we don't sleep, don't need the hum

of sleep, but erupting morning
after erupting morning
volcanic and we watch the churches
and the laundromats act
like churches and laundromats
under depths of water dark
as green & blue can go
oceans drawn up
at the feet of lighthouses
whose circuit boards
pour electric tongues
down naked throats

skylights flap like epiglottis

music that pricks ozone
turns saxophone from tenor to bass
in pairs of hands that flower on insomniac
torsos that never felt the rain
without raining lower & longer
than any storm earth's skies
can provide.

uh Heart Crossed off the Charts

I'm that faggot girl
up lighted in the blackout A.M.

I'm that faggot girl
in the ballroom corner
born without a uterus
taken on a cruise to celebrate
my infertility

you're not enough to prowl
linoleum squares with me
in tow, your awful

eye make-up & underwear
decorated with bears & giraffes

foolish child in pink
pajama jumpsuit

fostering nervous breakdown
in your elder admirers

making the mascara tears
cover the manhole covers
entirely in awful purples,

& so eager to see how
eagerly you'll kiss the convenience store

trails of blueberry where

deer trot their elegance
with just a hint of violent

effort, so small you have
to put your tongue

in a hoofprint, struck hard
in dark black mud,

reminded by your ribcage on a rock
your bones balanced

there, what violence is done
among us, how barely

sweet the blueberries are.

one
wet
violet

placed

where
only
you

will
notice
it.

I look for the one who
while everyone else laughs
is scorched by the movie,

for the Eskimo on summer
sidewalks who was pushed
like a scarecrow of hailstones
out of the dinner party,

for that girl knitting condoms
of seaweed's darkest green
for her genderless friends,

I seek those whose stomachs
can never be acidic enough,
whose ulcers come to be
small bubbles on the multiverse's
bulging moldsilverblue clusters,

I look for those to whom
this message is already a waste
of time because it can't find them.

HIGHWAY THROUGH THE POND'S MIDDLE

you take the handle to start hog up
(salamanders move
their orange 'cross wet tar)
avoid their bodies with your motors tires
ribcage crunch, tiny hearts

you wish for a crash to throw you down
to the swamp or the spiders that rule the dust
on the runway's ramp where the creatures merge

the purge of sunlight from broken
radio hole

we watch on our larger cages
the orange skin
take over the tent of our frames
and coat the rotting logs
with live
lizard

a female in fashionable rags comes toward
through the ballfield hologram
of a chainlink fence to march
right into my arms. She says:
I can hear you screaming
in the hallways of this world to be
left out. The end of this tall black fence

is just a tilted little puddle
you can jump all the way storybook through

crystallized on a bicycle seat
a snail's antlers frozen salted
hurting all the eyes of the air

put forth this morning a fist in brown leather
of subnormal pitchforker
beating a drum with a severed limb
half of the crown on his head.

Mom was washing a dull golden dog
in a groaning tub, paws were kicking

the heavens were overturning all hell,
the saltshakers were upright next
to the peppers, then huge robot arms--

DOVES EAT LEMON PIES, FRONT_ROW

I'm not sure how to spend my time anymore,
if I can't spend it all weeping.
I think of the rages and joys
of all my life, and wonder simply
"what was that all about??".
I just burst out cackling wildly
in the middle of a foggy sentence
that I happened to be speaking,
trapped in jail.

Bees disrupt the color of my hands,
all radiance come down to spill my guts,
and a handle of burger to flourish
from the waist of my pine shadow.

A telephone pole of black light, tar dark
on its torso & antlers, reaching all its
ringing anti-ecstasy into the stretched tarps
of vast disembodied ear.

2 skulls that knock together
chin & bridge of nose
interlocking blades
surrounded by every
engine.
Weeping continues in the banks
as well as the alleyways.

CROWS GULP BLUEBERRIES
WHILE STANDING NECK_TIED
AT AN ARTIFICIAL SHORELINE.

I'LL LET THE LIGHT TRICKLE THROUGH MY FINGERS HANDS
AS WE KNEEL ON THE FLOORS DOORWAYS
OF YOUR LAST FULL-FORMED MEMORY

I kneel in the cells of a slanting house
say "the rain is infinite" but know
it's not, I beg the senseless air
for company. The pissing of skies
traps me in my room, holds voices
of all others force-fielded far away.

I stop in the calls of a smashed drainpipe
to bring my walk down to a railroad sound.
I let the whole street come up
through my wrists. Streetlamps
tower & crown
my only shoulders.

I stop near a tongue-kiss memory
in the quiet hurricane of a concrete stairwell.
(It's a house I built steadfastly when I was unwell.)
We hated every moment of it's dilligent
progress, & faded blue-green down,
moss everyone.

there are two lives: one with friendships,
one without, both equally beautiful,
both equally irrelevant. Who needs

other bodies will speak of other bodies,
who speaks of other bodies will need
other bodies, in imagination.

How sad, to eat blue berries
thinking of this, and the rot in the gut,
and horror of the stained white

flickering at the bottom of the bucket.

A small lizard
from the melting skids
of a burnt tire

could fit
in its dying writhe
through the seam
of my shaking hand's palm.

Only we in its death throes
will know the quietness
of its last protest.

But its tongue flickers,
a brown flame from the hearth
of a life we abandoned
when we gained fur.

