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.

When the patterns glide by
Comparing swatches of the "is" and the "could be"
It's easy to get caught in
Things that don't, couldn't exist:
Pressed and glossed but cut off completely
As by a film,
Just like the picture show.
A sallow barrier reducing profundity to charcoal etchings.

My eyes fog over with winter breath.

Face all of crag
Lined out in youth
And smoothed where Time thinks best.
Parenthetical mouth.
Asterisk-ine blush spreads
Where Doubt lingers.
Question marks pronounced
Exquisitely through lips.
Like a tactile symphony,
No harsh chord exists.
Not in the lines of the face
Though it looks as if its
Planes were imported from disparate periods.
From a Baroque cheek
To a Tudor brow
And a smirk that even James would be
Hard-pressed to translate.

To my initial A. Long may he reign;
For I feel in truth whatever he may feign.

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.

Apparently, it is my societal rol
e to once a month (or once a wee
k, or how may you) succumb to
all the indignity, to the crushin
g blue of broken hands, and allo
w the swell of eternity its coarse
st way with me. And swallow lik
e a sieve the strands of all the flu
id universe.

Sepia wind runs through forgotten hands
Around a fitted frame, beneath a door;
Too like a battlement of local lore,
Too like an estuary of white sands.
And wind continues on and eastward past
A café built by Orpheus to house
The hungry lovers that would look, would louse
Eurydices by looking on at last.

And all to meet a rail upon a coast
Where sits a flower and a god of earth
Exchanging looks that burn the stars' bright feet.
She drinks the inks of valorous repeat,
Where fails the poet's hopeful hand at birth:
Exchanging all the words that leave us most.

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.

Not the romantic.
The control.
A single white digit,
the sprawl of cool
smiles extend to
taste and see.

Their lives like
hyacinths that drink
the air in books,
plastic lips.
Slime from the marble.
A widow-dream.

Metal midair that
speaks a rat's tongue
with the deftness of
a seasoned lover.
His eyes can see your circuitry.
Her mouth the tree of night.

The best thing about
Haiku is that if you run
Out of room you can…

Polar bears rarely
According to my knowledge
Play Marco Polo.

Sing with your eyes closed
And your audience can be
A thousand panthers.

The television
In the front room bites me when
I pet it too hard.

Is it still a haiku if all seventeen syllables are in one

No one can deny
My right to dream. Ah, someday
An all-moose hockey league.

Too late at night, I
Wonder if Shakespeare wrote D’s
The way I write mine.

I rearrange my
Furniture to make room for
More hopeful years.

James Dean. Rock Hudson.
Montgomery Clift. Cary Grant.
I’d hit it, girlfriend.

A girl of the streets
Offers him the right price for
One more game of checkers.

My bed does not face
The window. When it rains,
I always sleep through it.

I have not seen a
Sunrise in years; I don’t
Use public bathrooms.

…always continue
In another. [Something neat
About a panda.]

A pair of eagles connect in the air
in that mysterious way that birds can.
Rats that gave up the sea and the sinking
ships for a soaring finger
with which to scratch the night sky until
the skin breaks.

Here, they retain that tenuous extension,
a spark of the sin,
that ****** aristocracy that exalts in
making masks out of vellum day
and glowering down from box seats at
the beginning of the descent.

Whether in the sea or fallen as a tree,
the sky is memory.

No one bites me quite the way you do
or locks me with that tenderness of fright.
I cannot see the way we fit as one
But I must fall with you to rocky white.

I - The Sound Abattoir

Crisp fractal, sunlight
on new-day sweat.
No one inside knows
about the new day yet.

Forms **** and spin
and they toil not.
Skeletons can sway
with impulse 'til they rot.

Crush-a-pill with rosy tint
to last you all the night.
Catch-a-number 'neath your tongue
and later you'll revive his Fright.

Pleasure, fleshly grimace
scours the brain against the skull.
Apartment movement never stops
and starts and sweat-sheen from the pull.

II - O Androgyne

I cannot see the world for his broad face.
The smell of sulphur would be welcome but
To choke the alcoholic reek he brings
By clutching him to me in slick embrace.

I gain his absence when I ask for breath
And he, the smiling nitwit, must consent,
So I duck to the streets with haste and breathe.
A moment in my father's sight is death.

He could not know the life that I now lead,
And all the misery I rail against;
My form is set upon the grind of days
To starve in hard-brick walls of earthly need.

Moonlit ******* strips charm from the sick
And faces all too masculine leer back
From windows; prostitutes with glitter hair
As deathbed cries of need cut down the quick.

III - A Solomon Grundy Secret

I will be, as a child,
Crushed under black boot
and throttled with Belt.
Taught to be the Man we were.

