.....

Above and below
a new orbit glides across the curved sky
cosmic union a crass cartoon of wholeness
the normal lens over the hill people

harmless psychotic warrior-god
lord
about to be destroyed
every shape that's born to finish his melancholy island

wires through the weatherhead and blend of crystalline
the disembodied recuperate in a yellow room
lighting translucent leaves and flowers
turned again by the crown wheel, the decadence following the war
someone has planes while he has none

the center of fertility, mythology of earth
met as one, the world egg
stretching itself and growing across
the ultimate slide-show streams through a smashed dome roof

earth-mother, even the navel of sex
because his long legs could compass the vast passion of ancient places

.....

Maybe it's the blood in the body that thinks these thoughts
or the language laid over it
that becomes deeper than its beginnings
gongs and creaking of doors into machine code
the frenzy of world-changing beasts
reared on wastes from a brewery
the edges of newly shod feet walking streets
made for riding in cars
the whole plan of the flesh finally collapsed in a heap of sticks

.....

The hero descends to depths of dumbness
where not even the poignant speeches can find him
pummeled by the coolest of fists
balls swollen by the lash of a rope-knot
asshole turned to yarn unraveled
by a coat hanger that found him late
face singed by a knife print
looking beautiful at the bottom of the ocean
his crashed car also quite beautiful
finally bathed and crucified with the boards
and the best nails of the Home Depot
driven through his merman remnant
laughing at the dramatic mantle of the roiling
purple black sky laughing
resurrected to stand in the resurrected hand
of the resurrected greatest automobile company
feet adrip on the backseat healing slowly
then quickly the crowds with a familiar salute
and finally our loving tyrant
with all the scars he suffered to get laid
or never to get laid
is found in a thousand bright previews
performing the same feats over and over again
in cheaper and cheaper guises
until the animal of history worships him
and he becomes a fossil in its slobber
all his forms a candelabra digitized
to light the kings and tables
the hero ascends to giddy heights of talkiness
where many thousands and many more than thousands
speak for him on the future of television
and his taint is the taint of the ages

.....

Lemon-cat, brown-white silver mask,
the morsels of time are not for you to eat,
they fall from the far-built ceiling
in little strips, galactic wisps
that barely make your whiskers twitch,
you welcome the fire's heat from a near table,
the doors of the place are patterned in your stripes,
there is no symmetry that does not find us
wounded, uneven in the feet, in the breast,
in the faintness of blood that only
powers toward death, and we feisty
with brightness of eye until dullness
threatens the striking power of all we affection,
and the quaintness of your weaponry is kept
in microcosm, and to be petted
your blinking tows all hitching lights
to their own seasons, so that we may follow
each furred version of one another,
with all the perturbed differences that creatures carry
not quite disintegrated into sleep
electric company.

.....

Thin pieces of cold from one of the goddess's eyes
to knock him off his horse in a bubble chamber
veins with lengths of plastic carved on the fireplace
nozzle through the chimney trim white helicopter
nuptial hymns at the top nailed to the edges
hands of a human beast no plants with flowers
the anvil the soul no birds body-disc must be
thousands of iron parts and pieces green and still
a hole for each plant a dark pool small pieces of lettuce
that small crimes deserved death and that ladybugs visit an orange
a ringing sound a launch site to watch magic
fabric scorched from long blasts a booming sound
a shrill sound pick of a sweepstakes winner
a drum, or a whistle forged while cherry
the street and the outside world by cells and fibers
hard stones, a great quantity of blood 1,000 pounds of plants
he pries the calories of the sun like an old man reclining.

TIME FOR A NEW MASK

Now to the place where the moving firestorms
are no longer stopped by fog
doubt is the only constant companion

world crowded by superstructures
that take care of it, badly.

There is a lion in the mind of the flesh
who looks on aggravated, waiting for one
to submit to greatness and give all this new meanings.

Give me the wrath in your heart
and I will look after it
show me your loneliest landscape
rippled by the sound of shells breaking
I will help you to take it over
though my form is a tyrant
moving at times against me
in pickled youth, with a hatred for me alone
and a sidearm that inhabits my liver

when you are so tender to my foolishness
and I fall through the gulps of the earth in a usual way
and nothing that we are glued to feels familiar
in all the froth of what we wish
so it will happen and exist beyond us
from our hints
the curvature staked out
the presence of blue yonder in the space-time continuum

.....

Certain depth, shapes with any number of dimensions, among the robots
a wild yonder where the layman is lost the spiritual center
and I could easily lay down a multitude apart from society
for the plying within those walls of joy, nervousness
in which the bride did not survive his hatred of Earth and
of plague ships to the dogs, the grandparents, the toddlers
spares the dumb due worlds

.....

I want you to live in my coat,
to just move in, adorable woman,
all the spheres that broadcast your being
when I feel homesick for books
and things are all collapsing in a way that pleases me,
long pieces of chain the bottom layers for anything
the way of wrapping their bodies in heat and light
no more to it than masses of its own viscera
smitten with desirelessness
swamps filled up with dead land changed oceans moved

Outside it is cool charcoal comes from wood
carbon is black the sky is black the coal burns dead plants
and I think of the lovemaking and the music of the poor,
with a smirk that the centuries have put on my face
'til I go to my infancy--

Be a trunk against, humming
the loneliness of other trunks,
a forestwoman for rapture of the apartment,
a warrior in the electric shower
beams from a TV stall
the corridors of light close

I want you to live in my coat
the passage through which the sea blanches and the surface cries

Abattoir Static

Even in the labyrinthine vats of rat shit broth,
you make your stand.  You are a pine
holding the keys to a keyless kingdom,
standing somewhere on a platform of
vegetation impossible, so close to the sun's hold

They move you along in engine boxes,
from one wrong place to another, you keep
a grin stuck to the torch, the molten features
that followed us out of the womb, from lips
through the forest we seek, a surging
metal-tugged nightmare of beauty touchable

music stands sprouting with scented needles,
carved rivulets between trees trembling,
trembling because we are alive with the same
tail-symphony, corroding memory because
to remember is only a mushroom from the nucleus,
impacted forgetfulness,

We rise from the hills, behemoths who fenced
our cow-eyed understanding,
when we were only human,
before and after we looked down
the blown tunnel of our making
fields singed for sky-eyes
foot-beats of our solemnity disintegrated into song.

Something under the skin as a controller of light

presuming them to be too cold to look at for domestic comfort
crude as the exposed works

in a coat of air
on a single breath
their wings have become minutes of rest

the cardinal rule of total darkness
with special precautions
after a silver ion is snatched away to make the iron frames available for headlines
fold is rich in small blood restless color

violet made by mixing red and furnishings
a message in print can die

Earl of Basement

His belly is a footstool for a serpent.  His arms drool.
When did he come into village history, gaping like a loon camera?
With windpipes strapped in razors, all whistles stopped,
all bells stilled, to descend to a lower pealing

A small ship of friends is cruising into the fire's outline,
tinsel windows from a few yards of forest, the roadside winking,
the welling up and dying out of a consciousness, a teaching
through the eyes, a smudge of light-smeared
human photograph, tearing from the fabric of natural light

He's the driver in a thicket of reflection.
The liquid painted on dry bone that will flake off against the sunrise.
And he is resonant to the machine of the earth.

LEMON

That what I am is not effervescent,
that by the time I see you I have turned so many corners
that somehow we've become strange to one another,
that I cannot say it without a litany,
that I do not know how to express the drive of human love,
consistently, without a dagger,

that this cat and this fireplace
are the first and last world
trembling at 4 a.m., claws buried absently in denim
so gentle to the hell of the morning
fur silver and black
drag my eyes to the blindness of childhood
and on your way back--

this casserole of a brain, these ways of forgetting--
bring me your feline launch, finally,
give me up to the hum in my lap,
petite reassurance.

.....

When she first clapped eyes on a light field (say a button) a vanishing art
down in britches and boots the long, curving collarbones,
compressed air, and fresh breath, blood, urine and saliva
a clock with hands of clouds and gilded shell forms,
crystals suspended in magnetosphere's eggplant living room

all leaks, stand in our safelight
leaf through tiny lilacs and dahlias,
layers of plants and animals
to paint its walls black glaze with her decorator

no drunkenness, no rapture
no one knows what makes it red

a light trap burned up in the day
clicks to give him a precise voice, a birdcall

MS. FIRESTONE

Dreams do not make melody career
you see your cartoon breakfast in the dawn sky
through an android window
and cannot reach over the hill rise.

