we can kneel against birches
just minutes after you crash your car
the snow can turn warm
and squishy in a fertile moment

a gelatin of wasted seasons, under a concrete bridge
where the nuclear seasons move fast
under a crimson sky and a predictable cloud

the girls can drive their pick-up trucks
into boys on a ledge that overhangs the city
they can drive their cars into boy guts
and drift and hang there
after their engine hardness has totally died down

we can find a hill rolling halfway up the trunks
of palm trees that feel their trunks
being caressed by softened fibers
of guitar bodies
smashed and softened by the sea
wound together by their fallen strings

for Olivia

One day
we were in the back of the video store
looking at porn together
trying to find something beautiful
something loving and aesthetically pleasing
and you kept loudly denouncing
the films for being so stupid and degrading

you were the only woman in the room
and I was the only young man
and the middle-aged men all around us
fidgeted nervously because of your words

and I loved you for it.

I walked past the video store today
and looked at the posters: most of them display
the women that the world considers
its most beautiful. They are nightmarishly blank,
their flat eyes horrify me. And you with your
heartbreakingly gentle hands, you with your
elegant eyelashes, you with your naked eyes
trembling, are not here.

When we make love to each other,
our spirits go marching through
an alternate history together
arm in arm.

Your body is a sleeve of reddened light
encasing me, keeping me free
from the greys and blues in loneliness
of all the worlds.

And I let my body pray
inside of you, pray dearly,
pray to the laws of your faint
flesh, to be kept by you,
to be visited like this only by you,
to be kissed and satisfied only by you
in this cloakedradiant place which is love.

Sleep, my freckled doll--
the evil have their appetites,
but ours is greater.

I miss your strange chin
and your strange ears.

I'm going up
to the woods around a mountain pond
to weep on a rock and think of you.

She did nothing wrong
and nothing cruel, but
nevertheless

I have that wonderful Leonard Cohen feeling
of having been really satisfyingly
fucked over by a woman.

I can touch living things and cry out for them;
I can eat cheap and rotten food, and live on desire.

I can move around on the flying Earth
and hurl my tears onto things that won't move.

But I can't cling to you, a fellow creature;
because you want to be free of embraces,
the embraces that you used to want.

I can't make you want to live, to seek,
to plunge amazingly, into this thing, me,
which is waiting for you.

I just want to watch you move around,
touching the things that surround you.

I just want to be in your presence;
I want to watch you from behind a tree
where I can quietly sob
while you move around in your yard.

I want to watch, because my love
is not welcome; I'm not allowed
to get up close and close my eyes
anymore.

There are suns in other galaxies
that stun the mind. If you moved close
to one of them, they would cleanse you
of these half-longings and turn you
into a pure desire. But here on earth,
if you don't have any money,
falling in love with someone who has money
is terrifying. Because you can't follow love
around the globe; you can't afford
to track it with jetplanes
or move through its massive atmospheres.

There is a place in the heavens
inhabited by a strange star.
I live there, with a greenish glow,
now that you have broken my heart.
There is nothing for me on the planets
anymore, the creatures are on a landscape
that I do not comb or farm or copulate with.
Since I do not live on the land,
I can float with my eyes in front of me,
and see anything coming that might touch my body
and slice it away before it comes too close.

in my dreams my friends and I
take our cameras into the mountains
and snap pictures of our genitalia
laying up against mountain rocks

in the winter sun, shrivelling in the light
the army comes to steal our cameras
and chase us down off the mountains

into the land of parking garages and quick restaurants
where we try to find a darkroom to lie down with

and a lover leaves her camera
on the floor of my rented room
where I have assumed a false identity
that has become more real to me
than the name given me by my parents

I carry a grey heart in a pail,
over the wooded highways.

Over the roots that break tar,
I carry my heart in a grey pail.

I am going to throw it into the water
where the river intersects with the wooded highway.

I will throw the bucket with it
and let them be carried away by the stream,
and may they smash into something good.

After the war, your bed.
After the knives, your legs.
After being beaten by police with shields, your kiss.
After your bed, the war.
After your legs, the knives.
After your kiss, being beaten by police with shields.

This is the song
this is the song
this is the song
this is the song
this is the song
about the death you won't have to die
for the people who aren't required to be people
for the aisles mopped by morons
with the hair of morons
between the pickled morons
in the moron morning
picking idiot pockets
and arresting itself with hungry police
as the fleshy current rises toward the ceiling
this is the song
this is the song of the everyone
channeling through the shrunken driveways
standing stunned at a window
while the familiar blood eats meals inside
at the blood table with the blood stories on the wall
going sane while the staring outside turns into a human.
This is the song you won't have to sing
to the people who won't have to listen to it
to be smacked flat in the pages of a book you won't read
while the orange turns to pink in hazy near-nothingness
while the children turn into dandruff
on the grassy downslope.
This is the song
for the hardly songlike
disintegrations
and the forms that seethe out of them
like a fleet of tadpoles
in a lifted pond.
This is a song for the horizon that becomes a landscape
when the landscape drops out from under it.

I'm taking my rubber body down to the river factory
to be covered in splotches of bright metallic pink;

I'm taking my body to the man-factory; hey you,
you take your body to the woman factory: I want to press my mouth

to your woman-parts and praise them with my tongue;
and let you take my man parts in your tiny mouth

and let you clench at them happily, with your
whole being; I'm taking my rubber body

down to the river factory, you, you meet me
there on the warm presses.

brush your teeth on a high bridge
lower than hell in a city
eat match factories in semi-sleep
apply for the terrifying jobs
stir harsh chemicals under
dying dancefloors
in the starving night
convenience neon
lit up above the gas pump
open the frozen twilight
for the homeless who don't
fly straight, into the suns
of other hurting planets
while the solar systems
groan toward their origin openings
kitchens pouring
through sarcastic night
we jack statues off
into the thawing twilight
trashcans gossip
old towns talk to cities
in the uttering dawn

A heap of broken houses
a heap of torn skirts
a heap of old red bricks shattered into small triangles
a heap of ice cubes in a snowy driveway
a heap of martini glasses chipped and foggy
a heap of powerful people
sinking teeth into each other's entrails
a heap of stones covered sloppily in blue paint
a heap of ocean photographs with colors missing
a heap of sideways bedrooms
a heap of old haircuts and new haircuts crumpled magazines
a kaleidescope of cleavages, buttock & breast
a heap of vinyl discs, a heap of tar clumps,
a heap of unused pebbles,
a heap of broken houses with people in them
pretending to be whole.

There's a note on the door that can't be read
and a room breaking open under my soul.
And the all-night birds who won't sleep in the living city
have a grave to peck apart. The silent smaller birds
who surround them are making their way over a continent.
The all-night birds don't see the continent
but the shadow-birds guide silent birds over it.
The scent of your love is in the cube
on the tip of my cube-shaped nose.
The jewelry of trees is hiding madmen in the lawn
from a computer light.

After the officers raped you
we had to learn how to make love all over again
without thinking of all that policeflesh;
they pounded their wars into us
they pounded their hatreds into us
they made the continent metallic
all under our flight from the law.

This could be our shared house
twenty years from now
or a tiny hotel room on the edge
of a contaminated city.
All we know is that it holds the love that will be bones
and the blood that will run
on the fences of all the world's kings.

There's a
there's a stunned love under the people's river
where the
there's a stone in my lung.
There's a
there's a small snag in the cloth that you wove
where all the tiny animals come in.

I have a hole in my face called my mouth,
that I have never used. I have a mirror,
that I have never cleaned. There are paths
behind my house that I have never walked
to mountains that might as well be heaps
of garbage fallen from some other planet.
I have a hole in my face called
a world where I will never live.
I have a fag in my brain
and several botched political careers
with purple curtains.
I have a hole in my life called the sun,
with several minor embers drifting around
trying to take the place of its tongue.
I am opened like a thrown orange
on a city sidewalk, waiting for raccoons
and garbage men.

Short Story

lying on a mattress without box-springs,
on the floor of an apartment.

how she was when a wave was crossing
the street near or through her. And about
her on a heap of undulating trash, halfway up
skyscrapers with her vulva opening.

An ocean of trash, tossing, heaving, a world
of candy bar wrappers. He plugged the lamp
nearby into the outlet at the head of the mattress:
he wanted to look around at the room
to make sure he still noticed how it was,

while he thought about her opening up wetly
on a mountain full of trash. I need a town,
he thought, where the candy bars don't outnumber
the shopping carts.

