Cracked Altimeter

Volume 3

Joe Milford

BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, New York

Cracked Altimeter by Joe Milford Copyright © 2008

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

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Table of Contents

The Broken Book of Engravings...... 9 Hourglass in a Sandstorm...... 32 A Guide to the Sand Hissing Abyss...... 32 demolitions expert ...... 33 rocket scientist ...... 35 a construction worker’s poem on the void...... 37 I am forlorn ...... 60 Inspirational Paperback Rations...... 62 Pagoda ...... 64 manifest destiny...... 66 Setting out ...... 68 Santa Fe ...... 72 Postcard from a crashing moon over New Mexico...... 74 Looking For Something That Lasts in a Sandstorm...... 76 Leaving El Dorado ...... 78 Another dumb Tourist...... 80 hell ...... 81 for a lover of a dog from hell (postcard from Cerebus)...... 84 A Ransom Note Read Aloud and Accompanied By Harp ...... 86 postcard to my brother ...... 87 Postcard From Anonymous...... 89 Postcards From Weasels ...... 90 I saw one more last thing...... 91 Treatise on Excursions Within One’s Own Temporal and Corporal Body...... 92 Versus Verses ...... 94 Blind date with Infinity ...... 95 Wishing for the Unplaces...... 97 Poetry is sonic archaeology...... 100 A Nightingale Replies to a Boy ...... 102 Poem of the Desert...... 102 Fossilized Roadmap ...... 103 Looking for Sand in the Desert ...... 106 MIDDLE OF THE BURNING BRIDGE I. Eden’s Southernmost Regions...... 108 Vineyard Sketches ...... 110 Sierra Nevada...... 114 7:47...... 115 flew in first class for the ceremony, got the key to the city, left immediately...... 117 waiting for 14-Abercorn to Southside Savannah...... 119 The Low Country ...... 121

July 4th, Savannah to Charleston ...... 128 The Ghost of Frank Stanford ...... 132 frank’s knives ...... 133 portraits...... 134 Concussion at a campsite...... 137 erosion island...... 141 if every bottle is a soldier ...... 145 Savannah Saturday night with esoteric text ...... 149 Sunday morning...... 150 Croatoan ...... 151 DEMIURGE ...... 154 Mantra Jinx...... 181 Tambike the Itinerant...... 181 lead...... 184 take it easy unless it keeps you from effluvium ...... 185 Boomerangs ...... 186 Sikh knife ...... 186 what he said was by accident ...... 187 Reading Joseph Brodsky at 30,000 ft...... 188 the definition of the infinite...... 192 cages...... 193 lethargy of wonders upon parade-wheels ...... 195 Deconstruction Childhood Anecdote...... 196 gestalt graffiti...... 198 Echo is stasis ...... 202 Bowdon, Georgia summers ...... 203 After Kunitz’s Careless Love...... 204 That old leather green cover...... 205 Adumbral Aphorisms ...... 206 Sheltonisms (for Scott, the greatest friend anyone could ever have or try to kill) ...... 215 Tongue to Tourniquet...... 217 the census...... 219 confession ...... 220 Sunday morning after all night baking shift ...... 221 I let the reins go ...... 223 poker-face ...... 233 I spy...... 234 regurgitation...... 235 retroburst ...... 236 the mesh ...... 237 jaunt 1...... 238 the last great garage band song...... 250

onion-skin epic...... 251 my first semester ...... 258 for Sarah Strong Wilson...... 260

Cracked Altimeter

Volume 3

The Broken Book of Engravings

“The idea of using old engravings as a basis for current design, whole, in fragments, whatever - - is probably as old as the design itself . . . You want to know what Corvas corax, the raven, looks like? Well, here is what he looks like - - and what a bevel gear looks like, and a nasal cleft, and the Arc de Triumph - - lovingly detailed, cross- hatched, and, luckily for us, splendidly reproducible.” from the introduction to The Complete Encyclopedia of Illustrations (1st pub. 1851) plate 5. fig. 8, 8a: triangular compass

Ceiling is bent is prism or prismatic wall. Floor is bent is prismatic cubed into diagonals; we live in diamonds, not in squares. Truly it isn’t that simple at all, or ever. I, however, want to give you something to work with: blueprints that the ink hasn’t dried on yet. Hoe sure are you of your frequented rooms? Look again friend; learn to unlook.

plate 6. fig. 23: illustrating the theory of ebb and flow

And then things were ahead of their times. And then the things made to stand the tests of time. This is, of course, an oxymoronic exam, as time tests nothing other than itself. Temporal dialectics. Is it more efficient watches, or it is superior minutiae that’s required? Squeezing lives into imploded moments, and traveling. Across memories as does Arabic text on a translated parchment. Tracing and rolling scrolls and documents. Pressurization of every hit, every iota, and knowing that every seedling meant it’s planted. And impenetrable is the chronosaur with its hard spheres and possibles were the finest digitals. And one person seeks to monopolize time and that one is definitively you.

plate 6. fig. 6: illustrating the centrifugal forces of the Earth

And from the world you may steal memories, like dew to make your eyes, and then hide then hide them with lies in the guise of poetries, but do not be surprised

when instead of wrath from the world for your stealing, instead, you receive her, kneeling beside you and agreeing, as if with you at a mirror she is whispering, “Indeed we are beautiful together.”

plate 353. Egyptian temples and tombs

And the carney barkers atop the burning piles of the world’s landfills scream to go onwards to the lands of the salt pillar people, the junkyards the ends of the known Earth, the telluric currents pulling us, the like bodies gathered as if sieved. Amusement parks of past cultures, ash-land desert-silt sculptures. Sift: the caravan that slowly proceeds into an ocean of its own intention of ending. Grist mythos. Birdseed and prophesies. Polvo and gravel pits. plate 7. fig. 1: planetary system of Ptolemy

Nine beer bottles left at random porcelain planets picked up in tandem the lord of this house has big hands (my house) to send them to receptacles in plastic bags adjacent to slime and tin foil to be mulled over like so much mulch in mud and rags and bonemeal the bacteria in the bottles like us so small as not to notice the macrocosm’s upheavals and left somewhere in a methane-minefield junkyard-heap where far from away I crept out of the primordial night’s rust and into this kitchen’s silences to hide these skeletons these phantom custodians as I had dreamed it and I was to be so foolish as to believe that I could be the center of all of this

plate –1. fig. 6.12.72: pirates’ and poets’ accounts of damned attempts

Such is the fine line between possession and debt for to owe a god a boon or a gift is to be bereft on a raft too far to the left of absolute time there are too many guests on any one of God’s rafts and tickets here are useless try swimming in order to be left behind by all of these Achilles- Mephistopheles to act epical, but like a pirate, a spy, a thief, inconspicuously

plate 9. fig. 9-13: the Sun’s spots

I come to you naked as the first star is undecided. No reckoning left. No reconnaissance. No interstice of solstice, nor clouds cannonball billowing down. No men or machinations, it is an outburst of pain, as if a cauterization. Still, recite the dried wings in our souls eddying as if leaves on pondswirls. And the only way we can fly now is detonation. And there are no other destinations other than detonations. And fern-fronds drying on sandstone under groans of ultraviolet radiation and release. Harnessing solar winds to power our gramophones. I will play you a harmonium of stars, which I have composed myself. It’s all in grand style.

plate 50. fig. 2: submarine volcanic explosion

Minstrels in the garbage singing dirges. Tar-baby slanguage. “He talk so fast they call him Chinese nigger” Somebody was suddenly sliced. A Northerner, I think. Why can’t the races come together a bit better like they did in ancient Alexandria? We bang the sludge with words to describe it. Malleable sledgehammers that do commerce no good. We inherited the Earth! We already inherited her! And poor spenders of days and days lie out like legs spread for a birth, for we have inherited this infectious dirt which dares to bear life. This addictive invective this soil left bare to be born. It burns the doctor’s hands with realization. Sweated-out, the cord cut, the bloody hair slicked back from aquatic amniotics. As destinations are all detonations, hell we all know that we all began with an explosion

plate 5. fig. 57: application of plane table

A plane in flight above a plain all the same. Holohedral with a prayer for there to crack through next layer to reach the next plane. Hope it’s not the same. Planet is promised landing.

plate 6. fig. 26; illustrating the resistance of the aether

Up and out from the scrap with scrapes the oilslick soup put to use as an antidote for culture the panacea making alluvtha difference and you are crawling out of the data-manure a Fisher King a kingpin a big pond and the metal tore you up as you arose for the harvest out of tin-can-land but then you see the sky finally free of smog, you find the sky to be a mob of great blue ideas ascending constantly

plate 119. representatives of the Orders Perissodactyla and Primates; see also plate 130. Anatomy of the Fasciae, Integuments, and Organs of Mastication and Respiration

Are we all neotypes? Neo sapiens usurping sapientials? Are we all just apes Learning to laugh at previous apes? Eloquence and tact are hairy to enact.

plate –2. fig. joe/William Blake (1757-1827 English artist, poet, and mystic) somewhere between music, magic, and a scream was the voice of this newborn, earthbound foundling carrying for his heart an ever-mutating home called Imagination plate 47. fig. 9,10: charts of hurricanesA slave without chains.

Martyr with no sacrifice. Metaphysical bodiless-ness.Soul peering out at soul as if soul were its own periscope seeping through rising up through itself to break a surface fingerless fingers as does the persistence of melting Cambert cheese and there is no time when it comes to such amoebae.

plate 19. theories and instruments of mechanics, thermodynamics, and acoustics

emotive cognition cogs in motion emissions notes amiss paralyzed syntax demos isles of lisps dervish-derisions incoherigntitings galing nights in motif in action flicks aesthesiae ouches of sounds feelings without the halberds or bastards of cliché’s estovers of sound allotments for each of us emotive miasma of motes the symbols incessantly cursed cursing at each other it’s an ambush my horse has his headphones on and I am wearing his blinders the gallop home the full volume escapades salutes escapes and the windmills spinning like a loom weaving fortunes

plate 27. fig. 1: whirlwinds and waterspouts. see also, fig. 4: the drawing of water

I set out to free all of the waters from their prisons from their basins, gasoline rainbow prisms, and to stamp out puddles, to pour out oceans (better than they’d already been poured) but each drop became another reservoir for me to liberate, from a bowl to a lake to a wave. And I had no right to try to free what forms to itself the water gave. Those bodies were never imprisoned and I am so naive.

plate 26. phenomena of clouds and light. see also, fig. 1-9: illustrating phenomena of clouds

Sometimes I walk as the rest of existence runs, rockets, seems to propel past me, it sometimes may even appear as a dance of dunces towards some climax of a parallax-like finale in the distance viewed with near-sightedness and sometimes I truly notice things in their insignificance as they try to hide their magnificence and so I learn to light-speed sprint

with slow eyes deciphering the blurs

plate 454. Italian Painting of the Renaissance. fig. 1-13. Cardi, Caravagigo, Caracci, Sassoferrato, Raphael, etc. and etc.

It is the same sentiment I guess. Why do I pick up my cat and hang him, stick him to the screen-door just to see his reaction/ Why would God place man on this planet among so many cracked melons and diminished strata of foliage and sin-poisoned fruit and loot poised to crush us in floods and we dangle supervised over canyons and chasms in hopes of pocket trinkets and beads and dreadnoughts of what-nots with bottle-openers for prying the in- finites? It is the same sentiment, I guess. Learning the arts of perspective.

plate –3. fig. 1-4: broken clock spinning on a turntable under a mirrored ceiling

squelch and sustain stoma magna voxbox strain stretches of impetus envelops us uncomfort above able and us in un-rusting metallic elements unreliable except the deejays and tone of grit time-lapsed segments of beat doled-out sacrament-like retreating into counter- back- clockwards-wise like words and whips recoiling the chips of computers that couldn’t dig it all but the digital captured the ball on CD so what the hell? sound is an insatiable fungus.

plate 79. Insects of the Orders Hymenoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera, and Odonata

Beehive cluster of polygonic polygotisms clotted in static buzzing sound-gysms frequencies of winged gold stained low vowels with propellers bowel-bowled gutturals and still-shrill stings consonants humming- bird cosmonauts wingslashing honey is metaphorical, not withstanding through their own dull tones

plate 16. theories of force and gravity: demonstrations of these and other laws the crashing pilot Capt. Tate in the plummeting engine with wild eyes ripped and his own blood chasing, screams, “I’ve seen something finally! I have seen the face of my son!” Fuck the astronauts. And it, the insane unknown on the tips of our noses that can only be seen at the speed of sound and is never captured in writing but in individual comets of flumes falling, chutes fire-shot shod and cracked goggles boiling, steaming in oceans after fiery impact. his orphan son piloted pages and said: “fuck the astronauts!”

plate 302. illustrating modern artillery. plate 306. illustrating military pyrotechny

After the explosion after what had become of me

I stole through the forest collecting fragments of my flesh hanging from the trees my limbs strung out on limbs horror in piecing back together while searching for a mirror or a pond a moon in order to ascertain the pain the form the sound-diagnosed harmony of shred’s condition I was dosed with the new word that I have bloody embodied and what soul is is sound not shaped nor by symbol but it chooses to loosely nest around fragments crude structures of punctuals and capitals to experience the endless rapture of vocals as it rises in ecstasies, ex- desires freed all of the vessels of new vocals I sample ascension of sonicism I wish what language is is a slaughterhouse forest a deadfall closed-cautioned infinitely a deadfall closed-caption ed infinitely in reverse the noumena meet hanging on ordinary trees and the trees know each other well, yet they are wise to ignore themselves

plate 407. or, see Architecture, plates 350-409

Sky of flax in flux. Slowly looming into gold. Over a random moment for the Americas I am walking while holding my medallion hoping that skyscrapers don’t avalanche. They spindle up for underground steam-sprays. I’m the amanuensis for this minaret effluvium. This cortege of ocular columns. This hum ancient around the new buildings.

plate 19. fig. 17: illustrating the laws of vaporization self-sacrificing single-cells in cylinders cyclic oxidants arranged octavely not accidentals dented fenders lawn-mower blades spinning towards the clouds cumulonimbi volvox and jellyfish ascending like hot-air balloons will-o’-the-wisps osmosizing-up the cosmos epitome of the atmosphere’s dermas shredding platelets and arrows ash-handfuls in the tsunami the relinquished grey flesh the snow in its reverse crystals

kits full of winds and s’s’ kites made of nets flutes used for rockets shrilling hardcore in windshears as they catapult up hovercraft and trajectories we is all spreading up and out there and there and we are limits that coalesce with our convalescence of out there

plate 249. fig. 1-3: Chinese puppet-show. Chinese mandarin visiting

As kids, we decided to play to game of Time and, as always, I was the worm action figures for gods as marionettes squirmed kickshaws under cabriules silly rules and ice-cream paunches you always ate the last Cherry Life Saver we were lost in the atmosfield of it all heads in a ruckus like bowling balls the first beer the first kiss the first good read book the first dead bird found first arrowheads and miles of honeysuckle noticing every detail in a Monet way slinking free of authorities never truants to the creeks twisting up trees plastic-like jade pipes cool granite of library steps against our naked asses as taught and young as the feel of lithe new guitar-strings so sure that death only happened to birds and the mandarin came with cassavas and political texts and the men of the house would drink rice-beer with furrowed brows as we frolicked with puppets under the tables listening to their plots to us, none of them were of any use we never thought we’d become like father

plate 19. fig. 93: illustrating the echo in arched rooms. see also, fig. 96, 97: the tongue work of the organ, and plate 200: scene in Roman Coliseum and Roman coins the unsaid things “I was crushed under an elephant carcass; I knew that my parachute wasn’t going to open; I lost the readings in the warp core breach; the instruments all appear to be clogged with peanut-butter” etc. leading to machinations, too-soon conclusions, i.e.: “death is like a pachyderm; snapping bone; rockets miscalculate; boring lunch at the console; faulty launch” etc. apparatus deviations LEGO-like poem-parts parting

your hair with a word well-heeled collectors context was sentenced to a journey for its sins and then taxed what is to come from these pocket-sized epics? the said things always so inferior the unsaid things existing just beyond the credible the canyon between what is and is to be described the infinite chasms between two possible worlds I sit around and whinny and whine just avoiding animals of sound that are larger than my poor verbal stature

plate 405. the Capitol at Washington. see also, plate 13. map of the Southern Heavens

The last of the anthems incinerated parlor music ash-jazz-Muzack nostalgia dragging the skeletons down the hallways a Jacksonian guilt, I’d say we died of asphyxiation in welcome centers before we could finish our complimentary Cokes the proprietors dressed in flags of countries they’d sworn never to visit they were in full drag and no one was attentive to any yellow and black Caution signs we used the Venetian blinds to send Morse-code hell, we were trapped in this democracy and we liked it to clue in the riff-raff glued to a revolution all of us with star-maps tattooed on our backs and speaking garbled dialects with our mouths full of gourmet food here in the Oval Office cafeteria of the world

plate 427. fig. 12: Bacchanalian genii

The last song fell down the minstrel’s throat which was a lute-flume-chute or a liar-lyre to a void heartless nil paradiso a moat of unbreakable windows birds with no throats I guess that therein song was consumed by black ulcer sister in acid who had no beau called song or choice but to eat Narcissistic pie the poet would never repeat, although he would shutter quite a bit and in this way angels and demons clean their plates plate 15. fig. Hershel’s reflecting telescope

“photocopy of the proton. prototype of the photon. photos of volatile cthons. duplicates coated on photon after photon. someone introduces negative charge. protocol. proton belying negatives pawned for a bit more carbon. and there’s very little carbon, comparatively, to go around in this universe. it is manufactured by stars who wish to be seen. outer-space is the blackest black market.

plate: broken China: invasive annotation

John Zorn is born. Muse-mess psycho-sound porn surf-secret agents dissolving a mess of awesome sonic messiahs the chaos a-coming the scandal pistol anvil ska murder sax stomping in iron sandals on tin roofs and maidens impromptu thrown across the shoulders of flesh-choruses choraladagios and hombres with bazookas full of symphonies aimed at embassies and hell, even my pocketknife composed something today stockade embryo of bastardized zydeco banjo screaming newborn John Zorn

plate 3.333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 33333333333333 (etc.) mercs and vurts and megahurtz this is my tesseract journal folding open to the outer dimensions or is it other dimensions Moebius strippers unveiling superstrings unveilings as if violins got stuck to make stars a nervous breakdown’s not so quasar, yet it seems to spread out as such wormholes multiples in a tensor process of starving, coughing Reimann a genius feeding poems to the void like bread to birds crumbs crumbs crumbs

and everything in the big crunch and crumple will find the force the unified field

plate 42. fossils from various periods in order to discover something new, I had to travel back to the beginning of time and before first poems written, the sublime music of speech without worry of recording, for, our dreams were never carousels of words unless you have such nightmares nor were our hearts aqualungs lunging at language like anemones during tidal storms and out of our desire to share our dreams with one another, the first words were carved into stone. thus, here all evil and all good began. before, we were just men employing irresponsible sound

can I get an AMEN?

plate 204. catacombs, churches, and chapels the Madonna bites her nails. And Christ had hard-ons under his robes. Saints thinking sodomies all the while while the Zealots drink the blood of charlatan blasphemers. St. Francis eating the birds from his shoulders. Origen with hi testicles in a Mason jar. And poets when they murder.

They got away, like Adam’s apple-core thrown over the wall around Eden. It was probably never allowed to fully rot, hell, it sprouted the fields of icons. And, in some ways, this is perfect, and that appleseed germinates in all of us.

plate joe. fig. joe. annotated joe. me laughing at me while engraving myself. tongue-in-cheek vector. awaiting the union. exploding (see plate 50. fig. 2: submarine volcanic explosion)

I am beserker synaesthetically. Imagery, I shall montage you to death.

Our marriage is one shattering of receptions before ever a rite was taken.

plate 32. forms of crystallization; various instruments

I am sick of the organic. I need no leaves of grass to touch all of humanity. To do this to touch you all I must become concrete. The longest word. How dare these trees invade my city? Nostalgia never asks permission. Nevers are levers, so, never ever endeavor. At least as far as I can throw this jargon in the park I will. And voices carry like a song reminiscent and voices meet you head-on and headlong as if you crashed into a stable that was aflame but you doused it let the horses out to run down the thoroughfares during rush hour and out of the city for good

plate 12.72.6. B-movies of true love and 400-ft. tall reptiles that Blue Oyster Cult sang about nostalgiaGodzillaRodanMothra Ed Woods flying saucers Belugosi vampire incisors neo-techno Raphaelite scrapmetal gumbo of new bio-ethnical Homo’s boiling from Orleans to sprawling Tokyo-digital and sphere is unified ego third rock from the sun and cults and cultural cut-throats whirlpool switchblade knuckles ritual gumbo jamming-balaya belated riffing spoonfuls of slang on the pavement for urban tribes perturbed in humidity Atlanta in the middle of summer by the newsstand recipes for stronger poems vines oil vinegar jalapenos flower petals on pita bread for fiber and a street-act guy with a flame-thrower and skuttle- butts and hot-pants and short-shorts and the administrators don’t give no more flying fucks anymore

plate 439. fig. 25, 26: Bellerophon

Detach jettison the body’s strangeness. I’m the deliverer of birdcages (as if I wrote poetry). Something crucial is to be arranged here. Our tents are swept up in the storms. Feathers swirl around our favorite sounds and myths. Everything is a minuscule as a quark. We eat the air with sporks. Salads of sentience or any silly phrase you so choose. Who and what is appropriate in this mid-air moment? Apparatus got cut by his own device and fell off his horse like an Icarus. He had to get umpteen stitches. You can’t chart the variables the entrails of referentials writhing in their continual clouds of conjugals. You worship in the church of the too rational. Every feather is a perfect altar, and in this way my horse has accumulated wings and learned to use them to fly

Engraving Random 1:

In the way in which a body encompasses the entire world, a nugget of knuckle under a microscope, for instance, you can see it all there. The pain of the millennia in an epidermal chasm. And canyons are questions which are carved into their own answers. Bodies are swerves, are warps, are rivers; flesh usurped. And with me, and good, gracious us. We will touch until oceans erupt, and lightning will be the only instant of immediately gone evidence.

* spit on a star and boil your self a soul

*

Just because the elephant-headed god Ganesha broke off one of his tusks to create a pen to write the Mahabharata does not mean that I have to be Hindu.

*

A trick that the soul has learned: how to hide from itself, even though it resides over all, everywhere, the name of this prank is:

Body.

*

I wish to be in miniature to stretch out upon a single feather to remain there discreet silent

forever

Engravings Random 2 & 3 the simple fact being that I never see birds at night and this personal truth as a footnote: at night I tend to always achieve flight

Engraving Random 4

scratched

scratched into bone crag menophenome

you bring the arc love you & polycule too light as wave light as particle transparent eyemetal immerstone not as confused as crystal ARRGH’s gold-arching

X marks Go dot are byte wary derivative valences of dads the anxiety of inflummox

landmine verbiage no one responses

“the mind’s [mid] winter”

this blade of dash [sic] cislunier slaying one nomenclature

ganglion Doppler’s ergo and a farcical particular gimcracks and wet towel whacks

per se already names

a tap unsprung catches a mouse of Mallarme

here any no surge some linkages simple thrust of just-now like unexpected taste splash of mango juice something stings my black iris

wave I wave noumena at you

entropaphoristicephalous entropic hands were your last words

and my first tongue was a thanks

thank you for the light, great bringer of it

Engraving Random 5

eagles up here:

Flight

collection of bones and feathers down here Panoply (or, Frank O’Hara’s Toys)

Drinking hot chocolate from ballerina slippers and pointe shoes Selling the bourgeoisie snake-oil, Epsom salts, and cactus juice Teaching parrots new and unheard of curse words Attending coronation ceremonies for the inventor of the 1st clock and nitric acid Studying Hermetics while sloughing down honey-glazed hams and red wine Fascinated by the anatomy of merfolk Freeing the monkeys from their music-boxes and fez’s in malls Screaming solipsism’s in the seething seraglio Teaching Goethe to lambs and lame goats Wearing helmets made of volunteered lions’ skulls The divagation of insects masquerading as glowing naked children Shakespeare’s glove retrieved by a ragged drunken poltroon Lizards constant under our flesh moving liquefied in summer drizzles Impervious, we make origami palaces The Gondwanaland of an idea shatters open looks like drop of dye in oil A glass full of old toys that you must swallow down Genetically engineered stream-lined canoes that grow swan’s wings The mausoleums are architected as Trojan horses The wind plays Pan-flutes through our hair to soothe the scars where The horses wings were removed The clouds the shapes of glockenspiels Tremolo dogs yalp incessantly in the monotone meadows The promise of an insect found in the bark of a birch An outboard motor rusting in the center of the courtyard (It was covered with albino spiders) We rode the giraffes back along the esplanade The grenade craters loitering along the palisades The cicerone was inebriated again with his charlatan orangutan By overturned piles of tin, ceremonial breastplates, grieves of silver, And tarnished gauntlets to be soon auctioned I paint words like Bosch with a spyglass in the bushes Vapors of slumgullion wafting from the thatched hut A talking wildebeest asks, “Who was Prosperus?” Fishermen pull carts up from the shore full of prehistoric carcasses Trains of monks punctuate distant hillsides The battering rams failed when attempts were made to break through the firmament of thin air

Throwing bones to see whose turn it was to be famous that week Thawing out the venison steaks by the steaming geysers Putting porcelain bathtubs full of ice-cold beer into wagons drawn by strongmen Acanthus leaves, chopsticks, Bohme texts in picnic baskets, frayed paintbrushes, hairclips, arcade tokens from foreign regimes, fake moon-rocks, spacedust crackling candy-powder, fishing lures all the colors of the rainbow, assorted caps of defunct ball-clubs and automechanic garage chains, manifestoes of irrigation techniques, strip-mining companies tax returns, raspberry lip-balm cartridges, materials for kite-building, sweet-nothings, dog-leashes with burns on them at campsites, chunks of wood for carving/engraving, peacock feathers and other imports, pockets full of sugar-cane shafts, ghoulish saltpeter wafts, samovars arriving by sampans, Wingdings, whatchamacallits myrdles, shlimpies, cogs of lep-leps limping along, gorgonzola soldiers with guns full of virgin olive oils, gougers, latex toy warts, sprazzles and stainless steel pretzels, Dr. Seuss’s wardrobes, greasy travelogues, leather- bound padlocked tomes, discarded refrigerator magnets representing all the states of America, crushed camera parts and mismatched lens caps, lieutenant badges awaiting their second attachments, doubloons of yellowed photos, airlocks and hairnets, sheets of sheet music, a broken harpoon shaft, shark’s teeth congealed in whale blubber, one bottle of cheap Cognac, subterfuge of stiletto heels across sulfur clouds, songbirds crushed under semi-trucks and over-turned cement birdbaths, a quick-step 7-hop choreo by James Brown while fucking Ellington’s piano keyboard, obsolescence of picnics and the coming of age of a Bacchic blues-man accepting laurel- wreaths while deadpanning in a throng of sound sanguine and squamous.

Bill says that my new jacket and shaved head makes me look like a doughboy; I pull out my pen and say “Bayonet, Ojendyk!”

