ORNAMENTAL FIRE

Adorned with the drapery that gunlight caught,
 form cast on an orb ship galaxies fucked
  into transparent existence, planet lands on planet,
   screens form in the witnessed sky,


 my nymph with an axe cuts the anti-umbilical
  cord to the wax church pumped with slime
   that rides barren hills in a scaffolding of dried white shit,
    and has no tower


and in ornamental fire, love comes blazing without a framework
 to fuel wells with earthen water, cannot be held, cannot be kept,
  granted in time, it ties the knots inside the climbing fists, amusical wrists,
   that cause music


In tumbling neverthelessness, chords throated through a tapestry of cells
 in the goblet of broken atmosphere, lovers of earth for new earths,
  to ferret around on lank cages, through tubes from infinity's plastic,
   to gather on fiberoptic rafts and burn calendars, to minnow past faulty suns
    in a death-copped instant.

.....

The form's silhouette,
 and the magic nature of dissolving
 which we crave and surrender
 to grey light, to waking
the molten black, the cooled figure


a huge cat, looming on floorboards,
 chest-bones rippled by outward light
fails to recline on my horrible memory;
 a hangover, a woman


puts me at the terrible crest of my illusion
 and it sticks to nothing, then riots
within everything that is barren,
 parsed out by inexorable sadness


the total terror of white afternoons
 where nobody is watching
  with eyes, with eyes that have broken totally


 and to see

    taken by a gliding feeling,        reeling in a lot


       ass on a stump of years spreading               chained open






            every tank of light is closed off       by     lashes of money


hurt the self, fall on a wire      new to the only sun          the dripping of


 blood on glass     the singed piano     striking up the rhythm of the floor tiles




        taken by a striped and impenetrable feeling,      hands on a long row of metal carts




 for the money that wafts from the sky      for those who lovingly control it


   for the chlorine grin at the pharmacy counter telling a lie to the air


 sting the self's shadow, taste its resemblance          fall down in the depths of


     grandma's garden

.....

She paints in purple and tan the tearing of a body
psychotic lovemaking in a tunnel of leaves
smashed sirens lost in their hardware
staring elements into the river computer;
and stunned by their own laughter,
a wing-caress
a janitor's cardboard fortress
and he was her father of wide grey thirst
endless yellow pink  red
a free wind over the old neighborhood
where a nude is fighting another nude
and nobody is welcomed into the crystallization
but it glows to happen
atop every periphery shining
their hearts are making blood move and that's all

.....

The moon is a sash on the hearth of a dead map
The sun blazes under a cemetery
Out in the world of jobs and harnesses they bottle reason
I'm hanging from a ceiling's corner in a sling of catgut
The mirrors won't leave me alone or float
An imaginary uncle shares my face for years
I forgot how to get up unfold and make lunch
I cringed in a chair of dust
Imaginary governments kept an eye on the less interesting
The orifice of bright and dark multiplies in celestial gaps
No newspaper of the future shows the faces of my telephone's grandchildren
Tiny prophets scream pop in the fireplace
I am undiminished by history
My future's with unanalytical manwomanman
Don't touch the brick's glow until it blips its replicas into existence
Or melt into sex information on my doorstep
We are waiting in the nuclear ballpark
For intergalactic teams to fumble points against a gel bulletin
For the gods of meteorology to finish their cones

.....

Snow-sun, irreparable earth,
limbs linked in leather
driven with eyes to the banks,
the bowl-sides of town-planetarium
to the bulk of larger planets,
searing through thin layers of lesser stars
tin forks of battered cities
alleyways of accidental warmth
in the mess of civilization
where our bellies heat blood
for one another


Micro-town, a cell's existence,
tremulous to split the botched highway
where life makes way for murder
and a smashed hotel divulges one vibrating bed
nudged electric down the avenue
where we lay down and ride
to be rented by light
to be born from water


roads lower than the ocean
where our motors choked on music
we stepped out of antique doors


and took sight of each other, moon leaf wing
the pause of unstoppable things

.....

