Cracked Altimeter

Volume 2

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

theory of dealing with my girl...... 13 my torso bare under cotton sheets 2 a.m...... 13 millions of lives...... 14 machines for Venus from her crippled lover...... 15 your scars are my landmarks...... 24 incest with a flower...... 25 bad break-up...... 26 hunting harts and foxes...... 26 when ...... 28 it’s time for ...... 29 symbiotic relationship...... 30 for Sande ...... 31 Venus and Sirius...... 32 pimp love poem...... 32 thanks...... 34 sleep will hold our hands ...... 36 you are back (with the Kama Sutra)...... 37 sonnet to her (driving home)...... 38 AmensBrahminsPoemsOmens ...... 39 can’t even take a shower without the damn Universe ...... 42 gibberish...... 43 macrocosm/microcosm sketches ...... 44 1 ...... 44 at the foot of an incomplete skyscraper, ...... 44 on a green median...... 44 2 ...... 44 3 ...... 44 4 ...... 45 5 ...... 45 6 ...... 46 7 ...... 46 8 ...... 46 9 ...... 47 10 ...... 47 11...... 47 12...... 48 13...... 48 14...... 49 15...... 49 16...... 49 17...... 50 18...... 50 19...... 51 20...... 51 under the signpost...... 52 jargon...... 52 back of ache ...... 53 they didn’t shoot Doestoevsky...... 56 no accidents...... 57 waiting for the skylift ...... 58 anthem ...... 59 holograms...... 61 II...... 63 III...... 64 Astro Rant...... 66 NOTEBOOKS OF PRIAPUS PRIAPUS AND DEATH...... 68 shadow bus...... 68 Is that Death? ...... 68 when I met Lafitte ...... 69 how to be torn apart by the everyday happily...... 70 greenhouse ruins...... 71 the crossing and the crossing over...... 72 A soul trapped...... 72 curse of the hood ornament...... 74 coming home...... 74 at the end of poems...... 77 Pandora’s cortex...... 78 hey, aren’t you the Anti-Christ?...... 79 Jumping off the Pier...... 83 Opera House of the Star Field...... 84 Islands...... 86 Isle 1...... 86 Isle 2...... 86 Isle 3...... 87 Isle 4...... 87 Isle 5...... 87 the quiet love of the inventor ...... 88 I began in the mailbox and ended where the yew ...... 88 By the Campfire ...... 90 Ships in Bottles ...... 90 Psychic Debris...... 91 Fleas...... 92 Beheld the Manifold Folds...... 93 Convicted ...... 94 Within ...... 95 Saving Wilderness Inside...... 97 Ear To The Last Fallen Leaf ...... 98 Formation...... 98 The Body is a Trick That the Soul Has Learned...... 99 3 Parts of a Whole (2 halves plus invisible) ...... 100 To Be an Arrow...... 101 after it...... 102 You Are a Heaven Within an Earth...... 103 Counter-Field Tactics in the Field...... 104 steadfast patron? ...... 104 A Guide For Waylovers...... 105 I Wait For the Demon Bereft of a Mantra ...... 107 Toothache...... 108 The Oldest Survival Technique: Cannibalism ...... 109 bare trap ...... 113 Don’t worry I won’t hang around for too long ...... 115 Cityscape...... 116 the park: ...... 116 the tollway:...... 116 the rental efficiency ...... 116 the migraine of a sidewalk crack...... 117 the city proper...... 117 On the Tip of the Tongue...... 118 Never Enough ...... 119 And never enough ...... 121 Vacuum forgetting to vacuum the vacuum...... 122 deed...... 123 The Dervish and the Dream of It ...... 124 American Scrapheap ...... 139 I...... 139 II...... 139 III...... 143 IV...... 146 V...... 147 VI...... 147 VII...... 148 VIII...... 150 Table of Portents:...... 158 I. INLAND PIRATES BELOW SEA LEVEL ...... 164 The County Line, the Yellow Trails of Pollen...... 164 He is Priapus ...... 165 Before the Seeding ...... 167 Chattahoochee Mama ...... 170 Janitor Moonlighting ...... 171 Mirrors...... 172 fiesta postcard ...... 173 the walk home feverishly...... 173 At Red’s Ramshackle ...... 174 On the edge of the initiate’s fingernail lies the secret longitude, the lost...... 175 Parallel...... 175 “May the good Lord help us,” San Martin said, looking at the crucifix ...... 175 I...... 175 indefinable country of the generic...... 175 II...... 176 there is no adamant atomization of the All that can be captured in an alembic, ...... 176 III...... 177 and the printing press of night and its paranoid fanzines of moonlight ...... 177 IV...... 177 here is where the maps are spoken...... 177 V...... 178 even our provisions have become provisional here...... 178 VI...... 178 this is my Body...... 178 VII...... 179 when a certain vista implores you, be wary I say...... 179 Pastoral...... 181 Bluegrass lovethought...... 183 Another river episode ...... 184 Pissing in a river...... 185 The bartender’s wife says it’s closing time...... 185 Poem of Broken Doorknobs...... 186 To Stalk A Opossum...... 187 A Better Guitarist Poem...... 188 That Boy’s Got Backbone, I Tell Ya...... 189 not having the implied ...... 189 Bridge-builders...... 191 Love Sonnets Should Be Awkward...... 192 After I survived the Impaling of the Long Arm (for Jeff Buckley and Frank Stanford) ...... 193 Getting kicked out of a Discount-Mart...... 195 The Disappearance of the Mimeographs ...... 196 Lipscars...... 197 A Proposition for You ...... 198 This is How We Became Marsupial...... 200 that what his tongue touches is the ominous...... 200 Prophesy of my Grandfather’s Death ...... 201 Wantful Gain’s Confusion ...... 202 The Pointillist’s Vision of Any Afternoon...... 203 An Anthem For My Dentist: for John Ashbery...... 204 Homesickness...... 205 My Desk Is a Broken Gull’s Back...... 206 Vessel Christened ...... 208 The Mermaid Was a Manatee Said the Priest ...... 209 Chamber Music ...... 210 The Meteorologist Has a Seizure ...... 211 Diving Into a Dividend of Civilization...... 212 Invincibles...... 213 Ol’ Red ...... 215 Puns and Legends and Molasses-isms...... 221 We Were Forced By the Authorities to Become Ourselves ...... 222 Bedroom in Savannah ...... 228 When With You ...... 229 Why It Moves as it Does ...... 236 Art’s Plea in Midsummer Lightning ...... 236 A Sudden Urge...... 238 Sundial and Sextant...... 239 And you will go done into this specific crack ...... 243 Red Drunk in the Pulpit...... 246 Red’s Garden ...... 247 Thursday Night in Carrollton...... 249 Summer of ’91 ...... 251 Sore Thumb ...... 252 A star on the couch of the psychologist ...... 281 A way of getting there ...... 281 episodic ...... 282 still have some teenage angst ...... 283 leaving the Coliseum ...... 283 New apt. and a photograph ...... 285 like an idea ...... 286 the bee’s knees ...... 287 Found Poem: Attack Moves on the SoulEdge Arcade Game ...... 288

Cracked Altimeter

Volume 2

NOTEBOOKS OF PRIAPUS PRIAPUS AND LOVE theory of dealing with my girl

Tongue-less at times versus the timing of my tongue.

This constant dynamic tension.

my torso bare under cotton sheets 2 a.m.

I am too content to sleep. All of the women and wines of the world sleeping in the cellars of my mind

and willows drinking from clouds are as content as I am to let the everstark orbs of the galaxies recline in their orbits, constantlies

we seem to have come to depend upon being here, like me, sentry-like at the doorknob of my satisfaction at the brass of my brashness tarnishing

even content to write such faulty metaphors as wine will age and flavor and women tend to their endeavors as I lie here savoring the absence of anyone that I wish

I am sitting inside of myself and am beside myself with it; this minute was custom-made for me this love a trinket dissolving

at 5:00 a.m. I must unload trucks of stock for a local department store; I will have to assemble lawn-mowers, swingsets, etc. but for now I sit in my familiar room

realizing the clarity of what too easy gets scrolled over

millions of lives all glistening like peacocks’ eyes I apollo-like apologize for words exhaled and lost to me husbands and wives, on the canyon’s edge wreath is wrath is death, the breaths of your children can’t tether divorces across the horizons are splintered wishes all glistening like peacocks’ eyes the first zoo I ever went to, 20 years old taught me about the zoo I had, 12 years old millions of lives in love’s strobelights a heavy-handed world lends no levy betwixt the flow and flesh of families every birth an immaculate one and the cold backyard of our father’s home under the rusting rim of the basketball goal the things never said from one generation to the next is a canyon the families are propped upon the edge upon

machines for Venus from her crippled lover

1. the welcome mat was a torture rack the door rattle a ring through a bull’s nose I tripped over the garden-hose, her father turned me into a snake to her

2. the sexual blacksmith hammered opportunistic scrap into malleable perpetual motion machines secreting oils of human groans and stainless steel collisions as shrapnel orgasms ring while Medea kills her children and Aphrodite laughs

3. sometimes serpents shave their shins as pins are dropping as she marilynmonrows the promenade in a gown of heavenly white rose, a platoon of cherubs bearing the train with their clipped black wings and her smile of the world, dimpled by a mole and she loves the way Dali bends telephone poles and the pills spill across the floor as she strolls

4. you can’t call beauty what mutations of want and desire’s font was never full of double-nots this horde of black Pegasi unstabled, this torn tundra of bad blood and newspapers in wind she kept her secrets like a set of old keys bought after a polishing as antiques kept in a bureau by a stranger among seashells and manuals on birdwatching

5. just because she could close her lips around a flower and spit out bees on more than one occasion is not martinis from cheap laughter or sunlight from the G for godspot I had found in her and we would cry under sunspots that we had some unison we probably inadvertently created new species and they hurried nakedly towards harbors to purge and soothe their burning innards and this is beauty, what we do with our burlesque duties to one another, and I never had stealth in the snowstorms that melted around my face when you looked at me for you had taught me a priceless art, a way to fear myself with grace

6. scarify and terrify the populace you have spots on your flesh like a leopard a Mayan executrix signing the parchment made of an enemy’s skin you are perfect artisan of intricate motions a throng of matins on a scaffolding mutating you are grace in most every situation you are rage and the rage in all the others

I pick up the gloves you left and smell the resins of your paintings on them

7.

Artemis missed when shooting at this. You are arrowlore, old yews. You are art teeming.

A goddess in the likeness of a photo of a landscape burning.

I am always pinioned against your cello and you are always a dagger-like virtuoso.

Together we are a poem in need of revision, You hurt like my teeth. Your bones hold my gravity.

You were out under the anaesthetic and I gave you subliminal messages.

8. tributary to the velvet delta like the distance between two streetlamps I will light this light with my tongue when you come

9.

I tell her sweet nothings in a minefield I touch her nose through the gas mask by tapping on the glass she laughs I give her dead flowers, I read her the paper I found her sunglasses remembering a nightmare I only buy her suburban houses that are haunted I kiss her with black lipstick on squeeze her leather hips and order Chinese take-out I curse the unreliable tin-foiled antenna we are trying to watch old episodes of In Search Of this is our one-bedroom, half-bath honeymoon paradise for poverty-teens we always bleed our hearts on Valentine’s Day we read Dante on the subway got some home-made Indian-ink safety pin tattoos we send latenight calling-cards with biopsy results we chew the corners of porn-mags at newstands for psycho-sexual-spiritual power you and me in our dirty sheet oblivion dyeing our hair green with our greasy hands

10. my tears fall bitter and kill the earth my lips scar the soil my tears fall bitter and kill the earth I am away from you

(for good)

11. in the curvature of your soft cheek this then is your answer-- just as in any unending darkness a word can allow your flower in a needle of light to exhume, I am strong enough to chase away any demons from you

12. she is sexually frustrated and packing her Newports on my desk

I chronicle the worst women and they put up with my derelict best you smell like a stone that’s been rained on. you smell like you should. you complain of a lack of deodorant in my apt. so I stick my nose in your armpit. you smell good good gorgeous woman. she told me I had a heart as big as the antebellum South and I said I have always been a slave like women have been to themselves 13.

I remember a thirst unquenched by a million bottles a veritable recyclable forest of usurped receptacles I remember never being satiated by a thousand phonecalls and one hundred afternoon walks towards the graves of our fathers and the thoughts there impaled on iron fence-spires those yellow leaves and in my sleep I feed pomegranate seeds to myself so that I will stay here and be your ridiculous satyr you are the silken-haired pied-piper who led the little drummer-boy in my chest to the sweetness of your breast and the music we make is wonderful and cacophonous

14. out of the autumn walked the redheads the burnt umber birth of Venus out of the winter walked the brunettes the ravens folding their wings out of the summer walked the blondes the sun weaving silk on them and out of the spring walked all women the burning sun birthing its star progenitors and wombs of man

15.

Romeo is sick and tired of Juliet and all her prime-time balcony rhetoric and her schizoid high-school deathgames and he is naked and wrapping himself in tinsel he is climbing up a tower to make Rapunzel and all across the castle yards echoes smacks and rips of latex leotards but in moments he is through and bored, commenting on Rape’s wonderfully carved headboard he grabs his stockings the gun and the pills and leaps out over the windowsill and shimmies down his lover’s hair much much rougher than before

16.

I want to be your hardwood floor. Do aerobics. I want to be your favorite lamp. Your houseplant. I want to be your chilled plums a poet steals. I want to be your eyebrows but never your lingerie because I would be thrown into corners and not your cat-suit or your scuba-gear because of obvious reasons. I want to be your windows, want to hold your attentions without you noticing me noticing I want to be your clean-cutting autumn morning in Massachusetts that sort of brisk and bittersweet thought I want to be you in a way that love and lovers cannot.

17. narthex of your thighs veil of your cathedral portico of pudenda your mineshaft gold there in those folds I shall not hold my breath

18.

I explained the storm to her. She explained to me an apricot. I sucked the juice; she squeezed my bicep. I took her under the pines. It was the longest and the best and the last time.

19. two cans later I notice some earthworms squirming around the stale piece of pepperoni under the table in front of the parlor and I watch the parley as men and women with papers and bags poised and coiled and I also coil like a tight spring as if pressed down on this very brick underfoot and it gives my power of cat pounce and patience of cactus and you are always the prey that comes to mind in this parade of handcuffs, cufflinks, cut-offs, and cleavage and you say that I am just a dildo aware somehow of pre-Raphaelite art but then I recite Milosz and the poetries of lost countries, at least lost to your afternoon readings so far anon, and if I am to be your tool then I can live with all of the batteries it takes you to build your walls with and it will be your nature and mine when those walls become softer, gone

20 are you my freedom of my hindrance, my ornament of tolerance my prop for rainy days, my constant echo of praise, my prize my Queen of Hearts of innocence or Jack of Spades of decadence my winter wonderland, though I trace no tender nexus in the palm of your hand do my eyes ever wander from the delicate stone of your gaze? and I don’t care what’s swept under the rug, or shuffled into the broom-closet with a rifle-butt, and I don’t care what hides in cupboards and rattles its bones while jeering for I would climb to heaven and spraypaint the moon (but first I’d make a stencil of you) and I would fight a dragon with a bent spoon for you and meet the devil at high noon too. evade me persuade me invade me enslave me enrage me to have me to hold me to love me.

21 the box cradles the flower roses, bored rises the bird cockatoos the mount Sinai the word reads, rests not it is a clot of the image you are the window I am reading you the cradle, the window-box the balcony you first told to me you first told by me

22

Tristan and Isolde of the suburbs we built one of those Italian boats a gondola and pushed it into the shallows and I finally grew on you. Your newspaper hat was the want-ads and if you add up everything that I desire you will get one complete Taj Mahal of warm ire. We built one of them barges between our families. We stuck our hearts into stones and tossed them into mojo oceans. We lied our bodies down in swaddle-cloth and down. Aside by side-saddle and prone. We crossed our slender arms for later flight. You were death hoping for a praying mantis; I was praying for a mantis-death. In winter we became a neighborhood mythology. Lovers in lesser known tombs and tomes.

23. proceed with caution.

24. with my box of esoterics and my Gaelic dialect perfected I put myself into the catapult cup and cut the rope heading straight towards the battlement of your Doric-columned heart in a tempest of flak a lot of existentials piercing me the way that rain hits a man-made lake when an off-day was reserved for fishing and I am bloody when I arrive and you smile and say “I expected as much from you” and the laurels on the bedsheets and the laughter echoing the halls

your scars are my landmarks you are that fucked-up butterfly and I know where I am and what’s at stake when nude is I love you when our scars touch and make their own lascivity pink and smooth, gooseflesh bird-scales, cloud-sighs exhales of earth-old sounds two exposed soul-clones to hover above quilts stitched like world-maps the unashamed cock, the fuzz of your wire the blur of the down down down there the exposed and quiet fire of the flower I can taste the inverse universe under your pelvis gyroscope your breathing changes I am doing it right I detect the slow-growing longing to be filled it is me you want my finger on the button, somewhere in the warmth under-brain of the vulva palms, fronds, hands soles of feet retracting diaphragm gasps upon fingernails shudders and tightenings contractions and gorgeous wincings you are a mountain imploding becoming a woman by my hand

If I were a woman, I would want your body if you were a man you would make love to me I close my mouth now over all of your sacred mouths I know the answer in the cooling of sweat

incest with a flower air mater, celestial mother airmada, star meters, points of orbital references, an- dromeda’s nipples, earth motors terra meant for terror and holy stones marking bones attuned for review of worldview hells I know primitivity and blood tastes good on fingers I know technology and metallic dust tastes good on fingers I am a soul caught between a CD-player and a houseplant a helpless, motherless cult I am help less culturer, help more moms in ugly pastures committing incest with flowers, carnal love for what is beautiful and never lasts I will commit incest with disturbed pollen as I fuck it off of my face by speaking I walk into a burning field with every appliance in the house behind me humming smiling like barbed wire and ribcages focused on hummocks while waiting for the air mother to walk down through the stairs of oak limbs and embrace a son of the sky

bad break-up you took everything from me that day even my salt and pepper shakers hunting harts and foxes you opened your mouth and freed the hart. I broke the arrows over my knee. you opened your mouth and the china broke in another country and soon I will antiquity. you opened your heart and the chief died. the hierarchy and I broke off the sapling boughs. you stared too long. the mirror fell in love. I looked one last time into a mirror. you waited at the depot but were declared an invalid. I kicked the luggage into the vortex of hotel reservations. you knew I would die when you opened the chest. I pretended not to see the locket turn around the key. you broke it, my guitar into splinters stabbing into the headboard.

I forget the tunings. you wait for me in the alleyway of the longest ode with the secret I needed like nectar. I forgot my way home. my street, the flower that you gave me, what it was that was said when your open heart freed the flock, the fleet that upon my heart had tread

when . . .

I drink wine my ears get hot you said

hawks and sunburn to careen you to a pulp

here we are again at the cliffs I said

my ears got red you stick like gasoline

my hands are your dowries you said

you’re drunk and this is no time for family

we said the canoe is too far of a walk

you knew the wine would be splattered on stones

I thought you said so, about the hawk, I mean

a pillow of azurite all this too soon damn sunburn

you said that my ears were red laughing again

broken glass tent stakes baked fish tin foil cuisine

I said this is either love or murder you said,

this is just a nest of hawks

it’s time for . . . titillating, it finally came after so long we could not decide which harmonium to quit singing together forever take my arm and I will unleash a history of hands I have never had hands I’ll never make a bed with don’t speak French to me, you bitch! accuse me not of screaming from gutters like those who left their countries to hack out havens in the heads of historians all beheaded by Maenads earthworms wrinkling through bedrock and pomegranates stuffed in my sockets as my heart reclines on the kitchen floor of hell for days of keggers and cases take my nose for your acne pyramid take my hair for your scrimshaw haystack take my poem for your palace in the mire take my disposition, a bed of pine needles there and I will give you epics of cunnilingus with my second-day scruff and cat-tongue this newly landed continent of taking has a raped and besotten constituency that has taken its life too seriously or as already over, so, I drive the moon-rover around the beach and run over craters where the creatures you never see burrow back towards a tide that leaves bubbles as signs in the sand

symbiotic relationship hopping sporadically on the ends of puppet-strings while hoping we smile and inside wring our hands outwardly a Rockwell painting runs through a meat-grinder and bleached free of obscene west-coast flora a parasitic symbiotic relationship yet you are my spiritual Braille my hands are sewn together with an indecision that indicates innocence skingrafts and secret codes locksmiths and plastic face-masks burn victims are dreams of smooth thighs our dreams fleshed are flakes of fire desired

I have a mad-scientist, Jack-Ripper Pip eloquence of angry pauper my scalpel your voice reading the word scalpel we have no puppeteers we relinquish strings superstrings and other elasticity’s naught is my firstborn’s name dread no money and each other solace dreaded. the funny thing is that neither of us chose it this way. we sleep and dream of cumulus clouds like hundred-dollar bills taped to the backs of our heads that we can’t reach like imaginations of language

for Sande

I could love one thousand women with just one hour of her and her skin memorized in darkness living with her breathing a supple purr and the phenomena of flesh the white sarong flung into a night storm the flesh melts into my mouth white chocolate the palest woman, the starkest sight she wakes to touches in different ways as a flock of birds takes flight she wakes to touch in different ways like lightning without light

Venus and Sirius

taking the black permanent magic marker I play connect the dots with your freckles making a constellation of you for my spaceship to fly through starting with right eye, the Morning Star and then drawing diagonals to your nipples and connecting belly-button to vulva around the delta of your galaxy genitalia crude language like the hard physics and then the lines stretch trajectories to your knees pausing to draw Saturn’s rings (well, only twenty rings, actually) around each of your fingers and each of your toes (if I haven’t died of ink-poisoning so far then I doubt that you will) and now you are a walking constellation, a nation of paradigms, myths, and flesh-sketches at least until showers, sex, rubdowns, or beaches but where is Deneb? let’s see if I can find out tonight the sky will be peaceful, with my head on your stomach, your hand in my hair as the Dog Star pours The Big Dipper and the milk of worlds dries to make the sheets of our bed and if you are also my planet then I must be your moon that is chasing, that is orbiting, that is looking up and down and spinning all around you pimp love poem

Like a pimp in love with one of his employees I have got over all of the hoopla.

Put my heart on the end of a string lowered it into the barren well it is devoured by this thing laughing spasmodically I am consumed too dramatically by my own admittance by this thing you call love which in my tongue has been an indecipherable rune carved into the trunk of every tree in the forest of my being

Love is the queen you spoon-feed yourself to I must be the microwaved leftovers while you crave your sweet meats and gourmet fare we are crumbs of the moon we are globs of a star we are

Love, the beast that walks on its teeth Love, the backseat where all stopwatches start Love, the cracked vase inside the crackle-glaze case Love, the incantation frozen by the pause button Love, the white glove in the dirty beak of a dove Love, the Devil weeping at a mirror Love, the pond that swallows all evils in its complacence Love,

the silent suitor by the edge of the chasm and Love is also

the skeleton forever there at the bottom

thanks to the one who refueled my passion for reading after a complete burn-out during a hot summer of contemplative nude chess games and lakes of rum. slanted looks at her ruined my bishops. she found a note I had written to an ex-girlfriend that I’d never even sent and that was enough to end it. thanks to the few who would drink debaucheries with me and rend my flesh with the fervor of the Furies on Spanish Flies. thanks to the one who took my virginity and may her soul be damned forever as well. thanks to the one who brought me soup and juice in the pneumonia of 1991 which produced the vision of Dali and the first immaculate birth in 2,235,967 years (the amount of brushstrokes on any number of Dali’s paintings) and the vision of the Egyptian goddess Bast and her kingdom of panthers and this was one hell of a fever so thanks. of course the Picasso girl can’t be blue or Euclidean in this poem. guess then I should mention her name. thanks for my grandmothers and my great grandma, Bate and my mother, even though she knows exactly how I feel regardless of apologies, cooings, or excuses. the relationship between us leaves a lot to desired between her death and the uterus. thanks for the one who taught me how to make love and left me because she is something like a full moon of sickled horses that happens to all men and she was nameless and timeless and an obscure empress and she wore Red Door, her perfume and she sent me on my way with hardly a goodbye. thanks to all of the women who would call this poem condescending male-chauvinism for making it easy for me to avoid them. thanks for the golden goddess Geisha of voodoo I met in New Orleans who took me to brothels though it made me uncomfortable just to see that ravaged look on my face. thanks for the seductive dances that draw life’s hardnesses in and the unmistakable arc-hump of a woman’s pelvis, the opened Tigris-Euphrates, the only place where I become a river, entering into her waters. thank you, o unexplained power that created woman and fell breathless, blind, and helpless from the heavens in the very first orgasm.

sleep will hold our hands

I never knew the ocean until I met you until the trees arcane grew from your darkling eyes where the tentacles of love that leviathan, the kraken writhed on a beach of soda-pop acid on my brain so insane wolvesbane for my hairy were-man approach a manly-man but this was charming like a snake-charmer after feminism and terrible the burst eardrum of decibels I gave to you the electricity of these planetary bodies in our breasts changing orbits and this can sometimes hurt and the cruel birth of mirth flowers between the fences of our hearts mornings we spent weeding together and the mushrooms born between our bodies in the dark that rose in our souls that infects us the young blood-wet foal of our love that trembling, tender life-nexus

you are back (with the Kama Sutra)

The secret of moon is me and you.

Melting into the face of the mountain-stone as the sun wimps out at purpled peripheries.

Watching, pull off your T-shirt, sleeping pink aureoles and one tattoo on your navel, pale skin riding those hips to perfection lying with you as you peruse my books.

“A circle or irregular small tooth marks beneath the breasts is called the scattered cloud.”

“Four kinds of embrace are employed in preliminary lovemaking; encircling like a liana (lateveshtitaka), climbing the tree (vrikshadhiruhaka), rice and sesame (tilatandulaka), and milk and water (kshirajalakal).”

I can think of you now as the only one gradually becoming the sum of this poem and I hand you the wine and a slice of orange and you smile in a way that makes the walls less here, the world more sheer, all else less sure.

Lioness demure, I will kiss you down into the dirt and make us into flowers, the drums pounding us back into human forms as our bodies wake in writhing rhythms.

sonnet to her (driving home)

And I cannot explain blissful flowers of you, noir the blossom you grip me in. And your face burned across seventeen hours dove-driving feverishly home again to my niche which is between those magnolias of mountains I bring you. Lilies, tall tales, melted gold, and fallow. You will smile and hold me with your small hands. Don’t doubt this world we’ve made in our small rooms. It is a palace, a wilderness of our bliss. And I made love to you and only you. And I will have only yours and your sweet kiss. Aureoles of madness burn, parch: meant to be perfect, yet, I’m just so late.

NOTEBOOKS OF PRIAPUS PRIAPUS AND THE COSMOS

AmensBrahminsPoemsOmens parable: your head hurts for your eye are open

Go home while you still can, alien.

OmensAmensBrahminsPoems weeping celestial finishing the poem of the American soil with my ashes’ souls and my souls soles and blood is graven from quicksilver and saltpeter to dashes of mote and creosote, thus confused by the bible’s children burnt and trodden under cruel teeth of tractors churning psychedelic corn in a field of ripe ideas these huge tornadoes like a fruit splattered open in mid-sky but my gait is that lazy slow-motion synchronicity of the sundial slowly edging its way towards the shadows on perimeters of highways

AmensBrahminsPoemsOmens the sun holds the day the day holds our stone the stone Earth the Earth is a seas’ host the seas make love to the moon seven daughters with their tethers holding a satellite down for incest in the salt-surf and there is a perfect white marble thumb and forefinger framing the image for a painter about to completely canvas his own thumb protruding through the palate into a multi-media interdimensional replica of interdimensional travel which is our current state of multimedia bubbles in paint dry funny just ask God about his first universes

BrahminsPoemsAmensOmens the taste of your own sweat the taste of his sweat and/or her sweat the sweat of animals the distinctive smell of horse-sweat (I love it) the sex-sweat of two fresh ponies (Brookwood apt. you know which one do not disturb) the sweat of marathons, farm chores, post-shower post-scrimmage sweats, the Whitmanian catalogue of sweating and an axe drops to your side as a drop of it hits your lips like lemonade this salt the evidence of effort and secretion of life living and one day you will yearn for and forget it

PoemsOmensAmensBrahmins my love for anyone can crack open an egg. melon, nutshell, or skull an engine block, a small asteroid, a monolith, a rib a stained glass window, a heart (if I am not careful) a hardcase, a symbol, the rearview mirror of my girl’s auto can be cracked after reading too many Georgia roadmaps and if I can’t crack the happiness code then I become endearing simply for suggesting in my own drunken grandeur and cracking wise with a boyish grin that it is possible for me to even crack her much to her chagrin as my hand grips the inside of her thigh and we drive over the next hill into a temporary sky of radio and just ate great breakfast

OmensAmensBrahminsPoems my totem is the pterodactyl my totem is the chaos fractal my totem bold terrible angel my totem the wooden hand carved in wind not known since Hannibal

I will not erode I am dust kissing itself as you read and Love is the eagle that folded its wings and nodded his head to his chest and became your golden heart and heart of heart it is all of ours

can’t even take a shower without the damn Universe

Unity, is vanity it? Iota in love with its it-ness? It requires mirrors and a fragment from a raiment of pulverizations. This shard or sample a carpetbagger’s eye of a camel. And the needle desires the symmetry like lambs and tygers to be stripped as I am disrobed of Time and Space or any other continuum other than wet flesh and Day and Night halt in wardrobes beyond our R.E.M.’s. This exchange of Asrafel and Azrael in intervals, conjugal centrifugal larval dream-moments. Like dozing off in the shower, and some have died there. Minutes, those tap-water drops that’ve been tapped-out. I step out now and see the droplets on my body. Oh my body needs some serious work, there Universe. Hating my body is its own iota vanity in the vanity. I am fat with the unity of what I must be, the serendipity or retract. I exist like the water that I can’t reach dripping down my back in this lazy human universe that can’t scratch its own phenomena with the dripping pleroma showering around.

gibberish cotton candy pussy in a field of grain nuclear kid takes off skull-cap to scratch brain scarred men naked throwing stones at mountains helicopters exploding over demilitarized zones old voodoo hag by dead oxen rolling bones android cops searching salvage shops wolf-kid aborigines stirring slop on the home ranges chicken-little crushed under the heavy metal sky churches turned to salt and mounds of arsenic vigilantes drinking chocolate malts in the desert cotton candy outlaws run from the heat and posse motorized stallions mustang across the horizons zorro hits the turbo button on the pegasus snake charmers send in an army of water moccasins Apache kings climb up bows and slide down mesas with arrows soaring over landscapes and burning headfeathers entire american cities scalped and hanging on belts pelts of the last lift-offs of shuttles in scuttlebutt and scuttled cultures floating in rebuttals as the endangered species roll in their graves like the shifting of tectonic plates before names were shale, limestone, granite, marble, slate

macrocosm/microcosm sketches

1 at the foot of an incomplete skyscraper, a scaffolded scaffolding by the highway:

one discarded piece of jigsaw puzzle on a green median

2

the fiber winds through each molecule one strand of fiber beautiful once a thread of Napoleon’s favorite battle-jacket once the lunch of a silkworm now holding the button shut in a snowstorm, or

a drop of perspiration flung from a farmhand shoveling or a raindrop catapulted by a pine tree falling in a summer storm crashing to the floor in a cascade of needles and cones, or

any sentience, and animistic knowledge of every atom belonging to you as well no matter every created or destroyed no transition not recorded in an eyelash as forms occur on the screen, as the brush tortures life from the canvas as the patterns of mariposa wings congeal, become less kaleidoscopic as you hold your X-rays and see into your heart

while within the heart of the celestial gyroscope you are still a pulsing life

3 leaves wings hands fins wings hands fins leaves hands fins leaves wings fins leaves wings hands cutting through the rushing element stasis in the rushing element stasis in rushing wing hand fin leaves on life tree simple mandala of an open hand holding stasis the rushing element

4 from man to mineral to mahogany table to rot to nutrient absorbed into apple to basket to bowl to cider-sieve to pail to teeth to tract to bloodstream to single-cell osmosis to re-assessing the apple essence to beehive hexagon underskin islands of pulsing organs the microscoping life which makes my fists I bleed and love and I am the sweetest elixir left to ferment freely into degrees this passion this red fruit forming jelly to jellyfish to fish-jelly at a man’s foot to amphibian as a frog slowly climbs from bogs towards forests and then erects cities of eggs wherever it must and passionate life pushing its forms the constant metamorphosis

I see in the distance what I came here to be my genetic prophesy and I make a wish and kiss my fist which is an embryo of action and so I will walk back down and into the sea and I will walk down into origin

5 all the pain in the world can be contained in one bar of scented deodorant soap, or a wart that I notice washing my hands knowing that some things can’t be cleansed sitting here under centuries of great art listening here on the legs of an amputee history of western culture and its inheritance in a hazy mirror

I am dry under magnificent waterfalls I am safe in the avalanche but the tabloids are a firing squad that all superstitions line-up for every word is a bullet squib in the movie of the poet the poet of the movie the wart itself is an omen, I have handled a plague of toads and written

an amputated history of a western man

6

America your lotus is the rock-star on heroin that lives and lives and lives

7 with a helmet made of melted halos

I have been chipping away at this skullshell speaking to the celestial it has too many starforms

I break atmosphere venture inward final frontier phrases further from Samsara so sorry I go into Nirvana-Valhalla with a helmet made of melted halos

8 and the metaphysical scrapmetals collected for my makeshift vehicle pounding this into my flesh, I will be the greatest mechanic, taking the spirit-world through this rubbish and debris in my crude form organic

9 we thrive in the ecstasy of pointillism with faucet-fulls of finites to finger and we have a glorified apology for every surnamed ology and canis familiaris, the dogma of dogdom is truly man’s best friend as the cyclotrons spin

10 circuitry not capillaries print-outs no tongues binaries instead of hearts input not food output not sex the corpuscles micro-electric laser impulses electromagnetic Hermes fiber optics the mathematics of dead theorists thriving in holograms and irradiations

11

Time is an insane carpenter specializing in frames he captures the single vertebra of the winding accordion of existence like line he is prison and prisoner to the linear warden the cross section artist of every textbook opening up a carcass sometimes with paints sometimes with maggots and he is the most powerful eraser and his secret is that time is a wrinkled spiral cross-sectioned as a Cartesian possible coordinate imagine falling down the side of the infinite spiral, tickling the ribcage of Time with a feather and suddenly in his laughter, Spring occurs a golden chamber of swarming hues, and you desire to remain there, but, there is no stasis you are a dreamer, not a physicist, although some are both, but, not foothold here outside of time’s girth. so you become matter, allow your energy to fuse in birth.

