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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

******* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

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."

There is a false face behind a false breast
That beats out a tune that was never its own
And the thrum of the notes in the din of the night
Is a scourge to the dreams it is shown.

Wherefore sits he so melancholy? By
baked glass lines of chairs, all written up for
the task which he cannot but perform. Waits
with a cruel mouth; a crueler waist that
hoists him from the waste with watermarked wells
beneath his eyes, his staring eyes. Up there,
how many faces press against him? In
the well of his neck, the silver skin holds
back the mouth for all it might be worth,
to be seen by His appreciative teeth.

There is a false stage where stands a false man
That speaks with a passion that never was known
And the beck and the cry that is elsewhere not heard
Is a tear for the man that has flown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.