The radio is wracked with fervent calls
(Minutiae of obscure variety)
But silence comes from one room down the halls
As one man fights his own impiety.
Whatever ideologies he held
Before his current call have kept quite mum
For no two words their meanings yield to meld
(His god of information now is dumb).
A slight gives way to crack the dam of calm
As one man's altar all at once forsakes,
And pray-ers praying prayers receive no balm
When mortal ignorance its sanction makes.
     Men in apocalypses are left fire-less.
     (Though no one listens to the wireless.)

Mother bear in a waterfall
With bigger thoughts than blonde harlots
Eating porridge,
Fallen starlets with outer space in their hair.

Just you wait;
I'll be the happiest little sonofabitch
You've ever seen.

Some small consolation, if any.
That weekend we spent with our
Necks perpendicular to our spines,
Of course I still remember the films we watched.

I condition my hair with split infinitives
And live off the poisoned dew that settles
Every morning in my closet.

Turn your little black dress inside-out,
I've got this magic idea for a recipe
But we're going to need some ants
And that crazy Harryhausen dream you've got up in your attic.

Ten or twelve little blond kids up
On the cliff, each ten or twelve years old
And dancing with a flame-Buddha called "Home".

Let's spend this week underwater,
I'd much rather give up my weight and my due
If it ensured me any small hour
With you. Oh, god how I love you anymore.

I may have told you this a while ago,
But did you know the first Pledge of Allegiance
Put us some good height above God?

Sometimes I find the sugar in my gas tank
Makes for a rough start in the morning,
Not that I particularly want to go anywhere,
But it's what I've thought that counts.

He's a bit upset that I skipped movie last night:
But I can't play horizontal baseball
With my violent, violent imaginary friend.

The Rubik's cube beats deep in my chest
Without a hand to cheat and rearrange the stickers.
Claude enunciates something queer into my ear
And turns off the lamp with a snap.

I've noticed that I've stopped noticing;
The way I look at the forbidden face
And the way it looks at me
No longer stirs the heavens.
No sailboat turns on its heaving sea
When our corneas connect in a brazen
Fire, nor do any fidgeting mourners
Swallow graves over our crashing pink hands.
The tin-suited band piece has long ago
Replaced any emotion that could inflame
My cheek with a khaki cigarette smoke
And spun out days like empty bags.
     Still for the rainwater of his laugh alone
     Might I swim the Earth's crooked orbit.

Where is the cake? You
totally promised me there would be
cake. Words fail me. That simpering
gleam in your eyes is well-deserved,
you swine.

Yes, I'm still ****** about it.
You said I could have some. All
I wanted was a bite because I don't even
particularly like cake, but I guess
all those sweet words of yours were
just artifice.

No, that's okay. I understand, you
just did what you had to. If that entails
giving away my cake, I don't care.
I'm not going to hold a grudge or anything
over something stupid like cake. Ha!
Don't be ridiculous, it's not like the cake was good, right?
Carrot cake, you say?

Someday there will be time to reminisce,
But now my current plan is one of dread:
To yank your hair and whisper "**** on this,"
And pull your eyes out of your ******* head.

Oh, I guess I don't really know.
The music. Texas amber.
The voice of the moon. The barred door.
The death of the dog. Ampersands.
Woman underground.

The silk woods.
Women in purple houses.
The underside of the whale, the sun.
Have I got my shoes?
Words with even emphasis.
Speech impediments; the pen.
Too many rooms.
Any kind of jam, jelly.
Vertex in space.
Mint-flavoured Scientology advertisements:
Early Easter Sunday.
Strips of Velcro, ****** hair.
Original manuscripts and forks.
Tea-leaf autumns.

Footfalls.
Summon the poets.
Start the El Camino.
Strike my face with a match.
Eat Wonderland.

Light through and through
Heavy extensor to the peach
Occlusion in the blue graph.

Stem toward the finger,
Clasp the little star
That looked so ghostly to her

And the sphere spears
Through and through us.
Because it isn’t the dreams

We look for in the sea that will
Matter. That hardly matters at all.
A hand might part the sand, but a fall

From the sky
Can ****. The water ought to part easily
But won’t move for a measly body.