I am, as a man,
disciplined with the
golden silence
and icegrip of
solitude. No one knows
my stigmata better than
the Romans that wash
their hands of me.

I was,
as graying
Figure
nearing death,
too late to
utter any-thing of
Weight
at my
dying,
Last
breath.

Mother Edge
You walk with me
To Petri dishes
And light my silver lungs
With a screaming match
Drink the earth with
Me until dawn.

Father Red
I’ve run to your thunderous
Carpet in these shoes that
Can’t breathe through
The narcissi on which
You asked me to balance:
The electric taste.

Sister Shard
Sit like we did on the
Ship’s stomach
Memory has a hole in his lip
And my key broke
Smoke accidental
While you were gone.

Brother Trail
I grew in your shadow
Simple sentence cell
And dreamed, oh, dreamed
Of my black fingers green fingers
Sharpening
Coins for your eyes.

Those kids flash around me like mad planets;
days scream into vapor like a universe of mercury.

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.

The lady in violet waits
by Arab candle light for the sounding
of twenty-one silver bells.

Seven white divisions led
by four black stars.

Her stories feed the drowsy
like a stoppered angel
in the axe-man's hands.

It's spring, I think.
There's a girl.
Blue dress and eyes.
Gold hair and a toy
Soldier that smiles
From her golden fist.

She is playing by
A wide lake. The
Wind through her
Metal braid is the
Soft mother's hand that
Dances flowers smooth.

See the grass sway.
See the wooden man
Blow elegantly away.
See her leap after him.
Hear her splash
Through the water’s skin.

Above the air
In the corse of a spectator-ship,
A wooden man is upside-down
To watch her drown.
He hums with the thrum
Of the blood in his ears,

"Blue over blue over blue."

This man has a gun pointed at me,
that extends from thumb to index in an L,
at me from his hip.
I can't see much through
my hand. Reflexive, if dampened
by a gristle of curiosity.
Weight shifts from foot
to toe to ball to other
foot. He doesn't speak
to me; to the floor,
but his gesture comes at me
through the atmosphere or
whatever analogous high ground he possesses.

The tip of the pink barrel
menaces like a treble scream
or a broken blackboard.

Shift. Shift and a look around.
It must be done quickly, he
looks at her to ask permission.
I imagine her too cold
for response: atoms
held in hexagons to keep
that inevitable crack from
toppling the salty gravity.
However they must speak
through the superaudible
for her stolid fluidity
resolves his change
(changes his resolve)
and his eyes stop dead on
me.

The laughter of that trigger
rustles through skin
and plays with bone.

Some days there are no problems.
Others, becoming more the frequent,
I feel as safe as Anne Frank in
A china shop.

It's never good fun.
But it doesn't have to be this way.

Either the seekers' rubber boots
Squeak up on me
Or I fling myself against the
Floodlit brick wall.
I've dreamed it a thousand ways.
What new can they do?
Their gas and their bullets, and
Their tire irons across my cheek
Cannot hurt me, a fool
Who has no fear of death,
As every day Death walks beside
And casts a grey lens to filter
What I can see.

If I am caught
If I am found out
And if their hands, their hands, their hands
Pull at me until I am We,
I hope the rendered halves
Push forth that warm light we like to hear about
In place of a deluge.
A light
To burst forth doors
And save the ones who perch like finches
Daring never fly.

I might hope only to become a hand.
A hand in which to step
And to be clasped
And in that clasp be free.
For all the men and women and
For all the in-between as well.
I wish that I could give that to you.
To rip away from your grey rags,
Your stars and triangles,
And in the persiflage of silence
Break the gates and cells
With my limp wrists.

Throw stones until my blood be upon me.
Mother.
Father.
Sons and lovers.
Break my mouth and put my eyes away.
Let, though, my skin go last
As a radial, red calyx.
I. We. All.
I wish to be the last to see the sun.

To be at last
And to be me.

vegetation bleeds upward
toward heat-crying mothers
nascent textures that unfold.

underneath waterspout
sighing deathmasks contort
hoarse features pass to praise.

vast cradle inters wee motes
fleck of much that floats
stretches brazen in dawns full of dust.

all passes in my lack of sight
heat kills clarity at first
by swallowing air and greens and giving birth.

He sits on a porch-swing dying of heat.
The midday sun is merciless.
It juts out a golden face to ****
To test
To accuse.

He strokes the side of his face.
There is misery here but not remorse.
Sweat runs down the hollow of his neck
Traces his neck
Falls away from his neck.

He closes his eyes against the day.
And more besides.

