After the revolution

Remember days of staring at white walls
waiting for something black to happen.
Remember a silver tangle in the dark
and the mouth that opened under it.
Remember the couch overturned
and kicking at it as if it were
the framework of the world.

Now even the birds sound discordant
and the air jagged, filtered wrongly
around their wings, seems to be pushing
its way into my mouth; I cannot draw it
peacefully into my body of guns and tobacco.
The plants are wearing men and muscles.
Ferns have little machines in each green shiver.
And you have to go sleepless for days just to make a painting
come out of the over-stretched air.

But the mustached podium man and his guards
have been dispatched into a graveless void
and it feels good to have them swimming under us,
hitting demons that we unleashed with silver saucepans,
their pants lined with egg whites.
We'll be free for a few weeks like years,
and let the presses roll.

my grandpa Carl is 98 years old
and he paints pictures of kittens on his bedroom walls
all the cats he's ever lived with
who have died

he has outlived them all
and his children my parents won't allow him to have
a new cat
so he paints the infancies of remembered felines
on the plain white wallpaper

his skin is as white as the whites of his eyes
but his hair is whiter
his paintbrush moves much faster than his heart

Manworld is not Manworld or a world

I said, in a lost essay: 1) nobody needs
anything that they fight for.
2) The fighting itself has become the only thing.
3) Dominance is as miserable for the dominant
as for the dominated. 4) Just ask someone
with a penis how they feel about being so
"powerful".

We threw lemonade at each other
and then we threw beer. We wanted to sting
each other's eyes. The girls ran
out of the room to let us kill each other.
I grabbed a stool and pressed its legs
against your throat while you slammed
a heavy beerglass against my hipbone
over and over and over and the girls cried
wearily in their bedrooms.
We tried to rip off each other's genitals
but our pants were on backwards.

Then we saw each other's faces
(as if the smoke had set the house on fire)
and begged each other to stop, which we did.
We held each other on the porch and cried
while the girls emerged from their bedrooms
and laughed at our sentimentalities,
we were so wobbly with one another.

I beg everyone to destroy themselves
and everything they love before it's too late.

Short gender war poem

We all (even the wifeless among us)
cling to a female comforter.
We can't help it (shadows stroke
the wall on which they're cast)
and everything male is in parenthesis.

Let's all hold hands and sing about peace and love

Shithead's afraid (fear is filled with shithead)
that we won't live through:
next week's widely advertised
far-off glistening weekend.
The idiots, the idiots, and the idiots,
and also the idiots, not to mention the idiots,
in addition to the idiots,
incorrectly have correctly raped us
incorrectly. Rape and baseball rape
and potato chips rape, and also rape.
With their orifices they create new orifices,
holes in proletariat space-time,
and with their beautiful knives. Now we wait
and hope for them to be silent as feces
in a far-off Martian forest. Stony, odorless.

Shit from nobody. And the seas silent,
a sleeping skin,
and rich men filing their nails
with files made from the bones
of the poor, who are stupid and have good bones
and do not deserve to be rich.
Their bones are also made
into televisions and spy cameras
by highly metaphysical asians.
Stomach intestine testicle screens.
Buddha TV. The sexless gooks spray airplane glue
into their mouths and throw elephant meat
from high city windows.

Eat shit from a broken shard of mirror
while crouching behind a heap of automobiles
that just fell out of the television sky.
There is! A comfort here! As a radio,
half-crushed in the smoke:
plays songs by singers employed:
by those who make guns most of the time;
when they're not making popular songs;
for the youth of death to sing along to;
as they drive roads of frozen nigger blood
into their own endless lightweight
craniums. Niggers destroying niggers,
using niggers. Niggers eating nigger-meat
out of crucified cracker hands.

Labyrinthine fistula of puffed clam-tunnels
fighting with each other's tongue-bodies,
acidic in each other's entrances,
licking yellow milk from a dusty cushion
as the cushion watches television
with aluminum in her wifely spine.
And an army of faggots, faggots
eating shit from broken mirrors,
marching over heterosexual hillsides,
bathing each other's anuses
with crushed infants,
faggots faggots faggots!

Trees getting married to each other
by evangelists with clam-meat eye-sockets
of no visible color, and faggots.
Cunt bitches popularizing bombs with their hips.
Cunt bitches popularizing the warfare of the sleepless
with their sleep, selling clams
to the sleepless with their sleep,
selling sleeplessness to the sleepy
with yams buried and rotting
in their important vaginas.
Bitches are responsible!
Bitches are selling miniskirt clams
to everybody!

Fear is destroyed by beer.
Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.

Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Crackers walk past crackers constantly.
Crackers contrast the terrorists
on each other's T-shirts.
Cracker knows what's best for everybody.
Everybody knows what's best for cracker.
And each can holds the blood, with bubbles.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
The whole world is Pearl Harbor tomorrow.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
His eyes are nipple erasers, his head
is the body of a dead baby sucking at the air.

Sign of a new age

the pope and all his bishops gather
at a huge, important table
and eat bowls of bullets in goat's milk

it's good for their bowels
and they recommend it to everybody

everybody is uninterested

The eyes are dark but the body is bright
The tunnel is dark in movement of trains
Copulation of oils and electricity

Passengers kiss each other strangely on the last day
Buildings collapsing like birth control above them
And the ground hurts like
an alcohol hot-tub vagina beneath them

burnt by all the parties she has known
and none of you can help me
none of you in this novel
striking sparks against the pages
that are written at the expense of your soul

and the soul is paper
and the night is a train moving through couches and televisions
in the skyscraper fire escape night

bottles are being thrown
into places you’ll never be lowered
whole books are being written

in locations never ejaculated gardens are being seen by the lonely
from fiftieth story windows over a night of blue-black tar
paperback lipstick confessions after the fact

the fact is flesh

Your home is broken like a clamshell
The meat revealed
Your father sold rugs to unhappy ladies

While the cities burned like blonde hair

Oiled idiots dance into unnecessary rain
This pattern is the same as fingernail

You’ll need it when you get old behind a drunken desk
All the rectangles overturned
All the bedsheets smelling like new rain on the powerlines

This broken home is a new tar road
Walked by lonely sons and daughters
Meeting for a golf course fuck, green as the stars
That have just been born.

