The first-ever satellite images of you

Stranded upon pain inflicted desolation

The process of coming to pieces:

Nocturnal carnivorous planetoid

Moon in your mouth

They hint at remarkably renewed unfriendliness

It’s the same face we all see

Precious and cracked

Your isolated body orbiting

In its bitter ******

Where no sunlight ripples through

The string dangling between your legs

All the children hidden underneath your navel

Have fled down to Earth

To live or die in documented nightmares of their own

~
drawn to a twinkling
crown of muted lights

a moment in the waterfront
of your eyes

in between circadian rhythm
and a place called irresistible

there we listen to sun-filled hymns
and children's laughter

not caring what comes after...
~

~
Saturn Jupiter Mars,
three blind mice running
up the clock to find freedom.

starlight stairs in abyss,
cities of the interior ring
carry a dangerous cargo: citizens.

t-minus one/this is fear

I am no astronaut,
I'm a refugee, bleeding hands pressed
tight to the barbed-wired fence.

we play charades from the window,
lunar phases keening
in the tender light of these infant wars.

t-minus one/this is fear

farewell threshold on laudanum,
the grifted gift of the Joe Blakes
painted from memory.

the far off observation
telescoping my fear, leading me
to believe I'm hiding in plain view.
~

thin. paper thin.
here is a bonus. (or is it bogus?)

the order of release.
the order of dead pages gliding in the wind.

advertisements for adopting a lonely asteroid or building fire extinguishers in your spare time.

the rain of acceptance comes with dark clouds of shipping and handling.

just check the appropriate box and send it in. send it in now!

~
Dead ahead
The target is always
On a similar horizon
It's about surviving
Every blasted thought
More than eliminating all threats
When they strike
They form castellated holes
That network new fears
To long existing trauma
Careening off the deep seams of life
In intervals of jagged breath
I become part of the debris
A genuine tourist attraction
The size of a crater
Even after nothing else
Remains of my former self
~

~
Sleep, no sleep
No making plans
New bed linens eat my dreamland
And settle in the wilderness of my ever-opened eyes

I see you
I see me
I see everything
I'm a play with no final curtain
The story continues unabated
And the ridiculing light of day
Is as sacrosanct as an unused blanket
Nonetheless, I'm checking in
Sleep, O sleep, swallow me
~

Grey skies
flying moor
storm in a teacup
gas cell 4
the clock hands are matchsticks
...
The letting go of everything
in hopes of trimming the airship
this seat is no longer taken
...
In love with a bad idea
the zeppelin and the magnetism
closing in beyond the minimum safe distance
...
Dim blue flame
a psalm of survival:
days and peoples and places
are transatlantic numbers
crawling from the wreckage
the clock hands are matchsticks

It's hard to know from where you rang out, and how the tone changed from memory to sorrow. Perhaps all those little cuts from the knife of Aristotle came with a price. Or maybe the polygraphic wildlife detected in your letters, enough to stir the inner fabric of my womb, drew out the scent. This is more than obligation, child. This is about the seasons of force or choice. And how the aural disintegrations from your mouth sound so effortlessly submitted and submerged. I fear they've turned to acceptance, their floral remnants as besieged as a Sarajevo Rose. My love for you will never live on the margins. This love is a tree-lined battlement. An endless voyage on the barometric sea.

It's so hard to know from where you rang out. But worse, I suppose, to hear nothing at all. Nothing until ambulance day. And the words a mother should never have to endure.

~
In the mist of late night solitude,
                 from a mislaid plateau,
                 with a suitcase full of sparks

She observes constellations
        reflected as little needy eyes,
                        peering down at her

They could be midnight directives,
       postcards from distant nebula
                            suspended in gaffa

       "Ne t'enfuis pas..." She exhales

Still she wonders:

        will her children grow to love
          their perfect machines more
                                    than they love
                  their imperfect mother?
~

Boy meets girl.
Girl marries boy.
Baby comes nine months later
— blessed little killjoy.

Boy neglects girl.
Girl henpecks boy.
There'll be hell to pay
for slighting Helen of Troy.

Such an elegant fear,
this alliance, and yet,
when it's held in selfish hands
it merrily dissolves,
turning as tedious
and drab as Shakespeare.

Boy annoys girl.
Girl leaves boy.
It takes a special kind of madness
in building to simply then destroy.

Turn the other cheek
and Judas will kiss that one too,
reduce the bairn's fever
by visiting daddy's igloo.

Weekends are pay toilets
and happy meals,
frustration is a word all too real.
When did antipathy begin to rule?
About the time diplomacy was forced
into playing the fool.

The good times no one catalogues,
this life has gone straight to the dogs.
The Iditarod Trail extends
from Seward to Nome.
Run the race and make believe
the kids are tucked in safe at home.

