.....

Careening to heights, dizzy with rapture, I try
to pull all the aching eyes into it with me;
surprised at how much shows up,
in the radar of my chances.

This is the glinting scrap-mountain
of discarded dreams, where another vision
can still be assembled, painstakingly atop
with a wide bell, and a feather pen
with an electronic heart,
ringing from the anus to the tips of the eyes.

.....

Earth knocks on my door, as it knocked
early on the door of my father.
For now it's just a trickle; I let it in.
Geraniums are clamoring somewhere
outside.  I too am caught up in that false prophecy
of a world that will never end,
of a consciousness that lingers.
I can barely lie still to watch
the sun pass over me.
So impatient to live, that I make death
come a little closer, so this thing
that is not an entity and I
can check each other out,
fumble around the limits.
Like a parallelogram collapsing
into an escaping sliver of light,
what they call my soul
has eclipsed itself, and I am
already free.

.....

When you were fucked in love for the first time,
egging your chances, over the dry hump of a whole existence,
breaking in the radio, late night of the buttocks,
staring under the mirror, we are changed for reality,
there is no sensible end to this feeling, this peculiar disaster,
this and that run of wine and wildly radiant colored circumstances,
changed aching to combine, vaulted from a forested childhood,
unwillingly moving.

.....

Weeping-burnt alongside a river
a heron swept through my ribcage
and the clouds were a gauze between my bones
I saw a crushed pharmacy spilling medicine
on white-hot twilight tar
and the gift of the sunrise
cracked into lava's rivulets
by fleets of minnows scattering

reassembled around the eruptions of history
the blandness of human tyranny went on, troubling a few
and we gathered around a fountain of dream-glinting coins,
then going to buy things to clean our bodies, scour our homes
for an empire of thin wishes, a rain of spears
on the roof of the planetarium.

Agape

I can feel the human heart beating with fear, in the supermarket;
how we are suspended in the gossamer of each other's lives,
so nervously.  In the steps of these people I know the shuffle
of my own bedraggled shoes, how we are besieged by threats
of guilt-cancer, of guilt-cleansing and the promise
that every one of us will be nailed to these fucking walls,
well before the opening of all outer space.  And to think
of the many instants, when tenderness breaks out
in a glance or a clasp, of flesh on real flesh,
from our harried natures, pummeled by time,
is a violent caress, then a cooling lava,
and the growl of a lost leopard.
Until the very nucleus of one's being,
sabotaged again and again by love,
grows firm in love, defiantly;
until all the fragments of one's being
are suffused with love, and their circuits are bathed
with the holiness of its knowing sorrow.

Bartenderess

Your fragrant cool, how did it happen?
And the ear-curls, how did they descend?

If the orchard gave form to its shining technology,
if it went hot for cold, where would it sprout
and its productions land?

They'd thud on the moon, let the cycles vibrate,
where they fecund and move
dust into sculpture, that has eyes,
that has alien culture in its most familiar echo,

carving carving
and they love the blood of what
they will fall amongst, a teeming vacancy of cells.

.....

To become a realtor of star maps
hawking trails to the infinite
from a light-pierced kiosk
in a barren airport
eating the phonebook
a carnival and rubbed-out addresses
human neighborhood bulbing out
from an alien socket

.....

I am watching you burn yourself down,
and I can see how I am doing it, too,
in our own ways we go faltering,
time is dismembered by us;
and we follow it, very angrily, laughing

Whole bodies flung to the geodes
photographed, to the fictional solar system

body, body by death and body by life,
fighting without moving

I'm fucked up enough now to treat
my friends like angels
in the deranged way I love them
following a mantle I've never worn
through a dark I know better than
the specter who follows me, wearing
the horn of an idiot, being a human

Because you can't trust your own life,
because your own life is a stranger trapped
inside you; or because you can't talk, properly
without being seen, and are not
under any circumstances allowed
to fall over.

.....

This serenade must shiver the lilac bushes
blur the rings of elms within within
and haul late-night clouds aside
from celescopes their vapors cannot touch;
it must reach only one woman,
and her name is the sea,
and it has been said.

There is no ache in time
to abandon her tiniest doings
the light on her fingers is universal
and the song around it
needs to breathe the air of all time
through this time
bring stone together with stone
a bed of moss at the foot
of the life of a fountain
falling of cold water on matted rock-path

The cleanliness of it, and her place
so far along where it flows
where it meets salt and is overwhelmed
by the sadness around the earth
on the skin and in the radiant unseen
fire at the fire's center.

....

I am like a ladies' shoe.
They have carved me down
into this little form.
Twitching on the shore
of a mighty river,
twitching in the roots,
twitching in the soil,
seen backwards by myself

and for the water, the water,
why can't I tumble down.
I have thieved and been taken,
I have acted like a rodent
with a case of brain,
nervous in the blaze of time,
now I want to be vaulted into flesh tall
and have lovers all over me
day-long and night-long
springing secret terrors
into brightness and ease
from my skin.

.....

To live in the echoless vibrancy of space
where our voices trail off and do not return

or to think of a network of choirs
inhabiting dark matter, webbing and chiming

to bring histories together in warped majesty
until there are no aliens, until the broken threads

connect to all--these are my terror dreams,
of travel-lashed emptiness or voidless laughter

let them come together as one, though there be no one.

.....