12 to be portable static seed on a wave of feedback I feed and laugh while screaming at trees coming up on the forest on the right and moving so easily through mud kissing you hard down into the sludge ripping out through your seam crashing my train into your regime storing the fireworks away in pods and disappearing into the exploding crowds a portable static beam and on ultraviolet through everything ultraviolet through everything ultraviolet through everything

13

“writing about music is like dancing about architecture” writing about the universe is like screwing about abstinence the bottle hovers in outer space as the bubbles seep over its mouth the steel pedal guitar soundtrack in a waterfall of lights makes me sick and we can’t bungee in anti-gravity

I will make a sofa out of a supernova and drink quasar cocktails before I believe that I can comprehend the infinite universe or what my infinite imagination can do to it

14

I frame my soul and then it breaks the frame I-beam frame as the cataracts splinter architectures this laser-surgery as the goggles are melting into crow’s feet pulled tight in experience towards the back-brain like a cage bending G-forces of relative living in the endless zoom-maze and the end of life is not a painting but a frame breaking into a curved continuum

15 here be now and hear me wail while barbaric and chest-bound hair-cropped and crops of ideas crawling with crows and now bang your spears against your shields in the here and now the show and tell of the celestial and bestial wail I feel my genetic birthright voice as I pound my soul into the soil of my own body with Universe mind we share and sacred scared and scarred sacred and the absolute never feared the soul but the union of the body and soul and desire and to share the dirt with you like we always do I will gladly fight forever in that last moment as what the Universe gave is taken back

16

I lost the combination to the safe tonight as the earth doth sink into ocean and soft hair and atomic yawn as the yarn unravels of this space between two ions and anti-earth matter is a chunk of human flesh and though I digress tonight the earth shakes at thoughts of us and the crickets outside are earth-shatteringly silent in the moment before any of our kisses and a blanket fall’s over terror’s head and the parrots scream in their sleep sharpening their beaks in pet-store across the void of this continent and they wait to be purchased as our orb seems to grind to a screeching halt every time I hear a birdsong and my stomach sinks like a battleship into the vault where I wish your legs would lock around me because all earths must finally sink into their final perfect crevices

17 to come to Unity to come in unison with destiny to come together two unions we destroy objectives in dichotomy to come to absolute serenity to serum in serenade separate we in one serendipity Zen one engine indefinitely to definitively come to unity to succumb to ultimate divinity infinity can only be eternity if man exists to experience it unified be

18 landspeed, lightspeed, godspeed, manspeed impede, repeat, star-seed, spore-ling sweat bead divine brow nebula dripping eternal weed up ascend winding doctrine everything inherent and without super-amazing world king word king psychic lexicon mantra mantis like predator chi praying monkeys monks saints savages all fusing action repose Orion’s arrows exploding one minute one week one leap-year millennium derby dirge liturgy demiurge continuum demolition fighter-ace poems diving bomb squadrons concentrated capsules of concentric sermons the outcomes determinism determined in eject-cones rancid rabid politico short-term earth-vermin idea from rich soil squirming life within life itself churning we will read the Book of Light together particle by particle deciphering every article finding the switch the procedure to push us into the lamplit kiss of life-essence in the fields all amiss the amassed all spread before us the white blanket trackless out from the shelter the cruel birth behind us in the stark light of realization the journey, the original purpose landspeed, lightspeed, godspeed, manspeed, the chase itself is the actual light, the gnosis is the pursuit of the gnosis

19 the essence begins to scrape with what tools it has which it realizes sometimes to its horror resemble language in order to escape all bodies and when, finally cracking through the crust it assumes the form, to its horror of what it had used as a tool to escape, something that constantly scrapes

20 in more ways than some, the macro- microbe amoebae twisting to fill up entire oblivions, one velocit vomit one transmogrified comet coming and dirty snow is star excrement and we sit to talk of the universe and it is present like god is in his every cell far beyond empirical run your hands through the ephemeral and stars stars stars stars and never enough stars

under the signpost

I found the roadsign from heaven dislocated from its post. I found the bottom to the bottomless pit there. I found the skeleton key to free the hells. I found the end inside infinity, went into detail. I found the black in holes and not even light escapes. I found the ring of Persephone on the tooth of a rabid stallion. I found the fossil of my soul, its eye socket glowed. I found the droppings of a star and followed a trail. I found the arrows of a Sequoia. I found the gear of my heart and the pearl of my chin. I ate my own yearling infant of yearning. I found a secret but my eyes closed and my mouth and I was like candles and just as lost here

jargon in the jar again enlightzenment air with ions of icons endangerzen my fat, rigid bard-on emotezen wingfull of words sylvan consentzenment dervish mouthspeller weaver zender caged with a catchphrase exploitatezen no diagrams needed sinzen I am a peon poem thereof not having been simultaneous arc of never bell-curved there is no black hole in your heart don’t stop the start and the tongue and the cut of the suit koan: say tongue in a foreign tongue but never speak it the tongue will not move it is of stone set in zen

back of ache

cell division

soul division

green platelet let

blood-letting

cut open head

two brain halves

drop-in theatre

less than man

more than chance

fucking fate

with loins of fury

less than god

but enough for his skin

a peculiar calling itself a species

next of kin

a kindred feces

a human with fins

astronomical wonder

the good lords grin, grimace the aliens can’t figure illegal us out either the basic gist the entire tryst to try to ultimately re- lax (neck muscles always tight) with thought about to something ‘er other occur how I need to need a masseur, demure hand that makes tension into soft starlight poems on an ugly body of weight are your angel palm-trees on me bastion-body of weight underclassic of known-how-to cacti and weeds we grow as well stare as spores disperse your friends on highways and phones they mean to make money of he she I us we pus on the wound sell it as the stars disperse spores and we engineer new arms for old pitchers

I will be rubbing the sweaty, coarse, freshly-shaved and irritated hairs standing up on the back of my neck last words are: it is better to think thoughts to lost selves than to genuflect in high winds

they didn’t shoot Doestoevsky survival is to examine your hands at the faucet-mirror, exhibitions of prowess, pride, scab, niche and blood. with tears holstered at your bruised sides your ears ring around the plastic combs your thoughts are deloused of their brood. a soldier pushes his comrade through music the bands play at the whorehouse entrances and every breath is a chance taken cold. so, smile with good reason; it is carnage. but it is all that we can and wish to comprehend. and then we build our indiscernible baggage.

no accidents slow-motion banshee whale-wail sirens meta-phosphorescent-cysts on symbolic skin arena soul-subpoena flower behind the ear of the galaxiator in the Convalescium the airforms hockey-puck words and spitfires my native American name was “sleeps in hay,” I wanted, “outruns moon” broken bottles where the yellow lines on the landing pads the acres of loading-dock wiseguys the spent sperm of cigarette butts always antelope bones and particle half-life residue on reservations are uranium mines identical hotel-hearts, high-school cafeterias of memories microwaved of cobblers and squared pizzas and the millennium falcon’s state of erosion our imaginations American poetry playfulness curious in the sandbox under stars and kissing your effervescence armies of candybars in every gas station fighting their wrappers we are humans, the earth’s scabies mutated species of Sputnik apes no accidents here, no accidents found in any of my phrasings accidents as only one slipknot red-tape sketch of time accident as a word a merely single perspective inevitability of dying ridiculously

no accidents when stars explode no accidents when comets’ tails leak no accidents when stones erode no accidents when life’s eye opens tearfully

no accidents yet these chances, but no accidents in my repetitivity only I neglect parallel universe’s and university’s in my omits, obit-- but you have the words the worlds I have selected

waiting for the skylift boneyards scrapheaps landfills lifehusks one bird cries on a canvas in winds you found this stone upon my cairn red it’s molten poem slate on tile like slate on the thing I said ingenious igneous nucleus hold me down give my earth a hearth chance complete defiance of scent under accouterments waste-song, soft-song, singsong nothing makes sense unless I unleash the leashed leash of the unpaid lease of underpaid scantily the stern is weighed down lithoglyphs are a hard cargo silt carries a stone up a hill ask the physicist how his theory is

I rise I wilt I wish to be man before avalanche a silly sepulcher there, huh. re-finding the sky is getting to know old stones. my friends are firebrands that I’ve encode.

I throw stones up they never come back down anthem and these were to be the scratchings from the outskirts the railings, peripheries, curtains, menu-edges, detritus hiding indelibles, dirigibles, letters from lost cities manifestoes of crypto-cultures, attempts possibly to complete the unified sortie against conformity, in men born dismembered in memory merely to be raked up and raked away without any usury of mercury, any quicksilvered enlight- unmeant, and your astute revere for dogma dog-eared leavened out in tightly wound parcels letting you know what is real, what a stain, an odor, a blemish, a sin is distances between places in the stead of even tread of transitory spirit longing to inherit clumsy skeins of the fabric, fate testing forms folding the overlap burlap tarp of flesh back upon each year, each vein, each line re-clustering, sestina-like until whole, patternic parralaxis hyper sans the bole is a union is adhered, added here something of the page desired more than body or bone or soul while staggering towards truth is the newborn soul-foal

holograms

I.

The stimuli war left those at the helm overwhelmed coming down to a pinprick nervous breakdown no words left to caulk the bulleted gaps between delegates after the last catastrophic planet was pulled up out of its velocity poetic all apparatus calling for apparatus to report what all previous policed apparatus and before any conclusions could be affirmed the first incarnation was rendered obsolete by an apparatnaut and the cannibalism of utility in its ever-evolving function made machine man and man machine this can be downloaded with this chip inserted into your cortex homo sapien homogenization neo-sapien apparitions these ghosts in the machines can’t claim their own synapses the monitors explode as the Petri dish world waits for disease and scavengers to find a heart in the midst of the nebulous cloud of progress

“Shooting lasers through a tiny fragment of a holographic photo, scientists discovered they had reproduced the entire photograph. Conclusion: the center of one thing is connected in some multidimensional way to the center of every other thing, like a cosmic Internet . . . and each fragment contains the pattern, the DNA, of the larger whole.”

Now I am the king of the multidimensional non sequiturs! I will collect these souvenirs, mutineers of an insufficient culture, the best of all worlds until the next nanosecond produces another imprinted on each shard of a broken window blizzard is the microscopic holographic fact this modeling clay of my reality.

Particle colliders roar, and, supposedly a particle is what rendered the ultimate roar, the only way to regain any control of a fragmenting universe is to reverse The Big Bang, if Big Bang occurred indeed, but, I don’t prescribe to such an easily resolved theory of this pandemonic reality. Still, sucking the organism back into its seed to collect the blood that bled the bleed that clotted into earth, a scab on a scraped-up universe is somehow very appealing (peeling the orange of the everything in reverse to suck the juice, consume the seedlings somewhere inside the spores germinating).

We are the shard gatherers with no clues to the assembly. We are the surgeons in need of surgery. What if someone in a puzzle factory stole one single prototype piece of the universe out of the assembly line in random humor or cruelty? What if he has the piece that is missing?

He must be hyena laughing, scared and crazed. It is so fragile out here that I can almost punch my finger through the cellophane air.

Cows constantly gnawing a cud of information. It all depends on how long I can hold my breath and berth under a blitzkrieg shrapnel of symbols and their bastardizations it all depends on how long I can talk with my mouth full of them.

I hope for a Mandala Diaspora to spread like a virus across my chest, this broken North America.

And every morning the women of India collect flower petals for pigments to paint their athapoovidals which hold worlds in beautiful, concise spirals.

II.

Athapoovidal: to be washed away every afternoon reside in memory my true heroes of flesh and of screen of ascetic and aesthetic women to be reborn every morning with the blood of flowers and every morning the women of India use flower petals for pigments to paint their athapoovidals holding the worlds within concise and beautiful spirals

I wish to lie on streets in the sun like those spirals until rain or close of ritual to wash away in distorted liquid patterns as the geometry melts back into the models of soul before a temporary choice of form or body

I am in honor of Lakshmi, heralding some new birth or season or I am the flower waiting to become the paint-pulp or I am the poem or the poet observing.

III.

The One supreme wrecked Soul the universoul to keep itself whole must constantly re-insert itself into everything as trivial (and nothing is ever trivial) as pocket lint to mountainous monument to complete the form unbroken across the horizon the perfect pattern the imperfect pattern the order of chaos and the chaos of perception and the theories those theories

Uncross your legs and awaken. The exercise, the meditation is over, the Universe as demonstrated by the Big Bang is composed of abrupt, cataclysmic and brash action.

Anthropodal athapoovidal; walk out into the world dropping flowers and their blood on the streets behind you leaving petals and perihelia walking up to the gates of Heaven with America shamelessly smeared across your lips and laughing and saying,

“I had this already, and didn’t need it anyway.”

Then walk slowly away

from the pearly gates.

Astro Rant wearing rocket wingtips and in the astral valley my helmet was sloppy and decoding copy, I missed the decomposition and incompetent I received the transmission as sandpaper sound static was my dialect and I imp-lament my precocious-ness when the meaning came with its dapper dire straits so I danced on electromagnetic waves and my antennae began to decay I laughed, ate the static like rice and I forgot the infinite grass and began to splice my monads into the superstring (unproven sparticle) being of the emerging stratagem and shot slingshot into stilleto sting, I am gone now. do the planets miss me? discuss the discus that I am until the crash of land. there is a scar on an angel’s knee. there is a human being evolving from a god’s bikewreck. there’s a tin-foil ball dense in its scrap-garden. there’s the rusting fenders and the algae on the upholstery. there I am standing in piles of chains unchained down. there’s the silent eyesores of the lava-minds melting into their forms. there’s the cliffhanger, an accident’s hangar and the clear landing pad. there’s the avalanche-geronimo coast-is-clear launch propeller arrow-spear. (that’s always there) and I am deciding to detonate here. sitars played on mars and why not? we boom-box the muzz-fluff the burst speaker-drone, and with bazookas at the bodegas and bombshells at the barrio, and then Jesus was the most famous no-show, and sex-toys, wind-up robots and plastic grocery store reptiles, and sex amassed unmasked of orgasming flesh spreads across the floor of the super-dome, no one needs to go home our collective body is a brickhouse contracting the bends: no protection. encephalost video-poem. stereo-moan amplified pitch-fevers. monitor palsy sickness. slice slivers of decibels. glass does not break a sound when it makes. skyborg organic-mech lemming-men diving one after the other into the data-void but never screaming they’ve forgotten how. torn sail ruptured eardrum. pain is music’s blood. when i was six my eardrum burst and a specialist skin-grafted a piece of flesh from my left ass-cheek to repair it. I talk shit and hear it better than anyone. random poems like bowel movements. like colon cancer. they gave me a spinal tap to unprove a meningitis diagnosis. the walls were painted with Peanuts cartoons. “look at Snoopy,” the nurse said plaintively. needle-screams. the vampire closes the siphon. blood dries into a black egg roughly the size of a freckle. everything is punctured on this punk. how an artist is made is this: the moon is a closed fist, which by accident drops an amethyst. and an artist is born thus. how an artist is made is this: a drop of blood of God’s wrist cracks open the chrysalis; an artist is born thus. the only structure built by man which is viable from the moon is the Great Wall of China. so I conclude that there is life out there. To be protected from. the god sipping primordial broth while writhing with the cosmos-flu left some leftover scum at the bottom of the crock-pot which was microwaved by stars and became a carbon casserole, a slumgullion hodge-podge porridge universe.

NOTEBOOKS OF PRIAPUS PRIAPUS AND DEATH

shadow bus

The shadow bus is coming but not to stop for me I hear the fly buzz as she dies she did not die for me the carriage reeks of mildew of carrion by the sea the shadow bus is coming but not to taxi-cab the lord of worms and mouths has handed me his shroud and this is a veil I kiss and to kiss the lips of life like an altar by an abyss I say “I do” to my wife who is the daughter of death a gorgeous beauty who has named herself Quest so life I bid adieu.

Is that Death? wondering what it is like to be a cheerleader? is that death emerging from underneath a flat shale to spy by the creek on summer lovers? is that death brushing the dust from the leather jacket after the stunt? death has a “MOM” tattoo on his obsidian black mother-less shoulder. death’s breath is pungent-sweet, a smell you have always known suddenly. is that handsome gentleman Death himself? is a god taking pains to initiate a winter? is there a god wondering what it must be to be a man? a slug wonders things about stars. is that the shutter I didn’t secure? a fingertip behind the TV-set, an eye in a medicine cabinet? a tendril just moving before I sit to recoil behind an armrest? in every fingernail you manifest? the cat brings up a squirrel that is beheaded. it drops you on the old mat like mail, Death.

when I met Lafitte into the saloon Death shameless blood-glutton in mustard-gas electric guitars blazing his favorite whore on one arm a doll of silent porcelain he grabbed Lafitte by his freshly cropped hair said IT IS TIME and a brawl ensued as proprietors of the place, promiscuity and other well-fed weasels all just summed it up to another Saturday night and got on with the fight as gory as a surgery documentary spilled into the street a dirt road gravel and ten-penny nails and Death brought in other aspects of himself centipedes out of alleys Gila monsters crawling from under family sedans bats flying out of pipe organs and it appeared helpless for our fair pirate but he charmed death with another lock of his hair and later by a rotisserie barrels of rum tapped Death and the young buck made a deal and Lafitte agreed to keep up his dirty works

how to be torn apart by the everyday happily fighting an army of Ken -dolls with my bad credit bill-bullets slaughtering Calvary’s of stickmen with sickles of 3-D moons beating up buff lifeguards on balconies with boxing gloves of dissecting phrases the Neanderthal intellectual, a sword-tongued Zorro saving sacred cows from slaughterhouses only to sacrifice in ceremonies of grilled cheeseburgers stranding myself in deserts to diet and shacking up on cruiseships to fatten back up for the wrestling matches and hiding in cities to teach my shadow stealth against litanies under streetlights while swordfighting clock’s moustaches across minefields of daily occurrences where the anything masquerades as the painted everything as the windmill slats transfix third eyes as I lick my shoulders to shining aerodynamicisms like a cat cleans herself is how I glow in the dark florescence and writing with blue pens to fly writing with red pens to burn and with green pens to grow and black ink to authenticate truth, strength and beauty learning dead languages for advantages above corporate scavengers to be dogged becoming the scourge of the Coliseum of my poems the tridents, nets, and tigers and this astral humor my gifts breaking things in New Age trend-shops claiming free will and destiny, not paying for damages to windchimes and toppled overpriced incense-holders and the Maenads are all the small details of life the Orphic eye will not miss a thing and so we are ripped apart, and though I have the eye, I have not the capability as my head floats towards an island, the son of Oedipus torn limb from limb at sea in the ocean of eyes, an ocean of questions, daring to be land a definitive in the sacrifice of everyday life

greenhouse ruins

All of the blossoms have folded, necks broken by practical weightlessness. The birds are flying south through the hard gravity of burnt leaves. The fountains slice winter’s harsh breast with crystals of dormancy. Bite down on a frozen orange; this is the setting. The shattered glass and weeds in your mother’s old greenhouse. The cracked tiles yielding to weeds, the shards threatening a tattered music. Approaching rain is the thought upon the panes. This is yours, your inheritance. This geodesic dome of aftermath. Don’t bring me any flowers; let’s sit here in this frame and imagine when it would once capture the heart and life of the sun.

the crossing and the crossing over

A soul trapped. Canteen capped.

Stranglehold orgasm. Static spasms.

Acrobat hovers over last impact of his career.

Trapeze swings back to platform. Next.

The boulder falls, but you only dodge its

significance. A book of poem. A zoo of is.

Only open to you when there’s something else unavoidable

to do. I can’t even cage myself for quick retroview.

There are still secrets to be discovered. You would not have been mothered.

Burning amplified violins. Angel crucified on an upright bass.

Unchaste, I and muse can’t sing in the fusing.

The poem must be written, not to mention, I have

a terrible singing voice. A secret left as long as something takes a breath. Names shot from slings topple goliaths.

Poem in flesh pulps. Skeins, resins, glyphs floating. Tidal wave caught in a mason jar. A bashful autobiography.

A canteen forever uncapped and whose story is left to cross a desert?

Desert’s story uncrosses the desert. Dune is dune is dune. Make a pen of your last breath. You will soon need that quill again.

curse of the hood ornament my hell was to be diablo’s hood ornament the figurehead, the firstborn, to know the energy sodomizing me for an eternity, a stainless steel panther, a Mercedes peace-symbol at vile velocities aerodynamic insignificant and cursed to be out of control of my own kinesis as every species of insect loses its lives while splattering against my chrome frame like ideas evaporating in drunken bar-room brawls my sin of pride is the hell-ride if we fly off of this ledge I will be the first metallic piece to meet its doom taking the point and taking it too far

I am at the mercy of Satan my pilot I am the hood ornament covered in mosquito-guts rain windburn and ice-crystals and rusting and stripped and proud and erect and eagle at the speed of sound with light looking down and back at us gaining on its velocity through the infernal blue-blur of my uncontrollable, unfathomable, chaotic scenery that is ripping and raping its talons across me coming home to the same toilet that knew my ass for 13 years to the same view from windows as puberty handed me my skis

I keep the window open I like it open coming home there is a tornado watch in progress, my uncle has built an eight-foot wall around his one acre with two-X-fours coming home to my closet and cubicle, the same bed my feet hang off of the same desk with math problems scraped into it and the first times I read Poe and was afraid of what would happen if I were to write coming home to the odors of the rugs, the woodburning stove ghosts of deceased pets weaving through pines and my grand-pa’s garden destitute since his broken hip this is the ticket we all eventually punch this inheritance, this stead those pajamas with the built-in padded soles handed-down those unspent pennies in their conspicuous niches never gathered, not even for good luck old ballcaps, frayed toothbrushes old un-used cologne bottles, books smelling of mold, overalls hanging on a coat-rack, a new cane in the corner by a recliner the tornado watch is in effect awaiting the reunion of a father’s father and a son’s son lightning, thunder,

I am home

at the end of poems

afterwards the sailors arm-in-arm somewhere clutching their guts with industrious crunch in their govt. issues

* the semiautomatic syntaxery riveted me but my flak jacket filed the impacts

* the sailors gave their guitars up

* the oars gave the sails alms

* we all knew our wombs were full of energies we couldn’t curse with names but we did and those names poetries those names

* a rattling cemetery gate a car-horn-warning too late a fish contemplating squirming bait an ebony pistol trembling with hate a rebellious faction of a troubled state a mad-man’s sure and purposeful gait towards the sacred bedroom the neural trainwreck of a wildebeest’s flanks ripping open on a film as frame by frame the lion devours him a flight of stairs where you get the cold feeling you can take it all in while eating a sandwich life’s elixir is never sweeter than when you taste it drinking itself you understand when you are the decanter pouring out, broken apart, toppled over

Pandora’s cortex

My skull is Pandora’s box but isn’t everyone’s.

I opened it up and this world came out, and still there followed Hope. Strange dragonet and firework. But everyone has their world and woman.

Trails of tunnel-visions and odd ahems towards God. And yes there is Hope. She is a ballerina-knife-expert.

I have sealed my skull. Now I have an infected wilderness in me. All willows are washed away, and the black dominatrix Fate has my eyes covered in whips.

500 stitches, 1000 squeaks of thread I endured and heard inside my head. Then the cutting off of it.

I will chase Hope, but not to cheat Death. I will learn to brown-nose a bit.

No minor surgery will erase what I set free that day. You have one quill only to write with. Then you go about

the making of your wings.

hey, aren’t you the Anti-Christ? translucent ebony slicked-back into a greasy pony-tail Italian style with the best tailors best tricks with a switchblade, yo-yo, or keychain spit of Venus flytrap secretions, arm-hair of cacti-quill physique of ballerina and glare of a knife-thrower slicktongued, not one of the four horsemen (but he tends their stables) he’s got a sportscar and an obsidian washboard abdomen wears the leather belt of Marquis de Sade a very casual locksmith never made a bad photo or demo-tape never cut himself shaving or had a bad-hair-day knew where Icarus was gonna hit and stole his wings at the last minute plays poker with Billy the Kid, Ghengis Khan, Jimmy Hoffa and Attila the Hun (as Napoleon and Hitler fetch cigars) his smile is Bruce Lee’s biceps stretched between two flagpoles on a battlefield his father does not believe in curfews or moderation, lets the boyz be boyz you see him reclining in the corners of magazine cigarette ads he definitely masquerades as a bottle of cheap Vodka at times he supports the NRA with vigor he keeps a city of sterilized needles has the most chic mahogany walking cane crowned with a hand-carved ivory-bust of Machiavelli hangs out at the firing range with William S. Burroughs in the heart of Kansas or lying at the bottom of the Mississippi twirling the whiskers of giant catfish humming Civil War ballads he is the lights in all of the neon whorehouses at the witching hour and the lean Texas teen-age boys who lose their virginity at the establishment convulse as he laughs through their penises he has a moustache of TV-antenna subtlety I recognize him on sight, a foreseen requiem he seems to think I have something to sell him, some deal to make but, when you sell your soul to the devil you get nothing, nothing but a hard handshake

Pre-ordained

This is the voice of the first pre-ordained hour of salvation. This is the hand of the first pre-ordained hour of my salvation. This is T-minus and counting. This is the ignition chat. The Word of the pre-ordained. This is the malfunctioning answering machine being sworn-in to mundane calls. This is the destiny in its first hour and more. This is a drop in a bucket of a scheme of things. This is a salt grain in Utah’s Great Lake. This is my eye opening during the sandstorm in order to be cut spiral to spiral by the sands. This is the only way to record. I am not god, I mean, good at it, but, I am willing to lie down naked in a rain of knives in order to nail down one meaning. This is the Third Eye of the first pre-ordained hour of my salvation. It is also the backwards-spined demon. I accept my words as helpless stones of definite colors, sinking replicas and a slung chunk of my spirit leaves the leather into the heavens. It’s a good thing that infinity keeps talking. On the X-Files Scully said that she had heard that “conscience” is the dead talking to us. I think it’s vice versa. This place is on the other side of the River Jordan, right by the MacDonald’s. This place is right in the Milky Way, believe it or not. Mantras are spoiling manna on mesas. I will starve upon you for you are the most gorgeous wilderness. I do not need a red rock or a handful of dust to show me death or the impending lust of reticence. This is the first poem of the first hour of the next twenty-four hours of my ascension. This poem is a pilgrim to have reached your hands. May flowers piniata and Santa Maria on your shoulders O aboriginal children here on this planet in the first hour of its indoctrination. Life disperses diasporae out into orbits upon streams of light and consciousness. Hell, everybody and their grandmother knows this.

from PAPER AIRPLANES ON THE MOON

Jumping off the Pier

Some sort of lint in my last cup of coffee or any other reason to bitch prematurely. I have no care anymore for this obsession with doors for destinations are all whores. She will only paint with wolves’ hair brushes and supposedly I am the brute. She would pierce herself to shatter her infectiousness. She knew exactly how to fragment. Life’s junctures are punctures. I lost my last dollar before I could jukebox destiny it. Somehow at the edge of the world it becomes scapula-flat so who splattered this sea in order to confine me? I drank right out of the pitcher and ate the jalapenos and so I must have been Shanghaied. My mind has the colors of a complimentary map enclosed in a National Geographic. Now dad is born again with a new wife a decade away from her and all of us and she is a blond-bomb-shell by my grandma’s standards. The funny thing about rivers is that they only end in oceans. I think that this is called getting away with something. Well, there will always be toothaches and diarrhea. There will always be long-distance phonebills and letters arriving. Well, at least until the terrorists and the pharmaceutical companies assume the earth. But there will always be poets and people starving. And a moon coming up. Spending money you don’t have always. This is mankind always hoping that someone he loves is pulling into town any minute now.

Opera House of the Star Field stem of apothegm stem the face before the face the place

of phases fighting for stasis resounding phrases what results from them the music apostorium what next

this way comes frequencies sonic curtains opened vocal chords open labia or chrysalises

caught? sarcophagus means cylindrical kinesis potential a shredded opening, a molting or a lepidosis genesis?

the –ings of things what composition, this flesh?

show me with your lips all bodies objecting to their itness an orgasm the greatest rebellion

how to measure X to use the elliptograph or the sextant various surgical instruments or syntax

inheritance to fixed meaning the antiphasic chaotic churning calm not the iris of storm horizon next faces of

lightning emerging from the hypersea of superstrings is more cosmic hyperbole cloaking itself in body words

the genes the spine on me the paragonals the dangling X-factors

of impetus and language the epicenter simultaneously frozen rampage of crystals

exploding in light and what happens in the crude moment of X the Creation

the Eta Carinae suddenly assuming the shape of a human fetus or a recognizable glyph or imagine cloud-reading as such

here there are only periodic intersections stems of apothegm stems fields in bloom fields and fields in harvest

Islands

Isle 1

Giver of hard earth where the palms grow the lavalinguistics, the places for sound to stand and reverberate upon, a place for crude skeletons, a diagenesis developing from dialects where we all speak while holding rocks in our ruddy cheeks and bloody claws and in our jaws

Isle 2

I landed. I land it. Now, I slander, I, the islander. I am immune from the authorities of the mainland. But no man is an island; he is always an archipelago.

Shipwrecked, wracked. crackpotted and driftwood like a Johnny Cash hangover latitudes of mutiny, longitudes of hegemony the prophesied mandrake archipelago and whatever that means in this hammock.

Here natives hanging tom-toms on chunks and hunk-piles of scrap-metal conch shells here in gullah-ville the vaudeville of huge kettle drums of steel of people with Adam’s apples bigger than their stomachs of pestilence by the most gorgeous shore.

Calypso-reggae-zydeco-funk. I am a re-assembled monk of sound. I rename myself the Loneliest Theolonius. I am made of sound, the metal that drifts, the meta-liquefied metaphysical. I bang stings I sting bangings I make a clamor.

