Yesterday you gave birth to several children;
now every one of them is living on the sidewalk!
right in front of your house. Two are experiencing!
similar nervous breakdowns; the others, who seem!
to be mushed together and perhaps numberless,
are struggling toward the curb in order!
to smash their teeth on it.!

And the noises they make when doing so!
make the water flowing out of the sink's faucet!
wobble on its way toward my hands,
and the rust color it had has been replaced by silver,
and the dishes I am about to wash!
look like something I will never actually touch;
though that is not a possible appearance, and never will be!

Those children are making the linoleum crack;
they are making yesterday's rusty water!
leak out of my eyes, and the sky is heavy and low!
like a dome cage covered with vines!
that surrounds the neighborhood.!

when I was six, I was also five
and all the bright rivers followed me down

kitchen counters all covered in grown
grown men wearing white wedding gowns
in the crimson lounge

they're all lizards
covered in honey and they're ready to pounce
as only the old and hairless can pounce

we polish the silver
by cutting the bloodiest steaks,
by having flesh parties on gravel inclines.
that's where we make music with trash,
and cut our deadlines out of the blueprint.

but that isn't where we slide down long polished
wooden tables on our buttoned bellies

and that isn't where we plan the weather
in our tinfoil hats,

making the chimneys weep
their chimneysweeps with brooms on sticks
into the ashen afterworld
into the living room
sheathed in shadows it once drew back,
letting its only garment drape.

there were trees dancing
in a space that wasn't meant for them,
there were flames of green
lashing your peak arousals.

there were green flames moving
in a tin journey that wasn't planned for them.

at lonely times
the valley speaks to you
from far below the town

the crows surround
your angel in the mud
the swingset dangles
kid rhythms in your blood

you feed the slugs
a leaf that they'd eat anyway
& nothing needs your help

I'm a life alongside the world
where nothing hurtles & nothing
hurls itself a mini-self

the eyelash in my tongue's left lid
opens a neon forest in your left shoulder blade.

we both heap our rag bodies into the brightness.
we both have a night's worth of poolside kisses
stored up in our first set of stomachs.

the eyelash in my tongue's left lid
left me here, praying to the wing under your collar
for the whipped honey under your skirt
as if a subway breeze
were cleansed with water

my love
your hair is the only breeze
where the snare drum hits

Into the scrapyard with you,
into the brambles, into the pile
of crushed saxophones. Try it
in there for awhile, without women
and without music. Eat the branches
that whisper through the scraps
from buried trees.

And there will be a rhythm never heard
felt through the body, through the imagined
pillows, through the screaming underground
and high above ground, seen from an airplane:
you will die there in your own branches,
cast onto your reaches from the molten core,
through the frustrated soil and the bright
silver diapers, metal bent and pinned
by metal around a tight and hungering body.

I'll go as far as I can into this night,
into these purple tree streaks,
these sidewalks broken by robot paranoia,

these yellow clotheslined blouses in a white sun.
and green chairs lined up beneath water.
and ceremonies performed by anxious ferns,
trembling,
like protrusions into the land of the dead,
the softest place in the bread was her hair bun.

if you can turn toward the light on the water
and see a new dimension open,
with me in its torched slit,
waving with a book,
turn away.

if you can see me as one in a series of paperdolls
linked at the arms, don't move with your lens
until the bend sees through your unbending,
don't move such instruments as you have
past the rippling frozen at edges of court.

If their jackasses can run
with their teeth wobbling
in their goofy heads
from so much running
from so much running
from so much work spent escaping from leisure

then perhaps we can learn to play
behind the library
perhaps we can look at the ferns
while the vinyl spins
quicker in the pond-soaked yard
and the overflow
fills a fetus jar with murky green
for the firehose to finish
with a hydrogen lobotomy

I want to sing through your waist;
you, the daughter of fighting mists,
you, who play with a brass dish
filled with clean water

deepinsidetheabandonedbrickbuildings.

I want you to wait for my dog tongue
to come and find you and make a mess
of your unpowdered cheeks.

Since you make death sticky and real,
I want you to devour my life;
since you make me want to love
everybody, and I can't, I will love you
hurriedly and without hurry, my love,
who looks into the water and sees
a way to heal me floating
like a fish just above the sand.

At night in the hotel that is kept open
only for those who never sleep,
I lay on the ceiling with my buttocks
pressed against the hot bulbs of a chandelier
and worry that you
will never understand how wonderful you are

and I wonder why you, who also never sleep,
are not at this hotel
with me

I was a high number all the time
to take the books off the shelf
and be pumped for brine

I had fallen
in a shallow bay
hey hey, hey hey hey hey hey hey

and I had high wrinkles all the time
and I had high wrinkles all the time
and I had melodies in my spine

when I laid down on the stormy blueprints
where your life in architecture dried

and the long roads lead back to that skull,
and the long roads lead back to that skull.
in the white knowing, in the white knowing,
what itself devours,
what itself devours.

the white light basking in the orange appetizers,
glued to a promise on a blue and bright blanket.

letter to the best girl

allow me just
barely
like a dead dragonfly's wing
touch someplace
like the back of your neck
that doesn't talk
with the talking part of me
clamped shut against the blood thump
let me softly go past sleep
and past the ends of all the beds

let me barely be
suspended from the ceilings
that you move beneath
putting pieces of china together
delicately with such delicate
things that you have

your pillow's full: an armadillo
siphoning a busy colony into his body.

their blood of raw mechanics
keeps him edgy, keeps him alive,
keeps him numb to the stinging music
that they offer on the way down

to the dissolving fluids.

(sleep is the only joke
a tamed people can play on time),

your eyes open like mouths in the dark
your anus twitches
hello.

The thrill of being sad,
after a hot moment,
that's exquisite, that's
for the kings of this world.

And the thrill of being sad,
that's for a hot meal to enjoy
a golf-hole, in public with his
snouted friends.

But the shivers and shakes of
being sad, well son, that's for a princess
crying pinkly in a stairwell.
Deafening the town-world
with her fertile, ragged screams.

