Pain takes on definition.

The seasons grow in shape.

Architects of mercy

turn to savages.

New lanes open in the way

they used to go.

Orchard of a waning hand

each apple with a desperate shine

and a seedless center.

We are partners in loss,

the contest is over.

Time will write

with its syringe of mercury

into the sea.  Magnetic zones

will eat up the suns to come.

I burn an herb whose name

I do not know.

Rivers of paint flow over

the bulging doors.

The end glows.

A chain of basins

galaxies in budding rows.

I went to the cemetery of unmarked graves

looking for a friend who knows

their names and places

to walk with and remember.

He was absent--I felt he might

be gone for good.  Without a guide,

I climbed the paths of bone-filled hills.

I don't know the names or their places,

but I know the spirit of this place,

its rhythm and emerging crests,

angles added by this tortured continent,

its heaving body.

I know this pocket of recycled cells

cooling between raw trees

and uncaptured breezes.

I have watched all the ideas die.

Yet beauty remains.

The dancer hides

her scrambled brain

with a fan.

I give her my life savings,

which is easy to do.

The stool turns

like a flying saucer

as I scan the polished wood

for meaning, am glad

to find none.

The lights of strange departures

are warping the dome

of the local sky.

An empty lake opens

elsewhere, filling

a depleted clearing.

Empty means empty of creatures,

crowded with lonely molecules,

meaning not lonely at all, and then,

never having been described.

In a cleft between silent neighborhoods

shrouded engines tick like dying clocks.

I wake up walking

on a rope between bedroom windows.

In a spectacular flash

I am falling through erratic air

surrounded by squirrels

who are also falling.

I fall asleep in anesthetic snow

behind a dump of discarded machines.

I haul myself up from dreams

to find books in the rubble.

The kisses of yesterday are far away.

Time is not kind to its prisoners.

I am glad to be filled with dirt

and among sinners.

Pines pointing and the deer in my blood

each icicle star.

I follow the arc of leaping stars

of all things not yet governed,

all things escaping notice or

never to have been, sweetest

valley of all, valley of oblivion.

Hilltops are crowned

with ruddy light, mist

binds the magnificence.

Streams descend from

rock gardens, many guardian

reptiles are in attendance.

On the banks of this great

transformation, I am not transformed.

I am found on rooftops at odd

hours, I am wandering with the damned.

I am still watching the natural things

bloom in their decaying way,

yearning for nothing to happen

again and again.

I swam in cardboard space

and surfaced in hotel tubs

appearing in the dreams of others.

Searched the houses of the dead

for keys they lost

to some invisible kingdom.

All the trails ended in darkness.

Under the architecture of the old stories

a new story was repeated.

Mountains of teeth

guitar strung vertebrae

night doesn't need to talk back.

Waves of haunted appliances

ripple after ripple of elastic shells

crackling to suck the fiber of animation.

In the edited flow of time

on the sand still hot after sunfall

one cursed and glowing seed

need of the infinite

crammed into this breaking cell

the glory of numbered beasts

this infamous coupon.

Wheels turning all around me

will continue, altering their form

rectangular mirrors will flow

sideways, carried by star spangled

beauties of the realm

for whose form licking frames

of metallic paint crucify

the kittenish image,

engines in a long line

to see the dance of a chartless era,

cherry villages besieged

by tumbleweed steam

the crossbeam's frost in stages

dining on resplendent plastic

draped in unmoving flame

blood colored vines on theater walls

these shadows in historic clothes

the light of a keychain galaxy

all rent for mending

the gears of unthinking voids

have found a voice

ferns of death are resurrection ferns.