Let the quiet

seep down

into the deep

cracks of light,

bring the bright horizon

into a frame of ice,

make the sword-panes

move.

Touch the symmetry

of damp rocks

afloat above

the magnetic reservoir

where they go to dance

and I go like a seed

to explode.

Lonely stations with loud flags

bunks fresh with flower stems

light falling through

the webs of cracked defenses

pooling in empty hands.

Yards bright with painted rocks

a raindrop's

polished

tight divisions

night's cooling sash.

All my ornaments are aimed

at a mysterious beloved

hills descend to her yawning fire

and I rocket to the pines

that slap me down to her embrace

staggering to clearing after clearing

with my crooked mechanical wings

lost for the embrace I gave away

a thousand butterflies

in a long net's fiber optic fleece

that could not guide me

money landing on my beard

without lips

tasting of its abstract dirt

what I can't be

you have captured

in a golden glaze

and what I can

is captured too

in your sleeve of echoes

the root I can clasp

behind the flower

all the future I can follow

is in your furnace bare

and spirit firm.

My pinnacles of ice

hold plaintive blossoms

in the lips of their cracks

and quiet breathing

cones of subtle fire

hold sway in hologram clouds

where I keep my crazed love

and her dictionary fingernails

blankets of sawdust and honey

drape our rings of ectoplasm

caressing over dancing spheres

a pyramid's horizon

leaves glancing at the fair grains

their veins of shade attract

our glade for one fortified morsel

soft tongue in the teeth of steel

Imagine the wreath

that I imagine

placing around your halo

its tendrils winding into space

each thorn a captured star

trickling toward

your braids of bright black light

and fighting arms

take the lunar thread

from my pillow

drape it across your naked shoulders

anoint these veins of eyes

that have worked for your clay

lain in your grass

and touch your bare girl's feet

to my threaded belly

draw the acid from my guts

into a higher air

bring your copper vase of echoes

to my lips of ancient fire.

Dark threads of abandoned color

in the depth of cleft pools

winking through horizon wires

and mirrors of coffee.

Panes of ultraviolet saints

cracking in cathedral ice.

Long pews of sun bronzed clay

a blank night popped and frayed

by distant fires.

I was swept aside

by the strange transcendence

of others.  In a green light

in the cracks between many shadows

I grew and grew.  Soon

no tree or fuming human tower

could overwhelm me--

but still I stayed low,

bound with the roots in the soil,

fused into the wet

abundance of its

unaching maw.

And I furrowed

through fields that had lost their names

so seemingly to find me

that I might have sprouted there

and eaten sky.

You are the blade of a wave

prime cutlet

of blossoming sky, girl-cousin

to the infinite blaze.

Your pigtails drag imaginary runways

to the seventh sun.  High heels

place you above my magnetic core

as the engines wheeze.

Surrounding walls can't kiss us

frozen cubes and heated spheres

thorns of a green volcanic garden

let's crawl the bridge undersides

be spiders of a hidden architecture

nest in the fuming emptiness

a space-plow left behind

our haunted futures spanked

and painted fresh

by passing gravity

the prophet's pink white peak

moon from a fish's belly

bright brown flank to a tiny rose.

There she is.  And it's all

taken from me

now.  Her alternate

rides the sky

of a time

we don't know.

That's passing here.

Frost fried leaves

floating past the doorway

of a sunken temple,

its purple and

white green moss,

enchantment of bronze tinted

shadows.

She's left a throne

glittering and empty

in there.  The sea

doesn't howl

but the windows

wail.

I'm in the railyard's

rusty peak

where the old cars

crashed.  My lovers past

cluster behind the windshields.

Libraries fail

to catch her

as she climbs

the seething ground

outside my breathing

so far past

their senseless

hands.

Park Place

Where beauties gather

under a cracked roof

painted flowers gleam and slither

on determined walls.

I am here

behind their myriad reflections

in a dome of glass

that never leaves the floor.

A net heaves

over my head

and I catch their cliffs of hair

with empty ribs.

In you

I study electricity

moving like notes made visible

a song in the air

and look at your magnet pulse

bending structures all around you

into waisted charm

new frescoed and bulbous skyscrapers

springing up from your fertile frame

run reams of knotted silk

across these sterile counters

mount the god and goddess

on an arc beneath the curving sky

eye's resurrection

hair and breasts and

feet and hands and speech

above the nested gravity

where you and I give way

before the king of things

from alabaster lids

and lacquered heels

to the discus and galactic arm

all charm of eggs in ashes

that the sand can't wash away

and the water heals.

In a quiet silo

where the wings

have cut the words

and silver walls

vibrate with deeper voices

shadows traced by fire

speak to me

of places they never went

and unwritten stars.

The yoke of summer days relaxes

big doors swing into a cool light

of amber lines

and the vaporous

questions climb.

If I wrote the word

and the word was fresh

all the beds of ice-night

turning in their twisted streams

the images watched too long

would drop and scatter

from a fevered sky.

As it is on the dock,

on its reaching puddled shade

and its rails for languor

when the empty water calls

for bladelike silence

so the realms of extra life

move swiftly in their colored orbs

for no human purpose

veined leaves alleviating scorn

the cracked spring's mercy.

If your beauty would only

touch the edges,

if it could stop somewhere

short of everything,

if it could

invest me less deeply

in the storms of thought

that never part from man,

then all time would break off

and I'd be worshipping a skeleton

with astral hands

already gone remembering your voice

with blades and blooming stages,

with tongues and envelopes

and only your glass fronds

my looming master,

raw paths of ice cracked stars

the firmament's first

hereafter.

Drenched in the eyes

by all her green fibers

the forest's rack of blossoming scenes

is in my fingerprint lines

her purple paint

exudes me.

Twined into the lattice of her ways

a bridge festooned with smoking daisies

strings that electrocute

and slits that sing

the harmony

where I can hear the moss growing

and watch the pyramid's faint stem

rise in a desert's tent.

Late nights in a Georgia glade

I lay back and suggest the sky

go blank to suit me

before it pours its colors down

and I converse with them

vein to vein

nested in the shadows of the moon

and with the struggle of imprinted grasses

waiting for the bridges to moan

as the lights of many engines cross them

I remember her sweet

wicked eyes

and want nothing more

to paint me anew

let the vines reach up

on their secret feet

and the waterfalls hold their fire

in the shrink til her lips return

let the blooms of a warrior sun

stand savagely caressing.

Zig zagging dance

with a pumpkin smashed path

maps crammed in many handfuls

into this one face

where time stalls and falters

like a crooked flower.

A psychedelic shovel's mirror blade

making rocks and soil squeak

against its thrusting reflection

heaps and heaps

of sun touched particles

long rings of quiet teeth.

Our work of distracted hours,

cells trapped in singed reversal

and android dance moves

the sheen of erased landscapes

drawn to a lonely handprint

a scissor's rain of interdimensional letters,

hot features from the cut beyond,

gem sprung from animal fetters

a g-string's raging heart.

Clouds that scan dusty shutters

that glide across factory glass

and cubes of red rug

interspersed with graphic twilight,

a mouth-shaped shield

and circumstantial bone

that rides a crest of glacial waves

one magnetic feather one

caressed vertebrae above

the recorded attic

and the static of ten

wire-hung radios

one of three biblical refrigerators

and the pill bottles teasing

from formerly vacant shelves,

potato grease glaze

and infinite shade.

Inclines on the sum

of parched and slashed land,

the knife with lipstick imprints

turned inward for

an invisible stream

thatched through unstable time.

Masks for a fertile compost

the host of entropy's dancing

avatars, yours and mine

so aware in glances

across the glint of this

simulated wine, the movements

of gravestone movies

cracked edicts flashing from

glass revolving doors

the busy veins

of empty pages

blank tongues on a shelf

the breeze flippant

only in a dying mind

amp's odor of rage

a plugged cord for stages.