Olivia, you're my favorite creature,
I'll build a porch for you
and you'll build a porch for me,
on the hips of one another's blueprint
lives. We'll barbecue separately
and then together, when our lives move
into their near apartments.

And I want to embarrass myself all over your body,
unmarry you, Miss, so your name stays cute,
carry an umbrella to your sandy sun
while baby elephants play in your moving shade,
and move your lemonade around on a blanket
in the early moon.

Powerful morons have nuked our future
but the present disasters leave movies and beer
relatively unscathed. There will be a party tonight;
at some point I'll separate from my friends
and stand on a dark front lawn,
running a flimsy claw across the horizon.

There will be a death in the water
and a kiss in the apartments.
There will still be a few pets, instincts
broken by humanoids, that haven't run off to die
inside some prophetic vibration.
There will be a warmth in the crust,
there will be heavily protected sex.
We'll fall in love just in time
to see our lovers frozen to the sidewalk.

Powerful morons have nuked our future
and we'll pelt those powerful morons
with foam cups and napkins
while they scythe through us in religious airless
ness.

In the future there's a parking lot full of motionless cars--
we're dead there, but we're alive here--
nobody in those cars is waiting to pick us up.

You left your dress hanging
on the back of my favorite chair
but I won't be returning to it;
I won't be carefully removing the dress
and hanging it in your closet
for you to wear when the cars stop moving.

my mind is dripping down
Greg Devlin's ladders of gold

it's a fair trial from the underground
you'd better wake you up seldom to survive

bomb concert
nobody ever gets overground

it's in a deep toilet past
it's all past the ass

of a dearest thumb
twitching in a grain

where the best animal suns itself
rebirths ugly on a slim salted mountain

banned concert
in the megamegadome

nobody gets in unless they's financial
-ly inspired, hurt small

--into large--
by a spider.

clever metal figures
fine-working sleeves w/brains

can whine about fuck about something
when cats will be there

& a book will often fall out of a book

without the blood stricken
within the blood stricken
dry
as the desert runs away with dessert
and the open are croaking
in the oven hum.

The shadows of trees across your naked body
turned me into a little boy before I could kiss
the bright spaces between the branches

shyly I put dandelions behind your ears
and touch your lips while you sleep
on a neon orange blanket in the bright green grass
twilight seeps in around us while the squirrels
nimbly finish what's left of our meal

Your nervous music crawls
through the grocery store your nervous music
moves around the pickles in their jars

your nervous music blurs the faces
of my oblivious enemies
as they order their meat from my soul

your nervous music on a telephone porch
kissing unexpectedly me makes me loving when
the rooftops are drunk in a war of headlights

your nervous music when you shockingly love me:
I fall off a barstool and end up president of the world

a linoleum ocean smeared with violent lipstick
comes up to meet me and I
rent a room from your nervous music
nervously bringing my instruments into it
sniffing a rug on fire

I'm a freak afraid of being abandoned
you're afraid of not being abandoned
let's enter hell. The stunned people
will meet the liquid people on Main Street
and fly a plastic dragon in the bottled-up air
just above their heads
as the sky thickens and the toothy mouths
move up and down. There's a fishing line
with a hook in both my chests
pulling me upward over the crowd,
and a fleet of psychotically chattering pumpkins
arranged on scaffoldings
near my other bruised head.

There are pigeons who used to be turtles
under some ancient sea. Their beaks and their eyes
tell our magazines to go under the earth.
And a glossy page turns in their eyes
and a centerfold opens in their mouths
as we toss a bread into that bird void.
Those skinny tongues moving up and down
and a pillowcase trampled in the street
from a bed that fell onto this planet
where our matrimonial house
was supposed to be. Our clothes are dirty,
we grope towards the flesh that was broken by police
in our Asian bodies
so many other continents ago.

I'm going to die on the road, walking away
from a war my parents started with everything.
There will be a bird in my hand, I will cross
a ray of light and it will come to life. The pebbles will dance
like severed clitorises going back to their bodies.
Desperate to love each other
terrified to love each other
the sands will escape through my lips
and a gut will fill with human things.
The narrative pulled through my navel
will unwind and come back forever.
I'll paint horses with neon
in a dim field outside your bedroom.
We'll have a narrative here in the grass,
a basso profundo voice will munch away
on its cud. And the bird will peck a hole through my hand.

hammer comes down and I'm not here
in a whirlwind of leaves
stunned on the avenue

hammer comes down in city
I'm in a country tree
crying at a mushroom
cloud

hammer shivers the river
hammer falls outside
many dotted lines

There are mutated frogs
singing normally in the river
there are wine red stains on my rug
and the parking lots glisten with smashed glass.

The homeless shelter where I used to stay
is right next to my house
and if I fall out of my house I'll fall back into it.
But that doesn't matter to me now.
What I want is a lot of money to kill the evil people with,
to bless my friends, and to buy musical equipment
that will make all radio stations explode.

I want to tear the satellites out of the sky
and monitor the behavior of the dead.

2 boys waterfall

between 2 waterfalls
2 boys lurch up wet out of wetness
and see a blackness moss mouth
opening under the running water.

between 2 waterfalls 2 boys say
in the dark--under the ripples--
show each other a finger inches
above the brown moss squatting
--the blackmoss mouth talks--
the wet teeth break open--the world
flowing out of the soaked chalk cavity

2 boys rowing the world
in a wrath immediately
behind them--in the green moss
the first orgasm of 17 years.

sing for those in bodies who are trapped alone
telephone heads
alwaysringing
surrounded
by those who can't seem to see
your reptilian tongues of beauty
snickering quietly as you strut
across linoleum oceans
awaiting a kitchen counter on the other side
where someone with pie ejaculates kisses
so calm

telephone trunks in the deepest
pines pinning sky to a cloud
our backs can't see while we stare
through slug trails of mucus
on freshly fallen green leaves
at another half-transparent earth
through this earth through this earth
the bending ecstasy of roads
the dirt derailed there
under the tunnels and paths

sing in a body for those who are alone
trapped hard between bodies who can't hear a music
in their smashed branches
laying upwards and awake
in a whirlwind of hot summer snow

and in the sigh is a ship
descending oceans
through bodies of birds
filled with sunlight

and in the bird-filled bodies of sunlight
flesh is the only rapturous

layers of sand pushed apart liplike
by a transformation
in the dry places
in the longing water
in the clay under the swingset
looking up a churchskirt
the sigh is a ship
moving backyard into the ferns

Her every footstep rattles beetles on thin trunks
She's on the floor of the world
the knobs in her joints
like chickenmeat being broken
each fingerlong step illuminates a tarred kitten
every baby in a bush is sprouting from a dirt future

but a bananaskin hand comes out of the tender muck
for her footcuts to heal on in a limping moment
and an egg like a rock could roll in her cup
for breakfast in a forest, former driveway
while the rain rolls in on lizard feet from a closing sky
and a vague form with enormous breasts
comes out of the laundromat on rollerclouds
and she runs into her like her mirror's breaking
------------------in front of her-------------------

her presence is a small knife in a milkshake
her promise is twelve sparrows in a dying bush
her hands are clean
and blood runs through them like a silk

green world

oh the pill--oh the whiteness in the throat--
of the ferns lewdly green wiggling,
insane backyards & soft ribby hinges
in guts that stayed fleshy still
all through the war in a huckster's wail
bottom of the night
feet reading brail
on a moving wheel

tossed throatwar back & forth
between 2 moons
in a swingsetted backyard

oh rain pebble
oh them same rock apartments
falling through
the newsprint air
in the labial merging
in the hurting flag
athletes fuck
themselves on TV
& hack the finest fibers from the mean

In the next startling chapter, ladylike,
you lower your original body onto me
while helicopters whirr
wonderfully overhead

now that this has started many other things must end
wonderful things that have been happening must stop
many horrible things that have no significance must also cease

(before such dramatic lovemaking starts inside)
helicopters plunge into the tall grasses, breaking

everyone sleepily running
for the life of a horrible baby
suckled like a root in the air

children on the shingles
grab their garbage bags
and hop
into some garbage air

it's a seething ride down

with pebbles already
imprinted on the palms of their hands

note: This poem is the most succinct piece from my new collection, An Oyez & Thirteen Purrs. If anyone would like to have this collection in their pants, let me know in the comments section.

