I pedal my crimson wheels

around the gear-stuck calendars

watching webs tear

in the fabric of being

watching waiting rooms turn

into pockets of pocket treasures

and the desks of interplanetary study

turn to gems of dreams

feathers of flocks that were

supposed to happen here

erupting into twilight cones

squawks entering ethereal formation

among the chimneys of the actual life

chugging and wheezing with resin'd ribs

ready to be pecked by their descent

I give to the yawning gulf

my blood's devotion

and the ripped eyes of the night

that calls me home.

Blades of green that cross a microscope

get caught in my spokes

my pillow is a germ of ink

that blossomed into cotton

and flies over a map of steel.

A planet of black soil and bulging worms

scorched brown by sunlight

in the places where I picnic

alone, on a floating blanket.

Veils of steam girdle

mysterious dancing bodies,

in the parking lots

abandoned by motionless man

magnetized to granite homes

by a force-field's ban.

I am beamed down to observe

so little, in these hours stripped free

of all activity.  The windows teem

with ghosts of what went past

before the moments paralyzed at last

the cream of some frothing moon

brought deeper dreams to make us wander.

Now I walk the hourglass stained

by a kaleidoscopic garage,

by a light-burning engine and

a frail empire, flipping through

books of birds.  The guardrails

of empty roads are swaddled

in hair passionately left behind

by the wide-eyed staring blind

from a storm of trinkets that drank

their ragged veins and left me

pulsing in the outskirts with a stone tongue

and brambles in spheres to carry.

Maybe I'll wade out

into the blood pool

and open up my head.

Maybe I'll lay down upright

and turn into a butterfly.

Let the woods dance like rhymes,

let the fever come up through stone

with bladed limbs.

Maybe the carnival of bright wires

is my web of songs.

Maybe the fire contained

by mechanical lids

is the stuff of divine life.

Let the motors ululate

like fisher cats unseen

in the depths of a spectral night.

Let the keyboards be laced with skin

let the veins become codes

in the rain of unrelenting sight.

May the wings of this thing turn

toward the hearth of light.

Refreshed by the breeze

from the graveyard,

scraps of color that settle

on jagged concrete

caught in its fragile patterns

for a shattering moment

watching alkaline eyes

of battery acid

form into a naked body.

Shadows break into snakes

and crawl around the oxygen tanks.

Rust takes the mountainous highways

and the tunnels leading through

their waterfalls of oil.

Theaters of spider web

glisten in resonant pastures

where aluminum satellite dishes

crackle like punctured drums.

Towers of pasta texture

eclipse one another

as they glisten and fade

through the zombie footfalls

and the mind erasure of empty placards

in the next incoherent parade

fit as shit for flowers

fine as the death that leads it downward

weird as the breath that sprang it into hades.

The shrouded lasers

of autopilot spaceships

carve burnt symmetrical lines

for acid bath swimming pools

into the sleeping earth.

Grapes fall from a pyramid cloud

and are gobbled by a birth stricken orgy

nails are bitten back

on reptilian hands.

The mud wasp nests on my eyes

make a light wind whistle

for the frame that doesn't care

where the tongue goes to fly.

Streets wind like bright intestines

past the cemetery markets

in the heat of tainted stars

drunk serfdoms scratching pallid scars

on greasy glass

the vomit of a flashing screen

hot medicine for the dead

a dog skin bikini

stretched around her orbs of sand.

I don't miss the fantasy

of grand narratives.

I watch the river turtle

slide between some rocks

to hide himself

and I finally understand.

There is nothing to desire here

just some flashing scenery

ripples fascinating in the burn of death

the fevered ticking in the bones that dance

for battered flesh

and then it's gone for a song.

Zones of light constructed

square off against the snarl of storms

vines climb like rain

the bricks that know them not.

Billie sings so coyly

like a mockingbird concealed alone

in the swelling of a summer tree

some cancer of man has fallen

on lines of space like paint

I am stricken with a spell that fades

and the incense scented pages with a raging tell.

My soul winds like a snake

around the base

of the battered magnolia.

