A RIDE

I'm riding forward with my ribs
on the handle of a shopping cart
down a long tar hill.

A little child in a bright blue jumpsuit
stands inside the shopping cart
gripping the bars with his tiny hands.

Every few seconds we grin at each other
I give him the thumbs up
the speed increases. Gas stations & haystacks
are melting & upending
on either side

and all around us
airplanes are silently plummeting
in all directions across striped acres of sky
their broken wings on fire.
This is all a great show for the kid. I like it too.

One of the wheels on the shopping cart
is a bit crooked, and it wobbles wildly
(the kid doesn't care; he giggles when we fishtail);
I have to keep leaning to the left to keep us straight
so we don't crash into a swamp
or roll slower into the snore
of the everyday world.

MESSIAH

There was once a town in which only one man was homeless.
Being unique, he began to think of himself
as the savior of mankind, but he often doubted his powers.
He slept his nights in a pile of cabbages
behind a local supermarket.
One night he woke up covered in rotting leaves and heard
a human groaning in the air. He went out to find its flesh.
And presently he found himself
on a street where there was no traffic.
On both sides of the street, stretching
as far as he could see in either direction,
were crucified people, nailed to the telephone poles.
Their groans of exhaustion and agony
were the underbelly of the humming air,
and their blood ran on the pavement, fingering
its way into cracks. He stopped to look at them
one by one, trying to look into their eyes,
but they seemed not to comprehend his presence.
And he spat on the feet of the crucified,
watching his saliva run into the lips of the wounds
on their feet, so that, if a road crew should ever
come along and take them down,
they would be able to walk again.
And half-asleep in pain-shock under
streetlights that looked like spacecraft,
the crucified began to sing,
and terrified their savior with their song.

Questions about water

What did the water say?The water said something about a great silence
before the greatest event of all time;
an event that is now unknown and unreachable.
And that a silence like that will never happen again.

How did the water touch?The water touched like a sleeping lover.

Where did the water go, and why did it go there?The water went up in the sky, to shield me from the sun.

Why are you slightly delusional about water?
Because I love water, and I want it to love me back.

Where do you go when you run out of water?I go to a closet deep in my house
and pray that the closet will fall down.
I pray for a flood to come in under the door.

Really?
Yes. I go to the securest place in my house
and pray for the house to be torn apart by water.

That seems harsh. When did you first find out about water?Very early on, I was put in a womb full of water.

But even Emanuel Swedenborg doesn't remember that!Whenever you point that out, I weep.
That is how I find out that I am made out of water.

Why do so many people talk about the flesh,
when the body is mostly water?They are afraid to remember
how quickly their life will run out
if that flesh is wounded. They must
convince themselves that the flesh is all there is.
They are afraid of the flood that lies waiting
just behind it.

What is your favorite way to drink water?Glass is made from sand; when I raise a glass of water to my lips,
I remember that I am drinking water from sand. I like that.
But I prefer to drink water from a small metal bucket.
I like the taste of water best when it is surrounded by metal.
That is my favorite way to drink water.

When you pour water into your mouth, it is no longer surrounded by metal.Someday I will be made of metal. Metal makes me
feel very clean and futuristic.

So there will be a remedy for the fear of water?When we're all made of metal, won't we be afraid to rust?
I can speak only for myself, and for everybody else
when I'm not feeling like myself.

But you speak for all of us when you speak about water, don't you?Sometimes I say foolish things when I am asked about water.

Could you explain that further?Probably not. I can only say that if you drink water very quickly,
you will get drunk, but differently. And that when we make love,
we mix our water with another's water.

Stop touching my leg. Why is there water and not something else?So that we might know that life is transparent,
and that we can see through it.

a chipmunk sniffing
at the meat left on the driveway
of my wasted lives
is more sharp-eyed
than any immortality:::::

fresh from a car accident lip-lock
my spirit walks on the ceiling
and thinks the ceiling is a wonderfully decorated floor

Two 2nd thirsty Madelines

have you my darling
hold you against storms & rashes

stunned in a blonde web of softness
stung by a tiny moon
that pebbles around all young on flesh

hunger my darling
heave you against ships rainwilling

torn in a black
arabesque brigade
hunted in aisles
misunderstood
by the oh-so-understanding

hold onto darling
keep politics out of her mouth
hold onto darling
don't let her angel rain in wrong places

hunger for darling
oh
baby it's gonna be hard, ride it

Today I am in mourning

for those who have nothing to offer the world
but an obscenely malfunctioning sowing machine

for those who no longer wrap the daily newspaper
in the body of a fish

for those who receive packages of frozen birth control
in unreasonably loud mailboxes

for those who cry hosanna to a politician who has nothing
but a tea cup inside his head

for those whose hymens are regularly inspected
by men wearing religious hats

and for those who have never gotten drunk with a genius.

