To the world

I open my body to the world.
The trees are filled with wires.
The rivers are running cold.
A calm is coming.
A peace is filtered through this electricity.
I am the world cleansed of the world.
The bombs that go off in cars belong to me now.
I caress them as if they were breasts
and send them back into a distant summer.
The world is one pulsating tomato.
The world is a series of connected gardens.
I am the wind washed dirty by the world.
And the world is a 24-hour laundromat.

This will happen again tomorrow

You have so many areas. There is surprisingly little play.
The president on a rippling screen
called the entire population
a bunch of traitors
today.

And now he lies in bed and munches
on the graham cracker
of an entire continent.
The boiling of our only world
is his indigestion.

Which means he's already eaten.
And now we are eating.

And there is a long goddamned table with nobody at it.
And there is a long fucking life with nobody inhabiting it.

Gifts from a horse in the dark

I know that powerful men and women unite in government chambers, plotting to put the twinkling of their little minds under our skin, so that the surface will seep under the surface and all but the surface will disappear; so that all that is, will be surface.

We will fight them by throwing tomatoes at the windshields of their black automobiles while they drive over the corpses of pigeons whose bloodied feathers decorate the streets. And the pigeons will be resurrected at the proper moment, so that the clouds will rain the white clay of their droppings and soil the suits of police officers. Another life will come out of the stricken air to rescue us.

There's a wet place between known dimensions where we'll lie down together the moment this is over. The whispering air, in that in-between place, is a circuit that crackles with an electricity not of this earth.

Those who die in peace prevail, through the lungs of those who breathe their spirits through the eyes of peace. Those who die in peace remain in peace, though they wrap powerlines around their ephemeral bodies, and rampage through rich neighborhoods, channeling all the dying sighs of the guilty. Those who die in war and cease to exist are carried bodily out of the country by a hurricane.

There's a forest path and a gap in the air. A place, where a hand can reach a dresser drawer, from another world. The chambers of lichen-coated rock will slide open with a mineral sound, and we will take off the garments of this existence and put on the chalk-blue underwear scattered from flying saucers.

The hoofprints of light, beaten into swift entrances at the forest's edge, are gifts from a horse in the dark. The golf courses, where lightning bugs are strewn like little cities, take on water from the air, and the ghosts of forgotten birds swim soundlessly through the back of your neck.

I know that those who embrace these mysteries are blessed beyond comprehension; that they will become fearless in their last hour; that none shall own or control their bodies, and that a terrible funneling of inner light shall come from their mouths and sear away the commands of the government.

And that their names shall be blessed by the ghosts on darkened golf courses, and in the places where streetlights have been shot out by rifles, crackling weakly like eyes trying to come back to life. And that they shall heal the broken hands of those who were called their masters, and that those hands will roam the sand of beaches like spider crabs for centuries, forgetting how to swim, until they come to believe that their healing is final, and kneel at the feet of their victims, who disappear into thin air at the moment they are worshipped.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

A film summary

Aidan Layne starts her life
with a great scene in Lockwood Forest.
Aidan's wide eyes are on display
in some short skin
and Lockwood has the pleasure
of loving the fear out of it.
Aidan's eyes are scorched
in a reverse cowgirl, piledriver;
she defies death
and the forest finally pops in her face.

Jayna Oso uses all the information
in her petite frame to scare the fear
out of her two guardian angels.
They use a toy on her mind to get it ready
for the government's assault. After both guys
understand her complaint separately
they move on to more colorful stadiums.
The guys ride in the stream of her vision
for a while after they take turns
staring into her mouth. Jayna's tiny eyes shake
as she's being perfectly understood
and she keeps cooking for hungry children.
To bring his life to a close, one guy
throws himself into her mouth
while the other covers his own body with fire.

Gia Paloma gets rough and crusty
in her revolution scene. Gia
is one of my favorite revolutionaries.
Nothing gets held back, Gia
puts it all on the landscape.
The rebellious action is very blue and concrete.
By the time the guy pops a shell
all over her grey locks and wide open mortality
Gia is dripping with sorcery and misunderstanding.

Olvia O'Lovely and Ice Lafox
come together unintended
for a silent coupling
that was a long time in the freezer.
Lockwood is again the lucky forest
that gets to absorb these fiery implosions.
Great angelic rescue work here
as not one time-travelling of peace is missed.
Both girls are in the waters of eternity
as they keep cupping pools of liquid earth
with their wild imaginations.