LOTTERY WINNER

she's musical
every paycheck morning she goes out to a department store
and buys several new microwave ovens
she likes the sound they make when she turns them all on at once
and the lights dim in the kitchen

she needs new smells she'd set fire to one of the kids
just to have a new smell
she'd set fire to them right after buying them a new pair of shoes
and not see anything funny about it she also likes duct tape
she'll wrap duct tape around anything just to see that dull silver shine

she has a vaccuum cleaner in every room and a rodent lying
in every moustrap, she likes to see the guts and the body
in their fallen shape, she doesn't like to touch the wreckage
for fear of damaging the perfect instant it captured

she's getting used to her favorite restaurants soon
she'll leave the kids at home, gasp, she'll leave the kids
at home, gasp, in order to spend several weeks
travelling to new restaurants

I've got a bad orange circuitry
flaring up in the nervous place
employers call my body. help the clouds,

flatten the ice cream trucks until
they are pure sound, until they
don't ring their bells.

darling with the cone, help me make
these terrible decisions on the sidewalk.

the sidewalk has measles and the trees are damp
not quite like a series of wounds.

the kisses you gave me are burning
the white paint on big brick walls
and showing an old red, burnished by time

and televisions punched out, painting
those who are asleep forever--which is
a short time for them--painting those
who are asleep forever in the smashed
tubes.

The stars whirl over friendly oceans (this is new)
and hear a voice calling (this is a man having
a fantasy):

would you hear me again, back at 5 o clock,
with my voice less hoarse, in front
of the same fireplace that burned
at 5 o clock, when the room was young
and everybody wore the same sweater?

The boards glide over dumb oceans
as the core turns like a steel drill
being pushed

now that my house has found a wide field to comfortably collapse in

I'll beg for your hands, I'll pump the well

this is a continuation of an old story:

then I started thinking thinking of hours as minutes,

fleeting times to humiliate myself
for many misters and sirs,

a time for money and pigeons,
a time for money and pigeons,
I repeat without repeating,
I wash dishes, I make a little sense
between the smashing of glasses,

I move the clock along an inchworm's back,

the inchworm learns lightspeed.

my older friends are beginning to complain
about death pangs
I feel the death pangs lighter than they do
but I feel them
and their older bodies are eating my younger body
just by talking but it's not their fault
it's the death pangs
painfully taking over
this is too sad to continue
I wish this had never begun
my body complains in a small voice
that will soon be louder

There are theaters
in the mind, where this sort of fiery thing plays,
afterwards. With all the actors grilled
and looking like potatoes, ready
to be burned more.

There are so many places to die, but less
enwrapping moss, all the time. On a pier
the thing rolls forward on 3 wheels, towards a murky ocean.

The one being hurt doesn't cry out
that it hurts but the one doing the hurting
cries out continually help me for I must be saved.

His voice rejected after his force failed,
parades of robots move the action he hates
in front of his eyes continually who will be master.

His arms are weighted down with birds
who don't know how cruel he is,
how obscurely dark, their yellow wings
on his face.

I like your color
when you move off the spectrum
I like the movement
when you lose your lard like a drunk motorcyclist
on the thinning road.

Fenced-in kisses
where we dropped an icecream
captured ceilings
where the sky's pummeled by cartoonish boulders
and antique anvils
we pull the wet pages together
without covers

we fence in our kisses
and the sky torpedoes the objects,
the objects with the most life,
the jerky blueprints, the fuzzy
stuffed animals making love
in the shadows of the roots

of trees that have fallen
hard on our world
the wet soil rained
on clumps on slithers
into paint into burnt things
through a scarred rain. The wet charcoal
we wrote with, on a greying leather jacket
you dropped
in a storm
that won't come again.

As monotony increases, the will increases.
As monotony creates, the will sickens.
Then monotony is placed on white leather
at a sticky beachfront
with a glass of kowala's blood in its veins

And it drinks the monotony blood
with its paws clenched, grinning.
But kowala increases; up against
a Niagra of enemies, enemies
who float in their own shit toward
their mother's opening, the kowala
increases without fucking.

if the satellites gather together
to strike at the apartment
with a laser
I might
breathe a sigh of relief.

in the meantime
I brush your buttocks with my eyelashes
and the back of my skull fills with a zig-zagging orgasm.
and pray that the delightfulness
of this thing we are doing outlives
the things which we hate, which
horrify us on barren streets
in what others call daylight.

if the bodies gather together for a strike
I'll buy a brush to brush you totally from head to foot; and
a pick to excavate skies in the places
where the bodies gather together
to strike at us
from their mineral clouds.

our holes walk up the end of our bedroom
and squirm around together
until they become
an outline of pure light;
children get up and walk out of our bodies
and exit this world through
those outlines.

She sent me a collection of small animals
designed to eat parts of my flesh
that had become undesirable to me

in the mail
she sent them
and they had such little feelers
that some of them leaked happily out
to eat other things in the world,
starting with several bus stations
full of the homeless, now deprived

of all hemorrhoids.

Where are the eye-petals,
and the person attached to them?
Was she a photo I took under
a powerline, blinking, sad to flirt,
in front of a seething tanker,
or will she come into the flesh
that seeks my door and to melt
my locks into pure amber. And

will her negatives have soft places?

you've got lucky hands, (a wandering mother), and the guitar is swollen for bows, but there's a yellow mouth in the exhaust as you walk backwards through your own smoke concert. you've got cinnamon breath, and the bar's reflecting. there are worms, dark and warm, in the fertile shadow of your guitar. there are warms, dark and fertile, in the shadow where the wormy feet of children swing and get set to play in the air. with ferns, and frosting on the fingers. with fern, and white frosting on the fingers where the dry skin liked to pose like a lizard and the afro picks fell from it into a ditch; a ditch of blueberries waist-deep under grandpa's white hair, moving over bluejeans. and the weather pulled in the day, with its appetite neatly tucked.

holes are happy tonight and
pegs are not. Tomorrow night,
tomorrow night, tomorrow night,
on a pink bed,

the pillowcases will roll up their sleeves
the walls will pulp themselves and print
hot symphonies stuck fresh to window frost.

in a narrow field
of white straw, sun-dyed,

chasing each other's skirts

a memory of life
brushed his skull

they caught each other's fabrics

an umbilical flicker
touched her headset

things that crash at similar speeds
kissed in the silver mid-stream

blonde spraypainted grey
a shimmer on the lawn at midnight

crowds of evacuated nakeds
standing bare as flagpoles: people
who stare into the headlights of approaching angelics
with their footprints torn up behind them
and their shadows strewn on ragged rocks,
cardboard painted charcoal on the television sand;

as they kissed across the tennis net
they thought of all their gassed families

my days are backward
they fly spinewards through the forward currents
of the forward days of others

there are larger orbits there are larger
dead planets there is a desk clerk writing
your name in charcoal on a charcoal desk

note: I love you better from a distance, in a block of white
hardening tofu air where I can't chatter. But chew
near a concrete duct, suffering from the brightness
of a peacock misplaced, but strutting, in the suffering
April snow.