I open my robe and worlds fall out. I open my burning mouth and shout “Plant your universe at will where ye will!” And let the Chaos tree grow from any seed that may be on the brink of blooming; let us all evolve like in time-lapse photography.

Isle 3 and then we met the natives the mouthless ones they could eat no lotus nor sing siren songs possibly they were actually words, naked, savage the atl-atl’s were crude broken “L’s”, the awls were all consonants, upside down “p’s” and “s’s” stabbed upon “I’s” the wheels of course were “O’s” canoes of overturned “C’s” and “D’s” and paddles of “P’s” and the birds were either “W’s” or “M’s” the lytho-sapiens the latent native inhabitants of symbolic islands playing “u’s” and “v’s” and “a’s” for lyres letter-literal implements, the tools all un-exportable, only useful on the aisles of their origins, in the archipelago in this lingo without sound, without the pen or shape of accommodating lips, just clangs and slangs of enslaved dismembered, tormenting words (we were the truly tormented having mouths, having ears)

Isle 4

How simple it must have been for the first men. The language-less life. The writing was on the wall of caves, but, for the children of the mutated apes and hominids, there is a greater wall inside the mind. The bombed and flooded halls have no compassion for those of us who have forgotten how wholesome how easy and begotten it is to draw stickmen hunting

Isle 5

Hyacinthine I have scent thee thine hyacinths and wine I plucked thee off the vine like a splinter off a spine like a leaf standing between two massive pines my arms by my sides my mind caught betwixt the air and magic there glistening with teaming saps of imaginers and imaginings bursting green in vegetation an infestation ivy-esque explosion of springing spring incarnations as a desert plant screams mutely the foliage of words the jungle of entwining phrases the thicket, the rain forest of exotic opus-puns, your calypso-trees, dandruff-loins christ-an-anthems, prosies, high-I-scents, forge-me-knots, true-lips, trollops, roses are roses, Venus fly-snappers eyes of cacti, the flowers all speaking histories of bloomings, litanies of botanies of the anarchy hurricanes of spore wind-trips and rainshowers, all these leaves listening to leaves all these rustling and gatherings the quiet love of the inventor

I began in the mailbox and ended where the yew reached into the blue. Sky I called you. What I felt by rigid digit. My trousers covering secrets that I refused to appendage. I know the mathematics of feathers and their chances better than numbers mumbled. If you don’t know who it is then I will hold down all of the stones for you. I will finally admit it. This is never too technique-clerical. Stars stare in mirrors to lose their eyes and I will blindly tell you secrets like the light which stains immeasurable. To speak is to consummate children with the air. I become the hardwood floor and seasons of ceilings come crashing to me. Blood-red raped by blue-bloods in order to birth this world-wide royal purple. To whisper to the corpse is to breathe for the loved one bereaved. I became talented in braiding sand and unraveling water. The precious earth changes not its tangle as human tussles. I cut passion in half and I become the past. I chose to fall into a paper stomach-ache. Swooncroon swan sang down into the snake-infested pond. Think one million reasons. Optimism is one poppy harvest land-mining a battlefield. I have a brain-file of my tokes. I did not surf I went headlong into the tidal wave during the James Bond theme. My skin has sheet-rock consistency on purpose. Shave everyday but not me. The six-dollar-an-hour workers are the forgers of the everstuff. Freckles don’t imitate stars vice-versa. But stars seem to imitate your shoulders. Before the foreskins were cut there were different flowers. To turn the sky inside-out is to reveal eternal afterbirths. Placenta itching to the roots, like hair. Each newborn, each spasm of a lapse, each code of time distorted biologically erodes eventually into dregs of fractal description. Stories sometimes have a tale. And while chasing tail, I adulterate all clouds. I lean towards the opus ovum.

By the Campfire

After the hunt we had monster-cake. The poetbeast had been slain. And the savage linguals, and the Leviathanguage was skinned and hermeneutically objectified. Despite objections, nothing was left to critique. Such good meat we all eat. The javelins were stained with a rich tempting and blood sounds abound. Are hearts still white as snow someone said? Never mind. All descriptions that day were slain. Adjectives hung impaled from paralyzed poles of verbs. We slept by the fire as TVsets burned with plastic stench. And then, as if out of dreams, the real animals came to kill, and they slaughtered our names and through the rending we learned that we had always been a much different word than we’d known. I say the word “monster” though, still, in secret, but I say it softly, not to become pray again. I am a renegade, for now the only word allowed is “tribe,” yet I still scroll and contrive.

Ships in Bottles

First you have to cross an ocean (not necessarily parting its waters to do so); you must endure storms; you are allowed lukewarm meals and softcore porn, the comforts of pin-ups and what-nots, for women don’t need oceans-- they have wombs. Erect a vessel, pieced together

with cat whiskers, the hairs of your lovers taken in stealth. Assemble a crew, literally. Add extra-sensory sails strong masts of libido, a hull of fertile cargo, and set sail on a quest for the Holy Quill. When you arrive you must christen the land with anything that is yours,

tears, blood, spit, and words. Kiss the earth, feel it up with your hands, listen to the bells of ant caravans; with an ear to the soil, let yourself uncoil. In low tide write your novels with gull-feathers in the sand. In high tide watch them wane and reprimand.

Take the umpteen years of linear and scatter them to and fro in the non-ordered order of archipelago. Touch yourself to me when you arrive. I will have become a to be or not to be hive.

Psychic Debris gods are psychic debris gods are avalanche: me crazy in the debris, we unhappy to be just flesh filigree symbiotic and psychically see gods are avalanche and we on top of the ride kamikaze lives lived on mountainsides exploding we be crazy Commanches, be artisans of sea and tsunami in the freespun cyclone I reach my hand in and pull out wineglass shards without getting cut magician of tongue-grappling ing-ing as only wings can gods are avalanche of wings, see gods’ skies fall on me gods are psychic debris.

Fleas

The gates of hell were left cracked open tonight.

I have bee swarms for brains and I know the city is held-up by toothpicks and wet magazines and cigar-butts chewed-up.

I learn that to walk on water I must get to studying oils.

Give strangers reflections but no pennies for their thoughts and with trash and frostbite I hear a foghorn and a collision.

The dogs hang themselves from chains on doorsteps like albatrosses at the mailboxes.

Charon’s permanent smile is a piano keyboard. O Lord why don’t we?

Broken canoes and ocean-liners litter the streets stone angel statues fall and crush legions of weeds.

Cats explode into action and cockroaches run for wall-cracks.

I destroy a symbol plucking the fingers from a rose and does it cry out? With my ear to the blossom and Blake’s at the bottom.

The gates of hell were left cracked open tonight and all the ides of March let out of their cyclotrons.

And the daggers I see before me were somehow all born with me just as Christ was somehow with his cross.

Everyone already knows so I won’t tell you. Well, on second prompt, this is how they will do in that party abyss out there in the opportunities.

I know this streets. Urggghr. I am also slowly devoured year by year, hair by hair, pound by pound.

Close the gates when I exhume, but, for now, I will help hell to rise with hell to pay and raise some hell.

Beheld the Manifold Folds of the overlapping behest. Joust not these or dote upon the gauze of starlight. You will heal nigh this forthright. Sincere, I will say, that I am that soul, that one. No pardons in particulars. They just plain is. Think: grains on fake wood appear to be real wood grains, wow. A condition as such inherent as it is an equation. Explicitly, and to be quite frank, you are so. Simple as, or as is, depending upon your socio- ecologico-sexual position polestar in the cannibal grove. Fruit-bowls amaze me. One of the only constants throughout history. Whatever action was taking place, there was a still-life sitting despondently there awaiting rot. I am frisking you for what you have stolen from this conversation. I’m a fruitcake but with better taste. Astro heartland capsules. Perfect imaginary vessels. Although June-bugs die promptly enough they drone on and on. And flies never know how to get smashed while they have spunk. And ants watch too much TV; this is evident. Earthworms are too Buddha. Butterflies were worn out way before Keats. Still, somehow D.H. pulled a fast one on us. Maybe moths are a good bet. Enough craft coupled with stupidity to lead an entire race fumbling clumsily towards any light that presents itself on any street that never ceases to present itself. Moths and taxes. And we live forever under the lights.

Convicted

And my first crimes were these: throwing the arrowhead into the city of glass throwing the flower-grenade into the desert throwing the star fragment into the Sargasso black throwing the Prometheus spark into a dry pine glen throwing the birds against the wind throwing love into the trunk of a junkyard Volkswagen bug throwing the chicken bones into the alligator pit throwing the choking names into the accommodating mouths throwing the insufficient eyes into their sockets throwing the chloroplasts into green throwing the books into canons and the histories into microfiche accepting the purpose and direction which is the cursory dirk of an omen that caught its hook into me, and this is all that I am willing to admit take my noose to the river’s neck: you will have just as much justice there

Within

Within the black god is a snow white dove.

Within the white god there is a coal-black pigeon.

Within the transparent god there is a rainbow. A multi-colored quetzal.

Within the grey god is a magazine of mercury saying everything black and white.

Within the everything god there is the densest abyss.

Within the nothing god there is more and all of this.

Within the god of tension there is no opposition.

Somewhere there is peace to the point of apparition.

Within the god of love is war.

Within the vice versa god there is an inside-out deity.

Within the god of love is a putrid eyeball of hate.

It gives that god will.

And within my words I am.

And within me is a womb where gods are real and not just poems.

Saving Wilderness Inside

I see a frightened god over Alaska. I see bear-cubs fumbling with handguns. I see black priests with albino panthers. I see Native Americans pouring out of the nostrils of running stallions. I see the stampede of ghost legions. I see the dust settling behind the caravan, the moving citadel with its pentacles upon the horizon.

I see a dove in a street-dive. I see a diva through the eye of a shot-glass. I see a wing-tip in the corner of my eye. I see a splinter of steel inside a sportscoat. I hear the neon sighs on the signs by the waterfront. I see through the morning to watch the beautiful ass of elk-like night escaping.

I see a bone-cusp and Swiss Army Knife. I see a hubcap full of blood. I see animals observing the roads. I see the landscape inside my skull.

Don’t pick up any pennies on tails or trails. As I rattle my shackles, I disappear over the crest of the next hill, leaving no trace of my next passage except this message posted on a stake:

“If you follow me, I will exact a payment from you on the fields of this guilty universe.”

Ear To The Last Fallen Leaf

I can hear the wood underneath the finish, the stain in the grain. And the sand beneath the glass and cooled fusion. And the walls suffocating under paint. And the earth under the asphalt. And the current within the wire. And the staples trapped in the carpeted corners. And the rivers succumbing to plumbing. And the sun trapped underneath my freckles. And the fire trapped in Zippos. And the light trapped before the finger flicks the switch. And to me museums are almost unbearable prisons. And the seeds in the wombs I hear and the names engraved in stone. And the bubbles in the beer’s amber. Sometimes, I hear the grains martyred in fermentation for my buzz. I hear the spores on fern-fronds whispering under winds’ wisps. And the orgasm waiting within your abdomen as I lay my head on your bellybutton. And the storm of rain waiting to condense up from Lake Michigan. And the stranger in the window thinks I can’t hear him. I hear the pit in every peach. And the queen within the mound or the hexagonal hive. And the scream lingering within the lung. And this constant poem wailing between my two ears Like a universe of constellations waiting for the night to fall.

Formation glass in slow motion breaking is the form of ideas forming. insects birds bugs swarming is the form of ideas forming. the slow congealing moon-surrender of morning is the form of ideas forming. the crab crawling human’s can’t guess its motivations is the form of ideas forming. the bees buzzing mono-pattern hiding symphonies of hive trafficking is the form of ideas forming. the harmonica humming the slanted guitar-hand the piano improvisation is the form of ideas forming. I catch these ghouls and ghosts in jars or at least I say that they are there constantly forming. they aren’t specimens because of their constant formations but I could be coveting the thin air of the art of ideas forming. it’s never the moon or the morning after; it’s not the crab-legs or the melted butter, not the honey-bread, not the albums playing, not the wanton touchings, but it is the representation of the invisible form of ideas forming.

The Body is a Trick That the Soul Has Learned

And I remember being taught by love a good description of the world was “shattering of God.”

A simple enough definition for the need of some immediate shelter from the rain. If you live, hide the pieces of the Almighty in the earth.

“But, where will I hide a shard of the omniscient within the omnipresent?”

You will hide it where you have hidden your own soul

as deep within the self a secret that to re-assemble God must not stay hidden. Do your penance as bidden.

3 Parts of a Whole (2 halves plus invisible)

Half us, half crash is crush.

Half sea, half I is sigh.

Half us, half air is star.

Half us, half love is lust and loss.

Half us, half all is always.

Half time, half me is eternity.

Half ire, half I is fire.

Half sky, half me is steam.

Half earth, half me is birth.

Half poem, half me is complete.

Half me, half you is glue.

Half love, half life is light.

Half act, half ions is action.

Half ohm, half me is moan.

Half closed, half open is hoping.

To Be an Arrow

To self-destruct yet my mind the lucid projectile.

To bend street-signs down to suck out neon marrow.

Demonstrating the strata of my rib-caged monster.

Hearts have mouths with teeth. Where the crust on my lips is from flying too long which is angel felation.

There are latent Christs in men. This, ad infinitum.

I am the star burn. Can you spare a few protons?

I spin the wheel and throw the dart. I close my fists, my eyes. I embark and I will return, quivering when I have come forthright and found the indisputable evidence of beauty held in my mouth—kill brought by faithful hound.

after it

A kid after candy is a conqueror.

A Christ after condom is a hung jury.

A king after country is a rector.

A monster after candy is a wanderer.

A murderer after crucifixion is a slanderer.

A philosopher after gold is a panderer.

A soul after everything is a good lover.

A man after a poem is a mother bereft of an only son.

You Are a Heaven Within an Earth the clipped jungle your hair the blue volcanoes your eyes the moons your cheeks waxen the oceans your mouth abating the land-bridge your neck the horizon your shoulderblades the causeways your collar-bones the hillocks and hummocks your breasts the sigh beneath them, the buried roan the rivers your arms your legs the desert I am lost in your torso the bellybutton your origin the oasis your vulva the temple’s narthex your pudenda we are cartographers of each other

I am torn maps that being with you pieces together there is a universe of births molten within us knowing you taught me how many earths are heavens

Counter-Field Tactics in the Field

I did it. I snuck up on a tree today.

It’s not at all as easy as it sounds. You have to assume that if you can see them they can see you. I think most leaves are double-agents on my payroll, though.

Sometimes they crackle, almost giving me away like a writer giving away the season.

The oak uprooted and hid behind a dumpster. I guess I should plan on more auspicious ambushes.

Especially in a park like this city-park full of espionage missions.

I will sneak up on the sky (I set my standards high)-- maybe that marigold that never dies, maybe a lake.

Is it too late if I can already see you? And what if I desire to steal your harmony?

Don’t let your friend introduce me. Be like a tree.

You will never reject my bad screenplays then, will you, you steadfast patron?

A Guide For Waylovers

Way to travel: butterfly: haphazard, but momentarily arriving or alighting. Know which blossom to set upon.

Way to speak: water: The way that it heals a handful of thrown stones.

Way to hear: apple: Follow the last iota of ripe crunch.

Way to touch: carpet: As many fingers as.

Way to love: palace: And then you make love in each room as calendars burn around you. Wear helmets naked in the garden like William Blake and his wife. Eat pickles and watermelons. Free all pets that are reptilian. Use the eye-lock the hand-chain and the belly-kiss hemispheres. Not to mention the Bermuda Triangle of the pudenda. I love that taste I get lost in lust in. Sometimes I think that seraphim are pheromones.

Way to see: migraine: Intensity of detail.

Way to marimba: backbone: The body as a spinal xylophone. And play Zydeco on it.

Way to walk: saxophone: Sonorous steps. Like a funeral procession on Valium.

Way to Sodium Pentathol: Sodium Pentathol.

Way to know: traintrack: Seems endless in either direction until you see it coming.

Way to hear: bagpipe: It echoes up from a canyon like God finding his lost ear.

Way to spend an afternoon: horses: You are a centaur now, a teacher of your own legs. You have a bow and lyre and this makes you a liar. Run by with banners of what you have never read. Hieroglyphs have sharp shapes. Razor-wire-symbols. They cut me once too many.

Way to part water: stone: (Of course this is only temporary). (see “way to speak”).

Way to drink: drown: Learn circular breathing. Li Po gets resuscitated in manholes always. Don’t let rain choke you, and don’t ever open your mouth unless you want some sort of a storm.

Way to play guitar: precise bludgeon: It is a percussion instrument of trapped bronze stretched cord and warped wood. A river in lieu of an interpreter. It is water applied.

Way to persist through millennia: Komodo Dragon: Saurian saunter, observed persistence, tree-climbing, eating arcane insects. I wish I was an island of Darwinism unto myself, but, wait, I am. What is the way to Galapagos?

Way to write a timeless song: Impossible: But, see my CD collection. Touch my thigh and its long blue pumping vein.

Way to hold: rain: Envelop while leaving particles of yourself everywhere.

Way to cook dinner for Eurydice or an angel: Red Wine no Tubers.

Way to dream: cunning: Confuse the waking world awaiting. Try to look at the palms of your hands in order to usurp the camp of Morpheus. If you have calluses, it’s easier to achieve lucidity. Could you recognize your own hands in a police line- up? Perfect only means perpetually bad practice. No fingerprints are left on the thigh of a blue-veined god.

Way to hide a sliver of a shattered god: Body.

We simulacrum but still leave crumbs when we eat our copies. Way.

Way to conclude at this point: Sigh: A and an arcane secret hand-sign.

I Wait For the Demon Bereft of a Mantra

It must be the cut on my hand, then

Let the madness come I fight it like Liszt’s fingers I see it from a distance power I fight him with Quixote’s lances like damned Ahab and the Assyrian Jehu and the Leviathan at the maelstrom’s edge the fulcrum of god and man I give into this like a lady and eat off of this like a rapist perpetual virginity is a hard earth-core and the comet-sperm is a matter of timing everything is such an ingenious gadget all contributes to the deafening whorl I make no promises with my compass no more I only hope when I meet the end that life still wants to fuck

because it is like me a whore

Toothache

I knocked out the teeth of thee Speaker the speechMaker (my mouth began to hurt) the words broken surf on gravel turf on sandpaper (the knocked out teeth of the Maker) I shook the words up in a rattler (cracked skull maracas) giving back the teeth in handfuls holding up ink as sure as mountain ore the holy jawbone under new moons screaming enunciation’s (Ortho- idontra of night vibration) saying same words over and over in syncopation (bloody overtures) recreating the impetus, its winged mercury helmet fevered, its knickel- knocked-out plated teeth remade into men of words holding their mouths and their talismen on hurt-sounds (my mouth hurts) symbols are spoken and non-spoken alerts. Flee them. Never speak.

The Oldest Survival Technique: Cannibalism

Cancer is single-cell artwork.

Even on the most rudimentary basis.

Life will imitate life. Renegade cells building lymphocyte pyramids and sky- scrapers. They sail in like marauders on vapor-trails of blood and fever-rivers.

They scale the walls to penetrate the membranes and then stay for dinner.

They claim and maim the nucleic daughters.

And viruses, like cancers, are only at fault in that they render extinct their own foodsource.

And like cancers, viruses only desire survival.

Isolated codes wrapped in protein, beautiful spirals of perfect, microscopic life.

Vorpal, dorsal, manta, barracuda, and precise.

Arctic brushstrokes of living static and the snow was us thinking of snow afterwards.

I AM torpedo, bomb, aircraft, trainwreck, earthquake, piston, phoenix-wing, spastic semen, tree burning, guitars splintering trombones melting, sitars waterfalling, axe-blades, ballads, solid gold syringe, launching pads, alien terrain, decoder rings and laser pens, axiom, derelict and clarion, lover of the Pleiades, spanner and ranger of mindforest, long overdue book of the ultra-verse library, the momentum’s velocity curse.

I am

silver vomit, silver egg yolk, silver striated leg-muscle tissue I am silver glittered eyebrow, I am silver dragon, deer, Oriental lion, tattoo I am silver dandruff flake downy angelfeather, I am silver laced amphetamines, I cast die-cast silvered silver soliloquies I am the silver salt-shaker at the Last Supper.

I am

lichen of the rotting world tree, I am lichen of the world stone fungus of world mire, fern frond of world swamp, algae of world pool swirl of world whirlpool, mold of world bread, yeast of world brew, bacteria of world infection, virus of world blood, maggot of world decomposition ovum of world vagina, semen of world penis, eye of world socket snake of world desert, soup of world diner, goop of world crashed world like a splattered airliner, grease-drop of world fry-vat, whisker of world-cat.

I am

the courier, a package for deus, a star that can make love, a genital guitar my soul throws the discus halos

I am

Buddha’s pinky, Whitman’s lower-lip-beard-chin, Blake’s brow and brush, Celine’s colon, Dostoevsky’s esophagus, Heidegger’s authentic antique, Sartre’s jar of nothingness, Rimbaud’s liver and remaining kidney, Ginsberg’s left ventricle, Kerouack’s last football, Becket’s ear lent to Van Gogh. Breton’s fishcoathanger- banana-obelisk, Christ’s ribcage, Goethe’s grocery lists, Henry Miller’s dick, Emily Dickinson’s nipples, Marquis de Sade’s eyes, Satan’s beer-belly-button, Confucius’ nose and goatee, Mozart’s skull pounding obviously, Virginia Wolfe’s hips, Lorca’s shoulderblades (like crossed swords), Da Vinci’s wrists, Patsy Cline’s pubes, Israfel’s wings, and all of my words and names and misnomers in fragile casings.

I am

alcoholic of the planets, heroin junky of the planets, glue-sniffer of the planets, pill-popper of the planets, X-er of the planets, Berrigan Benzedrine-drilling to planet cores, nympho of the planets, arranging empty bottles like a solar system the wino of the planets.

I am

Patrick’s “pier that goes places,” I am Sol’s tiger-tongue, I am Sarah’s Ginsbergian city, I am Charlie’s piano keyboard, I am Craig’s MilleniumJohnnyCashSuperBob- Falcon, I am Jonathon’s sense of humor, I am Brian’s strange anger, I am Nicole’s timing and timeless beauty, I am a winged anchor, I am everyone in this room that no one will ever remember, I am a Sub-genius I am not a Sub-genius. I am a DNA code 20 trillion cells all activated in harmony with an aural multiverse of ions fate and accidents and all that separates me from being lion, tree, or mangrove tree is my secret code that the govt. owns. I am Lynn’s solar chimes and I am

The Soldier of Language

For land I am cheetah-elephant-koala For Zen I am sloth-turtle-cactus For stasis I am the fossil of brontosaurus in bamboo grove For no good reason I am hippo-gecko For water I am squid-angelfish-coral reef-bird diving down For swamp I am frog egg cell frog sperm cell chance meeting For tadpole I am amphibian For land again a tortoise is emerging For air I am dragonfly-flower-pollen spore-wind-driven swallow And for here is I the astronaut naked that needs no rocket

No gear for I am no backpack of propulsion no poems hidden in the ignition I wait for the heavenly pick-up as I ascend the slippery rope-ladder towards the silver platter with my nebulae-plated banter and my erased face gleaming metallic

that which is what

I am

bare trap

Always wanting to: leap off of the crest stick my fingers into fans or propellers dab a bit of poison onto my tongue say the most psychotic thing at the best time tempt the bulls of gravity’s equations be an acrobat with Atlanta I-285 traffic wear conductive armor-suits in lightning on airfields to disarm every foresworn omen with a scornface peel scabs for scars picking wounds compulsive open the doors I am afraid to open to shatter the cups, the dishes, saucers to decline all samaritans, lifeguards, ambulances to hand over my shield to the enemy myself to beg me for my sword to be the bard that split the gourd and let the seeds be sucked for visions to empty my veins to pay the price to use non-sequiturs to wrong the rights to write in the face blatantly to the meaningless world to live off of worlds after the death of sound to lie with gorgeous sound in silent impasse to make small monuments to her, to sound herself and to then conceive poems and fly in the face of it glazed by curving consonants

I sing without ears I hear without voice I touch without fuck I see with poems I want to walk into the trap like all animals do

I want to ascend like all of us animals do

Don’t worry I won’t hang around for too long

I am here for the young lady who loves me. I am here for the bottlecap that turned into a quarter. I am here for insomnia-soothing rain. I am here for the train but the frustrated cabby is not. I am here for the weeds that survive the late ice. I am here for the ice that survives the Indian summer. I am here for the child that asked Whitman “what is the grass?” I am here to unfurl the flag of my disposition. I am here for free beer at Kevin’s apartment. I am here for the roof over my head called The Great Sky Terrace. I am here to grow hair, fill lungs, beat inside my chest, propagate words. I am here for the species circus. I am here for the daily calvacade of American guilty-conscience credit-card commerce. I am here for all of this regressive slotheness. I am here for Robert Creeley, James Tate, Paul Bowles, and John Ashbery. I am here to watch the aging process of cartoonists, choreographers, carpenters, composers, and camera-men. I was twenty-two when I wrote this. I will be forty-one and no less of a flower. I am sixty-one and a proud stone. I am eighty-one and a seed for a tree on this or any other world. Let the musculature of nature encompass my bones. Today is the day I would thank God if I had a religion. Should I thank Yod or Yessod? I am an infidel soul. Regimes and jihad’s try to employ me but no. I am my own inward internal conflict. My eyelashes now begin the chronicle of light (I am awake). I am here for this moment. I am here for what I make as sun rises and sets. I am here for the secret of sunflare nova hydrogen quasar space-time curvature. Which nucleus is mine? What nuclei do we share?

Where I am is hard reality there snared.

Cityscape the park:

The way that light breaks open the trees is that friend of mine.

I break like trees against the light, a deadfall, a forest horizontal called foresight (in the park at night I already know the next urbane day) the tollway: we had to leave town and fast buddy when town got to be a buddy-system systolic pressure was up and the home-boys were down they had no trouble remaining in the beats as the streets are the new dinosaur species and freedom was a chance under the flexible ice of the Info Age data-foliage and we had to jet to crash or even jetcrash into the destination called: leaving the city for one city or another to visit Virgil, my brother, to check out the jazz scene don’t ask me what about St. Louis but Route 66 is still there and just drop in the quarters for the other road-side attractions but there is possibility in every city from Chicago to Los Angeles and we keep extra plasma in our backpacks and are road-ready the rental efficiency to put it into context I saw the sun come up today alone for the first time and I’m 25. when jacking-off with Neosporin, at least you know you’re clean. time to go to work. what is this second wind? weathervanes and lightning rods and pigeons and levitating floors of plate-glassed dolmens. afterwards is a warding word, like my fave: off-work, and so our antennae reach out for the solace of the man with his same events. we all want to be the man with the same events. most of us are troubled satellites and over-dubious about it. like us, they are only there to reflect. I stuck a cross in the crow’s craw. it didn’t pierce his tongue. leaving this town I sacrificed my left eye to continue writing this as a lady executive walks by. she says I like the eyepatch. then I see the WET PAINT sign on my bench. drat! imperviously clueless once again! the migraine of a sidewalk crack pain is a beautiful wide chasm as my grappling hook clangs against the opposite side of him and I’m sure by the sound of it that it hurt pain to make it and given the only thing in existence that can outdo itself always without providence or precedence and I know this because pain is like me: it can’t help itself. I am a god-damned revival of fire hydrants, a metropolis on stilts made from dead epics as the funeral procession of buildings and this parade of past-made stalwart gentlemen spire up in their towering fugues as raindrops falsely promise that they will land ever in any one place other than everywhere before you, everywhere no matter what you do, for, you can never step on the same sidewalk once the city proper man with agenda harnesses his stars

On the Tip of the Tongue

It is the extension of the most beautiful legs you have ever seen and they are yours.

Hours before a brigade of words brings you hyacinths instead of jeers, the urge is chasing you through exquisite doorframes.

Chasing you, like a pissed-off wasp-colony, chasing you towards greatness.

The postman has something for you. It’s as if you lost your virginity five minutes ago.

You have always known this sensation. All and all and all along. But now, it is flesh that reprimands.

Never Enough

And if it can never be enough If all of the clouds never satiated Or storms abated the serrated Corpses inflated with surplus lightning Animals learning human talking

If it can never be enough We keep feeding the furnace Ground crumbling faults up under us All eyes on bombs and turrets Un-used but magnificent sculptures Of each imploding moment The detonation of all adjectives

And if it can never be enough Enough to wake the mountains or shut close the canyons Or pause the rivers to make then listen Or cease the snakes in volcanoes from hissing

And if it can never be enough To turn the sky into land to turn the land into ocean to turn the ocean into a new sky to make all elements equally imply all predestined in its ionic condensation to unite in the mind the grand unified theory to see through the hyperspace illusion the transparency of density the lightspeed hoax of infinity and never enough to top the perfect landing to collect the epitome specimen to nurture the unbreakable skeleton to wipe god’s mouth clean with a star napkin and if it can never be enough for the map to fit the nation to make the nation fit the continent to make the continent fit the ocean to make the ocean fit the planet to make the planet fit the solar system to make the system fit the void to make the space fit the void and never enough to fit my pen on the page for long my page in a volume my volume to a limit my limit to the pulpit my pulpit to the sermon my sermon to the flock my flock to a field my field loyal to its stalks my stark field quantum and to a boundary finally please

And it can never be enough to make the birds give us their wings to make the fish give us their fins to make the trees give us their bark to make the insects give us their secrets to make the winds give us their cadence to make the soul give us its patience

And if it can never be enough to play all of the instruments to choreograph all incidents to record the voice of Deus to discord the voice of chaos to unite Dasein, Tao Zen, Design to unite all savior-warriors, prophets, bloodlines to ascend into heavens in the unified perfect incline and if it can never be enough to metamorphose all zero’s into heroes all heroes into genius zero’s the two in continuous battle and friction meeting on the field of dynamic tension and if it can never be enough to hoist the bridges to repair the china walls to mortem the mortar to fall fail the towers to trumpet battle-cries

Never enough to cease the pens to cease the print-outs to cease the faxes to cease the fiber optics to cease the cereal boxes and the censuses to cease the solstices and equinoxes to cease the endless sequences to cease the harvests to sew shut the season’s mouth to authenticate the holy silences

And never enough blood for the bullets grain for the guts and distilleries water for the seas and toiletries fires for the infernos and factories smog for the disguise of the cities enough carnage of flowers for the eyes enough orgasms for the flanks and thighs enough poems for the ranks and soon it will be enough while i am choking to death being force-fed my own breaths and phrases hard to swallow bad metrics tattered half-words ripping my trachea asphyxiating finally on my own poetry and was said and so is said enough.

Vacuum forgetting to vacuum the vacuum

I forgot to free the water from the tub. Things, ordinary things. I forgot to clean the sleep from the cat’s eyes. Things, ordinary things. I forgot to re-align myself with the moon. Things, ordinary things. I forgot the procedures for the navigation instruments. These cracked awnings, bad bowsprits. I forgot myself between two small stones. I child by now threw one of them. I forgot myself between a star and a parked car.

Things. Ordinance of ordinaries. To breathe in vacuums is to have the gills of poets. Songs and ordinary songs. Somewhere true to naming this receptacle of sense is the vessel now disclaiming its fill from recompense.

Let the fools vomit up their own universes. I don’t have enough maintenance men on the payroll.

In the sentence you forget that clocks keep on ticking to me though, each birth of the sticky minute has a hard time sticking

in the sentence you forget in the nano-second before uttering I reside laughing hearing you continually muttering:

“it was just always as it was an ordinary thing”

deed

I undid it. de-fanged the snakes. de-clawed the lions. de-finned the fish. de-fogged the mist. de-feathered the avians. de-wormed the larvae. de-spined the cacti. de-hydrated the seas. de-perspired the clouds. de-depthed the deep. de-smissed the emptied space. de-ployed the planets. de-stringed the guitars of icons. deified the idioms. de-planned the infinitesimal planes. declined cliché’s as best I could.