The living touchstone shows us just how like the sea
A stone can be, and so a man to poetry.

So what is he? A western with the bangs
Of blacks and whites? A horror film where one
Small man must **** the wound of the unknown?
A period romance, perhaps: the flags
With mathematic turns, and fronts that free
The watchers of anxiety, and drive
Out all the critics with a glistening nerve.
I cannot fathom what he is to me.

He is. He is. He is. He is. You see,
That’s all he needs to be. The seas, the seas.
What should I care for these when all my shaky
Sustenance from his Apollan whiteness
Falls as mana in the wilderness?
He is to me what film can never be.

Oh see the thing! Glass mesosphere and ink:
The soil contumely in the field of green
From times when man among the sand could think
A second longer, in the stone tureen.
His hand to wrist to arm is a bone at a blink.
Though pink birds innocent, they hope to glean
With blinding Wednesday eyes, they love to drink.
He, Woden-******, gathers what they've seen.
We gray collected in a city's link
Descend and nest on pavements, there to preen,
And watch enchanted victims gaily sink
By the cardboard box, attracted to the sheen.
     A street magician can the world reverse
     With subtlety and somewhere to rehearse.

Should I suppose that angel with the bow
Before myself did no one any harm?
Perhaps he hunted none but Romans. No,
The seas his dart can pass with a flicking arm.
And who saw fit to give him magic arrows?
Mother Aphrodite's got a flair
For an affair and so ignores her sparrow
Son. He wanders, aimless, through the air.
Thus found he me as aimless on a bench
And, seeking rectify my lot, let loose
A bolt which speared a hapless, passing *****
Whom I in my right mind would never choose.
     As his was based on love injurious,
     Poor Eros' gift to us is furious.

There is a pleasant silence in my head
And dreary pressure joins my dreary thoughts.
The color from my waking dreams turns grey
Likewise my cloudy vision fills with spots.
You cannot know how much relief I feel
For you, alas, have skipped and are not here.
You left my home and my bronze heart
And everything through illness came quite clear.
The tree outside my window stands the snow
To carry straggling dabs of wintry life.
I see more birds in frost than I had before
When summer, summer smothered us with strife.
     You've left: my mouth is cracked a thousand miles.
     The earth around, I've wrapped with my queer smiles.

The figure lurks behind my lidded eyes:
His back is all a-hunch and he is mad
With thoughts of you. But often when he lies
He dreams as slender silver as you had.
Your beauty haunts the belfry of my head
And Shakespeare’s darkened lady’s takes a glare.
The sun was Rosaline and I was dead
The day I searched for you and found you there.

The river ran too quick against our days.
My love for you, which never found its wife,
Heard clear those words you said upon the chaise.
The words, "I could not do", which were your knife.
So here am I with no chance to rephrase;
You wounded me with words. I took your life.

It must be nearly four on this side of the road.
With a great touch of import,
Trundling through the semi-wet
And gazing at the flints refracted in sod.
A few meters across and there is succor,
There is warmth, where the earth is
Turned fresh. Very little keeps me thus
From that solid solid open door.

Still, I should be a fool to with a one
Hand cast resolve into the nighted water
Of the soul and with the other
Craft the very means for its
Exhumation. As I turn around I close
The door and shamble into dawn.

He falls like a velvet bird
And lands scarlet loudly
In the hole we dug for him.
The four of us struggle earth
Back to its sweet home
At dusk. No eulogy or parting word
But I would lay my envious form
Down to die in the damp, the musk.

They would as well. This much anyone
Could surmise. Their teeth are set
At edge, are bare and they can
Ring the salty scanning soil in wait.
All thought and breath lies underground.
Word has it four men turned to stone at dawn.

It isn’t always going to feel like this, is it?
The metal chair, with wind behind my hair.
I bend, I bend, I bend.

He was taller than a demon,
Sun radical and terminal beside the bed,
The burning outlines of the comic strip man.

Black eyes in velvet folds hold out for me
Because they know.
And I know too, somehow.

