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.

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.

Interminably, he stands at the road side
Whether the weather is kindly or not
(Somehow it's never either one). Stands there
And makes an ingratiating little nod
To the clouds. The sky bears down with its slipped
Edges— Singular walls of the unspoken
Truth: The world ends at the last of vision.

Those cars that pass us reach the brink of this small
Hemisphere, quiver on the edge of
The black and turn sharply. The bell of the sky
Doesn’t ring like it used to anymore—
It’s just too **** big. And we are much too small.
In our opinion: all those hitchers wear
Their hearts on their sleeves
If they think they can get anywhere.

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.

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.

On evenings such as this, I wish I had
that inborn ache to cling to pen and page
and spread that sweet salve, ink, upon my thoughts.
But lost am I in spite of hindsight. Made
to gloss the details and emotions here
in voices strange from what I know or trust.
As such my words are handicapped to show
the brute ephemera I need my readers
locked away from my intent to know.
[Please note the rhyming there was not foreseen,
If anything the rhyme detracts the sheen.]
But still the message has to be declaimed:
     For no man taking pen and ink to page,
     was e'er a one a Shakespeare to his age.

(And mark you now the setting here does change)
O greater souls than I, I do beseech,
For here in cold packed earth are mortals bound.
Through mist and age the stones about ye crack
With Death triumphant making quiet rounds
About the silent earth, I plead to you
Good fellows, lasses tell me why you've died
What sins, what straws as would have broke a camel's back!

And from the ground a sound is faintly heard
By mine own ears as would a stomach turn
In any man that Fears his loving god.
The silence of the grave is cast with cries
Of silent sinners toiling in a Hell
Contained in plagued mourners' hearts.
They wrack
And reel in illusory pain constructed
By a mother, sister, husband, son
Who could not deal with earthly loss and so
Must feel sub-earthen torture nice-named
"Living After Death."
     And all God's children die in strife:
     A soul enslaved to an afterlife.

(Again be quick for here it doth conclude)
But let me not be chained with empty graves
Whose absence from this world is justified
By gentlemen in god's most high esteem,
Filled with souls who are not here but There.
I choose to breathe the clean world's air again
And not the stinking breath reposing in
A sepulchre.

Here grass grows brown and has no flowered gifts
Set down by loving family for show.
Yet still is it more pleasing to the mind
To lie on dying parched ground than to step
On land of pulchritude made for the dead.
And when I die, please cast me anywhere
Or burn me in the centre of the town
Or give me to a hated relative.
And think of me as but a passing dream
That sought to take the sum of your largesse
But never you impose seraphic dress
On memories of me as I did live,
     For no one can or should conceive
     What happens when we from a mortal’s ken gain leave.

Yes, I think it would be fine to say we are the
Sun and the Moon, respectively.
The world and sky of our disparate souls
nicely encapsulated.
To simple metaphor.

Yes. But it is incomplete, you know.
For sun may never touch moon,
and Day has no place in
the dominion of the nocturnal.
And the moon can have no adequate
view (but a sidelong glance) at
man and Earth in the sun's hand.

No,
I can touch you and you me.
Still more, I can see you and grow familiar
with what you beam upon;
Lie with the subtlety of a new night's
descent with my eyes twinkling
nonplussed to the crux of neck and shoulder.

Yes. We are, you and I, the Sun and the Moon,
if you say we are.
For you cast back the dark and shun the
dark places.
And the thin veil and living line that keeps
days apart, the Night, is the one corner
upon which I fear you shall never
Intrude.

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.

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.

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.

Stop. Become fluid.
Flow from your body to elicit a secret congress.
Drip away from your eyes
and fill the outline of my vacancy.
Meet me as I was and sleep
that peace in the warmth I
bore but no longer occupy.

And I will stop. Become gas
and seep unnoticed from too, too
solid wakefulness.
To the darkest corner of the
night sky and the brightest
glint of heat between particles.
So that you can touch naught
but my outline.
And feel but the passing breadth
of my hot breath.

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.

Neon-coat childhoods
belie the gray adult life
of all its people.
Just as the stone-hewn
face of the dark Previous
was unprepared for the Now:
wind-up, chrome
and chic above all else.
Yes, indeed.
What citizenry!
No opinion but for diary
and entire days and lives
to offer to the Group.
Little cogs twist and reel
for a reason.

But they draw no criticism from me.
As they have, through utmost
consideration, neutered the mass
by cutting at individual.
And kept poetry alive through
the fear and the strange and the
Bombs.
It lives in every word and
look and leaves blacker
features, all minor imper-
fections out of sight,
like an unsightly
pair of shoes.

I

Tiny, they dance through me on the green wind;
They breathe me in: flame-inflammable and time
Out of memories. Damsels in foreign stories long eaten.
Yet I feel so drowsy. Martyr-like they whisper trails
Of their sugar dust onto my face and make me
Itch. I scratch with citronella nails and burst
Forward into the night. One imagines they’ll follow,
Seeing as how they think I’m their sun.

