After the revolution

Remember days of staring at white walls
waiting for something black to happen.
Remember a silver tangle in the dark
and the mouth that opened under it.
Remember the couch overturned
and kicking at it as if it were
the framework of the world.

Now even the birds sound discordant
and the air jagged, filtered wrongly
around their wings, seems to be pushing
its way into my mouth; I cannot draw it
peacefully into my body of guns and tobacco.
The plants are wearing men and muscles.
Ferns have little machines in each green shiver.
And you have to go sleepless for days just to make a painting
come out of the over-stretched air.

But the mustached podium man and his guards
have been dispatched into a graveless void
and it feels good to have them swimming under us,
hitting demons that we unleashed with silver saucepans,
their pants lined with egg whites.
We'll be free for a few weeks like years,
and let the presses roll.

my grandpa Carl is 98 years old
and he paints pictures of kittens on his bedroom walls
all the cats he's ever lived with
who have died

he has outlived them all
and his children my parents won't allow him to have
a new cat
so he paints the infancies of remembered felines
on the plain white wallpaper

his skin is as white as the whites of his eyes
but his hair is whiter
his paintbrush moves much faster than his heart

Manworld is not Manworld or a world

I said, in a lost essay: 1) nobody needs
anything that they fight for.
2) The fighting itself has become the only thing.
3) Dominance is as miserable for the dominant
as for the dominated. 4) Just ask someone
with a penis how they feel about being so
"powerful".

We threw lemonade at each other
and then we threw beer. We wanted to sting
each other's eyes. The girls ran
out of the room to let us kill each other.
I grabbed a stool and pressed its legs
against your throat while you slammed
a heavy beerglass against my hipbone
over and over and over and the girls cried
wearily in their bedrooms.
We tried to rip off each other's genitals
but our pants were on backwards.

Then we saw each other's faces
(as if the smoke had set the house on fire)
and begged each other to stop, which we did.
We held each other on the porch and cried
while the girls emerged from their bedrooms
and laughed at our sentimentalities,
we were so wobbly with one another.

I beg everyone to destroy themselves
and everything they love before it's too late.

Short gender war poem

We all (even the wifeless among us)
cling to a female comforter.
We can't help it (shadows stroke
the wall on which they're cast)
and everything male is in parenthesis.

Let's all hold hands and sing about peace and love

Shithead's afraid (fear is filled with shithead)
that we won't live through:
next week's widely advertised
far-off glistening weekend.
The idiots, the idiots, and the idiots,
and also the idiots, not to mention the idiots,
in addition to the idiots,
incorrectly have correctly raped us
incorrectly. Rape and baseball rape
and potato chips rape, and also rape.
With their orifices they create new orifices,
holes in proletariat space-time,
and with their beautiful knives. Now we wait
and hope for them to be silent as feces
in a far-off Martian forest. Stony, odorless.

Shit from nobody. And the seas silent,
a sleeping skin,
and rich men filing their nails
with files made from the bones
of the poor, who are stupid and have good bones
and do not deserve to be rich.
Their bones are also made
into televisions and spy cameras
by highly metaphysical asians.
Stomach intestine testicle screens.
Buddha TV. The sexless gooks spray airplane glue
into their mouths and throw elephant meat
from high city windows.

Eat shit from a broken shard of mirror
while crouching behind a heap of automobiles
that just fell out of the television sky.
There is! A comfort here! As a radio,
half-crushed in the smoke:
plays songs by singers employed:
by those who make guns most of the time;
when they're not making popular songs;
for the youth of death to sing along to;
as they drive roads of frozen nigger blood
into their own endless lightweight
craniums. Niggers destroying niggers,
using niggers. Niggers eating nigger-meat
out of crucified cracker hands.

