she's petting a row of slugs
as they move past with their antenna trembling
she's driving her rickety car through a ditch
simultaneously
with the radio blasting
something like a harmonium
being dropped from a skyscraper
and landing in an artificial pond

she's sitting atop the refrigerator
with her legs under her
rocking back and forth
as meat slides off the lower shelf
and hits the floor with a tired-sounding flop
she's ripping the upholstry with little scissors
and landing in an artificial pond

she's petting a row of slugs
as they move by with their political signs trembling
she's moving their hair out of their ears
and spitting on their clay
after it's finished

pink velvet's gone
little orange and white is gone
bitten fingers so tiny are gone
gone also are the unhidden eyes

blue suitcase is gone
little splitpaws is gone
kisses in video light are caught
in a tumult of leaving

silver glasses are gone
fogged eyeglasses of terror are gone
gone is the prowler in white and orange
gone are the computerized hours

gone is the year of sack flour
that we struggled under
gone is the rift in strange time
that allowed us a broken breather

pink velvet's gone
little orange and white is gone
bitten fingers so tiny are gone
gone also are the unhidden eyes

someday all the bloodied nobodies will come
knocking at your door
they won't have weapons
they'll just stare

and if you try to answer
the question you think you see
in their stained eyes
it will be revealed to you slowly
that there never was a question
they will simply pour their eyes into you
you will simply look back with your eyes held in place

and whether you stop speaking
or continue to chatter
someday all the bloodied nobodies
will come knocking at your door

He have been forced to be happy
with the loveliest robot deer in the whole world
and now he am condemned to stay on this planet
with all him pathetic lifetimes
walking arm-in-arm right behind him,
in a long row.

She too have been forced to be happy
by brutal music from the necks
of those who surround her, him with each arm
extended toward a grove of grey tea.
They're the lovemakings; the tender
nesses floating just above cool grass in a blue fire,
accidental.

You have a neighbor in your teeth
and a hard life coming out of your skull.
The oil that once covered your body
has become the skin of a hairless cat.
The sky's colors are no longer
distributed properly. But your dinner is huge,
and the favors you do for your fat lover
help her sleep comfortably
through the end of her life.

The raccoons who came last week
to take your garbage into the rainy gutters
are back again, with a fresh prize in their teeth;
they carry your neighbor's ears and fingers,
they are protected by androids
whose machinery is made of sunlight.

Yesterday you gave birth to several children;
now every one of them is living on the sidewalk!
right in front of your house. Two are experiencing!
similar nervous breakdowns; the others, who seem!
to be mushed together and perhaps numberless,
are struggling toward the curb in order!
to smash their teeth on it.!

And the noises they make when doing so!
make the water flowing out of the sink's faucet!
wobble on its way toward my hands,
and the rust color it had has been replaced by silver,
and the dishes I am about to wash!
look like something I will never actually touch;
though that is not a possible appearance, and never will be!

Those children are making the linoleum crack;
they are making yesterday's rusty water!
leak out of my eyes, and the sky is heavy and low!
like a dome cage covered with vines!
that surrounds the neighborhood.!

when I was six, I was also five
and all the bright rivers followed me down

kitchen counters all covered in grown
grown men wearing white wedding gowns
in the crimson lounge

they're all lizards
covered in honey and they're ready to pounce
as only the old and hairless can pounce

we polish the silver
by cutting the bloodiest steaks,
by having flesh parties on gravel inclines.
that's where we make music with trash,
and cut our deadlines out of the blueprint.

but that isn't where we slide down long polished
wooden tables on our buttoned bellies

and that isn't where we plan the weather
in our tinfoil hats,

making the chimneys weep
their chimneysweeps with brooms on sticks
into the ashen afterworld
into the living room
sheathed in shadows it once drew back,
letting its only garment drape.

there were trees dancing
in a space that wasn't meant for them,
there were flames of green
lashing your peak arousals.