Peaches of honey

smears of hot glass

eyes through the vortex

that butters the knives

lips veneer of split wood

forest abandoned

like a field of upright oars

far from the shore encased in jello

lunar cement at the outskirts

rim and frame

lexicon's descending torrents

in a velvet pile

fruit of a stopped sky

hat's razor fist is

flying for a crucified crow.

Nests made in desperation

glinting with surprising joy,

the quartz of long-withheld eyes

taking on the realm of sapphire,

banks like tidal green

holding up the cliff face

in sweet reversal,

tips of emergent fungus

among the ragged autumn blades,

plates of advancing rock

resounding in the distance

of fire-touched peaks

their caves and alleys

wreathed with secrets of the heights

unfurled in wind whipped silence

the image of a root's

lack of deceit.

Uncertain

semi circles

around her halo

asking dead air from Saturn

voiceless dust from Mars,

choirs lurching

in bulldoze canyons,

ferns and berries

clustered at the feet

of erotic thorns.

As the arcs of missiles flying

bask in the cherubic marchers

so my soul finds

the cliff's root torn

skies normal as a gash in time.

Storms of love

on a star clawed roof

mirrored shade

fingering its keyboards

saw teeth

touching doorknobs

in the bitter night.

Coal swelling

among the roses

paths beside the river

where we ran nude

and laughed

to fly above the fern bank

through radiant logging roads

and all the sleeping herds

that held us down

a short time

before.

Tribal wounds of wounded color

poles of night light leaning tall

a gap in the clouds

where you perch

with your gleaming pose

and fleshy buttons

from a signal deep in time

where you dress up in radio wires

from some sixth dimension

and the lonely acres purr

like some aching ragged photograph

first hot step through the train window

a faint clink of smoke yellowed chandeliers

crime's kissing face.

Rubble from

the ransacked sun

glowing in our fresh tattoos

paths of water on wire

ascending to a castle of bronzed wheat

windows wide as blown eyes

from the halls of death

their threads escaped intact

sweet fragments

in magnetic dance

dispersing inverted blood.

She's gone from planes of dead shine

and distilled color

gone from aisles

blazing with kidnapped perfumes

in raging octopus containers

of star struck glass

gone from squares of radiant fur

cement floors humming slow

and fungus brains

in the corners of cracked ceilings

gone from my night-spent eyes

and veins of a bone wrenched morning

light as fluffed straw.

I am a pulled thorn

staring from a curbstone

white shroud curling off

a black dagger

revealed of architectural darkness

eyes habituated to the blade

a pearl graced bed of nails

the open mouth of my house

conceiving on a hill

of continental grass

the spark inside the bowels

like woodfire

doves homeward in evening

while the long ship moans

its way ashore.

Scales of dawn

glinting on fallen armor

cans turned over

in the cloudy wind

my gone seat of granite

and propeller pen

slanting from a hat left behind

and the one rose's sacred thorns

walks on an iron bridgeline

lingering alone

to watch the webs unfurl

into sweet nothing

on an outer plane

svelte reins and veins of lightning

lassos of electric love

melting the ice furniture

and an open doorway

for a thousand tongues

among the million

and the grass not theirs alone

Lily

She places little rubber ducks

on the frames of magnetic doorways,

the ledges of high corners

and running pipes that sing

along her secret walks

with a burlap handbag.

Each one wears

a bemused half-smile

like hers, each one

is a serene and floating

signature, each one

a peach-perfect

silent-feathered Mona Lisa.

The bag emptied of bath toys,

distilled to its girlish ingredients,

she leaves the scene

with its architecture of ducks

to be puzzled over,

radiant and intact,

others to inhabit the mystery

of which she is the ignition,

queen of ducks

and their many perches,

sower of frozen wings

who flies away,

ethereal prankster.

I know the hilltops

in the upper air

the light upon them fading

into slaked explosions

on a faint horizon fine.

Wheels on the old beeline

to work and withheld honey

extra coffee in the pot

a fallen mask and wig.

Hot plates and heels of ice

a corduroy ceiling.

Chair sunken in the numbers

gluey with their rows

clothed radiant in weapons,

with ambient gaze

I know the limping haze

that comes and sows

the ravens.

Her harps on the wind

fill the half bashed ears

of one destined to be the bad guy,

to paint the wet horizon regardless

to inner eye's perfection,

while she laughs

from her whole balcony

and the strings resound.

To label crates

with minutely manufactured

wheels of sound

in an invincible attic tower

my childhood's head in blankets

is a flash lit wound

and mirror begging back the twilight

where bones lean and I lie down.

Shields of bird flock

surround me as I dance

on the jagged rock ridge

the guards of time

have been fed their morsels

and now in broken light

I can kiss the Earth

run the rims of pools with me

cast the petals down

to dogwater and fallen ruin

to be resurrected again

harm's daughter

with the veins of future vacancies

a rushing hallway

of many pearl apertures

corners licked by lunar dust that sears

the packed and chattering boxes.

You hover in a space

where shade is bright.

Where cuts in heaving land

pour forth

their worm-spun miracles

and water unencumbered

spells your name.

A path flung to the sky

like a rope on fire.

Two forms in a bag

two solemn magnets

teething.  Lips aglow

with paintings of nobody's frame.

Torsos in a glass

whose fragrant ways

ascend to laughter

loins on fire in heaven

with nobody's name.

Lucid hammers drag me home

bright particle man

walks into a milkshake

armrests beaded stacks of gem

graphs cut into the face of ages.

Quartz hands for antique glass

lime buckets of dimly dreamed gin

a straw chair that was toppled over

ceilings mapped by a calendar blazing

with colored numbers

and shells of high sexed eyes.

Left at that mountain stone bench

a crushed can, one deft

and wiggling serpent

cash counters with leaf clenched stems

this field of thorns that flow

that snipped my ticket's

nub.

The stage cracked like an ice kiss

a goddess of ink black eggs

slithering amps and microphone cords

to the lambent ceiling

trashed by a radiant octopus

from the smashed clock's

last calling.

What hooks should I invite

from the fog?

Whose liquid spirit

to clog my rapt incisors?

Let them all bleed out

to the edges of the Earth's

brainpan, and curdle there

like a scimitar worm

to cut the sun from the sun

the totem pole spine

broken in its ornate chains

shackled to its inner light and gone.

I wait for her wings

in stasis,

wait for the killing tree

that grows me out.

Lines of reflected light

and captured lava

frame the empty lots

and erase the sky.

Her untapped heat

and restless departure,

my seat in the deep corner

of a dark shaft,

merely aligned in dreams

these pale arrangements

breathe.

Parenthesis of night

clasped around a swollen mountain

rocks bright with agitated heat

the paint of molten voices.

To share this legendary smoke

at the edge of a sheer ledge

cost lenses of ten thousand days,

the blood-shaken stories of stairs

extending beyond the one body,

the one wet talking tongue,

a white hot light

once more removed from grey

a heaving heap of gold scarred letters

a looming leap in shade

the street's a sheet

flapping.

Your nimbus dances

and contains my dancing soul

even when you're motionless

like an abandoned shrine

I watch from the stems

that grow toward you

I watch from the vines

that write your name

your angles are priceless

I paint reflections of the blade

your strut gives off

the little birds

with flashing beaks

that follow your fragrant circuit

twine around my steps in shadow

and pierce my thread.

When you burn the air

you burn the air

when the seagulls depart

in a wave

they depart in a wave

when your feet hit the shore

the sand cracks in gladness

when you put your straps on

buds move and flowers reek and scream

to be rooted

when you move your glass

or your sandal

or your finely combed teeth

of a deep and beautiful wound

my knees caress the shore

my elbows face and hands

I worship your diminutive

woman's navel

and let the trees bend

in my bent direction

while you try

all the fibers and smile.

The blinking bodies

of incarnate thought

their pretty shells of armor

casting light like coal.

Loves remembered in solitude

like a polished knife

the webs of many hearts

in automated struggle.

Two set apart

in a volcanic rift,

brought so close

by clashing earth

they meld into

a blindness of each other.

