PLANETARY FAUNA/A FORMAL UNDRESSING

deciding to forgo the usual girl on top

 when the mermaid wore a shell

flipped onto her knees and leaned her against the loveseat

 and the forest crumbled into blankets

turned her head to glance to her to get inside her

 for the remembering shed at the waterfall's edge

slid into wife’s ease, and as I watched

 the promise the luna made to no darkness

thrusting into notice of my own aching

 the dawning of upper layer light

so caught up in watching arousal

 as our waiter pushed dripping emitting electromagnetic

freed to match rhythm to theirs the sun

 which are harmful engorged turned on

by what I was seeing and the sounds more

 radiation and even gamma and I was glad

when I saw harder and faster super-charged subatomic

 mainly from the outside, both on the edge,

  and I knew materials such as aluminum or plastic

   hand not stopping till I’d drained tissue at the microscopic

    ass clench and release over whole-body radiation

     while he was busy filling scream like a quiet lover

      a bone marrow dose kept pumping the edge we were all spent 

      flinging wares, mysterious instruments on the city surface

    up his pants out the door, not wanting

   masking a long parade    employees out of our room

    in the morning through a smog of open earth

  bed, both fully satiated after only two days
 smoking in terror

.....

There are leapyears
     lost under me,
   whole calendars in murk
       where the eyes go sinking,
    women in a hedge
            around my bed,
         a lurking instrument
      that cowers when my memory
                                 kicks in,
       and so many fathers and mothers of
           industries that will not survive.


I go without searching,
      without prying, with so many
          limbs windmilling
                       in my limbs
  that subsiding is impossible,
       but without favor, and
  without tact, I hem the fever skyward
                                        lacking a garden.

.....

Ding  polyps are the long ones, thin tentacles that catch any immortal animal
      stubby and shaped side the urns little buds


          brain is dead if only bombarded with radio brain death means
                                                        past of cold chicken and wine electroencephalograph
                                                     down ordinary daylight paths, arcs spring from tube to tube


                young female corpses have been himself: he topples a huge statue
                        the sound of a language he cannot understand
                                 extracellular, hesitantly, he reaches out        to atoms

.....

The ice fish wife-murderer
                    cat in the alcove

                                           to control the lights
                                           the problem of seats and windows

                    a semi-transparent body
                    a puddle of molten metal
                                                                         two common mechanical

                       the acetylene hour, or less.  Was there any reason for light during the day
                                    will the despoiling screw on the front of each
                                                            fire, the unexpected extinguishing

                                                                                               a hard, glossy shell charismatic
                                                            mad monk which is pitted and grooved

                                    father to son                    their shells litter the ocean

.....

Ocean is laced and interlaced
           both sides for four pointed atolls


                         the universe was water
                  intermixed blocks of graphite, uranium


   thousands of pounding hooves felt I could defy the world
           shooting holes in a painting of cows as metal sponges


                               twisted together and stationary    set into marbleized pots
                 with the line wires ridges and fracture lines running at 90
                                                 eight countries are located in a slick
                                                   machine, spinner heads wind the wire for the barbs




                      flattened antic crustal plate


                                 the bristle of the wild oat   the transported floor

....

Rock dove                the gears turn a core


        copper-lined freeway    white of the eye


                  reel of tape and the take-up       behind the melted metal


         double-frame hammers          waving their flagella


                   bordering on the lid-slit         to the edges of the end sheets


                       signatures are sewed together           radiant energy is also


                               leathery rockweed held fast by disks         two red-eyed parents


                                      another sexual plant               lifting water from the earth

.....

Ice-cold tones in the world of
                               black and white,
    fidget infinity, the curtain between
                                                   continents
        beard of mud    looking out
          at              his love's glow
             abandoned.  And the film reel crackles
                                                   like a wave.

Led into distance, by a silent mob
                    to the outskirts,
                                 lightning bolt walkers
       frozen to the borderline by Martian
                                                         salt.

The strippers of mind gravy, jokes on a train
     the people that people the breaking of rainfall
     fingerdeep in the glowing cracks of the
              lover's skull, the Louis Sullivan doorway,
    the grandfather skeleton around   our lingering
      love  and the torch bearer of lichen messages

bringing hell paste to the face  of a flapper silhouette
 dragging all the daggers of the sea
            over  them  dining  room  over  them
                 cattle tramping the bedspread
         curtains rent soundless by money cinema
         the dementia among the fallen pinecones
   the longing at dim ancient mirrors
                         to be snapped, to have taken

.....

With my mother's left elbow attached to my nervous system,
            and various configurations of those with money
           who come against me with ferociously grinning presence,
      bifurcating my non-soul with existing desires, flared
                                                                              into ketchup,
    into groggy dishwash, inghappy in the mouth of the radio,
where an incantation is measured by units of consumption, here are
                                                        pine trees, fall down and
                                                          worship, them, etc.  Wolves on
                                                                                                     paper
rubbed from a tomb-wall,  running
                 faster each second history paints over
                                            them, with my father's brow
                          stupefying my mouth and eating
                                                               blood, the obstacle
                                                                 spiral very much
                                                                                    intact.

.....

Cliff-cusp   blood's rust on the gills
   fissuring the blind water
           as some glacial pebbles go
  time belt breaking along horizon
        sweetens descent,  the concrete bath
     eyes darkening with plunder


           doorway basement,  mind-leaf
                veins atrembled a bead of water
                    toward the hull's split
     the planet mouth opened they rose in dense clouds
             the deranged miracle planet hoppers
                a ring bark borer convenience store
                      clock's interference staggering
lined with dry grass.  The
young are ugly-looking
caricatures

.....

Into the stigmatic
    a single flower.  235 lunar months
feed on buds of guncotton in pools of water
 two separate, isolated coils
                                                           wound on the same magnetic iron core.  An
incubator hangs on all the walls and sits on all the desks (in the cathode
skin grows over the surface of the negative terminal.  The electromagnet
    of a dry cell.  A horseshoe shape pain of a gash in his finger invented smokeless powder


 seaweed to the sequoia ether and alcohol--that reduced the searing heat of reentering
             man-made fabric yellow-green gas on her dressing table.