Labyrinthine fistula of puffed clam-tunnels
fighting with each other's tongue-bodies,
acidic in each other's entrances,
licking yellow milk from a dusty cushion
as the cushion watches television
with aluminum in her wifely spine.
And an army of faggots, faggots
eating shit from broken mirrors,
marching over heterosexual hillsides,
bathing each other's anuses
with crushed infants,
faggots faggots faggots!

Trees getting married to each other
by evangelists with clam-meat eye-sockets
of no visible color, and faggots.
Cunt bitches popularizing bombs with their hips.
Cunt bitches popularizing the warfare of the sleepless
with their sleep, selling clams
to the sleepless with their sleep,
selling sleeplessness to the sleepy
with yams buried and rotting
in their important vaginas.
Bitches are responsible!
Bitches are selling miniskirt clams
to everybody!

Fear is destroyed by beer.
Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.Fear is destroyed by beer.

Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Cracker carries a six-pack.
Crackers walk past crackers constantly.
Crackers contrast the terrorists
on each other's T-shirts.
Cracker knows what's best for everybody.
Everybody knows what's best for cracker.
And each can holds the blood, with bubbles.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
Cracker rules the world, until asian.
The whole world is Pearl Harbor tomorrow.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
The six-pack is the white-man's burden.
His eyes are nipple erasers, his head
is the body of a dead baby sucking at the air.

Sign of a new age

the pope and all his bishops gather
at a huge, important table
and eat bowls of bullets in goat's milk

it's good for their bowels
and they recommend it to everybody

everybody is uninterested

The eyes are dark but the body is bright
The tunnel is dark in movement of trains
Copulation of oils and electricity

Passengers kiss each other strangely on the last day
Buildings collapsing like birth control above them
And the ground hurts like
an alcohol hot-tub vagina beneath them

burnt by all the parties she has known
and none of you can help me
none of you in this novel
striking sparks against the pages
that are written at the expense of your soul

and the soul is paper
and the night is a train moving through couches and televisions
in the skyscraper fire escape night

bottles are being thrown
into places you’ll never be lowered
whole books are being written

in locations never ejaculated gardens are being seen by the lonely
from fiftieth story windows over a night of blue-black tar
paperback lipstick confessions after the fact

the fact is flesh

Your home is broken like a clamshell
The meat revealed
Your father sold rugs to unhappy ladies

While the cities burned like blonde hair

Oiled idiots dance into unnecessary rain
This pattern is the same as fingernail

You’ll need it when you get old behind a drunken desk
All the rectangles overturned
All the bedsheets smelling like new rain on the powerlines

This broken home is a new tar road
Walked by lonely sons and daughters
Meeting for a golf course fuck, green as the stars
That have just been born.

I want a girl with a nasty mouth
To shrink these days into feminine hours.
The wine we taste is supermarket sour.

The kisses here are programmed into marching spines
But a light is heard in darkened rooms
And a prophet leaps head-first plate-glass out of the party.

(He is found later on the pavement by police monsters
grateful to stare into the face of a famous monster.)

I feel better knowing backs are breaking for my pleasure.
I feel better being poor by bloated standards
and hidden among greater decadences.
When the horny proletariat comes to drink my blood
I’ll hide under a fat millionaire.

The heart is a pepper. The dancing girls are fingers
On a loving hand. But the wrist is broken.

I feel better knowing throats are slit somewhere else.
I feel better being fifteen for the rest of my life.
I feel better than a sea which doesn’t feel at all.

What makes your face so cold all the time?
I’m not buying it, or slipping on the pennies of frozen sperm
You leave behind all over common sidewalks in the acid rain.

You see, it’s all going to melt, bitch, it’s all
going to include your worshipped skeleton.

We’ll be over it, making love like sexless children in a forest that floats
Far above these cities of stone. The stone is flesh. And the icy hours are melting too.

