-`~-`~-`~-`~


What's left of the earth by railroad stakes
I cling for healing
spider baby on a grass-point
my spine to groaning trees
watch watching the water
rain palace I entered
a butterfly knife in the basement
ribs open to flower
I fell through my grandmother's television
her solitaire laid out on coffeetable

Someday I'll come off the chemical leash
and even the propane-soaked moss
will bed me down to savor
the crunch of an indian cucumber
white root in the tongue-mouth
and mint of dark chucker berry
a fern-coat enduring whispers

luna moth on the center of ancient forehead
beaming to the lake-bed
beaming to the town's fountain core
the edges of a ditch adorned
with sugar of blueberry
who'll take my hand, a waif
in a riot of acorns.


-`~-`~-`~-`~

{{{}{{{}{{{}

I grip the thick stem of a broken hyacinth
propeller leaves rain, drop punched-in hours
down a chute that gurgles into the river
look at both paws and wonder
how well they know each other
feed like a squirrel, let the roofs
that shield from lightning saucer away,
watch coughing bicyclists
and swimmers who would be naked
in a clash with laws ancestors wrote
in sobriety, until their parchments made them drunk
guns sculpted from trees splinter pick at the  early stars
cartridges fall in the grass

There is a glamour girl gathering garbage
and many children born to throw
boogie boards against the art's tide
of a mushroom cloud
I had a shopping cart coated with lichens
and a tent that ate the dew
'til I pushed one into the other,
they enwrapped and faded

Another cargo on factory water,
things that the moon appears to knock down
and leave lying around,
and a healer's hand beaded with oil
that will never dry, an action movie
in the realm of a snow glass bulb
the mulch speaks thrusts of pitchfork
and a scythe spins in suspension
over lime-powdered fields
where many invertebrate cousins go to lie down,
a crumbled church is an other world's mailbox,
and the mating of foxes in ferns
ties hairs together on the back of my neck:

water forms a dollar sign, sex is food for plastic,
the abyss wears tender caverns
in its descent, and I wear it like a shawl,
it made a twin once
from my wanderlust imprisoned
but I laid him on cold wet cinders
and the gulls painted him there
I took a nightstick to his spirit
was a cloud of gnats
the berry that dropped from his stem
learned to clap leather and never speak
a void in windchimes, a windless world in female eyes
past the paths where computer melts chainmail
and we go to the ice-caps piping.

{{{}{{{}{{{}

-_-_-_-_-_-

Hierarchy of doves, lofting
the faintest the highest
the one touching the world least
the one whose being fits
most neatly into the breeze

the print of DNA creation
on a planetarium's ceiling
to be shattered against the sky
an egg in a net, a basement auditorium
strewn with pealing pianos
one hundred thousand tape cassettes running
the clickless push of fleshy buttons
a hot-tub hidden in the orchestra

bass thrumming in a wooden crate
the heart of a mummy alive with worm sex
the election of elders who babble toward infancy
pates gleaming in the torch of mosquito violins
burning imprints through cello bodies
cubbyholes of sad and shrunk computer light
music stands in plethora, feet glued
diagonally aimed, on a plateau
the theater screen like a bedsheet that we fall through
while chandeliers on pulleyed rope
descend with burning nightgowns
on their candled skeletons

the doves imprint the ceiling
from both sides, collapse
the diapered cherubs
like soaps on a hot hearth
flutter through the aging breach
where a city is an axe-cleft
gods departed to a park
to sleep under moss, we see through
the hidden radiance of aging shit

-_-_-_-_-_-

TRINITIES OF SMITTEN CONSTRUCT

In full plumage of sex I crawl to a garden
where an empire of wishes has never quaked
a purple mold on a granite chair

morphs into a woman, then a bird
still with a suggestion in its eyes
that will never cease

vices lead to virtues and virtues lead to vices
tangled vines wind unyielding songs
into all green machinery

shovels on stilts build graves in air
where arms are needed I reach
my body joins an engine it could not make

to rise through huge Vs of flock that drop incandescent
droppings on a plank, whose grain years crawl
an island where nobody waits