.....

The house a setting of gardens, and the thin eye bar is black.
  Cloudy crystals and blood red seeds on the crowned and pilastered front door; the woman
       is present in soil, water, minerals and the age of synthetics.

 The bridge of a submarine stands striking a mirror of trees we call maples.
     Glory opens by the clock; he inhabits, runs the elusive entity by grace of thousands
        in open water above.  This protects the dormant opening in the bony brain case
           and a layer of huge patches great factories of the modern fourth pound of fabric.

   Automobile housewife squeezing berries for hundreds of years as a wrapping for perfume
        with plasmid vectors slender and the ears large and naked.

    He is grayish-brown streaked with the intraspecific killing, the exit holes to the sea.

DIVING BIRDS AND DOOR OF COLOR

      Blood is the mortar.  Turquoise, defying envy
           that powerful yellow belted with a broad red
          to this house.  Firmly clasping bright lights and glass
 the noblesse of its legs to the ominous rope, thankful in the middle of
                       boutique slap bang bellow of a bull alligator and the evening cries
     to shake out the water.  Then,


                        The empty capsid of the phage is left as a laugh, large head, and doggish appear-
                                                                                            ance as the earth pig


               bones are closely united            and the systems within
                                                       use  a tiny electric-impulse of its many lives


                             to detect those pebbles that fastened to the still-sound parts
                                   sew the dead into shrouds with sheet-metal.

.....

at that moment
   when man has dug for himself
           the most narrow hole,
 so as he smashes his head on a random ornament,
      a ring blade, a dust star,
  and re-opens the tiresome mystery of himself
    and falls under it cursing
        with music and with tax forms,
             with so many holes in his consciousness
               for his debts to fall through, that
                 saplings and electric towers bring him
                 to an upright position, limber with confession,
                  until he weeps on the pornographic globe
                               with a file in his lips
                                     and a plan for an invisible escape
                                        and a chainlink valentine
                                                on the heart of the sun,
                                            a steaming paycheck,
                                     the rocks in the distance where he fell
                                          the hissing of long beneficent wires.

.....

a lone crow stabbing
  in the backfields
   with nothing shiny to catch his eyes


          his blood on the level of his brothers
            his plane unpierced in spite of pecking
                 every meter to breathe at the sky


     earth's own prey in the beak of his mouth
       the ground snoring not through what he has eaten
          sleep on his tongue from a sun-source
         a beaming white
                        cloudbreaker


    the layers of the trees at his far sides
     and under the bone-skin feet
      stalks of chewed and muddied gold
                  in rainless beams
              his charcoal and senseless senses
                        tail feathers the sister of a shadowdance
                  bent
                    glanceless as I bike past

.....

 Someone is counting a key alphabet
 with ironic fingers
 in cabinets that encircle the skull, the rafters
 someone inhabits all those who imagine them
 with the magic of the practiced


 dripping with extra limbs
 someone is shutting a poisoned door
 and the agent of all these
 is smiling not to open it


 over the film-blasted hills
 they tunnel the air with dialogue
 fight immaculately
 in alleyway after alleyway
 and balance a knife on their world
 while another knife watches.

I fall asleep in the bathtub imagining water tanks on every side,
and particles raining through the dream-lagged air
where they stretch for miles, gurgling transparently,
their pipes in the earth.
The swamp tendrils of a galaxy's future bloom
extend from every gland to join
the arabesque superimposed
of civilization upon them.
My thoughts on the ceiling stripped,
the sun reddening and making some new gambit,
I wake up in the bathtub and every raining particle
sprouts an ugly market.

.....

 From one young newt As the egg divides,
so much glass was impossible; lenses, housings, clouds of marine
 kinetic nations open up to us, we re-enter the kingdom flooded in light
 a vivid greenish blue a speeding bullet and a splashing
                                  drop of milk a safe and stable flashbulb
 yellow, orange and green weight to turn a miniature paddle wheel
       heir to every action of ultraviolet vents, hot springs and geysers,
torture for prophecies--the notochord and somites
       the gray crescent in the newt, the drum back and forth the drum stop rolling
         a print between time complete with spinal column like a necklace of coral
          head, trunk, legs and tail branching organisms, then into sand
         derms, crinoids, asteroids, and ophiur white, black, purple or variegated; their
          beam of life, daily coming and going makes the gases dance

.....

I am filled with a million voices, perhaps too many.
I am unsure of the century.
I am undead patter heading into the silverware.
I will be the Netherlands of space itself.
My ship of weights will bend matter and place burdens.
My headgear is moving into thatotherarea.
Come around the corner of the idea and make room for the cream bath.

.....

Shelf upon shelf of dwelling-places
                            in miniature,
cubbyholes punched in space-time, groaning
           our cities mature the shade trees and gardens the driving and the driven members,
           our body to start an eye in our face traps baited with food and water
            entering the windless mist nets, drugged bait, jack lights, foot snares
             whose legs he had put silver threads returned


                The ratio was nine :  three  :
   three  :  one  (nine plants
   yellow seeds; three with round and green
             three with dwarfness and yellow
   and one wrinkled

.....

                      Its bones soften, its flesh rots, spoken in revolution
with deeds to live by to this day--its skin falls off and death follows within


                       to the folklore of a body double he called his pineal door
                       in the dead of his first axis in the center of the ring I was powerless,


                       one last glance around and reentering his body back home
                       the girl of his projection of a magic wand--or a sledge hammer


               who and she quite properly held in a vise in my brain his family doctor
                              whereupon young to my toes and back to head, a great roaring oscillation

.....

