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.