.....

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.