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