drain
hydrate thought screen
orbs blooming in air on each side
bridge rattled by sunset energy

I watch freedom grow in its peaceful
moments, and think, now we're
really getting somewhere but the youngest
man I ever met whispered gently, humorously,
charmingly into my ear: just remember you're
always watching a funeral party
get suckerfeet and suckerhands
up into the sky corners
something colorless invisible old
is stirring nowhere at all

drink
oilships in the eyes of a good kisser
receding tracers tagged with blood
moth wings scoop after scoop

and many bridges saying
something gorgeous has passed under
something worthy of intake has crossed these waters
assaults on bare space should and will continue
something certain has vacuumed all overhead

the violence of trees and rain,
raw district drawn out
in universal color, front doorway
of the electronic soul, a new brain,
interplanetary imaginings, layer upon layer
tapped relentlessly in to the mechanism,
phallic ultra tip of the prime mover

a flood-tide of raccoon bodies
and lonely against it with a mop
watching the jelly of outer space
tense janitor in love with escaping,

his torso is part of a bridge
connecting states, ribs incoherent
reef's ridge at the belly
of the finger's touch, a black hole blooming.

we move as a couple-unit
through waiting rooms, jails,
swift bodies of the unknown,
we wipe numbers from the doors
of rooms we enter in our sleep,

suddenly we're walking to breakfast
through a long solid tunnel,

this subway cherishes its own bricks,
the love of motion, love of coal
histories, lipstick on bathroom doors,
low money in eroding corners, this

time-burst doesn't discover, it is outside,
it is not intimate lasers, it isn't required
to turn into plastic, this radio shrieking
is all my body can carry.

hornets on force-fields of wet lips
tickling the nerves of a close sun
light on the belly light on the stone
of a death in marble

twin dogs in sunlight on tar
twin dogs at the base of mailbox
licking a shovel together
twin nostrils on straws
black susans trampled in mud
hornets stomped in machine dance
proud electrical displays
in assaulted airport; the twin
on its hard nerves, tugging a kiosk hologram
with him in silver helm, eyes flecked
with asbestos, lips septum scorched twice
to match flares with the belly of a sun,

don't you ever lay down on the earth
to be healed, mush your tongue
on scattered maples. Propellers in velvet
sashes, disease crawling over the trunk
mantle the jug full of pulped grapes
a white cat crawling down the silent air
from a fluorescent light, eye of an alien ship

lipstick-blind, dashed by pennies
a shallow drainwalk

SIRLOIN DISTRICT

fruit-meat, saddled with ashes,
where do you go to droop
your velvet antlers,
where do you go to droop
your head on the woodpile,
we can get away with anything,
where do you go to bury
your leavings, where do you go
to dump your blood on this earth,

you were travelling, in a song, in a song
with backgrounds slipping
down the walls of interterrestrial time,
wallpaper of eyelashes, beloved,
stung by yellowjackets
in the horror of a light rain,
touch the beauty eat it out of the air,
to your right side the sea,
to your left side the sea,
letting the death ahead in vapor
blend into the movie,
blend crimson into the mirror,
the element of randomness
in a human face, the element
of strangeness toward all being,
the eyes a closed cabinet,
the eyes whole tunnels between rivers,
going blind to feel the all-seeing

back-fields, scarred in velvet places
dogs multiplying in a hypersecond
swingsets necklaced by beads of stunning viscera
eel meat on rye, government of flour
goldenrods take the corners
bright arms through chainlink
scythe caught in upper branches
yellowjackets swim above diaper pile
pathways stained with oil
sandbox full of bullet shells
brighter than all stars

perfect fallen skyscaper
boosts from orgasmic foundation
radio tower festooned with lacy underwear
penetrated forests, eternally unknown ghost species
the lovers speak, whole libraries of energy

BRIGHT OTHER

tiny pink spiders crawl thick green blades
headpiece stacked and laced
with white straw in the afterworld
are they babies are they about to die

I itch all day stopsign
buried up to its metal neck
in the corner of a high lawn
the one word staring tiny pink spiders
crawl from death to growth
their tiny noticing not much difference

scaffoldings of digital multi-fuck
and chihuahua paw irritates the mustache
the upper lip doesn't care about the lower lip
little legs going nowhere for everywhere
headpiece knuckled and bubbled
scissors invisible between limbs

if the right hand doesn't care about the left hand
the eyes behind fingernails will watch
tiny pink spiders think big
thoughts of devouring in the belly
of their hour on faint legs I
welcome them onto my belly hairs

let poison bite fiber and follicle
never reaching flesh flowers
have black hearts near around us
yellow petals long in the air
interrupt telephone wires all
erupt from their mother's egg back
and the earth has a magnet heart

calling headpiece down to rot in its rest

moths gathering on a steakknife
lonely hands in an energy porthole
twin moons that turn around an invisible bird
dead friend head against artificial heater
woken by backward time to prowl in drunk hours
the porch chopped to bits on the roof
fridge light damp on erections
electrical extension cord chesthairs
holographic muscle fiber
the word LOVE scrawled wide on a windshield

that one grows, until his forehead
is a vista of meaning. His dashboard
becomes a part of it, then his eyes
are imprinted with a historical map
of the sun. This unhealthy mammal
bribed the best of public men to rip
the cloth from his eyeless torso
in universal public. He can't stop
the orange trees from growing, or turn
gasoline to water.

That man would rather be a woman of his own
construction, a steakhouse mirror, a champion
of imaginary sports arenas, gleaning
ancient televisions from a belched wind
of statistics. He has wings now
that are different from what he imagined,
from what can be imagined.

little ramps of side-road
descend from monolith funnel
ruthless highway churning
cartilege & bone to marrow stew

dogs in a backseat grin drool
while the shocks groan on
orifices of pressed tar
damaged automatic doors shift
paws split where feet don't
go scampering where feet open

little cries to be fetched
muffled inward monkey
come from woefully
overcomplicated mammal
weather control is clicked apart
machine shell gasps to force
walls outward that are inbuilt
the yearning skull holds two dogs

LUXURY METAL

noise princesses on a firm ledge:
volcanic fire far beneath turning
fitfully to a pond of large mirror.
They take their vaginal intellectual names
down a radio antennae

lubricating the windless small center
with casual outcries. Shells of ant
sun-roasted on a painted runway
stirred by escaped air conditioning.
Kisses print the tunnel's sides
with evaporating tear gas

banished medics reconfigure traffic accident
to look like an advertisement party
this is my core crying out
through many faraway things

SNIGGLETOOTH

the floating water casts out birds
windshield painted in ragged light
telephone dead on the backseat, bark crawling
numb kidneys

bridges chime aging in rust
tar is filled with washed pebbles ashore
tires jump, sole flip in the air,
the agonies in little side mirrors

a rain pile of ribcages

and so much white clamor in traffic
bulb orange shaving the gentle nimbus
soft from every real light
between highway lines
radiant from the edge:
two cyclop virgins
staring.

VACUUM

Paraded in vulva sweaters
two sour green cheek wearers
proceed through the faint pink
airliner doorway, treadmills stalled
breasts lashing electric light
burst slackened veins,
the mountain signing off
through a trainmouth.

We have a mechanically achieving
champion, wearing our tits with a rash
for the storms on fire
in disconnected lands.