The sky burns in opposite colors now.
His eyelids play the stars and scenes of an afternoon.
After a time, blackness swallows the image.
He is perfectly closed.

Off past the gate sound cicadas,
Locusts, call them here,
Like an African choir concealed to chant
Concealed to slough away
Concealed from commentary.

He hears the door and feels her weight
on the swing. The cicadas seem louder.
She's come outside to speak with him
To speak at him
To speak about him.

"I hate you," says a voice but not in words.
"I love you too," sounds the other with a tone that says more,
Much more besides.

The dusk is usually far more perfidious
But not tonight. The weather is still,
The sun has nothing more to declaim.
She is perfectly closed.

She breathes in my ear
with the yellow of the star
that greets the dusk.

He whispers to my palm
in the nature-sweet wax hum
that misses dawn.

But only by an inch.

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.

a circle of squares
and a circle inside
hands rest on shoulders
for a moment
beneath a paltry smile
that smells of burning plastic.
acrid strength hides in
corners of years
under second skins of dust.
harsh lines emulsed
in black and white
etched in perpetuity
by the blaze heat
of cool baths,
drowned to life
in an inch of chemical.
Its womb is the darkroom.
Its crypt is a scrapbook.
Its lovers countless looking eyes.

Cold.
Run a ***** finger
along my cheek.
Sap my attention like temperature
And my thoughts stray to the occupants
of the wind out of boredom.
What horrible faces
they must have.
Faces lifted simply, effortlessly,
from the drowned
and flicked casually for
Wear by the zephyr and the breeze.
And they push push push us all
Away from ourselves,
indwelling ball bearings
Being rolled about in our plastic box.
A paper reality
that seeks no more of truth.

Simply push push again
at the catch and break off the lid.
To polarize and shatter the
Egg shells of ignorance
And walk on them,
Floating clamshell gods,
to break the clouds.

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.

Little girls in ****-bright paint
and their brothers with button-ups,
colorful shoes. I'll never be that fast.
"He" is having a party and his parents
will be gone. I could bring the
***** and be well-liked; lying
on the carpet in the sticky ***-smoke.
Summer spins as the ceiling fan
lies still. Still, I'll never be that fast.

My neighbors all burst into flame
But they're cool enough to dowse themselves.

Breathless little pod, enclose me with your
Wooden floors. Let the rain outside play as
Pianoforte as it can. Enough
Thought to sink a ship and all I can say
Is “The horses. Oh my God, the horses.”
What about the horses? In a tasteless,
Odorless, frictionless universe sleeps
The hammer of the clouds who eats our hours
And flips to more interesting channels.

Take a minute for yourself, this is just
An experiment, and run up those stairs.
Be sure to stop when you hear the lightning
Then nip back down like thunder so you can
Tell me the result. Breathe in, count to ten.
Breathe out, breathe in and try to remember
The middle of “Rondo Alla Turca.”
Take your time, it won’t be nice outside for
A while. Enjoy the breathless little room.

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.

Rubber soles squeak without pretense on air
Fills the floor and the dwellers' ears
With the simple note,
Deafens them all with empty afterechoes.

Not a single meanderer would care if he
Pulled out a gun.
Instead he pulls out a knife
(a paring knife to be exact)

And selects a chair near the door.
Begins to shear the hour.
The knifeblade gleams behind his eyes,
Skewering seconds,

And he continues not to exist,
Murdering minutes.
Someone physically there remarks a draft
So he rises to shut the door,

But reconsiders and retreats
Back to his homestead seat.
Crossed arms and crossed legs.
However evilly uncomfortable,

The figure must be statuesque like the air must be.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. And then sixty arrives
And he rises like a seagull in an operating room
In a grand gesture. He smiles to no one and

Retreats back to his burrow or wherever he lives.

But no one considers old, mad Mister Gray
Though he comes and sits queerly there day after day.

Texan-Georgian-Jews
Dance around a Christmas tree.
Forty minutes gone.

Standing rigid underneath a frozen
Light, I write down my wish for
Quiet. I whisper Tennessee
Williams to my naked feet.

Tomorrow ought to be much better.

In the next room sits my brother
Who is warm to his ears. He shoots at men
And is shot down and
Swears himself to sleep.

I fold the advertisement into a breathing crane.

They wear white shirts that lope into the village square
And hate the dust that settles there.

Their children leave the schoolhouse with schoolmaster's nod
To see the traveling works of odd.

With cries and drums and fire held in open hands,
Four insects bless the godless lands.

Yes, every song on every face is writ on steel,
Cemented by the thunder's peal.

Toward the night the fires burned away the spell,
Yet still the truth did four men tell.

