VIGNETTE

I listen to Rakim, God's voice

verbatim.  He fills my zen

with the mercy waiting.

I turn the embers

and refracture shelves of time,

feel the earth becoming my goddess,

filling my orbs with soil.

I turn green tea red

in rain revealed by sunlight.

Diego Rivera eats a dark watermelon

on my doorstep, wedge by wedge,

grins at my plans for revolution.

"I am", he says, "something

of an anarchist."

We talk about women.

Their fits, their delights,

their smells, the ways

of all their passages.

Their primacy, their power.

Our lives always linked

with their shadows,

our virtue spoiled by hunger

but the beauty of our greed,

and how they loved it

when it was theirs alone.

"We couldn't be kept.  Street dogs,

not house dogs.  Let's go and visit

my friend Mike Tyson."

May the data pools be smelted

by the human spirit burning

in the shackles of this handmade hell

let the cuckoos of an

endless morning dwell.

On the beach of bones

where spirits paint in smoke

fizzing with green ink

the chains of space are tied with pleasure knots

and echoed pains of unknown histories

forever in the rapture of their deaths

skin and flash to decorate the trade winds

steaming wheels of steel that never cared

gears run on captured blood that won't cry out

all the knowledge of distorted names

the descendants of a motionless game

hairy valley where the cleansers shave.

The breeze fondles its secret crevices

with green things,

is groomed to be a greater wind

fleeced of easy curvature

billowing like the blood of the world.

The orchestra of blades

proceeds through trees

that will not lean its way

this time.

The rumble of liquid fire

bright ferocious tongues

from many mouths.

I cracked my head on northern ice

and burned my feet down south.

These vines are in my veins like crowds.

ASAGRAUM

I keep company with my witches,

and my witches comfort me.

We paint memories with black

and purple stripes.  We reach

a highway strewn

with secondhand cigarettes.

The ground lifts off

like a rug with rockets.

Towers gleam around 

the emperor's ring of gardens.

Their windows blink

with secret bohemian signals.

We see the strength of a painted wound

in vaporous space.

TOBACCO ZONE

I carry an apartment on my back

imprinted by the dancing feet

that made this town your street

the floorboards wrap my spine

in wax and shine

I lumber through this world with gone

Greg Devlin's ghost,

looking for a lost bohemia.

Birds in the rafters

riding heavy metal hair

branches whose forks liquidly multiply

extending warm wet growth of grandeur

cooling through mercurial sunsets

roots coiling beneath the cord

of connected skies.