And the mortal branch

and the mortal sight returned

going somewhere deeper than space

and sharper than time

with a delicious

crack.

A pink leak

in the sorrow

of my dark blue cave

a damp charcoal mermaid

the ripples of my tidal floor

antennas in rank and file

all flexing brain stem and golden claw

drum beats of a bone song

silk teardrops on the snake and cross

and their union

my kite to the forbidden

heights and depths

a knife on the grid line

a rip tide soul.

Let the sun burn me

let the sands toss me

let the women taunt me

let the winds blast me

I'm a tattered remnant

I'm a finely carved dagger

master of cute molecules

in technicolor hot from my blood

you can lash my bones to the ship

I will listen to the sirens

hand me the whip to be remade

and I hand back

a planetoid of vines and vipers

intertwined in flowers

stamped with an evaporating kiss

Let the moon cross me

let the rivers eat me

let the sail scissored

by the sword of hereafter

be my banner and tongue-smashed flag.

Electrified vanilla knives,

a glitch-run enterprise

disowned by the thieves

who stole it.

Platforms pockmarked

by magnetic bombs

whose mouths of shadow

pour with lilac branches

and rust-caked conscious tools,

the seams in liquid rock

alert with frozen tongues

and settled fragments.

The panorama's gap

an empty eye

that swallows clouds

and rains on underground chambers

bright veins across tin floors

with little teeth

each one a sad enameled brain

a fallen stranger.

From the vacancies

in punched-out states,

from the weaknesses

furnished in gold,

from the old ways

crying and bent

and the new ways

crying and warped,

I come with the outlined fumes

of a rotten splendor,

I come out of the rot

fresh like moss,

you can't see my spinning rims

or cascading chandeliers

until they land on your planned attack

with a dancer's troupe and cargo,

with a whip and ten fists,

with the mercy of disintegrated love.

Frontiers close down

like sandwich time.

Someone is cradling

the dagger that finished it

like a precious jewel.

Shields of water explode

all over the wounded emblems

of a perfect calibration.

Salamanders crawl

through the paint brick walls.

The searing clean curve

of planets from a distance

a face full of unruly gravel

freed from gravity's chamber

or in its maw

the bronze lights

and long glass

of meticulously departed places

their yield of dark milk

the wheels in the ceiling

of an ever-extending tent.

Wind will talk to blue clad limbs

through the ditches of the kingdom

strewn with forgotten gold

the stems our hands have touched

will intertwine

the soul flown around in plastic bags

will find its evergreen cover

and the jabs of time

will fall to a greater curtain

all the veins of ancient highways

fresh as milk in glass

where the trampled seed is stubborn

and the bad seed lasts.

From the beautiful month of your birth

I look to the sky for signs

that the waves of deeply layered

forests will bring us together,

that the semblance of sacred stone

in the chinks of our vertebrae

will vibrate in delirious tandem,

that the fettered bark of growing trees

interlinks and knows.

From the bleachers in a cloud

that look upon a faint ethereal auditorium

I am eating peanuts in the gravy of the air

and I am betting on your lips,

your sweetly braided hair,

your tiny rebellious chin,

the set of your eyes

on my dedicated gravestone,

your climax's taste for laughter.

Let me climb into the mischief

of your ancestral curve,

be my shell's grain of sand,

my quiet reminder,

the gaze of many women

on this thousandfold man

bisected by a grand piano.

Let groans of love multiply like stairs

(no matter where they go in the grand meander)

forge between two

the weightlessness of monumental chains.

As if you were counting,

counting your pearls

on a strange shore

and could not be moved.

A great wind has swept me empty.

I linger in the halls

of battered frames

and ailing family portraits.

Here is a web that glistens

with evacuated mind.

Here are your chess-carved

partners.  Play.

No thanks to the chain of talking rectangles

regurgitated from some geek's

delirium, no thanks

to the scum with lipstick,

weak snips of a turning wheel.

I'll take the path between

the fallen piles, pick out

the twisted logs

that interlock.  And watch

the light curve

around many Earths

to grow its shape

in your corner,

little woman from the faint towns

who resounds without clamor.

If I could swim to you

through the air of Oglethorpe

through the rocks of Chickamauga

if I could perch on your wing

and grow to kiss you

while the petals clap

on their opposing shores

we'd bounce around fern-clad ditches

with feet of sweet

anti-gravity

and the lightly woven

bows of cloud

would drift their way back to you

all articulate cells

and bell pull rope

so deep in my hands

The vise grip of beauty

on a broken man

long days lit only by the parking lots

and uninhabited fields

reflecting a crazed sun

are we moles in our cozy blindness

do we shine where the linoleum bright

drops off

or hang glide

into a time rift laughing

Is there resurrection for the punks

for the freaks rejected by the new freaks

will there be a rebirth for disfigured heroes

and neglected spawn

will there be a light that shifts the burden

or just these gravity suits of inertia

does the soul breathe

can it find me

can we meet in buried history

and halve the galaxy's collapse

or put it right like printed tin

and go under it

regardless

So many wild ones gone.

The chairs filled with their light

recede and fade.

The darkness under time

has taken them far

now.

Oh to be in their midst

for another hour.

To withstand them once

was not enough--it never is.

Only to hear them howl

and subside,

rage and slumber,

only to live in the labyrinth

of all their breathing

for a second more.

I draw myself out

on the electrified hillsides,

waiting for you.

Draw myself

tight as a drum,

ready to resound and

touching nothing.

Pretty as glassy embers

put to bed on ash,

resonant as

a whole choir of females

in your solitary breathing,

you pass me by like the light

on a bale of hay, again and again.

Your circuitry is the moat

that protects without armor

these fences painted

with my patient blood

in the shadow of your perfect longing

where I will go like scattered rice

or be cast aside.

Lest we contemplate

the strange humanity

lurking beneath Darth Vader's mask

and know ourselves unknowable

for the small and bitter gods we are

try stacking lists, try

the smell of desire try

the smell of money on money

and wherever it runs out

hope for a happy chair

to sit in like a dummy

carve the insides of the mask

with fervent strides of color

from the beds of bones

let green yellow the air

and the svelte throng care.

When we met

your young beauty

was already old

As old as anything gets

in this world,

as old as the salt in the sea,

older than me.

You slayed the reflections

of fallen arrivals

at the pageant

of pride that fades.

You raided the bones

of desert royalty

for DNA

And I waited

like a cave of geodes

for your fingers

that arrange the stuff of life,

for your braids of light

that hold up the dead sky.

In its tendrils frozen

your light returns

with its shining warmth,

its rescue of the moon's

turbulence.

I am the rock that waits

for your tough little feet

cells answering cells

in the web where there is no answer

save the shuttered water

and its ageless thirst

to swell without eyes

for your skin,

to yearn without features

for you casting glances,

the eggs that I catch like seeds

from all the reeds that bend

a chandelier's pen.

You glue my twin soul

to a tower of scorpions.

I waver in its grip

until your gown appears

in the window of

a neighboring lighthouse.

Our masks

and their wires with diamonds

have fallen to a valley of silk.

I walk around you

like the skirts

your shadows flare.

Billie Holiday sings in my veins

when you step so lightly

on autumn scales that suit you

in the rugged dark torn blue

by a relentless moon.

I hear prophecies of you

in David Bowie.

The madness of the radio

is silenced by your breasts.

In the crux of crossing shadows

I see you are the trees

that cast them.

I walk beneath your body

through the sky

and then back in

over platforms of laughing soil.

The atmospheric curtains

thrust me out

to the senseless stars

and airless majesty again

I long for your talk of butter

of small grains and earthly things

that blossom in the flame of your hands

imperfect devourer

sweet fount of braids and chains

where I give up my wandering

and you send me into ashes

waiting for a pin to prick my soul

for you to pipe my longing

deep to be the water of my air.

Pelt me with red eggs from hell,

be my grim transcriber.

Let me not stray

from your frail and square

hourglass,

take the libraries from my heart

with a drag on your cigarette.