CIRCUMCISION TIME

we are going to remove just a little bit of your penis
just a little piece of your penis a small chunk from the tip

don't worry about it this is standard procedure
if you protest we will make it clear to the world
that it is you who are disgusting and hysterical
our scalpels are clean and efficient you would be dirty if it were not for us

Edgewood Hotel

Confuse yourself with books, until nothing's left of you,
then throw yourself into a shallow pool.
There will be a girl waiting, there will be a wine
improving, and a fish to be fried in the muck
near the bottom. There will be a girl waiting.
And the wine moving gently for years in the muck
near the bottom, brushed by the fish as yet unfried,
meant for the hands that now recline
in the sun at the crumbling circular edge.

Read books in a sun-lashed room with draped pianos
until there's nothing left of you, until you bathe your friends
to kiss them cleanly, and move the mailbox into the hall
to bring the mailman closer. The hosts divide the house
and the parties get hotter and smaller. The counters
are covered with fresh-sliced onions, and oven fans
keep them moist but the chef is off somewhere flirting.
The customers about to be hurt unaware at their tables,
the waitresses wringing out tears in meathooked freezers.

And a lonely chef, done with the men and the gentle
ladies, asleep in a long final kitchen
with a small television, snoring towards death
while short-lived ferns pulse
lightly in the trash dump on the plunging hill
where the cooks threw their leftovers
when all the buffets ran out
and noodles clung briefly to birches.

delayed command,
machine wants
a different kind of user--a different kind of touch--
and the mouth it puts on
is a humanoid in lipstick

machine wants a simple chaos
to make it a mossy blur
in the corners of controlled gardens

the machine wants to turn brown
and machine wants an orange to be rolled into its mouth
it wants to explode peacefully inside
another machine
the machine wants kindness
it needs kisses to breathe

mounting her on a wet picnic table
the pure spouts clogged up with leaves
nobody remembers the rain inside the rain
nobody pounds on the door underneath

stripped in a latenight latenight
frogs on a concrete globe
veins in the backs of animal hands, electric white
oil pours down the freeway
oily hands grope oily trunks of trees

outside a lunatic cuddling another
lunatic, the nights tick on simultaneously
never touching the clocks, never touching our backs
with their aching oils

Not document

There's a girl waiting in a tree under an airplane
ramming through a cloud in the Carolinas.
Our telephones are eating through the air
toward each other. After all the religions,
after all the politics, there's nothing left to do
but let the oceans fuck us
and let time pull out our hair.

Grandpa doesn't fish anymore.
He looks sad in the livingroom.
Who's the bigger mess for president,
an uncaught fish asks.
The mirrors are not new,
but the rooms in the mirrors have changed.

My love, and my love again lie down
(my love, and my love again)--

I have woven you a crown of black-eyed susans
and lain leaves of pale yellow
on a dry
carpet of needlepine

tonight
look up to your starry origins

while life crawls endlessly underneath us
and I make love to you
with all the colors of my mouth--

(my love, and my love again)

while the taste of half your life is in my lips
while the fibers are raging underneath us
to be kissed by disintegrations

I think of the circuits just above my tongue
I think of the rushing of blood, I think
of two birds falling out of you

touch your mouth
with the mouth
you have re-made for me with your mouth
and the seeds rush in from everything at once

*****

Now that you have re-made my mouth with your mouth
now that you have re-made my hands with your hands
now that you have re-made my chest with your breasts
now that you have remade my rough belly with your smooth belly
now that you have remade my prick with your cunt

the music is quieter in the air
but it's rising in volume again
the music descends
but it has hands to pick us up
now that you have remade my music with your music
a bird like a note pecks hard in the back of our head

I'm glad your kittens

for Jentri

I'm glad your kittens
are comforting you: one on your belly
and one at your feet, one on your face
to make you gigglesneeze,
one purring uncontrollably
against your neck.

They are circling
your hurt vibrations, part of a music
humans made.

I am too deliberate to be a cat,
and the slight gracefulness
(in less fur) of which I am capable
will someday receive a beating
from the police. And the cats
will climb all over me.

The ducks,

The ducks, those perfect little machines,
leave flames in their wake: each trail
of feather-oiled ripples roaring
with fire all over the water.

An old woman pulls up in a deranged automobile
and throws them bread and the meat of other ducks
from her window. They smack their beaks
and narrow tongues together slightly
as they pull the morsels apart, flurries
of meat-eating ducks reflecting in black water.

The woman leaves with an engine snort,
the ducks get stoned on her fumes,
then take off leaving trails of fire
across the limited water.

When I see what a girl you are in your steps,
when I see that radiance coming,

when I stop on a small piece of metal
and gaze out over a cracked parking lot, full of parked music,
[while I'm holding you
and looking over your shoulder]

when I see you being such a girl with the back of your neck

I hurt to be a better man, with big hands on the nervousness of your love,
I yearn in a small bucket, I enlargen the world.

I read
about the lives
of desperate,
brilliant,
lonely men

men who died alone
lived alone
fucked alone

and I know that I am one of them
and it makes me happy

And there is something in you that will not be contained, that,
and there is something in you that cannot be housed, there is
something of you that's innate in an airport,
that makes breakfast in handcuffs,
there is something,
there is a,
there is, there is,

there is something in you that cannot be held--
something alone and amazed--
something handless on a bicycle--
something riding over a stone in the crater of an evening--
an eyeball in a broken
cup something, and a grey muzzle
and a bloody tongue,
a red shawl and a rack of teeth

there is something in you that breaks
out at odd moments and eats--
that sacred, a rat:
there is a death in you that is on fire.

A rabbit, a remnant,
a thing too young to run away,
ears transparent in the sunrise
(her veins lit up in pink)
a stupid little furry thing
chosen by time
to break my heart.

In my human life, I was like a beaten dog
bearing his teeth for the last time.
The rabbit doesn't run; it feels I know
that life is finally over.

On the path to the supermarket
draped in mist
we eye each other
until a human
on a bicycle arrives, (horribly)
and drives the young rabbit away
while running over me.

She was a little bun of leaves
wrapped in a cold afternoon
organized around other buns
bruising her tailbone on a front bumper

while the radio had a baby and the anvils
cried on the hood with their weight
all illness carried away and under a pine's tent
by the body of a deer trotting through its last winter

brittle in the air of death, living

drugs help, nobody plays guitar
every yellow wants a buttock to be smeared on

(the paints impatiently], the wails trapped
bubbling and upwards in the throat,

the pants impatiently come off on slick pianos
the colors are distilled in an eye that once
whirled around three spokes of eye in front of a Hindu head
north colorado's dead

of the purple-haired none bred turtles
and the ordinance was passed through seventy smooth intestines
while a cat watched from a plywood table
leagues under the basketball hoop
and a lamp shined tight as an onion

DECLARATION

If raindrops of soda go down through his cranium
and fuse his neck with the sidewalk

I will go down my alley on a salt road
and bring him a thin hallway
with dry hair on its walls.

If taffy clouds are in his escape mirrors
there will be time on the plate
and a sound in the bottom of the funnel,
light green.

There will be, at the end of a long living chair,
two people (a nonsensical couple) kissing
hard.

DECLARATION 2

There are these in the love, these objects:
a ball of wire stained with blood, now pretty,
now a safe object. And the silver shines
inappropriately, as if preparing itself
for a celebration of the life that coursed
painfully through it, the cells in its interior

and a sheaf of dark black papers
folded so many times their landscape
is a dueling pile of lines, while the faucet runs,

drunkenettes, and the self-stranger, in the floor,
re-constitutes himself for a final victory,
before the earth and the people in the earth
get tired of their solitudes.

For there are these in the love, these people;
these sucked through a burning forcefield
into a clamor of ultrawhite light, and hairless
on the otherside pursuing one another, mating
in stacks of hot grass.

oh, equals in the lips, so finely disguised,
a tall wanting, a petite wandering, two pigeons near
the ice wanting, a desiring wide on the ice
the fire, the brilliant hurting,
who can make a peace cry out with a hurt sword,
the rug, machine gentleman like, the couch split,
the luxuries offered, the rent hurt,
the crawling on the stairs stifled,
the desperation frocked in minutes,

all the commas that skin cannot but have,
a hurt multiplied on porch abysmals,
a depth in summer, of shadows,
near a crumpled playset, a swingset
focused magnetically, on a hand digging red clay
underneath, the skeletons calling

and the flesh on their newish lips, not quite alive

a solid ham of woman
thick-hipped with a big stern wedge of a head

stomped on my bag of potato chips
on the subway car's
quickly moving floor

my chips exploded under her foot
like a dried old sack of kid skeletons
blonde shards landed in my blonde hair
and she picked one off (pulling a lot of hair with it)
popped it into her mouth, and said
"this is new York, faggot-ass".
I almost liked being sworn at like that.

