I apologize for not posting much lately. I have fallen into a hole. Hole number six, to be not-quite-exact. It's damp and mossy here, and Pabst Blue Ribbon (voted best beer in America in 1893) pours from crevices on every side. I drink to keep from drowning, and to keep my typewriter relatively dry, but the keys are rusting and they sometimes stick, as you may be able to tell from reading this manuscript.
THE WASTELAND IS A WONDERLANDby Luke Buckham1 Entrances into eleven infertile womenYour homelessness darkens the air
as you stumble like a kite being dragged
and you're dragged over tinsel everything:
parks and ponds covered with tinfoil,
benches and playgrounds, churches and sidewalk,
all silver metals crinkle
under your every step. The town is torn at the corners,
everybody's watching the snowflakes turn into water
before they hit the ground, everybody's
kneeling in their closets to beg for the water to come
or recede, but to do either of these ridiculous things
very quickly. And not to push our porn out
onto the street where somebody might see it
and have a good time with our favorite images.
This is the first and last
private prayer of our lives.
The magazines flip open like hands falling asleep during prayer.
The closets open violently in a tin foil wind.
The snowflakes become more and more like each other
while nobody's microscope is looking.
The steeples relax and collapse more than halfway;
shape themselves into sleepy tits,
like the tits of a woman lying down
backwards worshipping shadows on the wall
while a man pulls on his pants
far out in the closeted distance.
A squirrel is at the window, his teeth are wine-stained,
he drinks burgundy from a saucer on our porch,
we're too passionate about animals
to poison him, we eat meat while we watch him
from our kitchen, the cold air
blows the linoleum cold as a politician's voice.
We leave handprints of heated lubricant on the television screen
and take our camping trip onto the roof, tongue-kissing
eleven big-breasted Albert Einsteins on the evening newspaper.
We drive the silver poles deep through the shingles.
We hear our house crack open underneath,
we hear the supporting beams give way beneath our hammer-strokes
and collapse as we make love into the kitchen,
the wind becomes hollow as the voice we make
apologizing for fucking strangers behind dumpsters
at polyamorous pizza restaurants. This is a part of our landscape.
And since nobody wants to sing about it, we cough about it.
It feels good like the tickle of a Japanese beetle
crawling down out mutual fund throats
in the bank account morning.
I wish another planet would come hurtling in. I wish a godless
unnamed would thrill us in our orbits with its dancing.
2 The party at sevenLay down between six apple trees in the numberless April day
watch the beards of tyrants wet with your girlfriend
drift downward in a stream that carves through stone
while the sand is sleeping underneath; a planet waiting to be soft
under all its hard hard hard hard people people.
Multiplied in welfare brick, newspapered free of lips,
skyscraper windows, outwardly severe,
rub against sensualities untold from the inside,
offices exploding without style into a new and better night
of broken glass. And the greatest poet in America
riding the wind over it all in a hang-glider,
with his dick jutting out, twanging in a winter night,
invulnerable against the newscasts and the bombs
which happen indoors.
Your guitar waits in the barn like a destroying angel
frozen when the gardens spilled their profits on
surrounding grass. And everyone was happy to invent
three thousand beers, and play basketball with legendary gods
under a punctured tarp while the rain waiting in a sag
sang a song to its healthy daughter
just beginning to bleed between the legs
while the real river waited behind a thousand rhythms;
driveways take their cars like a virginity giving way,
the host is drunk, the sleepers on the grass
are eaten hollow by ants while pie is served,
the waitresses are drunk on absinthe
greener than the Martian skies, inaccurate.
3 An orgy in the convenience storeYou have to lie down in the gutter and put your ear to a beercan
to hear this pirate radio broadcast; today: an orgy
in a convenience store cooler. Frozen deerskins
found stuck to six-packs, fur plastered solid
and unyielding against a wall. A powerful defrost was performed
and the sperm is flowing toward the roots of pines
in the streetlight-dazzled parking lot. Someone
is listening to fifteen stereos while a masked man
walks away with the drawer. The meat is missing,
and the spirit is stuck in an abandoned church,
while an opportunity goes wandering like a glass comet
to escape this monogamous half-light.