Its roots snipped from their tangle,

it might bloom in fullness again,

but the petals and the leaves

remain in white and shining green

still vibrant within the sun burnt

and withered branches.

They still spark

under many hollow stars

as I rise with limbs

and my forked tongue

infolds with singularity

to sing to the ripped hills

and walk upon the dead

scales that I've left

on the earth's remainder.

The evil kingdom is dying

but there will be more evil yet.

Man is unmade, clearly seen

to prefer suicide.  His little gods

have eaten him alive.

Spirits that rustle the bright bushes

clamor for a life apart

from this ritual of madness

gone on too long.

There will be no more songs

for this empire.  The new songs

will be oceanic songs.

Angel space with magic hands

comes not to me now.

I don't need the channels of light

that follow companions of laughter

I don't need the singing shrines.

Dawn brings a fist close

to harden my stomach

leaves and their moving worlds

in the careless breezes

are more than enough.

I don't look for eyes of understanding

in the shuttered cities

or the frightened towns.

That's over now.

Broken rivers are winding

winding to somewhere new

in the solitude of night.

Let the talkers of humanity

go to hell.  Let their speech

bubbles burst in radiant fire

as their guts slide down

the shaft of a solemn spear.

Absence is the beauty of the spheres.

If your rind pops, don't call me:

I hate your kind,

won't drink your juice again.

The daffodils cry without their core:

their petals fly with me,

I won't come back.

The hacked sun doesn't desire

her planets.  The ruined glare

casts crushed light

across disarray: pert rings

and gaseous bulbs

are disintegrated.

The real lines bend like bodies,

conceptual trash is gone:

your populist religion

and decaying politic

have only wasted time.

The colors of life behind

the veil of lies

run forward raping space,

spirals drip gorgeous turmoil

through the mute mouths

of deific corpses.

The lens cracks

under a needle's grain:

sad species beaten back

explode in outward arcs

blood paints the steerless dash

a pirated remainder

rises only in forsaken hands

with spires set in poison glands

the necessary demon stranger.

Long blades soaring over tender skies

from the wind of space,

from the ripped envelope

of anti-matter,

tricking a punctured globe,

red rivulets in clouds of grayish blue

spelling names of trapped circular gods,

the fatigued inertia of angels long fallen

to a stony earth,

rings moving from fecund eruptions

in the articulate core, sanctified fire

of lesser weapons melting,

bones talking that have no home

in desiccated cities

or barren countrysides

where material men have harvested all

and a song is lacking

that now returns in a sexed ball bearing,

in a sculpted seething

and a chandelier of knives that moves

to strip a starless dome.

I am unknown

like the light in the dust

unknown like all the sparks that

never descended to become

unknown like the pearl of hell

that none dare touch

tagged with scars by crooked arrows

turned into a twisted map

by the barbed wire of senseless minds

still licking the skies like a flying carpet

that nobody wants to ride

bleeding arabesques in eyeless space

writing like the spit of God

only on decaying tablets

unknown like the fire that resides

in the organs of all men

the fire that resides like second sight

and resisted to the last

breath of the angel of death

dripping uncaptured music

unknown like the mouth

that has the last word

dust dancing with the fury of the end.

Moss is growing on the arrowheads

that pierced when I fell through the earth

wires through the caves that grow with music

stabbing through the dark

cloaks of the bones that danced

flapping like flags

with some unknown insignias

ashes dropping on the shine of polished wood

the inner dome's alien letters

buzzing in cathedral stone

can't you see that I am stillborn

like a baby with no features

I can read the air because I do not breathe it

I can see the traffic is not coming back

because I never joined its attack on nothingness

oh sweet entropic lips

oh cool entropic limbs

feeding me the straw from nowhere

that is the last

dot of light from the blood past.

I worship the black metal sunrise

that pours down my throat

I watch the river rocks

danced by dervishes

take on a frenetic light

there are screens in the trees

billboards for every milky way planet's

circling moon

I see the proud southern honeys

with long braided hair

coming over the hills

with bayonets and waffle irons

I sit with my squirrel cheese burger

on an iron bench

and smile with all my teeth

just one last time

my heart's in a heron's wide wings

taking off from the stream

in the web of oxygen

where stars drool from a safe distance

his long beak is the tool of my eyes

ripping fish from time.