I am pure noise. Here’s the disclaimer. Your sandwiches are too existential for my palate. The cheese and the Big Cheeze’s.

I must look up habaneras, mantilla, and panoply, and soon.

Only time will tell if i will be a Selected, Collected, or posthumously published Complete Colloquium of myself.

Blaise Cendrars says that the masterpiece of plastic art is the guillotine. I disagree; I’d say it is the spinal tap.

You are mimosa kimono I am threadbare cable you are seismic you-ness I am mine own receptacle you are dragons if they were mammals I am bird without wings you are the stem of a decapitated tiger lily I am eating what’s left of the rose of myself petal by petite petal on me palate and petals haunting your flypaper windows and how I lounge upon your lawn wrapped in the anaconda water-hose there, trying to make you laugh by your condo I can’t take root I am wearing a kilt faster pussycat swill swill it made a mountain out of a dust-bunny and when I un-Don-Juaned my shirt I guess it’s a forest of unkempt Irish and I’ll be with you as long as I can stomach certain altitudes choking the green from me and us like a love-letter leftover from a war that wasn’t addressed written in Braille for a scientist the message left at the gates was a lamb stampede was coming and revelations and my chops could not mutton up to it the carnage or i couldn’t muster even though I am a 70’s martial artist with a hairy chest and who is it that choreographs parades like this and these herds hurt our mortgage payments and all is amiss and I have late fees on the card and when quasars explode in order to create shopping malls and colors sacrifice all of their lights to plastic instead of plasma and it’s a killer whale glinting like the very sunlight hitting its sleek back and this ornate world with its words aplenty and spastic strategic droplets for the captured reels reeling and I’d as soon just stay here and watch the nature-features the creatures that keep foraging as the world burns down that squirrel in the burning tree eating acorns like nothing’s happening

and the eyes of the Bengal tigers rotating in orbits around your hands your palms up and out you, the harlequin with your “I didn’t do it” mask and the eyes tend to fetishize your one-man act grand finale on the sheets sand and claw-marks in headboards of waterbeds and what-the-fuck kind-of idea is a waterbed supposed to be? love or a ship or sex or a sickness? my back can’t stomach it. there’s blood in the ruddy coffee-cups. a note never read is wisped out of a window by nonchalant winds a decapitated head in a birdbath grins at that unlikely paper airplane.

And I get this any less than you do in my dada ochre submarine.

All conclusions come to are incon clusive I’ve decided that the sleuths must have been only lucid when scouring the lumina with the 3-legged dogs of their civil intuition . . . stamps & other insurgents dance ‘round foundations of spewing proto-data. my story is the coin you are happy to find for a candy-bar. the feeling you have when you are cleaning out your overflowing desk is my modus apparatus.

I just remembered that ink is liquid that it had slipped my mind also liquifick-like and for so long it seemed to do so as I’ll write making love to you animated or not and a pre- scription for every existing thing ‘cos I’m trying

to make it alright so I’ll cut the cables and ropes holding my hot red feverish head of a body and balloon-like-sail-up slowly all can observe my one last regret as if I were culturally-significant martyr which I’m not but name the summer after me and spraypaint the monuments with accoutrements and use a secret glyph that’s only been over-used for nobler purposes for I remind you that ink is actually just a simple liquid, like our blood, just an elixir of coursing

“Poetry didn’t tell me not to play with toys” Frank O’Hara meat-pies! cheddar! my lover choreographing Stravinsky for a recital as i write on loose leaf paper! one good thirty-minute sit-com! endless rum and beer! oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies! stoned and then-some! I never started smoking! Japanese fighting fish floats in his own wavering stylishness! I just had sex too! I didn’t bounce that worrisome check! Chinese delivery is on the way! Mongolian beef and Li Po Mein! Plum duck! satisfied dissatisfaction. Shelton looks good in my hat. Ghazal shows me how to make the coyote call! It’s Friday night! 10-17-1997. videos of motorcycle wrecks and exuberance! staying in with winter encroaching on all sides like a brigade of stiff sore nipples! I told Frank that chameleons aren’t neurotic; they don’t know what color they are ever! i got the keys to the cities and cigarette machines, that is, if anyone here is interested. no more South American pot-brownies but I have the entire Japanimation collection on cue so let’s fake it. gypsy- living but no Bohemian. actually never that close to either but romancing both. found a ten-dollar bill this afternoon in laundromat and this is my life . . .

. . . my illustrious life . . .

With Olson and Homer and Melville says he’s leaving.

I hurl poisonous mud-pies towards all friends and enemies. I am always harmless and well-meaning and it kills me.

And I went to the hospital where there was Queen Ann’s Lace in the ditches outside and doctor Patterson was reclining on his side and while there the nurse couldn’t find a vein and then I turned green when she passed out a proper footnote, that so I did it myself and laughed even more always filling vials with my souls where’s my donuts and free pop I screamed and someone came with a bandage some iodine and a can.

Is moo the opposite of ohm, or it is the same? cooed the harangue.

Kleinzahler says.

“ . . . and Joe is drinking again . . . “ yet, Conoly replies,

“in the night damp there was nothing to look at”

Hourglass in a Sandstorm

A Guide to the Sand Hissing Abyss

Strange configurations, bleached flags, blank sheets of paper, half-finished maps unaccounted for. Unsuccessful para-sailors. This albino appears from a dying sandstorm with his parasol and spits out an ice-cube.

They will never believe it back at the regime’s boardroom.

This cubed inch of quickly extinct oasis. This Marco Polo crossing the desert with a poorly equipped lacrosse team and they heard the sand booming and were frightened.

He thought these to be the sounds of demons. I was there, aye, myself but never put much thought into it other than faith in that there must be a logical explanation for the booming. It is always just holistic, if we can feel it.

Still, I have to carry a banner and beat these drums on every commission.

I have always pitied dreamers with their superstitions and such flighty employers they make.

demolitions expert and we were the detonators awaiting action-flicks and enough of the inter-webs to be the better networker or the fly that escapes the lacewing in a meteor-shower of data an asteroid belt and passing the griot with his dreadbraids on a bicycle who is searching through discarded books in the gas-masked catacombs of hovering trash-city and these things I saw in the highway’s gully: shards of a windshield, curls of a fender, other artifacts of impact, a silvered dime retrieved

(a 1995), a marble (cat’s-eye), a shred of what had to have been a porno-mag, an unidentifiable dead animal, a receipt (home entertainment center, tampons, one BIC lighter, all totaled at $275.23), an ant tribe, an idea attempting to become some other kind of roadsign galvanizing for me. because I had found them, these things were all mine. to be an all-terrain vehicle, an autonomous earth released from its shackles of inertia and orbit, a world with words my populace, colonies of thronged symphonies, a star nursing its wounds after its fall,

Icarus on bike-wheels, churning spokes towards tropical suns, a predator loving my victims to death, a Mafioso of ideas coming to collect paydirt and cram a barrage of sound down your collar. to be a thief-priest de-robed in the holy squalor of the martyr, the sexiest,

the hang-ups, the receivers, the translators, the opiated masses and to let my depositions kudzu around the monuments and their pedestals.

I would be a captured detonation, an oxymoron of unlimited energy for all to see at a tourist attraction. worship me in permanent pink cyclones of marble. regale me in the maelstrom of sound. I squeezed this poem from a roadside stone. you can get blood from a rock. I’m a good aim. don’t take your hardhats off. it’s these sites all around us that are dangerous.

rocket scientist they lied there’s no music of the spheres no timpani’s of Big Bangs to scatter out theorems to be gathered up later by the basket-minded and kites will always function as well in inner or outer space always perfectly fine with or without us or wind-machines as the Victorian fans himself by the Victrolla impressing a feminist-duchess enough to give him that grant which will help to isolate the gene that made her nose so bent, and though we be fathers of the formulas, the mind’s continents seem unenslaveable and are their own forays surrounded by snafu sting rays and great white noise sharks and it all mutilates into magnificence and the kite stretched from a scroll-piece of a genius’ scalp and framed with the bones of his pelvis meanders about the orbit of a Jupiter’s moon and a mathematician, astronomer, gentleman, or a poetic buffoon with passes to the planetarium will become at times high-falootin’, but still if an entire shipment of fireworks was placed beneath the last space shuttle’s launching pad, everyone at a distance with their monocles and binoculars would exalt in the blast

and then moments later fade into something less than boredom, something akin to the non-entity of a constantly active and functional

modem, and I’m an explorer looking through culture for

that fireworks-display that doesn’t fade so fast in the mind as it does invariably

in the sky. pens are poor mine-detectors, or so I hope. you see, I have designs of one day lighting up the sky.

a construction worker’s poem on the void

The difference between the void and the that-which-seeks-to-encompass-all is desire hiding inside a question-mark’s curve.

Asbestos and steel-wool torn from walls and poisonous are allegorical fibrous sinews for our testimonies and fears. We all must insulate.

I hold the divining rod over the nothingness and it still trembles violently in the living room. Lead and radon visages. What it means to fall through a floor of a work of genius, only to look back up through its trapdoor at a rack of caged and ragged alabaster ribs. If fame equals death, then we are all prematurely infamous.

After seeing how neighbors are built, I’ll starve my loves into shanty-towns and shacks of anonymous lives. Following the blueprints, the interior parchments of our heart revealed and never reveled in makes me want to be a ninja on Thanksgiving. These houses lined up like Stalin’s victims. The stars align to fade in history’s braid.

And as always, on the one side: our materials. On the other: our intent. And then the middle where it gets ugly. This is the ugliest of it: ions choosing tropes. Your gravity

rapes you daily and you challenge it. Fine. Stride onto the scaffolding and walking forth no matter when it ends. Tool-belts and lunch-pails.

And suddenly, this particular wage knows. And what expectancy ‘s hour is is knowing this. I desire to become forgetfulness. Not forgetting, no, I want to be forgetfulness itself in its holiness.

Devoid. Fibers of asbestos, steel-wool, plate-glass, steel-struts. What do the contractors suggest can insulate the void here? What exists between the walls we exist betwixt always transfixed? Nothing can shelter a quantum wanton-ness. And no body for very long encompasses. Desire adores homeless-ness. I can’t quit my job. Nothing can shelter quantum loneliness. No body for long encompasses. Desire adores homelessness. So, I have become the window seen through, seen out of when there’s absolutely nothing to see, for once, happily. When the horizon is as flat and devoid as it looks, for once, finally, when there is no land left to build on and when we take to perpetual roads and vacations with full pay all across the board these new destinies without enmity all these amnesties and amenities and when the monads focus on one structure, I will gladly hand over my tools to you and let you take any impending contract if you are just not ready for Paradise.

inventor with his patent pending for the life of me I can’t find replacement parts for my galapozipotron in any mail order catalog or cyber-cafe’ and though I’ve even through various planetary metal processes and other esoteric apparatus reduced it to the sum of its parts the galapozipotron seems elusive in its repair and so amoebically indecisive in its function why, when the ambassador and his entourage of concierges observed its fine stream-lined, yet as of late inadequate (by its own standards) zipotrons they too, although aghast, were aware that something was amiss even as they stood in awe and quite impressed at how it brushed my teeth, salted two-hundred pounds of pork, and groomed a camel all at once, and this was just the morning’s agenda by brunch the galapochronzipotrous had already makeshifted a scenic villa from red clay and fish bones hardening in the sun under its many magnifying lenses, and its cameras were capturing several backdrops for its archives in small cubby-holes beside samples of nautili. corpora. and pyrites yes, this particular galapoziprotein was some glass, stucco, ivory, steel-girder, hinge, silicon, seaweed, balsa-wood, petunia thing to be seen and pondered upon, still, my difficulties had always resided in the mass-production if the thing, and now, by lunch discussing it with the Dalai Lama we then observe the trusty galapo (for short) using its forceps to remove a scorpion from harm’s way and I am then reminded by my host that this invention (whose prototype was the now obsolete hemisaperidifickozoid) immediately eradicated any use for

the Flying Carpet, the Colossus, the Hanging Gardens, belly-dancers, and sent into hopeless unemployment all of the noble shoe-shiners and lamp-lighters of the world.

But I am just a lowly inventor and where does responsibility fall or lie that the galapizaparticularatron could not use its myriad dustpan to efficiently dispose of the shattered fragments of it?

And then some unknown matron replies, “well, it falls upon you, the inventor of this wonder.” and then, with unprecedented grace and candor, the galapozipotron fell upon her in mid-curtsy and landed in slow-motion upon the silk of her lap as a single peacock feather.

A Cobbler Lost in the Badlands

Being that we are the potentiality of dimensions to come let us set out to sea compass-less. Waves and dunes, latitudes and longitudes. All of our efforts before have amounted to the platitudes of perfecting preservatives.

Even a dead man’s garden will continue to grow, but what may grow there is ever wilder than any human hand could plant. Fingernails and manes, runes and omens. If there is an All-Knowing Eye, it shall remain shut until there is something altogether new to be dissected.

We were not made in God’s image; we were made to wield his eyesight.

The heart is not an autoclave. When crossing a river, we muddy the water.

And here all water is sacred water.

As every celestial body in the Universe, inscribed into the Micro and Macro Book of Verses, corresponds to my own

flesh-encompassed dust,

I walk under stars as proud as a drawn sword.

I am filled by this life as a well in a rainstorm overflowing long after the tribe of its diggers has migrated, been decimated.

The only way to cross the desert is on foot. And so Hermes on his wings wore boots.

The mail gets here in time, in time to requisition a fertile iris, the last mandala for all of us.

Mandalas for all of us, athapoovidals petals and eyelashes dunes and ocean-floors.

Insignias in powder. Vortices in typhoons.

I was never apprenticed to mending wings, but, in this wilderness, one must make passage for all amends.

Traveling salesman of airplane engines

Centuries have passed since I began my seasonal sojourn in the rain forest. Since I took those days off, they were my last. As does an angel know, employed on an airplane-engine assembly-line, a revelation must be imminent, a retirement.

Explode or emote. We are all religious here, and crosses become light worn ‘round one’s throat. Appraise or affidavit. A paralysis of effective paperwork leaves us all happy to build airplane-engines. Once, over this town, a hallowed weather-balloon hover-crafted like a halo.

For a while it avowed the solstice. It meant something in particular that maybe we didn’t. Like sounds of arbitrariness. A wary weariness. Either way, it was launched as anything always is. We took solace in it. Poets wrote that “will-o’-the-wisps weep with light,” and,

“heaven and hell, who will ever tattle-tale on Ourobouros?” It’s just as well that all our hoaxes were penultimate sooth and that citadels were built after burying severed tongues of the seers. The engine-factory had to be preserved, at all hoaxes. We knew about heaven, hell, east, west, south, north, sunset, twilight, sunrise, dawn. We wanted to make it simple with clubs and stones. However, the engine had been invented. The scam went over smoothly until the first eclipse, even after we insisted on a certain dualism despite periodic tables and quick bullets. I’ve agreed to one position at this wheel of gold-diggers, fortune-hunters, and ambulance-chasers. I’ve agreed

to surprises in life, like scorpions under whippoorwills, phosphorous clouds surrounding nite-lites, etc. Hell, I check my boots for scorpions every morning, and I leave the light on when I sleep. Some place coins on their eyelids to sleep fastest. Pilgrims will march for years to witness the petrified thumb of a long-dead saint. That is what my dreams of the airplane-engine factory are like. They test-fly constantly, like a sleeping-sickness, a narcoleptic cryptophrenic experience.

I laugh at the pilgrims amazement and they are amazing; we all desire to pilot certify. It’s amazing, we laugh. Anorexic, adolescent, and androgynous enough, but will I ever get the job? Death is so photogenic, like a teen-model. Fate fears something altogether different in her own rearview-mirror. I’d just as soon join the papacy and make a hitchhiker pilgrimage myself.

Back then, when I slashed my trapeze wires and fell upon the czar, the crowd became so riotous with applause that i had to kill the rectors with my bare hands and escape across the Badlands in my leotard fighting lepers without any assistance from the underground or the Bedouins. Things pacified without any subversive administration, thanks.

I’m happier now than those weather reports that work out. I’ve since found gainful employment. I’m in the grindstone business in a town with a nose-less populace.

An elbow-grease factory in a village of convalescents. I’ve found my niche, lucky for my constituents. An airplane crash-landed into the forest canopy full of contraband day-before0yesterday. It was my lucky day! Once I was an angel, now I will be winged again! I am so glad that I came here with my carpetbags full of wares, full of pre-fab pyramids ready with some assembly acquired to begin civilization anew.

carbon and silicon

Escapes, escapades, Epics of apexes of it.

No shit we did our best To expend Desire’s secret

Weapon, which was too succinct for The bodies given. Enmesh me with

That exoskeleton we all said, that moxy So into this proxy-existence I will weed. Sound will not satiate Any more span than light

Will. Drums pounding in the desert. Our own devices. Silicon and water make a gel That resounds under dunes. Absorptions, radiations. The speed we run at is what is called

Mankind. I wonder how That works into the equation. A star had to die To make you. A zero to a one.

The chances of it, roulette On periodic tables. Life chooses its oxymorons. Artificial intelligence is the town drunk.

All of this becomes a pursuit of gold, lies Of star-wombs. Amazing odds squandered, landscapes

Of spent light-bulbs outside of Vegas. Landfills of light-bulbs making mountains outside of Las Vegas. In this lottery of highways, not slots, in this slut Of maybes, your life, your wrist-vein, your tongue

Lashed to pistons, cogs, combustors, sprockets. We are stars’ mirrors in the dockets. Your name is a limp thing hidden in the small of your back.

But it is a screw holding down a firmament you cry.

It’s still too early to deploy time capsules; Trust me on this one. I am the fuel

Too knowledgeable of an impending launch

Postcard concerning our hero

Leaving the Taj Mahal He was said to have heard the cry Of a roc or a cockatrice.

He was quite chimerical, but he was not Disturbed, regal of genes; i.e.: Stephen Marcel and Doris Day, say, He could have been a different sort of cowboy.

His former dog, Napoleon, Winced not at Geneva (the other guy’s dog), nor did our hero, While brandishing the exhaust pipe Of a Volvo screaming, or, exclaiming an ‘ahem’ with flare(guns):

“To whom, sleeping before the altar, Urizen in a vision thus answered!”

And so to the aisle of Elba we traipse To get some free snack-cakes, promotionary giveaway Sponsoring the historical significance of piniatas. Elba’s cute in her clerk-smock.

Americans should be proud of her, Ur of America. It's said of him transexually that Hermes Trimegestrius Bombastus Beaucephalus Artichoke Jordan, Such as Balzac, or, even Pontopiddan

Had lots of friends that were gay or Geisha. Life, whatta. Happy was the state of affairs at soiree’s especially. No one ever asked the cardinal question, “what do cardinals do.”

When our hero had had (quite clenched the idea of had, that is) Too many beers, and David Callan and Aeneas with his Trojans Would arrive. Our hero’s first book, composed

With the Ouija-board trembling like a smidgen of luck in a sandbox Was an epic entitled: Confessions of a Fish’s Soul, a Transgression, To be followed by, Fly-Fishing Despite Jaundice, and To Hell with the Theory

Of the Method of the Novel (for this latter tome, our hero Was nominated Nobel). Green being His favorite color, off to Iceland with Joe Melnibone Bjorkson he went.

The narrator can’t read a compass To know his ass from a North pole in the ground. Even though the blacksmith tags along with a meteorite anvil

And leads, waits. So many rickety side-kicks. In Iceland, On the steppes of broken dolmen foreheads, we found:

Skeletons of electric eels miles inland Broken samurai swords hilt-cleaved One cigarette lighter encased in amber One application for a full-time Dadaist position An ash-bark skein with a recipe for sourdough-starter inscribed A woman’s name in the snow that would not melt A grail we tossed away A theory of hero, a treatise of legend Disclaimers in the pine needles

We found Forgotten-ness (thanks to…)

2nd card the ragtag man stayed built his home upon a grave house like a beast with two backs his father sleeps under his hearth

3rd card love lies like a beast with two backs upon a beast hardly having a spine to speak of. The aisle ends. There is a guilded cot on an island that no man ever sleeps in. The cottages thatch their roofs across archipelagos. Storm season brings derelicts, Possible mates.

In this cornucopia is the banal signature. Rain speaks to our tent-tops with soothe. No more guides, only an abundance with

4th card

no capacity to fail it and matter somehow. There are nine muses and I can spell their names correctly. Though I can’t navigate the cosmic vicinity of this desk. The next eclipse wipes it clean; blinded orphans run across cobblestones For staring too long. The hero has tired of codes; he won’t send Zip.

“and I never buy umbrellas, ‘cuz there’s always one around”

Tom Waits, troubadour and the rain of fire and it’s not judgment day yet and I’ll give you my bones and it’s not judgment day yet and so when it’s exhausted leaving town with a rolling stone you bathe in formaldehyde and wait to be dissected like a toad and third-graders smoke cigars better than you and you can’t skateboard anymore and you are almost only twenty-six and yet you are still a bad-ass somehow

‘cuz the timeless muse has her skirt hung out to dry and the feminists are cutting the line as a herd of randy bulls run by and i’m a kidder wasn’t born in the back of a taxi on Pearl Harbor’s anniversary and didn’t take my gruel lightly really, the privileges of the rich are procurable enough with a blackjack or safe-combination of the correct words but the only brown-nose I want is a mustache, which in my case would be red being a Scotch-Irish Cherokee Milford being only a terrorist of intent, hell-bent

but not a bomb or a bomber though i wouldn’t mind being either so be it the sword of my soul is always sharpened on a star with Tom Waits I’ll play cards and kick around the ashes of a Pope gin and tonics at 10 a.m. and I’ve had loves and lived a full life already diseases, cancers, operations, warts, carwrecks, conflicts, no wars thank God, pin-worms, dislocated shoulder summer of 1992 pratfalls, stage-dives, belly-ups, banana-peel-outs every body is a bone machine

I could make you a list of every movie I’ve ever seen as could you for me and so now we have an operable synopsis, a common tongue forgive my sentimentality it’s time to call it a lunch-date when you see me again I will have become the heart of a mountain contained within a mouse what I always was and didn’t know it I’ve wrote it, been able to write broken mandolins, wheelchair spokes, manhole covers, rat-pelts, nasty Valentine’s-day-cards in blurred blue ink

I refuse to get a tattoo until I cross an ocean or until God falls in love me said Tom, but, he was lying

the somnambulist

Such viciousness does not go un-rewarded for long. History, playing backgammon, pauses to recommend a song.

But never to request one. That would be redundant. Irreverent, Everything suddenly wises up, zones out. Down the drain goes a secret:

The universe, or a piece of fried egg. Nights here are as dry as elbows and poker- cards. Words said like shock after carwrecks. The wainscot of my collarbone sags.

No beach beckons. No turnpike. No oracle. No procedures. No gnosticism. A comet is a campfire glimpsed interdimensionally. Always such faith.

Take comfort in these ides under stratospherical shrapnel, take to marching. Cliff citadel off the edge we go.

The sister has sewn Occam’s Razor into the sleeve of Pascal’s bathrobe and tied it shut with a Gordian Knot. That’s it. That’s that.

Shall I surrender to the never-ending abyss of coruscating floor-tiles? Not to mention the googol of cracks in the chiaroscuro.

Crepuscular. There, I said it. Once again language is jealous. Of Man equals Time. Woman equals Space. Vernal Equinox. Lunar Eclipse.

What does an hourglass in a sandstorm know? A nexus of form is the first easy answer. A pearl, an abhorrent grain and its trek through the ages. Everything is as inconclusive as a circle is. We were left to devices; we devised mutant scythes to swath with. Metaphors.

Rusting bayonets, decapitated figurines, charcoaled telegrams, dusty sistrums. There never were garden-times. We always wrote good myths about eating bad fruit.

We have zest, oeuvre. A taste for figs and crab-apples. Flora and nautilus. There was a photo of you standing in the center of the cromlechs.

You looked so young and vibrant. The curator was caught fondling and fumbling,

sleeping with your image. Security found this morning that all of the exhibits and paintings had been arranged. You’ve been sleepwalking through the museum again yet, no one will admit to these crimes.

saying goodbye to mike’s Tap, Iowa City

Our hero died soon after he’d quit smoking. He got shot. He would have survived had the cigarette case been in his coat pocket that day. Irony above his heart. Lead got into his heart.

And now there’s no new deals. The old ones are as novel, like robot snakes eating more natural genetically-engineered snakes. And venom falls short of industry because venom can be bottled like soda-pop but only the alchies and snake-charmers are buying.

Someone spraypainted the glass of the trophy case black in here. Lots of step-dads got mad. Wives didn’t laugh. Junior’s hat-propeller spins as tornadoes of nicotine and carbon monoxide writhe above the monochrome furniture.

The bartender drinks eighteen whiskeys and says, “What’s the record?” But that green is as old as the last lark that barfed in here. Two more Old Styles and one more bag of Sour Cream & Onion. Someone says, “What happens when you’re in the throes of passion and then Jeopardy comes on?” No one ever says don’t

stop here, don’t stop. Time for the jukebox, for a simple pocket-change rainbow. Patsy Cline side by side with the Pogues. The Jukebox Continent is where I’d like to go. No one uses 45’s for Frisbees there. Nope.

Why didn’t the acid finish its job on acid-washed jeans? People wear out too tight the damndest strangest things. Knees buckle, and after some belts I sound funny. This isn’t a typical bar. Poem. Hock your pool-cue for a pet ferret. Homeless Hank drinks tonight after some traded pounds of morels he picked.

Aromatic kitchens of my poetry love! Trumpets and reveille’s stitching the moments! Suddenly, I try to imagine what the penises of certain poets must’ve looked like even though I never considered mine too much except during the revision process. It’s enough to make one not a chauvinist or go out and catch twenty-two reasons not to speak of something, or remember what it was like to be twenty-two and stronger than a young pine-sapling. Who is it that speaks of those halcyon days and oaths of double dreams by rivers and mountains playing tennis under some trees with three poems in your keds getting sweaty? Who is it that’s so happy?

When the last pinball machine is crushed for scrapmetal then I will embark for my own private Avalon. Remember as a kid when a chocolate bar was enough to galvanize an entire day except for the lactose-intolerant? You could make such excursions for dead lizards. Swizzle-sticks and space-dust. And now the questions in the mirror being: “Will I age?”

“Is that me?” Am I young again or at least according to an inspirational paperback? Shit, at seventy, we’re all just sphinxes. Riddled with pockmarks.

Deft, daft, daffy, or dumb. Agreeable satellites position here, or crash into oceans. The River Lethe has been bottled out. Here’s to ya! Hells can slow down with this stuff, at times. And hell is an industry to inspire us all. Two Tequila Roses and one Cactus Juice.

Maybe an Ass-Kicker. The mind’s a too-charted mesa plagued under a locust storm of umbrellas that won’t open. Kisses are welcome feedback during the Hendrix from the jukebox. I leave for Arizona tomorrow with a beautiful massage therapist. I’m happy to have known you and all of us, especially that new kid, the one who brings his own pool-cue to a gunfight and always wins.

The one who won’t say goodbye to me.