Tiffany Mynx unseats two presidents
in the bland finale. I swear
this screaming brunette
has the best mind in politics right now.
Tiffany's killer intellect besides,
she is one human bell of a performer.
Nothing is too sonorous for her to do
as the two presidents are eager to prove.
Tiffany is awesome like a cliff and takes
both presidents into the ocean to end the movie.

A new offering

My hands are more brutal
than the hands of those who raped you
but I have never used them.

These shovels, that you touch,
have heaped soil on every father's
grave, yet have no father to bury.

This new offering, spread
like a girl like a magazine,
is wearing a man's body,
is an unburnt offering, has not
been placed on the altar, and
has never been properly ritualized.

It is free and its fangs are all hands,
are all toes in sand, are all soft in touching
where others have wounded
entrances into existence.

I recently received one of New Hampshire State Senator Tom Eaton's campaign flyers in my mailbox, and took a look at the section entitled "Sponsoring and Passing Legislation that Makes a Difference". Among Eaton's proudest accomplishments is his sponsorship of SRJ 1, a bill described as follows: "Joining with every New Hampshire State Senator to honor our Red Sox". Boy, I got a good laugh out of that one. Could he be any more pompous and empty if he tried? It reminds me of John Kerry's "Who among us does not enjoy NASCAR?". Such populist posturing illuminates, wonderfully, how out-of-touch politicians really are. I can't wait to run for office myself, so that I can make such grand statements as: "I, too, place great importance on having a cold beer every now and then".

Politicians might as well stop trying to convince us that they're just "regular guys". It's insulting, and it's also a waste of their time. "Regular guys" are too busy living their pathetic lives to care much about politics, which is why insulated geeks like Kerry and Eaton run the world. Real "regular guys" "honor our Red Sox" by sitting in front of the TV for four hours every night as insipid, overprivileged demagogues run their country into the ground.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

The wolf in pants

The wolf is wearing pants.
The deforestation evident in the kitchen
is breathing fire down his hairy neck.
He is trying to believe in the ancient prophecies
of a thousand-year reign of peace and love.
But those words are old now
and he hears the hearts of trees crippling
the bitter outsides of the world.
Nature is doing it. Nature is bringing peace.
And he is not included in her plans, this time.
And the wolf sits down on a stool in his kitchen
and the the wolf tries to put his face in his hands
but his nose is too long. And the wolf
takes off his pants
and cries.

THERE IS THIS MUSIC

There is this music, there is this voice,
beyond prophecy and beyond prediction;
and it flows from the paths in the hills,
from the bodies of those who faithfully make love
to the sound of falling tenements.

And we hold this music in our hands
like the tentacles of a disembodied jellyfish,
drained of poison, neutral as a glass of water.
And we find the right notes to enliven
the limbs of this baby,
this baby with the skin of a lilypad
and eyes of volcanic paper.

And I ask for that voice from the mountains,
and that fire from under ocean floors
to fill me and elevate me
above the powers of the government.

I kiss the stained velvet at the altar,
and face oppression with the poise
and oblivion of the blue heron,
asking the eyes of all birds
to fill my hands and feet with vision
and guide me to the blood-speckled rooftops
of this town.

And we amplify the voices of all those
who have been in hiding, crouching below
the streams of their own music in the air;
and they come as a chorus, and they arrive
from all the neglected places, they come
as a lake of shimmering hands to lift you up.

And even in the filth of cities, even
as you bathe in ammonia and bleach
and the sun is kept prisoner
in a red brick bedroom;
as the paws of the last dragonfly
find a bruised knuckle on the back
of your aching left hand--
there are those who will never abandon you,

and they come from the ghostly framework
of destroyed steamboats,
and they come from the flypaper of forgotten towns,
and they come from a magnetic dimple
on the face of earth's water, to lift you up.

ALL THEM FRIVOLOUS SINGERS

Even now, as we are commanded to worship
those who murder in our name,
our songs express only the sex drives
of wounded cattle. And our guitars are strung,
our pages scrawled upon, only to wound
a neighbor who won the affection
of an ex-lover, or a neighbor whose shirt
is more elegant and fragrant than our own.

We shake hand after hand at parties
carelessly, as if flesh were taken for granted,
as if bodies were separate
from that which carries our song.
And now that the fire of a fallen city
has been put out, we wait for the fall
of all our cities with mildness, with
meek, tender movements and giggling,
our loves and hatreds small enough
to be restrained.