Yes, she was a big wedge of a woman
fist-fucking all the tunnels in the world
with her terrifying body

Mint cities, into death's silver,
the splendour of so many dogs on so many hillsides,
tucked redness, flickering green, touched redness,
fingering lilies, misplaced octopus tentacle
shoved suckers & saliva down
the open mouth of a rose.

Yellow cities, linked hallways,
hand-holding briar-walkers sporting an oath,
holding dim coals in their hands, black hallway
reciting. And the church alarms, and the grope
near the water fountain, and the secular bells,
and the magazine racks covered in wilted magnolias.

City horses, country horses, stunned ices
covering stunned ponds, smooching with bare lips,
lips barer than the first human, naked in a naked world,
and the baby-pink bats so gently
floating over the corners of the golf course.

Blue cities of the undamned, blue fountain
allowing a yellow flame between such frozen plastics.
Poles of frost are standing next to other poles of ice
all over the graveyard.

In the forks of trees, vagina-tight, a force is hopping hot
under many leaves, the air is staggering through
my nervous system, all driveways are smooth & open
to the entrance of cars. There is no ugly reason now
for worlds to end.

And the truth of a lemon, the layered yellow,
the yellow into white, the beach-chair experience,
all wetness wetter than any skimpy oath,
a girl in summer, locker room metal, drummed
by a steamy array of half-broken hands.

A loyalty shattered neatly into fourths, three bulks
re-united, a bicycle silence, a humming,
a humming in the dragon flys by afternoon. Rotten
place to start, but, a sandy shore re-opened in the fog,
rocks with bitter chemicals in their frozen bellies,
broken under a chisel in the certain rain,
the rain chiseled open by a brighter littler rain,
the rain-birds flying.

Forgotten built people a concrete river,
corroded into beautiful
long after their absence collided with town.
Many years after beauty had begun to sink in,
stupid people tossed garbage & unnecessary rocks
into its long tongue
and the slithering stopped. Pass me that beer.

Gulp, I am going to make your body music,
I am going to watch you closely, with total attention,
until you become very attractive to yourself.
I am telling you this river about the story
because I know that you will very beautiful
before (during the years
of your ascent in radio static
and your parent's obliteration) become:
your absence collides with me, beautifully.

I'm going out on an icicle to see a hard little world
all you ancient skinners
gather around me as I howl
there is a storm in the tea cup
there is a storm in the rain
there is a storm in the storm
on a plane skimmed
by rice eyes
in a lunar week

all it can be is a pin
it can't go any farther
it can't sell its coin to a handless coin
nothing is holding its outward
nothing is inward in summer
summer is doors and an outward teeth
grabbing you elevator in
the teeth between a straw
the teeth between a--

eating, in the hollow shaft--

outside in a sycamore sat
outside in a sycamore sat
a Chaos cat
a Chaos cat

nobody knew where the machine was hiding its olives

marijuana poems for dickheads on hell
rang softly in bathroom hallways
while the engine ticked like a bug

the whole kitchen-mass heaved
in a clean white fur
pigs don't purr
they snuffle hoses
long in skin

I'm waiting on the darkside of your tailbone
pouncing on waiting rooms
with an old tongue

The kingdom wants, the kingdom wants,
the kingdom is just
a diluted batch of humans.
If you cannot see their up-close faces

they seem like a machine of god,
but they are not.

Sorry for you, the dog-whistle blows itself
and the dog smashes a window.
Your dog is a love coming for you between
(furry & frothing between!) all organizations.

He is licking at his own mouth, he is happy
to be a chaos, he does not know that he is a chaos,
he does not know that he is happy to be a chaos

and I love him
and I want to take him away from you.

I am worried about the heat flagged down by mercy
that makes red dust whirlwind itself
in perfect DNA spirals
on skinny country sidewalks.
I am worried that walking there
will fill my head with babies
and your belly with leaves.

And I am worried like a broken priest
when you come to me,
soft-bellied and sensual,
tense as a newborn crying.
I am worried that I will make love to you for ten hours
behind a guardrail
and make you very late in coming home
to all your other husbands.

And I want to meet you in a whirlwind
on one of those broken paths
nameless and alone, unable to see
one another, feeling in the powerful dark
sunlight.

I am worried that my voice goes on too long
in the wrong places, and stops crucially
when it would otherwise
become a part of your body.
I am worried that my voice cannot
love me in an echo from a woman's body,
and I beg you to shut me up
with your hands beside my knees
and your rear-end on my mouth
while you rip up the grasses, solemnly
like an angry child.

Who will kiss my sister's hands
and witness the wind through my brother's hair

and who will play the violin for them
when the violent go to bed

and who will pray for them
in the night sand

when the telephones die

and who will comb my tiny sister's hair
and care for the fracture in my brother's eye

and polish every rough to a jewel
as the sun is a radio sky

I hate that young man:
he wants her to keep his cunt
in her back pocket,
and he hears it laughing.

She is no longer slender enough
to move through a modern town
without painting a few smoky people
with her non-vital organs.

And I hate that boy:
when she feels herself becoming plump
with every movement on the sidewalk,
she also feels him, following her.

I want to take out the cords
from his excited neck
and watch him wobble around like a sick turkey,
trying to look at her.

And I want her to place her breasts, so sore
from being hunted, in my hands
by bending forward, to rest her brain
in my lap, while he watches from a wrecked triangle:
the brokenness of the stupid shapes
he's created in the air with all his watching.

the kingdoms of the world will try
to get their buckles onto you
(you've gotta steel inside
their infant firepower)

police parenthesis
put a hole in my mouth-area
so that my mouth can eat other mouths
in a mouthlessness without end

there are no kingdoms under you
there are no kingdoms over you

but who can stand inside their firepower?

the kingdoms of the world will fall
into a pulsing kingdom hole

but who can stand secure inside their longing?

and who will braid my sister's hair
and who will touch my brother's voice
and who will kiss the walls inside the ruins

Who in the trees
will come down to the beach
to kiss you in front of the sea
the sea that is covered in beautiful trash

While a woman in a blanket heals my wounds
and who will lay your blanket on the sea
Ms. Melody
and break your sister on the sands
while the radio plays:

And her epic fingers,
and her legendary torso,
and her feet smelling of limes my love
punctuated by sweet sounds dot dash;

who will stand behind the lens and,
affectionately,
let her pound her pianos with hammers
in a little boy's dream while the radio sleeps.

my little sister sleeps on the porch
(while we all sit inside, loving her)

Florida is a little blonde shoe
at the foot of her bed

while the antennas drown in sound
I kiss her dirtyblonde hair--

--pray protect her from the sound in my head--
pray protect, from the whistling also blonde

boys in the street
who whip one another with thin

shredded pieces of truck tires.
Then in the haze

between stations of light, the air;
the sweet air turns brunette

and all the crumbled systems go to war.

looks
like
you've
got
a

big
handsome
clitoris

step
inside

we'll
find
you
a
belt
of
tongues

what

was

the

first

word?

and, um, this is dizzying to ask, but

how

did

it

happen?

I'm
trying
to
look
dignified
and
serious

(as
if
I
will
be
important
to
futurepeople)

for
the
girl
who's
sketching
a
profile
of
my
big
nose

if
you
continue
to
use
that
facial
cream
to
make
your
self
look
younger

your
face
will
shrink
into
a
tight
little
rectum
of
mottled
and
distorted
features

surrounded
by
overly
conditioned
hair

a
head
that
looks
whole
bursts

and
reveals
its
brokenness

the promise of religion

I
can
put
you
in
the
center
of
history

with
your
dick
in
your
hand

how dangerous it is to hope

sunflowers on the roof
a mouth full of salty dressings

a hot shadow holding you in a hailstorm.

how dangerous it is to love

two legs that brush each other in a dugout
oil running down appeased volcanoes

the dark under the eyes
stricken with sudden youthfulness.

some
carry
prettiness
and
know
it

some
carry
prettiness unknowing

some carry the world
and of others who don't
some know it

some
prettiness carries nothing
some

prettiness carries
us all

everyone's fucking to forget the strangeness,

start turning your key in wet tar on an endless road,
crawl into your mailbox,
with blue feathers sticking out of your rectum,

the emptied pools are viewing us
with lucid emptiness
grey and invisibly stacked

cats are eating the tuna sandwiches
we dropped on the tiles
on our way to the hard empty pool
where our greater eyes were waiting
in the future's stupid blood

Crumbling agenda celebrations

Wednesday, brain-fuck the government
beautiful talented women are walking face-first into my cell
there's a church organ old in my wall
skinny supermodel doors open up like cellophane
the salad-making days are over
and we're on the edge of making sense

tell-tale floors are bleeding pagan sacraments
put both sets of labia in my mouth play that saxophone
movie floors
I am a young century with a hard-on
forming in an oceanic mouth

picture us far behind banana-filled dumpsters
making out in our army clothes
Thursday arrives like a thumb
each finger is a holiday

I dreamed all the oceans were frozen, (beautifully,)
that I led a party of children out onto the ice.

