___________

WORLD ARCHITECT PRETEND

A crow thatched into the chainlink
dark matter drape and drizzle treetops grey
large numbers twitch the air
to collapse the lonely

Girl buckled onto black landscape
by a silver brace through her strong hair
what she has conjured in presence
she'll climb up to absence
on accumulated wire
from the depths of the world's fair

Deer deer deer deer deer deer deer
turds they leave smoking on the holy path
of enumerated cellphones, quiet as punctuation
lead to the shell ghost of their ribs
where roots mate with plastic
deep under the plans for our graves
all the basements roar with vacuumed sunlight
prophecies bulletined on public time go up in dust
to ask our bodies where they are
and though we move we do not answer
though we speak we can't say
peace built on bones, constitutions in crayon

We take the sled of this world
down a corridor a slope chased
before it shrugged into the ocean
in the depths of no religion and no resistance
follicle on follicle to touch anemone
wet streaming weeds and undergarments
bloodied on a reef
watch sperm of twilight grow
to capsize all transitional being
a drum at the beginning
a sledge and a capsule
a scalpel or an axe swung underwater

Sing
princess of the chopping block
with umbilical fingers
lands have overlapped whole lands
to pull feathers loose from metal
all the things that have been named
unidentify their captors
to fill the dictionaries of their throats
vacant with living matter

______________

BORNE OUT OF THE NATURAL ARCHIVE

Brick piles pock-painted
by active radio gulls
sea-driven or land-urged
the wings move the same toxicity

skeletons in hollowed elegance
unchanged, our floating relatives
over parking lots and vaster expanses
with the universal death palette
contributed to rain all over

Where the compass is killed they won't move
and where we have flown our machines
may be birdless
but for a few escaped images
chapels of domed digital
where a liquid metal core lofts flowerbed nukes
to teem with galleries of what
in brilliant minority
we ache to keep and have destroyed completely.

+=+=+=+=+=+

Whole storerooms of quiet
are now filled with birdcrash
comfortably the sinews pull away
from ceiling corners
to a latticework of painted milk
phony flowers
are more than beautiful enough

vinyl stems and polyester blossoms
point to an earth piled higher
above, magma of fecundity
roaring to mute

my grandmother cried in these rooms
because potpourri
had not died to scent in her hands
no matter how many thatched wooden boxes

no matter how many icicles are ignored, falling
past the windows drizzling lightspeed
squirrels impaled
to treat the treed and pampered cat
to an extra snack, if it can climb its way down

_____________

As the hemispheric belt tightens
an inner sickness is tired
of being hurried, sticks
to rooms full of untouchable people

as the dry core melts
our vertebrae climb the air
few layers are left behind, fluttering
coat-hung over the one river

