^^^^^^^^^

The trucker is having the time of his fucking life.
His gasoline lunchbox, his liverwurst
prepared by a countess.
He is letting his angst balloon
into the radio frequencies.
He is luminously understanding
all the glad and sinister messages
are for him, but not for him alone.
Nevertheless, he is almost criminally
solitary, a stone carved heartily, left in its own
chiselled dust, he cries into a silver bullet
then seals it up in the glove compartment
with a cracked toy airplane
and the remnants of his marriage degree.

I wave to the trucker because I recognize
the strange stubborn miracle of his transport
but he only nods begrudgingly.  He is taking
a cargo of neon screws
a fleet of french fry ketchup plates
in flying saucer formation
and a crumpled pack
and the blah blab lah
goddamn windshield wipers
as a stunted language of mother--many wheels
passing the laundromat--begs her daughter
not to climb into the round and punctured mouth
of the open dryer, though it looks
bound to happen.

<*><*><><>

Imaginary grandfather took his special flask
down from a high shelf, his hands
were the blades of an old saw.
He opened a valentine wormhole
by looking at the wall
between himself and not quite immortal her.

I've been gazing since, no matter how many
ships and goggles I gather for speed and blur
to paint highways over forest,
in deep corruption to be accepted.
Imaginary grandfather took down
a paintcan lid speckled with whole stars.

Orphan Vortex

I was a boy in a small frame
with grapes growing out of my chest,
vulnerable to all the wind.
I was a girl with early lipstick smudged
by a flying brick, and I do fight back.
Whole parades of human beings moved past,
smitten with plastic words, we spoke
across ruined air.
Intertwining above and below the blood,
we learned to share one body,
to make this nightmare smile.

NEIGHBOR CAT

Matilda on a bright mat, velvet black
brown and red striped fibers
big squares of sunlight
so pert in eternal window
this moment cannot eclipse her form
she is a swervy shape in fur
in the doorway's window on the dripping world
she is paying attention to the weather, nonchalantly

Matilda
on my wrists I can observe the shape of your claws
to remember you purred against my veins
you are ecstatic in your off-hand cruelty, your
cut train of thought
so small and hard in your eyes
you are the portrait of my feline self
shitting on ashes

THE NOUMENA

The king of laughter came around, yapping
about a woman who fascinates him totally,
slamming his strong square head in the freezer.
Talking about the noumena, the expanse of the unknown
that frisks us when we wake deeply,
he fell through the kitchen floor in a riot
of clothing that discarded light.
He bellowed from the basement and leapt
singed and grinning
up through the gaping linoleum to stand on the edge
suddenly munching a zucchini, asking between bites
how the world economy should be melted into happiness
by a fire dance, how he should be first in a conga line,
how he should fuck, finally.

The king of laughter has a pain in his side
from a rotten rib, he still reads the Bible,
but only the dirty parts.  He visits
because the outdoors, he says, only insults the sky,
even in the woods, even on a mountaintop,
he can feel the inadequate architecture.

When the king of laughter has exhausted
the night-life, he finds a stone apartment
and lies down.  His snore is an engine
that starts it all up again.
In the hung afternoon
he is leaning against pines
with his cereal bowl full of blood flakes,
he is like Oscar the Grouch with a hard-on.
His audience waits in a thicket of earth-dreams,
he moan to bring 'em through a galactic cervix,
his bed is still wide open but now
he can't lie down.

()*(*)*()

The tiny, foolproof mutant moth in British smog
from falling water, which spins the machinery of power

folding and eruption
the face of the earth

massive walls take shape around us
distribute the flame into an even curl
lip downward and outward; draw it
backward; three heads together deep
hollow behind soft and slanting breast
between 3rd and 6th
ribs; with the sun's face blacked out by a disk inside

(..)

Every day I feel the contours of your absence
slithering in my belly.
Every day I must allow
the flames in my shoulders to flicker down
and let my arms hang quite limply
in the water of life.

I strut around spending money and drinking
friendly laughter from the air, trying to stifle
for one more night the invincible disquiet,
the mortal hum.
Astral vines that grow from my pores
want to be bathed in the milk of your ribs,
your fiery outline on the wall
of a tumultuously growing forest,
the door that you are
and the cathedral that sprouts from around it.

Until my room is all moss
and my pen hand is cold
as a buried stone
somewhere on earth
I will think upon
how everything I love is lit by you
I will study
for the core of everything that suffers from thought
the fiberoptic crossroads
where desire burns against eternity
to extend and extend
its meek love and its proud love,
its loud love and its quiet love,
until all the fertile chambers of the unknown galaxy
break down to pour it out.

POWER-PACKED PHOSPHATE FOR THE FLAME OF LIFE

From the flow of raw
by the cell from the atmosphere and the soil
this millionth of
a bucket brigade for energy
throughout the living world, in animals as well

As yet, the exact manner in which into its lethal halves
locked in the granules of the worlds beyond the milky way
the affinity of carbon breaks
animals fill a cold room
the air is warmed, moistened
it soon becomes sheaths, which accounts for the difference

Threaded coupling exhales, he gives off much
as the green moves in
as the dusk flowers

~^~^~^~

If the firmament remained
unshifting, man would wink out
beneath.

For the fire returning, for the
earth giving up another notch
of eternal space.