Let the dust under sofa
cover your tongue, your backhole
languidly offering new.
We have a chin for the new wearers.
He will march with us into the solar system.
He will show tricks with which to scare idols.
His palms will observe a salt moment
white black grainy old photo tracking
the tracks of the tracks of the tracks
of those healing veins, licking one rectum shyly.

BRAMBLE PORN: NAILED INTO GOLD

I was in the realms
of comfort, a friend was dying.
No November can fall
on this roof, quacks the robot.
We were playing hop-skotch
deep in Elysium back fields,
quacking roosters
raid the field of night, over and starlit over
again the basketball hoop is
tilted by leapers, moth hop
dying on the old rope net,
grey as the whole polluted sky,
hung on a white cotton
fuzzed antler, space-sprung
nuclear yellow, liquidly poured open
from universe to universe. easy,
all quick naked veined
childlike, right for the job.

Ice-picks beheaded adorn
each helmeted shoulder,
the ones coated in lipstick
step up after and after the
unmolded quiver of each other,
lighting the eaten web, two rainpeople
laughing, two drizzlepeople
nailed into an attic corner
by collapsing gravity. And a mansion
is reconstituted pinkdarkly
among murdered restaurant winds
what holds the palm lined in engine oil
drawing the vaporous presence
of otherworld moth
twitching under rock walls,
nudging sheep to the late flares
of the open sun. You evaded
your taxes for this, you bought
and drank twin plastics of vodka,
you rubbed saddle lotion
on the TV wires, for this, you undid
your fake gown, you androided greenly
through everything, this is youth,
swingset's eye on the road wreck's
parade of daily loving bodies.

So that you could go to the bottom
we all talk about
and go there and go there
and go there
and find out what is left there.

sOLIPSISM IN PURPLE

1

He who lays on his own doorstep,
crying as if he cannot get in.
That one ate the berries
and puked them onto a runway.

We hear the scythe of his sun's last surge
in the trots of a kitten, bound for brush
and to be mysteriously eaten,
corpse-flaps torn like fetal wings
failed beautifully against moss forest floor.

2

He chases himself around the room, she drifts
across wall after wall healing blisters in the paint,
he won't look. Now and hereafter are the same
crimson muddle. Elbows eye sockets greasy hairs
in greasy teeths.

A new bulb grown between weather
near the top of a central town statue.

LONG VERTEX SURFER, YORK BEACH

mechanical overtone dusk on bridges
rattling in darkened time, pigeons startled
in their half-numb ways, looking you far
under an umbrella robot's green lipstick,
robot's vermilion furs, robot's bowling alley:

arteries frayed in the air, holding a laughing knife

to his guts, neck deep in the bank waiting room,
a sad deer limping through the wooden gaze
of his reflection-worship, the stunned vertebrae of his
admired objects, wing torn twice on ocean rock,
long mouth beak tongue rooted to the taste
of pink sand-meat somewhere near, under ice-trays
and a radio, someone's snoring the life away,
someone is velvet laugher, someone is holder
of a license, black-shelled, charcoal battle-vest
of ink-tree, tattooed to a blade-fence
of city on sky sky on city

a mouth hot in the woods, whiskey flask
deep in the air, deer hooves left a series
of clumps; worms in pebble writhing:
dark whores on the quartz smoking

nuns in suppliers, whole dark on their daughter's pulse.

Urine-pod, the mouth without kisses, mouth that steals
a tunnel, the mouth that is alarm-clock deep in the air,
distributing waste--and I prophesy
a kitten olive in an ice cabin.

Mechanical overtime welcomes its daggers
in the mouth back of each ringing springtime--
eyes on the zipped lids across the gloss
of mirror-dagger
tonsils asquirm in the clothes-machine--

we throw terse peanuts at our mothers
in the ticket windows--there was
an old money lover
with eyes on the bridge, seagulls
raining upon his desperate mouth,
his green eyes gobbled up in white shit,
his thumb-finger combination blue
in public realm yellows, high white
podium people blanching
in the televised wilderness
of the untrained mammal spirit,
rubber eyes entering a wall--

the talons of daydreams in white shirts,
hot winds of non-history
from their his/her faces
each at its separate time and place
the science-fiction indoors
and the science fiction outside.

HUNDRED sEA Numb

the air cave of sleep,
light green where electronic women
grate the air through bladed holes
in cell walls, uncooked rabbit
eating other rabbit
the dulled ghost nucleus
a cooling campfire's iron spit,
rusting and bloody in salt daylight,
magnet ocean, deliverer
of instantaneous dreams.

There are several dolphin heads
bunched together at the port:
several knives gather around a table
to defile the game of chess,

Disembodied mantlepiece of jawdreams
bathed in oily beards
hundred sea numb with volcano's blood,
shore warm with lipstick radioactive
from day's atomics, sandstone-faced
long-eyed. All spoonmouthed, virgin.

snakes of longing, winds of flesh,
garlands of strong spice, computerized
phalluses, streetlight poles
eaten by tides, we'll dance out,
into the copulation of words, carrying
a trash can charred by acidic blood,
refusing to show the staring crowds
that it holds nothing
and is for nothing.

I'd love something to lift this neighborhood
with predictable suddenness, then drop it,
a big tar pancake, cracked all over,
powerline streamers flying saucer eyes,
pedestrians carved down past apathy
to the kind of gaze hard enough
to take five pounds in five seconds
from your body if you meet it
with one of your own.

WALKING tHROUGH A LIGHT GREEN ZERO

We're eating mirrors again today,
the most exquisite cactuses
are on our shoulders,
dogs who seem to smile
in our blind spots
are really panting desperately
for life when we turn and light
our darkness to find them,
we thought we were desperate for experiences
that have made little difference now
they have happened, everything that carries
the dirty fur of daylight
is now going bald with strained deliberateness,
the bones of a beloved lizard decorate
the dresser in an ex-lover's bedroom
and the dashboard of a scrapped car
simultaneously, three pairs of eyes
stare at them from three places
at once and create with their staring
a fourth, then nimbly lizard bones
crawl around on the cylinder of
a misshapen model of earth
in the skin that once covered them,
someone is eating tinfoil, someone is not.

LOVE POEM # 20

If your body falls out of your body
while you sleep in my stumped
watchfulness, I won't know where
of what's left to go,

magnets of now
hold us palm to palm
or arch to arch
while one's at rest
and the other roams,
this mirror-walking
on each other's frozen
seek has become
we're made of the same exact water.

Into your attic of hair
hands fly lightward
from the strong core
of a weak being,
each holds grim laughs
a dagger to the flab chest
of all lower selves,
each we sweep our kitchen
to see the other turn
wet from sink to try
clean steps into gratefulness
more to see
the features of the electric one
reflected in the floor
of the world.

Chests wet with the blood
of mutual emergency
we turn past the turning to look
into the force farther out,
further in that prompts
the turning turning. We walk
in an orchard of cascading skeletons,
each knife-sharp orb-cave cut

to painless enfolding
of all sight
by the thinnest clouds
brightest lunar skies
collide with all afternoon
our nearest clothing renewed
is a subway train
moving sideways into organism.

If your body falls out
of your body, my body will
fall out of my body to follow it.

LOVE POEM # 19

at times I don't know our love's depth,
sometimes I'm walking
down a path exactly the way
I walk up it, sometimes I don't know
the sex of the daffodils.

Soon I know like a tight green bulb
that we are entwined by the vines
of grapes that I went near
but did not pick
when I was young.

