Fierce letters printed on wilting skin,

a glaze of blood to polish timber

and take down the skies,

hands clasped on the disc

of an airport dining table,

zones of ordered paint

rushing sentient space,

I can't talk, I must stare

into the voidless yawn that crackles,

I must know its unforced embrace

where the parched ground heals

and wounds with wetness,

bridges cross the chasm's

multicolored light,

my delicious torment redeems

the tragedy of my elders,

I see wings in shit, the corpus

emblazoned with frauds

that have become genetic,

the stones go quiet

in their slow decay,

the water wades into me,

I am a sea invaded

by this unwelcome body,

the eye is all, the poles of vision

are making shapes from a hell

of elaborate echoes,

the sun cools on waning rye

my wallet is a folded leaf

that holds a supernatural seal,

the gash of a gone root waits

my feet are numb to finding

the sleep of mercy ends in ecstatic birth.

QUIXOTIC

All my life I'll just be a fool.

I'll fuck it up, probably on purpose.

Murders will happen because of me

but I'll never be there.  This

is the paranoid eye that searches

only for a certain frog.

This is our earthly home,

that leaks and screams.

I am absent from the rituals

of birth and death, my attention

is elsewhere.  The obsessive

carving of reality must take place.

The gift I don't deserve

must be shredded into

shimmering fragments.

Man must survive on the salt

of dead ideas.  This skin

is a kind of armor I put on,

and it doesn't work.

This cactus tongue

is milky as a neon pen.

The frame falls off

from the jagged landscape.

I am aligned with the dying god,

with the ones of this world.

There is no other seeking.

Luminescent curlicues unfurl

on a cold horizon.

They are not straight, they tremble

like frozen lashes.

The way the blankets heave,

the dome of space has opened up,

a voice without language is calling,

calling.

Tentacles of ephemeral fluff

retreating from the light of hate

shores of naked angels on plastic sand

shadows loving under tentscapes

of plaster branches

wasp wings moving over marble sheen

Vines from death

reaching over abandoned racetracks

flowers of a raging bulb

that knows the grip of soil

worms flicking the beginning

of angel wings in blood gravy

long tubes of light that linger

in dead halls

a walking spine

that flounders like a sleeping dancer

the stench of millennia

all gone from a long bone bridge

the flanks of passing ships

alive with tangled circuits

their cycles winding closer

to the sanctum of the pilot clown

one pyramid of clear glass

under fiber optic oceans

bioluminescence simulated

by a dragging hand

The reins of spirit snapping

in the furrows of galactic night

where orbs are born from burning mercy

rails of a vaporous train

rivers of electric mud

scorched thorns in arabesque of longing

smashed maps of many lamps

ghosts limping over dream-born mattresses

chains leaking from a ruptured iron cloud

that the seamstress of these wastes allowed.

The vein that goes all the way down

bronze light of divine tentacles

faint bubbles of broken speech

seeping into space

from a cave of pearl rapture

purple pentagram neon eyes

and pinball paddle thighs

the mask pierced by handcuff capture

heartbeat's colored panels turning

lane to prismatic lane.

Cocooned within the wreckage

with these laughing scars,

past loves revealed as psychosis,

quartz walls around remembered parties,

treadmills of omega

scriptures written in unyielding steel

somewhere in an active cloud system

the poison knife is tracking electricity

walls go up like wings to ride

the wind of death to rumors of a different life

untangled into grim surrender

cloves of purple rent from gray

stacked flowers of concrete

on caving plaster.