Honey dripping down the ragged rocks

is rain from an estranged heaven

locks of hair stuck to apple skin

branches in a cluster round a nest of hornets

caves of glue soaked soil

are mouths in an empty field

hallways into empty space

form from such falling stars

as smite the exit sign

like attacking planes

firing electronic rocks

orange peels and cylinders of lipstick

upon the speech-fed end of things

a sacred cigarette.

All gelatin slow motion air

and kissed by fiber optics

winged lions swipe at weightless mice

with glittering claws

dead things obey their artificial laws

singed angels of light on pause.

Orchards from fevered hands

pour out of the slits in the cosmos,

swimming pools of purple mutant blood

gather in the ice cube trays of concrete

encircled by rented souls.

Plastic trunks of scaly trees

cross windows of the lonely looking

over lots of neon hotels

where ships of machine crafted steel

painted by unconsciousness

reflect the agitated conglomerate eye.

The falling of a fleshy leaf that lands

on this electrocuted petroleum land

traces an escaping pattern

on my bony scraping hands.

Zones flex and curve like buttocks

the quaint demonic architecture

jumps and crashes.

I laugh where the intersecting blandness

makes a bolt of lightning

write like minnows on an ashen stand:

some underwater rock, some printed altar,

is the place where all my senses ran.

I take the dead snake skins

of my past lives and tie them together

across a golden road.

I watch the toads hop

out of the grass onto the steaming tar.

They encircle me with croak-song

and I am careful in my spinning dance.

Trees groan prettily behind swamp trenches

the honeysuckle smooths the breeze.

In my moon bruised incarnation

I take on the improbable shine

of the southern magnolia.

Nymphs with lovely psycho eyes

are coming to carry me away and

hurl me down on the painful pleasures

of a thistle bed.

They can have the magic

of my milky spine

they can sever my selfish head

and with pink thread sow it on again.

They can see if the hair on my body

moves like seaweed

in their bath of sacred potion

or the crimson of alchemical wind.

My tomb is a spaceship

cruising through gold channels

and silver streams,

wrapped in webs of lesser caverns

that snapped as it passed,

my body laced with psychedelic nails

meant for my coffin that was

a liquid pill, suspended from clouds

that carry grueling memories, the gone

shells of the man that I was.

Peacock skirts for the ghoul,

my dancing effigy, bronze eyes

and blue hair for blonde faces,

all sliding down a waterfall

of metal tongues.

Moss-cloaked rocks in the stream bed

where I dropped my house keys,

linen dolls in lines strung on dead

electric cords, slime on wires

leading back to scheduled days

that were mine and now

move no bones.

GNOSTIC BLUES

I dreamed of the wood

where my consciousness was born

and when I woke it was gone.

I walked the hideous roads of men

to find another forest

and when I found it walked around

but it was no dream.

I have become a painful bridge

between worlds that are pulling apart.

I will watch the ferns blow

on a beaver's dam

I will watch the gorgeous gleam

of the skyscrapers swaying in the distance.

I will walk back

to the home that is not a home

and see the beauty

of the man-made streets this time

knowing that none are absolved.

Life is a flaw that leads through error

to death, and I will believe

that death is a kind of music.

I will watch the ruddy tendrils climb up

from my hands and the hands

of my creator, knowing that it is a joke,

and I will not laugh.

Until I am unseen in the music,

until I am free from the frame

that was confined in time.

The sinews of brain in the visible leaf

agitate for life and decay

in the unsculpted music of the breeze

birds send their variable messages

I am lonely under the bridge

with my finger-worn instruments,

and the water of life,

though diseased, still flows.

Cries of revolt and conformity fly

overhead, splitting existence

into warring branches, all destined

for error and certain death, but

there is some quiet here,

in the low hum beneath the grind.

What I looked for in love

and religion and politics and wild parties

I found only in solitude:

only in art, in the inexplicable, only in

the inner hope that denies the outer shame.