If I step back from my life I can see my lovers--
hurt by me, wandering in a maze of spiky plants
just to the left or right of many things
I couldn't do. I watch them and love them
now that it's safer to do so, without being
hindered by their presence outside the maze.

And I wish I hadn't begun this piece of writing.
And I wish my lovers could step inside it and trample it,
and me with it.

you're like a wet otter in my bed
your slinky fur
your silkiness in climax

I want to get all the groceries in the world for you
while you level a towering remote control
at the walls
and make the glass neighborhoods change rapidly
into heaps of multicolored sand

I'll get a glue-gun
and stick all your favorite things to one wall
for you to enjoy all at once
then duck at the foot of the wall
while you yell at me
and pelt me with my favorite things
until I turn into a wall
your favorite wall
that you can change with a remote control
made of me and my own buttons

you're like a wet otter in my bed
let's forget the errands and the lists of milk
that we have accumulated

buttons that strike back
can be pressed between walls of favorite things
heaps of multicolored sand
held in place with carefully placed shots
from a gluegun
aim me at myself and I'll do the job while you do the job

You are a basket of eyelashes,
a pink lobe wrapped in dirty blind satin,
golden onion skin roasted shoulderblades
and a fervent shower of dust perfume
in 3 fog-weighted bedrooms. But.

If you have (outside pink) a servant, to discard him,
completely on my chest, a puppy,
push gently aside his cloth-blunted claws
delirious with sutures, his hanging lower eyelids,
his whitely mohawked chest,
will melt into my face like a summer stereo. In code for.

And the picnic will resume next to the highway
until the hanging places are filled with plums,
and the napkins bones and berries hovering in the air
will find bliss of fuzzy hands, clay pillows
and a whisper of Olivia, tired enough
to love a ragged man, hunting for a bleached outline
in the mountainous power outage. I love you.

Tabitha opens her body at the mouth
and a white snail craws up to the tip
of her tongue and moves around the curve.
That's a nice trick, Tabitha, and something
for me to watch from my sick bed.
You'll let me watch, but you won't listen
to the story of how your mother
ran me over and with her car screaming
for me to shut up about politics and pushing the horn
until the neighbors came onto the lawn
with flashlights and dogs to see what
the sound of crunching ribcage was about.

we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
the flood comes just in time to catch the fire
we can stay here and watch the river through the wall

we can turn our two into a snake
that nimbly cleans itself
we can see the fire and the water coming together

we can stay outside so many events
we can see a path out of the world

we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
grandmothers and grander fathers
stay alive long enough to cry us back to sleep
when the cities melt

we can rent a room in a tidal wave
and keep it upright as it rushes into towns
where we once lived miserably
we can hear the music all become young again

put moons back into canyons
pull planets that are jagged
out of a rough place made smooth

we can stay in this hotel while the other hotels
slam their boards together and say
to the wind how sorry they are

we can drive our room through every other room
until all the passengers of things that stand still
let their fingerprints make love to one another

you make homes for me in myself with your tongue
kitchen erupting from stall showers
a cook in the ceiling banging pots against
electrified grid of sky

you made a home for me under
a tiny field
that stretched under foot-thumped blocks
but held out their rhythm
with a kiss in the soil
with five hands inside each finger
you hollowed out the places that I would need
to be empty when the world began to fill me up

you make a movie using my eyes
you mount them on a tripod of flower stalks
the air with its shivers a movie of unseen dust
with my eyes you make a movie
and we're mounted on a tripod that's your body with one
limb impossibly holding the top of my head
to keep it from falling off into the final scene

you want the title page of your life
to be walked upon by many kittens
I want the same thing
we like it when our names blur
hard lonely antennas go soft
wrap around one another

you have fur in all the right places
I trim mine to fit into the places where you are bare
you want the title page of your life
to be put into a toaster next to the title page of my life
to let them burn together in their separate slots

you want the marquee to carry your wordlessness
the inside of a beetle's shell
to bring under its shiny hard
your meaning to a place where it'll
slowly be appreciated by lizards

I want the same thing but not now
I'm too busy chafing
your eyelids with my eyelids
too busy in your heat with the things
that have previously made me cold

I watch that man carefully
who runs with his loud happiness
through a big grassy field full of robots standing still
flicking their switches--their switches
are on their backs, halfway
down their spines--into the OFF position
while cackling wildly, with his smooth haircut
never moving. I watch him carefully,
but I can't figure out his operation
or why he controls so much. And I can't understand
why this thin bubble of glass just in front of me
stops me from smashing into his movements,
from finding out if there is something in him
that one could make love to, something that might
justify the proudest country in the world
for giving birth to him.
The thin glass looks like it's being hammered
by more than one sun, but it throws so much back
that the one striking it seems to be turning
into a grey suckermouth. The robots are marching in rows
towards each other now, there are red propellers
coming out of their wrists. They don't seem ready to do battle.
Their affable master shuts them off again and they totter
into one another and fold up into crude ovals,
limbless as a heap of tight-closed clams.
I can only watch and eat my insides while that smooth man
laughs at the joys of his authority,
but the grass begins to feel good on my urine-coated thighs
and presently the glass bulb begins to give me the intensity
of reflected light, and it puts a soft throb in my forehead
like sex after a lunch of fruit and cheese,
and I go to sleep thinking I might wake up with a weapon
or an abandoned world.
And I feel, between worlds, a switch in my back
that was broken by too hard a flicker of a boss hand,
and now connects to its circuits only once in a while,
at terrible moments that are peaceful for others.