Let's watch the rivulets

carved in this hillside

run with restaurant milk.

Already you are blooming

under the lights

that scalp some.

Havoc is breeding

the central diamond

in your eye of eyes.

The soil's life reaches up

into your fertile web.

Sanctuaries cluster

all around you in a bright

stone-tapped mosaic

where I am

falling over.

I am the swelling

above your ribs,

the tigress heat

that makes tigers.

As the cliff blades

find my fur

my bones

will not let go.

The green rows open up

when you close your hands.

Palm leaves crack

when you avert your eyes.

Nets fling a harvest

of empty armor.

But the one who has

walked the longest

will not be clothed.

The sky gnashes

and impersonates

a purple wreath.

Thorns write on my pillow

and retreat into my veins.

The journey

is a smashed grain of sand

where the gardens

ripped a man.

The yellow flower trembles

on its patch of scrub.

My blades are careful

but her scowl

obtrudes the air.

I'm alien here

but the veins have got me.

I plow down the green gulf

into the holy river.

A cloud spits hail

on my dive

and the wake

retracts my eyes

to be born green

in the garden of sodom

one more blinking time.

A crescent there in black blue,

the sinking earth,

the fates of ice in current

like dying letters.

I love this whole

distorted timeline,

all its flakes

of hurt light

falling together through space,

and the sweet circuitry of noise

that becomes music, flowing

through the snot

and dreams of fuzzy multitudes

to create violent diamonds,

quiet embers

and radiant eggs.

Its tangled sutures

in my hands,

bruised wheat

and deeply speaking vine.

Its ice cold merry go round

and my seat in the fray dripping,

the whirl of expressionless horses

and liquid chains.

Let depth penetrate depth

and the waves fall

all in their places.

Let the goddess

anointed by time

fall under its wheel.

Let the fire be with me

in its open guise

and her tragedy fall

into my arms to be sown

in a closer cell.

Let the garment tear

with its willingness spent on trifles,

let the banner be

a thousand tongues.

On the brine of my back

let her hands eat me up like the sea.

Destroyed for all but you

in your pink silence

and quietly folding hands,

fixed by you as if I am a thought

from your sweet nerve.

Under bridges

and along despairing roads,

I wail in the water of life,

fall through the harpsichord

of all the little ways you were created.

Deep in the silks of your pondering

you seize me from a distance,

my barely modern body

in these ancient shoes

yours cleft for the taking

in my missile ways,

in the corners and lilac shadows

where we are breaking

in a dogged dream

in the hollows of unspent spaces

from the light of your mischievous chin

from the toil of the ocean

this desire was bound up for you,

exclusive as the molecules that matter wears,

one woman, one heaven's inlet,

one particle crowned.

Lily, daughter of the stargazer,

where do I go

to search you out?

You rise above the empires

and their adulterers,

you throw me into the abyss

with your little hands.

Jasmine stands next to you

with its scent of sleep.

September is

another care away.

I open the poem

and you come out of it.

Record another song

and your secret soul of evil

turns another pearl.

Untie me from my agony

of desire: have mercy on the years

that have not smashed a man

the way your furtive glances

and your pigtails did

in the months of your pale blue eyes

blonde sabotage of discovery

waiting with empty thighs

in the outer darkness of my mind

for the breath of an unknown morning

souls under the lidless scan

I beat your legend into me on hot tar

and go far to the day moon's strength

and the night moon's mirror

your name like a knife in my side.

I miss your green fangs

fruit of the fire that commands your will

as I drink from the smoke

in your shoe.

The wheel collects

its paste of human excrement.

We shine upon it

with our worship from a distance.

The bright zones tug

and the dark zones move.

Water boils.  The cauldron is angry

in its lowest curve.

Stalks of daylight fallen

malformed on a tent of twigs.

The propane forest quakes.

The stone hemmed junkyards

heave.

In the great mystic reveal

we will come bubbling up the depths

to embrace halfway

from the belts of a run down sun

where you are my cavern

there will be a ribbon

of brushed-by faces

melting on a bronze floor

and a high-set star that howls

from the wound of its beginning

salted in dayless matter

by the lights that never cease

rib's brain of echoes

orb of the last dawn

drowning gear in tongues

to come what's next with feathers

locked in kaleidoscopic combat

oh silk spun dyad

catching milk from the cloud's dark yield.

Ever to see you

stalk the floors

tapping dimes

into the shadowed rug

with your little heels.

Swinging lamps

the scene runs rampant

I duck beneath a feathered table

and watch the water

crawl across the wires.

Tongues flop in the hallway

raw tons of meat

you stand on a strange

precipice of chrome

commanding the rivers of blood.

Pound the silk,

you fragile imitator,

walk gingerly

around the knife.

Delicacies don't come

without fangs.

The jungle seethes

with diamonds.

Your vent for crimson air

the rage in concentrated errors

sown into the liquid

and the land.

Velvet bombers

with tongues of tar

setting fire

to the tangled vines.

The hourglass we rented

cracking in the speed

of time warped sand.

My rollercoaster highway

rolled up into my wrists

and lit by

a drip-drowned bulb.

Street signs

promising the sacred

to the vacant

all die down to darkness

in a desert wind.

A plane of light

anointed anew

from a single braincell

left flickering

above the punished void.

Naked in the clutch

of softening bones

my side wound

longs to taste the pain

of vinegar tongues.

Wings hammered in the deepest forge

to rise over the fallen prototypes.

Blood rivers reflected

in spoon-like eyes.

Lightning crossed

by vaporous souls

as it flashes

the fragrant abysses.

Victims lining up for lunch.

Diamonds exploded

at their feet

for gravel: this network

of ignored stars.

Strings cut from dancing puppets

sky ripped with robotic alphabets

veins of living things

stretched on a dying wind.

Smiles were senseless gashes

when the party swirled

this crushing solitude

lives near God's heart

I say to the smashed water,

I say when her ways depart.

Even in the galleries of beauty,

there are none like you.

On the electric boardwalk

where they twirl their finery

through the razor web

of a prize calendar

still

there are

none like you.

Your soul in evil solitude

like mine, you slim and fine,

quiet in the bamboo reaches,

quiet in the midst

of a cicada storm.

Tell me why

do I walk looking

when there are none like you?

Why do I wait

where you never come?

Only the time stripped bare

in your echoless clasp

can be redeemed

by sweat and blood.

The coin of a gone realm

shining on an empty road.

Wheels in gray churning transit

bone sockets for the trains that pass.

Uptown, on the frolicsome curb,

a trio of hourglass beauties

in owl masks

begging for the blessed light

that sticks to the ribs.

Sky soaring overhead

while I watch

from a cartoon face.

Disintegrated songs

riding through my bloodstream.

Your neon halo

body fit for a gun

scriptures on grass

a skeletal train car.

Zooming frame

your silicon nightgear

sleek spandex rags

the paths of a femme fatale.

Perched upon rails of glass

my braided heartworm

leaning in the light of chrome dashes

and frozen bars

hot moon-flung harmony catcher

a flopped series of echoes

or newborn ancient clay

the water's finger playing.

A slab of stone

in the coldest eye

shines with reflected bones

from what's left of me

claws that stripped

the covering of skin

their place with the hands that take

the sky glazed

with icy sperm and egg

the quick deaths

of a dying world

a monolith's cracks

that blot the sphere

of no horizon.

Put the veins of my eyes

in a temperature dial

ladle my blood

for the canal

of a desert chessboard

let it run to the clay root

from which this

flexing tragedy

was sculpted

let the corpses

run the amusement park

and me with my silent jewel

be gently forgotten.

Sermons of delirium

vibrating from a fallen wall.

Their unicorn vocations

and lust for suffocation

all their flash bouquets of culture

gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Blast me with another cartoon melee

from your insensate organs

tell me that your desire can find the soul

so I can sleep inside the rocks

make me a criminal of the mind

so I can throw my bones against the sun

and melt into your atmosphere

I am tired like a tiger in a cage

of your frowny-face mothering bullshit

tired of these fucking feminine old men

and their tired nubile nurses

let me rise into vapor and reclaim

what these animals have lost

let me feel the fanatic purple

O Lord of your energy captured

rain the linkage of frozen realms

upon these bitches

so the fire can sleep in form.

