.....

for Margaret


 I want to walk down an empty five-lane highway with you.
  To see with you the radiant doors on both sides
    that are not there.


When the molten, inevitable traffic comes
 and we have to trade our faces for theirs
 we will still have a secret webbed between us.


 That which we cannot relinquish
 because it is hidden within
 and cries for mercy from itself
Which it cannot give.


 I  want to take your hand in the sprawling ooze
  of endless neighborhoods.
   Watch the twilight turn to a slit
      in your honey of forepaw.

.....

Code symbols in nearby hardware stores
of domed cities pounding results
awash in the violence of marriage


grilles in the walls, veined outlets flush
double reeds by the chamber or tower
noise of the plant cells  arc-fit pipe notcher


smoothly sculpted contours strung on rods
or wires set into strips by pieces of wood
curtainscreen and glued


in a glider with rainbow-colored fringes
through a small hole in the door denuded
a military highway can go into a basket or cloth bag
valleys so green can easily be polished to an imperfection

.....

We can't hide in the green shelter
   watch geese with a clean eye
       torment the electric scaffoldings
         or fall into edgeless water:


           something bonnets our skull fragments
 close cloth to the ears of botched head by a sidewalk
         gliding in cities imagined
        by leaves on a wing


    we aren't able to uncloak
      what goes over or under
        our silently trans heroic bridges
        of cock and dark marble
        what flows through blood that we can't capture


           in dust the struggle of invisible liquid
             makes a smooth a fragile imprint
                                                               and the dusk glows in its
                                                                 chipped-off bit
 of triangle sun


            this threshold to be  crossed singly
                                            what is it?


                wood falls
                     the blade speaks years through a handle

.....

The corpse is water alive
                         while harp and gray
                                        soothed by heat
                                                        milk to form
                                         one endless iron hoop to encircle
                             the point where the river withdraws to a cooler
                                 forged at an angle to match the dish of the burials
                                          with his left hand with a hot iron with a loud voice
                                         the insane were whipped as a floorshow
                                            the proceeds going to unwindowed keepers
                                                   a frog in a colewort leaf in a new earthen pot
                                                                              between the two panes
                                                                                                unable to sweep

.....

bottomless without a thread
 he who wears the name assassin in my skin
                                                     to block the country of the air
                                                       from the country of the ground
                                       his pain in my stead, unwanted
                               how footsteps crack the palm


                                     history falls off of me
                                               and anoints others to talk
                                                   their colors into me like lead
                                         and waves me in the ocean's face
                                              like a strangled traveler


                                     bottomless without a thread
                                                on the nothingness of progress I ascend
                                                      soup, an asteroid

LANDINOSCOPESCAPE

                              At the broken apex
where green leaps up from the concrete border
   the way I see John with a microphone
sanctified by sky-flakes
        brought down on an amplified trailer
 by the torque and the thrust of his voice
when it is a catalogue muffled within
               it is stronger than light


How he doubles himself
     anti-tuning fork in a public room
           the instrument in sunlight and in
  damp waves, dense machine reverberations
        beach tangle of fiber optic electronic seaweed
             brother of thuds, of soft escapes
                               amp-mouth ratio
              life-gatherer peering out of a well
                               to the vaster water
                            a mast of woman
                        and a bladeless anchor massive with tongues
 casting lines from the sun's tow-rope of earth


             a tabernacle'd garage, bass-strings
    El Greco, naked mannequin dance
               standing on hips at the drum's heart
                      from which the door flung him back
                                                            and now the canvas takes him in

.....

darkness ridden into damp light
         broken harbors of sky
     zig-zagging wings that have no life
                  doorsteps into basement
                           house sheared off by a mineral flood
      smokers on telephone office entrance
                  coughing a streetlight bulb into thought balloon

.....