Wristwatches and auctions of love

You remove your watch at the end of the day as if all of time weighed not at all.

Under radio towers we sit on carpets of tight static watching fruit bats under street-corner lamps, all thanks to the sheetrock, sheets, of plate glass. There are vaults locked at the bases of our tongues but for once this is a chaste combination not to be cracked and we, chased to the city’s borders to abide. Time-biding is our specialty. The swan symbolizes your stamina, and the scarab represents mine. The sun rises dismembered, as a rose encumbered with love. I hear your thoughts like fathom-charges. I seek your depths in foreign rooms.

The only reason I’d cut the line between us was to tie it back together myself. I was wings folded about a violin of a year’s worth of songs unplayed. I’m without arms, you are without legs. Apart

we cannot use our telescope across the cratered moon of desire. On the same day, John Dillinger’s pistol and Napoleon’s compass were auctioned off.

Either one right now could prove useful to us. We could use the radio I, overheard this bulletin on, but the power is out, and so we rely on conversations wondering how we could ever possibly cross this Rubicon? By trimetrogon, or echolocation? Dislocated captain, I love your elliptical mistakes, you always leave scorched feathers in the medicine cabinet.

And I take them. And I take them to places where nothing flies.

And where these flies hover, where these sands sift constant as wings in any heaven where the clocks dangle constantly from kite-strings

I long to shoulder your days like a puppet who finally has humility.

Take away the hourglasses and smash them on cornerstones as the auctioneer keeps his double-time-vocal-digital rap.

The espionage of my words is unraveling your wristwatches.

I become a door that opens both ways at once for once. A Duchamp.

I become your eyelids in a maelstrom of flicker-films.

The only way out of any of this is to stop time itself with an untraditional mantra.

That scroll was as wispy and nonchalant as the bird we caught and caged in the clock. As feathers, as ash, as time itself was naught.

I shot the compass with the pistol. I cracked all the clock-faces with its handle. I grabbed you and threw you over my shoulder.

And I didn’t know when or where I was going but it felt like I could call it Strength.

Departure credo

I am forlorn In my divestiture Of tar and feathers.

All the sailboats are gone. Everything’s a motor-powered Motor.

Abandon’s caviar Is savored.

Who’ll collect the larva Of the stars, of the what Could save us?

Buddha’s playing the jukebox again. Popsongs unspecified. Eerily Not moody.

Moderation never advocates Sitting there too long meditating.

We all know that a flag Stabbed into the heart Can’t kill the aboriginal spirit.

You must trade with the natives Gold, liquor them up, steal their horses, Share blood-vows, get to know their women.

Points of interest and weakness: Fear, Greed, Sex, Pretty colors on detergent boxes.

Still this is all too simple. I’m to give plasma tomorrow For my own inequities.

And so, the skeleton keys Are lost to opening the heavens.

All this exists: ballads, bouquets, brocades, And balustrades. There’s even some gold in our piss.

I am forlorn in a vest of your letters. There are stamps of every country across my back.

There are two different kinds of legends. I can’t read either of them.

Inspirational Paperback Rations he was an addict before needles or referees and in trains that only stop when voices crack or accumulate while he waits for the sovereign and of course the sovereign comes every time of course he does but we all wait in the kingdom of not-so until wait-dom sets in

I sat in constant amazement in a pool of anointment until the red-tape spiral of bureac came down to dry me with a martini and all slobbers are soaked up by the mauve sponge of tisk, tisk, and terrible

I was never that prominent anyway, nor was I ever a prime mover and I wait for the king-architect of mazes amidst the amendment of self itself and self is a hedge that eventually prunes itself for desire’s ire has deed already and decided an aspiring catalyst that would dream Americanly with or without constant production of paperback novels those inspirational ones that funded or not, on travel-fund or grants, there in their hotels, these dry aspirin, nasty towel, fast-food-napkin, and antiseptic-soap is all that I have left as I am the hero facedown in a magazine with a migraine and will I be awakened by the wake-up call that is my epic?

a book that fits in a pocket a small Universe pamphlet that’s my next project.

Pagoda

If I remember, the floors were lacquered black dragon scales.

The molting of them becomes a summer house. The soup made from the lotus simmers. It will heal us in this new age just like any other otherworldly tapestry. A justice of gardens surrounds our constellations of antiquities. Indiscernible and quaint. As a Santa Fe landscape, there’s more iron in our words than in any infrastructure. A constant red, wrinkled shirt on a kitchen table. A starched lapel duels with a straight-pin as a button with four eyes looks on. Slow- motion doesn’t ever realize that it is slow. Domesticities in hotel-rooms as a famous comet flies over.

Omens, un-noticed, the heart is a Trojan Horse or a nectarine on a sofa. I’d rather be stricken with a well-wrought word than my own silent sexual surrender. Or murder by the wrought-iron fence and rice-paper walls with thorned hedges for embellishments and our flanks were marked as by our owners, if I remember, and the guitar was covered in black lacquer and no one dared to play it. If I remember, we stayed in and it rained a finite forever. If I’m correct through this mist, only this incident was misconstrued as inconspicuous. Most days spent without words in the Jacuzzi. Strawberries surrounded molding fecund and sensuous.

Our summer home: Baba Yaga’s hut. A Hanging Gardens made of rubber-bands, skint-knees, splintered stilts, basically a tar-and-feathered trailer in a mudlot.

It’s always what you make it; the Eighth Wonder of the World inevitably postulates the ninth. And progress must be so-so. I should have never quoted the tour-guide, but, the booklet seems to think that this was its first monument, and I tend to agree with it.

We’ve come to resorting to resorts. We build resorts in the middle of deserts. Cities in salt-lakes out of some superstition that this will keep them from their salty fate. Great prehistoric palm-trees surround our adobes. They are all genetically-engineered breeds. Only reptiles can survive here. Can you lay eggs and golden ones for this age, I mean, this millennium? Can credit-lines grow on trees?

You know the answer to this. And the palm-trees sentinel the neon as symbols of this eon. Under the merciless sun the day before a war begins, you’ll find a credit-card receipt beside a lump of coal wrapped in butcher-paper with an epigram scrawled on it.

Rick-shaws probably trot past the wigwams. Maps burn where I lay my heads these days.

manifest destiny

At some point having nothing left to lose means having no one left to lose it to. A whole century of loss passes like a fart through a line at a deli. And with each autonomous line like kites’ twine tangling with weather balloons, the fun always mingles with mixed blessings. Arriving on the hunched backs of meteorologists are the ensuing next year’s predictions. We all file in filing for bankruptcy, with each prodigy making his demands for customized all-points bulletins. There’s just no time for there not to be emergencies. The Emergency Broadcast System has been lying in waiting.

As ribbons and banners unfurl, the day begins like a nurse who can’t get the I.V. in. No matter what storm, there are always accolades over appetizers under rocketing satellites. This is the plebian land of casting extras.

We must surrender to the majestic phalanx. That once and for all pristine phalanx. The stargazers will keep the machinery moving. The sidewalk gazers will keep the machinery moving. As simple as assigning names, things all seem to snap together just like plastic napkin-holders, or compound fractures. Each hovering cloud reminds us of voting. For some regions, paranoia is the only pathway to democracy. According to every grass-roots shaman’s press release, snakes are patent-like. There are no trademarks on any of nature’s creations.

Begin the conversions. Stamp them. Execute. Move product, said the weather-storm in the desert. It lapped its preternatural

tongues about the Leviathan we had erected. That Leviathan, that Golem of Immovable Chaos in Vegas that we once laughed at as the tourists paid good money to laugh at it. We started everything from crude diagrams, where all good things begin. Before mysticism, all we had were meteorologists (and good riddance). The Golem was born from this and crude complications. We had a theory that always proved us to be perfect in our intent. Like trademarks. I could lay no claims to my most prized possessions.

No logos, no ingots of Golem’s sights were ever set to such horizons. Yet, starstruck, he set out, he sundered, foaming at the mouth. He got spells, our creation did, you see. The first act of indifference happened, apparently. After that there was no one left to lose to with nothing left to lose. Apathy is a marketable commodity.

There is a murderer’s glove in the rain at an ignored crime-scene. The meteorologists say that Loss is not predictable, just learn to blue-screen in what you prefer. The meteorologists fear that this destiny we’ve created is coming home, talking about ozone. Everything went west and it will; it’s only a matter of time.

Families hover over hearths and hovel. The storm bears down and we fabricated it from crude materials, from raw intent. Huge homunculus and what nature gave of itself. Man, oh man. Nothing left to lose but its own kind.

I hold this reckless abandon kindred. I stride like the titans through dinner parties. I call the next day to make my apologies. They always say no apologies necessary. They all have a sense of manifest destiny.

Setting out

I.

It gave us a wide berth. Floodlike existence. There was always a quality of seeping

Mediterranean light. Kegs of honey and olive oil, jellyfish littering the shorelines. Always debris.

What is precarity? An eclipse cracks and eyes stare nonetheless. Opulence?

All of the leaves hit the pavement shaped like crescents she said. The paintings we were considering in our own curvatures and such.

We were trying to invent nets that were compassionate. Idealists.

A divorce of stasis. Who gets which offspring?

Goatheads of Space and Time. On each side the nickel displays the face of Copernicus as it spins in a toss.

Blood is not enough anymore to seal anything.

We are hemophiliacs of the soul.

Virgin souls, encusp yourselves with lumens.

Everybody gets cut up with lasers; it’s a new religion.

The amphorae have been brimming over with spirit or far too long,

and the engineer’s battalion is not cutting the fractal’s squirt of mustard anymore at all. A coil of metrical error. Apologies are digits away from holocausts or holograms. What dimension gives us passage? The eye just saw itself. Justice, as if.

The postcards reach home reliably, or have, at least, up until this point.

And because of least-resistance we’ve never stopped migrating.

The eye surveys. While migrating, is there anything other to consider than the emblazened horizon?

Just keep riding the blood of the flood-like existence.

II.

The study of exotic birds is as good of an excuse as any.

Ga-lap-it-goes-- the sound of gentle waves upon the rocks.

It really gives a man some time to think, or to venture towards uncharted lands with plagiarized affidavits in his hands. Fates like ice-cream cones, conical and canonical. Time-concerned.

What ways of thinking that die as they were made. What waves, what odds and ends. That’s either perfect or ridiculous.

Nomadic drones proned to charming dooms. Shit,

dice-crafters die sometimes without ever once rolling craps

III.

My face in the rearview-mirror is Roulette when I look at it. Here today.

Gone temporal. Egrets fly over a flock of regrets.

Exotic when they land, such beautiful legs juxtaposed by murk and marshland.

A thought sinks in like a cigarette dropped on terrycloth, constancy of melting butterscotch.

I’m lost and being followed by cops and I have the secret of this land and I’m a foreigner, a rare bird.

My parchments of painted egrets are considered contraband here. And I’ve got a trunk-load of these things.

Kamikaze on an interstate as I compose my maps upon firecrackers, the leaflets for the Cosmos, these notes, a combination hidden in my left eyebrow, or in a certain freckle (this briefcase of melanin, this genetic uncooperative operative).

Unlock me with a destination. A place with no birds, no roads. A new world.

One unleavened, deaf, mute, and never made love to by my whoreful mind, not just yet.

IV.

Sketchpads and binoculars. Canteens and staves. Almanacs and divining rods.

Our umbrellas marking the boundaries

of the New Worlds when we need them to rain. In any other case we have spears or spares.

If the world is flat, then, logically it must be bent to our needs.

Entrenched. It’s in a captain’s journal. The lost coordinates. All is accomplishable, eventually.

It gives to us a wide berth, and so, an open invitation. Every day the horses seem to understand what we intend to do.

Every day they are more apathetic, biting their bits, trudging like exotic birds through deep muck.

Santa Fe of zeppelins and postcards of mesas and galleries of namesakes forgotten in New Orleans of centauric bulldozers of three-dollar domestic beers of burrito breakfasts of

Georgia and Georgia O’Keeffe. A desert, a photo, a kiss on a mountain of copper then three strikes of lightning on an effigy mound of paintings of mastodon skulls a Sphinx on a butte purrs nomenclatures wax-monkey candles, novelties melting miniature horses carved in hematite wind-up Grim Reapers can’t throw a rock without hitting an exhibit of exhibition, a true terrorist Venus flytrap best breakfast on the map, alchemy of hotel room lovemaking of snowstorm lovemaking a line as true and faultless as a papercut a fault-chasm in the wallet one word freezes the pendulum in mid-swing

did she say “wrong exit?” of fingers frozen ‘round gas-pumps of bad American radio of the heaven of being home in the crook of her shoulderblade anywhere on this planet and that being enough to end any of our poems or enough to begin them.

Postcard from a crashing moon over New Mexico

The magnitude of Constantinople exerted its pull beyond the reach of Orthodoxy. Men will gladly die for golden, glimmering things.

At least there’s some consistency in that. Old news is good news. Pave the roads. Ruse.

Paracelsus, an alchemist, doth say: “If he thinks he is a fire, then man is.” Great works burn from my touch.

I found a magic locket in the aviary, yet I’m afraid to open it (Pandora lies again to Pan).

Love’s not a padlock any more than it is a tulip. Joyous and treacherous. The insignia was made across you with whips. You smiled blood in a dream. Woke to cottonmouth and need for the trick is to fool the space-time continuum by making its planets forget their own stars. Flashback interim.

To us, a Universal Catastrophe is but a leaf crushed under a boot made from pages of books. Isn’t this the Burning Bush?

Suspended animation, paper airplanes, the eternal plight of the marionette.

Cinema and cryogenics. Cameras and sutures of light resplendent.

A soul escaped from a rucksack bought in a pawn shop. Breughel’s or Goethe’s. There’s never any receipts.

“Next day there was a wind and the hovercraft was grounded. I took the noon boat and after six hours I was back in my hotel room at the Hilton.” William S. Burroughs’ last phone message to me.

We are off to the Western Lands officially.

Travelogues are more poetic than anything anthologized that gets read worldwide. Displacement journals with pop-up portals.

Indifferent lost souls in steel fishbowls flying at eighty-five miles-per-hour down tracks parallel-lined. Smart-bombs become mud at exits.

By astrolabe and sextant by odometer and wheel and nights soaked in rain and rum and under a falling sky of the intangible omnipotence of dust-motes under rockets, comets, streaks of angel’s hair and we so clueless to our own immortality we achieve destiny like a waterfall flooding up into itself only to piss-off a river of a bamboo forest epiphany of flutes. We achieve destiny with flippant and fervent metaphorics.

We understand surge. But let’s not throw away the flare-guns yet. The ocean’s lips are tight-stitched ‘round every tongue of wave.

The final punctuation for this particular poem will be an over-gorged full moon in June and then the season of the monsoons.

Looking For Something That Lasts in a Sandstorm

Every line a season ends and in that’s the interim between next’s hunger for the next.

It lasts long enough for a blossom or a star of snow.

No one plays poker for long with Heisenberg or Newton. The moon becomes the sun with this particular wager. I’ll write up the perfect waiver for autumn. our planet forgot its star, now look where we are. Man is built to last. We have harnesses for tsunamis and sandstorms. In a sandstorm, to recite a name is the fusion that makes glass. Impasse:

Only a pillar of salt knows how to survive there. Blake was up to his terroristic tactics again. A dervish using nitric acid and nitro glycerin to complete his engravings. Corrode; there’s a copy of Milton under the tombstone of my head wherever I sleep. Whenever and after doing the laundry, I found ten guitar-picks

I’d been looking for. Something in this life

that’s happened. A vision only as haphazard as mismatched socks. Lot was barefoot when he looked back and she slipped forward through his toes like the cold ash only a hearth knows. An amulet cremated. I’ll look back at summer’s end, feet crackling the first fallen leaves and in my hands. Sun-stroked, veined mandalas shredding. Every line a season ends.

Sands sift for more lines, sieves and grieves. Time belly-dances against the grains. Between each particle is the interim of next’s hunger for the next. In this life that’s something to admire upon.

That particled particular something always happening.

Leaving El Dorado a never-had bin overflowing with has-beens who are all millionaires yet there is no gold left here chandeliers the size of cars surfboards made of lead

no chevaliers in sight ghosts linger about punchbowls cislunar circus distortions spirals pterodactyls and fractals

in hand-mirrors a hangnail cracks a crystal ball an evil eye is in a hole in the wall

lizard skeletons on puppet strings

bee-stings and home-remedies sumac, poison-ivies all used for garnishings Love is biting its own shoulder down to bone

over and over then the leftovers the fountains full of broken aeroplanes

the once terrorists becoming disgruntled bartenders blueprints to convention centers never completed as wallpaper

fingerprints all over History’s still wet paintings, all over the replicas of Flemish masterpieces lunar eclipse, full moon, Friday the 13th, March, 1998

remember this? or any other alignments? a tattered magic carpet the only cloud in the sky

I reach out to hand to you my credentials

as they fly into the mouth of a marble Cupidon

hell, I’ll just call for a cab with bull-horns on its hood and then call ahead to my Siamese twins who are faithful and awaiting

my arrival like an armistice Armageddon

a postcard to a full moon written in golden script has promised it

and the foretold storms in the archaic

oghamics of scars across my arms tell how far I’ve come and how far will I go? and this question is the spirit’s chorus

and home does well to come to me or just as well or may as well come hell and high water to loft it and I’ll reward

all makeshift homes, even golden ones, with prescient presence

I should swear not to go to it my words aren’t signal flares

or bottle-rockets in any Southern tradition nor are they poisonous snakes, I should hope and I’ll then leave

my corsage to grow as I go in the garden here, in my host’s grove amidst the goldenrod

and tiger-lily and may it prosper into fertility even in the moss-cool garden for this is an age whose lords

carve not their names into stone

they don’t know where to carve their names and one wonders if they ever did and what matters

as the stones become metamorphic and igneous

Another dumb Tourist

Talking to a three-headed dog, he ask:

“Is it the Cherub-Bus I’m looking for?”

Three heads nod and bark, “Get on the boat.”

hell

What hell means to me is a cliche title. Hell, what it means to me is a tower that continues to burn on the high horizon that no one ever asks about but me; I’m to catch flames of disdain and the tower burns and burns like Mexican sunsets and excellent salsa-- and what hell means to me is:

no more John Ashbery no more beer no more Liszts for my hungry ears no more jackals and coyotes no more being able to feint Fate with the transcendental-transparent and rampant word-world-whirl

or a few beers-- and gone’s the days of Ginsberg live and train-brakes that can stop at a drop and concordant lives that end in whispers

(they have uncovered everything!)

Under rain-clouds and the hiss of bacon in the pan and what hell means to me is no more half-naked women

don’t we all love half-naked women? and no more gargoyles or feather boas or Mardi Gras beads or extravaganzas of anything else I don’t surreptitiously need just by mentioning like spent shells swept up by barmaids in bad movies in hell who are actually demi-succubae and hell’s got Lenny Bruce Charlie Chapman and Buster Keaton and just because he couldn’t sail and win the World Cup don’t mean that Satan’s not sea-worthy-- and gone are the days when suddenly the entire world would focus on one square inch in the middle of the Atlantic where the Ultimate Salvation was prophesied to go down, terminologically speaking, and then all of a sudden of all, a majestic flag rocket-shot out of that square inch of the sonar-satellite grid-locked square foot of oracular radar pinpoint

and everyone was waiting for that to finally be that and once and for all, but, the flag shot up in a flaming comet-like fart towards some barren planet that didn’t even need

that kind of Hope.

And they all went home as blind as comet’s courses. And they all learnt how to burn up faster.

How to burn: faster, up.

for a lover of a dog from hell (postcard from Cerebus) tomorrow I go to a wedding a-wielding my lapels starched and clean everything smells over-vacuumed too freshened-up in my radius and the smell of cheap cologne. I’m up at three-nineteen a.m. thinking of old Charles Bukowski no matter what you say about that bastard he’d have said it about himself first, that bastard isn’t that funny? and the roominghouse madrigals are real. his gut had things scrawled on the inside of its walls snub-nosed shotguns aren’t as easy as snobs and snub-noses there were worms in his lines; he wrote his way in and out of hell by constantly writing about hell with some freakish glee and a hard or not pecker, depending on the myth of the author. he even wrote a novel of the postman’s plight; could Whitman have snubbed him? hell no. so I’m going to a wedding tomorrow, free food and booze; I have no problem whatsoever, no hells-- and I don’t get into brawls and I don’t have a horde of whores and I’m not famous and I don’t (usually) drink a twelvepack a night--

(anymore) and so I go to the wedding of someone I remotely know of two people to a thousand of them, I mean

I must be a made man I live a protocol life here. hell is becoming more and more fashionable, its fiery runways and three-headed dogs and bystanders at weddings fast-talkers always wear the same suits on their sleeves; they are all gate-keepers or trying to give you their card to sell chain-link fencing or lattice-work, but, no matter what you say about Buk, he’s probably already said it insulting to someone else in “no uncertain terms”-- he has the self-realization of simply being raunchy him and can you imagine how whore-fucking, blood-pissing, beer-drinking, wine-guzzling, Hamsun-reading, Americanly rolling around in puke-stained life and loving it that that is? I can. and in many ways it is rancor and in many ways it is stupendous

A Ransom Note Read Aloud and Accompanied By Harp

Ontologically speaking, we’re all orphans. So, stop your bitchin’.

You must have the sense of humor of a one-armed juggler forced at gunpoint to play the xylophone in a prison orchestra. The only way out is to learn to play the harp. Probably a great escape.

I’m here to tell you that I wouldn’t know, as would admit most virtuosos. Still, catastrophe’s never begun to malaise me, nor entrapment, I guess I’m old-fashioned. A priori is not always the hierarchy it can be cracked up to be or not to be. Boring, isn’t it?

That same old xylophone. Ontologically speaking, I may as well be your parent, right now, if you’re reading. Let this be an excuse for you then, for every hair upon your head there exists a harp-string.

I’ve only come here to this white expanse to. It’s why I have. A page, or an instrument of no proficiency.

I’ve come here to kidnap my own parents. My composers. The poem is over for you. I’ve just done it.

postcard to my brother

for Jacob and Sol

I’ll meet you on the shores of the Yellow River where Chang Tse-Tuan shed his own blood to paint a beggar.

I’m forever your brother.

1,000 monkeys with 1,000 laptops will eventually type the Bhagavad Gita. I’m a jackanapes composing odes to baboons. You have the telepathic power of a photojournalist on mescaline. Do you feel me writing to you under the palms of a ventriloquist moon while you recline in your hammock as creatures crawl through the Rousseau-thick foliage of your undertakings? The tundra hides eyes of borealis. Tigers and starlets.

This seems to be a night of cowboy antics and bacchanalia if there ever was one.

There are such fields of ganglioned brambles in my cortex that a minuscule centipede the size of a quark could not navigate such treacherous passage.

The Sword of Damocles hangs above my bed; I sleep soundly always. Do you still dream of our father? Of derby-winners? His gait of ice? Can you see his hands cracked

‘round an axehandle. I’ve seen the charioteers

making love to their war-horses at high noon in order to ensure bloody victories. History doesn’t record such undertakings, so

I’ve taken certain measures for posterity. Crimes. In ink I’m safe where my tongue would otherwise be severed. I’ve worn veils to infiltrate the chambers of Ukifune. Rilke says, “Love should not be nurtured with grain, but with the mere possibility of being.” Man does not live by bread and bullets alone, then. There’s no difference here between the mosaic and the myriad. I’m always the aliquant to the universal equation. I guess that you, my brother, are the remainder. Ukifune, my beloved, has her hair done into braids as long as rivers. Those black rivulets in the palace of Heian in the center of the labyrinth while looking through magic tapestries into other worlds. I’ve important business at the crossroads, in the fields of blood-songs and whipping-posts. In this world of hashish and harems,

I await Hassan’s word. I’ve been given a sword filled with scorpion-venom. We shall win the Crusades. Many knights have fallen to us, one way or the other, by seduction, or scimitar. Don’t worry, I’ll be home in time for the full steaming samovar.

And this bloodbond to you from your brother who’s awaiting alms upon

this Yellow River

Postcard From Anonymous

Diseased presidents in fields of hemp with wooden teeth lying to one slave, impregnating another.

The country has an itch it can’t scratch with militia. Secrets cover the soil like permanent sleet.

Invest in bacteria, incense and compu-virtual stuntmen. Strut around the sets of the marketplaces holding your pieces of facades, manufactured tailfeathers and willow-the-wisp shake-up globes. I’ll remain under mailbox posts tinkering with your life like movie rental late-fees that pay some future president’s salary.

Postcards From Weasels written on a postcard found by the River Lethe

I’ve forgotten your address. upon reading your name

I’m cold as week-old paper-cuts purpled during winter in Iowa weasel says to the Starry Night

“your light does not hinder my kills, so at night, the stars must acknowledge all weasels” to Jacob and Cally, of my litter

I broke my easel to build the mainmast

I’m coming home, I promise.

I saw one more last thing

And I shattered. The glass boomerang returned To a hand of brittle glass

The vision circumlocuted Executed its original intent; These fingers could not grasp

It. Quite an impact, that. A breakdown. I’ve learned to be stern and taciturn With either prey or prayers.

I’ve thrown missiles from my lips Into the stratosphere, like a cardinal, Like all pariahs. Distinguished throat-singers Armed with lies of nothing aforementioned.

What was as important as the points of the compass? This Mecca of truth at my disposal, this projection That always returns full circle? Illegible, unusable.

I reside in the summer condo of the possible. The paintings hover above the hinterlands Like holograms. It’s the season to sojourn. Shutters shatter. Invasions of light.

The easels never faltered under our opuses. Our misspellings were taken as the freedom of rivers Not the destruction of dams, not small town floodings.

We can’t nevermind the implications, though we can Misplace the footage. Have our souls always been flung So haphazardly into rainstorms? Who cuts the path through? We remain dry no matter what the downpour.

It all came back to me, all that I had intended to stab somewhere And stay away. Fatal in us is what gives and what gives in To reconfiguration. I saw one more last thing in the shattering:

Plethora.

Treatise on Excursions Within One’s Own Temporal and Corporal Body

I’m a vacation everywhere I walk and things legends are made of Velcro to me a trumpet sounds in the jungle but you won’t find its origin the mind uses sonar the heart has binoculars we are all nocturnal on vacations a pigeon coos it agrees with me in a palm tree

I burn my bare feet on Arizona asphalt

I’m vacationing on Mercury or may as well be or on LSD, or my own candor and apparently the best way to out-run Death is to walk towards him for a while with your last handheld breath my mind has no Feng Shui it’s in disarray, a cracked sidewalk carrying frantic ants next to a carwreck and what has been called the sleight of hand of the mind

that rests on the nose of a still pond

I take small vacations from being says one being to one state of being to one corresponding to what is written and always plagiarized in the Supposition Deposition that we all signed by speaking but the ink was ether and we were dizzy with scribblings but we are always notarized molecularly, cellularly and our code speaks through the temporal and corporal bodies every moment a breath bequeaths its courageous next and I am now coming back home now to my flesh and I say: Thank you, O bodies and bodices for teaching my soul with your worldly ways.

