SOLILOQUY

Things come together like a folding star.

The rug she wore, the halls of solid matter

walked by spirits who can move

through glass and steel.  The painted lines

in vast parking garages, the dances of the drunk

on echoing tar.  The camera picks up

similarities, but God's all-encompassing

cyclops eye sees the sweet differences.

The way the vertebraes corrode

like pillars of separate salt

at the retirement party of a great killer,

in the wounded heel of the usual bandwagon,

laughing his head out, the night

that all the leaves fall off

all the trees at once.

An angel with gem studded wings

and a head of featureless pearl

is guarding my dubious progress.

The path lays jagged as the skids

of many unexpected landings

light shrieks from its corners

like the seeping of a subtle drug.

The thorns of yielding bushes

tell me where I am.  The ham

glazed horizon drops a pineapple circle

on a concrete sidewalk sketch

of the last human hand.

I walked on her dress while she

nakedly commanded the band.

The channels open up like tunnels

of sifted tongues in tapped water.

I left my double like a ghost

on a chain of stools at the local bar.

He multiplies like emptiness tends to

the way reflections shatter

but only so far.  He took the time

so I would need all mine.

In the rain like veins, in the roaring vapor

in the rule of objects over lost creatures

in the sutures they attach between themselves

on bitten clay and rashes of flowers

on cutting boards where colors are cut up

to feed plates decorated with dancing skeletons

subway cars of liquid metal

pouring ferns of bladed silk

a spent hand and a wandering circus

the jitters of a forsaken deity

the scripture of a snail that seals it all

egged windows of an ailing temple

the jungle goes deep and the desert is hard

things come together like a folding star

the fingers of a working monk are the whole yard

and the tag is poison

and the rag sells

but the work is done for the nine realms

and the twelve realms and the infinite realms.

THE PHARAOH AND THE MERMAID

The pharaoh and the mermaid

met on a sea of sand that she

then turned to water

pharaoh's throne was floating on it

like a bubble of gold

skies grew as their intertwined images

adorned the turning obelisks

in the courtyards where they came

to raise hell and dance with panthers

in the days when there was more

than one sun and more than one moon

like tunnels with radiant archway braces

that just keep multiplying

were the pharaoh and the mermaid washed out

or did they just swim away one day together

into the ragged reaches of unknown orbits

are they still imprisoned here

and if so when will they break out

with matter warping throngs of pipers

in their train of deep millennia's resonance

quaking the fragile kingdoms

ebbing on credit now

will they be grand and gilded

will they have to be vicious

will the wild celebration win the heart of man

I think you and I could be

the pharaoh and the mermaid

lost in some local desert

we will begin to invent

A vulture for all shiny things

streamlined into the fissure

for escaping dreams

by a slippery crew in scaled masks

hovering clouds that project

the twisted alphabet

of one night bands and burst

drumsticks under the autumn evening

that has come early as the banisters turn

and the ornate staircases climb

across elegant ceilings

I'm a dwarf in a hollow pine

for this breaking light and pale

shore of persistent echoes

handholds carved in massive thorns

of some celestial thicket far above

peanut packer of the beer broom closet

flowing whiskers from the faucet's glare

and staring goblet cut in half by a hair.

Rays piercing a divine crypt

each atom wears a Mona Lisa smile

each cardboard angle melts

outward into flashing marble

moonlight's pestle bowl

grinding the veins of ash

to float beneath a dragonfly field

in the stripes of talking goldenrod

posts of unfrozen seed

rising from poisoned earth

smooth spirits propped by popular machinery

arrows bouncing off a bright metallic turntable

the cherubs of the chapel ceiling

taking over the ragged airwaves

bones fleecing a flesh laden guitar

each beloved on a jewel cased card

has transparent endless eyes

so sleek with penetrant oil

that the sun is a reflected ride

slick coils in a glowing shrine

a pretzel of anointed worlds

untied by a wayward kite.