Lightly, oh how lightly, on the wood
I hear them prying out the nails. Their teeth
Cause me no end of worry, because

I can always hear. The swing moves through
My skin and it spins in my blood with the infinite
Touch of the sea

Anchored, I wait for the bolt, and I sit in the bend.
Attend, if you care, for the sound is my friend.

Brown shirt
  receding figure
     hands are cold
steps ahead
     hands are cold
maybe too close
     hands are cold
red shoes
   brown shirt
     red shoes
too far away
     hands are cold cold
         hands are cold
maybe hands are too cold
  neon light
steps ahead
  neon light ahead
       and muscles hurt.

Hungry
   but not too
      set apart
         from another one
other side
   walking away
       set apart
hands are fists
   hungry
neon night
   another side
      another one
and fists
    fists
        fists
a neon night
   stepping away
and set apart
   hungry cold cold hungry.

Step up
   step up
      step up
a step apart
      and set away
brown shirt
   white arm
      arm to face
         arm to chin
hand to lip
   hand too cold
and hands are cold
   and hands are cold
swinging door
   and closing door
      and closing door
    and closing door
      and closing door
   and closing door
     and closing door
and hands are cold
   and hungry
and full of sleep
    and muscles hurt.

They hurt real deep.

For all I know,
At the atomic level
There aren't any dreams
Except possibly this one.

softly
through the hair
step
upon the stair
song
beneath the ceiling and
the story
isnt there

hes
out there
drinking his something
or other
god i need water
because its *******
hot in the desert

when
the cold is too much for me
i sleep on my side
and wish it was
yours

he wasnt mine but i heard him sing the words

softly
through the hair
step
upon the stair
song
beneath the ceiling and
the stories
out of air.

****.

My winter love I loved in spring;
We met in my nativity.
But when I found my love for him,
He'd met senility.

My autumn love was much the worse,
He met me in my summer's heat
And when the harvest moon arrived,
He'd much too chilly feet.

My summer love was full of life,
But autumn costs a price too steep:
He'd wake each day at half-past two,
And I would be asleep.

My springtime love, though, God preserve
Until he wakes to find me dead.
He takes the winter out of me
And makes me young instead.

He has a voice for an empty night.
When no one else is up or interested,
He crushes out the words of his pagan love song
And the blue hasn't answered him yet.

What must it be like?, is the thought
Burrowing its way home to the secret core.
What must it be like to be one inside another?
The veins for the tempest of beats in a man's shape?

Too many thousands of days have rendered him
Lazarus but brave, champion of Hours in the lake:
Without the missle of the mission,
Nothing lasts but the foolish story.

The one. The two. To one again, but always
The desperate search. Heat and the rustle
Of body and body seems like the primary theme.
But the two hasn't echoed back yet.

Then the one hits the mark, as he watches apart
From the crowd that produces the crown.
Someday I, is the thought, will be part of a whole.
And sinks back to the evening streets.

Over the city while we sleep,
Outlined birds under the snow
Dream about us.

There used to be an old woman
with an apple tree, and she'd
let me shoot at her.

The blackened foam beneath the
cliff aspired higher than they
ever could.

Who is that lying in the ash?
Without food and without heat
and without blinking?

The ******* the right finally
said something to us that was
not that funny.

To the sand, to the boulevard
with a bang in the heart, and
with plenty to spare.

But don't listen to me,
I'm just the last six words
of a story you've all heard before.
Everybody knows what happens next,
we just like to doubt.

I should have lived to thank you more,
where the blue dots and the green dots
met on a stormy porch-front streaming
crack-paint, blank and dirt from years
of games on the blurry tabletops.

Years of games.

We should have walked in the fields,
you the tide swelling and falling and
ultimately disgorging universes of all
you used to know: the good and the small
and the stern and the silly and the cruel.

The good and the small.

He will take your place in the shows,
in all the nightlies and the dailies,
grey hat and black sash. He is taller
by far, and you can't look up to someone
that unabashedly taller than you.

Grey hat and black sash.

You would have made time for me between
strides on the honest diamond of the sky,
and I? I might not listen at all, but
the pearl in the glasses, those awful
brown glasses would stay with me.

