Out of the mesh

of little gray men

came swashbuckling bones

with a blonde wig and a bucket

bending spiritual poles

letting sculpted paint leap

from the empty and hated places

letting seams of ragged concrete

speak boldly with flowers

and these gardens of feverish error

outgrow all man's fake stone

for his hours alone.

Missiles faint from far off countries

are a glowing mist

with orbs and angles

in the glass of their existence

setting like fettered letters

in the cold paths on torrid air

the ranks of the disturber's hair.

Out of the plague with plumes

I came calling for kisses,

filling silver carts

with silver onions

calling to the clouds

for golden bread,

making what could be made

with tormented blood.

In the mold with diamonds

jostling for articulate space

watching a fleet of beds

from rooms long torn away

sent into seams of water

with infinite ways.

Let the guitars clang

at their filthy apex

and the dungeon wounds wheel:

let them be ripe for service

at the bright mirage

with the birds that the breezes heal.

The seasons in their visionary cycles

fall across vacant lots

I am swimming in the shadows

on the edges

where the hedges and the chain link fence

mesh with green and thorny wires

to trace the outlines

of a bright volcanic island

in the curdles of a murky sky

I am searching for the drums

that echo on the cliff face

of my abandoned soul.

Stabbed in the vortex

of converging opposites,

the camouflage

bursts into radiant flowers.

The foreground is drained

through black holes

and ugly kaleidoscopes.

I sit on a dim hill

sipping my

electromagnetic seltzer

convinced of clouds

and their thoughts

the many souls within me

running to a trail of water

running to a caged flame.

The branches

and their attendant owls

yield to a greater light.

The red mouth coos

to a blue lagoon.

The lanterns dance

with robot rays

around the old fireplace.

The scarecrow leaning

in the tin barn

calculates and moves.

I take a rag from

someone's distant pocket

and wipe away borrowed drool.

The ground with its

symphony of pipes

is my box of tools.

The granite in my spine

gets used.

The chant rises sublimely

from a pack of fools.

The hips of this matrix

have the seed's power

in a glass that cools.

ASTRAL ANGER

Desolate reminders

of the beauty that could have been

ravaged by empty heads

of styrofoam rhetoric

filling their poisoned air

with more nothingness.

Sunflowers pouring revelation's light

into hell's infertile sanctuary

marked as a ruined sacrifice

by broken pillars

reflected in a huge demonic egg.

Hatching a last green thorn

in the fractured miasma

the spider's craft

making love to embers

of searing metal,

strung up in its web

of ephemeral steel

and supernatural roses.

In the vacant expanses

where blooming moss cracks tar

and all the voices

popped and faded long ago

I go looking for no one

with a mask of gold

just in case my own reflection

catches me looking for more.

Days hacked open

by the night's ghostly marauders

look strange to the living

but not to my spinal eye.

Desks are empty

with scarred chairs

on roofless floors

the charts of catacombs

they never touched

laid open like the plans of ants

dates dutifully kept

that never came

on calendars of glass

with oily numbers.

Time was scrubbed

and so was I

of many errors

but the wind still howls

like something lost

in this parched

and achingly clean 

redrawn December.

BLUES FOR AIDA part three

All time has stopped,

there is no goal in sight.

I am tired of striving:

I don't want to be seduced.

I have seen the pretty ones

come and go, I have sung

my songs for them, I have

built them little cabins of color.

All have gone to the tides

of eight or nine planets,

all have gone swimming

in the gravities of those

stark and foreign worlds.

I don't want to fall into

the dream of your dark hair,

I don't want to fall into

the dream of your compact

and delicious little body.

But a beautiful woman

is a gift from God:

I don't want to look away.

INTERLUDE

There's a crescent moon

shining in a clear sky

that keeps me coming

back to autumn.

All the invalids, all the

crippled scenery around them

still praising babies,

fresh new life

in the shell of imperfect light.

I can see your spirit

dancing in your eyes.

I want you to touch me softly,

where the deer go to lie,

on a blanket you brought

from your childhood, battered

by many journeys, into my

second reach of arms.

That set of cells is gone,

that reached for another.

