It's the skin on skin basics:
You may touch, but please don't look.

I hand him a pinecone,
pale petals,
and some Tulgeywood bark
saying "Feel it out in the dark,"
saying

"Can you tell me what that is?

Can you dab your flesh on those pine needles,
***** your tips in the dark?

Feel it out in the light now.
Can you taste it:

Can you lap it, lick it?
Bite it, mosquito, bite
'til your lips are swollen
and
'til your teeth are blunted
and
'til the thought of one more cigarette
is enough to
make you sick,
make you smile,
make you laugh for a short while or an hour or two...

Spit, *****, spit; you're a jumpy little mare.
If you don't know what a pinecone feels like
I'll break all 13 hands of you.

Can you press petals in your fingers
and call it the skin on the small of my back?

Call the dew in small beads the perspirin' of my lust?

Can you do that for me?
Imagine, for a second?"

I imagine for a second—
I imagine for a second or two.

It's been one hell of a night.

She sat in blue light, artificial,
fingers tangled in dreds, natural,
head bobbing to bare beats
and **** draws upon the well of
electronica, O' jazzia,
O' sense-sinking psychedelia,
O' fleeting fingers ******* false feelings in the dark;

And this is what music is.
This is what music has always been.

The arrangement of sounds to tell a story,
paint a picture,
build mindscapes and landscapes upon which stories and feelings
will meld and melt and freeze to ice,
hot ice,*
a paradoxical nocturnal noctuary of dreams and nightmares and candles dripping with wax.

Sing me home, Chet Faker,
bring me back to your apartment.
Sing it long and sing it low,
(This gas station fluorescence sure is ******* the eyes.)
sing me back to Boulder, Colorado;
to Joliet, Montana.

O' jazzia, my jazzia,
my sweet sand dollar saxophony,
will you meet me in Amarillo, Texas?
Will you play me a tune before the water-meter puts me to sleep?

I've heard that wakefulness is life.

That hearin' and seein'
and feelin' a'tastin' and touchin'
are living all the same.

I've heard that to bear one's heart is above all deeds.

He said,
"The world's built for cynics, don't say such things. I'd spit on an ant just to sit and watch it drown before I'd share a picnic crumb with an ant who can't swim."

I'm not a heavy sleeper,
I don't spend much time shot puttin' a'careenin'
through nighttime and midday naps.

I think it's hard to bear one's heart.

I hope that someday my son has a branch outside his window.
And that at night it will whip o' wind
and scratch a'scrapin' at his window
and his call will bring me in to bear my heart.

And that the person I first love will walk out the door,
intent to leave me forever, just so I can run after them.
In a sprint to hailing cab to feet on airport linoleum I won't dare say,

"Come back."

No, I'll be a'whisperin' sayin',

"I don't care where that plane's going as long as I'm going there with you."

In the terminal I'll run in to bear my heart.
I guess at the bottom of it all I just want to bear my heart.

I've heard that wakefulness is life
and that the sleeping are not living.

Nor a'dying buyin' time in nonexistent shot putt courts
where they aim for dreams within their dream.
The sleeping are surely always dreaming. But wakefulness is life.

How about that gasoline
in Autumn rain puddles?

How about them cars that don't start,
can't start.

I just wanted to start.

Playing games like this never amused me much;
I guess I'm more of a reader than a writer than a toy-game-player.

I want the facts.

None of this horseshit media circus,
ignorance is neither knowing nor caring.

Nay bliss,

It was bliss on those cold winter nights,
night twilights pressed hard against the city-smogged sky
where the gases of sugar beets and petroleum reflect back down orange.

Orange on the snow and orange on snow drifts and snow flakes on your eyelashes.
Little orange dusts
(**** your lashes grow long)
dusts fallen halfheartedly like rain in the fall
and rain puddles shone red
and blue
and green
and orange, orange, orange...

Always orange.

Like gasoline in rain puddles,
gasoline in cars that won't start.

They can't start, don't start;
My engine must be misfiring.

(How about them metaphors for a heart?)

Will you call me when you get there?

We should be finished by next fall. Last autumn was a good time and I hear history repeats itself. Sleeping under trees, smoking Lucky Strikes and tending to our hobbies. Lackadaisically bent over antediluvian scrapbooks, I hear this winter's to melt into a flood. The ark is under way, we should be finished by next fall.

It was something in the calm drift of the clouds or the tick-tick of the water meter. There was us and then there was them. We were flushed, the world was bluffing. There was us:

Deep breath.

We were the lost children roaming 'round Cair Paravel; the boxed kit youth unboxing on a caravel watching hypnotic YouTube videos and firing fire out of firewood; that was when I fell. Beside the flames under cover of conversation of God and Hell and all the proper nouns that we fear so much. But fires burn out, so let's be civil. We should be finished by next fall.


But how can I be civil when I hope that your spit flies back in your face; that when you flick your wrist, your muscles tear because I've torn too. It's torn past the heart into my legs, immobile, and my arms, useless. These hands are cramped and shredded; scraps and pieces and bits, drill bits carving their way in. You carved your way in. They say an animal in a tailor-made niche is an animal in a found home. So carve away, carver, we should be finished by next fall.