Some of the waves were still intact, caught roiling.
And the ice was foggy in its distilled, flat places
but the children pointed out creatures here & there,
visible & like paintings. And water began
to come up & down out of my eyes.

We took out our sharp equipments
& started to go to work on the ice, sad to disturb

we had a lab back there in the white dunes
to fill with thawing animals.

*****
--luke buckham

A RIDE

I'm riding forward with my ribs
on the handle of a shopping cart
down a long tar hill.

A little child in a bright blue jumpsuit
stands inside the shopping cart
gripping the bars with his tiny hands.

Every few seconds we grin at each other
I give him the thumbs up
the speed increases. Gas stations & haystacks
are melting & upending
on either side

and all around us
airplanes are silently plummeting
in all directions across striped acres of sky
their broken wings on fire.
This is all a great show for the kid. I like it too.

One of the wheels on the shopping cart
is a bit crooked, and it wobbles wildly
(the kid doesn't care; he giggles when we fishtail);
I have to keep leaning to the left to keep us straight
so we don't crash into a swamp
or roll slower into the snore
of the everyday world.

MESSIAH

There was once a town in which only one man was homeless.
Being unique, he began to think of himself
as the savior of mankind, but he often doubted his powers.
He slept his nights in a pile of cabbages
behind a local supermarket.
One night he woke up covered in rotting leaves and heard
a human groaning in the air. He went out to find its flesh.
And presently he found himself
on a street where there was no traffic.
On both sides of the street, stretching
as far as he could see in either direction,
were crucified people, nailed to the telephone poles.
Their groans of exhaustion and agony
were the underbelly of the humming air,
and their blood ran on the pavement, fingering
its way into cracks. He stopped to look at them
one by one, trying to look into their eyes,
but they seemed not to comprehend his presence.
And he spat on the feet of the crucified,
watching his saliva run into the lips of the wounds
on their feet, so that, if a road crew should ever
come along and take them down,
they would be able to walk again.
And half-asleep in pain-shock under
streetlights that looked like spacecraft,
the crucified began to sing,
and terrified their savior with their song.

Questions about water

What did the water say?The water said something about a great silence
before the greatest event of all time;
an event that is now unknown and unreachable.
And that a silence like that will never happen again.

How did the water touch?The water touched like a sleeping lover.

Where did the water go, and why did it go there?The water went up in the sky, to shield me from the sun.

Why are you slightly delusional about water?
Because I love water, and I want it to love me back.

Where do you go when you run out of water?I go to a closet deep in my house
and pray that the closet will fall down.
I pray for a flood to come in under the door.

Really?
Yes. I go to the securest place in my house
and pray for the house to be torn apart by water.

That seems harsh. When did you first find out about water?Very early on, I was put in a womb full of water.

But even Emanuel Swedenborg doesn't remember that!Whenever you point that out, I weep.
That is how I find out that I am made out of water.

Why do so many people talk about the flesh,
when the body is mostly water?They are afraid to remember
how quickly their life will run out
if that flesh is wounded. They must
convince themselves that the flesh is all there is.
They are afraid of the flood that lies waiting
just behind it.

What is your favorite way to drink water?Glass is made from sand; when I raise a glass of water to my lips,
I remember that I am drinking water from sand. I like that.
But I prefer to drink water from a small metal bucket.
I like the taste of water best when it is surrounded by metal.
That is my favorite way to drink water.

When you pour water into your mouth, it is no longer surrounded by metal.Someday I will be made of metal. Metal makes me
feel very clean and futuristic.

So there will be a remedy for the fear of water?When we're all made of metal, won't we be afraid to rust?
I can speak only for myself, and for everybody else
when I'm not feeling like myself.

But you speak for all of us when you speak about water, don't you?Sometimes I say foolish things when I am asked about water.

Could you explain that further?Probably not. I can only say that if you drink water very quickly,
you will get drunk, but differently. And that when we make love,
we mix our water with another's water.

Stop touching my leg. Why is there water and not something else?So that we might know that life is transparent,
and that we can see through it.

a chipmunk sniffing
at the meat left on the driveway
of my wasted lives
is more sharp-eyed
than any immortality:::::

fresh from a car accident lip-lock
my spirit walks on the ceiling
and thinks the ceiling is a wonderfully decorated floor

Two 2nd thirsty Madelines

have you my darling
hold you against storms & rashes

stunned in a blonde web of softness
stung by a tiny moon
that pebbles around all young on flesh

hunger my darling
heave you against ships rainwilling

torn in a black
arabesque brigade
hunted in aisles
misunderstood
by the oh-so-understanding

hold onto darling
keep politics out of her mouth
hold onto darling
don't let her angel rain in wrong places

hunger for darling
oh
baby it's gonna be hard, ride it

Today I am in mourning

for those who have nothing to offer the world
but an obscenely malfunctioning sowing machine

for those who no longer wrap the daily newspaper
in the body of a fish

for those who receive packages of frozen birth control
in unreasonably loud mailboxes

for those who cry hosanna to a politician who has nothing
but a tea cup inside his head

for those whose hymens are regularly inspected
by men wearing religious hats

and for those who have never gotten drunk with a genius.

And I celebrate my grief
by raking myself with urgent, spiritual penises

I drink wine through a radio antenna

I plan to liberate everyone
using my voice, my beard, my prick,
a multitude of brilliant essays, and
the two fingers on my left hand that haven't yet stiffened
from years of hurling snowballs at blind librarians.

In the time it takes me to reach you
you will be raped by approximately 35,000 robots.
Also,
a redneck who will not even bother to eat me
has installed an enormous reptilian vagina in the center of my chest
with a new laser weapon that he's very proud of.
So we won't be visiting one another today:
we won't be making love to each other's girlfriends
on a bright blue tarp in the backyard
while Elton John plays in the background;
we won't be cooking steak with mushrooms and onions
for one another, we won't be performing
oral sex on one another, and we certainly won't
be roaming the town at midnight, or taking photographs
of the very pretty skunks who live behind the local pharmacy's dumpster.

*****

--luke buckham

Heaven # 2

This armchair is covered with breasts.
I can't help sitting in it for hours.
A nipple pokes at my anus
and the hairs on the chandelier stand up.
Ferns guard the lower corners of the room
spiders build webs in the upper corners.

The chandelier dims. The spiders descend.
The ferns grow higher as steam
feeds them through the cracks in the walls.
This is the best air I've ever tasted:
someone is cooking a feast in a distant kitchen.
If I can wake up in time to walk through
the smashed television screen, I'll make it
in time for scrambled eggs with salsa.

PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A DEAD FISH

)you're floating in wrong directions, again dad(I don't have
a hand for yours to grab)your eye
is so dry in its stare, pike(I once had a mouth for you
[now it's going dry like your sight](the plate is soaring
under you toward, a rumor of light)I once had all to myself
a corner, of a field square as suns are round(th
is is the terrible end of all our dreams)th
is is a milky way with a black hole in the middle
hurling us around(this is a dad on beer)

These are intended to be song lyrics for a future musical project.

"Madame X installed a piano in the Alps" --Arthur Rimbaud

SEARCHLIGHT Luke Buckham

I've got a searchlight that goes on in my head
I've got a searchlight

bringing back all of our long-lost friends I've got a searchlight

and there's a bucket with a rim of frost
and there's a rainspout where the water comes down on me
and I can taste the shingles in the water
and I can taste the dust of long-winding roads

it makes a hallway
through the bodies of mercurial girls
it stuns pigeons as they peck at the lawn
it stains dirt pathways with a nuclear light
it scans a golf course and a forest and a high-school friend

and in the mornings it remembers the neon streets
it just barely casts a flare on grandmother
it sees the leaves falling on her folded hands
it sees the searchlight flicking on and off in her eyes

I've got a searchlight but it's starting to ebb like a star
and what's projected is a light dying at the source
I've got a searchlight that goes on in my head I've got a searchlight

I apologize for not posting much lately. I have fallen into a hole. Hole number six, to be not-quite-exact. It's damp and mossy here, and Pabst Blue Ribbon (voted best beer in America in 1893) pours from crevices on every side. I drink to keep from drowning, and to keep my typewriter relatively dry, but the keys are rusting and they sometimes stick, as you may be able to tell from reading this manuscript.

