The zones are closed

to bodies lacking in official poison,

to tags without position

piercing synthetic flesh,

the flashing eyes ransacked

by forked reptilian tongues

retired into glass

and cases sealed.

What is rooted under bridges

and submerged in sagging parks

emerges in a thousand skulls.

My quill and inkpot's helicopter blades

cut cracking cells

loose from the unwinding sun.

I pray to the oak,

my costume stuffed with telephones.

Thanks for the shelter

that the deer shared,

and the dark road

that the loggers abandoned.

Thanks for the turning wheel.

For the woman who groveled

and the man who fell.

Thanks for the emergent soil.

There is a sun-rim plastered with daffodil

from which I run and return to

in the speed of dreams.

Filth hag, fermented in maggots,

laughter like the bark of a dog.

No corridor remains in light

but leads to sorrow.

We walk together through the vines of the air,

past the snoring cables

and the trapped souls.

Somehow they have all gone

yet surrounded us in time.

Sweet maid of dandelions,

first daughter to my growling birth,

bridge me with the land

on a beam of light.

How our lives unspooled here

revealing in rented rooms

granules of impregnable light

specks the wind could not wash off

strings across the moon that was kept

one seat left empty near the center of the room

where the guest of honor is always leaving

a ditch that becomes a solar runway

one fatal word.

LAST SUNDAY IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

And the temples are flooded with paper

like leaves from a tree

pouring from the garbage avenues

into sanctity, veiled across

the doorway of my soul.

Teeth lined up like pawns

on the array of flesh

eyes fading through the visible eraser

that uproots the sky.

Tarnished quarter on a curb

bright muscles and banter

hacked off away

from familial time

selling himself to a dawn

that never comes.

Following his green repetition

like a skunk under the moon,

dancing for the screamers

in the jagged thorny trees

coming out to water his shadow.

Blood the ocean under paint

and metal posts

a bone bridge over

the crying desert

one winking dime.

One more scraped out room

slabs of effort in transport

glossy wings around the glossy heart

mechanically breaking webs

from floorboards and flexed

windows flying.

I'm on the crest

of all my ex girlfriends

moved through stone

from all the pillows shared

and the high shelves groaning

one diamond horizon waits.

Through the tar pools

and sticky lit rooms

where we danced

carrying a rope of wires

amplified between our hands

I leave the springboard panorama

steam pierced and tingling.

You fogged yourself out

for a long time, still chanting

satanic prayers.

The bags of dead batteries,

the slowly dying spunk.

You used to stand without sleep,

you used to stay and rage.

With a thick friend

you'd rock the moldy armchair.

And your other friend would laugh

playing his rancid stereo.

A siren would be plucked

from the air.

And the lights of town would ooze

above the hilltops

that we could not see.

On a ledge I remember pleasure:

the kind of pleasure expressed by mouths,

pursed wincing or gaping.  Let the

colors cut time and run.

Lord, we hold our enterprise

in Your hands.

Let it not be harmed

by the necessary salt.

Your impossible task is ours

in flesh on this Earth.

Let the cells dance,

may the vein memorize

its only pure circuit.

Sentence the fungal creep

to come in on an open window.

Come invite the sunlight to kill.

Let me be its only wound

that never moves.

All your stances so aligned

with seeping death--

where is the programmer?

How do your sealed doors bang?

When the tumults of constructed green

soar skyscraper high,

and spout unrooted waterfalls

from hologram bouquets

where do the framed clouds fly?

In a wet perch of departed autumn

far between dancing cliffs

I am watching airplanes

wrapped in cloth

fall into a mechanical anthill

of liquid fire.

From a barbed wire coffin

from a chain link net

of sacrificed bikinis,

I fold my hands and levitate

and laugh.

Skeletons in satin sleeves

walking through wax hallways

with a frame of frozen blood

that they pass between them.

Goblet skulls to hold the junk mail

they fight with broken fingers

while the ink cascades

that feeds them poison wishes

and a cage of organs

to pursue again.

Slammed into the hurricane's waist

by a ghostly competitor

strung across the guitar mouth

with companion veins.

Leering over a glassy ditch

through a tumult of acidic leaves.

Gas tank soul

muscular above your shared vomit

still strangled at the gut

by an undergrowth vine

smoking naked to the sky

in a collected swarm of images

the bashed sidecar of time.

Perched where the feathers point

to the limits of blood,

where the stripes inflicted on flesh

extend throughout the surrounding fields,

electric stars assemble vast

intestinal constellations.

Smoking on a peak of moss

and communicating mica.

Brain where the gun sprays

on imagined marketplace

and subsides in languor.

Over the fields of tar

and concrete runways

a lightburst travels

heading for the braided corn.

Piles and piles of night

sky after earth's gone to ash

wafting past a moth background.

Rain from the ships

gone over dry sand

descending into puddles

as they disassemble

on their crater-hidden carrier.

My seat in the bronze bubble

where I pray to the gleam of a knife

knowing.

Picking out the ripped actor

in a beam from above

the seared shore

and a coughing weasel.

Files where the faceless names

are always kept

in hinges getting wet.

The spear's tip

is an eye.

Split hair

of a bomb's making

so combed into the ordered fray.

Freed from the chains of shit,

the paid joker's mask.

Walking the white and black linoleum

watching the curtains stretch

across an alien horizon.

My action figure hands

hooked along a barbed wire brassiere.

Defrocked priests of grass

strolling to the ramps on high.

The bitches of destiny go to war:

manes glinting in the spread of darkened light.

Chrome gloves for the hot trash

gathered at the plastic edge

of imprisoned soil.

Gymnast in the air eating air

springing from molecule to molecule

turning smiles into trees

establishing a steaming leafy ground

frothing invisibly at the lips

in tights turning

where the field triangulates into space

and the fake turf shines like honey

I climb a reef of braided hair

and turn the paper into flesh

with a medal gleaming.