I might not listen at all.

She sat with us many evenings as the
winds raked the small lights of our speech.
What has become of her, I wonder more
frequently, but sleep with my head
on my hands all the same.

Sleep with my head on my hands.

They call me under the door, they call.
They fill me with themselves until I'm out.
Just what they want from me and less. Still,
they can't tell me the good and the small,
The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.

The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.

It takes the sky to make me feel small anymore,
Ridicule from orange light
To make the ghost town fill the bluing coast.

Single silhouette, the wailing breath,
A trailer park becoming fast and
Coming near the closure of her home.

Drinking quickly stars,
The eating face of face-consumers
Touch the late-night masters, late at night-time shoppers:

Impartial is impervious, but he is much the more impious
After years blaspheming from rejections.
The magic circles spell out years

Of demons that have failed to come--
Have failed to wake the hands
And slap the machine like deviant memory can.

Hand into the cup into the hand:
Same business.

"For I am he that sways in multitudes,
The Ur-reader believing faithfully;
With words beneath my starry fingernails,
And arms attendant to the mescaline sky.
Forced blue and always empty to the face,
Blue hands against the million-houred nights.
Not blue by name but in a walking breath
Beneath the curse and cry of glinting day.
But praying's pointless anyway now that
The Seven Hands that turn the Sky have moved;
And walking with the moon can't turn me on,
Because I end up doing all the work."

There's not a ******* thing that you can do
When all the forest's trying to keep you still.

What poems do you write for me,
O sovereign brother?

What songs do you dedicate to me
without seeing my face
or knowing my name?

In what mercifully alien tongue
are your prayers of me spoken?

And by what brooks
and under which installment
of the universal moon do you stop
and pen the thoughts
of your heart to me?

In the broken colors of the earth,
I welcome you across the sea of souls
to read what I have put down
in my private books
in an ink thrice-strained by love.

"It would be a statement of complete fatuity were I to claim I had approached the venture with no measure of trepidation."* - Myself, moments after writing this poem.

I claim very little.

I claim the cold of the night as regards my own warmth.

I claim the twinge in my right ankle for no one else would, surely.

I claim what little daylight I see and that sees me.

I claim the stagnation and degradation of my soul which I allowed to prosper deep within myself in all those hurtful years I spent convincing myself that you would eventually be capable of loving me as I did you.

I am.

I am aware.

I am a vigil for myself.

I engage the world for my own ends.

I sing a song that carries no one.

I breathe only when my lungs will suffer no further delay.

I am the concept of revulsion that stirs the body instinctively, like unnecessary skin.

I am the cold entity who never felt an embrace, whose face slips out of view of the light of the flickering bulb.

I wrong myself furiously.

I rarely forgive.

I choke on the water. I burn in the deep tissues.

I feel the idea of desire, and I smell the smoke, the herbs, and the mud.

I prepare a table for myself in the presence of my infirmities, and I cannot help but look at my self between my fevers of antique wakefulness.

And I wish to God this had a happy ending.

Figure on the hill,
the vast and dark;
heinous conqueror
with single, vaulted eye.

That common passing mark
a whitish spear
who often in the morning
passed unheard.

Color in the walls,
the tangent all of space;
and I most meet
and he the thrilling knight.

Braggart of the ears,
where sleepest thou,
an curvature would bite
that runs upon the steely edge of wit?

In this repose, and let no man declaim
that music cannot work the bones of fame.

The other day in madness walked I past
The tree we used to sit beneath on days
As fury white and emerald cold as this.
To me, the tree looked clothed in common rays
But still I felt a change upon the air,
Indicative of one who would not speak
At once upon the edge of crying out
With words of import; so I heard, though weak,
"Call me and I'll divulge." Thus paused there I,
Beneath a cruel empery of thought
Not dispossessed of thee, and still I spoke,
And through the word, I have deposed thee not.

The other day in madness spoke the trees,
But what they spoke of from me ever flees.

I stood in the water
which rose to my ankles
and I asked it to lower an inch.

But water is set from
the sea to the stagnant
and it paid no attention to me.

I stood to the chillness
which swallowed my stomach
and I begged it to give me some room.