Batter into a useful shape the nearest quartz deposit, with the bodies tools that argue
 echo sounding in time of peace deep scattering layers     
   yet all store the salts which give bone violently with both hands by the size of their ears
    to the weld in front of the flame while shoreline defenses, lighthouses, dwellings identify
      the owl swivels its head, eyes glow in the beam bone cysts, benign giant anchovy, magnetic tags
                                                                    artillery of observation  apes in light many times
                                    as narrow canyons, food chains grunted warnings of an artificial afterlife
                               lethal scissors and mineral deposits
                    needles breaking down the edges and the side walls
                                                                                    the acoustic rocks

OUT OF TRANSLATION

for Kevin Smith


I walk right here on the street
there is powerful knowledge
in my deoxyribonucleic acid
so many passers seem
absorbed in apathetic particulars
related to the worst of the moment
that my heart is hard to believe
and regardless it lifts me up
knowing the coming radicality of change
when we will not be here.


When all the dissolved mantles
give way through our upwards
to the whole lake of antimatter
and we find the fumbling of our tongues with foreign languages
reflecting barrenly on the faintness of our own
and the mind and the hands of the mind
fail at rescue
and the whole project of human affairs
is more taxing than the idea of nothingness...


These days I don't believe in narratives.
I don't bother with ideas.
Planning one's existence is ruthless to the soul
and we all try it, relentlessly.
I want to give up on reality
to stretch my arms into another dimension
but instead I jerk off
wash my kitchen and my cutting board
take some vitamin pills
with an egg and spinach sandwich
and walk to the post office
waiting for its reality to be
almost obliterated
by the blitzkrieg of maniacal history
and the uncoerced erosion of the stars.

.....

Adobe wall overlooking the hitch rails, and the gang tied
shade for spring-fed bluegills
sharp hooks, with open canvas steps facia fasteners
      underneath post bracket
                              aluminum handrail moulding
the leaves are long, the tough skin system of radar
 a cunning timber beast wrestled the ancestral names young bushwhackers then mounted
  like silk or jewels to their intimates   recognizable pools
  motor spook walleyes in shallow water   honoring rice

.....

We ride the thinned-out hills feelers with boundary
thin rivers leave threads in our recurring instep
we brothers of rubber wheels
 and the knocking sky's frecklight
      we share on our shoulderblades
         the bucketmouth of ultimate cancers
a ditch of purple gasoline shadow folded
  up in a wallet, into a money hatchet
     back of the deadbarn ferns at the edge
          the gripping lake of monkeywrench tears
              spider's door vagina at the bronzed rear
                  of the head, of the mouth
                    explaining in music this is how we were eaten

.....

To glow a dull red or orange in which she orbits it   as a holy city
that hot objects emit light         a mist of fine oil drops   the intergalactic pact
at the short wavelength, or blue, end set into oscillation
simply too small a bundle of energy to be
the pudding model incubator
the spectrum called unending circle
the coils of an electric broiler for the outturned eye
rolling hills everywhere and the current flowing through them
folded in the golden bubble of your sun system
the more heat a body has   considered, in a mysterious way, to be
                                          replete with immense rays are not deflected into the powers
    the law of the one which governs all things frozen

.....

Orbs deflecting solar smash-up
    we knelt and remembered
       all the luminous torture
          of having been present,
             in the depths under the fireworks,
               watching changing forms of fire,


groveling for sugar stomp gummed bleachers
       in the dank factory mystic-lit roadsides
             where I follow my asshole calling:


leveling the above and below streets
      multiply in this uncandid, greed-muffling air,
         a coat hanger thief, a bad bargainer
            with the shaper of many eyes
               that stare from cliff-faces on cities
                 until the cities go out
                   and the plague of selling grows claws in a wood.

.....

If I loved you with money
    you still unadorned
      if I loved you with a nuclear army


if I loved you in falsetto
  while the incoherent applauded
    and we bowed together through             
        a curtain of static to be cut in half


if I loved you stilletto'd
  to the unknown where you walked
the rebounder's body is filled
   with blank spots, a kind
          of glitch lazarus


rising with the heat of money
 money staring at other forces in the aisles
   that bear him to a rivershelf tirepit
 budget wiggling dragon death spectacle
                    that comes with no hint
                          of the twin oceans
                             of the mercury sky, a foil
                                      torn with warnings

.....

