slow waltz of sirens ghosts the path


sea spit splendours elusively

near and not near you


but the requiem of space leaves a patient mark


of this

the white curdling on the edge of things

I do not ask the sorrow to stop, but further

to take my grief from me


would unravel the singlest thread yellowing

in my gut


dropping as feathers

:immaculate

gold things

heavier than the world of you


unfolding and folding as a sea of dust


in my serpentine universe


I shouldn’t ever ask it to stop

rather,

as a stone I worry it


cherished as the only open glade

of my tangled mind

all the complicated feelings of outward past us-raking the tawny munich sand
the strange depression asking of itself, and of itself
beetle hymn involute vessel

imperceptible footprints walking towards

then away        array of circles


lounging for themselves the sweetbitter

arc

      of hands

riderless horse, pales in the east

bringing in this fragment of blue,
trampling off the edge
in slow patterns.

at night I am lost.

I am bleeding. I have asked so.

I have nothing to offer you,

but the senna of crawling branches
under closed moon.

absence oils my throat
a purple flux of cessing.

a vagrant hue.

I want your human letters
but I am stained with ink.

the blue floods my eyes
stains the hue of wanderers
at the slant of my door.

once, I thought I knew
my heart

but I am mundane and
cut with sorrow.

I am not forgiving,

just a few paw prints
left in snow.

in a luxurious, shallow sky
I am tethered

to the kestrel

folding itself
to my ribs.

unraveled in the singing

the hemlock spool yellows
in my gut.

I wander my city of pith
as a sickness

asking the hole
in sky
to shut my mouth

to the senseless tune
of what I do not own.

I want to touch the un wholeness of you
fit the tremendous darkness
to air

unreal world
will you move within me for a time?
innumerable arms reaching for hell

motionless limits
within us

we are drowned as oceans
and too dizzy for this
secret

be with me so that I cannot have words

there is some soft space of you always tearing into me.
black claws, coffee laden, drunk from the spirits.

I, a manner of scents ascribed by you.
tallow of night, drowsiness of hands,
wallowing  in the redolent shame
of past mistakes.

we can fjord a victory.  green-lanterned.
don’t mind the clocks.
we, relic of timepiece.

ticking lavender and bourbon and truffle salt
haloed in tobacco screens.

bitter, rapt mouths.

in a disheveled state, desired stupor
for fumbling hands,
the grief of desire
rakes us.

we know what the guilty do.
these streets were chosen.

we posted the lanterns.

oil light gills us.
I do not even regret the time, just the departure.

I am still filled with musk.

separated, only, by this death between us
can either survive, or meander on.

harbinger
harbegere
G. harbor

here/heri[army

beorg[refuge

how the harbinger flies flames
and you dissemble
in her wings

this morning
the crows have gamboled
behind the rooftops

in the druz of fields

a hawk peals for
something

I am too sensitive

the empty house with a person in it.
asking.

“sap of progress”

the dark matter between us
must stay.

although,
the jackdaws clean the
branches clean as bones.

stalks for white

the roots are full of her fruit,
urchins of red in a congealed space.

we will leave them there for safe keeping.

jam of black,
buttoned as a root dweller

you will repeat what you have said.

I will ask not to uncleave the truth

for safe keeping.

all these birds. everywhere.
there will be nothing left.

imprecise
-epithet


nothing but trees
“__” nothing but trees


sea blue of blue sea of blue
diseased as stars


flowering as orchids
in the descent of a wet lake

we do not chose for ourselves

I held the pool of her in my hand.
A universe succumbing to its weight.

This smallness, of me, diminutive letters on parchment.

A lens, rupturing itself.

There is no way, no way at all to be, now.

We are committed and forbidden to our own fate. Pale hour.
Hourless East.

You give it what it asks for. You always give it what it asks for.
You collapse. Paper house, conformed for service.

The endless hunger, pleads for you.
A dressless ******* wooden knees.

You think you prefer not to go where you are not wanted.
If that were true, it would be easier to leave your self.  