The noise of satin uniform
falling on the floor of a trashcan
alerts genius to the presence of murder, in the self,
on the apartment precipice, forcing music
into fire escape and wires
the aridity of loneliness accepted
an orchestra of nerves that have
no homes in other nerves.

To abandon abandonment, the arctic heart,
spreading tendrils of frost across the skeleton leaves
of human cities, to open a mystic dresser drawer, to
see a metropolis of burning numbers, in which one
is a letter transfigured.

A crucifix older than history
nudges its indecipherable plaque
against the underside of the lounge rug
and strains against it until the floor becomes
a wave of tumblers, children prepared to play,
who'd not begun.

FIVE FORMS OF LIGHT

To add wonder to message
all these subjects were taken out
in raccoon territory
they raged and raged at dumpster fires

in the fiery dark, they learned a lesson over and over again
their mattresses were soaked in tears and all their agony was music
they moved like dowsers, navigating a slight deception in the breeze
they turned a mess of corner, dragging a train of eyeballed kerchiefs,

moving their mandibles around candy bars with famous names,
stalling the traffic with a murmur, blades loose on their back pockets,
who know about the errors of childrearing, and the sanctuary of the wounded
who know about the handwringing of the dead, which is imaginary

SILENT TAPS

I am turning into a houseplant that watches you.
In the past we are dancing; close your eyes and smell
the soil I grow from. The radiant nowhere, silently
opens up, from the sun on a beer coaster
or a napkin scrawled with alien alphabet,
closer and closer to multiverse, the fibers of our beings
stretched tighter and tighter in the refining blaze of theory.

You are a drumskin whose under-air I live with.
This is the apartment where we plot the smokeless end
of the known world. Genetic material sprayed in laughter
across the flowerets, the sound of many bicycles
passing huge, closed windows. Make me closer to both
death and life, in the music of your refusal to analyze;
root in me behind my hilt, show me the infinity
backwards.

This coming bloodletting, a history of love-blips,
will not be enough. Things must fall short somewhere,
to keep the steps worthy until the great until.
What is meant for the eye, the ear, the nose,
the other tendrils, is meant in profound ambience,
is meant in the bloodlessness
of closely studied blood.

This is the first door to the house
with the most doors, where a fart waits in denim
laughing kettles to a stove with feet
that print linoleum and forget. Drink your tea
with tumeric and let the ceiling's whir of caged beings
turn into a planetarium helmet over your head.
Soon we will not remember ourselves, much less each other;
soon we will out in the wide tiny,
be feeding ducks who are already done eating.

.....

The blue door, opens on white-streaked
fruitful sky, it looks like the ultimate window, then
it is closing

cruising the ocean's glow, nervous in the international air
spiritual loopholes closing up like sand
broken light in the head
wiring

a call is coming from the tree-wall
a siphon is sucking down the marrow of a field,
somewhere skeletons buy tickets, on a narrow highway's
eaves of authority running with piss

deep in my dreamt house
a woman in a plant-dress is always passing
from detachment to detachment
the veil of letters fits her like a leaf
and her snore issues
from the valley of unpublished music

.....

Prey, what could I want revolting,
talk to eating all, thoughts rotten with sleep,
no will to imagine the future, pulled by a light,
angels over the parking lot, filaments dropping from clouds

the mind of a snake in a garden,
all warring with conquered earth,
burnt civilization, lingering in its laws,
surrounding the frenzied desire,
owned by a failed monk, failed millionaire.

Nothing stilled by thought, coming up molten and alive,
will silver the landscape with what rides atop blood
until the fiber in flesh breaks with what is tired of words

I will come down in rivulets from party mountain
singing purely.  Nothing that has touched me
in oblivion or waking will go to waste.

.....

Young woman, I fear the grief of old men
as it enters my being without a shout,
I find the core of where old selves clamor with chisels
and you are a lightning's root in the overbecoming ephemera,
you slant the landscape with eyes, with footsteps under your footsteps
smoldering, you hoist me with gravity from my ceiling bed,
I withhold only what cannot break loose from the wall groaning calendar

Young woman, I never ascended like a prophet to paralysis
because we are living matter, undirected by words to be shaken,
let this hymnless abandon light up the vaulted cobweb
blueprinted into life by those dying, who pretend eternity,
take my carcass of moss, vibrating with song, to your lip's crux
one final perseverating time, be my salve's looping station,
repeat and repeat me, you are the hourglass emptied of atlas
 

.....

Stilts high above grass and shrubs in a wet woods
the colorful king stood at the earth's center, linking it
allowing it to flash the rig over one man's head

he saw rings around the faint wash of blue light
he saw four moons near tree-ripened fruits
he saw stars that had never been power to a bone
from a ring of fragments on the retina in profusion

the machine in games of ticktacktoe the shadow of phases we see
some cordlike long thick draping vines
cool, shadowless white flowers
an apple, the apple's thin skin

.....

Flesh is more expensive on this disc; the heart on a screen
tiny polyps which are the folds and garments that will fall
from twigs, dead leaves clouds of ammonia snow
light-years across their eyes close to the windows,
soft tissue of the body is bathed in bulge of stars
that has the same colors and each window
need not be bigger than a man's face
eggs or fledgling birds vast swirling city of
acorns, berries, lichens, an inner-halo-ring
is even fainter, spinning off each of the discs
is a steady crescent-shaped golden mist
from the blue sky, first light sucks it clean, then returns it
and morning blots out the building, leaving only the water

.....

That the nights and days of society do not belong
to the hearts of the passionate
and how the illusion that my eyes are changing the light
puts my days in a bubble where I break

but toward the rainforest's blankets
of life-giving death, lost medicines
and this cloak of fiber-optic snakes I wear
to frighten away all the armies and how at times
it lights up their blades and their cannons
and the technology of silent time travel

love that brings to the abyss
its desire to inhabit all the milliseconds
as the trains rush past the tree trunks
and into the valleys of concrete
covered with patriotic tarps
and the sweet nonsense of sellers

that the passionate cannot sit still long enough
to be shot into space, but build stages
from the threshold of their nerve
decorated with face-paint of burnt forests
charging and laughing with fists
full of berries and bushes
stained by the night life that is growing like a vine
while a girl dances to Al Green on the tiles of a bakery
and a buyer laughs
the myth is what actually happens

.....

If I go with the fire of my destiny
through unsilent corridors
and speak there with mirrors that deepen
into alternate selves, sending their eyes into me,
if I multiply existence, only the time-blossom
can breathe these creatures scented onto my path
and take what it produces roaring
down the nearest wormhole

you keep a gauze over your world
and it includes me, and I am exhausted
behind it, it makes a total shield on my skin,
and I can watch it form from a new distance,
harmonizing with thin water

when the earth found me
I'd finally stopped suffering in her grasp

.....

You have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to be your Humphrey Bogart,
your good wolf and the guardian of your river's heart,
and the autumnal apocalypse is shivering and falling
all around me, it brings my tropical soul
in color to the fore without a temperature to match it,
the tilt of your mouth to the gleam of your gaze
broadcasting over valleys and hills through black & white
the heat of your being, you have that throwback beauty
that makes me want to walk into an old diner to be awed by
you inhabit classic skin.

.....

Careening to heights, dizzy with rapture, I try
to pull all the aching eyes into it with me;
surprised at how much shows up,
in the radar of my chances.

This is the glinting scrap-mountain
of discarded dreams, where another vision
can still be assembled, painstakingly atop
with a wide bell, and a feather pen
with an electronic heart,
ringing from the anus to the tips of the eyes.

.....

Earth knocks on my door, as it knocked
early on the door of my father.
For now it's just a trickle; I let it in.
Geraniums are clamoring somewhere
outside.  I too am caught up in that false prophecy
of a world that will never end,
of a consciousness that lingers.
I can barely lie still to watch
the sun pass over me.
So impatient to live, that I make death
come a little closer, so this thing
that is not an entity and I
can check each other out,
fumble around the limits.
Like a parallelogram collapsing
into an escaping sliver of light,
what they call my soul
has eclipsed itself, and I am
already free.

.....

When you were fucked in love for the first time,
egging your chances, over the dry hump of a whole existence,
breaking in the radio, late night of the buttocks,
staring under the mirror, we are changed for reality,
there is no sensible end to this feeling, this peculiar disaster,
this and that run of wine and wildly radiant colored circumstances,
changed aching to combine, vaulted from a forested childhood,
unwillingly moving.

.....

