Paths are carving through the coils

of deep wet woods

swamp's fever of vine flowers

reaching through metal fences

and floating bones

the cursive link

between times is formed

of melted gold among dancing blades

love made on a sandstone bridge

in wreaths of criminal twilight

for those who resist a common death

and ride a fiery saddle

through a lunar escape

the knuckles of deific fingers

popping like bombs

my hiding place of intertwining tendrils

emits a pained antenna

to a wrecked world where

one glowing siren

imperturbably cooks the air

with rivers and waterfalls of dark

dark hair and purifying stare.

If there are still mermaids singing,

if my feet will float above the ground

to take me to my ship of angles,

if the veins of leaves

blowing in a purple wind

will turn me into articulate smoke,

maybe the rocks will speak for themselves

and pour like concrete,

maybe rivulets of hot ink

will bisect the raging sun and suck me in,

maybe the ground will sin with me

against the dying day

and stringy devils live again

in my swooping songs.

Maybe the walls will blow like wands

and the museum of ice

become a lasting bronze.

Your beauty is heavenly.

Out here in the circling driveway,

I sweep up the shattered mirrors,

I long for your face behind

clear unbroken glass, the cruel

engines hum around us.

What do I know of heavenly beauty

in your feline form?  All I know

is a series of desperate dreams,

each with a succulent imprint

and a sweetly wounding name.

Let me in to your dipped darkness

and the brine of your planetary fulcrum

that men and mobiles and beaten buildings

fly past as your delicious orbit increases--

vivid daughter of earth, send me the days

of your smile and your strut

across foot-blessed floors.

Wild nights are gone

beneath a floodlit scene of funerals

for nameless dead dancing on film

I encounter empty fields

spilled popcorn on green grass

old fashioned techno music

in my rerun dreams

we ran from party to party

on crooked country roads

with neon platform islands

where our timely incantations

were repeated and understood

those times have been blown to hell now

and maybe they never happened

I was laughing on a sex drenched

fire escape walkway

black ladders pulled up from the street

like leather belts or some unseen photo reel

in those pictures I am dying in slow motion

I've got a notion the fireworks are all exploded

and I'm alone at the bar and the bar is abandoned 

deep in some night that never arrived

I pause to drink a flashing flask

of disappearing water

and write this on polished wood

that's going dull beneath the curling paper

Hills grow from the ripples of the earth

stems in a torn mouth

beckon to vivid clouds

for dark oceanic weeping and

pierced pillars with viaduct roots

radiating torn concert posters

myriad tongues of dirty mercy

the moss floors of flowing cool canals

sag to the curb and watch

cranes lifting elegant gutters

feel my poor fingers

on the length of your multiplying spine

sip the soda of eloquent corpses

distilled to the roil of their final songs

the river through the graveyard

is long with many turnings and

the glint of many fragrant metals

heat of somber lips where an eclipse

boils and runs

the sun drips radio error

two notes for a high-strung ton

this risen clump of rabbit bones

and reptilian dung

stretched wide with violin eyes

where the moon is a wire hanger

and a singing black hole is hung

Let the light frost of December

write its prayers into a higher ground,

may the empty heights

reflect the mirror of the heavens

clouds of blue and skies of yellow dust

the shine of an unshared park bench

rails of granite up against

the swollen pond's frozen beach

the reach of jagged paths

diamond eyed owls

in the hard fought woods

footprints of marble radiance

along the glowing green intertwined

of falling and rising trees

in sheaths of erotic moss

bright city's distant glaze

an ice bouquet of water torches

frayed rind of its light

on insistent gray

as the tracks to eternity fade

under the dome of days.

Against the wall of sand

in conscious sleep,

in the place of dead fathers,

in the dreams of

the rose-tinted womb,

within the flesh-lit ghost

roaming endless shelves,

hands prowling through

the cryptic instruments of unseen fate,

with a signature and a vessel,

blades doubled and securely bonded,

strings roaring in the purple valley

by the peaks of crashed wings

flooded towers of glass and steel

the laughing of a crooked mouth

in some free-form south,

angelic horns in seas of silk

red eyes aloft a velvet pause

of lightspeed armchair

where the ear bones are fiber optic

and the vast shell purrs

scarred bright by dying scripture

a watery cave

the tongues of a fecund grave.

Beauty of beauties, you touch me

from the deep expanse of time.

Here you are between the sidewalks

and the restaurants,

here you are smiling, a fragment

blossomed of all that's come and gone.

Vines carry me up the wall

to your glowing window,

the hands of clocks tremble

in place as you move

in the gown of your birth,

as the earth gives up its cinnamon

and its licorice sticks

I come to find you on a fine boned wind,

on the structure of unseen things

I am coming for a final kiss.