I try to disperse waves and waves of convergent light. de-sloped the mountains. de-leaved the forests. de-materialized the phenomena. de-sewn the harvest. debated the debits of insipid relics. defied all pilots. undid these with unified paper-works. de-locked the keys. deterred the truth. de-wound the clocks. de-classified time. de-charged ions. delayed the malaise into oblivion. gave to the deacon the ploys. deadpanned the poise of my noise. deadened the air. debauched the debacle. I debriefed the debris itself.

I try to disperse waves and waves of convergent light. deciphered the disease, all my deeds infecting me. I could never define the divine, despite my best disease. I did un-doings in order to deify myself, me.

I have never mined the mind of the light it has refined.

But, I try desperately to disperse waves and waves of convergent light.

The Dervish and the Dream of It

Playing the ‘rkan-dun to Paul Bowles as he laughs his heart rebuilt at Emory in Atlanta returning home with his entourage to the Sahara brushing bees off his beer mug verandahs of melting oasis and mirage . . .

Throwing I-Ching with old Uncle Bill coming up with the 23 means proceed with caution “no luck here” “discipline required” planes go down, ships sink, wherever there is the number 23 is death, trust me (I remember the summer of my 23rd year) Bill burrows through his favorite photos of demolition explosions and his most prized cut-ups he shows me his favorite firearm and the necessary guard-dog he hates (this one room he won’t let me in)

I’ve been nowhere ever though this room of my own its possibilities all maps inverted, even a guide to travel and proper etiquette in India magic-markered continents it means as much as an apple core browning under a cheap couch I need to book a fare find a photo-booth to complete the Dossier set my identity afire let them find my ashes for by morning I will have phoenixed or maybe, like Galway Kinnell says, “to be the flames?”

“El aqua corriente no ve las estrellas,” Lorca laughs at me. Out of the current I am in I point to his eyes with my finger make triangles to the sun and reply, “La luz no sabe qua’ quiere.” “You remembered” he says in the twilight tongue and rides his horse into a mammoth hay-bale to disappear.

Eta Carinae, the nebulic womb looms over every telescope but, our skulls are all nothing more than planetariums my favorite constellations are those of autumn, winged horse, dolphin, lynx, princesses.

Cherokee-gallowglas. Windpipe-bagpipes. Philomela-hemaphrodite. Every time I sculpt a statue I become taller than the obelisk and must start over, my shadow a stag I chase with the sun always to my back.

The strangest sensation a euphoria, really, after having attempted a Hart Crane bridge death dive and surviving, remembering the exhilarating adrenaline sentry of scrolled oblivion as if life was waving its finger at me, and alive, I never swam so hard then after hitting that water, never so hard since under the great looming structure of the bridge.

If you watched me, yes not withered before your eyes transform into one thousand years what mortal morsels would there be left? Bones and moments to be taken, stretch them between two stars and my birthdays now are light-years apart.

Tiger is the anger in my hangar-cage releasing black jets languid flanks in formation through flak-storms and underbrush below lava-flows with our goggles melting into our eyes and no oxygen, only ice-spittle form our lungs and we crash into the white snowbank like a thrown grenade and now someone will name a grave for our indolence.

Death does not have to bend his bow he only has to show us the arrow and so, he is so unlike the marksman Love.

I have slain my mother, lain with my father, emerged from the desert cursing water with my mouthfuls of sand and my fistfuls of quartz spines of saguaro shoved into my shoulderblades and I will find and bind the birds for my wings amid the wreckage of the defunct gliders and biplanes

Who is safe under it? Under the sky? Always there, the weather like a mood, the meteorite like an inevitable shrug it hovers like a scowling blue parent Kafka says we are on the wrong side of the shield to protect us we only have our drills, crests, and umbrellas

Tried so hard to make the play, but, home was stolen already the shovel and the trowel cutting me while I still slid in as the jungle suddenly erupts on the horizon in the parameters of this makeshift Americana hot-dog selling venture and you, the bulldozing machete’ tearing down the bleachers around me, I say I thought it was a game, all for sport and during the beer commercials of past-life regressions a predator rolled over me like a linebacker with his dragon motors churning and next year the groundsman will ride over my bones on a rumbling riding-mower paid for by beers and fried pickles.

We’d all gathered and built the fire sawing appendages off of the piles of summer-storm deadfalls I was so drunk that I ate moths standing at the porch-lamp everyone laughed I rolled once through and across the bonfire fatally burning my consignment-shop sportscoat (losing two or three bucks) then someone declared me pagan even though I passed out on the sofa with a stomach-full of Irish beer and insects (a head full of porch-lamps) hungover around eleven p.m.

Buffets of broken glass industrial teeth in translucent brown green blue sea-glass color-shards cutting me in lightning-bolt shaped strawberry scrapes

I had had another bikewreck, this time on train-tracks and all that I can think of is if anyone saw that or not if I looked like a real idiot or dumb-ass or not.

Upon my spine I swear that I need not one tear of light in spite, I will lie low in night, alone because love has pricked me with a poison palm-spine and I was soon scorned by Milady who thought she was the sun but I think her name is Mercury yes, without a sunspot of a doubt.

A friend of mine wrote something about cutting a rose with its own thorn

I think that this is sex

I want to cut myself so I want to bleed like a real rose

And so I have a patent pending I am an entrepreneur, all of a sudden I have established a business based solely on enticing immortals on this earth to come to my firm so that I may assist them in achieving death ( I am interested to see who my clients will be, however, no one has answered the ad just yet.)

If Rimbaud would have climbed Yeats’ TOWER what could have been? I could have waited in the closets with gauze pads for his legs and gummas I would have prepared myself for the duel with pathetic Verlaine I would have endured his curses for cleaning the bullet-wounds “The weasel’s twist, weasel’s tooth.”

“never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day.”

I need no other things, just the weasel to eat the light the breath to make the day the eye which suffocates where the blessed hell is

and so I slink away down the tower’s stairs towards black continents scorned by too many Maud’s and Verlaine’s

The difference between Basire and Blake is the story of my life. My mind is the Bastille. My Blake is a vision awaiting still. My Basire is a poor craftsman. Who will I be apprenticed to? And when they let out the vision from its final guillotine of form whose head will scream from the gallows the songs of experienced innocence?

With manacles I fasten myself to the unworthy debacle of this monumental stench-monument and I send out signals and I have emitted, I admit it, contracts for my head to my own soul to kill me and it objects and so hit-men in my mind are pissed but usually so am I I can nor but reprehend my noir but, in this last poem, let the doe give birth to hunters, let the cougar squeeze out a weak man

The curse, oubliette-head to eat all of the books if I could in spoon-hordes the last empty parking-lot on earth seemed to mean as much to me to do as I asserted no movement on my roller-blades the empty spaces await our onomastics Vad mecums all secured under our tongues hordes of spoons and the consummation is the opposite of consuming one rings with punish, the other with lusting and nothing is accomplished with doing. nothing is done without the underlying desire of the nothing to become a something, even the sun and the moon have heretics of albedos to deal with, everything always attempting to be more of what it already is light even is attempting to be lighter

universes attempting to be life life attempting to evolve into universes (it succeeded)

poems attempting resolutions I attempting clumsily to say goodnight

to this poem

my cadence, resolution, and purpose are and were always enough.

Godshrapnel

Big Bang was the bomb (like Corso’s poem) endless erupting codas all existence is god-shrapnel-star-piss silver quantum comet vomit and the penultimate result is HERE WE ARE

all of us the result of a lingering star.

the noise of firmaments mis-firing falling shattered indoctrinations on the battlements wrecking balls of culture scaffoldings the imploding millennium ending up all sparse with whimpers and spit. tomorrow the gusto of the good god Gattling gun grows grenade-like green mangrove commandos. in eventide monday moons of light are the bamboo shoots of sugar cane as inane checker-games corrode boredom’s sexy lingerie. so much non these days makes sense to say. elephant death ermine breath more noise for language is the safari for sound’s valuable skins and tusks of ivory. what doesn’t even matter is matter. energy being matter storage units and vice versa. and what is the matter with un-used matter? abuse of this matter is also equated with energy. who uses who is the true energy signature. I am getting to know matter and vice versa ergo plasma. balance and exchange of universe pattern and man insists on the separation of kinesis with stasis. man separates who is kin from him from who actually stays at the reunions of sky and earth, of matter and energy. all of are faces are of divine lineage. all of us are relatively relatives. in the glue the very stuck spool the ball of twine of fates incoherent on wine playing with scissors killing my neighbors. empty winebottle your souls are free in me no more fermenting entering hemoglobin-tribes and cell-fort-walls in wah-wah tones of ether inhalation as the sirens scream their epileptic spins. the only way my poetry will survive is if it learns to fragment capitalisticaly. I hope my shrapnel hits the fucking lotteries. divine cut-ups, multitudes of fuck-ups, lightning-rods of luck, a flux semi-certain- perpendicular shut-ups ceasing filibuster of up-chuck suck-ups and their dirty grails and holy coffee-cups and bad utensils and fingernail-smut with forks stabbed into golden candied-apples in ruts of gluttony like caramel. in the city something wrong under the stars skeletons and rats parking strange cars and lights and explosions contained in cracks of the un-ending sidewalks of cement broken backs of steaming wooly mammoths that live under manholes and chew Chewbeacca’s of sticky-bubble-gum advertisements on the shoe-soles of assholes and on bus’s bumpers, etc., and so they give head for it or for fifty-cent cinnamon rolls and coffee-blood-crud-liquor-brains. the Quaaluded-heart sputtering itself out in a sink-drain on Thanksgiving Day and if we continued to consume the entire planet, then what to eat next? Or would we regurgitate-violent? No, we’d just keep chewing the infinite of it. blackjack in a black jazz magic river-city sundown orchestrated by the TV lighting up the red district like car lights in still-photography all vacancies soon permanent seven lucky sevens in seven heavens who die in a shoe-shine sanguine smudge. a very strange bartender took my order I did not know that that drink existed because I made it up i said serve me up some Rocket-Fuel I should have known better as the monsters onstage poured out of the plugs and there was audible fire as if sound could burn.

Christmas carols are always sung louder on the edge of the last chasm aren’t they?

Cain I came to the perimeter of No Man’s Land. I kicked the icon can. I can kick the habit of tablets. I kicked the can across the grid into the elapse- spasm (pessimism-rip). I carried the effigy, a shimsham shaman rickshaw on my back, not a crucifix in the crux of a scam, nor an albatross shot with shrapnel, but it was a piece of art for either the dizzy angel or the spinning hearse. scrape the strange barnacle off of the remora and look at the scar the regeneration plethora and there is the answer to who you are and so off with the cultural parasite to reveal the slimy lesion the healing pus and whiteness. the journey into any one word can end like sound at its barrier and a wall ends surely like a period and periodically I say that I am nearing a barrier and periodically you hear nothing but me constantly crashing. color-less quest for the soul-ethnos the essence-aesthetic cityscape the strobelight cyber leisure-suit hanging over the globe the prisms unifying culture but i am not Communist still somehow sutured together into a mob-quilt races like stitches like telephone poles connecting all roads the xylophones of our backbones playing their genetic symphonies the spanning linguistics the flags in winds over a human species ocean and the colors of the ocean the colors of all of our souls. disregard all statements that begin: “The Universe is . . .” “Poetry is . . .” which also end with a period. disregard all so-called periods. don’t be fooled by my apparent finites. up from the trash that we made was a new type of trash that forbade us to gather up the trash. each star is a kiss from the Creatrix for this vast, vast abyss we transit. why in this trap, in this mortal tangle? why in this trap between animal and angel? only to eat at my soul like some mad cannibal. until I am no more but deadkill in the carnal carnival. mercy crawls up out of the crater spitting out flowers spitting out flowers. this is floating space-cadet lit, anti-gravity in which I spit. the human condition, a piece of chewed resin, a piece of used gum, rolling in information, sticking, in a gibbering mouth, in the mud, eating carrion, assuming form in a dustbin, a soul caught somewhere within the deep core of the abomination the dirty snowball accumulating, ascending from an arctic sanitarium. following the cursor the silver surfer the idea to the end the end of the river the end of the pen. assembling myself as I work as the assembly line segments magnetic conveyor belts major domos bolted centrifugal a Frankenstein notion a neon convulsion and the crude mettle cranks into the sunlight unpainted and grating with a flashing digital copyright. on the rack, turning the crank, stretching myself, to become a wheel, my ribcage opened, bones cracking, as I assume the position of a horizon. metaphor is meter for the afterworld. I am astute and a steed. I record everything in my galloping. image after image overlapping. this esoteric pattern I sing imagining. the metaphor for the infinite I imagine. meta I for image I am in. seeing through the very middle of it all white chaos unseen-hearing no noise nor speech nor held no words in my horde in my head you ask did essence or existence come first? that is easy enough: it was simultaneous. and all of the souls assembled in a circle and each reached into their heart and took a piece of it (celestial purple) and handled it to the soul beside them counter-clockwise in rotation which renewed each incomplete heart with sections of others’ and so they became a chain, a kaleidoscopic one being . . . the light was overwhelming. wearing trilobite armor. skinning flying fish. braiding my hair with guitar-string. inlaying my ribcage with solder. eating flowers, torque with torpor. awaiting the civilization to attack me with bludgeoning words. with its battalions of Cartesian dotted i’s and crossed t’s while feeding off of the chimera sound with barks, whale bones, crude clubs and stones. lying down in daisies to rust, in silence, in solace, in insolence (I’ll stop this). the rain of shattered poems in need of re-assembly is the rain called Language. my mouth is a bucket for it. ashes to astros, cosmic gusts to dusts, solar winds and rocket pirates, cons piracies and quantum physiques, gravity gone mad throwing planets like basketballs, ice-sickling comets, hydrogen-helium fusings for amusing illuminations of muses, the sex-thrust of suns is brilliance chakra-waves, mediocrity in the World Tree, a sphere of spiral, the spiral shape of the outer-space of my ear. reaching into the Bag of Ways and always refusing the answers. reaching into the Bag of Ways the super-satchel and pulling out more random quests and questions (hungry data cancers) reaching into the Bag of Ways and throwing fortunes (salt) over your shoulders. reaching into the Bag of Ways and refusing fate and Time’s embroider. reaching into the Bag of Ways and assembling the scraps at will drawing straws with feather-thin squiggly-straws. assembling Life’s crazyquilt hung out to dry on the World Tree after millennia of laundry and laundering. embezzling. experience in the kitchen junk-drawer world the trinkets and treasures waiting not for themselves but for their uses to help them disappear into function. what tool am I? earplug? washer? nail? toenail clipper? paper-clip holding the eternal manuscript together?

Lebenswelt welts on my burden-back. mind-spine time to overdrive. living the hours of life under florescent lights fearing balding and it all as if something was to be cultivated or grown hydroponically like buds in my head grown within a shaved skull something hydraulic. something ironic, not altogether vegetable or organic, but something of two worlds colliding, an unnatural fever under filaments buzzing, a cyborg standing, unaware that it is living. metal, animal, vegetable, all fused and assumed to be normal. alert and speaking fundamental mineral. what sad face in outer space cries meteoric tears over the human race? they named me It-Can’t. and so forever I rant. flagships, flagellates like sperm, smuggling smoggy halves of life, out to pollinate fertile islands which are evolution eggs, exploding up like Normandy’s and dooms-days as nomads charge the shores, screeching and howling aboriginal autochthonous Vikings. my thumb is trombone. first finger is pistol barrel. second finger seems to break off easy. third finger finishes the G-chord. fourth finger with an in-grown nail. this the bad handwriting left hand. right hand: (good right hook). thumb is thunder. one is fistmaker. two is final insult. three is knife- balancer. fourth is card-shuffler. hands together is ambivalence. we will rebuild civilization from the ruins of the galleon. culture crash-landed into a reef of masses a coral of people transmorg-mergering and rectifying as i walk the skyscraper plank and I wilt into a voice sublime a vocal reverb a saint’s afterbirth an underwater whale a culture-swell spraying an attempt to hold our hands across the toning mouth of oblivion. one race is in a kiss and the innate bliss and everyone kiss for we are one race. the guy was holding (plugging) his finger into the air. he said that “can’t you see, there! right there is a hole in the Universe!” he could have been crazy, but then, he could have been right. he called it,

“holding back the Light”

I am the kid who made his soul into a kite, and then cursed the wind all night. there is a magnet in my core attracting every iota every insignificant iron filing every ore of information to cover my skin like an armor of questions. climbing under the crust of the earth cutting the tree roots watching them rocket up to freedom. climbing under the parchment, pulp, the paper to cut the sutures of the dead literatures open watching them rocketing-up cosmic archaics arc-welding. coming back down to the surface gathering up my parachute in a field of crashed plane wreckage, and used books.

I was pickpocket-pirate of the God’s palaces. smuggling the loot of symbols back to the planet, back to the spraypainted granite to add more graffiti to the empirical graphs of the silly more phrases for war and some for treaty more diatribes of gutturals to separate tribes the idiom lingos of scurvy scribes and here is where we cut the hands off those who write, like a desert-land justice, loose tongues are cut and hollowed and filled with sand and then handed back to the babbling preacher-man. his horror was true invoked (he should be choked) in his vocal religion. this is what does exist and what doesn’t persist and this is the interstice so here I will stop to allow my slop and my word-sleet and my god-slivers

to cease

American Scrapheap

I.

Regardless of what they say to be truly mad staring down a continent’s collective maxim that I am prematurely American dreaming like everyone else you have been whispering stale stoic slated stalwart sturgeon of Old Age Rotten Reason I inquire too much about my methods of torture these thumbscrews and iron maidens still arpeggio into our nights like papercuts you can rewind and replay halogenetic light-infants gathering-up minutes in thermo-dynamic buckets as if on egg-hunts to hatch prototypes of the first fungus, first bacterium, first reptile, first blossom, first metamorphic life-form and the histories teach us that the first life-form must have been quite without a doubt an American and the meek are filling shopping carts with aluminum cries and the halos of neon porn escalate above the toolboxes and dinosaur bones rattle in our constitutions and yields of frostbite and fire rake over the cicada shells of our lust and the disposition is a wire-brush-tangle-turf of spikes that are poisonous and the grass is dying everywhere unnoticed

Bring on the artificial intelligence! It’s about democratic and efficient loneliness. Survival occurs when beings can’t separate themselves from their environments. Separation equals immortality. Time machines work because time does not exist as we know it Clocks themselves wrote this amongst timelessness

II.

Globules of rainwater the hovering amoebas in open grease-vats in restaurant back-alleys those poor orphaned cosmos-drops.

Stray cats with the secrets the powers over Egyptian deities always landing on their feet on street hieroglyphics the alley toms of Osiris.

Love chameleons, manhole iguanas, alleysaurs, reptiles in the traffic new Mayas are forming new prolific Mesozoics.

Prophet pool-players snooker chess with magnetic cigarettes dangling from their lips discussing horse races cock-fights feeding their eccentric lipstick-pets’ appetites with neon lights at billiards and poker chivalry.

Wanna-bees, shoulda-beens, coulda-beens, would-bees buzzing in beers musing on piers losing teeth for all the wrong reasons swimming with virgins in the toxic Hudson among stray bullets, burst barrels, and a cop with a lucky rabbit’s foot flips a coin with a toothpick in his mouth checks the head and the gun cock clacks.

Beat-exploiters like me in the neck romance of the brass and wind and the long line and the snare the upright and the wire, turtle-necked tone-dogs are cool and aren’t.

Straight-shooters, refined and elderly addicts somber as well-kempt houseplants authoring best-sellers, goodguys, badguys, screen-writers, chick-flickers techno-saloon operators, parked Harley Davisons and melancholia.

New Age computer generated drum-machine drams of clean soma pseudo-tribal valium verbatim drool of designer-drug vampire ecstasy composition Mozart machines with tasteful receding hairlines and the most indestructible plastic for brains.

Suicidal Indians boiling down hairspray for alcohol never cancerous in the sun scoffing at sunblock following the trial of fears and the trail of beers towards all cliché’s to the casinos in the heavens where the slot machines pour blue corn.

Motown crooners in shopping malls with coin tophats. Tom Waits and waits.

Spoken word never dead since first primal grunt the clarion call the vocal corded drum-skin taught and so my catalogue is percussion.

Morlock Oliver-twisted street urchins with cavities skateboarding the suburbs awaiting Fahrenheit 451 and no more homework and the last summer of any dandelion wine.

Pawnshop Gothicism glories or morning Rimbaud world travelers word-smugglers missionaries in the elephant congress in red clay and seaweed and archaeological Formica dust on the pilot’s goggles and coffee and rubber is our trade.

Hot-rod enthusiasts feeling up B-movie babes and bimbos on racetracks regardless of political correctness like poems really are these rockabillies akimbo with myths of the smoldering old west with the undead evil Keneval and the brain-dead Keanu stunt-men champions all competing in a haze of lies and farts and half-musings as the ones using diesel peel out in a spray of monoxide and sulfur.

Postmodern diners with mutant proprietors, disfigured prostitutes as a glass eye rolls under a malfunctioning Elvis jukepelvis and they serve green-tea-malts and grilled-cheeses and swordfish and use hubcaps for plates and lead mugs.

Street gang urbane karate art Dadaist graffiti punkrock enthusiasts bagel-fascists rickshaws hot dog vendors shanty-town emperors rainbow spectrumed skinheads prismed jarheads, rusting trumpet-men, one armed guitarists, gyro-kiosk- aficionados sushi-stand-up comedians, braut-vendors, Tai-vendors, butchers, the milkmen, the ghosts of the fifties suburbs, the bread-men, the street-squatters, deadheads, bouncers, pimps, hit-mens and such as all this and that.

Poets throwing grappling hooks into the sky fishing for planets sometimes catching stars light-strung-sitars hooking black holes accidentally being entropy points pulled under to the nth-degree maelstrom.

World Series another world is a series, a shredded baseball reaches escape velocity from centerfield unraveling forever as a Fate waits to snip the Romantic twine of American boyhood myth from its spinning distaff.

A gnat has the secret of the food chain in its wings and can annoy a creature billions of times its own mass and that is some sort of power in the face of the ultimate void of too much every man is a walking oxymoron and this is the vampiric condition of man suckling the blood at intervals out of a monstrous swollen bovine culture.

This is where I begin in this current event of currency caught up with this existentialist Pharisee standing in a riverbed of dried animal skins all scrolls where water once was and this bark peeled from hearts and this driftwood metaphysical will pave the parched satellite Dow Jones quintessential but let’s just say that I am the best goddamn anchor-man in the Universe!

Mountains can move in the eye of the beholder, this is the scam and sham of miracles as the sleight-of-hand faith-healer like a street-hocker reaches into his trench-coat full of fresh cattle organ to exorcise the faithfuls’ tumors. Just ask Andy Kaufman.

Allegory is low-fat want and one too many Americas have boulderc-oloradoed into my resort, an avalanche incident that I was the last to report that casualties of the mind are buried in the radioactive smiles of swarming insects.

The tabloids have become valid points of reference. The writers of children’s books are aliens from planet NODEGGNOG. Dr. Seuss as Zeus as all points converge kids worshipping robots and Christs mechanized Christ-like.

You see, they had to push candybars, hamburgers, cigarettes, and oceans also pussy, dreams, picket lines and picket fences, and soda-pop, in order to follow up with an industry of Nutra-Sweet, saccharine, lite-beer, guilt from consumption after being hard-wired is millions. The spiritual gluttons the sloths slugging away and laughing at the physical gluttons but then crying over the macrocosm microcosm.

Industry, you are Behemoth. Call me Ishmael Jonah; here’s my card.

A lollipop culture with a Pollyanna cure, pedi)phile)cure, manna(quin)cure mass-Ages, plastic surgeons prosthesis nightmares of body-organ black markets cloning me, that is a true nightmare, I have certain fears these junky physicians with their anathema panacea sweet and mantras clone my cock and vocal cords and build a religion.

French fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries, french fries french fries French fries, french fries.

Information bytes two-hundred billion served daily or more for life here is like being a bean in a bag of beans being picked by a bean with a bellyful of beans while he works in a bean-field with other beans.

This is the american pile of new world order shit.

Embowel me with more of those grey-green intestines for digesting this coiled mollusk hurts with embolisms at this length uncircumcised to unite frontal lobes with this reptile stem I will also lie down because the skull diarrhea needs a constant neural huntress.

Burn me on the Burma-pyre! The American Scrapheap! The spinning Bible-DVD’s humming forever! Tie me to nostalgia’s UFO! Inventory my soul and finally just nuke me!

I am so tired of remaking America for me-self. What kind of psychopath was Whitman, anyway? I am Whitmaniacal! Was he? I have trivia hypochondria! What trivia is the screw crucial enough for earth to destruct if we don’t keep tightening the habits? What useless piece of information is the ultimate irony in this house of cards O Universe?

Aphrodisiac implants, pheromones prevail, harmoning and whore-moaning murdering zoo animals with my bare cages and knuckles and building armor from their skeletons while cutting out my own tongue with a shark’s teeth and gurgling blood with no more language but bestial honor and this is how it is in the offices and executive boardrooms so be it.

What cortex does this galleon cut? What hemisphere of Jungian Dopplery?

Execute. Exec-evolve. Evolve. E-volvate. Volvos. Retro-Fuck-ups. Exo-plastic. This is my dreamy life cycle thank you dead Europe with your Afterbirthemerica.

I can swallow a quark.. So be it, the ides of god’s farts and burps. I need more slag and compost.

I leave in my will that I will be smothered in my coffin by a million pieces of a million unfinished jigsaw puzzles.

The Maize-God, The Bacchus-Fisher-King, the Sun-Christ is riding serpents and centipedes up from the Yucatan to cross the desert American to cleanse the Hopi and plant seeds of truth and bring the Third Wave and strum the Last Chord of the Guitar of the Universe.

Here in the junkshop of this leather-bag, rhinestone-crusted heart I wait and smile my Allen Ginsbergian-hopes.

III.

Flesh Age. Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. Golden Age. Christ Almighty Age. Flesh Age of Sleek Steel. We Are Damascus Swords. Then the So Be It Age. The realization of the trinities within me:

Ego: an eater and creature of cock and cunt. Id: the Emmersoul, Innersoul, Everysoul, Stink of In, the Instinctual. Libido: the open hands of the Gemini Twins at the mouth of a black hole.

I recognize full flower recon in the irrationality of Dali. So atomic you bitch, so atomic.

There is a shape I like called “V”.

I have a Configuration of a Vanishing Point; I a have a Fetish Eclipse; I have a Aurora Nexus; I have a Shadow of Yourself. All credit cards are accepted.

I begin where this is a where-ness. Schizos in the chapels say Jesus got lost in the honeycomb. But, they will Jerusalem it out of him, like any good Baptist, Batista, or bloodthirsty Persian. I am dioramic symbiotic up for that shit, my niggah. I use my winged loafers only for deliveries. Everything else is on commission, see? I would, in alternate universes, be content to just bag groceries.

There is an aerodynamicism of pyramids and Cat’s Cradles.

The magnetism of the tetrahexagonic shotglass pulls my bio-rhythms.

The two sexual pyramids touched together at their tips perpendicular to all rhombi.

Two cocks. Two vaginas. Two worlds of energies and triangulars. We build pyramids on our beds when we decide to do it.

Christ is Id. Judas is Ego. Peter is Libido. They are all interchangeable, though.

This poem is a last supper and so everyone who reads it sits in the catbird seat of perspective like a true Renaissance messiah.

The Zealots are somewhere cutting their ears off for their sons so that they may know Christ’s words after their father’s deaths like listening to the sea within shells.

And people call me a phonetic Fascist.

You just saw a shape disappear in your hand. No? Then look there again and again. Paradigm is this. Only three ways: Slab. Pyramid. Sphere. Pick and then develop an Age. Choose wisely. Assuage, sage.

There are only three shapes needed to construct the human body, and the space-time continuum then curves itself into completing them.

Depth as illusion all sleight of hand. I have quit the horogolium to instead calculate the nature of mankind’s insistence on dreaming.

Clay hides the obvious: we are color sound word.

God made us and made a getaway with the blueprints into every one of us hidden in us but we read the encryptions in every leaf, scallop, cell, rhododendron, giraffe-hair, mohawk of wild boar, spyrogette, and these are just a few citations from the Americana Architectural Fabuloso!

His golden mean is a feather in a cap it is a great Sequoia for a pencil.

I was once a wooly mammoth lumbering across a vast expanse knowing where tundra would lead me by some inner navigation called keep living.

I was the X-factor, the great Spirit Hacker, God-heckler, Celestial Jester, spitting poems like a nail-gun to secure the tarps over the libraries after the tempests cave their ceilings in and the rain of fruit-bat guano and the choirs sing hymnals in the rivers of filth.

Using my soul synathesia I can see you with my mouth.

I will drive my car towards that ubiquitous parade upon the horizon.

I will carry a spoon in one hand and a bird-skeleton in the other.

I will lay myself out upon a cairn of collapsed newstands.

I will stare up at the sky and never see a glorious star.

I will hope that every man will hold and have one cell of my flesh through reading this while breathing the change.

This will be my final burial and cremation.

You will all always see me as a phantom in your peripheral vision.

I will use geometry against you like love and angle myself towards your heart without any Cartesian or chart-able explanation.

We have long walked the earth and now we will run and run it into the ground.

Too much to know too much to get done between monolith slab, sphere, pyramid, and the horizon.

Cantankerous towards the bijou of you I carry mega-thousand-watt cones of ecstatic love.

Together, tonight, the melting begins like a cheese melting on something glorious and edible after your island of starvation.

Quasar of fluidity. Dust of flowing. Sieve of what’s sown.

Residual pollen grains on windows give me allergies and great hopes.

Life is trapped against transparencies. Life is trapped against transparencies.

IV.

new archetype of the payphone con-artist new archetype of the cocaine accountant new archetype of the one-golden-tooth smile new archetype fast-food girl on roller skates new archetype of a humpback whale on bumperstickers new archetype of truckers and road-whores at Waffle Houses new archetype of skateboarders and surfers with Zen at positive age thirteen new archetypes of Fisher King guitar hierarchies among friends because everyone plays guitar now like folklore flashfloods a herd of beatnik heretics and lost idiots devoid of any useful cults bungee-jumping blond burlesque bazooka-babes hanging above beaches bikinis raining from threatening skies androgyny-scouts of liberties upright in their boot-like tar-heel spines the mythology made real against america the mail-order phone-sex hag afraid of burning her own sustained flag leaning westward like a Piza Tower full of too much Mafioso pizza and the heads of the country in the Rockies like a hydra and the pelvis in the Mississippi delta and the feet in the Everglades like toes of magnificent bald cypresses and the one arm in Texas holding the torch to Mexico (yes the liberty fell over and became a westward bound male) the arm in New York broken off and still holding the constitution up for angelic junior-editors fornicating with their own typewriters as the intestines of In God We Trust must to Hades lead us for money is we is and without it we ain’t as Las Vegas shits Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean, all of whom are from the same family called Poster-Boys and fathers pin-up mothers push their soapbox-derby boy scouts towards video games of broken glass developments and girls are breaking open their chastity-belts with indoctrinated Popsicle sticks and the yellow journalism rides in on the television horses’ backs and kicks up some impressive plastic surgeries in its stirrups and tampons and condoms may be holding and killing the only epic heroes and whores left and thank goodness for that small miracle of sparing them as Third World candle-wax drips fallen stars unto Daryl Strawberry’s rehab hotel knotted stripes swell in my fingers like a tendonitis and these burning flags of sulfur lead me further into a void upon a void that has somehow lost its mother yet still become a thriving culture

V.

The nano-seconds stick like chewing gum in the angel’s hair. These arpeggios of cascading experience and our children are our finest musical pieces. Radioactive sermons and the newborn gods are stringing up guitars and strumming and singing.

VI.

We got crash-test dummy therapy up here in the capital hill conservatory. Choke the smoker to death unless he has a pension and can get his surgery. It is very difficult to break a hand to eye psychological habit like democracy. We require legislation that protects innuendo and territorial ashtray tapping.

On a sign outside the base read:

WHAT YOU SEE HERE WHAT YOU DO HERE WHAT YOU HEAR HERE WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE LET IT STAY HERE

Pull up the scandalous pants up to the lowbrow scorn of Uncle Sam. Stop tapping fresh dirt with sallow boots. The only men to die on this soil had a liberal’s fervor for it. List me on the list of the pissed-off. Rage against the machine that put machine-guns here. Drinking port with my passport.