We're an island on an island
on an island towering
straight from a center, wielded
slightly by the strongest centers
of others, now from every molten heart
our orbits among the length of our love
longer than our progress along it, some-
times we are late to discover
the strength of the daffodils.

LOVE POEM # 18

one voice moves through time
the other moves without it
both come from the same mouth

they sing at first
as branches underwater
sometimes simultaneous
sometimes from the center
of a bright anemone
in brighter sunlight

a whole ocean drawn back

they sing at last
each is pair upon pair
of lips
opening upon opening upon
lid upon lash upon lid
between the amphibian diagrams
of each others each
rib upon rib

both come from the same mouth
the others move without it
one voice moves through two
in time, the other moves
without them, together they ride
apart.

LOVE POEM # 17

I'll kick holes in all
the hospital walls
until a clean bed
falls out of it,

until the bright lawn glints
with brighter drops
of doctor's blood,

frozen semen chandeliers
dangling over the beds
of sleeping nurses
summer clothes adorning
a mannequin.

I'll kick the hospital walls
until you fall out
of one of the windows
and into my arms,
we'll spit at the flame ends
of the tattered blankets around you

we'll let your hair enwrap
the roots of trees every sleep
and polish our antiques
to go to work on the world,
kissing each other through poised
scissors.

LOVE POEM # 16

rain-touch, fur-touch,
tar touch, far
touch metallic,
wind-touch
and touch of breezes,

sky-touch, you punch a womb
into the strides of air.

rainbrush
lady fern
micro-cut
in eyeleaf & bladeside
ripping holes in underwear
the passenger seat & then

solemnly thinking
of ice-cream you--
have your amusement--
look back, someone is riding a bare deer
into the notched stem of your spine,

LOVE POEM # 15 Opal green

I love to sit and touch her with
that part of the blanket

that gives way

even though I know she'll never end
I cannot get sufficient portion
of nudging her bedside crying,
on those legs.

I love to crouch clamped
with the right velvet taste
in my mouth and wait
stupified by the things
she can give me;

I never know whether I miss more
her feet in the photograph or
her absence in presence
her presence in absence

LOVE POEM # 14

I love the smell of acid rain
gas stations lit up
by useless signs, fish-scent
in the oil of ceaseless electronic air:
our two mind-capsules heavy
under the lash of eyes
from the belly of a tree,

slums answered with barks
of celebration, the poet-warrior
slumping to his last mirror.

I love the docks untidy with guts,
hammering lemon & tomato odors
in the hot air of forever,
stunning its sights into scarcity,
behind the pink eye's beyond:

one nickel parked
on a cooling driveway, I remember
a truck rattled in the empty road
until you closed the window.

early dyers, living
forever. Stuck in the eye
of a monument.
All doorways open
grapes in the threshhold
to the outside air,
fish in the black blur
of a holographic moat,

fishscale measured to the eye
snail feel menstrual protein
under the ridge
of a snarled nail
coming home to computer dinner.
Sad frog's frozen, eyes
looking out over a desk,
legs ruined to a chair,
to sit & observe: retinas
of chainsmoke,
a bad pastiche of mustaches,
sit and stare each other's
beings until the body
and its clothes are turned
high white quartz
then marble deep
in the eyes
burst-first.

lates

answers came from other fields,
out around a colossal central mountain
to chains of reaction

the taste of a lemon, by anyone

the alternating sugar
the backbones
where they are paired

LOVE POEM # 13

the yellow
four petals; the white
the red
navel; the green airy,
whisp-

(((())))

he eyebrows the
union
the head spreads

to identify himself

liquid by water;
the incandescent

direct symbol.

LOVE POEM # 12

the white of this dog's fur
is so white, the black of his fur
is so black, his mongoloid angel
eyes, sweetly bulge

on paths toward no path,
he runs island edges near
the bay's lap, an ocean's

reverberator, his teeth & tongue
are greetings to the air,
that dog makes a man cry
who can't cry,

his white fur disturbs the black
of one room's sofa, his black
the white canvas of another.

LOVE POEM # 11

we are lust,
that is what we love with,
the skies we push out of the way
the numerous umbrellas that sheathe
our oversides,

we are a crown around
the root of a cliff-grown
sapling.

our heels dig in the same places
where our toes very recently did,
the beach we invent
overlaps the beach that invents us.

LOVE POEM # 10 Red Admiral

music-threads, my little bird
connects the connections
to the other connections
makes fertile soil moisten & surge
around the roots of the
telephone poles,

takes my poor head up into
the territory of my rich head,
moves my shins through my
elbows feelingly, the bellies of boats
are above our root,
the ceiling thatched
with underwear-leaves,

pillowed for every angle,
our bodies jutting
with bones in the tongue,
tongues in the bone,
quiet satisfactions that get louder
at their most
intimate ebb.

my shadow has two tails
one turns into your caress
the other is a spray of surf
that your caress brings me to

that room is an empty channel
I look for new ways to pronounce your name.

Sometimes I want to find
out if I have a spirit,
the way the tip of the tongue
tastes sourness,
the ceiling of everything.
-----------------------

----------------------we finished the page, the
brilliant script lasered into our
tent wall, green canvas in
a maze of birches, toothbrush
pathways sand-scrub bath

in faded cooler, finish, in blue
sleeping-bag interior finger vulva
finish, finish the tides with
your feet, dance the poles
upholding fishing docks, deep
into the beach, all restaurants

and deep computers shut off.

NO LONELINESS

there is a ledge where you
continuously flow over

even when you are pinched
in a silver mask

even when you hold your bag of guts
with stoicism, reptilian poise

you are continuously flowing over
the edge of this frozen verge
of nothingness feeding on a flock of chickens
feeding on a field of corn
aisles painted white with shit
there is a shovel you hold

when you want to kiss a religious woman
on the softest part of her mouth
the hardest edge of her
continuously overflowing
a multitude of dainty hands
(the wide white air at all backs)
on bloody balconies over and over

SAD ECSTATIC COMPANIONS

for Greg

1

If we see the star tonight
we'll know it's a planet

fire from our mouths will almost
consume it. Our own planet,
our own star, will remain

as we stand within their magnetism,
patting each others spine-tops,
swilling each others pine-flavored
liquors. Vein-mouths open,

bloodshot slots of eye, a hurt flicker.
Even if we can no longer look at each other,
we can at least look
at the same things
at the same time.

2

All our late nights & early mornings
lumped together, two drunks gang-fucking
the dawn in multiple forms,
springing from corrupted wreaths,
our rustic crowns. Speed limits
kept far outdoors, unable to touch
our louder & louder lives.

Crack the one window wider,
caterpillar & moth crowd in
around several bulbs, first
sun-rays conduct
half eaten shadows of leaf,
orchestral twitching plays the grime
out of the old floorboards, our friendship.

LOVE POEM #9

Space so vast on all sides only opens up
when your girl's arms are linked around me,
let me be void of hurt,
the vented undersides of our love-
making clean as a throng of vented mushroom,
dark fissures breathing desperate
to make rings & wreaths of mica & moss,

aisles birch marchers toward ash calendar,
shallow roots in face of soil, leaf-terrain
pock-marked by naked heels, fern realms askew
of propane tanks quickly rusting, sandstone almost
thoroughly crumbled, fireplaces on cliff's edge
where you dropped a spotted bikini, allowed swivel
to take hold of shy belly, among newts & slugs
on inner curve of lichened fallen barks,
oaks repressed letting fall their cloak
of half-starved creatures,

to be salved of all sting, aisles
of breezy light rushing over white-haired
raspberries, gold-backed beetles all to land
against your bottom lip, ladyslippers
quaking in nubile emergence
of their fresh century,

Let bulbs break leaning upwards from
our proud foreheads, let a train of beds
left behind burn in the heat of computer
letters, then lilacs grown on rubbing alcohol
spill our glimpses on a grass that scrapes
our chests free of all afternoon cemetery
moon-rash.