Versus Verses racing against books, versus cars, faces, disease versus fumes, exhausts, steams, vipers of vapors versus concrete, loose screws, piles of paperclips contracting a linguistic virus a Tourette’s syndrome of the vilest category versus lyrics verse with divine or not doggerel versus phantoms, gods, voodoos, pantheons, bad Tarot card readings bad I-Ching throws, bad poker bluffs, terrible cinema of mondo films, unlucky cribbage and die-throws resulting in cops or shallow plots, chain-letters for Chrissake! there are mountain-fighters, cloud-fighters, river-fighters, canyon-fighters, with weaponry of rappelling, skydiving, kayaking, spelunking, snorkeling for oceans, roulettes of all sorts amidst bulleting sharks and hands-down verdicts versus pens, oil-paints, bracelets, boils, scabs, and our flesh poised against sex, headaches, shin-splints, alcoholism, kidney-pains, neck-sprains, etc. versus podiums, professors, ball-parks, pylons, computers, stats, data-chunks, probabilities, and there are ancient temples crumbling grain by grain by the nanosecond and the minute minutes of our lives dissipating like the slight aftertaste of something metallic and to be against all of this with only a generator of poorly-honed experience and arias for the deaf, pyrotechnics for the blind, endless music and glamour, dialects, orations for the mute the sprint of the cheetah for the paralyzed and versus everything with love versus passion with passion

versus God with doves

Blind date with Infinity

The secret of it all Was lost in the last slurp Of a milkshake.

Nevermind the fact that every molecule of carbon In every living organism originated in the heart

Of a star. The galactic is sprinkled with Calculus; I’m not its best charioteer.

Hold the flashlight above the skin above You heart, it’s translucent primrose glows Beaconesque. What is a path other than

A man’s foremost invention? Endeavors Of a machine of nicotine, alcohol, and libido Harnessed behind collarbones and crass lips.

But some smile is still missing From this date, this night, this vortex. My mind is an ameba seeking a skeleton

Yours remains spectrally mindful. More wine. We are a seashell and a microscope making love. A wilderness of apparatus

Creates its own tornadoes, and every variable Becomes accountable. Is it I, or is there a constant Ringing in our ears? Is it you?

I could never pinpoint my origin either. This we have in common. I’m a nail in the wall Of you. Don’t call me or call me mortal.

I’ll never tour Budapest, but I am sure that the earth orbits solely for me. There is a souvenir shop there remote and Romantic with tickets. In the end every poem is a love poem.

This is a detour. Is a blind date with infinity Fate? The check is misnomered, please. To know your name is desire; to utter it is to become one

I don’t want to pay just yet; I don’t want that kiss goodnight. I now know the value of the ever present moment.

Wishing for the Unplaces

It’s believing yourself to be alone in the desolation on a black unfurling flag of field, a racetrack during Armageddon, and suddenly, the entire symposium of your senses is forced to accept the beacon of a distant small fire lit a blip on the horizon,

* and at that point, all that you have is horizon. Someone is still out there and so you must remember how to speak. Clouds surprise the unity of your obelisk erected in their pageant; their faces nonchalantly shifting and still someone is out there to be spoken to, and for, in order

* to achieve a heightened sense of smell one has to be blinded. To possess perfection of sight, oracularly seal the ears shut with river pebbles and candlewax. In order to cease being a heretic you kill all gods and desecrate all relics.

* as mammoth as mountains may alter when a sightseer in a car points to them and another passenger never sees the same thing as the disjunctive driver. Fleeting, the 747 of the mind flies too fast. 70 miles per hour as life is a passing-lane always

* no verifiables, or signifiers, as some may’ve called ‘em.

And to remember any Tuesday during any given month and what you ate for dinner that Tuesday evening of X-variable month is quite a tall order for some whose numbers aren’t formulas. It is of no significance that we always leave on Tuesdays

* to go pearl-diving or mad..

*

But the mine of salvation was found. And it was dynamited. Chunks of luck and benediction rose in clouds as gravel was gaveled into dust. Tourists ran to horde pieces of it all in black and white reams and reels.

*

I remember once at a four-way stop I saw a butterfly fly out of a Lincoln’s hubcap

* it was the perfect moment.

* and we are all aware of a fall, aware of being there awaiting and guilty of that with dirt caked in our hair

* free some past detonation. We will make it back to the crater’s edge. We will peer on into ourselves with better surveyors. We will plant the mines again. We are beautiful demolitioners.

*

On the last Tuesday to end all Tuesdays we will remember the last brunch to end all brunches and the last remembrance of all remembrances the dues paid, and then, the metamorphosis

* leaves us stoking the fire with another across from us who says “Where you from? I’m cold. Stars no longer console us. Your name?”

Sore throat, eclipse-blind deaf-mute, fellow wanderer, talk to me please.

Poetry is sonic archaeology

What it does simply is Uncover the lost arts of never

Recorded, never excavated civilizations Building a megalopolis within the volcano’s

Active mouth is easy. After the cryptographer has Secured the blueprints and carbon-dated the cracks

In the churchbells, you will be delivered more code By quetzals and we will squander away the last

Of our decency for gondola rides towards guided tours Of cremated libraries. Nothing but frames left, really

And in this foreign country, where any secret worth stealing Is locked in the jowls of skin and bones dogs

And our scraps of translations mildew in saddlebags And as we pass windmills and granaries stockpiled

With kernels and grains of further peculiarities, Our instruments become archaic for not being archaic enough

Our cranes break the horse’s backs; our ways corrupt the youth. The crankshaft and combustors become daft to a deft basketweaver

Water-hoists and bridles aflame. Impertinence as inheritance Windmills and oars. Tornadoes and wars. Cellphones

Tossed into primitive wells. Scribes would arrive by teleport And still punch their timecards wrong. And what endures

Is the creations, the can-openers and toenail clippers of the diaspora. In the ash is no signature but function’s cruel fictions, civilization of sentences strung together. Orators And hanged-men continuously editing past lynchings

Poetry as soul archaeology? Poetry has killed the soul Whored it all out. If art of fact is yours

Then curate plums, spawn utopias (easy pickings) We’ve already too many species of quetzals to skeleton

This cargo of cages and labels, my blurb and draggle Exponents of failed exposé’s, but, the latches behind tongues

Hold great plumed exotics yet to be conquered, I’m confident Of this, yet, jungles of cords and vines give light disparity

A Nightingale Replies to a Boy

As he picked one up he said. “This is the wrong feather.”

“But how can that possibly be?” she sang continuously.

The eyes of the peacock looked on in quiet apathy. A king’s perfect aviaries.

Cages glinting bequeathing second-hand stars, i.e., stars. Stars named.

What a tapestry.

Poem of the Desert

I found it odd that the merchants had caravans supplying scorpions encased in glass spheres preserved bubbles of fates unrequited and it was all the rage especially here, in the desert, enough profit to cross it and become rich and it was especially ironic the day I’d met them considering how Bowles had died only the night before by the selfsame venom that essentially I was holding in my hand’s palm within this perfect global.

How the enlightened world doth change, I said to a dust-mote.

And here, where all that was fundamentally precious was only a few ounces of water was Death as a novelty. Boggling.

Let the renaissance happen without me, I said to the scruffy Erudite.

We must not forget ourselves, said I, under my breath, staring at the bit,

fingering the bridle.

Fossilized Roadmap

“Are we there yet?”

The impetuousness of youth. Leonardo himself couldn’t design toys to satiate you.

And prodigy could put allspace in a notshall. This poor Hamlet would now be counted as a king of infinite space. Yet, still, he gets antsy in the backseat of an uncle’s station-wagon.

The merchants are the same as the cannibals in their desire., but procurement involves so many flesh-transactions.

It enters the right auricle, slinks into the left auricle, exits into the right ventricle, leaves once more through the left auricle and into the blood continuously.

Many a furtive glance has destroyed an empire; many a veil fallen has inspired one. Secret rivers, tunnels, and gates. The lovemaking of continents.

Counting the lines in the road with the abacus. Cussing potholes and armadillo crossings. Theoretical diligence and armors.

Sunflares, geysers, whalespouts, rains of ash, brocades of light, fire from the eyes and words, the black swords and white wings afluttering forever.

These lands are irrigated with our sweat. Blood rains under the earth’s crust. Magma through the bones.

Just by standing in a field, a man plants seeds. The root of what he does resides in the angel and the demon of him. A farmer knows that his place is between.

Every crop is a welcomed requiem. Mandrakes and mandarins galore. We move to the spanse of prickly-pear. All is a smorgasbord of noir under a constant star.

We make relish out of relishing it. Chop up all into art.

I refuse to wait in the sauna any longer. I’m strong as a winged lizard riding a quetzal.

Our lives are the drivings to constantly relocating coronations. We’ve exhausted every mysticism. The soul must stand alone in a crowd of itself.

Our hearts are sportscars that none of us can afford.

The soul knows what it does not; what the soul is is its own personal knot of not-gnosis.

In a forest a unicorn versus a buck is nothing to bet on.

Too symbolic. Every line.

The clashing of antlers, the clang of one-ness.

As my eyes become pale and tired before the wheel. I’ve always been the center of wheels. Who has met if not through me?

Tribes are smaller than we breed. Living under helicopters and above cops. Regiments of age, optimistic cancers, learning to make exotic parchments.

I am Milord, a dying name. Horsepower and longing. Dazzling love and fear and guitar strings for arteries. Taut steel-belts for rhythms. Syllogisms of interstates confused and frustrated gas-tank muses. Sappho and her Harley.

When the mandala is the break of a sunset in your firstborn’s eyes and perfectly aligned with the heart within then I’ll know that this telegram has reached its home as a final divine rest of wings.

There will be one ominous cloud, and only one, and you will call it SKY. For lack of a better world. And someone’s namesake. a constellation:

one letter per event per millennia. One particular sky per person, please. Said the consciousness.

The rings of Saturn will change someday. And I return with quills and feathers

I’m sure.

Looking for Sand in the Desert

Sand through the funnel, hourglass. Sand without itself, in funnel-cloud. Sand fused making glass, this Leaves us sinking into dunes As a drop of acid into a pile of sugar.

Holding trophies up. Holding flagpoles up rung with maps. Cracked goggles, weathered satchels.

And to grasp its waist The storm, time itself. And to judge chaos in that fist, That clenched grain, moment held fast. The caravan is one of interdimensional tents. The campfires are comets at this trajectory.

Come in; come in. Do you read me?

The street vendor of magic carpets Still carries his wares home Via horse-drawn carts.

One wanders, walks-about At the foot of Camelback Mountain, looks up Not at the cloud, but at the shadow of the cloud On rock-face; it confuses-- Replacing one ephemeral with another-- Still you get over this fast.

Shatter the hourglass in the sandstorm. What is there to lose? A moment laid claim to, but precious As a pearl, and, when a pearl shatters, Does it render thousands of complete pearls? The answer lies not in deserts nor in oceans--

The glass shattered, the storm roaring down To a whistle, then nothing, and then the pilgrims With grieves and sieves sifting for the sand Of the hourglass, picking out shards and splinters. And they will sift for this ore forever. And the funny thing about these sunburned devotees is

They never age, never grow old, ever.

MIDDLE OF THE BURNING BRIDGE I. Eden’s Southernmost Regions out of print texts and travelogues: writing poems is the naming of knives beautiful crowbars cup we seldom drink of dwarfstar lodestones the light from flare guns is silent guitar canoe adieu our country arcane where laurels rained my hand the book opened fishbones, blue potatoes, flour, burlap, & cayenne library fire alarm false alarm concussion at a campsite floodparks hungover in the planetarium where I didn’t find myself undeniable only T-bills please mother has a cislunar scar her ovum extend the grace train

Golgotha cobblestone St.

Sargasso in the Spanish moss dreadnought viola anchored word never said is what you attempt too often texts that shark’s teeth tear like ligaments

Vineyard Sketches

1

Giant dragonfly a psychedelic crucifix in rearview- mirror somehow keeping time with the Chevy on a dirt road, Mendicino county

2

Darkness, a hiss of sprinklers through the valley. Outside our room the dew descends already, an ink not unlike mine

3

Free dinner certificates from a vineyard to a brewery. Waitress serves us with a seven-month-old babe in one hand, a beer-pitcher in the other

4

3 earthquakes in 3 days. 20,000 dead in Turkey. supposedly are on vacation; felt an aftershock while eating red snapper on a dock. San Francisco Bay

5

Boys back at vineyard talking golf. Tai Chi heartthrob postures by the pool. Elderly women with perfect silicon tits and bad tans. California, fer sure

6

up on a road like a swarm of eels winds through the hills above the symmetry of planted rows of vines. Our rental car moans and grinds

7 flowering tobacco, palms, manzanitas, cantaloupes, lingering lights, beautiful woman laughs obscured by a wineglass and Jacuzzi-mist

8 these roads: like a nest of copperheads like unkempt hair of an Italian mistress like the words of a drunken sailor like a firehose writhing at full volume like a simile describing itself like the tendril of exhaustion running through the body from right big toe to migraine threatening optic nerve

Highway 175, Cobb Mountain, I would not skateboard down you

9

Yuppies falling from the sky like a strange Golconde’ descending with picnic table umbrellas and planting them in the cobblestones dusting off lapels, going straight to wine-tastings in the a.m.

10

Stayed too long in the edible herb garden with a bottle of Chardonnay my head next morning

a besotten armageddon an auger could have read what came up out of me

11

Casual acquaintance in parlor says: I’m from Cheyenne, where belt buckles are bigger than brains. No one laughs but me.

12

The days here don’t fall from above, they emanate from the earth’s crust, and the colonnades of light, a gushing blood of blossoms creeping up, cuts through the valley at the mountain’s foot, the contrast of this cloudless sky meets your eye, shadowed by your hand and the horizon is like a half finished bottle of Merlot corked and toppled upon its side, and you are the same and so you peer into a blurred truth: half-horizon, half-blood

13

Delis, stables, lofts, apple groves, all in isolation, I have found my haven.

Add a gas pump and the place would be the perfect civilization, not that you would ever want to leave, but knowing that you could if you had to.

No need to make constantly detailed lists of why one should stay around.

No need to write poems at all, unless you have more than one best friend

14

Dixieland band in Northern California.

Too much wine, too much clarinet. Trombone guy smiles as he plays more than he should be able to smile as he plays. Eating rack of lamb in Cloverdale. My luck never ceases to erase me

15

Sunday, worst hangover since Tuesday. Old farts meander through the deli with more coordination than me. In the adjoining gift shop full of T-shirts, salsas, vinaigrettes, virgin oils, I become nauseated by all of the beauty of this place, the absurdity of having to put it into jars

16

Vineyard behind us, we snaked north on a coastal highway, now I am in City Lights bookstore, an hour into San Francisco. Bukowski has his own shelf; I don’t get it. Chinatown dragons, streamers above strip-joints. Any city right now would be the greatest city on the planet. But, I am just not ready for Paradise, I guess.

The vineyard reaches the world in bottles;

I had to leave that place behind

Sierra Nevada

All this writing down to redeem one word one name one theorem gnosis susurrations, adumbral sketches ultimatums humming through the grasses and what a wild wind does.

That dwarfstar, that lodestone, that spore, the flora and fauna within and without your bloodstream, the peck, the petal, the genome, endless word deciphered, the mute cryptographer can’t withstand the coming of it all together.

And if I could parade it, the poet I would be, the ambulance chaser, the poet the ice cream truck driving through Antarctica, the poet the fat lady refusing the last aria, the poet, the regnant imprisoned poetic in the tower full of scribbled themebooks the hunter of grizzlies asleep in his longjohns, the poet a dentist for cannibals is a poet.

It’s no transgression; we are the narcosis of our own poppies. My name is as conjugal as any; the mountain range rings out a name on every peak. Yet the range is one word to the ranger who knows not to intertextualize. The eye is its own dialect, a pageant knows no tree in its supreme forestry.

I can’t roll the entire ensorcelled orb of the perfect word for this off of my tongue.

Archons in the aspens, cometdust on cliffs. Tomes in birds bones windread overhead. Monosymbol, a light of one lightning, a genuine unattainable. You are insidiously never the name I am sure of. I am sure this is redemption.

7:47 this deficit impossible to fill with every implement and experience with every exploration into the self renders one-armed burglars fumbling with goods at strong locks all of this at our disposals all hovering above trash-compactors, above the Grand Canyon, Tripoli, The Udal. scary, our destinations never measure our destinies; it's an old song, again. she never said, "Play it again Sam" in Casablanca. she never actually said that, or anything, really. watch a movie for history's sake. slake it all in with your lover, for no major appliance on the planet, no luck-out, no lottery ticket, no number of successful arrivals or departures to and from fervent exotic locales will remedy the last curtain-call. yes, you are in love, but, aren't we all? try to plaster your heart on a brick wall in one line. a Pollock painting. I can't. see, all of this pageantry this perfect lighting is for the underlings and the director will never speak, so adamant about it, and the producer, well, he's the sunlight on the starboard wing of a 747 at 7:47 a.m.

Atlanta to Chicago (layover in Charlotte). I've tried to sustain the lustful angel in me until the last lines crack my lips like feathers crack there own wings. a chaffing of physics. the struggle between beauty and the will to usurp it never itself became beautiful enough for us to lie down resolved and absolved, at the end of any day so far. the final trick of lighting makes us all perfect. engineering, rivets in jetplanes. small things holding your small life together. nuts and mechanics. friends, this deficit is impossible to fill. read this scrawl, you already know that everyone else

is going everywhere with everyone you ever wanted to go there with. piniatas are bursting worldwide as you obsess. there, within you, is a windshear that was named; you fight against yourself beautifully. you are a sane crash-landing

flew in first class for the ceremony, got the key to the city, left immediately bought the shop I had sold my soul too it was like a porno I felt it like a real star, I bought an albino skin alligator jacket on my card I put a cardinal’s kibitzing at the whorehouse I paid dearly and no one ever had to work ever again then I brought home the washer/dryer (the Sun and the Moon) it was enough for her until I bought her the real her a lump of coal crusted with diamonds I meant to be metaphorical, and still made millions, I brought home the breadbox I bought full of vaccinations and acquired the car full of vagrants and immigrants and purchased the pen full of affidavits and perfect for forging checks and the can opener that spit out tiny tin migrant workers and fertile crops and the shovel that dug up all past estates and the wallet full of holy grails that were spillproof

bought the plane ticket that made the planes align bought the wristwatch that paid time off slick as a shark’s mustache, I was bought the bottle of pills to biopsy my new skin it needs the ocean inside me to begin, that’s all had the slot-machine delivered to my casino that I owned and had it blessed with fools manifest jerking throttles saddled by buckets of quarters bought monuments, purchased a geyser, and a snowplow that causes summer invested in and acquired all of it, but, one poem lodged in my machine and forced a bit of work out of me it was like acquiring too much money that could say where it had been.

waiting for 14-Abercorn to Southside Savannah it's nothing interesting at all, an old bike tied to an oak in front of the methadone clinic as a fat tie-dye boards the north transit, I wait for the southern. a radio tower looms above all of us, and the recurrent image, and the re- currency of bad pop-songs, all filled with melodies plucking lullabies from our childhood memories, and the caravan of ants by more sore feet, these recurrent images in my poems providing theme, in other words, "I was and must be." theme, delineation. a guy tries to bum a smoke. I tell him I never started it. he calls me a liar. he leaves, meanders back, boards bus behind me. I'm nervous, hair on back of neck. well, I was called a liar and a loser only days ago in a stupor in a drunken wrestling match with God-Language the Leviathan and he kicked my ass that night, but I got a piece of him, some meat like a part of a stray cat's brain in a stray dog's teeth. this paltry parcel was the image at the bus-stop, cheap, I know. still, longing to be famous never helped anyone's ego, and me? well, let's just say that I'm infamous among half-friends half-words, half-miles and half Saturday-afternoon drives away. I can take the bus to the ocean here, on the East Coast. Tybee Island at low tide with hard sand like snowdrifts. waiting for the 14Abercorn transit with a notebook.

I bake frozen bread all night for a living, bread from a commissary and bread from the kneader, and so much depends upon the sourdough besides a white row of government buildings. young art-college girls come to work and look at me like a grey ghost; I'm always in overalls thinking of their older sisters, and where they could be. and the drangstrum of life, the slow tidal rhythm doesn't stop the tax-collector with Band-aided papercuts from taxing the workers in Band-Aid factories. such as we go. waiting for the transit. we have all always been in the making, and on the make and take, whether we are purse or persecuted, still, there's nothing to see here.

a bike chained to an oak tree at a bus stop. if only I could steal it off and ride it to work, or to Tybee Island, feel the wind again coming from my own legs thriving like unpaid bills with skies always too much alike, striated

yet thriving with radio waves and the songs of ants.

The Low Country

The story as I've untold it, as so, infinitives shackled, so. And likewise, it falters, slows like glass does as a liquid, and these gates to the cemetery, rusted together, a cemetery by a river as squirrels dart around moss and lichen-stones. names that could be afforded, the rest even more cryptically etched . this city, a Gothic arabesque, Savannah, Georgia. The pirates and debtors who founded this place their names fossil in the ledgers, the archives caught in Spanish moss. I've landed here like the rest of the mosquitoes, a hymenopteron of words, to sit here, on this bench, the grave of Conrad Aiken. the Cosmos is veritable worldview for all when sitting upon the headstone of a poet. here, my southern juxtajunta, under oaks and cypress, but, enough of this rustic

*

I was wheezing across this wasteland, America perpetual motion, a walking enneagram, America brought too many wares, too many vendors visited, America arrows, plastics, postcards, and feathers, America we desire to lose so much and we just can't, America we just can't lose, it's hysterically America how prosperous we are, holy grails in the hatchbacks, America everywhere the smell of polyurethane and fast-food the fake leather of roadtrips, America we all long to raise children who will finance a critically-acclaimed cinema, i.e.: they were lovers/members of Mensa on heroin/lesbians broke the hero's wallet/car and heart (Winona Ryder the lead part)

Cinemamerica

* evil, in its morundity, its morbid blood simply the curse that courses us. a loose tooth. a promise. a notion towards a knife. how close we walk serrated edges. and the corpses never rot, they simply guild sunwise as offerings under wonderfully stenciled parchments bits of beehive bark upon silken swaths bodies laid into their elements, discarded parachute fragments from the definitive battle. scorched.

I broke my legs in the first rite of passage fall. the dust settled, an epic came by to remind me to crawl. a lyric came by, said, "you will exemplify a great cause" (that old Shakespearean rag again?)

I curse them both, epic and lyric. I'll lie here in the crater I made when I fell to this Earth.

* sacred. there is a hummingbird and a church. there is a guitar with three nylon strings left. not enough for any choral piece. green vines wrap rotten rafters. there is a fountain that is dry it is the story. there is a courtyard where we once had beers, once had coffee. you wait for the horse-drawn cart to become antique enough to auction it. it is as rusted as cemetery gates together. an Italian sportscar delivers the mail, all the sweepstakes you've already won. the chain-link fence holds you here; good fences make nosey neighbors. you were once a magnetar skirting, zigzagging through the heavens like an amphetamine zipper holding back some luscious truth. bravado for its own sake is wind, whatnots, and wiseacreage. is this golden age revisited only colossal among the withering goldenrod’s? send millions of postcards each with a dollar bill attached to them. Antiquity is not your family museum; your musing lies in the cans and the heaps of crow-ridden compost. you are too frail to ride your own horse. cap the flask. meander back to the porch. this epoch makes your nerves ant-like

* and so it always is, the high-heaven stench the dogs lapping at the skirts and outskirts of it you with crude instruments, as if the stars had not already aligned themselves you have to prove it to some ill-mannered conventionists the sensuality of knowing every mote, its recompense of ions that you can iconify, edify, "if-icate" and we have all managed to fuck a dust-mote or circle-jerk the last of respect out of a blood-brother we have murdered the last of the silences from the Earth the ocean floor moans with more thermal wombs, megaplumes' moans with the symbiosis sickness, I say no more suicides of lyric no more death-defying leaps into syntax, I am triple-X fully adorned, no matter what I wear, I am a man walking out of an icestorm with a torch, and I reek of it, a flesh-zealot, what have I ever transformed? the Word?

No. the word made of me a thief, a bulimic, a whore, a cannibal, a god, a worm. or a process, or a procession of them.

It writhes through us. A tiara of chakras is thrown into a void, cheap and disposed-of. Don't choke on the knowledge, chewing on a Hanged-Man's rope. The tongue is a crippled trapeze artist. Give up don't stop. My symbology like a fingerprint (unique yet easily documented in ink).

Decoded. Decode it. I'll have a defense for stealing that particular fire.

Learn disappearance into the grotesque. Ugly enough you are left to Be. Learn the toad-stance. Learn fat belly and wrinkle, Shar Pei and sloth. Koala. Slow down, study entropy for empathy's sake. Enough this time, no, I mean it, really. I once had a lamp in the likeness of the Buddha. The thing never worked. The pawnshop of the mind. White-trash baroque America, learning the New Age.

the Buddha does not work as a lamp (a new koan)

* Messages in bottles (bone marrow) secret chain-link fence of language secret junkyard dog of vocabulary missing parts to the engine of the cosmogony lies in this scrapyard of broken homes and poems get the thing/machine/word running, avoid the rabid dogs, hit the downtown Chicago of the mind running

* the carney-barkers roll up the tents. the satellites photograph it at a safe distance made even safer by an internet of telescopic excuses to preen and pry open eye into umbra. hysterical evil always wins. hysterical evil of summer, of all of our successes, from navigation to fiber optics. Hart Crane! I found the shirt you threw from the bridge! It was no suicide after all; you were just testing the poem. Delineations. Goggles. How did this world become so crepuscular? Kill the third-eye krap. I can't de-program this viral fear of viruses. Span it all away. Take the Dossier to a remote place; my own file and rank is destroying me. Schizophrenic century, I salute me. My mirror writhes under this torture. The anthropomorphic mirror. I was the one throwing the party (hiring the carnies, the circus) the ebullient kegs frothing upon the burning bridges a hangover is the only gap, it is Heideggerian, you've lived through it again, my host migraine of Dasein is Dasein

* this discourse:

TV dial, sundial. Laptop, lexicon. Space shuttle, caravan. Data-Bedouin, Cerebellum-Bedouin. The lepidoptery of synapses.

The electric eels of verbs. The weather-vanes of nouns. The cannons of proportions mis-firing their flare-guns. Such manifestations, such galleys and galleries. Arcana, the true name of our country. I drank Mallarme's last bottle; didn't you drink it with me? It is time to reawaken the miscreant gods! Gods on Prozac! Awaken! For your children have charted the oceans for you using nothing less than the selfsame stars and configurations that you hide behind.