the many rivers, the few we care for
we walked out on life
and forgot to shut the windows
forgot our currents
move

~~~~~~~~~~
SCAR CHART

Radiant old men in profile
beards turned to solar interference
hear a deeper whisper from the falling hail
when love finally came it was not a seizure
the fountains ran as ordained and it was a brokenness
the same shiver from root to claw
at sunspots in a thicket, parked
as firmly in their bodies as they can be
the old men don't call to the young men
but let them watch, the wiser ones
to learn the poise
as against a great current

--------------
HURRY SADNESS

Hurl me through my own door
like an incantation,
I'll find you sleeping there
in a palace of wires. Goldenrodded
the field poke panoply of eyes
out of an algae'd lake, wide
bristles of silver that are not
our friends from the plant world.
Hurry sadness to save me through
these ecstatic hours,
spreading

fiddle of cattails on rattled breeze,
telepathically I command you
to start the car, then I watch
your pink limbs climb into it
from a grey shadow weather low
in the hood of a parking garage
the lights of Boston like a whole lottery

ox-like intoxication
where oblivion fights with my bones
on riverbeds, parkbench
throughly squirrel-searched,
hands folded on a stack
of thin prophecies.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Let huge plains of rampant color
children run in the becoming of corn rows
sunflowers beaten with the chalk of a popped sun
lines erupt into faces
veins find rivers in the sea
everywhere speech is falling out of fashion
roamers wearing helmets of water
glued to a hotel door where some star
was slingshotted into being
all the numbers fall like weather
we crash into our money with real tears streaming
the moment somebody sings who is not our mother

We're gone from human knowledge
on the lake rocks lapping
up a lunar engine
through the closing eye of the milky way

Prelude to Impalement Arts

In my half world and your half world
the same street is simmering
we pass racks in dreams
looking over tides of bruising color
to see if the other notices wind
testing the windows
until the frames bend like an organ of time
expect a duck to swallow a whole river
and explode into a pile of oily dominoes.

I wasn't waiting in my infant body
to become a man, anymore
than I would wait in my sternum's rug
for death before we move and move
who cares whether it's a canal or a river,
an ocean or a mirror, a neighborhood quaking
or a barstool spinning like a hubcap
we'll slide down a vast fall of linguini
fresh from water and spice and land
on moss-furred mound of ancient tires,
spelling lives with all the arrows that have missed
until the raw forms shine through
like a shark's head in a basket of biscuits.

00000000000

Elevated lawns pick up quick stumblers
shafts of channeled rain blow the sod away

to stand there on a plank of hot cement
while daily all the plans for further planning are destroyed

bewildered with milk and coffee, by no war
lost in the presence of beloved bodies
planes for touch lost to touching

lamps under soil, garlic in the sun
stripped of earth-grown paper

each citizen stands on a separate platform
their frenzy so quiet
only those in silence can hear it
from their blood broadcast
the porches teem
with hedgehogs of annospiritual static
roaming chairs and radiant prophylactics
'til someone volunteers an open breastplate
for paws of nonbeing
to be quelled by

to lie down on grass that's never been tasted by fire
and wake up on a cum-wet cinder slab
daydreaming of a chute toward night
where one can see all happenings
freed from motion

}----WATERTORCH----{

Somewhere in the future alone
this tumult will come down
with its powers to greet me
unready

a cabbage in the dark
lips without prayer
how many vents are open
to the heart of present time

where nothingness brings on no disappointment
I'm watching the form of the neighborhood slut
dissolve into every tree trunk as a blessing
the all violet around her
the moment pods touched soil and she was playing soccer
froth of weeks or froth of years in devotion
always the same, a snapshot breaking on the nets.

>>>>>>Saint E<<<<<<

You're on a strong march
that will never end,
I can see it in the set
of your diamond head,
the way that girl said
"he looks so determined"
before dragging you into my bedroom,
while I waited humorously with wine
and gently turned up the stereo.
Body of genius, I understood,
the maker of unknown sciences,
stood in your bewildered hair
as she dragged you across
the whole kitchen floor,
the legendary strength of a girl's legs
that you were too thin to fend off.
Did you really expect me to rescue you
from experience? We gave up on that
long ago, there are no guardians
for those like us, and when in the afternoons
we watched screens and hid from the windows
smoking shit and gulping malt
we knew their spatial swords
would never reach our orbit.

(((()))))((((()))))((((()))))

Corpuscles that loosen in the spring
will open a garden on tar
roofs paved up to the faint air
runnels snoring of confused waters
winding their way down from the peaks of our babylon
where we collect life's substance in tanks
where no one swims
and send it down on lime, to spray
the faces of those who expected death.

Trim after trim of female feathers
on high drugs or removed to a clean afterlife
watching the passions scatter like ocean clad lights
into emergency rooms
the eyes windshield impaled by violin
and the ribs like chords breaking
we watch on this tanned stoop
our beards growing out through us
from the calendar that was murdered
in an old forest, where the women rested like warheads
and here they wait like switches
to torture the inanimate into perfect being.

Glycoside society mouths on rails of salt
or frozen satin towards
a silence arcing wide
for those who've never halted to listen,
doppelgangers at breakfast, in vests of mercury:
everywhere we sit among them becomes
the location of a religious service
all the ceremonies that have left us dazed are there
pillars bristling into carbide flower
to make a high play for your heart,
that word that's finally killed
the organ and the core
your heart, your heart, your astrophysical heart.

Our Lady of the Meantime

Make out of me
a song that sounds like your speaking;
let the heights come in
to these small intersections
hill path take a fuming tree
to a peak bombarded by electronic vapors
and the time-yelps of touches cut short
put movements of kids in lonely corners
tiny boats touched into slow motion
something shrouded that begs
continually to be devoured
while trays of waxy light float past

We could be in Paris, or fucking
with religious figures in the palaces of Chicago
we could be in an afterlife where all one does
is exhale
listening to a student of galactic infrastructure
threaten to bury himself
with a load of railroad stakes
or erupt like green lava
from the local radio station saying:
make out of me
a song that sounds like your
speaking you
who do not.

__________

Time-scythe, sweep further:
only you will not be commanded.
The push of tendrils in the soil
does not ache or listen.

I'll be greatly aged, to greet the body