LOVE POEM #8

we were air
brushed out
of the picture's color-grip,
the canvas put us together at the ribs,
hinges wrapped around the others
weakest elasticpoint.

Dragonfly corpses falling down the edge
of every painting's frame,
where we are active
in lapping half-silence,
the oiled shell of a canoe.

Zeros float through the air
smiting monies to nonexistence
from the screen high on all sides
waterfalling the place into
two, that hold
the ballroom's tiles down one step at a time.

High in legal wisps, where laughter breaks,
then breaks again, we are won from sad islands
always by the same oilbrushed boat: a streak
of light fresh blazed across our wrists
two knots of bleeding silk
lashed together by dissolved space.

LOVE POEM #7

the tyrant of love
hammered our ghost pain
wings,

while the music went blank
all over the room. Caligulas in lipstick
marched through the fireplace,
singing mattress in half
with radioactive feet on their way to
the platform, we kiss,
we're off the room, we're immaculate
beaks
up in the ceiling corners,
tongue sparks
flick from mouth to mouth

we were hammered by charging
breastplates of gold,

soldiers let loose before our veined heavens
went mad with humble energy.

The tyrant of love
went back on his heels like a stained
mechanic, satisfied with this
final
engine.

LOVE POEM # 6

there is surgery in lilac bushes

slab of granite turning to mush pile

dwarves with blood light faces,
electronic eyes
dancing in a gazebo of interacting flames
trickle of sperm & viscera
ascending a church tower
to slow the hands of a clock
there is nothing left to do
but to be together.

here's a tree-crotch pouring from its deeps
the lives of wasp babies

a torn white dress begging
for the ravage of all color

a woodland wedding where only ghost squirrels
the necks of best friends

attend to the duties of a ringbearer, light hung
from strands of bark peeling
the emptiness within images there is only
a space left in which to be together.

LOVE POEM # 5

As if life has been a city
me at many attic-peaks
screaming
when a bomb goes off in depths
elsewhere

granite floors filled with my voice
recommend that all the most
intent listeners be evacuated.

As if life has been lived
only in one city, reaching in an arc
against the sky's curve
to life in another--sad macaroni
metropolis, all broken limbs
turning to unconnected elbow--

that she has saved me,
that I've saved part
of all, what I've wrecked;
our two cities join. There is much
merriment among those concerned
who will never understand, and
like a lilypad above mud, her dress.

LOVE POEM #4

they each, anchored in the steadfast death of organism,
in the grey stretch at the edge
of multicolored space. Our Milky Way
just a slight dash of motion
figure-skating in the reflection of your tear ducts,

plunge of lily-pad throat-stems
through the sky-floor of perfect pond

her lips on a huge screen above the swamps
emerge casting off cumulus
emerge with a tiny nape of neck
in their shrugging
in their plucking
strings beyond strings
lips all gravity-vast

eyes touched truly
with the salivary gaze of a misguided
saint, now
carved in hers to a prettier
guiding, the knifetongue

moving and never seen
seen and never moving
silken backs, the ears of sheep
leaves sliding under
our same hands,
by fanned bays disturbed

breeze under bridges
spraypainted
into stone by dying headlights
vast this canyon's
merging

LOVE POEM #3

they, anchored together.
the light, chrome hard hot
through antique brown leaves.
and all kitten gestures absorbed
in mittens of a bear
tree-trunks of the youngest sap

going numb & wide
all around. & I there
heel-deep in the bright

flicking ash of our gone houses
from your eyelashes,
every burnt couch flooded
with images of a veiled room
writhing.

And I will follow your breakfast mouth
like a streak of
like an appearance of
like a vein of
like a string detuned

melting fractures into jewelry.

LOVE POEM #2

lines of force
where there are no currents,
from imaginary acting

single magnetic that
of a long magnet, so long
at the magnetic everywhere

under these conditions
repulsion at any unit pole
of the same kind

having a greater oxygen,
salts of iron, our theory, ought
to be in air media water,

melted
in air
of two according to
great precision, limited range

in the fluid known to us,
takes the case of electric current
infinite as
the field of force

Let the axis be that
within the conductor
per unit of area

LOVE POEM #1


electric currents
theory of mole

lied to magnetic phenom

so that within
in the space round it,
is the distance unit

tending to move the conductor in the
hands of a watch, if the observer
of the current.
Let us now consider an axis

in the place
and the length of the part
be its strength
in equations

of black-pink volume;
and multiplying it
so that the attraction between
will be greater than oxygen
and greater in electric currents
and greater

MAGNETS ON A LIGHT CAUGHT HARD

Sadness of magnetism on polarized light,
I have been ruthlessly investigated
by everyone at the peak of this soft
blow-job town, Italian sandwich

dripping dressing down the cast
of my ribs. The devastated parks
made public by raging fire. Every mammal

in the drowned room
standing wobbled
marble feet in hot reef.
All eyes reptilian shut
against parking lot
dark. We saw a cloud expand
we shared an asshole.

At the drooping center of vagina
choking heart meat, rubbing off for steady
fluorescent hours, hair
of an artichoke. As the slowest point

of magnetism dissolves, we discover
the most terrible center
of intimate mystery is through

our only buttocks, in the direction
of the awful whole, particles
within the space, we shall have.
Sadness

has been emerging
of the deep blow-job time
in a dumb basement heart
of neglectful library,

half panther oil, dark
as lamp-shade, underside deadened
one gravity's center-center
of dying armchair,

A SHORT DRIVE OVER AND OVER

foam horses cover the stone hills
in eternal front yards

eyes widen in sidecar mirrors
white paint lines whipping past rubber
eyeliner

we are floating an ashtray between us
on a tarnished front seat
bloodied with broken crow wings
horn honking all day

making tunnels of blue tar sound
over the puddled parking lots
with a rain of delicately dropped lipsticks

we are floating an ashtray between us
full of kangaroo heart
building infant with closed soft eyes
with a bit of inner-blooming blood
in a dry fur pouch

beaches scorched to glass like tortured water
flanks touched by slow loving acid of low surf
two snouts touching in the cough
of fragile new motors

1. WEDNESDAY'S THURSDAY MORNING


make the blocks of sound
heavier, until they plow
all these creatures into the soil.
Make their day a yellow blur
painted by digital
ghosts on the huge shell
that surrounds their actual fucking lives.

push harder through soil
things that kill mankind
with their equipment;
grab their boats and fling
them off like leaves,

from a rhododendron bush
left untended by awful giants
with mail slot eyes.



2. MONDAY'S TUESDAY NIGHT


school of fish
came frantic through
television,

tiny dots took over
huge spaces left
by retired stars.

we'd barely leaped
over the wall of nakedness,

freckled with nowhere,
bound by the slime
on pond floor
while the pinecones
whirl in the air

and the machines all gape.