Time to let the laurels rain. Reward the spoiled with love, lest we truly outdo ourselves once and for all, without you by collecting the spoils of this hollow tetragrammaton of a planet

* ebb or wax never tell the story never implore for the horse was impaled along with its master for war-crimes navigate don't narrow the template for it is all that we have the negatives of the lips of it the negatives foment in our new Logos the dark room embryonic of syllables a tongue-forest a stalker there with the scythe designed to rape its image into our own visage don't Smithsonionize it this crude mutant was there all along. the jawbone icon held up to lightning-storm

* the harness we've built for the stars is Paranoia the stars have built radiation for us anthropic, anthrogenesis, anthroNietszche if only Grace were a widespread plague

Well, that's it. I'll molest the forests, figuratively for once with an orgy of buxom phrases, a basket of swerving words. What I bring to you on the cemetery grass is a picnic of sorts. Behind us is a city of silences before a war when a brother would murder another. Many of them are buried under our blanket. The architecture here is beautiful; smell the magnolias. Yet every level of gray interpenetrates the next. Curdles. I live where I still know who the shopkeepers are, the merchants. Cobblestone sidewalks (although haphazard for the drunken). The Monday-morning cataclysm doesn't touch me here. Yet still, I long for the podium to scream from, throwing transcriptions towards a black gravity of hordes, the words must get out, the etherized Ego.

There is a crease that the tongue can never wriggle itself into: My tongue got stuck in there trying to

* every lock clasping shut asks as it does, "(are you finally) happy?" satisfaction is that handkerchief that politeness and self-preservation won't let you fetch for her at the edge of a canyon. mockeries are our vows.

Noir is lifegiver, although the tract is insurmountable. We achieved base-camp; that should be good enough, but, the fact that a corpse lies a few thousand feet up gives us path and causeway. At this altitude, there is not a breath left for a cellular phone. Only raspy hacks towards llamas.

And all that I know about the world I learned from Cable. I'll sit on this grave in the deep South. A poet was put to rest here. The universe's closet-door has been left open for too long.

No one is left to claim the raiment save for infant language, as always it is

the most gorgeous failure that I become gorgeous by failing

July 4th, Savannah to Charleston first summer of second millennium. dogwoods and blackberry vines in rearview- mirror blossom. hurricane season. roadblock on Interstate-17, I had an open container, Lori put the joint in her panties, we hope no K-9 unit. landcruisers everywhere, babes in convertibles with bad tans and both of us buzzed at 10:00 a.m. there will be no open hotel rooms there will be vacancies on credit accounts there will be disgruntled children waiting in lines for shallow pools under waterslides we just passed Coosawatchie always drive as if you have one pound of contraband on your person (we do at all times) we get lost and make circles within a herd of diesel pachyderms, the Winnebegos with their mature pilots, but all of us are still tempted by shops full of fireworks, imported pyrotechnics gas prices up, the Genome decoded Y2K sold some rice, batteries, generators my generation straddles this century awkwardly according to me, the lyric is hotter than blacktop on bare feet after the Devil exhaled cigar smoke on it I wish I was a blues man we pass a ghostforest petrified driftwood skeleton park keeping its camp in marsh cameras can’t capture this wreck Lori could, she wants to

read this I will let you read it later in the hotel after our heads are given back to both of us by each of us woods at 70 miles per hour the staple of travel in Southeast America a camouflage cinema a spinning green propeller in the trees, themselves a song pines broken by palms every branch covered in a resin of light words at 70 miles per hour, a poem I write a lot we stop at an abandoned laundromat. no ceilings, roadside ruin, rusting washer/dryers en route to a scenic city but we spend our limited film here I see many lizards and dragonflies I feel the sun pull the skin on back of my neck real tight genocide cultures for roadsigns here America, your cables could be such gorgeous hair but we always go too far by way of style of cutting, of getting there gravel quarries and money worries the insignia of the sky says no fear of inevitable carwrecks, of splintered windshields of glass puncturing the windshears of our itinerant peripheries somewhere in an Alaskan tundra my old friend is welding anchors and he writes and never writes back any of his funereal postcards, he should be here on this roadtrip one more sign and I will align with a road’s mind

I smell grills; we are approaching civilization. the Interstate will never end, but, we will eat and sleep as if all these motorhomes weren’t crossing an asphalt sea to pay meters and admission fees

we are finally in Charleston sailboats in the bay aligned as perfectly as Volvos in a laboratory parking lot there is my crucifix, a weathervane atop a downtown steeple she drives; I drink. this may as well be Arcadia

* Dinner: I eat grouper; she eats steak. Later I write to bad movies back at the hotel. A bird with a fish in its claws flew over our car On Interstate-17 (or so at this hour I fabricate). I saw God with his gasmask on almost asleep. I call someone at a desk to call me to wake me in order To call someone at a desk. On Neptune it rains Diamonds from the planet core; in the hotel cooler it makes ice.

I sleep knowing everything beside a gorgeous woman. It rains ice and diamonds in my funereal sleep.

*

En route to home. Callawassie Island is private. Savannah, 42 miles away.

I remember to tell the Savannah tourists not to touch the Spanish moss, It can give you mites.

When I came to the city of the book, When I came to the city of the road, When I came to the city of love, When I came to the city of my body: no friendly local had advice for me.

My entire life I have been itching with mites. My entire life I made myself into a city. My tourists are just like me; my residents are few. The nomad is pen; the landscape is parchment. I am the metropolis of my senses applied to senseless wandering

Footprints in sand are more remembered than any desertland

You last as long as the lines in the road sprinkled with lime while someone is writing a poem at 70 miles per hour

The Ghost of Frank Stanford

I watched myself burn I reached in the ashes and found a red knife

Frank Stanford

frank’s knives

Cuts Veal Like Butter Willow’s Banjo Driftwood Splinter the Negotiator Carwreck Femur Tyrone the Torch Surgeon General Engine Fan Blade Sax Saber Kamatsu Barnstorm Shrill Glass Slint Karmic Avenger Three Shots in the Dark Unspent Shell Ocean Photo Swordfish Sceptre Starfish Tetanus Slow Meteor Caffeine Cross Sawblade Kiss Cockbone Key Punkrock Mohawk Rabid Rat Tooth Coffin Liner Forest of One Knife Scared Granny Scarab Leg Silver Surfer Selectric Machete Genghis Mirror Shard Seahorse Spine River Dragger St. Louis Song Rusty Fandango False Tooth Cincinnati Shard Taut Guitar String Appatomax Bayonet Key to Your Heart Shoulderblade Bicycle Spoke Satan’s Shiny Icarus Feather Sting Ray Tale Lightning on a Weathervane Junkie Hypo Mason Jar Shard Abednego Tarsal Pig Rib Pierces Prick Story of Cutter Brittle Dactyl Radio Signal Blunt Death Knoll Born in the Camp With Six Knives Sarong Rip Publisher of Soil Unknown Girl at Funeral

portraits

family portrait your father was a scarecrow holding a radio my mother was a supine rotting pine trunk his sperm was sawdust and her ovum a silver raindrop I bleed moss and lichens, pebbles and pewter fire

I would wear the trophy deer’s head and keep silent for your father’s lectures. Mother hung jawbones of wolverines and shells of dried tortoise on the clothes-wires during the salad days mom became a wool shawl your father became a set of dentures forgotten on an ottoman I wanted them to finish me off. I was barbed-wire rusted. they would try to guess my age over the sawmill of a static radio mom pulled a grey hair from my head said:

“someone is out there hunting me” the first whipping was for smashing a streetlamp on our dirt road with an aluminum baseball bat all I wanted was to be able to stand under it but it was they who had made me a signpost in the night without ever teaching me how to read the omens self-portrait after all-night binge bruises are muses and for those who break wristwatches over the bridges of formulas’ noses and watch rain on bonfires or hiss of asphalt but I don’t do anything significant

just sit around all day eating bacon and egg sandwiches staring at starlings dropping their shit-parcels everywhere and a bruise can be focus on the crux and crocus of a waning bloody lip from the night before and I may call myself a warrior-poet but I am the prep-cook allergic to garlic the night past or its sexual repast however you’d like to sum it up for the cameras is mute moot under a steel-toed boot and enough of that, it seems that nature can be easily corralled when we all have beer-bongs the size of Jupiter we mourn the death of the fiddle player and kick around dead dog skulls paper plates stained with catsup we grill our meat in iron lungs Sunday or Tuesday night in Americana all of our ex-lover’s names rolodexed by water-beds guns and guitars and eight-balls in particle colliders so many meteors fell that night that my hangover was like a planetarium portrait of a lightning bolt if all of existence is a storm then I am a T-shirt in a tornado with a lightning-bolt airbrushed on it quick sketches of certain listeners

There is a light-bulb wrapped in purple velvet. She shakes, she jingles, she’s spent.

There’s an eye shot out and shut into a weathered leather flask of a face.

There’s a never-once-opened bottle within which is a mosquito whose belly is full of the blood of Christ.

There is a spy; he’s deaf, dumb, and mute.

He carries a talisman made of owl-tongues.

In the corner leaning is a framed blueprint instructing how to build the first frame ever.

One tries to be a bird carrying a bird by its feet over a field of dead birds. He stumbles into the street.

A wing falls like a leaf from my poem. If my soul walked into the bar It would wear a robe of clocks A rope of clocks A belt of clocks All stopped

There is that hour for light that won’t breathe this smoke. There is the heart in all of us scribbled with veins, Etched with arteries.

The dichotomy we carry is one side always lying to its bisymmetry:

What the hell is it that keeps us from right down the middle tearing?

Concussion at a campsite

1. hit my head on the tolerance canopy night before now in the VW van roadsign reads ISLANDS, time to reconnoiter a lump on my thyroid like a sore thumb, a roadsign the disorientation of dead oaks and palms, driving into the campgrounds get the assignment, the allotment from the stark ranger, hide the contraband, park the van neighboring sites all silent around our crude cairn of stones, it’s not camping season we hope but for the best, no cougar tracks in the sand we burn National Enquirer’s for kindling drinking beers like catching catfish in Styrofoam coolers the ocean is like a guitar lilt, comes almost up to our fire it’s too cold for mosquitoes, therefore tonight it’s too cold for us, Shelton says it doesn’t matter, judging by the cooler, and my head, we came here to die anyway Cajun burger patties (pre-made in a small-town butcher-case) a bundle of wood, propane lamps, day-job subpoena poetics we be kings like the kind that slink out of Sun Studios we be rocka-Billie-the-Kids, satyrs from Savannah the rich once hunted fine game here, Hunting Island now high school kids come here to take LSD the surreallity of the shoreline chewing the treelines there is nothing left to hunt here but two over-educated rednecks playing at romance, ignoring injuries, telling the same old college story

2.

The ghost of Frank Stanford chases me as far as Land’s End

I turn to face my hunter as the spectral knives fly

Stanford threw Boo Kay Jack he threw

Loki’s Tongue Hilt-splitter Railroad Spike Rabbit’s Foot

Splinter-Under-Fingernail Jesus’ Tooth

He threw Brown-Bottle all whistled past will-o-the-wisping I knows America hunts itself down the coast

I faced the poet’s ghost, said: “I thought you couldn’t cross rivers now”

I’m free from that age said Stanford

I had three bullets in my pocket, but I didn’t believe in guns,

at least not yet. He says he misses ghosts and mosquitoes in early June then dissipates, like so much foxfire

3.

You wait for the narcissus to stare up at you and answer but Nature has no tongues nor tact for human nature, its pale perversion, its frail evolution, no truck in this at all your soul can’t hold its weight in cotton, the flax is in full flux all is potentially a rape in the wilderness, and you have never been a noble savage, still, you stare into this pond and expect wishes to be offered up like some mythic, whiskered goldfish, his eyes bugging-out and wisdom on his scales. You see, every iota of your blood,

your very cellular structure is for sale only a bridge away. Here’s how to maximize your potential; drown trying to love yourself, into your own reflection, a convex mirror that swallows you as a lily pad shifts softly above the last glance of your flower

4. splicing cassette tapes in the van to map memories with, Scotch-Tape and old guard on duty here we can both repair rocket-engines at this point but this fragile music chewed up by a tapedeck and low battery at a campsite is eluding us our women are getting drunk somewhere in strange towns while we hope for Steve Earle and Will Oldham, some tunes, while drunk counting one-legged gulls and creating new curse-words let’s not think of what we’ve become

5.

I sew the days together a real working-class hero knowing secrets soft in the sphagnum I drift through the harmonica rain angelprow and its prowess your aureoles sunburn I used a warped cello for a paddle overhangs of Spanish moss we heads towards the waterfall in the dugout they will hook me in from the dock like I was a mail-bundle, something special I was once a bull bucking with a china-shop in its belly now I’m a buck with three legs and broken antlers dark mouth of river opens on I freshen my bandages and smell salt-air I am before my time I am Death’s walking-stick all day I looked for God and only caught one catfish that should say it all

6.

Two days after the trip Shelton calls me at home. The VW won’t start anymore. His great-aunt had a stroke while we were camping. He’s already planning the next trip. The lump behind my left ear sings Like a knife shines in the hand of a poet. Writing poems is the naming of knives.

A ghostly knife whistles by, a woman’s name in the night. A cougar walks through the still warm ashes of our derelict site.

erosion island

1

Her hair across my chest spread intermeshed. A wave meets a damaged shore. Never damages the shore. I cup her ear to my ribs as I read more lines in her crude dialect.

The ocean is the greatest acid. Erosion is a starving contortionist with skin like diamonds, exercising.

My thirst is as bottomless as a shovel cursed to levitate over soft ground

2

Forever all morning your wife beats the coffee beans with a hammer. She intends it to strain I go insane in the yammering. I need that hot item. The countertop suddenly cracks, and she too, in a small way, holding a hammer in a camper in her negligee.

She slides over a chipped cup. I am glad for any gesture in the chaos of observing this marriage. The camping trip is full of murderers behind every map, is full of rage behind every simple suggestion

3

Squirrels haunt the payphones. I try to call you from the ranger’s station, no answer, I walk back towards the ocean smiling in self-immolation.

I am a deer with three good legs; I am no prow’s figurehead.

Only the blues remind me I need a woman: Lightning Thompkins, John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf hunting the island

4

There are three incredibly poisonous snakes: the hooknosed seasnake (venom 60 times more powerful than a rattlesnake) the Russell’s viper (it has killed the most people worldwide) the taipan (one bite can kill a mature elephant).

Man has a venom that is slow, and it only works on his own kind. It takes years after the first bite of the first handshake. A beautiful blue poison we share erodes our island everywhere.

5

The closer you get to the water, the better the soul.

The closer to the desert the better the mind.

The closer to the earth the better the body.

The closer to the air the better the words.

The closer to the celestial (there is no such thing as being any closer to the celestial).

6

Tried to dig the seashell out; it was like a stubborn tortoise’s spine. Turned out to be the tip of a treetrunk; shoreline is treeline here.

7

Shoreline is treeline in these lines a mind sanguine on a horizon a constant friction of fission my sunglasses are missing in this world of everything under the sun burnt skin will peel like a page from me like the ash of a burnt wing

8

Listening to the surf, I know now how to name knives.

9

Looking for sponges, only jellyfish mutilations wash up as you smoke and I drink and we wish it all to fall to us, a manna on our bare feet like new eyebrows, like now, like tan skin, like belonging.

We would walk on nails to get to The Largest Nail in the Region and this is tourism.

As the barbarians build their arcades and we make love to women and their agendas, we still have an undeniable urge to hunt down all of our best wishes, stab fishing-hooks through their lips as each shorewhisper murmurs. The Word hears itself and writes like it doesn’t. I hear what does not write and mishandle silences. I should have been on a copra plantation, a Polynesian with my indecipherable rongo-rongo boards making basalt carvings of this life, for this life requires much thicker skin than mine. We buy lawn-chairs and lotion and talk of flippant armageddons: me, the disgruntled wife, and my best friend the husband.

10

In the Dead Sea the water is so thick you can’t swim. Level drops three ft. a year. Such saltiness. Exploit resources, swim here. Don’t settle down. The loggerheads only land long enough to lay their eggs on this island, then leave life to its best marathons

11

DW loves RH carved in a picnic bench.

Any language that allows love to emerge in a quadra-set of initials is a language better than one

I have ever spoken in a poem.

if every bottle is a soldier

1 then I must be the war of sidewalks vs. mirrors and the sidewalks are mirrors shattered and I’m in tatters you drugged me through the underbelly I caught things in the hooks I have under my belly gleaming horizon teeth my resolve absolve me from days as brigades of clocks wipe their faces with sharp concentric gesticulations of frozen gerundives the sleeves of a minute’s shirts are tattered as are my patterns, slow-motion, I went to accept the keys to the city the fans all paid their fare pinwheels I had a city in my hair, fireworks above they say there is a city on high that is a glass mountain range that only takes one ray of light to cut to its ore, it explains why that’s me, harlequin and assassin wannabe just can’t procure a day job, however, I have learned to juggle, bake bread, hold liquor, echolocate, divine water, etc. judge me not like a paycheck not wearing bullets around my neck not an albatross or pegasus mane for sale here no snake oils, no unguents of eternal life no omens hung around the necks

of buxom beauties or shackled oddities nothing but packages that were wrongly addressed wrapped in headlines about miscreants thinking sidewalks are mirrors as they walk into themselves over and over (sorry, sorry, sorry crosswalks are always shattered) and I’m in tatters scattered shards of jukebox parts litter the parks read the spilt songs like leaves in paper cups

2 as I say these things to you someone is being stabbed to death as they lie dying they think of saying inane things to a loved one the inane things the most important

3 the viola begins to play. the way we are disheveling is a ragged epic, no one’s fault that the winds have always required that the sails should be sewn from previous epics, the shirts of the past minute lyrics, the rips in the apostasies and there are Sumo wrestlers with Alzheimer’s diseased, grunting in the sun, expressions of elemental gods personified, wrestling in saltspray with candorous grace, the object is to take the weight of the world off of your back and put it on the back of your opponent a noble and honorable sport, an attack upon one’s own self is a heart. what is a heart attack then?

sew the epics together and the wrestlers trample on the sails making mockery of the wind circling in slow elliptics, concentrics the violas continue to play as we attack our own hearts

4 the surrealist may not interview me I said to the praying mantis the camera kills its mates after clicking fornications the Dadaist may not interview me I said to the ceiling fan blade but, the dumbass over there, the entomologist is allowed to show me the paintings of his lucid dreams the ones with the cameras like insects

5 my muse is sick, she all inclusive cacophonous endorphic

6 a trawl is a large cone shaped net dragged along the sea bottom for fishing purposes. like walking across the ocean floor with your eyes open

7

I made love to the moon last night, I said.

The man who had just cut down the moon with a broken lightbulb shard calls me a braggart, he then tries to sell me a piece of her

8 the Sumo wrestler is a stargazer. the entomologist fills tunnels with moonlight, and its murderers will always be here, the epic writers.

I am simply the heart’s braggart, the heart attacker, the inane war of sidewalks in tatters, the song with swagger trawling forward the song with swagger trawling forward

Savannah Saturday night with esoteric text

Here in the swamp rang out simpatico of teethgnashing and bottles ringing, of baleful guitar and underwater murmurs we gots mad kegs and craw, enough to kill the leviathan, but he ain’t swimming close enough in for bottle rockets, telecasters, or harpoons to scrape the baleen of his hard life one scale at a time, on this dock with whiskey, with music as my climbing tree I will sling hammocks between any two points cuts sting here in the mire while making chords the snake doctors see to your blood like land surveyors ziz and behemoth are frog gigs and moths amid the demonic dragonfly nymphs I use the hermetic text as an ottoman as I drink and strum nothing stirs in the song of insect legs the insect legs don’t move inside their own sound my sore fingers learn this truth after years of building cities of calluses

Sunday morning

You brought the cheap frames to the beach I made the sketches. They were finished but sand got under the glass. Imperfections like waves under kites, the shadow of one string across your breast. There is a baseball stuck under your shoulderblade that I can’t massage. Here on the white-trash beach, nursing last night with its own tits; I find a sacrament. Raiment of easy associations everywhere. A week after a blue moon equinox and no nuclear family seems to care. A new millennium asks of me to write an autobiography now that I have relocated from a desert to an island. If only the one-legged gull could speak, what a prophet he must be.

My canister has made the rounds, my time capsule has its passport. Kites fly above small kernels of truth; the beach never ends like the shore does.

The world never beaches itself upon us. We fall towards heavens and fall back up.

Croatoan

By 1590, all that remained of the Roanoke colony was a mysterious word carved into a bald cypress.

“The mortality rate in Jamestown’s first six years, 1607 to 1613, was a terrifying 50 percent. Corn withered on its stalks, and good water was hard to find. The nearby James River is salty even at the best of times; the settlers dug wells only to have them filled with brackish water as the drought lowered the water table. Relations between the colonists and the Indians grew increasingly difficult. ‘You have two alien cultures suddenly in contact, and they’re trying to understand each other. That’s tense enough . . . add to that a food shortage and water problems”

In 1607, 104 English settlers founded the Jamestown colony in what is now Virginia. One year later only 38 of them were still alive. Many had starved. Some of the survivors later resorted to cannibalism. Ritualistic fragmentation must very direct be memories process very direct one’s own of. Do you suffer from nocturnal teeth-grinding? There are safer mouthpieces. To live more than one soul-cycle in any allotted flesh. Fleshpot. Schizophrenia is the art of spiritual excess. The road to wisdom leads to the malice of Coliseum. A suburban family has a pet Bengal tiger and a mischievous child with firecrackers. America, what are you doing in there? Few can master the art of multiple souls in one body; listen to the ocean; it’s quite good at it. Aspirations require even bigger aspirins. I am the shadow of every infinitive. These voice-overs exhaust me libidinally. To. As. To go. The sea is quite good at it if you listen. To whom it may infinite be; I eat crayons in front of God after scribbling lightning bolts.

The snake that eats its own tail is a metaphoric blood. This snake has a third eye. Step out from the Parthenon cage. Don’t look back at the columns (someone a century later Will bombs them. They take it personal. Thus, a Renaissance period. Make the cryptoglyph. Name yourself. Resonate. Do it one minute before, for The deathbed truth is the truest name. No reckoning there, only reconnoiter. Our inheritance is obvious: we must name ourselves in a way that destroys us Yet makes us infinite, simultaneously, schizophrenia of “to be”. You, all you, your voices are so cruel. Violent violins I love. We must live vibrantly in the infinitive, as:

DEMIURGE

Who is Legend?

Is Joe Legend?

JoeLegend.

*

Lost word carved into sepia-tone Everyone died in a drought We left signs, warnings

* dreamy sepia-tones. We were all thirsty Monsters here

*

The winter was hard

*

No one to blame

*

(Cosmos in a name)

* and suddenly it all boiled down to my own infinite stubbornness that I was a woodpecker without a beak pecking continuously at the back of my own brainstem

I was addicted to addiction, In other words, I was a finite

Creature with an understanding Of the rape of stasis I was wrapped like a dull candy-wrapper Like waxpaper swathing infinity’s jealousy Of itself, that is, if this jealousy Was the very last morsel of chocolate left

Or the first. The transcript was so long That the trials and tribulations of stenographers Became mythic. Chocolate was hung For tasting so. This happens When anyone tries to cannibalize or murder that smidgen It, that smidgen. Of beauty left, that

Smidgen Genocide. Worldview is surrealism for profit. I wait and look for new seed. Well, I wait.

But, the promenade continues. We still write the lovepoem. We are scavengers, damage-controllers, expert Model-builders, attention to intricate details, we Are reconnoiterers. Specialists.

At the foot of any given tree is a fallen fruit Which can’t be eaten at the time that it is Accessible. Futility whips me like a wanton whore. I love you echoes as if a word before the word echo Was made. To forgo luxury, I have become a forager.

This excursion into unknown territory Is riveting. We still write lovepoems. This is not a common thread. Chocolate is. Trials are. Myths assuage

The mass-surreal. I love you.

*

There are statues of pigeons for miles. Nothing but statues of dead, motionless pigeons for miles.

An Easter island down the cityscape. Every bench and sidewalk cracks under the cold of it. Every weather event accentuates the petrified. The tragedy of sculpture, of culture? Is in this Memorial cemetery of stone pigeons.

Who knows what will be left. I make leaps. Feathers are grave and graven. A new book of classifying birds of stone.

This method, this trudging through Is a finding of multiple voice. The city, the pigeons. I need to stop Relativity. Relativity suggests that this may be

Possible. A quarry of potential flight. Our city. Our civility. What we bitch about. Our lovepoems of skyscrapers. Our pigeons. Our constants. Our comfortable warblings.

I walk through a ruin. Imagination, Broken legs in the park. I lounge among stone pigeons, seeing no movement As the spring erupts like a skull that shines And once again no metaphor makes sense With any other in the explosion of it

*

Jawbones, dreaming of flight. As in X-rays. Like birds before I had invented culture. Mythic. Birds were once considered God’s slingstones.

Here, in a dying colony We have lost language Among confused media. If we photograph a poet In sepia, well, his profile Comes through to yellow Scrapbook forgetfulness.

I am a brown-paper lunchsack Full of ghosts. Crinkle me up After you eat this. Throw me Towards the East.

I’ll slit my weathervanes. I’ll hang myself from the tallest laughter. I won’t stop the declension of this Chaos slanguage Called Americulturism.

I have and will always been had/halved A poem that breaks its own heart By being written.

Most poems do. A poem is hopeful desolation.

I can’t believe I did this to myself. I am a liar.

Once, the jawbone of an ass Killed 1,000 sybarites.

That’s flight, and I long For escape.

*

Arpeggio conversation Method man, math is A slit throat and I am not being Cinematic, I’m filming me cut

You. Semantic razor. Blowguns and woodburners On a tree telling a story. It’s sharp, like a phantom.

These were farmers. How did they disappear? Cropped hair cropped lives. Abundance for whom?

Did it all ionize? There’s a lot of rust on the implements we dug up, Though. Too much.

Inconclusive. We found an artifact. Named it Joe. What a tool it proved to be. Joe is a process. Be named Joe. Drunken violet, how violently gentle are your guises. Be named. Even as a person named Joe for 70 years, Joe becomes a process of war. Too much for a monosyllable. The cog in the tank is pissed so the gun misfires on refugees. Slang. Hell, Joe, I, myself Stapled a culture down to joe. Joseph is synonymous with synonym. We all have scapegoat joe. Joe, let in the lamb. Joe slashed Croatoan. JoeCivilization. Do you fetish language So that History Has its back broken upon badly excavated Broken potsherds?

Exhibit joe. I invented mustard for someone Who had never tried mustard before. A nephew of mine thinks to this day That I invented mustard. At Wrigley field on Father’s Day

I drank much beer. And thought too much. A bola and feather-boa wrapped my throat with thoughts. The cubs won; we spilled into Chicago like the last night Of anyone’s life. We were always, like a Coliseum is

Built to spill.

* Father of joes. Father of lies. Joe-Mama. Joe made Jesus. Joe this and Joe that. After tomorrow, when I am done There won’t be A monosyllable left

Not even in

The darkest alley

Of a curse

*

I left bombs of new slang on every doorstep the world abound. Well, I write like a gentle terrorist.

