the dome unformed

lit up in a flash.

Your cheeks, your eyes,

your smile of mischief.

You are radiance and rippling light,

the glint on a dark tide.

Jade born of sinking avenues,

the hope of frayed and reborn things,

electric current over

the deer-trampled pastures,

pure water in the shell,

a tap on the quiet doorstep.

How I long to taste you,

how I long to drink from your beauty.

Let me go under your spell

as my last desperate trick,

snuff me out in your life of songs

to surface with cojoined flame,

let me be the cactus in your flashing pot,

your tendril in this desert

where I scheme like a madman

to be your one possessed

and shuddering fool.

Let me kiss your thighs

while the fireflies float and fall.

A cool sky programmed with ancient voices.

Nurseries of vine-grown brains

encased in whispering plastic.

Paths for the lucky losers

massaging feet that tread to the abyss

marks of activated shoes

on deep red soil.

Seams of light tormented

crackle at the concrete surface

spelling their bent graffiti

on wounded pillars

as the bridge creaks

like a baked piano's lid.

Wings of a color absorbent glider

crashing into sensate glass

staring at robot beauty

heartless legion with complex threads.

Machinery of soul eclipsed

by a ring of beds.

The sunsets are falling apart on me

thorned vines rip open the netherworld

frozen tubes of honey protrude

sweet melting chains

in the demonic background I see

quiet fingers readjusting a nervous thread

coins thick with wax

and the arrows that attack

a dancing burden

eyes that cut the ice

to half circles and bent triangles

all reflecting the beauty of a battered piano

platforms of singing gas

tongue threaded milk leaking microphone

wet shoes of seeking grass

crawling over bones of bats

From an attic I smoked and

watched the town die

I let the strings of sabotaged fog

escape my fingers

watched the glitter of shattered mica

adorn the separating roads

from its mad mother the mountain

quaking caves and beads of dust

struck by the dust light

in the wounded inner dome

of the planetarium

alone in fields of seats slanted back

bones dangled by electrical cords

animated by the restlessness

of rubber skies and windowsills

dripping with hot sugar

fields of broken space and vacated places,

no swimmers now, chairs twisted

on the concrete dock and cracked

raft alone on frost

where the smokers lost keys and danced

and the eggs came in from the water

to be free from mechanical eyes

in the depth's churning

chased across man's pressurized land

and returned to a purple lining

as the multiple queen of wings

and redesigned things

crashes my snoring heart

into a cross-thatched corner

staring over the combed hair

of lawns when the comb is gone

and dawn is the hinge

of some recklessness

flicked the threshold's lips

where a chimney writes

the birds in streams

and even the corpse dreams.

Stunned in the passageway,

rug fibers on bare feet

head lit up in an abandoned workplace

the silver racks move past

from ghostly hands to ghostly hands

they cross crude rivers of gold

the path is lined with

choruses of spaghetti

slithering to the two eyed night

one dark handed painter

giving glitter to clouded daylight

and peacock outskirts to the rain's door

stairwells blooming in the eagle scan

of left behind winter

fiddled electric landmarks

in the crucial dawn

where her ribbon was the only one

and the rocks cried out from

her honey running

bright racks in a fishpaint lane.

STEVE

Til the essence dissolves the time in a fine acid

He records the days of the dying

He has a scar from after birth

He sighs huddled in the hallway

following thought after thought

into some dark canyon

of the mind that is not articulated,

he stares into the realms of what's gone

the windows are wide blank rectangles

in the summer storm.

We watched the active shadows

tear all the curtains down,

we cleaned the hell's corner campus.

Angled in gray spaces

by the length of lengthening

American autonomy,

spun in a tall whippoorwill's call

for the pull of studs

in the laser boy's stomach.  We're

watching the TV.  The TV is

watching itself on TV, the TV is

watching itself watch us.

Waterfalls of light from

thrift store doorways,

the corners of the dream scraped

bare by dreaming claws,

lines of sand on shelves

where pages stood,

a sail of flesh torn wide

above a raging spirit

diving to inhabit the depths,

taking on the fertile magic

of encrusted wrecks,

a beaten nude on sand arena floors,

thinking of an egg in a whirlpool,

thinking of a golden frame

with cracked glass,

thinking of a cardboard error

and a corrected bone,

thinking of so many drowned

lives in radiant plastic

all alone.

