when we fuck, the bone spurs in my feet
melt back into the world, the back of my head
contacts the rim of the sky,

I am flying in an animal who knows my wings
when they unfurl and when they retract,
we are the same pair of shoulders, grinding
olives, our kneecaps morph back into baby
flesh, for the comma inside the instant,

when we fuck I know the street
will not take my body

she who was a girl, opaque on a bicycle,
entranced by every language around her,
ran rubber down the the center
of Main Street's great wound,
occasionally brandishing her tongue
to attack a fleet of grey moths
under the yawn of a convenience store's
half-eaten electric light, bronze & blue
overlooking itself in the mirror
of a wet paved place, her tire
crawling up my left shin, over
knee-cap with a fleshy jump,
to stretch a bruise into my thigh,
stitch wishbone kisses
between my ribcages.

let her ride on her seat like a snail
who was a girl without my knowing,
who was a reach past every odorless moment
toward a force-field of fragrant gardens,
where broken television antennas lie still
beneath moving ferns in choirlike multitude.

snailbird,scarred gears
in a bucket under the body
scarred gears moving again

scarred deeds in mucus,
for the inadequate
between bodies always.

you cover whole highways in salt
with your small refusal
slashed by small town lights,
becalmed by big enough
moons.

they together curl claws around
their sorrows like a decaying bird

they together by an old river
mouths stuffed with a recent steak

they together as hurt cartoons
they together as two hot trees

worming hot roots through
ground after ground after ground

in separately colored worlds

your protected rapture uncolored
you come down feathery stairs
in a gown of feathers
making my afternoon
lime, mildly ridiculous.

smoothing your running blood
under a blonde skin
unhappy as a bird always is

wishing you apart, scattered
in petals, where on the moss ground
you can't speak against yourself any longer.

stained skin, eyes in velvet
wallpapering a wallpaper
with unnecessary tears

there is always murder
there are gifts in the world
to make you happy briefly
you'll die in the shade
while I'll die in the dead sun

superluminal coupling
outside playground fence finally
struck against lunar skin
above factory blades while chains
dangled swingset over clay abyss

lips tinier than expected

tongue reluctant, hand moving
hipbone toward collarbone like a wish
stunned our old webs with droplets
stuck our new droplets with old webs

when we bathe in the lights of this city we forget the sun.
when we bathe in the sun we forget the city.
when we move through this street we forget our feet.
when we bare our feet we forget the highway.

where does the life go that has no backdrop?
what do we do with ourselves when the surroundings stop?

gap-people, aromas of awful thought,
surround, on bar-stools
in lugubrious multitude. Their kicks consist
of getting radiated with neon
cancers in three forms, their zippers all
pointing to the end.
these alien familiars, whom we all
know brightly, in a damp light.
These aunt-and-uncle robots.

All bars hold them. All illusions are swept
under their rugs, to stay in the house unseen,
laser criminals. Two red leaves in a pot
of green tea, swirling and swirling.
Two oysters in a melting ice-bucket.
Appearing to love each other
without any visible language.

the holes in a certain tree
spoke
to the holes in my skin.
Where I was standing
no longer mattered.
The space I rent now
is built from the same holes
the same spaces breathing
through the emptiness between
my every


stand where you're standing.
Frustrate the earth with your song.
Our anti-matter makes fervent sex
where our matter won't.
Our dark matter love-fucks
where our bright matter can't.


the hole in every animal building
the holes in every other animal.

We wait in draining offices
for the things we hate to help us,
thinking of rabbits on the library lawn,
thinking of anything anywhere.
We think of a world fit to protect
our many embraces. We think
of no world at all.

We hold hands within connected suits,
wondering who connected the suits.
Thinking of death, we hold monogamy
to be the standard. We think to hold
nothing, then to hold more and more
nothing, in swinging arms
toward familiar parking lots
swaggering in our damp mechanisms.

Hologram chimneys for real houses
with hologram fires. The sweat
on grandpa's face is less real
than the blood on his descendant's
palms, flickering in the fake twilight,
in the ersatz dawn. Only dusk is real;
the place where someone thought immortal
smacked their young head
on a younger parking meter is as real as the sun.

the possibilities of real mental damage,
brought home by a third-storey evening
on a damp chair, sweating through one's guts,
clenching one's teeth at the screen
and the sound of a computer.


Skies will be dramatically torn open,
but nobody will escape.
Planets will pop like frozen balloons,
but nothing bold will use
the stunning force to found
an orchestra elsewhere.


We will bedroom together
more desperate and ape-like
than we ever imagined, in a sickly lull
between the great collapses,
clenching what remains of our tongues
between what remains of our teeth.


And now the damage will re-imagine
our mouths; we will kiss with molds
re-made by events of which we will never speak,
we ourselves being those events,
dousing cancers with white wine,
hot leprosies with darker red.