Drink inside two blue suns on a summer Monday
while the winter and its broken reporters are waiting
outside, their shoes frozen to the pavement
by teenager sperm.
Someone extends a microphone someone watches a hotel
slither like a snake out of their right arm
while massive electronics take care of the rest.
Someone brandishes a saxophone instead of a computer.
And the robots take off their kitten flesh
to become human children, they file taxes
in the snow and angels leap up around them
eating the beams of streetlight light light light
with animal mouths. A question that isn't asked slurrs
retarded frenzies from the ice plowed up in rivulets,
vaginal against the pine trees, while the phallic telephone poles
ask it a mundane question, and the answer comes
from a skull opened long before these debates:
when a man hides his fragility for a small forever
guns shoot out of his arms
his sex is sealed shut by a telephone wire
bombs thrill the seats that he rides to pink oblivion
and his seed runs in the aisles
of burning magazine supermarkets. It's a joke
that everyone gets and nobody dares laugh at.
And at at at at this location, you are the bar,
the drink is a stranger being poured,
the drink is your blood leaving your body,
you are a second stranger drinking it,
kissing a selflessness mirrored
in sands burned glassy on every beach
while the whitest houses last behind the dunes.
4 Singers on a stereo while we drownThe squirrel against the window gives his teeth
to the ice and doesn't know
his body won't grow back.
Against the wind of these inhumans
with their human music, he tries to make
himself into the glass. A sky comes in
behind his efforts and it's tiresome
the way the sun the way the sun.
Moves.
I can't hear Odetta anymore
through all these bathrooms.
The urinal is flushing her voice away in cheddar Vermont
sunrises and when this state does not exist
the boys on rollerskates in the White House hallway
call for a breakfast rat to make their teeth shine
in the fur of southern wind.
The sun in a tiny box of glass
the moon in a little slice of wind
a honeydew current runs
through sunbathers and newspaperreaders
on the beach and the soda machines are running like fans
every little girl is ready to leave her blood on the sand
every little boy is ready to be circumcised today
and burn the lens of manhood shut against the beach
and crack a soda high against the porch
of vinyl fantasies melting
around an orange electrical cord
(their slippered feet are higher than our unsheathed heads)
while Barry White gargles the underwater
and climbs the side of Hawaiin mountains
with his stinging teeth
--an earthquake!--blood with hands on our birth
blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands the friendly animals don't know our hands blood with hands on our birth born we've hurt so many of the things blood on our hands born with blood on our they don't call brothers and sisters with blood on our hands born with blood they don't pucker their mouths on our hands born with blood on our hands against romances they can't feel with blood on our hands born with hip-hopping against the chlorine wind hands born with blood on our hands born disoriented by lips in the gym on our hands blood with hands on our birth the hymens popping like frog throats blood on our hands born with blood under needle fingers with blood on our hands born with blood on our hands don't make a difference to the animals born with blood on our hands
5 Two girls from far away are taunting the soldiersTwo girls walk into a deli begging gently for meat
one has a chin-dimple like that of a superhero
I tell her she should wear a mask over her eyes to accent her chin
one is spilling bright blonde potato chips all over the linoleum
with her cute and messy little mouth
one has blue hair the other has green hair I always fall in love
with green-haired lasses the bluehead's taken
and there's an immaterial war
going on under the linoleum--potato chips sprinkle the soldiers--
they look up angrily at the bluehead nobody seems to
matter much anymore but she catches their beaten attention.
They yell and the tiles,
once immaterial, now rattle as if they were the last necessary matter
on this whole kitchened earth. This is the first and last
public prayer of their lives.
You--not to drool while you're flirting--
press your groin against the cash register drawer
in hopes that money given
will drown lust before it turns into love
the television moans
like an old woman touching herself with a billy club
every day there are more and more cops and less and less gentle people
so many accidental loves make cracks in the concrete
from subway kisses...babies exploding like landmines
because this is what we must do
as the trains fuck the air
and the sheets of metal make their music far overhead
the sunlight seems to beat them into shape.