I want a girl with a nasty mouth
To shrink these days into feminine hours.
The wine we taste is supermarket sour.

The kisses here are programmed into marching spines
But a light is heard in darkened rooms
And a prophet leaps head-first plate-glass out of the party.

(He is found later on the pavement by police monsters
grateful to stare into the face of a famous monster.)

I feel better knowing backs are breaking for my pleasure.
I feel better being poor by bloated standards
and hidden among greater decadences.
When the horny proletariat comes to drink my blood
I’ll hide under a fat millionaire.

The heart is a pepper. The dancing girls are fingers
On a loving hand. But the wrist is broken.

I feel better knowing throats are slit somewhere else.
I feel better being fifteen for the rest of my life.
I feel better than a sea which doesn’t feel at all.

What makes your face so cold all the time?
I’m not buying it, or slipping on the pennies of frozen sperm
You leave behind all over common sidewalks in the acid rain.

You see, it’s all going to melt, bitch, it’s all
going to include your worshipped skeleton.

We’ll be over it, making love like sexless children in a forest that floats
Far above these cities of stone. The stone is flesh. And the icy hours are melting too.

Radiant doubtful profiles

and they don't care who dies so long as they have a piece of land they're selling stars on the radio you can re-name whole constellations after your girlfriend she can blow you under her own constellation in the driveway if you lick up your own sperm you'll gain spectacular powers of intuition now the advertisements have ended for a moment they're yelling at each other on the radio on all the radios all the radios in america my hatred is more beautiful than your hatred my religion is more logical than your religion we escape to a path in the woods but the sky opens and they're cancerous powerlines buzzing overhead vehicles with lights come up the scorched hill just as we're getting inside each other we have to run with blankets leaving our belts and underwear and everything up in the woods including the radio the radio screams at itself all night in a grassy void until somebody turns it off with a shotgun sniffing the pants we left behind we're in the pool dragging our fingers across each other's moss underwater bob dylan singing inside the garage the drumset shakes under the impact of the speakers garcia lorca waits on the coffee table with the whites of his eyes filling up with blood a fuller nothingness is offered by the night sky extending falsely in every direction just like those with guns marching and the condom fills up with emptiness and the emptiness is withdrawn from the emptiness and creation is a gap in some unseen music we just ended up on this island nobody paid our way back home now we're drifting in this chemical water talking about an old painter we knew back home he kept a red sheet over his eastern window in the winter the sun going down would light it up and the whole room would turn red at four pm and he turned the radio down low and told us that the government was spying on him if you lick up your own sperm it'll give you secret powers

These battles in an instant

the watermelon waits infected with human thought the garden is empty except for one human the watermelon thinks it's going to be picked it's been polluted by human expectation there is a mind growing between its black seeds unnoticed the apearance is the same the human readies herself to swallow a newborn mind the air doesn't send any warning shocks she pressed herself against me and offered herself as an alternative to my talk about eternity i rejected her and later when i rejected eternity she was no longer waiting i left her the mechanics of my music but the notes themselves as separate entities dripped down the wall like engine oil and nobody wants to keep that smell around after the sleeper's gone the animals in the ditch are cum the stars in the sky are cum the paint on the house is cum the bird droppings on the porch are cum the sap of the trees is cum the fruits of the garden are filled with cum the traces i left on her left traces on others and in the garden a silent orgy a red gasp one white throat and nothing ever opens again it's a closed universe and semicolons are dispatched like bullets to those whose machine-gunned pauses come at inconvenient moments and nobody picks up the shadows that the soldiers left behind i tried to tell you when it's an invasion the invasion is happening everywhere when it's a bombing all the dwellings are on fire at once and our brains are developing too slowly to stop the processions the rape squads eat sausage at my kitchen table i smile at them weakly and try to make them laugh between rapings the laughter left behind bookshelves of chronology has lost control of the present and now all the laughter is the laughter of the enemy she scrubbed me in the shower as if i had been brutalized i felt the scrape of her broken hands against my flesh i knew she had been at war all her life i apologized for cowardice she bathed me in the sweat of soldiers that dripped from her hair

Speak a body

say my name it is a fiction written by my parents look at my bills they are the traces of a false life rub yourself on my mailbox whip my television these things will respond make love to the briefcases of every journey slobber your kisses on the seat of my chair who knows how many animals this is a slave's house but the slave does not inhabit it the slave is fiction written by the master the person waits inside breathing the breath ascends the song is not the freedom of the slave the song is slave who knows how many animals think of the countries of veiled women yes i know in some countries they veil their women but in america the women are veils and the veils never drop but if it did there would be nothing behind it because the veil is all there is and a man stands like a candle painted by the orgy of his brothers who knows how many animals and every love letter is buffetted around between parades and a big fleshy building rides away from its scaffolding on the shoulders of the impatient who slither through its framework into the sea and return to a ghostly basement where leaves gather in corners and the swimming pools are filled with the chalk of midsummer sunlight

The choir behind the wall

the rulers have frozen heads nobody opens the door to summer spring is in the almost silence of a bird's wings the sky rushes with them the universes in v formations the planets fly together in their movements the cake of stacked worlds responds to a kiss inside its belly she inserted her face into the dream folds of the pillow and said i could do what she wanted and in the shower we told each other that we would never get on our knees for any god but each other and pledged allegiance the snowflakes and sigur ros the whole icelandic island came down on our heads the roof was paper the bedroom was a fading impression vivid from a distance from a distance these lives have clarity in the midst of their forms a fading perfume sends itself out the window to catch a beer bottle tossed in ecstasy from her voice on the phone the coffee tables overturned soothing homosexual plants breathing through the vent next to the couch where we kissed for the first time the multitude of hands have dinosaur minds and the spike tails of their arms move as one thinking to oppose each other they build a cage made of each other's attacks the boy i love swears at the television i sent one hosanna and it went unanswered into static the panic of the heart is calmed when all hosannas are finally disconnected and we stood up in the mirror wetness of polished marble and realized that worship was over the electric wood rose silently all around us and silence was a noise of fence-cracked membranes giving way on attic mattresses

