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.