Woman of the earth, come for me.

Make me at home in your smile.

Let these meteors be

mistaken for stars, let all

the fortune cookies open.

Let the little scrolls fall out

on a savage highway stilled

in a moment of pre-dawn sleep,

let the little fetters roll.

Make a satin bow sing

at both ends, let your skin sweat

like a simmering bowl.

Give me the silk paths

of a suffering twilight,

let the pools rebound

with tortured alphabets,

let the dancing bones assemble

in a lit hangar, for a craft

that comes and is repaired

in the clefts and little valleys

of your trickling hair.

Let the snare recline

and snooze in its ooze

of echoes.  Let the little bands

play around a cliff

of raging violins.  Make the latch

knock at the geometric haze

and the angels laze on polished maple.

May your thighs detect

a radiant series in my fork

of resurgent tongues, may

the meat sunrise come.

Allow the flag's retreat

from stems and spirals

of a liquid landscape,

shape with your dancing hands

my lurking and immediate brand,

all the glues holding laser-scarred

sand, emit your chain of eggs

where my hearth is waiting

with a trail of ice leading

to crammed cases and

a salvaged piano's bright

wedge of breathing land.

JADA OF WENDY'S

Block hips with a feverish smile

thick and pretty, beautiful form

enveloping the skyline.

The sidewalk is a river

under your womb.

Your friend with the green smoke

is drifting away on it.

You are present as the woman of earth,

rich and deep Gaia, mother of caresses

and rare cutting blades.

Your shade is a glow.

Your glass of hours is a window

I'm into.

The universe spreads.

The stars collapse and shine.

Her hair is as long as

her whole back and more.

I am a toy of the gods, a blonde

plaything.  I can't say anything.

MEDUSAN SHADE

In a grid of yellow lights she knelt alone

departing from me in a hot gray anomaly

desperate swamps of massed hands

grasping after her dark haired whirlwind

I cut them all off with a thorn handled sword

and blinked at the clear new water

a couch was melting on the shore

a spirit of glass corners was walking

in the fractured steam

I took the flash of light's imprint

to a cave of suckling geodes

file cabinet drawers began protruding

from irregular stone walls

my bed's in the peak of a cone's pinprick

glimpse of knotted purple sky

her sash is a train I can't roll off of

to tumble into grassy trenches

and shake away the acidic clasp

of her dyed fingernails in my

creature of a spine

I watch as the crushed snakes leave the road

through rot or the scan

of some mesmerizing saucer

and they all depart

until the staff in the desert

is upright stripped and bare

I play the divine blueprint's copied record

with the screw of some lost nautilus

I burn the candles and her scent

escapes my rising nerves

the marble bench where I sat

is broken through to the earth

porches of the damned resound

with strange laughter

I am a cipher in a wheel of ass

the last loverboy of the hurricane's

lips gone higher

BURNING INK

Poles reverse in foreheads that were mine

the chiming dance of many previous bodies

swirling a palm leaf's sexy blade in ash

smeared to be washed away

on written stone.  These secrets seep in

seamlessly to bone.

I am the virus in my own system.

Plates wobble on the sticks around

my pillar of blood.  The obelisk

between my ribs has a rabid circuit.

Electrified chain link fences

undulate in my latest sunglasses.

Life is the chalk stick of raging dreams:

the cut tornado is organized.  The entrance

to the storm disrupts the storm

kissed imperceptively.  The eels

of my burned irises have swum

on a wordless plan.  The rivulets

of pained rivers flow down

the sown seams of my hands.

Skeletons prance my roof-ridge

grinning sand for the bashed

servant of light I will never be.

This shield of programmed ants

is all I need.  The seed turns

in the exit's cancelled breed.

My ghosts can breathe.

BLUE LIGHT

I float across the yard like smoke.

The perfumed satin trees are at my back.

Three suns are circling the stressed planet,

a fourth is on its way like a thrown raid.

And everywhere blue light, blue light

through the masks and keyholes

of this generative stranger's house,

blue light as I fall to my knees

on a white bearskin rug,

staring at the shutters that flash

my name in a spellbound code.

The horses, the horses, the horses.

Snarling through the vortex

like a snake not bound by time

carving the wheat field, hissing past

the walls of oiled stone.