Radiant doubtful profiles

and they don't care who dies so long as they have a piece of land they're selling stars on the radio you can re-name whole constellations after your girlfriend she can blow you under her own constellation in the driveway if you lick up your own sperm you'll gain spectacular powers of intuition now the advertisements have ended for a moment they're yelling at each other on the radio on all the radios all the radios in america my hatred is more beautiful than your hatred my religion is more logical than your religion we escape to a path in the woods but the sky opens and they're cancerous powerlines buzzing overhead vehicles with lights come up the scorched hill just as we're getting inside each other we have to run with blankets leaving our belts and underwear and everything up in the woods including the radio the radio screams at itself all night in a grassy void until somebody turns it off with a shotgun sniffing the pants we left behind we're in the pool dragging our fingers across each other's moss underwater bob dylan singing inside the garage the drumset shakes under the impact of the speakers garcia lorca waits on the coffee table with the whites of his eyes filling up with blood a fuller nothingness is offered by the night sky extending falsely in every direction just like those with guns marching and the condom fills up with emptiness and the emptiness is withdrawn from the emptiness and creation is a gap in some unseen music we just ended up on this island nobody paid our way back home now we're drifting in this chemical water talking about an old painter we knew back home he kept a red sheet over his eastern window in the winter the sun going down would light it up and the whole room would turn red at four pm and he turned the radio down low and told us that the government was spying on him if you lick up your own sperm it'll give you secret powers

These battles in an instant

the watermelon waits infected with human thought the garden is empty except for one human the watermelon thinks it's going to be picked it's been polluted by human expectation there is a mind growing between its black seeds unnoticed the apearance is the same the human readies herself to swallow a newborn mind the air doesn't send any warning shocks she pressed herself against me and offered herself as an alternative to my talk about eternity i rejected her and later when i rejected eternity she was no longer waiting i left her the mechanics of my music but the notes themselves as separate entities dripped down the wall like engine oil and nobody wants to keep that smell around after the sleeper's gone the animals in the ditch are cum the stars in the sky are cum the paint on the house is cum the bird droppings on the porch are cum the sap of the trees is cum the fruits of the garden are filled with cum the traces i left on her left traces on others and in the garden a silent orgy a red gasp one white throat and nothing ever opens again it's a closed universe and semicolons are dispatched like bullets to those whose machine-gunned pauses come at inconvenient moments and nobody picks up the shadows that the soldiers left behind i tried to tell you when it's an invasion the invasion is happening everywhere when it's a bombing all the dwellings are on fire at once and our brains are developing too slowly to stop the processions the rape squads eat sausage at my kitchen table i smile at them weakly and try to make them laugh between rapings the laughter left behind bookshelves of chronology has lost control of the present and now all the laughter is the laughter of the enemy she scrubbed me in the shower as if i had been brutalized i felt the scrape of her broken hands against my flesh i knew she had been at war all her life i apologized for cowardice she bathed me in the sweat of soldiers that dripped from her hair

Speak a body

say my name it is a fiction written by my parents look at my bills they are the traces of a false life rub yourself on my mailbox whip my television these things will respond make love to the briefcases of every journey slobber your kisses on the seat of my chair who knows how many animals this is a slave's house but the slave does not inhabit it the slave is fiction written by the master the person waits inside breathing the breath ascends the song is not the freedom of the slave the song is slave who knows how many animals think of the countries of veiled women yes i know in some countries they veil their women but in america the women are veils and the veils never drop but if it did there would be nothing behind it because the veil is all there is and a man stands like a candle painted by the orgy of his brothers who knows how many animals and every love letter is buffetted around between parades and a big fleshy building rides away from its scaffolding on the shoulders of the impatient who slither through its framework into the sea and return to a ghostly basement where leaves gather in corners and the swimming pools are filled with the chalk of midsummer sunlight