Genius has no memory
and the soul registers from the mundane, from the purging that
begins to look schoolmarm


slugs into his face slugs into the officer
fragments of a creature now called little pear, then


rock shows forms of man that the murder occurred
replacing the chord called spirit


each interglacial period--the time body they came from
bones of a child killed by the religious frenzy of the ghost dance


water consciousness flat-faced, fuzzy-cheeked, but he commanded
suckle their young change to a vertical face


cemented on the slide with balsam electron

.....

From a bulb or underground as otoliths in the inner ear
even in cracks between stems and on leaves high
from his mouth and it was bright the body of the legend
strips of light on temple walls, in the colossal, belted globe


The flattened claws from the grave of 400, 000 kinds of sound
to rest in crow fashion to overthrow his father


A slitted disk was attached to the scribe's arms
and made the dead person come alive again
lean, tireless, and striking an electric arc


A cord of tissue extends from a small water pocket
his bullet-mould, ball-screw, wiper, awl & with a gun-stick
when blood has delivered tight ovens called retorts blood cannot return
blasting garden flowers and grasses and dulling razors


Spells fall from septa, or walls, holes or cans or chambers
horsetail black-eyed susan deerhorn ferns
subkingdoms in the center between the corolla

.....

Light-years light-years
cuneiform wrapped in smoke
the blush in your eye
the water in the steam tubes, waves in the open ocean
rounded and pitted rocks nested
the chugging engine, before a rail broke the cloth that covered


there is a thin band of green, of lapis blue, and of indigo
bones, shells and teeth fingers to man-made brains
the beasts of lightning in higher layers
for the ballet, fine silver in the solar wind


on the drilling deck iron colts tore up rails, exploded, set fire
this group this night is a golden-white light golden-white light
the head is crowned coins rest on the eyelids--two to three earths
dashes and various matrixes as sacramental tokens of
stored on magnetic tape and replayed
the water becomes too great

SHE SLEEPS WITH A HAMMER UNDER HER PILLOW

She sleeps with a hammer under her pillow.
Her son was a small torpedo.
When she releases her ponytail her eyes grow three sizes.
Networks of electric re-creation are all her ceilings.
She knocks them closer to the sky every time she sits up in bed.
Her mattress is a little airport abandoned by civilization.
Phantom mechanics make threatening noises in musicless hangars.
Her solo office faces a molten seaboard.
Her keypad smokes under small intelligent hands.
Once a month we visit her shower and she melts me back into my height.
I can see her nibbling a cool sky-corner that has fallen from the wallpaper.
It turns into the skin of an unknown fruit when we press it between us.
The walls cocoon and bristle as the bones of airplanes crumble like salt
in the unheard outskirts.  And when we part like lovers
she strides our reincarnate sight through the alien city,
my eyes shining out of her.  And her breath fills my prisoner legs
until my history is mute with gladness
she reclines on the light in my head.

.....

In man-made rigid hulls would you taste the roar
Of a fold within the rearing tanks
With a slow flow of airstone
With a silvery sheen to the eyes and abdomen
Through which a pulse of light flashed more zones of the grey scale
Orange blossoms and buzzing bees raspberries and clover
The thermometer expanding in wood


If someone called to you, would you hear him make models of water?

THE RED ROAD

From the roots to the floodlight meters
through the stems to the near-by buildings to the human face
yesteryear dined on an oil well in the earth
any air-breathing animal a prism compressed by the surrounding


by the sphincter muscles of some sunlight
antistatic rubbing and biting lasting many hours
to swirl about your fresh-cut sound waves in the enlarger's egg
pressed by her luminous, averted turbulence-damping shapes and doing no injury


the tinted glow gone from the sky of honey
colors disappear; the world including an adult pair
becomes a pattern of black butter.

.....