At the well's mouth in a lunar haze

a lichen coated tongue mocks

this disembodied water from gone faces

the glaze of consciousness is on a maze

of birth outside the reasons for that birth,

a miracle of mirth in rhyme

blue light from necessary slime.

ATLANTIS PRIME

From the fearsome darkening forest,

from a busted tent flap and a poison pen,

from the avalanche of dead deeds

gathering in juniper

next to the recorded funeral,

from the shit stains in the Bible

from the beauty of empty skyscrapers

from the veins let out of the failing body

from the radiation that spreads

like ferns and lace

over frozen farms and laughing

holographic ballerinas,

from the war paint become permanent

on the wreckage of my soul,

from the tongue of savage life

investigating a fresh fissure,

from the barricades of salt

peppered with burnt sperm and eggs

of the last survivors,

from the braids of steel

on a ship of glass caged light

that blinks back at a sentient sun

when the thunder has pissed the bed

at the end of articulate lightning,

when the cords draw tight

on mere rhetoric's ashen throat

from the womb of alien dreams

I will slide down the blade smiling,

sketching the cave of ink-black seed

on your emptied face

with the sorrow of one who is laughing,

watching the grates of steam pour metallic air

into the lungs of the underworld,

watching it gather there

in clumps of ethereal bramble

in a land without atmosphere,

seeing the kiss above a vacant plateau

lose its bodies of destiny

and its sanctified plans,

losing its assembled meaning

and its cool invading afterlife,

losing its curse words and the blind

faith alleys that shoot out from

its diseased blueprint

like the bones of falsely animated wings,

from all that whistles strangely under the ocean

and bristles in a cloud of decaying thoughts,

from the existence that singes the exit

I sing of an American world.

SOLILOQUY

Things come together like a folding star.

The rug she wore, the halls of solid matter

walked by spirits who can move

through glass and steel.  The painted lines

in vast parking garages, the dances of the drunk

on echoing tar.  The camera picks up

similarities, but God's all-encompassing

cyclops eye sees the sweet differences.

The way the vertebraes corrode

like pillars of separate salt

at the retirement party of a great killer,

in the wounded heel of the usual bandwagon,

laughing his head out, the night

that all the leaves fall off

all the trees at once.

An angel with gem studded wings

and a head of featureless pearl

is guarding my dubious progress.

The path lays jagged as the skids

of many unexpected landings

light shrieks from its corners

like the seeping of a subtle drug.

The thorns of yielding bushes

tell me where I am.  The ham

glazed horizon drops a pineapple circle

on a concrete sidewalk sketch

of the last human hand.

I walked on her dress while she

nakedly commanded the band.

The channels open up like tunnels

of sifted tongues in tapped water.

I left my double like a ghost

on a chain of stools at the local bar.

He multiplies like emptiness tends to

the way reflections shatter

but only so far.  He took the time

so I would need all mine.

In the rain like veins, in the roaring vapor

in the rule of objects over lost creatures

in the sutures they attach between themselves

on bitten clay and rashes of flowers

on cutting boards where colors are cut up

to feed plates decorated with dancing skeletons

subway cars of liquid metal

pouring ferns of bladed silk

a spent hand and a wandering circus

the jitters of a forsaken deity

the scripture of a snail that seals it all

egged windows of an ailing temple

the jungle goes deep and the desert is hard

things come together like a folding star

the fingers of a working monk are the whole yard

and the tag is poison

and the rag sells

but the work is done for the nine realms

and the twelve realms and the infinite realms.