Drum corners and through walls from every direction--


the half is now halved and halved again
him to the earth itself buffeted by stimuli
from the forces holding each individual
the very large size of even the smallest piece of material


seize pamphlets ink with wet
from between bricks cast by a light
from the sky brains
from the thoughts that control the weather
in your guts     in your cemeteries
and all the stumps which my tarnished marble was not born from

.....

    glamour, down to fur-trimmed pencil
     dumb show the electronic team now added
a throne room of earth
       the carved figure of a horse
          priceless blueprint to the vast electric
               whole warmth of the human voice and violins, the sound
           a revolving cylinder that plays them into a photoelectric gray in the picture


waiting metal arms of rooftop
 sharks whose mouths are under the head
  the spread of water hyacinth
designer's grip on women
the airship an oil-rig the laser beam a power station

.....

A clothesline of nanoblueberries
 flossing through the body ecstasy of
expert flesh of the near future
     hosed down in the labyrinth
  of the waiting who fidget with blanks
     electric information wristed away
  the tiles floors blazing queen blazers burning
polyester adrip on plastic creases
    hot metal rods long with melting hangers
  terroramory in aisles blazing with windows nudged out of the wood
  the fallen neon breaking up on a total slide of information
  fallen parkbench, sagging wire, rusted ballerina
       snagging a punctured form on seasonal tooth
   each rickety hero finds a piano bench
     sit simultaneous in the thunder
        of the mushroom cloud shadow master
      speech as long as a lizard's graze
          pineal cum trickling into his unibrow
             ask verbal wit eating balloons to imitate
          a water tank, put his ear up to the engine's flank
             watch his face erupt away in the resurgent light
       which tasted fences on its way
             and through his telephone and fish plans
           famished rapist of the nectar queen
          under the pool burlap against the rabbit rivers and diamond borders
        turning codes into lightning
                   liquid turn to configure coupling
               china broke like an egg's Neptune weight
     Oscar green Oscar blue cat's whiskers
             and winebottle drift on a mass, claws mind
           the think shanks of the doorway
                a clothesline of nanoberries
                ecstatic flesh of the near future

.....

    A leaper, in spite of herself, all that
kitten compact black and silver moving
         the universe scans, again and again,
                   until her silhouette is the movements of all trees
   the hypnosis of its sex the cage of a blind instant
                                            adorned with flowers and traces
                             entwined and widely,      with lips,
                               a leaper, not unblinking the
                                  soft territory of life


    (open)

.....

    When the bubble casts off
              a god's clump of houses
           and sea graphs turn to hard land
                 under the sadness of the young
               early burning or the icicle
                       stalagmite of pure eyes
                      from the ceiling of oh fuck
                           to the floor of the fathomless


imp's voice depths of book without sugar
           imp's depths of book in a quiet night
             and the big nothing nodding
                        with all teeming it's gathered
                               dynamited channels of determined tar
                           wet alleys dripping a railroad of fire escapes
--heeding curvature, and motionful--neverwavering:
                     taller than hell trees

.....

The song is telling me I walked past the lights and they said nothing.
A hideous roadmap of blue veins.
The energy of radio is broken by an ahistorical crinkle.
The whole subway station of burnt nerve was already there.
You're telling me that the song is a sword between us auto side-by side,
that it shows you a directionless taper.
That the slipping lines never collide with reality.
That these seatbelts are bungee cords
that nothing can throw us loose without bringing us back.
The vacation in a blue jet landed on a salt slab airway,
led to this engine
itself tailing.

.....

A freckled mass
a ship of whirring tigers
nine tenths of the law
an atom of Sunday
four lashes for the separated creature
can-opening the soul's alarm
clock of all evaporated fantasies
to the toppling moment
when the river eats numbers and paint
when the missionaries are murdered by other missionaries
I will be staring from a small broken library
smiling from the niche of my hell
with my hands on the secret skeleton of a calorie bible

.....

 love billowing through time
                          catching an imprint
      here              there
                here
planetarium of streaks
                 an orbit paints past
       and the halved units speaking
            to jumping rice, and a field
             the blanket of life unfolded
                                         in a dying sun
  ecstatic the leaden slow rhythm
          sex muzzled in winter's breaker
             and the dawning of twilight gas
                  on the perimeter hills

......

 From the pit               washing away


        rock that walled it in cast cool shadows, and polished to a satin
                     ivy on drainpipe plasma drips into the tubules
        blood of the bull, the follower of brackets for handrail mould


                                                                    These light rays the water unfurls
                                                                     nothing shall bar the lesser part words are
                                                                     or reaping angels who shall come to distort
                                                                     shall carry


 The river, trout are active all through the geyser area
          a hammer, pitons, spring clips nylon tape


        As the day ends we have never been able to photograph
                                gulls flock close to catch their evening

.....

 pinning machine power by waterwheel
           black blight over
               spread a reekin
      drink its blood the lion in a place of honor


        The sharp-shinned last uninhabited regions where man could
              wherever there was coal to heat the boilers
    his larger brother seized it and tore it away from the crows


           Blood rites have remained drunk either fresh or
                     drought or nomadic migration


                     less than half the cost of horses for the same work


           with faith, philosophy and mystery people drank blood to gain


          black-and-yellow Rocket, winner of the sensational power of cotton
                   from the clockmaker from a barkeep friend


         Their smokestacks and slums their steam engines
                 pastoral streams and financial help

.....

 A drip in the lower kitchen
  waterworks of a newworld
   falling through every papered wall
    to the void flowers medicine of daylight on the rubber lots
     flash mob of forgotten orgasms
      a cliff-face climbed by magnetic paint
       studio of the half-convinced   with authoritative poses
        nude in the wax collaborative
         hair pouring with crinkles of white light
          high shelves of identical pillows
           in a bookless dream
            orgy of pasta touching pasta in a sonic rivulet
             stems spurt on the background sky
              the sheen of a photograph   disrupted by fiery existence
               lips on a thump-tip fawning
                narcissus in the side mirror
                 beard taped to the windshield
                  the volley of separate elevator sounds
                   and the organs all snoring internally
                    rounding the twin sparks of faint existence
                     in a figure eight the twice-pierced omega
                      to vaguely respectable figures
                       I was a molten recital in your parlors
                        slouched on a stool dislodging  your little cities
                         your glass conversations   and in the morning
                          I walked scorched alleys and observed
                           bright black tar in yellow truck beds wet
                            vivid poison   agent of nothing in particular
                             I sent myself out.