According to Dorothy
there's no place like it.

~
Bergamot morning

the astronauts are sleeping

and she dreams like a mannequin

ceiling stars abound

like hummingbirds in celestial flight

about the nectar of

young bodies, young machines

we drew a map together

from burst to bloom

from fever to neckline

from scale to mirror

pretty scar, a thing of awe

when the curious girl

realized she was under glass

raining in time lapse

she traversed me ad rem

with might and main

I didn't have the heart

to wake us from

her brainchild's motif
~

Technological giants

We learned early

How to command our angels

To ascend higher than our sins

They offered us immortality

In exchange for our planet's wealth

And naturally

We signed on the dotted line

Like spies selling

Secrets to the enemy

But here we are now

With the well run dry...

~
Learning to patch. Learning to mend.
Learning to venture. Learning to comprehend.
Learning to capture and befriend.

Inventing the berry. Inventing the cream.
Inventing sweet slices before bedtime
and the Fragaria colored dream.

Loving new life. Loving each child.
Securing the stem and raising the vine
by loving the wife.
~

~
stationary now
duct tape loves
mouth and hands

inside removable interiors
heliocentric discontinuities:

the racket club
and the backstroke
the rabid club
and the hallucinogenic backchannels

swallowing too many placebos
on his balcony
facing away from the sun
blank diary entry
open on the table
'from despair to where?'

stationary in the trunk now
he says it will all
make sense soon
~

~
Optimize
Arborize
Centralize
Personalize
Give recognition its own library
Its own USB port

An evening of multiple connections
Hardwired and soothingly modem
Transmits my thoughts into you

I know your voice
I know your body
And how they work together
To leave a clear network to my heart
~

Man.
Woman.
Ghost.
Little wind in their sail.

Boat.
Watercraft.
Impulse.
Limited space on board.

Free from heart. Free from clothes.
Drunk together for a swim.
Errant, disinterested kiss, planted
under the keel.
A sparse ****** isosceles is struck.
Parts are muted and slit-eyed.
Parts are surface tension.
Parts are counterparts.
She pulls away, running below deck
and vigorously brushing her teeth
before weeping.
The razor of night struggles to sleep.
The sharp object thrown overboard.
No one wants to be first or last.

"We're out of words and moons and stars, there's no tenderness in us..." she said. "When did our love become the stab of ultimatum?"

~
lost library books
and broken lunchbox thermos,
her childhood under a forgotten
leaf on a pond.
she's attracted to the sound
of the breeze through her hair,
inner-city birds recommending
she listen with her head underwater,
to experience it as a fish might.
this is inescapable.

blood roses in the snow,
her unemployed martyred
fingers in the factory.
the manufactured years go by
at a price too great to recover from.
for every flash of beauty,
there is a hint of anger; a dash of violence.
this is inescapable.

her sleep-flower recital
in a dew-swathed spring morning hospital,
some kind of faraway pink funeral for
dead trees and traffic lights.
treasure impaired clouds capture
an isolated moment in time.
perhaps several moments.
perhaps several parts of the same moment.
this is inescapable.
~

~
black tie, bare feet,
a walk through dandelions,
following the scent of wine
and mirthful promise

phosphenes and paresthesia
—slow dazzle motif;
the bluebird of happiness
echoes in a shallow bay;
pieces of places to claim as theirs:
moth wings, flower petals,
and blades of grass

seduced by eventide,
unhurried mouth(s), lips searching
and soft, all words seem to have
a few extra vowels;
sudden ubiquity
to collisions and slippages,
cultivating suggestive shapes
from aleatory arrays
of objects and forms

in the surf they mingle and link,
emancipating adrenaline;
they love like they were
water for life
~

I dreamt I still knew myself the moment you turned your face to me

you were about to enter a very personal space: a diary, a dream journal, a shoebox of love letters, a suicide note, the angry ramblings of a madman

Standing on the bridge where we're no longer suffering, the dream exhaled

and joy found eternity running over the closing frame, floating away in every direction where time intervenes

~
if you're feeling sinister tonight, come inside the darkroom. picture yourself pouring over mental images of a demure young botanist, loitering around the trapdoor of nostalgia, kissing someone new for the first time.

now imagine she is conscious and clustered in titillating blur, her smile beachy and airborne, with only the slightest suggestion that something troublesome is lurking underneath.

can you see her double exposure? totally tranquil, she poses with an arsenal of poisonous plants, as if she’s already slipped their venom into your tea.
~

step right in
where commodity and fiction
are deliberately blurred,

electrostatic dust collector,
after-shower body air-driers,
a spatially disconnected
from the world roll-on wife
complete with a dining table
that sinks into the floor;
don't tell her she's an android;
just don't.

she is captured
and ever ready,
she was a stenographer
but quite unsteady,
her mouth a spark of vowels
when her far off places
are aroused.

repeat this soothing motto — space, place, memory.

outside is scenographic sensation:
lightology. unbreathed air. porcelain skin.

she's the soft electric assurance
of a better life — the life which rests on device alone — a strong, sweet poison which infects the blood.

she is "the light of any home"...

a desire to erase,
to stay away forever.

an opportunity to transfigure,
to sit on the floor and wait for storms.

a line to cross, a lion at dusk,
a catastrophist.

a pen filled with acid,
a book of theories full of holes.

once this begins, there are only endings.