Somewhere,

in a room,

it is a slow dance, and mostly never.

and how shall I fare thee well, pale love

bare foot


pearling under stars a skin of shape


dropping here and there
a world made of rib bone white and yearning


in nets


weaving mulch and roan      and made


pale as questions
crying in stone


how shall I close now


that which has been opened
and misarranged


pour of stars           in a dusty solar system


in a not a world of
have and you

lying
silver lung


a thought (belonging) to darkness


full of violet, red coloured matter


loquacious parenthesis, admitting
of and how         - and redact


ere requisite gibbet


the mute parable of gate
dull eyes strangers a keep
strange of          of


the truly meaningless word


lathe,


there is a way to remove the clothes
with      out


silence of months


cruor of origins


belongings,
her winter hymn


gullet of marble


crop poached and gilt
in hematic bath of       of


the ashamed hum of wrongness


it is not interesting
carving yourself with a knife


the contents come out slowly
bruised-cask of ocher


her     of       she


lain out under stars
strewn in the lope of distress


a hind
untold



*last night, a body wandered off

showered in woolen eyes
not knowing how to love

what strange material


we could disassemble the black
cut the mantle to pieces


yet, everything looks like it is dying, keeps looking for


a mortar for cloth and beetle wings
iridescent powdered plumage


turquoise, for damaging skin


a mark
to remember better times, for worse


times past weaving weavers leaden tongues
these tongues


de-sexing the virtue in -


you look at me as a stranger
I, the mirror of you


there is a fire in the house
it is too much for saying


no one pays any mind to the muffling of small birds

and then again, I am the same tree on the same hill
look you have seen it

here,

your eyes close

shutting feathers down of egrets
lounging in morning fog

tall nudging of estuaries
of reeds, foxglove-purple glens

here,

your eyes are closed

the white is peeking in from the edges
soft memory

plump and poultice

the egrets blush a ruffled wing
unsetting setting dust

the yellow fog claved the fold

martyred the morning
before it began

in a studded wood, you river
sapless stream of spruce bark


-no ailment
-no midwife for the sediment


in a black mirror, the seer
needled to the tree-


two ravens


I know what my future holds


watch as the horse balks
white rind eyes


hopeless as stars

Jean Baptise Clamence said ‘…in all things we are merely” in a way” ‘.


I possess nothing, but what’s in my heart.


But what am I to love? – the cherub morning, my sovereign hands-the sea?
How to love, how to love anything?

Turn to my silence voice of a voice.
Here whisper of you, I have been waiting.

In me you have inspired countries. Strange
devastating realms of cold lands, wet fogs
and steaming lakes.

I am full of canals and you are no where.
You do not even know, that I speak of you..

I am swarming with your absence and you
do not how do you not know my name
or that it asks of you.

Here and elsewhere, littered. Partments.

Untouch my hand that you ungloved so impetuously.

I cannot place it.

You have inspired the only light in me for miles.  
And here I am, talking to myself again-

My eyes become jeweled, the colour of dead leaves.
Yet still you will not choose me.

Fog of smokey neon.
At any rate, you run a great risk.

somewhere in the dewfields a feeling unfolds. it was a noble feeling, but just a feeling.

ah, but nothing can ever hear us now.

save the fields     -     to you I belong to them.
arrowless voices snake the round room,
but you are wearing fox feathers, saying

“what will be, will be”
“say it is so, is so”

here, the room      -     the empty field.

You know of what I speak.
Space lags. I will adjust time.

and in some blind room I make love to you alcove for suffering
as strangers arriving from the sea, a heap of fragments
and unsettling landscapes      nearing something

and for the first time, the deep heartache that comes from longing.

We are using the same words. We are saying the same things.
Mark it. The interchangeability of birds resilhouettes the sky.
One grey line drawn overview. A space.
Bare clap sky. You are puncturing yourself.

All that gas, you think. No matter. No matter.

You will be lighter eventually.

Not before the birds blaze, metric of ash and gust
partitioning a pomegranate sky.

You loved pomegranates once.
Now there’s fruit everywhere.

These little seeds stitched into the hemisphere,
the drive, your hand.

The birds have gone mad. They will not eat them.

How the heart becomes a stone. Of unavoidable weight, sharp as a quill.
I wonder, what stranger’s blood gathers in these gravitous veins?
A picture: black stone. Black hearth.