We tested them and built bunkers and spliced some DNA and let progress do what it does. False pride means not bickering at poverty-stricken farmers. Watergates, contras, north’s, whitewaters, Bangkok air-attendants who suffer the burden of serving all these assholes their drinks. First class struggle for us.

If only I’d invented Velcro! I wouldn’t have the time to bourgeois bitch. In 1994 a Georgia minister used a Ouija board to roust the spirit of Dr. MLK and he was completely annoyed, the minister, that is. MLK apologizes vehemently to the cosmos for our transgressions. Shut the fuck up, Jesse J.

Let the margins of the fashion magazines ring with radioactive horror! The mustard gas on the sandwich of “famous last words” entrenched. Let young militant indie-rockers and straight-edgers with slavehard abdomens scream atrocities at awards shows and collect cable revenues on this anger!

Advertise all of your evils to the point of population de-sensitization, Use televisions to do so, even. Via satellite piecemeal the grey matter of the nation. Citizen lame will be shackled further by media chains. It will all be blamed on cheap beer, pizza, and shwag. A forty megaton fuck-up with its hovering cloud of a future. I’ll swing in a hammock on the battlefield of a full supermarket. I’ll leisurely buy all of the correct products. Hell, I’ve already paid for my mother’s coffin and bought the stars and stripes to wrap her in. I’m having a bad day, I guess, with this lament here in the most beautiful land in the world, America.

VII.

I breathe and build the monument.

Sex angelic par excellent pure serpent neo-genetic skull full of capacity in the red zone of a lesser known district.

My soul fills me to the ends of my fingers and toes and genitals and nose and eyelash and navel and reality is the senses’ fables. Just apparitions based on electric impulses.

To be one is the ode unsung on the pre-eminent mountain summit.

I become the automobile, the throttle of the world one car collects the gravity of all unbroken highways a magnet of momentum pulling all moving things into me and heading straight for a city.

A plane drops in flames and smudged glass of rain cracked as the apolitical pilot pulls the ripcord hurtling through flak in a dream of the shrapnel as one with the bombs exploding around him and the trees will get his bones and blood in a violent shower and the kamikaze honor piercing the sphincter of my eye with its disaster and it is about shit and only shit is what I seem to see across this land of unsewn seeds when we go to war.

My iris has burst, the pale poppy of its mouth becomes an evident planecrash photograph.

My soul’s existence is fogging the world’s windows, ever-angel.

Evangelistic punk-rocker of this rock of the Milky Way of the mariner flower stems in my mouth beheaded by a fishbone or thorn or fingernail scritch or insect carapace-crack or jealous fit, a veritable naked and pulsing man hopping around on the heaping mound of exposed bedrock the earth’s plowed-open guts.

Whitmaniacal oversoul overhauled on the mechanics of bowling balls, hurtles, cellphone calls, snack foods, etc. and the seraphim greasing the hinges with oils of minor mythologies and the strike is almost over and the lunchboxes get back to work but I can’t keep score and I have no team so the spark-plug rednecks and me go to the pub by the ocean and beat each other unmercifully and then get some chili-dogs and we have the secret to power, it’s panic attacks. No one ever capitalizes on real power, just real ignorance of others. This is why blood is bliss and there are very smart Kewpie-doll vampires who can sell an igloo condo in South Africa before it melts beside a regime of radicals armed with flame-throwers and torches not lit since the Crusades or the Ottoman Turks. Then catch the first flight to Miami, eat some sushi. I roll the sphere towards the verticals, gutters and topples, spins and spares, feeling of nothingness surrounded by its noise and colors.

The soul-wave TILTS the trip-toy pinball-machine landscape.

Walk away down Route 66 to a jukebox atom-bomb and put the quarter in and hope for the last time.

VIII.

America is the shape of a cow on the map of the world, it is a huge sacrificial beast of fast-food.

The bombs detonating in the west are the aurora borealis to the far east.

Empty bottle on a barren beach with a spider’s web for a soul and the moon is a huge luminescent (looming crescent) incense-burner wafting perfumes sieved through the waves of sand wings of gulls.

Close the book, throw away all of your keys, and sink back into listening.

If “planet” is a word, then why can’t I get to another one? I guess that the imagination in the only thing which travels in excess of light (Einstein would agree) speed. If I was imagining you with me, but, you were imagining something else in the precise second, we would both be propelled in completely different trajectories and directions. But, however, if we could synchronize somehow, maybe we could meet and collide and detonate.

There are more stars out there than us. Do you think that they are concerned with their insignificance? Of course not. They are just burning. There is something to be learned from that.

I shrug my shoulders and some god laughs but to reassure myself I call it wind.

May you multiple orgasm into burning flowers and may time bow to you with a bouquet of hours of free-time to wait for love waiting at the gate where Soul and Body eclipse and chaos gives you the delivery kiss into the glorious sense-abyss and may the amulet of your heart never become an anvil until it is time for it to locket.

When I am with you, you seem equally rapturous and reserved. You could either explode or become a statue. I never know how to touch you.

Or, maybe I will touch you like the falling star touched the atmosphere.

Daedalus of the Earth-Machine Crashed an Astronaut

There is a word which can destroy a world and I am out to find it. And no action, intervention, nor oblivion thereof will erase, destroy, unbind it.

We no longer have to fear Big Brother’s Ear in the Red paranoiac terror (“you are not paid off to be quiet about what you know; you are paid not to find it out,” William S. Burroughs) for we have neighbors with state-of-the-art video equipment all syncopated and synchronized into an American’s Most Wanted awe-conspiring anti-light show all via-sat-com adagio linked-up to the parasitic birth the derelict Dream and America’s paper airplanes splitting in their seams with all the red tape shredding and unraveling in an orbit around the galactic cranium traveling with its blistered hull covered in worn currency rendering the atomic legacy into formulaic relativity with only potential for tragedy but in practice was perfect for the jarheads squared to the nth power in their bureaucratic black-magic hierarchy of 2-D dot-to-dot mentality desire to use fire to render everything as flat as paper because paper flat is better than action cubed when dealing with an enemy. Remember who is writing history (predominantly in black and white 2-D). Let the hackers sabotage the entire grid and cross the Cyber-Atlantic to discover the New World of Free Speech.

But for now it is too late for the poets and too early for the gods.

*

Myths impaled across the Heartland bleeding arcane arts onto folk-farmers hands as the scarecrows dance with the orphans and ears of corn bleed die-cast scorpions.

America the Epic-Hero (having never produced an epic poem unless you count the Maximus ones, and I do, for the sake of later argument) falls upon his own sword hara-kiri at the foot of the Dragon Myth, at the foot of time itself and its genetic.

Time turning to devour its own tail, in the hunger urge of inevitable worlds deciding to perish as History is senile and repeating himself like a flapping newsreel as he pricks himself on the tip of an iceberg against all optimistic forecasts and headlines as the Titanic and the Hindenberg collide in an explosion of burning water, airwaves, oil, and flying microfiche.

Time the lost language. Time the serpent in a Ragnarok of meanings. Time the Chaos trying to fake the straight line. Time the linear through the ears and out the ass. Old slithering and scatological Time. Time the river from the ribs. Time the anthropology denied from anthology. Time the lost brother of actual rate and distance.. Time the invisible and odorless sewage of us.

And the dragon called tomorrow always kills an epic hero.

America going down in flames frantically writing as it falls recording all names for posterity recording a page for every hundred pages as the momentum accelerates the ashes at impact spread out in patterns dismantling in re-entry waiting for the sky to fall at the close of the century and the moon is but

A word

circled by concentric radio-flies in waves of yellow journalistic plague a parade of tabloid page by page as the carcass of the planet is divided cracked granite emitting radiation the atomic half-life of the American Dream at T-minus and counting decomposing uranium penetrating everything a silver brain in orbit a space station exploding the eyes on all of the dollar-bills as a fiber-optic mass of tentacles surrounds the planet’s

Psyche

exploding with telephone cables and man-o-war sting operations labeled top-secret gone haywire secreting arsenic nuclear nematocysts of apocalypse the Internet jellyfish hovers and quivers as arrow backwards sun drifts into the numeric folds of the cloaking device as a flag falls over the eagle’s cage for bedtime after prime-time the dark mold of a mushroom cloud erupt enshroud a skyline held motionless with a dagger at its throat a launching rocket a stiletto to a star.

Always the urge and urge, the procreative urge of the world as the populace remote remains completely devote and in the New Dark Ages remember the stars for stars and not for pages and pages of formulas. New pilgrimages will require rockets and pharmaceuticals.

The sun setting in the Old West across the New World over Japan and California in the Last Recorded Earthquake.

There is a prophesy of a thousand man-made suns rising in the West and setting in the East in paradigm reverse as the legs of oblivion spread and the suntrack becomes a black magic marker across the white paper and across the broken terrain and into the name of America.

There is still so much to be learned about the atom, so let the Earth’s core turn inside out a balloon when it pops and smother this place with molten rock.

My rite of passage is to endure the next fact.

Someone once said that every atom that belongs to me belongs to you as well and an age and approximately Einstein later we invent the atomics and split open the atom forever the singed grasses of histories lawns.

*

The fallen father, fallen feathers emblems sinking into the sea as reverse-Icarus at ground control watches his falling daddy watches the disintegration of mythologies as the children pilot the fathers out of context with history and Daedalus is crashing with no parachute, no net into the sea for he flew too close to the sun incineration as Daedalus falls to kingdom come leaving behind Icarus his always screaming orphan.

Myths not made anymore but only collected the fragments of an unseen catastrophe as burning debris falls from sky to beach to be arranged as burning, silver, singing things each to each.

* between SOS taps and telegrams:

. . . this just in . . . and the rockets’ red glares . . . a visual skipping record . . . award-winning photography . . . what the hell happened in Salvador anyway? . . . the cover of Time . . . cosmonaut crashed after the cover of Cosmo with his wife on it . . . it was made to look like an accident . . . the bomb’s bursting in air . . . don’t call the President (what an unusual precedent) . . . what gives proof through the night . . . the astro-runway-model’s soul blown instantly out of his designer body . . . the defunct space-age fabric and to the metal and not to its mangled humanity . . . rocket shrapnel and scuttlebutt scraps . . . and the flag was still there . . . footage filed under “Smithsonian: Deepest Basement Level Possible” ......

Monsterica! Angel-Maw! Sodomerica! Gommoramerica! Babylonamerica!

Avatar of the free and actively involved in economic slavery to plastic currency serialized third-world third-eye countries as the patron of rotten corn and industry sharpens his sieves on the bad voodoos of sewers and the nukes hiding in the proctor and gamble cupboards as the tractor-teeth churn progress and the sun-god turned supernova and succubus of artistic incubus as Kali-Ma-Ma demon-ness androgynous surviving its aborted birth in Europe to crawl across and leave its afterbirth in every country and awaken diseased on the shore of a new continent.

A carnival on it head like a fruit basket-hat surrounded by insects its hair aflame, its voluptuous androgynous body pock-marked with billboards, its breasts the prosthesis of Native-American skin with skyscraper nipples, its vagina a gaping black hole of TV static, its penis a particle collider under Nevada, its eyes are pornos of nations and continents copulating in unorthodox diplomatic positions its eyes spinning Mowgli-lollipops, its fists are Nagasaki’s and Hiroshima’s, its feet are oil-tankers between its toes are third world countries and starving children with wooden bowls eating the faces of the last one hundred Presidents of the United States of America off of the skulls of weevils as insects work the factories of America’s organs in convulsions of PMS (Post-Modern Syndrome) its breath is literature and the poetry of the colonizer and its heart is a pile of blood-red tape stuck with newspaper and un-filed documents.

To be free in the land of the free i lie down with America in the mud.

To be free in the land of the free I make this gorgeous.

Cannibalism plus catechism equals capitalism. This is why the American poem must be an exorcism.

Holding my mojo up to the monument and reciting the star-words the multi-cultural lingo of soul to find the loophole in the out-of-control machine we have made.

Remembering life in a series of episodes in poems, short-stories, TV shows, radios, bulleting image crescendos, in slangs, lingos and retro-domino effect, fast-forward, rewound, spliced sublime paradigms flash-gordoned flash- bulbed camera-branded and crash-landed across drive-in theatre minds, and mine, a soft grey test-tube of intestines, a dinosaur of intent swimming in Indian-ink thick comic-book pulp-fictions grinding through a sieve, a haze of soda-pop bubble mushroom clouds bursting into an atomic gap in the generation, a slit in the breast of the Creatrix . . .

I burn my hands. Am I the Phoenix?

The body breaks, the spirit falls out cries the spirit like Malatov cocktails.

I will rise from ash with poems from the beginnings.

DIVINING ROD ON THE OCEAN FLOOR

Table of Portents: beehives found on telephone poles i have never fallen to earth butterknives wielded as fatal weapons by women moon shining over an asphodel field seeds giving birth to planetoids we harvest ahem! maybe is actually an atrium after all i was locked alone inside the echo-auditorium gravity could hold down alms upon this earth four feathers or four zillion poems are enough mystics, genii, verbal relics, ass-kickers galore as if railroads ran through rain-forests sex is best had at high velocities in cities vast maybe I just vehemently lied the serpent was in love once the desert was always a movie called Lawrence the forest was the greatest fugue ever an allotment of our paradise was an actual apparatus we can’t use it, this warning called Atlantis buckwheat in your teeth and Woodie Guthree, what else? we harvest grass while using grass to do so dandruff is man’s life-reminders to himself there was once the 1st kiss at the Roman Coliseum men were afraid of the dark, being that they were ringed in cats play inside pianos when the lid is shut I have reached a horrible conclusion at a beautiful end sharks played harps with dorsal fins as accidents happen upon the oceans sidewalks contract too much on morphine and Mercury she wrote wings on her sullen sandals with nothing to write with alligators don’t eat birds they eat baby crocodiles dinner could be anything else but this plate of plague palate escape was a broken bottle bees would swarm the world’s rim never landing, and so no honey seahorses breaking their backs because they were formed to a mammoth ankh telepathic domestic disputes beside man-made lakes a jukebox full of lusts locks the backdoor locks himself out dreams will always be our only blessed epics she laughed at her father for what he had named her stars are riding escalators fighting wars with banjo duels honey and freedom for all sleeping silent under the sidewalks scientists tend to become artists marriages of others and their sisters the papacy awaits us all for gainful employment cliché’s: the river is as holy as a huge phallus Priapus, for scuppernong wine is nothing to be scoffed at your name is Charon? all is aubade, the past present future gorillas and violinists dada Derrida not nightfall affects anything loveletters are found being handed a gemstone on the carousel a guitar flew through the window the charming silence falling towards my house from the heavens an eagle’s eye sight of sound and writing the creation of aviatic mammals the creation of non-aquatic beings a platypus and a word in edgewise birds are lying stars and stuff falling off the porch of the day house into an abyss in the pouch was an inlet the incredible graveness of lying a mutant Phoenix perspective of parade trombonists tomes found under tropes of bones where are you exploding no resources of remorseless morsels left stabbed by love and war ectoplasm meant you were mine, populace that good old homeland made of carnage my grandpa and my best friend it was invisibly recorded spiritually, like a church on trial someone sent a card to me or a subpoena to a heart’s sentry there could be more beauty as usual that was the first neck-tie I’d ever tied cavities full of drill symphonies as astonished exterminators basked a dream of oaken doors that arboreal we got bubble-gum stuck on the EXIT Shelton had a rental card and a Pabst case a random afternoon of precision the best man is crashing saxophones have wings of vengeance’s a guitar’s synopsis of river waverings a god becomes human by acting human trees diligent to our ire and iron three fluid moments before me architects and scabs and no spleen no ideals inconspicuous wings at window-pane the leaves aren’t rustling like a walk home with a black angel bees hive in the live-wires and black vines an elder and a bear we know an excursion-dislocation rock-stars in the southern lands two tapestries of childhoods formica, shale, slate, brooks the Moon’s infertile soil and a beast in the desert my favorite velvet corner pocket and jars full of it a noose and a promise of laughter too many miles per hour is the speed of my assessments I miss the Medieval and the Mesozoic the invisibility of the authentic Heidegger fiddles fell upon a drowning Berryman an old flick about a man named Henry sisters and martyrs Shakespeare in the Sahara wheels on ankles not wings all the good stuff serving booze at the Cinemopolis the trinity of the womb a brotherhood of lovers and loudmouths umbrella tornado etiquette my doppelganger dyslexic cursed arrows wound into bronze strings the painting of one Amen the ocean in a thimble caught a migration of eels of light foreseen the Sirens sing at firetrucks earplugs by the sieves in an aftermath a delicious dinner our last resort poems are orange groves and one ladder paper lantern galleons are always helpful focus of storm crocus narwhals don’t sing I didn’t contract the bends, Cousteau the world was flatter and smaller than ever here they will remember us on the mainland the sun just hit the moon sloths and lorises survived to mate missing links a wreath of river stones moths embroidered in moonlight as badger-jawbreakers and kestrel-cry slingshots light the night sky with a mask of macrocosmic microbes of quasarae a shirt of roses and thorns that fit you a fire-extinguisher melting in a housefire sun-roofs, seasons, and niceties, and my girlfriend stole my Rilke collection incantations and heroes’ welcomes for janitors thriving during the Spanish Inquisition like Mecca Queequeg lived like Jimmy Hoffa crows with their antennae together diamonds are now like lost socks Z was still the last letter of any alphabet levees not anthologies hold back the future flat tires and chalk marks not uncommon smelted a javelin from melted-down pennies that never were spent this mortal coil was an animal paragon astigmatisms I would never live downtown, parishioner a streetlight and a couch helped a star in analysis freckles of rust on my Colossus she ate a lot of pizza i love her wicker is a good word not good furniture at Merwin’s birthday party lightning strikes a bridge like Mayakovsky don’t question the custodians, Becket won’t move from the hollyhocks and civilization is riding tricycles across fresh lava towards a mountain of Progress blacksmiths, farmers, and mystics astral planes hate epiphanies what said can cut is you a harmonica and a hoop of sharp aged cheddar Keats in love with Rita Hayworth patience when regarding oracles when falling down the waterfall we remembered water the hives don’t much theorize boats full of dolts in a sea of tranquility praying mantis on a fire hydrant on a mesa far from Mexico a cherub with a shotgun avatars craft forests for dumb enthusiasts feathers frozen to my lips lovers on hovercrafts a basketball-player a tall lighthouse a shattering of celestial bodies in a mirror Bacchus laughs at himself spilling decanters the poet is a great landscaper with sawblades and sand-blasters blood erodes itself and its signatures are fire I kill beautiful winged animals rain, weeds, cheese-cakes, rucksacks, forms to be filled even though we all get shovels in the end a galaxy vs. a caste system TV’s float when put out to sea banana peels and empires of rubber farms haws crash into words about to be spoken then spread their wings Appollonian felines and uncanny alchemy lights in August hurt the Irish the Mafia in earnest and carcinoma really this whole poem is about Sigmar Polke anorexic diamond phoenix a rose clones itself a universe another homage to good indie-rock songs egg and potato salads are symbolic, don’t kid yourself Frank Stanford is my unborn daughter tree-sap and self-loathing leads to maple syrup birds peck angels into seed piles I fell for the chief’s daughter during a mutiny and so physiognomy and piscatology were viable an igloo of Hope was melting we are seashells, yachts, timelines, and trilobites

I. INLAND PIRATES BELOW SEA LEVEL

The County Line, the Yellow Trails of Pollen

The leaves spin like Hektors behind chariots of winds’ winters.

The epics are imbedded in the chemical-treated scars of telephone poles: these ashen, planted spears prodding up our surges. Here, we gorge ourselves on gauges, altimeters, no-meters, over-taxed, cracked odometers.

We can’t keep up with machines can’t keep up with us.

In this frigid land of constituents, the ice-scrapers supply the soundtrack.

As I walk towards the heart of the city, I drag the squares of this cement-track behind me. City, you wondrous murder of the obvious, you erect, secret history.

I am Telemachus to these telephone poles, Priapus to street-vendors and bartenders,

Cadmus to the electric cables. I defend my right to public archives of private tragedies. I get a bad paycheck, me, the colossus cresting cuesta to plant the dragon’s teeth. I will build my own parish of carnage, placing these affidavits under loose cobblestones and in potholes. This is the democracy of the beehive, but, somehow we still buzz our own original names as we build the cacophonous citadel.

He is Priapus

The bastard son of the town drunkard and the town beauty-queen, Priapus, moonshiner, bee-keeper, raftsman, tortoise-stalker armadillo herdsman, bank-dweller, not a patron saint for travelers, but a bent tree of a man that monks would seek out only trough intuition. Still waters run as deep as ever in him. Looking into the rippling water of the river, lying belly-down in his dug-out, his face did not seem so deformed to him. His smile succumbs across a sunglint like an axeblade underwater wavering there.

Priapus says, “I’m from a neck of the woods.” Then they proceed to beat him unmercifully. After they get tired and leave, Priapus drinks the beer-scuzz left in their mugs and imbibes the ashes of a burnt pile of leaves mixed with a pulp of deer’s blood. “Let their families’ be cursed forever!” he screams to the equinox moon. Priapus only knows the old ways, a boon for every bruise.

A walking corpse with a fever not a pulse and hangman’s scars around his jugular- shaft, the Fisher King came back to take his acres and to teach his children certain guitar parts. Priapus caint learn them. His bloodline must escape and swim upstream with the lusting trout, What life is: a myth out to gut its children. Also it is a quest through sound, a river we must decipher. The song of ourselves that we can only hear once we have birthed our own. Knowing what the creeks know: koans.

Priapus feared that the bees would mistake the music of the river for the tribal humdrums of their hive. He was afraid they’d all fly into it and drown like salmon don’t. See his logic? He was always paradoxically always what he was right about. But like all of us men, us sons of good God can become confused in Nature’s diverse harmonies. Priapus soon would learn the music laid out in sheets under the piano-lid of his self, always waiting there to be practiced. Priapus did not know that he was already one with his environment. And so every song to him was redundant as well as reverent. And he ate no more honey. And he never swam again. And he started drinking whiskey and scrubbing himself with Spanish moss and a swatch of field knew that one day he would be buried there and a ray of moonlight hit the very spot and it waited and it waited

The moon was closed in by a cumulo-nimbus canopy. Stop throwing rocks at it, a voice told me. But, I must be sure it is still there, the way my stones can’t reach it. And the moon parades once a month, like the deaths of relatives these days. The stars always seem to sigh. Awry will assuredly come nigh. Who could have guessed that the rain taught us to fall back upon our own earths. Who could have guessed that burials had this tact. Who could have known that the earth lets us know with periodic storms what the hell’s going on. This telluric tongue. I stab my crude cross, a crutch into the ground. I gather up more stones. I smell the rain before she comes. I’ve become a dirt prophet.

A large face carved into a small stone and birds crash here into the grills of speeding sportscars on these backroads birds know no better and I am a small earth carved into a woodsman one that is subtle and it kills me and all of my hounds to know that you were the hunted and unworthy of our supper so I licked the blood from my hand and thought of you patted the dog and laughed, picked a fat tick off of him and dropped him on the ground by some unspent shells as the candle dripped on the old log and the day congealed and I am the animal population control called human nature

the tarantula has a tentative touch life is as such, as I watch him cross the plow’s path and rain is tapping lightly on the bull’s railed ribs as he eyes me disinterested, and there will be a symphony soon of spores spiraling through spring trying to find their dirt lodgings, implanting their implements, and spring’s hand opens wide with more fingers than in octopus in a kaleidoscope more eyes than a flock of peacock in an atomic explosion and so it washes over and through you orphic, delphic, bacchic surge and there is always a bird cry to insure that incisively one more last attempt will be made. ______

We cut off his arms and legs with a rusty cutlass stolen from the museum and laid him in the bean-patch face-down. Now he can look up at his god as long as he likes. And the bean-crop will prosper this year. The yield will be eyeballs multiplied, visions of dark godhead. And the village will no longer be plagued by an outsider in the ranks of its southern chapels.

Before the Seeding

The moon is the shield of a warrior I haven’t seen the face of nor fought yet. I learned to make love by watching lava-lamps.

And everything is arranged in cycles of gorgeous, succulent slow burn. Tone of butane aflame.

I was never a rocking-horse one cliffhanger in hell or one you put a quarter in at a department-store. I am a stallion behind these sore eyelids.

I have signed the floodgate deposition. At some point we must all become as infinite as toilet paper or bags of dried black-eyed peas.

There are so many wavelengths in any strip of stained hardwood floor that I am lost studying the lifetimes of pulpwoods.

What I spraypainted on God’s ribcage was authentic. I hung from a belt-loop as the train rocketed above and the traffic rocket in its elongated blur below on the Atlanta highway as streetlamps were the only stillness each of them like an unbitten pear.

I told you for the last time those crickets are true American TV static. What you hear is the protest of wind and locusts learning calculus in the grasses.

The flux and redux the wax and wane the jawbone of the ass the death of the philistine ticketmaster the midgets in the nuclear silos the poisonous turbans the fiberglass arrowheads the tourists on mescaline the ceramic skull the phrase of power-adornment the keys to the firesafe of the snowbank the crossroads the maxims the infinitesimal reasons that matter takes the day off under an umbrella of high-country bluegrass.

If you wake a dog twitching from a violent dream you run the risk of getting bitten. Let me sleep then, I told her, let me dream.

The dog gave me fleas; the tanager gave me mites; the sharkling emptied my bladder; the spider gave me a lesson in ostensible collecting; the cat gave me attitude and I gave to each of them one human thought and you can imagine what it was I said.

Topiary masses of Monet static ordered across the spanning spanse of my dreams. Gardens.

Topiary masses of Monet static ordered across the un-oiled sparseness of Wednesdays. Gardens.

The invisible fish-hooks of desire snagged into my eyeballs pulling me towards the distant barges of piled redemption.

Earlier today I weaseled my way out of jury-duty to supposedly take a final exam on Chaucer but instead had a 40oz. pitcher of Guinness at a gyro-joint and then Shelton drove me out to the farmfields to see the crystal-spires of the frozen-over irrigation spigots.

An interesting afternoon detail was the making love to a soft nebulous cello.

Confusion over the beauty of the genetically-engineered three-headed swan. I fear the upcoming DNA-tetrahedron of blue-eyed blonde-boy.

The seeds upon the land were lain. On a waste barren, the grain, a pod please it germinates, a possible budding its differences from sandgrains “I a spore” it positively re-enforces itself. “could’ve been an oak a rhododendron, or Venus Flytrap, obviously, I am not a cactus.”

A fly buzzes by. It is elemental. We all flourish. Hyper maggots in the meal.

And my children hold dominion over all places, even the niches moss-curtained behind waterfalls. Ask yourself why

The mouth of the crocodile or the killer whale always is slanting and shining. With a grin put salvation’s seeds back in you pocket.

Chattahoochee Mama

I knew I should’ve been a moonshiner. All of the pirates have retired to their own islands. The crawdads here are tainted. Six-legged frogs, muddy waters and pellet-gun kings sieve the river for honors. I found a ruined, cracked stopwatch. a fish full of gears platinum and silver. You called my nipples ‘squito-bites; you are ripe and right. Once you were a lifeguard, now you study the mind’s eye. Same difference. I’ll push you in this swing if you tell me the Jesse James story again. You’re simply not an apricot and my jaundice is acting up. I should have been a corsair biting the river out of your hair like a chain of roses. A buccaneer here, long poles prodding the mudfloor all the way up-current to your plantation. I bring you books and magazines, melted chocolates, fresh catfish brown bottles with ring-handles and large X’s on them signaling sweet hangovers after great, rough sex under great hags of Spanish moss and cypress

Janitor Moonlighting

The candelabra of the stars’ canopy above me.

*

I adore urns, domes, and gourds; All shine in an await of shattering.

(Everything is broken until it is shattered) I eat crackers all night while pushing the dustmop across the floor of the planetarium.

My job is to sweep up the stricken spectators. How many of us can sustain that interest When viewing the ceilings and walls of anon? WARNING

Signs sometimes should be heeded. I’m beyond that, and Numbed beyond all belief By the brilliance

Of one tiny nail-hole in an otherwise immaculate plaster wall. One center of focal decision was rooted there, A puncture.

Something was hammered-in, something was done once, then Undone, pulled out, the ghost of the event jettisoned. Like stars are.

I’m a carpenter by day; I understand the structures of the baffling. Under the balcony I envision, they are all ravenously chawing popcorn As the movie of life suddenly glitches on its reel, and then

No catcalls, because, instinctually the audience knows That a popcorn kernel is causing the trouble. Ironically, irony will have endless sequels.

This grain of the eternal I imagine. A nail-hole, a star, a kernel, a star. An origin under a canopy, a

Ceiling made in the likeness of the celestial

That I do my mundane sweeping beneath

Mirrors

You were an armoire made of mirrors. You were perfect. You kept us all Aback. Unapproachable. What a defense. Yet, you had no defensive nature; your strength being enticement. By looking at you we committed suicidal visage. Victualization of vanquishing, a synchronicity of identical upon Itself, magnets pushing apart. Existence, your craft, an aesthetic Defying all compassion. It was never intended to nurture. Our truth carried like a secret we can’t access in the small of our backs. We look deeply into you, into eyes with the sole intent to soul Or else! We have lost the reason we were pulled from the mind’s scabbard In the first place. The prow sinks into a sandbar. Kaput, Kerplunk, Zip. Yet, the appetite unslaked is like a robe of mirrors unbroken by sight. By incident, apparently, I am a parentless, old-fashioned romantic. Sick to our stomachs, folks like me are poor fencers. Barricaders Of lies, sandbaggers of innuendo. I am an artisan of the synaesthetic, Of fooling myself with rococo-stoccado follies. I am a kleptomaniac Of tongues. I live in a citadel of cardshark charades. What I wrote to you, Universe, audience, is this: it’s impossible to take what you give back to me When I look into you; it is me looking the same way I always do.

I need a break-room with a vending-machine full of hermetically-sealed answers. And where’s the intergalactic steward going hurriedly with the blueprints and sloshing decanters? I’m tarnished; I’ve never been cleansed. Now in you I seem to have no reflection.

fiesta postcard

I was mimicking a gargoyle, throwing the eighteen-inch television off of the roof and someone screams, “Run! Those things give off radiation!” No cops around for miles, no umbrellas or punchlines left on coat-racks or wire-hangers, no rescue Styrofoam to throw at the drowners. Playing stickball in the library parking lot and Shelton spins the sundial Roulette wheel style. We were all born on Valentine’s Day and are all great at painful break-ups, and we never celebrate our birthdays, as contradiction is the sportscoat hand-me-down. I am not a short story writer of the soul, nor am I a statistician of the body. We build paper boats and throw them through the air. Dew-harvesters and devil-may-caretakers. We send our phone-bills to the guv’ner’s mansions; we play soccer on the edges of canyons. Stalwart women adorn our brows with kisses. It’s fat Tuesday and my pockets are full of your letters and you, sticky you. the walk home feverishly throwing a brick at the glass eye of God has some consequences but it don’t dissuade me sidewalk bird-carcass on the way to church don’t dissuade me hitting the pothole full of nitro at eighty miles per hour can’t stop the party who she’s kissing he’s the greatest guitar-player alive and finds her G-spot with a fernfrond by accident don’t really eat at me much the fact that the comet armageddon came so dangerously close to our silly terrarium that don’t got me bill collectors, cavities, blood in toilet, condoms, liquid paper, rejectionslips they don’t dissuade me either houseplants get more attention than me but okay just fine they are a source of oxygen when lightning strikes we all look around monkeys regardless of satellites but that is copacetic the fact that I am an ameba of chaos in a skeletal shell that barely congeals may one day dissuade me, I’d venture to guess no Tom Waits on the jukebox but plenty of James Brown, KoKo Taylor Patsy Cline so I’s not dissuaded a damn bit phone cut off, no sandwich meat, appointments, poems didn’t make it to a certain box but they still got lots of heart don’t hold me back I like forests I said to the ambulance not gonna sell my $800 guitar for nothing I love her cedar and rosewood she never disowns me the sun is finally back from Poland, his bags of light unpacked buy boxes of Popsicle’s in bulk they still print comic-books so I’m not discouraged that it’s always been so simple hasn’t it?