*

I am quintessential joe. I got dibs on being the last joe. Trademark my frontal lobes. This shattering has stopped. I’ve enough to give of language. The fig tree runneth over. Martyrdom itself, Rilkean, Brodskyean, Celanic heart Fetish for sidethorns, tumors A choleric of words The humours hang in the trees That can’t yet be described as of yet And there are forests of them From horizon to intuition As far as the morals can see

*

In my slang The Croatoan is the phonetic Of disaster Harbinger, blackbird foreboding The tree-carving, the diseased Thirsty rings The concentric warnings Year by year Not to name our children here. Of that selfsame tree’s pulp, poisonous paper was made And written upon in journals throughout Roanoke The Croatoan is a cannibal The language eats its own kidney-shaped poems

One word eats itself More than any civilization Could ever provide Metaphor enough

Codes of laws swept up in gale force Lightning bolt jikjaks syntax with drawl down my torso

Capitalism is cannibalism with unlimited starvation for all Like a virus, the economy devours its own foodsource Colony to colony, longboat to longboat, immortality Is so silly, leaving us all with blood-stained greenbacks In our clenched blackbird talon arthritic fingers

America, the arthritis of Europe The fingers too weak around the pistol To pull the trigger, Bubonic and weak Before the silo of the holocaust

A ghost is in the forest here It always has been, pervasive, relentless Makes men not know what they do Until it does them

America is dark Romance. It was waiting for us here. We’ve awakened it.

*

Politics of revulsion Or is it thousands of joes Hellbent on the flagship mentality I am the eagle, the scythe, the torpedo Or nothing

Inertia, equilibrium Editing the dockets A new cynicism can be erased (the cenobites Can re- or pre- scribe (i.e. we were soaking up too many gamma rays, the rye bread was a bit molded, they slipped us a lot of mickies, etc.) there is no other way

give me the flask the saddlebags, the maps the legends, it is manifest

(and so joe left the forest to seek his bloody fortune) rivers of gold, fountains of youth, cities of platinum should only be imagined billions of doubloons litter the floors of the oceans billions of years from now they will litter mountain crags and cliffs selfsame pocket change

(and so joe left the forest to seek his bloody fortune)

*

That handsome burning in your belly boy, is it Refugees and when even lollipops become smugglers’ wares We will still feed such fires as to retreat continuous across these Messed-Up- potamias To fertile silicon valleys and aqueduct cess-oases and all of these engineered youths Yapping at our heels still believe that all they need is proper I.D. to be saved From the inevitable resurgence of the armageddon rave and final wave This is the resurgence, that the human heart was constructed to be bigger in purpose Than its own planet, backwards micro-macro-proto, and so this heart Sends its calvary of corpuscles towards continents to conquer as the white cells develop From the disease and the red ones are over-ridden even superimposed for moments Upon the design of the Overworld Heart, the surge, the Demiurge, the Pulse Which is of course what drives us and makes us in the first place But its drive is coming dangerously close to allowing the realization that This Overworld Heart exists, and we can’t afford to believe that it cares somewhere out there And so it drives us towards more and more reckless behaviors of wanton-ness

On the borders the canyons of heart-attack thresholds Lie answers too late to stop explosions but incendiary enough Are the aftermathematics

After so many genocide’s in any one history Really according to certain timelines certain timelines

Should just manifest or either wormhole

The heart can’t bleed enough of us murderers And it makes one wonder what love is in And if necrophiliacs embrace roses in respectable ways

Overheart pushes its bloodstream towards The Universe already diseased with itself

The antidote? I once thought poems.

The antidote.

*

Us Being Gone.

Not nihilism. Poem bye-bye.

* carve your hybrid language onto a tree it consists of one alien word

croatoan the sea is quite good at it if you listen

Demiurge

Leaving the River of Fire

deposition

The piano on fire made it rain. The maelstrom has its center. The forest fire, unbeknownst to most, has its symphonies. The colt broke its knees the second second after its birth. The island sank into its own vegetation.

Miracles hit visage like harpoons. Maybe a violin on the ocean floor creates certain hurricanes.

A lost wind walks in, dusts off a torn jerkin, says I’m tired, two ales.

The metaphor of metaphor is the word world.

Write a metaphor encompassing the four compass points. If you don’t know truth, it is like your teeth are.

The guitar found frozen in an iceberg broke someone’s heart at every kiosk. And the headlines of guitar magazines full of isolated, yet small truths. Tablatures.

Of small truths: I surrender to wayfarers, clockmakers, nomadic monads. All passwords are elemental, you asked me about burning and I said: the piano on fire made it rain, and that is my official statement whether or not I was in the car that night after the recital whether or not the virtuoso is missing in his actions

Charge me, or try to play this incendiary piano.

And our mothers all architects. And our fathers all demolitions experts. And truth is the technique I was taught to be prodigy, prodigal, prophetic, visionary.

(I can’t play the piano that well, but I must convince you that I can produce a music sublime,

a fire that exists arrogantly in the rain)

A page of lines, of small murders, of avoidance’s. I am guilty of killing him. He was too beautiful there, in the rain, indulging, on fire, at his storm. I confess.

Fish heads, regrets, cardiacs, and politics

1

There they are, the things that I’ve said. Those things that I have said back to them. My bad verbatim parades: there they are that twig snaps in the deep wood, you remember faith, or other things that tend to move by themselves, but

I tend to talk too much about paranormal experiences especially while hungover, nursing wounds leaning against a dead tree, knowing that it is hungover as well and becoming termite larvae.

The things that I have said, each word like a termite. The houses I have said back to them. The way nature prevails ad infinitum. Talking tends to corrode its own foodsource.

These are facts out there that are irreconcilable. The definition of truth is: irreconcilable

2

At birth I was placed into the cage with the sleeping tiger.

Everywhere were parents on siesta. There were cacti and monitor lizards.

Many furtive glances towards the tiger I must have had.

It would only have been instinct to write

a lifetime of poems to my parents at this point.

A teenage boy with a scarred face walked by. He had a set of keys and a claw on his keyring.

Becoming a man is cutting the claws off of the urge of your own parents to kill you.

I am learning how to scar productively. Gnarled and determinedly.

My offspring will have eyes like poems eyes like claws

3

After reading Beckett drunk, I can’t write the lines (I will write the letters)

I joined the Coast Guard yesterday. That point in your life when you should do something real, something without quotations hovering around it with anchors on either shoulder, I will live on the high seas saving those who are queasy with indolence, knowing that any one in a panic will swipe a lifejacket and knowing that I am a lifer, a career rower of oars, a blisterer and my buoyancy depends on how full of hot air I am

I have always been a witch that just can’t drown

4

I have put all of the things I have said within a frame. This sarcophagus is put into a gallery. It is hung for its crimes. The gallery spins under every codex ever written as all spins on its axis across an infinite forest of axes, and being so is this all spinning out of control?

My words stale like sourdough by a fish head and some Anjou pears wonderfully painted by some student who was passed over by the politics of her age, and she could paint fish heads so well that you had an archetype stuck sideways in your throat, a minnow or a carp.

And politics are the things that I have said. And revolutions are the things said back to them. There is just no talking to painters and poets; their materials are just too expensive for negotiations.

I have come to the conclusion that everyday life is the avoidance of constantly writing

5

My last poem will be:

Massive Cardiac Arrest and it will be its own reward my funeral will be as huge as all funerals are underneath as many invisible noon stars

one month in new south ghetto

I saved the cork from the night I called you.

In one month was a mugging and a cartheft my mother’s car, which was my car, but my grandmother’s car inherited by my mother and used as collateral to secure a loan to pay off debt from greyhound tracks, and this is as simple

as we all know it ever gets. There was a near fatal asthma attack in a basement, swamp apt., a bike used as an assault weapon as phones slammed down into their holsters all across this sample of a universe, I put in my notice

and all the women in an inch radius of my temple (none, I am a drama queen, I am all my own women) slit their throats as I waded through tall grass and flea colony moats

I saw God the Chattahoochee Baptist leave a burning cigar behind

the notches it left were sky niches and we all testified that a teen did it another Rimbaud with a bad leg, an attitude

I held my soulpelt up and achieved the rejection again

but the void throws another comet like a rotten peach pitched across a park blooming

and these are the fruits of it and I am a pickpocket of light and I steal light from keyholes

And tonight I wrap the cork I popped when I called you inside the receipt from the gas I bought

to drive me to you, from a swamp to a vineyard

like a comet through every city park like on a Sunday a thrown bottle at a wall after a sermon

"will split atoms, for food" you know it's there when, the distance, and in it on some porch, the silent ember of a cigarette opens its cyclops, and when you get that inexplicable whir in your ears, that's it, stalking, and just because you're paranoid doesn't mean it's not cloning you. and just as you know in your core, much put into the Earth's care, as you look down at your shoes, just as you do this, and as you peer

into your earthly visage, morning by morning, mirror by mirror what is the horror you miss? tetanus? on a razor's edge? your reflection looks lost; look to it again. it's out there, the burning cigarette of that hitman, Fate on his porch with a beer and a shotgun or death by papercut, no morbidity no matter, and this very nanosecond, as pulsars burn as comets collide with bodies more heavenly than any voluptuous vixen of fleshform, as manners of violence on grander scales than any of our skirmishes, wars, massacres, chronometers, gyroscopes, particle colliders, it all reeks of an axe chopping at infinity without the source of energy to keep chopping, those roughhewn infinitudes out there, in here, those cosm's in our catacombs then, underfoot, the twig snaps just outside and beyond your campsite, beyond the fire's radius, lurks preternatural you are reminded of childbirth, and whether or not you will ever again participate in it, the making of children, that is that's basically it, your paranoia, scant knowledge of everything, but, no gnosis of where you fit into it you are a privilege of life's lust and lust's procreant sacrilege

Land’s End

*

join in the gestalt in the data-basalt up to bonelevel mercury notwithstanding come down for fairs, for hot-dogs the parachutes are tents now maritime and monotony of monstrous desires all steeplechased into stun-guns scratch a ticket at the petrol-station ride a bullet into your father's heart mankind's greatest creation so far was not his, mankind's greatest accomplishment was not a walk on the moon but the beautiful desire to. and then he went and had to do it.

*

That fire was a dare, it was eternal. That monocellular. Monadic overdrive, that lust was all on a dare. The heart is like that, always nudging us into heroics so that it may swell into itself, fill with blood to gorge on. But then, everytime the rock-star makes it to the top, he immediately tires of it. All of the sex, drugs, exposure, a walking death. What is left to transmogrify? A will to live. An aching back. Shoulder-up and saddle-out; the grindstone must be heave-hoed. Still, these occupations, all of our neighbors looking with vice Into our backyards, the affairs, the hidden receipts, the one thing You can do that no one else can that haunts your wildest imaginings, These are our import. Of course, this is not a poem; you already know All of this, that the entire world was a dare placed upon us. I know this; I was dared to be a poet. Chewing a bit between my teeth No blinders on, evermore, and on.

*

Untranslatable Lord Of severed Common tongue(s)

A pilgrimage of severed tongues Through the dunes

Beautiful deserts Are gods Revealed, unmarred Jabes Won’t release my hand Because I won’t Drop the book

*

Life begins like a flight to Las Vegas. You get there. All a theme-park you are encouraged to gamble on. You can’t find an ideology any better than you can find your hotel-key. Midlife, on the return flight over a desert, you look down (you always Get the window-seat, of course) and see a junkyard of misgivings. Later you become a widow to a tarred-and-feathered Pegasus And you try to take this act to Vegas. Ludicrous and lucrative. The roundtrip ticket stands at the foot of the itinerary And flicks him a bird and planes full of dullards explode Like pigeons from a rooftop in a town with no neon

*

Hire me. I am a navigator of images.

*

I shouldn’t contribute to the decline of Western Civilization

But I sure love Writing these Poems

* my poems break the falls of angels from heavens

and hide in grottos behind waterfalls among lichens I guess that blood is its own ink; is my ink the blood Of angels that have fallen? My poems the flow Of a divine blood in their divinations? The awesome Reconciliation of blood versus wings and the interim between The blades of shoulders, the body’s hierarchy These galaxies of words like freckles on Christ’s back Faith making you step back from the precipice Of the void, you begin to seriously reflect on All of those stars from your cheeks; you are finally Grounded, the earth’s core holds you where you walk Like a frozen metronome. Feel it humming in you. Acquire gravity, stand in one place during the high testimony, Catch an angel when it falls bloody and wanton into your arms. This aching swoon after swoon after swoon.

*

Linnaeus-lineage. Loki-kin. Prometheus-primadonna. prankster of in- advertent schemata creationism, no, demi-surgistics can it even be there? even in breakfast cereals? in lice-piss and tears of gerbils? too many times I must answer yes. truth is lurking like your paranoia you must embrace your microcosmos, man for any one life, there is the ultra-Blakean angel to discern what is snake and lamb and behind the barn and behind the triggers and behind the pens is danger lurking hardcore in Americana in the labia and between the nubile breasts of an Internet teen and that pestilence is freedom and democratic like all firing machine guns are and cosmic smirkiness and these short lines short-lived monikers

of my wit, my life, a document-awry I was the crappy bassist in a good band, but, I had the only passion and this party level is just below "cops-at-windows" until we hear our own empty promises too many times among the empty bongs and then suddenly the patsy-wagons arrive to place us back in the lunchroom lines and like a cop's insipid flashlight probing a pair of dilated pupils the rancor becomes veiled the predator unveiled I am up to it again shut off that light and fuck me proper, poem poem fuck me properly and thorned

* the lightning bolt the Strep-throat the three steins containing Destiny the rigmarole the diastole the lesion of love cut into a kid at a latchkey the marble the icon column the exhibit the reasons chapels are locked at night the squalor the train's holler the despondent alarm clocks the discrepancies the tin cans the middlemen the battleship bolt-factories the matrix of secrets Hecate spread wide upon a mattress like a rose upon a manuscript hungry as bombardiers drinking beers eating flesh and ammo we go straddling the eve hockey-pucks and what-the-fucks flying easy rhymes buzzing 'bout ears ashtrays bad jokes and jukes no service no tips bartend too smart for spirits night after night lit up like gold becoming lead like solar to saturnine

the flare-guns all a-firing above the posh plush homes of the politicians a militia of poets at odds with the epithets of physics a godhead of wordsmiths the forest with teeth beaches for the meek cities to scrape the gums of the sky the poem as a fist the reader's jawbone gets nailed like an eye opened fast

*

“We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real...We must therefore displace everything onto the sphere of the symbolic where challenge, reversal, and overbidding are the law.”

Jean Baudrillard

*

*I interrupt again the bell of your spirit is sine-curved away mouths spill those invisible rivers superstrung through sinew of skull to skull phoning the scenic of being out-leagues horizons you exist in the rain of a world as if each particle could be felt across the crooked nose of a monument, god, or leviathan one day they will build a galleon for you and you will die as the vessel is filled with riches and then buried in a tomb with your attendants for the afterlife this will all happen in the middle of a wasteland that may or may not have once been a paradise the prow is being hewn now, nightly

shank, shave, shirts, shit, rank and file days, endless alliterations of illiterates time never wrote a poem, save for wrinkles about the eyes. sew shut time's lips then. watch it begin to form words in your own mouths. guilded frames hover about the air dodge them I'm jumping through hoops to capture this image no simpatico frame, quadrant, quartered, drawn into quatrains to as is said too movement not trumped yes fold ace flush gambol stillness of sfumato the smell of documents being signed that change all life as is as if for to chance is an honorable hit-man he kindly stops for legends holocaustically he himself is hunted as we map atoms and genomes good for us we live in a drought of chance for the afterlife clipper to be buried with us only one drowning ever really happened civilization, you are a marvel aren't you

Phrasexodus

I.

Cycloptic we are all wunderkind in the eye the fire burns verbatim no friend in language, only vendors strippers on strips, wholesalers, pimps all bureaus of license that own your gab

and prattle what’s next is the as/is impertinence of the next’s moments patience

spit upon spittle upon cough upon cough upon stained window now covered with germ angels apparitions and apparatus breath on the back of your neck from your lover as you sleep the first of all poems and languages

in and of the word inside the inquisition of each syllable oily rags, mildewed cellars, fire hazards of curses can reside in our breasts

this world is a garden of nacroeative floraciousness

and art’s togglers endure patrons, wasps of auction tenors while souls are screamed through bullhorns as if poetry was the quantum physics of slingshots but the work is never lost upon us for there is a fingerprint of a man upon the altar of every inch of anyone’s flesh

voicebox pipebombs the concords are all glitched we have interdimensional travel in our small talk, but the pilot is lost, the navigator drunk on tongues

we must stay wanton, I am also whore of word worm of easy references

anaphasia of idiot luck clock stopped with a thrown knife, simpatico whose tongue broke the silent pane

someone flung a word and shattered all of the plate glass in our city

II.

Give to metro what nano Draws you to

I salute to surrender you Space lined up is a firing-squad crosshatching stars

Do you wait for me To draw your light like a moon from a pool of ocean?

Do you we wait for all of each of us on the fragile trellis of the first word ever uttered? my kiss was well lit lightning

Chorus of flashbulbs

No candles, no ensconcement of light yet all flesh is candlewax, we know this

Tongues laser Faces wait to

be like light as a particle or a wave

III.

Spires of window-bars in my viewmaster iron railings, alarums of car thefts, Sargasso seas of Spanish moss, balconies of beauty seething in wisteria fits here in the swampcity, I have hewn a song with an arc

and my heart is an ark the animals in my blood find reason to flood to the voicebox

after dropping the reins of our own rantings

we pursue their catastrophes we never meant to hurt anyone with crudely structured poems

IV.

That constellation eradicates all possibility Of ever being named after you

Christian names sprinkle the infinite Like pulverized messiah dust

Torque and train, cable and taut sinew We heave the lens behind us To the observatory of a lost phrase and the lens is heavier than the mountain where the telescope awaits

Word as power

That which conquers as it is quelled That which when said

Quenches the constellation s fire With a mere naming

V.

Don’t ever say ET cetera to me Or I will punish you, etc.

VI. spackles skin sleeves of reptilian for the blind auditory glands cinders are like deep cuts in forearms in a man effigy in this man-effigy of sconces and rites and doves impaled like heavy-handed debacles that hear throbs as far as poems there are conscious voice-overs preternaturally played backwards in time to start this poem over your tongue is a battering-ram which blurs its force into a wormhole

Houdini chains of rattling mortalitities you talked so much you made a dictionary of locks you tried a combination it became a snowflake you were then addicted to imagination (imagine that) the page was never blank you imagine a snowfield

that you should trot through the page becomes bottomless you melt in being left behind

never taking a step but always walking is becoming hieroglyphic

*

VII. you have a handful it is an all that you have ankh and altar and you shave as if your scruff was gold-dust you are convinced you are adamantly deserving of fireballs never quenched which become bitchy phoenixes

I was an idealist and I wanted the embrace of the brackish swan no preternations in my melodrama I wanted to drown in black rape like flags unfurling for a country of blind men but I am harnessed like trochaic feet as every phrase leaves any dark book like a ray of light and anyone reading a dark book is holy for the first time

Mantra Jinx

Tambike the Itinerant says war-crime plastic is an ovum hooplah never knew how the marquis was body parted syzergic puke on the Rorschach and then we ate hash

Tamlife never modernized then that arcade made millions angels couldn't fathom

Tamlife said to gods better niche next time

Tamlife, why do I always dimensionalize, asked Tamlife to himself because came from a long line of because's and his mother was a since no answer there, as Tamlife catches a fish castles get built when Tamlife masturhates regimes fall when Tamlife pro-hate-incriminates waiting forever for one cloud to assemble the shape of a cloud waiting for Tamlife to get tired of making pictures exgurgitate the purge rehabiliphrase of the logometric spine-song

Tambike was an alter ego of an altar that had a bikewreck during a Dada experiment in the Warm War which oppressed the Oil War

Tambike had balls like a bag of marbles covered in creosote

Tambike, may you write your name on the walls of Uruk

Tambike only upchuck pemmican jerky

Tambike paint murals on timpani's

Tambike hero for the moment

Tambike get laid out -ism it has two syllables “ism”, the epos thematic pharmakos phase opsis epiphany? nope, naive alazon. this is stupid, let’s just call the place, okay? glance lexis. melos drama.

I don’t care if the monad is the part of you that makes me say this. lyric ethos. the machine’s a black girl named Eris. motif myth. bullshit said the cuestick. anagogic apocalptic and some weird French shit. well, when in Tome, do as the toll-men do

as they always said in halls of foam. high mimetic. confession dianoia. a craft is a word that you can leave on. a craft is a way of words to stay on. heircraft. craftlooms. slinking out of that fold dollar bill dollar bill dollar bill

“ism” has two syllables, is isometric panoptic tick stuck in my Sargasso hair pubes electric like art that is really there

lead

I will not answer your seance.

I won’t uncloak the negatives (these poor darkroom superstitions).

No one will channel me through medium volumes.

I will not hide the housekeys from paranoid ghosts rattling chandeliers and door-chains. Deadbolts and stormdrains.

I will not succubus, incubus, djinn.

No mandrake, no heroin. No St. John’s Wort, no belladonna.

I will not manifest for cameras. I will not death-defy.

I will only leave memoirs in ashtrays fireplaces and firepits.

I will leave a scratch on the bedroom wall.

The new tenant will always wonder if and how he did it.

take it easy unless it keeps you from effluvium and that black hole corona, that event horizon a point eating its own pointillism, ad lit finitum as we chew light, masticating illuminations the moon is not a rock it is an iris there when full that great astrodome cure that tranquil eye I look up against the grain out of the sky’s brain and think of cloud galleons and regattas of borealis pirate of a star smuggling a heart in a fading vessel for every launch is a mutiny to a world and every world itself is a cowardly launch and with the altimeter going off of its chart and the primordial tightens its belt and crawls up the face from the valley’s wreckage out of the crater and into the casting of missiles into the void smuggled star out from the vessel and from the shadows our flags and the world the primordial that gives out eyes and weapons the primordial that pounds hearts' drums cement-filled guitars fall from high altitudes and this is our music here, this celestial dodge and submerged in emergence, that buzz of all about it in the sweat of gods and words stinking to high heavens and there is pungency here where skies fall differently and down into the smokestacks of swamp-side factories

I will lull the reeds in the fields with philosophies I will amphibiate and be all elements at once sucking in the effervescent silence after the launch

Boomerangs

Boomerangs have no wisdom that is, unless their wielder does who has thrown them.

Sikh knife

I kept Death close to me as a means of living. Like a black leather jacket. Like a gun just in case. I see the sad eyes of the old young men. I see the women hunched over them. Towers will fall as they always have. I hold a key but can’t stand the house. I kept Death close to me. I hid it in her silken hair. She pretended not to know it was there. I whispered in another’s ear about the quiet ships. I kept Hope closer then. And it stuck me like a splinter, and though it caused a limp, I wouldn’t pull it out. I let it go in deeper. Deeper past the Death I’d kept. Deep to the solemn field where I could have stayed forever. I kept Death close to me; as a gnarl of knowing there, by my thigh, omnipresent

what he said was by accident occidentally what he did set him to saying such things he'd do and not admit to like riding kertang in the caddy or esplanades by a shanty or licking the molasses from the mayor's lips or showing his hubric scrutiny in a gallery of thespians with firebrands or befriending mascots who have no rivalries and signing promissory notes for loans over poetry or america's without precedence and munitions enough or the cosmic being somewhere there weren't also some tree-sap and a bed of hollyhock to roll in while reciting ommateums

Reading Joseph Brodsky at 30,000 ft.

Leaving San Francisco, I read Brodsky, the screen informs our speed of 5-hundred-70 miles per hour, dour faces stratify aisles

As do surrounding clouds. Have to be stern with altitude's milieu imagining below great lakes of salt, crop circles, Golden Gates of supreme engineering’s past Bridges of light, space, time are cast in the exile's words, the speech parts themselves are of the coldest sorts befitting of such lofty heights And here in America might one find a modest little sea between pilot, poet, Brodsky

Return to exile, if you may among the anonymity of crowded cafe' and alley to blurred rhymes, those crafted galleys

And there, dream of Norenskaya fourteen huts, your beer, your manna The snow will fall there forever Dream not of America as your poems assuage its narcotic mass

the hydra has more than nine heads that grail we passed around must've assuredly've been holy don't you, wouldn't you say so? blindfolded, the last poem is pushed off an exclamation point into blindness the rewording of this genetic code makes boring mutants comfortable clones line after line after line

*

I am the offspring of common valor and curses where is my tongue of legions like lesions leaving a battlefield?

* my legion of tongues? these are hanged men they speak through scars through jugulars your tongue is a hanged man the minute you learn to talk sometimes he comes back to life and you say what you should and shouldn't

* endomology is the study of trails left in prehistoric rock

by grubbers

I want this innocence so furiously badly I grub for it and leave tunnels through life behind me

* every idea that I have could potentially decapitate me

*

I have as many ideas as the nine-brained hydra with its infinite identities waiting to manifest when a head gets severed please cut off my heads

* after its mutation the headless horseman writes many poems many of them involve blindfolds, valor, innocence, pumpkins, courtships gone awry a sense of the world clavicle-up only living in the suite between two ears above a trash-compactor mouth and home-entertainment-center eyes and fast-food nostrils and a cranium overloading all of its reptilian mammalian human potentials

* my fingers reach back upon themselves I have too many ideas, too many brains

*

that grail we pass around and the cup we seldom drink of to teach the word "plate" to someone I would have my head cut off and brought to them upon it

I can think of no other way anymore to make a word impact

the definition of the infinite you have a handful it is all that you have you are convinced that you need to get more there is nothing but desire what filled your hand in the first place? you have a handful it is all that you have have you ever seen a handful of desire? it is all that you want but forever nothing is there until you take your empty hand and throw emptiness towards its own endlessness and then you have substance and then you look into your palm and you see that desire is your hand and what you hold in it holds in your mind the endless pain the glass full of deserts the thirst full of quenching

cages rose embroidered on a hairshirt (Christ made love) dried liver paperweight (am I breathing) dolphin ribcage (above the ammonites) scarlet letters (of petrified wood) a Whitman revision (in a vial of acid) a fragment by Stein (in a lint dustbin)

Rimbaud with no wine (it never happened) my pinky's fingernail ( a hangnail hanger-on) scabbard full of holy water (a wine-bottle) knife stuck in a tree on trail Appalachia (kill Whitey) a penny on the beach (what time is high tide) hollowed leopard's tooth (broke off inside a jackal's side) your poem on my necklace (goodbye)

torso under a tour-bus (no more groupies) seashell on a mountaintop (time) feather in lava (evolution) lollipop on asphalt (chew gum) marriage in a barn (kids with genius) motorcycle helmet (teenager with scars) broken tusk of mandrill (a zoo gets funds) mold on a tome's cover (pretentious) hand in my pen (gospel according to . . . ) hand in my heart (gate rattles with key in it) gate in my open hand (salvage salvation) nation in my mind (constituency of turbines) flesh in my pen (written attrition's) body in my soul (ethereal)

lethargy of wonders upon parade-wheels good world knows, I've got stimuli-eyes help this hapless lord of lost word lights to pass over the scintillating gates so that I may and may have so in May and in return, in my love-bag, I might get a down-to-Earth-Autumn, if not, the barbells still swing low in a strong man's chariot and in my heart like a swamp, many have found a Cosmos, it is veritable I was always asking for it, I guess, as betrayal is forgiveness that can be carried upon your person but never given away fast enough, like voodoo or banana-peels in a worn knapsack and only a monk or saint of different moderations will dally over a river on a tree-trunk carrying that in rain, that is, or a torrential downpour, that is if I was cut open you would see shadows of men meeting men that I once was and I understand this, but, I would have to be cut open for it, but, then again the world is a whirling scalpel of several scissors whirling around handshakes with fragile wrists shaking blood pumping over the compost heaps I carry a war in a bag that no one fights but me poets and business-men should have conventions shit upon shit and such and then what would fertilize this excursion we would grow fucking rain forests all of my great men are doppelgangers, cloinoids, monad-copiers, etc. I was once a great man and then I stopped writing and then I was weak and full of shit and then I started it up started writing that full of shit shit again

Deconstruction Childhood Anecdote avant archaism idiot savantism the aggregation of this soap operatic lined text get to the deaths this story-board in a rainstorm like they all are (my head is on the block) no, not ever so easy post-traumatic syndrome for indeed the worst has already reached, breached its quickening the horse must be shot more for us than its own idea of pain or lying onside with colic I was only fourteen its language was a languid groan poor old bed-sore roan my sister was crying that’s when we broke up finally she would cry more I would one day confuse this event with a poem the hole erupted in the roan’s skull the brutal finality my step-father was never more beautiful in his mercy, “put out of misery” is what he called it my first real violence because of the size of the horse I once rode her across Mr. Williamson’s acres later, step-father would show me and my brother had to clean

the gun and Mr. Williamson had the roan hauled off my sister would leave home less than a year later I’d be the next to leave one season soon after.

gestalt graffiti

B-movies are documentaries our thoughts, guns, tits, and ass

* trailer-park children flocking to pool-halls and above-ground pools

* try to hang-glide into a higher bracket, invent a better socket-set

* wet black bodies carved from flanks of ibex ranks

*

I am atomic and have always been erosion control is the science of living

*

I am a spinning weathervane powered by a perpetual turbine

* adroit and drifting, aspiring to higher device yet no soul shall be sacrificed

* my angel lies in the cracked cornfield as earth abandons a halo for hope of heart

* abandon all human instinct to the grid, I guess

* all these tattoos across America slowly scabbing under

* no one will be notified in the event of this super-ego’s blackout

* at some point you must sleep through the flak and shrapnel

* a metaphor is a meteor that falls like ______and then by being read it becomes a meteorite and then, subsequent that crater of ore

* this is what an alarm clock is really worth the sun, its 1st fast pressure breaking its wineglasses over the earth

* your hands are windmill wings, shotglass slings I crash my brake-less school-bus into you

*

I make the miasma of night my lover.