The skin it sheds
is coating still
the severed hand
I left behind,
with one of my favorite
fellow mammals,

when the yellowed eyes
of the fur-wearers
wore out
and I saw their emptiness
in the reptilian tunnels

they had avoided crawling
ever before I
entered and willingly let sag
my halves of skin.

I cut her slim belly open twice,
once above the navel and once below the navel.
I push stones through each incision, both ovoid,
each looking like Brancusi's
Sculpture For the Blind.

I tell her, "I hope this is my best
cataclysm". She readies herself
to carry these articles within her,
and asks me to walk hand-in-hand
with her, as I talk ceaselessly,
gloomily, about what, I cannot tell.

She grips my hand tighter
and uses her other hand
to hold the slits shut
that I cannot stitch.

Watching this all from a distance,
I know I am not a surgeon, or a murderer.
Watching all this from a distance,
I don't know if I am a surgeon,
I don't know if I am a murderer.
Watching all this from a distance,
I don't know if I'm watching this
from a distance.

I have a thread wired into my hamstrings
that was shipped from a floating saucer
hospital to fix her belly,
and in the numb bulb of my groin
a salad scoop for the stones.
I keep these things
meant to help her form
in my form, in order to inflict
pain upon us both.

She knows from my cringing walk
that I carry these instruments.
She grips my hand tighter still,
the sweat thicker than the blood
that seeps against her other,
and begs to be allowed
to heal me.

clasp
the awful gold
hate
the silver
around the eyes

where to go with a mop
where to go with a pen
inside the body
of a new dragon
inside
the pages of a dragon's
stupid wings

snail on a dandelion leaf
opens a hole of empty white light
in the spiral of his shell
his mucus-trail turns to hottest fire

the dandelion clock goes
rapidly back to yellow after firing its seeds
into the dying
pink horizon.

I offer my palm
to the inching of this visitor
from a dimension of tightly-woven,
never-dying, heavily compacted light.

He crawls through a faint stigmata
the only part of my hand that is still there.

SPARROWS ON EACH SIDE SLIDING

My moratory body, gives me a moment of loved
disintegration, sparrows are on the bush
to the left of my floating ribcage
parkbench burns beneath me
I'll never get up in time,
the sparrows are holding
thin branches between
their twig feet fingers--

they shame me obscurely; not to be one
with their twitchy midst, but in not
watching closely enough--
I have erred, black tires
on black ice; and a floppy carrot
through my sadding heart, soft rot body

Their bodies of leaves,
atomic intricate,
flutter other bodies out of shape.

Antennaes buried deep
in each grave small forehead
down toward the nostrils of the beak.
Their eyes and bodies moving sweetly
separately. Their brown eyes
in bodies, moving sweetly separately.

Their brown eyes in brown bodies,
chests downy of white
atop the heavy-scented
hedges of low pine brush,
hung on a puff of exhaust

and not on the hope
of a human breath

OF THE EMERGENCY ROOM DOOR.

Girl-bone, born in small barns,
from a skeleton-leaf wood,
trailing a cape of bloodied feathers,
coming toward, me with my pork-chop mouth,
carrying a distraction of flowers.

Girl in ladyslippers, toting a computer
briefcase that quacks like a duck.
My mischief of little remedies,
my last great love before dying,
no matter what years it takes
my sad body to kill me.

A milk-yoke in a plastic forest,
an apple cored and thrown
among the ferns,
carrying all your old hurts,
a brave little lady.

I want to get out of my body
and cloak you with a hood
of anti-matter. I'd like
to find something to feed you with
that comes before and after time.
Take my body, though it's not enough;
protect the work of my hands,
though the world iced it.

Make my plot of land a tigerspawn of brushfires.
My will and testament a litany of fly droppings.
My marriage a union of broken ice-springs
in a moss cathedral.
And my birthright a trumpet the factory
never cranked out.
Time pulls its garters up its untimely legs
and gathers its hurts into the grocery store.
Time gathered is a studio built in a vault
of withering stars.
Time gathered is you like a microphone
next to my throat.

Make my pores the wreckage-pits
of other's smallest bones,
without much left to break, canyon kisses,
jellyfish deaths
far in all we never know.

French kiss in a river of neon
subway tongues dirty as two pigeons
belts tense with hands in the hooks
feet twisted by movements of strangers

if we don't get each other out of
here, our eyes will drown
to death in each other
beneath the climate-control
canopies, dear.

Someone tripped over a dollar
& into a feather cut. No more
mating plumage.

We shut her in a soft room. She ate the walls.
We put her in a tall bottle. She stayed
until a tadpole grew as her tongue
then squeezed a pregnant belly outward
until the glass showered.
Her tears sprayed antique walls.
She thought she could see the scales
on every scale of a leaving snake.
We shut her up in a strong room.
She thought concrete into soil
and departed through the earth.
He hides his mouth in a deeper cavern,
letting her walk over the linoleum array
of his many teeth.

from an oily mouth comes
a clean flood of tongue
a ship's floor full of standing daggers
and the eyes of a child
on the tonsil that turns into a snakehead
blossom sadly
then a road of deer-trampled snow
and a girl in reptilian coat
who says: these powerlines
are serpents leading you home
follow them to a hearth
or leave their squeeze before fire
for a desert highway
where you will lie down
your weathered skull crack
fragile tar
man's crust which is cracking
man's crust from under which
a vast skin is resurfacing