Be spoken, by low bushes, by
puddles half frozen and all
things winking half-eyed,
necessarily wounded.

{~~*~~}

When you stand apart let the sky feel closer to you.
When you go grocery shopping let the strands of the sun
connect to all your follicles lovingly.
Let the light of green peppers and other items
reflect the skin of your flesh accordingly.
For we all thirst after you, and you are tired.
For you desire to be loved in the comfort of a vast cloud.
May the hammer in your ribcage finally crack the heavenly door.
May you come down on me like a real sunset.

Rawmn

I am emptiness, terror.
The tethers of imagination,
painful scrawlings on cell walls,
the feel for life imprisoned in cliche.

In the dawn light of sarcophagous towns,
I paid false angels to whip me with bicycle tires.
From the genuflecting heaps
of their dying, participatory victims
came no word of how to avoid
being futuristically broken
and presently broken

so I simply left it all
drying to premature age
in its unearned spotlight
and laid up in healing, hurting salts
for in my short life
what passes for a very long time.

(((((

Take your gypsy skin to the dull sound of the dryers
take your hurt venom to the ultimate elsewhere
please reside apart from mine broken being
which apart from be

take thy print strongly through the side-bank steaming
angry on the horn of the car

moving always when they told machine
shoving digits through paper flower
knots enough for
we will always
at
tack

(((((

__)(__

The geese are wearing beautiful masks.
Mine is heavier.  Flight is an afterthought.
The landscape is whimpering under our many feet.
The sun punches dripping holes in the snow.
Riverside explodes
with roaring white ass-feathers
of our cousins the swans.

Next is the planet of all birds, slowly arriving
in the torched sky.
There will be a place for one man there:
I latch the window of my helmet
and to my honking fleet
I hang on.

__)(__

~()~()~()~

I left a trail of hats and sunglasses.
I drank until the moon capsized
and then I, kept drinking.
Fields rushed by in an unplanned riot
of gasoline maps,
the babble of sinister squirrels
under the projections of old men
in dilapidated fur.

My scalp torn by midnight after midnight,
everywhere I knelt became a rushing tunnel
of errant prayer.
Desperation was my suit and my song,
the unearned pride of getting used to it,
shoulderblades tickled by the longest branches
of this land, I began to lie down
earlier and earlier, chuckling
about the snail in my belly.

Women who cared sadly for me
laid their masks upon mine
and we languished beautifully that way,
painting the weather into a small radio
with our clefts and our hairy rivers of blood
burping fire through vast pornographic laundromats.
We watched the world through quartz of warped glass
bean-shoots of planets fertile toward the sun
until invisibly it began to come down.

~()~()~()~

)~`~`~`~`~`()

The quick night thunders,
the growing night folds my hands.
I have bound up my tongue;
should I loosen it again?

Hungers deeper than my body can contain alone
wrack me day and night...
and do I have a right to cry out,
among so many others crying?

Maybe you will be foolish enough
to pray for me, to sympathize
with my common and paltry madness,
to conquer the world through dreams.

I have not run out of language,
but today I do not want to speak.
Surely you can understand my body...
surely someone somewhere understands my body.

)~`~`~`~`~`()

)()(

two lavenders
magenta and orange
I built myself a throne of magazines
to treasure silence
toss off ecstasy
the emptiness of beauty
two eyes on a rag
beer inside the heart
lung flowers of smoke
a certain pulse sound is waning
from the upper deck
where love won't listen to reason
no commands are coming

two lavenders
magenta and orange
the creatures dancing in canvas
who come out only for my hands
none can keep me company
in my body bent backward
from love and understanding much, too little
the murder of fictional destiny
that they cannot soothe
for they are moving

pulses.  The photoelectric surface is made up
heads and wings and long tails
the sex glands

slow heartbeat
the trachea in the throat

shelled evening
stars hardened in their casts
to watch the tension ascending

Hollyhock instruments and furniture
on the brightwork of boats, the superior vena cava

leaflets that turn red throughout the United States
and a scattering machine that must be split into different beams

each of the smaller tendrils a pattern of the sound on smoke
with five to seven lobes off a mirror standing near

three kinds of tubes: speech made the membrane for teaching caged
birds to sing with each other, creating light and dark

a disklike sucker pad which attaches
their peak in the famous

<*><*>

I turned into a cat.
I ate and moved back and forth on the floor tiles.
Do you love me more?
I believe I will tolerate you for quite some time.

Don't put my affection on a tow-rope.
The whiskers will come around presently.
Yours is to sit and wait.
Mine is the territory, claimed so quietly.

<*><*>

{}{}{}{}

The little girl is dreaming of gold.
Her father is holding a bullet.
They are together under all the winds of the earth.
Shopping carts and pinwheels roam
the scorched, flat terrain without will.

Someone is singing a song for them:
an unextended man, a very sad man.
As he raises his voice from a stone fence roadside,
the fibers of his being are infused with tender prophecy.
From the fracture in his spirit cast,
a healing river meets the many currents.

The embrace goes beyond blood.
Father and singer are one.
Tarnished earth, the choir of melted libraries,
the way the soft weight of the innocent child
hurts the arms that know.

The singing throat, love that wavers
no longer, suffering and still.
They are two men: they learn to talk
and then learn not to talk.
The little girl is dreaming of an unbroken god.

{}{}{}{}