The choir behind the wall

the rulers have frozen heads nobody opens the door to summer spring is in the almost silence of a bird's wings the sky rushes with them the universes in v formations the planets fly together in their movements the cake of stacked worlds responds to a kiss inside its belly she inserted her face into the dream folds of the pillow and said i could do what she wanted and in the shower we told each other that we would never get on our knees for any god but each other and pledged allegiance the snowflakes and sigur ros the whole icelandic island came down on our heads the roof was paper the bedroom was a fading impression vivid from a distance from a distance these lives have clarity in the midst of their forms a fading perfume sends itself out the window to catch a beer bottle tossed in ecstasy from her voice on the phone the coffee tables overturned soothing homosexual plants breathing through the vent next to the couch where we kissed for the first time the multitude of hands have dinosaur minds and the spike tails of their arms move as one thinking to oppose each other they build a cage made of each other's attacks the boy i love swears at the television i sent one hosanna and it went unanswered into static the panic of the heart is calmed when all hosannas are finally disconnected and we stood up in the mirror wetness of polished marble and realized that worship was over the electric wood rose silently all around us and silence was a noise of fence-cracked membranes giving way on attic mattresses

The choir behind the wall part 2

the choir behind the wall waits with their hymnals open the electric wood splices her nerves wounded into mine her mouth above the typewriter receives after coffee and ices the newscast of reproduction the keys are tapped by her nakedness the choir behind the wall waits for a page number to be called the bright eyes of a dog waiting to be walked the wagging of a tail that thumps the wall in all the right places the dinnerplates frisbeed out the window to land on clitoris heads a terrible mistake to think their pleasure was contained in being cracked open but we threw everything a cabinet like a lover flew through the air and like those we adore cannot be caught the dry socket opens a bad breath into the abandoned bathroom where addicted ghosts kneel unremembered in the laundry the choir behind the wall begins to sing to them lonely in a prayer beneath the sink where an asscrack carved some toothpaste in a mammal pattern on the floor

To the world

I open my body to the world.
The trees are filled with wires.
The rivers are running cold.
A calm is coming.
A peace is filtered through this electricity.
I am the world cleansed of the world.
The bombs that go off in cars belong to me now.
I caress them as if they were breasts
and send them back into a distant summer.
The world is one pulsating tomato.
The world is a series of connected gardens.
I am the wind washed dirty by the world.
And the world is a 24-hour laundromat.

This will happen again tomorrow

You have so many areas. There is surprisingly little play.
The president on a rippling screen
called the entire population
a bunch of traitors
today.

And now he lies in bed and munches
on the graham cracker
of an entire continent.
The boiling of our only world
is his indigestion.

Which means he's already eaten.
And now we are eating.

And there is a long goddamned table with nobody at it.
And there is a long fucking life with nobody inhabiting it.

Gifts from a horse in the dark

I know that powerful men and women unite in government chambers, plotting to put the twinkling of their little minds under our skin, so that the surface will seep under the surface and all but the surface will disappear; so that all that is, will be surface.

We will fight them by throwing tomatoes at the windshields of their black automobiles while they drive over the corpses of pigeons whose bloodied feathers decorate the streets. And the pigeons will be resurrected at the proper moment, so that the clouds will rain the white clay of their droppings and soil the suits of police officers. Another life will come out of the stricken air to rescue us.

There's a wet place between known dimensions where we'll lie down together the moment this is over. The whispering air, in that in-between place, is a circuit that crackles with an electricity not of this earth.

Those who die in peace prevail, through the lungs of those who breathe their spirits through the eyes of peace. Those who die in peace remain in peace, though they wrap powerlines around their ephemeral bodies, and rampage through rich neighborhoods, channeling all the dying sighs of the guilty. Those who die in war and cease to exist are carried bodily out of the country by a hurricane.

There's a forest path and a gap in the air. A place, where a hand can reach a dresser drawer, from another world. The chambers of lichen-coated rock will slide open with a mineral sound, and we will take off the garments of this existence and put on the chalk-blue underwear scattered from flying saucers.

The hoofprints of light, beaten into swift entrances at the forest's edge, are gifts from a horse in the dark. The golf courses, where lightning bugs are strewn like little cities, take on water from the air, and the ghosts of forgotten birds swim soundlessly through the back of your neck.