Still the puddle was deaf
from loud years in the sky
and it reached its blue arms around me.

I stood in the last lights
with a collar of ice
and I prayed all might cover my head.

Then the water did drop
as a freak act of chance,
but my feet are still stuck in the earth.

I watched him on the
Green vein,
Looking at nothing,
Caressing the infinite
Skin.

I watched the sun
**** up the dew
And spit it back into the air,
But humidity doesn't bother me
Anymore.

I fingered the white thread
With my bitten nail.
(Because I bite my nails, fingertips
Lips
When I need to focus.)

The spider on the leaf
Never looks at me.
He just drinks what's inside of the fly.

My roommate and I
were talking about
The Barrel Roll the other day.  

Now, the Barrel Roll sounds incredibly difficult,
rolling around the outside
of a giant imaginary barrel,
but you can do it.
Apparently.
In one of those rickety World War Two fighter planes.

The Aileron Roll sounds even more difficult.
You roll around an imaginary needle…
of infinite length.
To avoid the Germans or Chinese or whatever.

Even more difficult than those, of course,
is the “****-Off Roll”
wherein you stop the fighter plane
in midair
like a hummingbird.
Then, turning sharply,
you spell out the words “**** all of you”
in luminous green smoke
and then you explode
into a million purple cubes that then fall to the earth
and bury themselves upon impact.

Then, with rain and sunlight and so on,
up grow an assortment of tall, unlikable trees
that bear unpleasant fruits that fall to the earth
and decompose until the seeds plant themselves.
From these, more trees grow,
hundreds of them,
thousands.
All growing inward and converging on one point
over the course of many years.
The dew of twenty summers winking
and sparkling on this forest of wonder.

Until one tree grows
in the absolute center of the others
and it has this huge fighter plane dangling on a little stem.
The plane breaks off
and flies up into the sky
and the pilot alternates between shouting “*******!” at the Germans
and raining stagnated walrus carcasses down on the Chinese
who have forgotten all about the second World War
and the fact that it was actually the Japanese who were involved.

"Poetry is not an opinion. It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling mouth." ~Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

I

I’m so embarrassed to tell you this, but well…

You do this one thing that drives me absolutely wild.
You wore your shirt to that thing yesterday.
You know, the one with the pearl buttons.

And you had the first two buttons undone.
And I could see this bit of your chest.
And I just wanted to touch you so badly.

But then you told me how "hot" the girls in the yard were.
And then you’re just not for me.
Because no one is, it seems.

II

The air’s too heavy.
It’s cream and the sky is too.
Skim.
Skimming through the grass.

III

I’m so embarrassed to tell you this, but it’s…

A bit of you that I thought I knew.
A splash of your skin that I know would perfectly fit my hand.
A triangle of tan and tangle.

IV

I’m under the moon right now
And sleep should be in the door any minute now.
What did you say to me earlier?
When you were speaking to me for seven minutes,
Seven minutes under the red lights,
But I can’t think that means anything.
No matter how much it should.

V

I’m a little ashamed to tell you this, but when I was little…

Everything was smaller.
The world accustomed itself to me
And I ate it up as though it were real.

But I’m not sure anymore.
Not about anything.
Not even myself.

I was playing checkers for the first ten years of knowing you.
And you reached across the table, took my hand.
Told me we were playing cards.

VI

A bit of a weird metaphor, but…
Days fall off the calendar like apples.
Meaning comes in boxes now.

Boxes of light.
Boxes of ***.
Boxes of music.
Boxes of things that aren’t funny anymore.

And I shouldn't have to leave myself closed.

VII

I’m a little curious why you want to know this…

Yes, I love you.
I love everything about you.
I love every you that there has ever been.
And every you there ever will be.

The very possibility of seeing you in that chair is a miracle.
I hope you are around in the future,
So I can not tell you these things.

VIII

I’m pretty sure he’s music.

IX

I’m sure you’ve heard this but…
The night is for us.
The trees expect activity.
The distances serene and slightly buzzed.

She was so short when I met her,
I could see you over her head.
All amber and slightly buzzed.

