I reserved a table for the two of us
at the only restaurant in the world
that not only offers atmosphere and setting
but tone and syntax as well.

First some articles for appetizers. They're
easiest on my pocket you know.

An an, a the, and an a.
Let's not even start on the punctuation,
I'm treating you to a rather large meal.
As large as the entire English language,
now back to the articles.
Sure these taste like lint but they still
taste. Petit fours but there you are.
Try to be disinterested or you'll
put me off my food.

Nouns now. My, what a variety.
Bit meaty, eh? These have staying power.
They taste like a bit of everywhere,
and everyone, and everything.
What's that? Surely they're not that bland.
Maybe you need some seasoning.

"Adjective" comes from the
French for "to the word."
So exotic aren't they? These
really are fantastic.
Exquisite, unique, zesty to say the least.
You must admit, they
make the meal worth it.
I hope you're not allergic,
I could have sworn I just
had something "nutty."
Oh, it had nuts "in it"?
There must be some prepositions
mixed in here.

(I'm glad we're getting through
these now, I've never been a big fan of them.
When I was a kid, I would always push my prepositions to the end
of my sentences. You just can't do
that in a joint like this, it seems.)

Ah finally. The verbs are served.
Well-prepared it would seem.
Yes, anything you can do to a verb
they've done to these.
Infinitives (too good to realistically be believed!),
gerunds, and participles (No, not particles. But we
did have some of those at the Japanese restaurant.)
Fairly lean too, as I can't see
any auxiliary fat.

For some reason
those adverbs (just to your left, under that
thesaurus) really go well with this.
Plus those adjectives from earlier, rather pleasantly.

Now a brief selection
of conjunctions, but don't ruin
yourself. They're not a meal of themselves,
just a link to...

Oh! Look at those interjections.
So delicate, so (Wow!) incisive.
I told you to keep your appetite.
Well, just try a little of this. Goodness, me!

And then everyone proceeds to
die  
from a split infinitive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sky-flower.
Blooms to sway in blue bowl.
Feeds with ******* root, edges in grass.
Turns quick head.
Flicks dead eyes.
But sings *** brightly.
Plumage song,
Melodious leaf.
With nested seeds in calcium shelf.
Dies under the sting of a Tybalt or two.
And the ****** bird drops.
Wilts in the sun.

"And Abraham drew near, and said,
Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?"
- Genesis 18:23

I

There are about four thousand people
Here.
They throng in blasted heat like
Little arid wasps.
Gasping summer rain,
Like the opposite of fish.
Of their individual character
I can give no generality.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs and
Sleep on their words.
They are hot and cold
And they hate and scold.
They are devils and stars
And ***** and priests
And children of priests.
Orators, they are also:
The speakers of the state (which
Is hotter than they could
Ever know); they steal
And reel and impose their
Splitting fingernails deep into
The varnish of the
Wishing well.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs and
Smother dreams by spitting on the sky.

II

Fox. Come and light my little room
With your brilliant breath. Have you
Come very far? From the eye of the trees?

I should leave this little town if I were you.
It has its ways and leeches from our
Dangling hands. A tongue named Lethe.

Wake early and flee back to your dark,
Summon that green corpus shell that
You came from and follow its outlying root.

You should know the power of the vine.
It crawls in the blinding night and
Strangles what it cannot feed upon.

Oh my little fox, I beg you turn back,
For in familiarity lies strength and nothing
In this wilderness will give you nourishment.

III

He walks in waterways and crunches bone.
He watches moonlight play on open wounds.
He wishes dearly for the ends of weeks.
I heard him live his life without a sound.

The high school band with a treble clef. The year
Of empty penmanship in which he wrote
A thousand notes and mailed them underground
About which neither parent knew a thing.

Encounters best discovered some years later
Work to redden ears in coffee shops,
Or rather as I’m talking to him now,
With darting speech and halting eyes and all.

Perhaps the atmosphere could lend itself to blame,
The hormones and the collusive ennui.
But little charms the tear ducts quite like saying,
“Why am I this way, do you suppose?”

I haven’t got the heart to make reply
And often pose myself the same question
Before the mirror thinking of my whims,
The muddied roads that led me where they did.