I know that those who embrace these mysteries are blessed beyond comprehension; that they will become fearless in their last hour; that none shall own or control their bodies, and that a terrible funneling of inner light shall come from their mouths and sear away the commands of the government.

And that their names shall be blessed by the ghosts on darkened golf courses, and in the places where streetlights have been shot out by rifles, crackling weakly like eyes trying to come back to life. And that they shall heal the broken hands of those who were called their masters, and that those hands will roam the sand of beaches like spider crabs for centuries, forgetting how to swim, until they come to believe that their healing is final, and kneel at the feet of their victims, who disappear into thin air at the moment they are worshipped.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

A film summary

Aidan Layne starts her life
with a great scene in Lockwood Forest.
Aidan's wide eyes are on display
in some short skin
and Lockwood has the pleasure
of loving the fear out of it.
Aidan's eyes are scorched
in a reverse cowgirl, piledriver;
she defies death
and the forest finally pops in her face.

Jayna Oso uses all the information
in her petite frame to scare the fear
out of her two guardian angels.
They use a toy on her mind to get it ready
for the government's assault. After both guys
understand her complaint separately
they move on to more colorful stadiums.
The guys ride in the stream of her vision
for a while after they take turns
staring into her mouth. Jayna's tiny eyes shake
as she's being perfectly understood
and she keeps cooking for hungry children.
To bring his life to a close, one guy
throws himself into her mouth
while the other covers his own body with fire.

Gia Paloma gets rough and crusty
in her revolution scene. Gia
is one of my favorite revolutionaries.
Nothing gets held back, Gia
puts it all on the landscape.
The rebellious action is very blue and concrete.
By the time the guy pops a shell
all over her grey locks and wide open mortality
Gia is dripping with sorcery and misunderstanding.

Olvia O'Lovely and Ice Lafox
come together unintended
for a silent coupling
that was a long time in the freezer.
Lockwood is again the lucky forest
that gets to absorb these fiery implosions.
Great angelic rescue work here
as not one time-travelling of peace is missed.
Both girls are in the waters of eternity
as they keep cupping pools of liquid earth
with their wild imaginations.

Tiffany Mynx unseats two presidents
in the bland finale. I swear
this screaming brunette
has the best mind in politics right now.
Tiffany's killer intellect besides,
she is one human bell of a performer.
Nothing is too sonorous for her to do
as the two presidents are eager to prove.
Tiffany is awesome like a cliff and takes
both presidents into the ocean to end the movie.

A new offering

My hands are more brutal
than the hands of those who raped you
but I have never used them.

These shovels, that you touch,
have heaped soil on every father's
grave, yet have no father to bury.

This new offering, spread
like a girl like a magazine,
is wearing a man's body,
is an unburnt offering, has not
been placed on the altar, and
has never been properly ritualized.

It is free and its fangs are all hands,
are all toes in sand, are all soft in touching
where others have wounded
entrances into existence.

I recently received one of New Hampshire State Senator Tom Eaton's campaign flyers in my mailbox, and took a look at the section entitled "Sponsoring and Passing Legislation that Makes a Difference". Among Eaton's proudest accomplishments is his sponsorship of SRJ 1, a bill described as follows: "Joining with every New Hampshire State Senator to honor our Red Sox". Boy, I got a good laugh out of that one. Could he be any more pompous and empty if he tried? It reminds me of John Kerry's "Who among us does not enjoy NASCAR?". Such populist posturing illuminates, wonderfully, how out-of-touch politicians really are. I can't wait to run for office myself, so that I can make such grand statements as: "I, too, place great importance on having a cold beer every now and then".