Do you remember that summer we spent with the
Dead? Maybe it was too long ago for you, but you
Always woke me for the sunsets. I remember.
And there was some song or other that kept break-
Ing through the radio… with the raindrops and some
Stately clock that I always associated with you.

II

You were always underneath me
Writing those idiotic sonnets.

When you broke water-heavy from
Me, of course I tried to follow.

The song to which you referred
Was “Night and Day”, but you know
I can always remember the words
To you better than any foolish
Song. There’s a torch within me
Keeps repeating “You. You. You.”

Blinking back tears,

I contemplate that cruelest of human injustices:

How few friends I have on Facebook.

Electric river
stretch bluely
past events
and their horizons.
Fingers spider
by facespans
to ***** in
the semidark.
Cannot see
past "do not want"
but I could write
it in the sky
to last for
these blackened
hands.
Electric river:
it does not flow
out of any
incredulous
uncertainty.
It advances
azurine, ringing
past words, works
and their echoes,
past influences
and their ******
circles.
No web and no
fine web
can confine the
austerity in its
loose dimensions.

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.

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.

"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.

Part One: Wolves and Chokes

Children are such wolves.
A day is a fledgling lamb
That can be crowded, cloistered
And clawed.
I used to speak to you and
Run with you.
You in your red coat

And I with my white throat.
Suspect nothing.
No tooth was fear to me
For a pack does not stack
Its white edges against itself.
Yet still I must have itched
A miracle of irritation
That cannot be ignored.
In the night, my mouth
Is drawn wide.
Like a fetus, I am transparent
And cringing in black situ.
Then a bite, and then a bite.
Then you see what is inside.

A one I love the best of all
Is loath to see me live.
The bitter taste of childhood vow
Comprises all I give.

I’ve broken you, you say.
With a box of fools I never sought,
Always galumphing back to me.

You broke me first, I think.
What posturing, straighten that halo
That chokes me rightfully.

Of course there is no way
To seek out your paradise.
Not if sinners cannot speak.

Part Two: Sebastien

Your hysteria is a fine rope.
My tree stands ready at the dawn,
A line of men and my
Brick wall that chips and splits
When bodies fall.

Even the sun is watching.
No one swats the stinging gaze
Away and no one dares offend.
But I stand.
I shall try to be as salt.

Salt stands even as dust.
Salt sneers at wounds.
Salt loves only the earth.
And the earth will love me soon,
Championing me as her lover
Which is an irony too ghastly to feel.

Rain in the still air, in the sun.
Silence that grinds a heel onto wrists
That steals from me.
A second, then a heartstring.
Thousand and thousands.
Eyes and minutes.

A billion is still only a tenth.
Release.
It is the boundlessness of the sky
And a chorus stabs their shovels,
Stabs the vein with silver mirth.

god touches me.
I am touched by gods.
I am born
And slain by daylight’s pink
Hands.

Every iron finger
Every one a steely tongue
Every cut a golden affair
And the spurns too hot to hold.
I fall and fold and dim.

My hour is burnt
And still your eyes, your teeth
Go with me
To forge both of my decades with
A gilt life of ecstasy I never
Touched but saw.

I saw it in the face of god.
And heard it as a note
That echoed through the days I lived,
And every word I wrote.

A second with the fire in my hand.

Can I honestly walk away without an
Ocean in tow?
I see. It's “no.”

Belt out arms to whip the ******* sky.
Ever impartial.
Ever my surrogate for its emptiness
My scream tucked neatly inside.
What kind of god would curse me
With knees? Damnation is a collapse--
Fling my neck without breath to
The sea of the earth and pant
Out sacrificial smoke.
I see it snow.

The earth prays for me.
Delicate soil casts up vigilantly the
Orisons I will not. I've murdered them
On the doors of my mouth. The key,
Keys are maledictions;
Are devilish devotions to destroy
With wine-soaked fruit.
Cast it away after the first sin.
O, felix culpa, I walk to the
Dawn to meet you
Tasting it ever on my lip.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

As I stand in the field, it occurs
To me, like a mosquito bedding down
in an ear, how light I am this
life. How shallow do I feel
To have trekked in loosest soil, over
Land and across years yet
have so little fiber clinging in my
soles for proof. I may as
Well have been but a step in
Sand at a tide that gasps
its opens shut at night.

The winter had been bitter cold,
Yet still gave way to spring.
Anticipating the untold
And ev’ry lively fling.

Of eager mists and marigolds,
The winds would think at length.
In majesty the hilly folds
Shone sunny, golden plinths.

Still Silence greeted Morning, bold
Not fearing, he, the sting.
For Winter had been careless, cold
And murdered everything.

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.

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

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.