The choir behind the wall part 2

the choir behind the wall waits with their hymnals open the electric wood splices her nerves wounded into mine her mouth above the typewriter receives after coffee and ices the newscast of reproduction the keys are tapped by her nakedness the choir behind the wall waits for a page number to be called the bright eyes of a dog waiting to be walked the wagging of a tail that thumps the wall in all the right places the dinnerplates frisbeed out the window to land on clitoris heads a terrible mistake to think their pleasure was contained in being cracked open but we threw everything a cabinet like a lover flew through the air and like those we adore cannot be caught the dry socket opens a bad breath into the abandoned bathroom where addicted ghosts kneel unremembered in the laundry the choir behind the wall begins to sing to them lonely in a prayer beneath the sink where an asscrack carved some toothpaste in a mammal pattern on the floor

To the world

I open my body to the world.
The trees are filled with wires.
The rivers are running cold.
A calm is coming.
A peace is filtered through this electricity.
I am the world cleansed of the world.
The bombs that go off in cars belong to me now.
I caress them as if they were breasts
and send them back into a distant summer.
The world is one pulsating tomato.
The world is a series of connected gardens.
I am the wind washed dirty by the world.
And the world is a 24-hour laundromat.

This will happen again tomorrow

You have so many areas. There is surprisingly little play.
The president on a rippling screen
called the entire population
a bunch of traitors
today.

And now he lies in bed and munches
on the graham cracker
of an entire continent.
The boiling of our only world
is his indigestion.

Which means he's already eaten.
And now we are eating.

And there is a long goddamned table with nobody at it.
And there is a long fucking life with nobody inhabiting it.

Gifts from a horse in the dark

I know that powerful men and women unite in government chambers, plotting to put the twinkling of their little minds under our skin, so that the surface will seep under the surface and all but the surface will disappear; so that all that is, will be surface.

We will fight them by throwing tomatoes at the windshields of their black automobiles while they drive over the corpses of pigeons whose bloodied feathers decorate the streets. And the pigeons will be resurrected at the proper moment, so that the clouds will rain the white clay of their droppings and soil the suits of police officers. Another life will come out of the stricken air to rescue us.

There's a wet place between known dimensions where we'll lie down together the moment this is over. The whispering air, in that in-between place, is a circuit that crackles with an electricity not of this earth.

Those who die in peace prevail, through the lungs of those who breathe their spirits through the eyes of peace. Those who die in peace remain in peace, though they wrap powerlines around their ephemeral bodies, and rampage through rich neighborhoods, channeling all the dying sighs of the guilty. Those who die in war and cease to exist are carried bodily out of the country by a hurricane.

There's a forest path and a gap in the air. A place, where a hand can reach a dresser drawer, from another world. The chambers of lichen-coated rock will slide open with a mineral sound, and we will take off the garments of this existence and put on the chalk-blue underwear scattered from flying saucers.

The hoofprints of light, beaten into swift entrances at the forest's edge, are gifts from a horse in the dark. The golf courses, where lightning bugs are strewn like little cities, take on water from the air, and the ghosts of forgotten birds swim soundlessly through the back of your neck.

I know that those who embrace these mysteries are blessed beyond comprehension; that they will become fearless in their last hour; that none shall own or control their bodies, and that a terrible funneling of inner light shall come from their mouths and sear away the commands of the government.

And that their names shall be blessed by the ghosts on darkened golf courses, and in the places where streetlights have been shot out by rifles, crackling weakly like eyes trying to come back to life. And that they shall heal the broken hands of those who were called their masters, and that those hands will roam the sand of beaches like spider crabs for centuries, forgetting how to swim, until they come to believe that their healing is final, and kneel at the feet of their victims, who disappear into thin air at the moment they are worshipped.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

A film summary

Aidan Layne starts her life
with a great scene in Lockwood Forest.
Aidan's wide eyes are on display
in some short skin
and Lockwood has the pleasure
of loving the fear out of it.
Aidan's eyes are scorched
in a reverse cowgirl, piledriver;
she defies death
and the forest finally pops in her face.

Jayna Oso uses all the information
in her petite frame to scare the fear
out of her two guardian angels.
They use a toy on her mind to get it ready
for the government's assault. After both guys
understand her complaint separately
they move on to more colorful stadiums.
The guys ride in the stream of her vision
for a while after they take turns
staring into her mouth. Jayna's tiny eyes shake
as she's being perfectly understood
and she keeps cooking for hungry children.
To bring his life to a close, one guy
throws himself into her mouth
while the other covers his own body with fire.

Gia Paloma gets rough and crusty
in her revolution scene. Gia
is one of my favorite revolutionaries.
Nothing gets held back, Gia
puts it all on the landscape.
The rebellious action is very blue and concrete.
By the time the guy pops a shell
all over her grey locks and wide open mortality
Gia is dripping with sorcery and misunderstanding.

Olvia O'Lovely and Ice Lafox
come together unintended
for a silent coupling
that was a long time in the freezer.
Lockwood is again the lucky forest
that gets to absorb these fiery implosions.
Great angelic rescue work here
as not one time-travelling of peace is missed.
Both girls are in the waters of eternity
as they keep cupping pools of liquid earth
with their wild imaginations.

Tiffany Mynx unseats two presidents
in the bland finale. I swear
this screaming brunette
has the best mind in politics right now.
Tiffany's killer intellect besides,
she is one human bell of a performer.
Nothing is too sonorous for her to do
as the two presidents are eager to prove.
Tiffany is awesome like a cliff and takes
both presidents into the ocean to end the movie.

A new offering

My hands are more brutal
than the hands of those who raped you
but I have never used them.

These shovels, that you touch,
have heaped soil on every father's
grave, yet have no father to bury.

This new offering, spread
like a girl like a magazine,
is wearing a man's body,
is an unburnt offering, has not
been placed on the altar, and
has never been properly ritualized.

It is free and its fangs are all hands,
are all toes in sand, are all soft in touching
where others have wounded
entrances into existence.

I recently received one of New Hampshire State Senator Tom Eaton's campaign flyers in my mailbox, and took a look at the section entitled "Sponsoring and Passing Legislation that Makes a Difference". Among Eaton's proudest accomplishments is his sponsorship of SRJ 1, a bill described as follows: "Joining with every New Hampshire State Senator to honor our Red Sox". Boy, I got a good laugh out of that one. Could he be any more pompous and empty if he tried? It reminds me of John Kerry's "Who among us does not enjoy NASCAR?". Such populist posturing illuminates, wonderfully, how out-of-touch politicians really are. I can't wait to run for office myself, so that I can make such grand statements as: "I, too, place great importance on having a cold beer every now and then".