My time has run itself to pieces in
The hope of spreading my horizons, but
Some sand runs faster in the way, some gains
More ground. And mine? This distance is unknown.

I licked the shelves of Hardy, Plath, and Keats.
I lorded over idiots with glee.
I lured the fathoms of my mind to float.
And oh, the things that he must think of me.

IV

The doors know I am coming,
They dart out of my way.
My telekinesis stops there
But I troll forward
And brandish my little iron steed.

****. Adjust my strap
And push the cart onward.
My purse like a little leather
Bundle of swaddling.
I nuzzle it close to my breast.

Frozen foods. Diet says
No carbohydrates, so I adjust
My tastes. In a little town
Like this, they’ll notice if
I don’t.

Magazine aisle. Nothing
But ***-endorsing rags
And godless photo sessions fit
For lining shelves and
little else.

Lord, this vast store!
Give me strength to bet back
To my car. God, look at
That **** at the pharmacy
Asking for birth control.

And I can’t help but
Cluck my tongue at her:
I just tell Ray I have a headache
And turn on my back.
Ha, as if she’s married.

No decency any more.
Men getting married, women too!
God supposedly “Banging” us out of
Star dust. Who are those atheists
To judge my truth?

Checkout. No, self-checkout.
I don’t like that clerk
Staring at me. Receipt.
Probably a ******* anyway.
And for a moment my mind controls the doors and all things.

V

She’s gone a bit insane.
Yesterday in class, she asked
To go to the lavatory
And just went straight home.
(Poor thing, I can’t blame
Her after all that has happened.)

She’s told me about her
Father before. Whether she’ll
End up as warped remains
To be seen. She’s got my sympathy.
(Mother dead at four, brother at
Seven and something else at twelve.)

Senior year is more than
Freedom from Dad, she says.
It’s freedom from myself,
Whatever that means.
(It is her father’s profound wish
That she memorize all of Revelations.)

From the grass, she tells me
That her father explained to her
That non-dairy creamer kills
Ants. She does it with a smile.
(We don’t have to say much more,
Suffice it to say he’s a very loud man.)

She still has an averse reaction
To stories about car crashes.
And I never read her her
Early July horoscope.
(Nightmares are too kind.
Panic sifts through windowpanes.)

Her uncle doesn’t call from
The old hometown, he was
Grabbed from her life and her
Father never says why they moved here.
(Two years her junior, she jokingly
Calls me Grandma because)

She hates her real one. Prom
And graduation. A candle
Ceremony and she’s gone.
Her father left before it was over.
(I’ll miss her, but I made
Her promise not to visit.)

VI

Hot like a miracle breath.
The two seasons: Summer
And February.
We taste the heat
And drive away for the weekend.
Of course the world ends
And the “Welcome to” sign.

Unsurprisingly,
The radio dies as we
Head back to town.
Why should the death of
An intangible surprise me?
Everything else
Dies here.

Pessimism like a mockingbird.
The smoking trees
Ripple like an Ella
Fitzgerald vowel.
Hold your
Miraculous breath
And it still won’t rain.

Our abortion
Welcomes the needle heat
with a  horrifying
Little finger.
That smile,
That smile.
Jesus.

How can it stay so
Hot? No reply,
But I forgot who
Was asking.
The irony of this ****
Town sparks my
Smile.

VII

So where are you from?

        I lived up north
Before I moved down here.
They needed teachers and
I thought “Why not?” Turns
Out this place is a lot
Slower than up where I
Came from. No offense.

(Laughs) None taken.
So what are you teaching?

Senior English. Pretty cool
Subject but I was shocked
How little the kids had been
Exposed to. I hope to remedy
That soon. (Mumbles something)
Any more problems, you know?

The parents have complained?

Oh, just the usual nitpicky
Silliness: “I don’t want my
Christa or Johnny reading
Such-and-such a book.”
After a few years, I’m
Sure the parents will lighten up.
Or, (Laughs) at least I hope.

How are the kids?

Can I actually answer that one?
One or two brights but most
Just seem ready to get out.
They’d better be willing to put
In some actual thought if
They really hope to. (Pause)
It’s not all about sports.