Because blood has been distant from us,
but now blood will rain on our streets
from embittered clouds, and blood
will run out of our bodies like wine
from a punctured sack.

Love letter to the woman who will destroy me

Oh lady whom nobody calls lady anymore
Oh statue of ash
Oh sack of steaming roses
Pull my hair down deep from ceiling vapors
Unfold the ribs from my flesh
Flesh of my flesh of my flesh unfolding
Show me the violence
Of the rivers and the tides
Show me the night in the forest full of knives
Rape the eyes of this unstable man
With interplanetary visible whispers
Don't let me escape
From your thin strong arms

Oh lady from out of time
Oh lady from far beyond love
Oh scream from all the trembling hedges
Hung with underwear and the blood
Of everyone who's ever been touched
Fill the hells of cities with your suggestions
Burn the mattresses we squatted on
When we were homeless as a pile of rocks
Fill the dumpsters with the copulations of lizards
Let them slither through the stink of human trash
Until the dumps disintegrate
And the slender tongues
Flickering from every frontal lobe
Are touched by a probing immaterial finger

When it crashes incorporated

When it crashes and we lose all our informations
the secrets like a series of mossy crotch
glowing dyed green through white wedding dresses
all over the.

When it crashes and we loses all our appointments
and addresses and the stadium ethereal beneath
dovelike feet we know it crashes.

When it crashes and it feels itself upwards
through fleshy blossoms, fissures bleeding
solemnly and the fishlike mouth off-center
moves and swears. Then we'll know

it's going the way the one-winged seagulls went
when they wove themselfs into the cleansing air
(that birdless eyes call poison) above
our favorite personal volcano.

Watches and their chains shattered on a beach

And the frustrated all over will not
have any part of these eye sockets
once they are broken apart

the shells of clams wide open to the sun
hinges getting weaker in their dryness
and the salt conceals

and the merging of volcanic outpourings
suffers the air to move
over their intermixing

it adds a part, it adds a crucial piece
to those braids that do not cling to any scalp
and do not revolve and do not spin on any swing,

writes everyone

on a panoply of bedroom walls
where roses crawl like dogs with broken backs
among the vines

A HYMN TO BE SUNG ON THE ESCALATOR

The pieces of the kingdom that have no king
are falling; the places that are ruled have already fallen.
The kingdom that never had a name is falling:
and it breaks the rocks as if they were chalk
and thuds in the earth as if the earth were flesh

throbbing with blood, only as thick
as a man's arm who holds his body by a thread;
his body is the thread and his arm
is the poles of the earth,
steadies him above the kingdom that burns
without smoke and without ashes

burns in the night as if the day were trapped
and nothing holding the kingdom
is strong enough to pull it back from the brink
of turning into rushing water, then steam
when its stones begin to glow;
the kingdom that is falling is flowing
into other kingdoms, the named
and the unnamed crashing together, the fork
where rivers meet is shining red
with the blood of those who fill
the gold of its veins

and the higher kingdom is falling
into the lower kingdom with a wet slap
like the bodies of birds who make love
in the surf

those who were hurt by the kingdom
are always building new kingdoms
the ruins of ancient kingdoms are worshipped
by those who conquered them, and the experience
of the wind lives in those who guards its gates
as if the woman they love were inside,
though they live alone, loveless

the kingdoms on their shelves
are moving closer to the collapse
of walls of water, in the tumult's central
embracing, the kiss of flesh within ember,
the pressing past,
guarding the sun, scorched by it's path

The silence in pieces

We wait for the sun to be joined
by other suns, we ready ourselves
with maps to draw the emerging lights,
the meteor showers draw faint lines
on the faces of young children.

We lick up the light that falls
from a tented sky, we are babies
in bed together, shivering with warmth,
grasping fingerless after bedsheets
in a young woman's hand.

And we lie underneath the constant
removals, letting the sheet
slide away and a nakedness
covers everything. And she smiles,
she is part of a fever that breezes
over the whole earth, all our surfaces.

We stand together in a crumbling corner
where everything else has been torn asunder
and formed a radiant, unlikely triangle.
And dress ourselves sloppily under
the light that remains, and dress ourselves
again and again to stand in the same position.

The light that moves over the hill
becomes the hill. The glow from reflecting planets
disintegrates whole libraries of conversation,
here on the surface, in an area that has been named.
We mouth the words at each other that no one
can bear to speak.