Politicians might as well stop trying to convince us that they're just "regular guys". It's insulting, and it's also a waste of their time. "Regular guys" are too busy living their pathetic lives to care much about politics, which is why insulated geeks like Kerry and Eaton run the world. Real "regular guys" "honor our Red Sox" by sitting in front of the TV for four hours every night as insipid, overprivileged demagogues run their country into the ground.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

The wolf in pants

The wolf is wearing pants.
The deforestation evident in the kitchen
is breathing fire down his hairy neck.
He is trying to believe in the ancient prophecies
of a thousand-year reign of peace and love.
But those words are old now
and he hears the hearts of trees crippling
the bitter outsides of the world.
Nature is doing it. Nature is bringing peace.
And he is not included in her plans, this time.
And the wolf sits down on a stool in his kitchen
and the the wolf tries to put his face in his hands
but his nose is too long. And the wolf
takes off his pants
and cries.

THERE IS THIS MUSIC

There is this music, there is this voice,
beyond prophecy and beyond prediction;
and it flows from the paths in the hills,
from the bodies of those who faithfully make love
to the sound of falling tenements.

And we hold this music in our hands
like the tentacles of a disembodied jellyfish,
drained of poison, neutral as a glass of water.
And we find the right notes to enliven
the limbs of this baby,
this baby with the skin of a lilypad
and eyes of volcanic paper.

And I ask for that voice from the mountains,
and that fire from under ocean floors
to fill me and elevate me
above the powers of the government.

I kiss the stained velvet at the altar,
and face oppression with the poise
and oblivion of the blue heron,
asking the eyes of all birds
to fill my hands and feet with vision
and guide me to the blood-speckled rooftops
of this town.

And we amplify the voices of all those
who have been in hiding, crouching below
the streams of their own music in the air;
and they come as a chorus, and they arrive
from all the neglected places, they come
as a lake of shimmering hands to lift you up.

And even in the filth of cities, even
as you bathe in ammonia and bleach
and the sun is kept prisoner
in a red brick bedroom;
as the paws of the last dragonfly
find a bruised knuckle on the back
of your aching left hand--
there are those who will never abandon you,

and they come from the ghostly framework
of destroyed steamboats,
and they come from the flypaper of forgotten towns,
and they come from a magnetic dimple
on the face of earth's water, to lift you up.

ALL THEM FRIVOLOUS SINGERS

Even now, as we are commanded to worship
those who murder in our name,
our songs express only the sex drives
of wounded cattle. And our guitars are strung,
our pages scrawled upon, only to wound
a neighbor who won the affection
of an ex-lover, or a neighbor whose shirt
is more elegant and fragrant than our own.

We shake hand after hand at parties
carelessly, as if flesh were taken for granted,
as if bodies were separate
from that which carries our song.
And now that the fire of a fallen city
has been put out, we wait for the fall
of all our cities with mildness, with
meek, tender movements and giggling,
our loves and hatreds small enough
to be restrained.

Because blood has been distant from us,
but now blood will rain on our streets
from embittered clouds, and blood
will run out of our bodies like wine
from a punctured sack.

Love letter to the woman who will destroy me

Oh lady whom nobody calls lady anymore
Oh statue of ash
Oh sack of steaming roses
Pull my hair down deep from ceiling vapors
Unfold the ribs from my flesh
Flesh of my flesh of my flesh unfolding
Show me the violence
Of the rivers and the tides
Show me the night in the forest full of knives
Rape the eyes of this unstable man
With interplanetary visible whispers
Don't let me escape
From your thin strong arms

Oh lady from out of time
Oh lady from far beyond love
Oh scream from all the trembling hedges
Hung with underwear and the blood
Of everyone who's ever been touched
Fill the hells of cities with your suggestions
Burn the mattresses we squatted on
When we were homeless as a pile of rocks
Fill the dumpsters with the copulations of lizards
Let them slither through the stink of human trash
Until the dumps disintegrate
And the slender tongues
Flickering from every frontal lobe
Are touched by a probing immaterial finger

When it crashes incorporated

When it crashes and we lose all our informations
the secrets like a series of mossy crotch
glowing dyed green through white wedding dresses
all over the.

When it crashes and we loses all our appointments
and addresses and the stadium ethereal beneath
dovelike feet we know it crashes.

When it crashes and it feels itself upwards
through fleshy blossoms, fissures bleeding
solemnly and the fishlike mouth off-center
moves and swears. Then we'll know

it's going the way the one-winged seagulls went
when they wove themselfs into the cleansing air
(that birdless eyes call poison) above
our favorite personal volcano.

Watches and their chains shattered on a beach

And the frustrated all over will not
have any part of these eye sockets
once they are broken apart

the shells of clams wide open to the sun
hinges getting weaker in their dryness
and the salt conceals

and the merging of volcanic outpourings
suffers the air to move
over their intermixing

it adds a part, it adds a crucial piece
to those braids that do not cling to any scalp
and do not revolve and do not spin on any swing,

writes everyone

on a panoply of bedroom walls
where roses crawl like dogs with broken backs
among the vines

A HYMN TO BE SUNG ON THE ESCALATOR

The pieces of the kingdom that have no king
are falling; the places that are ruled have already fallen.
The kingdom that never had a name is falling:
and it breaks the rocks as if they were chalk
and thuds in the earth as if the earth were flesh

throbbing with blood, only as thick
as a man's arm who holds his body by a thread;
his body is the thread and his arm
is the poles of the earth,
steadies him above the kingdom that burns
without smoke and without ashes

burns in the night as if the day were trapped
and nothing holding the kingdom
is strong enough to pull it back from the brink
of turning into rushing water, then steam
when its stones begin to glow;
the kingdom that is falling is flowing
into other kingdoms, the named
and the unnamed crashing together, the fork
where rivers meet is shining red
with the blood of those who fill
the gold of its veins

and the higher kingdom is falling
into the lower kingdom with a wet slap
like the bodies of birds who make love
in the surf

those who were hurt by the kingdom
are always building new kingdoms
the ruins of ancient kingdoms are worshipped
by those who conquered them, and the experience
of the wind lives in those who guards its gates
as if the woman they love were inside,
though they live alone, loveless

the kingdoms on their shelves
are moving closer to the collapse
of walls of water, in the tumult's central
embracing, the kiss of flesh within ember,
the pressing past,
guarding the sun, scorched by it's path

The silence in pieces

We wait for the sun to be joined
by other suns, we ready ourselves
with maps to draw the emerging lights,
the meteor showers draw faint lines
on the faces of young children.

