~^~^~^~

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.

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