Cascades of spider web

upon the murdered commons

thumbtacks in every iris

lassoes around each tackboard body

limbs cut into flowing grass.

Desiccated remnants

that once sang of pure ideals

and now swallow knives.

Bulging thought balloons

from chiseled shit

that communicates error.

Forked tongues frozen

to descending poles

the love that ends in total violence

for stacks of screaming scrolls.

Trails of wet coal

on concrete slopes

beneath the bridge

invite my body to go limp

and tumble down

entropic signatures

of doubtless decline.

Bent cigarettes in ditches

like the nested bodies

of beautiful girls

where I am going to align

with the great uncaring dispersal.

This is not a cry for help,

it's just a cry.

This is not a prayer,

just an exhalation

of poison air.

Beneath the chrome carriages

my disintegration will be

untouchable peace.

Beneath the printed papers

in flight from unending flatulence

the street is the soul

of a sealed world

kept clamped in a mindless rift

and the puppets can keep the gift.

Carving through blind alleys

at the speed of light

setting up a bed

at the waterfall's edge

I become my own failed

handyman, rain tousled

by a curved sword's breezes,

beef knuckles and a cartoon

heartache.

Coming up on a plot

of quartered and floating daisies,

gashing through a rut

it's heyday music

on a purple highway,

beats and rhymes

from the center of the earth

great girth's warning,

it's a soul spooked morning

haybales laid out like marshmallows

in the deadweight of the sun

of old towns I'm gone from

still on my mind

long tooth and claw

uncrowned along the braided night

and propped up like a stone.

A robot penis

penetrates your forehead.

Your limbs are replaced

by the circuit board.

Your loves and hates

are all lined up

like synthetic trees,

waiting here for you

in this place that extends

with bloodless grandeur,

shielded from its roots

in frictionless nirvana,

a voluntary wheelchair's

rocket pack

and rocket glare.

Wrapped in the roots of my rage

waiting for them to gather

impatiently around The Entity,

worshipping their robots,

saying to one another "look

what our machines have done!"

these flesh and blood drones

demanding my servitude

to the fire in which they burn.

And the tabernacle of their error

will be bell-shaped, hammered

into a human brain

with its circuitry of beer cans,

with all its vacuum urge

to be empty and blank to design

a labyrinth whirlpool

with a black hole's eye.

Strings of hot saliva

linking planets and stars

as they drape the stratosphere

and its many cousins.

Everything bright and

sharper than time

ground flat against

the great denominator.

Gray walls with graffiti

of gunshot lipstick

overlap of recorded train cars

tinkling like hidden urine

in the divided dark.

The razor lips of an inverted tulip

time sabotaging time.

Blankets filled with jagged letters

heaped upon my teething corpse

long ranks of heated wires

and a sky of whip shaped clouds

flowing to my seat

of wood and stone.

The fountain split

by solitudes disrupted

has erupted into soul.

Feathers and flakes of metal

stick to the lawn

outside the sanitarium.

The offices and classrooms

are abandoned,

the wide landscape

heals.

Planes of steamrolled glass

hold the angels upright

through the current of beefy speech,

lactating in cursive.

Seams bridging fractured castles,

impossible stitches like thread on water,

seven flames from the sun

bisecting radio signals,

then and now dancing

in refurbished chorus,

the spoon's lunar dash.

THE SHOOTIST

John Wayne is dying,

dying before they can evict him,

dying before his facial hair

can get any longer

or deeper in granite gray,

dying before he can kill

any more bad men

(or maybe a little bit

 later than that)

dying before he can become

very much more tenderhearted,

though he may give away

a few more rueful but real grins,

knowing the weight of the world

to be divinely ridiculous

John Wayne is dying.

Let the broken basement

flourish with beauty

let the eaves testify

to the run of rain

that has already fallen,

let the many suns

move.

Bricks in orbit glint

with a strange twilight

in this early noon

the roll of tires lactates

a lunar light that lingers

she who surfs a plume

across the earth

blows me a kiss for never

and closes the lids of time.

NOIR

So much ice

in my veins

the pillared flowers

reach up through crooked beams

shining for no figure.

Outlines of a dying star

bent shoreline's chiseled rocks

standing out from the screaming pattern.

That zone, that void is dead

having catapulted

its lucky victims.

Last one home

is a hole in the head.

All the magic is gone

from the magic makers

I hold it in a lonely scroll

unfurl it to an empty room

laughing at the walls

that blink my fading name

the moon whispers to the grass

on the high hills

that all is gathering entwined

but I can't hear it

and I trust the sun's

rolling crush.

I shake off those years,

when power and sex were

thick in the air and everything

was altered: and I shake it all off.

This is the clean orbit

of emptiness,

dark matter stirring

its glitter

of universal jewels.

These are the walks in silence

that erupt nature,

the uncertain berry

glancing from a wall

of shadows, into an uncertain hall.

I am blown by winds I don't know.

In the traffic of lilacs,

or walking behind the gauze

of ephemeral forests

that fade at dawn,

I can't hide, the clouds are flung

from the beauty

of one who eludes me,

streets are covered in the water

of burning tears, the bridges

fold up like bat's wings

and creak accordingly,

the land masses linked and electric

flash like taffy,

I duck behind the soil-bound roots

of a fallen giant oak

and smoke my soul.