Weeping-burnt alongside a river
a heron swept through my ribcage
and the clouds were a gauze between my bones
I saw a crushed pharmacy spilling medicine
on white-hot twilight tar
and the gift of the sunrise
cracked into lava's rivulets
by fleets of minnows scattering

reassembled around the eruptions of history
the blandness of human tyranny went on, troubling a few
and we gathered around a fountain of dream-glinting coins,
then going to buy things to clean our bodies, scour our homes
for an empire of thin wishes, a rain of spears
on the roof of the planetarium.

Agape

I can feel the human heart beating with fear, in the supermarket;
how we are suspended in the gossamer of each other's lives,
so nervously.  In the steps of these people I know the shuffle
of my own bedraggled shoes, how we are besieged by threats
of guilt-cancer, of guilt-cleansing and the promise
that every one of us will be nailed to these fucking walls,
well before the opening of all outer space.  And to think
of the many instants, when tenderness breaks out
in a glance or a clasp, of flesh on real flesh,
from our harried natures, pummeled by time,
is a violent caress, then a cooling lava,
and the growl of a lost leopard.
Until the very nucleus of one's being,
sabotaged again and again by love,
grows firm in love, defiantly;
until all the fragments of one's being
are suffused with love, and their circuits are bathed
with the holiness of its knowing sorrow.

Bartenderess

Your fragrant cool, how did it happen?
And the ear-curls, how did they descend?

If the orchard gave form to its shining technology,
if it went hot for cold, where would it sprout
and its productions land?

They'd thud on the moon, let the cycles vibrate,
where they fecund and move
dust into sculpture, that has eyes,
that has alien culture in its most familiar echo,

carving carving
and they love the blood of what
they will fall amongst, a teeming vacancy of cells.

.....

To become a realtor of star maps
hawking trails to the infinite
from a light-pierced kiosk
in a barren airport
eating the phonebook
a carnival and rubbed-out addresses
human neighborhood bulbing out
from an alien socket

.....

I am watching you burn yourself down,
and I can see how I am doing it, too,
in our own ways we go faltering,
time is dismembered by us;
and we follow it, very angrily, laughing

Whole bodies flung to the geodes
photographed, to the fictional solar system

body, body by death and body by life,
fighting without moving

I'm fucked up enough now to treat
my friends like angels
in the deranged way I love them
following a mantle I've never worn
through a dark I know better than
the specter who follows me, wearing
the horn of an idiot, being a human

Because you can't trust your own life,
because your own life is a stranger trapped
inside you; or because you can't talk, properly
without being seen, and are not
under any circumstances allowed
to fall over.

.....

This serenade must shiver the lilac bushes
blur the rings of elms within within
and haul late-night clouds aside
from celescopes their vapors cannot touch;
it must reach only one woman,
and her name is the sea,
and it has been said.

There is no ache in time
to abandon her tiniest doings
the light on her fingers is universal
and the song around it
needs to breathe the air of all time
through this time
bring stone together with stone
a bed of moss at the foot
of the life of a fountain
falling of cold water on matted rock-path

The cleanliness of it, and her place
so far along where it flows
where it meets salt and is overwhelmed
by the sadness around the earth
on the skin and in the radiant unseen
fire at the fire's center.

....

I am like a ladies' shoe.
They have carved me down
into this little form.
Twitching on the shore
of a mighty river,
twitching in the roots,
twitching in the soil,
seen backwards by myself

and for the water, the water,
why can't I tumble down.
I have thieved and been taken,
I have acted like a rodent
with a case of brain,
nervous in the blaze of time,
now I want to be vaulted into flesh tall
and have lovers all over me
day-long and night-long
springing secret terrors
into brightness and ease
from my skin.

.....

To live in the echoless vibrancy of space
where our voices trail off and do not return

or to think of a network of choirs
inhabiting dark matter, webbing and chiming

to bring histories together in warped majesty
until there are no aliens, until the broken threads

connect to all--these are my terror dreams,
of travel-lashed emptiness or voidless laughter

let them come together as one, though there be no one.

.....

It is moving toward,
it is light and flavoring space,
the reality of death being an architecture

alive and no longer wandering
taken deep to be molded,
hungering only for the inevitable,
taking it within wearing an eerie smile,
shrugging off the transported weight
of many planets, tracing raw movement
with instruments that do no follow,

and holding it fast with nothing limbs,
loving it strangely with love
because love is strange in this world
which was not made by love.

.....

When the wolves recede from paradise, for a moment,
and take time to lick the sugar of their wounds,
and you let me into the honey of your torso
to forget what I will never remember,
remember what I will never forget,
and you bring the budding mouths
together to pause an apocalypse,
I watch from a girlish bedroom,
I watch from a half-open kitchen
you preparing the three hundred pounds
of redness, the hammock of the sky's counter-pull,
and the busted opulence we will become
when the shells have softened into flower
and straight lines of stringed instruments
have broken, arabesqued.

.....

I will furrow your insides with heat

for the dawning, it will be petal'd

I will be present in the present like a bird
rejoining its flock's lettered sky, present
at your squirming altar

I will take the decorative wound
out of the air to place
on your cool forehead
the emptiest kisses
the open territory
your voice and wandering agent

coming home from the kill of the engine
to be bathed in all the thoughts that the lights missed
hurt vegetable skins on the sidelines
strangely in their watching and being mute

and lost in the leftovers of the cavassed landscape
of a whinny that dies in the throat
and a wind of thought fucking
and a cemetary bench outlined with bodily vapors
the condensation of flesh on marble catching stars.

.....

When I touch life's substance,
when I bury my instruments in the earth
and let them ring stone,
I pay attention with pain
to the small, irritating numerals that float past
and the interruptions, all of them--
do not reject, do not compromise
the vast cloud of corruption--
and I watch with fondness
a woman in twisting hair descend the vines
and begin her assault there.

.....

He keeps a piece of tape
over the slot in the top of his head
to keep coins from being dropped in;
he keeps himself in a shell of clothing,
and never lies down to rest.

Wounded to stillness and wide-eyed,
invulnerable to language,
in the garden he waits, on a stalk.

His placement outside the market
makes him shine, with the shine
of one who is being looked at,
all glossy with sunrise, annointed
by early twilight
in the falsified calm of the afternoon,
his grin is what he's got.

In the magic territories, collecting a paycheck.
He is not an answer, and the question
has never. Been. Asked.

.....

Someday you'll see me
mouth scorched by tobacco and alcohol
crawling from the outskirts
onto the whole glinting plate of your horizon
widening your peripheral glare
feeding on your perfume
desperately, like someone recently made homeless
and by you are the pools of water multiplied

determinedly, we meet the current entire
my forefathers are moving in the curvature of my back
you sweeten your belly with a twitch
we have arrived reverberating in the maw
thick with disguised existence
purging our territories of false looks
reaching the age-old hearth of the sexes
tortured by the dreamed reminder
of a frightened congress
in the fixed community of my scaly blending

I will be your ten-cherry dancer
you will be for me the sabbath of venus
I will blur and twang in your toes
until the ceiling begins to come loose
and we find ourselves nakedly propped on a door
then falling on tubes and flimsy surfaces
and we go to our circuits flailing
and we go to the graves of our pillows drunk,
benignly separated, then over the froth and the fog
into the merciless radiance of the tugged-on morning
drinking your vanilla and vinegar
draping your productions in my robe
in my encampment of kisses

and you will be paddled by water
by the spiritual water that wafts an image
from the strength of my forehead
where you go to lie down.

.....

When the beautiful surprise happens
totally, surrounding
arctic shelves in the life of the mind
and you break into your body
and you shiver over mine
and it is the perfection of a squandered millenia
and the taste and the dampening everywhere, snugly
of your goddessblessed pudendum
and I'm doing time in your vision
and I descend into the deep mazes of your sensation
and it is the only place where my spirit lifts off
and drips over the miraged edges
and I am casually knocking a hole in the sky
with the form and the flake of my flesh
winded by holiness
the shameless drum riding my blood
and you are the crest and the ship's prow of womanhood
and a breath flowering
and your presence and your capacity
pushes back all the walls of life
and lets me fall slowly, from a great height
into the velveteen of your magnet laughing.

.....

You are a woman in ashes,
I am a man on water,
you are the serpent in a telephone,
I am a cell weeping,
you are a religion of thieves,
I am the toucher of stones on a mountain,
you are a chorus that breaks down,
I am a soloist sweeping,
you are the wandering talk,
I am a trumpet bent open,
you are alone in light,
I am the rain on a powerline,
you see the sickness of violence in valor,
I see the pesticide spray on fashion's visor,

we are in a combat for which there is no hospital
heart's matter hammered by star-fibers
that died behind their light
and became merely power.

.....