(Laughs) I hope you’re not too
******* the athletes. They do their best.

Well, I certainly hope
They do. I won’t play
Favorites or anything like
That. Hardly fair to the
Others, right? (Laughs,
A pause, tape ends.)

VIII

He can’t breathe.

He’s been running for
Hours.
The trees. The brush.

Wonderful veins blast
Away at their work
To preserve him;
Great fibrous tendons
Work to carry him
Away from the noise.

The murderous streets with
Scoured buildings
And trees inviting the
Convening crowds to lay
Out their burdens, to
String them up and
Ease their hard frustrations.

They have not seen him as yet.
He follows Polaris,
god of the irreverent,
Meager candle for a
Drowning man.

Exposed road; he flags
A car like a madman.
Well, we shan’t go
So far as to call him that.
And has he any bags?
No.
And which way is he going?
North.

Procession. Silence.

The coolish progress
Of a blackish
Summerish
Night.
How many minutes
out of town? and how
many moments in the
rounding cruelty of acting?
The driver smiles in his driver’s
Seat, eyes lit by the green
Display, ears filled suddenly with
Static.

The bruised night
Raises its single, white eye
Like the ponderous pitch
Of a bird.

I suppose he knew from
The second he saw the car:
There was never any sanctuary
In this little cloister.

The towns spreads like
Botulism over both windows.
He stops before the courthouse.
Stops before his jury,
Hanging judges.
And you needn‘t ask yourself
“Who are they?”

I’ll tell you.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs.

They are boys from California
Who ran like foxes but refused
To run away.

They are musicians who lived
Their lives without a sound.

They are hopeless hags who
Speak in blinding grocery stores
And **** the gossip air.

They are girls with opportunities
Burst like an innocent cell
And violated by the heavy hand
That tucks them deep to sleep.

They are cruel little ******* who
Only wanted something to listen to
While the seasons spun around them.

They are teachers who never learned.
They are hearts that never burned.
They are heads that never cooled.
Not when it’s so hot outside.

They grew uneven like a story
Written in celebration of a meaningless title.
They have every right to be angry,
And yet they level their stones
At one another instead of the
Hell a glass house can become.

They walk so slow the sun
Can stoop and eat them up
Without the briefest guilt.

In a different town.

The baked streets have thinner air.
The fata seem to belong less to Morgana than to the mountains.
The tall mountains that freeze
The water of the eyes to
The water of the roads a mile away.
The terrific air.

I can now only barely recall.
No sound, the film skipped,
Slightly off the projector track.

The dark insides of a native heritage.
The store with an open door.
The stern woman behind the white smoke counter.
Turquoise is expensive,
But no one buys enough for it to be in vogue.
A vogue might swallow all the sulfur
Sand.

The sharp nose,
Cheekbones that squint the little black eyes deeper inside.
I can see why they must have been afraid,
Though I’m not quite sure what I mean by “they.”
This town is different from any other one.

And you can feel it when the mountains
Pin their tongue into the sun.

If you care:
My
life is a little
box
and I dreamt of a
little box. The more I watched the less it
was. In
a solid white something. Lamps. A
table. Clothes. Proper punctuation and
capitalization. Unthinkable hopes
and blasphemous suppositions. Some force
that I can’t call God, just my sick
dream-logic, blew it to ashes. My world-cube. My mirrors.
My books. My awards and certificates and
All my precious stanzas. Cinders and pronunciation alone remained.
At this, I
smiled and
shook my soul
with the Prophet. My own music burst out
before me like mathematics
(My very breath guided by an
infinitely ascetic
sweep) and like oil paint (in
a world that glows
like neon and
breathes out empty
space) and I awoke from whiteness. I fold
myself into four
like the
secret of flight. But you don’t care.

Every day.
The everyday.
You see it every day.
The twitch and reel and marble movement
As turgid blood surfaces to face,
Flows to operate stiff shoulders.
Backs hunch as soon as they're alone.
And they are alone.
Surrounded by lovers that
Love in word only.
They chew their nails and cross their ankles.
Uncross.
And look around.