~`~`~`~

~`~/~`

From a large leaf-hung shadow I watch
the grass burned yellow around the trembling
edges, an island built by rays through space
murmuring perpetually to myself
today I will reclaim my nakedness
march through bright parellelograms
on a toppling horizon
but the unclothed day never comes

Someone is leading a child on figure eight paths
through the park going grey under green
the swamp departed
no more slithering through roots
growth turned to granite
their years go together like a falling book

I'm attached to the dream nerve in their heads
but we never look at each other
through the arabesques of carefully torn vines
that veil the pathways, that have no door
woman leads child
there is a key on the ledge of a falling world
there are many robins in the death of one father
there is an ovoid century clamped
in the back of your neck
to be released by the kiss of distance

~`~/~`

=

Bundles of goldenrod
clenched in each hand
I go to the ragged territories
where the marks of my kind fade quickly
sleep next to a swamp
wake up with my best hand
in a smooth flurry of tadpoles
wrinkled by water
spent all night lashing at the fields
with no woman to watch over me
my very being is stranded
fireflies in the amber of that stilled evening
hummingbirds at the archway
where dead gardens live
I practiced love like an escape artist
clothed in inter-dimensional purple
now I'm trapped in its maw plain-wide
swimming the time-stop
orchards left behind
turning their apples to drop
among the moguls of twilight

=

>^<

Brown painted picnic table
lit by pink baby spiders
quick crawl through dried rivulets of sugar
quick crawl over my wrists
I move to the drying leaves
watch ants and smoking cars move
over bridges and brittle stems
the fields don't ache somewhere for me to lie down
but cry with crickets in humbled midnight
after the fever taken to conflagration
after the kisses that landed like hatchets
loving a gnarled branch
off the birch's ash
we shed the seasons
return to a mound of tarred earth
to watch six feet above
our silence inevitable
learning to quiet toward it
larvae on the vein of a leaf
through the sunlit ground
quickened even by water
pond's history on oars of hand

>^<

~*~*~*~*

The earths speak clearly when you move
there is a clotted notch between my shoulders
that knows it and opens its lid wide
we will move the bright items along
of sound or sight on a flashing scale
over a strong river
I've destroyed every one of my
ideas
to lie beside you on this sledge
ice branches quick above
but our talk is tumbleweed
it lingers around rectangular drains
lined with light-intoxicated lint
of tobacco cotton soaked with urgent breathing
remember the exit from an ancient restaurant
with a handful of peacock knives
alleys stacked with discarded telephone poles
we'd planned an ecstatic lightweight government
over a forest of cocktails
and when we strobed our unstable forms
in the pulse quick sidewalk
the people seemed quiet and sad
as if about to shuffle together
to the foot of a mountain grave
not holding hands
and we met the nameless there on the ignited outskirts
it lingers around the fleck black holes
eating through glacier dropped rocks
near those blueberry bushes.

~*~*~*~*

_____________


everything in the house would be shut down
and severe pain in the eyes


there is a simple relation


two galaxies pass
through each other

Too much air
too much gloss
too much bleach and linoleum
no eyes watched money
into the suds corner
rags rung hoop-high
in panels of labelled sunlight
swallowing the world
and the anti-world around it
for a wrapping paper
planet squirm dead like a fish part
sandwiched in seaweed crackers
love on tin
love on monoxide

By
the fir, the elm,
the walnut,
but not the redwood, he's
walled off from her beauty

a rabbit, a pomegranate,
a comet, a thicket
of branches

~~~~~


Faint whirring of ships and gates
over the ocean; one wonders--

leaf-towers slanting
upwards to the sky--if our fantasies

outstrip reality, every time: one denies
the bottomless thought.  Wings chirp

from the bones, over the ocean entire

whirlpooling down
the core of the earth.

