Whitman's barbaric yawp

was a prophecy of rock n roll

I step out through glass doors

scanning all the rooftops

and the hilltops

tapping all the keys that lead

to an isolated stairway

ascending gelatinous clouds

and the sparks flying upward

of a raw subway

and I am the battered

blue dawn rising

creaking through

rotten mountainous throats

with zinc lined whorish

trumpets of healing

America, sit on my face

sing me your foolish song

for a rascal's taking

violet blushes like curtains down

to the frail apex of every town

rolling tar and daffodil tongue

my singular soil.

In the beginning was the image.

The word followed some time later,

and the word was not God,

and the word was not with God.

The word was man's,

and he put his stamp on everything.

Names can be a kind of refinement,

but now we are possessed by names

and nobody can find reality.

Things and creatures are

saddled with names, but they

are not the names themselves.

It helps to know this.

It hurts to know this.

Our genocide is in our names,

it rides on our interpretation.

Words do not define, they can only

at best caress meaning.

The fabric of existence stretches over my grave

like fiber optic cobweb.

Blood yearns for mercy

from these violated particles

that make up a churning sky

and build an envelope of linked blades.

The illusion of a limitless source,

of a divine ground for physical being,

is in my cosmic underwear

and nucleic core.  Confusion

of beauty with goodness

hangs a noose adorned with flowers

above the howling void.

Even your aching spirit

has been formed into an android.

You look upon the surface of my eyes

with the secondhand anxiety

of a dying god.

I am your fear of reflection

turned into madness.

I'm in the earth, I'm in the earth

vomiting blue light from parched

amphibian vessels.

I'm the coffin of the things

you never saw.

Cracked sky steaming on painted gravestones

barefoot walking in a suit of wet leaves

bars of moving shadows

licking over her recumbent form

streambeds of frozen chalk

crossed by prints of ragged shoes

high arches of razor thin silver

glinting shore to shore.

The shroud of breaking roots

that hover around in pieces.

Threads ascending with a bloody lisp

into a ruptured sky.

Bone bridges shining with borrowed light

across a seething purple canyon.

Eyes that never saw the soil

impaled on plastic.

I am older than your gods.

At the source of this wrenching poesy,

at the crux of crossing astral trains,

in the swarm of spirits

showing their astral teeth,

I simply drink from a deeper well.

Your civilization has accomplished much,

but when it ends my voice will go on,

and yours will not.

A weapon for artists,

distilled in the soul

and passed through ages

like a dreaming dream,

this knowledge of temporal flux

smashed open continually by beauty

unaligned.

The sparkling void

a bottomless cup

an hour with wings

and the rest of the day buried

fire surfing on fire

rods of gold bent low by the river

curtains of glass

reacting to a dream of speech

tongues and their drum of the infinite

echoes framed by new flesh

lines of energetic penetration

writing from beneath the soil

a knife's blade and its curse of neon

bars preserving an imprisoned soul

the clench of blood that never answers bone

time and its peak outside eternity

the rages of a sucking vault

links of the milk train lagging

springing into notes of their own

above the sacred cloud.

On the cusp of a great new kingdom

drunk on purple vapor

in the piss-back of the garage that's rocking

long fingers of sight sprint flashing

through a planet-wide forest

crooked bones jigging on a rope of raw space

ruts where Venus lowers her gun of grace

and takes the powdered wig of fate

stars commence around a rotating stain

gray gashes give a blue sign

wheels torn from a remembered pine

the freedom strings had in breaking

never matched the flash of the golden chain.

Lonely American Edward Hopper shadows

bright porch pockets of light

suffused into divine compartments

and silently staring eyes

riding the raging tide that speaks

of many metals

rails that reach under hills and

passionate mountains

laundromats churning turning over time

tickling its starlit belly

putting its raw epiphany

up high on a neon crucifix

sand that glitters on a reckless tongue

machines that breathe

hot air from rigid gills

tendrils to tap electric groaning

enamel pails thatched thick

with piled silver nails

rusted hammer heads

on notched broom handles

cream stacks of cheesecake layers

reamed horizon's bloody gleam.