      The hands lack oil             a huge new gateway


       zones of the world up through its double row of tapered
 the soft, feathery leaves are   heavier than the rock underlying the con
    nearly all other damsel
          the number of luminous traces on the sculptor and his assistants
             appearance of both tubes stood inside the temple


like that of a violet      the huge bronze fig
             in gargles and liniments with the gleaming marble façade of


          in charge of the depot of charts and in a circuit multiplied by


                                                                            lustrous ivory
                                                                            drapery of the brightest
                                                                                               could only

.....

I wish I could save just one being
from unrelenting sorrow, that my hands
were the vastness of imagination,
even that requiring a body,


that my loves, mired in this,
could leap out and return,
through the cleansing rings
created by their exits,
even that requiring a body,


so that the sun never loses skin
and the moon has no journey
without this imprisonment, that holds
the core to its core,
this chaos just within shape.

.....

While a second taking lens records on the end of a pole
the slanting rays of light which, coming through clouds, resemble death on the rocks
days of history shiver as if in a snow                            posthypnotic
back hairs are erected in anger and gill slits the lower edge of the paper
a lighter patch on the location of a gland that is the wish of the hypnotist
the bulb of blowpipe, the intense brown hyena buff-grey or dirty
hung vertically in a glass vessel   a layer of solvent in the vessel
plants with their strong beaks   a common nickname for the chrysanthemum
they are kept safe inside wooden boxes to protect them from dust and magnetic influences
used to make safes, ball bearings, sperm or egg
a gap separates the connecting wires and the cutting edge of various
                                                                                           automobile bumpers and door handles
                                                                                       for their extended foot can excrete
                                                                                                                       his daughter's dress,
                                                                                                                                  and the wall.

.....

     Sent warbler, drive blood of scent
     into my windowsill, into my circuitry of footbed;
           put the shape of your hair on the mantle's far sharp side.


    Where we are standing is always flickering.


     And we watch ourselves standing there
            I see you from all sides at once cutting down
         the barriers of time warp
            incisioning a dream into my clogged
 domepiece, where you sing for new furniture


      and the lust of garden statues
           drives the rain to another town
         we office escapees are a thumb-harp of clits
  diminu intuiting the spiritual headline


        that there will be a scarcity of horses
           that the market will suffer gains
                from the dream quarter.

.....

Mule cars, the clothes    the shaft to which they are fastened
                   to pass before the elect at high speed
                    more than a hundred years after the first balloons did not fly
                     there's the sonofagun commercially
                      the pipe in his teeth   bag under the worktable
                       kicked an envelope to spoil a sensible man's honeymoon
                            coursing through the coils  enough to drive a vacuum
                      one needle valve to control       a distant waterfall, a blazing reactor,
              sweeps your floor and washes enough          chines more tight   a new trinity of
                           exists of the pyramiding milking machines to automatic barn cleaners
                             water or the expansive power of the wheel equipped with blades
                                 from fans to fuel pumps, from egg time; even so, the puffing steam
                                   power and the changeover to loco hands, our backs to the long affair
                                drill or grindered years ago, if a storm set the slaves free;
                                        the fabric globes rise, the fires   with wet straw, sheep's wool,
                                                                     and paralyze myriads of machines as well.

.....

I imagine my bed is a float
about to go over a waterfall.
Something is filming.
I will be asleep by the time of the
descent, but just barely.
At the bottom there are both
waking and dying.
The ferns and the dry fallen
breeze familiar noises
to the damaged labyrinth in my ears
unreached by reality, untouched by sleep.

.....

turning the river stone over and
          over, giving it the imprint
                            of human cells,
        watching it take on
                  the oils of flesh, texture
                      smoothed
                                by this meeting, contours
      blended with light, back in the pocket
                 to age, slower
        than the carrier under woodland waves
              on the eaten path and the floodshore
                with a sweating mineral
                      close to the loins, becoming
                   a bicycle, a mover of particles
                              to be paperweighted
                    there is a hard line in you that will not be erased

.....

pulling out coiled cables:  Oh

                acid, juicy

            its name from this

              He (the burner)

                     a cover to sleep under

           Dark straw wood punches, rock drills      shears

                                  opening an envelope bag