6 Think not to try too much aboutThe flesh forming on dinosaur bones.
The blood coursing through highway veins
like a series of inhuman symphonies.
To watch your sex be dragged into the past, I know:
the silver seems to blend into the gold
but it's all a metal nobody can wear.
That armor is too soft to put on cars
nevermind people putting bombs into other people unhappily
or in a sensual daze--the tanks are the same for prostitutes
and for weavers on the bronzed shores--make the world safe
for nothing but flowing alloys. The poison in the brewing
can make children in the air with demon hands
for the dead to defile. There's no deflowering when all existence
is a constant killing performed by virgin warriors.
And they cauterize the navels forming
on holiday oranges in defunct Floridas
while the speakers wail about fear and the products of fear
several products are not afraid
and they take their own bones out of the engine oil
and they start the motor seething with their oldest blood
while the grass turns red with easy summers,
and the newborn body escapes into thirty adulthoods.
Think about the baseball game, kid. Your mother raped an aspirin
with her toad hands and served it for dinner.
Think about the baseball game, kid.
Dinner is just breakfest for bohemians
who balance moist TVs on their heads
while performing oral sex on visually impaired journalists
and generals in the military dark
of an unnecessary hotel. They call it dinner because it's a pancake
who turned into a toad-like entity after being left
on the table too long after breakfast, when an absent kid
watched baseball in the afterlife:
Tigers vs. Bluejays in the uppermost inferno
while his parents screamed under the roof
and the shingles came to life under his ass of bone
and slithered uncomfortably, like tapeworms
in the hour of their own unreckoning.
Karma's unreal: nobody ever answers for their misdeeds,
motherfucker. Think about the baseball game, kid.
7 The hatreds are now gardened like a dirty kissThis is a poem about heaven
very few people have been to heaven
but the few who have hate it worse than they ever hated earth
or any of the other worthy planets--let me tell you
about the lack of hunger there, the lack of learning--
while I look down into my lap and see a bobbing head, brunette,
the planets moving. What if the Milky Way should de-activate
and seem to stop like a fern in mid-air?--sliced by hair-thin blades--
you have to be watching closely--
why should anybody hurt for the kid, ogling angelic porn
on the underside of his baseball cap, while the sandwiches
are ready to be eaten under fertile ground? The garden atop a train
is zooming past while a madman rakes and hoes
and loses his head against the city's most wondrous lightbulb.
The passengers underneath asparagus and thriving
black-eyed susans at the edges of the city's tunneled heat, dusted--
flowering in pale grey light, or in paralyzing fluorescence--
the city basks its flowers
in a hatred only vacant lots can nurture
back to something like love, truncated--the flesh stem-hollow--
milky in its resemblance to blood, in photo negatives.
And the moving bathroom at the end of the car
bumps up and down on bodies, jerks you off against
the sound of miners hollowing the earth
so peacelessly
while an audience howls like a sink
that channels rust and nobody makes poetry
for the gods who hurt them anymore. Because this
is a flock of eyes like semi-colons; always
a planted tear underneath the watching sorrow
of the sheep-fuckers who wait, who wait in a yellow shadow;
who wait in a subway lined with sandwich-bread;
who stomp with bucket feet on flattened bucket floors:
somebody like a stove full of beautiful jews is dancing.
8 Groping each other on the last trainHolly opens her asterisk
for me to dunk my winter-wettened nose in
whenever the crowd stood up by speeding trains
is gripping engine rails and waiting for scraping skies
to land through forty feet of concrete on their Q-tip heads.
Each eyelash is a terrorist.
And in Holly's prettylittlebowels
a lunch waits for a lover
to grab it by the balls
and flush an alcoholic ocean down its throat
when the toilets aren't looking.
My tongue is an enemy agent ready to repent,
my tongue is jelly and fire through a pretzel's mouth,
my tongue is heaven cooking.
