on the day of the double funeral I stand
waiting for the rest of me to die,
I am that I am but I harbor a bad disease.
i should be anywhere and be doing anything other
than what i am.
because before Abraham was i am
standing in the empty quarter
reading a funeral manual on the
day of the double sky burial.
i’m poisoned off my pouch of yesterday’s mana.
gums are bleeding this is yesterday’s daily bread.
men cannot live off bread alone
and the jackrabbit horde is coming home
our own locust plague for a new Sahara.
i stand with a hangman’s fracture
lost on the old sermons in the sand.
following my family’s footsteps sadly in the wrong direction,
lost among the marking rocks.
snow leopards of the black blizzard and
my poison pouch of mana.
drowning in the fires we cook a stray dog
reaping all the whirlwinds I sound a 12 foot Tibetan horn
on the day of a double funeral -
perched in the dwelling of the solitude.

I had went to visit some friends
some acquaintances
these people i used to know
I was a ghost in my hometown,
where no one used my given name.
they brought me in through a screen door and
sat me down in the kitchen.
their voices were like underwater sounds
they told me to be still while he said hello.
I looked down a flight of basement stairs
where bathed in a blue light like Chopin’s  no. 19 in E minor
sat a tiger burning bright.
up the stairs it bounded forth in muted strides
to the floor it pinned me under protest
in cemetery stillness it said hello.
the kitchen was an autoclave
I never asked for help.

my hometown calls to me in my sleep
like an indian death wail on a buffalo robe
so my eyes sink back into the firmament.
bathing in the predawn light
my bones are an old horse I ride,
I score one for the body then I get onto a plane
then I score one for the body and I get onto a plane
then i score one for the body as it lays dying without complaint.
kneeling before the Holy Cross by the roadside
I take note of really just how much room there is on the bed beside me
strange bedfellows are I and the space I’ve been given.
there is a queen sized outer darkness within my twin sized
gestures of self control.
the dusk is day now and the moon is the sun
and my hometown calls to me like Jericho’s Trumpet
sounding from inside the Pale.

in my hometown I am a pilgrim
I saunter towards the seaboard
where the docks hold greek columns that soar into the air
like the elephant’s legs in Salvador Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony”.
nostalgia burns my throat like acids and bases
and the columns lead up to nowhere and this place isn’t
how i remember it beyond the Pale.
limping with thin soles
dragging a dull hypothalamus like a dead mule chained to my ankle
we would sit and watch our forefathers stare at the static on the TV
from their arm chairs in the dark.
we would offer them coffee and ask how their day was and they
would tell us that sometimes they feel like a lone alley cat.
It’s like my buddy's roommate when I would go to visit; always alone inside his room.
sometimes I would see him around town and say hello and notice his face and
see that he was still alone inside his room.

well, I have skin in the game and I have a reputation
and i’m attached to my non-attachment.
sometimes a subtle brand of disgust creeps in to replace my avarice
and sometimes I starve to death holding a long handled spoon
seated at Caligula’s table.
sometimes i can’t tell their maidenhood from their madness
so i hoard one for the body.
sometimes i remember the way bees will talk to each other by dancing
and how old men will tell you they’re afraid to die.
Sometimes I hand a *** a 20 and weep as I watch him fold it
into an origami crane.

while I was in town I looked up my former landlord
I held a fondness for the times when they didn’t use my given name.
I wanted to see my old room and I had kept a raven back then and
he assured me it was still around.
the room was now and attic and was much bigger than I had held it
in my memory, vast almost.
I ask the dust as it was thick upon the floor boards and something
felt abandoned in the air.
the roof was in disrepair and one whole side was nearly completely gone.
tranquil ribbons of cirrus clouds stood in the sky through the roof like
a child’s drawing.
“Is it like you remember?”, he asked.
“Way over in the corner there was a couch my brother would sometimes sit in” I replied.
I asked after my raven and he pointed to the part of the roof that still was.
from the shadows came a bird song like an irish low whistle from above the Pale.
“That doesn’t sound like him”, I said (more to myself than to my host),
“that’s an owl or something.”

Snakes won't cross a braided rope,
so I take the leads up from around my bed.
I remember her face-
bright and
smiling beside mine
white as if she had just shed a skin
and the dunes grow now over the urchin barrens,
a desert in the sea.
I can peer beneath the 3rd lid
my heart claws at my throat,
allergy tight from the judging shade of
green.
The 3rd lid opens over the Taklamakan,
Tibetan horns sound so old -
ancient vagus nerve endings in my throat but my heart claws them away.
Snakes won't cross a braided rope but
her eyes are green and we lay a
cottonmouth skin across her womb.
All I see are diamonds on the ring fingers.