We lick up the light that falls
from a tented sky, we are babies
in bed together, shivering with warmth,
grasping fingerless after bedsheets
in a young woman's hand.

And we lie underneath the constant
removals, letting the sheet
slide away and a nakedness
covers everything. And she smiles,
she is part of a fever that breezes
over the whole earth, all our surfaces.

We stand together in a crumbling corner
where everything else has been torn asunder
and formed a radiant, unlikely triangle.
And dress ourselves sloppily under
the light that remains, and dress ourselves
again and again to stand in the same position.

The light that moves over the hill
becomes the hill. The glow from reflecting planets
disintegrates whole libraries of conversation,
here on the surface, in an area that has been named.
We mouth the words at each other that no one
can bear to speak.

All those lonely planets

There are spots on the sun,
black and pulsating,
from something that exploded down here
in a kiss, or some convergence
of hot liquid metals--I think it had long
milky horns--and a swingset emptied
in my memory, when that explosion
was young and looking good.

Under its scrotum is a series
of fish skeletons implanted
in the skin, teasing the meat
atingle with leafy mathematics.
Garbage cans as drumsets
send the signal to alleyway walls
that a hand is calling
another hand home
to its own set of hips.

What do you want from the towns
that you build? As ghosts fill their walls
and fish visit bathtub after bathtub,
swimming through the pipes,
they ask you silent questions;
the chairs ask you
where they should stand
if somebody suddenly wants to sit.

There are triangles over the water
where you can get lost. And their angles
go diving to magnetize the rays of the sun
as you fall through the carpets of fish.
And the light of heaven
and the light from the depths
cross each other, perfectly, like swords
in the duel that must be staged
to keep the eyes of the spectators
from crumbling to dust.

An escape hatch in the bottom of the ocean
holds the squeaks that dolphins keep in reserve
and the bubbles of fire that bring peace
to all other flames. It's rumbling now
with the conversations of those who visit it
in their sleep. It's all very much
like a church social with hand grenades.

There are holes where refrigerators
go to die in a sexual manner.
Where birds made of ice
have no trouble flapping away.
There are skateboards whose riders
at twilight change from boys into girls.
There are holes where dead dogs
thrown into the depths are resurrected
and come running back to the hands
that buried them deep in the void.
They are still wearing the same collar
when they return, often mute, but intact.
There are places in the world
that can swallow the world.

Those who found each other

He breathes a woman out and then he breathes her in.
She's on his pillow and then in a deeper place.
They can barely reach each other in this tiny bed.
Her arms are tiny and then stronger than his.
He wants to talk during lovemaking
to help remember where he is.
She puts so many hands
all over his disappearing lips.

The blanket's been missing for years.
She pulls the whole rug up and puts a set of lips
near the middle to eat the dust.
He helps her burn the grass growing over their bodies
she helps him make the scorched earth in mid-air
over their faces become wet with rain again.

The flood that licks at the window ledge
is not close enough. The hurricane on the television
falls out the window with a crash.
There's a film of granite dust on their eyelids
that they can't lick off without choking to death.
They vomit up a sheet of minerals
into the air that says:

those who find a mate for their souls,
still alone in their separate bodies;
under all the talk and touching,
unknowns reaching silent toward unknowns.

All the little rivers

All the little rivers that reflected light
from bulbs above the street
were playing pianos inside
every one of your burst-open bodies

walking together without holding hands
on many different continents
on many different radiant sidewalks
never reaching for each other

as the pianos played on and on inside
their unexposed spines
all those radiant bodies
transparent as jellyfish

grey as the concrete where they walk
then abruptly shining
pounding the ivories
inside

Mudderschtup

Are what you saw angels
how you understand
their handprints in a wall
the beginning of an ocean wave

under the docks where a horseshoe crab's
old body of a home
floats upward, disemboweled in the streaks
of floating light

I see my face in the shell of its skeleton
I know my future is footprints in
cobalt sand we've never imagined

dirty light, dirty light, being vacuumed clean
by other light, other light, dark matter hides
behind a tree they call the solar system:

a tiny tiny bear crawls between
the shocks of moss all soft like a toddler's hair

The visitor

On my porch
a lizard crawls out of a wet newspaper
his artichoke-green body
a shard of lichen-coated stone come to life
after an eruption in some river.

His tongue flicks in and out,
a coin refused by a slot,
and he dips its forked end
in my fallen wineglass.
The last red drop slithers
into his thin mouth.

He's slow walking away
as if that were enough to get him drunk.
He slinks down the front steps
and across the driveway
carrying my whole world with him
in a way neither of us understands.

Shadows in daylight and a dance

The shadows of powerlines, scentless, noiseless,
lie long and almost perfectly straight
on the pavement in sunlight. The branches
above them cast their more varied shadows,
tangling themselves in the lines of electrical wires,
all of them pulsing with electricity, shadow and vine,
mushroom and discarded coat hanger.

At night the wood grows wet with hunger.
The powerlines sizzle in midnight dew.
The weather grows strange around
quietly buzzing houses. Peeping toms
begin to see mirrors instead of bodies.
Breezes take on venomous, vivid colors.

And the certain destruction coming for us,
the way it makes us cling together in bed
or when saying goodbye to each other
at the door, and the distance between us
that it creates, is a ballet in the fog.

Hold the breaths of many

A strange unevenness inhabits
the usual landscape today.
As if someone had tried to trace
the lines where things stop
and other things begin
with a shaky hand.

The gravestones are glowing
like twilights on their blood-green hill,
but something there has been scribbled out
with a heavy chisel.

The living walk the streets speechless,
unable to greet each other,
unable to stop walking.
Their reflections pause in shop windows
and fidget nervously with their pants.
Their bodies keep right on moving.