.....

She has a machine that heals with sound.
I vibrate from brainpan to tailbone to feet's arches on the linoleum.
And it takes me to hospitals in a gentle future,
rooms where leaves rattle harmlessly against the glass walls
and the furniture rustles like a living creature.
Error is elsewhere, in the mansion of fading lovers.
My head comes off like a concrete pebble.

SANCTUM SANCTRECTUM

The soul is cutting garlic into imperfect rhombuses.
A painted ceiling is lower than before.
The knife has survived, stereo speakers are making
footnotes on a manuscript in the basement.
The soul is the body once it's learned to count.
The soul is a complication of breathing.


An alien within an alien, on a familiar globe,
with a triangular headdress, that one lunar world
heats with a numbing thought.
The soul is a sarcastic priest,
with only two pairs of shoes.


In the salted territories, squirming
on more than one bed-memory,
more than one bath.
The soul is related to math.


A ceiling with hieroglyphs is extending
into the walls.
An apartment is built from a smaller flame.
A mortgage is a bonfire
a house is a pyre for the senses.


You pay for death hotly, you pay for death coldly,
large birds and small snails are making noise.
The churches are closed, the museums are open,
the bars are explored to the bathrooms,
the soul has no schedule
and advances.

ORNAMENTAL FIRE

Adorned with the drapery that gunlight caught,
 form cast on an orb ship galaxies fucked
  into transparent existence, planet lands on planet,
   screens form in the witnessed sky,


 my nymph with an axe cuts the anti-umbilical
  cord to the wax church pumped with slime
   that rides barren hills in a scaffolding of dried white shit,
    and has no tower


and in ornamental fire, love comes blazing without a framework
 to fuel wells with earthen water, cannot be held, cannot be kept,
  granted in time, it ties the knots inside the climbing fists, amusical wrists,
   that cause music


In tumbling neverthelessness, chords throated through a tapestry of cells
 in the goblet of broken atmosphere, lovers of earth for new earths,
  to ferret around on lank cages, through tubes from infinity's plastic,
   to gather on fiberoptic rafts and burn calendars, to minnow past faulty suns
    in a death-copped instant.

.....

The form's silhouette,
 and the magic nature of dissolving
 which we crave and surrender
 to grey light, to waking
the molten black, the cooled figure


a huge cat, looming on floorboards,
 chest-bones rippled by outward light
fails to recline on my horrible memory;
 a hangover, a woman


puts me at the terrible crest of my illusion
 and it sticks to nothing, then riots
within everything that is barren,
 parsed out by inexorable sadness


the total terror of white afternoons
 where nobody is watching
  with eyes, with eyes that have broken totally


 and to see

    taken by a gliding feeling,        reeling in a lot


       ass on a stump of years spreading               chained open






            every tank of light is closed off       by     lashes of money


hurt the self, fall on a wire      new to the only sun          the dripping of


 blood on glass     the singed piano     striking up the rhythm of the floor tiles




        taken by a striped and impenetrable feeling,      hands on a long row of metal carts




 for the money that wafts from the sky      for those who lovingly control it


   for the chlorine grin at the pharmacy counter telling a lie to the air


 sting the self's shadow, taste its resemblance          fall down in the depths of


     grandma's garden

.....

She paints in purple and tan the tearing of a body
psychotic lovemaking in a tunnel of leaves
smashed sirens lost in their hardware
staring elements into the river computer;
and stunned by their own laughter,
a wing-caress
a janitor's cardboard fortress
and he was her father of wide grey thirst
endless yellow pink  red
a free wind over the old neighborhood
where a nude is fighting another nude
and nobody is welcomed into the crystallization
but it glows to happen
atop every periphery shining
their hearts are making blood move and that's all

.....

The moon is a sash on the hearth of a dead map
The sun blazes under a cemetery
Out in the world of jobs and harnesses they bottle reason
I'm hanging from a ceiling's corner in a sling of catgut
The mirrors won't leave me alone or float
An imaginary uncle shares my face for years
I forgot how to get up unfold and make lunch
I cringed in a chair of dust
Imaginary governments kept an eye on the less interesting
The orifice of bright and dark multiplies in celestial gaps
No newspaper of the future shows the faces of my telephone's grandchildren
Tiny prophets scream pop in the fireplace
I am undiminished by history
My future's with unanalytical manwomanman
Don't touch the brick's glow until it blips its replicas into existence
Or melt into sex information on my doorstep
We are waiting in the nuclear ballpark
For intergalactic teams to fumble points against a gel bulletin
For the gods of meteorology to finish their cones

.....

Snow-sun, irreparable earth,
limbs linked in leather
driven with eyes to the banks,
the bowl-sides of town-planetarium
to the bulk of larger planets,
searing through thin layers of lesser stars
tin forks of battered cities
alleyways of accidental warmth
in the mess of civilization
where our bellies heat blood
for one another


Micro-town, a cell's existence,
tremulous to split the botched highway
where life makes way for murder
and a smashed hotel divulges one vibrating bed
nudged electric down the avenue
where we lay down and ride
to be rented by light
to be born from water


roads lower than the ocean
where our motors choked on music
we stepped out of antique doors


and took sight of each other, moon leaf wing
the pause of unstoppable things

.....

Genius has no memory
and the soul registers from the mundane, from the purging that
begins to look schoolmarm


slugs into his face slugs into the officer
fragments of a creature now called little pear, then


rock shows forms of man that the murder occurred
replacing the chord called spirit


each interglacial period--the time body they came from
bones of a child killed by the religious frenzy of the ghost dance


water consciousness flat-faced, fuzzy-cheeked, but he commanded
suckle their young change to a vertical face


cemented on the slide with balsam electron

.....