It is moving toward,
it is light and flavoring space,
the reality of death being an architecture

alive and no longer wandering
taken deep to be molded,
hungering only for the inevitable,
taking it within wearing an eerie smile,
shrugging off the transported weight
of many planets, tracing raw movement
with instruments that do no follow,

and holding it fast with nothing limbs,
loving it strangely with love
because love is strange in this world
which was not made by love.

.....

When the wolves recede from paradise, for a moment,
and take time to lick the sugar of their wounds,
and you let me into the honey of your torso
to forget what I will never remember,
remember what I will never forget,
and you bring the budding mouths
together to pause an apocalypse,
I watch from a girlish bedroom,
I watch from a half-open kitchen
you preparing the three hundred pounds
of redness, the hammock of the sky's counter-pull,
and the busted opulence we will become
when the shells have softened into flower
and straight lines of stringed instruments
have broken, arabesqued.

.....

I will furrow your insides with heat

for the dawning, it will be petal'd

I will be present in the present like a bird
rejoining its flock's lettered sky, present
at your squirming altar

I will take the decorative wound
out of the air to place
on your cool forehead
the emptiest kisses
the open territory
your voice and wandering agent

coming home from the kill of the engine
to be bathed in all the thoughts that the lights missed
hurt vegetable skins on the sidelines
strangely in their watching and being mute

and lost in the leftovers of the cavassed landscape
of a whinny that dies in the throat
and a wind of thought fucking
and a cemetary bench outlined with bodily vapors
the condensation of flesh on marble catching stars.

.....

When I touch life's substance,
when I bury my instruments in the earth
and let them ring stone,
I pay attention with pain
to the small, irritating numerals that float past
and the interruptions, all of them--
do not reject, do not compromise
the vast cloud of corruption--
and I watch with fondness
a woman in twisting hair descend the vines
and begin her assault there.

.....

He keeps a piece of tape
over the slot in the top of his head
to keep coins from being dropped in;
he keeps himself in a shell of clothing,
and never lies down to rest.

Wounded to stillness and wide-eyed,
invulnerable to language,
in the garden he waits, on a stalk.

His placement outside the market
makes him shine, with the shine
of one who is being looked at,
all glossy with sunrise, annointed
by early twilight
in the falsified calm of the afternoon,
his grin is what he's got.

In the magic territories, collecting a paycheck.
He is not an answer, and the question
has never. Been. Asked.

.....

Someday you'll see me
mouth scorched by tobacco and alcohol
crawling from the outskirts
onto the whole glinting plate of your horizon
widening your peripheral glare
feeding on your perfume
desperately, like someone recently made homeless
and by you are the pools of water multiplied

determinedly, we meet the current entire
my forefathers are moving in the curvature of my back
you sweeten your belly with a twitch
we have arrived reverberating in the maw
thick with disguised existence
purging our territories of false looks
reaching the age-old hearth of the sexes
tortured by the dreamed reminder
of a frightened congress
in the fixed community of my scaly blending

I will be your ten-cherry dancer
you will be for me the sabbath of venus
I will blur and twang in your toes
until the ceiling begins to come loose
and we find ourselves nakedly propped on a door
then falling on tubes and flimsy surfaces
and we go to our circuits flailing
and we go to the graves of our pillows drunk,
benignly separated, then over the froth and the fog
into the merciless radiance of the tugged-on morning
drinking your vanilla and vinegar
draping your productions in my robe
in my encampment of kisses

and you will be paddled by water
by the spiritual water that wafts an image
from the strength of my forehead
where you go to lie down.

.....

When the beautiful surprise happens
totally, surrounding
arctic shelves in the life of the mind
and you break into your body
and you shiver over mine
and it is the perfection of a squandered millenia
and the taste and the dampening everywhere, snugly
of your goddessblessed pudendum
and I'm doing time in your vision
and I descend into the deep mazes of your sensation
and it is the only place where my spirit lifts off
and drips over the miraged edges
and I am casually knocking a hole in the sky
with the form and the flake of my flesh
winded by holiness
the shameless drum riding my blood
and you are the crest and the ship's prow of womanhood
and a breath flowering
and your presence and your capacity
pushes back all the walls of life
and lets me fall slowly, from a great height
into the velveteen of your magnet laughing.

.....

You are a woman in ashes,
I am a man on water,
you are the serpent in a telephone,
I am a cell weeping,
you are a religion of thieves,
I am the toucher of stones on a mountain,
you are a chorus that breaks down,
I am a soloist sweeping,
you are the wandering talk,
I am a trumpet bent open,
you are alone in light,
I am the rain on a powerline,
you see the sickness of violence in valor,
I see the pesticide spray on fashion's visor,

we are in a combat for which there is no hospital
heart's matter hammered by star-fibers
that died behind their light
and became merely power.

.....

In machines and lashed water
there is a hand moving
in parks and unfettered scenery
coins spin blur dates and faces
numbers are punched holes
thick syrupy light comes pushing in
and will not be still
or move as light moves.

Once I had the light hard,
hard in my eyes, I used a device,
a device to deflect it,
what I could not name, I ignored
to give other things names,
I named what was around me, I used
a device, I used several devices,
I ate up the space, I thought I'd kept
somewhere, a clean departure, a vessel
waiting, once I had the light hard,
clean in my eyes, I held it with
my open, hills glowed at the edges