THE WASTELAND IS A WONDERLAND

by Luke Buckham

1 Entrances into eleven infertile women

Your homelessness darkens the air
as you stumble like a kite being dragged
and you're dragged over tinsel everything:
parks and ponds covered with tinfoil,
benches and playgrounds, churches and sidewalk,
all silver metals crinkle
under your every step. The town is torn at the corners,
everybody's watching the snowflakes turn into water
before they hit the ground, everybody's
kneeling in their closets to beg for the water to come
or recede, but to do either of these ridiculous things
very quickly. And not to push our porn out
onto the street where somebody might see it
and have a good time with our favorite images.
This is the first and last
private prayer of our lives.

The magazines flip open like hands falling asleep during prayer.
The closets open violently in a tin foil wind.
The snowflakes become more and more like each other
while nobody's microscope is looking.
The steeples relax and collapse more than halfway;
shape themselves into sleepy tits,
like the tits of a woman lying down
backwards worshipping shadows on the wall
while a man pulls on his pants
far out in the closeted distance.

A squirrel is at the window, his teeth are wine-stained,
he drinks burgundy from a saucer on our porch,
we're too passionate about animals
to poison him, we eat meat while we watch him
from our kitchen, the cold air
blows the linoleum cold as a politician's voice.
We leave handprints of heated lubricant on the television screen
and take our camping trip onto the roof, tongue-kissing
eleven big-breasted Albert Einsteins on the evening newspaper.

We drive the silver poles deep through the shingles.
We hear our house crack open underneath,
we hear the supporting beams give way beneath our hammer-strokes
and collapse as we make love into the kitchen,
the wind becomes hollow as the voice we make
apologizing for fucking strangers behind dumpsters
at polyamorous pizza restaurants. This is a part of our landscape.
And since nobody wants to sing about it, we cough about it.
It feels good like the tickle of a Japanese beetle
crawling down out mutual fund throats
in the bank account morning.
I wish another planet would come hurtling in. I wish a godless
unnamed would thrill us in our orbits with its dancing.

2 The party at seven

Lay down between six apple trees in the numberless April day
watch the beards of tyrants wet with your girlfriend
drift downward in a stream that carves through stone
while the sand is sleeping underneath; a planet waiting to be soft
under all its hard hard hard hard people people.

Multiplied in welfare brick, newspapered free of lips,
skyscraper windows, outwardly severe,
rub against sensualities untold from the inside,
offices exploding without style into a new and better night
of broken glass. And the greatest poet in America
riding the wind over it all in a hang-glider,
with his dick jutting out, twanging in a winter night,
invulnerable against the newscasts and the bombs
which happen indoors.

Your guitar waits in the barn like a destroying angel
frozen when the gardens spilled their profits on
surrounding grass. And everyone was happy to invent
three thousand beers, and play basketball with legendary gods
under a punctured tarp while the rain waiting in a sag
sang a song to its healthy daughter
just beginning to bleed between the legs

while the real river waited behind a thousand rhythms;
driveways take their cars like a virginity giving way,
the host is drunk, the sleepers on the grass
are eaten hollow by ants while pie is served,
the waitresses are drunk on absinthe
greener than the Martian skies, inaccurate.

3 An orgy in the convenience store

You have to lie down in the gutter and put your ear to a beercan
to hear this pirate radio broadcast; today: an orgy
in a convenience store cooler. Frozen deerskins
found stuck to six-packs, fur plastered solid
and unyielding against a wall. A powerful defrost was performed
and the sperm is flowing toward the roots of pines
in the streetlight-dazzled parking lot. Someone
is listening to fifteen stereos while a masked man
walks away with the drawer. The meat is missing,
and the spirit is stuck in an abandoned church,
while an opportunity goes wandering like a glass comet
to escape this monogamous half-light.
Drink inside two blue suns on a summer Monday
while the winter and its broken reporters are waiting
outside, their shoes frozen to the pavement
by teenager sperm.

Someone extends a microphone someone watches a hotel
slither like a snake out of their right arm
while massive electronics take care of the rest.
Someone brandishes a saxophone instead of a computer.
And the robots take off their kitten flesh
to become human children, they file taxes
in the snow and angels leap up around them
eating the beams of streetlight light light light
with animal mouths. A question that isn't asked slurrs
retarded frenzies from the ice plowed up in rivulets,
vaginal against the pine trees, while the phallic telephone poles
ask it a mundane question, and the answer comes
from a skull opened long before these debates:

when a man hides his fragility for a small forever
guns shoot out of his arms
his sex is sealed shut by a telephone wire
bombs thrill the seats that he rides to pink oblivion
and his seed runs in the aisles
of burning magazine supermarkets. It's a joke
that everyone gets and nobody dares laugh at.
And at at at at this location, you are the bar,
the drink is a stranger being poured,
the drink is your blood leaving your body,
you are a second stranger drinking it,
kissing a selflessness mirrored
in sands burned glassy on every beach
while the whitest houses last behind the dunes.

4 Singers on a stereo while we drown

The squirrel against the window gives his teeth
to the ice and doesn't know
his body won't grow back.
Against the wind of these inhumans
with their human music, he tries to make
himself into the glass. A sky comes in
behind his efforts and it's tiresome
the way the sun the way the sun.
Moves.

I can't hear Odetta anymore
through all these bathrooms.
The urinal is flushing her voice away in cheddar Vermont
sunrises and when this state does not exist
the boys on rollerskates in the White House hallway
call for a breakfast rat to make their teeth shine
in the fur of southern wind.

The sun in a tiny box of glass
the moon in a little slice of wind
a honeydew current runs
through sunbathers and newspaperreaders
on the beach and the soda machines are running like fans
every little girl is ready to leave her blood on the sand
every little boy is ready to be circumcised today
and burn the lens of manhood shut against the beach
and crack a soda high against the porch
of vinyl fantasies melting
around an orange electrical cord
(their slippered feet are higher than our unsheathed heads)
while Barry White gargles the underwater
and climbs the side of Hawaiin mountains
with his stinging teeth

--an earthquake!--blood with hands on our birth
blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands on our birth blood with hands the friendly animals don't know our hands blood with hands on our birth born we've hurt so many of the things blood on our hands born with blood on our they don't call brothers and sisters with blood on our hands born with blood they don't pucker their mouths on our hands born with blood on our hands against romances they can't feel with blood on our hands born with hip-hopping against the chlorine wind hands born with blood on our hands born disoriented by lips in the gym on our hands blood with hands on our birth the hymens popping like frog throats blood on our hands born with blood under needle fingers with blood on our hands born with blood on our hands don't make a difference to the animals born with blood on our hands

5 Two girls from far away are taunting the soldiers

Two girls walk into a deli begging gently for meat
one has a chin-dimple like that of a superhero
I tell her she should wear a mask over her eyes to accent her chin
one is spilling bright blonde potato chips all over the linoleum
with her cute and messy little mouth
one has blue hair the other has green hair I always fall in love
with green-haired lasses the bluehead's taken
and there's an immaterial war
going on under the linoleum--potato chips sprinkle the soldiers--
they look up angrily at the bluehead nobody seems to
matter much anymore but she catches their beaten attention.
They yell and the tiles,
once immaterial, now rattle as if they were the last necessary matter
on this whole kitchened earth. This is the first and last
public prayer of their lives.

You--not to drool while you're flirting--
press your groin against the cash register drawer
in hopes that money given
will drown lust before it turns into love
the television moans
like an old woman touching herself with a billy club
every day there are more and more cops and less and less gentle people
so many accidental loves make cracks in the concrete
from subway kisses...babies exploding like landmines
because this is what we must do
as the trains fuck the air
and the sheets of metal make their music far overhead
the sunlight seems to beat them into shape.

6 Think not to try too much about

The flesh forming on dinosaur bones.
The blood coursing through highway veins
like a series of inhuman symphonies.
To watch your sex be dragged into the past, I know:
the silver seems to blend into the gold
but it's all a metal nobody can wear.
That armor is too soft to put on cars
nevermind people putting bombs into other people unhappily
or in a sensual daze--the tanks are the same for prostitutes
and for weavers on the bronzed shores--make the world safe
for nothing but flowing alloys. The poison in the brewing
can make children in the air with demon hands
for the dead to defile. There's no deflowering when all existence
is a constant killing performed by virgin warriors.