From a bulb or underground as otoliths in the inner ear
even in cracks between stems and on leaves high
from his mouth and it was bright the body of the legend
strips of light on temple walls, in the colossal, belted globe


The flattened claws from the grave of 400, 000 kinds of sound
to rest in crow fashion to overthrow his father


A slitted disk was attached to the scribe's arms
and made the dead person come alive again
lean, tireless, and striking an electric arc


A cord of tissue extends from a small water pocket
his bullet-mould, ball-screw, wiper, awl & with a gun-stick
when blood has delivered tight ovens called retorts blood cannot return
blasting garden flowers and grasses and dulling razors


Spells fall from septa, or walls, holes or cans or chambers
horsetail black-eyed susan deerhorn ferns
subkingdoms in the center between the corolla

.....

Light-years light-years
cuneiform wrapped in smoke
the blush in your eye
the water in the steam tubes, waves in the open ocean
rounded and pitted rocks nested
the chugging engine, before a rail broke the cloth that covered


there is a thin band of green, of lapis blue, and of indigo
bones, shells and teeth fingers to man-made brains
the beasts of lightning in higher layers
for the ballet, fine silver in the solar wind


on the drilling deck iron colts tore up rails, exploded, set fire
this group this night is a golden-white light golden-white light
the head is crowned coins rest on the eyelids--two to three earths
dashes and various matrixes as sacramental tokens of
stored on magnetic tape and replayed
the water becomes too great

SHE SLEEPS WITH A HAMMER UNDER HER PILLOW

She sleeps with a hammer under her pillow.
Her son was a small torpedo.
When she releases her ponytail her eyes grow three sizes.
Networks of electric re-creation are all her ceilings.
She knocks them closer to the sky every time she sits up in bed.
Her mattress is a little airport abandoned by civilization.
Phantom mechanics make threatening noises in musicless hangars.
Her solo office faces a molten seaboard.
Her keypad smokes under small intelligent hands.
Once a month we visit her shower and she melts me back into my height.
I can see her nibbling a cool sky-corner that has fallen from the wallpaper.
It turns into the skin of an unknown fruit when we press it between us.
The walls cocoon and bristle as the bones of airplanes crumble like salt
in the unheard outskirts.  And when we part like lovers
she strides our reincarnate sight through the alien city,
my eyes shining out of her.  And her breath fills my prisoner legs
until my history is mute with gladness
she reclines on the light in my head.

.....

In man-made rigid hulls would you taste the roar
Of a fold within the rearing tanks
With a slow flow of airstone
With a silvery sheen to the eyes and abdomen
Through which a pulse of light flashed more zones of the grey scale
Orange blossoms and buzzing bees raspberries and clover
The thermometer expanding in wood


If someone called to you, would you hear him make models of water?

THE RED ROAD

From the roots to the floodlight meters
through the stems to the near-by buildings to the human face
yesteryear dined on an oil well in the earth
any air-breathing animal a prism compressed by the surrounding


by the sphincter muscles of some sunlight
antistatic rubbing and biting lasting many hours
to swirl about your fresh-cut sound waves in the enlarger's egg
pressed by her luminous, averted turbulence-damping shapes and doing no injury


the tinted glow gone from the sky of honey
colors disappear; the world including an adult pair
becomes a pattern of black butter.

.....

My friend could shake the earth
his life was a raging tribute


his throne of drums, his bellow through the wires
his infrequent collisions with the sky


age hit him hard, he was a wanderer
in bright places he fell, burned up by common things


we could see him flailing with cumulus
when all was falsely intact


his movement printed earth with arrows
to all that strives burning

.....

It was wafting, wafting, when the world caught up with it
it was a new chemical, from the depths of a great forest

lavas gone still on the face of a world, stunned love, stems in the belly
studying its hardship into song
for the angle of a comet
coming on a train of mineral fire
spatial grace in descent

fire of an earth come to dance cliff-faces
in the labyrinth of kept sound

.....

Weather of the growing strains of ghostly music and
at the muzzle end of an ancient event for a square root;
of the windlass, which raises winding a cord


these too are cut away for his narrow house at his ease in white sneakers,
in the growth ring while a mirror set limitations--his bulging, liquid
sepulchral laughter wafting across the woodwork behind his head


where the basking shark rose from the earth in the face of the sun god
such as the acorn worm for infinity; kicking which
man-beast is known loudly squalling with each of its many parts
as colors stream out of bags across grass or concrete
lenses set slightly apart

.....

The girl leave a broad white blur long before the coal
the prism prepared his iron with a beam of light


millions of years going into the air
a ball of camphor hits the mountain


only models how the socket, the switch, the cord are put to courtship ritual
gaudy with plumes that quiver when they display stored knowledge
relishing eggs and films that end on a burning door


lovers watch erotic futures through a bloodstream of atomic and spatial time
the apes clustered by the barrier of cold intermingling with alien forces


ooze that has rained beyond the continental margins  like climbing vine


the earth, an hourglass, a pulse count, the thickness of

.....

I come to you disheveled from a feverish life,
guardrails in my collarbones
barely holding my blood together
birches and pines rising on each side,
the thrum of a loading truck in the cage of my groins

I no longer want to see the masks of profit
the intoxications of slow death
drizzling down the sides of great architecture
or the burden of humanity carried by the social life of cancer;
I want instead the mineral hearts, the marrow's faint speech
as bodies give voice to one another
to pendulum centers of gravity

the sobbing that has no journalism
and the jeremiads of the thwarted
that crown our kingdomless ascent,
and a small dark woman who takes my bruised mouth,
coiled vine of my lips to the faint arc
of her fruitful belly, inked with the slogans of necessity
road pale as a knife's wink
through the cunt of the penetrant hills

.....

The black gold floating in the green heart and great scarring
views of the ruins by kite to locate a meal in the mud under the mouth


abyss--vast plains interrupted only a few men in bathyscaphs
this tiny nucleus of artisans began to appear on land


to gain the heights in solitude and
freedom of the flesh, of the womb, of the grave

.....