And I celebrate my grief
by raking myself with urgent, spiritual penises

I drink wine through a radio antenna

I plan to liberate everyone
using my voice, my beard, my prick,
a multitude of brilliant essays, and
the two fingers on my left hand that haven't yet stiffened
from years of hurling snowballs at blind librarians.

In the time it takes me to reach you
you will be raped by approximately 35,000 robots.
Also,
a redneck who will not even bother to eat me
has installed an enormous reptilian vagina in the center of my chest
with a new laser weapon that he's very proud of.
So we won't be visiting one another today:
we won't be making love to each other's girlfriends
on a bright blue tarp in the backyard
while Elton John plays in the background;
we won't be cooking steak with mushrooms and onions
for one another, we won't be performing
oral sex on one another, and we certainly won't
be roaming the town at midnight, or taking photographs
of the very pretty skunks who live behind the local pharmacy's dumpster.

*****

--luke buckham

Heaven # 2

This armchair is covered with breasts.
I can't help sitting in it for hours.
A nipple pokes at my anus
and the hairs on the chandelier stand up.
Ferns guard the lower corners of the room
spiders build webs in the upper corners.

The chandelier dims. The spiders descend.
The ferns grow higher as steam
feeds them through the cracks in the walls.
This is the best air I've ever tasted:
someone is cooking a feast in a distant kitchen.
If I can wake up in time to walk through
the smashed television screen, I'll make it
in time for scrambled eggs with salsa.

PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A DEAD FISH

)you're floating in wrong directions, again dad(I don't have
a hand for yours to grab)your eye
is so dry in its stare, pike(I once had a mouth for you
[now it's going dry like your sight](the plate is soaring
under you toward, a rumor of light)I once had all to myself
a corner, of a field square as suns are round(th
is is the terrible end of all our dreams)th
is is a milky way with a black hole in the middle
hurling us around(this is a dad on beer)

These are intended to be song lyrics for a future musical project.

"Madame X installed a piano in the Alps" --Arthur Rimbaud

SEARCHLIGHT Luke Buckham

I've got a searchlight that goes on in my head
I've got a searchlight

bringing back all of our long-lost friends I've got a searchlight

and there's a bucket with a rim of frost
and there's a rainspout where the water comes down on me
and I can taste the shingles in the water
and I can taste the dust of long-winding roads

it makes a hallway
through the bodies of mercurial girls
it stuns pigeons as they peck at the lawn
it stains dirt pathways with a nuclear light
it scans a golf course and a forest and a high-school friend

and in the mornings it remembers the neon streets
it just barely casts a flare on grandmother
it sees the leaves falling on her folded hands
it sees the searchlight flicking on and off in her eyes

I've got a searchlight but it's starting to ebb like a star
and what's projected is a light dying at the source
I've got a searchlight that goes on in my head I've got a searchlight

I apologize for not posting much lately. I have fallen into a hole. Hole number six, to be not-quite-exact. It's damp and mossy here, and Pabst Blue Ribbon (voted best beer in America in 1893) pours from crevices on every side. I drink to keep from drowning, and to keep my typewriter relatively dry, but the keys are rusting and they sometimes stick, as you may be able to tell from reading this manuscript.

THE WASTELAND IS A WONDERLAND

by Luke Buckham

1 Entrances into eleven infertile women

Your homelessness darkens the air
as you stumble like a kite being dragged
and you're dragged over tinsel everything:
parks and ponds covered with tinfoil,
benches and playgrounds, churches and sidewalk,
all silver metals crinkle
under your every step. The town is torn at the corners,
everybody's watching the snowflakes turn into water
before they hit the ground, everybody's
kneeling in their closets to beg for the water to come
or recede, but to do either of these ridiculous things
very quickly. And not to push our porn out
onto the street where somebody might see it
and have a good time with our favorite images.
This is the first and last
private prayer of our lives.

The magazines flip open like hands falling asleep during prayer.
The closets open violently in a tin foil wind.
The snowflakes become more and more like each other
while nobody's microscope is looking.
The steeples relax and collapse more than halfway;
shape themselves into sleepy tits,
like the tits of a woman lying down
backwards worshipping shadows on the wall
while a man pulls on his pants
far out in the closeted distance.

A squirrel is at the window, his teeth are wine-stained,
he drinks burgundy from a saucer on our porch,
we're too passionate about animals
to poison him, we eat meat while we watch him
from our kitchen, the cold air
blows the linoleum cold as a politician's voice.
We leave handprints of heated lubricant on the television screen
and take our camping trip onto the roof, tongue-kissing
eleven big-breasted Albert Einsteins on the evening newspaper.

We drive the silver poles deep through the shingles.
We hear our house crack open underneath,
we hear the supporting beams give way beneath our hammer-strokes
and collapse as we make love into the kitchen,
the wind becomes hollow as the voice we make
apologizing for fucking strangers behind dumpsters
at polyamorous pizza restaurants. This is a part of our landscape.
And since nobody wants to sing about it, we cough about it.
It feels good like the tickle of a Japanese beetle
crawling down out mutual fund throats
in the bank account morning.
I wish another planet would come hurtling in. I wish a godless
unnamed would thrill us in our orbits with its dancing.