My friend could shake the earth
his life was a raging tribute


his throne of drums, his bellow through the wires
his infrequent collisions with the sky


age hit him hard, he was a wanderer
in bright places he fell, burned up by common things


we could see him flailing with cumulus
when all was falsely intact


his movement printed earth with arrows
to all that strives burning

.....

It was wafting, wafting, when the world caught up with it
it was a new chemical, from the depths of a great forest

lavas gone still on the face of a world, stunned love, stems in the belly
studying its hardship into song
for the angle of a comet
coming on a train of mineral fire
spatial grace in descent

fire of an earth come to dance cliff-faces
in the labyrinth of kept sound

.....

Weather of the growing strains of ghostly music and
at the muzzle end of an ancient event for a square root;
of the windlass, which raises winding a cord


these too are cut away for his narrow house at his ease in white sneakers,
in the growth ring while a mirror set limitations--his bulging, liquid
sepulchral laughter wafting across the woodwork behind his head


where the basking shark rose from the earth in the face of the sun god
such as the acorn worm for infinity; kicking which
man-beast is known loudly squalling with each of its many parts
as colors stream out of bags across grass or concrete
lenses set slightly apart

.....

The girl leave a broad white blur long before the coal
the prism prepared his iron with a beam of light


millions of years going into the air
a ball of camphor hits the mountain


only models how the socket, the switch, the cord are put to courtship ritual
gaudy with plumes that quiver when they display stored knowledge
relishing eggs and films that end on a burning door


lovers watch erotic futures through a bloodstream of atomic and spatial time
the apes clustered by the barrier of cold intermingling with alien forces


ooze that has rained beyond the continental margins  like climbing vine


the earth, an hourglass, a pulse count, the thickness of

.....

I come to you disheveled from a feverish life,
guardrails in my collarbones
barely holding my blood together
birches and pines rising on each side,
the thrum of a loading truck in the cage of my groins

I no longer want to see the masks of profit
the intoxications of slow death
drizzling down the sides of great architecture
or the burden of humanity carried by the social life of cancer;
I want instead the mineral hearts, the marrow's faint speech
as bodies give voice to one another
to pendulum centers of gravity

the sobbing that has no journalism
and the jeremiads of the thwarted
that crown our kingdomless ascent,
and a small dark woman who takes my bruised mouth,
coiled vine of my lips to the faint arc
of her fruitful belly, inked with the slogans of necessity
road pale as a knife's wink
through the cunt of the penetrant hills

.....

The black gold floating in the green heart and great scarring
views of the ruins by kite to locate a meal in the mud under the mouth


abyss--vast plains interrupted only a few men in bathyscaphs
this tiny nucleus of artisans began to appear on land


to gain the heights in solitude and
freedom of the flesh, of the womb, of the grave

.....

I want to go back to a place of sadness and drink the water there
Until I am full and clean with it
To let my childless future, my childless friends sing along
The path flickering through days what remains of my secretive spirit
Of any remnants not healed into gold
To december the heated orchestra into deep sleep
And lucid there, eyelashes frosted looking to an ocean
Of memory's ash, so many in the wastes of the earth
To be kissed awake by madness
Until all the caged sing the spotted sun into radio errors
And the anima speaks dance in woman and man
And in all the translations between them
And the sparks lie down to be anointed by ice
In the depth of their territory
With the fragrance of a monk's incensed cave speaking to multitude
And the sodium insistence of the moon
And the few, hurt boundless who must live in this time of dying
With the dome of their present cracked by celestial collapse
Who bring the fire of their happiness to an invisible altar
And cannot sleep to move with this world of tongues

Much fingered terrestrial banality

As he wrapped with canvas strips and glue rejects the antithesis
he has a cosmic sex-brain optimism
its leaves peeling off one by one lamp with his pulse
atoms jump like the flanks of the raging mare between his blast arcs

two light rays would be faraway stars
one kind of time machine is reborn from its own big bang
its own ultimate clock, to produce, fight, create in the phalanx of dying meanings