~~~~~~

Long sickly gazes
the pause in the dials
of the frogs and the cows

rock-strewn planet-sized staring
at the micro-pebbles of silica
on the hearth of your each freckle

these creatures joined, by pine trees
and oblivion, by rust bucket
and apocalypse, there is a stairing
in the rips, between town-realities

the circuitry in ferns and brambles
foot of a superglued teepee
a neutral plane flashing

~~~~~~

SASH      (song lyrics)


The beast is hungry as he's ever been
love circling the drain
I saw her standing there in overalls
with engine oil stains

you men can steady your forces
to the basement of a jail
I am here to take her out of here
and scurry down the air

Don't confuse the bleeding cancer
with the oozing of a lawn
I slumped against the driver's wheel
and slept through the emergence of

twelve ready, angry doctors
who drank coffee by the pail
relinquish all your daughters to
the groaning in the ocean's depth

of ears suspended in the circuitry
that's fallen overboard
we will tangle in a ballroom
or a tattooed boulevard

You can call me agent stranger
I will suckle in the breeze
wait 'til you rescind your hair down
when the fall starts throwing leaves

@@@@@@


I am a traffic light
blink blink blink
all night on automation
we are babylon
and I am a bobcat
she took her scythe dress off
and put on a hairpin
we danced like tops
to the dull shine of an open oven
the doorway in the guard of a small dog
light on and on in our pale heads
until we bashed the kitchen apart
attacked the bedroom with weary streamers
and opened the front yard to lunatics
every one of whom knew our first and last names

A TASTE OF THE MAGICAL ARMY


Bloodied snow
bones, flexible plastic panels under the skin
a loud noise will slam the eyes shut,
the essence of the person--
animals on a world being surveyed
their consciousness coalescing
theory, destroy

Dropped it into an icebound river
bound the bundle
in which every molecule
has been replaced by stone

Natural diamonds themselves
to spin new thread
nestling on the mountainside
his or her self split off from
with a gasp and a start,
to feel the core woke up in it

~()~()~()

There is an owl
deep in my being
who has never moved.

A kingdom bristles around him
which he's never tampered with.
Officials ascend their ranks,
order the assemblage of shielded walls
which burglars climb
he stays perched.

It is uncertain what power
he possesses;
he does not crave power.

You may picture him in marble
at the floor of an overcast ocean;
but his habitat is deeper
and weightier still.

If I can stir him
maybe his wings would sound
like the energy in marble,
which is never still.

But I let him
breathless hold the living center
he has no task to perform with his claws
what holds him
I must move rightly to feel

~()~()~()

_++_++_++

Yours is to touch the endless air
on a pier
overlooking everyocean
a boat's edges out of faint luck
the rippling turn of vast waters

mountain sides that thrill in each ribcage
a ship that carries a whole jungle
and twilight unknown that wearies no song

into the aftermath of who met whom
yours is to part the edgeless rice paper
curtains and wings over the aging sea.

++_++_++_

------->>>)))

Walked through glacial hallways
looking for a beautiful sound
to dwell in the tiny bones of the ear
mowed lawns around the peaks
of always solitary mountains
moles safe from the blades in a valley
the faintly aged plastics
of hastily assembled towns
filling low tunnels
with run-off of dreams
from exposed stems
the pistil of eyes, sleepwalkers who garden
all night long and meet me
on sanitarium paths
sometimes a porch is the hearth of the world
melting glass gears
behind a fertile wall
of detailed flame

(((<<<-------

(#)(#)(#)(#)


When I see my corpse
on the earth's floor, soaked in radium
petals snuff the time clock
I had three dreams from red to sepia
kissed days separated by black curtains
dropped 100, 000 light bulbs on a polished stage
while you were whispering in a snakeskin orb
the fiber optics of discarded hair
two guns and two sets of lipstick on the breakfast table
shouting over the overpass from separate convertibles
curtains ignited with stage-safe fire
two couples throwing dinner plates at one another
and not laughing
linoleum curling like a wet rose

scorched day serves no empire
I hold up the discs, our sun's multicolored representatives,
all that's needed is the rustle of unwritten pages
to hold the clouds in place with many sets of pincers
to let these cafe tables melt into the sea
and the kitchen shrink a tunnel to afterlives
through the bread and the knife
skylight cracked by a running guitar
the empty frames adorned with crystal light deposits
shelves lined with miniature forests
I descend on pulleys in jeweled drag
looking for a prehistoric shape
in the far warp of your iris