And they cauterize the navels forming
on holiday oranges in defunct Floridas
while the speakers wail about fear and the products of fear
several products are not afraid
and they take their own bones out of the engine oil
and they start the motor seething with their oldest blood
while the grass turns red with easy summers,
and the newborn body escapes into thirty adulthoods.

Think about the baseball game, kid. Your mother raped an aspirin
with her toad hands and served it for dinner.
Think about the baseball game, kid.
Dinner is just breakfest for bohemians
who balance moist TVs on their heads
while performing oral sex on visually impaired journalists
and generals in the military dark
of an unnecessary hotel. They call it dinner because it's a pancake
who turned into a toad-like entity after being left
on the table too long after breakfast, when an absent kid
watched baseball in the afterlife:
Tigers vs. Bluejays in the uppermost inferno
while his parents screamed under the roof
and the shingles came to life under his ass of bone
and slithered uncomfortably, like tapeworms
in the hour of their own unreckoning.

Karma's unreal: nobody ever answers for their misdeeds,
motherfucker. Think about the baseball game, kid.

7 The hatreds are now gardened like a dirty kiss

This is a poem about heaven
very few people have been to heaven
but the few who have hate it worse than they ever hated earth
or any of the other worthy planets--let me tell you
about the lack of hunger there, the lack of learning--
while I look down into my lap and see a bobbing head, brunette,
the planets moving. What if the Milky Way should de-activate
and seem to stop like a fern in mid-air?--sliced by hair-thin blades--
you have to be watching closely--
why should anybody hurt for the kid, ogling angelic porn
on the underside of his baseball cap, while the sandwiches
are ready to be eaten under fertile ground? The garden atop a train
is zooming past while a madman rakes and hoes
and loses his head against the city's most wondrous lightbulb.

The passengers underneath asparagus and thriving
black-eyed susans at the edges of the city's tunneled heat, dusted--
flowering in pale grey light, or in paralyzing fluorescence--
the city basks its flowers
in a hatred only vacant lots can nurture
back to something like love, truncated--the flesh stem-hollow--
milky in its resemblance to blood, in photo negatives.

And the moving bathroom at the end of the car
bumps up and down on bodies, jerks you off against
the sound of miners hollowing the earth
so peacelessly
while an audience howls like a sink
that channels rust and nobody makes poetry
for the gods who hurt them anymore. Because this
is a flock of eyes like semi-colons; always
a planted tear underneath the watching sorrow
of the sheep-fuckers who wait, who wait in a yellow shadow;
who wait in a subway lined with sandwich-bread;
who stomp with bucket feet on flattened bucket floors:
somebody like a stove full of beautiful jews is dancing.

8 Groping each other on the last train

Holly opens her asterisk
for me to dunk my winter-wettened nose in
whenever the crowd stood up by speeding trains
is gripping engine rails and waiting for scraping skies
to land through forty feet of concrete on their Q-tip heads.
Each eyelash is a terrorist.

And in Holly's prettylittlebowels
a lunch waits for a lover
to grab it by the balls
and flush an alcoholic ocean down its throat
when the toilets aren't looking.
My tongue is an enemy agent ready to repent,
my tongue is jelly and fire through a pretzel's mouth,
my tongue is heaven cooking.

Holly is a train inside the train
she lets my hands rub upwards in her mink
--how many quiet animals died
to let us cloak this grope--
oh I think of the parenthesis
that breasts always are in the cold

9 Nursing on the air above the subway

Those silken minutes you spent
on a train with perfect tablecloths
throw chaos over the third rail
and electrify those always waiting
near the rushing doors that never stop
and currents rushing never make their home.

In those rusting hands, always waiting,
too late for flowing things.
The conversation is as light
as a chicken bone in a gigantic mouth.
And your long and weary life was just
a few minutes badly spent
waiting for a frosted train
to banjo through the hanging metal chimes
above electric rails for dogs to die so lonely on,
tails wagging in frantic, chain-linked loneliness.

Swallow a paragraph from a stranger and lipstick smooches,
subway seats and sandwich bags become swift creatures
in the moving light--the nameless hesitate to burn a cigarette
while every car is moving heavenward on broken rails--
nobody's blonde for an instant,
everybody's blue-eyed and black-haired as the lights
flash on and off and every city wavers gazing
at the headline of its undeclared eclipse.

Stray dogs walk together in the concrete trench
men dug without a sound between dueling electricities
of cities fighting oxygen.
Neglected towns light up with hot-tub kisses
for a glassed-in summer night
against all television winters, and the dashboard
is a piano for only children, steerless into streetlit night,
unsure if stars are out, or if anything will ever peek
again, chomping on the head of peaceful movements,
ripping out the arms that meant to hug, a music terrible
lashing, lightwards on the dusk underneath leaves.

10 The odor of some stranger staring

Has an amputated tail, the danceclub waits behind
a mutilated streetlight, the dancers are all women
trying to be whips in hands of men
before the dollar falls
through neon flashing floors.
There's too much music here, no remedy
for the necessary deafening. My left ear crackles like a glacier
moving into the wrong history, tropical, forced oceanic
as the frozen fish thaw in its side
and swim out into aquarium histories, my crow-feathered girl and I
leaning against the glass that sharks nudge:
softly every day with foreskin eyes, thick noses,
tongues on the move backdropped by every world
they cannot fight inside the glass.

And the teeth are sharpened by an unexpected moan,
security guards turn heads to see the lips
glistening they have destroyed: every affection they planted
comes back as napalm in a kiss and children fall into the realm
of sight gnashing where the ocean would disperse the blood
the cylinder of glass contains. The plume of red's no longer
isolated on her lips. A child leaped out of her before she could
lie down, and I defend the shoes and shores

fallen off her body before a sea of police
angeled her away on stretchers
plastic, revealed her naked back, the baby swimming,
the silver dollar souls of sharks rubbed faceless
by the whirling of this salty laundromat.
I think love is losing its gods.
Every bench a seesaw in the shadow of the capital,
every child strangely adult
and trained to act on couches pulverized by made-up light.

And the false innocence no longer dashing,
the robbery no longer eclipsed
by extravegant dinners. All panther movement
stilled inside the vase of the sculpted city,
turning in a potter's hands while terrorists kiss
against the glass and the killer is in the womb
and the womb is a jellyfish
and the tentacles are baby's fingerlashes
and it's perfectly acceptable behavior
to sing a song while aquariums fall
whole and with their fish onto your womb.

11 I can't find a properly sized cucumber

Or number this color
stutter this number fill the craters
with a ribbon made of shredded records
of the innocent imprisoned
of guitars succinctly prismed as all lunar light
is sabotaged by whirling rocks.

The matter of these objects is out of joint;
it used to move in a socket nobody knew about,
so now the science of the phrase: "does not
compute"; the lips are holy, the teeth know not
soft movements of the bought:
the paid-for whores leaning
against a light their taxes snuffed
with ancient liquor while the stars watched.
Having renewed them aching selves fern overnight,
and mushroom too, stone fences strung
like polished pearls across the countryside.

The derangement of the sheep is curiously human,
and a glass eyeball found in each
sideways and wandering, and slip against the hoaxes of the moon,
and lose the loyalty of suns, and stem the raging
of a Saturn in the blood, having usurped the gods of war,
having newspapered all that had been painted,
hanging from a desperate tree calmly
calling for grandma while the Milky Way burns out early.

All those abrupt, all those alien in the fastest,
all those lava sidewalks, all them copper trees
seen acting on their blisses in the non-shadow
of radiant mountains: these are the objects
to which we done declared ourselves,
the chickens aren't listening, spouseless,
childless, sibling-abandoned, the crimson families
bath themselves until a pond come from their longing
and cucumbers come to rest in the lake
while vacant-eyed crabs take vacations, massively unsure.

The little girls pile the sand the little boys
step on jellyfish and scream
through sandstone megaphones at absent demons
in the fishless morning. It a beaut, of scum
radiant and dark, glowing with a human beast
for centuries later, when the beach is melted whole into a sword.

12 Making love to a hole in the planet

The human beast has a song like a wheelbarrow
moving over grass, pulled by a clumsy child,
and what the rubber tramples no rhythm will ever know
again, not even the pulsing suns, not even the failed stars,
nor planets snoring in their orbits like malfunctioning
computers. Did we splash the right amount of blood here,
did we tuck the right amount of cunt-suggestion
into the sunflower, enough phallic vibrations
thru innocent daisies and susans with black eyes
like abused women who go yellow around the edges,
their petals bright and vulnerable as a star held deep
within range of sweating missiles nuclear and kisses.
There was a question here, but it disappeared.

