She lives with her hands in the earth.

She watches the chickens.

Branches have fallen in the backyard.

She rewires the wires.

Stones from the garden

line the walk.

No one is a match for any other.

Galactic freckles

pushed by some far off expanse

dimes washed by rain

just a scattered handful

ghosts waiting in airports

ghosts waiting in bus stations

weight carried back to its maker

in a bronzing time

aisles built by frost

between the deepest trees

Cliffs of cheddar

crowned by garlic boulders

herbs and mushrooms sliding

into boats of burning leaves

a clay mask on a satin pillow

body of eyeballs wrapped

in curls of written hair

poured forth from neon skin

transparent scalp that rides

a squirming mass of brain

slithering to fill each limb

windows lit with violet glass

mouth packed with transmitting wires

church of blood with three delicious fires

Black sky rolled back by blacker sky

cave's furthest reaches

rippling with cool new yellow light

bright ointment on the lips of the well

limbs reaching to be inked

near its darkest center.

Yarns to be held by fate

and flowing over junkyard lots

apples polished in ghostly carts.

Ditches creased with oil

near the concrete path.

Your body will be made

into a hive of instructional booklets

all talking at once.

Rotten fruit will fall from the sky.

Your technocratic tramp stamp

will ride you home.

Money will enfold you

in your bed.

The secrets of these molecules

will become yours.

Your toilet and kitchen combo cube

will make your vomit

into golden chains.

A sacred script

will magnetize your brain.

Nude scenarios will sprawl

all around you.

These medicines will help you

take onboard the new equipment.

Mechanical assistants

will walk around inside you.

Your boss will now alert you

from the confines of your head

in the new and improved voices of the dead.

Jugular sorrows

ring throughout the embryonic cave

spackled with moldy frosting

ornaments of terror

and electric frost.

Shopfronts done up in wrapping paper

never to reopen.  Sanctuary streets

closed to all future traffic.

A dream of perfect silence and repose.

Distilling fury seated

in the center of the rose.  A canvas

bleak as stone, and just as beautiful.

A zone of forced fecundity

bleeding jagged fragments of the past.

The blossom cased in unreflective glass.

A road that swallows up the wound

is never to be found.

Look at the heaving ground

glinting with unearthed blades,

look at all the old wars revived

with such sorry flesh.

The mesh of natures

can never be at peace.

Hard won patches

liquid lamps adjoined

melted into blood

and muffled deep.

This canopy against

the rain of planets

and rings of supernatural ice

jeweled fangs against the mist

one burning eye.

Beneath the crust of a battered planet

clinging to a cot with silver wings

canyons had always called to me

some fragrant abyss,

some flowing curtains

smoke draping all the bedrooms

of the damned

now the shelves lined with urns of ash

so neatly, brightly labelled

names that ring the rafters of this tomb

the ribs of some grim prophylactic womb.

Flakes of old lives on film

carried by a stream of molten wreckage

tongues pooling in a furnace mouth

purple vines of an unsettled south.

Naked forms on barrels drifting

through smoke battered arches and

nudging the machinery of dreams.

In cycles a quartz lady screams.

Ladders are floating

and bending in air

each link is a painted portal

through stunned clouds

to blue playful bodies

over rutted crests

of cemetery hills

mushrooms blooming

from the footsteps

of the devils of the dawn

blankets of leaves

arrange a crux around

my phosphorescent torso

root's poison pulsing every branch

sap lit with oil of caverns

egg's map of the deathless depths.

Blossoms on the waning tree

bright thistle mouths

shaking a video frame

squirrels munching on a lit fence

currents dancing over lonely lanes

beneath a granite tower

paths over the mountain

carry slow moving dogs

each one the same white color as the snow

Blades of raw inertia

make war upon

an individuated corpse.

You tried to plug their breaking dam

with your flesh: they pulled you out

and cursed you for the flood

that they unleashed.

You wasted your martyrdom

on a horde of ingrates.

Now they celebrate

your willingness to be killed.

There is no place for humanity

among humankind.  Stop trying

to save the masses.  Their doom

will be yours.

Imagine a sober Bukowski.

Imagine a self-indulgent Buddha.

Imagine a profane, sarcastic Christ.

Imagine an anti-war, anarchist Muhammad.

Imagine a Gandhi who no longer gives a fuck.

Throw their stories away

throw their respect away

throw their values away

throw their entertainment away

throw their beliefs away

throw away the cancer that cures

their cancer.  They have no answers.

REQUIEM

From the entrails of dead dogs,

from the trickle of cracked brains,

from the copulation of oiled androids

comes a sad and disembodied song.

The surfaces change

but the depths remain the same.

And now those depths

are swallowing your fake world.

There is no escape

from entire lives lived in falsehood,

no relief to be found

behind another clotted mask,

no mercy in the grip of your

monotonous and automatic master.

From the pink blood of shells

the sea vomits up in froth,

from the chains wired back together

no matter how many times they are broken,

a tuned cacophony rises much too carefully

and the simulation continues.

Truth was stillborn in this world

and its cells fade out like tendrils into a void.