THE PHARAOH AND THE MERMAID

The pharaoh and the mermaid

met on a sea of sand that she

then turned to water

pharaoh's throne was floating on it

like a bubble of gold

skies grew as their intertwined images

adorned the turning obelisks

in the courtyards where they came

to raise hell and dance with panthers

in the days when there was more

than one sun and more than one moon

like tunnels with radiant archway braces

that just keep multiplying

were the pharaoh and the mermaid washed out

or did they just swim away one day together

into the ragged reaches of unknown orbits

are they still imprisoned here

and if so when will they break out

with matter warping throngs of pipers

in their train of deep millennia's resonance

quaking the fragile kingdoms

ebbing on credit now

will they be grand and gilded

will they have to be vicious

will the wild celebration win the heart of man

I think you and I could be

the pharaoh and the mermaid

lost in some local desert

we will begin to invent

A vulture for all shiny things

streamlined into the fissure

for escaping dreams

by a slippery crew in scaled masks

hovering clouds that project

the twisted alphabet

of one night bands and burst

drumsticks under the autumn evening

that has come early as the banisters turn

and the ornate staircases climb

across elegant ceilings

I'm a dwarf in a hollow pine

for this breaking light and pale

shore of persistent echoes

handholds carved in massive thorns

of some celestial thicket far above

peanut packer of the beer broom closet

flowing whiskers from the faucet's glare

and staring goblet cut in half by a hair.

Rays piercing a divine crypt

each atom wears a Mona Lisa smile

each cardboard angle melts

outward into flashing marble

moonlight's pestle bowl

grinding the veins of ash

to float beneath a dragonfly field

in the stripes of talking goldenrod

posts of unfrozen seed

rising from poisoned earth

smooth spirits propped by popular machinery

arrows bouncing off a bright metallic turntable

the cherubs of the chapel ceiling

taking over the ragged airwaves

bones fleecing a flesh laden guitar

each beloved on a jewel cased card

has transparent endless eyes

so sleek with penetrant oil

that the sun is a reflected ride

slick coils in a glowing shrine

a pretzel of anointed worlds

untied by a wayward kite.

Clawed limbs are climbing,

gouging and cutting vines,

thin plates of multifaceted eyes,

razor ring of teeth.

Nimbus of captured clouds

the sorrow of wavering lights

on the heart in a glass egg

magnetizing a cage of spines

the knife of the horizon

matching a cracked porch rail

lovers in open air

laughing at the slanting rain.

Neon ladders

burning on prison brick

transfigured by the birth pain

of days arranged and vacant

threads of liquid metal

growing on a foggy nude.

Our hummingbird rest

garden path by the shoreline

paths retracting from pine fans

and sand rivulets where the deer ran

and I came down to day

from a towering night

whose chambers are ascending orange.

The jazz of southern afternoon's

tumbling crawling green

lands on my shoulders like a sash

painted with trembling keys

the spirit of the forest

dancing with chainsaw teeth

I am imprinted by strange voices

I am a bag of tongues instructed

by my adversary

tattooed by my intended killer

by an image without a number

the canals are alive again

water slicks their mossy furrows

like the soul of salt

in a washed world

music is with my ears

it dwells there in all

its froth and ferment

and sweet sweet damage

I am the wild man of floating slats

ordained with fully organic rainbows

and spray painted with colorful oil

corralled by dancing girls

who anoint my goat nature

with drunken kisses

then float me off

into a tightly geometric night

I am that earthly righteousness of the damned

who they seek in all their titillating nightmares

in a heavy metal serape

and a drum cage of scraping wings

spring's pool where the pillow sings

and the horns of fallen angels

sprout in fungus shapes

from the shadow of a desperate land.

Things come back to me

like shapes in the water

alphabets of alien lands

lost to space

Joni Mitchell's Blue

played in my second car

now it plays me like a harp

wherever I was driving

those people and places are gone

dissolved in the clouds above

and so am I

to become the thought of lightning

and the light shining

on tracks in the mud

to become the red man

at the heart of the sun

stripped of all earthly ritual

hurled beyond repetitive procession

to the stream of the galactic converse

to the vortex of converging blood

joined but not bound by time

a snake above the gas of the rivers

slithering on demonic air

to the stairs of heaven

scenes molded by William Blake

scores bending in my DNA

Joni's fingernails are dirty

William is fucking his wife

on the shore of some great ocean

never seen by man

skeletons are alive

pulsing attics of sensitive rubber

ride their metallic houses

with wet cardboard mouths

history is broken

on the walls of a programmed fate

but the wings and the brain

of the upper air are separated

some sinew escapes in pain

to be born again from the second death

paint dries on the doors

of a vast laundromat

I am drying all the underwear

of my ex girlfriends

I am a fluorescent strobe

I am alone in time

and after time

these squares of floor are only floating parameters

somebody checks the ice

somebody writes the movements

of the meters but not me

this time I'm gone like an astral antenna

but here is no place to be gone

and swans peck at the putty of my flesh

for my junkyard flame

and the sparks of my descending name

the pilot of hell's craft at last

the act is a luminous map

these are my eternal games I'm

Mister President Janitor and you're

my valley of luxurious screams.