COMMON DININGS

white marble dishes hover
halfway between greasy cafeteria tables
and immaculate ceiling

fans blow columns of active air
down to meet tabletops exactly
in the center white marble
dishes widen the disturbance
of silence in the center
of artificial breezes

pestles grind immaterial
spices from ancient tomb-time
herbs from elsewhere
midway to the dead heaven
above the heads--hair flattened
by dense conditioned air--of
the students of oblivion

left without flowers to guard
the applerot soft
temples above ears
nudged by ten thousand hums

until the magnolia trees fall
through two-story tall
windows and spill
their blossom fragrance
on the altars of young mouths, sex hysteria
chewing pond-meat
of unidentified amphibeans

the tadpole textures
tongue-drunk as arms are slashed
by falling panes as tall as houses, heavens

kept unsensed in electric
bathrooms third floor ephemeral
attics spraying hog sides with sawdust guns
palm-lines alive with sperm-trickle
slapping mirrors to revive
the yawn and a garden snake
navigating pebble roofs
of interdimension.

CONCRETE CANALS

The new womb is cut in half
I surround myself with people
just to sit and watch them die

light flows from the television; it feels
as if the very winds are sapped of savagery
by its rectangular river glowing.

I can see through lunacolored chainlink
all the patches of dead grass
where last summer I dropped my guitar
in a fit of drunkenness

and pines like tentpoles toppled on me
homophobics picked up by wifepolice
in the belly of the soil we all

in the belly of the soil belching we croak
our little laments into digital mole-tunnel,
lips pushed back raw to the gums
by the oldest special effects.

The small surf lapping at a slant
of the concrete wakes me want to kiss
wet tiny shards of glass
on the gravel everywhere

where this species that shares my blood
walks treading on their foul products,
rebuilding the robot maids
that guide its days.

The old womb is cut in fourths
I become the genitals of a mythical creature
the kitchen table is made to float
up hard against the sharpening
of my elbows; light is not alive

the creatures under it are eating
the crawl of neon across
ashes woven together
of an old pillowcase
concrete canals
are steering a fish for the mouth
to the absence of our one moon.

WEEKEND DREAMS

For brushing the highway clean
with a broom of horse tail
I was given in my cupped hands
clamshells writhing with
licorice-black maggots

a rainbow trapped triangular
in an apricot tin
four amphibious rectums in the realm of
forehead just above my scorched lashes

a wife with chrome insides to steer
toward the drive-in movie through
forests of vines that no longer need trees

and alleyways of coral no longer supported
by oceans, marble streetlamps bulbed
with lizard bellies taking on the light
of foreign stars: all glowing in the aftermath
of a torn wide sun, radios going wild.

Bikini bottoms puffing up so faintly
hung on antennas in what wide kisses earth
breathes up through concrete
slow to return to the death in a hot hard parking lot
crucified sideways on information television

holding a small dog in your small dog hands,
a morning we share, heavy as a bad spacecraft;
plowed highways slam into the sides of coffeeshops;
old kettles rattle a fresh hard-on's last shackles.

I see a radiant world coming out
from the black core between
the yellow petals of a susan
flower. I see from the charcoal heart
a silver glitter, fragments from
deep through the stem deep
through the whole round earth and out
the other side and far beyond
into a universe being drained
to collapse
its off-white purity
like a new bedroom being killed
with echoes.

I see a girl in multi-colored dress
(though these colors are like
no other shade I've seen
in gardens of before) stepping out
from the center of the flower, and as
she carefully avoids stepping on
a praying mantis she moves towards me,
her every freckle and cell a healing
particle, her flesh-petals apart
from all other plants, she holds me
to my roots in the earth, that grow
beyond the earth, my eyes that look
from behind my eyes and all around
the goldenrod twitch
from dry season to dry season
until they begin to bleed
their own version of water.

The shingles turn to creature skin,
the creature they are is new
under a new sky, we are tortured
by our happiness, I see
the glint near and intimate, of
the girl's world melting down her eyes
the girl's world melting down her dress,
the girl's world is my hands, these
other objects are my hands, also she lives
in all the things that connect, I die
to all the things that disconnect.

I'm suspended somewhere deep
in a moderately huge machine,
with too many arms & legs, too many

orifices enwrapping too
many fingertips. My core
pulled out like a frog's scalpelled
spine.

And I leave again & again
until my leaving sticks
and my staying replaces my center in

a gathering of slim-toothed goats,
over & out, 2 big bears & a jumpsuit
drawing too much
cartoon heat
for the silence of all beauty
to manhandle.

where the blind lose all evidence of triangles
lightheaded businessmen walk
in constant sneakers treading on the rhythm
of the rhythm of the rhythm of the rhythm.

while I climbed a weeping willow
covered in hot rain & little paper dragons.

oh you have so little color
in your movements how
the shopwindows steal
your whole frame & face
while you are looking at looking at looking at.

in your first backyard
there will be a woman

with her arms outstretched
gripping stalks of sunflower

lightest breezes heavier
than all the weight at her center

one rooster out of three
struts with a bloody comb

he left his blood
and the blood of his brothers
on the peel of a young birch

a battered coathanger
holding a huge rose

the woman's picked him up
to stroke his bloody feathers

he has thirty hens to pleasure
here's a few verses before you collect the eggs

stories for you & the claws
on the rooster's thumbs

things born deep in fire
return to the furnace

a rain of angry hands upon the airport
piles of multicolored helmets
in front of government houses.

a haircut for all trees near to our channeled
electricity, one thousand bees
clotted in the air like a flash of TV
static all over, for hot orange hours
on the porch, extraneous nipples exposed
to the useless sun
to the useless moon

the one local satellite hovers
near all weather-causing stations
in a hurtful mirage.

the many hands win nothing
with their protest-worship
the great machine gun
continues to dominate
the gentlest air.

a rain of larger and larger nothings
on the lightyear-dampened sun
receding to make room for its younger

we don't sleep, don't need the hum

of sleep, but erupting morning
after erupting morning
volcanic and we watch the churches
and the laundromats act
like churches and laundromats
under depths of water dark
as green & blue can go
oceans drawn up
at the feet of lighthouses
whose circuit boards
pour electric tongues
down naked throats

skylights flap like epiglottis

music that pricks ozone
turns saxophone from tenor to bass
in pairs of hands that flower on insomniac
torsos that never felt the rain
without raining lower & longer
than any storm earth's skies
can provide.

uh Heart Crossed off the Charts

I'm that faggot girl
up lighted in the blackout A.M.

I'm that faggot girl
in the ballroom corner
born without a uterus
taken on a cruise to celebrate
my infertility

you're not enough to prowl
linoleum squares with me
in tow, your awful

eye make-up & underwear
decorated with bears & giraffes

foolish child in pink
pajama jumpsuit

fostering nervous breakdown
in your elder admirers

making the mascara tears
cover the manhole covers
entirely in awful purples,

& so eager to see how
eagerly you'll kiss the convenience store

trails of blueberry where

deer trot their elegance
with just a hint of violent

effort, so small you have
to put your tongue

in a hoofprint, struck hard
in dark black mud,

reminded by your ribcage on a rock
your bones balanced

there, what violence is done
among us, how barely

sweet the blueberries are.

one
wet
violet

placed

where
only
you

will
notice
it.