there were green flames moving
in a tin journey that wasn't planned for them.

at lonely times
the valley speaks to you
from far below the town

the crows surround
your angel in the mud
the swingset dangles
kid rhythms in your blood

you feed the slugs
a leaf that they'd eat anyway
& nothing needs your help

I'm a life alongside the world
where nothing hurtles & nothing
hurls itself a mini-self

the eyelash in my tongue's left lid
opens a neon forest in your left shoulder blade.

we both heap our rag bodies into the brightness.
we both have a night's worth of poolside kisses
stored up in our first set of stomachs.

the eyelash in my tongue's left lid
left me here, praying to the wing under your collar
for the whipped honey under your skirt
as if a subway breeze
were cleansed with water

my love
your hair is the only breeze
where the snare drum hits

Into the scrapyard with you,
into the brambles, into the pile
of crushed saxophones. Try it
in there for awhile, without women
and without music. Eat the branches
that whisper through the scraps
from buried trees.

And there will be a rhythm never heard
felt through the body, through the imagined
pillows, through the screaming underground
and high above ground, seen from an airplane:
you will die there in your own branches,
cast onto your reaches from the molten core,
through the frustrated soil and the bright
silver diapers, metal bent and pinned
by metal around a tight and hungering body.

I'll go as far as I can into this night,
into these purple tree streaks,
these sidewalks broken by robot paranoia,

these yellow clotheslined blouses in a white sun.
and green chairs lined up beneath water.
and ceremonies performed by anxious ferns,
trembling,
like protrusions into the land of the dead,
the softest place in the bread was her hair bun.

if you can turn toward the light on the water
and see a new dimension open,
with me in its torched slit,
waving with a book,
turn away.

if you can see me as one in a series of paperdolls
linked at the arms, don't move with your lens
until the bend sees through your unbending,
don't move such instruments as you have
past the rippling frozen at edges of court.

If their jackasses can run
with their teeth wobbling
in their goofy heads
from so much running
from so much running
from so much work spent escaping from leisure

then perhaps we can learn to play
behind the library
perhaps we can look at the ferns
while the vinyl spins
quicker in the pond-soaked yard
and the overflow
fills a fetus jar with murky green
for the firehose to finish
with a hydrogen lobotomy

I want to sing through your waist;
you, the daughter of fighting mists,
you, who play with a brass dish
filled with clean water

deepinsidetheabandonedbrickbuildings.

I want you to wait for my dog tongue
to come and find you and make a mess
of your unpowdered cheeks.

Since you make death sticky and real,
I want you to devour my life;
since you make me want to love
everybody, and I can't, I will love you
hurriedly and without hurry, my love,
who looks into the water and sees
a way to heal me floating
like a fish just above the sand.

At night in the hotel that is kept open
only for those who never sleep,
I lay on the ceiling with my buttocks
pressed against the hot bulbs of a chandelier
and worry that you
will never understand how wonderful you are

and I wonder why you, who also never sleep,
are not at this hotel
with me

I was a high number all the time
to take the books off the shelf
and be pumped for brine

I had fallen
in a shallow bay
hey hey, hey hey hey hey hey hey

and I had high wrinkles all the time
and I had high wrinkles all the time
and I had melodies in my spine

when I laid down on the stormy blueprints
where your life in architecture dried

and the long roads lead back to that skull,
and the long roads lead back to that skull.
in the white knowing, in the white knowing,
what itself devours,
what itself devours.

the white light basking in the orange appetizers,
glued to a promise on a blue and bright blanket.

letter to the best girl

allow me just
barely
like a dead dragonfly's wing
touch someplace
like the back of your neck
that doesn't talk
with the talking part of me
clamped shut against the blood thump
let me softly go past sleep
and past the ends of all the beds

let me barely be
suspended from the ceilings
that you move beneath
putting pieces of china together
delicately with such delicate
things that you have

your pillow's full: an armadillo
siphoning a busy colony into his body.

their blood of raw mechanics
keeps him edgy, keeps him alive,
keeps him numb to the stinging music
that they offer on the way down

to the dissolving fluids.