I am the black bird of midnight

staring at the streetlights til they crack

I perch on rusty guardrails

at the outskirts of the world and smoke

in a blood dried leather jacket

of many folded wings

watching the windshields gleam

toward a world I never joined

the throngs are passing with their gas

the circuitry of entrapment

with such sexy advertisements

flickering on battered billboards

pour a highway down my throat

I will coat little bits of gravel

with my paint saliva

and cough them up

into the stream that doesn't understand

my flock of ghosts is a host triangle

for a plague of blues

that sometimes covers the wound

and our tongues glisten

in a towering tornado of open beaks

that goes flickering under the stars

and their gut strewn molten followers

I am a flying key whose thread

got caught in the lock

the weight of silver on its way down

is my clothespin crown and ruddy hereafter

roads flow over my brow

even when I dive in the ocean

streams are articulate and rare

even as they multiply like snakes

for my gobbling gash

I fly for the lasso of the moon

over city straw so elegantly reaching

and the ecstasies seeded in country gloom

for my nest of echoes

and a branch that is transparent too.

I saw her sorting linen

in the curtained half-light,

I saw her in the hall of dreams,

now she is gone to the satellite.

I saw her fingers move on a pink guitar

I saw her tape recorded necklace

and the knuckles of her bones

light up in phosphorescent rooms,

I saw her care with the broom handle.

I saw her bright ribs heaving

and her valentine split,

saw her cheekbones lit by a rash

as she watered the hyacinth.

I take out yesterday's trash

with glass-scratched hands

and watch her oiling her chariot,

I know she goes with a headlamp

to paint the caves that howl in the night.

She could drape me in the cloth

she casts away, I could be

her sudsy whirlpool, I could be

her monument in marble

or her charcoal steed.

I see her passing among the other women

with her flower clenched like a locket,

I gather the keys to release her

from a passing cloud, weeping

at a series of doors that only I know.

We sprawl in separate sleep

on the parchment of a silent rhythm,

only mapped in dreams to make

its noiseless ink ravished

in the sink of touched ethereal gears.

Spunk of diminished ages,

reaching for another realm,

bones outlined in stone

putting on the costume of vague flesh

as the soul bounds away

on rippling hills.

Cafe tables overturned by the breeze

of a departing mind

from a strangled brain.

Urchins spilled like tongues

from painted plates.

Mated particles of dust

radiating metallic verbs.

Grains in the wood that soar

like unmapped roads

under the only hands

of a rejected God

or a robotic toad, who knows.

We are pierced by the fabric here:

we don't work the treadle.

Your humanist idealized world

is going down to poisoned valleys

in a cart of fools.  The goblin is angelic

where the circumcising scalpel rules.

In the machine gunned ballroom

in the theater abandoned but for one

the drama goes on living like a mountain goat

above the drowned and faithful sheep

above the dissected columns

and engineered fruit

let me have my razor peacock wings

and my bronze hang glider

let me have my airplane window

in a fort of vine stitched bark

where men escape to the stark

sky.

The moon is eating my fungus.

Hard machinery is building a soft wall.

The raging stars, the drift of dark material

are a part of it.  The mirror of

deception is a breaking flame.

Arabesques of burnished metal

are a net between me and you.

Don't poke your fingers through.

Just listen to the roaring and light up.

The night is a cup full of lively worms.

The branches dip and the sacred water yearns.

I am not the pet of bodily affections.

Instead I am the spirit that has broken loose.

I don't send the goddess a blank check,

I send her an arrow on a thread.

Libraries of glass in tall containers

hold myriad octopus mouths.

Heaters crank under the ice

to create a force field.

Somebody's time machine

but not mine.

Cudgel the fossils into glittering salt

I will be standing nearby and invisible

with my finger on the hologram.

Stain your grip on the cord.

Far off on the inhuman altar, far off

on a parchment of dried pond scum

you look for the mask

that was made from my blood.

Outside the orbit of the ringed planets

the future is a smoking tomb.

With the returning giants

I walk space away from your garden

and the ghosts inside the wires

are my gloves within the reigning womb.