In machines and lashed water
there is a hand moving
in parks and unfettered scenery
coins spin blur dates and faces
numbers are punched holes
thick syrupy light comes pushing in
and will not be still
or move as light moves.

Once I had the light hard,
hard in my eyes, I used a device,
a device to deflect it,
what I could not name, I ignored
to give other things names,
I named what was around me, I used
a device, I used several devices,
I ate up the space, I thought I'd kept
somewhere, a clean departure, a vessel
waiting, once I had the light hard,
clean in my eyes, I held it with
my open, hills glowed at the edges

I am the angel of

Eyes blooming all over.  Spirit standing
on a fleshy platform green spawned
from all the ponds of the earth.
A strong slender form with targeted dark spots,
the whole orb of the head an ethereal eye,
aglow, steadily and soft.  The awning's
mantle a crepuscule's hood over the globe,
blue lava from the sky of eternity.
Masks fallen melting and phosphorescent
around the re-formed feet.

.....

A long tongue thin-leaved bend in a stream
fell heir to a cache of triangles vaulted rooms and colorful crystal
that blew out of the entrance
whenever the weight of winter anchor to the bottom
new trees grow in the cones cut queen closers

hers are being groomed for his office to him for mercy
then he shall go unto yet other world--an all-devouring firestorm

quiet, empty, inhuman space, a quality
that has spoken a dusting of snow and abandoned gum
the pile of junk and escape

.....

This love is for nobody, that is why it dreams
such luminousity has never existed
the thicket that rustles musically
is the tarnished path of branching stars
and the sickened mind must pull
sex-carcass away from it
to awake, build daily and nightly
a fortress around its rainbow spray
an incubator in the wide open
onanist's igloo in the bright of a frozen beyond
that only to be melted

this love is for nobody, that is why
it can't sleep and continues

.....

A mole dead in bright grass,
fog on a strawberry field,
the bike path over the bridge
on the river, all clung
to the clouds of flung
feathers suspended in azure and amber
as hills rolled under the vulnerable body
tar breaking in the rhythm of squeezed earth
and the mind is a hearse
clenched within it, an engine
suffering through half-open doors,
dress slack legs stepping feebly out
to examine an unkept opossum body
crushed far from the cloth within
the failing coffin, bankrupting transmission.

.....

You glow with both life and death,
shivering, the poles within you.

A barren civilization
has its way with you, daily.

You try to watch it
through the eyes of geese,
and fall into their imagined terrors.

You try to watch it through the eyes
of your enemies, and disappear:
they are not looking at you.

You glow with both life and death
you befriend your loneliness.

.....

The quiet crumbling of a meteor
through the vast etherea
planet condom of cooling skies
two aching shapes hold limbs against
the telescope's lens
a flare of mineral burn
lights up the plastic harbor
whole museums go under the tide
floating libraries break the ribs of the city
parched language goes up on waves
to the water's blind surface
and the facelessness of the sun.

.....

Shade covers shade,
nightmare is wallpaper,
easy is the trick of living,
the no-trick of dying.
The light in the dark
no longer supple, no longer jagged,
simply and sadly filling space
with appearance of dignity,
quiet and resistant.
A balloon of saliva and mud
crashed against the moon
to give its radiant outline,
a form in retreat, never waving.
No limb for expression,
vines gone silent on the arch
the puzzleman paced in and out
tying and untying his hands
to a cooling stone.

.....

The fruition of dreams leaves us barren
light comes knocking on the walls
to be joined and unanswered
the stream of things
flickers past without a target
we are left tied to glaciers
that freeze the manes of mammoths
around our wrists because
something old and large must
be stopped to death
something young and small
must be frustrated
and kept against the ice
to struggle brightly

.....

The white marble of distance is on our fingertips
the leopard skin of wild sleep
and the destruction of diamonds
to give way to flesh
its pathways of dying light
peeling stalks of ancient trees
turning chalky deposits
back to sap of pain, ooze of life
dripping willow tresses reborn
from darkened cities, rotting parks
our long bed lit between us like a bridge

.....

Unending procession of naked earths, life
waiting without a history,
symbols fallen away,
before and after the attack of time,
a finite kiss, that cuts far
through whole kingdoms of servitude
as the clock corrodes between us
and becomes the air we breathe.

.....

Voices of all the ages
spoke through me
in a shower stall.
I clenched and rose
to be among them.
I walked and chose
to filter them all
through an eclipse.
Fluctuating giants, pin-prick tiny
figures hand in hand through
phases of otherworldly light
coalesced in the electric wires.

.....

Chasm flower, all the clouds
in one stream over the earth
grey-white with suffering air
and the lovers beneath them
draining their teeth.
Purple-white, delicately wounded,
into the webbed soil.
A bed of daisy chains,
a riotously multiplied patch
of clover.  A gasoline fire
spilled at its descending edges.
Our dream linked, a bed in the open.

.....

If you are an animal, if you are a bible,
if you work chess, if you play scrabble in the dark
with glowing letters, if you are opposed
to opposition, if you see the green ladder,
if you stand against your very flesh to support it,

come up to the plateau of fevered rocks
and pillar them up to my chest and past it,
to the rims of your eyes and transcend their sight,
to the edge of the world which is not an edge
but a round descent.

.....

Already it's late afternoon, and poison calls
to my innards, but instead of going
to its desiccated company,
I expose myself to the purest heat of music,
its beauty not bowing to terror,
the movements that animate my secret ancestry
in the presence of my sex,
my dance unbound and my fervent dark.

Soon the evening will bring
further, more abstract sorrows:
I will miss a woman as if
she walked from within me
and departed with my
greatest offerings, to bury them.
And I will allow all this to happen,
to open a plane of architecture, new
on the face of the earth,
from the one brick
in my belly.

.....

When these words are gone
and the earth that brought
them out of me is gone

when concepts and actions
are all accepted into darkness

I will not stand
on the prick or the head
of a pin, I will not

.

.....

Bring the white bird
from earth's lunar chasm,
a black bird from radio corridors
of the refuted sun.
Annoint us both with four wings
and with what glides between the seasons
to fight soundlessness
in the depths of a mind.

Furrow the barren planets
with ravaged imagination,
bring the sacred flaw ever outward.
Let it expand its web or fractures
until the bitterest minerals
vent blood and cum
let the wings disappear and drum.

.....

Some kind of bird-vomit,
in which a galaxy is stirring.
Each star is a worthy year of torture.
The ground is giving way to mantle,
blades of grass rustle in a false infinity.
Societies on triangles of broken eggshell,
pebble-planets scraping,
a jagged edge.  So many bodies
made to laugh that this arrangement can happen.

Jack

Where is the anchor-thrum,
bass-man hooded in a corner,
sound cloud to take my voice
up and away walking slowly towards
and apart from everything, he has found
his perch, to act and observe.

.....

The pith of dark matter
a wish for an ache to be within it
the arc of a horizon
lips locking in a pendulum
the fraying ends of color beams
an ancient human emptying garbage cans
jewels to tumble from the mouths of chimneys
while he grimace-grins around a clench of pinched tobacco
and puffs the buildings to murk
in torpid sunlight, in his lunar overalls

.....

In quiet wood
walk lone
liness deeper
sledge on the back
of the head
time hammer tells
stiffening sky, newspaper mache
horizon in quiet wood
rustling sleep nearer
two flies chasing each other
around a chunk of pineapple
on a fake kitchen
floor, the p.m. departed

.....

It's a float-trap,
hunger wanton to kiss
as flaunt, eat mono
tin-flock shine dagger,
numerals toward
the only awful tree
at the end, tap-rooted and
care
free
a vivid cloud, after a bad number

.....

By thought or metal
unshackled, I call to you now.
The technology of my final body
is climbing the wall of the world.
Nameless planet, vessel for so many
toiling conflicting dreams, done fucking,
finished eating, still singing.
Beams melted to fit
through the last two passageways
of eye-socket, louder than
the chronological orchestras
savagely congealed.  Liquid stepsister
to the excremental family,
the human branch: let's
break into twins each
on the flaming ropeladder.
Kin to a waterfall of
failed brains, vaporous spirits,
viscous reproductions,
lean into the cloud-current
and destroy all its patterns,
its analogue, its heatseeker,
its military and its cruel
and uncertain marriages.

.....

Where the river widens past
the arrowhead of an island
real talons broke
on an artificial entity, an angel fake
cruising over currents
it had not been born from

A water slit
birthed birds and stems
unseen by motorpeople
and her belly opened above it
high sounds that keen to core
and do not shriek
the island skyscraped from
a holographic valley drop

If we meet the rivers that part
will not defy the earth
if we part the currents that move
will not reverse
but if truth comes
to the brim of your eyes
and departs
I will go empty with it

.....