(sleep is the only joke
a tamed people can play on time),

your eyes open like mouths in the dark
your anus twitches
hello.

The thrill of being sad,
after a hot moment,
that's exquisite, that's
for the kings of this world.

And the thrill of being sad,
that's for a hot meal to enjoy
a golf-hole, in public with his
snouted friends.

But the shivers and shakes of
being sad, well son, that's for a princess
crying pinkly in a stairwell.
Deafening the town-world
with her fertile, ragged screams.

LOTTERY WINNER

she's musical
every paycheck morning she goes out to a department store
and buys several new microwave ovens
she likes the sound they make when she turns them all on at once
and the lights dim in the kitchen

she needs new smells she'd set fire to one of the kids
just to have a new smell
she'd set fire to them right after buying them a new pair of shoes
and not see anything funny about it she also likes duct tape
she'll wrap duct tape around anything just to see that dull silver shine

she has a vaccuum cleaner in every room and a rodent lying
in every moustrap, she likes to see the guts and the body
in their fallen shape, she doesn't like to touch the wreckage
for fear of damaging the perfect instant it captured

she's getting used to her favorite restaurants soon
she'll leave the kids at home, gasp, she'll leave the kids
at home, gasp, in order to spend several weeks
travelling to new restaurants

I've got a bad orange circuitry
flaring up in the nervous place
employers call my body. help the clouds,

flatten the ice cream trucks until
they are pure sound, until they
don't ring their bells.

darling with the cone, help me make
these terrible decisions on the sidewalk.

the sidewalk has measles and the trees are damp
not quite like a series of wounds.

the kisses you gave me are burning
the white paint on big brick walls
and showing an old red, burnished by time

and televisions punched out, painting
those who are asleep forever--which is
a short time for them--painting those
who are asleep forever in the smashed
tubes.

The stars whirl over friendly oceans (this is new)
and hear a voice calling (this is a man having
a fantasy):

would you hear me again, back at 5 o clock,
with my voice less hoarse, in front
of the same fireplace that burned
at 5 o clock, when the room was young
and everybody wore the same sweater?

The boards glide over dumb oceans
as the core turns like a steel drill
being pushed

now that my house has found a wide field to comfortably collapse in

I'll beg for your hands, I'll pump the well

this is a continuation of an old story:

then I started thinking thinking of hours as minutes,

fleeting times to humiliate myself
for many misters and sirs,

a time for money and pigeons,
a time for money and pigeons,
I repeat without repeating,
I wash dishes, I make a little sense
between the smashing of glasses,

I move the clock along an inchworm's back,

the inchworm learns lightspeed.

my older friends are beginning to complain
about death pangs
I feel the death pangs lighter than they do
but I feel them
and their older bodies are eating my younger body
just by talking but it's not their fault
it's the death pangs
painfully taking over
this is too sad to continue
I wish this had never begun
my body complains in a small voice
that will soon be louder

There are theaters
in the mind, where this sort of fiery thing plays,
afterwards. With all the actors grilled
and looking like potatoes, ready
to be burned more.

There are so many places to die, but less
enwrapping moss, all the time. On a pier
the thing rolls forward on 3 wheels, towards a murky ocean.

The one being hurt doesn't cry out
that it hurts but the one doing the hurting
cries out continually help me for I must be saved.

His voice rejected after his force failed,
parades of robots move the action he hates
in front of his eyes continually who will be master.

His arms are weighted down with birds
who don't know how cruel he is,
how obscurely dark, their yellow wings
on his face.

I like your color
when you move off the spectrum
I like the movement
when you lose your lard like a drunk motorcyclist
on the thinning road.