I know a girl who spends days in her kitchen
looking through the holes in her cheese shredder
when she looks through the shredder
all the squirrels eating birdseed in her front yard
turn into dinosaurs with nasty mouths
little predators with scaly skin
trampling the tomato plants

through each different hole in the cheese shredder
she sees different kinds of animals
sometimes the animals are mating
sometimes they are petite foxes in bisexual tuxedos
sometimes they are primitive humans who bang
on her window to beg for food
lazy cavemen who are intrigued
by her toasters and microwave ovens

every day she feels the planet
turn to a ball of hot liquid metal
under her feet

it doesn't burn anymore

strangely, it doesn't even feel hot anymore
but it turns and it turns
into something inhuman and huge
and has a silver radiance
that makes the stars cower

she walks around on it waving her hands in thick smoggy air
the cities have all burned down without a scream
her high heels turn the surface solid everywhere they touch
she doesn't know why she is unharmed
but the world is very pretty
undulating gently liquid metal

there aren't any mailboxes in the bright monotony
but she doesn't mind
the eyes who read those nervous words
are all gone under a sea of steaming silver
and soon the steam will disintegrate
suns will greet her in their purity
blue will cease to exist
and she will keep walking into whatever's left

on the way to my room you walk through a refrigerator
you walk through a graveyard of mice and a ballroom
floor covered in golden ribbons
you punch out the lightbulb in the refrigerator
you make the mice into quiet necklaces and drape
their little gravestones in grey silk
you stir the golden ribbons with your feet
until the uncovered spaces are dancing

I'd like to do something nice for mister sidewalk
make every one of his squares a different color
put smiling children on several
and fell a bright green pine in his middle
make people notice how nice he is to walk on

I'd like to put some sparkling dust on mister sidewalk
and throw glue in certain grey places
for people to get stuck on
where they can look at each other and decide
whether or not to kiss each other for a long time

he's felt so many unfeeling feet
he's been lying down
for so long surely he's hungry for a new world

We're kissing each other under a huge porch
There's a family reunion being held in the house
that's attached to the porch, and the footsteps
of a huge and disorganized family
move around in casual rhythms
on the boards above them.
The gentle sound of drinks being poured
merges with the happy sucking of our lips.
Is that your family above, or mine
Perhaps they belong to neither of us;
we certainly don't belong to them.
But somebody's uncle looks familiar:
he's walking down the steps onto the lawn,
with a dumb grin on his face, drunk.
He rips a car door off of some other relative's sedan
and props it up against a tree. We've stopped kissing
and we giggle in delight; he begins to paint
the door with a brush and some cans taken
from the garage. He paints the scene on the porch
with every member of the family as standing crocodiles,
sipping drinks from glasses that have been cracked
by their huge sharp teeth. And a landscape
of mushroom clouds with tree branches
lurks behind the porch railings.
On the other side of the yard, a radiance--or maybe
a crowd of blonde children--is crawling up a tree
and crawling down a tree simultaneously.
Long yellow whiffleball bats fall out of the tree
and make a mellow clatter on the artificial grass.
Either the children are picking them from the branches,
or they are falling from the rectangular heaven that (our?)
drunk uncle has painted on the window of the car door,
above the crocodile family. The flesh of the children
is turning into butter; the butter covers the bats
and they turn into snakes, snakes that slither
through the artificial grass and turn
the green blades they touch into real grass.
Sometimes one of the snakes will raise its head
to peer at a car-window heaven and to see
if the contents of the porch are human;
and we share an orgasm whenever that happens.

The jagged lines in the blueprint
of your experimental force field
are creeping imaginary things moving
across state lines to be with me.
That which you had sent out like a shield
has become a net.

The spaceman flying through the forcefield
gets a coat of metal covering his pores,
and can only smash it off
by crashing into your door.
And by never flying through the forcefield,
since it doesn't actually exist.

The blueprint of your experimental force field
lies atop a bouquet of burning candles
whose hot white brains are starting to show
through the paper. There's no meat heart,
but the air inside a clenched hand;
no mere familiar function, but a starfish
made of darkness in your vulnerable
hallways of hours.

The spaceman flying through your forcefield
is trying to get up from where he crashed
through the roof of an indoor basketball court;
he is trying to peel himself like a dark starfish
off the wall of a local restaurant.
He's trying to stop the barnyard blades
to hear your helicopter music
through a labyrinthine ceiling.

Now that we are strong enough for this desire,
let the fingertips that dragged the city walls
come in like humbled invaders. And let the lights
built up so robotically on the sides of our valley
become like bioluminescence, and be moved to glow
by the passing of a lover's craft.

Our ship of canvas numbers has been turned
into a soft black hole with jellyfish tentacles.
How did the crushing suck become a trailing mess
of ladyfingerslinked by darkmatter, aching
with celestial honeypot? The universe of hardness
punctured itself and threw us out into its sister.

We both stand in the prow and put our black dress-coats on,
me with my chest hair flaring out of a rigid brassiere
and you with a velvet bowtie above your barest nipples.
The multiverse without space for angels
is with us now.

For people who hate each other,
there are plenty of things to do.
They have warplanes and missiles,
they can alter the air. They can
communicate with one another.
The whole world seems devoted
to the production of things
for them to fight with.

But if two people
living in such a world
should fall in love with each other
where are their big machines?
What factory devotes itself
to making the massive things
that they might use to impress one another?

But I forgot that love
does not need too much power.
Love is timeless, and makes
no demands of the future;
it does not need to be seen
and heard all the time,
it does not need to win everything.
And there are no contests of blood or fire
that could prove it worthy.

People say that love is free, and perhaps
there's still a truth ensnared in that cliche.
But love is surrounded by myriad things
that are not free, and these things
restrict its movements. And those who insist
that love is free are often most imprisoned.

Love wants greatness, lovely architecture;
love wants a good government.
For love wants everything to love;
love wants the post office and the sidewalk
and the education of children to be
impressive and beautiful experiences.
Or maybe love is just a crowd of monks
making beer together
and forgetting their religion in their labor.

But those who have the most love
often have the hardest time
putting it into practice; their
love wants a whole world to run free in
but too often is forced
to settle for a smaller space
where it can easily become frustrated,
distorted, turned into fear and even hatred.
And so the greatest lovers
often lose.

How terrifying the world is.
And how few good people we have;
and how hard it is for them to remain so.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen.
I dreamt my hands onto your waist,
I dreamt your arms over my shoulders.