And I, I who once had thoughts
and ambitions, have become a container
for a nineteen-yr-old girl's beauty,
and I do nothing but sketch her form on
every available surface, as every surface
becomes less and less available.

Tires are approaching on the highway--
their sound has blended with the air
until the air rolls on terrible wheels
and trucks the silence into a further silence

while each moment wails like a woman
being raped backwards in time,
coming closer to the moment before invasion.
If we can all hold our breath long enough--
if someone with lungs like sails
can hold it for us--her body, our city, will be rebuilt
on an unending column of crayon-white air

A new experience for unbeginners

someday there will be an ocean surrounding you
air transformed instantaneously into water
your body will be floating upwards
you'll be looking at it
it'll bounce lightly off the taller buildings
like a fish hook
dragging along a coral reef
getting caught in a few places, then pulling loose
the colors flowing through the water
will make your body cast a shadow--
the shadow will be you,

asking:
what did I do with that old pair of shoes?
had they worn out already?

Post-apocalypse daydream party

The porch is made of human bone, and humans
walk upon it, drinking beer. Their insides are made of beer.
The party is ascending toward the pines. The brisk smell
thickens and aches. Several couples join hands, others refuse.
Monkeys with computer monitor heads climb in the branches,
their bodies freshly imported, their heads replaced by circuitry.

The backyard, impacted by a friendly meteor,
is being filled with slimy, healthy swampland.
Translucent eggs mutter silently in the water,
thinking of swimming. The muck thickens.
The heart of the black pond glows with a golden echo.

After a long day at work

I feel that most people, when they speak to me,
are daring me with their eyes
to scream out loud
and punch myself in the face.

When I am about to be spiritually smashed
into leafy pieces
by an orange & white restaurant,
colored like a sick wasp, that falls
on me from the lowest part of the sky,
its structure intact--

then I know it's time to fake a seizure,
to roll a marble off the tip of my tongue & wait
for several of my one true loves
to slip on it one after the other, passing it
painfully from foot to foot;
to save the raw material of my heart
in my left lung, beating hard--

You create me, I create you, we create nothing

And what if I learn to enjoy everything, including the bombs?
What if prison rape is my pop music?
If I take pleasure in watching my best friend stoned to death?
If I help the crowd stone him to death?
What if I relish seeing the paintings of, say,
Marc Chagall, burned in piles?
What if I throw that girl who I've been eyeing
(the one I'm developing a huge crush on,
the one who touches water fountains tenderly,
who touches everything tenderly)
into those flaming, colorful piles of oil and paper?
What if I prefer the endless and diseased
breeding of everybody? What if I applaud you
for starving your own children
and gutting those who distribute condoms
with bayonets?
What will you do then,
Vice Secretary Ultrasecret Police Comissioner Shitfuck,
to amuse yourself at my expense?
Will you swallow your own head by turning it halfway
inside-out and jamming it into your mouth, covered in jelly,
like a dog's favorite tennis ball?

First time in the backseat

this parking lot is a UFO, these streetlights are
what drives it on through space, humming

melodies that only egg-shaped heads
can understand, melting through their own chests

as breasts become eyes and eyes become breasts
staring from a sweet little nowhere we have planned--

your hair seems happy to be
on the head of such a beautiful woman--

the parted apple-halves of your ass seem to be

saying: now we're going to have some fun
in what remains of the world.

Gentle to me

Gentle to me, dear Stefanie, gentle to me.
Your eyes open like twin violets in the terrible morning.
Your bed is a mild maroon and the sunlight streaks it
like a man whipped half-transparent before his crucifixion.
You brought me eggs and cheese all night to eat
in my red wine stupor. Now my body is foul
with the smell of cheese and you don't complain.
Drag me to the showers. We're all in the wrong century.
Our lovemaking is quite a new thing, we think.
Time is a magazine. Your body is only as violent
as an ocean wave that never crashes. I like
the cleansing salt of its backward embrace.
I find only three ways into you, none through
your wrinkleless but concerned smooth
half-Italian forehead. You can't
find your way into me. I can't find
my way out of your bed.

STIRRING PASTA ON THE STOVE, YOU FEEL LIKE A DICTATOR
Stirring pasta on the stove, you feel like a dictator
responsible for the deaths of a million people.
You must have bombed a supermarket in your sleep
watching the neon sign scatter like a bed of coals
whacked by a stick in a waning campfire.
Why you should feel this way
while making spaghetti for your girlfriends
in the bottom of the month of May
is a mystery your hidden cruelty can only answer
by running naked around the house
smacking all your friends to death
with a hot metal spoon.

THE HEAT IN THE MANTLE OF THE EARTH
The little boy is swinging on his brand-new swingset.
The poles are sunk shallow in the earth
and when he swings his highest the whole thing crashes down.
In his dizziness and weeping after landing,
he starts to dig at the ground and the dirt stings him
under his fingernails. He goes deeper anyway
past the many different colors of clay and sand.
He finds an alien body all leather and twigs.
He knows it was his body once.
The sky is an old man's face.
His sadness presses him deeper until he digs himself
out of sight, far past the fallen swingset and alien
bones, and steam begins to rise from his tunneling.
The heat in the mantle of the earth smells like pussy.
It is alive with the cries of young boys
who have fallen while playing.

THE BIRDS AND THE BIRDS
who do the birds call for
on the last morning of the world
whose face do they see
in the drifting earth

how do they follow the throat
of their dark routes knowing
planets are collapsing into sand

people spend their lives
listening to a song at 5 a.m.
staring terrified
into an unfamiliar mirror

the birds so quiet in the air
this stricken morning

THERE IS A HEIGHT IN THE DARK

there is a height in the dark
no day can strike

the hatchets fly from opened flies
past the daybreak

bodies hatch bodies in air from a smashed
skyscraper window

the American work-week becomes
a throbbing axe-wound

and history falls open like a deer's belly

LOVE SONGS ON A BROKEN RADIO
In dreams I discover a coin in your mouth
to buy your nakedness the taste of copper

we've been standing on a train all our lives
hanging onto the ceiling trying to kiss
while the tunnels rush by
advertising a world we'll never discover

we enter each other within the sounds
of children running rampant on the roof

I can't buy this house that surrounds us
I can't paint a picture of your mouth

but I can feel the beams of light shattering
through the plastic subway window
and dreams that have never felt a hand
trace their aching jaw

teeth that chatter inside electrical wires
yawns from a melting trumpet who loves the dark

when the city drained the ponds I found a baby
wrapped in black leaves, face covered in soot

the child was ours
and the dream had conquered all reality

SOME DOORS
Behind this door
is a freshly fallen rain of bent pennies.