I walked on empty roads with music

pummeling my head, the

psychedelic patterns of ejected eggs

the sound of rivers I have never seen,

the ground tucked into a folding hole,

the halls of far gone New Hampshire,

a blue gash in the fading gray,

the bell yields, the oars give

a low transparent lick,

the street bulbs pulse

to a roaming beat,

the horns of light kiss,

horizons are shuffled by pale meat,

tubers cross with poison souls,

bronze water speaks,

afflicted families rise from dust,

the cost is a wailing call.

A shell of broken human soul,

a quiet sighing animal, a song,

a torch to watch the hours by

while darkness surges with necessity,

the drums are touched by rain,

the quaking veins are joined on canvas,

joyous tongues arrive with stinging sleet,

the stone winks, I derive from

ancient spirits who incite my awe,

the giant climax of unfolded skies

pours down riveted artificial hills,

the genius of these sad days

remains untouchable and true,

you who have wounded me have also

lifted me up, I care for the midnight teeth

of spanked alien spawn,

the fissure of a granite wall

siphons black red blood,

the sun cools, the moon bursts

into feathers of magnetic dust,

the wheel purrs with living salt,

the names of souls are called,

the bodies fall away

from remembered laughter,

the incompletion is the arc's way home.

The spreading egg of solar system

untying brain from bloodless speculation,

cool units of abstract sound

colliding with floating ears,

the afro of the sun

frying my ectoplasm of echoes,

shorelines touched by lipstick fire

washing over fallen gravestones

and tongues of moss,

frost handled by seeking rays,

stone benches for dreaming bones,

bleached oars left along the vine

of some solitary voyage,

open pathways to the blue hum

of electrically evolving stars

the feather weight of worlds

and all their dancing girls.

U.S.A.

America: once a slave ship,

always a slave ship.

I write your obituary,

motherfucker.

Fuck you into the dust

from which you came.

Abomination of metastasized ambitions,

the fiend with a thousand arms.

Fuck your corny religion,

your stupid songs.

You came too late

and you stayed too long.

New humane angles

in the expanded prison.

New portholes into hell

for pastors and other leaders

to jack off into.

You have made my bone marrow

into a disgusting fucking cartoon.

You have raped my soul

with your lewd, repetitious chanting.

Your advertisements are your reality,

but not in the way you think.

Your crude, drooling vampirism

defines you.

Stay the fuck away from my altar.

Your offerings are putrid,

your prizes are beneath

a poisoned animal's shit.

I live my life as an imaginary being.

Let the gray light fill the room

and paint the corners with waking sleep.

Let the birds gather around

seed-stirred puddles, let the mysterious

chemicals of life rise from around metallic roots,

zones beneath neon giving birth to painted fruit.

May the morning without alarm

bloom over smoky balconies

in the river of a new bohemia,

even in lanes of glass gliding

past my staring eyes in stasis

we do this in remembrance of battered maps

improved with intricate bundles

of ink that the divine fumbled

and gave back to dark matter waterfall

words like limbs are signaling

tongue's heat to the silent veil

nine planets in the path of a snail.

The spider walks my brain

with icicle limbs.

The ground swims.

Stalks go up with descending

bark of leaves, seeds of a different

shadow.  The cryptic nature

of crows, the scent of

burning leather.

Steel wheels on a velvet landscape

long vacant fences.

Turns in gardened alleys that

open up into the sky.

New light on the old burdens,

gathered sparrows following

the uninterrupted omega,

coffins talking to scattered coins,

mercenary soundwaves,

sciences of sex

encouraging torpedoes and bronze

fortresses of stacked meat,

pallets lavished with enchantresses

unruly silence

black clouded word.

Long teeth dripping from a meek mouth

living sinews desperate on concrete

rivers siphoned up into a spaceship

the shapes of sculptured shit

lactating in unmixed paint.

Forked entities with no heads

the scum of painted highways

grid walls of bisected insects

flesh blasted from broadcasting wheels

a cloud of floating skulls

wafting through an open galaxy

as the particles of hot divine substance

are flushed through ungrateful channels

and sprayed upon an ornate clock.