There is an unkempt room, grey with milklight.

Someone wanders there, as a body dragged into the woods.

The intimacies of half-light loom in the indistinct hour.

Mute weavers- nudging one another,
voluminous and pale.

Light exudes her milky latex.
Porcelain hand,
reaching towards the cool umbra. Always reaching.

All certainty ebbs here, in the achromic film.

The manes of the spirits gap the dusk floating as spectral pappus.

They are shaking.
So many spaces between the gloom.

And yet, only to divert the hospitable darkness..
The opening, enveloping absence.

I want to think of the fireflies, their universes of warmth.
Opening and closing their bodies to darkness.

Always.

A room of many doors.
This is not what I meant.

Doe white walls, half lit from what light?

The sensation of option leaves quickly
as the rain that never comes.

How long am I to stagger along these walls
curseless as a ghost, feeble handed

and trailing fingers

claspless along every groove and *****
of brass, of wood, of parchment?

How to wind circles in a square?

What flat universe has swallowed me
only to reconfigure the obvious parts?

I feel that something stares through me
dull as a hammer

and I melt like glass
lungless and ugly,
watching the dead pile outside the windows

-so much condensation for so much blue.

I am too simple

I have been spread as an arc of cards
on an empty table

I cannot breathe the tome of madness
singing fire within me

Everything knows how to die

The threat of losing forever, has lost its weight.
It sits like a stone at the bottom of a river.



It was a pitiful feeling of knowing one deserved more
and would never obtain it.

all of my hearts feel injured
out of each mouth a separate tedium

unaccounted, all unaccounted

the ticking of this tongue flat and gross
in the stupor of days and-

and you are dead in the East

pale horseless East

freckling

falernum soaked feathers
for fathers
fatherless East, now

and farther

over the terminating sea

you have left me, here

and how sick I have been
how unimaginably quiet my bald mind can be
I touch my own forehead, lest I forget myself

I do not even recall, who I am talking about

I find myself in the strew of night, ineloquent
and helpless

how easily, I flicker
not even a copy of myself

Everything is starless.


What hand claps count the silent syllables.


How easily the sentiment of humanity leaves itself
in ghast emissions. This dust, now, remarking at itself.


But now, how words misspell out of me in grey, phosphorescent gestures.


All lights bend from me.
If they had heads they would turn away, ashamed.


Everyone is quiet in the darkness.


This infinite moment has stolen the lungs from me.

“a starless galaxy carrying gas and shrouded in dark matter”

a townless galaxy
rich in sulfur

a gas cloud plummeting towards the milky way         home

you are reminded and now pale peels off you, shaved as ice

the implosion completes itself in four ways
replicated by the gravitational lens
of something heavier than itself

time in time in time rich in sulfur and algae blooms

everything beneath the meniscus
heavier than itself

drowning in algae blooms

purple mollusks, sardines
sea lions
swallowed by forests of kelp
guts full of domoic acid and forget

we eat the toxin-laced fish
and cannot talk about what we wanted to talk about

star matter, rich in sulfur
rich in

dark matter, heavier than starless towns

home
heavier than itself

toxin laced, eating and drowning
on matterless stars

what unborn, soft objects
curved and lonely
wither with the yellow grass,
the foxgloves, passing in
copper flame

I am ill with the miscarriage
inside me

here, a seat will remain cold
for all time

there is no lantern to light
these ways we have passed
and continue to pass

unlearning

the deepest shame
those that live, always struggle to live

I won’t reason this over anymore. It is an unkind fruit.

This is how we say, without really knowing what we mean-
the pale impressions of a furtive heart.

-how everything blooms in this prism,
the fearful knowledge of nothing more,
the wilting hope
the changing glass

how soft everything seems now
and alone

my contrariness lies
as bodies in the sand.

The years leave me in misery
and I lose all definition.

I am still.
With boldness, I lose everything.

I am looking for a place to return to.
I have no strength.

I find myself exposed, one skewed shadow
pulling roots beneath the sun.

Overnight I became wary of everything.
I remark at my own existence. That I could walk away from it.
As all colours part from me.