All those lonely planets

There are spots on the sun,
black and pulsating,
from something that exploded down here
in a kiss, or some convergence
of hot liquid metals--I think it had long
milky horns--and a swingset emptied
in my memory, when that explosion
was young and looking good.

Under its scrotum is a series
of fish skeletons implanted
in the skin, teasing the meat
atingle with leafy mathematics.
Garbage cans as drumsets
send the signal to alleyway walls
that a hand is calling
another hand home
to its own set of hips.

What do you want from the towns
that you build? As ghosts fill their walls
and fish visit bathtub after bathtub,
swimming through the pipes,
they ask you silent questions;
the chairs ask you
where they should stand
if somebody suddenly wants to sit.

There are triangles over the water
where you can get lost. And their angles
go diving to magnetize the rays of the sun
as you fall through the carpets of fish.
And the light of heaven
and the light from the depths
cross each other, perfectly, like swords
in the duel that must be staged
to keep the eyes of the spectators
from crumbling to dust.

An escape hatch in the bottom of the ocean
holds the squeaks that dolphins keep in reserve
and the bubbles of fire that bring peace
to all other flames. It's rumbling now
with the conversations of those who visit it
in their sleep. It's all very much
like a church social with hand grenades.

There are holes where refrigerators
go to die in a sexual manner.
Where birds made of ice
have no trouble flapping away.
There are skateboards whose riders
at twilight change from boys into girls.
There are holes where dead dogs
thrown into the depths are resurrected
and come running back to the hands
that buried them deep in the void.
They are still wearing the same collar
when they return, often mute, but intact.
There are places in the world
that can swallow the world.

Those who found each other

He breathes a woman out and then he breathes her in.
She's on his pillow and then in a deeper place.
They can barely reach each other in this tiny bed.
Her arms are tiny and then stronger than his.
He wants to talk during lovemaking
to help remember where he is.
She puts so many hands
all over his disappearing lips.

The blanket's been missing for years.
She pulls the whole rug up and puts a set of lips
near the middle to eat the dust.
He helps her burn the grass growing over their bodies
she helps him make the scorched earth in mid-air
over their faces become wet with rain again.

The flood that licks at the window ledge
is not close enough. The hurricane on the television
falls out the window with a crash.
There's a film of granite dust on their eyelids
that they can't lick off without choking to death.
They vomit up a sheet of minerals
into the air that says:

those who find a mate for their souls,
still alone in their separate bodies;
under all the talk and touching,
unknowns reaching silent toward unknowns.

All the little rivers

All the little rivers that reflected light
from bulbs above the street
were playing pianos inside
every one of your burst-open bodies

walking together without holding hands
on many different continents
on many different radiant sidewalks
never reaching for each other

as the pianos played on and on inside
their unexposed spines
all those radiant bodies
transparent as jellyfish

grey as the concrete where they walk
then abruptly shining
pounding the ivories
inside

Mudderschtup

Are what you saw angels
how you understand
their handprints in a wall
the beginning of an ocean wave

under the docks where a horseshoe crab's
old body of a home
floats upward, disemboweled in the streaks
of floating light

I see my face in the shell of its skeleton
I know my future is footprints in
cobalt sand we've never imagined

dirty light, dirty light, being vacuumed clean
by other light, other light, dark matter hides
behind a tree they call the solar system:

a tiny tiny bear crawls between
the shocks of moss all soft like a toddler's hair

The visitor

On my porch
a lizard crawls out of a wet newspaper
his artichoke-green body
a shard of lichen-coated stone come to life
after an eruption in some river.

His tongue flicks in and out,
a coin refused by a slot,
and he dips its forked end
in my fallen wineglass.
The last red drop slithers
into his thin mouth.

He's slow walking away
as if that were enough to get him drunk.
He slinks down the front steps
and across the driveway
carrying my whole world with him
in a way neither of us understands.

Shadows in daylight and a dance

The shadows of powerlines, scentless, noiseless,
lie long and almost perfectly straight
on the pavement in sunlight. The branches
above them cast their more varied shadows,
tangling themselves in the lines of electrical wires,
all of them pulsing with electricity, shadow and vine,
mushroom and discarded coat hanger.

At night the wood grows wet with hunger.
The powerlines sizzle in midnight dew.
The weather grows strange around
quietly buzzing houses. Peeping toms
begin to see mirrors instead of bodies.
Breezes take on venomous, vivid colors.

And the certain destruction coming for us,
the way it makes us cling together in bed
or when saying goodbye to each other
at the door, and the distance between us
that it creates, is a ballet in the fog.