Fenced-in kisses
where we dropped an icecream
captured ceilings
where the sky's pummeled by cartoonish boulders
and antique anvils
we pull the wet pages together
without covers

we fence in our kisses
and the sky torpedoes the objects,
the objects with the most life,
the jerky blueprints, the fuzzy
stuffed animals making love
in the shadows of the roots

of trees that have fallen
hard on our world
the wet soil rained
on clumps on slithers
into paint into burnt things
through a scarred rain. The wet charcoal
we wrote with, on a greying leather jacket
you dropped
in a storm
that won't come again.

As monotony increases, the will increases.
As monotony creates, the will sickens.
Then monotony is placed on white leather
at a sticky beachfront
with a glass of kowala's blood in its veins

And it drinks the monotony blood
with its paws clenched, grinning.
But kowala increases; up against
a Niagra of enemies, enemies
who float in their own shit toward
their mother's opening, the kowala
increases without fucking.

if the satellites gather together
to strike at the apartment
with a laser
I might
breathe a sigh of relief.

in the meantime
I brush your buttocks with my eyelashes
and the back of my skull fills with a zig-zagging orgasm.
and pray that the delightfulness
of this thing we are doing outlives
the things which we hate, which
horrify us on barren streets
in what others call daylight.

if the bodies gather together for a strike
I'll buy a brush to brush you totally from head to foot; and
a pick to excavate skies in the places
where the bodies gather together
to strike at us
from their mineral clouds.

our holes walk up the end of our bedroom
and squirm around together
until they become
an outline of pure light;
children get up and walk out of our bodies
and exit this world through
those outlines.

She sent me a collection of small animals
designed to eat parts of my flesh
that had become undesirable to me

in the mail
she sent them
and they had such little feelers
that some of them leaked happily out
to eat other things in the world,
starting with several bus stations
full of the homeless, now deprived

of all hemorrhoids.

Where are the eye-petals,
and the person attached to them?
Was she a photo I took under
a powerline, blinking, sad to flirt,
in front of a seething tanker,
or will she come into the flesh
that seeks my door and to melt
my locks into pure amber. And

will her negatives have soft places?

you've got lucky hands, (a wandering mother), and the guitar is swollen for bows, but there's a yellow mouth in the exhaust as you walk backwards through your own smoke concert. you've got cinnamon breath, and the bar's reflecting. there are worms, dark and warm, in the fertile shadow of your guitar. there are warms, dark and fertile, in the shadow where the wormy feet of children swing and get set to play in the air. with ferns, and frosting on the fingers. with fern, and white frosting on the fingers where the dry skin liked to pose like a lizard and the afro picks fell from it into a ditch; a ditch of blueberries waist-deep under grandpa's white hair, moving over bluejeans. and the weather pulled in the day, with its appetite neatly tucked.

holes are happy tonight and
pegs are not. Tomorrow night,
tomorrow night, tomorrow night,
on a pink bed,

the pillowcases will roll up their sleeves
the walls will pulp themselves and print
hot symphonies stuck fresh to window frost.

in a narrow field
of white straw, sun-dyed,

chasing each other's skirts

a memory of life
brushed his skull

they caught each other's fabrics

an umbilical flicker
touched her headset

things that crash at similar speeds
kissed in the silver mid-stream

blonde spraypainted grey
a shimmer on the lawn at midnight

crowds of evacuated nakeds
standing bare as flagpoles: people
who stare into the headlights of approaching angelics
with their footprints torn up behind them
and their shadows strewn on ragged rocks,
cardboard painted charcoal on the television sand;

as they kissed across the tennis net
they thought of all their gassed families

my days are backward
they fly spinewards through the forward currents
of the forward days of others

there are larger orbits there are larger
dead planets there is a desk clerk writing
your name in charcoal on a charcoal desk

note: I love you better from a distance, in a block of white
hardening tofu air where I can't chatter. But chew
near a concrete duct, suffering from the brightness
of a peacock misplaced, but strutting, in the suffering
April snow.