I will rest

in the socket

of an artificial mercy,

raging against time

for your love.

You touch the silver,

you perch in our favored lowlands

on carved and curving wood

eaten by the open doors.

Faint blue eyes

and braids of southern gold

will not save me from

the darkness behind the glass,

the howl of wounded plastic.

Resigned to flesh

older than the spirit,

I watch from the distance

that your beauty is,

I die in the rush of urgent air

to nowhere.

Vacancies ripe

as turned compost,

the bleeding

of open space.

Histories ringing

the helmet mirror

that I wear through fields

of bone powder

partaking of none.

Her bright cocoon

pierced by an axis

surging through

some other Earth

like a spear of stars.

Send me up

to the cloud you planned on glass

feathered with springtime

laced with summertime's regrets

plastered to a plinth

beneath a statue's time-hacked face

worshipping the valley

of mysterious laughter,

set me up for your kisses

in the shrink-wrapped radiant

dawn where no one goes,

set me where the moon drinks water,

set me where its minerals are afire,

bring me to your lips

so I can see my fate in stone.

I cut an eye-shaped hole in the earth.

Wolves come pouring out.

Cemeteries without end

feeding the speech of tall grasses.

Water that roars

and the veins that guide me

exploding into space.

Help me over the fine ridge

dyed multiply with fallen nature.

Stab me into the vortex of struggling souls.

Let me come up from the distance

of trees in the shadow of other trees,

let me be stained with solemnity.

And let the colors rule the world

with razor strangeness

as I sleep with the chaff of gods.

In the teeth of dawn

I long for your fluttering embraces.

The sidewalks move away

like a crash of waves.

The whole sky hovers.

I searched the aisles

of statuesque lovers

but none had your nervous,

peculiar beauty, none had

your fading and newborn eyes.

It's a sad opera with hilarious fangs

and it fits on a thumbnail.

I talked it into existence

and you crushed it without a kiss.

Claws tapping

on a stained glass dome.

Eyes of pain

plastered to an immaterial door.

The rat faced bodybuilder

in a gilded mirror

braiding his veins

to the mortal hinge.

I can't push the path

to the highway

where the deer bound

and I

silently drown.

Buzzsaw teeth

with all the right words.

Lapidary banquets

blooming on deep set eyes.

Soft touches

measuring a boundless frequency.

The velvet path

that circles a sunken bed.

Weak lights playing

on a blazing force field.

Stung circuits in the nerves that bore this art

going home to the rift of bright

but absent souls.

The vacancy turns pink

as a peaked sunset.

Stripes of ruin

carve over the quiet seats

settled once in rock

now gone to acrid vapor.

Companions of a shadow

little flicks of astral hair

find me wanting more

than earth or earthly light.

Now they've stripped me

of all my feathers.

I can begin to drink the brine

gratefully.

I can move the air

with my fan hands.

Ice will glimmer around my torso

from the passing talkers.

Knives will glint from the cemetery walls.

And a rash of purple moss

surround the open well

where the fire of earth

pours out.

I see you looking out of my face.

You rented my shoes and shrunk them.

Little monster of ribbons and bows.

Sweet tidal wave of eyes.

A pale blue lake with pink echoes

left behind in the sanctuary lot.

Girl-grim valentine

where my crane

raises a tumult

of petals and ashes.

A silk fish hook

pulling out of snow.

Ruined reminder of days

looking over the grave

with a hopeful rectum.

Fallen from tapeworm skies

to a lasso of branches

this bramble in the brush

tongue's thorn of longing

blood torn from scales of rain

sneaky mound of venus

like a stone bell calling.

Boulders torn

from the arms

of the mountain

screaming their own names.

A slab of cartoon crucifixes

squirming with bright tin maggots

carried along the horizon line

by a roaring train.

Where is the seismic kiss

that opens these barbed gates?

What is the sweet signature

to melt glass?

Only this brick with many eyes

unwary on the tracks

knows the coming light.

A dead schedule

will be imprinted on my life

again.

And I will go under it

like a bloodless dream.

Blades write quietly

on labyrinth walls.

One mousetrap for the planet

seething antique hinge.

Stripped eyes

in a lucid vacuum

unable to expire.

I'll let the rolling skies

squeeze out my blood

and lay down in a field of deer.

Squares and fettered domes

will not melt all around me.

The sun won't tell.  The pines

won't shed their ridged bark

in anguish.  But the long legs of the dawn

are agitated, and will have

their stirring song

in any weather.

It's just the stillness of her shadow

now

and my outline gone

from its departing measure.

The lake shore wedded to a mask of fire

pale blue eyes in a circle of galactic stone

the groundswell on a lid of hills

quaking like an android giving birth

railroads walked in twilight

lining up with velvet bones

I take off my shell of old bodies

and walk the blood fought bridges

man made in the sleep of life

that gave them shape

and wonder at the warped perfection of your form

conquering machines and graveyards

with its frictionless divinity

sun's fragrant carrier

invisible siren's caw

I crush these thorns

in my hands

to a black silt.

The moss beneath cemetery granite

surges and exhales.

Long arms of machinery

draping a cold distance.

A subway chain of daisies

flaming the linoleum night.

She picks up the arrows

tucks the movements of sundown

into a painted bag.

Treadmill mirages

where we cross ticket arms

touch circular doors

and ride the rag doll's elevator

to the mind of God.

Furniture stabbed by

the long gone nights

of a ruptured life

stung by the passage

that wrings the tides of time

stunned by the trees uploading

and the cautious deer

heart's in a vine cast long ago

hung loose to sanction the abyss

a whale-mouth, a gashed series

of spasmodic dreams

in jelly green peppered rings

all the colors lost beneath the tides

reborn in suffocating skies

the bones on the couch stuck

waiting.

Days in a liquid state

long faded from me

the rope swings of departed planets

where a dry breeze

tucks itself into me

like a language of dust

planks and planes of

the grid vertebrae

strangled in living vines

and by her sorcery of quiet dancing

running through me

like a leaf of scenes

the mercy of moss painted ledges

bright claws and lips

retreating from

a blood drained sun.

A segment of mutated flowers

offered on an altar of bronze

pools shaped like sacred letters

lining up to bounce the mid day sun

a crane scooping gelatinous matter

kitchen table lit for an angry dwarf

the midnight slab of highway

where a sky pours oil

your gravity of braids

and shaded thatch

in a colored cave

faint cubbyholes of light

becoming urgent bulbs.

Chickens are scraping the yard

I watch a fault line open in the sky

grates and manhole covers

come tumbling out

from the sorrows of lightning

I take my despotic hand

and shove it into the fire

a woman's body carved from sapling pine

outlined against the deeper trees

that gave her being

a shadow angel shaped in shaded pools

could come no closer.

A frozen waterfall with eyes

a scythe of light

sweeping scraps

from quiet galaxies

the screaming

of intelligent particles

dancers in suits of splintered glass

running down ribbons of cashed-out stars

a transparent pyramid's peak

dripping with neon sulfur.

Two little puff pieces of cloud

suspended

in the going of their holinesss

over ragged and light smeared hills

a track of salty tears

on stripped white pine.

Wherever they go in time's terror

the sunset horizon

pursues their robes of smoke

two unknown signs

flashing in tandem.

Nuggets of purple gold

on the cemetery's face

long sidewalks to nowhere

on the rough silk of curving Earth

breathing on hills

and slim low hanging clouds

the strangeness of some river

polluted by ink grey time

a mask sinking

in the sand bed

love roving over hours

where the light pools

like untouched money

and the water cools

the sill of the sky.

Our love will be torn

from the theaters

and placed on corners

of vine-crawled streets

by a rotating wind.