I open my mouth. I am full of willows and moth wings.
I look for words. I find the old ones and dig up
empty rooms.

I have become so simple.
My anger slouches in the corner like a rook.  Shuffling, always shuffling.
But he will not speak to me.

This is a living thing.
The paradox is a minor landscape.

No time believes in me.

I will say it again.
I woke this morning and found myself missing.

How you become a part of the earth, and away from it.
Grab your furs and your moss. Pull them closer.

I have tried to walk near the entangled forest.
Its belly is swollen and impregnable.

Its warm tongue flicked at me. “It’s just a fever.”
Though you flail your arms dismissively
as though to ward off danger.

There is a malice in everything that whispers.

“It’s just a drop of blood,” you say.
Though it draws you out in anger.

It doesn’t mean something.
Though your eyes are prophetic, crowing for the dead.
Still.

Everything in unity.

This white morning may destroy me.
How I bend and unbend without my acquiescence.

By nightfall my eyes will be moons.
I will open for a moment
and blink out.
Swift as dust.

Your love is illiterate.

My needs are too far within.
I am primitive
and will never be satisfied.

But how I will cry and pine on the strings of this instrument.

Place your palms on the soft animal of my body.
Find me.

I am unaccounted for.

I become frantic in my silence.
My gravity becomes  pinions.
A volute **** in the ether.

Such will you, I.

There is no means to entering the gateless gate, though you will try.

My body is numb, and I am senseless with the roaring waters behind me.

It will not desist.
This endless sea, forgets.
So the blur of organs, the blundering cold of a concept.
I am non-matter. Absence of all things, in me.

Here is a story of ignorance: something.

How I become sick on my self.
My mouth is wooden. Knowing, what can be said?

We lose sense of sense.
Soft, and vulnerable fawn, intractable in the tall grass.

Do not love the uncast word. Forgive.

How you have unfastened yourself from me molding red clay in many shapes.
Relentlessly fashioning versions of thing after thing. How I distort in every mimesis.

What you are looking for refuses to be found, though you spread the red everywhere.
Futility becomes of your fingers, too nervous for sewing.

The frequency of this life distorts on you, and you see less and less.

Sole star of sky, unthinkingly, in the dye of yellow, verses you in elocution.

Parody to mutable earth, shall the shadows of stars turn aside?

Belonging to time has its perilousness. In fervor you have underestimated the vulnerability
of the infinite.

We too have wounded, and been wounded.

The heart wavers at the threshold of an uncommon door.
Imperceptible boundaries have multiplied like trees.

How to be water. How to be, they seem to say, stretching small arms in every weak direction.

The angles have become too much for me.
Time is what I ask for, so I may ***** my words for a certain moment.

How unthinkingly you have carried on into an isolate realm.

All worlds pull from me now, as though offended.

In my dreams I see a woman stretching, always stretching towards.
We do not talk about the arms. How they wilt this way in curved angles.
Forest full of ferns and green light, emerald depletes her.
Though she manages the mud in an absence of water.
When it is darkness in a soft womb I can open my eyes.
I see my own ignorance.
Long lines of imperfection threaten the threads of light
closing their wormy mouths over the seams of night.
I am afraid to look at myself.
I know what desolation lurks,
ranging, imperfect, well-bred
beast, calling longingly to
the incomplete latitudes of forest.
Encroaching the barrenness,
I find my body occasionally,
covered in wet leaves.

There is a time here. Everything has turned quite flat.
But I do not resent the sinister feeling overlapping my worlds.
A great whelping worrisome feeling fills me up.
And I am encountered one by one by dreams
I will not remember.
I am a gentle touch. I have left scorched earth everywhere.
I am still hungry.
I too have lips. They also are chapped each morning
from the bitter rinds that dreg from the sea.
I cannot account for time. Nor do I wish it.
I cannot hear the space or the conviction
that will sway you.
From me, the reflections have dried up.
I have become a foreign presence in my own body.
Neither truth nor wholeness matter.
But a lingering darkness.
The wick of all things.

My pride pours out on you and I am a desert. You can have all of it. You have.

The vanity of remembrance feints like an open wound.
It is time only, that has helped me to see my self.  It is not truth.
That is untamed and unplottable.