Smerdyakov is the name of my bartender.

* the decision on the cusp of all the dice were frozen in an ice-cube and we waited for it to melt

* the stone’s a poem; the mountain’s a not so novel novel

* they never tell you how blood got all over your shirt and then they book you or bill you

* we used candlewax to close our cuts, super-glue for the worst ones and mouths also congealed after our burning tar of words

* the litanies at the close of every faucet, door, eye, account, and day every glance a distant door shutting I hear its abeyance

* grab your shawl as I grab my veil. Clouds of dust linger longer than we breathe. This is always known by our steeds

* who is he who sleeps to Beethoven (my other half)? he is deafer than that man ever was

* a leaf is a god’s handkerchief Zen-girlfriends, flea-collars, roach-motels: do the rich have these? (it all or always depends on the advertisers)

*

kiss my acid. I eat words. love turds of them, try to stomach icebergs as tasteful white dirges. I can chew a star in two like Zeus with a migraine-hangover drinking dew

* one nail protruding from the exact center of an immense white wall, one nail. That has its own immense power

* the mass of a dwarfstar lodestone in scale to the hurt your theories have caused

* torn between two beasts of insurmountable beauty on a battlefield of my body, as a gut-shot delegate pleads for fifths of whiskey

* frayed paintbrushes and bulls charging and they still re-assemble my portrait after I’d disgraced the family royale

*

Nature writes in invisible ink, and from animate to pulp to permeate the ink is constantly permanent as debris wraps roots like dentistry

* a plum jettisoned at the foot of a plum sapling is how it is and will always be debris wrapping our roots like perfect dentistry

Echo is stasis

I am the silence. I stand in the field. Unified, waiting.

Echo. Nothing traverses other than. I let go of the reins. No stalk disturbed.

I wait for Echo. Again. Conditions aren’t right. Abort. Finally

I cut my hands open. I hear something coming. The world meets me here, thrumming.

Like a name spoken on a pier. In high wind (like a name returned).

Like slack reins. You left and left and left it.

Skewered, finished, an anything in a strange painting of an assured commission of name.

Culture heals no echoes; it only hears them. Cry out that history one more time.

Bowdon, Georgia summers

You’ve got to tip-toe around the stepfather of your heart a healing can’t begin yet this late into summer let it fester like rotweed on sweltering gravel. Too many guns always around the house for all this rural boredom. An old roan stands by a fence like indifference, as if its jockey was a misplaced forensics file. Call in the psychics to locate our lost childhoods. Resurrect the honeysuckle vines. I am barren with the Southern Cross of it all. I wear myself like a tarp. Famished, tip-toeing around the bedroom door and into the kitchen to steal his beer and water down his Scotch. And then out into the field of acres we can’t own on the salaries of cop and secretary as I sit on a hummock as cows gather around, dirt-dumb, but still, like me, always vaguely curious.

After Kunitz’s Careless Love

Lonely syringe and its ounce Glass table, bills, loaded guns. Disdain and clamorous speech. Dark beauties clasp handsome cheeks Whose eyes beside nothing glows. The gun in silent repose Begs for power of a hand. Lost loves don’t understand That frames shudder the frame. I lost my nation, un-named. I went to shoot my love. I had something to prove. My heart could hold no more heart. Like a bulb too many volts, I blew into vicious joys and killed her other sultry boys.

That old leather green cover

I found the ample street logic needed to remain in the establishment and there was that unfinished equation lingering like an unknown closet whose door needed closing business unfinished in the spore piles but all of my bluffs paid off my die of flesh rolled molecularly across fate’s cobblestone as it should but, mortal simply is its own excuse and so goes this folly to another every morning a blackjack gambit for omelets over an oubliette I like to make (sh)it exciting I fall off the cliff and land in my shoes the most perfect prefect walks out of the government line and rosters illuminate like a census in a plague somewhere the nose of a god grows bigger as I begin the Ambrosia Project, just something I came up with for justice and glass is a concept not a mindset and grasp is a verb not a noun here and reflection is unheard of, and our muscles stretch the texts further

Adumbral Aphorisms

Hairshirt mantle hangs in pawnshop always someone will buy it

* one careful stone thrown broke a forest of bottles that one phrase of bullets

* my demographic of demons: bulls, colts, millers, pilgrims, ki-rin, pirates, bootleggers, kilts, stouts, loggers, rocket dogs, rogues, saints all ensorcelled upon labels priced with any random volatile possibility, but what price dignity?

* the river of forgetfulness can’t be purchased flask by flask pint to pint the tether between two worlds can hang you can tie the prow to the dockpost can trip-up a stampede can be a fuse both ends burning like you are lit you lit it yourself

* your ornithology has become the

oxymoron stabbed into the side of me

* always wade dangerous waters before drinking them there is a war of cautionary tales my soldiers now shattered into shards my war was never mine was never even a war had no progeny, had no country, no kin no banquet, no vestal virgins, no sacraments been this bent since I broke in

*

I’ve already lived an eternity in every single night I’ve woke to oblivions to my own wake every other morning

* the book, poetic apparatus an actual device of divisive-ness the jaws of life between two covers the mouth that gives birth as it devours the umbilical cord you bite into in order to tie yourself off as you become an expert in ship’s yarns and nautical knots

* a drunk at an AA meeting once said to me: “alcoholics are just frustrated mystics” now it’s quite obvious what drives him to drink that shaman with no social intent is always the village idiot and, usually, he will be continually arrested

*

I’ve been as week as can be a bird with broken bones hobbled under a fig tree circling on rotten fruit and the ants eyeing me

* to fight a long battle with your soul to fight a long battle for your soul to fight an epic after selling your soul to reclaim the used soul to never know your soul at all I say it is best to be road-weary, scarred, humbled it’s best to have had, several times over, your soul’s ass kicked

*

it took all of nanotechnology a full phalanx of microscopic biobots to rebuild me, to rewire my skewered symmetry after my own heart’s mutiny that contraction like an ion what is not bound by what charge, what freedom that it longs for?

* a dream can be a cage if you wake up in the middle of it as the electrons swarm your nucleus

* my life was not to become words that I never got around to looking up

* shake it off like a wet dog in the rain

*

Americans can get away with anything after all, the movies taught us that there is always Mexico to run to

* it’s a fact: earthworms crossed the ocean in horse’s hooves on Spanish galleons to repopulate the North American continent which they’d not inhabited since the last Ice Age and I will float across a river of fire in a migration of my own diminutive kind and do it on a barge of feathers to get to my homeland to begin again my worm progeny and kin

* the dignity of the bull reverence and pride of the bulwark purpose and strength in the bridles and languages and the sarcophagi of clues and intentions and the relics and rites of shards and bulls being mummified and revered reverence, respect, and fear a bridge at night, a bulwark under solid ice, or my plaintive signature here across the pale forehead of a page

*

I searched for the learned hermit I leaned against a lamp-post the regulars didn’t know what mists he traversed

to some new gate of hell there is always another gate to there (trust me on that one) I could hear the red words of his nova fire and I asked, “are you my teacher?” and I heard the leather of his wings

* strange that my mind is only quiet of words when writing and my silence is never much of a poem as much as it is an admonition of a canvas painted over by a blind man a million too many times and his every brushstroke is true

*

It all ended it all began when I realized I had to live what it was I was preaching and this is exactly when it all began it all ended

*

I love you like the infinite gap between two snowflakes

* this truth serum burns my blood (get away from me with that)

* like the secret dialects of restaraunteurs, of tugboat captains, of English teachers, I waited for life to hike up its skirt for us but, life had never worn one what had I always been thought? life never did anything concealing and for that matter, it makes Hope more appealing it gives me that good inside feeling, yes it does

*

Futility, you are the towel I use in the downpour of self. I am a lucrative sponge, a beached being. Love is a papercut drinking lemon-juice and turpentine on an orange sluice. I am a hemophiliac and you are the Romantic bloodbath ensuing.

*

Panther startled by sudden cello.

*

Sensual, like the sweetest earlobe.

*

Language, I have bullied you, so please kick my ass anew around new lines, the jagged demagoguery’s of the rabid lexicon menagerie

* we stare into it as the Cyclops glares back from the desktops as our goggles fog up and we clench with tendonitis and the hum is constant and the keyboard more tactile than a wife or husband’s flesh

* the best we could do with our souls so far is become greedy children with more hands than candy in a candy field

* as one embalmer to another, we all speak to and from our scars we’ve been there you say to them they speak to you these notches in bas relief these waxen lips set deep and shut in your skin

they never age like the rest of you frozen there like the only cuts ever frozen there like the name of the same cut over and over for all of us

* how much math can you bring expecting Beauty not to sing?

*

I was left behind and angrier than the reason anyone had left hell, I was even angrier than the last time I’d written about it but I made due, paid everyone’s dues at the house tree paid them to keep quiet about it I said stop wearing those reindeer belts out to the bars, boys and girls

* a small town is so cellular under your gossip’s tumors cannibalism amok in rumors via satellite via towers

* no poem has ever made of me a mirror in this language I look into a sky painted by Magritte

*

I have wished for complete total implosion that black hole encumbrance so to embrace the entire space-time continuum with the atoms I have of theirs

*

a strange dissonance like pissing in a toilet as a trainwhistle blows I am lackluster flushing my nightly under a green light I’ve got enough left for a good tip and one more pint

* seeing the back of your own skull as you write a poem is a delicious horror

*

I am an unhinged catch-clasp there’s no wealth inside this chest so soon that a star did not know I always use Johnny Reb-Ebonics I am the box of fickle light you gaze into my wounds you only understand pain as a predilection I know pain as an epic of insane proportions

* it has never been an alchemical soul it has always been an alchemical one

*

I recite Ghazals to myself to constantly piss myself off these war-songs about inside-fires and for running distraction the Devil gave me his carbon badge and wearing Pride, the Star-badge, I walk through the heavens brilliantly, at least until I piss on the wrong hellfire and then the politics take my wings and make armies out of them

as I stand, can’t fly

*

I was born under the same sign as Chick Corea and Egon Scheil

* you are the last to ask, “so, what do you do?” I cut out tongues I am a tongue-lasher. my godfather was a postman, now a butcher. this is no baloney; greater men than me have lost their wit for speaking of one another. once I was trying to tie my shoe for the first time now I’ve tread untold when’s in them. I love watching rodeos, the rally of it, the gates slammed open, the roughshod tumbling of everything from a shed; it makes me wince and pour salt onto my cut (a quarterhouse). I love silent movies about rodeos the best. Don’t prod my bull with a spear; it speaks randy enough. Now ask someone else, “so, what is it that you do?”

*

I am:

“Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion, the way nets cannot hold water.”

Pablo Neruda

* poetry is the daily advance of unsung stupidities towards my own weaknesses they cut off Che Guevara’s hands when he died; I did not know he was also a writer

*

“We’re like fishermen living off the sea,” says Taghlaoui who spends his life digging fossils out of desert rock, “Except that our sea is dead.” Lawrence Osbourns, NY Times Mag. Oct. 29th, 2000

*

Sheltonisms (for Scott, the greatest friend anyone could ever have or try to kill)

I. I’ve got a shotgun-shell knife and a wedding to attend.

Stranded celestial moonbeams—like lima beans in fatback broth.

Colon arteries of preachers’ pasts and cancers; never fart in church.

Lepers can’t hurt you if you don’t touch them; we drank beers on the burial mounds.

Look out for that El Camino 454 and the hearses with wagon wheels that are worth more than the coffins they carry.

II. Shelton cut me like an apology. The eulogy was too short. I despised you, yet I fucked you ‘til dawn.

Making love is disposition of distortion. My life is forgetting what I was born to do. No, that’s it. Save the couch-converse. I pull a knife from behind my left ear and make a new craft of hurtfullness. Then I say those immediately regretful slurthings and then you find that behind your ears you also harbor knives.

2. Palms and pines. Weird erosion. An empire of bog vs. smog. Kissing in a bottleneck of bad culture. You can tell it is those black kid's 1st time at the ocean. The ocean insists constantly. Its greatest fear is that it is never ending. Its greatest fear is never ending.

Personal History of My Piracy

Culture was always a stasis of guilty victims.

A moth sells a chic soul under a spastic lamp.

Sincerity, I’ve walked your bricks. Austerity, your burns and blisters.

Saltspray and sandpaper wind shanks me in this paradise.

Coastal highways tempt with cities. The dunes corrode the hammocks.

A gold old forest of meanwhiles awaits.

I am only carving out a meager. Culture the impetus of victimless guilt.

We need a code of laws someone said. A grackle of crows caws.

You are mooring the vessel and the passenger has his knife shining

Behind his back in his one good hand.

Tongue to Tourniquet a tourniquet around the tongue to become famous a poet need only die in one book resurrection no matter no cess or jest of gestation then cut out the tongue of anyone then hang the fleece over an olive tree its lowest limb lowest comedy becomes him let the sculptors do their verdigris let the critics pop their speed they’ll need it assume the position you’ve earned for accolades all of this in jest our tongue is rapier we are all men hung over hung men hung-up on women hearts are the only books left a scatology of history that is smarter that chronicler me

we crude craftsmanships power struggles with no penmanship on our last hour nothing gracious is signed without blood signature snipers kill the week in media floods from the birth certificate to the last certificate we are a Sargasso Sea of tongues just ask any of her After a Flood

Poetry is the hat with wings. You go to the market in a canoe after the storm not knowing if a market is even left.

This disaster area and your bloodsong your family tree aria wrapped around your waist like a belt hung with wares for sale.

There was nothing left to waste and you unfastened your wares and drowned them and then sang low like a swung chariot.

the census

the amanuensis only had eyes it only had eyes on one side of its head

the tweezers which could hold the last truths could not be retrieved from the dark niche with our other tweezers

walls walked away from themselves leaving behind only transparent walls, bipartisans

in the squall and squalor we christened our vehicles and structures with those adverbs of color we hollered in the street the amanuensis closed all of its eyes but one and by doing so became a bona fide citizen

every poured into the streets cheering from their auditions

confession

I never once said that that was my only solace.

In the rushes’ quickenings, I never once heard whispers.

The fireworks over the beach left X-ray shadows over the waves.

Which do you like better? I never once claimed my sentence.

If I were to solicit solitude, I would do so as a peddler of fine hair products, of slick gleam, sheen, shine. I’d sell snake-oils. I’d sell hallucinations, pyrotechnics, smoke-bombs, illusions all man-made. The sfumato would hide my art (that would be my art), and reveal its light in my spinning mirror escapes and I would never once admit it as I collected the town’s purses that this politic was my only solace.

Sunday morning after all night baking shift totem, dulcet quiet solicitor quiet, no stolen soul was ever given chords dulcet, totem backslider, ensign vocalize the thief’s name call it out be true to form put your treasures in your croon fill up the steamy rooms like all calls of desperation that end up orbiting craters or being caged in satellite dishes but, the ballad is the only ore there I don’t sell or buy souls I just steal bread from my boss but this galactic perimeter piercing its own side I’d rather study just never could do the math the writing on the wall I wrote and I couldn’t read it next day my gnosticism is of the third shift I craft a totem, sleep-depravation dulcet of crust and dustmote something to wake to, some bread. the sun comes into my kitchen I remember that I once had a mystical life I really thought I did, then the sound of steel guitar peels across the air towards me from the Steve Earle CD I lean into, break the bread, totem, dulcet no sleep, 3rd shift, sip first beer, sunrise dulcimer, banjo, guitar, talisman, dulciana another night notched into the tall anthropomorphic pole of my spine there will be no storms today according to my fiber optic netsea palm-pilot it will be characteristically characteristic here.

my living room is Delphi (read more contemporaries!) my bedroom is Alexandria (is she really right for me?) melodious totem of saxophone now, sonorous, bending up like the neck of a slow egret, other frequencies like calluses peeling, burns from baking, fleck of rye screams somewhere in meteoric craters, screams of here we are. the kitchen in golden light. toast and honey butter, beer, Sunday morning, shift done totem, dulcet, talisman, bread, home.

I let the reins go

form, and the contortions of yours

and mine, these lines kill country roads

with tentaclic lustful scrap clinging trigonometric against gravities of stated moves and slated troves of ions of what formulas

what next? the golden ammonite

curl of the tongue

hypotenuse of hyperbole

megaspeech

logostronomy faulty arches

still spew their lights

we engineer rhapsody

dance more, closer now there’s an edge

how will I build the body

that can withstand

such seizures as these

the fact or glimpse improbable equal

the miracle of aptitude amalgamous all the gymnasts fall to the floor from atop the pyramid in a mass of wincing snap of syntax

fluid through tubes from combustors jetstream navigators from speeding bikes ask any attendant the maps are legends put Tarot cards in your spokes ride hard hellkites, ride hard for the itinerant the completion of every sentence requires cage and gauge, passport and deutschemarks someone on the web just got erected broadcast quotation obscurity is not the maze that one thread of crumbs can lead you out of anymore your poem slams shut like mousetraps caught in crab-cages and you are afraid to investigate the trembling other end of a taut rope caught somewhere deep

this fence of thought not yet built with the bird perched there in mid-air waiting for dimensions to be perceived and to flesh and feather them out

ontology recapitulates philogeny and after all this time you still don’t love me

the mafia of language won’t release you alive once you’re “on the books,” y’know, a “made man” you are done, neck-tied, hobbled, etc. you are cappacello for the dogs and scraps for pigeons and being that there are no man-made words, well then there is no release, no witness protection relocation, you see, we have found these sounds

they were a tight family well before our time, fellas

physicists theorize that the entire unknown/known universe folds about itself much in the manner of a burrito. let these conquistadors still starve, these hagueros, these bastard comprachicos, let this jungle of substrata kill their own in the way of the viral world.

this tangent has order its chaos the higher order that I am unaware of (obviously!) and, I am always entitled to my disclaimers (I wear them like a raiment)

O night negligee of nascence black alliteration punctured with celestial prisms burning!

contorted

centauric verse

wrong, staggered

drunken, maned, trampling on orchids

randy fevered forest-lost

adrenal rush of life equaling death

the continuum must balance

in the next next

get out of the vineyard

play chess with other oracles

you are folly without youth

Love’s quiet moccasins Love’s empty holsters Love’s thorned tiara Love’s hood ornament found in a fishing net Love’s tick embedded in your lover’s hair Love’s pendant hung from an antenna atop a skyscraper Love’s psycho jumper cables Love’s ridiculous, love’s enablers

I am the mass-hallucination in the mess-hall for an army that only eats ink from a pen writing a pinpointed vintage of vantage points. the grimmoires of grace got left open. so it’s open risk season at your shack. get the shells. be stillness by the still. the amphitheater of the forest has too many voices. the old southern catapult and the new evil maladroits. be ready and stocked and ready to be readied. jinxes have their numbers on you.

heist of poltergeist anger

locked in ampules hermetically

sealed telekinetic valences

these crazed pharmaceutical co’s

trying to colonize souls

basically, there, I

said it again fill this inscription, you

industry-fed bitch the fragment’s fragmencement is a direct answer to an indirect question asking itself why ask.

The Golden Mean is mean the ammonite, the beehive, the magnet’s coils there is no flow other than the desire for flow we provide and so nature is pitted against human nature frontal lobes and ganglions wrapped around their own DNA spirals and vice-versa in the spiral the pit of the pear vs. the pit unfillable at least that’s how I see it confounded as I am without compound eyes

The ballast of a tempest Plankton, from the Greek “planktos” being more dreadnoughts to wander, as words do, I say to them than what it destroys that I am a hungry blue whale and there is no honor among weather patterns

Autarchy, I am building a propulsion system for my artificial island. Don’t say malarkey. Hydrostatic, magnet vs. magnet. My wall vs, all the walls of the world.

Nodus: this notice hereby prohibits not having one.

You live in that treehouse on the edge of the cliff and dangle your rope-ladder down.

I am Euripus.

Find me somehow contradictorily eurythmic.

Quotha! Quotha! Cover me in plaster! Make a mold and break over the stubborn brow of the original! We’ll have our neoclassical cloning! I’ll pick the mosaic from the pieces. I’ll sell the tiles down on the open market.

Whippletree, clevis, etc. One word always tows another. The madman wrote the Oxford. It broke his stamina, without question. The heaviness of books, lead coins on eyelids. The sacral-cranial bend, the hump beginning to rise in the back.

Got hit by a carcajou. Got trampled by a megapod. Once in Canada, once in Australia. I love weirds and words.

I have reached apogee. with you my reader or have I a slower moon’s path? I can’t do the math. Paths of moons should be slower (you were right) being a peaceful beach-lover an studious of tides.

In a few day’s time my form will burn away like gold becoming lead so give me a few days, okay?

Iamblichus, hand me my staff please. This song needs be noted.

My pathology is the merger of all ologies.

This nature of my addiction. The line itself is but a Cadmean victory. The earth rotates under the axis of this pen, at times.

It is all so boring that we actually have the time to archive. This world’s very existence says something pending. Keep good records, corpse. Initialize the copses.

Awe that glittering it mauls hold. It was excitedly original how the piece wholly unforgave itself. She wiped her lipstick on a lamp-post and walked away into an American ethos. All amidst the petroleum-fed dinosaurs. The stars were stuck fossils. The horizon has always been placated. Freedom, I’ll pierce your tongue for you; Truth, take this last doubloon. I’ve no more use for this green card anyway. I’ll see you all there in the end, on the short day. Together, purblind in the ambushing glory.

for such malfeasance, a slap on the archaic with a wrist is in context blindfold me first prop me up for the firing squad then, don’t shoot me after leaving my lifestyle of tempting executioners I will soil some other Siberia I’ll become an alcoholic, a compulsive gamboler across the planes I’ll entice the local farmers to kill my father no chronology the blanks at close range can still kill they can end the lives

of the sons of dragons the newfoundlander genius runs amok across the tundra-muck from a battalion of cardboard riflemen and publishers and all cultures and legends become one in the can the celluloid and cellular absurd that I am the catamite of the genome my bitterness genetic (sic) it coils about its own perfection like a billion years of progress just for the achievements of maybe gills, or a thumb.

what broken glass shards now found by bare big toe later? the only truth left to write about, get the tweezers. such august moments make me reprobate (oh shit!) here comes my officer (I’ll get back to you more later . . . )

to the great poets I say: thanks for the hailstorm of wailing metamorphic sulfurs, the swan songs, the armies, and all of our chauvinistic hermaphrodites in waiting

my heart lives under a bridge it knows riddles it eats children it has hands like a blacksmith its secrets are blood-bruises nothing to pity, there is no vocabulary for the bent ogre in the crotch of a gutter he is wisdom, wise, and knows he repeats wherever he goes either you have a death-defying love or you are a daredevil let’s bungee into the infatua-vat and sashay into the accua-station trap let’s get our meatgrinder experiences within that yellow-tape perimeter swell to antithesis, boil there and swelter and when the bubble bursts we will all know and fill

Nowhere to begin in a snowstorm. I just heard that fly’s wing. Make tracks? Avail? I heard the same one that night we met. Leave drops of blood? We ate, went to the efficiency, kissed. In the mildewed hall-closet shower. We were hiding from that old college. Conversation, i.e. “the future will call this road A road. I wish certain moments were quarantined. I may as well pull all the grasses up. Out of the Earth. Pull hair there (something activates). Look, flies everywhere. Look, snow everywhere.

You are better at me than this. Like love or a skull-crushing can happen in the same alleyway at any time at the same time. The rat of the wharves is always the same rat you see; if you see him in numbers, then cash the chips in. Take it from one who flew in on a guitar and out on a greyhound. I can make the best appetizers, and I can wire a house. I have a beergut America- style. I wonder should I own a gun. An umpteen-alt Heston. But, the ferret always needs another operation. It’s not affordable, these jobs, fads, and juxtas. My modus apparatus is a given notice of nodus, sub-operatic sitcom. To be sure, pathos is no path, although every path leads to it. Build a playground in a Third World country and let the survivalists worship it. It’s fitting, it is a cathode ray to bring all to us. Proper perspective of talking heads. It’s a fiber optic out of context fed to a last nerve to get on an alien monument to decipher per every destination.

It is love or death in an alley dialing a dictator “He’s a purist; be one.” We make so many deals, electric eels in suits of magnetic fields, Doppler wares of doppelgangers all marching towards a lemming horizon. You are better than me at this, out-fighting fire with fire and breaking free finally from wet paper bags to careen through new detritus.