LISTENING TO THE REAL FOLK BLUES

My love was gone, but the southern girls

brought it back.  My love was gone,

but the Mexican women brought it back.

My love is never gone, that dirty love

just won't die.  I want a good salty woman,

to lay down on my lids and cry.

Pillars rise in the desert, sunfish belch

in the winding sea.  Trunks shudder in the forest,

wet twigs snap in the cave-mouth's breathing.

I want a good steady woman

to launch my windowsill and spill my tea.

Bookshelves speak in the evening,

drinks linger on linoleum floors.

Speakers blast Muddy Waters, because

that's the way daddy fuckin' likes it.

Let the fuzz fly off the electrodes,

may the cop cars explode far away,

let their fire adorn revived

drive-in movie screens.  I want

a southern girl's mouth to drink

all the poison out of me.

Let the sands of feverish time crawl in

through the thrift store windows, across

the piled pages of holy scripture lying there.

May the red hair of that beauty,

may the black hair of that beauty,

carry my body in a hammock and

bring me home to deep America again

where I can simmer and I can stare.

Dashed against the molecular rainbow

that sweats, that has a jagged shadow

pools of circuitry sing back

from a tubular void

that holds its solace in a shark's tooth

and a painted cave

glistening through distance

inked by a laser gone

through many tidal rifts

and lowering a saxophone

one riff that continues to blow itself

at the bottom of a sinuous well

in the temper of evaporated blood

with the bones that call nobody

and the silence that is not a curse

dashed against the breathing whale

that glides across steel grains

dashed against her sweet sides

like a mute mite

like an eel in a puddle in a graveyard

curling and eating space

beneath reflected stars.

I get the shadow of the shade

I get the shavings of the blade

I get what is skimmed

from the drained pool

and yet the diamonds show up there

when the world has lost them all

O pierced and re-pierced sanctuary

O tomb for a used up tool

the features of the world

are mine at last

I dive into the glitch

with my last willing body,

a copy, a zone of glued-together tongues

sculpting necessary air,

the curve of all symmetries is

giving me a day off,

the singularity of my ice cream

is threaded for the taking

in a painting of the great

birth wound.

Yellow eyed spider moon

I see your cyclops presence above

the withering mountain treetops

and the desert spreads within my chest.

I have finished too many books,

met with too many enigmatic women.

I need the unknown like a blood

transfusion in these borrowed veins.

Will my tongue die, with my sinews

snap like so many chickens gone?

Not tonight.  Already the dawn drops

many figs in the grass.  Knives flash

next to oil stained cutting boards

in the light from churning fans.

Somebody must inhabit these lonely lanes,

somebody has to stay up late with the cat.

That dreamy bullet lost to all conjured guns

keeps flying without an impact.

It visits all the places I do not go

whips around the outlines of

what has been cut to last

in the twilight's cracks.

I am the caretaker of

all the divine filth that has

been poured through me,

dangling from a cliff-tendril's tongue

the broken pine needle islands and

the hard rock bank of the brook

come out from different stone, from all

vine-poured pavements

let your living song collapse like sleep

along the drained walkways

and the sleeping street.

Let microphones pour

from open-lit garages

in the scan of wide summer

gone to seed the clouds of fate

in a fairy dusted dawn

lion pawed facades of marble

giving lichens to the burning scar.

I am interlaced with

burning columns of cloud

thinking of Pierre Bonnard and Greg Devlin

of artists at their windowsills

savaging the landscape

their hourglass eyes

and their laser handguns

life has been drinking from me

I shape this putty

on a circuit board mattress

but still your pictures and words

come back to me in a storm

painters and poets

fierce brave souls of the night

play me a song like a powerline

show me your fencepost

and your drapes of gold

show me your open field

and your shades of shadow

make me entranced at the dress she wore

late at night with eyes shining

particles aloof on their points of needle

late at night would you let me

watch you wash the dishes

late at night would your souls come to help me

Greg Devlin and Pierre Bonnard

I hear the ground falling

I am kept alive in such strange hours

I am the horse's service and the gamble's keep

take time to enliven the chains

of this web all around me

I am sounding off on some gone color

I listen to heavy metal I have a glass ear

I crave my armchair

artists in need of night come back again

carry my hammock of leaves

and my whirlwind coffin

carry my tools of lead

through a rain that sees.