I want to go back to a place of sadness and drink the water there
Until I am full and clean with it
To let my childless future, my childless friends sing along
The path flickering through days what remains of my secretive spirit
Of any remnants not healed into gold
To december the heated orchestra into deep sleep
And lucid there, eyelashes frosted looking to an ocean
Of memory's ash, so many in the wastes of the earth
To be kissed awake by madness
Until all the caged sing the spotted sun into radio errors
And the anima speaks dance in woman and man
And in all the translations between them
And the sparks lie down to be anointed by ice
In the depth of their territory
With the fragrance of a monk's incensed cave speaking to multitude
And the sodium insistence of the moon
And the few, hurt boundless who must live in this time of dying
With the dome of their present cracked by celestial collapse
Who bring the fire of their happiness to an invisible altar
And cannot sleep to move with this world of tongues

Much fingered terrestrial banality

As he wrapped with canvas strips and glue rejects the antithesis
he has a cosmic sex-brain optimism
its leaves peeling off one by one lamp with his pulse
atoms jump like the flanks of the raging mare between his blast arcs

two light rays would be faraway stars
one kind of time machine is reborn from its own big bang
its own ultimate clock, to produce, fight, create in the phalanx of dying meanings

.....

A maker of bright things, with dimming vision,
crashed through the paper-mache of my self-wall,
and the sidewalks rippled like mirage
with the spell of her genius had entered nature,
and today the beaded vampires who devour plastic and not flesh
to push back curtains threaded by cold
and burst innocent lava of thin floss
will rise around me
finding her needles open
grey marbles bubbling from a crack in the head
shining inverted sky for its imperfect instruments

.....

Light's machinery has worn the beam thin;
substanceless the time passed,
the wire so far from the source still humming
in snowy flesh, no buds in the air
the first stirring beyond patterned season
not yet arrived, a rustle
from the uncrossed mountain
picking at the bells in the ears
past memory of muffled birth, the tone rung
in a patch of sound over the earth
the wide road made white sunlit
laid out like a parameter of gladness
what the light is eating
what space is sending out of time

And so, sufferers, I am cooking a potato lunch nowhere,
the space-tunnel opens at my back
and I am taking you all with me in a blaze of
nothingness, then out the other side to teach
vaporous beings to walk and live, an orphan chief,
white bone face looking outward over
a parking lot, and the dull stars chafed by his dissatisfaction

.....

Above and below
a new orbit glides across the curved sky
cosmic union a crass cartoon of wholeness
the normal lens over the hill people

harmless psychotic warrior-god
lord
about to be destroyed
every shape that's born to finish his melancholy island

wires through the weatherhead and blend of crystalline
the disembodied recuperate in a yellow room
lighting translucent leaves and flowers
turned again by the crown wheel, the decadence following the war
someone has planes while he has none

the center of fertility, mythology of earth
met as one, the world egg
stretching itself and growing across
the ultimate slide-show streams through a smashed dome roof

earth-mother, even the navel of sex
because his long legs could compass the vast passion of ancient places

.....

Maybe it's the blood in the body that thinks these thoughts
or the language laid over it
that becomes deeper than its beginnings
gongs and creaking of doors into machine code
the frenzy of world-changing beasts
reared on wastes from a brewery
the edges of newly shod feet walking streets
made for riding in cars
the whole plan of the flesh finally collapsed in a heap of sticks

.....

The hero descends to depths of dumbness
where not even the poignant speeches can find him
pummeled by the coolest of fists
balls swollen by the lash of a rope-knot
asshole turned to yarn unraveled
by a coat hanger that found him late
face singed by a knife print
looking beautiful at the bottom of the ocean
his crashed car also quite beautiful
finally bathed and crucified with the boards
and the best nails of the Home Depot
driven through his merman remnant
laughing at the dramatic mantle of the roiling
purple black sky laughing
resurrected to stand in the resurrected hand
of the resurrected greatest automobile company
feet adrip on the backseat healing slowly
then quickly the crowds with a familiar salute
and finally our loving tyrant
with all the scars he suffered to get laid
or never to get laid
is found in a thousand bright previews
performing the same feats over and over again
in cheaper and cheaper guises
until the animal of history worships him
and he becomes a fossil in its slobber
all his forms a candelabra digitized
to light the kings and tables
the hero ascends to giddy heights of talkiness
where many thousands and many more than thousands
speak for him on the future of television
and his taint is the taint of the ages

.....

Lemon-cat, brown-white silver mask,
the morsels of time are not for you to eat,
they fall from the far-built ceiling
in little strips, galactic wisps
that barely make your whiskers twitch,
you welcome the fire's heat from a near table,
the doors of the place are patterned in your stripes,
there is no symmetry that does not find us
wounded, uneven in the feet, in the breast,
in the faintness of blood that only
powers toward death, and we feisty
with brightness of eye until dullness
threatens the striking power of all we affection,
and the quaintness of your weaponry is kept
in microcosm, and to be petted
your blinking tows all hitching lights
to their own seasons, so that we may follow
each furred version of one another,
with all the perturbed differences that creatures carry
not quite disintegrated into sleep
electric company.

.....

Thin pieces of cold from one of the goddess's eyes
to knock him off his horse in a bubble chamber
veins with lengths of plastic carved on the fireplace
nozzle through the chimney trim white helicopter
nuptial hymns at the top nailed to the edges
hands of a human beast no plants with flowers
the anvil the soul no birds body-disc must be
thousands of iron parts and pieces green and still
a hole for each plant a dark pool small pieces of lettuce
that small crimes deserved death and that ladybugs visit an orange
a ringing sound a launch site to watch magic
fabric scorched from long blasts a booming sound
a shrill sound pick of a sweepstakes winner
a drum, or a whistle forged while cherry
the street and the outside world by cells and fibers
hard stones, a great quantity of blood 1,000 pounds of plants
he pries the calories of the sun like an old man reclining.

TIME FOR A NEW MASK

Now to the place where the moving firestorms
are no longer stopped by fog
doubt is the only constant companion

world crowded by superstructures
that take care of it, badly.