Stole the anonymous journals

from the exhibit, took off my gas mask, extinguished the lamp my hard is a foreign artifact when opened, a marvelous alien thing. I am out among the pimps, the blues men, the lovelorn and the drunken. Still, I recognize no kin. Staring down the barrels of divine cannons as the flint catches. spark. The fuse quickens. How even in the safest modes of thought I end up paraplegic and face-down in a hailstorm. “If you will just shut up a while you will learn something,” was no way to begin a poem. Nor was “emu stampede” or “whorehouse burning on a New Year’s Eve.” I’ve got lots to learn and a short straw to draw and hang onto. I am a name on the fingertips of my own sculptures. I was crushed under the weight of the interminable world, like a wus, like a crybaby.

Golden ladders and philosophers’ stones, man, my closet is ersatz full. The gods can pick their teeth with radio towers all they want, my nickname still is “toothpick.” My lies are slippery, like successful lies. I shot the shotgun into the floor of the dinghy. I was drunk on many packets. The orphaned oracle said, “the river is passion that has learned.” How could I have known I’d be shot out of cannons into a profession of cannon-crafting? Life is strange, and then you become food for great, majestic, incredible worms.

poker-face sex, and what a life it is! death, a bad angle on a prolific angel’s face. the photo booth is out of film. today you get no passport. the negatives are returned damaged anyway. scabs and bills come in by the truckbed-load. All comfortable sofas have been eradicated. You are destiny going to its last enemy’s funeral. You want to see who is there. There’s no more volunteers. You are a lipstick cartridge lost behind a toilet at a train station. Your valuable surface inks my lines. Empty the boxes I put flesh into. A flesh that turns to wordmesh. Too fast, and thus, I am a god only in passages. And hallways of arrogance fueled by passion’s pistons. Tongue or tail you propel into the vast. Perfect organisms, and what a life we is is. False history of the history of pseudo. One cell screams macro-micro! Reconsidered zygote. Religion burning in its embryo of indecision. Be here or not my halfway brothers. This page and other mad slantings. A hand that should have been folded. A bookie universe, a gangster-fate, a poker table universe. The house doesn’t always win. We are all high aces.

I spy

My boy’s name is Sputnik. He’s really hot, incandescent in his descent, a potent acquisition to have procreant in earnest achievement. I clocked a storm and you sipped vermouth. A bird ate a popcorn on the roof; you sighed. No struck lightninged. No gales all night. We waited for Europe, our supermodel friend. She arrived and tussled Sputnik’s frame. Neutral countries spilled from wicker furniture. The fake mahogany of our conversation lacquered. Technology’s signature was too lengthy to sign any checks. Spies are unemployed and sometimes deployed and decoyed. They were holding their cameras while being filmed in the process. The cellphone calls the cells’ numbers, appeals to the neurotic route. The cellmate, the murder, the DNA disaster, the fiber optic fibers ringing migraines of finality. All the high school bands all across the world suddenly play TAPS. You have to shake off a suburb for a sense of it. Stay just the way you are, or put down the camera. I execute the shots (secretly, I confiscate all the cameras and save the stag party playbacks). Sputnik spins about after the war he was about. It is good to know when lightning strikes so that you don’t avoid it.

regurgitation

And that the only reason it was livable was that it didn’t ask in the 1st place in a 1st tense gesture towards elusiveness or essence my prevalence is an ordained valence it seems towards insatiety, be it so, one learns to love even under the best conditions the most dangerous and despicable times for alcoholics aren’t depressions but celebrations these are avenues puked and pissed down. No one can seem to calibrate the turkey days. If the murders of words hung from street lamps too much light would be bled out. I’ve known for a decade that music comes from one triangle or another. And so, 3 points in any given field have given dimension. This dimebag worthy philosophy. Potent and pointed. You see: stars. That’s it. It is livable and up to your waist the rice patties of words and round your head the bat-swarms of them and the vapor of one used always in conversation but to try and write it down is hard to remember: swarm, swarm , swarm. Language is not a cockroach under a heavy boot; what can be said is never crushed when it should be. It is never trapped or alive long enough to say it. As waves of sound bounce off of space stations and stasis of other innerspaces it’s inhabitable though manic. The alcoholic adjusts the scuba gear and becomes an initiate in the golden mire. It’s thousands of years and you can own it. Mine it. Go to the grimmoires, talk to the tomes. Patriots, pirates, deejays, emcees, skags, rebounders, lepers, snipers, purse-snatchers, poets, fathers, wives, spontaneous owners etc., urchins, pawnshoppers, and we all slobber over the world with words wasted seldom for one another’s hearts.

retroburst

I am tired tonight beyond all summer wasps. The sounds of the city let me go back to the horde of uninhibited soul. Dare I say the word soul? Or the word uninhibited? Please don’t take my pain away; I justify my pill. A Prometheus to myself, a gasoline Phoenix Viking firestorm wingbeat and stones and meteors hurled by it, a comet whose ache defines it. I have a scar on my right shoulder from barbed-wire, but, I pretend it was Psyche and her lamp. And I have a scar on my cock; I pretend it was Pleasure, her daughter. Off of my chin drips quicksilver. I am still the matador of my own bullshit. I would joust lightbulbs of streetlamps holding their glowing cries of pain. A braid of lion’s mane, a ground rhino’s tusk, piles of bottle caps fused, plastic rockets and toy dinos melted into a clump, tattered postcards, plum seeds. I have many a thing I’ve years been constructing. I have a scar below my left thumb. I pretend I am its father. I will always thrive and escape as the concubine of smoke mirrors. On a frictionless canvas, a ghast painted lingering in the backstage of stanzas. I have this particular stride. Slow as bird’s flight, fast as man’s thought. Maybe I plunge over the edge of myself. You gave me my life, that cloud of dust, that lotus blooming in reverse.

the mesh your listless self-romance, yours the interminability feeling thin wraith-waif, not in shape, not successful in your vespers, the contrails wrapping you like Koto notes falling over a stream you are oblivious as usual, like a self-portrait a slight metallic taste of documents being signed as the lumberjacks agree to provide redwoods and gunpowder (and more paperwork), but, more interesting is how you move inside your suit le grande fromage, leopold of all you see, my friend from another bracket; your wife needs you and I overheard the payphone conversation you and me are hollow in such separate and drastic ways melodic distortion has its healing properties you always stand too close to the podium now stand back modulate, don’t moderate, the Buddha is always fat with voice and now in the antenna-dish nation of Afghans and contraband you start a jazz band at a ski resort and eat boar and fruit torte American poetry is an oilspill, an orchid cartel, a beautiful new species of whale and in civil criteria: what is in a thief’s name? well, the music tells you first and never beats itself to death media Grande Fromage in medias res always starting the epic when our eyes open to the carnage, it makes sense, midlife crisis of Western culture: it has forgotten its alchemy: never retire: pursue me and the two Mexicans, the one Egyptian, and one African-American (and sometimes the Portuguese Domini who comes by on special tasks) who get along great in the warehouse (I am not making this up: Savannah Furniture 2001-2002, warehouse on 1624 Newcastle St. Brunswick , GA 31520) and we were all there when the September 11 sent us home for the day no one knew until the next 16 hours of television what was who and how still don’t rub your sandpaper against a blue sky and maybe one resin clot will fall hold it close to your heart it will clean out your ears we make a mess of things in the mesh of morning we rest half-asleep inside a lightning bolt and it strike’s a snake’s tongue wake up wake up wake up (lethargy the dinosaur eating its cud) no didactic, just Koto over the stream and the mind meandering

over itself and not over the story boards vespers, contrails, clouds of rubbish over craters

jaunt 1 oh shit. my odyssey probably continues. oh shit.

*

I had a preview of hard-knocks in front of despot’s doors no one meets god without a little lipstick on his collar

* no one says the secret password quietly we’d rattle any bones we could just to rattle them

* it’s not as big as you might think it are as the big screen encroaches with its mean ideal on the median and you make sure that the dolly is positioned

over the doll in the station wagon that was never really wrecked until just now when the floodlights cued

* time to tie up some noose ends

* we thought it would be too late when we caught up. we never had a dime on it. we thought it would be too much when we fessed-up about the new quantum mechanics. decimation across a field of spyglasses all wired under the grasses. the fires ran and run that deep. I fly in vain towards an imagined Ukraine or other easy rhyme full of mail-order brides glowing from Chernobyl half-lives like unspeakable crimes. but then, I just take out the trash among a gaggle of grackles. I see how steaks make people happy in the commercials. I watch the happy hour brigades careen onto the streets of sand on this island as the strobelights slash from overheard like scythes through our invisible hearts full of tone. I want to learn the qualities of wood and what it can conduct; I know what it can make. I want a wall of foliage around all of your homes today. a piety of piebald horses in two rolls of film. I remember your pillow’s smell. you curled your hair; I curled your toes. you sued me for my lists and I kept writing them affidavits. this never claimed to be a poem or not to be about a pelican breaking threadbare barely above a crash-landing into my Volkswagen as he shot upward into a zenithal stab as I crossed the causeway to St. Simon’s Island. it will be a foggy tomorrow—the last thing the radio says as the car door slams.

* a coven of seagulls in shell debris.

not afraid of me. the sky blue except for sporadic jet fuel dragon-tails. and the pelicans plucking strings of fish from the tide’s music. the wind carries no signs of a splash. all plash.

* the trouble knew me well before I had the chance to be unborn. it was the only signature I’d never sighed. there are no poems but in stings. how we love to complicate sunsets. the space shuttles pander to the pondering celebrities as stars pay to orbit stars. blast the hatch, crash the asteroids, dodge the asterisks, blackball the logistics, hide the ellipsis, read your manuals. we can all wear belts of alibis and overcoats of policies in the parade, over and under the arches, banging on the pearly gates the sidewalk squares for our heads and the streetlamps for our souls.

* each of us is the gut of a clock I hear the punk rock and see the gardens grow evasive pinion, residing behind the cathode rays adroit bolt in the particle collider, atomonster, genomonster geopoliticalite, roots like ganglion take me to that quantum heaven with your engineered explosions make my face spiral in the bubble chamber

*

it was all a negative forced to foresee its own imagenetic no eugenics of light a hero among men will often forget that he is one, but his remembrance will be unsavory and painful and all who await his heroism

*

“mirror of the causes of all things.” Robert Fludd *

Plato’s “Great Year”: the time the point of Spring takes to cross the entire Zodiac is 25,868 years

*

Here we reside within the snowglobe full of glowering glowers and cowards alike

* the universe at about 10 –34 seconds

o (ACTUAL SIZE)

*

ZERO, nada infusoria of protoglossia I could get

tinnitus in a vacuum over-sensitive in a field of iron dandelions rusting away let it rain neurons all over my other crippled ones

*

“Quark Soup” where the protons and neutrons came from: a liquid net (3,5 minutes)

* I don’t kill myself because I would kill me for that.

* poetry only works as juxtaposition. that sux. if it is on, then give me some back-up. if it is off, build a papermill. I will work there and posthumously steal.

* how do I tell you, Nascent Star, there was no space nor matter in the place from which you start or spark

*

Vulva-Universe, my heart is a pussy come nigh

*

“he sleeps with the telescopes”

that’s how we knew he’d been offed. we got the message, awright. the garden variety imagination and tulip jargon. dumbasses driving herds of oxen towards cliff dwellings. toughen up you Georgia Copernicus’s ‘twill be Ragnarok on a fishhook soon

* opine the layers unwhittle the little sculptures what can’t be requisitioned won’t help the myriad followers of these specimens we tried to make it simple gave primrose path and diluted it with yellow lines, but you had to embezzle a soul into all of the great organism of it yo made the pipe organ sing and then wrote histories only on musical notation sheets but I’ll be damned if you slam the piano lid down on my plans I need to get paid for at least a smidgen of this fodder I’ve delivered it’s made me nothing but a little smarter and a lot fatter

* our ameliorization by the river of cities or city of rivers we forget which but the ironic cajole brings us back in to the bets we’d placed outside of the ring and the ones we took our rings off of to knuckle up to the plate to do so, and to do so well is never saying so, but we talk of youth and concerts like atom bomb films at stag parties

you need to be solemn or have a sovereign and there’s no room for the evil niceties no matter how many swoons have cluttered the galleries, the spore collection escaped its culture and dished out rosy pox cheeks to all but the elders who knew to stay outside the place and it spotted trout running through the rivers we got so old that primordial was scratched from all tomes and rewritten opioidal we write in reconnaissance what history was rewritten for like ink-whores in a mausoleum eating ash with flour-scoops just wipe the birdshit off the bench and sit, or hell sit anyway and talk of angels and their spit upon Vatican spires and the garrison of documents there retires in every sentence of politics in your seduction Ulysses should have been named apt ellipses and he could eclipse his own odyssey by bending the space-time continuum with such inarguable punctuation, and caesura laughs trochaically, but this isn’t about crude music, it’s really about that alter-me that is allowed to reflect in cities by rivers, genuflect of orchard-sun in its flexing and the wave washed over me silent like a film or paste everything stuck in the repast of the wordplay for I am guilty of making fish-gills into guillotines but I have had lethargy impotence of status, promiscuity, localized leprosy, and anthills full of apathy just like you and the burgeoning rest of us await elect the first star to cuss

we know how logos cuts throats and emotes

*

I echo that. Great bird flies to its only perch. The name of a cliff.

*

The endangered species list is an endangered list. Repast and repose. Darling, expose’. Enough, shed the skin clothes. No more aperture. The wildebeest is cold.

* that land we record and call sublime I am guilty catalog here, where the meter-maids eat their young cut me in and cut my out, I am a hat and that which we do in wonderment I am skinhead lawyer in New Guinea pro bono what will never go away like a swarm of a phoenix gnat swarm what is anyway but an offhand comment about a yodel? we don’t do nothing in wonderment watch the flying fish jump in the net wow and whoa I would never piss on a fire here I would never ask for a pint of blood there why is it that bad credit is good when you walk through the greatest gates and they smile at you?

*

“And that’s the way/ we get old with poetry. Comes a time when no one has a notion/ of anything else, and the odor of fried brains contends/ with the damp of vacant ancestral halls, to their mutual/ betterment, actually. Here, hand me that cod ...”

John Ashbery from Dangerous Moonlight a primula is the primrose is of primrose is primrose-like

I through a window flip-off the lit-phonebooth on the corner of my block of current life for no reason for-no-reason the flush of the toilet-tonight the zither was an instrument with 30 or 40 strings or stings played with the stickiest fingers of foliage zigzag ripshod disgruntled-ness of of-the-behoovement-of-yes calvacade and the dirthole we can’t be stopped from crawling to the heart-heavens from! promised land of bloodclots those chocolate-covered cherry-bombs of aplomb aforementioned! we can’t make a treaty with the sand because of beauty’s offbeat hand (but at least with wind there is no reprimand) “be advised; he is westbound now.” I made a best friend on a crumbling foothold calamity ... his name was necessity ... he is fuckin’ bad at cards. the vestal swoopings that I keep ducking just biding some bought time with strong bindings and I can come by finagling and dickering and dealing running like a horse of Jehu to escape what the flight leads to we all die under a flag in the wind and some die better than others I am gonna leave here soon or live here doom, you betcha die as you live unfettered in hope as the heart explodes it has always been an incendiary kaleidoscope

* a worshop: a cross between a workshop and worship a workshop: a cross between worship and a sandwich a warship: a cross a wasp-shop: a workshop on a warship a ship of shops: a language poet a shop of acrostics: a warship and an epic poet a shopworks: a shock treatment a crossing is a lozenge of slalom of grinding a worshop is the only good war workshop

*

I’ve been fair to middlin’ the greater half of my country-fair county-life the casino boat calls from the other side of the tracks but the damn trains never ends in their push-pistons the mundane level is much like the lie of this and there is

enough cleaning work to be done here (you will find so much change!) and in the air of the paper mills’ bilge, pipes keep horking out hovering white zeppelins of afterbirth all day. don’t call the strippers squaws, or especially by their Christian names. everyone here works on the same chopping block and must be accorded remittently. Dawn rises with the help of pulleys not like a cheap production. It all reeks of manufacturing and idols burning, in a good way. I smell the anchorman’s hairspray. I hear the call of the intern. Olfactory lingual experience brought to you free of charge and federally disavowed. let the talkshow gladiator pits provide some onion-skin levels of respite. let the world be awash with scintillating gewgaws. just go around plumphing all day among the stark-naked picnickers. the need for those cosmochemists and skyrocketing internecine price-margins due to an interest in seas and ice-caps apparently once on Mars? our points have no sysarcosis. neurosis of aptitude and resources. we have so little trouble here we make robots to look for Martian fishbones. blunderbusses firing salutes as the timeclocks garble digits. name all the sons Buster and all the daughters Bridget. rampant eisoptrophobia has really hurt our appearances but the phenomenon is uniform. when hoping for the best of men to come floating down from the altocirrus clouds of one’s mind to begin a meandering and a way to map the territory of gene-slanting. the fruit flies and the fish on Mars and the answers that fit well in fragile bubbles on the standardized template. no mo’ mamby-pambying! hang with the neonascent. bang the gong of the googol and let the vibrato days clang in the sonic dome.

* mesomorphic hand relax! we will take a stand in her hand I’ve seen it done before a million times mesomorphic hand relax! in no time at all light will get stuck in your

gel

*

O Polyhymnia I sang the right song to the wrong gods see you next time the harp sparticle strings are plucked near my dimension you said that Modernism – Romanticism = Postmodernism

I said that the lyre has always been superhuman

I sang that and I broke my strings good oil spilled out and floated on the water of your skin

O Polyhymnia I will wait until we do it again

O Polyhymnia you showed your thigh once under the aurora curtain

I laughed like someone running.

Incanto

Lyric elemental dispel. dispel. Endangered larynx phoenix implore, implore.

Pre-arranged double-helix beware, forewarned. Unearthed anodyne of evidence edifice, take heed. Monoliths with open mouths endure all truths. Tablets tied to ankles of criminals granite and graven.

A welcoming party for the hero for once the wife was faithful. A star emerging from the earth’s crust ascend ghost to the host. When the earthquakes hit the hometowns did you dance? Atremble, adagio adagio concertino. Dragging the river for a locket the secret of my murder. Lust in the haunch of the elephant ominous regiment of leather.

A telephone rings on an abandoned ship ... --- ... --- ... --- ... ---, etc. The radios explode into smoldering manna we know how to knowledge. I am ravished by a rain of negligee’s not cool. Wonderful. We’ve become experts at these blueprints these EKG’s. I am the foundation and you are so celestial. Fall down so that I might touch you. So that you may touch me.

the last great garage band song

It was a rain of flaming dictionaries and we were not doomed so far and Armageddon landed in a pink leotard handing out gifts of pairs of butterfly wings, mood-rings, and exotic coins from provinces of the heavens as high up as the Plenitudes and we could see all the folk-music stars in their spangled lies cursing with brilliance and so we passed through the great halls and the aviaries where the cherubim hung upside-down until needed and there was an acacia nursery and in one room naval battles could even be fought and gladiators would bleed enough for empiricism and now this great westernism is in ruins and is only a tourist attraction and all of this under a meteor shower as somewhere an ichthyologist convention is thriving until a carpool of one of its best scientists collides with a tractor trailer boxcar-Willie circus and the hell-bent drunken clown evangelists slapstick an alarm clock factory together and leave town with clamors in the distance as condoms litter the air like flying jellyfish or new words on fire and all the jars of what could have been have been broken open and they spill out pre-programming and we fled from the barrage and ran into the garage of every abandoned suburban home silent during the commutes

onion-skin epic

There is a woman, but wait, this is misleading.

The scuba gear here working only working for the asthmatics.

We could stay now by this river (or buy it).

It’s easy crafting forevers. Watching our hair grow in fevers in our separate mirrors. We are affixed still to the apogee somehow.

When it comes to our silence, let the waves have their allotments.

Good goddamned wrecked racked wreckage. The actual overcast of “it was if as-is was shattering.”

It happens during anything signaled by banners hanging from stoplights. The pyres yet unlit;

The statutes marbled in brilliance. Heralds of the plastic cries of seabirds. Venus fades with a late moon as I neglect to mention I’ve finally found a use for every one of those skeleton keys in the junk-drawer today, and yes, a purpose for every last paperclip and earplug, and yes we are chasing the tocks for meat and leeching them where the white tube socks are found after losing them in the laundry, there where the universe contracts

and expands, there where all stockings go sock factory of the universe and the time clocks there and the rotating stones around stars noting it all with notches of seasons and the constellations with their appropriate misnomers, and the nubile nebulae spilling dust through grinding light on its path to any eyes and in some cases, a star explodes, and the matter it releases becomes a being that its last light (before it died) has not reached yet, and when this light finds that eyeball of an atom, God will remember, then re-scatter

Clear now upon my skin: each a world on its own.

The effluvial never calls itself so. It can’t even roll down the window.

Dust-bunnies float around the Void. Water I can’t catch is dripping slowly down my back.

I am a cascade of my own tongues, a waterfall in a rainstorm.

Perverse thrills are only written. No lies unless you get caught, says secretary.

The effluvial can’t dial a phone. You’ll never get called on it.

The god who never invents a mirror is a star. Riddles on stones where we lie they are.

I’d rather see that reflection, unequivocally, those stones of skin, standing

in fields of names, all of us, walking through the eternal rain A solstice of equinox.

The truly spiritual forgets the motions of stars or earths.

Sew ‘em together. Moons, mouths, lips, labia, worlds, births.

A quilt, sew it upwards like a swung scythe. Sutures of ladders and contractions of lights.

Beings becoming been. Regrets of irregulars. Sickles and throats.

Histories’ burps of hosts. Possibles and formulas thereof.

A beautiful living thing and a beautiful living being’s limits. And then there is belief and faith.

Which eclipses which? You go blind finding out. as archaeological brushes stir me up I start drawing circles with them using strings to show skeletons it is all always circles, corneas cut by lasers unity in punctures and cuts and eyes that pour forth light into our lives be my guide. stay a while. watch with me. that is the chorus to the song I am hearing right now. what you see as your god bleeds from your eyes. he can’t see you until you have bled sufficiently. the blood of stars is our DNA and the blood of god pours into our eyes. and no pliers can hold a slimy minute down for long and so the poem is gone

brandish the sweet breath of or on newborn mermaid bride’s-maids nipple the froth and tarnish the tin-roof temples of torn tenements in this sentimentality wrap your warm arms around a wilting flower-trial daisy-chain-gang in diesel-fuel fumes spin or spiral into plainly Plan B. try to forget your unrecoverable virginity. I want to be the straight-up acupuncture of the heart.

There are no jetlaggers or lollygaggers allowed when it comes to my lagers.

We just keep shooting into the sky forever without any landing pads on our shoulders.

We don’t care for the sciences of navigators. We like to just fucking go go go and go

It itches, this bite, and the medicine is worse ubiquitous consuming term my teeth are cut on you though I am long in the tooth and my friends try to steal what I will soon sell and my friends try to corral their youth and childhoods and the old bastards of childhood scream from how hard they learned chutes and ladders are automatic weapons it never ends it just convalesces into its own amends and dimensions and let’s just say that I waited forever and forever knows my kiss as well

and forever calls it passionate and then blows a pile of powder off its wrist that was once my namesake

I have become the perfect writer. Every line erases itself.

I am perfect bipolar Gemini twin. Schizoid revise again.

One star convinced it is two solar systems. Castor Pollux flummoxed one

I am two stars but one woman makes a constellation stew of me I am a held-together ripping hair growing down the spine of a wolverine light creeping sfumato through your dream the seam of seaming being poorly sewn the back of a good idea’s backbone behind a thought’s throne

Bursting Forth Spangled Banter The truth is an eardrum and it has perforations.

So the truth hurts when it says its own name. It. That’s what we work on. We can’t define it.

I regurgitate. I benign totems. Thank God for Scotch and mattresses.

The truth hurts on mattresses especially. I have a dynamic dynamic.

I have people working on it. I’ll fight as you scatter fights to pacify souls.

Beauty is a silly prospect, but, gold is a solid pop-song. what great tits and ass the world has

working hard for its cash psalms of the white-bread-god in a condo in Cape Cod while his sod huts litter third world real estate in cans, toxic waste is a paste of souls in sweatshops atoms wasting, in wait these half-lives of economic theory pop-cans hollow and the world like swill sucked and crushed in the hand of big bosses bigotry (paranoid

I erupted from the pus of a nuclear scar when penis brought forth the spit of my forefathers that never spoke like me) what the fuck am I anyway? which we all ask at the tollway and we ask ourselves this in dark rooms full of loud music and sex but, those billions of stars in that folding universe are still out there (duh.) satyrs chiming in unions, fishtailing into oblivion and oblivion, she is enough, that sitar-player who is a contortionist and her ovum spread open its black slit and light came and entered it and mom, here we are

and I am the true pure grammar lick my wings like stamps ban my books airplanes and tornadoes flesh is unsure of itself until war comes and teaches us limits society sits on laurels that it seals in plastic this is a fragment of the shrapnel I took by writing it here, look at this, this is a word caught in my flesh, you can have it what word is it? that name that thorn that splinter mine and yours good then

my first semester the era of un-err the erroneous with stipends this variable that no one makes slang with is un-slurrable make this the cord you cut or tie around monuments’ neck all the same jugular I made respite a pincushion for quilters when in gout, doubt pharms at least these days the monitors are external back when I was alive, I had to self-examine the Dark Age trolls around stagnant ponds and lakes and makes its fish there in the era of un-err it is never your fault who could teach anyone how to read the mangled guts of Europe? augers we aren’t ensigns we are to be sling the thing less precious towards notching your gold be the same as conquistadors

MALARIA = More Anxious Louts Always Raising Inaccurate Ages and then the mosquitoes kill the weak to even out the architecture just ask Alexander the Great we are on the greatest high of all, the angel whose wings falter briefly it is far more than enough to be a culture discreetly this is the thing that lichens have taught me a fellow instructor has me pegged as a Romantic it is a Romantic notion on his part

that he could ever think so so I say to the lichens, the nematodes, the frontal mold-encrusted lobes let the music videos infect you let the pop or punk force you towards commerce let the wave be the only thing in a stadium let the @$#%! hit Heisenberg’s Fan and spread itself out across the Universe evenly again if you could write it on a Post-It then that’s it and always not it I am only concerned with knotting up it and not what the great thought taught and written as a poem, formula, or piece of warp is nothing but a man’s last gulp we know after Enola Gay how to say “fuck it” let’s just wear kimonos in our samsara and call the end of a day what it is and sleep good beside what children we have: books we never read

CD’s we bought for one song shirts we wore only once

for Sarah Strong Wilson thank you for your letter pain is a boring commodity i think of fish hooks i smile crookedly that tarpit only kills marsupials they are so devious, those pouches we carry what we are we obsess over the abscess and then praise a pus star i never pretended to know the secret of the guitar-chord of Love that's why i play slide when the time comes all will fill out applications with hereditary hellfire and tarnations i had you once, there at that river you lost me like a river never loses a thing there is time under the rocking-chair slats there is time between the chorus sighs there is time when the amp shorts out the stadium of time to make space we hover, dervishes of Dante but not punished--we spin waiting for it savoring, scorn-shovels digging air and nothing in truth no one has loved like that praying mantis in my penis

in truth hurt is faster than why should I turn back and slow down a go-cart with a Whiffle-Bat and see a pale moon rising thing is: a maelstrom eye is just a tentacle storm and whatever that means is how you keep going