I even dreamed a chandelier
made of beercans and candles
to light our sweeping progress
across the room. And I dreamt
the walls covered with your paintings;
a ballroom for your greatness
(a whole world for your greatness)
that made the Sistene Chapel look
like a rusty thimble in comparison.
And an elevator coming down from the ceiling
to take us to a high bed in the great city
where we could make love and breathe
the hidden matter of the universe
into each other forever.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen
to a velvet revolution. I dreamt your life
into my life; I dreamt my strange tuxedo
next to your startling dress
at a ceremony the world has never seen before.

When you walk into Paris, I will feel
my shoulders jump off of my body
into a raining sky. I will have airplanes
in my bedroom; I will cling to the sheets
to avoid being sucked into their blades.

When you walk into Paris your scorched prettiness
will dismay the air
and make people drop things
that they are trying to eat
and you'll have to help them
pick those items up off the bricks
so that they can chew to keep quiet
and astonished in your presence.

When you walk into Paris I'll be walking
into another dimension; a dimension
where every little plant looks like your red hair
and frogs worship your reflection
in a wet saucer. When you walk into Paris
my passport will lose its labia
to a searing wind, but I'll stamp it with kisses.

When I say I love you, I mean that I want
all the authorities of this world
to tiptoe politely when they are around you.
I mean that I want violence to melt away
in your presence; I mean that I want
you to eat good food and breathe clean air,
always. I mean above all
that I want the media and the music
and the airports and the theaters
to stop insulting you; I mean that I want them
to shrink with shame in your beautiful presence.

So I pray to nothing
for the systems which are not built on love
to come crumbling down
leaving love standing naked and needless of defenses
in the wreckage, preparing to rebuild
a better form. I'm afraid it won't survive
the demolition. But I want for my love and its world
an unprecedented freedom.

And since I cannot provide these things,
I become crazed with a thwarted passion.
Love wants power; power to produce,
power to heal, power to help. And lack of money
gets in its way constantly.

We put a picnic blanket down
on the scrubby lawn
in front of the supermarkets.
And we lay there
exchanging squares of cheese
and small goblets of red wine.
We arrange live electrical wires
around the blanket
so that nobody will bother us.
We take your wide black scarf
and wrap it in a silky mess
around our heads
to soften the smell of car exhaust.
The highway just a few feet away
and the moving sidewalk roamed
by puzzled travellers.
The movements in the parking lot
are like a swarm of beetles
moving on the outside of the scarf;
we can see the world's smallness,
and feel its brittle rhythms recede
to give way to the massive rhythms
of our blood. I do something strange:
I duck out from under the black scarf,
run into the parking lot, kicking up
chunks of sod as I dash away,
and I grab the payphone in front of the store
and I call your cellphone
and you pick it up, bewildered.
I watch you from the storefront,
thinking I might see something different
from a distance, might pull some monsterous
tragedy out of your voice and stomp on it
before it kills me. You slowly peel
the black scarf from your face
and see me staring from across the parking lot
as silver automobiles move across my body
and my eyes glow with the terror
of the distance. You warn me that you'll hang up
and I ask you, please, if you're going to take
your voice away, not to cover your eyes.

I must have stepped on a current in the wires
as I was running away from you; I know
some force revealed my brokenness,
and you were frightened. Now you can't
move toward me without stepping on those wires
that I mashed into the ground with my fleeing feet.
And the phonelines in the air
sag like clotheslines grabbed by children
who want to climb them onto the clouds.

we can kneel against birches
just minutes after you crash your car
the snow can turn warm
and squishy in a fertile moment

a gelatin of wasted seasons, under a concrete bridge
where the nuclear seasons move fast
under a crimson sky and a predictable cloud

the girls can drive their pick-up trucks
into boys on a ledge that overhangs the city
they can drive their cars into boy guts
and drift and hang there
after their engine hardness has totally died down

we can find a hill rolling halfway up the trunks
of palm trees that feel their trunks
being caressed by softened fibers
of guitar bodies
smashed and softened by the sea
wound together by their fallen strings

for Olivia

One day
we were in the back of the video store
looking at porn together
trying to find something beautiful
something loving and aesthetically pleasing
and you kept loudly denouncing
the films for being so stupid and degrading

you were the only woman in the room
and I was the only young man
and the middle-aged men all around us
fidgeted nervously because of your words

and I loved you for it.

I walked past the video store today
and looked at the posters: most of them display
the women that the world considers
its most beautiful. They are nightmarishly blank,
their flat eyes horrify me. And you with your
heartbreakingly gentle hands, you with your
elegant eyelashes, you with your naked eyes
trembling, are not here.

When we make love to each other,
our spirits go marching through
an alternate history together
arm in arm.

Your body is a sleeve of reddened light
encasing me, keeping me free
from the greys and blues in loneliness
of all the worlds.

And I let my body pray
inside of you, pray dearly,
pray to the laws of your faint
flesh, to be kept by you,
to be visited like this only by you,
to be kissed and satisfied only by you
in this cloakedradiant place which is love.

Sleep, my freckled doll--
the evil have their appetites,
but ours is greater.

I miss your strange chin
and your strange ears.

I'm going up
to the woods around a mountain pond
to weep on a rock and think of you.

She did nothing wrong
and nothing cruel, but
nevertheless

I have that wonderful Leonard Cohen feeling
of having been really satisfyingly
fucked over by a woman.

I can touch living things and cry out for them;
I can eat cheap and rotten food, and live on desire.

I can move around on the flying Earth
and hurl my tears onto things that won't move.

But I can't cling to you, a fellow creature;
because you want to be free of embraces,
the embraces that you used to want.

I can't make you want to live, to seek,
to plunge amazingly, into this thing, me,
which is waiting for you.

I just want to watch you move around,
touching the things that surround you.

I just want to be in your presence;
I want to watch you from behind a tree
where I can quietly sob
while you move around in your yard.

I want to watch, because my love
is not welcome; I'm not allowed
to get up close and close my eyes
anymore.

There are suns in other galaxies
that stun the mind. If you moved close
to one of them, they would cleanse you
of these half-longings and turn you
into a pure desire. But here on earth,
if you don't have any money,
falling in love with someone who has money
is terrifying. Because you can't follow love
around the globe; you can't afford
to track it with jetplanes
or move through its massive atmospheres.

