~
scarlet wind sails
upon an ultrasounding wave,
postcards from tiny islands;
nebulous, indefinable, floating,
fresh as a field
of crackerjacks;
nodding happily
from minute one,
celebrating the mountains
and valleys of being alive
in excelsis; irresistible and impish
in its understated insinuations.
~

undecipherable loss
  • [it's steeper near the roses]

attenuation
  • [the mystery in the trees
  and the mistral sound of your breathing]

dreams of perfection: floral dress summer
  • [the apnea and the scream]

a touch of labyrinth to this world
  • [in the fair and harmless light]

imagine somewhere close by
  • [imagine him waving as you say goodbye]

~
Daydreams
in passing with the clouds,
and their weary structure,
and their idle loneliness,
and their struggle for tomorrow.

You and me and the image of an immense tree; satellites hanging from its branches like minacious ornaments; sending frightful messages to far out places; convincing us television is real but our lives are fake.

Nightmares
in passing with the shadows,
and their elusive silhouette,
and their active aggression,
and their march for tomorrow.

You and me and the image of a school bus sliding down into the ice...
~

I saw an old man crying at
the precipice of his sanity,
ten stories above the sea,
and the world at his feet, a helo-deck:
a principality that had the worn out lay of home.

So trivialized.
So fantasized.
So immobilized.
Transmitting pirate-radio-waves eternally.

Seized the tower.
Hoisted the flag.
Crowned the queen.

"I've no blood right, only a passport," he said. "But do have the right mindset: I can't leave, we're so dangerous. Don't be a stranger now, we'll never be this dangerous again..."

~
Prescience
of dawn:

a sunny place
for shady people.

Long shadows
on the lawn
of a thin pixelated
crowd,
in parade
of blood red
sorrows.

But your curtains
are always
drawn.

You hide
behind
smooth and sterile
surfaces.

Finish your
collapse
and stay for
breakfast.

Buildings aren't
haunted,
people are.
~

~
"Leave the lights off and on,
I feel mysterious tonight,"
she says.

"Every time you look different,"
replies her careful ecstasy.

Practice makes perfect,
and from chaos comes 💋 (kissing).
She floats free from
her own body's outer reaches:
The mirrorball and the mystic circle.
The mirrorball is a light
for attracting attention.
The mystic circle
is an unsustainable trance.

"Will I dream during the process?" she asks.

"Only if you know the wild that wants you," chants the infinite unsayable yes.
~

I wrote to you in broad bold letters.
I wrote it on a tree.

You know the one, remember
—it called to us from the middle of the garden.

Sassafras: our secret token.

Winter's stillbirth is soon upon us,
and our placement in the sun in peril.

But I have whispered it all to stones
now ****** into the sea.

Remember the tree, and pray I live long enough to dream in its hollow.

freckled cheeks / soft decibels

dress wearing
wine taster
dreamcatching
manhunter

an attraction
to green and yellow
an aversion to blue

an imprint of her muted form
under a name that hides her

she often lies there
in a shimmer
a bit of a sleeping beauty

in the pleasing shape
of Wisconsin / Illinois

whose charms
are revealed
like arcane secrets
only to those
with patience,
persistence,
and a lack of proximity
to heavy machinery

~
Storms make grey the sea
And erode the surface of the shore

Cold resentful icebergs
Outside my window
A field of sinking liquid caskets
Closing in on me

I hear the sound
Of toy pianos underwater
Remnants of their music keep
Washing up on achromatic beaches

Songs that made love shine
Have fallen into shipwreck
A missing charter's rusted hull
Casts the one color heaven allows

Storms make grey the sea
And erode the stages of the sun
~

Handing out wings

like they were portions of God

this narrow asphalt

made by architects of tourism

movers of time and space

reaching out like insane astronauts or genius heretics

breathing our iodine

becoming halogens

the sky moves sideways

dystrophic airwaves

feeble beacons

eerie radio silence

here come more perils from the sky

~
Moving beyond the sun
to where our minds
are a fraction behind us,
believing they've found
the other-side.