If I step back from my life I can see my lovers--
hurt by me, wandering in a maze of spiky plants
just to the left or right of many things
I couldn't do. I watch them and love them
now that it's safer to do so, without being
hindered by their presence outside the maze.

And I wish I hadn't begun this piece of writing.
And I wish my lovers could step inside it and trample it,
and me with it.

you're like a wet otter in my bed
your slinky fur
your silkiness in climax

I want to get all the groceries in the world for you
while you level a towering remote control
at the walls
and make the glass neighborhoods change rapidly
into heaps of multicolored sand

I'll get a glue-gun
and stick all your favorite things to one wall
for you to enjoy all at once
then duck at the foot of the wall
while you yell at me
and pelt me with my favorite things
until I turn into a wall
your favorite wall
that you can change with a remote control
made of me and my own buttons

you're like a wet otter in my bed
let's forget the errands and the lists of milk
that we have accumulated

buttons that strike back
can be pressed between walls of favorite things
heaps of multicolored sand
held in place with carefully placed shots
from a gluegun
aim me at myself and I'll do the job while you do the job

You are a basket of eyelashes,
a pink lobe wrapped in dirty blind satin,
golden onion skin roasted shoulderblades
and a fervent shower of dust perfume
in 3 fog-weighted bedrooms. But.

If you have (outside pink) a servant, to discard him,
completely on my chest, a puppy,
push gently aside his cloth-blunted claws
delirious with sutures, his hanging lower eyelids,
his whitely mohawked chest,
will melt into my face like a summer stereo. In code for.

And the picnic will resume next to the highway
until the hanging places are filled with plums,
and the napkins bones and berries hovering in the air
will find bliss of fuzzy hands, clay pillows
and a whisper of Olivia, tired enough
to love a ragged man, hunting for a bleached outline
in the mountainous power outage. I love you.

Tabitha opens her body at the mouth
and a white snail craws up to the tip
of her tongue and moves around the curve.
That's a nice trick, Tabitha, and something
for me to watch from my sick bed.
You'll let me watch, but you won't listen
to the story of how your mother
ran me over and with her car screaming
for me to shut up about politics and pushing the horn
until the neighbors came onto the lawn
with flashlights and dogs to see what
the sound of crunching ribcage was about.

we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
the flood comes just in time to catch the fire
we can stay here and watch the river through the wall

we can turn our two into a snake
that nimbly cleans itself
we can see the fire and the water coming together

we can stay outside so many events
we can see a path out of the world

we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
grandmothers and grander fathers
stay alive long enough to cry us back to sleep
when the cities melt

we can rent a room in a tidal wave
and keep it upright as it rushes into towns
where we once lived miserably
we can hear the music all become young again

put moons back into canyons
pull planets that are jagged
out of a rough place made smooth

we can stay in this hotel while the other hotels
slam their boards together and say
to the wind how sorry they are

we can drive our room through every other room
until all the passengers of things that stand still
let their fingerprints make love to one another

you make homes for me in myself with your tongue
kitchen erupting from stall showers
a cook in the ceiling banging pots against
electrified grid of sky

you made a home for me under
a tiny field
that stretched under foot-thumped blocks
but held out their rhythm
with a kiss in the soil
with five hands inside each finger
you hollowed out the places that I would need
to be empty when the world began to fill me up

you make a movie using my eyes
you mount them on a tripod of flower stalks
the air with its shivers a movie of unseen dust
with my eyes you make a movie
and we're mounted on a tripod that's your body with one
limb impossibly holding the top of my head
to keep it from falling off into the final scene

you want the title page of your life
to be walked upon by many kittens
I want the same thing
we like it when our names blur
hard lonely antennas go soft
wrap around one another

you have fur in all the right places
I trim mine to fit into the places where you are bare
you want the title page of your life
to be put into a toaster next to the title page of my life
to let them burn together in their separate slots

you want the marquee to carry your wordlessness
the inside of a beetle's shell
to bring under its shiny hard
your meaning to a place where it'll
slowly be appreciated by lizards