There is a place in the heavens
inhabited by a strange star.
I live there, with a greenish glow,
now that you have broken my heart.
There is nothing for me on the planets
anymore, the creatures are on a landscape
that I do not comb or farm or copulate with.
Since I do not live on the land,
I can float with my eyes in front of me,
and see anything coming that might touch my body
and slice it away before it comes too close.

in my dreams my friends and I
take our cameras into the mountains
and snap pictures of our genitalia
laying up against mountain rocks

in the winter sun, shrivelling in the light
the army comes to steal our cameras
and chase us down off the mountains

into the land of parking garages and quick restaurants
where we try to find a darkroom to lie down with

and a lover leaves her camera
on the floor of my rented room
where I have assumed a false identity
that has become more real to me
than the name given me by my parents

I carry a grey heart in a pail,
over the wooded highways.

Over the roots that break tar,
I carry my heart in a grey pail.

I am going to throw it into the water
where the river intersects with the wooded highway.

I will throw the bucket with it
and let them be carried away by the stream,
and may they smash into something good.

After the war, your bed.
After the knives, your legs.
After being beaten by police with shields, your kiss.
After your bed, the war.
After your legs, the knives.
After your kiss, being beaten by police with shields.

This is the song
this is the song
this is the song
this is the song
this is the song
about the death you won't have to die
for the people who aren't required to be people
for the aisles mopped by morons
with the hair of morons
between the pickled morons
in the moron morning
picking idiot pockets
and arresting itself with hungry police
as the fleshy current rises toward the ceiling
this is the song
this is the song of the everyone
channeling through the shrunken driveways
standing stunned at a window
while the familiar blood eats meals inside
at the blood table with the blood stories on the wall
going sane while the staring outside turns into a human.
This is the song you won't have to sing
to the people who won't have to listen to it
to be smacked flat in the pages of a book you won't read
while the orange turns to pink in hazy near-nothingness
while the children turn into dandruff
on the grassy downslope.
This is the song
for the hardly songlike
disintegrations
and the forms that seethe out of them
like a fleet of tadpoles
in a lifted pond.
This is a song for the horizon that becomes a landscape
when the landscape drops out from under it.

I'm taking my rubber body down to the river factory
to be covered in splotches of bright metallic pink;

I'm taking my body to the man-factory; hey you,
you take your body to the woman factory: I want to press my mouth

to your woman-parts and praise them with my tongue;
and let you take my man parts in your tiny mouth

and let you clench at them happily, with your
whole being; I'm taking my rubber body

down to the river factory, you, you meet me
there on the warm presses.

brush your teeth on a high bridge
lower than hell in a city
eat match factories in semi-sleep
apply for the terrifying jobs
stir harsh chemicals under
dying dancefloors
in the starving night
convenience neon
lit up above the gas pump
open the frozen twilight
for the homeless who don't
fly straight, into the suns
of other hurting planets
while the solar systems
groan toward their origin openings
kitchens pouring
through sarcastic night
we jack statues off
into the thawing twilight
trashcans gossip
old towns talk to cities
in the uttering dawn

A heap of broken houses
a heap of torn skirts
a heap of old red bricks shattered into small triangles
a heap of ice cubes in a snowy driveway
a heap of martini glasses chipped and foggy
a heap of powerful people
sinking teeth into each other's entrails
a heap of stones covered sloppily in blue paint
a heap of ocean photographs with colors missing
a heap of sideways bedrooms
a heap of old haircuts and new haircuts crumpled magazines
a kaleidescope of cleavages, buttock & breast
a heap of vinyl discs, a heap of tar clumps,
a heap of unused pebbles,
a heap of broken houses with people in them
pretending to be whole.

There's a note on the door that can't be read
and a room breaking open under my soul.
And the all-night birds who won't sleep in the living city
have a grave to peck apart. The silent smaller birds
who surround them are making their way over a continent.
The all-night birds don't see the continent
but the shadow-birds guide silent birds over it.
The scent of your love is in the cube
on the tip of my cube-shaped nose.
The jewelry of trees is hiding madmen in the lawn
from a computer light.

After the officers raped you
we had to learn how to make love all over again
without thinking of all that policeflesh;
they pounded their wars into us
they pounded their hatreds into us
they made the continent metallic
all under our flight from the law.

This could be our shared house
twenty years from now
or a tiny hotel room on the edge
of a contaminated city.
All we know is that it holds the love that will be bones
and the blood that will run
on the fences of all the world's kings.

There's a
there's a stunned love under the people's river
where the
there's a stone in my lung.
There's a
there's a small snag in the cloth that you wove
where all the tiny animals come in.

I have a hole in my face called my mouth,
that I have never used. I have a mirror,
that I have never cleaned. There are paths
behind my house that I have never walked
to mountains that might as well be heaps
of garbage fallen from some other planet.
I have a hole in my face called
a world where I will never live.
I have a fag in my brain
and several botched political careers
with purple curtains.
I have a hole in my life called the sun,
with several minor embers drifting around
trying to take the place of its tongue.
I am opened like a thrown orange
on a city sidewalk, waiting for raccoons
and garbage men.

Short Story

lying on a mattress without box-springs,
on the floor of an apartment.

how she was when a wave was crossing
the street near or through her. And about
her on a heap of undulating trash, halfway up
skyscrapers with her vulva opening.

An ocean of trash, tossing, heaving, a world
of candy bar wrappers. He plugged the lamp
nearby into the outlet at the head of the mattress:
he wanted to look around at the room
to make sure he still noticed how it was,

while he thought about her opening up wetly
on a mountain full of trash. I need a town,
he thought, where the candy bars don't outnumber
the shopping carts.

Olivia, you're my favorite creature,
I'll build a porch for you
and you'll build a porch for me,
on the hips of one another's blueprint
lives. We'll barbecue separately
and then together, when our lives move
into their near apartments.

And I want to embarrass myself all over your body,
unmarry you, Miss, so your name stays cute,
carry an umbrella to your sandy sun
while baby elephants play in your moving shade,
and move your lemonade around on a blanket
in the early moon.

Powerful morons have nuked our future
but the present disasters leave movies and beer
relatively unscathed. There will be a party tonight;
at some point I'll separate from my friends
and stand on a dark front lawn,
running a flimsy claw across the horizon.