I am glass shattered by redemption,
and I am now the shadow
of a mirrored divinity,
for somewhere out there
is a god resembling my face,
and its nakedness stares me down.

Raising eyebrows at the moon
as if this is love's culprit,
yet, opening arms and minds welcome
the thereupon lust as if
some devoted era:
bow and arrow shapes
of you and me,
falling out of love without travail,
but of constant ease.

I look better in black and white
than in vulnerability,
my exploitation of
private earth looms casual,
though I'm well aware
of the vibrations it sends.

Manipulators of love and war
were all we really wanted to be,
cheating destiny
by falling for the future.

And from this side of our mind
the sun was always cold,
just a vague old relic in a fresh grave:
a princess ruling among
the ruins of past decisions,
and happily she gives
a stagnant kiss of consequence.

Recommitted wind breaks
through, like turning, burning
pages desperate to speak.

But I'd rather that her white lies
take me now, than a waking grasp
or a skirmishing wave
terrorize me,
as this black [media] plagued sun's
desecrated heart bleeds
and recalls to mind
the coming blasphemy.
~

~
Weather balloon for a hat
propeller on his back
morning is observably alive

leaving it to atmospheric pressure

he consumes today's newspaper
with the enthusiasm of a bowl
of Corn Flakes

this Heath Robinson contraption
of getting to work first
over enemy lines
is all the rage in his satirical
state of mind

that is until the absurd derailment
of wartime employment

and so he returns home with tubes
and catheters attached to his body
and feeling like one
of the unwieldy machines
he had so often created

full of atmospheric pressure

and apparently thinking it
an undignified fate
he pulls out the tubes
and quietly dies
of his own invention
~

Soft shoulders

shoreless summer

out of the sinking

and onto the floatation

hunting for mermaid

while taking islands

along the river's mutiny

blue coda dreamwater

but fire in the organism

the hour is thin

the ice is even thinner

Taken by the reckless wind
Lost in distant clouds
         And here the fall of her hair
         Tethers my mind to the sky

"Memory is more indelible than ink."
—Anita Loos

~
Europe, after the rain,
the sun lending warmth and comfort.
fringes come into focus.
shadow journal,
fiscal dreams,
becoming ****** lines on a page;
procession bells
for young brides,
veiled in lace.
a touch from her
outstretched hands,
this honeymoon phase
running up the thigh,
the holding quite still until
she smiles for pendulum.
at first light, breakfast in bed,
granting pastel wishes on
boxing night,
then a letting go of the kite string.

new fingers in the medicine bottle,
tiny geometries
inside a house of reciprocal numbers.
paradise in mnemonic children:
cartwheels and handstands,
coloring books of
neglected spaces,
future ruins.
one hundred violins
play to isles of ignorance,
stray embers settle
along the solemn Chemin De Fer (railway).
a catalogue of afternoons
on the bike path
thru propeller seeds and dragonflies.

arriving in the haloed flesh:
skin dive,
the place of couloir descent;
**** beach,
the place of odd glances;
gun chamber,
the room of secondary light;
all horizon variations.
an algebra of darkness,
this dense Roman twilight,
their exiles unreflected
in blind lanterns.
our brightness will become
refracting silhouettes,
a broken yolk in the incendiary sky.
~

~
I work in the clouds
Building a world out of hype
I could be a beekeeper
A prison guard
Reverse pop idol
Extinguishers, all

Hackers ferry contemporaries
Around the diseased city
Merchants of transference
Polymorphing
Paths and angles
Pieces of eight

They could be brutal war fantasies
White noise translations of the snow
Cathedral nights in the deli
Ghost recordings from an opera house
Each with its own price tag

All the pretty girls
Thick with mascara
Go to plasticity
Drink chloroform
100 aspects of subterranea
So long as they come home
With a credit problem

Money devotion
It's what transferred us
Into numbered silhouettes
Slavishly pouring our blood into the sea
~

the cult of the ideal woman.
silent era mignon.
pass the baton.