X

What in the hell is wrong with me!?
Throwing away my life and energies on you…
Unlike people that actually feel the acuities of time,
I glass feeble ******* worm straight through the walls.
I don’t deserve the power of speech,
Because I only use it in one-way liaisons with you!

And you can’t appreciate me,
Because you’re too ******* straight.

XI

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but…

I moved a hand in your direction the other day
And I think you looked at it.
But you didn’t look at me.

I think you made eye contact deliberately with me today,
But there was nothing behind your pupils
But “Hey… buddy.”

Later, when I pick up my arm
I can only really focus
Really, really focus
On the divots cut into my arm
By the picnic table.

XII*

But the summer is folding itself away,
And the grass starts to move without a thought.
Not about me, not about any of us.

When the heat inside the clock face presses down enough,
It might run a bit faster,
But it won’t ever admit to what it’s done to me.
And understand why he should be so embarrassed.

christ.

Blinking back tears,

I contemplate that cruelest of human injustices:

How few friends I have on Facebook.

You are the hidden quantity,
The man on the other side of the canvas,
The word written behind the sky.

You are the breath
that transfers oxygen to the lungs of an awful house cat.

You are the reason
that anybody bothers to finish the book

You are the second wasted retrieving coffee
that allows the stars to escape me.

You are the trauma in my childhood
that will haunt my genetic code.

You are the x
for which I am solving.

You are the hook in a song
that makes all the fans remember it.

You are the ingredient
that is toxic on its own.

You are the remembered name
in a world of forgotten faces.

You are the accidental word
that destroys the context of the sentence.

You are the electric innovation
of which I would never have thought.

You are the designation of a fiasco,
The shadow we recognize,
The boy or the girl. It doesn't matter which.

The greatest poem in the whole wide world
Is all about a boy and a girld.
They love each other very much
And spend the poem kissing and such.

My poem should be about true love and pain
And maybe a scene in the middle with rain.
The girl and the boy might have a brief fight
But be ready to apologize by the morning light.

The words are not especially lyrical.
A college professor would find it hysterical.
But that doesn't matter, and nor does the meter,
Though you don't know what a meter is either.

The rhyme scheme is awful but no one will notice,
The everyday reader just wants it to sound close.
We smart people care so much more about story;
So what if the actual technique's derisory?

No intimate struggles with life and death
Or Shakespearean references that no one would get.
Just make it appealing with predictable rhyme
And too many words which ruin the rhythm of every line.

Write quatrains in sing-song that should have been couplets
And only use subjects that are okay in public.
But remember the rule that is chief above others:
Don't use a word that would frighten your mothers.

If you follow these steps, then you too can be great
And have all your scribblings inscribed upon slates.
The world will declare you a king among men
And the words are pure gold that escape from your pen.

For the greatest **** poem in the whole wide world
Is supposed to be all about a boy and a girld.
And no one suspects or cares if it's garbage
As long as it's the same degrading, puerile drivel we've grown to expect.

I feel pretty sick knowing
you’ll be a part of my
art.
My poems have you in
them like a metallic aftertaste.
A hint of nuts.
Did you put vermin in
this fricassee?
Some people put God in
their poems but with me
it’s always you.
You’re the inky air in
the corner that congeals like
bad music.
No, I don’t want to
listen to that song.
Just put it on “shuffle”
for Chrissakes.
You sit there in the
crack on the wall and
scrunch your body at me.
You’ll ruin your posture but
you’re not really there.
It’s a metaphor.
It’s what poets do when
they hate you as much
as I do:
You blast my taste buds
away from the ordinary and
force me to talk about
you in euphemisms.
Or dysphemisms in this case.
God, I don’t freaking know.
You just make me angry!
“I’ll treat you to dinner.”
*******, go treat yourself to the bottom of a lake.

I told you you were
black space in the walls,
but I’ve opened a window.
Weren’t expecting that, were you?
Still, perhaps you’re too utterly
utter to suffer the flutter
of the breeze.
I’m going out.
And believe you me pal, you’d better be gone by the time I get back.

Even though I know you’re not really there.
It’s the principle of the thing.