Looking down from over their bodies - I count them.
My split mind at once rejoices in and recoils from that counting.
Peering back over my shoulder I make
dark associations.
It’s as if I was afraid of becoming lost
the way the bodies made a trail like bread crumbs,
leading back from the places I had been.
I walk with the Holy Light.
I walk with my dark companion.
I walk between the spines of the body shrikes.
They harvest all my crumbs and remind me I am lost.
They hook the bodies high from spikes
so I look up to make the body count.
I can see the Holy Script
but I can’t seem to find the way.
Red and gold beacons in the dream,
flickering off and on like syncopated declarations
as if saying:
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am.
All elbows and knees I slip between the webs of the
orb weavers and the cactus spines of the butcher birds
while they count the bodies for me:
Here they are
Here they are
Here they are.
Hang-dog and hard of breathing  I have my medicine.
I’m hanging from the sleeping cliffs over
hell’s half acre and the high deserts.
I remember my brother flying me to California on a great olive branch.
He fed me sushi and smiled while he watched by brain heal.
But I was coming for the bodies.
My count was smaller then, but it was high enough for him
and his hands were the keepers of the flame.
The fire there was exiled and quietly he laid it by.
My brother spread out over the carpet of time like
the faithful departed with the weavers and the shrikes and
mounted bodies in the sky.
A child appears before me on the walk - eyes like a baby deer.
His mother is two blocks behind, so he asks three questions while he waits:
Why are you smoking?
Where are your hands?
Is it getting dark soon?
He leaves me to wonder where my hands are and where the dark is,
the Holy Sage smoking at my side.
Like some dark sabbath.
Like some reading of the will.
Like some dark and holy delta sleep in a crib of red clay.
I have a feeling I have been gone a very long time and I
want to be home now,
but there is buzzing and chirping and a red light and
Saul of Tarsus holds a great tome before me and with my hands
I hide my eyes.
I am the dreaming of the world of dreams.
Therein the Holy Light rages like the flare of 1000 suns
while my eyes are shuttered tight
like old memories all gone beyond the sorrow.
The old oath keepers are all plates and screws.
The golden woven orbs and cactus spines are all empty on
the altar like a decommissioned slaughterhouse.
So I go and make a body count.

When is sunrise?
When will the mushroom zombies arrive,
settling our scores for us?
so we can keep new ones
and sniff out where the hatchets are buried
I was listening to public radio(when under attack I can say I listen to objective news reporting)
...something about roller coasters in Japan
...some type of advice on how to safely scream:
So I scream inside my heart.
And I watch videos of women dancing so hard you know that any
moment their spirit will burst forth from their husk.
Then the dancer will leave the dancing and the
empty eyes of the dancer husk reminds you of who
you’re not when they look at who you are.

I rise and the ground moves beneath me.

OneState keeps track of my time and my stack of green paper is
this big now.<------->
The world is on fire and the world has seen better days.
The zombies of the mushrooms groves are waiting for they know
we’re getting close.
tick, tick, I read furiously sometimes.
I hold the other heart.
In the land of 1000 ***** houses there are only hearts to hold.
I pulled the hanged man because I am the hanged man suspended
and adorned with 10 pound nickel batteries and they
come from Silicon Valley and they fly rockets
out of there now and from
space you can hear the whole world scream inside its heart.

I’ll plant gardens and I’ll sow seeds of love and they’ll
grow inside my son’s heart-mind like vines of purple ivy
along the bricks.
And he’ll join his siblings of the Hologram and
they’ll sing inside each other's hearts because it’s been
declassified it’s public record you can pull it on the CIA’s
Freedom of Information Act section of their online reading room.
(https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf)
I’ve lived the lives of 1000 ****** or so it seems sometimes and
I’ve sat still longer than Rasputin on the Tura river after the Moika Palace incident
I will use the body to prove there is no body because there is nobody there and
I am that I am before Abraham was and I am that, but not that
neti, neti my darlings.
from our flesh we pull new flesh and no matter how close our bodies get
we might as well be a data fractal
or a warble on the 6th pixel.

National symbols and the captains of industry.
Mushroom zombies and the red ***** house from beetle juice.
Michael Keaton and the red death and the red half moon
waning on a red tide and the red cent i would spend if
I could only scream out loud.
But Portland is still America and that's what you get
when you scream so they can hear.
And when this red swell abates
And the fungus grows from their tin suits of armor
We’ll look back upon our husk
And then we are the Noumenon.