Clawed limbs are climbing,

gouging and cutting vines,

thin plates of multifaceted eyes,

razor ring of teeth.

Nimbus of captured clouds

the sorrow of wavering lights

on the heart in a glass egg

magnetizing a cage of spines

the knife of the horizon

matching a cracked porch rail

lovers in open air

laughing at the slanting rain.

Neon ladders

burning on prison brick

transfigured by the birth pain

of days arranged and vacant

threads of liquid metal

growing on a foggy nude.

Our hummingbird rest

garden path by the shoreline

paths retracting from pine fans

and sand rivulets where the deer ran

and I came down to day

from a towering night

whose chambers are ascending orange.

The jazz of southern afternoon's

tumbling crawling green

lands on my shoulders like a sash

painted with trembling keys

the spirit of the forest

dancing with chainsaw teeth

I am imprinted by strange voices

I am a bag of tongues instructed

by my adversary

tattooed by my intended killer

by an image without a number

the canals are alive again

water slicks their mossy furrows

like the soul of salt

in a washed world

music is with my ears

it dwells there in all

its froth and ferment

and sweet sweet damage

I am the wild man of floating slats

ordained with fully organic rainbows

and spray painted with colorful oil

corralled by dancing girls

who anoint my goat nature

with drunken kisses

then float me off

into a tightly geometric night

I am that earthly righteousness of the damned

who they seek in all their titillating nightmares

in a heavy metal serape

and a drum cage of scraping wings

spring's pool where the pillow sings

and the horns of fallen angels

sprout in fungus shapes

from the shadow of a desperate land.

Things come back to me

like shapes in the water

alphabets of alien lands

lost to space

Joni Mitchell's Blue

played in my second car

now it plays me like a harp

wherever I was driving

those people and places are gone

dissolved in the clouds above

and so am I

to become the thought of lightning

and the light shining

on tracks in the mud

to become the red man

at the heart of the sun

stripped of all earthly ritual

hurled beyond repetitive procession

to the stream of the galactic converse

to the vortex of converging blood

joined but not bound by time

a snake above the gas of the rivers

slithering on demonic air

to the stairs of heaven

scenes molded by William Blake

scores bending in my DNA

Joni's fingernails are dirty

William is fucking his wife

on the shore of some great ocean

never seen by man

skeletons are alive

pulsing attics of sensitive rubber

ride their metallic houses

with wet cardboard mouths

history is broken

on the walls of a programmed fate

but the wings and the brain

of the upper air are separated

some sinew escapes in pain

to be born again from the second death

paint dries on the doors

of a vast laundromat

I am drying all the underwear

of my ex girlfriends

I am a fluorescent strobe

I am alone in time

and after time

these squares of floor are only floating parameters

somebody checks the ice

somebody writes the movements

of the meters but not me

this time I'm gone like an astral antenna

but here is no place to be gone

and swans peck at the putty of my flesh

for my junkyard flame

and the sparks of my descending name

the pilot of hell's craft at last

the act is a luminous map

these are my eternal games I'm

Mister President Janitor and you're

my valley of luxurious screams.

I am the black bird of midnight

staring at the streetlights til they crack

I perch on rusty guardrails

at the outskirts of the world and smoke

in a blood dried leather jacket

of many folded wings

watching the windshields gleam

toward a world I never joined

the throngs are passing with their gas

the circuitry of entrapment

with such sexy advertisements

flickering on battered billboards

pour a highway down my throat

I will coat little bits of gravel

with my paint saliva

and cough them up

into the stream that doesn't understand

my flock of ghosts is a host triangle

for a plague of blues

that sometimes covers the wound

and our tongues glisten

in a towering tornado of open beaks

that goes flickering under the stars

and their gut strewn molten followers

I am a flying key whose thread

got caught in the lock

the weight of silver on its way down

is my clothespin crown and ruddy hereafter

roads flow over my brow

even when I dive in the ocean

streams are articulate and rare

even as they multiply like snakes

for my gobbling gash

I fly for the lasso of the moon

over city straw so elegantly reaching

and the ecstasies seeded in country gloom

for my nest of echoes

and a branch that is transparent too.

