Many of us saw the light.

It blew our eyes out.

We saw nothing else

for a long time.

There must have been

some other gods, some

other shade of reality.

I remember the fire escape

glinting out beyond

my tin of baseball cards.

That was in the holy place,

the place of money exchanges.

Weeping and strange

movements of tongues

as the golden dishes of cash

were passed and pocket lint

was turned to alchemical silver.

I was pulverized by the light,

and left behind with the light

for a long time, long enough

to fuck with the light.

I learned.  The light had turned

me into darkness burned.

THE CANOPY OF AIR

The pages of a tightly coiled spiral

you can find the galaxies of outer space animals

see ctenophore

the distance to a rectangle

enclosing perfectly symmetrical spheres

clouds of gas and dust three thousand feet

eight thousand meters deep

spin turbulent configurations

with the waters hairlike hard protective

two colliding galaxies pass through each other

at some trackless crossroad

dark intruding opaque matter

the six hundred feet of water above the seafloor

space of lies where the seafloor

is no more than something in my brain

bioluminescence of the galaxies,

the stars within them

a form of camouflage one mile from the shore

the amount of plant and animal life

in a given area used by most comb jelly

architecture for the life he was born to live

indoor outdoor linen enveloped in the powder

feeling the timeless southern textures.

MURKA

I am a banished westerner

who remains in the west.

I am no longer a guest

in my father's house,

much less a son.

This family's God is not

my God, but I am his Satan.

He cast me out of heaven

with a sneer, but I came

back with a black horse

and a burger king crown.

I wrote the poems of His

empire's death, with a wet

crayon.  I watch the gaps

between the verses yawn:

that's where the Goddess goes.

I slit His throat

while She irons His clothes.

The goblet full of engine oil

stains your teeth with sacred grease.

You belch balloons whose rubber skin

is tattooed with a money museum.

The corridors of stale treasure

extend through the profundity

of an empty galaxy.

They injected themselves with fat,

ate gold and died,

and not one higher being cared.

They made a long documentary

about the process.

They were satisfied by their influence

upon their own decay.

They added complexity to their disease,

and celebrated that.

Their own eyes

got tired of watching them.

Their blood revolted against their veins.

They made themselves iron bodies

and plastic minds.

The new product

was more democratic than ever.

It sang the songs on time

and kept them clean.

You drink your petrol drink

and lean on leaning things.

Your conscience is the way

their sawblade sings.

The ship of clouds

is filling up with patterned rooms

swirls of finely cut artful containment

interpenetrating panes

that lock with roots

to push a rock residing flower.

In a feathered tin can

tunnel underground apartment

I am visited continually

increasingly radical females

bring all the fruits of vapor's lust

a kingdom in this raging rust

that sprouts from skeletons aging.

Hand me my kaleidoscopic knife

and my drag police deceivers

let angelic oars dip into my soul

boats of metaphysical substance

glide across my liquid universal interiors

the heart of which is in your posterior.

I tap on a glass dome

over a faintly ringing town

set my backpack down

on steps of glowing marble

I hear paradise calling

above these knots of concrete

doubled echoes kiss

the swirls of ears

around the misty ceiling

panels slide like ice dividing

theaters of quiet light

kept crackling for fragments

of divinity that doesn't need repose

paths pouring from an unseen rose

fed by magnets of a frothing fountain.

Black veils touched with yellow sauce

tie dyed tunnels through softly sighing trees

the swaying rays of elevated streets

beds drummed by fever bodies

halls creaking with passionately painted rafters

doors fluttering like massive insect wings

bells ringing on ascendant porches

rails of snakeskin covered metal

racing to a hungry moon.

SONS OF ASHERAH

The sons of Asherah shall defang

the sons of Jehovah on the spiritual plane

warriors of love who drink from trees

and fill the pods of loneliness

with furious seeds.

This epilogue's protagonist

is the fist of the goddess,

man made female appendage

is more man than ever,

the architect of silence

who will deafen the gods of speech

and eat from Asherah's mossy crater.

Radiant phalluses of thought

grow from her gnarled theater.

The preachers can survive on her dung

and be grateful for the scat they munch.

Now the mother is filled with teeth

each one marked for the heart

of a false prophet.

Their names are known,

they are proud

of their descent from reality.

The spiritual is sensuality.

Tribes in separate cages

all sharing the fate of wanderers

whose journey is never done.

They blow up their own homes.

They smash their toys

into cubes of plastic death.

A little light escapes their grip

and they chase it frantically.

It hovers over the hills

and winks like a laughing god.

TO AMERICA

You are the Beast,

hatred of life in form.

Your tentacles

are electronic death.

You rape all your children.

You make life an obscene cartoon

for discarded adults.

Your robots fuck paint cans.

You would castrate the sun.

You will melt the moon

into an energy drink.

Inhuman entity, may you choke

on the poison you feed us.

May it swell your cancerous heart,

may it burst your lungs

like an explosion of shit.

May you suffocate on the filth

inside your own blood.

I'm leaving purple footprints

on the cemetery walls

nailing letters to the totem poles

aloft in pink chains

serving landscape with the blessing

of acidic piss

peacock parrot

learning how to miss.

Fill the gunboat with painted females

and let's go.  Spray avenues

with sparks of raw confetti

as we roll through tar

down into the water.