Spring. Could you imagine?
Gear, wire. Did he say?
Bolt, frame. Isn't he?
Ratchet. And then what did he say?
Screws.
Rotor.
A bunch of ****.
Oil.
Oil.
Oil. Oil. Oil.
Plug in.
Silence.
It moves.

We move a head in times of
Strain. To signify
Exact measures.
Twist on axis
With perfect posture.
Unnoticed frameworks bar our days.
We are brass.
The more crass are silver, gold.
And the days are polish. Or maybe sand.
Soon there are no mistakes.
The veneer cakes without flaw.
We do not acknowledge.
We are not caught.

For little hours though, there are kinks.
Pauses.
Errors.
Open the clockwork face.
What is stuck?
A look around.
The gears that grind us to cognition
Are jammed by a fly-body
Of soul.
Soon, soon, sooner than ever
It will be crushed.
So gears might continue,
Might make room for the everyday.

Rather I did, once. No longer.
We were magnetic, tectonic.
Constantly and consistently converging.
Unfolding.
Seamlessly (it would seem) arranged on
Memory's golden stage.
But today, tomorrow,
Where moves are flimsy and unsure
Lines drop from lips in silence,
Unraveling like gauze,
As we both wait for alarums that cannot sound.

I feel anesthetized, don't I? I—
And the curtain will be merciful.
A breath of disdain perhaps, disastrous.
Your touch is autumn.
I eclipse the sun, suffocate you from it.
Take your warmth.
Leave you colder than Ophelia
And bloodier than Brutus.
My inadequacy was once your balm,
A catechism to ensure another world
That we both know isn't sound.

The very least you can do is become like Icarus
Who was beautiful in his fall
And silent at his end.

I am the trusted family spatula,
the curve in a Slinky,
the light refracted from antique shoppe crystal,
the distrust that sits at the back of the mind while reading a movie review,
the subtle humidity of the end of spring that goes without remark.

Also, I'm a flamingo.
Never forget that.

Sing to me, O dark vault of night.

The divine muse is upon me;
Up on my shoulders.
She doesn’t appear to have
anything instructive to say
apart from “And how the ruddy,
blasted, Viking-snogging,
******, ******, mother-defecating
hell did I get up here!?”

Inspiring words indeed.

The last feeling pang passes in a gasp
As the cold metal, hot metal
Pierces through that bending
Wind-like flesh.
In a second it will be a
Feature like the hue of eyes
Borne its weight long and steps inside
Its waiting grave.

You cold?

I am.

My jacket.

Thanks.

Yepp.

The clothes on a perfectly sculpted mannequin
do not accentuate the garment's beauty.
Rather, it hollows it, makes it unwholesome
and outlines all the more clearly how empty it truly is
to the point where one forgets what one is looking at.
Like a vague pronoun.

The human mind, the decent soul, cannot and should
not be subjected to such a ******* and feels inhumanly
compelled to destroy the effect.

And that is why mannequins are so good for sales.

There is a beetle on the high street,
pushing the sun along at a fraction-
0f-a-mile-per-hour. He is pondering
his plans for the summer.
Perhaps different venues?
Perhaps different dung?
But he knows it's all foolishness.
He never goes anywhere.

Then a god falls out of the sky.
Not a particularly large one,
a medium-sized god as far as
they go. Roughly human-
shaped. Not counting those
streaming banners of fire
that pour from his eyes.
Few humans have burning eyes.

A dagger drips from an open
wound and he clenches his
blood (it is his own blood) in his hand.
More are coming he realizes.
All of them. And he's quite
correct. Without trumpets or
lights or choruses or bowls or
scrolls, it starts to rain.

The beetle pauses in his
pilgrimage to survey the
man underneath the god's feet.
A hand in a crater of asphalt
with a keen, nigh-inaudible
wheeze of breath. A cough
and a choke.
And the beetle scuttles on.

They fall from clouds that aren't,
I mean, actually in the sky. They crush
buildings and businessmen, They
eat fountains. They descend into an
unthinkable and unthinking
age like a dizzied chorus that cannot
pick up on the beat. Purple sash
and green helm, They build mountains.

Teeth chip around the clay- the men
and women- like fireworks.
The gods' great works resolve
like a finished slider puzzle, like the
back of the sun. Mannequins watch
the moving marble for a moment.
But the Mutes eventually find a voice,
they shout, they run into the fray.