Politicians might as well stop trying to convince us that they're just "regular guys". It's insulting, and it's also a waste of their time. "Regular guys" are too busy living their pathetic lives to care much about politics, which is why insulated geeks like Kerry and Eaton run the world. Real "regular guys" "honor our Red Sox" by sitting in front of the TV for four hours every night as insipid, overprivileged demagogues run their country into the ground.

--LUKE BUCKHAM

The wolf in pants

The wolf is wearing pants.
The deforestation evident in the kitchen
is breathing fire down his hairy neck.
He is trying to believe in the ancient prophecies
of a thousand-year reign of peace and love.
But those words are old now
and he hears the hearts of trees crippling
the bitter outsides of the world.
Nature is doing it. Nature is bringing peace.
And he is not included in her plans, this time.
And the wolf sits down on a stool in his kitchen
and the the wolf tries to put his face in his hands
but his nose is too long. And the wolf
takes off his pants
and cries.

THERE IS THIS MUSIC

There is this music, there is this voice,
beyond prophecy and beyond prediction;
and it flows from the paths in the hills,
from the bodies of those who faithfully make love
to the sound of falling tenements.

And we hold this music in our hands
like the tentacles of a disembodied jellyfish,
drained of poison, neutral as a glass of water.
And we find the right notes to enliven
the limbs of this baby,
this baby with the skin of a lilypad
and eyes of volcanic paper.

And I ask for that voice from the mountains,
and that fire from under ocean floors
to fill me and elevate me
above the powers of the government.

I kiss the stained velvet at the altar,
and face oppression with the poise
and oblivion of the blue heron,
asking the eyes of all birds
to fill my hands and feet with vision
and guide me to the blood-speckled rooftops
of this town.

And we amplify the voices of all those
who have been in hiding, crouching below
the streams of their own music in the air;
and they come as a chorus, and they arrive
from all the neglected places, they come
as a lake of shimmering hands to lift you up.

And even in the filth of cities, even
as you bathe in ammonia and bleach
and the sun is kept prisoner
in a red brick bedroom;
as the paws of the last dragonfly
find a bruised knuckle on the back
of your aching left hand--
there are those who will never abandon you,

and they come from the ghostly framework
of destroyed steamboats,
and they come from the flypaper of forgotten towns,
and they come from a magnetic dimple
on the face of earth's water, to lift you up.

ALL THEM FRIVOLOUS SINGERS

Even now, as we are commanded to worship
those who murder in our name,
our songs express only the sex drives
of wounded cattle. And our guitars are strung,
our pages scrawled upon, only to wound
a neighbor who won the affection
of an ex-lover, or a neighbor whose shirt
is more elegant and fragrant than our own.

We shake hand after hand at parties
carelessly, as if flesh were taken for granted,
as if bodies were separate
from that which carries our song.
And now that the fire of a fallen city
has been put out, we wait for the fall
of all our cities with mildness, with
meek, tender movements and giggling,
our loves and hatreds small enough
to be restrained.

Because blood has been distant from us,
but now blood will rain on our streets
from embittered clouds, and blood
will run out of our bodies like wine
from a punctured sack.

Love letter to the woman who will destroy me

Oh lady whom nobody calls lady anymore
Oh statue of ash
Oh sack of steaming roses
Pull my hair down deep from ceiling vapors
Unfold the ribs from my flesh
Flesh of my flesh of my flesh unfolding
Show me the violence
Of the rivers and the tides
Show me the night in the forest full of knives
Rape the eyes of this unstable man
With interplanetary visible whispers
Don't let me escape
From your thin strong arms

Oh lady from out of time
Oh lady from far beyond love
Oh scream from all the trembling hedges
Hung with underwear and the blood
Of everyone who's ever been touched
Fill the hells of cities with your suggestions
Burn the mattresses we squatted on
When we were homeless as a pile of rocks
Fill the dumpsters with the copulations of lizards
Let them slither through the stink of human trash
Until the dumps disintegrate
And the slender tongues
Flickering from every frontal lobe
Are touched by a probing immaterial finger