There will be a death in the water
and a kiss in the apartments.
There will still be a few pets, instincts
broken by humanoids, that haven't run off to die
inside some prophetic vibration.
There will be a warmth in the crust,
there will be heavily protected sex.
We'll fall in love just in time
to see our lovers frozen to the sidewalk.

Powerful morons have nuked our future
and we'll pelt those powerful morons
with foam cups and napkins
while they scythe through us in religious airless
ness.

In the future there's a parking lot full of motionless cars--
we're dead there, but we're alive here--
nobody in those cars is waiting to pick us up.

You left your dress hanging
on the back of my favorite chair
but I won't be returning to it;
I won't be carefully removing the dress
and hanging it in your closet
for you to wear when the cars stop moving.

my mind is dripping down
Greg Devlin's ladders of gold

it's a fair trial from the underground
you'd better wake you up seldom to survive

bomb concert
nobody ever gets overground

it's in a deep toilet past
it's all past the ass

of a dearest thumb
twitching in a grain

where the best animal suns itself
rebirths ugly on a slim salted mountain

banned concert
in the megamegadome

nobody gets in unless they's financial
-ly inspired, hurt small

--into large--
by a spider.

clever metal figures
fine-working sleeves w/brains

can whine about fuck about something
when cats will be there

& a book will often fall out of a book

without the blood stricken
within the blood stricken
dry
as the desert runs away with dessert
and the open are croaking
in the oven hum.

The shadows of trees across your naked body
turned me into a little boy before I could kiss
the bright spaces between the branches

shyly I put dandelions behind your ears
and touch your lips while you sleep
on a neon orange blanket in the bright green grass
twilight seeps in around us while the squirrels
nimbly finish what's left of our meal

Your nervous music crawls
through the grocery store your nervous music
moves around the pickles in their jars

your nervous music blurs the faces
of my oblivious enemies
as they order their meat from my soul

your nervous music on a telephone porch
kissing unexpectedly me makes me loving when
the rooftops are drunk in a war of headlights

your nervous music when you shockingly love me:
I fall off a barstool and end up president of the world

a linoleum ocean smeared with violent lipstick
comes up to meet me and I
rent a room from your nervous music
nervously bringing my instruments into it
sniffing a rug on fire

I'm a freak afraid of being abandoned
you're afraid of not being abandoned
let's enter hell. The stunned people
will meet the liquid people on Main Street
and fly a plastic dragon in the bottled-up air
just above their heads
as the sky thickens and the toothy mouths
move up and down. There's a fishing line
with a hook in both my chests
pulling me upward over the crowd,
and a fleet of psychotically chattering pumpkins
arranged on scaffoldings
near my other bruised head.

There are pigeons who used to be turtles
under some ancient sea. Their beaks and their eyes
tell our magazines to go under the earth.
And a glossy page turns in their eyes
and a centerfold opens in their mouths
as we toss a bread into that bird void.
Those skinny tongues moving up and down
and a pillowcase trampled in the street
from a bed that fell onto this planet
where our matrimonial house
was supposed to be. Our clothes are dirty,
we grope towards the flesh that was broken by police
in our Asian bodies
so many other continents ago.

I'm going to die on the road, walking away
from a war my parents started with everything.
There will be a bird in my hand, I will cross
a ray of light and it will come to life. The pebbles will dance
like severed clitorises going back to their bodies.
Desperate to love each other
terrified to love each other
the sands will escape through my lips
and a gut will fill with human things.
The narrative pulled through my navel
will unwind and come back forever.
I'll paint horses with neon
in a dim field outside your bedroom.
We'll have a narrative here in the grass,
a basso profundo voice will munch away
on its cud. And the bird will peck a hole through my hand.

hammer comes down and I'm not here
in a whirlwind of leaves
stunned on the avenue

hammer comes down in city
I'm in a country tree
crying at a mushroom
cloud

hammer shivers the river
hammer falls outside
many dotted lines

There are mutated frogs
singing normally in the river
there are wine red stains on my rug
and the parking lots glisten with smashed glass.

The homeless shelter where I used to stay
is right next to my house
and if I fall out of my house I'll fall back into it.
But that doesn't matter to me now.
What I want is a lot of money to kill the evil people with,
to bless my friends, and to buy musical equipment
that will make all radio stations explode.

I want to tear the satellites out of the sky
and monitor the behavior of the dead.

2 boys waterfall

between 2 waterfalls
2 boys lurch up wet out of wetness
and see a blackness moss mouth
opening under the running water.

between 2 waterfalls 2 boys say
in the dark--under the ripples--
show each other a finger inches
above the brown moss squatting
--the blackmoss mouth talks--
the wet teeth break open--the world
flowing out of the soaked chalk cavity

2 boys rowing the world
in a wrath immediately
behind them--in the green moss
the first orgasm of 17 years.

sing for those in bodies who are trapped alone
telephone heads
alwaysringing
surrounded
by those who can't seem to see
your reptilian tongues of beauty
snickering quietly as you strut
across linoleum oceans
awaiting a kitchen counter on the other side
where someone with pie ejaculates kisses
so calm

telephone trunks in the deepest
pines pinning sky to a cloud
our backs can't see while we stare
through slug trails of mucus
on freshly fallen green leaves
at another half-transparent earth
through this earth through this earth
the bending ecstasy of roads
the dirt derailed there
under the tunnels and paths

sing in a body for those who are alone
trapped hard between bodies who can't hear a music
in their smashed branches
laying upwards and awake
in a whirlwind of hot summer snow

and in the sigh is a ship
descending oceans
through bodies of birds
filled with sunlight

and in the bird-filled bodies of sunlight
flesh is the only rapturous

layers of sand pushed apart liplike
by a transformation
in the dry places
in the longing water
in the clay under the swingset
looking up a churchskirt
the sigh is a ship
moving backyard into the ferns