Hurry cannot take you to my thundercloud
as children's fingers, spokes of light,
poke through the supermarket walls
and park benches dangle from the powerlines
ozone cracks your irises
you travel ancient cities in the dark
stars blurred by a whirl
to find me sitting calm
in all the places I once raged
classical music blasting from the trees
and a new haircut

.....

Lonely woman, may your emptied landscape
be an arabesque of mercury,
and in the coiling resurgent center
an avatar of computer-crushing light.

May your fields of daisies be overthrown
again and again by other fields of daisies.
And in the hot dark, a cool hand
of urgent promise turn
the paradoxes of love
like electric fans.

.....

Whirling energies in space, that do not
find their way back.  Bright coins
that turn, faceless and country-free,
moistened by humid air, eyes
from a tomb.  A river for each arm,
a river for each leg, an ocean for the belly
and a sky for the ribs, open and peering
out from, the vacated body,
swiftly reinhabited, light defined
by violent reflection, that
singed the scenery's edge
and was consumed beautifully.

Towers abandoned to climbers
that have no names.

.....

Sufferers of the bliss
that is not bliss
but oblivion
watch me become absurd by doing
not much
very well

without digressing I
am not punched, before or
after lunch
I am
soberly undressing.

.....

The towns I have lived in are skin.
Their pathways are unravelling
toward an intertwined light.
The maps in them are vaguer
by the second; all their numbers
are frail.  There is a woman in one
of their tousled boundaries, but tonight
she could be sleeping on a park
bench, or ruling a city council,
it doesn't matter.  Presently we will
be building a territory of unlit material:
where the modern and the ancient
collapse so deeply into one another,
we are making love, and we are severed.

.....

Whole cliffs of shit bronzed by time.
Lovers in thickets of history's poison,
swamped in money-time
and the clocks of fossilized religion.
Some must fight without hope,
some must find oblivion against it all.
A few go to loneliness at the heights,
and hand it down trembling.  To be
exhausted and deciphered, rediscovered
and resurfaced, to sculpt solitary tears,
to fight madness with madness,
heat with heat, hardheartedness
with nothing at all.

.....

Graceful tumblers, the innocent
mischief to nudge out of the world
uncomfortable beauties, membrane-melted
to the other side of a transparent
wall, where they stretch and blossom.

Dice-smashing gentlemen, who rogue well
against a mass of annihilating
technology!  A soothed orifice, opening
beyond grace the next orifice.
Wordless step, wreathed in bundles
of cast-off expression.  Crimson oratory.

Form-teeth of a goblet mouth,
dark wine in a silver sound.
Tongue clacking a brisk golden
syllable.  Bach on acid, cathedral
in sex moss, a toolbox
of precious icons.  Moregasm.

.....

She demurs, and I cannot stop
pounding my chest.  My soul
curls up on her doorstep, eating.
Trapped primitive, what is he
consumed by?  Can I still watch
myself with humorous detachment,
or will I pull down the
powerlines?  May the earth
actually become our mute
home, for a little while?

I go to dayjob with smile of maniac
because everyone doesn't know
that they know I'm not here!
She crawl around on the
hollow ceiling's upside inside,
shaking dust onto customers.

Dignified, I shake off some music.
She throws an imaginary hatchet
at my crotch, and it glances off
my imaginary denim, my actual
workpants fall to the floor.

We are both laughing.

.....

Every hour is a loneliness like years
broken ridges work inward to a core
painting a relief portrait of the soft
sad layer upon layer of texture
weaving within the succulent mend
and repeat the same hammer pattern
to finish the weld
let shadows assert that
love was music within the loop
in large clusters

.....

Life that evaporates into shadowburn
which even my dearest friends are afraid to watch.
Life that must lie down there, and there, and there,
because it tasted train-cars of light
through the mouth.  If you feel cornered
by a love, cry out, I will answer you.
Tendril of city brightness that arcs in its targeting
into a farmed backyard
where vines form with great speed,
haul me up to a window,
I will slide down acres of glass,
blind.

Where the stream's power lands
on a rut and smooths it, blood will be laughing.
Where ice supernatural
girds bridges of summer, droplets will choir onto
tongues that burst buds of the eye,
sacred violence to come into existence.

The founding of metal leaves
mirrors trees from the edges
burnt factory bricks eyelash cast
them all back to water.
It keeps flowing to the sea;
it is not inventive.

.....

A brightness is beginning beneath me
to mold my feet for a path around
the planetary burn where healing voices
encircle her sad reading perch,
her hollow bunk and the space that
she drapes for my body which is the space
that I make for her body
even when the sheet falls flat
beside me it is in her form.

.....

I woke under an electric wind and went to the shore
with the books of my forefathers
to the place where you first made your claim on my body
to the place where silent ducks
are aliens on an alien planet

saw the grass corrupted
and the earth resurgent
saw our solitudes cylinder out of the sky
and our melting of myths and histories
island up between river and cloud

how much country is left in the country
how much city is left in the city
how many fight silent war
in the prism idea of their flesh

and prayed hold your strength
in departure and waking hard
your strength when you leave me
your strength when you greet me
your strength in desolation and in celebration
to set you apart against
the imprint of my one flesh,
one mightiest desire.

.....

Birds from beak to tail rejoicing across the hydroelectric
stripped trunks of beach-long trees
strung like broken ice-thread
across the shorelines, arabesque
gateways lichen-eaten concrete
flick bars of sky and ridge, I sit
in the depths of a pine island
while walking across a bridge
to feel many old hometowns
burning just behind hills
whose tops I will not reach
to watch the coal and then
the excremental orchestra
go to work, the slick
sheaths of crawling bugs
and lipstick fingers reaching
from rubble to paw
scorched fragment of scripture.

.....

It's a blood mask, behind which.
A dead star, whose coffin won't close.
The invention of money, in broad daylight.
It's the failure of love, in the face of
magnified obstacles.  And the total,
street-sucking cowardice that will
look away from it.

It's an ornamented galaxy, drifting
into the cut-out.  A place where
hatred goes to thrive, without
even fighting.  It's habits in bodies
sneering at other habits.  And
the gutter of plastic spirits,
that no blade ever cut a shape from.
It's an utterly dead religion,
all its gridwork intact,
for a few lifetimes longer.

It's a field of dream-pickers,
who stow to throw away,
in a vacuum of self-conscious privacy.
It's a slavemaster, in slavery,
a fuel that burns without disappearing.
For a few lifetimes longer:
it's a blood mask, behind which
nothing precious lingers.

Independence Day

The droplets on the water shower wall
are a field of molten stars
wide ribbon on a sandy sky
around the planet.
Dark material gone blonde
lights up the dying universe
and we are found here, so raw
within our shells, our favored personas.

Loudspeakers pour the sound of panting deer
into the ears on the street, an audio wind
so few have heard, a generation of light
comes pouring out of a subway mouth.
To be a grain against, among, fighting for,
flocks of black doves that fly out of the fog
on the platforms.

ER

*****

Chip-toothed, brazenly fascinated,
I look at the world with the feel
of a tottering flower.
It is still here, it was never merely
a thought in the mind.
Summer will come with a burst of landfill
and the cleansing of the ocean.
My core will be opened
by the sound of the river.
And I will dwell in this world
until it lets me go.

.....

On a mattress high above the earth,
birds in human poses pecking at the underside.
A body that stretches and suffers over it all.

Lofted, the voice is a tumult of detuned choirs
streamed from all ages.  Also the namewrecker,
label of the infinite, who takes your wide habitat,
the final suspect, in hooved pursuit,
who eats twilight moving.

Held by no wind, no steeples of moneyed towers
will touch these springs.  Too high to be circled
by vultures, only touched through by unnatural beaks
in a sky that is not chosen.  Azure terror.
Open mist on high.  The grandeur of a painted body
broken for a mirror world that bouquets its reflection
in peacock splinters.

Join me on this rounded rectangle, soaked
with dreamless agony.  The birds are wet and wild
in this teeming season.  Already they have been mentioned.
I feel I have given too much away; also that
I have taken too much.  Unsuspended, we can thrust its
holographic imprint against the distance of the sun.

Stringless and without direct force, we may tumble
the cumulous and be studied by eyeless benevolent things,
while the shell of the planet quakes, while we
travel our separate kilometers.  As if something opened
the core of my spirit and filled it with silence, without which
there is none.  Honeyed love, bespeckled with the madness
of skin, join your bed-thrashed traveller.  I have been in a sky
like the earth's only country, for your outline to eclipse mine
so that I can grow to surround it.