Belts of tape wheels

agitating in the sun

through the roof of a glass factory

where we walk barren aisles

with the kisses in mind

that have not died there.

Circuits of steam

that ride back alley fire escapes

your dress of flowers hanging on a line

my kidnapped eyes.

Make more emptiness in me.

Let me forget the flowers.

Under bridges I will smoke

and read the leaves

that are left.

Many will be altered as they pass

from raw sunbeam to sunbeam

line to painted line

minds roving high

above bodies.

I will keep the shade

and reserve these glinting shapes

tapping the vein of living ground

that knows an end.

Tankards of blood from my eyes

emptied through

the fallen lattice of ribcage.

Scopes left by falling stars

tunneling through space

glittering with scars

from the hot passage.

Saints of silence and dead time

perched on their radiant porches

ready to fall in the sabotaged atom.

Love recycled by fire

to return in rumors of steam

a force field of vibrating arrows

caught up in senseless water

and a godlike sneeze.

These burns will itch and fade --

that fly will die.

Planets teeming with beauty

will be seduced by the dark electron.

Blades turn in the arabesque

of hidden thieves

taking light

from the currency of fire.

The curb swoons by mirage

to join with liquid space.

A cigarette goes out

in the heart of an abandoned temple.

The hawk escaped from gravity

dives and dives.

You prayed to your gods

but they did not come.

Excepting every totem that

landed like a bullet

deep in flesh to be recovered.

Slabs of overpainted shoreline

on a fluctuating screen

my life lying next to yours

in the glow from a televised phonebooth

gone far down the channel

of these blinking years

in color to be commanded

from the stem where we fade out

far from our source.

At the cusp of the last waterfall

I hold a decorated rock

lettered with doctored moss

by a western knife

for your oriental pause

and your braids of light.

The waves lap the sun

at the height of an empty hour

green frames rise from ocean floors

a platform cups her feet

the vines that snake

across the walls of towers

lift her light up to the veiled sky.

Pedals of a drum that beats at dusk

the strings of a furtive arm

her unharmed way

first tick of a hand chiseled clock

on a garden wall.

Let the dry light run

to its pockets of water.

And the wigs on long sticks

be ruffled by a careless wind.

All eyes will be split

by a separating cloud.

Every grain in its hollow abundance

washed out to the ocean's bottom.

My umbrella of bones

its rag circle of shade

in a rift will remain

I tap dance

to the smashed candelabra.

FROZEN ON THE WOMB WALL

Cruel goddess, rule my life

with your whips of mercy.

Pour out the covenant of oil

upon my willing shades

and the terror of the dusk brighten.

Pull down the smoky pillows from the windows

let the cuts of light reign

and the bones of an ancient love

find flesh to walk again.

For hologram line boxed clouds

the crooks of a miraculous highway

long ruts with rank prodigious flowers

the cracks of a settled sun.

The wings of living things

point to you with the immovable humilty

of cut stone.

Trees bow down like reeds

without sackcloth and ashes.

The rubber yield of maple lines

peppers my aching veins

while you light up the bent depths

and stun the periphery.

The lost sun raging

and a milk drowned moon

your scent for my throat to drink.

Frozen suns

in the magnetic distance

calling to the oiled wheels

that roll my catapault home.

Split hairs

of the middle distance

breaking atoms of hot sand

the glass of the outer wastelands.

Needles in the flesh

that bloom with tired alphabets

vein's ruby electric charge.

The ocean's prismatic suds

washing a long knife.

Faces from the depths

of pressure conjured

fading in mid air

before they pop

the sky.

Evaporated mouths

that fly to darkest space

their invisible teeth.

Shells of the dancer's curves

standing crookedly on sand.

Walls morphing to a fortress

from an inner maze

cacophony of bone chains

the thread of a salt eaten blade.

Sheer cut sheen

on the wall with a thousand eyes

that I am vaulting over

bends with its sweet mirage

around my twin shoulders

afloat with a chain

of jagged glass.

Eyes bugged and yellow lit

with the fever of a cracked love,

torch of molten leather elbows

scanning the parking garage.

Four eyes on a glass plate

planet scattered in a comma of flour.

PURPLE QUEEN FROM TENNESSEE

I only smoke Purple Queen from Tennessee

stare through trees to the grime

of diamond chiseled trailers

made vivid by the passing sun

she says she wants to be

picked up and cracked like a whip

she came out of the thicket

of electrical antennas

to shed thick layers of death

and fight brightly with gravity

I remove her shoes with my mouth

while she sits on a milk crate

and the crest of the moon

hovers like a penetrated ring

exhale hot rays of mapped air

while she braids and unbraids her hair

and I worship the dirt of her birth

to disappear in chrome and high rises

or manifest in the old hill guarded

valley and eat my arms.

Lips eroded

from the kingdom walls

find the crumbled heart

of forms in broken symmetry

where the dance of stone

kisses back at fire.

Rims of a shining world

its statuesque corners.

My lasso for your tender waist

drifting into a canyon.

The tin and sand air

rushing through our dance of plaster

a delighted sneeze.

Let the dawn paste

cover me like a napalm calm.

Rivers talk to the telephone line,

black seagulls crash on the concrete.

What has been weathered

now gone to the galaxy's

rending indifference

the light of magnetic basements

drawn from tight gloved stars.

Newspaper in its cigarette smashed clover

now unreadable as glass

the desk's crucifix past.

Harm of bodies on lightning tracks,

blown circuits that move like mouths

while brains drip in the gutter.

Mates of death's seductive shadow

shitting on sun drenched brick.

Kisses of derangement

sliding to the oily floor.

Basking in the solemn flatulence

of these rubbery angels

pacing the carpets

a raving sky laid down

with soiled light

and broken celestial mirrors

sad eyes depart the skeleton

and ask barbed questions of beauty

and the love that failed

on a cardboard cross.

Shit sculpted for the river

with its shapely pride.

Mid nights in glass

where I suffer from the strength of your beauty

shells of my forgotten past

leering from the highway's forest pockets

and underscored embers in lime

stunned in your mercury evening

fountain's birth where I address the object

slave to your dewstruck inward eyes

like the sun thinking

the sheath of a reluctant moon

should be his habitat

for switching earthly places

her green and grey lacework of days

on the vines of a grid

quaking.

To fly through a cracked glimmer

in the gut tanks of the great facade

out the orb of consciousness

into a womb of laughing mazes

I follow your form

across these melting and re-frozen floors

and feel your taste closing over my mouth

in dawns of braided worlds

where I am the stone pan

under your knifelike river

lightning in the light

of your divine mouth

that ceaseless remembrance carries

to watch your engines purr

against the tides of space

and catch my departing soul.

Through the blades we built

in pixilated skies,

through the long reeds

and the silk torn

on a line for drying,

the articulate breezes surge

in like competing oceans,

through the handiwork of a moment

torn loose into the void

the fog is eclipsing us.

When we met in aisles of cloth

or shelves of reels and cylinders

strangers to the language of our birth

rediscovering rapture,

the linked fires of much mapped galaxies

hurtling across our fond marquee

and seeds of structured fate cast aside

were in our unreached recesses

brewing alien bones.

You enter on a grid of glass,

walking through the many cracked

pools of reflection.

Grains of light

from a spray of ice

on cemetery ground.

The eyes go up

to the floors in thin air

paving basements

with fans of spilled milk

the whine of metal shelves

on wheels.

Desolate highways

masked first in fur of trees

and then the stillborn leaves.

Skull welded to a narrow road

cut seed

of a violent cell.

Thick helmet

of many underwear

elastic knots and layers

speaking memories

of fond flesh

treading the cusp

of raw eternity

together in the light

of teething globes.

Tides on a knife

the dust raked

special effects

of time on spiralled wax

and charcoal lipstick.

The hedge cut yard and wired sky

a nest of cones from which to be reborn

her braids lighting up the foothills

and the surging of their paths

around a harnessed magnet's kiss

and a pool beneath the separated mountain.

