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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the costume knows true reincarnation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A smile might have
mailed it straight ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Look.

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

That's all I wanna say about it.

He never touched nobody or nothing.

That's all.
Really.
And stop calling.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And pull him fast inside.

He opens his eyes as usual. That ends it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blinking back tears,

I contemplate that cruelest of human injustices:

How few friends I have on Facebook.

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.

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.

A hundred threads
Whitely pass
Into the red curve.

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

I sip daintily at
Stark faces in
The brilliant musk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

****.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I proselytize
For a new mythology
And worship alone.

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.