At Red’s Ramshackle

He had the complexion of a sweaty water bottle. I shot the muzzle-loader on loan for the novelty of it. He even owned a pair of flintlocks rusted so bad they’d only explode. Dead lightbulbs hung from hardwood limbs by 10lb. fishing line. Filaments noosing up spent filaments.

You take 100 grams of powder and one ball Of molded, imperfect lead from the mold of the rifleman Who molds his target before it could ever be hit.

The barrel is hexagonal, long, and lean. The stock is of pine. The recoil bruised my shoulder a royal pansy. The flower is Fitting for me. I never hit the bulbs, but splintered craters Erupted in trees several hundred yards past the swinging targets.

My misfires could kill someone one day in those woods. I knew a little bit of everything, but not how to judge light and a bullseye. Red laughed and never said a word. He’d had his teeth knocked out years ago by an apprentice. These visits keep him going.

On the edge of the initiate’s fingernail lies the secret longitude, the lost Parallel

“May the good Lord help us,” San Martin said, looking at the crucifix which hung over the captain’s bunk on every ship (in Don Fernando’s cabin it had been replaced by an astrolabe).

Napoleon Baccino Ponce De Leon

I.

indefinable country of the generic perfect tourists the pantheon of pluralistic pamphlets the wilderness, its gamut just plain riffing here

tour-boats never sink, it seems burgeoning

espousals of lyric maps between stations

rain forests captured in fist-sized plastic globes (shake them to make it snow) uncharacteristic propositions

of trajectories, directions, a slender filament toggling you from receipt to receipt, from weathervane to pump hope dangles on this line attempts to pull as taut

as eyelids embalmed as scalpeled extremes in museums on the borders pressed against our amebic theories

the rationales kill as many as the indirectives misguide

and the eye explodes, chides its own vision despite snapshots

in these explosions of probables goggles melting, yet focusable the ontology of the heart is navigable

the wind, that mirror of what is blown, fragment wisp of single hair crossing a lens a concentration broken

like a feather disconnecting over a dark pool, lilting down to its catalyst ripple its function

transmogrified flight over the broken easel of yesterday

stern prow of purpose we hide our atlases

under stones, and what lies under stones and the lies

we whisper there the tracks we erase

II.

there is no adamant atomization of the All that can be captured in an alembic, I’d say

I imagine what it would have looked like, a poetic book-device.

what resemblance, burning ash, silt of a man’s flesh, God’s one bad idea?

strokes of genius across landscapes, the mastercraft.

in pastorals, desire is a quasar for dullards, a cloud of infant stars

spoiled by their own light, stingy for it. and stars holding back the day’s

wings until they snapped, and gave all their vortices to night like kindling

like bones. spent sparkler and incense stems. the thieves that we were

before we were born stole all the answers, tore the curtains for their sails

and these spirits escaped into any oblivion of our births

as light comes through the rips they made in the firmament

we endeavor to call the illuminations holy

they may or may not be.

III.

and the printing press of night and its paranoid fanzines of moonlight

and the diabolical yes-men, a battalion of double-standards stealing your breaths for shields, for excuses to acknowledge a nobler chaos. damn Being. bless

the farspanning parallels never to meet where the triggerfinger becomes the impetus of the hand and the hand assumes the helm of the heart

blessed Being, we are all stowaways here foreigners within our own forms

when we touch

how it terrifies us

IV.

here is where the maps are spoken.

topographical torque in the tongue’s rigging.

you sketch the plateaus with a desert-whisper and the mountain ranges with a hint of ocean

Classical the plot as full as any alternate pathways in this jungle yet to be written

in longhand, cursive upon the clefts that we’ve put down. leaves inscripted are silly under such boggling surveillance. I know this. Fluid

clarion, siren quetzals over lobes of hills. Paradise is remembered ground.

here, in breath’s intervals, the alternating gusts surrounding the raptor mind

as it converges on one name and as if that was all it ever had to do,

ever,

just this one perch

V.

even our provisions have become provisional here

where the natives teach an animism, the way spears also kill the air

on the way to the kill, we whisper instinct to be gone

we shackle the primal to our sunbaked bibles, we hope

that the four corners of the world still support the tent-poles

we are not owned by this urge, this need to find some eternal

opposition to be pitted against, we languish here, we ponder

and the wind testifies as flowerspores leave their wombs astrally, uniformly in blossoming shrugs

VI.

this is my Body. take of my Body. I touch your Body to take my Body back.

Eco-Ego, I’ll be your country. a daybreak vision. this is my Body.

we are ours. the Soul being the meat of Light. the Light our Desire lingering without and around us.

the Light is the thirst for Envelopment its Desire is entrance.

we shall open one another, apart together,

God’s broken thumbnail cracked open

a universe

an island

VII.

when a certain vista implores you, be wary I say.

you should implore a shore before there is ever a sea. you must allow my double-helixes, my halos, my albedos

to illumine boundaries. is it enough for now to have faith? hunger stalks like the beast it wishes to kill, lithe, pantheresque

and passion eats too much passion until it defies quantum physics that we can be so much in ourselves and still exist

I would drink a salty sea of forgetfulness I would carry a mask and let light escape the facade

of its mouth as the mutiny ensues I will never again be thirsty

dropping anchor into the spirit eddying destinations

yes the flesh inhabitable

islands

ideological archipelago

atomization of the All as the shattered alembic

Pastoral

Carnage of marauding May, and the compulsory piles of lists check, checkpoints, teepees of pines counteract. Expletives of ruttings, musk of oxen, haunts of snakeberries, green children of ivy. Honed explosions of sentience, fields that seed us, unified syntax of petals. Fictions of man-made lakes on the make for pastures. Complete pollen infiltration, beetle picnics, plowshares and grumps with slipped disks behind tractors. Slumpy creek-dwellers, scat of bird banter. Reckless salamanders, daddy-long-legs on poison mushroom (a double skull and crossbones). Bramble stink-bug odors, honeysuckle’s, Sun-Kists on ice. Water-dogs snapping, turtle shells dried, the army of death the wasps. The ponies crossing the gully, exanthema of poison ivy, lean pork chops, beans and blackberries. Rain dances and banjo breezes. Bluegrass on the a.m. station, radio older than I am. Active volcanoes of hubris, flowers fencing and fences sagging kudzu-heavy. Whittling our women with pocketknife tongues and steamboat horns yelling Poontang! Poontang! Facial expressions like the crinkled bodies of crustaceans by too many high noon’s, Flannels and steel-toed boots, rusting jalopies full of snakes, only three strings left on the guitar. Bloodclots on knuckles, repair-man with fingers missing Plagued with gout and shingles. Lard-crocks, fifty pound bags of salt piled up. Cellophane bags full of seashells this far inland used as checkers. Knowing the varieties of grasses and species of nocturnal rodents. Idioms waiting in old coffee cans. Building the church of a treehouse. Blue-speckled eggshells on the compost heap after breakfast. Rhino-skinned Buddha-bellied deputy waves from a pick-up. Bloodshot oaks in my eyes. Brahma bull minotaurs, chicken-house silos. Playing cards on a wooden spool once used for winding copper-wiring. Scrapmetal crucifix planted by the orange mailboxes. Air smells of saddles and churned loam. Swizzle-sticks of underbrush, mashed clouds of smelly greens, collard-stained, the superior hook and eye configuration of chickenwire and honeycombs, the raccoon, North America’sgibbon, the woodpeckers knocking prayercalls out from minarets of pines. An hourglass the height of a plastic Army-man rests near an oil-lamp. Wooden-rails lined with tobacco braids. Pollen yellowing everything into the sepia-tones of old scrapbooks. Mangy cats and mutts plagued with mites. Anthrax inoculations, wormings and grub excavations, bushmen logistics. Boomerangs, horse-shoe games, shotguns and shot-glasses. I am a cur, cuz, I have finally killed off all of my elders, but I can’t decipher their almanacs. Once there were gravel pits; now the ducks swim in the quarries where secrets are submerged deep. Shelton walks up and says, “Don’t just gawk, getcherself a bottle,” and rattles a dripping wet case of beer from the river thud-down on the porch. Then with his knife he cuts a gray cone, a pea-sized lump from the back of a pellet-shot sparrow’s brain and says, “This here’s the pineal gland. This is what enables a bird to fly, you see. We got one too, we just don’t know how to use it anymore.”

Bluegrass lovethought

At some point a drunk will only fall in love with a fiddle it all certainly comes together you remember kissing her you remember a certain battle you look to your models certificates of gallantry aren’t they such brilliance, you remember running miles without breathing very hard you forgot how much you loved hearing the fiddle someone looks at you with love from across the room but you don’t see him you leave the event like a pocket turned inside-out emanating a once sweet scent you gleam while jackals sleep

Another river episode

I used the badger jawbreaker and the ferret-musk pouch-sling-gourd and for the finishing blow I resorted to the cry of the kestrel and giant dragonfly crossbow stance, after all, it was mine, my territory, and callow-lilied cowards and their cohorts fled towards their boats which I had already rigged with poison oak and tar and feathers and itching they paddled downriver and as for me, I was immediately bored, at peace. Priapus would have scolded me, to be sure, he is so wan and demure. He never gets locked out of his apartment living in the great outdoors. His morals are the spindle and amaranthine, his rules a harmonium. A poem of us together is man enveloped in man’s best nature. As if I did not know what a fish was thinking when I caught it, but a moment of its thoughts when it contorted in the air as I threw it back, something like a healthy cardiac. Then, the bass was back to normal, breathing underwater the experience forgotten in mere moments with the hook still hanging from his lip.

Pissing in a river

Onomatopeeing

The bartender’s wife says it’s closing time

When you look across the nicotine room You hope to see the home-town muscle-bound hero Or the demure goddess of all that humanity has to offer, and has Awaited, but, like reality, every jukebox is limited And there is a door that never opens, even at happy-hour, Within you as the peanut-shells litter the floor And punchlines are forgotten simultaneously laughed. What you end up with is your world collapsing into something Terrifyingly manageable. Epitome of slow-sipping death, this Makes you feel so alive that you wreck the car of your body Into its own birch-patch or bird’s-nest again. You want to walk from the demolition with an answer that will fit into a pocket, a backpack, a purse, something inscribable on a cufflink. Goodnight you say to everyone particularly. You would make love to anyone right now for any morsel of truth, for a lodestone in a grocery-bag, and not melting in the snow by slip of slur footprint. But it’s always tragic, a James Brown medley-epic at last-call-- those were the last of your quarters and the wife’s patience. You walk home, the absolute monarch of 2:15 a.m. Alone past the desolate sickles of dove-piss (or so you think), past the cars hiding love in their gloveboxes and thrills in rearview mirrors. The radio is so dormant. You hover over it. Like a satellite you see yourself spinning and then malfunction. You hover, see yourself, a still-life in a fogging windshield.

Poem of Broken Doorknobs

The smell of things being hidden. An empty room laughing at your loopy cranium with its open doorway then ceasing to when you finally find the housekeys. A new philosophy of faith in animism. An exotic plant on your bedside table probably withholds the cure to your fatal disease but no one will know, in time. And the cancer spreads like kudzu vines. The drops of dew have condensed on the TV screen out of nowhere, obscuring the images, exposing their primary colors. You have a bloody lip when you awaken but you can’t remember the dream.

To Stalk A Opossum

What the night wants to give is me. The sun laments as I pull my shirt over, tuck it in, grab the keys, wallet, swatch of legal tablet, small silver heads, random tokens, trinkets, significance. And I am the night’s sun, like I said. The intended puns of bar signs call as the deadbolt slides home to confirm that it has begun again. They are all out dragging this ocean for a “live one.” So it goes. But I forgot to gargle enough listermint, er something. Lisps of radio-hiss invade my thoughts. I could very well be a murderer. At the bottom of the steps and clasps of possibility pulling me through the forest of posts and lintels towards streetlights of particular fingers. I’ll find her tonight, one way or the other. My breathing sculpture of exquisite denial. She waits there where the jukebox convulses. This is such a jangling that only a luster could love.

A Better Guitarist Poem

After the misfire, Pat could no longer play the guitar. Blood spattered across the boardwalk and the fretboard as he began to laugh. He knew that he would have to kill them now for terminating his cosmic dirges his sell-outs to the gods and such, his songs. He could implore the infinite with a riff, his lips making shapes of strange ghouls. It was time for a death-fugue with him as the coda and those marked boys as the variations. His songs were sentenced to headtrips only. He took off his shirt and pulled ten blades from the sheaths of his abdominal muscles and went straight for their throats half-singing, “roses towards the burning dawn, yet I shall not regret.” He made it all up right there on the spot. Even this, what for him would be the very last time.

That Boy’s Got Backbone, I Tell Ya

not having the implied regal posture

of a seahorse or an ostrich

or the straight-up-ness of a noble kangaroo

or the secure cliche’ colloquial of farm tools

axehandles or rusting imbedded plowteeth

not possessin’ the quiet strength of an unplugged

air-conditioner or TV or the sobriety

of an unlit cigar or closed umbrella

or the knowing of my appendages

as does the octopus or ivy and without the austerity

of a ship’s prow or a broken femur

lacking assuredly a leg to stand on

when it comes to the patience of lightbulbs and sparkplugs devoid of the endurance of one specific brick, or the grace to realize why it must be so evident it does not call itself at midnight as a beggar for your ardor.

It waits, like a calm lake for any extension of the cycle to emanate it. My posture, hopefully, an evolving anger of ascension. Upright and right. Pious nose-bridge. Just hand. Tower of a man. A will heft to hone.

I give myself a gift fit for a monumental bad-ass.

So crass, yet, the finding of form is never gentle. It is a cuirass wrapped within a cassock’s sash.

The unabashed spine for a strapping appaloosa of a young man.

Bridge-builders

You who’ve descended from a long line of bridgebuilders, I come from a long line of canoe-crafters.

And you, who were raised by wolves and beavers, I was reared by crows and magpies and taught to fear centipedes.

And your brethren, the fire-eaters and forgers, and mine the crafters of blow-guns and perfumes, the protectors of silkworms.

We all became farmers and slaughterers for food. And we forgot the true names and we exchanged a watered-down knowledge of writing. And “so” became a word.

You, those of you who build canoes and we, who drop poems from ancient bridges, and now our children swim from bank to bank in rapids that are words and ballads

and in waterfalls are these lyrics

Love Sonnets Should Be Awkward

She said I was a shiny thing blinking while her eyes broke into a flurry dance of birds unafraid, barely recovering from reckless plunges into happenstance. And I knew well the impact into her where the edges blur, where I no longer shine. And love here becomes a surly bore, a rust upon a wing. I will linger in the corridors of her might until the doors swing open again, and then mine is bittersweet escape. Impossible to cease, to never again drink her wine. A luster fades, a love tarnishes here. She flung herself far upon my heart’s spear.

After I survived the Impaling of the Long Arm (for Jeff Buckley and Frank Stanford)

They sent the lynch-mob after me. I was burying a torn satchel. It had a mojo and a scalp inside it. I was on the front lawn of a long-time loyal friend of mine.

I also was disposing of the ammo. I had conquered a continent that night but only the authorities wanted to hear about it. Shit begets universes, I said.

I got dunlopped. Whatever that means, but that’s what it felt like. Once I put a pistol in a mailbox and I put the flag up. And I waited and watched as the torches began to mount at the far end of the suburb cul de sac.

Faces began to materialize wanly under the accusing lights. I thought it was my relatives, though. Then I caught a cudgel with my nose.

There were men there wearing chest-stars. They asked me my name. “Yes I am.” Then you are coming with us the men said.

There was my own blood under my fingernails. Should I have mentioned this? It’s too late, I guess. The hairs of Priapus were entwined with mine like the braids of vine he builds his hives with. All fibers and fibers and such.

I could have put up quite a struggle. And actually I did, in retrospect. I was wearing Death’s beard like the goatee of a myth-slayer.

I am not going near that river, I quivered in the arms of the men with stars on their chests.

They took me down a dirt road. Away from West Chandler Street where I washed in the tub that had its own feet and it was on a Friday night.

It seemed like these were my last good friends the way they tied me to an anchor and dropped me down because I took a piece of each of them with me to the bottom floor. And I wonder if they ever suppose so.

Getting kicked out of a Discount-Mart

Come back! I am not cut out to be a thief! And I threw the AA batteries and the pairs of mismatched socks towards the automatic

gates of the entrance while I retreated like a family sedan at Christmas I volleyed towards a new temperance

only to see discipline escape in his harlequin dress while riding a stuffed-zebra head on a stick and he was doped up my patron was

who had I ever chased to be so hunted? I slungshot towards the tower-clocks as my white flag was ignored by a barrage

of sirens in a labyrinth and cop-cars and so I threw noise-makers and spent shotgun shells at my would-be captors

and on the shore that I ran towards waves retreated leaving vapor trails and steam and little spark-sized red crabs

and I thought of finger-food, being such a kleptomaniac and knowing the reward would be my final verdict

in this celebration of incest that our culture teeters upon but to my chagrin, I became a millionaire once gaining parole and dying relatives

cleared all the books and one day I will roll my wheelchair into a zero-shaped pool

with the seatbelt welded shut but, many well-heeled lifeguards will rescue me because this world isn’t taking back anything

not even me, off schedule

The Disappearance of the Mimeographs

Suddenly, all of the grand pa’s, county roads, the factories that manufacture corks, the knack for using doorknobs and fire escapes shoelaces, buckles, plastic forks hair-clips and scissors the ability to read barometers or newspapers even the plastic molding on all of the electric wiring just up and vanished. And more things seemed shimmering to exit daily existence in a mutiny of utilities.

Predictably, a riot of international proportions ensued. Everyone wanted to blame the other guy for supposedly hoarding all of the plastic pocket-combs and varieties of lip-balms. These two items recently vanished during the composition of this poem.

After the carnage, we all knew where the nails which bend when being hammered in go in the long run. If someone said walk in a circle, then you did, for hours, until a good decent Samaritan could give you another function by walking by and whispering “fulcrum.” Or some useful something.

Tools never fail; they just become obsolete, like any number of living species or like couch-sized adding machines of recent old times. As I hung Christmas lights above my desk (which was actually a makeshift thing constructed of an old oak door lain across plastic crates of all sizes), the cat

began attacking the bulbs and was trying to eat them. The cat actually thought that it could eat light, I think.

It was on this illuminated example that I began to re-invent all of the little things of the earth all of the plastic pocket-combs and giant mimeographs

Lipscars

It may be that the common misconception is that wisdom comes with the scar.

That is a movie device. Yet, inherently there is a truism of a wound’s rending.

This rendition within the story of noncausal pain, the pain that follows all incidentals.

The pain is the only story that there is. Get to it.

It tells itself secrets that only your skin hears. Its ears are pink raised glyphs.

This flesh and what is moreso beneath it. The wound remembers.

Do we as well? That first crash of the bike? That last slice of the scythe?

A Proposition for You

Gaudy baubles seem perfunctory when you are a defunct punk. And store windows wish to debunk your pocket of spunk-- just don’t bet on the otherwise and you will purge on. Altruistic forager exiled from a conservative colony, and so what will my purpose be? Could I brush my teeth in the echoing empty coliseum amidst thousands of feedback amps? Could I sandpaper a star? Could I drive the Chevy Nova or the Harrison Ford across the lawn of a royal wedding while my chaps clung to me tightly and so does my blood-purpled jerkin? my guitars are growing wings and flying over this entire scene. There is a freshly killed stag in my backseat and each tip sports a dead nation’s flag. Is that not as satisfactory as my thrilling speech vehemently? Could I be your stunt-double in Mongolia for Leonardo? Could I build a paper airplane or teach a raccoon how to? Could I teach an epic hero how to make a casserole and entertain for once? Could I teach the handless the major chords on an Alvarez acoustic guitar? Could I ride tidal waves riffing while sitting on a wave-crest-sofa and landing on the beach wearing polyester while grinning and reading the Holy Kabbalah? Could I learn the neck from snakes and the speed of small cornered fish? Could I learn the agility of a fossa, minx, lynx, or pygmy loris? Could I free the martyrs from their pinioned prisons of telephone-pole transformers? Could I simonize the carburetor of the earth’s center? Could I simply make you the best fucking sandwich ever? Would you balance to kiss me on the fingertip of a steeple? Would you swing hammocks from crucifixes or put me in their cross-hairs? Could I peck your cheeks like a mad magpie? Could I pet your exotic cats hiding behind writer’s wastebaskets? Could I be a penny on heads underwater on the waterfall’s edge? It gurgles forever like a wet supernova with its long fillibusteration. Vic Chestnut say, it’s “a trick-e-lin’.” We glisten, like something caught from a gorgeous sea. Maybe my entire life is a continent’s birthmark? Maybe under my left clavicle a tumor awaits to become mainland Africa. I hear the soft breathing of a forest and know it is her there. It’s true that the necks of giraffes developed from battling one another for mates and not from trying to eat out-of-reach vegetation. Let’s evolve.

I will make love to you like an infinite stretched between two off-ramps. You and me riding that entropy point like the last prom. I kiss you like the manta ray takes a breath. with thin lips underwater. Not to beg, but you need to bring that last puzzle piece you are holding right over here right now.

This is How We Became Marsupial

He’s becoming an assimilator it’s obvious that what his tongue touches is the ominous.

It has never been strange to build this isthmus. We have no main land and lots of maidenhead.

As the carbine rattles its exogenesis the scalawag pulls up his secret. We wondered what was next and then we found that kernel. It was so many was’s that couplets of now exploded.

We auctioned too many swords for liquor. There is a science that could market our obscure industry of harpsichords.

When we felt invincible, we were lying to lain agendas. It sucked, as history will attest.

True love, you redneck, caged and eschewed. We wait to be photographed like pandas in a zoo. Nothing to do. We can still fall headlong into love with the right pharmaceuticals.

Prescriptions are the only poems that matter. They actually touch people that don’t read.

Man is an isthmus that longs to be his own island. He is always almost there.

He’s becoming an assimilator it’s obvious that what his tongue touches is the ominous.

Prophesy of my Grandfather’s Death

Papa-Joe said that you could go down to the Everglades and purchase a baby alligator for 50 cents back in those days.

He came back with one as a kid; said he tossed it up into a pine tree and never saw that hateful thing again.

Still, to this day, with Diabetes deadening everything below his knees, He believes that there are renegade, full-grown-gators in the sewers.

Maybe one of them ate Fred, the poor little mutt Irish-Setter. Maybe one of them will eat Uncle Norman’s Bear one day.

When the alligators come to drag Papa-Joe by his Diabetes-numb shins, I will be swinging from vines screaming out the secrets of his gardens.

And my grandmother, Marvene, will outlive all of us with her carefully executed strategy of hypochondria.

She stands there in the kitchen in the early autumn. I remember these flaws of myself and so through seasons slander.

Wantful Gain’s Confusion

We had decided to tear Paradise down through ritual sex. Our hex was to reverse the curse into intricate flesh.

Meshed in scales of oily skin we were sleeks like seals like the backs of greased-up power-lifters.

Not as re-defined; such ineffable qualities of shinola.

We stuck soft socks into the banshee-incessant sportscasters’ mouths until time for the parade. A sirocco of charades always ensues.

Dentists were sacrificing their ears to drills as the tirade reached the anthropomorphic orgasm-point.

Horrific. Terrific. Exquisite.

Keeping things smooth like earlobes and running to the town’s edge exploding under a hail of gutturals.

A speech like a fish-head congealed in the governor’s coronation complimentary Jell-O desert.

This was a naked riot of words and I knew which part of me was arms was wings was eyes was fury.

The Pointillist’s Vision of Any Afternoon

I stared at the cold black stove eye until it became clear what it was I had to do. I walked towards the dirty laundromat

and every praying mantis in a mile radius rotated its triangular skull towards its prey. The sun as bright as a new book of stamps.

I knew my destiny. I made sure that the small empty vial was in my left-hand coat pocket. Somewhere south and parallel

to a shore and close to where cocoa beans were being harvested, the fields all smelled of heavy adultery. I have collected a scarab

carved of every precious gemstone known to man and don’t you forget it and I hung each of them on necklaces hung from telephone poles

throughout this town. I know what must be done. Being powerless is the quickest way to digitalize al angles.

I found the specific acorn finally. I just had to let myself go a bit. Under this live oak, this arboreal lady. I will grind the smidgen into poison.

The poison makes the vision.

An Anthem For My Dentist: for John Ashbery

The philanthropist transvestite mechanic finds his mark and keeps it. He says don’t you see? He’s impersonating a soap opera? We will hand out leaflets, eyepatches, and shoot pistols without even freeing them from our bandoleers, eat black-eyed peas and cornbread with cracklings to ensure the next year’s fortunes. Spend the day with invalids making clay ashtrays. Count the butts strewn through grass in the park. It’s a stark lark, a naked hibiscus patch of gushed rustic or else. Fantastic as homemade biscuits, the leaves have learned to hang themselves levee-like now, and in doing so have forced the tree’s conglomerate.

The shortest definitions of history were not, “seemed like a good idea at the time,” or, “we just couldn’t help ourselves,” or “too much ballast on the Basilisk.” It was more like, “Okay, you shot the albatross, just deal.”

Operation thatchery was a voluminous success. The silencers worked and the dullards on the hull were expertly riddled with verbiage. Why always the ship metonymy you ask? Stay focused. There is an ear- ring in a crater on the moon. It catches starglint reflecting off of a satellite’s solar wing. Then it retracts on an astronaut’s helmet, all in secret. This is expected, accepted. A drive-by-shooting with feathers for ammunition.

Little Tyke asks Papa Shelton “What’s a heyday? A fruit-salad day? A romper room? An impart?” He says keep your shoes shined for this land is a man’s hand held over your hood. Field it and make a final out.

Deep in your bones is the ‘morrow, and you have known that drum. Deep in our bones it is sung. The transvestite monk pulls off his sequined tunic, says a few kind words to the eunuchs. Wonderful choruses startle blackbirds from ramparts as the sky fills with colonies of dark putti and fermata. The raiment’s splendor has always been bedazzlement upon the dazzlement of bedraggled women and men, all this sky first hand, and addiction to Love’s blue Novocain, too much for us to take in, always too much.

Homesickness

They caught the last narwhal dragged him convulsing up unto the deck and began the interrogation.

He laughed, squeaking, and pulling off his horn he said, “Idiots! I am but a costumed red herring!” So indeed the legends were all dead.

The esteemed photojournalist slumped in her khakis while absently checking the rigging. The first mate caressed the figurehead’s breasts muttering,

“I should have never left New Orleans.”

My Desk Is a Broken Gull’s Back

I am an island, and she, a Sargasso sea.

In my chest the volcano rumbles, lava outpours and so I grow as I cool but never enough for her.

When the mutineers hung, they did so from her exquisite hair.

The eels migrated here to mate. We took off our moccasins to tread like breeze across soft sand. We bred a flying fish with a rattlesnake once.

This was a biological exemplar of the union of Space and Time.

I am an island in her perfect skin. Green eyes adorn every crest of a wave.

I always freckle, never tan, a leopard of a man.

Spiral notebooks, simpleton timelines, captain’s logs, clay tablets, almanacs of ecliptics, engravings of bread recipes in steel plates, paperbacks full of esoteria, Sanskrit-like Zodiac tables, sun dialects, droughtpoles notched, and us standing erect amongst junk in a paradise.

A bottle washes up on the shore with a scroll in it that reads:

“Liquor, liquor everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” The colored ridges of the atoll purple across the azimuthic zenith.

I string up the balalaika and sing to the hammock with the steel guitar lounging in it.

I am this island; she is a cruel distressed mistress. In angel-hair of seaweed, far out in the undulating green we become azure together. A sunset is seen to suddenly represent an agreement, not of the horizon or of the planet’s axis but of the eyes and heart of a man witnessing it. I become my own eclipse, here, as a remnant reflected in a full rainbucket of what I was before her waters found my island’s shore.

Vessel Christened

And so we put the members of the exhausted papacy onto the galleon stocked with barrels of oranges and red wine bottles. The only crucifix on board was the mainmast. The priests screamed that the earth was flat, that they would plunge over its edge into their doom. One of the bishops mentioned that they would more than likely starve to death before anything of that sort could happen. We liked that one. We pulled him off the boat and bid him farewell. He carried a wharf-rat in an incense-burner swinging back and forth as it smiled its four-toothed vermin grin. A herd of trained manatees tugged the ship out towards the vast blue of the horizon’s paradigm. The priests thought that the manatees were mermaids, being of that Age, and they were too terrified to hug one another as they were sentenced to be forgotten at the dawn of a new millennium that’s really saying nothing new, just the same old human thing as any of them.

The Mermaid Was a Manatee Said the Priest and she waited there upon the shore as if she were the shore and I tore my bodice on the mainmast as the cabin-boy laughed then flung it down impaling it on a shark’s dorsal fin and that shark circled the ship and she on the shore with the knife the Bowie knife between her teeth killed the white fish and took the bodice from its fin and put it on one breast hangin’ out through my rip like an Amazon archer, and she waited no more for she had then become the seafarer and no longer the shore. are ships cursed arrows as the vicar said?

Chamber Music

I’ve sorted out all of the lost socks of the Odyssey. It was an excursion, all these warrants signed by Persians. And, well, when gnats were caught under our eyelids we simply thought of synaesthetic symphonies, anything to buzz the pain out of the zone of humming utility.

The handsome surfboarders kept running into us broadside and splattering champagne as they burst against the hull and our brains were littered with lust on a long voyage. Many Nobel Prize whiners were quelled when it rained and we gathered the fresh water in hubcaps or anything.

In the typhoon mutiny brewed. We couldn’t just be kites. Our leader was no lemming, but it seems that we were. We caught scent of the quest again soon, though; it led me to a spot under a lilac. I set up the yurt and laid down the bearskin within. I decided to leave my brethren, stop questing.

My brothers and I are like pearls; inside of everyone of them a hurting begins, a grain of sand, a birth realization that a heart is enclosing.

The Meteorologist Has a Seizure

Under the umbrella was an occidental rain that defied all gravity. Your chin stubble pelted me, your stipend of warmth and here’s the stipulation: if we are to be surplused the big head must deflate. Super-fluffed for plush picking and sustenance of perfect packaging was our promise. The obvious never sells; you must sell rain to the forests with great lust and effluvium. We are so special, even cute, the way the entire nation cruises bashful around natural parks. Our afterthoughts are families of ducks by now. Svelte, swanky little water-walkers are not the false prophets we wanted, however. Suddenly, everything we did made us money and we hid inside behind the Venetian blinds miserably. Have you thought about this too long? Well, there should be a song. Maybe a good headline. Think about this when it rains. I regurgitate clouds of broken promises and I spit out psalms when it’s balmy and hold the kite-twine on those sunny days. I’ll even lie to you just to get you out of bed with less humidity and a partly cloudy. I will wait for love on the horizons where the four winds began as one. And they began there only once. And they have continued since, uncommodified. But, what I am trying to sell to you is this or that, either a weather machine, or a non-awkward umbrella. The beauty of these times is today it is precisely your pick.

Diving Into a Dividend of Civilization

It is a gorgeous lush abyss here isn’t it? Such generous viscosity. We put the incompetents to the counting of the ballots. I am amazed to what lengths trains will rocket corn-syrup and knick-knacks to. And we are a surly sort of dented brain-pan ladies and gents. All the dentures floating in jars significate the absence of the judges. Make your excuses for everything from back hair to tire-tube waists. Heartbreaks to freckles to premature balding patterns. Next we are to be crowned for all of our ailments. Pills will be manufactured to make you appear drunken after all alcohol has been abolished. Prohibition has always been more cosmetic than health-oriented. We will begin to grow fishfins up under our armpits and gills behind our knees. Walls will simply become obstacles of impaired need. Shivers me shimmers. We are evolving faster than our own pre-conned concepts. Breaknecks skilled in derelict equipment. Diving into the black, purely fascinated with the oily bubbles rising to meet us. Diving into the black, the light that we chase into the depths, that sinking flashlight on limited batteries dropped long ago by Prometheus, I think was his odd name. Or maybe it was an understudy of his. Who knows. Holding your breath is an under-appreciated art. Our eyes popping under the pressure, we go down, down there where the relics are neck-deep in silt, and such beauty there and we try, but these artifacts can’t be dislodged so we die there over and over trying, prying, drowning while pulling at them.