Shaded by the leafy stalks

above a broken bridge

veins move at the speed of light

in departed dimensions

she carves me from a static rib

and departs the glass shelter

of my sleep stuck arms

the bright harm of inverted corners.

In terms of place, to be

plunked down over and over

by an unwilling self,

thrice removed from

the decisive moment,

the rivers are the rails of

something sifting through the trees

the scene of gathered light bulbs

at a first crowning,

I am alive in stone that is the sky's deposit

I am frowning in glass that is bent around the moment

my chair of echoing plaster

follows me along the tracks

of furry meteors,

I spill candlelight,

the photo lined hallways of a dream

follow me to the helm

of all cashed beams,

skin soft for the rope surroundings.

If I enter into the bitch

and time stalls, permitted

this fall in suspension

shall be my banner

and fulcrum drive,

the wheel of spines

is a city's height

that rolls with her acceptance

and the harbors are

stricken with labor,

and the shore mapped

with cloth-torn acres,

wet lightning that is akin to an indoor moth,

the meat levers of scissor limbs

at work on matchbook coffins,

garlic tassels and dune

photographs that ache for the rain

on a train of bookcases

strung forms of light.

To avert the blood

and see the vault of heaven

constructed like a snail shell

descending out of time

an angry tusk, whole arsenals

of flowers spilling from

anointed glass,

one smooth table at horizon's dawn,

three weapons of coitus

and a mortgaged womb,

stammering in the coils of

a great soul's antique apparatus.

On upper story lawns

of groomed rooftops

and ripening siloes

sits the empty flask, drained forever

of its potency and dry

beyond the roads

of consciousness it rides

she conquers time's analysis

with a liquid fist

fragile as a nuclear plant.

Simmering in bedded fire

some robots

will have to be punished,

some dreams of patterned will

led out of living space

through an empty corridor,

your flame of organic nature

tempered by collision with water,

framed in mating the most

opposite numbers,

beauty of rains and seasons all

beyond reason,

scythes of bronze

sky scraping floors

far up in the air from

where we know our clipped roses

spit tossing in a wayward constellation

groove touched by a film of pearls

The clock cranks out

dead-eyed doctors

run backwards by lunar dust

and the fuel of collapsing stars.

The screen of beloved eyes

is black as ink.

A vein like wandering lightning

plows down through the throats of dawn.

I minister to

the recently drained pools,

their bare walls.

Near the salty drains

I see what crawls back up

to recover.

Watching light crawl like sand

across the abandoned path

seated on the magnet hearth

where fire talks to fuel

I'm a mute letter.

Screaming dancers and the stars

the battered lips of sad stages

screens and their confetti

can't animate me now.

If only the painted scene

could pull my blood

over this fall of water,

or a lost grain

could start the stone

in my strange heart.

When the sun finds

your scars to travel

and you go down

to the lips of the water,

think of me sliding past the blade

of the envelope of space

hesitating to touch your little shoulder

with the boulders of the last avalanche,

the one that fills the field,

suspended in mid-motion at my back,

and our kisses held in prison

behind a false mirror, a neon promise,

a flask of golden alcohol

left behind on the coin-crushing rail,

where masks are hammered

and the strings of chastity

released into the doors of the rising current,

two letters twined in gilt

can stem the fall

dewdrop to ragged face

of the free ray

and the ravished republic.

Darest I besmirch with words

what God hath made?

Your glaze of hazel images

the angel glances in hurt smoke

that you have left unplanned

all wrapt in layered gauze

to be sifted?

Time will slay me at your feet

while the pines and birches

allay their frost to dawn

and carry me under.

The clock of breezes in your bangs

wafting me outward

has a wide

third hand and glistening eye

to the wink of costume wrought in blood

of which that womanhood is made

the braided cliffs

I climb to a braided mist.

Oil black cap of night

the maze of stars compacted

through an igloo's window

landing on the bullseye

of a reckless bed.

The lunar planes

of many kept reflections

flying from the broken caves

where they were fixed in honey

burning a tunnel highway

through the vacant sky.

Flecks of her marble stare

the one so cool at dawn

where the tar pours

and all the bubbles breathe.

I have a taste for bitter things,

monstrosities perch on my elbow.

The couch mid-floor floating

where my tangled loves lay.

Shrines and their mercy of energy

inured to the skank pale doorways

shelves of bottled cherries

glinting at the fringe end of

the galactic edge.

Born on a wave of broken crusts,

I love the wild hills, the wild women,

eternity squats on my doorstep, I can't

leave the fresh cut circuit,

the days add weight to the need

to be formlessly continued,

knives pyramid on the sagging desk's

array of contents, the magic diamond

of sorrow, spring where night

lets down her veil

my hot lines of wet white androids

leaping to inform her tongue

where the scar trails off

and the light of the cave

rules paint wall time.

To wash four panes

in the same light

and lay her bed among them

steaming with the hunger of violets

watching vines attach the ceiling

to a mirror chain

we met in red air

of a deep back hallway

surging past the stairways

of a hidden church

climbed out along the window smashing branches

of a fallen elm

valleys were filled

with a gelatin of hot

swift moving shadows

where she arranged the cut

transparencies.

Arachnid soul powering past the desert

geysers preening from moss mouths

clawed tracks of the hillside

I position my tinted lens against the lava

pull the seat lever's quim

around my clotted brain

the shine of divine spaghetti

in a bleeding man suit

a glow in the depths that slipped the catalogue

rhyme posters of the subway cell chart

dogwood flowers from the coliseum floor

the pine bark reptile look

of the latest spaceships

brine covenant for the dashboard

firm flash of a thinking pole.

The flowering imbroglio

tricks me into its immortality.

Suffered, keys pluck at my nerves

stuffing veins with candy.

I want to climb the light

to where I am.

I want the cushions of the breeze

philandering with shoreline.

Grey swamps eat up

the buttery flowers.

Mail comes in its lily pad of ink

dripping fossilized shadows.

A tower rises from

the refulgent moon.

And we are closed inside

its secret ripples

like two clocks of mice.

Forms of death in dance

of a stone's edge, a flash burnt field

oozing with the coiled vine

and the turd's anger,

squares of grass lined light on tar,

breath surging through the cracked Earth,

twin brains in imperfect symmetry,

tent's whisper lying to the persecuting wind,

poison berry of sky where I 

lie down to fade.

Ploughed yards and their ache of structure,

dyed wool rustling in cubbyholes of flesh,

my cluster of rounded mirrors

and denim clad cancer

all reeling into the pitch brown eve.

Light's anvil

and costumed hero

fallen in the green woods

for a stack of mushrooms.

Bones flying to the rainbow outskirts

a cloud's venomous carcass

torn sails in the pounded window.

Strapped to the sky's farthest nimbus

landed on a particle ledge.

Ears extended into the blue void

of cotton filters

a mattress of flattened saints.

In the grains

of a deep root

soil as blank

as the sun.

Swinging metal doors

the shock of the lit

green pasture.

A skeleton remembering

on a bulb of benches

in the faraway rain.

His tears are not for departures

but for dawn yet to come.

Blistering recall

limbs in a ditch

speechless berry pickers

a snakeskin scroll.

Arms for the womb

to take goose shape

ghost winter to summer.

The light infinite is the light captured,

is finite

only that, uncaptured

may it bless in

rings of flag-whipped cloud

to be drowned in leather

may the vents frown

on its abnormality of progress,

let the hills and mountains

drain shanked roots

and bring the ribcage home

like a leaning ship in tow.

Deep in the rows of trees

I am moving backwards,

backwards as against time,

looking for the face I cherish,

hoping to hear the cherished word.

Her travesty of anthill sidewalks

spilling the erupted grain

laser framed kiosks of the new abandon

pulsating airports where the

credit's soft in alcohol

jagged cliffs of green racing to the river

a deck of alien teeth

spread across these liquid ships

a fan of dying echoes

a propeller's wig.