That beaming sun is gone,

that smote us while we lay.

BLUES FOR AIDA part two

Aida, you are more beautiful

than all the beauties.

How can my heart

catch up to you?

I cry to you with my grief

that resounds

in the deep hillsides.

I paint myself into

a sublime wound that bleeds.

My mouth is crooked,

my words are broken.

Who can undo my suffering?

I want you to swing from me

like a swing from a tree.

Cling to me

so that I can be strong,

let me hold you

so that I can be a man.

BLUES FOR AIDA

Your beauty makes me

want to reach into the heavens.

On the blade, on the blade

of a hard life

I try to sleep.

Help me overcome my tongue,

make me clear as glass.

Ring the bells, ring the bells

in my bones.

Aida, you are the daughter

of darkness and light,

you are the queen

of the paths that shine.

Take me out of my broken state,

heal me so I can speak

with my hands

to you who are among the living.

Her fingers write in lightning

and alphabetic vertebrae

from before the cave of time

I watch the viscera

paint the pillars

peacefully transfixed

by the play of crimson waves

the shining of a bone sun

an ember of lunar pubis

glowing in the mechanista night.

Spirit from the sinews of the clouds

that hold the reins of sweet blood,

of edible mercury

and elastic kisses,

of skin that holds the twilight

in a deeper world.

REWARD

I see her dark braids

on the cracked horizon

sending light in little lines

to the steeple made

by demolished temples

crashing into one another

as torn things reach

coming into their foundation

the blades wet

and flexible as grass

cutting away

dead hasty shoots

her forms of many births

coalescing in the mold

of one small and bold

senorita.

EDGEKEEPER

I am the edgekeeper, inked

lion in the grass.

I perpetuate my own

mythology.

Predators pass through me

and I take their entrails.

The grey men, the ashen men

in corners, I know

where they live.

I am the line stretching

between silence and chaos.

The words for land rise

out of the strummed

channels of my throat.

The light grooves

and all is ensnared

in abounding love.

The cracked speedometer draws

a seamless spool.

The ground drools.

Suits of torn shadows

sown together by snakes of rain

we're dancing in a fever

on the bridges of light-beams

that stretch from frozen

moment to frozen moment

never reaching the end

floors blinking in sync

to some new Earth's counter-spin,

some pinball machine

upside-down in the ceiling

sending signals to the pulse of time.

We're a twined hook holding

what slips away and is bloodied,

holding what does not slip away

in the slump of hours

or the sulk of rhyme.

CRYPTIC VESSEL

The many paths, the colored tassels

dangling from jagged and branched

cliff sides that hug them close,

and a crucifix of frozen gelatin

rising out of it all.

Out of the collapsed many

the startled yet triumphant one.

Out of the seas

of shifting kitchen counters

the ticking of microwaves

and mouse-like movement

of living lights,

this divine brat of fierce echoes

more real than the last,

more real than the everlasting.

Dragged along erupting flora

by intelligent cranes,

by laser-guided anomalies,

secured in the sap of fate

by veins that are mouths

that are eating,

alive in a bubble of glass

with cinematic hatreds,

with loves of the past codified

with an ejecting mirage

and an electronic tiger

and a talking stove

that cares.

Solitary in the midst

of insistent fragments,

of pipes that cry

their own mechanical names,

waiting for the kiss that clears

away the artificial magic,

waiting helplessly among the many

things that mindlessly clamor,

brushed and stapled and waiting

in the nostrils of a beak

that bites at time

dawn rhyming with an elegant blade

that lays its open dome

with reactive ribbons

and the source insubstantial

of a killing salt

that never rests

among the startled stars

and the fabric disrespected

one wounding eye.

Frozen roads that glisten

around a raging sun

ribbons of torn space

abandoned constellations

reconfigured by heat of desire.

Bridges flowering

against an almighty void

archways reflecting agitated light

bend strangely to emergent blades

that cut the clouds of cliff-face

to a finger-size door.

Branches of blood

from my face of echoes

to a baked brick wall

where the vines like living snakes

shed skin to smoothly crawl

and resurrect the grandeur of the fall.