There is a lion in the mind of the flesh
who looks on aggravated, waiting for one
to submit to greatness and give all this new meanings.

Give me the wrath in your heart
and I will look after it
show me your loneliest landscape
rippled by the sound of shells breaking
I will help you to take it over
though my form is a tyrant
moving at times against me
in pickled youth, with a hatred for me alone
and a sidearm that inhabits my liver

when you are so tender to my foolishness
and I fall through the gulps of the earth in a usual way
and nothing that we are glued to feels familiar
in all the froth of what we wish
so it will happen and exist beyond us
from our hints
the curvature staked out
the presence of blue yonder in the space-time continuum

.....

Certain depth, shapes with any number of dimensions, among the robots
a wild yonder where the layman is lost the spiritual center
and I could easily lay down a multitude apart from society
for the plying within those walls of joy, nervousness
in which the bride did not survive his hatred of Earth and
of plague ships to the dogs, the grandparents, the toddlers
spares the dumb due worlds

.....

I want you to live in my coat,
to just move in, adorable woman,
all the spheres that broadcast your being
when I feel homesick for books
and things are all collapsing in a way that pleases me,
long pieces of chain the bottom layers for anything
the way of wrapping their bodies in heat and light
no more to it than masses of its own viscera
smitten with desirelessness
swamps filled up with dead land changed oceans moved

Outside it is cool charcoal comes from wood
carbon is black the sky is black the coal burns dead plants
and I think of the lovemaking and the music of the poor,
with a smirk that the centuries have put on my face
'til I go to my infancy--

Be a trunk against, humming
the loneliness of other trunks,
a forestwoman for rapture of the apartment,
a warrior in the electric shower
beams from a TV stall
the corridors of light close

I want you to live in my coat
the passage through which the sea blanches and the surface cries

Abattoir Static

Even in the labyrinthine vats of rat shit broth,
you make your stand.  You are a pine
holding the keys to a keyless kingdom,
standing somewhere on a platform of
vegetation impossible, so close to the sun's hold

They move you along in engine boxes,
from one wrong place to another, you keep
a grin stuck to the torch, the molten features
that followed us out of the womb, from lips
through the forest we seek, a surging
metal-tugged nightmare of beauty touchable

music stands sprouting with scented needles,
carved rivulets between trees trembling,
trembling because we are alive with the same
tail-symphony, corroding memory because
to remember is only a mushroom from the nucleus,
impacted forgetfulness,

We rise from the hills, behemoths who fenced
our cow-eyed understanding,
when we were only human,
before and after we looked down
the blown tunnel of our making
fields singed for sky-eyes
foot-beats of our solemnity disintegrated into song.

Something under the skin as a controller of light

presuming them to be too cold to look at for domestic comfort
crude as the exposed works

in a coat of air
on a single breath
their wings have become minutes of rest

the cardinal rule of total darkness
with special precautions
after a silver ion is snatched away to make the iron frames available for headlines
fold is rich in small blood restless color

violet made by mixing red and furnishings
a message in print can die

Earl of Basement

His belly is a footstool for a serpent.  His arms drool.
When did he come into village history, gaping like a loon camera?
With windpipes strapped in razors, all whistles stopped,
all bells stilled, to descend to a lower pealing

A small ship of friends is cruising into the fire's outline,
tinsel windows from a few yards of forest, the roadside winking,
the welling up and dying out of a consciousness, a teaching
through the eyes, a smudge of light-smeared
human photograph, tearing from the fabric of natural light

He's the driver in a thicket of reflection.
The liquid painted on dry bone that will flake off against the sunrise.
And he is resonant to the machine of the earth.

LEMON

That what I am is not effervescent,
that by the time I see you I have turned so many corners
that somehow we've become strange to one another,
that I cannot say it without a litany,
that I do not know how to express the drive of human love,
consistently, without a dagger,

that this cat and this fireplace
are the first and last world
trembling at 4 a.m., claws buried absently in denim
so gentle to the hell of the morning
fur silver and black
drag my eyes to the blindness of childhood
and on your way back--

this casserole of a brain, these ways of forgetting--
bring me your feline launch, finally,
give me up to the hum in my lap,
petite reassurance.

.....

When she first clapped eyes on a light field (say a button) a vanishing art
down in britches and boots the long, curving collarbones,
compressed air, and fresh breath, blood, urine and saliva
a clock with hands of clouds and gilded shell forms,
crystals suspended in magnetosphere's eggplant living room

all leaks, stand in our safelight
leaf through tiny lilacs and dahlias,
layers of plants and animals
to paint its walls black glaze with her decorator

no drunkenness, no rapture
no one knows what makes it red

a light trap burned up in the day
clicks to give him a precise voice, a birdcall

MS. FIRESTONE

Dreams do not make melody career
you see your cartoon breakfast in the dawn sky
through an android window
and cannot reach over the hill rise.

The noise of satin uniform
falling on the floor of a trashcan
alerts genius to the presence of murder, in the self,
on the apartment precipice, forcing music
into fire escape and wires
the aridity of loneliness accepted
an orchestra of nerves that have
no homes in other nerves.

To abandon abandonment, the arctic heart,
spreading tendrils of frost across the skeleton leaves
of human cities, to open a mystic dresser drawer, to
see a metropolis of burning numbers, in which one
is a letter transfigured.

A crucifix older than history
nudges its indecipherable plaque
against the underside of the lounge rug
and strains against it until the floor becomes
a wave of tumblers, children prepared to play,
who'd not begun.

FIVE FORMS OF LIGHT

To add wonder to message
all these subjects were taken out
in raccoon territory
they raged and raged at dumpster fires

in the fiery dark, they learned a lesson over and over again
their mattresses were soaked in tears and all their agony was music
they moved like dowsers, navigating a slight deception in the breeze
they turned a mess of corner, dragging a train of eyeballed kerchiefs,

moving their mandibles around candy bars with famous names,
stalling the traffic with a murmur, blades loose on their back pockets,
who know about the errors of childrearing, and the sanctuary of the wounded
who know about the handwringing of the dead, which is imaginary

SILENT TAPS

I am turning into a houseplant that watches you.
In the past we are dancing; close your eyes and smell
the soil I grow from. The radiant nowhere, silently
opens up, from the sun on a beer coaster
or a napkin scrawled with alien alphabet,
closer and closer to multiverse, the fibers of our beings
stretched tighter and tighter in the refining blaze of theory.