Tantalus' mouth fills with
wine. The beetle walks around his
head. Sisyphus' back was broken
by a boulder. The poor little fellow
descends into an inferno and
climbs the devil's back like a
Purgative mountaineer. Such struggle,
thinks he, to have to take a detour.

Sky sets fire to the shell pink
sun at night.

The liquid spheres engulf ideas
on a dry stretch of ocean.

Clouds splinter in a victor's hands,
are frozen shut.

and everything sinks back home
in the middle of a wor

Up from the deep
Water breaks in diagonal sheets.

The skies careen off and away
Red arrays.

Universe of musculature
A foot in a sandy detour.

Indirect to purpose
Skin and flow.

Dries on the gilded bank
Wild hair set flat.

A thousand atmospheres taken
Into a single ozone breath.

After a time, stoops
By the multiform to look.

Stones heavy-
Light enough to carry.

To the mouth wide
And bitten dry.

The water wears everything
So the teeth can split.

A fortnight of spite
And the treacherous bite.
He returns to the sea
With a headful of light.

"This s.o.b. has got Tourette's.
Who knows what he might say? We'd better
Get him under before he rises.
Sterilize something fast!"

I'm awake for the time being. When sleep comes
I shall play the perfect display of my bacillus. Reposing
On the white table like a necrotic pieta. Off to my
Left I can hear those touchstones spinning in fine sockets,
Sterilizing my hands by binding my feet. Soon I will be
A paragon of grunting celluloid, clutched at by
Heated hearts to wrinkle and shear.
I can already taste the cleanser.

Rubber foam, steel clamp and tongue depressor.
Excise the black portions with a serrated life,
You might as well. Because it doesn't matter
How much morphine sits in the delirium drip.
I'm still alive: the crush and blink in Boris Karloff eyes.

When I gather up my self in the morning.
I will be instructed to take all Ten a day
And check in regularly. Despite the cold,
Despite the heat, the embryo has quite failed.

It was a fortunate evening
I chose to stroll out. Somewhat cold
and cloying soft for recent rain.

The grass arched speculative at me
the better to see Godot on his way to an appointment.
Just so, the stage light
mixed its ponderous firmaments
to a more even pigment.

I gazed upward at the longing, doleful
eye and felt the monochrome sigh of
that girl who sits upon the air.
She directs her lambent limelight
half-heartedly for she only reads the script by candlelight.

You can see her strolling over gondoliers
or pausing on the running man  in a
nineteen-forties travel film with all
the ubiquitous pains of
a villain in a childhood mystery.
A bleating bulb that never burns the eye.

Look.

He was just very enthusiastic about
being a fireman. He was always on
time and he never stole anything.

That's all I wanna say about it.

He never touched nobody or nothing.

That's all.
Really.
And stop calling.

"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.

My newest hobby is telling people
that I have a prom date, watching the drift of mouths
and listening to the refocusing
of eyes. I'm sure they don't mean
to be rude but they certainly make a good show
of their unkempt reactions.

"Really?" comes the pestilential chorus
as trains of thought rapidly switch tracks.

One stalwart, you may shudder
to hear this, expressed profound
disgust when I disclosed the girl's identity.
"I wasn't aware they let lesbians go to the dance.”
he says and I: "Well, you'll find
they cannot bar the doors to any
sort of trash. You're going right?"

Not a thing about this business seems (to my joying eyes)
quite belonging to its proper world. Yes, it's really me.

I, the wandering ******-shaman,
must look quite at odds in their view;
despoiling the *** ritual
by stepping out from behind
the moon's galling rind of half-light.
To beat at my own tides? Oh, god!
The quiddity of my queer mind
is sacred like a water-walking rumor.

I find myself betrothed behind my back,
my role is sealed ere tightness shows a crack.

I walked over a hill
at seventy miles an hour.
Through the early dew I
experienced geography like an audio
sample. I tasted the black
road. I was suspended in
the air. I heard my
edges falling into the grass,
carried by an unkind wind.

For a brief moment, I
understood the earth and
sought to shirk its pull.
I am a fruit from
a tree, a moist bead
that sings to its matriarch
root, but of the tree
of knowledge. I will fall
from my branch so as
not to bend in the
wind.