a little diplomacy.
a little electricity.
and a waterfall of curls.

she moves with the fayre.
I see her idling on Fifth Avenue
and at work behind the counters
of the stores.

besotted men plant young, leafless trees upside-down,
roots in the air, simply because
she wants it that way.

a groundbreaking end
to The Broken Oath,
and her name on the credits
for the very first time.

screens, fans, and umbrella stands.
or maybe lilies in a field of seclusion.
she is stardom.
she is the eternal question.

tonight the sky.

dark palette.

the stars are projectors.
the paintings of them are in
perpetual motion,
carry the zero.

conflicted still life.
of spathodea.
of pomegranate.
of her own folded-up *****.

it's all in how you interpret
the brushwork.
girls can tell.

a reassuringly dull sunday
turns to intrigue.
the busy girl buys beauty.

people are places and things.
lost affections in a room
in need of images
or at least explanations.

she looks for it.
she listens for them.

the sound of existing.
the sound of a quiet room.
a rainstorm or possibly the sound
of someone taking a shower.

blind little rain.

autosleeper lowers her head.
the economy of sleep patterns.
and little else celsius.

tonight the sky.

tomorrow a place where
one can ruin oneself,
go mad, or commit a crime
with paint.

I knew we were in trouble
when they taught the machines to talk

parliament of artificial owls
nocturnal park line pirates

watch and learn
these conspirators
abduct the listening chair
and strap deniability to
another infernal device

so some hotwired pilgriming woman
possesses superior ****** abilities
and a skill with
the violin, the pointy end

camera is king

yet all the negatives
have been destroyed
still somewhere out there
remains a flash card
and a hybrid set of eyes
watching all the people fall to pieces

we're perambulations around
collapsed buildings,
rather than the collapsing buildings themselves

me and the machine
of contradictions
sick as our secrets
with all kinds of shenanigans going on

welcome to the age of copying minds
onto hard drives and cellphones

a future too heavy to carry
and so we plant it deep into the soil
letting the cables sleep
like fading city lights, receding
like strange fractured reactors
at the edge of the world

in lieu of flowers send hope

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

~
Black as coal.
Moth or myth?
It helps with the lights out.
And travels by thought.

Cleopatra enters Rome,
Dropping names,
Reciting pagan poetry,
Knocking on forbidden doors.

Nicole sees shadows
Of her former self
Staring back at her,
Rock paper scissors,
The color of three.

Give and take after take
On the burning soil
Of a blurred crusade.

Typewriters
And other assorted weapons
Form white lies and alibis,
Calibrating the dusted variations
Of a caught-on-camera obscura,
It is a dark waltz,
Some small hope still,

Yet there's a comma after still.
~

~
"memory runs back farther than mythology."

two years,
two months,
and two days,

in a cabin they built
near Walden Pond.

on a mission of gravity,
the heavens forming a spotlight
on centrifugal force,
abroad the hollow mind,

chronically untethered.

"I went to the woods to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..."

this ship's captain was an architect,
but her starblazing failed
to break ground,
so this life is now a structure settled upon sand,

and way out yonder,
where there is
no blade of grass,
just weeds growing out from under the floor.

but her daughters are
grinning magnets,
passionate machines.

"copy that?...," asks Houston.

she takes a long, hard swallow,
the shadow of a bell
inspiring the astronaut in her
to shoot for incapable stars,
but the bell she hears now
is that of an alarm clock
telling her it's time to wake up:

shoulders straight.
hands free.
arms strong.
fingers stiff.
chronically untethered.

she's not looking for new days,
she is a new day,
compacted out of water,
tired of changing real estate
and showering with
other people's success.

those loud kids, her kids, play
down the hall, in the beehive.

radio jargon's on full blast too
and telling her where
to buy and sell today's instant pleasure.