Lizards sun, drag hours for themselves
On the baked rock face,
With tense hands prepared always
To run, even in the face of bliss.

Hands curve prematurely,
Turn rock face into a more appealing
Rock bodice, and the
Lizards are cast away
By the sudden **** of millennia.
Do not litter the bettered stone
With a dainty snowflake likeness
Sought in the bedragglings of
Their skeletons.
What little ancestry to look back upon.
It's probably better...

No, absolutely it is.
That is the cry of the valley:
Massed voices weighted with spring
And enunciated by winters.

The sunrock bathes for
Whoever knows how long,
In drys
And in humids.
And then one day is crushed
Underfoot by the hulking form,
By the tense little claw of a
Reckoning nomad.
The surroundings look
Sharp at the smart little giant
And pull themselves neatly away from the dust.

If I had a dime

For every time

That question was asked of me,

I would spend all those cents

On the Chippendale's gents,

And Oh! how happy I'd be.

now i lay me
down to sleep
it wasn't real
enough to keep
if i should die
before i wake
then not an echo
would i make

now i lay me
down to sleep
and ***** my sides
to break my keep
if i should die
before i wake
i've filled my mouth
to drain a lake

now i lay me
down to sleep
i hope to god
not six feet deep
if i should die
before i wake
i hope i got
all i could take

On the sofa.
On the carpet.
In the parking lot.
Out back in the dirt.
No one's looking, now.
She's on her knees
Heaving.

Face red with disbelief.
It's because they're all
Dead
But she's alive.

It's because they get to live.
Not her.
She's laminated,
Book-pressed to last,
And it's death.

Glossed pages, merely
Slides in lantern light
Without narration.
Monday slips into Friday
Without a sound
Or impress of color.
Yesterday was February
And tomorrow drags
Muddy footprints as it heads
Into next year.

It is not real.
     so pour yourself into your works
     build an immunity to it:
What we can feel.

The Dead don't bleed.
The dead Don't bleed.
The dead don't Bleed.
At the bar without heed.
Gulp down burning
Mouthfuls of amnesiac need.
The devil's in the music,
As it creeps across the floor.
But the Devil
(with a gold star from Sunday school)
Hasn’t got the power to hold a pin.
And nails go through.
And nails go through.
And he's surprised
Because they Do.

Scratch it out in the back as a
Quick bathroom rendezvous.
She can rid her self of
A gypsum heart and
Rinse it down the drain.

And he in the stall
Kills his rebellion
With sharp hands and sharper heart.
Holding frenzied permanent ink.
Every number he leaves,
And all the faces he defaces,
And every envy he engraves
Blossoms in tune with, complements
Her ecstatic criticisms against the stall.

Now I lay me down to sleep
It wasn't real enough to keep.
She ended it in love, with loving leap.

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.

Startling, simply.
***** form of white;
Pillar of morals
Tied to fables
That are taller still
Than even he.
And yet the sight
Takes wind from
The watcher.
Rapt eyes stroll
Languorously across him.
Form unconcealed
And no appendage
Draws undue focus.
Stale cupola air
Becomes spring in his repose.
His smirking dead eyes
Mock spectators.
He leaps and vaults
Through the deadened vaults,
Then furrows his brow, opens his mouth.
Mute shouts ring terribly here like slung stones.
Were he out in the elements, the earth itself might
Gape monstrously to sputter out, "Startling, certainly."

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 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.

I sat on the square of carpet and screamed
very quietly to myself.

I, the boy who
cried
melancholy.

I, the man who
watches his life
through his eyes.

I, the cruel ship that
glazes the waters of
a harsh music.

I, the silly hair that
obscures the face of
a murderess.

I, fit only for sleep
in the white palm
of an arthritic hand.

I, the child counting
backward on an abandoned
island.

I, glass-colored
and triangular like
the start of space.

I, the single ******
that begs for
a just spark.

I, the skin of glue
in a sweating
photograph.

I, the man selling
VHS players for
mega-discounts.

I, who clasped your
hand when you were
so very small.

I, an errant breath
in the postbox before
the empty Jones house.

I, keen on eating the
brick and mortar
beneath me.

I, who shall never
touch his face,
not even the one time.

I, in the midst of heat
and silence without
a single syllable of wet.

I, with a hatred for
your searching fingers
sticky-sweet.

I, sitting behind
long after the film
dies of exhaustion.

I, crayon and
8.5 by 11 inch paper
Valentines for violent boys.

I, second man,
forgotten man,
to my own movie.

I, grinning through
the lame as the
stitching wears.

I, strategic misery
on a tempest moon:
contemplating contemplating.

I, the laughing door
with a struggling ****,
and no keyhole.

