The fingernails of my brain brim
Horizons of grime. Can’t seem to keep them paws
            Out of the dirt.

And the dirt lives on the ground, so its head is always
            Down.
And it claws like a dog spraying a groove under a fence
After he’s picked up in the scent what it would be like
To roll in the other grass, which is the same grass, but it’s
            Across the pickets.

It’s the uncovering, and it’s dead awfully hard.

For instance…

Thinking I must scratch sound to hear sound.
Not knowing, like this, of course there’d be only
That scratch-scr-scratch-scr-scratch-scr-scratch…
Around me like hellrats…

For instance, hurling my eyes at vision, only
That they should slam against something like stonewall.
            (And the crash, unscratched, unheard.)

Imagine how gravity would throw your skeleton
(Nest of forest twigs-become-tooth-pick birdcage)
            Ten, twenty      thirty stories
Meeting earth’s immovable bone—
That cold you’d feel crack your headrock—
            That concrete is my vision.

Yes, finish off the senses, finish off the lines.
If you put your life here, in this poem’s lonely glass,
            It will take its shape.
For isn’t that the oldest metaphor?      Life—water?

Yes, water with yourself these lines.

My brain needs to rinse me         clean from its hands.

As the beer somehow kept spilling
over the edge of the ping-pong table—

as its cascading luxury of foam
called to mind, for some reason, ruins
of imaginary Babylonian gardens

and the girls began to unravel with the night,
besotted with spume, gradually untwining
their spooled effervescence—

as our volume rose, and our thoughts clacked
against our teeth, the laughter silly—

as we unhooked ourselves for a time
from the existences we ourselves had stressed,
kneading them—and I smelled euphoria—

I, half-drunk off something
other than beer, turned to my friend and let out:

but what do you say to the doomed?
Teeth clacking.

His eyes heavy at me for having wrenched
at this. His eyes fading behind a film of alcohol.
His eyes silent.

Then his cup to the air, firm, salute-poised.

Then his cup to his mouth, quick chug
amid clamor of enclosed mirth—small,
clanging against walls, girls’ skirts—

as if you could only salute, then wash down
the aftertaste
with imaginary Babylonian gardens.

The music of life, at times, is a raucously *** concert
of ominously monotonous melodies sung sirenically
by voluptuously ugly monsters.

Curvaceous enough to flaunt the fact they’re actually ****.
Which makes you feel like an *** but that’s just the way
it was meant to be.

Then the chorus bombs in, and the song starts to get sweeter
since the tune becomes a lot like Bob’s album: Street-Legal.
But as quick as you can nictitate, the ****** you anticipate

flicks away like a spark that was never gonna be lit-to-flame.
And so revert the monsters, their obnoxiously off-key verse,
somehow being, paradoxically, still acceptably heard.

And I almost forgot to mention how horrifyingly awkward
the gawking audience dances! Watching it is honestly
the most awful part of this non-senseness.

Our consciousness is often conjured in the noggin the way
pompously-starved college kids microwave Ramen: phenomen-

ally over-heated and eaten up unbelievably quick, wow, you’re a
genius, now you can hurry back to completing your awesome thesis!

Neatness!

But having burned your tongue, you vilely cursed inside
with words rougher than ***, not knowing where they were from,

and flustered, said you were done; plus, **** it, this work is dumb.

Oh, freshman, if only you had savored dem noodles!

Seeing you drops me

into a roiling hot-spring (extra-dimensionally speaking) where
the insides are known to welter—their opalescent phospholipids

doing the wave at lightspeeds. Faster. Creating
a ring of light. Now the sound of light. From inside, creating

            Me.      You

            make me light.

Oh the way you came towards me in that vermillion cardigan!
The color was not as fierce as your eyes! But I saw, too,

their softness behind—their yolk. And with mine I asked
            as you passed me by
what would happen if I broke            the shimmering membrane?
            
            Would your water leak to blossom
the spell-bound violet amaranths that sleep their promise
                         in Borges’ living garden?
            
            Or would it spill thick in crimson?
The hot sweet density tasting
                         like a wound freshly opened.

The taste I’ve come to know
                                 when women’s eyes have made me light.

It seems tenuous. It seems
Vanishingly thin but so seems anything
Threaded across the mightiest distance.

The faith I keep in its eternity
(There is no origin as there was no beginning.)
To sustain eyes’ struggle against
Earth’s walls built of paper.

To have them look assuredly  
Into its finite but unbounded space
Beyond the interstice
That reservoir
Unheld by hands divine

Sipping from itself to hold itself
And us full
Teeming most round the brim
In being which we are fulfilled.

He would ride up to the field
God had lain so purposefully for him
Along the final bight of an earthen track.
Narrow, which climbed, as with him
It swerved. He believed in God then.

Fenced off, blades became thick as
A dare, a moment—before confession
Or asking out his girl, the one whose
Crescent eyes in smile moonlit clefts
In his time. He would see her moving

Her body like His girl, exhaling His
Name, as if He was her only breath.
Through oceanic grasses she would
Flow in his ear, all the warm hadal
Mist of her. Aging wood throbbing

From gusts of wind on the fence. Deep
Enclosure of slender stalks and stems
Swaying by the rhythm of an ancient
Reverie. Crickets and junebugs, early
Fireflies lilting, sung to him tunes of

Indecipherable freedom. But not once
Did he cross, not once did he ever
Disturb a nature obeying the music.
Only the torrid yearning he allowed
To slip through the separation, knowing

There it was reunited, home among
The barely heard hum of the grasses
Oneiric and bare. Years later, when
The fence had disappeared, he once
Walked through and was overcome

By an emptiness thrashing against
Emptiness. In a single gust, scented of
His desinence, those years passed again
And he thought. Even if I’d crossed,
Had joined—not disturbed. Even if.