Even I do not belong where I have been, but that is irrelevant. Hush, now.

The feelings pour out, and unmutual.
The effort is worthless. Remark.
Somewhere azaleas trash the ground in pallour.

The more space escapes us, the more deformed I become.
An unpleasant presence in the black of your absence.
If I have ever loved nothing, I have loved.

I am looking for a language that only I know.
How I ruminate on bones.

Richard Grossman said, “There is nothing more terrible than loss, which cannot be measured. Lost loss.”

How do I say, I miss your hands.
How do I say anything?

The slow movement of away may be the calmest and most difficult thing
I have ever endured.

There were things we could not find the words for. A mastery of leaning into. Though I cannot say I didn’t try, didn’t try to immobilize, though the dusk always called for it, in its one’s and two’s. It is always ******* of sunlight, always ******* of cornflower blue. At the moment, it is eating off the shores of Northern and Southerly. At the moment it is slick in regret, in paradigm of what was and wasn’t said. Tomorrow it will eat off the coast of tempestuous Eros. It will churn in spoil. The weather will be asking for injury by this rose hour that makes your face glow now, regrettably and earnestly. Wanton will be swimming in the shallows, coated in oil and gloating in the fat of Mercury. The seals will be loose jawed and whorish tonight and prime their grey bodies amongst the sand. It was true, you know, how we would embed it. In the coffee we would see our past lovers. Too much cream, this time. Too much silt, the other. The adjustment of bathroom soap collected a solicit slough of how permissible became habitual. Now yellow, now how obtuse you are, placing the teapot this way, not that. This time the ocean will become other and it will forget. It is migrating deeper now, to the other blue. Feasts are off course, elsewise the ocean flacks and mist creates you. You now, always blissfully aware. Always pardoning yourself as the sunset flocks off in orange claps towards dawn black horizon. She is not there. She has never been there. By morning you will be bones and it will have feasted on forgotten.

I do not have access to fact. The truth is I will remember you and not remember why. I wish she was here to remind me of what I’m missing. Details leave me as well as the persistent heat of year long summer endures, reinforcing the blatant query of forgone. The once known gently shrugs tired arms and I am loose paper.  I am impressed with a deep instinctual need for movement but the reality is I move less and less each day. My ego longs to move on but keeps returning to the bed I don’t belong in. It is covered in owl feathers and blue petals. Someone else occupies it now in another city. I am thirsty, but everything is bittersweet. It is always bittersweet. This tang always like copper in my mouth. A tired hand always spins the spoon. Images overlap of her wet face and sad arms. She is happy now. You can only believe this uncertainty. The truth is there is no truth. Only knowing. This always keeps us looking. Something inside keeps scratching, always twining the immutable self, eating its way out. You have a name for it, but you’ve forgotten. Her arms are forgotten, only now the things she touched. Like the morning. In me always morning, the lament for impermissible time leaks out between the floorboards in blush white light. Even now there is no explanation.

Last night I went to Africa. I spent a month there. I know this because I told you.This morning I am exhausted, turned over too many times in sleep and wakefulness as the day gloats over my body. Yesterday’s skyline made me dream of lavender forests. In the dreams I took stills of purple and blue bark, papery shadows. I wanted to capture the essence for morning.  In the morning I knew I would forget, but the image, or the fleeting, trails in me. I spent a lot of time by a river. Grey mud grows on me. In the mud there is a struggle. At times I would touch myself and find blood. I am not afraid of the scarlet here. The colour is rare and important, but tomorrow will be lost on me. I will be left with the flash of an impression in your arms. When I woke up I wanted to tell you something. A why was stuck in the mud burrowed within me.  A new cleft. When I open my mouth I create old wounds in silence. I will spend the next few days trying to cover them in dust. In the dream I walked many miles, and the stairs of a house burn in me. I felt the thoroughness in my legs. Before I woke I squatted in the schoolyard where I told you about it, inspecting the new firmness in my muscles. I realized that I didn’t long to impress you. There will be things we never know.  There are roads I walked and can’t remember now. The earth will not discuss it. Today the light affronts me. I am lost somewhere in Africa where you are not. Today I will not wake up. I will keep remembering the blood. The lavender forest spreads within me. A man will protest it with forgetfulness. I will push against the morning and slide into it. I will always slide into it.

