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.