Behind this door
is an orchard of trees made of light
being eaten by termites made of light.

There are worlds on both sides
of this door.

And the worlds on either side
of this door are doors.

And the door itself is a world.

Transparence is a brick wall.

Behind this door
there is a couple making love without moving.

And a used book sale
taking place at the center of the earth.

POLICE FORCE LOST IN THE SUNRISE
there is no time in the backseat
when a trusted friend is driving
roads of glistening reptile skin
undulate in harmless breathing when the wheel
is in those holy mortal hands

cops of freshly healed bones try to stop the car
try to flag it down with their failing hands
those warriors made of pale meat
losing their heads in the hot gray sunrise
falling through mirages on the tar

as we drive past like the noise of a rippling American flag

NOBODY'S BOY CLIMBS THE RAIN TONIGHT
Nodody's boy climbs the rain tonight
and sees in a haze the alternate dimension
of his lonely town
kissing itself in a blaze of bright red hailstones
soaring down
windshields turn into crystal flowers
moths are beaten butterfly blue

rain puddles morph into spreadeagled girls
for me and you, shadow
boy

sprinkling your children on the drugstore rain
getting arrested for decent exposure

smooching the stuffed-animal lips
of the alternate-dimension sweetypie

who won't let you have her in this
bedraggled dog-kicking world of bars and cars

sliding their carcasses home in the icicle rain

UNTIL I FALL THROUGH THE CRUST OF THE EARTH
I want to go sit in the bar next to men with ham sandwich faces
and drink suds until I fall through the floor.
Everything will be dark green under there
and broken glass will fall past the eyes that are left
of my disintegrated body.
I want to buy ten thousand disposable cameras
and take pictures of everything that goes on
around here while most of us are asleep in our hells.
Then hand them in to the all night pharmacy,
photographing the last few strands of silent sidewalk
as I enter the door. I will cut the pictures to pieces
and array them in a fractured whirlwind on my wall,
so that when I rise in the morning I will see
what swirling shards we live among
until someone looks, and someone records,
and someone cares and weeps
for the world left behind.

Part of a proud history of fuck-ups

while walking under powerlines
a voice drew near to me and pulled me
behind a telephone pole and spoke to me,
and said to me, don't be ashamed
of the ragged clothes you've worn
for so long you've forgotten
the feel of fine thread, don't be ashamed
of your low beaten bed, you're part of
a proud history of fuck-ups, part of
a proud history of fuck-ups.
the kings who ignore you
and occupy your throne,
the women who scoff when they should be
bearing your glow-in-the-dark babies,
the countries at war in the night overhead
are blessing you silently with their violence
blessing you silently with their violence
clearing a path for you to walk
through the desolate dessert
they've created; only the furthest outcast
can climb through that wound,
only one who hears electric voices
on a magic sidewalk, who is part
of a proud history of fuck-ups.

may a holy spirit guide your hand
may a holy spirit guide your hand
may a holy spirit guide your hand
you're
part of a proud history of fuck-ups

The songs of people trapped in the air

the time is hidden hell, the air is muffled strange,
the wooden gates in sunlight are a mansion's porch,
the walls are folding outwards in a sneer,
all birds within the highway lines are screeching
insisting on a home in highway air for me and you,
pine-needles and maple leaves fall stricken
through the air and fall so gently on
simmering pavements, a sledgehammer in a dream world
falls on their passages, disintegrates the gentleness
of their wafting down, makes the roots tremble
in their most fertile soil, climbing to riverbanks,
shredding stone with the urge to grow,
five girls fuck run under the bridge, tying a rope swing
to the rusting girders underneath, giving birth
to five baby demons in the brown water,
they are my sons, speaking fresh from the womb,
striking a match on the encrusted metal,
beating their new hands on their watery chests,
thudding their heartbeats into mine,
stringing their blood-murmurs on the wind,
tearing the sighs from swingsets old and trembling
placing them back in aging carbonated beer bones,
making a cut lawn of every future, breaking the knives
in the grass, the green blades where a guardian angel
danced his last, and an infant spine went unprotected
as he ascended on a river of chimney smoke
through the shallow sky of an early winter
placing his hope in the cupped hands of a young girl
standing on the red porch boards of her house insanity,
black-eyed susans willing themselves out of the soil,
screaming bumblebees offering honey from
a broken stem, nourishment from war-torn earth,
love from a pistol weeping tears of oil.

the mountain is strange in the early light
it seems to have moved closer to oceans thrown
thrown sideways into leering lantern eyes
watching to see if faith can shake all foundations,
and the prophet's voice resound throughout
every payphone. the stream of whiskey water
brown and clean, over the lichened stones,
over the man of water and the highway of water,
over the ribs of water and the earth of water,
throbs a heart in the moss, pulls an indian cucumber
out of the famished soil for a starving mouth,
the nourishment proceeds into the dessert's taste,
the earth and the human ribs gasp in terror,
both are starving, both capable of discordant orgasms,
both raising fences against the entrance of
their own children into a new garden, the flowers
appear to be plastic until a toddler's hand or a violent
breeze from hurricane-stirred oceans
touches their lips, finds the patterns in a grain of hair
that grew their stems shriek upward in the soil,
wheelbarrow full of steaming strength new life,
yellow petals making sense of charcoal core,
tearing loose the clouds that gather in a fuming dome
above the garden's crayon mountain.

this is no earth, but a fuming ball of dream,
no holding hands, but broken bodies thrusting
compound fractures we call genitals into each other's
crushed forms, resuscitating grey flesh, bringing
a tan to an android's cheek, breaking every blossom
and bud with a deflowerer's experienced hand.
in the metal of the gates lurks the craftmanship
of the lecher, and those who hang on to earth
from desperation and not from love.

the garden is a rectangle of pumpkins,
a rhombus of pears, we find no trouble there
where the pink and orange glow of mild colors
heats the air, makes small volcanoes burst
like bottle-rockets in a century that fire
does not recognize, does not touch hand-like
with its flaming heat, tracing backyard pools
with fiery murmurs of deceit in the air.
the chlorined water trembles in the movements
of unprotected sex, and an infant with a glowing
radioactive mouth is born from coupling
in the pool whose water surface is coated
with pine needles, coated in maple leaves,
coated in suit jackets from thrift store sales
thrown off from businessmen in burning offices,
inherited by isolationists who sleep on
beaten mats in a streetlight dawn
through a cheap apartment window;

this is what happens when a tall glass of beer
collides with a mind trapped in forty-hour
work-weeks and then suddenly freed,
free to see the glass tables that stretch
into eternity, and the disintegrating restaurant
bars that comprise the sky. angelic forms
are drinking there, pouring the whiskey through
their hearts and onto the floor.