Holly is a train inside the train
she lets my hands rub upwards in her mink
--how many quiet animals died
to let us cloak this grope--
oh I think of the parenthesis
that breasts always are in the cold
9 Nursing on the air above the subwayThose silken minutes you spent
on a train with perfect tablecloths
throw chaos over the third rail
and electrify those always waiting
near the rushing doors that never stop
and currents rushing never make their home.
In those rusting hands, always waiting,
too late for flowing things.
The conversation is as light
as a chicken bone in a gigantic mouth.
And your long and weary life was just
a few minutes badly spent
waiting for a frosted train
to banjo through the hanging metal chimes
above electric rails for dogs to die so lonely on,
tails wagging in frantic, chain-linked loneliness.
Swallow a paragraph from a stranger and lipstick smooches,
subway seats and sandwich bags become swift creatures
in the moving light--the nameless hesitate to burn a cigarette
while every car is moving heavenward on broken rails--
nobody's blonde for an instant,
everybody's blue-eyed and black-haired as the lights
flash on and off and every city wavers gazing
at the headline of its undeclared eclipse.
Stray dogs walk together in the concrete trench
men dug without a sound between dueling electricities
of cities fighting oxygen.
Neglected towns light up with hot-tub kisses
for a glassed-in summer night
against all television winters, and the dashboard
is a piano for only children, steerless into streetlit night,
unsure if stars are out, or if anything will ever peek
again, chomping on the head of peaceful movements,
ripping out the arms that meant to hug, a music terrible
lashing, lightwards on the dusk underneath leaves.
10 The odor of some stranger staringHas an amputated tail, the danceclub waits behind
a mutilated streetlight, the dancers are all women
trying to be whips in hands of men
before the dollar falls
through neon flashing floors.
There's too much music here, no remedy
for the necessary deafening. My left ear crackles like a glacier
moving into the wrong history, tropical, forced oceanic
as the frozen fish thaw in its side
and swim out into aquarium histories, my crow-feathered girl and I
leaning against the glass that sharks nudge:
softly every day with foreskin eyes, thick noses,
tongues on the move backdropped by every world
they cannot fight inside the glass.
And the teeth are sharpened by an unexpected moan,
security guards turn heads to see the lips
glistening they have destroyed: every affection they planted
comes back as napalm in a kiss and children fall into the realm
of sight gnashing where the ocean would disperse the blood
the cylinder of glass contains. The plume of red's no longer
isolated on her lips. A child leaped out of her before she could
lie down, and I defend the shoes and shores
fallen off her body before a sea of police
angeled her away on stretchers
plastic, revealed her naked back, the baby swimming,
the silver dollar souls of sharks rubbed faceless
by the whirling of this salty laundromat.
I think love is losing its gods.
Every bench a seesaw in the shadow of the capital,
every child strangely adult
and trained to act on couches pulverized by made-up light.
And the false innocence no longer dashing,
the robbery no longer eclipsed
by extravegant dinners. All panther movement
stilled inside the vase of the sculpted city,
turning in a potter's hands while terrorists kiss
against the glass and the killer is in the womb
and the womb is a jellyfish
and the tentacles are baby's fingerlashes
and it's perfectly acceptable behavior
to sing a song while aquariums fall
whole and with their fish onto your womb.
11 I can't find a properly sized cucumberOr number this color
stutter this number fill the craters
with a ribbon made of shredded records
of the innocent imprisoned
of guitars succinctly prismed as all lunar light
is sabotaged by whirling rocks.
The matter of these objects is out of joint;
it used to move in a socket nobody knew about,
so now the science of the phrase: "does not
compute"; the lips are holy, the teeth know not
soft movements of the bought:
the paid-for whores leaning
against a light their taxes snuffed
with ancient liquor while the stars watched.
Having renewed them aching selves fern overnight,
and mushroom too, stone fences strung
like polished pearls across the countryside.