I look for the one who
while everyone else laughs
is scorched by the movie,

for the Eskimo on summer
sidewalks who was pushed
like a scarecrow of hailstones
out of the dinner party,

for that girl knitting condoms
of seaweed's darkest green
for her genderless friends,

I seek those whose stomachs
can never be acidic enough,
whose ulcers come to be
small bubbles on the multiverse's
bulging moldsilverblue clusters,

I look for those to whom
this message is already a waste
of time because it can't find them.

HIGHWAY THROUGH THE POND'S MIDDLE

you take the handle to start hog up
(salamanders move
their orange 'cross wet tar)
avoid their bodies with your motors tires
ribcage crunch, tiny hearts

you wish for a crash to throw you down
to the swamp or the spiders that rule the dust
on the runway's ramp where the creatures merge

the purge of sunlight from broken
radio hole

we watch on our larger cages
the orange skin
take over the tent of our frames
and coat the rotting logs
with live
lizard

a female in fashionable rags comes toward
through the ballfield hologram
of a chainlink fence to march
right into my arms. She says:
I can hear you screaming
in the hallways of this world to be
left out. The end of this tall black fence

is just a tilted little puddle
you can jump all the way storybook through

crystallized on a bicycle seat
a snail's antlers frozen salted
hurting all the eyes of the air

put forth this morning a fist in brown leather
of subnormal pitchforker
beating a drum with a severed limb
half of the crown on his head.

Mom was washing a dull golden dog
in a groaning tub, paws were kicking

the heavens were overturning all hell,
the saltshakers were upright next
to the peppers, then huge robot arms--

DOVES EAT LEMON PIES, FRONT_ROW

I'm not sure how to spend my time anymore,
if I can't spend it all weeping.
I think of the rages and joys
of all my life, and wonder simply
"what was that all about??".
I just burst out cackling wildly
in the middle of a foggy sentence
that I happened to be speaking,
trapped in jail.

Bees disrupt the color of my hands,
all radiance come down to spill my guts,
and a handle of burger to flourish
from the waist of my pine shadow.

A telephone pole of black light, tar dark
on its torso & antlers, reaching all its
ringing anti-ecstasy into the stretched tarps
of vast disembodied ear.

2 skulls that knock together
chin & bridge of nose
interlocking blades
surrounded by every
engine.
Weeping continues in the banks
as well as the alleyways.

CROWS GULP BLUEBERRIES
WHILE STANDING NECK_TIED
AT AN ARTIFICIAL SHORELINE.

I'LL LET THE LIGHT TRICKLE THROUGH MY FINGERS HANDS
AS WE KNEEL ON THE FLOORS DOORWAYS
OF YOUR LAST FULL-FORMED MEMORY

I kneel in the cells of a slanting house
say "the rain is infinite" but know
it's not, I beg the senseless air
for company. The pissing of skies
traps me in my room, holds voices
of all others force-fielded far away.

I stop in the calls of a smashed drainpipe
to bring my walk down to a railroad sound.
I let the whole street come up
through my wrists. Streetlamps
tower & crown
my only shoulders.

I stop near a tongue-kiss memory
in the quiet hurricane of a concrete stairwell.
(It's a house I built steadfastly when I was unwell.)
We hated every moment of it's dilligent
progress, & faded blue-green down,
moss everyone.

there are two lives: one with friendships,
one without, both equally beautiful,
both equally irrelevant. Who needs

other bodies will speak of other bodies,
who speaks of other bodies will need
other bodies, in imagination.

How sad, to eat blue berries
thinking of this, and the rot in the gut,
and horror of the stained white

flickering at the bottom of the bucket.

A small lizard
from the melting skids
of a burnt tire

could fit
in its dying writhe
through the seam
of my shaking hand's palm.

Only we in its death throes
will know the quietness
of its last protest.

But its tongue flickers,
a brown flame from the hearth
of a life we abandoned
when we gained fur.

The skin it sheds
is coating still
the severed hand
I left behind,
with one of my favorite
fellow mammals,

when the yellowed eyes
of the fur-wearers
wore out
and I saw their emptiness
in the reptilian tunnels

they had avoided crawling
ever before I
entered and willingly let sag
my halves of skin.

I cut her slim belly open twice,
once above the navel and once below the navel.
I push stones through each incision, both ovoid,
each looking like Brancusi's
Sculpture For the Blind.

I tell her, "I hope this is my best
cataclysm". She readies herself
to carry these articles within her,
and asks me to walk hand-in-hand
with her, as I talk ceaselessly,
gloomily, about what, I cannot tell.

She grips my hand tighter
and uses her other hand
to hold the slits shut
that I cannot stitch.

Watching this all from a distance,
I know I am not a surgeon, or a murderer.
Watching all this from a distance,
I don't know if I am a surgeon,
I don't know if I am a murderer.
Watching all this from a distance,
I don't know if I'm watching this
from a distance.

I have a thread wired into my hamstrings
that was shipped from a floating saucer
hospital to fix her belly,
and in the numb bulb of my groin
a salad scoop for the stones.
I keep these things
meant to help her form
in my form, in order to inflict
pain upon us both.

She knows from my cringing walk
that I carry these instruments.
She grips my hand tighter still,
the sweat thicker than the blood
that seeps against her other,
and begs to be allowed
to heal me.

clasp
the awful gold
hate
the silver
around the eyes

where to go with a mop
where to go with a pen
inside the body
of a new dragon
inside
the pages of a dragon's
stupid wings

snail on a dandelion leaf
opens a hole of empty white light
in the spiral of his shell
his mucus-trail turns to hottest fire

the dandelion clock goes
rapidly back to yellow after firing its seeds
into the dying
pink horizon.

I offer my palm
to the inching of this visitor
from a dimension of tightly-woven,
never-dying, heavily compacted light.

He crawls through a faint stigmata
the only part of my hand that is still there.

SPARROWS ON EACH SIDE SLIDING

My moratory body, gives me a moment of loved
disintegration, sparrows are on the bush
to the left of my floating ribcage
parkbench burns beneath me
I'll never get up in time,
the sparrows are holding
thin branches between
their twig feet fingers--

they shame me obscurely; not to be one
with their twitchy midst, but in not
watching closely enough--
I have erred, black tires
on black ice; and a floppy carrot
through my sadding heart, soft rot body

Their bodies of leaves,
atomic intricate,
flutter other bodies out of shape.

Antennaes buried deep
in each grave small forehead
down toward the nostrils of the beak.
Their eyes and bodies moving sweetly
separately. Their brown eyes
in bodies, moving sweetly separately.

Their brown eyes in brown bodies,
chests downy of white
atop the heavy-scented
hedges of low pine brush,
hung on a puff of exhaust

and not on the hope
of a human breath

OF THE EMERGENCY ROOM DOOR.

Girl-bone, born in small barns,
from a skeleton-leaf wood,
trailing a cape of bloodied feathers,
coming toward, me with my pork-chop mouth,
carrying a distraction of flowers.

Girl in ladyslippers, toting a computer
briefcase that quacks like a duck.
My mischief of little remedies,
my last great love before dying,
no matter what years it takes
my sad body to kill me.

A milk-yoke in a plastic forest,
an apple cored and thrown
among the ferns,
carrying all your old hurts,
a brave little lady.

I want to get out of my body
and cloak you with a hood
of anti-matter. I'd like
to find something to feed you with
that comes before and after time.
Take my body, though it's not enough;
protect the work of my hands,
though the world iced it.