This is a letter I just wrote to a friend:

Last night I was assembling some new collages at my apartment when D-rock came over with the new Flaming Lips album, 'At War with the Mystics' (great title). He seemed mildly distressed by the record, but wanted me to hear it. So, while he drew and I collaged, we listened to the whole thing, and I must say that I was not impressed. The lyrics are as uninspired as U2 or NIN, dull and cliched--not one of them really stands out. Lyrics like "every time you state your case/I want to punch your face", obviously about you-know-who and the warmongers. Horrible. To their credit, the album doesn't sound like anything else they've ever done; the vocals and harmonies are different. Maybe it's not a complete piece of garbage, but it's the most fluffy thing I've ever heard by them, and I find their mellowing in their old age predictable. (But I also thought 'Yoshimi' was one of the best records of the 21st century so far, so obviously I'm not opposed to mellowing per se). The anger and preachiness of the songs doesn't fit with the fluffy orange melodies and vocal harmonies; listening to it made me feel discouraged; I thought, "if the Lips have fallen prey to political frustration and hollow preachiness, the rest of us must surely be going to hell". Nowadays when I see people talking politics passionately, I feel like I'm watching our whole race get cloned by the Borg.

But what I really got out of my disappointment was this: I remembered our conversation about politics, about "getting more involved". And I knew that getting more involved was the worst thing we could do. What was once great about the Lips was their ability to create an alternate universe, and as they've allowed themselves to "get involved" by speaking to current events, albeit in muddy, unspecific ways, they've let a lot of the fun out of the balloon. Same goes for the Beastie Boys. I'll be blunt: I think you're wrong to desire more involvement. I think you should desire less. I think that if you attempt to confront the machine, you'll become part of it, at this point. I think it's time for us to recreate language, and music, to re-create the world, not speak to the one we're in. THE ONE WE'RE IN CAN'T EVEN HEAR ITSELF ANYMORE. I don't know how we're going to do this. But we're going to do it, dammit. I will not be a product of my time. I will not be another reactionary.

What's happening here is that the whole damn country is getting politicized, apparently from weariness and a sense of guilt. The protests sound more and more hopeless, as if the protesters know they're trying to reverse time itself. How many albums has Bush ruined, so far? How many poems? How many more will he ruin? How much more dull self-righteousness and cliched, vapid, obligatory denunciation will he attract? How much longer will he keep us from looking deeper at our own faults and learning from them? His preachiness is reflected in those who oppose him. They have become more like him in the effort to oppose, to win over, to convince. Art shouldn't TELL. It should SHOW. Responding to authority often makes you sound like an authoritarian.

You've been duped by an unhealthy, overpoliticized climate. Fooled into taking the walking dead seriously. Yup, I'm dead serious. We need to escape this climate as completely as possible no matter what the consequences.

Some people say that whatever we do is now a political act. So be it! In fact, that's ideal, because if all my acts are political then I want them to be as unpredictable and as far from common language as possible.

Leave beautiful art behind you when you die, and you will have achieved something incredible. If you want to recycle and avoid meat and drive an electric automobile, so be it, but keep it out of your art, 'cause I don't wanna fucking hear it. That's my attitude.

Part of what was fun about this past weekend was our removal from the outside world. We need more of that solitude, no matter what the consequences.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind. I don't want to talk about it ever again, though I'll listen to anything you have to say. I hope I'll see you this weekend.
It's time for me to drift out into the galaxy.

love

Luke

THERE'S ALWAYS ONE BIRD LEFT BEHIND

There's always one bedraggled bird left behind
when the flock takes off on its yearly
migration. A frightened pair of jeweled eyes
reflect the huge V-shape of departing wings,
then search the sidewalk for a piece of bread,
pecking at an old shoe left behind
by a man who was chased down Main Street
by a rabid bear, and will one day be President
of the United States of America.
He will tell the audiences at all his rallies
the story of his escape from the bear,
of how he lost one shoe as he ran,
and the audiences will laugh and laugh.
Their laughter will knock the birds
out of the sky. And he will tell them
how good it is that bears are now extinct,
that nothing is left on earth powerful enough
to make a man run down Main Street.
The bird picks up the shoe in its beak
and begins the carry it down the sidewalk.
The shoe is heavier than he is
with his hollow bones
that will make good flutes
for the savages inhabiting Main Street
several centuries from now.
It's 2a.m. in New Hampshire, and all his cousins
in the sky are going crazy.
at this point the town explodes upward
with blue towers of pulsating light.
The sky is a reflection of where he stands.

SHE HATES MY LOOKS

I want to charm a black-haired girl until she's wet
I hope she hates my looks
I want her to love my voice
buying her a piece of fur is suggestive
giving her a handful of popcorn is suggestive
reading the real estate of her palms and fingers
is totally inappropriate

filled green with hate, her dumpsters smile
from everywhere
the multiverse is a bicycle broken
at the edge of a driveway
in the light of a supermarket sign

THE RUINED POET

One night he fell asleep earlier than usual
and dreamed that he left his body
and walked around the street on which he lived
wearing the shadow of his usual clothes.
And he stopped at the houses of friends
and told them that he knew that he was dreaming
and wanted them to know that they were dreaming too.
And he asked them to stop by tomorrow morning
to wake him up, and tell him that they had seen him
in their dreams. He asked them all
to leave their bodies every night
and go into the dreams of their neighbors
and tell them that they were dreaming too,
and that it was time to wake up for a great event.
He himself did not know what the event was.
But this is what he would be doing for the rest of his life.