The derangement of the sheep is curiously human,
and a glass eyeball found in each
sideways and wandering, and slip against the hoaxes of the moon,
and lose the loyalty of suns, and stem the raging
of a Saturn in the blood, having usurped the gods of war,
having newspapered all that had been painted,
hanging from a desperate tree calmly
calling for grandma while the Milky Way burns out early.
All those abrupt, all those alien in the fastest,
all those lava sidewalks, all them copper trees
seen acting on their blisses in the non-shadow
of radiant mountains: these are the objects
to which we done declared ourselves,
the chickens aren't listening, spouseless,
childless, sibling-abandoned, the crimson families
bath themselves until a pond come from their longing
and cucumbers come to rest in the lake
while vacant-eyed crabs take vacations, massively unsure.
The little girls pile the sand the little boys
step on jellyfish and scream
through sandstone megaphones at absent demons
in the fishless morning. It a beaut, of scum
radiant and dark, glowing with a human beast
for centuries later, when the beach is melted whole into a sword.
12 Making love to a hole in the planetThe human beast has a song like a wheelbarrow
moving over grass, pulled by a clumsy child,
and what the rubber tramples no rhythm will ever know
again, not even the pulsing suns, not even the failed stars,
nor planets snoring in their orbits like malfunctioning
computers. Did we splash the right amount of blood here,
did we tuck the right amount of cunt-suggestion
into the sunflower, enough phallic vibrations
thru innocent daisies and susans with black eyes
like abused women who go yellow around the edges,
their petals bright and vulnerable as a star held deep
within range of sweating missiles nuclear and kisses.
There was a question here, but it disappeared.
Beercans emptied in the wake of hurting oceans
the palm trees bent like exhausted lovers
and jellyfish washed up like condoms on a searching shore--
hands are everywhere, the wind has dyslexia,
the commas turn into vaginal hesitant semi-colons
nobody's sure as a cock where the rooster moves
to the geometrically perfect center of the farmer's roof
as he used to, when the oceans would withdraw
and now they don't and now the kisses are a doomsday
of summer liptick spring and struck with powder of falling
moons toward menstrual oceans, libraries moving back
into the protesting core, and the homeless asleep in a loudspeaker,
safe in an afterlife no music can lick or reach with other,
interplanetary, tongues--heaven is invisible on Mars--the balls we licked
in highschool snub us with their sweaty angles now, the cubist
fertilities. And moles that would become
so cancerous in doubtful futures
now spread ruddiness over
whole sunstruck bodies
harmless as a lightning fills
the skyward holes with homeless meat.
13 The earthly operation, warmer than a surgeonThe sexlessness of a hotel morning, the pool
still as a fenced-in desert, the window vibrates
with a sensual return. The glass reflects a transparent man
and the pools shimmer, or ripple, I can't tell which.
When the solitary orgasm hits
the glass shatters to reveal its helplessness.
And a couple walking past shields their baby, their eyes go wide
and the balcony trembles with the weight of the father.
The mother almost levitates but her feet are glued
to the fake grass rug.
I've left the shower on and whiskey dribbles down
the side of the television. A war smudges the screen
in imperfect rhythm with the thoughts of the owner
of the hotel, who can taste my whiskey coming
through his screen from his seat at the front desk,
snarling at himself and at the soldiers
that his sons and daughters have become, faces reduced
to chins under helmets. There's a parking lot to write about
while the sands are opened up to a parade of tires,
human spirits jostled above the muffled clamor of their rolling,
a thousand lizards dying as magnetic industry
draws the hotel into the air and drops it again,
rattling all its rectangles with a fall. It feels good to lie back
in the smell of flooded cavities and feel the building
come apart. And the highways forgetful of furtive passages,
cops putting on their cherry lights while falling
off the edge of sudden chasms, speeding people
with lipstick faces honking their own bodies
like horns, eating spicy food behind the wheel
as the radio condemns and the wheels bless
tentative. Roads breaking open easily, like the tops
of cooking pies,
the everybody that posed as an individual drawn and quartered
by its own faceless horses, revealed only in pain
as populations morph into long ropes of sausages,
linked by what they had called love, and transcendant cats
flee the earthquake before it hits, and are reported
in sun-scorched newspapers
by a dying and superior people.