Invincibles

We placed one man between every Two trees, hired a woman for the barriers of every body of water (women tend to live longer). Prosper Your verisimilitude. We have Sackcloths full of proverbs.

Toss the seeds into diurnals, Ravines, crawlspaces. Unhinge the tomes! Revolt!

Tomblike or not to be, there In the lectern is a host Of shattered lanterns.

Estranged or edge-like But no leaf shivering Yet winded, this haunting

Needs more form. No breaths but sheaths And clasps, hinges, knobs,

Ornamentals. All is starved For a verb. Go about the manor In your manner, my robe

Of shutting, of abeyance. Faint Soft hiss of yes’s. Stand at The trees and at the waters;

Decide the barriers, walls, clasps, hinges, Names, our raiment, our flesh.

On the Banks with Shelton

He threw an arrowhead he had just found right at me. It bounced off my cheekbone. You could put an eye out with that thing I told him. It must have been obsidian.

“I’ll pour another Mason-jar-full but you are not about to drive your drunk ass to the store in my car,” he says. Well, I always win in this briar patch, I guess.

Let’s go make a killing from scratch somewhere, I said. A real life with red clay in a fertile realm. Some abundance without sacrifice. A place where Sam Clemens isn’t so chagrined.

Women on the opposite bank began taking off their tops. Over there beyond rapids on slabs of dark shale. I didn’t think that they could see us. The gorgeous

Spectacle was giving me cottonmouth. Take your damn sedan up the hill for more Pabst Blue Ribbon I tell him. We need minnows too, there’s crappie all in the shallows,

And, pull up your shorts for Jesus’ sake I am sick of your carpenter’s crack. “You coming with or what?” Shelton asks and demands simultaneously.

I am not going anywhere while these women and these fish are here, old man.

Ol’ Red grids of girds and gurneys held up his massive head his skull as huge as a church his visage that of an angry saint with gout his movements alternating between lurch and lithe with occasional spitting like a bat caught on a fishhook he calls his wife Rosinante he was not afraid of me, a whippersnapper I had a broken bottle shard and a bicycle chain that time and I meant business he claims to have been a helmsman at sea during the second Great War he has submarines lost deep down in his voice

And So

I played pool for my life that night. The first cornerpocket call knocked out an eyeball.

The bartender swoll-up under a rotating clock. The second shot gave me nervous mumps.

Somebody faceless wants to buy me a beer through a slur. The third shot punctures a kidney of mine as a gunshot ballad flung from my mouth it was ice-sickle shattering on a windshield or an inflated balloon turned loose in the Nitro-Glycerin closet.

There’s an infinite number of straws, lime-slices, miniature parasols, and crushed tiaras in this place.

A brown tambourine tacked to the wall makes me think of pissing. There’s a smudged mirror there and a fishing-net hung here in the middle of the Midwest. Then the fourth shot cut a portion of my lower lip off, got my attention like a picked-at cold-sore.

The fifth ball inexplicably got shot off of the table and broke the fat iceberg of a farmer’s beer-mug.

He did not notice under his eyebrow clouds. The sixth ball was like an inning impending at the crux of a playoff decision. A stand-off. Seven was a penultimate groan over a gurgling tap.

Eight. The ball is sunken.

Well man you won, and about it you may be prideful, but after the game how do you dividify up your time?

And what are you, what is anyone, without their game? Either beat me to a pulp, or puke with me in the morning because it’s the same hospital in this zip code that you said you have always lived in.

No matter what they say. Life is pretty fair.

You are a hell of a shark, saint.

Lumberjack

And his name was jack, and this made us laugh but we were always easily entertained out here. And an innocence came with it, as if a forest was merely an accident and not all the scheming trees. We could never have believed it, all these negators being the prime delegates in question. We tried to install air-conditioning vents beneath pine needle beds. And in underbrush to freshen things up. Always, ultimate control eluded us. We did not learn from bear maulings, snakebites, tepid canteens, sybarite anthills mustering like living fire, venom of dirt-dauber nests, or burning acid mandibulars. Darn and tarnation we had always known better. Give a man an axe and hell, he’ll grow arrogant. Give a man an axe and his arms will bulk up defiant towards a wilderness. Destinies will be carved in a spray of splinters and a shower of sawdust across this continent. Give me the axe mr. surveyor because I got to hurry up and level this sucker.

Ode to Spring

Dionysus, father of Priapus, has got the bee-stinger stuck into my mind like Cupid’s bird-finger and on one dizzy utterance I could topple the tower of any unwilling girl for it is Spring! And I am centaur of the blossoming center of a flower the horse of a heart and the heart of a man all here formulated in the abdomen, yes we fall towards the barren fields, and they await our sore impetus incredulous and presumptuous scrumptious and as green as my thoughts with the last balsa-wood erection becoming thick bamboo shoot I strip my skin naked down to clouds to pink skin and red hair and so pollinating my semen and learning the drone of honey-bee and I have already learned the dipnoan of secret animals under our flesh O yes, and I can use my atoms or one specific one anytime, anywhere I like in a particle collider in my mind to cause a 40megaton blast of pure hormonal Spring a nuclear splurge to bring about well, May to be awakened the sacs, lips, cupolas, and gourds and to remind the buds and dry the mosses and to stand naked on stone fountains imitating marble cherubs and spitting out springs in constant dribbles of the sun-grifting pure water the precious water of waters the birth of all mothers the flow the river, and so, could I please

be the rivers the once and for all the everfast rapids

Puns and Legends and Molasses-isms

“Molasses Molasba loved his mother and killed forever,” Renklauf O’Flannery said and he wore a mask that looked like a hillbilly and when he would strip it off he looked like a lightbulb some folks (like Red) said he’d been struck by lots of lightning and he had skin lesions and devils and a dead family as yardwork he did and I also hear the legend of him and the old lady bear and what it means to a certain congregation and the buckshot cyst on his back the shape of Rhode Island and how the canoe he had was crafted from the bones of dead Cherokees which are now a rare breed of evergreen trees and his sayings sure could take him into that spiritual world and then he came back with parchments and he burned them for fuel for fish-fries and everyone tried to read them before the flames consumed but Renklauf knew that fire had always been his side-arm and this secret he had was a good one to keep especially in days like this when all it does is rain fire

We Were Forced By the Authorities to Become Ourselves

When mulatto John got shot three times for dancing lewdly in the pub with the Grand Dragon’s wife it was me, Shelton, Priapus, and Red there all drunk and we stayed around and for this the next day they run us all out of town.

Now Red works in an ottoman factory and collects his pension every month on the 1st like a swift uppercut.

Shelton drank a hole through his stomach that you could see a tree behind him through. Shit, he would have anyway.

Priapus jars honey and sups on venison for he is no longer a vegetarian. He bowhunts and masturbates on mushroom clusters.

I walk the perimeter of the county with cameras for my eyes and operas for my ears. Always drunk on home-brew. I am building kites for the children of our exilers.

At the city limits line I gets a pretty fair penny for the kites. Then again, I just spend my money on women and ammunition--

I am no longer a hunter of any reputable sort. And so I carry this stomach of perdition.

Well, back to the kite-making.

In the Kingdom of My Brother Backwards

A telescope in a citadel of sledgehammers and carjacks. A spinal column in a ropeweave of steel girders. Cannon fodder in a warless province. A pine sawhorse rocking on a wilderness of plastic surfaces. A vending machine full of matchbooks during the famine of an endless ravine. A mute in the grotto of the zealots. A spasmodic divining rod on the bottom of an ocean. A cannonball holding down a compost pile of potato peels. A daisy on the slope of an active volcano. A broken lip under your nipple. Logged into my own position while writing the infinite paychecks of others. A lover in a calvacade of lovers. An apple waiting to be eaten lying beside a sleeping tiger. An EXIT sign above the inside entrance to heaven. A discarded level beside the perfect machine. An automation of deconstruction, a contradiction intern. Hold my negative hand down in your solution until you develop us. I think it’s beautiful how we are never identical.

I see the elephant trudge through the documentary with tons of ivory tusks strapped to his back.

fist held up to an assured infinite

And dreams are our epics, I guess. And to know that something must’ve happened, that you engineered it. Or the acceptance of your place in the stark void. A single gladiola petal on a beach, or a mask of fallen bulbs on a windshield, or the small section of glass not covered by them. And epics are our lives, I guess. And like odysseys of oddities we migrate.

The continents held together by as much tectonic stone as phone conversations. Our bodies held together by as much sinew as love-words. Our words held together by a vernacular epistemology of sacred lies. Our lives held together by a series of as many roadsigns as tragedies. The trees held together by as much bark as our breaths.

All is uniform and to be so in its exposure. All is double over-exposed, all of us pushed out of our houses as if skimming towards a horizon of perfect time and purpose nexus. And our dreams are held together by a caravan of our days as circus-tents of love-making are traipsed up on all the riverbanks. And the moon and sun holding one another intact in an archaic dynamic tension. And the earth held strong steadfast bearing its witness to the equation within the clasped fist of the curved universe. And we all held together by great fists of matter and of what matters.

Epics! Calvacades of adventure crests! Tempests of our nuttiness! I say excelsior to you again, O universe, for I am plagued with your divine dementia praecoxia! You always have your surprises; you come wrapped in a robe of eyes yet tell me they are bright stars.

A Formal Last Testament

And let the odes to the navigators and the astronomers, the lovers. And leave the sestinas to the architects and the genetic engineers. And let the villanelles to the stuttering philanthropists. And the pantoums to the Malaysians. And leave the haiku to the mountains by a river’s birthright. And leave the sonnets to the eloquent, to those who can trick us into believing that they know what they are talking about. And leave the free verse to the dreamers and the hornplayers. And leave the waltz and the opera in the auditoriums, at least for now. And leave the epigram and the limerick to the rodents and the birds, to the worms and the flies, to the microsporangia and the weeds. And leave the eye towards your particular planet of interest. Make no cities; plant no gardens. Carry rucksacks full of outlawed, tattered notebooks. Learn to wait and lie down in patient sand. Things will always come to you in abundance. And leave me here as forms come to me gorgeous rugged and ragged.

Grounded Reverie

I found a bird this morning frozen to the sidewalk outside my door in a frigid pool of its own urine.

I sprinkled de-icer on his tail to corrode the crystal but he would not fly. I put him on a washcloth, out of the piss.

I think that he was a sparrow but I attach no religious significance to this. I took him down into the basement wondering if birds can get frostbite. Hypothermia? Their bones are straws of air-marrow. He may have been already dying. I never heard of a bird landing to relieve itself. I was caught unawares minutes later leaving the bird to climb into the car by a quick hallucination. A black ram on the blue hood.

I attached no religious significance to this either. These archetypes are haunting apostles when you are in Iowa in January.

We went for a burger and beer run and while ordering lunch I saw a crow half the size of a small child perched on the lip of a dumpster. I got my bag of box of bottles at the package store and thought of the bird.

I went into the basement but the bird was gone. I waited under rafters for the sound of beating wings. There was nothing but the hum of the coin-operated washing machines courtesy of a stingy landlord. There were only gobs of purple lint like cobwebs. No feathers anywhere.

Outside there was the disheveled corset of feathers frozen still to the cement. Those blue-black arrow-rudders

Will they be here until the thaw? The winds will swipe everything off. I wanted a memento of it, of that morning.

My girlfriend said that I could get mites from handling the bird. But hell, I am always itching from something anyway.

And maybe feathers are the handiwork of mites. They could be the architecture of parasites. Sort of like ten-penny nails that can hold together submarines and skyscrapers. I began to wonder how the bird had escaped the basement. Sande says that birds know the secrets of windows better than us. I tend to believe her. All I know of is forests and sawdust, paper for words.

There were feathers stuck in the ice outside my stoop for an entire month. I have a sense of how

I have lost an art.

Bedroom in Savannah

I cut myself open to extinguish the candles. You gasped, and your breaths threw the curtains about the windows. And the night eats our darkness as it eats your eyelids calmly. You once had a name for this vernacular. It is what I call vultures without hunger or beauty. And your eyes always were for the night’s taking, like archetypes. Eat us both! I implore an infinite mouth! I pull open my shirt and arch my back. Leave a statue here in my stead. Or our bodies left clinging to the walls like transparent cicada shells. Husked, cocoonic mysteries of abandoned form and like this flesh we share scars like dried riverbeds. Scars always drink their invisible rivers. And the emerging new pupa will know flight while the shell remembers a craft of wing-making. The making of light and likenesses.

When With You

My arms are wet noodles. My skull is a rotting apple tree. My legs are molting snakes. My words are forgotten roller-skates under a boardwalk Rusting. My heart is a retired salesman plying tubes Of cortisone to paraplegics. My back is a country road being zoned. My neck is a broken swan in mating season. My shoulders are ex-convicts holding shovels by overturned pylons. My crotch is the bus everyone always gets off of. My nose is a land-bridge that kept snakes out of Ireland. My tongue the sidewinding swollen alligator.

Neptune is my body temperature. A houseplant challenges me to a personality duel. Sweet Bejeezus! I am losing it tonight! But with you I am convinced that I will have incredible strength. Hell, with you, I’ll become a Titan! I took the sign leading to your road and placed it at my door So you will always get lost coming home. Everything everlasting concentrates into one point into The quasar where you let me enter you. Where your pull nets me in. I wish I could stay there, it being so rare That my starvation of flowers finds its barren field. But, your face is tomorrow’s construction That you are every minute contracting and down-sizing. There I hover, above a sea of blueprints, sea-charts, maps, calendars There I hover as yet undiscovered in this country where I am ruler. You can’t see me because I have already arrived in you. You can’t see me in you because You’ve never come home.

Sadomasochistic Futon

I was never much for arts and crafts, and I am as always a terrible mechanic, but today I’ve completed my masterpiece.

After all, my grandfather is a carpenter, and my father an engineer of amazing bullshit semantic excuses, so maybe this piece is a twist on my inheritance. I built an S&M futon. Made of steel, cedar, and pine slats punctured with rusted bolts and railroad spikes. Strategically fastened leather straps and hub-caps welded to its frame, and in intervals riveted farm tools and spade-tongues for a fence around its base. An old tractor battery powers the red and blue lights rigged from ax-handle bedposts.

The entire apparatus a Unisex harness for the shafting I had taken from my family’s men. I spared no expense for their negligence.

I am looking for my first willing and worthy partner, however, no one wants to be beaten upon the horse I’ve built for my father.

As A Boy Learning To Fly

I remember that once, as a boy, I thought I could learn to fly by gluing mirrors to the soles of my feet.

I’d gotten the idea from playing with magnets, y’see. The way that alike charges would repel one another.

I intended to fool the earth and gravity itself. What I ended up with were several hideous cuts, stitches and the only fight being that of pain uncurling up from toes to brain-stems. And blood on the hot blacktop.

I’d bled in this same place before, in front of the textile-mill. I was riding a Big-Wheel barefoot and tore four of my toenails off.

I should have known better about the mirrors by looking at them. They have that light mystery. I never appeared to be me there, not exactly. I would try with all of my expressions, but, never not exactly. I thought about becoming a metaphysicist, but, gravity was too sacred to me. I have a piece of the broken mirror from that day.

There is still some dried blood on it. For me it was red wing shard.

There is a cloud of smoke coming out of the mill-pipe that has a shadow that is thicker than the smoke itself.

This is how flight really works. I know this now.

I am a man.

Coming of Age in Lanett, Alabama

We used six-pack rings for handcuffs breaking them apart screaming “Shazam!” And we had wooden swords from Papa-Joe’s woodshop and jousted with bamboo poles on dirt-bikes using trashcan-lids for shields until Steven Harry got his head cut open. And that was the end of that. His mom called mine. I got whipped by the basketball goal. I had to wait for dad to get home. I never made a jumpshot again. We found some nudie-mags in the woods once, somebody’s stash, I guess. A secret buried in pine-straw with the chiggers. I got spit on by a girl at recess. I never forgot it. My first day of first grade I got my first paddling for stealing my first kiss. Miss Gilbert whipped me. The paddle had a name but I can’t remember it. I quickly learned that life is ridiculous.

In My Favorite Arena it’s funny how the mutants mutate phonetically it’s funny how the mutants mutate phonetically it’s funny how the mutants mutate phonetically it’s phony how the mutts eat us glib sarcastically it’s money when speech equals marketing (etc.: e.g. . . .) it’s lovingly the way we mutate out-of-orderly it’s assimilating how data slurs its scalpings verbally I don’t know how to abort my human allies it’s funny how the servants excel at serendipity those scientists query as to what to be wary towards well, it’s funny making formulas at the edge the end of known world whirling best be allowed as we tumble up towards night it’s history how the tumblers mimic any sort of prophetic insight its webs when we RNA towards the sacred golden lights and also those northern lights aborealisin’ to the Logos and it’s funny how idiots revolve around flesh whining and it’s funny how phonetics hit a kite right in mid-flight and it’s amusing how this is alright the way it turned-out all ripped hilarious how the sentients formulated less than mute indefinitely my what a pantheon is cooked in this sauce-pan over-easy it’s funny how the masticators joust matadorically and the bulls impale the bullshit that they implore constantly

I’ve given up sold all my belongings devoted my life to the plight of the misodoctakleidist, as good a cause as I have yet encountered

Levee Poem

Take a man like me to the levee.

Scatter the bones of my skull shattered in the gates.

I’ll pour my own river here.

The tadpoles will all become impregnated

With my illicit ideas; they will metamorph and mutate.

The fishnets will swell with largemouth bass,

Twenty pounds each and each with a human face

Uttering secrets: how to open oysters properly,

Cures to cancer, lost treasure troves, why trolling motors

Aren’t stealthy. I’d say anything here on this water.

Oars lie placated by canteens full of sunblock like unripe coconuts.

There is a wedding ring not paid off yet in a tube-sock

That sank and is now complacent in the belly

Of a large carp that never dies, as hooks clang in its jowls,

Underwater windchimes in the green memory he swims in

New Orleans Sunrise

My time in hell has now begun. You are gone.

And the vicar escaped to the verdigris tropics with the unfinished maps.

And I crafted a ukulele from remnants of an old shack.

I played it on a dock. A candlewick on the oceanfloor may or may not have hope. I wax for you and wane within.

Tempestuous are these chagrins I grin. Bushels of spent skin. Splint my skull with your straight pursed lips. Give me the bitters, the salt-waters, the daffies!

Sobriety is a stopwatch, and liquor, of course, is an aqueduct full of sprinters.

I am thirsty here without you on time. I miss the taste of the knot behind your ear.

I miss the smell of your crotch as I awake with my head on your thigh, with a dark mole polar to my left eye. I miss you walking in the den and saying,

“So, my day sucked. Hi.” Well, so did mine.

My time in hell has now begun. The void is a never-ending dawn when you are nothing like the sun.

Why It Moves as it Does the lightning

is furiously

jealous

of itself

Art’s Plea in Midsummer Lightning

I am beyond Love, and Life has surrendered to it. Every thought that I have will contribute to my newfound beard. And this contraband across my jawbone shall be worn and then forsworn. Then there are those preternatural job interviews. And all of mythology is a maybe riding an ology towards a sketchy probably. I swing a lot on the playground swingset as the stars just sit there. Don’t the stars just sit there? The higher I get the harder is the hangover of less light. The sterility of what next. There are no more playgrounds. I can spare no expense for my inhabitancy of insatiable want. The light should be purged from my visage but it is not light’s want. My advice is this: If you are given such a surplus of light, please be somewhat tasteful about the shadows that you let surrender to you for shadows will always shamelessly oblige you

. . . And Then There Were Suddenly Rivers

in Eden, before the apple

there were only

placid, perfect lakes of pallor

A Sudden Urge to slash everyone’s throat in the room: a tasteless scene of B-movie blood spurting, bad cheap special effects, the entire thing perceived in the most amateur camera angles of eyewitness perspective, as much compassion as nightly journalism, then:

I become as calm as a butcher-knife in the drawer as predictable as any kitchen with relation to a washing-machine. Where we eat is an ugly custom. Meet me at a slaughterhouse where the suburbs decide to be bashful about overpasses. Our cuts will heal with the pigs, the crows, the cows, the buzzards.

We can rise, take shortcuts, sharpen our skills at perfunctory sailboating of intention. Technique! The glint of a Rolls Royce’s grill on the asses of fireflies. Take this gift as you ride out towards the farmlands. Your vacation will be blunt but sweet, a honeydew punted into a frequented summer street. The garbagemen will escort the jury to the lake. There’s to be a drowning for these collective crimes we’ve committed. Some’ve admitted. The abortion of a would-be lifeguard occurred today. Watching the cypresses sway in their sighs,

I was sharpening my knives.

Sundial and Sextant

I.

Wind occurs in my tiny apartment when the trains rumble by trembling the vines of the wandering Jews in their hanging baskets. The blinds drawn tight, it is as if I was in the cabin on board some ship, or a stowaway in the hold and the locomotives the tempests gone just as suddenly as a tropical storm in the Atlantic.

II.

As far as I ran, still the lighthouse beam would eye me down it knew I would die at sea it held me under scrutiny, you might say “land-lubber.” Toy galleons in my hair and a belt of lightbulbs buzzing round my waist.

My mainland was my destiny and my past a rotting carcass of a defunct continent.

III.

The dead guitar lies there under soft shafts of moonslant as I carry a white feather through black shafts of bamboo and the tribesmen’s canoes embark towards the mountain’s foot and the river welcomes the braves’ outriggers propelled from pagodas that walk upon the rapids on stilts like gigantic paralyzed waterstriders.

The young men are faithful that the mountain is there, even though they can only make out how the obscuration changes the seasonal constellations. The women are busy slashing and burning the grasslands to the west as the rapists hide on the steppes asleep on their horses among wooden tortoises and other totems and crucifixes, ever-obedient to their khagan, who no one has ever seen, but it is said he has a dragon’s head.

Everyone knows that there will be pillagers, and the women find my red hair fascinating and they aren’t modest about my white skin and their husbands don’t seem to care as they pass around snuffboxes watching as their lean sons paddle upriver swiftly for a rite of passage on a volcanic mount. Mutts yalp about fires for scraps of fish and sick of unleavened bread crusts burnt. One of our crewmembers was nearly killed for eating a bit of raw fish, which, apparently, is forbidden in this culture. He was flogged by pangs, but then apologies were made, and he was given one of the chieftain’s daughters for compensation.

I know that there are birds flying above unknown to my eyes; great cranes and flamingos and ibises with wingspans the widths of tall men.

None of us wants to leave this place, but, tomorrow,

we must raise the mainsail again

IV.

Such a world of love and a love of this world all the trappings and only the blind horse paces himself across the corpses we have left back home. He bites the bit over and over again until bit by bit sight returns.

The navigator squints behind his quadrant. I have scurvy and sun-sickness. I have Indian ink tattoons of anchors. And I am in love with the handsome captain. Sting rays are studies of aerodynamicism. Opened-up cellos make good canoes, I hear. The quiet one has a tattoo called “Pequod” on his only arm. Never speaks, that one. I study the physiognomy of flying fish, their debatable piscatology. I draw circles in the air with chopsticks. The priest has prohibited mindmelds onboard. They lead to mutinies, I guess. Why, just yesterday I tossed a full-orb’d eidolon of dreams into the ocean myself. I miss our little island.

I pity the madman they locked in the hold. He was caught whittling the hull for a toothpick. The bayou is a place between worlds. It’s long gone now. On the mainland you are in the sticks everywhere you go no matter how sophisticated the clientele. The samurai does his exercises on the poop-deck every morning. I peel burned skin from the bridge of my nose and feed it to a wharf-rat. I need a woman and an aloe plant. Some sand in which to sink my feet.

V.

Dreams of igloos melting of ugly, otherworldly faces of natives on sketch-pads with their odd-shaped heads and piercings and discs as our belongings sink into broken umiak skeletons we have found a paradise with dazzling cold teeth for miles the smell of Athlete’s foot from the camp and damp soot burning wet wood, trying to as bush-pilots soar overhead dropping the parachuted mail-bundles the augers broke down and told the truth like the warbling malfunction of the well-cisterns but I can still get a postcard from the mainland or some crushed Fed-Exed cookies and you there, fondling your rosary you should be slapped it was your faith that brought us to this desolate place of death scrawled discreetly in the tundra the isthmus may provide a channel for escape if the ice holds and i am now a navigator without relevance on a sea frozen

VI. at some point I feel I was given a star the spirit of the navigator and at some point I would wish to burn out, but for now, I am too late for where I am going like the light is of an illumination while billions of hands try to obscure it it festers but it never caresses faces of any fertile planets

I am a man a fickle scintillating star-watching man

Simpleton’s Timeline

And you will go done into this specific crack and there you will find my childhood.

And you could ooze through this particular crevice and there will be a fig on a tree my puberty.

This parable and this passage-rite. And give or take some years in limbo.

And a month of scars from cymbals and scritches. And more bracken than the rest, my first marriage,

Four fissures for my grandparents’ deaths. One for every fish, gerbil, gecko, houseplant, dog, cat

best friend, lover, or myth that I have killed by association. There are several slash-marks left. I adopted this discarded map

of mollusk sites, of fossil enthusiasts. The trilobites sand-sifting. I carry this petrified fan on my person at all times.

I have some dinosaur bone on a chain, a talisman to attribute a holiness to something. To this sea a shell, this shell

to a sea. I have cut a map through myself, my days the roads this life an intersection of grooves, flaws, and scars.

West Ga. Repo Co.

I was so proud at the repo of my car. Al of the trouble and clamor to drag off the dent-enamored Cutlass from its driveway sheath. Squirrels panicked among rolling and crushed chestnuts. Wood-bore bees and beetles erratically bumbled on the rotten porch. Chains and gear-prattle loud as hell as I sit down bewildered at the kitchen table. I don’t even remember being required to sign anything. Shelton and I shared a 40oz. while burning the payment booklet in the sink. It was almost glorious; establishing bittersweet financial anchors of freedom while they towed my transportation towards a landfill of society’s accumulated credit shit. It was amazing how the corners of that room suddenly surrounded us. Made us best friends, actually. It was ninety-seven degrees outside according to the morning paper. “Bastards,” Shelton says like it doesn’t matter. He knocks the windowscreen clear out with a thrown toaster in the yard; cats all scatter.

After the Usual Service

Today I am to be impaled upon that Baptist Church Steeple here in Carrollton, Georgia. And the squirrels have hung garlands of copperhead moltings on the telephone wires for me. They understand my spirit, you see; as I stand with my hands bound like an altar there is a bald man with a bad sunburn streaking by the stained windows in his navy blue convertible. Half the pews are occupied by bulls and the other half is stacked high with empty Mason jars. My hair is long enough now to save me from sunburns. I could cover a crucifix with it. I have come here with a symbol to surrender to a myth. In this way I am authentic. The bulls use their eyes to make the jars catch light. The pilgrims know what I am about to request. They have seen my kind before.

I need a basic clean death.

Red Drunk in the Pulpit

“I have reached the ritual state and nothing can now abate the trial, the residual rite of wait. I drank the snake spit and pulled the serpent from the pit! The vines on the side of the church are torn, and we are reborn. A gesture from the jester, sacrilegious laughter of a drunken sailor, and lies are sweet when dripping from God’s bowsprit. Gorgeous forests of lush us lying down in maritime matrimony. I had a dream of an orgy of bears and women. One of the bears knocked his teeth out with a Jew’s Harp by the campfire. Child alive and tarnation! Flames licking you in the pews! But God has only one true name; it is: Triumviral Virile Beast!” Then an altar-boy began to mop a pool of a dropped, shattered bottle of Evan Williams.

Red’s Garden

Suddenly you were grown; you were a succulent bulb with an intention to learn how to pop. A marigold, queen Of freckles and of their concealment. Softly I shook the gourd, its guts rattling seeds as we walked through the patch of watermelons. A spaghetti-junction of vines for fire ant errands and June-bug chunks. Red swung in the hammock he’d built under maples dreaming of Fred His lost russet-red Irish setter. Muscadines beckoned us, as unripe as they were. Our old treehouse rotted as we confused the pine-needles with the selfsame ones from our childhoods. We do this because we are no longer identical in any respect. The courts are poorly ran around here and somewhere a dead race-horse is being turned into glue-all. I am lost in time. So many degrees outside and humid as armpits. The scrapbooks are yellowing in a cupboard. Our grandfather swings like a pendulum that can speak what it has learned over time. We pick green tomatoes while kicking pinecombs, remembering what it was like to fall out of magnolias towards our grandmother’s pact of three meals a day, each with home-made biscuits. And Red’s knowledge of how we’d mistaken bird calls for tree-frog chirps, as he smiles with no arrogance, like a true father. That day you whispered to me that Shelton was long gone and you were pregnant. Thanksgivings, misgivings. The sun suddenly brilliant again. My sister, I could have killed you, and wanted to, but then, lunch was ready, we heard the call. Biscuits, cantaloupe slices, collard greens, cole-slaw, ham, and fish-sticks for our fickle younger half-brother. Red swang having sired so much.

Thursday Night in Carrollton

I snuck into the church irreverent and stole the black Catholic tunic.

I figured it was used for death, and Ellie was driving in from Atlanta.

It may as well have been Atlantis she was coming from and she was an embodied Hail Mary.

That night at the party, I wore the robe without my boxers

And Shelton stole the bottle of whiskey from the rednecks

After we couldn’t steal any of their big-haired chicks and we strode out casually

Me with my manhood flying free in a sacrilegious cassock, and him with a bottle

Of rye shoved down his pants and the cap stuck in his hairy bellybutton-lint

I expect. I tripped and fell down the concrete steps dislocating my shoulder.

“Damn grubs never smooth the shit out,” the ignoramus bigoted whiskey-thief laughs.

My ass ripped out of the back of the satin robe while I screamed at the steps’ bottom.

Shelton grabs me under the good armpit and drags me into the woods behind the apt. complex.

“Stop your squealing before the pigs show!” He pours the whiskey into my mouth, slaps the right side of my face hard and then pops my left shoulderblade back into place.

It sounded like a snapped balsa-wood rocketship. “Let’s go, before they get wind of this bottle missing,” Shelton says. I lunge forward hoping somehow that there is some Elysium home I can somehow make it to tonight.

Summer of ’91

Baxley broke the neck of my guitar that night. He bought a case of beer and tried to play it off. This is our logic around here. Pollen and musk. So be it. I understand him, and therefore, I would kill him myself, but, this is a transgression in this circle of friends. We will all cheat on our wives one day, I guess, is the logic. Circumstance, benefits of the doubts, idle hands and such as they go. Shit. He was trying to do me some voodoo, I suppose. Breaking the neck of a guitar. What in the hell is that? It was always free here by the rain-drenched, poorly-caulked bay-windows so why start a war? My vengeance was a memory of him vomiting on himself on my sofa as my lover and I watched naked and disgusted wondering if he was gonna die or what? Back then, I would have done anything for a few beers or laughs. Now I would like to reach into his putrid throat and wring the guitar of his heart out of him, and, if I did, if I asked him what he wanted to make of me, he would say,

“Joe, now you are a musician.”

Somehow he is okay.

Sore Thumb

Shelton jarred the MARS ATTACK machine so hard that it came unplugged in TILT from the wall socket and he toppled his draft it shattered on the carpet. “Shitfire!!”

I reached over to plug the machine back in not noticing the centimeter of my thumbtip just barely touching the third tongue of the tri-prong.

Shelton was already springing the first pinball up-rocket the lit-tunnel to the mothership while I was seizuring and tremoring in beer-spill electrocution.

Seconds later, after losing three silver-bullets and two quarters Shelton realizes I am being juiced and elbows me off the outlet.

“Jeezus Milford you tryin’ to kill yo’self?!!” My elevator don’t go to the top sometimes. Here none of the buildings are tall enough for a myth.

“Shelton, can we just play pool for our lives tonight instead of pinball? Everything

Every night is always a death-defying act. Yes with beers aplenty was the reply.

the midnight reeks of laughter elegy

Tonight’s mode is cloven hoof, as tomorrow’s is horse’s femur and an invention of new skin consistencies, as if we could never be satisfied with the miracles of our own flesh. Morning shall be a corsage of damp kiss; the bedtime epics of gnats. We all were the midnight once, us, mankind a primordial populace. It mattered not that we had flesh; it was merely implementary of our design and designations. We were to evolve, to grow things. We were to gather, to be forced to develop more and more malleable symbols. Our minds became monoliths without landscapes to provide proper perspective. We were to forfeit the midnight to an idea of evil. Have we forgotten how to be one with our shadows?