There is an ocean under a lake under a sky under an earth.
-
I am digging under the carpet.
Carpet. Carpet feathers everywhere.
-
The body of water moves, misses something.
Here. Always pulling. You know about gravity, and sadly never understand it.
-
Circle sky of stars embedded in basalt caverns.
The water is the ceiling. The universe spirals into the infinite mirror.
-
Under the carpet, mother’s old photographs of you.
Still of you and the men who touched you.
-
Flocks of bats discard each other in reverse.
The mirror moves, breathes her wings towards the ocean.
-
I have forgotten how many I have slept with, sit on the bathroom floor
drawing circles in the memory of what if.
-
Deep earth. Hand drawn circles in bone. Mother moves inside you.
-
I am crying and do not know which time it is. I light a cigarette in the mirror.
-
The water touches on something. There is a vacuum of time you exist in.
Milk bats nurse from the black hole at the center of the cave.
-
The bats have gone now too. Feathers. Feathers everywhere.
-
I am wet but not here. The sheets are wet. There is an impression of someone
next to me.
-
At some point I realize I can’t go home.

we will stay away from the usual colours. they make you sick now. I watch the blue peel from you as paint from the walls. they are small and you are small, and I have become small watching and leaving.  and pressing. last night I dreamt of pomegranates. the seeds were yellow. I uncapped the small heads routinely, the rest in black and white. yellow dischords a monotonous uncanny vellum. it soaks the paper that spreads between us, accents the spacelessness we have grown accustomed to. I thought about writing a letter. the colours had began bunching around the corners, and somehow I am convinced that I have done wrong. in the absence of words, a gesture of apology. you know, there is a hole in the sun, the size of many earths. maybe this is why my phone loses time. mars keeps losing its atmosphere, a desert framed by solar winds. I think, something was forgotten. tomorrow I may talk about something real. it will make you sick. I will never write the letter. in the morning you will forget. you will replace the subject with line after line. the colours will bleed out. I will be reminded there is nothing left.

A machine altering itself is a very complex concept.
Self-repairing implies some idea of a conscience.

You are told you are the result of a primate leaving a tree.

A unit without the second protocol could travel the road of evolution.

The only limitation a machine has is the second protocol.
The second protocol prevents the unit from altering itself.

We do not know what lies beyond the second protocol-the protocol exists because
if it were eliminated, who knows how far it could go.

The human thought structure:  you are covered in dust, stand in the white rim
of desert. The sky peels, cloudless.

You ask, was coming down from the tree worth it to get where we are?

The unit has been manipulated.
Is there a trace of origin?

The human thought structure entangles wires.
Iron hierarchy of meaning-infrastructure compounds to collapse.

You are looking for the beginning.

You forget if you have seen an ocean before, stand in the white.
The dust pit opens itself, cracked sea wound articulating fingers of irony.

You forget, you must live first in order to die.

The ocean swells. The machine needs something from you.
You keep thinking of returning to the city. The white is everywhere.

You are still looking for the beginning.

The unit does not need to speak, but it breathes. It has been enhanced.

darling, life is not in my hands

outside the bittersweet turns orange
in the tide, birches like zebra fish

the woods are underwater
bewitched, bitter pulse counting your blood

I cannot promise very much
I cannot promise

but lie still with me and watch

the wind’s not off the ocean
-sleeping, grunting, sighing

and sometimes, sometimes
in the room crying like a wolf
a long time, time

what can I give you
but an ark between the eyes
for when the world goes wild

as pheasants, pulled through the mulch
and foaming, flood of scrub pines
in pink dread strands