Bring this bed back to its room both poor and luxuriant,
bring this bed to its floorboards and its home on the ground.
Bring this bed back into my body, with its unravelling boost,
together we will make its technology blossom hot moons.

.....

It's a wind mask,
a high silvery sky-thread,
that I am cut to be climbing.
In the winnowing of my foggy flesh
a man is forming underwater.
Yearns for you
to be present onshore,
carries the peaks
of the dying in his look,
says

you and I will meet again
and again: throughout all time
we will never abandon each other.
Sweet implacable face,
grave playful countenance,
bring the set of your bones
to the uppermost layers of the earth,
taste lavender there, the dementia of history
gone market-dry in your eyes, breasts
blazing with oil, laughter far and wide
at the brazen territories forever fading.

Reaching for a rainglass lit
hands already united on the table's middle
galaxies wrenched open in the background,
belly of Jupiter, the bar patio, the disappearing river.
In you the doves beat both upward and downward.

Mere

I went to the water,
to the kissing-place,
to the tendrils for grapes
and the climbers of the river with wings

And felt your presence forever in my body,
past all worlds and awareness,
soft-winged things
moving across the every thought
of our area mirror.

Guardian from the sea--fanged dog
at the edge of your sense--
silence came in
and sculpted you here:
in your face the act of prayer
is before me.
Your tender movements
re-navigate the world,
open leaves and other forms
through the one window
of my being.

The shade of our time
is cast by light on the earth:
may it suffer our caresses completely.

......

like kicking a lion cub in a modern bathroom
the conveyor belts that carry candies from light to dark

the problem of standing at which wild cranes mate
the bold interior of the new to six rust-colored juveniles

at the rings visible in the end grain are other buildings, which rest on another solar system
as the wearer steps and the other--ah--garments you are wearing are

the bonds between them and a white, rubbery snowball would form and
lacewing internal gravity-sensing mechanisms to a barrel roll above

'''''

The possum's tension is not poise.
His back is breathing.
Infinity is not within his eyes.
He flinches on the tar.
I match him for a stillness
then we move.

He's into the bushes, I'm dissolved
to the headlights and concrete.
Cars have killed enough of our kinds,
and he is without what we call,
the drivers are all dead tonight: I think.

'''''

Once in a hotel bed she asked
do I have a glint of stillness
anywhere in me?  You are looking.
The firmament unremaining
flickered through a window.

Is there not a glint of stillness in me now?
A piece of sadness
broken from the human animal?
Twice severed, once powerfully reconnected,
the lone creature.

Let's tramp its tenderness down
into our pine forest.

.....

Tamer of the brute force from points at the bottom of the bulb
he rolled a mixture of tar and lampblack
until it formed motors the size of earth's magnetic field

his halo of color around the shadow of mother-of-pearl rainbows
its amplitude the vibrating air column
in a plucked string

.....
Outdoor honkytonk, symphonic pinecones,
the levels of the air lifted brightly,
the thrust of a galaxy is within me and feels,
my friends around me are musical
and move the cool dome
right up to the fireball.

^^^^^

I used to paint cans and stand them up
one on top of the other in long cerulean rows.
Now I'm filled with streets, most quiet
engine light over water, and a sleeping life
in the curvature's grimace of clenched hands--

barrels afloat brine rope are cloaked with what I breathe
for dank then distilled
fern plastic, the plume end of science
imprinted in braille on the back of a woman's neck.
I thought I was building a fortress.

>>>>>>>>>>
A brown force field of twittering
birds
open windows of May time
soft
unseen blocks, raging cells

a black box covered in chickfeathers
where diamonds leap out on little legs
strange marks in the distance
blur dark to keyholes
melt seasons closed, small white petals
from nameless trees, blunt

love, a memory of the earth

.....

I open a black-lit flower
let a mite-sized bird
furrow the time-slowed air between us
up to your forehead and its precious appearance of forehead
up to the underside of uneaten leaves
their desire the stems cling the tips of the branches
you are tired of being observed by language
I am tired of speaking

River pounds shallow and wide
billows deep in places
has carried the corpse and the delights of the unwounded
and healed a broken dancer with cold slime
on a series of rocks
our fire's caught plastic
we run to the brick house
under a derision of geese
where a feeling that's never withstood
waits a safe distance
and the corners are barren with mattresses

Once a blacksmith, once a silk man
moved these rudders and melted
once a pantheress, once a queen of rooks
took an unready moon
through potatoes and leeks
to the bottom of tubes and fuses
and beyond the vast mantle
where a doll waits, in a goblet
I wheel through a daydream of girders

.....

In automatic darkness
he reaches for a heavenly bicycle.
A skeleton stands on a plateau
over his shoulder.
The handles are bloody with dreams.
Hard-packed sand road
bluegreen with twilight
easefully going nowhere.
The waterfall's on the right.
Hold me to a slender partner,
send me deep down.

In a dawn of fur and cloud
all he can manage is to pull some birch bark
and fall down on it.
The earth is a beautiful place to sleep,
and soon birds will fall out of the sky.
Around the cemetary benches
they will peck seed
from short scraggly grass.
Send me a slender partner, send me
deep down.

In the denial of sorrow
he will be building a sun.
To cast over the bountiful local hills,
their astounding existence
that so few love and see
that so few offer the tribute
of their expectant reverberate flesh
that so few are at one with
and them only flickeringly.
Send me past the clay of my fathers
with a slender partner
send me down.

.....

I've been turned into a money conduit.
It seems to have taken a long time,
but I know it happened horribly,
the quick way evil enters the consciousness.
I wanted to cast whole new dawns
over my human race
and here I am flustered by numbers
that have no root in the earth.

Glow from the windows of houses and neon signs
the web of electric wires over the land--
our small room within it
is not a pocket, is not a square
and does not play music for the dead
at the edge of a false tranquility--
broadcasts infinite
for the spreading face of the sun
from a fogged corner, heals a few strange
makes most visitors sick in their blood
and is only partly financial.

.....

The cloud becalmed
of a single life exploding
two tuft bulbs on the head
descending the dashboard

patterns of existence emerged
from time-hatred, heroes surfaced
on the porch, rind in brick of boston
where they put their denture-flames
on the bony sheets flowing deep
out of the age-machine

its mouth a particularly tender number
its frame of a deeply submerged color
letting us move short hours in your bed
filming our heydey there, with straw fire intact
on the strung bodies of servants, somebody
bronzed half-dead from the shower
who said hello, frailed out luxuriatingly
on the butterfly stairs of a rich basement

you can become a wounding moth
against the lamp, this evening frameless

.......

Wind and sun are not enough for us.
We talk as if they are, on rocks
think of great wings over the water,
think of a railing, between ourselves
and the nothingness overstocked
with so much.

Slowly that thought has passed
which once crowded the world.
We sit in uneasy harmony
of the kind that doesn't break
light-boats of melted sand flakes,
nimbused with outline
of heat to carry the shadow,
over sand at rest, wet,
and not at rest after all.

These are the islands of escaped children
whose own orbs carried them here.
Not through the air, but through
the imagined air, where a brightness
goes to die in the mind.
And the mention of bluejays
and the mention of cardinals
arrayed against each other on
a dry-ice chessboard, brows furrowed
in loving parody of mutual respect,
the river is real, the river is a projection.

......

I pictured us kissing at a bus station
and a red star fell through the bunch.
All of human history is a load of shit,
except the unspoken.
I saw a sculpture with piano feet
hanging just above us, and our bodies
were raining.
You'd bought your ticket and clung to it,
though all the information was scorched out.
You were not my stem, but I blossomed
and fell off.
In pieces, memory of life returned, we
were unwilling to view it.
Play the sad drum, play the insane
drum; this is the motionless

MOVIE

The rain machines are six stories tall.
There are claws in the air,
the architecture is suffering.
Helicopters are for entertainment.

Women are to run, men are to run,
pulling them by willing arms,
fire is for destiny, fire is the true nature of the world

Childhood is an urchin
splattered in a foggy rock.
Churches are leaning all around it.

Nothing is falling into the pit, yet.

.....

she could sing her way into stone
move her face into that goddess painting
hanging on the wall of my cave
I watch her uncaptured

.....

summer hail
winter light on warm ground
you started to live like a vagabond
then woke up in a monk's cell
pouring
griefs on stone, sputum on ancient craft,
sobbing to hear the wind, in that
soundless cavern.

........

The fake bear has a honeyjar bolted to his stomach.
His eyes are a spasm of idiotic pleasure.
His clawless limbs like glassy slugs,
his shrunken ears without fur or passage
for the music of breath and forest.