An Initiation

When I cried back at the cruel lord there, he sighed more than any ashtray at an extinguishing fire.

I was ash-covered. Knowing this is easily confused with the state of the flesh. Still, this shouldn’t be so, at this altar of particulars. No wonders. They are all shattered. Avatars of noir are squandered, as they so desired. I was aimed at his throat. Hands clasped in prayer position. Ironically the same way that high-divers poise off cliffs. I will rip out the bird from his throat.

I will pluck the harp-strings from his thighs like tendons. Chew up the Adam’s-apple bleeding its wine. Hum a litany and flutter a manifesto of screeching desires. Most bitter zest. I don’t jest; I will chew the birds all down with songs until my spittle is the sky itself. And I can read, even breathe. All the while in the underwater of the spirit, as we exit the chapel at noon to yellow clouds sickened, we find that Christ was actually God’s daughter and this is her cycle, her era, her menopause.

This ritual of diving bird of harp and throat.

A Rooted Embrace

The crude tombstones were tips of mainmasts for gondolas Constructed for poorly embalmed middle-class pharaohs of mundane businesses.

The worms aren’t good oarsmen; what does a huge Wizened oak hope to accomplish in a cemetery with its roots spreading a quarter-mile radius?

These tentacles will search every skull eventually. Each ribcage an ivy lattice, each pelvic bone a broken troglodyte flowerpot.

Bones appreciate strength. Bury them at an oak’s foot. Or just an oak box full of ashes at the foot of an oak. Hell, when I die

I’d like to slide into my own handle like a knife. Like a mirror sliding back into itself until you only see you.

Oak roots may be the only promising backbone Marrow I’ve seen lately down here; most promises aren’t as long or strong.

Always is another and

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

smog vertigo

There are places where I can knock on the door saying, “it’s just me” and they still let me in. Kinship is an endangered species here. I’m friends with mandrake-sickened insectivores. Kinship is a sleek schooner no longer in this marina. You gotta go out and find him. Put your miner’s helmet on. Switch to adorn. Navigate through the cigarette-smoke alleys. Ignore the tendrils throwing pamphlets and free samples. I found myself being held in your small perfect hands as if I were a dying precious bird or gem. However, I am merely a joe. We could save each other just by holding tight tonight. The stars, I swear, will oblige. The All thrusts itself towards delicate breasts as we ride the ripples towards nests. We want a part of the seduction, all of us. Let’s staple up the night. I will help you. It’s simple as dimples. Wonderful that you are finally here as a voluptuous specter. You are more than what more can you ask for fer sure.

You are finally here. I can’t believe it.

your journey

Does your journey end in good music? It should end so well.

A telephone and magazine forest with no bows or arrows.

Does your journey end? as the gates part? and she kisses you final full on the mouth and the sweet blossoms speed up and the reply 3 seconds before last impact and the guitar-peg you almost lost in the air-vent but didn’t, as the keys you tossed into a different vent happy to do this . . . does your journey end ever? even in the first time you read the myth of the Phoenix?

It becomes easier and easier to write poems the less and less that you own.

It is mythology; it is why homeless guys don’t hock their saxophones.

It’s why they ornithologize the cityscape perfectly and beyond. Does your trek become sweet? as the fleet hits the homeshore as the cacti embrace your flesh as the constellation Orion cums on the Great Pyramids as the sconce becomes a rocket as the coffee mug gets rid of its handle and starts flirting with a flowerpot named Lewis Carroll as the lamp spasms with light and the sink sprays hard water

And you now know that it’s time to get it together, but to get it together, you assemble a wrecker and the oxymoron is you, and so surrender with me into the fact that we, all of us, destroy what the artifact of writing poems is by never writing the best poem of our very own.

the lost sea

We weren’t allowed to play in the boat unless it was planted firmly in the backyard’s dirt. We were very parent-supervised pirates.

Still, we paddled until the old oaken oars were splintered and the grass on either side of the vessel was rutted. My step-father looks to my mother and says,

“There’s no such thing as a simple procedure involving lasers.” Her appointment is tomorrow. We imagined there were catacombs scattered underneath this town--under the churches, under our beds and under the govt. projects where I was caught kissing Veronica on the swingset and the sewers were where the lost receipts to everything bought around here ended up. I watched the two of them pull off the next morning in the pick-up truck as my brother sat despondently silent in the planted boat.

clairvoyant sex-mad culprits of indirect tantric magic (for Holly) poetry is the infant of telepathy. what I thought was a transgression was an oasis. yet you had already surmised it, intuitively. forthwith we fall up into boxes without openings and still know every door of the anti-gravity feelings in our stomachs and knees. and then an ultimate stillness reaps flesh across us like a harvest. we made love as the salamanders crawled the walls outside; we made love as a ballet was performed somewhere. we made maps when we made love, but you would never call it a dance even though you were a top-heavy ballerina. making love like this is a pirouette whose fractal is a battle between epitome and epithet. our bones will break painlessly as a sunset. with your telepathy I already know who will win-- it is easy to see where this whole thing is going. being so horrible at dancing is my ace in the hole-- it is my last idea. you knew this in my position of ecstatic weakness, just as you knew you would never know my last name and I would from time to time terribly miss you.

bikewreck the terse discussion of the thing is cursed. my fragments dispersed, I give to you dirt. a grit metaphor anomaly for organic talking mud of me. inherently, enclave of clay can’t bend sufficiently to sound; even dancers succumb to gravity (this, admittedly, is largely their beauty). my mind is the distortion pedal of experience not a transcendence, more a bit of obsidian trying to recall its past lava-lives to flow like an epic through a tainted lens and writing elegies for each grassblade might be a start or as significant as one I thought, lying facedown on a freshly-mowed lawn after a bikewreck with my nose bleeding red on green and the taste of it metallic and the smell of torn vegetation mixed with mowed dogshit; this earthen end to my hard ride today, but soon I will pedal home to record what I’ve found here-- an evidence of beauty held in my mouth a trapped but willing sound, even though I am tired of wrecks, even though I am terribly tired of the all of thinking of it.

cabin sailor

Diplomacy here be scuttlebutt. I realized that the womb must be screened. I can’t open the blood-caked eyelids to the scissors-blades of light to make a new day. It is you that I recognize, lovable leech. We all live as the Unrealized One. As particled sieves we go out and gold-dig. We gather enough day by day to pay the harpsichordist. I whimper about us eating lion-meat. I grew up in suburbs and have designer feet. Being spiritual is learning how to untie the knot you must immediately tie back before you perish. We choke the moments with our gravy-stained napkins. I cut the thread so the heat unravels. Metallurgy is a life-saver, to say the least about all of it. In the aftermath is a configuration of an altercation. Poets go to war so naive, no matter what terrorism. Dinner was divine; hang the valet upon the bestowed banister we forgave. I will follow a thread of crumbs through the maze of your etiquette. Nothing of beauty gets uttered on the plentiful table. The mortal coil wraps tighter around a cosmos-gift. We have matins late for matinees, we have slum-gourmets. Pack the trituration of the beasts and sell that. The mainsail flaps away like a butterfly on Valium over a chalky sea. Me, personally, I lived in the desert and then I moved to the sea. People are the same, just like every terrain is eventually. Wherever you go, they play the lottery.

Back there there was . . .

Shelton who so much depended upon a maintenance man, y’see we carted him home in a wheelbarrow one night after the whiskey and the cops were lenient at the Mansion bar in Carrollton.

And there was Tron the biggest black man I’d ever worked for, making sandwiches at the deli while blasting reggae Peter Tosh, onions, spicy mustard.

And Ronnie was he homeless? Retarded? Is he hurt? He carried his tennis rackets on his everyday trek around the town’s perimeters.

And Mandy, elf-like, junky-esque wrecking her parents’ cars into our parties and laughing when TV’s are thrown from roofs in the decrepit house across from the library parking lot.

And Charlie, the reincarnated Poe reading Hegel and awaiting a heat-stroke “down the long streets” we always drank 40’s, and tried to kill each other one way or another, every day.

And Craig, who made my lucky shirt truly lucky in a carwreck and he has the coolest scar now making his face the meridian of something as yet uncharted, but, Lynn’s got a line on it from some lunule vantage point, I’d expect.

And Andy who runs naked through the metaphysical briar-patch coming back with the scars the secrets of sexmagic and esoteric epithalamalions and he and I are bonded as Chaos is to Life Life is to Chaos as brothers born of another world’s womb. Quintessential orphans.

And Patrick spawned from a guitar and then adopted and Bob his brother spawned from a song played by action figures before he was born and Amy who will one day build guitars out of men, and Krystina will give birth to the most beautiful guitars!

And Sol lost in Homer on some ontological tundra harpooning whales with his poems, reeling them in then throwing them back, as mythic as the tribes and their artisan hands even though we once French-kissed he will never call me back.

And Amy Ayres, I loved you. You touched my face until it became beautiful. You make photographs out of eccentric people. You were the only owl in love with other owls. Those lovemaking sessions we had, those afternoons. Someone was pounding on my apt. door as you moaned. Trapped in our own self-made tower, you would perfect your lipstick immediately afterwards. I wish you would just spend one night with me. But, back to Atlanta.

And Ken Mallory, Jamie Davis, Amy Ericson who are forever the summers of my life to me and who know that I will love them--also Joe Elrod, Dirty Al, and Drummin’ Jason those pirates of sound, my friends in the sonic wasteland.

And for Bob and Jane Hill at the kennels of power-saws and suburban kestrels as Austin fishes somewhere with my negligent father and I collect seventy-seven berries of dreamsongs and one really eroded tome for I shall ponder all of them and when I finally decide to really read Shakespeare I will walk upon sonnets and not waste a step on those alcoholic bridges and the heartbroken and those hart cranes on cruiseships I can’t give advice to Mensa or Freemasons, but stay away from the poet that reads everything-- these are just some names that clog the gears and cogs of the great catastrophe-submarine where I man the helm poems caught in my baleen

a Tuesday night

All of the circles close off as if the serpents’ eyes had to be dilated to be fitted for bifocals and reptiles to me are sexless regardless of their (if any) genitals to them it is all heat waves even if they ever did look at their own non-existent crotches I am also here

I deal with me in the suburban kitchens where nothing shields it I talk to me, the lone larva

I await pupa I await cocoon stage I await the molting

I entertain myself with marionettes of appetites the metamorphosis to become super-altered give my the drugs by god! but the goddess refuses me I am altered to the nth degree and so I get a kiss in the Lady’s Room from the wrong mirror the aperture was ripped and the jukebox full of pogues called me a pussy and the wanna-be Hell’s Angel gets eighty-sixed by the bartender Ezra and so, this night ends as I stumble roughshod through snowbanks muttering words like “mother, stethoscope, yam, swingset, etc.” I was fucked-up, definitively.

I climb the stairs to my apartment to find the shower running and the oven characteristically bored as usual banjo, basket, shin-bone, scythe

Was this harvest-time or just a reason to gather? I have slept drunk through the solstice, I guess.

We ran into the sunset with awkward baskets, the children outpacing most of us; I knew it would continue past nightfall. Priapus beat us all to the field’s center. No one seemed to care about bones that littered the pastures or of what animals they had been left by. There were strong weeds here. Deep-rooted. Root and rot are so close.

The sound of string instruments being tuned keeps rabbits at their distances and let us know that songs were coming to fill the trampled fields with warm geometries and curves. And we are happy tonight, even though tomorrow the wars will begin again.

River stones, slender vines

I.

I am tendril, I am tentacle, I am sentience unfurled.

Sometimes when the moon is just right You can see past the swaying women, past Past, beyond the pendulous Street-lights (held up by birds Perched always on wires we left) Past the dying campfires (looking above I think; star-vein, I starve for you ore!) And into an evening. Into

constellations of trees swaying, weaving where the sun is wading in an uncertainty of pied glint sent an ad infinitum of dumb-again-ness. Days waiting to raise the curtains to the lit

hilt of procession. Whether infested weather or blessed, it’s light’s swordforehead shining in another radioactive encore as nocturnal things cover their faces insectivorously cursing and hobbling with wobbly asses

back to their openings in the earth. The winding pipeline of a vine released like a tongue, like a caterpillar, a worm

it is hung on a wall of crumbling mortar, it crawls over into a crevice past the beetles and millipedes exchanging intervals on mosaic patios. On close inspection, it seems to be craziness concealed in their exoskeletons! What scraping chords of music are occurring between those plates of chitin which we are deaf to? I seem to reveal myself in crushed thoraxes, broken bitten fingernails, and bloody cuticles.

Husk and ooze.

Noun and verb. The axis of life teeming on grids of ceramic plateaus, and all of this observed with binoculars from my third-story window.

Sentience equals: I am sent here with eyes, thus this.

Japanese dragons, these kites spinning above clotheslines and children as an ant is drowning in a rained-on bottlecap and a flower is deranged by a pollen-caked bee and goldfish revolve in the pond with seemingly-timed glitters lazily and my glasses glare with living grails of swimming and certain leaves are imbibed with alchemy, certain pads inscribed with poetry,

tiger lilies dropped above the empty page to plummet, in those time-lapsed freefalls and somewhere between paper and infinite space, or paint flung there by brush to canvas, the hue-spores in their pre-splatter, sight thrown between landscape and portrait the absolute being hitting its maximate that instant before that impact the sight before the eyeburst of pattern deciphered a flower falling to paper but not splashing through that canvas

not ever caught in the ink of it all

what we all attempt to be is the breath held before the impact of body

II.

What I do is try to capture a cat’s thoughts, but I may as well try to net in with a tennis racket or colander certain sunsets.

I am an assortment of burnt claws unraveling an afghan on fire. There is no time as I will crawl towards

you as the read is ugly as the read is an imperfect trail so many meters long. A vine unfurled.

Scorned trail a poetic tactic after lancing wound and taciturn romance of self-induced jawbreak which some call music, that is to say,

speak for all of us now and I shall say INK! INK, I love you, you gorgeous insatiable fucking visceral whore III.

It is impossible to postmark, corral, or test-tube it.

To straightjacket, toolbox, or hopechest it. To bottle or giftwrap or wallpaper it.

I desire it; inviting it into my livingroom. Drink to it, then, I drink it in. Holding it in

the palm of my hand, yes, there is some substance there. I paint it in a stream

of consciousness, painting lush burst bristles with wolves’ hair brushes.

Decanters of I overflowing before one drop becomes stroked canvas.

Placing it on the mantle rather than trying to dis- mantle it. There is no place for it

in any dialect or alphabet. It can’t be caught with parachutes or butterfly nets--although

scrolls seem to be scratched on the interiors of dried tortoise shells, runes etched in the veins

of sun-cracked animal hides or weathered snakeskins, fish-scales, theogonies withheld within seashells. Labyrinths

of the exposed paths, ores of the squamous and the morass of spores. I am a whore for the details of flesh, enmeshed

-ness of essence. Chitin-cracking sentiment. Textures. Sight into all of the crevices. I am peering through

portholes, foxholes, 1000X lenses, telescopes. I am gathering leaves, these veined, cracked, discarded

mandalas. I like to crackle them up in my hands; it is pleasing but only temporary, this fist of pleasure cringing.

I pick up a random handful of stones and throw them into the river. It’s like throwing a handful of commas.

IV.

River is tongue unfurled without regard to syllable it is rapid repeatable indoctrinal of infinite tendril, the swillswigspew of long drunken verse lyric universe skill of timid tentacle from cocoon coda of flow pliable unified verse sightscape trope elemental

V.

The stone liquefies through various chemical processes into fish and stream keeping pace with the Golden Mean numerology folding in and then hardening again at its origins flowing into the mouth of the canyon ions, atoms, vibrations spraying, mistfrothing, galloping and slipping into fissures of obsidian rushing as not to disturb the fossils within which lie pale and chalky in everlasting repose staring silent from the catacombs.

Yet it continues, still, climbing, gathering momentum, blasting from stone tired complacency (which makes or equals root when stone attempts another form) spreading liquid horse-forms and mastodons riding the crest of knuckling wave-breached banks.

These may be images of naive machinations, but still, observe: at this point we are river as well as oak, a question only of contingency. Rocketing up the outstretched arm of Pythagoras to become treeform, or a pyramid, a pinecomb, strobilus, coniferous. Riverflow, or spore waiting. I see them as the same. And I have

as the kid who never grew up enough to hate the difference between shapes. It all fans out like hymennopterons from the hive.

Life is either river or a flowing independent longing for riverbed. Either equivalent. Valence is important. I convalesce into this, an upstream breaststroke of form.

VI.

I mean this to be bad diction. Metamorphosis is not smooth, nor are rivers, or the diaspora of oakroots or tributaries. Grooves still are granular rivulets. Eroded eroders.

VII.

Solidifying suddenly on a crusted branch supporting the talons of a hawk and the window up under her wings where the instinct brought in more honorable things than science

is the wind that swallowed her beak and the velocity that pressed her to her prey and the exhaultation that snatched the hare upward in a flurry of pine needles and blood and the feathers that lifted and the heart that accepted the glory.

And falling from between the toes of the hunted a stone returned to the downstream epic. Don’t call this as much chance as harmony is, okay? Our dissonance is what makes us squeamish to the process.

And the tiny red mite between two hawkfeathers which witnessed all of the momentum and the taloned kill or nothing at all

because the great bird is his earth- equivalent, and he must forage as well. Keeping a nose to the ground. And I forage

for images, and I watch the birds and the river and the mountain with my handful of pebbles,

knowing the truth; knowing what it is that is impossible to hold and loving the hurt like a bramble on the brazened crag of it. I have nothing to throw my rocks at, yet, I have so much to say.

I have no use for mountains, no use for flesh that resigns to reside in its finite. Lakes should all be slaked gleams. Bad residue is memory. Good residue is algae, sludge, and scum. Husk and ooze.

Noun and verb. Let life come again from as much slime as I can drool, my words becoming primordial pool.

VIII.

An iota or drop, call it a stone, as insecure as form is, I mean exactly! Look at any given rock, at its diversity; that is called

Insecure Form. It has so many faces even in its compact density. It has desire for surge.

Stream, river, cave-carve, stone, frozen erosions. I am tendril; I am tentacle; I am sentience unfurled. I cocoon perpetual; every womb is a world. Tendrilous-umbilical-penumbra. Birth, vision, eternal vine

I tie myself to. Vein of ore of vein of man entwined.

Ablutions of strands running down our torsos in reprimand of land. Showers. We understand that that place is free. And so languid is the humanshape if we agree to relinquish scape. I love to let trees rip into me like sharks. Simple as a picnic, I become earth. Smelling the sun. Vinepaths. Vernacular sunburns. Raisins. Yearn for Autumn is the longest shower Nature takes before exiting naked into the cold

leaves

*

A God that is a river whose tributaries lead to you to that river you can river in in rivulets, you give droplets, fragments your soul liquid to God bloodwine-we, by the iota, flow and now we have become what it is that is heading towards an ocean to empty.

More uniform than snow. Unto you I bequeath the holy undulate. Whole-I is holy.

Arms outstretched. My tentacles. Testicles full of seed. My tendrils. My sunsets. My tiger lilies. My cocoons, my wombs, my flesh. My afghan you run with unraveling into nothing. My spores in my grottoes. My mosaic patios sporadic with dragonflies. My millipedes. My words. My branches roots creeks I love you’s. My offspring in pods and pools, as life is either a single drop or scattered ameba of spores blurred into ions, I revere, concur, I spur the stallion of I into the waters (palavers of splattering mutterers) to make a crossing, and:

we will meet:

Fresh water (flesh) Salt water (soul)

Together, merger, my eyes sting no longer.

*

Riversurrender. To name chosen ocean to spill into. Engulfing. I scream unpronouceables towards waves and in the surf I heard not zephyrs but my own name coming back to me not as echo but murmur you can only hear it if you are underwater thinking of words only submerged can you name it, there, in womb-form and drowning in soul that self-selfless river that seabound tributary

special delivery

I found an ingenious way to bite off my own ears and wait until the blood of sound drips down the contour of my jawbone and makes a beard of the Word.

And the technique of being marsupial unto myself, a spirit in its pouch and its subtle nuances sometimes sublime antics, a pro- crastinator of space and time.

I am the philoso-spy for you. I will help get you off to a particular erosion, a metaphoric wave encroaching. I will get your rocks off one way or the other.

A flatbed full of gravediggers and books comes up the drive. I can’t make the payments, I say. No matter, they start unloading the truck on the walkway.

I sign for the stuff; what else can I do? Makes no difference. These leaflets have been initialed by the centuries. I hang the invoice on a nail inside the front door like a hospital clip-board. I grab the first text and begin to read all of the words I once could have written.

Sound of distant doors shutting

You have your papers I see for it is imperative here on these borderlands to be one who is well documented.

This affidavit is a forsworn coming storm. Who can negotiate a scirroco’s twisting. There is an empty hut you will keep-up and you will be apprenticed to the fifth of the elements which is silence. You will cobble the spaces between the stones with your breaths. Never touch the skulls in the niches and nooks. No studies of the fossils. Chasmophilia here is punishable by death. You are forbidden to think for yourself unless you are now the wind. The wind will know it if you do so, and then all bets will be off. Yes it is at hand, an oracular tension. Shut tight the ragged gates of the epoch. You must learn to walk into truth while constantly looking over your shoulder. Your temperance, your significance.

Acolyte, you’ve graduated. The mantle hangs above the vacant hearth. A half-singed note in a foreign tongue lies discreetly in the ash.

The Escalator Prophet

This is the land of promises, a convention of delivery-men awaiting gift-wrapping across the continent quite disconcerting. We are all excellent chefs with a flare for garnish thanks to the satellite dishes and we conceal well under elegant garlands our sinister landscaped greenery. The moment was harpooned, then netted in pontification, reeled in, so to speak, made par, ex cetera. It was out on the deck of that chartered pontoon vessel that it all came out, all affairs, all of us nefarious. Bad weekend. We could have caught sharks with cancer cures in their genes way ahead of technology but we had no imaginations. We fill our luggage with animal rights pamphlets and pearls of stringent sharkskin-slabs. We can get through customs what we must to hang onto customs. There are so many events that they must be stored in the skyscraper-file-cabinets. We have always been exemplary secretaries for our own bosses that are bullhorns toxic to us. We carry our bosses at our hips like bullets without guns. Bumperstickers will make the endangered species lists soon enough. Scrambling signals with gradually altered signatures. My belly is a funny font. I stare at God’s thighs for a moment through tinted plate glass. Perfect ass will always bring us back to base level. I need perfect brigands escaping on ships of legends with bagpipes playing I need allegory I need hope! Not a brand of soap called HOPE. Forests won’t always flourish in the city’s heart with their islands of anthills and squirrels like struggling Minoans or the island of Manhattan. I ponder the lost discs of Frisbees. Can we please relearn to play. The world is made of parks not lots. The sound of the vacuum cleaner or microwave hum brings you home but don’t live there. Here we are heeding fire safety with skulls full of infernos. We eat smart on top of our silos. Here with arsenals at our disposals drooling our loss of aesthetic. We cultivate broods of scorpions to kill the other breeds’ children. It’s just logical. Only human. We could save each other riding the Jacob’s Ladder escalator as the skyscraper implodes. We could meet that violence we make. I will hold the fork from now on at an angle that says “I love All”. I will pacify the globe with pretty airplanes.

I wish we could all lie down in June on my birthday the twelfth and see the same constellation.

Can’t look at you for long the lighter of the lamps is unemployed. his stilts lean against a dumpster. no one ever trashes them or salvages them for firewood. disposal and disclosure are the downtown’s paradigm of reprisal. I wear binoculars when just shopping around. if anyone were to stare, the lenses would shatter I am sure. what isn’t magnified? what isn’t rapacious with rapture? we all have ice-cream headaches on the highways. I try to even the odds by making them bigger. constantly larger than life in order to live a prognosible life. all of my permission slips have been signed. my soul is on consignment. rag-shops of the mind where I hang my endless coats. my binoculars turn inward until they root in the optic nerve. I have seen the light that curves around all bodies like a foreign tongue..

A star on the couch of the psychologist

Volatile very open I’ll be. I hope you all die as beautifully as me. Because when I kiss the brevity, eternal bliss of the quasar abyss, as I disperse across the offices of the universe, volatile very open I’ll be beguiled upon the lips of creation, the entropy the black hole, the infinite discretion no molecubicle with enough gravity to resist the pull. A wreck happens so lovely; all of it chocks up to light always being always. I have always been dying slowly, my failing engine born with and within me. I am jealous of Antarctica, how its lights sparkle under me, and the madness of the prolific snow! I am jealous of even myself, how I shine, and I am wary of that final imploding end.

A way of getting there

How’s your scrapheaps coming, men? Destiny presented me with several refill rolls of Scotch tape, said, “get to the collage of the deluge of borderlands, southern boy.” As I have demonstrated, I have no idea what constitutes collagistry, that fine art. However, I do have an uncanny lexicon of fragments in the ol’ bean. Okay, I’ll paint wings on your ankles for you; I’ll even hold the whiteblue hot firebrand in my bare hand while reciting the last four chapters of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem in order to be your friend. It’s the most glorious scam, all sleight of hand. I’ll airmail myself to you, my love, in a wooden crate. I’ll need crossword puzzles, a quilt, some sandwiches. I’ll pop out with a half-eaten cake and give you a bicep necklace. I’ll break the beer-mug on some driftwood in the stale air at the bar. The waitress won’t like it; she’ll probably make an announcement. I let it all hang out like the tail of a mare. Tell me this: can you say I have not had bliss? I’ll gather the metaphysical scrapmetal. I’ll construct the makeshift ramshackle vehicle. I’ll speak in tongues of angel creoles and pidgins as I rickety-rocket ratchet through these Midwestern streets. Your windows will all explode into the poems they truly contain. These words map out just where I’ve been, the gates where passion meets chagrin. It’s an easy rhyme. A good time.

episodic

And a lot of the idiocy of it is an allotment of love falling short of sufficient apparatus.

But we can graft certain unrelated varieties of trees together in order to birth mutated fruit.

And we can use the trees continually as a sky-mesh while lying under them on our backs. And we can walk towards monuments tongue-in-cheek, shufflingly and hope for some universal knowledge after already knowing too much. And our retribution will be the beauty of a can-opener when there are no longer any more canned goods. And someone then will craft a spear. And we will hunt live game riding suped-up motorcycles while wearing the skins of our fathers and helmets made from melted handguns and rifles. We’ll be hootin’ an’ a hollerin’ out on the plains. Or maybe we will just start it all over again. Brash headlong to the far horizons is man’s kind.

still have some teenage angst

They made a bet that I could not ride the mad Palomino. My step-father put me up for stake. A case of whiskey bet on my saddle-savvy. Of course I went down and hard in a splatter of hurling mud-tufts and manure-scrud. Blood. Twelve stitches it was. He whipped me for embarrassing him after I got home from the hospital. Then I cleaned the putrid sawdust full of weevils out of the stall of our old sweet roan. The gentlest nag you’d ever seen. Complacent, really. I will kill him with the prowess with my will. I will ride bridled thunder across his impotence of compassion. My youth destroying all of the bitterness of men down before their time, before their prime. I will kill him with my jawbone, standing above the weathervanes in an electrical storm, and I will become what it is he could never comprehend. I will become a poet then.

leaving the Coliseum

As final as the decision of the last bowl of popcorn we are goddammit gone. Tempting edge will not hold us to a commitment of partake. We have slaked so fat that it has become superslack. Spar with your own latent desire. I’ll try to be pat. The event was not worth the ticket.

I’ve been really scalped. More blood in those 16oz. cups boys!

More for the luck of it all! Usually I end up with a black eye and the wrong partners. Kernels of blood on me eyelids, babies and grids of my fingers in the mud making sorrows.

I get my ass kicked, yep. I will remember how to stand with an exacting forthwithal. What to say and exactly when like an eloquent scalpel. And your face against the pillow a precise insignia of how I have won you with no skin off of my back. Calluses are elsewhere and all over the continents mapped upon my flesh and littering the treaties I’ve broken within my mind. The silent earthquake awakens me.

It’s always: to the games! To the games! Through the maze to the games!

New apt. and a photograph

There’s a beautiful girl who loves me and I sigh an archipelago of pop-songs. And another, a beautiful man loves me, and I gasp an isthmus. Can we deny that this was the apartment we all wanted to inhabit? Clean is this cleavage, and equal. Decor anonymous, yet palpable. I adorn you with succor. Sweetness, you are. There’s a beautiful girl who loves me; I am gasping on her shore. Constellation you, constellation us. Posh plush illuminous. You let me get gory and I like that. You disparage my more evil music. Coo-bird, you are outside on the air-conditioner. You sing about the window. I say chain; you say deadbolt. I say houseplant; you say it’s perfect. A feral ferret speaks in my ear by the minute so it’s not my fault. You’ve admitted to studying the linoleum patterns in the bathroom as well, and this was a shared sacrament. If I’m a sailboat, then you are a pinion or winch or a pulley or a monkey-wrench. It works out dine. We never look into each other like we know we do. And the supernova is our bedsheet. Hit me again with that handful of orchids! I never get enough of your symphonic violence. I never understand it that I don’t though.

like an idea

Like an idea on an awning, please linger, but don’t procrastinate even if the expert hangs the paintings in mid-air or makes holograms please just come through for me. The ledging of the moment for the moment replaces all surreal edges. Skein kills piece piecemeal in my hectare. So I shed you to wear you to a better occasion.

Please just come through. Fantocinni dancing to foghorns. You are the reader I made love to. Those sounds fishtailing in your mind’s palate of mesh. Sounds are doors so just come through them. Open your heart to my shabby furniture when you enter this parlor. I know no one ever gets past the lobby and its hazel ornations. The chandeliers rattle with rasps of crystal. I’m now so awake that light hurts. By itself it seems uncommon that these daggers of my eyes go in as well as out. That you brought to me the magazines from Venice; yes, you came through. The horse was left to die on its own, said the letter. This is this or that’s secret codification. That you received a burn across your entire body on some winsome beachhead. Our freckles once made sacred words but now you have a tan. No matter. I am just happy that you came through. You walked out of you and right through me in order to.

the bee’s knees

I was ravenous for that particular particle knowledge of binding. Where the tin slats’ molecules give way to rust, ice, stalactites, or alchemy.

And whatever drips there is sweet distillation. Ions and crystallization. No harm has come to me of this. Purity, I try to assist the union of something. I know I have cavities.

To bind peripheries with the cords of my eyes and the knots of my crude associations unraveled from the twines of a heart’s core and the mind’s receptacle to make the weaver.

Slipknots and hook-nooses. Falling through the gallows with your buffeting cash. Someone throws a silver dollar into the absolute silence. It spins and you never call it. Terrified.

You will beat nature again by succumbing to its tendency to change. It always will get un-theorized. That’s nature’s secret, they say. All facts were meant to be broken over the knee of any possible probability.

This must mean that we are frustrated among an infinite number of knees.

Found Poem: Attack Moves on the SoulEdge Arcade Game

Discus Thrower Wasp Stinger Rock Climber Phoenix Tail Sky Splitter Shin Slicer Buffalo’s Charge No Escape Tornado Windstorm Tidal Wave Thunderstrike Cut-to-Pieces Steel Slicer Piston Attack Leg Slicer

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Death Spin Drilling Horn Windmill Kick Blackmail Great Loop Wheel Turner Shooting Stars Brain Masher Thunder and Lightning Cross Cutter Lightning Strike Spiral Attack Reaping Hook Flapjack Whirlwind Sledgehammer

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Tricky Tangle Spinning Sparrow Sunrise Slice Triple Wave Whiteflash Sparrow’s Revenge Maiden Revenge Meteor Shower Moon Flip Starlight Explosion Angel Strike Axle Kick The Conductor Mountain Crusher Angel’s Punishment Skyscraper

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Heaven’s Swing Thunderstorm Praying Mantis Hailstorm Deadly Rose Twin Harpoon Demon Elbow Harpoon Driller Leg Trap Crazy Windmill Killer X Rope Attacher Rat Chase Punisher Whip Dark Shredder Rope Skipper