Totem poles and centerfolds

collapsing into space

the grain of blades

a bright antenna

rising from rotating ribs

tickling the city sky

where shells depart like smoke

to drink from gravity

an oiled navel

whispers to a striking snake

for ink of the split tongue

my wind balled hair

and vein shocked eyes

her spit cracked criminal flower

our cloud of nooks

and sweet smacked echoes

a shrink wrapped screen.

Hills emptied of daylight

grow with a grey warmth

the stones whisper

with deep tongues

tucked into the folds

of fertile Earth.

Scorched windows glow

from the desecrated temple

and its icons of dust and clay

put on metallic masks.

I'm alone in a seething aisle

between frozen seas

when I see the golden

pawn they've made

of my goddess queen.

My losses fit me like a cup.

They're dialing up the grain.

Ash-spent decks

and oil lit garages all.

Do they circle me like tongues

or empty thought bubbles

am I panicking panel to panel

or do I just drift?

I'm the lion of the thrift,

battery pack side-beams.

Figure eights going over

the graveyard.

A diving board glistens

from the circuit of echoes

that subtracted me

here.

Dispose of the husks

into other husks.

Tap veins

with the one vein's eye.

Make water flow

through the machines.

Fog rises to its end

and the sun repeats.

Man missed it.  A severed eyelid

tossed on a river of timeless oil.

The horns blew through every dawn

while his corpse flew skyward.

A rippled park

regurgitates its trash cans.

Games favored by millions spin

into obsolescence.  Roots are fettered

to the green Earth

from more than one socket

and the blessed grounds ooze.

Earth is hallucinatory,

the time-saving devices

all break open,

folding floors

swallow remembered moments,

the forest creaks

like a ship enduring a wave,

my bones drink backwards

in a snoozing aisle,

lovers leave

the room lights up

friends depart

and then the sky

flashing like the oil of Mercury

that is going home.

Fresh colonies of limbs intertwined,

square vats of twilight

poured full with glittering

transparent jelly

the mouths in an infinite chain

that speak in lunar equations,

cloudy whips lashing at a frozen waterfall

walls of liquid ball bearings.

Fingerprint smeared glass doors

line up towards a mineral gash

where the sky's map flutters.

Ferns lavished from the fringe

of unvarnished foundations

a thorn spilling

whole alphabets of milk

speak to the surfaces

and uniform shadows

furnish the graveyards

with spillage of salt wings

I will be rising from bug-lit doorways

back of the shop smoke

to pine in your ruin

first servant to the neon rain

wings tucked in to the trees

bronze face of a torn cliff

gleaming.

Slabs of sweet blood

from the dawn sky

bright lit throats

from a patched planet's thatchwork

of roots and ghosts

in seminal gel.

Where the water talks

to broken bowls

and sand cracked channels

the shoreline is

a silk of neon gnats

kissed mute

by structured vapor.

Wind coil

where the tree frogs vomit

serenity's metallic creek.

Cold breath of desire's end,

far under the cloak of appearances.

Frolicked there

with a time bender,

with a harp of cages

the sweetest snare.

Fell from great heights

in their alien slumber,

to a dashed-out piece of wood

to a radiant armchair.

That forgotten window's closed,

there is no return

to the fading clouds beyond

or the first day's mouth

that only thirsted.

Leaping from a fang of ice,

bowels disjointed by

the wandering sun,

torn globes of this cosmos.

Eyes wider than

the dawning road,

a cut horizon.

Minnows of blood

quick in a pale stream

running over packed earth.

Lights from electrocuted depths

pouring out on a frozen field

where they come to rotate

with their shadow knives.

Bright gas

of a beauty gone.

The feathered fingers

of an exploded brain

stuck learning in

his labyrinth of cardboard.

Waves mounting

in a strange pause

behind the myriad

plastic doors.

His rib-mirror

with kneecaps and eyes

with swamps of gelatin callers

riots frozen in deep

wide tanks.

Her decorated fertility

taking on the runway trees,

the cloud crushed

blood polished

bus station.

Winged animals emerge

first from the rim,

from the contact's faint eclipse,

the dance-room emerges,

the tinted couches

lining seashore balconies

where we tore each other's

fabric to break through,

placing on each ladder

a completed canvas,

a marble-black hospital wedding

dispersing over easeful glass

thorn of anonymous kisses

lost in the cranked chemical night

and she who knows in many cabins

let the hour babble let the rabbit

ache open doors into early

morning.

Apocalyptic hens

crazed enemies

go plunging over the impacted cliffs

moon's molar champions

beneath a soaring playground

deep in galactic trees

the decks of paradise Androidea

a nude throng and their pagan clench

high pools on the levels of chessboards

stirring with a glittery peacock lash

dorm's rack and theater,

where the crucifix is altered in cellophane

the night sweats of wrong doctors

elms fallen of a ghostly street

in cage after cage proceeding

from gladness, from the ministry

of wire.

Light barred

comes crashing in

from the Earth,

from the fountains of fire

in the feminine core.

Lids pop at the peaks

of plastic encampments

and the mute emerge

carrying empty containers

smudged motionless eyes.

Lines touch with liquid acid

and return to indifferent orbits.

Rays cutting through

a stained glass cage

a series of tongue waterfalls

lips baked in clay

and rock teeth.

Signatures dipped in salt

two partners laughing hard

sky above the armchair

egg stained and stained glass shining

plaques of liquid gold.

Vibra-bubble where

we can't get out.

Shrink veiled inlet

pursed with rippled snow

linen licking the highway.

Screens barking at screens

sunk holograms of subway tunnel walls

the mind meld of water.

In the wonder of falling

a blossom unraveled in pale light

from retreating corners.

Wings clashing cross the moon

sleepers in a stunned mobile.

Wire boxes blaring their

sacred repetitions.

In a skeletal foot-prop

throne of moss, of spent bibles, of snow:

one runny eyelid

cups the spitting sun

my shadow walks a balcony that's gone

threads gather her wig like a golf course

one rotting name.

Watery apartments

bright windows in the steel air

my dawn wrecker

pussy vein umbrella

flapping bat wings

beneath a gelatin curtain

the fire lit machines

building dams

on dazed paint accruals

the eyes in battery acid

pushing overdrawn soul

my bed in the river's delta

a face of knobby fingers

vapor's cabin

in the canopy of bird rings

spout's rented cell.

If the cracked moon calls forth

the pouring children's voices,

let the sun wait

and the bright caves quake.

Queen's harvest

from what is slashed

away for tender places

where the synthesis blooms

like a cartoon chimera

long lost cloud arrangements

a buckled seal in the salt of light

arranged across a series of skulls

the look of familial eyes

from a great fire

all tile and ceramic glass

all stair-tossed lipstain

As the radioactive beauty

of days torn away

surfaces in small pools

and the blade of creation

flashes in diminished places,

let me be the hungry vessel

for what flies on Earth

the sledgehammer's secret kisses

and blood rain's hidden favorite

let my heart come so close to my wings

that the veins pour out

celestial floors

and vaporous couches.

In the dust shot diagonal shaft

where light descends

I see my dead cat

living and pawing

at an indecisive hair

and in the same fragmented stream

my heart attacked friend

welded to an armchair

pouting with the blood

that swirled him here

we steam with sweet disintegration

in the ribbon tied celestial

gasping rhythm of our gulping veins

this ocean sphere cannot deny

its omnipotent tongue

that the sky shares

and the ground redoubles

a dare

and all our air is clawed.

Deep in the rain

with a pale reflector

slashing nets that held

the errant soul

I double the rind

that grows from aching sweetness

buried in the cruelty

without a name

a denim sun

above the red barn engine

turns the finger ditches

to raging arms

grass blades of some god

that speaks in twitching drops

Slapped through the black rainbow

of harp strings

with a skeleton smile

birthed by light

inside the ruins

by the guts of the waterfall.

Fountains from the eyes

that died seeing

out of sync with their time.

Poisoned liquor dripping

on a maze of swords

grid gone from the landscape.

Levitated shadows

plucking electrified wire.