2 The party at seven

Lay down between six apple trees in the numberless April day
watch the beards of tyrants wet with your girlfriend
drift downward in a stream that carves through stone
while the sand is sleeping underneath; a planet waiting to be soft
under all its hard hard hard hard people people.

Multiplied in welfare brick, newspapered free of lips,
skyscraper windows, outwardly severe,
rub against sensualities untold from the inside,
offices exploding without style into a new and better night
of broken glass. And the greatest poet in America
riding the wind over it all in a hang-glider,
with his dick jutting out, twanging in a winter night,
invulnerable against the newscasts and the bombs
which happen indoors.

Your guitar waits in the barn like a destroying angel
frozen when the gardens spilled their profits on
surrounding grass. And everyone was happy to invent
three thousand beers, and play basketball with legendary gods
under a punctured tarp while the rain waiting in a sag
sang a song to its healthy daughter
just beginning to bleed between the legs

while the real river waited behind a thousand rhythms;
driveways take their cars like a virginity giving way,
the host is drunk, the sleepers on the grass
are eaten hollow by ants while pie is served,
the waitresses are drunk on absinthe
greener than the Martian skies, inaccurate.

3 An orgy in the convenience store

You have to lie down in the gutter and put your ear to a beercan
to hear this pirate radio broadcast; today: an orgy
in a convenience store cooler. Frozen deerskins
found stuck to six-packs, fur plastered solid
and unyielding against a wall. A powerful defrost was performed
and the sperm is flowing toward the roots of pines
in the streetlight-dazzled parking lot. Someone
is listening to fifteen stereos while a masked man
walks away with the drawer. The meat is missing,
and the spirit is stuck in an abandoned church,
while an opportunity goes wandering like a glass comet
to escape this monogamous half-light.
Drink inside two blue suns on a summer Monday
while the winter and its broken reporters are waiting
outside, their shoes frozen to the pavement
by teenager sperm.

Someone extends a microphone someone watches a hotel
slither like a snake out of their right arm
while massive electronics take care of the rest.
Someone brandishes a saxophone instead of a computer.
And the robots take off their kitten flesh
to become human children, they file taxes
in the snow and angels leap up around them
eating the beams of streetlight light light light
with animal mouths. A question that isn't asked slurrs
retarded frenzies from the ice plowed up in rivulets,
vaginal against the pine trees, while the phallic telephone poles
ask it a mundane question, and the answer comes
from a skull opened long before these debates:

when a man hides his fragility for a small forever
guns shoot out of his arms
his sex is sealed shut by a telephone wire
bombs thrill the seats that he rides to pink oblivion
and his seed runs in the aisles
of burning magazine supermarkets. It's a joke
that everyone gets and nobody dares laugh at.
And at at at at this location, you are the bar,
the drink is a stranger being poured,
the drink is your blood leaving your body,
you are a second stranger drinking it,
kissing a selflessness mirrored
in sands burned glassy on every beach
while the whitest houses last behind the dunes.

4 Singers on a stereo while we drown

The squirrel against the window gives his teeth
to the ice and doesn't know
his body won't grow back.
Against the wind of these inhumans
with their human music, he tries to make
himself into the glass. A sky comes in
behind his efforts and it's tiresome
the way the sun the way the sun.
Moves.

I can't hear Odetta anymore
through all these bathrooms.
The urinal is flushing her voice away in cheddar Vermont
sunrises and when this state does not exist
the boys on rollerskates in the White House hallway
call for a breakfast rat to make their teeth shine
in the fur of southern wind.

The sun in a tiny box of glass
the moon in a little slice of wind
a honeydew current runs
through sunbathers and newspaperreaders
on the beach and the soda machines are running like fans
every little girl is ready to leave her blood on the sand
every little boy is ready to be circumcised today
and burn the lens of manhood shut against the beach
and crack a soda high against the porch
of vinyl fantasies melting
around an orange electrical cord
(their slippered feet are higher than our unsheathed heads)
while Barry White gargles the underwater
and climbs the side of Hawaiin mountains
with his stinging teeth

--an earthquake!--blood with hands on our birth
blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands the friendly animals don't know our hands blood with hands on our birth born we've hurt so many of the things blood on our hands born with blood on our they don't call brothers and sisters with blood on our hands born with blood they don't pucker their mouths on our hands born with blood on our hands against romances they can't feel with blood on our hands born with hip-hopping against the chlorine wind hands born with blood on our hands born disoriented by lips in the gym on our hands blood with hands on our birth the hymens popping like frog throats blood on our hands born with blood under needle fingers with blood on our hands born with blood on our hands don't make a difference to the animals born with blood on our hands

5 Two girls from far away are taunting the soldiers

Two girls walk into a deli begging gently for meat
one has a chin-dimple like that of a superhero
I tell her she should wear a mask over her eyes to accent her chin
one is spilling bright blonde potato chips all over the linoleum
with her cute and messy little mouth
one has blue hair the other has green hair I always fall in love
with green-haired lasses the bluehead's taken
and there's an immaterial war
going on under the linoleum--potato chips sprinkle the soldiers--
they look up angrily at the bluehead nobody seems to
matter much anymore but she catches their beaten attention.
They yell and the tiles,
once immaterial, now rattle as if they were the last necessary matter
on this whole kitchened earth. This is the first and last
public prayer of their lives.