This not quite the underground, but still a strange corridor-
Scurrying in skirts and argyle and
Two-piece research paper suits.
They get together in the new Underground, they
Smoke old memories and sit in a stoner semicircle
To listen to old attendance records.

Humming the anecdotal lark, a man with a  prim tie
Rises and steps into the middle to slam. Over the deafening
Hookah comes David Copperfield.
Hello Voltaire, have you brought your
Reading glasses? The secret anatomies
Held in the inked atomies

Are all we come for. Let us in on this electric
Canvas. Let us paint out plots of plots that
All of us have known,
Around and underneath, and speak out our
Crayon set opinions, to tell the dim-eyed boys and girls
About in detail later. Ooh, say eight o’clock?

The intimate mountain--
Weekends in a mercury supermarket--
And the nearly vindictive lilt in
Your voice when you drop the
Last 'T' in restaurant!

Perhaps for just a few months
We might dispense with the honorifics,
Because we each know perfectly
Well your finger-ring has a smile
For no one but me.

The first autumn was always impossible for me
(or at least it will be).
Winds winding like a clarinet--
A boulangerie cover of
Dies Irae.

Now where have I misplaced my
Sensory glands? Charles
Walks an intricately awkward emphasis
In ungodly,
Strangely comfortable stilettos.

The emcee has no frigging
Idea what the people want to hear anymore.
His serape and his wine--
Not to mention his women,
Although I have just now.

Poor little frog.
It looses owners off its skin
Like tadpole-seeds, over
A game of backgammon
That never really cheats anybody.

The abandoned LiveJournal account.
The forgotten Myspace passwords.
The iPod that hasn't been updated in years.
The body slumped on a threadbare sofa.
The broken earbuds and busted eardrums.

Start spreading the news:
I've already left.
Go and empty the pews;
My mother bereft.
And the Chamber of Commerce wants to blame the ****** on me.

****.

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.

Sky is pitch and crystal cloud
Wild figures languor on the dusty ground.
Eight pairs of darken haloed eyes
Strike the blue to blacken.

Bring the night.
And bring the work
The work by voice and light
Work with reddened hands
And verbal glance at a
Smaller place that must
Be walked: a faster pace
To lose the mortal race.
Mellow hours decay with gracelessness
That cannot be dreamed

On April nights no one in the road
Can be exempt. Nothing is exempt
At the stroke of the hour.

A step cracks in the deep
In those woods with painted fronts
A step that eats a flower
Sending up devotions.
****** rocks the riverbed
Hums a note in the still.
White shoes in black line
Mechanical clarity, footfalls.
Frissons from foreshadowing
A judder and a burial.
A burial in white.

It reeks of adrenaline, God's own ketamine,
Is sundered somewhat by a Sunday.
Sunday suit and six strong suitors
Following suit to the spot

No one could say. Still, the air
Is too hot with electricity to suffer it.
Tomorrow we can say
That we all knew the night's dread
Export, but for tonight we pray
Our lambs are all a-bed
And not a one of them
Is dead.

No one taught Ophelia to swim.
The hateful eating orange of dawn
Mocks her slow and stymied progress.

I feel like I am A New Orlean doll
With my burlap and my threaded seams
To view the world.
My fingers are stitched
And immobile.

I feel like I should scream—
Scream to wake
Scream to crack the atmosphere
Or scream to come alive.
My mouth, however, is dumb.

I feel like I am in someone else's shape
Someone who has wronged
And will be wronged alike
With needles I ***** myself.
My embroidery comes apart near my chest.

Blind woman's stitch binds me to his hair.
He turns and drops when I am rendered air.

All day
He stands at the tree
Doesn't touch
And does not speak
Stains linger
That way all the onlookers
Know:
"This is his tree"
"This is where they"
"This is"
So while for the
Neighbors, friends,
There may as well still be
A body
Spinning up there
He comes again
And again
And again
To stand
Where the stool stood,
Looks up to the obfuscating canopy,
As He must have done,
Again
And again
As He twisted and twisted
For three spectator-days
At the rope-hugged branch up yonder
Before they cut him down
Before the crowd.

