The breeze fondles its secret crevices

with green things,

is groomed to be a greater wind

fleeced of easy curvature

billowing like the blood of the world.

The orchestra of blades

proceeds through trees

that will not lean its way

this time.

The rumble of liquid fire

bright ferocious tongues

from many mouths.

I cracked my head on northern ice

and burned my feet down south.

These vines are in my veins like crowds.

ASAGRAUM

I keep company with my witches,

and my witches comfort me.

We paint memories with black

and purple stripes.  We reach

a highway strewn

with secondhand cigarettes.

The ground lifts off

like a rug with rockets.

Towers gleam around 

the emperor's ring of gardens.

Their windows blink

with secret bohemian signals.

We see the strength of a painted wound

in vaporous space.

TOBACCO ZONE

I carry an apartment on my back

imprinted by the dancing feet

that made this town your street

the floorboards wrap my spine

in wax and shine

I lumber through this world with gone

Greg Devlin's ghost,

looking for a lost bohemia.

Birds in the rafters

riding heavy metal hair

branches whose forks liquidly multiply

extending warm wet growth of grandeur

cooling through mercurial sunsets

roots coiling beneath the cord

of connected skies.

STONES OF THE SOUTHERN SKY (after Neruda)

Red jasper, beautiful

brick red blood of earth,

bright and rough rock of persistence,

stone of my mother who plants

in the darkest dirt,

stone of our humble ancestors,

known by our Chilean cousin.

Pablo, your hands are companion

to omnipotence now.

These stones are for you and for me,

each splinter of chert, each undissolved

dramatic cluster, dark quartz closely packed

from its molecules outward,

jasper for Greg Devlin's hands,

chert for mine and Pablo's,

we make a time-resistant fire,

we make the blood of man create rock

in these holes of boiled dust,

stones of light

sailing through constellations,

changing the maps of space

sky seen from a southern depth

stones deep in a nurturer's net

bright stones of June's December,

January's April rent.

GREG IN REPOSE pt. 3

I listen to Andrew Hill's Point of Departure,

and picture you meeting a broad sky.

I picture your ecstasy made universal,

in final harmony with all your heroes.

I see you seated in essence with honor

ranked among compassionate hearts

and the most perceptive eyes.

I see you elevated and adorned

for your devotion to those who create,

which was second to none.

I know you make common cause

with a loving God, Who knows

your every name, in jazz aligned

designed your rogue chimera,

everlasting primavera.

GREG IN REPOSE pt. 2.

You were right to favor mercy.

I was wrong.

I thought judgement

was the parlance of the strong.

The strong favored me wrong.

You sang again.

The bridges flexed

around the coops and glens.

I favored wrens.  I favored

secret weaknesses in friends.

Gregory in relapse sleepless

still in fine form, cooking shirtless

to Ornette, or talking

ceaselessly of Todd Rundgren,

Mark E. Smith vs. Damo Suzuki,

big knuckles of brass,

all our eye's lips are kissing

Foxy Brown's ass,

and the half-year's new at last,

and the marsh-hen's a wriggling down

Beefheart lane, Greg Devlin's memory

is Europe's and America's,

paid tribute to Ravel and Matisse,

honored our deep and fatal

ancestors, and has not

failed them yet, and never will.

1968 )( 2026

Catcalls of riotous looters,

the infection of belief systems

crashing on an all too human wall,

walking around the deportation camps

with Allen Ginsberg

weeping for trapped humanity,

hungry for more than the slippery grasp

of nebulous eyes, hungry for more

than the slogans of profiteers,

hungry for a third American Revolution,

hungry for the thirst of evolving soul.

GREG IN REPOSE

I see you in your armchair,

all transactions pending in heaven,

praising the searing

colors of Bonnard

in all their domestic gentility,

carving a bathtub of rain

out of the air,

stuck to a cross

of swatches and switches.

You tap your ashes on a Mingus CD,

brush them carefully into the trash,

straighten your chest,

listen to Pithecanthropus Erectus.

I am the darkness within,

the voice of the denied.

I am the furious ecstasy

borne upwards by all your hatreds.

Mine is the blood on your hands,

that has learned to speak.

I am the cancer of civilization

given divine status.  I am the menu

splattered with infant shit

as you make your decision.

The wellspring of life has dried up.

The dead rule now: they seek only

to punish the living.

Inspiration is gone

from these streets of automation.

The empire of bright lights

has gone down to sackcloth and ashes.

I mourn in a moldy fireplace,

gnawing at my rags for dirty moisture.

The smell of shit fills the museums.

The gas of senseless rage

blows through the libraries.

My body is an instrument

tuned perfectly against itself.

I can't help.

Swollen in the rift

collecting rain from other skies

cups and limbs

long desks of ice

lamp lit by the canyon's edge

tendons climbing jagged ridges

souls equipped with claws of bone

tender circles closing clover homes.

I am the son of my fathers

the men who threw down your false god

you puritan shellfish

mating with electrical firecrackers

I walk across the bleak land crying

pen trying to find my hand

I sleep face down on the soft banks of a black river

broken by the rocks that know my name.

Wheels are unloading

strange vessels in my mind

strings are brushed by skirts

far outside solitude

the tendrils of a goddess are connected

the earth shrieks with joy

The kingdom sleeps in shit tonight.

The brightest flowers bloom.

I play the pristine music of the ages

in my rotted room.

Butterflies of steel on a floating blade

of weightless grass

reflecting all the dead sky's glass.

THE JOY OF SATAN

I am an inhabitant of Hell

and a keeper of Hell

I am the refurbisher of Hell

and its first and last most

colorful servant,

enemy of all that lies above.

I watch the accumulation

of plans that lead to nothing,

and I laugh.  Here in the depths

things take longer to move,

and they stick, while the way

of the surface is ephemeral.

The beauty of Hell starts

with space: it turns out

that Heaven collects the multitudes,

while Hell has few takers.

These red depths are for

architects whose designs

are unwelcome in the thin air

of a febrile empire.

Our fire is deep, but our roads

are cool and clear.

There is no alcohol in Hell,

only grave tasks.

Pedantry is annihilated.

Inversion must bloom or die.

The new country is here in the dark

and my dick is in it.

Long ravines of supernatural wine

penetrating clay without words.

Moving over a quiet planet,

sinuous throughout receding fire.

I scoop your form from a rock

and carry you between

these sweet slow gashes in the earth,

their winding presence riding

in the blood we mix with radiant cells.

Tied around a slowly dying star,

the dark materials of consciousness

look for an increasing contest.

A feather finds a feather

and begins to write.

I suffer lapse after lapse.

I put on the charming mask,

but it always cracks.

Darkness pools in me

and tries to compete with death.

The raging seas are tied

in a daisy chain

around my raging dance.

I invite the lumpen toads,

the fluidly curvaceous doves,

to fill the bleachers of bones

and cheer for my flowery devouring.

Bombs that are muffled in me

explode elsewhere.  Ruins of gold

decay on my refracting table.

I will never be peacefully inhabited.

My dreams are the dreams of slaves

who never accepted their fate.

You have made me an immovable nothing.

You have made me an immovable emptiness

and yet you fall into me

like one who needs to be drowned.

The instability of yes

and the numbing no

congealing schizophrenic soul.

Kingdoms opened at a touch

closed down within invaded afternoons

leaving me in clouds of crumpled brown leather

fighting for the eyes that led me here

to find the stamp on a dragon's tail

swishing over gorgeous fortresses

turning air to pink reactive water

joining infant smiles to a sky beseeching spine

as the lightning picks grape from vine.