You--not to drool while you're flirting--
press your groin against the cash register drawer
in hopes that money given
will drown lust before it turns into love
the television moans
like an old woman touching herself with a billy club
every day there are more and more cops and less and less gentle people
so many accidental loves make cracks in the concrete
from subway kisses...babies exploding like landmines
because this is what we must do
as the trains fuck the air
and the sheets of metal make their music far overhead
the sunlight seems to beat them into shape.

6 Think not to try too much about

The flesh forming on dinosaur bones.
The blood coursing through highway veins
like a series of inhuman symphonies.
To watch your sex be dragged into the past, I know:
the silver seems to blend into the gold
but it's all a metal nobody can wear.
That armor is too soft to put on cars
nevermind people putting bombs into other people unhappily
or in a sensual daze--the tanks are the same for prostitutes
and for weavers on the bronzed shores--make the world safe
for nothing but flowing alloys. The poison in the brewing
can make children in the air with demon hands
for the dead to defile. There's no deflowering when all existence
is a constant killing performed by virgin warriors.

And they cauterize the navels forming
on holiday oranges in defunct Floridas
while the speakers wail about fear and the products of fear
several products are not afraid
and they take their own bones out of the engine oil
and they start the motor seething with their oldest blood
while the grass turns red with easy summers,
and the newborn body escapes into thirty adulthoods.

Think about the baseball game, kid. Your mother raped an aspirin
with her toad hands and served it for dinner.
Think about the baseball game, kid.
Dinner is just breakfest for bohemians
who balance moist TVs on their heads
while performing oral sex on visually impaired journalists
and generals in the military dark
of an unnecessary hotel. They call it dinner because it's a pancake
who turned into a toad-like entity after being left
on the table too long after breakfast, when an absent kid
watched baseball in the afterlife:
Tigers vs. Bluejays in the uppermost inferno
while his parents screamed under the roof
and the shingles came to life under his ass of bone
and slithered uncomfortably, like tapeworms
in the hour of their own unreckoning.

Karma's unreal: nobody ever answers for their misdeeds,
motherfucker. Think about the baseball game, kid.

7 The hatreds are now gardened like a dirty kiss

This is a poem about heaven
very few people have been to heaven
but the few who have hate it worse than they ever hated earth
or any of the other worthy planets--let me tell you
about the lack of hunger there, the lack of learning--
while I look down into my lap and see a bobbing head, brunette,
the planets moving. What if the Milky Way should de-activate
and seem to stop like a fern in mid-air?--sliced by hair-thin blades--
you have to be watching closely--
why should anybody hurt for the kid, ogling angelic porn
on the underside of his baseball cap, while the sandwiches
are ready to be eaten under fertile ground? The garden atop a train
is zooming past while a madman rakes and hoes
and loses his head against the city's most wondrous lightbulb.

The passengers underneath asparagus and thriving
black-eyed susans at the edges of the city's tunneled heat, dusted--
flowering in pale grey light, or in paralyzing fluorescence--
the city basks its flowers
in a hatred only vacant lots can nurture
back to something like love, truncated--the flesh stem-hollow--
milky in its resemblance to blood, in photo negatives.

And the moving bathroom at the end of the car
bumps up and down on bodies, jerks you off against
the sound of miners hollowing the earth
so peacelessly
while an audience howls like a sink
that channels rust and nobody makes poetry
for the gods who hurt them anymore. Because this
is a flock of eyes like semi-colons; always
a planted tear underneath the watching sorrow
of the sheep-fuckers who wait, who wait in a yellow shadow;
who wait in a subway lined with sandwich-bread;
who stomp with bucket feet on flattened bucket floors:
somebody like a stove full of beautiful jews is dancing.

8 Groping each other on the last train

Holly opens her asterisk
for me to dunk my winter-wettened nose in
whenever the crowd stood up by speeding trains
is gripping engine rails and waiting for scraping skies
to land through forty feet of concrete on their Q-tip heads.
Each eyelash is a terrorist.

And in Holly's prettylittlebowels
a lunch waits for a lover
to grab it by the balls
and flush an alcoholic ocean down its throat
when the toilets aren't looking.
My tongue is an enemy agent ready to repent,
my tongue is jelly and fire through a pretzel's mouth,
my tongue is heaven cooking.

