###############
THE PATCH CLAM THRESHOLD

From the upward growing lattice
pagodas made of lead travel in loose flocks
caught in the anchor rope of the rising
thinking of the town at their back
her forehead which made her eyes seem to lift
in the midst of worthless things--
into his gondola--painted a matching blue

CANYON TAIL
____________

Focused on the chastity of rocks
I was shifted by the loosening circle of exhaust
from a young lady's car-pipe.
It bathed my shoes one after the other
as I observed the rear wings of her hairdo.
I'm always watching what they do
next, and next.

In a wayward current
the habits of squirrels
cycled around bits of failed recycling:
torn barcodes of lost number-language
labels slipping from glass surfaces
in mineral whirlwinds.

They all move
like a more anxious version of the cat,
not actually biting their knuckles;
everything gnaws quicker around them.
Too quick-moving to beg,
I feel the ribs in my coat
tightening.

FLECK STAMPEDE
____________

There's no music playing anywhere tonight.
Some insane silent word clamoring in the background.
Attention severed by planetary movements.
This is how birds begin.

This is how nameless pilgrims die.
With the sign of eternity hammered into our haircuts.
Tentacles home in the sea, bewildered.
Bring me back to the place where a cat's chest fallen
knocks a quarter out of the whole day.

From here we can stare at the star-merge
of extinguished commerce.
Just hold my hand until the waves don't break.
Feel around this well we're in
until the dark stereo comes on.

THE COMING OF AN EQUINOX


She sat down at a far table.
The force of unstoppable things.
We gathered in a crescent of energy
around shimmering pasta
and waited like wolves
the wine merely drying our throats.
All the legends killed off by teachers
clamored in a corridor
one with the music of antique weaponry
and we took to swearing if she walked
the broken glass one of us would brave
the other side of the television,
in a maze of neon pipes
where nobody learns how to dance

the vines finger at open ledges
brick of the hot sun great souls lounging
past the evaporation of all hysteria
in a mist, smoking, drinking the sparse
carbons left from a broken mountain
fueled by a reflecting planet
magnet storms, and the rowing of relatives
gone insane toward green pooled light
in an interstellar nightmare
bars of high color in a horde of eyes
the orchestra of petroleum
flashing rain-wept chairs
leaving their imprints on dying grass.

Mouth of cucumber
at the tree's thick hip reaching
she got up from a goblet
we moved like a cue ball of awful minds
searching the plane she
threw dagger after glitter
through tide whirling mid in the air,
squirrels near the roots all taken for granted
cobbling small sounds out of low space
golfed a kiss into the bough
cross of light cast deep on the forehead,
the picnic dissembled in a lunar rash
our last words will break
the web under these power lines.

==============

nailed onto a clay path
soft grey sounds whip around
in slow motion bodies, solar eyes
lit up in squares, a mutant giver

pooled a low din of smooth rocks
into my last pair of hands
while heels sprouted a claw each,
imprint towards the dark white core

THE HOMELANDS OPEN AND CLOSE


This grinding and polishing
of her delightful animal head
the myriad subcatastrophes carrying a man
keep a nice, clean scientific edge between us
fringe-tipped tongue pierces the snail's nerve
harness lets the man quickly feel fruitless,
to a level beyond the lament
of an elephant in a state of melancholy

Found in the boundary layer
the gentleman, the clown, the lawyer,
rattling and trembling all day long
could never learn to rule themselves
all need to be sheared
to fight wars to maintain

In a storm, the eggs stick sound
in the predawn body moved past the workers
scripts lay muzzle on her mouth and a white blanket
hum of her snore was the tide of revolution

Laughing, smoking, or torpid and electric
the scholar, the beggar, the doctor, the idiot
clamored for war
in buildings that had long been fire
built trading posts
like frozen cobweb
and never got uncoiled.

>>>>>
POEM
<<<<<

Tonight the billiards sound
like little continents crackling
against one another's plates,
I don't even need to close my eyes.
I have a strange, familiar urge
to make a fool of myself,
to fall in love and be mocked for it.

At a table surrounded
by many siblings of wood
and incessantly pouring metal,
a group of women are talking.
I want to know
what they are talking about,
but I won't move
tonight.

I will sit here and think hopefully
of the day when I actually die:
a friend will be sitting nearby,
and then she will leave.
Me with a window alone, going.
Not the window I'd hoped for,
but more than enough; let it drain
my sight outward and outward
in sweetened failure.

I will surge momentarily, suspiciously
like a mere man, toward your chair,
and when you fill it again,
I'll have accepted my bed
for being close enough.
There is nothing on the sill's ledge,
there are many things in the sky.
I have never been alone with it; now
let me be alone with it.

_____________________

AN ATOM TADPOLE TON
_____________________

Silence let my lips fail
on the slenderness you've become
I open an antique door
you slam the shatterproof

in the holiday foliage of broken money
and movements of snail on a jewel
you put a shelf in my chest
for your trophies to ache there
I found a lock that kept torn space
on the root's tone socket
of a sideyard garden

the man who said My body
has become the body of all men
lied like a pop song to vast time
and I tell you about the boy whose head
was a determined hatchet
flipping through the continuum

he took me to a courtyard of toxic salts
radioreactivated
what I had left from birth
of my female garment
and tunneling through its alphabet
he fucked its geography open

and everybody sends each other flowers at the same time
and their tendrils splinter through each drying other
in the pelted mail.