Blink on and off
In the trees.

Blink on and off
From the hedge.

Blink on and off
At waist height.

Blink on and off
Waiting for something.

Blink on and off
In the honeysuckle.

Blink on and off
Nearer the roofs.

Blink on and off
Landing but briefly.

Blink on and off
Inside a jar.

Blink on and off
Waiting to die.

Blink on and off
Seeing great fingers.

Blink on and off
And I start to wonder how long fireflies generally live.

I stop thinking about it when the little girl smears me on her face.

I fell in love in the cloudbank,
And like all the purest infatuations
I was the only one who knew what had happened.

I feel it terribly.
8A, what is your name?
The sounds up here knock off of my defeat like radar.

I thought I caught your eye
Between your perpetual noddings off
And that one time we crushed alongside a lightningcloud.

I am the man named 9B
But I doubt you know that.
The sky won’t ever pick me up again.

I could see the stars tonight; three of them.
Half-turned from the face of the moon, one
Could just barely make out what they were
Maybe thinking.

It was as if they were reading out their own
Transcripts of all the good nights I have ever
Had: bullet list format, possibly written on
Index cards.

Small though they undoubtedly are (if they
Are, because I’ve never seen one up close)
They make the wideness of Everything feel
So poor.

When my evenings were read out in their
Starched mutterings, the sphere of the sky
Was delineated utterly to me: one club that
No one joins.

Deep grit.
Fine, fine tacks.

Over-heated night.
My face, the light.

The glass points at me.
Musk and moonflowers.

I throb to the beat
Of a glycerol heat
That keeps coming
And going and coming.

I've just written two hundred or so pages of prose.
I've cradled each word in my arms
And dreamed about their futures.

I've mapped out every interaction between the characters
I've created them and given them their instructions.
And they know what to do.

I've sent my multitudinous children off to the editor.
I've made sure all my wordings are whole
And healthy.

And I have made some mistakes on purpose, I must admit.
And I hope they distract the editor from noticing
I've emptied a dime-bag of ****** into the manuscript.

That should keep the little buggers reading.

The Sun is dire and bites His sandy teeth
Into the burnt and the discourteous.
If you forget to tell us that you've sneezed
The devil will devour you in hell.
The sky is but a face that hides His shame,
In burqas made of promises and cloud.
If you or I were one day to awake
Our blood might chill at all the mocking air.
The desert kindly tucks its child to bed
And never mind the fact of naked bones.
If mystery's the reason for my life,
The One who writes it gives some dreadful clues.
     See, any spectral hand who wants for care
     Is something for which something must be done.

Speed is an ocean,
My shore lined with its salt,
Walking quiet in a chasm
Paved in bitter broken stone.

A relapse breaks out mid-step:
Pupal voices, murmuring hearts
In origami churches.
The anticipation dogs me madly.

My days are hollowed out by what you give,
I’d set myself on fire to see you live.

Down in the cellar.
By the river, by the candlelight.
She sits with her pale grey

Eye that points and beckons,
Beckons to the gibbering
Of incessant trees.

She calls out to the Man she
Is destined to meet
Like everyone else.

Like the curdling of what
Is there, faceless, at birth.
A Figure proceeds out.

From his coat He pulls a
Golden pin that is as long as
A day or longer. He smiles,

He takes her hand and stabs.
Her wrist beads with the
Dawn. It runs down her arm.

She smiles, she takes her candle
By the wick and feeds
A Man

Her flame.
Under the speculative moon.
Under the sleeping house.

Finally, a sigh from the Man.
He has no mouth to speak of.
To the river He leads her.

The water accepts her. A hand
on her neck, He the biting aid.
Not light.

Not of need, but to feed-
To cede an ember.
To burn her up in the night.

A hundred threads
Whitely pass
Into the red curve.

The sea of grass and I survey.
Delicate folds shape the mass
As a cobweb napkin.

I sip daintily at
Stark faces in
The brilliant musk.

This is a struggle to
Recover my black bones
From velvet soul-eating sleep.

Here, inside of a glove
Which always seems to
Have an extra finger or two.