Holly is a train inside the train
she lets my hands rub upwards in her mink
--how many quiet animals died
to let us cloak this grope--
oh I think of the parenthesis
that breasts always are in the cold

9 Nursing on the air above the subway

Those silken minutes you spent
on a train with perfect tablecloths
throw chaos over the third rail
and electrify those always waiting
near the rushing doors that never stop
and currents rushing never make their home.

In those rusting hands, always waiting,
too late for flowing things.
The conversation is as light
as a chicken bone in a gigantic mouth.
And your long and weary life was just
a few minutes badly spent
waiting for a frosted train
to banjo through the hanging metal chimes
above electric rails for dogs to die so lonely on,
tails wagging in frantic, chain-linked loneliness.

Swallow a paragraph from a stranger and lipstick smooches,
subway seats and sandwich bags become swift creatures
in the moving light--the nameless hesitate to burn a cigarette
while every car is moving heavenward on broken rails--
nobody's blonde for an instant,
everybody's blue-eyed and black-haired as the lights
flash on and off and every city wavers gazing
at the headline of its undeclared eclipse.

Stray dogs walk together in the concrete trench
men dug without a sound between dueling electricities
of cities fighting oxygen.
Neglected towns light up with hot-tub kisses
for a glassed-in summer night
against all television winters, and the dashboard
is a piano for only children, steerless into streetlit night,
unsure if stars are out, or if anything will ever peek
again, chomping on the head of peaceful movements,
ripping out the arms that meant to hug, a music terrible
lashing, lightwards on the dusk underneath leaves.

10 The odor of some stranger staring

Has an amputated tail, the danceclub waits behind
a mutilated streetlight, the dancers are all women
trying to be whips in hands of men
before the dollar falls
through neon flashing floors.
There's too much music here, no remedy
for the necessary deafening. My left ear crackles like a glacier
moving into the wrong history, tropical, forced oceanic
as the frozen fish thaw in its side
and swim out into aquarium histories, my crow-feathered girl and I
leaning against the glass that sharks nudge:
softly every day with foreskin eyes, thick noses,
tongues on the move backdropped by every world
they cannot fight inside the glass.

And the teeth are sharpened by an unexpected moan,
security guards turn heads to see the lips
glistening they have destroyed: every affection they planted
comes back as napalm in a kiss and children fall into the realm
of sight gnashing where the ocean would disperse the blood
the cylinder of glass contains. The plume of red's no longer
isolated on her lips. A child leaped out of her before she could
lie down, and I defend the shoes and shores

fallen off her body before a sea of police
angeled her away on stretchers
plastic, revealed her naked back, the baby swimming,
the silver dollar souls of sharks rubbed faceless
by the whirling of this salty laundromat.
I think love is losing its gods.
Every bench a seesaw in the shadow of the capital,
every child strangely adult
and trained to act on couches pulverized by made-up light.

And the false innocence no longer dashing,
the robbery no longer eclipsed
by extravegant dinners. All panther movement
stilled inside the vase of the sculpted city,
turning in a potter's hands while terrorists kiss
against the glass and the killer is in the womb
and the womb is a jellyfish
and the tentacles are baby's fingerlashes
and it's perfectly acceptable behavior
to sing a song while aquariums fall
whole and with their fish onto your womb.

11 I can't find a properly sized cucumber

Or number this color
stutter this number fill the craters
with a ribbon made of shredded records
of the innocent imprisoned
of guitars succinctly prismed as all lunar light
is sabotaged by whirling rocks.

The matter of these objects is out of joint;
it used to move in a socket nobody knew about,
so now the science of the phrase: "does not
compute"; the lips are holy, the teeth know not
soft movements of the bought:
the paid-for whores leaning
against a light their taxes snuffed
with ancient liquor while the stars watched.
Having renewed them aching selves fern overnight,
and mushroom too, stone fences strung
like polished pearls across the countryside.

The derangement of the sheep is curiously human,
and a glass eyeball found in each
sideways and wandering, and slip against the hoaxes of the moon,
and lose the loyalty of suns, and stem the raging
of a Saturn in the blood, having usurped the gods of war,
having newspapered all that had been painted,
hanging from a desperate tree calmly
calling for grandma while the Milky Way burns out early.

All those abrupt, all those alien in the fastest,
all those lava sidewalks, all them copper trees
seen acting on their blisses in the non-shadow
of radiant mountains: these are the objects
to which we done declared ourselves,
the chickens aren't listening, spouseless,
childless, sibling-abandoned, the crimson families
bath themselves until a pond come from their longing
and cucumbers come to rest in the lake
while vacant-eyed crabs take vacations, massively unsure.

The little girls pile the sand the little boys
step on jellyfish and scream
through sandstone megaphones at absent demons
in the fishless morning. It a beaut, of scum
radiant and dark, glowing with a human beast
for centuries later, when the beach is melted whole into a sword.

