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.