I, who commits
suicide every Tuesday,
Thursday, and Sunday.

I, with cigar boxes
filled with all the tiny,
grandmotherish pieces of ****.

I, the knot that slips
off the head of a lonely
purpled finger.

I, and my
cloverfields,
and my rust.

I, with my dreams
about Japanese furniture
and magic, geometric roads.

I, dancing to a song
I cannot hear that issues
from a nonexistent room.

I stood and walked outside.

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.

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.

The novelist shows people that do not exist
in situations that never happened.

The memoirist shows actual people
in situations that never happened.

The biographer shows people that do not exist
in actual situations.

The poet shows every person that has ever existed
in situations that should have happened.

The playwright shows people that should have existed
in every situation that has ever happened.

The journalist rather makes one prefer fiction.

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.

There sits a woman who
cannot feel the rain.
Trapped in thoughts
that cross her to the neck
and stifled tongue.

A bench beneath holds
up her sodden world,
to push back hands on
a crystal face and nail
her to her seat.
She cannot feel a single
lachrymal word nor
hear a vertical eye as
they, by the familied thousands,
rip her ripe in two.

Perhaps it is for her ultimate
benefit that these thorough
roving mouths are but
the muted daggers of her mind,
else she might stand
from the bench
fall into her lap and feel.
Oh, unthinkable as it may seem, to feel
those manual nails in her feet
and free the fingertips on hands that
tear out fenestrated faces
firmly held a pace away by freakish
phrases.

There sits a woman in the rain:
all dressed in red and white and slain.

Gorgeous fruit,
You are the mercury and
I the *****, slanted surface;

Faults in the flesh cry
“Scarlet ants
To fill my dreadful purpose!”

My little voice that steals from the page
Can fill the singing water.
But I wonder often

If all my breath
Is in accordance with
That great tome

At the end of all our days
Which instructs us
In the proper use of semicolons.

Until we know, I bar my
Wanton lips.
Get up and bar my wantonness

That I should
Live in the sands I am
Allotted.

O despairing syllabus!
Can you- will you care to number
On the murmuring calendar all

The days you must
Wait for me to clasp
The iron bar?

Ay, with my teeth set as far
Apart as my shoulders
And my very animus

Sewn into the college ruled
Notebooks, records, loose-leafs
With looser thoughts.

What I would do without
The seventy
Anticipatory footsteps in the snow

Might stop the very
Pull
Of land and ship

And pull out every
Stop
From under our deck.

Gorgeous fruit, I ask
You to pull the pencil
From my desk and entice
Me once more from my bed.

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.

A blue cave sits patiently in
His eye, sits welcoming
Herbal songs and idly
Exhaling a rasp or two on
The willow, reeds that stretch
For miles. Nightingales
Sip at their little, pink drinks
And summon their obscure
Relatives who are themselves
Entirely unaware of
What the hell is going on.

The silver general admires
His golden chess strategies,
Neatly printed out on tacky
Paper. Tomorrow the invasion.
Tomorrow those
Friends of his will stare
Like a murdered upcard.

She receives the afternoon
With a  pocket thesaurus embrace,
Whispers an indigo X
Into his reddened ears.
Intelligence penetrates uncertainty
Uncertainty staggers back home.

Tastes iron.
Smells iron.
Feels iron.
Feels it deep.
Feels it deeper,
As it eats him inside out.

I’ve heard there used to be
A blue cave in those eyes.
But they must have
Burned out the sky
With all those fires,
Let alone a little iris.
Discards piled up over the
Half-remembered and half-hated
Songs. Not to mention all
The birds that used to sing them.
We never have birds anymore.

There may only be fifteen
Minutes before the fires catch
Up, but all his words
Would still burn through.
Who can say what lies beyond
The close of eyes save a
Broken string and a splintered
Reed? Rules that defy ink,
Defy Hoyle and his ilk.
Line up the minutes,
The fewer minutes yet,
With a slide rule.

We only feel how sharp it really is
When we meet ours, as he’s met his.

The wind is my lover
and the water that pivots
beneath the sky above me
could be any color for all
the attention I'm paying it.
For in the speed that whips
me about in a circle,
this world loses meaning.
As my hair gains independence
and my skin darts behind me
in the afternoon heat
and my limbs numb utterly
to victorious speed,
all my cares and leaden ties
are brought to light
and shown their insubstantiality;
they are spat derisively
into the dusk.

For the wind is my lover
and he sates my hungers
and visits with my youth
and quiets my longing
for sense with every velvet
torrent that passes through
my open hand.

And when the boat stops, I will break apart.
Would that the wind would grasp me and pull me
aft into the blackness beyond the shore.