12 Making love to a hole in the planet

The human beast has a song like a wheelbarrow
moving over grass, pulled by a clumsy child,
and what the rubber tramples no rhythm will ever know
again, not even the pulsing suns, not even the failed stars,
nor planets snoring in their orbits like malfunctioning
computers. Did we splash the right amount of blood here,
did we tuck the right amount of cunt-suggestion
into the sunflower, enough phallic vibrations
thru innocent daisies and susans with black eyes
like abused women who go yellow around the edges,
their petals bright and vulnerable as a star held deep
within range of sweating missiles nuclear and kisses.
There was a question here, but it disappeared.

Beercans emptied in the wake of hurting oceans
the palm trees bent like exhausted lovers
and jellyfish washed up like condoms on a searching shore--
hands are everywhere, the wind has dyslexia,
the commas turn into vaginal hesitant semi-colons
nobody's sure as a cock where the rooster moves
to the geometrically perfect center of the farmer's roof
as he used to, when the oceans would withdraw
and now they don't and now the kisses are a doomsday
of summer liptick spring and struck with powder of falling
moons toward menstrual oceans, libraries moving back
into the protesting core, and the homeless asleep in a loudspeaker,
safe in an afterlife no music can lick or reach with other,
interplanetary, tongues--heaven is invisible on Mars--the balls we licked
in highschool snub us with their sweaty angles now, the cubist
fertilities. And moles that would become
so cancerous in doubtful futures
now spread ruddiness over
whole sunstruck bodies
harmless as a lightning fills
the skyward holes with homeless meat.

13 The earthly operation, warmer than a surgeon

The sexlessness of a hotel morning, the pool
still as a fenced-in desert, the window vibrates
with a sensual return. The glass reflects a transparent man
and the pools shimmer, or ripple, I can't tell which.
When the solitary orgasm hits
the glass shatters to reveal its helplessness.
And a couple walking past shields their baby, their eyes go wide
and the balcony trembles with the weight of the father.
The mother almost levitates but her feet are glued
to the fake grass rug.

I've left the shower on and whiskey dribbles down
the side of the television. A war smudges the screen
in imperfect rhythm with the thoughts of the owner
of the hotel, who can taste my whiskey coming
through his screen from his seat at the front desk,
snarling at himself and at the soldiers
that his sons and daughters have become, faces reduced
to chins under helmets. There's a parking lot to write about
while the sands are opened up to a parade of tires,
human spirits jostled above the muffled clamor of their rolling,
a thousand lizards dying as magnetic industry
draws the hotel into the air and drops it again,
rattling all its rectangles with a fall. It feels good to lie back
in the smell of flooded cavities and feel the building
come apart. And the highways forgetful of furtive passages,
cops putting on their cherry lights while falling
off the edge of sudden chasms, speeding people
with lipstick faces honking their own bodies
like horns, eating spicy food behind the wheel
as the radio condemns and the wheels bless
tentative. Roads breaking open easily, like the tops
of cooking pies,

the everybody that posed as an individual drawn and quartered
by its own faceless horses, revealed only in pain
as populations morph into long ropes of sausages,
linked by what they had called love, and transcendant cats
flee the earthquake before it hits, and are reported
in sun-scorched newspapers
by a dying and superior people.

14 Seduction by the electric company

My tallest darling, wearing a dress made of steaks,
the best part of a raw cow the butchers killed this morning,
enters the only numberless room in the hotel--the hotel
that was built next to a supermarket filled with red wine
and salad dressings in profusion to the ceilings of
a grey-painted world--the lifeless blood coats her body,
and when I slam her gently against the heater,
we smell meat cooking, the toilets open their mouths
and flush on every side, suitcases slam shut,
salival glands open, mucus seeps
out of the partitioned ceilings, the floor
is multidimensional as we fall into it together
like a pair of human televisions sprouting
antennas all over. The groping that we do on earth
is a reach for many-limbed spirits waiting like machinery
to be used in baseball stadiums for the happy damned:
we eat us, as we are no longer we or us,
and are as separate in our joining
as the otherside machinery are one.

It becomes easier to repair the failing flicker of a pale hotel;
the vibrating bed causes an earthquake
in the red wine bottles of the supermarket, cauliflower
rolling on linoleum, the smell of chemical cleansing
in innumerable abattoirs, the knives we stabbed our bosses with
languishing like unused flesh on the door
as the hinges freeze into place, as dimensions fall and crumble
into one another and the hot-dog machine
raves like a preacher against the schizoid vulva hidden
in the back of his head, a ranting mouth accepting
sunlit beaches past the corpses carrying umbrellas on sidewalks
of cities, cities pelted by mushrooms and refusing
quaint and helpful psychedelics, cities going grey
behind the boiling water.