she's busy now with self-stimulation,
Betty Dodson Method,
then mixing orange powder
with 100 year old whiskey
kept in the lunar module:

it's a spacewalk to eternity, faster-than-light:

she sees broken pool tables
and backyard swings.

she sees 'ordinary'
checked off on the calendar.

she sees 'happiness'
hiding in an old photo of Murphy's Camp.

she wakes to
her husband, Houston,
in a holding pattern,
she feels him moving, whispering,
and touching something
far off inside of her,
but not moored
in a specific time or place.

in search of where
she now exists
(if she even existed at all),
her memories feel artificial
in that she lacks
the emotional attachment
that comes with
actually having lived them.

there are no answers, no choices.
only reactions.
it is always going to be
that broken state of things:
these days of heaven,
chronically untethered.

"only that day dawns to which I'm awake. there is more day to dawn, I suppose. and like us, the sun is but a morning star upon being dreamed into existence..."
~

4.
Patterns of sugarless fairytales:
Field of reeds
Beckoning strings,
Robots in the garden,
Theory of the crows
Favorite lunch spot
Right in front of the window
Where we sit and drool
Our later years away.

24.
Amusement parks on fire,
The new improved hypocrisy.
Amusement parks on fire,
The science of imaginary solutions.
Amusement parks on fire,
The masses in line for the ride.

~
Desert pond,
       idle sun.

Salt, shadow,
       and the revealing light of midday.

She traipses from
the safety of the car
        to the danger at the water's edge.

One hand shielding her eyes,
the other,
        her over-exposures.

Discomfited by a lack
         of self-confidence.

Loving the water,
         hating her thighs.
~

~
Apathetic city skyline
This must be Drum Street
There's critical thinking
Digital tendencies

Pigeons on the roof
Kids in the library
Hail and flashpoint
Homeroom
Their final resting place

Who of you misses the bleak missiles of youth?
And how they used to hit like needles?

I can count your sufferings on my fingers
See them hidden in the tall grass
They move in secret
With shadow blister
As much as the caterpillar:
Elusive and eruciform

Sixteen crane wives
Collect on the guide wire
Their weathered plumage
Strangely displayed

Airplane debris on an uncharted wild
Macabre flowers growing out of air masks, gone quiet
The magic word is drear
It's a sorrow-filled caw
As if feathers from the grave
Clothing our fears

I can count the flock on my fingers
See them separate in mid-flight
Each a solitary path
Fusing rage and grief
Each a solitary path
Fusing rage and grief
~

When youth was moth, love flowed over us in prismatic waves—systems of romance.

Then came the phoenix of your heart, and everything was a ceiling. I moved clockwise past infinite shadow and onto your wall.

Sorry to wake you. [...] I forgot to tell you something. [...] I'm like the sun or perhaps the moon. And there are times when I know I'll make you sad.

Distant polyglot in its timbres, its psychological profile, and its pulse, it could not sound less like a soundtrack for a search. More like a Middle Eastern funeral.

Stemmed from a shared anxiety over self-definition in an indefinite world, and each of them has searched for answers in the amorphous space between where “you” end and “I” begin.

By turns, august and sweet—revealed a complex stillness, a set of detached passions attempting to rebuild themselves, a desensitized state searching for soul.

I have loved you into oblivion and now move into thin air. Please remember me as a time of day. As long as you can hold your breath, we'll always be together.

~
A mix of
Startoucher
And Venus in furs

A minor astronomical event
Between luminous beings

Timean sparkles
Fast atoms escape

And in their wake
Baby satellites to bear
~

~
Imagine a box
In shadow
Of utter regalia
Iris, dressed as a waterfall
She comes scattered

Imagine an eyelid illusionist
Praying for more palettes
Enters steelbook cathedrals
To a ministry of colour

For the street outside
Cannot offer as
Interesting a hue
As those fascinating within
The pigment of her imagination

It's compelling artistry
Like oil on canvas
A slight of hand
Smoke and mirrors

Her skilled fingers
Kohl mining
For soft medley
And the new liminality
Above the spectator's eye
~