Beercans emptied in the wake of hurting oceans
the palm trees bent like exhausted lovers
and jellyfish washed up like condoms on a searching shore--
hands are everywhere, the wind has dyslexia,
the commas turn into vaginal hesitant semi-colons
nobody's sure as a cock where the rooster moves
to the geometrically perfect center of the farmer's roof
as he used to, when the oceans would withdraw
and now they don't and now the kisses are a doomsday
of summer liptick spring and struck with powder of falling
moons toward menstrual oceans, libraries moving back
into the protesting core, and the homeless asleep in a loudspeaker,
safe in an afterlife no music can lick or reach with other,
interplanetary, tongues--heaven is invisible on Mars--the balls we licked
in highschool snub us with their sweaty angles now, the cubist
fertilities. And moles that would become
so cancerous in doubtful futures
now spread ruddiness over
whole sunstruck bodies
harmless as a lightning fills
the skyward holes with homeless meat.

13 The earthly operation, warmer than a surgeon

The sexlessness of a hotel morning, the pool
still as a fenced-in desert, the window vibrates
with a sensual return. The glass reflects a transparent man
and the pools shimmer, or ripple, I can't tell which.
When the solitary orgasm hits
the glass shatters to reveal its helplessness.
And a couple walking past shields their baby, their eyes go wide
and the balcony trembles with the weight of the father.
The mother almost levitates but her feet are glued
to the fake grass rug.

I've left the shower on and whiskey dribbles down
the side of the television. A war smudges the screen
in imperfect rhythm with the thoughts of the owner
of the hotel, who can taste my whiskey coming
through his screen from his seat at the front desk,
snarling at himself and at the soldiers
that his sons and daughters have become, faces reduced
to chins under helmets. There's a parking lot to write about
while the sands are opened up to a parade of tires,
human spirits jostled above the muffled clamor of their rolling,
a thousand lizards dying as magnetic industry
draws the hotel into the air and drops it again,
rattling all its rectangles with a fall. It feels good to lie back
in the smell of flooded cavities and feel the building
come apart. And the highways forgetful of furtive passages,
cops putting on their cherry lights while falling
off the edge of sudden chasms, speeding people
with lipstick faces honking their own bodies
like horns, eating spicy food behind the wheel
as the radio condemns and the wheels bless
tentative. Roads breaking open easily, like the tops
of cooking pies,

the everybody that posed as an individual drawn and quartered
by its own faceless horses, revealed only in pain
as populations morph into long ropes of sausages,
linked by what they had called love, and transcendant cats
flee the earthquake before it hits, and are reported
in sun-scorched newspapers
by a dying and superior people.

14 Seduction by the electric company

My tallest darling, wearing a dress made of steaks,
the best part of a raw cow the butchers killed this morning,
enters the only numberless room in the hotel--the hotel
that was built next to a supermarket filled with red wine
and salad dressings in profusion to the ceilings of
a grey-painted world--the lifeless blood coats her body,
and when I slam her gently against the heater,
we smell meat cooking, the toilets open their mouths
and flush on every side, suitcases slam shut,
salival glands open, mucus seeps
out of the partitioned ceilings, the floor
is multidimensional as we fall into it together
like a pair of human televisions sprouting
antennas all over. The groping that we do on earth
is a reach for many-limbed spirits waiting like machinery
to be used in baseball stadiums for the happy damned:
we eat us, as we are no longer we or us,
and are as separate in our joining
as the otherside machinery are one.

It becomes easier to repair the failing flicker of a pale hotel;
the vibrating bed causes an earthquake
in the red wine bottles of the supermarket, cauliflower
rolling on linoleum, the smell of chemical cleansing
in innumerable abattoirs, the knives we stabbed our bosses with
languishing like unused flesh on the door
as the hinges freeze into place, as dimensions fall and crumble
into one another and the hot-dog machine
raves like a preacher against the schizoid vulva hidden
in the back of his head, a ranting mouth accepting
sunlit beaches past the corpses carrying umbrellas on sidewalks
of cities, cities pelted by mushrooms and refusing
quaint and helpful psychedelics, cities going grey
behind the boiling water.

15 The domestication of loneliness

Mushrooms spring up nightly on the golf-courses,
they make the news, the players hack through broken skin
and smell the vegetable kingdom in the trampled roots
and see the pines and palms all joining in a sun-drenched dance
to sink within their teeming mass the ships that come
when moisture does prevail. You linked these long sentences
to my body, you dared me to take an electrical shower,
and I am stepping left against a hailstorm, right against
a coming rain. I am pulling jails with a bit clenched in my knee-teeth.
All pain of bluish wives electing men
blonder than me within the storm
is flicked by healing tongues, all mine.
The ambitious remove themselves from our bedrooms,

the votes of squirrels go unanswered in the tiny kingdoms
of the overgrowth, the vendors bring a universal sausage
to the feet of statued ice in thriving winters/mall displays,
a million little ice ages under careful supervision.
These words that have gone cold against the surging of their time
are pregnant in the infertility
of mustached aging housewives
and their magazine-making slaves, the soda's bubbles
are filled with a health for the desperate.

16 A mission statement contested by androids

The insignificance is a song. The divers come up
with diamonds of their own water, sweated
under more expensive water. The wasteland they uncover
is a wonderland: the deaths of many are a thin champagne
tasted by a restless millionairess, her flaming hips
both under and over the carpets of this world are discovering
a joy in destroying tomorrow. And I share in that joy
as I kneel in those public carpets

knitted in dimensions cold as dead grannies,
bloodless as the corpse at the open-casket,
made wax for our flesh flesh flesh and tunneled
embraces. And the silence is a tool for the sound.
And the skull is a crown for the finite. And the golf course
is a dead man's outstretched hand covered with
microscopic grapes, the overgrowth will outlive
the trimmers, the structure outlive the sellers
in its perfect crumbling. Vines are slithering
into everywhere. The worhipful outlast
their own stoic idols while they kiss
under the seats they made
by sitting on the air.

The caricature is stencilled in the emptiness
of earlier caricatures. But a vast jelly, and a vaster jelly,
surrounds like a sweating planetarium
the air of parking lots where cars gather
like whores in a third world, like scrawny children selling postcards
to the deaf. Their laundromats are open
to a pregnant woman's fondest anal wishes,
and her sighs from far behind the silenced city
that her child will support and spines

played like a harp in the last crushing, fingers pluck and preserve
the necessary tension that upholds,
trembling is the only standing
in the fractured end.
And now her tousled image is everywhere.

WALKING DOWN A ROAD BUILT FOR SOMEBODY ELSE

College kids scream on porches
and in freshly painted rotting houses

while the professors, too tired to plot revolution,
fall asleep in their armchairs.

When I draw near to the dead
the trees get taller.

There is a moon-dissolve taking place
in the clouds in the pines.

The eye like a frightened white rat
winks for me frantically.

The beercan next to the river is tilting
towards me and away from time.

The frogs are louder than my heart.
An old lichen-covered temple comes crashing down
somewhere in the woods.

We are together in the metal and the moss.
Together in the muck under the stream
and grasses turning dry above the water.

I'm in a graveyard and I'm about to take my clothes off
but I'm afraid the police will come and interrupt
my rebirth.

I'm listening...

I'm listening to Bob Dylan
yell about the corruption of eternity
instead of doing my tax forms

Bob Dylan's teeth are dirty today
from eating tobacco plants
the linoleum in this tiny kitchen
is covered with Jackson Pollock patterns
of semen

a red sun crosses all the windows at once
and the linoleum glitters
my teeth are just as dirty as Bob Dylan's
even though I don't eat tobacco plants
I can't see Bob Dylan's teeth right now
but I know that they resemble mine

I am proud that my teeth resemble the teeth
of a great poet

as the newspaper tulips
tremble like naked girls
standing in wet field
in the beginning of autumn

Virginity in shorts squatting on a big rock

...there are other worlds. Felt them in a summer forest,
afternoon, floating near mushrooms and fallen
shards of bark. Touched them with descendant hands.
Time I'd known was gone in a pinch of (barely) autumn air
dodging between unprepared trees.

The hollow: nobody comes back: is what he spoke,
clinging to a leaf as he was falling. And a silver bucket
filled with hallucinatory beer
stood on a mossy stump,
metallic among the brown histories.

So take a drink
And drink we did
from inside
so many bodies that we are.
The kiss we took from each other
floated above the silver
bucket of beer. And the stump split halfway down
by lightning
when its surroundings
were low in the soil, showed us a mouth to put parts
(nimble, unconscious)
of our bodies Into.