Continuing in a serene orbit,
Just a figure on a rail,
And silver day is an idiot greyhound,

Bounding instantly afterward
Rather like a run in a stocking
But not at all.

Days extrapolating feeling
Rise before beloved nightfall;
Fill my wisdom teeth with malice
And my writing hand with red sound.

Could it be that such a nightfriend
Wishing me his presence bear be
Such a creature of convulsion to
The color-coded fireworld?

Yet again, it could be thus:
A figment of the waterthought
Defending self-same affluence
In verdant speech clouds’ spheres.

Here simplicity should be foregone
Whilst incorporating to my ken
The worthiest of childhood urge
And true descriptions seen therein.

Sally kisses Johnny on the lips.
Johnny feels her pressure on his hips.

Sally will not ever get it back.
Johnny cannot give her love he lacks.

Sally finds it inborn to be ******.
But Johnny sees it as contextual.

I have secrets. Not really. The
thing about secrets: everyone has them.
It doesn't matter how close you
feel to someone. If you know
someone, you keep secrets from them.
To avoid keeping secrets from someone
is to speak your every thought
and conceal no transient stirring of
opinion. And who can boast that
they have never held their thoughts
in check for the sparing of
an unwilling or unwitting ear? Indeed
I have no secrets from others,
simply sides I have not shown
them. And no one can be
my closest confidant, for there are
questions I have never been asked.
So when you feel I am
keeping something from you do not
assume it is my malicious vouchsafe
that I guard from the daylight.
The things I tell others are
as readily apparent in me as
the steps I take, the things
I have not divulged merely the
undersides of my feet, not displayed
but ever present.

But there are things I have
not divulged within me that have
been scrutinized and been subjected to
taboo. These for want of a
better word, we can call secrets.
They are small motes of golden
truth which swim in my bones
and glitter in flames of indignation.
And they are alive for they
move throughout my entire being and
use quick teeth to try to
rend me open. They thirst, these
infinitesimal planets, for the sun which
casts light on everything and bears
nothing in more genial light than
its neighbor. I rather suspect they
would appreciate that equanimity.

However were I to free them,
to cast asunder their parasitic bonds,
I would be cast from my
comfort and tormented, guilty as a
twin shamed for his brother's faults.
So what am I to do?

These glazed traits, my inner selves,
have teeth so I feed them;
I feed them with knowledge and
the comfort that they are not
unique, for others are feasted upon
by the unknowable and un-"what"-able demons
that lie in wait in their
bodies; I feed them with promises,
so infantile yet that they cannot
be tested for emptiness, of an
eventual release and the opportunity to
cast loose the bonds of disgust
with which my peers lasso them.

And they grow larger. They are
engorged with hope. Still when the
beast grows larger, larger grows its
bite.

And when I am at a
loss to placate my secret in-dwellers
with hope, they gnaw. And the
bites which at one point might
have been an irksome scrabbling at
my heart now cave in my
resolve and threaten my breathing with
an erstwhile unspent vigor.

The lily’s face on my arm,
I saw it often.

The words I spoke to it,
“I thought I knew.”

The day it scattered,
I forgot to breathe.

The memory is odd music now.
I think that was when all

The people who knew,
I fancy they do, told me

“The spell is broken.”
I disagree, I argue that

The spell was deeper yet.
I felt it for a spider’s heat,

The work. Luminescent,
I see it even now;

The alabaster ground,
I freeze unto my very bones.

The spell was broken but
I thought I knew.

The black is bitten bright and
I will not feel tonight.

I've been here a year,
A miserable year.

The lease expires next month
And then I won't have to sit
Here in this alleyway
Anymore.

Of course, if on the day
I get to move out some psychopath,
Like the ones you hear about,
Decides to firebomb this whole
****** building
I should like only to sit and listen.

From the warping of linoleum
To the light off the tile,
I would sit on the threadbare
And subscribe to the dance of
Sugarplum atoms.
They spit and sparkle
Like children and stars, respectively,
And give me something to do.

I've been here a year,
A miserable year,
On the corner of Walnut and Greer.

Under cloudbanks of ceiling,
I've been without being,
Been seared without being a seer.