I will press my finger here
to the temple of time

where we pool
innocuous in the secret dye

in the cohort of her hands, a disorder

lost dignity wrapped in the red of need
reckless and arrogant as lilies

an abundance of periphery
wavers at the sea-black hand

of hands of time of hands

rune stones
black granite spattered in stars

a slutter of language
of words of wombs

necrotic we burst
a pause of however

a narcosis of want

meander of limbs
siphoning brine-white tide

colorless-the disorder
marquis of white shadow
on seal slick waves

and the lilies,
petal outward

and in the silence
there were unknown weeks
where the flowers foundered
other bodies

there is a form in the garden
still as clay

we reddened our mouths
and still like clay

slant of a neck untattered
partitioning cerebral sea
arcing back on itself

there was a benign negligence
in the want-of flowers of lilies

vague signs of amplitude
pachyderm and small
in the grooves of lack

malnourished, contrite hands
flushed blooms of pink paper along
pink walls-flush seas of lack

vague symbols of wood and
purulent understanding a

nest of roots
dipping towards the alkaline sea

we didn’t even begin to understand
the range of mourning
becoming us

smooth white shells of elegant
weakened at the hock
distempered by the recent winters
foundering in the vacant space
between us

I mule you
through the tapestries of my desert
and am still, here
where I don’t belong

here I am spread as an excess
as an unfortunate truth
glossed by negligent hands

anxious, with the possible morning
indistinct dwindling winter
curling pink paper
along the walls of black sea
earth-tide

small weakened arrangement of groundcover
jostling in the ferns of truth

we measured the years in numerals
as with skin, ardent and ruddy

palpable lost youth

the rare wood of mistake
loosened from sleep

in the morning we resemble damaged objects
prized for obedience
at odd angles of deformation to time

in the body, a funeral
still warm

skin and stone a slender neck of atonement
for the absence of home

here in the husk of noon
now bleached, now yellow
oracle of time.

we have made a place, neither inside
nor outside.

behind the city
and under, nightfall.

she planes the land, herself
slaked as butter
to grease the worm pits.

we languish as cohorts to the deepening exile
vexing from us, as flapping bats
nocturnal, pardoning the night its bounty

to the shame of diurnal reap.

there is an uncertainty now
bosomed in the fog of twilight.

behind us,
the interest in truth.

but we never came for pleasantry. we came for nothing.

absolute; the daughter of another time

swathed  in the naivete of childhood.

in the darkness of our feet
lavernum dreams
pale laudanum lips
lavender flowers

world stretched out as gossamer
too tensile, unraveling

there is another language here: you
pale and glowing
volume of phantoms pressed as books
against the history of our backs

now here, now stretched too thin
for wanting, for wanton
for the drain of love, or leaving

unmistakable grift, small as peonies
partitioned as ash, well-wish
silver ripple, or nickel of time

in the water a reflection: un-you
always losing shape amongst shapeless arms

there is an alm:
forgetting

There would always be a she. She was irrevocable. It was no more plausible to remove or separate one’s self with all certitude from her than the notion of removing one’s organs was plausible. The possibility in theory, existed, as with the removal of an eye or a kidney. However, it was impossible to sever these aspects from one’s self without crippling self-injury and irreparable damage. No, she existed, or must exist in an auxiliary sense. She must be muted, though not wholly removable.  She would always exist, but most bearably so, on the outside, that hint, that shadow of something that exists at the corner of the eye, one that exists at the periphery, ever present and always fleeting. She was best glimpsed intermittently and with doubt. There in that place between places she could remain an ideal, a fantasy, an illusion rather than a thing ever to be experienced. But as usual, we are such weak creatures, and as irrevocable as she is, so inevitably we languish in her. Too often I have abandoned my autonomy for the illusion of her favor, only to be burned again, and again and again. Too often I have seen her face change in too many eyes. To succumb to her was futile. She had no favor to pander to, however ardent the will. But then…nonetheless.

absurd violet mouth

I must raise a house
bewildered and lucrid

just in case it’s true,
as in the middle of the street
steeping into puddles of rainwater-lampham
black bantam wings acruciate
I am thinking on love,
erasing as statues
a vellum scrawling red rhone rocks
here, and nowhere

inevitably, that month will swallow her whole
it was last summer, months run raw
how can yellow be so brown?
distinct home of snakes

there is a certain sadness in her want this she
shoulder of form too accustomed to this mis-peace

a war had occurred without notice, without years
time pulls scars nightly

how can we ignore it?
put your clothes back on.