The surf rides under time

our shrieking bitches make the signs

of many mutating Edens.

We fired the cartoon police

and spread the leeches on concrete

for suns to bathe the earth

now this one's gone.

Pull up the anchor's teeth

and dance with slime

sex drowned within

the oil of many worlds

this one's not mine.

THE SIGNAL MOUNTAIN SEED TAPES

The valley folds over a prisoner

makes him a treasured cave

moss moistens the jewels

with glowing green surroundings

painted hunters drink from horns

of stored and sacred water

spiced with all the ruins of our time.

The skull is scoured clean by wine

prepared for scrolls divine

gleaming whitely to the black expanse

of infinite celestial ass.

VIGNETTE

I listen to Rakim, God's voice

verbatim.  He fills my zen

with the mercy waiting.

I turn the embers

and refracture shelves of time,

feel the earth becoming my goddess,

filling my orbs with soil.

I turn green tea red

in rain revealed by sunlight.

Diego Rivera eats a dark watermelon

on my doorstep, wedge by wedge,

grins at my plans for revolution.

"I am", he says, "something

of an anarchist."

We talk about women.

Their fits, their delights,

their smells, the ways

of all their passages.

Their primacy, their power.

Our lives always linked

with their shadows,

our virtue spoiled by hunger

but the beauty of our greed,

and how they loved it

when it was theirs alone.

"We couldn't be kept.  Street dogs,

not house dogs.  Let's go and visit

my friend Mike Tyson."

May the data pools be smelted

by the human spirit burning

in the shackles of this handmade hell

let the cuckoos of an

endless morning dwell.

On the beach of bones

where spirits paint in smoke

fizzing with green ink

the chains of space are tied with pleasure knots

and echoed pains of unknown histories

forever in the rapture of their deaths

skin and flash to decorate the trade winds

steaming wheels of steel that never cared

gears run on captured blood that won't cry out

all the knowledge of distorted names

the descendants of a motionless game

hairy valley where the cleansers shave.

The breeze fondles its secret crevices

with green things,

is groomed to be a greater wind

fleeced of easy curvature

billowing like the blood of the world.

The orchestra of blades

proceeds through trees

that will not lean its way

this time.

The rumble of liquid fire

bright ferocious tongues

from many mouths.

I cracked my head on northern ice

and burned my feet down south.

These vines are in my veins like crowds.

ASAGRAUM

I keep company with my witches,

and my witches comfort me.

We paint memories with black

and purple stripes.  We reach

a highway strewn

with secondhand cigarettes.

The ground lifts off

like a rug with rockets.

Towers gleam around 

the emperor's ring of gardens.

Their windows blink

with secret bohemian signals.

We see the strength of a painted wound

in vaporous space.

TOBACCO ZONE

I carry an apartment on my back

imprinted by the dancing feet

that made this town your street

the floorboards wrap my spine

in wax and shine

I lumber through this world with gone

Greg Devlin's ghost,

looking for a lost bohemia.

Birds in the rafters

riding heavy metal hair

branches whose forks liquidly multiply

extending warm wet growth of grandeur

cooling through mercurial sunsets

roots coiling beneath the cord

of connected skies.

STONES OF THE SOUTHERN SKY (after Neruda)

Red jasper, beautiful

brick red blood of earth,

bright and rough rock of persistence,

stone of my mother who plants

in the darkest dirt,

stone of our humble ancestors,

known by our Chilean cousin.

Pablo, your hands are companion

to omnipotence now.

These stones are for you and for me,

each splinter of chert, each undissolved

dramatic cluster, dark quartz closely packed

from its molecules outward,

jasper for Greg Devlin's hands,

chert for mine and Pablo's,

we make a time-resistant fire,

we make the blood of man create rock

in these holes of boiled dust,

stones of light

sailing through constellations,

changing the maps of space

sky seen from a southern depth

stones deep in a nurturer's net

bright stones of June's December,

January's April rent.

GREG IN REPOSE pt. 3

I listen to Andrew Hill's Point of Departure,

and picture you meeting a broad sky.

I picture your ecstasy made universal,

in final harmony with all your heroes.

I see you seated in essence with honor

ranked among compassionate hearts

and the most perceptive eyes.

I see you elevated and adorned

for your devotion to those who create,

which was second to none.

I know you make common cause

with a loving God, Who knows

your every name, in jazz aligned

designed your rogue chimera,

everlasting primavera.

GREG IN REPOSE pt. 2.

You were right to favor mercy.

I was wrong.

I thought judgement

was the parlance of the strong.

The strong favored me wrong.

You sang again.

The bridges flexed

around the coops and glens.

I favored wrens.  I favored

secret weaknesses in friends.

Gregory in relapse sleepless

still in fine form, cooking shirtless

to Ornette, or talking

ceaselessly of Todd Rundgren,

Mark E. Smith vs. Damo Suzuki,

big knuckles of brass,

all our eye's lips are kissing

Foxy Brown's ass,

and the half-year's new at last,

and the marsh-hen's a wriggling down

Beefheart lane, Greg Devlin's memory

is Europe's and America's,

paid tribute to Ravel and Matisse,

honored our deep and fatal

ancestors, and has not

failed them yet, and never will.