I want the same thing but not now
I'm too busy chafing
your eyelids with my eyelids
too busy in your heat with the things
that have previously made me cold

I watch that man carefully
who runs with his loud happiness
through a big grassy field full of robots standing still
flicking their switches--their switches
are on their backs, halfway
down their spines--into the OFF position
while cackling wildly, with his smooth haircut
never moving. I watch him carefully,
but I can't figure out his operation
or why he controls so much. And I can't understand
why this thin bubble of glass just in front of me
stops me from smashing into his movements,
from finding out if there is something in him
that one could make love to, something that might
justify the proudest country in the world
for giving birth to him.
The thin glass looks like it's being hammered
by more than one sun, but it throws so much back
that the one striking it seems to be turning
into a grey suckermouth. The robots are marching in rows
towards each other now, there are red propellers
coming out of their wrists. They don't seem ready to do battle.
Their affable master shuts them off again and they totter
into one another and fold up into crude ovals,
limbless as a heap of tight-closed clams.
I can only watch and eat my insides while that smooth man
laughs at the joys of his authority,
but the grass begins to feel good on my urine-coated thighs
and presently the glass bulb begins to give me the intensity
of reflected light, and it puts a soft throb in my forehead
like sex after a lunch of fruit and cheese,
and I go to sleep thinking I might wake up with a weapon
or an abandoned world.
And I feel, between worlds, a switch in my back
that was broken by too hard a flicker of a boss hand,
and now connects to its circuits only once in a while,
at terrible moments that are peaceful for others.

I know a girl who spends days in her kitchen
looking through the holes in her cheese shredder
when she looks through the shredder
all the squirrels eating birdseed in her front yard
turn into dinosaurs with nasty mouths
little predators with scaly skin
trampling the tomato plants

through each different hole in the cheese shredder
she sees different kinds of animals
sometimes the animals are mating
sometimes they are petite foxes in bisexual tuxedos
sometimes they are primitive humans who bang
on her window to beg for food
lazy cavemen who are intrigued
by her toasters and microwave ovens

every day she feels the planet
turn to a ball of hot liquid metal
under her feet

it doesn't burn anymore

strangely, it doesn't even feel hot anymore
but it turns and it turns
into something inhuman and huge
and has a silver radiance
that makes the stars cower

she walks around on it waving her hands in thick smoggy air
the cities have all burned down without a scream
her high heels turn the surface solid everywhere they touch
she doesn't know why she is unharmed
but the world is very pretty
undulating gently liquid metal

there aren't any mailboxes in the bright monotony
but she doesn't mind
the eyes who read those nervous words
are all gone under a sea of steaming silver
and soon the steam will disintegrate
suns will greet her in their purity
blue will cease to exist
and she will keep walking into whatever's left

on the way to my room you walk through a refrigerator
you walk through a graveyard of mice and a ballroom
floor covered in golden ribbons
you punch out the lightbulb in the refrigerator
you make the mice into quiet necklaces and drape
their little gravestones in grey silk
you stir the golden ribbons with your feet
until the uncovered spaces are dancing

I'd like to do something nice for mister sidewalk
make every one of his squares a different color
put smiling children on several
and fell a bright green pine in his middle
make people notice how nice he is to walk on

I'd like to put some sparkling dust on mister sidewalk
and throw glue in certain grey places
for people to get stuck on
where they can look at each other and decide
whether or not to kiss each other for a long time

he's felt so many unfeeling feet
he's been lying down
for so long surely he's hungry for a new world