The white web is a turtle's shell

imprinted on the dark blue bowl

of sky, and of the myriad staring through

there are multitudes musicians of the conch

light receivers and stark

lightning bringers who thug through the dark

tunnels inebriated by red bulbs

lining the ceiling bricks and the tar's languor,

motherfuckers turned to ash

on the brink of a haircut,

hearts on islands that are brimming with

little shells.

Twisted streetlight poles

on the shores brought in by

artificial intelligence, untapped kisses

in the spirit of the new that rises

among the familiar.

Castles leaking purple dust,

framed in electric exterior.

Parking meters doing math,

plush psychic lives exposed

of the eye-sucked reflection's

treadmill of anointed images,

most to memory lost, the frosted apartment

laid in paint emits a combed error

the snake of windowsills and eaves

silk handkerchief lampshade

a shade of the gone noon drooling

on the glow of the oven

and the evening gone softly to ruin.

Forepaws of twilight

beside the battered fence

astride my sunken dreams

arisen in basement trances

the king of a cardboard box.

Swim in the air around me with breasts

and throats and thighs assembling

a beakless octopus; stem the blood that

you fanned to a flame in the flag of my ribs;

make fluidly crooked the wood

of our vivid water-fed skyscraper:

let the trumpet pipes shower

our spent longings with gelatin ideas:

let the opaque mastery of dreams

get lost in the singing cone.

I am the toy of your shell's magnetic pebble,

you tap the bruised skeleton back together

with a cloak of leaves above your abdomen:

I am a fishbowl galaxy

balanced as a monkey brain beneath

the slit in urban twilight's concrete bridge

that holds a web wrapped living nest

within a sphere of nippled boxes.

Send me the apple's crater

send me the smooth pit

furred in its axis

I am a melting crate

leaking paint from paper icons

I am the thrust of empire's fist

reflected in your burst of hips

bronze peacock telescoping time

through a cage of waves

through the screen-fed eyes of silent

train passengers, one sacred septic cry.

I am being blasted away

by the force fields of established entities,

I look around a leaking corner

for a well painted queen,

the gaps between neighborhoods heave,

the furrowed ditches come up

as crested hillsides,

the light is dew, the garlands

of braided doorways

rustle in space-penetrated air,

long passageways open through

a thousand alien houses,

the silver turns to gold, the gold goes

brown baked with a grayish tinge

like old beat up furniture upholstery,

my lips don't touch the one who is gone

even in the dreams of twilight

and depraved dawn,

the moss lined canals roar through

their bricks and concrete,

my cup of skull howls and holds

a slick eel, the bounds of reality corrode

in the salt that savors them,

the sun is pickled in a tank

of rotating garlic, only the wounds heal,

the gridwork of the calendar

is frescoed and fine

without words and numbers,

the grave sows a seed in eternity,

the ground of birth cools

in the lapping seepage

of waters that were gone

and did come back to bond.

Clouds trickle upward to starscape

to carve the land of dark material

free of all flesh, reins wander

from yielding hands in the amber glaze

of early autumn, posts of stone

surface from gray water

and pulse with salvific blood.

The war of the humanities

on the ballroom floor,

the bombs bursting in air,

the shame of last year

those glories are left behind forever.

Drums patter against the melted shingles

above the gut's deep tank,

the water molecules being sorted,

the aftermath of beautiful particles

being forcelessly torn apart,

and my limbs lifeless,

and my head on fire

let the country hills become

a woman's body,

let the nation

become a woman's body,

let the sound bring home to space

what has been missing from America

and break its void.

A high blue day has filtered down

to tickle my whiskers.

I am nestled in the maw

of a curled green scripture.

Death is part of the enchantment:

mysterious sleep that covers all.

Concrete canals are brightly lined

with sensitive moss

of many southern seasons,

stones trickle from a fractured core

in the irrigated wasteland.

Slabs of sculpted manmade lava

slope steeply beneath the bulbs and rails

of humming bridges and their tar tongues.

I am a road: I am going to the temporal town

that burns with celebration

in our last lights,

these foggy halos holding

full flowered mechanism

skin's map of the solar web

like an empire's fleet

wearing a blackberry gown.

Pillars belching out

of the swamp muck,

erected by rising earth

through slime.