14 Seduction by the electric companyMy tallest darling, wearing a dress made of steaks,
the best part of a raw cow the butchers killed this morning,
enters the only numberless room in the hotel--the hotel
that was built next to a supermarket filled with red wine
and salad dressings in profusion to the ceilings of
a grey-painted world--the lifeless blood coats her body,
and when I slam her gently against the heater,
we smell meat cooking, the toilets open their mouths
and flush on every side, suitcases slam shut,
salival glands open, mucus seeps
out of the partitioned ceilings, the floor
is multidimensional as we fall into it together
like a pair of human televisions sprouting
antennas all over. The groping that we do on earth
is a reach for many-limbed spirits waiting like machinery
to be used in baseball stadiums for the happy damned:
we eat us, as we are no longer we or us,
and are as separate in our joining
as the otherside machinery are one.
It becomes easier to repair the failing flicker of a pale hotel;
the vibrating bed causes an earthquake
in the red wine bottles of the supermarket, cauliflower
rolling on linoleum, the smell of chemical cleansing
in innumerable abattoirs, the knives we stabbed our bosses with
languishing like unused flesh on the door
as the hinges freeze into place, as dimensions fall and crumble
into one another and the hot-dog machine
raves like a preacher against the schizoid vulva hidden
in the back of his head, a ranting mouth accepting
sunlit beaches past the corpses carrying umbrellas on sidewalks
of cities, cities pelted by mushrooms and refusing
quaint and helpful psychedelics, cities going grey
behind the boiling water.
15 The domestication of lonelinessMushrooms spring up nightly on the golf-courses,
they make the news, the players hack through broken skin
and smell the vegetable kingdom in the trampled roots
and see the pines and palms all joining in a sun-drenched dance
to sink within their teeming mass the ships that come
when moisture does prevail. You linked these long sentences
to my body, you dared me to take an electrical shower,
and I am stepping left against a hailstorm, right against
a coming rain. I am pulling jails with a bit clenched in my knee-teeth.
All pain of bluish wives electing men
blonder than me within the storm
is flicked by healing tongues, all mine.
The ambitious remove themselves from our bedrooms,
the votes of squirrels go unanswered in the tiny kingdoms
of the overgrowth, the vendors bring a universal sausage
to the feet of statued ice in thriving winters/mall displays,
a million little ice ages under careful supervision.
These words that have gone cold against the surging of their time
are pregnant in the infertility
of mustached aging housewives
and their magazine-making slaves, the soda's bubbles
are filled with a health for the desperate.
16 A mission statement contested by androidsThe insignificance is a song. The divers come up
with diamonds of their own water, sweated
under more expensive water. The wasteland they uncover
is a wonderland: the deaths of many are a thin champagne
tasted by a restless millionairess, her flaming hips
both under and over the carpets of this world are discovering
a joy in destroying tomorrow. And I share in that joy
as I kneel in those public carpets
knitted in dimensions cold as dead grannies,
bloodless as the corpse at the open-casket,
made wax for our flesh flesh flesh and tunneled
embraces. And the silence is a tool for the sound.
And the skull is a crown for the finite. And the golf course
is a dead man's outstretched hand covered with
microscopic grapes, the overgrowth will outlive
the trimmers, the structure outlive the sellers
in its perfect crumbling. Vines are slithering
into everywhere. The worhipful outlast
their own stoic idols while they kiss
under the seats they made
by sitting on the air.
The caricature is stencilled in the emptiness
of earlier caricatures. But a vast jelly, and a vaster jelly,
surrounds like a sweating planetarium
the air of parking lots where cars gather
like whores in a third world, like scrawny children selling postcards
to the deaf. Their laundromats are open
to a pregnant woman's fondest anal wishes,
and her sighs from far behind the silenced city
that her child will support and spines
played like a harp in the last crushing, fingers pluck and preserve
the necessary tension that upholds,
trembling is the only standing
in the fractured end.
And now her tousled image is everywhere.