Brother I do not know who you are.
Though like a pious gypsy I pray
to odd winds and set down
curious cards that I might
     grow to know you better.
     Little Moses, stolen in the
     night without your blanket,
     without your breath. How is
it some wandering seed
like you can stay my
watery mind? Sistered with a white
gem in a secret tide, you
     surface long after the
     scene is closed; you follow
     me home and sing like
     a thousand years of
May beneath my windowsill.
But as I say, the scene is
done, swallowed mother firefly
by the fluorescent night. So
     gather your things: these
     thoughts do not become,
     nor would they ever become.
     You’ve a hand like kite string
And I'd never hold on. All my
cards gutter in the wind
and the candles cannot be read,
not as dark as I've allowed it be.

I hear a song my brother sings
that echoes in the rock
from which my soul was hewn and that
shall never be forgot.

There's little more to do for
that solitary image.
A brown house on an off-brown
background. The door stopped
closing right nearly ten
years ago.

She sits at the single table
eating the brown dust like
a baby's song, cooing to
herself. Cooing to the walls.
And stopping to stretch her
muted fingers.

He sleeps. A deserved sleep.
Better than propped dry against
the outside wall, marshaled
hands still en deshabille. All
that stuff was his wife's or
his father's.

It fetched a nice enough price
all the same, and where
antiquity fails the wise man
speeds off with a whistle. Funny
tune, but it's better than what the
wife murmurs.

Oh my, one almost forgets.
There was a boy as well, but
he left long ago, must have
been nearly twelve or so
years ago, when the sun was high
as now.

Though truth be told, he was
one of those poor ******* that
exercised theory and let practice
starve; let action gather dirt
and whipped the thoughts to breathe in
still more dust.

One would say they raised him
right enough and still be wrong.
The day he closed that door
on them, they just stood still
kinda watching as the wind blew
them along.

Nigh deep in the Woods near the Waterfall Tree
Sleeps a House that was built from the Fruit of the Sea,
And the Man and the Woman that lived in it once
Ate the Forest and Sky indiscriminately.

Through the Winter and Rain they would **** at the Sun,
Drank the Land, chew the Oceans and spared not a One.
‘Till the Day when their Neighbors the Stars saw their Work:
So they speared the Pair wholly and called their Job done.

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.

possibility
inside a conjurer's box
infinitely felt

hush from outside it
carefully like broken arms
so carefully now

she, an audience
callous, loving, drinking gal
gasps at every cue

the night's coup d'etat
what they all (that one) pay for
the lid is seized free

it's empty: applause.
but only because they don't
know where she has gone.

In the span of an hour

I fall asleep.
I have a dream about Barbara Stanwyck.
I wake up.
I look at my phone with blank eyes.

I am hot
I am bold.
I am not
I am cold.

I can compose but cannot think.
I must never.
I shake out my crick and wince in a panic.
I persevere.

I am hot
I am bold.
I am not
I am cold,

In the space of a minute or two.

The heart that ticks
Inside her chest
Will talk to someone else.

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 hope it's dead.
The way it spits and foams
and drags its pure white
form against the fence.

I left for breath
but it stays with me,
keeping pace with hopes
to crawl and live and be.

But they do not deny
the blood from gaping mouth.
My sister and my brother
are behind to watch, uncouth.

It will not let them near
enough to bludgeon to
near-nothing like Heaven
and cries for what it cannot do.

They are twisted,
his innards, and they mesh
further. An hour, not two.
I hope it's dead. God, how I wish.

Letter opener:
He fills his lungs and his arms
With the universe.

A-1 specimen,
He won't put his hand on his heart,
Not after all this.

Two men embrace in
A darkened room. Turns out
It's only his skull.

******* on a bed of nouns
Spiked by the periodic verb
And desiccated seconds.

The taste is like a herb
Stored since birth
And the death that stretches before it like a curb.

Flavor radiates plateau from the earth
As the little soldiers, little flies
Fly out through mouths with their small girth.

The insect words that scuttle past our eyes
Know when recited truly each one dies.

Oh madam!,
Red of face and quick of word.
I must admit the father
sees no one today.
He has taken (white of face
and singly staring) ill and
thus has closed the box.
There must be no confession
while he lingers so
within.

Who knows what he might say!
Who knows what sins he might forgive!

"Let the ants toil freely," I heard
him declare, "while the birds
mend their fractured flight."

Now, until Our Father deems
it fit our father ours
should heal the sick, I most repentant
ask you hold it in.

A million years ago, there was a man
Who maunched an English breakfast while his wife
Was sitting simply, contemplating life.
With spider-sitting ease, with pad and pen.
“I think” thought he, “that I would be quite dim
If I should not your beauty recognize
And in a sonnet seek immortalize.”
His wife, just then, a note displayed to him.

What Elizabeth for Robert did
I lack the expertise to do for thee
But for the simple sonnet that was slid,
I know I match her hot sincerity.
My fast from human touch has made its bid:
Though I have words, my thought will ne'er be free.