We're kissing each other under a huge porch
There's a family reunion being held in the house
that's attached to the porch, and the footsteps
of a huge and disorganized family
move around in casual rhythms
on the boards above them.
The gentle sound of drinks being poured
merges with the happy sucking of our lips.
Is that your family above, or mine
Perhaps they belong to neither of us;
we certainly don't belong to them.
But somebody's uncle looks familiar:
he's walking down the steps onto the lawn,
with a dumb grin on his face, drunk.
He rips a car door off of some other relative's sedan
and props it up against a tree. We've stopped kissing
and we giggle in delight; he begins to paint
the door with a brush and some cans taken
from the garage. He paints the scene on the porch
with every member of the family as standing crocodiles,
sipping drinks from glasses that have been cracked
by their huge sharp teeth. And a landscape
of mushroom clouds with tree branches
lurks behind the porch railings.
On the other side of the yard, a radiance--or maybe
a crowd of blonde children--is crawling up a tree
and crawling down a tree simultaneously.
Long yellow whiffleball bats fall out of the tree
and make a mellow clatter on the artificial grass.
Either the children are picking them from the branches,
or they are falling from the rectangular heaven that (our?)
drunk uncle has painted on the window of the car door,
above the crocodile family. The flesh of the children
is turning into butter; the butter covers the bats
and they turn into snakes, snakes that slither
through the artificial grass and turn
the green blades they touch into real grass.
Sometimes one of the snakes will raise its head
to peer at a car-window heaven and to see
if the contents of the porch are human;
and we share an orgasm whenever that happens.

The jagged lines in the blueprint
of your experimental force field
are creeping imaginary things moving
across state lines to be with me.
That which you had sent out like a shield
has become a net.

The spaceman flying through the forcefield
gets a coat of metal covering his pores,
and can only smash it off
by crashing into your door.
And by never flying through the forcefield,
since it doesn't actually exist.

The blueprint of your experimental force field
lies atop a bouquet of burning candles
whose hot white brains are starting to show
through the paper. There's no meat heart,
but the air inside a clenched hand;
no mere familiar function, but a starfish
made of darkness in your vulnerable
hallways of hours.

The spaceman flying through your forcefield
is trying to get up from where he crashed
through the roof of an indoor basketball court;
he is trying to peel himself like a dark starfish
off the wall of a local restaurant.
He's trying to stop the barnyard blades
to hear your helicopter music
through a labyrinthine ceiling.

Now that we are strong enough for this desire,
let the fingertips that dragged the city walls
come in like humbled invaders. And let the lights
built up so robotically on the sides of our valley
become like bioluminescence, and be moved to glow
by the passing of a lover's craft.

Our ship of canvas numbers has been turned
into a soft black hole with jellyfish tentacles.
How did the crushing suck become a trailing mess
of ladyfingerslinked by darkmatter, aching
with celestial honeypot? The universe of hardness
punctured itself and threw us out into its sister.

We both stand in the prow and put our black dress-coats on,
me with my chest hair flaring out of a rigid brassiere
and you with a velvet bowtie above your barest nipples.
The multiverse without space for angels
is with us now.

For people who hate each other,
there are plenty of things to do.
They have warplanes and missiles,
they can alter the air. They can
communicate with one another.
The whole world seems devoted
to the production of things
for them to fight with.

But if two people
living in such a world
should fall in love with each other
where are their big machines?
What factory devotes itself
to making the massive things
that they might use to impress one another?

But I forgot that love
does not need too much power.
Love is timeless, and makes
no demands of the future;
it does not need to be seen
and heard all the time,
it does not need to win everything.
And there are no contests of blood or fire
that could prove it worthy.

People say that love is free, and perhaps
there's still a truth ensnared in that cliche.
But love is surrounded by myriad things
that are not free, and these things
restrict its movements. And those who insist
that love is free are often most imprisoned.

Love wants greatness, lovely architecture;
love wants a good government.
For love wants everything to love;
love wants the post office and the sidewalk
and the education of children to be
impressive and beautiful experiences.
Or maybe love is just a crowd of monks
making beer together
and forgetting their religion in their labor.