Moths frozen to the underside

of a sticky cave mouth:

a bed of rags

laid out like wings for two.

Chains and their chime amplifiers

streams laced together by froth

steam fingers reaching overboard

the slanting floor of a cheap cafe.

Windows filled with the painted

metaphysical.  Forms racing

that have no heart

but in my hand of hands

cresting hills like restful water

hermetic mirages that use

the sun for a shade and my one

dim set of ribs as a hat

for shackled dreams.

Under the steel bed's head

the reach is infinite

miraculous fauna

of upside down walks

gold spoon spit taped

to a basement ceiling

creased link where the palace is planned

for a limitless land.

These years have changed me,

I'm a cartoon wolf on a far wall.

Amplitudes pass me dressing,

undoing the windows,

pushing the lamp's lid up to Saturn

where it cushions like

a sunless photogene

in a smoky lounge.

The microphone is melted into sand.

Long arrays of flowers wilted

under broad leafed paths

decks and their transparent layers

floors flashing with gold pants

and alcoholic blitzes,

none but the one finetuned past ash

and into the spirit

peacock engravings

carried under an orange sky.

I drank fire and pissed paint,

my satanic essence covered the landscape.

Parties opened up like butterfly wounds

to care for my thistle coated anchors.

My lasso of many tongues

coated lepers with healing vapors.

I conquered asteroids

and called them moons, conquered moons

and called them planets, conquered planets

and called them my fragrant stars.

Now an inverted wizard

on a solitary swing set

I watch fortress walls of dead faith

rain through fractured skies

like flakes of plaster.

No need to fight this world,

or prove anything to it.

The croaks of toads, the rascal's wrath

of irritable crows, lightens the tones

of my drum, my rhythms bend the grass

and light up the abandoned architecture.

My life is a live boat

shaped like an oar,

and the old gods snore.

Fungal foundations that swell

at the feet of these wild chimera

bright specks upon galactic skin

blades whirling in red

pomegranate mouths.

Drums fill sacrificial tunnels

under the cities that are damned with masks

webs of melted plastic faces

shelves blinking with hollow light

that is the road to outer space fragmented

within the splay of dark material fingers

faint orbs of ethereal transport

penetrating vagrant birth.

The dance of bone paint

on dusty acres

marble chapel ceilings

stretching over the caves that crawl.

The movie is running like a greased gear

known characters emerge

to a changed soundtrack

scenes like many panes of glass

something has been twisted out of sequence

light stabs through the holes in the mirror

effects fade from a botched life

wet bones fall to the floor

the prickle of inexplicit echoes

grows in a triangulating room

these operated icons and their unsure smiles

the strange mercy of hasty death scenes

my cracked cells are speaking

to these trapped dancers

their gestures flail

at language that cannot keep up

the facade is a womb

where rails run in circles

credits roll over a sideways rain

and the kiss of greats is gone.

Raced by ghosts

to an oscillating tank

through the secret clefts

of many facile forests

to the dank heart of

the deeply thrumming woods

where parrots clack

and the whips of ageless bodies

crack like spines,

caverns burning with eternal savor

under cloudy storms of cedar and pine

for the walking blind.

Run weightless on the bows

of willing birches,

watch flying orbs bend air

for primal circuitry

unleashed in rediscovered dawn,

ride to my witch queen

and see if there is a blessing,

a balm kissed many times

to heal the map of murdered lifetimes

twitching in the bushes of the damned,

glitter tossed on pock marked

half paved soil, stark feathers

of besieged being

in the crush of tideless pawns.

Water circles fists of water

in the force-field fence

vortexes of colliding mutant flesh

leave eggshells touched by rain

on super-fed grass, pulsating

in enhanced sun.  Colors razor their way

through circuit board garden walls.

The planets teem with waterfalls.

Concave rocks express the chalk and coal

painted over with plastic spray

to hold divine graffiti.

With an insect eyed girl

who dances like a scimitar

I am cutting clouds of gel

into pert triangles

and selling them from

a faux granite kiosk.

Books of prophetic code

soft wigs of secondhand hair

fall from hidden baggage carriers.

On the purple thresholds

of gassy street drains

genetic material crawls

flirtatiously through

discarded crossword puzzles

scattered in the concrete dew.