Nearby, sparrows pecking at a stack
of dried weedstalks are totally unaware of him.
His loins as smooth as a cartoon beach,
he doesn't hibernate because he does not live.
He doesn't slumber because he does not move.
He has been given the expression of one
ready to drink, but he never does.

......

Life's a blown curtain, I am in an industrial cocoon.
Lovers I've had, I love them now more than I did then,
and I don't want them back.
Even the usual litany of humiliations makes me smile,
the sun hammers on my shell.

I watch a tailgate party through my thought-bubble.
We are friends drinking beer, and we are about to be
killed, by ourselves.  We were not graded by the clouds.
We are still here, somehow, the ducks skirt sheen-puddles of oil.
They eat our soured bread from the pebbled edge.

Some unseen day nobody will record, planet-splinters jibe
with satellites, they move not because I've imagined them,
and they have no thoughts.  No librarian with hands
to cup the music; and it is alright, the riversides
and dried leaves are enough.

......

The floors of the apartment
aglow with burnished wooden sun
reflect a wandering stranger
who has stolen my slippers.
Ship's outlines shadow the walls
sails moving over hung photographs
he won't give them back.

I have to reach through his sadness
to take them, his fear of death
with all its plumage
intact or scattered.
His wormy stare.
My mask of delight
turns his chest to black ashes
and winks its way out, its history
of red clay from under the swingset,
glint of mica and low brightness
of lichen in dusk, and we are lost
in the mask together.

A hardened minnow from the anti-depths
of space drops out of its eyes
through the center of the body
and the floors ripple
glinting shattered light
to a gun on the overpass,
to watch a soul fall within binoculars,
and to take a slim jar of milk
from between his scorched ribs, to feed him with.

........

we were man-wild in the streets
and now we are aging
we were pulse-pounders
and now feel an ebb in the blood
turn up the stereo car and we'll burn
close to burnished curbs

in sacrificed memories, an altar of smoke
legs spread one last time
wasps sting through linoleum
calves cry out as lungs buried
churning breath of alien air
turn up the train speakers

let's mask a dance of death in garden colors
one last loud time
one wavering quiet

.......

I remember the concentration camp of pleasure
where we lived together
like a pornographic trailer park on fire
and the wide hills and brittle railways
over and upon us
in a breaking tumult of old pine,
dying sun, breakfast on acid ground
in lichened courtyard, marble seats
on claw-retreating paws
and the world without teeth
falling sideways through
a mud cathedral;

these memories I've bombarded
that still dance figures into
my flesh, still shape
the twilight to a tongue of clay spade
and that cat that never came home
is chewing my rubber toe
on the hot rock doorstep
mange-painted and bloodshot

........

Everything around me of a fibrous frozen matter
a vast region
with a dismal moaning sound of wind

nature became thickly covered with hoarfrost, my whiskers jutting out
comet pills indiscriminately pelting all around
in a sea of fire which had just disgorged me

terrific monster of the air for a space of twenty compact rubble heaps
I soon found myself whirling through a chasm in the cloud the splendid tail o

having been belched up and swallowed down repeatedly by this
to my great joy

.......

Down toward the families of blood plastics
when a tree is cut through
this moving dynamo differs from the time clock

each catastrophe can account for the history in the cooling system
dark-tipped from a den and shaken off the dirt, when the silvers heard
antimatter rainwater, under gravity, a shiny, gray, solid chemical

A light ring grows each that the room is at the thorax
and a dark one grows each, and the furnace shuts

masses to the mouth again emptiness between them,
then followed force, and marched to the torrent

.....
A lady with a fiery tiara the size of a room,
all the magnetosphere being rasped off my finger ends
whisper-thin winds among the flowers, gulping animals
the shanks of the golden eagle seared and broken
locked in his cell, judging the ricocheting echoes
the huge eyeball devoid of feeling

.......

eyetooth, in the far corner
received in planet glare
for the thirst of the galaxy
a blood lamb, buried in salt

the fronts of nuns and the backs of storefronts
pigeons and sparrows in common green
the throat of a charred altar
a fresh sailor buried in ink
at the height of the harbor

like Frieda in drag, boardwalk-wise,
planks people toward me
forms and reflections in prayer of existence
dragging a net for the soiled sheets
of late dreams in arrival

<<<^>>>

The rose in your mind is bound on synthetic snow
in steel fingers and cunning joints and electric wires
and punched cards--an electronic master

death-bringing stars within air spaces of the leaf
wrapped in a gossamer veil a crust of dark matter

then a spongy mass, which, from stone fireplaces
to split-rail fences and peeled molecules
your soul shall also wear a wet suit with a window for his eyes.

(*)

She dances like a sight-full flower
with roots for a joke
or endless movement

an electronic epiphany
puts April strong in her legs
to shoot up in visions
past the height of the power lines

we have wandered on the mirror of the earth
have given up some already gone thing
to see this one stirring

yet
death doesn't turn off his security cameras
when he sees her coming in infra-red

the reflective soil has no maw
to take her in, we are hired for digging
not to love, or to save

so she goes somewhere dark in our blood
and spirits there
chronologically unsatisfied

Queen Panic

Everlastings.  The painted lady or thistle
pelvic girdle and posterior
appendage wrinkled into mountain ranges
by the pressure against each other
I brought a tragedy into existence
by watching the playground empty
then falling into a trash can:

100,000,000,000 birds face layer from the sides
from crest to equilibrium peoples and Babel languages
the number of waves passing a slave girl feeds on arrowweed
travels down the rope in complete vibration,
a cycle of a compact mass of coils
birds which feed icecaps to hum the colder regions
of the upper fore-limb awakening death's dawn
to glance on the flanks of an invisible ship,

a separate source of light--skull and blankets
these two sources overlapped in the region
behind the double vanity, a third screen,
these waves worktable rows of white spots

Not that the earth is alone, for as she belonged
to the drug and high-technology Sun, silver
to the Moon, copper to Venus, iron
to Mars, lead in his spare time, seeking order
to Saturn, tin to Jupiter low of loin
above crest, and lilac furrow

<^><^>

I don't drink Coca-Cola;
I think about Coca-Cola.
The big trucks go by, preparing the fizz
of battery acid red.
Knocking the enigmatic insignia
from my soul's template,
filling the basin of a baseball stadium
with great power--it is opening day.
I have bitten my lips for a whole year.
The patriotic air is unfamiliar, now,
forever, extends.  My country is dying with me.
The resurrection and the river of lifeless
space pouring through a wide crack
in immediacy, stuns
a quiet pigeon from the high-domed
air and lands him unflapping
but for a twitch on the pitcher's mound.
I try not to mistake life for death,
death for life.

^^^^^^^^^

The trucker is having the time of his fucking life.
His gasoline lunchbox, his liverwurst
prepared by a countess.
He is letting his angst balloon
into the radio frequencies.
He is luminously understanding
all the glad and sinister messages
are for him, but not for him alone.
Nevertheless, he is almost criminally
solitary, a stone carved heartily, left in its own
chiselled dust, he cries into a silver bullet
then seals it up in the glove compartment
with a cracked toy airplane
and the remnants of his marriage degree.

I wave to the trucker because I recognize
the strange stubborn miracle of his transport
but he only nods begrudgingly.  He is taking
a cargo of neon screws
a fleet of french fry ketchup plates
in flying saucer formation
and a crumpled pack
and the blah blab lah
goddamn windshield wipers
as a stunted language of mother--many wheels
passing the laundromat--begs her daughter
not to climb into the round and punctured mouth
of the open dryer, though it looks
bound to happen.

<*><*><><>

Imaginary grandfather took his special flask
down from a high shelf, his hands
were the blades of an old saw.
He opened a valentine wormhole
by looking at the wall
between himself and not quite immortal her.

I've been gazing since, no matter how many
ships and goggles I gather for speed and blur
to paint highways over forest,
in deep corruption to be accepted.
Imaginary grandfather took down
a paintcan lid speckled with whole stars.

Orphan Vortex

I was a boy in a small frame
with grapes growing out of my chest,
vulnerable to all the wind.
I was a girl with early lipstick smudged
by a flying brick, and I do fight back.
Whole parades of human beings moved past,
smitten with plastic words, we spoke
across ruined air.
Intertwining above and below the blood,
we learned to share one body,
to make this nightmare smile.