But those who have the most love
often have the hardest time
putting it into practice; their
love wants a whole world to run free in
but too often is forced
to settle for a smaller space
where it can easily become frustrated,
distorted, turned into fear and even hatred.
And so the greatest lovers
often lose.

How terrifying the world is.
And how few good people we have;
and how hard it is for them to remain so.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen.
I dreamt my hands onto your waist,
I dreamt your arms over my shoulders.

I even dreamed a chandelier
made of beercans and candles
to light our sweeping progress
across the room. And I dreamt
the walls covered with your paintings;
a ballroom for your greatness
(a whole world for your greatness)
that made the Sistene Chapel look
like a rusty thimble in comparison.
And an elevator coming down from the ceiling
to take us to a high bed in the great city
where we could make love and breathe
the hidden matter of the universe
into each other forever.

I dreamt that you and I were dancing
in a country whose borders had fallen
to a velvet revolution. I dreamt your life
into my life; I dreamt my strange tuxedo
next to your startling dress
at a ceremony the world has never seen before.

When you walk into Paris, I will feel
my shoulders jump off of my body
into a raining sky. I will have airplanes
in my bedroom; I will cling to the sheets
to avoid being sucked into their blades.

When you walk into Paris your scorched prettiness
will dismay the air
and make people drop things
that they are trying to eat
and you'll have to help them
pick those items up off the bricks
so that they can chew to keep quiet
and astonished in your presence.

When you walk into Paris I'll be walking
into another dimension; a dimension
where every little plant looks like your red hair
and frogs worship your reflection
in a wet saucer. When you walk into Paris
my passport will lose its labia
to a searing wind, but I'll stamp it with kisses.

When I say I love you, I mean that I want
all the authorities of this world
to tiptoe politely when they are around you.
I mean that I want violence to melt away
in your presence; I mean that I want
you to eat good food and breathe clean air,
always. I mean above all
that I want the media and the music
and the airports and the theaters
to stop insulting you; I mean that I want them
to shrink with shame in your beautiful presence.

So I pray to nothing
for the systems which are not built on love
to come crumbling down
leaving love standing naked and needless of defenses
in the wreckage, preparing to rebuild
a better form. I'm afraid it won't survive
the demolition. But I want for my love and its world
an unprecedented freedom.

And since I cannot provide these things,
I become crazed with a thwarted passion.
Love wants power; power to produce,
power to heal, power to help. And lack of money
gets in its way constantly.

We put a picnic blanket down
on the scrubby lawn
in front of the supermarkets.
And we lay there
exchanging squares of cheese
and small goblets of red wine.
We arrange live electrical wires
around the blanket
so that nobody will bother us.
We take your wide black scarf
and wrap it in a silky mess
around our heads
to soften the smell of car exhaust.
The highway just a few feet away
and the moving sidewalk roamed
by puzzled travellers.
The movements in the parking lot
are like a swarm of beetles
moving on the outside of the scarf;
we can see the world's smallness,
and feel its brittle rhythms recede
to give way to the massive rhythms
of our blood. I do something strange:
I duck out from under the black scarf,
run into the parking lot, kicking up
chunks of sod as I dash away,
and I grab the payphone in front of the store
and I call your cellphone
and you pick it up, bewildered.
I watch you from the storefront,
thinking I might see something different
from a distance, might pull some monsterous
tragedy out of your voice and stomp on it
before it kills me. You slowly peel
the black scarf from your face
and see me staring from across the parking lot
as silver automobiles move across my body
and my eyes glow with the terror
of the distance. You warn me that you'll hang up
and I ask you, please, if you're going to take
your voice away, not to cover your eyes.

I must have stepped on a current in the wires
as I was running away from you; I know
some force revealed my brokenness,
and you were frightened. Now you can't
move toward me without stepping on those wires
that I mashed into the ground with my fleeing feet.
And the phonelines in the air
sag like clotheslines grabbed by children
who want to climb them onto the clouds.