15 The domestication of loneliness

Mushrooms spring up nightly on the golf-courses,
they make the news, the players hack through broken skin
and smell the vegetable kingdom in the trampled roots
and see the pines and palms all joining in a sun-drenched dance
to sink within their teeming mass the ships that come
when moisture does prevail. You linked these long sentences
to my body, you dared me to take an electrical shower,
and I am stepping left against a hailstorm, right against
a coming rain. I am pulling jails with a bit clenched in my knee-teeth.
All pain of bluish wives electing men
blonder than me within the storm
is flicked by healing tongues, all mine.
The ambitious remove themselves from our bedrooms,

the votes of squirrels go unanswered in the tiny kingdoms
of the overgrowth, the vendors bring a universal sausage
to the feet of statued ice in thriving winters/mall displays,
a million little ice ages under careful supervision.
These words that have gone cold against the surging of their time
are pregnant in the infertility
of mustached aging housewives
and their magazine-making slaves, the soda's bubbles
are filled with a health for the desperate.

16 A mission statement contested by androids

The insignificance is a song. The divers come up
with diamonds of their own water, sweated
under more expensive water. The wasteland they uncover
is a wonderland: the deaths of many are a thin champagne
tasted by a restless millionairess, her flaming hips
both under and over the carpets of this world are discovering
a joy in destroying tomorrow. And I share in that joy
as I kneel in those public carpets

knitted in dimensions cold as dead grannies,
bloodless as the corpse at the open-casket,
made wax for our flesh flesh flesh and tunneled
embraces. And the silence is a tool for the sound.
And the skull is a crown for the finite. And the golf course
is a dead man's outstretched hand covered with
microscopic grapes, the overgrowth will outlive
the trimmers, the structure outlive the sellers
in its perfect crumbling. Vines are slithering
into everywhere. The worhipful outlast
their own stoic idols while they kiss
under the seats they made
by sitting on the air.

The caricature is stencilled in the emptiness
of earlier caricatures. But a vast jelly, and a vaster jelly,
surrounds like a sweating planetarium
the air of parking lots where cars gather
like whores in a third world, like scrawny children selling postcards
to the deaf. Their laundromats are open
to a pregnant woman's fondest anal wishes,
and her sighs from far behind the silenced city
that her child will support and spines

played like a harp in the last crushing, fingers pluck and preserve
the necessary tension that upholds,
trembling is the only standing
in the fractured end.
And now her tousled image is everywhere.

WALKING DOWN A ROAD BUILT FOR SOMEBODY ELSE

College kids scream on porches
and in freshly painted rotting houses

while the professors, too tired to plot revolution,
fall asleep in their armchairs.

When I draw near to the dead
the trees get taller.

There is a moon-dissolve taking place
in the clouds in the pines.

The eye like a frightened white rat
winks for me frantically.

The beercan next to the river is tilting
towards me and away from time.

The frogs are louder than my heart.
An old lichen-covered temple comes crashing down
somewhere in the woods.

We are together in the metal and the moss.
Together in the muck under the stream
and grasses turning dry above the water.

I'm in a graveyard and I'm about to take my clothes off
but I'm afraid the police will come and interrupt
my rebirth.

I'm listening...

I'm listening to Bob Dylan
yell about the corruption of eternity
instead of doing my tax forms

Bob Dylan's teeth are dirty today
from eating tobacco plants
the linoleum in this tiny kitchen
is covered with Jackson Pollock patterns
of semen

a red sun crosses all the windows at once
and the linoleum glitters
my teeth are just as dirty as Bob Dylan's
even though I don't eat tobacco plants
I can't see Bob Dylan's teeth right now
but I know that they resemble mine

I am proud that my teeth resemble the teeth
of a great poet

as the newspaper tulips
tremble like naked girls
standing in wet field
in the beginning of autumn

Virginity in shorts squatting on a big rock

...there are other worlds. Felt them in a summer forest,
afternoon, floating near mushrooms and fallen
shards of bark. Touched them with descendant hands.
Time I'd known was gone in a pinch of (barely) autumn air
dodging between unprepared trees.

The hollow: nobody comes back: is what he spoke,
clinging to a leaf as he was falling. And a silver bucket
filled with hallucinatory beer
stood on a mossy stump,
metallic among the brown histories.

So take a drink
And drink we did
from inside
so many bodies that we are.
The kiss we took from each other
floated above the silver
bucket of beer. And the stump split halfway down
by lightning
when its surroundings
were low in the soil, showed us a mouth to put parts
(nimble, unconscious)
of our bodies Into.

After the revolution

Remember days of staring at white walls
waiting for something black to happen.
Remember a silver tangle in the dark
and the mouth that opened under it.
Remember the couch overturned
and kicking at it as if it were
the framework of the world.

Now even the birds sound discordant
and the air jagged, filtered wrongly
around their wings, seems to be pushing
its way into my mouth; I cannot draw it
peacefully into my body of guns and tobacco.
The plants are wearing men and muscles.
Ferns have little machines in each green shiver.
And you have to go sleepless for days just to make a painting
come out of the over-stretched air.