NEIGHBOR CAT

Matilda on a bright mat, velvet black
brown and red striped fibers
big squares of sunlight
so pert in eternal window
this moment cannot eclipse her form
she is a swervy shape in fur
in the doorway's window on the dripping world
she is paying attention to the weather, nonchalantly

Matilda
on my wrists I can observe the shape of your claws
to remember you purred against my veins
you are ecstatic in your off-hand cruelty, your
cut train of thought
so small and hard in your eyes
you are the portrait of my feline self
shitting on ashes

THE NOUMENA

The king of laughter came around, yapping
about a woman who fascinates him totally,
slamming his strong square head in the freezer.
Talking about the noumena, the expanse of the unknown
that frisks us when we wake deeply,
he fell through the kitchen floor in a riot
of clothing that discarded light.
He bellowed from the basement and leapt
singed and grinning
up through the gaping linoleum to stand on the edge
suddenly munching a zucchini, asking between bites
how the world economy should be melted into happiness
by a fire dance, how he should be first in a conga line,
how he should fuck, finally.

The king of laughter has a pain in his side
from a rotten rib, he still reads the Bible,
but only the dirty parts.  He visits
because the outdoors, he says, only insults the sky,
even in the woods, even on a mountaintop,
he can feel the inadequate architecture.

When the king of laughter has exhausted
the night-life, he finds a stone apartment
and lies down.  His snore is an engine
that starts it all up again.
In the hung afternoon
he is leaning against pines
with his cereal bowl full of blood flakes,
he is like Oscar the Grouch with a hard-on.
His audience waits in a thicket of earth-dreams,
he moan to bring 'em through a galactic cervix,
his bed is still wide open but now
he can't lie down.

()*(*)*()

The tiny, foolproof mutant moth in British smog
from falling water, which spins the machinery of power

folding and eruption
the face of the earth

massive walls take shape around us
distribute the flame into an even curl
lip downward and outward; draw it
backward; three heads together deep
hollow behind soft and slanting breast
between 3rd and 6th
ribs; with the sun's face blacked out by a disk inside

(..)

Every day I feel the contours of your absence
slithering in my belly.
Every day I must allow
the flames in my shoulders to flicker down
and let my arms hang quite limply
in the water of life.

I strut around spending money and drinking
friendly laughter from the air, trying to stifle
for one more night the invincible disquiet,
the mortal hum.
Astral vines that grow from my pores
want to be bathed in the milk of your ribs,
your fiery outline on the wall
of a tumultuously growing forest,
the door that you are
and the cathedral that sprouts from around it.

Until my room is all moss
and my pen hand is cold
as a buried stone
somewhere on earth
I will think upon
how everything I love is lit by you
I will study
for the core of everything that suffers from thought
the fiberoptic crossroads
where desire burns against eternity
to extend and extend
its meek love and its proud love,
its loud love and its quiet love,
until all the fertile chambers of the unknown galaxy
break down to pour it out.

POWER-PACKED PHOSPHATE FOR THE FLAME OF LIFE

From the flow of raw
by the cell from the atmosphere and the soil
this millionth of
a bucket brigade for energy
throughout the living world, in animals as well

As yet, the exact manner in which into its lethal halves
locked in the granules of the worlds beyond the milky way
the affinity of carbon breaks
animals fill a cold room
the air is warmed, moistened
it soon becomes sheaths, which accounts for the difference

Threaded coupling exhales, he gives off much
as the green moves in
as the dusk flowers

~^~^~^~

If the firmament remained
unshifting, man would wink out
beneath.

For the fire returning, for the
earth giving up another notch
of eternal space.

Be spoken, by low bushes, by
puddles half frozen and all
things winking half-eyed,
necessarily wounded.

{~~*~~}

When you stand apart let the sky feel closer to you.
When you go grocery shopping let the strands of the sun
connect to all your follicles lovingly.
Let the light of green peppers and other items
reflect the skin of your flesh accordingly.
For we all thirst after you, and you are tired.
For you desire to be loved in the comfort of a vast cloud.
May the hammer in your ribcage finally crack the heavenly door.
May you come down on me like a real sunset.

Rawmn

I am emptiness, terror.
The tethers of imagination,
painful scrawlings on cell walls,
the feel for life imprisoned in cliche.

In the dawn light of sarcophagous towns,
I paid false angels to whip me with bicycle tires.
From the genuflecting heaps
of their dying, participatory victims
came no word of how to avoid
being futuristically broken
and presently broken

so I simply left it all
drying to premature age
in its unearned spotlight
and laid up in healing, hurting salts
for in my short life
what passes for a very long time.

(((((

Take your gypsy skin to the dull sound of the dryers
take your hurt venom to the ultimate elsewhere
please reside apart from mine broken being
which apart from be

take thy print strongly through the side-bank steaming
angry on the horn of the car

moving always when they told machine
shoving digits through paper flower
knots enough for
we will always
at
tack

(((((

__)(__

The geese are wearing beautiful masks.
Mine is heavier.  Flight is an afterthought.
The landscape is whimpering under our many feet.
The sun punches dripping holes in the snow.
Riverside explodes
with roaring white ass-feathers
of our cousins the swans.

Next is the planet of all birds, slowly arriving
in the torched sky.
There will be a place for one man there:
I latch the window of my helmet
and to my honking fleet
I hang on.

__)(__

~()~()~()~

I left a trail of hats and sunglasses.
I drank until the moon capsized
and then I, kept drinking.
Fields rushed by in an unplanned riot
of gasoline maps,
the babble of sinister squirrels
under the projections of old men
in dilapidated fur.

My scalp torn by midnight after midnight,
everywhere I knelt became a rushing tunnel
of errant prayer.
Desperation was my suit and my song,
the unearned pride of getting used to it,
shoulderblades tickled by the longest branches
of this land, I began to lie down
earlier and earlier, chuckling
about the snail in my belly.

Women who cared sadly for me
laid their masks upon mine
and we languished beautifully that way,
painting the weather into a small radio
with our clefts and our hairy rivers of blood
burping fire through vast pornographic laundromats.
We watched the world through quartz of warped glass
bean-shoots of planets fertile toward the sun
until invisibly it began to come down.

~()~()~()~

)~`~`~`~`~`()

The quick night thunders,
the growing night folds my hands.
I have bound up my tongue;
should I loosen it again?

Hungers deeper than my body can contain alone
wrack me day and night...
and do I have a right to cry out,
among so many others crying?

Maybe you will be foolish enough
to pray for me, to sympathize
with my common and paltry madness,
to conquer the world through dreams.

I have not run out of language,
but today I do not want to speak.
Surely you can understand my body...
surely someone somewhere understands my body.

)~`~`~`~`~`()

)()(

two lavenders
magenta and orange
I built myself a throne of magazines
to treasure silence
toss off ecstasy
the emptiness of beauty
two eyes on a rag
beer inside the heart
lung flowers of smoke
a certain pulse sound is waning
from the upper deck
where love won't listen to reason
no commands are coming

two lavenders
magenta and orange
the creatures dancing in canvas
who come out only for my hands
none can keep me company
in my body bent backward
from love and understanding much, too little
the murder of fictional destiny
that they cannot soothe
for they are moving

pulses.  The photoelectric surface is made up
heads and wings and long tails
the sex glands

slow heartbeat
the trachea in the throat

shelled evening
stars hardened in their casts
to watch the tension ascending

Hollyhock instruments and furniture
on the brightwork of boats, the superior vena cava

leaflets that turn red throughout the United States
and a scattering machine that must be split into different beams

each of the smaller tendrils a pattern of the sound on smoke
with five to seven lobes off a mirror standing near

three kinds of tubes: speech made the membrane for teaching caged
birds to sing with each other, creating light and dark

a disklike sucker pad which attaches
their peak in the famous

<*><*>

I turned into a cat.
I ate and moved back and forth on the floor tiles.
Do you love me more?
I believe I will tolerate you for quite some time.

Don't put my affection on a tow-rope.
The whiskers will come around presently.
Yours is to sit and wait.
Mine is the territory, claimed so quietly.

<*><*>

{}{}{}{}

The little girl is dreaming of gold.
Her father is holding a bullet.
They are together under all the winds of the earth.
Shopping carts and pinwheels roam
the scorched, flat terrain without will.

Someone is singing a song for them:
an unextended man, a very sad man.
As he raises his voice from a stone fence roadside,
the fibers of his being are infused with tender prophecy.
From the fracture in his spirit cast,
a healing river meets the many currents.

The embrace goes beyond blood.
Father and singer are one.
Tarnished earth, the choir of melted libraries,
the way the soft weight of the innocent child
hurts the arms that know.

The singing throat, love that wavers
no longer, suffering and still.
They are two men: they learn to talk
and then learn not to talk.
The little girl is dreaming of an unbroken god.

{}{}{}{}