People are social beings: we want

to be noticed by our killers

as we flail down ruined avenues,

glad to be jeered as we die:

better to be mocked by these lunatics

than left alone in silence.

Even the soul of solitude

abides in an inverted violence.

From infant skulls in welded doorways,

from a land of pepper and a land of salt,

from banquet tables left sideways

by a row of tortured grapes...

Want more poetry?  Fuck you.

This is mine.  Write your own

in your own weary blood.

Stuff it down with rags and hack and hack.

Gears chew human meat

to produce utilitarian architecture.

These structures drain emotion

and increase numb obedience.

This is to be celebrated

with every square on the calendar.

We are glad to be civilized

cleansed of all identifying features.

Hate your neighbor within

the limits of the framework.

Express your angst with impotence

to make the blow go down smooth.

This is the joy of democracy.

Our brave enforcer androids

share our sophisticated ideals.

Wound them and you shit

on the storyboard.  Don't

muss the narrative with such

unnecessary feeling.  Extinction

comes for all, it must be

greeted with humility, maturity

and wisdom.  Call out

the glorious names of some

old books.  Our savior has

arrived in cellophane.

Crucify unruly spirits

starting with the errors of the brain.

We share the deep deliciousness

of pain.

Looking for a spout of unknown water

that broke a rock and fell into the sky

wings of paper fallen from departure

gems of plastic fallen on the roots

of disappeared trees.

A crushed salt grain

blown along by violent whispers

powder clinging to the bones

of a chicken who was born alone.

Monkey bars adorned with jeweled thorns

horns honking at a moon kite

suspended over sagging streets

shop windows show elastic machinery

paint stirred by a metallic oar

the gloves she threw from a bone balcony

to the stone floor time machine

are worn by spirit waves

melted slowly by their shapes of raging color

the horizon of a bedded glade

clawed buttons

leaf by leaf to pause the old tornado

the lifespans of electric shadows

rising to be bathed in responsive clay

armchairs facing off

on an enhanced glacier

swirls of dirt in a gelatinous layer

benedictine fog.

Black veins of transfigured daylight

run over bright coal and cracked roads

clock hands reflect on pools of melted idols

gold in the eyes of fools and gray desire

downward knives of a consuming mouth

avoided by hang glider.

Hordes with neon masks

the labyrinth is wet with rain

late nights are lost on a steaming highway

wings are active in the water clock

vast distances where black holes bloom

a thread of vision diving

to get out of the arid spotlight

vast wastelands of bright broken things

buried buttons and circuitry chirping

these bodies are forgotten thoughts

from some run down machine

that captured a meat brain to torture

and reproduced the bones that are lost

a plastic fraction of the infinite cost.

Rings of painted impact

dwarf the halo

quiet roads and their ways

always disrupted dawns

hills of lunacy's arrival

where hairless caterpillars glow

and stoic anvils hold

the corners of styrofoam pyramids

down to the poor clay

of civilized earth

ripples leave the sky in tatters

from the thought that popped

its gray conception

riverbeds strewn with

armies of forgotten clothes

the folds of a carnivorous rose.

A veil of ash

a path of coins

holy is the stained earth

and all the flowing streams thereof

the weight of many apples

on a hill of bone and branches

zones of pink neon blankness

between pools and lawns

I am a pinball laughing in spirit

watching the luck of others

move me around

sleeping in the sound of pouring gravel

born on a porno wave

of glossy inhabitants

over the hotel rooms in fury

angels estranged in flight

naked days of the inverted slave.

I once was a human spirit,

I camped alone on many plateaus.

The contemplative nimbus

grew many tendrils.

I rode one up into a golden sky.

I mutated in a cloud, something

deeper than my cells

hammered its way out.

I flew home without a doubt,

my flesh in tow.  I strut

these alien sidewalks

looking for a strange job.

Swamps are blooming

purple flowers for my demon seed.

The round hills seethe with desire

and topple old financial structures.

The social system is

winding its weird way down

as I sharpen my illicit crown.

A monument of bones

becomes a bird home

these roads are ribbons

floating under geodesic domes

the symmetry of souls

reflects on water

split orbs rotate

in transparent walls

the trains of earth

are leaving through a cloth sky

pulling all the fabric from the maze

canals of milk and cubbyhole homes

a draped ecstatic tongue

muffled in the twin zone

void's keeper on the run

death's angel in a crystal cone.

THE FUTURE GLAZE

The empire is still filled with cruelty,

but its embers have cooled.

Chrome surfaces have taken over,

cyclical announcements insinuate

vague danger, but specific threats

have all but vanished.  Voices vacuumed

no longer plague us.  Now the quiet

carries the blade.  Latex kisses

smear the cold away

and replace it with a numb ache.

The cup was passed so gently

by a goddess who had quelled the storm.

We worshipped all her fingers in our brains.

Already our language had fallen.

She showed us a deeper technique.

People were swarming each other,

they needed to be separated.

Replicas confuse the interactions

and can play even better with genes.

We had seethed our way to scything

now the seeing eye can edit dreams.

These words cannot grab what I breathe.

All the cream of elimination

cannot gather steam.

The mist of electronic bugs

has entered the cauterized seam.

Resistance is too painful to conceive.