But the mustached podium man and his guards
have been dispatched into a graveless void
and it feels good to have them swimming under us,
hitting demons that we unleashed with silver saucepans,
their pants lined with egg whites.
We'll be free for a few weeks like years,
and let the presses roll.

my grandpa Carl is 98 years old
and he paints pictures of kittens on his bedroom walls
all the cats he's ever lived with
who have died

he has outlived them all
and his children my parents won't allow him to have
a new cat
so he paints the infancies of remembered felines
on the plain white wallpaper

his skin is as white as the whites of his eyes
but his hair is whiter
his paintbrush moves much faster than his heart

Manworld is not Manworld or a world

I said, in a lost essay: 1) nobody needs
anything that they fight for.
2) The fighting itself has become the only thing.
3) Dominance is as miserable for the dominant
as for the dominated. 4) Just ask someone
with a penis how they feel about being so
"powerful".

We threw lemonade at each other
and then we threw beer. We wanted to sting
each other's eyes. The girls ran
out of the room to let us kill each other.
I grabbed a stool and pressed its legs
against your throat while you slammed
a heavy beerglass against my hipbone
over and over and over and the girls cried
wearily in their bedrooms.
We tried to rip off each other's genitals
but our pants were on backwards.

Then we saw each other's faces
(as if the smoke had set the house on fire)
and begged each other to stop, which we did.
We held each other on the porch and cried
while the girls emerged from their bedrooms
and laughed at our sentimentalities,
we were so wobbly with one another.

I beg everyone to destroy themselves
and everything they love before it's too late.

Short gender war poem

We all (even the wifeless among us)
cling to a female comforter.
We can't help it (shadows stroke
the wall on which they're cast)
and everything male is in parenthesis.

Let's all hold hands and sing about peace and love

Shithead's afraid (fear is filled with shithead)
that we won't live through:
next week's widely advertised
far-off glistening weekend.
The idiots, the idiots, and the idiots,
and also the idiots, not to mention the idiots,
in addition to the idiots,
incorrectly have correctly raped us
incorrectly. Rape and baseball rape
and potato chips rape, and also rape.
With their orifices they create new orifices,
holes in proletariat space-time,
and with their beautiful knives. Now we wait
and hope for them to be silent as feces
in a far-off Martian forest. Stony, odorless.

Shit from nobody. And the seas silent,
a sleeping skin,
and rich men filing their nails
with files made from the bones
of the poor, who are stupid and have good bones
and do not deserve to be rich.
Their bones are also made
into televisions and spy cameras
by highly metaphysical asians.
Stomach intestine testicle screens.
Buddha TV. The sexless gooks spray airplane glue
into their mouths and throw elephant meat
from high city windows.

Eat shit from a broken shard of mirror
while crouching behind a heap of automobiles
that just fell out of the television sky.
There is! A comfort here! As a radio,
half-crushed in the smoke:
plays songs by singers employed:
by those who make guns most of the time;
when they're not making popular songs;
for the youth of death to sing along to;
as they drive roads of frozen nigger blood
into their own endless lightweight
craniums. Niggers destroying niggers,
using niggers. Niggers eating nigger-meat
out of crucified cracker hands.

Labyrinthine fistula of puffed clam-tunnels
fighting with each other's tongue-bodies,
acidic in each other's entrances,
licking yellow milk from a dusty cushion
as the cushion watches television
with aluminum in her wifely spine.
And an army of faggots, faggots
eating shit from broken mirrors,
marching over heterosexual hillsides,
bathing each other's anuses
with crushed infants,
faggots faggots faggots!

Trees getting married to each other
by evangelists with clam-meat eye-sockets
of no visible color, and faggots.
Cunt bitches popularizing bombs with their hips.
Cunt bitches popularizing the warfare of the sleepless
with their sleep, selling clams
to the sleepless with their sleep,
selling sleeplessness to the sleepy
with yams buried and rotting
in their important vaginas.
Bitches are responsible!
Bitches are selling miniskirt clams
to everybody!

Fear is destroyed by beer.
Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.

Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Crackers walk past crackers constantly.
Crackers contrast the terrorists
on each other's T-shirts.
Cracker knows what's best for everybody.
Everybody knows what's best for cracker.
And each can holds the blood, with bubbles.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
The whole world is Pearl Harbor tomorrow.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
His eyes are nipple erasers, his head
is the body of a dead baby sucking at the air.

Sign of a new age

the pope and all his bishops gather
at a huge, important table
and eat bowls of bullets in goat's milk

it's good for their bowels
and they recommend it to everybody

everybody is uninterested

The eyes are dark but the body is bright
The tunnel is dark in movement of trains
Copulation of oils and electricity

Passengers kiss each other strangely on the last day
Buildings collapsing like birth control above them
And the ground hurts like
an alcohol hot-tub vagina beneath them

burnt by all the parties she has known
and none of you can help me
none of you in this novel
striking sparks against the pages
that are written at the expense of your soul

and the soul is paper
and the night is a train moving through couches and televisions
in the skyscraper fire escape night

bottles are being thrown
into places you’ll never be lowered
whole books are being written

in locations never ejaculated gardens are being seen by the lonely
from fiftieth story windows over a night of blue-black tar
paperback lipstick confessions after the fact

the fact is flesh