Both touch the grass heavily
Both are mute
And they don't touch.

I proselytize
For a new mythology
With a gasp and groan.

People I don't know:
I might crucify myself
For all these strangers.

Inaccessible;
Turn crucible sweet with work
And wake at manger.

Must find the lady,
Cast her down, find Narcissus;
Teach him to atone.

Cain, Prometheus.
Mood colors a mountain day,
Forges with cold hands.

The earth high can see
Serene deaths at silent sea.
All the quiet lands.

I proselytize
For a new mythology
And worship alone.

The sky shoots its myriad blue eye
into a pavane of reds and silvers.
A farrago of ****** tastes signal second dawn at noon.
An indescribable sound pierces the eardrum
from the inside as it rushes ******,
humanly,
inhumanely outward.

I live here.
My world with edges.
An Oklahoma landscape.
Couldn't bear to be anywhere else.
You live away from me, though.
That failed mystic: Time
Sets his claws
(Teeth seizing ice) then
Bleeds all color from our hair.
But I can live eternally in
A photograph. My mother,
See? In the corner?
Yes. Just there.

When Death sets all god's children free,
There will be room for one.
For I will live in ninety-three
And pray for Kodak sun.

The suit in question
Is grey. Pin-striped white.
Double-breasted. Three piece.
Blue tie, grey hatching.
An absolute nightmare to change into.

I drop my jeans
In the monastery stall,
Shed my shoes.
Old friends.
The trousers, slacks,
Rise morning fog
And sleep in the stratus
Of my waist.

I really wonder how
The men of the then
Could have worn them.
So much taller.
So much grander.
So much straighter.

White shirt with
The butterfly tracks,
Make-up stains
From a billion ancestors.
Dead relatives that don’t
Respond to the call.
I take their places
Without a single
Crumb of guilt,
O feel the guilt.
The vest. Easy enough.
Yeast but grey and it
Rises horizontally.
I’ve just noticed pockets
Sewn into maddening teases.
The barest suggestion
Of an opening.
It holds like the bowl of the moon.

The coat. The great monarch.
Organizer with a clipboard
Ensuring the quality
Of a burlesque of silk.
So strange.
So other.
So queer.

In a minute or two, the
Hyperhydrosis.
It really is my only hope
Of describing my true temperature.
I will ignite in a biological
Soliloquy that can
Pronounce all those tricky
Thoughts I’ve given up
For the stage.
Gentle gravity,
Cruel crushing backhand.
Burst my complexion,
Steal my aqueous words.

Again, this suit.
How many Lomans,
Bankers, adjudicators,
Businessmen and Babbits
Have lived out their deaths
In you?
Brave rain cloud,
Where is your lining?
I feel the quip swelling
And project it to the back wall:

Only the costume knows true reincarnation.

A thousand god-eating plates in a summer wind
Listen, china-white, to the audible inaudible that flanks
The paint-chip, earth-red bridges. Susurrations weave
Through grass with spider fingers; following curves in seashells
As a voluble electric screen who Speaks as dew and taste.
Water is depth beyond what can be acquainted with memory
Or fancy. Watches turn delicate, May-lace and wedding night
Music: Vertical, Veiled, Very. Dust in the stream lisps
Headily to shore, rests by a forgotten child’s shoe,
Bronzes it like mother’s finger and burns like daybreak.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Skeletons of shadow teach me anatomy from inside the ark.
Quiet. Old women at the double doors. So dark, the sanctum.
Heaven is stained glass. Fold your paper hands, your husband
Mumbles under the preacher's emphysema. On the mic,
Occasional screams of raspy black-and-white noise. Screams.
How He screams. Red-faced Church-parent. Little Easter bows,
The snarling bouquets who sting and follow the grass-green Moon.
Of the ten mounted fans, only one stays awake enough to listen,
Awake enough to hope to catch every particle of sleeping dust.
We were made from dust. The mountains too. I can't see.
The concrete days. Cinders and spiders and cracking tile.
Roaring, wailing, proliferating my thick umbra in the mesmer flask.