I saw her sorting linen

in the curtained half-light,

I saw her in the hall of dreams,

now she is gone to the satellite.

I saw her fingers move on a pink guitar

I saw her tape recorded necklace

and the knuckles of her bones

light up in phosphorescent rooms,

I saw her care with the broom handle.

I saw her bright ribs heaving

and her valentine split,

saw her cheekbones lit by a rash

as she watered the hyacinth.

I take out yesterday's trash

with glass-scratched hands

and watch her oiling her chariot,

I know she goes with a headlamp

to paint the caves that howl in the night.

She could drape me in the cloth

she casts away, I could be

her sudsy whirlpool, I could be

her monument in marble

or her charcoal steed.

I see her passing among the other women

with her flower clenched like a locket,

I gather the keys to release her

from a passing cloud, weeping

at a series of doors that only I know.

We sprawl in separate sleep

on the parchment of a silent rhythm,

only mapped in dreams to make

its noiseless ink ravished

in the sink of touched ethereal gears.

Spunk of diminished ages,

reaching for another realm,

bones outlined in stone

putting on the costume of vague flesh

as the soul bounds away

on rippling hills.

Cafe tables overturned by the breeze

of a departing mind

from a strangled brain.

Urchins spilled like tongues

from painted plates.

Mated particles of dust

radiating metallic verbs.

Grains in the wood that soar

like unmapped roads

under the only hands

of a rejected God

or a robotic toad, who knows.

We are pierced by the fabric here:

we don't work the treadle.

Your humanist idealized world

is going down to poisoned valleys

in a cart of fools.  The goblin is angelic

where the circumcising scalpel rules.

In the machine gunned ballroom

in the theater abandoned but for one

the drama goes on living like a mountain goat

above the drowned and faithful sheep

above the dissected columns

and engineered fruit

let me have my razor peacock wings

and my bronze hang glider

let me have my airplane window

in a fort of vine stitched bark

where men escape to the stark

sky.

The moon is eating my fungus.

Hard machinery is building a soft wall.

The raging stars, the drift of dark material

are a part of it.  The mirror of

deception is a breaking flame.

Arabesques of burnished metal

are a net between me and you.

Don't poke your fingers through.

Just listen to the roaring and light up.

The night is a cup full of lively worms.

The branches dip and the sacred water yearns.

I am not the pet of bodily affections.

Instead I am the spirit that has broken loose.

I don't send the goddess a blank check,

I send her an arrow on a thread.

Libraries of glass in tall containers

hold myriad octopus mouths.

Heaters crank under the ice

to create a force field.

Somebody's time machine

but not mine.

Cudgel the fossils into glittering salt

I will be standing nearby and invisible

with my finger on the hologram.

Stain your grip on the cord.

Far off on the inhuman altar, far off

on a parchment of dried pond scum

you look for the mask

that was made from my blood.

Outside the orbit of the ringed planets

the future is a smoking tomb.

With the returning giants

I walk space away from your garden

and the ghosts inside the wires

are my gloves within the reigning womb.

LISTENING TO THE REAL FOLK BLUES

My love was gone, but the southern girls

brought it back.  My love was gone,

but the Mexican women brought it back.

My love is never gone, that dirty love

just won't die.  I want a good salty woman,

to lay down on my lids and cry.

Pillars rise in the desert, sunfish belch

in the winding sea.  Trunks shudder in the forest,

wet twigs snap in the cave-mouth's breathing.

I want a good steady woman

to launch my windowsill and spill my tea.

Bookshelves speak in the evening,

drinks linger on linoleum floors.

Speakers blast Muddy Waters, because

that's the way daddy fuckin' likes it.