Make my plot of land a tigerspawn of brushfires.
My will and testament a litany of fly droppings.
My marriage a union of broken ice-springs
in a moss cathedral.
And my birthright a trumpet the factory
never cranked out.
Time pulls its garters up its untimely legs
and gathers its hurts into the grocery store.
Time gathered is a studio built in a vault
of withering stars.
Time gathered is you like a microphone
next to my throat.

Make my pores the wreckage-pits
of other's smallest bones,
without much left to break, canyon kisses,
jellyfish deaths
far in all we never know.

French kiss in a river of neon
subway tongues dirty as two pigeons
belts tense with hands in the hooks
feet twisted by movements of strangers

if we don't get each other out of
here, our eyes will drown
to death in each other
beneath the climate-control
canopies, dear.

Someone tripped over a dollar
& into a feather cut. No more
mating plumage.

We shut her in a soft room. She ate the walls.
We put her in a tall bottle. She stayed
until a tadpole grew as her tongue
then squeezed a pregnant belly outward
until the glass showered.
Her tears sprayed antique walls.
She thought she could see the scales
on every scale of a leaving snake.
We shut her up in a strong room.
She thought concrete into soil
and departed through the earth.
He hides his mouth in a deeper cavern,
letting her walk over the linoleum array
of his many teeth.

from an oily mouth comes
a clean flood of tongue
a ship's floor full of standing daggers
and the eyes of a child
on the tonsil that turns into a snakehead
blossom sadly
then a road of deer-trampled snow
and a girl in reptilian coat
who says: these powerlines
are serpents leading you home
follow them to a hearth
or leave their squeeze before fire
for a desert highway
where you will lie down
your weathered skull crack
fragile tar
man's crust which is cracking
man's crust from under which
a vast skin is resurfacing

We run barefoot on a globe of needlecarpet
trying to call each other's names,
not knowing the names. Two throats
open to the air. Two bodies run
for more breath, thinking that their rush
will fill them with enough to call
across the planet's prickly miles.

This is twilight activity;
in the noons & nights we build
chain-link fences in many places,
hoping that a friendly playground
or neighborhood will erupt
where we can reside between the rattles
in metallic breezes.

We run barefoot to a shoestore
that closed decades ago, trying
to buy something that will move us
faster on our heels towards
the beginnings of us together.
Our lives move at the pace
of the cash register's pleasureless
pleasure, then run
with the rhythm of blood.

A hood of vapor sipping wine

Pause at this ledge, clutching white entrails,
cursing brother back in a womb, who comes
through so much delay to locate me,
sitting at luxurious table with legs crossed
like awful scissors, to pound the earth in its mercy
between ribs, to let him in through root, stone,

to pause at this ledge with his pulse in my hand
discovering the outerside of outside-ways.

To pause in his frame, with my person, an owl
overlooking our efforts from a fork
in married pines. To pause
in his person with my frame, encountering
only the hot faint edge of him,

past sand, far past root, past stone,
into the volcanic sacs with hands
like white grapes, paused at the ledge
of his demon neon, clutching a veiny wig,
from the center of that beautiful humanoid,
watching the owls of all and subtlest colors
digest.

BLACK MAILBAG TUESDAY

You boil a lobster
as quickly as possible,
red & black miniskirt,
knife to its neck-hinge,
body-claws sunk
in the hard water,
legs lovely
as an ice-creamed
vanilla swirl.
You smile unsteady.
I'm going down to the subway
with a flamethrower.
Take the thick bands
from the largest pinchers;
melt the butter, let red & black
melt onto floor, pole-eyed dead
armor-clink onto plate.
I'm going down to the subway
with a trashbag full of band-aids.

You put your name into the machine.
The machine puts its name into you.
You remove your favorite shoes.
You will never remove this not-you
that is a section of the first & final you.
Step off the smaller weight-scale,
onto the runway larger.
This is as close as we can get a system
to collapsing outward into infinity.
I'm going down to the subway
with a grenade launcher
full of burnt red roses.
You put your not-life back into nature.
Nature puts its not-death into
you. You're alive & can't be.
I'm going down to the neon subway
in my grey-soaked underwear.

You pour the steaming water from silver
on the dry blossoms, and they expand
in the time it takes to give you a long
dragging kiss against the cutting board.
I'm going down to the subway station
with a laughing flame-thrower.
Time passing will never feel
this way again. Images will never hit
so soft & plain, but will hit harder.
The long wooden spoon
moves a sausage in butter; a bluejay
perches on a flowered sill beside
the channeling sink. I'm going down
to the subway with my bluest clothes on
grass-fire.

JUNA

That woman, she's in pain in her floppy
headscarf, she's carrying it for us all.

That woman I will know before my birth,
always staring at me through a bloody beak,
always waiting for a wordless answer
to come in words.

That poor mail-carrier. That output of harmless
weapons upon the world. Her perfect inability
to understand a single newspaper headline.

When younger she wore leather dresses,
swore constantly at the money-changers,
she wore a hemline far above her hemline
whenever she was young. Always
at the end of the night eyes
muffled in a hot washcloth, never
to stare again above the sink.

She changed form as an old butterfly;
she turned herself
into a far white solar system,
into a swallowed sextoy,
into a green wasp,
into an array
of imagined hells, into the sound
of ten thousand ants clamoring
in a yellow apple, and the saints uncaptured,
far behind the stainglass,
jellyfished on bare rock, using their suicide methods.

Oh, Juna, February will see
insaner you, left conversationless at last
for me, perched around the corner
from my bitter wine and bitterest coffee.

The wasp, the ocelot, and the elder go
as a group to communicate
with a far-off shadow continent.

The wasp is weighted low in the air
by the ocelot's fur; the elder
pets it raw and bald with his good hand,
holding the tithing platter in his crippled,

stood stiff on a laser-outlined sci-fi
platform on the watery hearth
of the brickless age.

His smile has the dubious fortitude
of day-old concrete. His hands
are the wings of birds
held together by wire.

WALLS OF WIRE-LINKED BIRDS
And the security camera turns
into a tight circular rainbow.
My love walks out of the money machine
towards me with a toddler ostrich
in her tiny hand, her grip
on its wrung neck. Not our kill,
but it'll do for dinner. Later
the kitchen table vibrates
under its spirit leaving
through everyone's ribcages at once.

We look at its sleepy pretty eyelids,
slowly chew the stringy meat
from its thighs. The hills
from across the streets
come rippling over the ice cream shop,
then the small-town airport,
then the glassy escape
of our rugged living room.

We're tied by a thin chicken sinew
to the national currency and the clock.
When the wet string goes dry and snaps,
we fall through the open doorways
of the mental hospital, to be surrounded
by chalk pillars with fluorescent
sausage arms, crudely attached, the heads
lost somewhere near the functionless tops.

On a path where rails were once torn up
we attacked each other with kisses
and pledged to lit streams of jet exhaust
never to abandon each other in the eye
of any storm. The grey rocks ran
with black water. Moss opened itself
to sponge the mouth, the trunks
whirled under all the blankets
of our seperate, similar memories.

Kids who jumped from sixty feet
to hit the water with their arches
sailed past insulting security guards
and we spidered under
a dim rugged ledge
to save each other from shivering.

Black moon arrived, but resembled
so closely the violet sun
that our bloodshot veined eyes
reached at the telephone trees
and the telephone branches.