She egresses from a pool of blue and straight into the colorless, Californian dregs of summer.

Each passing plane reminding her how stuck she is.

The question remains whether some people are doomed to just survive, a yearning for freedom following them around, until they learn to numb themselves to such aspirations.

Faraway trains pass by.

The sound in their whistles knowing the events she will litigate with herself for years to come until it empties the contents of her soul.

~
...he dreamt of her,
the one who could dance about
twin suns in cantina lace,
course through the veins
like power converters,
and scare far more
than a pack of raiders on the prowl.

...she who laid out
in the sands of Anchorhead,
and became a seductive sculpture,
her howls mixing with the wind
through Beggar's Canyon,
and turning into flame,
ascended like nomadic campfire
in an ocean of night
as far off as Mos Eisley.

...the one resembling Camie,
who bought farm water
for her off-world thirst,
he dreamt of her, you know,
he dreamt they would inevitably marry,
and settle down deep in the feral
of their desert love.
~

I feel the weight of nearly a hundred moons upon this suggestive flight deck, overtaken by transfusion in a high formation rhythmic way. Fluorescent headphones—neon red, rotate around neutral zones. Push in, pull out. Swim under the pink, towards some aerobatic link to mother earth. And still, we're not in orbit yet. Your dawning glow you blow into my lungs. Will you catch me if I blast away?

~
alone and an imposter,
deep in syndrome.

she absorbs the frost of seasonal ghosts
and hopeless feelings
of death and darkness.

she only shows one side of her every time.
she calls a random number
from a bar in the middle of the night,
seeking to confess
or find solace in the voice of a stranger.

but any stranger might just happen to be
a lie detector.

still she lays bare all the duplicity
and fragmentation of self:

prescription bottles with two different names,
elaborate façades in Los Angeles
and in New York,
so complicated she creates
something she calls the lie box.

inside her purse there's a collection
of file cards. "I tell so many lies," she says.
"I have to write them down and keep them
in a box so I can keep them straight."

alone she waits for either
sweet apricity or identikit:
each a memento of her faces.
~

coloring inside the lines is impossibly bleak,
with a hissing noise
atomic locomotive
rounds the bend,
extrasensory perception is not
a mindless gift,
it's a train station in the clouds,
tracking all my starting points to you,
nothing in the middle,
nothing at the end.

you leave in opera
with secrets and grievances
under the radar,
and your ready-made
wings catch in the power lines,
you're coiling like smoke
in the arches of my cathedral,
a sense of elegant decay
while sweeping up the debris,
committing arson
with the paraffin of my temporal lobe.

yesterday's fairground waltzes,
ghosted lullabies,
and woodland hymnals,
set in a context not of
resolution and closure,
but of contradiction and assimilation,
break the bond,
away they float on purveyor belts,
one too many molecules,
one too many departures,
always on the surface of everything,
nothing in the middle,
nothing at the end.

~
The name on my lips
is a prophecy

An unsustainable breath of life

It sparks revolutions
both for and against

To say it is to pray it
in a word, a phrase, a life sentence

And it lies scattered on the beach

Put your ear to a seashell
and listen

Listen for the sound of terrible canyons of static

Of plastic birds
decomposing trees

Things we lost in the fire

Listen for the starvation tapes

For the voice of people who eat darkness
and make big fires out every little syllable

Listen for the work of reformatting spiders
spinning social webs to burden and ensnare
naïve reckless hearts

Listen for the heartless aftermath
and the building blocks of sheer madness

Listen for the sound of weeping
at the memory of peace
~

~
Mermaid in a manhole
suffering hibernation sickness
she drinks in every sob like wine
her oceanic call reverberates
whilst speaking dead languages
into the receiver
but slipping off melancholy
and blown a wish
by hide-and-seek lips
she chooses an unfamiliar light

****** with scissors
throbs of undamaged energy
from her vernal equinox
but in love with a bad idea
and beyond the minimum safe distance
she no longer plays at fragile volumes
and careful times
hands playing butterfly
pinch nippled skin
she chooses an unfamiliar light
~