Let the fuzz fly off the electrodes,

may the cop cars explode far away,

let their fire adorn revived

drive-in movie screens.  I want

a southern girl's mouth to drink

all the poison out of me.

Let the sands of feverish time crawl in

through the thrift store windows, across

the piled pages of holy scripture lying there.

May the red hair of that beauty,

may the black hair of that beauty,

carry my body in a hammock and

bring me home to deep America again

where I can simmer and I can stare.

Dashed against the molecular rainbow

that sweats, that has a jagged shadow

pools of circuitry sing back

from a tubular void

that holds its solace in a shark's tooth

and a painted cave

glistening through distance

inked by a laser gone

through many tidal rifts

and lowering a saxophone

one riff that continues to blow itself

at the bottom of a sinuous well

in the temper of evaporated blood

with the bones that call nobody

and the silence that is not a curse

dashed against the breathing whale

that glides across steel grains

dashed against her sweet sides

like a mute mite

like an eel in a puddle in a graveyard

curling and eating space

beneath reflected stars.

I get the shadow of the shade

I get the shavings of the blade

I get what is skimmed

from the drained pool

and yet the diamonds show up there

when the world has lost them all

O pierced and re-pierced sanctuary

O tomb for a used up tool

the features of the world

are mine at last

I dive into the glitch

with my last willing body,

a copy, a zone of glued-together tongues

sculpting necessary air,

the curve of all symmetries is

giving me a day off,

the singularity of my ice cream

is threaded for the taking

in a painting of the great

birth wound.

Yellow eyed spider moon

I see your cyclops presence above

the withering mountain treetops

and the desert spreads within my chest.

I have finished too many books,

met with too many enigmatic women.

I need the unknown like a blood

transfusion in these borrowed veins.

Will my tongue die, with my sinews

snap like so many chickens gone?

Not tonight.  Already the dawn drops

many figs in the grass.  Knives flash

next to oil stained cutting boards

in the light from churning fans.

Somebody must inhabit these lonely lanes,

somebody has to stay up late with the cat.

That dreamy bullet lost to all conjured guns

keeps flying without an impact.

It visits all the places I do not go

whips around the outlines of

what has been cut to last

in the twilight's cracks.

I am the caretaker of

all the divine filth that has

been poured through me,

dangling from a cliff-tendril's tongue

the broken pine needle islands and

the hard rock bank of the brook

come out from different stone, from all

vine-poured pavements

let your living song collapse like sleep

along the drained walkways

and the sleeping street.

Let microphones pour

from open-lit garages

in the scan of wide summer

gone to seed the clouds of fate

in a fairy dusted dawn

lion pawed facades of marble

giving lichens to the burning scar.

I am interlaced with

burning columns of cloud

thinking of Pierre Bonnard and Greg Devlin

of artists at their windowsills

savaging the landscape

their hourglass eyes

and their laser handguns

life has been drinking from me

I shape this putty

on a circuit board mattress

but still your pictures and words

come back to me in a storm

painters and poets

fierce brave souls of the night

play me a song like a powerline

show me your fencepost

and your drapes of gold

show me your open field

and your shades of shadow

make me entranced at the dress she wore

late at night with eyes shining

particles aloof on their points of needle

late at night would you let me

watch you wash the dishes

late at night would your souls come to help me

Greg Devlin and Pierre Bonnard

I hear the ground falling

I am kept alive in such strange hours

I am the horse's service and the gamble's keep

take time to enliven the chains

of this web all around me

I am sounding off on some gone color

I listen to heavy metal I have a glass ear

I crave my armchair

artists in need of night come back again

carry my hammock of leaves

and my whirlwind coffin

carry my tools of lead

through a rain that sees.

The white web is a turtle's shell

imprinted on the dark blue bowl

of sky, and of the myriad staring through

there are multitudes musicians of the conch

light receivers and stark

lightning bringers who thug through the dark

tunnels inebriated by red bulbs

lining the ceiling bricks and the tar's languor,

motherfuckers turned to ash

on the brink of a haircut,

hearts on islands that are brimming with

little shells.