When the door opens, how will I feel? Glass and sandstone.
Will I have my face or someone else's? Eight faces by four.
How will I taste? Cinnamon and lapis.
Will I have angles or planes? Metric and function.

Little, silver words trail fingers through me, trace me, and cement me.
I glisten once and then am spent.

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.

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.

"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.

Come and feed
Opalescent mouth
Come break bread with.

My kith and kin
Seek to join.
You can doff your.

Hat and sit,
yes, they're in
The parlor.

Is the Parthenon
But my clan is borrowed
From the Coliseum.

Come and see 'em.
Ranged in chair by
Height.

To bite,
Now you can go in to
The table but only along.

One side as
Leonardo
Would suggest.

Our featured feast begins with mother's grin.
But ends with wiping father's ****** chin.

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.

Bird against the night,
White fingertip against
A negative held up to light.

Whisper, soft by definition,
Work your maledictions
So I have something to react to.
The way you talk it would seem
Those words have been
Asleep for years. I’d
Hardly want you to
Strain- sprain anything.
Spring it on me,
Show the Bruce Lee
Of your larynx. Strike
Me or smite me, bury
Your fist and pronounce
That solar syllable before-
Before the storm cedes.

We’ve all been waiting for
The blue flick, the
Clear blur, the handle
Toward your hand. Spit
It into the light. I don’t
Really care, I just need it out.
Cut around it anymore
And you might inadvertently
Break the clouds. It’s a cheap
Trick but it’s all I ever had
Over you.

Night bloodies the beach.
A moral goes unheard  like
An ignored spectator.

He closes his eyes as usual. That starts it.
Gallon blackness against thin skin but split,

Suffused with a million rushed and serene
Shades of purple and sickly, retinal green.

Squares and curves, utterly vertical rounds
Imprinted obsidian spheres, half-sounds.

A vague intimation of abyssal, milk white:
Horizontal paradigms on the coast of sight.

Yes, indeed the whiteness on the horizon
Flutters scop-musical like a lark’s blazon.

How it snatches up the blackness, losing
Clarity of its edge like madmen’s choosing.

It ceases growing yet consumes all within
The poor man’s eyes, traversing the din.

A pure, blank line that is born in the mind
Fills the soul nacreous, leaves him behind.

Goes it beyond him and stretches open.
Straight wide. Too wide. Much too wide!

The teeth he hadn’t noticed crush him dog-brightly

And pull him fast inside.

He opens his eyes as usual. That ends it.

Jack jumped last night.
We might have expected it
had we not been so unsuspecting.

Those blue periods of his,
I'm sure you've witnessed one,
were walled in somewhat by the
swelling tides of years
and years
and years.
When they came, they were
quelled by the very occasional red mark.
These punctuations
when they mercifully visited
would open doors for him, in
which our brother, neighbor,
father discovered strange liquid
tendencies to ailing strength.
Too many blank-out nights
could find him and his new
battery bickering the old childhood
verses. Too many four-of-the-clocks
would cue the choragos his
specter-critic's eye to deign a
Plan on our friend's blue
stationary.

A smile might have
mailed it straight ahead.

Perhaps it was last week when the
boat met the shore, some heinous
delivery of packaged, patent-business
sealed reformation, salvation.
In the midst of his violet smile
the cogent steam engine had a chute
into which it might heartily crash.
However it came remains to be seen.
What we have all seen this morning
remains our family's chief export.

Jack jumped last night.
He ascended the hill with his red hands
full of ****** punctuation marks, and
he spouted full-rehearsed
all those lines he'd learned in
grade school. Like a prolix
Gertrude complaining of her thirst.
And with the singularity of purpose
that haunts even the sharpest eyes,
he completes the trek to his three-foot tall Kusinagara
with his asthma wrapped around his neck.

Victory is a queer bird. Its song is never heard
the whole way through.

He breathes in weightlessness,
regains his bearing and waits for the
lines to quiet down. No one should leave
in the middle of a recitation, regardless
of the quality. At last, "Richard Cory"
reaches his terminal syllable and
our dearest man searches for his place in the music.
And it's just a minute,
just a minute,
just a minute,
jumps.

Jack jumped last night
Just as he said he would,
And had we heard him say it
We'd have thought "He could. He could."

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.