----------
----------

for Veda

I am two dachshunds chasing a lady swan
winter soot on her wings
ice huts at the edges of glacial lakes
two sets of tight canine nuts
we're always chasing

in the hands of gone musicians
departed from our blood and our walks
breeze changes direction as if
soft switches somewhere are being touched

_______________
_______________


two pigeons on the sill between
my house and the next
tucked head to head and bulging neck
to bulging neck
the wind cut into a tall rectangle
brickwork on all sides
of the winged bodies fall
wet clumps of ash became birds
I dove in a dumpster for lipstick and banana
your face is a rotting peel
lit by jungle tatters
the river's kept locked away from that face
dodging the earthquake plan

the gray mates flap in a gloved sound
they take the whole thoraxed place
between my knees and chest
down to a closed harbor
cracking triple joints
on the belly of a birch craft
pillowed tits in a palm of each hand
thriving lower and lower
into the putty cracks and crevices
put down my mason knife
and traded pigeons for crows
electric hat crackling
all of us in love with tin
crown hair and tufted down
together falling

here comes my bald one
old in husbands
with a mint cigarette
guarding the waves in a picture frame
where they will spill out of a Saturday
she tells the electricity she's been through
the murders committed by being mute
stacked sunlight brassieres
on the body of an old junkyard
newts left tails pumping
on the long teeth of fake metal grilles
we danced a windshield

up to the low rim
of an evaporating sky
the girls in the trees
and the boys in the clouds
who no longer have conversations
two pigeons are more than one
and could be three or four
if they keep almost
kissing and pulsing
their necks like that

SAD ANIMAL NUMBER

limp,
scarred.
limp,
buds are
yellowed.

bend easily.
has lit-
tle black spots
on the florets.
limp.
husks that
are dry and/
spotted.

has yel-
lowed leaves
or slimy edges.
are
spotted or
dark.
soft or
sprouted.

has a gray
color or slimy
surface.
smells sour.
have cloudy
eyes, or gray
green gills.

THE BROKEN HYMNAL

You stand against bright fibers
to become a dark
step against the darkness
to become a light.

This is why
men beg to be let into love
and out of life
or to be poured into life
and out of love.

There has been
too much mortal hatred
expressed with tenderness
or expressed with bread;
it might as well present itself
as a mollusk sized like a galaxy
or the ugly shoe of a child
who's just now left the building
in which we stand
like a frozen clan
refusing to weep or waver.

That is why
today I wear the face
of a gravedigger
who has failed
to cover the faces of his familiars
with the ample dust of neutral earth
and I weep
for my cruelties
for the ones who touched
an air train on fire
while I sped by
in the godlike blindness
of an engine room.

You who have reached us
by erasing jungles
you who telephone telephones
don't tell us your name
this time. I beg:
let us escape
the thin hurt
and the landscape
that this language
has created: teach us to wither
like old belts of star
or lit by falling speak
the brickwork of bodies
vapors lent by love
and, very merely
the forgetfulness that remembers.

______________

Before the empty veld turned dark
my machine was vibrating
calls brought more telephone
the mercy of strafing
given in peacetime
the steady, ceaseless drift of materials

languages die in the air around a magnet
of erotic zones in the social body; it will return in the middle of summer
the patterns of energy locked in an oyster shell
or the power that harried it; power anchored
in these animals, the terminals of amorphous creatures

sexes may take turns shaping a nest which they are sent
flushed, male rises with loud metallic whir of peaks that reared up

the maps seen in the adult
born at the time of injection
being aural, just dissolve

cups and saucepans in a pail of cold rain
the waves that roll over the recorder

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

he has three birds
cut up in his chest cavity
the blue, the red, the green
left there by his wandering grandfather
whose family the ocean had never come from before
and the long chain of shells lovers punch into their walks
and the rasping curls of wind left there

she and the river take
the stems of conflagrated forests
on the sinews of a last ride
toss his condom'd soul into the powerlines
past fall and the fundraiser for cancer
supermarket banner grinning
kids imposed on airplane hangars
clothed in paint and filled with pine
the cloud is a soldier falling
who doesn't want to live this close to life

((())))(((())))

Two cultures lived students of the near-death
two cells from different supply houses
and ballet dancers also
who name themselves the terror,
fixing baths before the blue filter
in the mirror of the glass
in timber and iron
to leap the void
to a time before the future in schools,
hills, carved by glaciers, every target cell is in
the mountain barriers.

))(())(())((

the city's machines
for the death-voyage
your bones to wear down

order has totally broken android masters,
their eyes enlarge and alter form;
lacy, fragile and thin of the upper stories

shapelessness or idle shape-changing
to revolt and destroy

************

Broke down the soft furniture
put a church organ in the best window

body of gin and breath of smoke
played until you smote my ragged court

with tongue touched foot soles
and rode an armament of orchids

on the hood of a rust tank
pushed the forest in piles

for me to climb down laughing on pipes
to rip news from lumber, trying

to ignore your dress and your rarity
or feed your little dogs

at the edge of our space station
while the limbs of your sashes push me

into a copper paved fountain
to taste blood from the mantle of the rich earth

and ascend to my room, where the only vote for silence
wafts down a long chute and ignites

call me the king of magnets, attack dream,
this time I won't ask your name, you'll know
I'm a roof watching.

UNICODE BREAKER

The deep forest talon variety
you gifted on me, without buckskins
or fragrance of blood
is now a part of my arsenal:

fields through the curtain of your eye
I watch ephemera in factory windows;
blade mouths you stitched
where silence is usually kept

cord deeper than mine in this chrome island

to root me out with arms of man stammering
yarn wet from the core of a pumpkin.