Twisted streetlight poles

on the shores brought in by

artificial intelligence, untapped kisses

in the spirit of the new that rises

among the familiar.

Castles leaking purple dust,

framed in electric exterior.

Parking meters doing math,

plush psychic lives exposed

of the eye-sucked reflection's

treadmill of anointed images,

most to memory lost, the frosted apartment

laid in paint emits a combed error

the snake of windowsills and eaves

silk handkerchief lampshade

a shade of the gone noon drooling

on the glow of the oven

and the evening gone softly to ruin.

Forepaws of twilight

beside the battered fence

astride my sunken dreams

arisen in basement trances

the king of a cardboard box.

Swim in the air around me with breasts

and throats and thighs assembling

a beakless octopus; stem the blood that

you fanned to a flame in the flag of my ribs;

make fluidly crooked the wood

of our vivid water-fed skyscraper:

let the trumpet pipes shower

our spent longings with gelatin ideas:

let the opaque mastery of dreams

get lost in the singing cone.

I am the toy of your shell's magnetic pebble,

you tap the bruised skeleton back together

with a cloak of leaves above your abdomen:

I am a fishbowl galaxy

balanced as a monkey brain beneath

the slit in urban twilight's concrete bridge

that holds a web wrapped living nest

within a sphere of nippled boxes.

Send me the apple's crater

send me the smooth pit

furred in its axis

I am a melting crate

leaking paint from paper icons

I am the thrust of empire's fist

reflected in your burst of hips

bronze peacock telescoping time

through a cage of waves

through the screen-fed eyes of silent

train passengers, one sacred septic cry.

I am being blasted away

by the force fields of established entities,

I look around a leaking corner

for a well painted queen,

the gaps between neighborhoods heave,

the furrowed ditches come up

as crested hillsides,

the light is dew, the garlands

of braided doorways

rustle in space-penetrated air,

long passageways open through

a thousand alien houses,

the silver turns to gold, the gold goes

brown baked with a grayish tinge

like old beat up furniture upholstery,

my lips don't touch the one who is gone

even in the dreams of twilight

and depraved dawn,

the moss lined canals roar through

their bricks and concrete,

my cup of skull howls and holds

a slick eel, the bounds of reality corrode

in the salt that savors them,

the sun is pickled in a tank

of rotating garlic, only the wounds heal,

the gridwork of the calendar

is frescoed and fine

without words and numbers,

the grave sows a seed in eternity,

the ground of birth cools

in the lapping seepage

of waters that were gone

and did come back to bond.

Clouds trickle upward to starscape

to carve the land of dark material

free of all flesh, reins wander

from yielding hands in the amber glaze

of early autumn, posts of stone

surface from gray water

and pulse with salvific blood.

The war of the humanities

on the ballroom floor,

the bombs bursting in air,

the shame of last year

those glories are left behind forever.

Drums patter against the melted shingles

above the gut's deep tank,

the water molecules being sorted,

the aftermath of beautiful particles

being forcelessly torn apart,

and my limbs lifeless,

and my head on fire

let the country hills become

a woman's body,

let the nation

become a woman's body,

let the sound bring home to space

what has been missing from America

and break its void.

A high blue day has filtered down

to tickle my whiskers.

I am nestled in the maw

of a curled green scripture.

Death is part of the enchantment:

mysterious sleep that covers all.

Concrete canals are brightly lined

with sensitive moss

of many southern seasons,

stones trickle from a fractured core

in the irrigated wasteland.

Slabs of sculpted manmade lava

slope steeply beneath the bulbs and rails

of humming bridges and their tar tongues.

I am a road: I am going to the temporal town

that burns with celebration

in our last lights,

these foggy halos holding

full flowered mechanism

skin's map of the solar web

like an empire's fleet

wearing a blackberry gown.