You are a drumskin whose under-air I live with.
This is the apartment where we plot the smokeless end
of the known world. Genetic material sprayed in laughter
across the flowerets, the sound of many bicycles
passing huge, closed windows. Make me closer to both
death and life, in the music of your refusal to analyze;
root in me behind my hilt, show me the infinity
backwards.

This coming bloodletting, a history of love-blips,
will not be enough. Things must fall short somewhere,
to keep the steps worthy until the great until.
What is meant for the eye, the ear, the nose,
the other tendrils, is meant in profound ambience,
is meant in the bloodlessness
of closely studied blood.

This is the first door to the house
with the most doors, where a fart waits in denim
laughing kettles to a stove with feet
that print linoleum and forget. Drink your tea
with tumeric and let the ceiling's whir of caged beings
turn into a planetarium helmet over your head.
Soon we will not remember ourselves, much less each other;
soon we will out in the wide tiny,
be feeding ducks who are already done eating.

.....

The blue door, opens on white-streaked
fruitful sky, it looks like the ultimate window, then
it is closing

cruising the ocean's glow, nervous in the international air
spiritual loopholes closing up like sand
broken light in the head
wiring

a call is coming from the tree-wall
a siphon is sucking down the marrow of a field,
somewhere skeletons buy tickets, on a narrow highway's
eaves of authority running with piss

deep in my dreamt house
a woman in a plant-dress is always passing
from detachment to detachment
the veil of letters fits her like a leaf
and her snore issues
from the valley of unpublished music

.....

Prey, what could I want revolting,
talk to eating all, thoughts rotten with sleep,
no will to imagine the future, pulled by a light,
angels over the parking lot, filaments dropping from clouds

the mind of a snake in a garden,
all warring with conquered earth,
burnt civilization, lingering in its laws,
surrounding the frenzied desire,
owned by a failed monk, failed millionaire.

Nothing stilled by thought, coming up molten and alive,
will silver the landscape with what rides atop blood
until the fiber in flesh breaks with what is tired of words

I will come down in rivulets from party mountain
singing purely.  Nothing that has touched me
in oblivion or waking will go to waste.

.....

Young woman, I fear the grief of old men
as it enters my being without a shout,
I find the core of where old selves clamor with chisels
and you are a lightning's root in the overbecoming ephemera,
you slant the landscape with eyes, with footsteps under your footsteps
smoldering, you hoist me with gravity from my ceiling bed,
I withhold only what cannot break loose from the wall groaning calendar

Young woman, I never ascended like a prophet to paralysis
because we are living matter, undirected by words to be shaken,
let this hymnless abandon light up the vaulted cobweb
blueprinted into life by those dying, who pretend eternity,
take my carcass of moss, vibrating with song, to your lip's crux
one final perseverating time, be my salve's looping station,
repeat and repeat me, you are the hourglass emptied of atlas
 

.....

Stilts high above grass and shrubs in a wet woods
the colorful king stood at the earth's center, linking it
allowing it to flash the rig over one man's head

he saw rings around the faint wash of blue light
he saw four moons near tree-ripened fruits
he saw stars that had never been power to a bone
from a ring of fragments on the retina in profusion

the machine in games of ticktacktoe the shadow of phases we see
some cordlike long thick draping vines
cool, shadowless white flowers
an apple, the apple's thin skin

.....

Flesh is more expensive on this disc; the heart on a screen
tiny polyps which are the folds and garments that will fall
from twigs, dead leaves clouds of ammonia snow
light-years across their eyes close to the windows,
soft tissue of the body is bathed in bulge of stars
that has the same colors and each window
need not be bigger than a man's face
eggs or fledgling birds vast swirling city of
acorns, berries, lichens, an inner-halo-ring
is even fainter, spinning off each of the discs
is a steady crescent-shaped golden mist
from the blue sky, first light sucks it clean, then returns it
and morning blots out the building, leaving only the water

.....

That the nights and days of society do not belong
to the hearts of the passionate
and how the illusion that my eyes are changing the light
puts my days in a bubble where I break

but toward the rainforest's blankets
of life-giving death, lost medicines
and this cloak of fiber-optic snakes I wear
to frighten away all the armies and how at times
it lights up their blades and their cannons
and the technology of silent time travel

love that brings to the abyss
its desire to inhabit all the milliseconds
as the trains rush past the tree trunks
and into the valleys of concrete
covered with patriotic tarps
and the sweet nonsense of sellers

that the passionate cannot sit still long enough
to be shot into space, but build stages
from the threshold of their nerve
decorated with face-paint of burnt forests
charging and laughing with fists
full of berries and bushes
stained by the night life that is growing like a vine
while a girl dances to Al Green on the tiles of a bakery
and a buyer laughs
the myth is what actually happens

.....

If I go with the fire of my destiny
through unsilent corridors
and speak there with mirrors that deepen
into alternate selves, sending their eyes into me,
if I multiply existence, only the time-blossom
can breathe these creatures scented onto my path
and take what it produces roaring
down the nearest wormhole

you keep a gauze over your world
and it includes me, and I am exhausted
behind it, it makes a total shield on my skin,
and I can watch it form from a new distance,
harmonizing with thin water

when the earth found me
I'd finally stopped suffering in her grasp

.....

You have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to be your Humphrey Bogart,
your good wolf and the guardian of your river's heart,
and the autumnal apocalypse is shivering and falling
all around me, it brings my tropical soul
in color to the fore without a temperature to match it,
the tilt of your mouth to the gleam of your gaze
broadcasting over valleys and hills through black & white
the heat of your being, you have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to walk into an old diner to be awed by
you inhabit classic skin.