Moths alit on lichens
where the water stopped
and sunlight dried
the landscape to match their wings.
We sang underneath all this;
we sang like a cave
with two deep mouths.

a frog belly landed
wet with urine
in my only hand

I felt on the edge
of a black hole
about to become destroyed information

I don't know why that afternoon
the frog's life was my own
held at an arm's length and growing closer
all other arms melted by throat-bubble
frog-voice, subtly desperate

my body breaking to bring the belly
towards throat, feeling stomach churning
in little body, now in awful sunlight I remember

the winter is too powerful
turning leaves into destroyed tears

through the window you look upon
the suffering of your horrible
fellowcreatures

the lake breaks itself
in what a relief
in what a horrible breaking

loose, turning the silver screws,
pledging each other
to eternal distress on party porches

an animal becomes lion-like
in these awful jungletimes, hurt
by the first dagger, strung up

by the last robber who would dare
disrupt the propriety of the pink
totally digital temple,

several hundred navel
eruptions.

I have a snail on the tip of each finger
as I duck below the window
on the public library's 2nd floor.
Poisonous blue light pours over the sill
and I blink beneath it, under my increasing hat.

My fingertips grow numb, the snails start to move
toward the first knuckles, the windowsill melts,
I hide in the trashcan. I shiver and the shells
make music on the garbage-streaked walls.

Then a noise at the lid, and an alien
creature smiling: the smile the most alien
part of her, her eyeglasses built into her skin,
I offer her the snails and she gobbles them up
with bittersweet little sounds,
then I produce a thin goblet of red wine

made from the poison light distilled into
this small communication, turned purple.

You took off your arms
and placed them on the table in front of me
you gave me a questioning look
with two glass eyes

you took off the wallpaper
and showed me the bugs crawling underneath
I watched helplessly
blinking my eyes in the rain of bright dust
from a frosted chandelier

I waited in the doorway watching myself
sitting in a chair by the table
looking hopefully at your stumps hoping
that another pair of arms was forthcoming

every bulb on the chandelier burst
like something worse than an accident

your glass eyes started to become wet
I hid under the table trying to open a violin case
my hands failing on the rusty clasp

You took off your glasses and sat
lightly in my heavy chair, I placed
my head in your lap, relieved to be back in the future

I turned over in a bright
pink bed
the world did not
turn over anywhere

I robbed my sleep
the world did not sleep
or rob
but from itself
as if asleep

I moved a log
saw salamanders
I moved
the world did not move
I saw
little orange adorables moving
toward an awful hand
I hesitated to claim it as my own
the little orange bodies claimed
nothing
I followed
my hand remained aboveground
the rest joined
soft orange skin clamoring over
all our meek skeletons

when we fuck, the bone spurs in my feet
melt back into the world, the back of my head
contacts the rim of the sky,

I am flying in an animal who knows my wings
when they unfurl and when they retract,
we are the same pair of shoulders, grinding
olives, our kneecaps morph back into baby
flesh, for the comma inside the instant,

when we fuck I know the street
will not take my body

she who was a girl, opaque on a bicycle,
entranced by every language around her,
ran rubber down the the center
of Main Street's great wound,
occasionally brandishing her tongue
to attack a fleet of grey moths
under the yawn of a convenience store's
half-eaten electric light, bronze & blue
overlooking itself in the mirror
of a wet paved place, her tire
crawling up my left shin, over
knee-cap with a fleshy jump,
to stretch a bruise into my thigh,
stitch wishbone kisses
between my ribcages.

let her ride on her seat like a snail
who was a girl without my knowing,
who was a reach past every odorless moment
toward a force-field of fragrant gardens,
where broken television antennas lie still
beneath moving ferns in choirlike multitude.

snailbird,scarred gears
in a bucket under the body
scarred gears moving again

scarred deeds in mucus,
for the inadequate
between bodies always.

you cover whole highways in salt
with your small refusal
slashed by small town lights,
becalmed by big enough
moons.

they together curl claws around
their sorrows like a decaying bird

they together by an old river
mouths stuffed with a recent steak

they together as hurt cartoons
they together as two hot trees

worming hot roots through
ground after ground after ground

in separately colored worlds

your protected rapture uncolored
you come down feathery stairs
in a gown of feathers
making my afternoon
lime, mildly ridiculous.

smoothing your running blood
under a blonde skin
unhappy as a bird always is

wishing you apart, scattered
in petals, where on the moss ground
you can't speak against yourself any longer.

stained skin, eyes in velvet
wallpapering a wallpaper
with unnecessary tears

there is always murder
there are gifts in the world
to make you happy briefly
you'll die in the shade
while I'll die in the dead sun

superluminal coupling
outside playground fence finally
struck against lunar skin
above factory blades while chains
dangled swingset over clay abyss

lips tinier than expected

tongue reluctant, hand moving
hipbone toward collarbone like a wish
stunned our old webs with droplets
stuck our new droplets with old webs

when we bathe in the lights of this city we forget the sun.
when we bathe in the sun we forget the city.
when we move through this street we forget our feet.
when we bare our feet we forget the highway.

where does the life go that has no backdrop?
what do we do with ourselves when the surroundings stop?

gap-people, aromas of awful thought,
surround, on bar-stools
in lugubrious multitude. Their kicks consist
of getting radiated with neon
cancers in three forms, their zippers all
pointing to the end.
these alien familiars, whom we all
know brightly, in a damp light.
These aunt-and-uncle robots.

All bars hold them. All illusions are swept
under their rugs, to stay in the house unseen,
laser criminals. Two red leaves in a pot
of green tea, swirling and swirling.
Two oysters in a melting ice-bucket.
Appearing to love each other
without any visible language.

the holes in a certain tree
spoke
to the holes in my skin.
Where I was standing
no longer mattered.
The space I rent now
is built from the same holes
the same spaces breathing
through the emptiness between
my every


stand where you're standing.
Frustrate the earth with your song.
Our anti-matter makes fervent sex
where our matter won't.
Our dark matter love-fucks
where our bright matter can't.


the hole in every animal building
the holes in every other animal.

We wait in draining offices
for the things we hate to help us,
thinking of rabbits on the library lawn,
thinking of anything anywhere.
We think of a world fit to protect
our many embraces. We think
of no world at all.

We hold hands within connected suits,
wondering who connected the suits.
Thinking of death, we hold monogamy
to be the standard. We think to hold
nothing, then to hold more and more
nothing, in swinging arms
toward familiar parking lots
swaggering in our damp mechanisms.

Hologram chimneys for real houses
with hologram fires. The sweat
on grandpa's face is less real
than the blood on his descendant's
palms, flickering in the fake twilight,
in the ersatz dawn. Only dusk is real;
the place where someone thought immortal
smacked their young head
on a younger parking meter is as real as the sun.

the possibilities of real mental damage,
brought home by a third-storey evening
on a damp chair, sweating through one's guts,
clenching one's teeth at the screen
and the sound of a computer.


Skies will be dramatically torn open,
but nobody will escape.
Planets will pop like frozen balloons,
but nothing bold will use
the stunning force to found
an orchestra elsewhere.


We will bedroom together
more desperate and ape-like
than we ever imagined, in a sickly lull
between the great collapses,
clenching what remains of our tongues
between what remains of our teeth.


And now the damage will re-imagine
our mouths; we will kiss with molds
re-made by events of which we will never speak,
we ourselves being those events,
dousing cancers with white wine,
hot leprosies with darker red.