of a woman who has already suffered.
Hack me down to a burning semi-colon:
a solid sun and one that flares
to paint with radio waves

my small room, where I keep the imprints
of those who died creating blind
those who were wept down to dregs
by their own hysteria; let me be a red priest
tugging all their gravity of manuscripts
over the urgent local hills.

In the blueprint's net
where they suffered and reached
let us make love in the manner of crows
the web of bright-wound things
we've taken offhand from each other.

ACCUMULATION BLUES

Eyes across avocado bridge
supermarket's a rustling deadfern
beings too distracted to investigate one another
seek more distraction, select bright things
to place against dull things
make some explosion seed warless air

minutes ago I heaved a car
through a pharmacy window
but I'm still sitting in it.
I'll give birth to a thousand vandal children,
just being here.

Headphones in the bones of my feet
soon so many cameras
will be built into this multicreature
that the world of eyes
will be blind from overlooking

thieves take to public places
crater their privacy deep
through the hungering earth
sleeping bag flower pods
deep in reawakening chaos

Singers in bark, living wood
flickering sapping, running
roots over the edges

shoes of fruit peel, millions gulping coffee
over paths abandoned by pathmakers
the milky way dissolved
down the scorched curve of a potato chip.

/////////

The energy of corroding hills
set batteries humming under our uniforms
dream relatives returned soaked
from imaginary bathrooms
demanding to see the hidden gardens
in butterfly half
mother and daughter, heels punching
between old roots of city forest

webs of path speckled with shattered intoxicants
the spilled life of fish on rocks
aglow with dusk-blue afterlives
viscera in flower on an unmasked apron
the day broken into a jelly around
aging footprints of swamp

You'll pass, in a green cloth
with an unringed hand
a bottle of spice to torch all others
then disappear into a slender pink door
in the repeating jukebox

Fueled by solar winds and the falling of huge pines
we clink frozen apricots together
on an amphibian balcony
marble tarring a single blade from the light
that pins our sources to their handiwork
necklaces of baby scissors floating on plastic handles
in a lost well
familiar brown ready to rot comes
down from the familiar trees

the energy of constructing hills
you'll pass by, drinking what
the engines all through the evening have unthawed
powdering the wings of illegal moths
sending them into the skylight
in little sandwich bags
and all the napkins of money
will not stop their deaths from flying.

TWO FLIGHTS OF CORPSES PLANTED

Seagulls are over the falls
from the chain-link walk it's a rush of bodies
paths found radiating pond-length yellow leaves
trunks in deep-rooted coil
sending stranded radios huge Arctic signals
towns merry-go-rounded by money and dementia
gas pump nozzles left hanging mid-air
from limbs of fluorescent cobweb.

Ice makes out its own territory
in you, in the door, in the salt,
in your rampant destruction of memory
years of garlic in your retired apron
hanging next to the men's thumped grey coats
dry as potpourri in the sprained morning.
Blandness fills up the kettles
the floor and the hallways, fever child
in a bathtub of apples. Don't tell the kid
what's at the windows.

Their wings come lipping over
a full crest clipping of water
skulls that have not read road-signs
except as color shape
in short feathers, with whatever their thoughts
a hole punched through the yellow a hole
punched through the sadness
in the kitchen stereo and a can

from the path veiled in boards
new river boiling in rocks
to flock out among the seagulls
make passage in a series
of delineated clouds, whispering fire-lost
between grandmother stations.

GILT-EDGED DAYS

Whole mountain ranges of filth
out on a long dripping limb
from a scaffold of naked house
grown men living like gerbils,
old human devices
clutched in their leafy claws,
like dirty totems.

The town is tarnished to the peaks
by dark brushes, a melted blueprint corner
allows two to escape, under a bridge of vapor,
to a cavern that does not belong
to civilization's property.

We have to believe in so much
that has already been done, just to keep walking;
have to pretend in the calamity of roses
when all we see is their outline

scripted on a string layer
of clouds behind messier clouds
outer atmosphere mushrooming in,
we sit here like cannibals
never having been cannibals.

RIVERWALK

She climbs in a huge crucifix of fallen bridges
painting the highway signs entangled there
with watery self-portraits
gathering force far behind
the ice like sperm of manmade mirrors

In sugar town she squeezed
a vinegar sponge for me
on her guardrails sheening
my white blood went
tall pillars of crib enclosing

blues and sepia came
from an earthquake in our favorite city
squatters fell out of a portal
inhabiting the clogged foot of the cross

We fed them raw sausage on wheat
peeled casing away
no condoms inside the body
all realms of angels are
a gathering of toothpicks in a jar of fluff

we lay in forks high above water
where poles for telephone wire
and fallen lives in bark converge to make
a crotch of unthatched houses
society gone cordless at the bases of our spines
where we no longer exchange
shadowed information

The two thieves at our sides
are towns whose cries we can't forgive
brickwork of car batteries
stolen from all their engines
to build a skyscraper of acid

Two masons with clay of banks
harnessed in grape leaves
with the hands melted finger to finger
of broken oars, a shrunken highway's
rubber bands from rotted broccoli
gripping to our wrists
until our zig-zag scaffolding comes down
like an earthless watchtower

dry her who doesn't want to be dry
with whatever garment of leisure floats
out the back door of the thrift
to be clothed in labor.

**********

The clutching fields

Shelves of tall square houses
rear up on slants like little
San Franciscos, I am kissing
someone away, chickadees tear
daintily into the birches. A blackness
has crept into their skin
of the news' ashes.

Events have fallen away
dreams are dry as torched tobacco
elbows hit diner counters and tables
with a sound of dying blood;
I found my phoenix here
with a lime in her claw
the sugared virgin of her drink
oils flashing from the rails
of a long train.

We discovered
that we could make the junkyards
shiver and reproduce
the many eyes in many kinds of leather.
Bills are no longer paid
by lashes of gold and silver
and money floats, as your dress drapes
there is no tense to put this time in.

Over the April sidewalks
comes your daughter future
with a fogged rain of cymbals
bent in fortune cookie shapes
from heavy metal attics thick in font
where one crept onto the window's mustache
and ate his electricity like a delicacy
to be considered
heavens are one pillar rolling rain

Neighborhoods explode into plastic
chutes where intimacies unimagined
go secretly away, in disorganized murder
we walk through it for coffee cake
laugh deep as ancients on the wired banks
of halflife rivers.