Her every footstep rattles beetles on thin trunks
She's on the floor of the world
the knobs in her joints
like chickenmeat being broken
each fingerlong step illuminates a tarred kitten
every baby in a bush is sprouting from a dirt future

but a bananaskin hand comes out of the tender muck
for her footcuts to heal on in a limping moment
and an egg like a rock could roll in her cup
for breakfast in a forest, former driveway
while the rain rolls in on lizard feet from a closing sky
and a vague form with enormous breasts
comes out of the laundromat on rollerclouds
and she runs into her like her mirror's breaking
------------------in front of her-------------------

her presence is a small knife in a milkshake
her promise is twelve sparrows in a dying bush
her hands are clean
and blood runs through them like a silk

green world

oh the pill--oh the whiteness in the throat--
of the ferns lewdly green wiggling,
insane backyards & soft ribby hinges
in guts that stayed fleshy still
all through the war in a huckster's wail
bottom of the night
feet reading brail
on a moving wheel

tossed throatwar back & forth
between 2 moons
in a swingsetted backyard

oh rain pebble
oh them same rock apartments
falling through
the newsprint air
in the labial merging
in the hurting flag
athletes fuck
themselves on TV
& hack the finest fibers from the mean

In the next startling chapter, ladylike,
you lower your original body onto me
while helicopters whirr
wonderfully overhead

now that this has started many other things must end
wonderful things that have been happening must stop
many horrible things that have no significance must also cease

(before such dramatic lovemaking starts inside)
helicopters plunge into the tall grasses, breaking

everyone sleepily running
for the life of a horrible baby
suckled like a root in the air

children on the shingles
grab their garbage bags
and hop
into some garbage air

it's a seething ride down

with pebbles already
imprinted on the palms of their hands

note: This poem is the most succinct piece from my new collection, An Oyez & Thirteen Purrs. If anyone would like to have this collection in their pants, let me know in the comments section.

CIRCUMCISION TIME

we are going to remove just a little bit of your penis
just a little piece of your penis a small chunk from the tip

don't worry about it this is standard procedure
if you protest we will make it clear to the world
that it is you who are disgusting and hysterical
our scalpels are clean and efficient you would be dirty if it were not for us

Edgewood Hotel

Confuse yourself with books, until nothing's left of you,
then throw yourself into a shallow pool.
There will be a girl waiting, there will be a wine
improving, and a fish to be fried in the muck
near the bottom. There will be a girl waiting.
And the wine moving gently for years in the muck
near the bottom, brushed by the fish as yet unfried,
meant for the hands that now recline
in the sun at the crumbling circular edge.

Read books in a sun-lashed room with draped pianos
until there's nothing left of you, until you bathe your friends
to kiss them cleanly, and move the mailbox into the hall
to bring the mailman closer. The hosts divide the house
and the parties get hotter and smaller. The counters
are covered with fresh-sliced onions, and oven fans
keep them moist but the chef is off somewhere flirting.
The customers about to be hurt unaware at their tables,
the waitresses wringing out tears in meathooked freezers.

And a lonely chef, done with the men and the gentle
ladies, asleep in a long final kitchen
with a small television, snoring towards death
while short-lived ferns pulse
lightly in the trash dump on the plunging hill
where the cooks threw their leftovers
when all the buffets ran out
and noodles clung briefly to birches.

delayed command,
machine wants
a different kind of user--a different kind of touch--
and the mouth it puts on
is a humanoid in lipstick

machine wants a simple chaos
to make it a mossy blur
in the corners of controlled gardens

the machine wants to turn brown
and machine wants an orange to be rolled into its mouth
it wants to explode peacefully inside
another machine
the machine wants kindness
it needs kisses to breathe

mounting her on a wet picnic table
the pure spouts clogged up with leaves
nobody remembers the rain inside the rain
nobody pounds on the door underneath

stripped in a latenight latenight
frogs on a concrete globe
veins in the backs of animal hands, electric white
oil pours down the freeway
oily hands grope oily trunks of trees

outside a lunatic cuddling another
lunatic, the nights tick on simultaneously
never touching the clocks, never touching our backs
with their aching oils

Not document

There's a girl waiting in a tree under an airplane
ramming through a cloud in the Carolinas.
Our telephones are eating through the air
toward each other. After all the religions,
after all the politics, there's nothing left to do
but let the oceans fuck us
and let time pull out our hair.

Grandpa doesn't fish anymore.
He looks sad in the livingroom.
Who's the bigger mess for president,
an uncaught fish asks.
The mirrors are not new,
but the rooms in the mirrors have changed.

My love, and my love again lie down
(my love, and my love again)--

I have woven you a crown of black-eyed susans
and lain leaves of pale yellow
on a dry
carpet of needlepine

tonight
look up to your starry origins

while life crawls endlessly underneath us
and I make love to you
with all the colors of my mouth--

(my love, and my love again)

while the taste of half your life is in my lips
while the fibers are raging underneath us
to be kissed by disintegrations

I think of the circuits just above my tongue
I think of the rushing of blood, I think
of two birds falling out of you

touch your mouth
with the mouth
you have re-made for me with your mouth
and the seeds rush in from everything at once

*****

Now that you have re-made my mouth with your mouth
now that you have re-made my hands with your hands
now that you have re-made my chest with your breasts
now that you have remade my rough belly with your smooth belly
now that you have remade my prick with your cunt

the music is quieter in the air
but it's rising in volume again
the music descends
but it has hands to pick us up
now that you have remade my music with your music
a bird like a note pecks hard in the back of our head

I'm glad your kittens

for Jentri

I'm glad your kittens
are comforting you: one on your belly
and one at your feet, one on your face
to make you gigglesneeze,
one purring uncontrollably
against your neck.

They are circling
your hurt vibrations, part of a music
humans made.

I am too deliberate to be a cat,
and the slight gracefulness
(in less fur) of which I am capable
will someday receive a beating
from the police. And the cats
will climb all over me.

The ducks,

The ducks, those perfect little machines,
leave flames in their wake: each trail
of feather-oiled ripples roaring
with fire all over the water.

An old woman pulls up in a deranged automobile
and throws them bread and the meat of other ducks
from her window. They smack their beaks
and narrow tongues together slightly
as they pull the morsels apart, flurries
of meat-eating ducks reflecting in black water.

The woman leaves with an engine snort,
the ducks get stoned on her fumes,
then take off leaving trails of fire
across the limited water.

When I see what a girl you are in your steps,
when I see that radiance coming,

when I stop on a small piece of metal
and gaze out over a cracked parking lot, full of parked music,
[while I'm holding you
and looking over your shoulder]

when I see you being such a girl with the back of your neck

I hurt to be a better man, with big hands on the nervousness of your love,
I yearn in a small bucket, I enlargen the world.