N  Y’s serrated skyline,
a pale blue sleeps on teal.
But cut out
the distant end of it

and something of that shade
might wake
from under there, I feel.

The cross which I tend
to see is nearer than
N  Y. It is rusting
an old green garden on it
and there is much strangely
colored gray living in
the winding motions above it.
The last of the sun, it dying
again pours libations of
pink upon the summit.

The view is far to me
yet brings me close
to a sky’s permeation.
(Been dragging me forward
a while now to its edge,
this now ever wasting.)

This is much like the way
the Torre fell through
my eyes, pending inward
upon some mind, which
I tried to catch in my gray
gray matter (sitting next
to her) like that was
the last essential task.
I said keep it keep it.
Did not keep it. It passed.

The blue is changing now—
lighter, paler, ghost-like.
If you were here
you would know the color.
(It is the sheet spread over
when things are lifted
as if born.) Lights, smaller
than skin water specs
begin to glimmer.

A breath is a crumpled
thing, used and used but
never wasted. When I
breathe to breathe I
remember to keep
breathing. And when the
world enters my lungs,
I can choose when to
exhale time—if I breathe
to breathe.

More speckling of sky skin.
The shades are fading, darker.

Suffused under, the clouds
congregate in covers.
The Brooklyn museum
is some pantheon upon
my roman hill from here.
The street lamps flame
orange as if it all was a
constant procession
towards the unceremonious
entrance, through the changing
gates, to the unknowing
home of being.
(The blue has fallen
from the sky and dropped
onto the roofs.)
The impossibly colored
clouds smoke up in
one heap from the end,
still the same distance—
far away. (But there still
is blue behind me.
A blue has kept away
from the end.
The cross has blackened.)

I wish not to leave this
Brooklyn roof. But I have
chosen to sleep on a bed.
One day
I will sleep on a roof.

A break of this window glass
would break a beginning you think.
But you just watch through it, a squirrel, you
and it alone
assuredly peaceful cracking something.

But maybe it’s not. And maybe you’re not.  

Your finger oil stains are skied out
like canyon rivers from the earth
a million million years ago, you don’t know.
You streaked your hands across it to feel
it push against you, its imperceptible thickness,
to feel it, in doubtful awe, you pawed against it
only because you knew it would
make you think, didn’t you. Oh didn’t you.

And your gaze would be drawn by whom(ever)
to the emerald shades, to the insides of the pine furs,
as if there was your mystery, your easy answer.
Uncomfortably, sure, but still, it had a home.
And being still, it was enough.

And then—
and then your hope, what else? For everything, for
anything, of course, you don’t know. Winged from
across the ocean, down upon you like felt breath,
like your ancestral wind slid from an eternal mountain,
upon you like wash, like eyes the warmth of which
only you know and can wish for, and then—

And then it was all imagined, all of it, and
the squirrel’s gone, you don’t know when, or
if it got what it cracked, the window’s *****, it
needs washing, and the deep green darkness within
the cloud of leaves sways exasperatingly to you.
What was today?
Was it my father’s birthday?

I must remember that
through a mirror I do not glimpse
flesh or name. I am observing
a different type of existence.
The meaning, to all of us, of
a simple phrase—I see myself—
a profound one.

Yet how soon that I could die,
sooner than it would take
those simple phrases to grow
expansively and never fully.
Sooner at least than it would
take to truly believe one.

My high school teacher of
biology, thirty something, he
will die any day now.
Perhaps he has just died. Now.
I had forgotten about him

till yesterday, when a friend
mentioned sudden cancer
and I felt a shudder of
life inexplicably swallowed
down an inexplicable abyss.

His last look at himself;
whether there is a mirror there
or it is given; his last glimpse
at the phrase; whether it finally
expands for him to answer
the question of himself—

I don't know.

The unwelding of us was reverberating
and time was heat even then. Though
I feel its waves only now—a stretching

of full air, an enchanted scraping
of flimsy tied veins, these boats
poorly moored to moving docks

never moving water.
Then electricity, inflaming suddenly,
and there is a terrific prying apart.

These days, I can sit with the snow ice
spearing down and empty myself of it.
When at least parts pour back in, though,

and I smell the skin you wore in summer
when a wind blows,
restlessness speaks volumes.

will come unpredictably
not surprisingly

the ultimate hardship to be
weathered
luffed through
mercilessness
and squall
and scud
and a nearly drowning
wave
subtle as the
undertow

though weren’t hardships
named this way—

to be sailed?

what would my first breath
have drawn
had I never felt
my own breath now teetering
upon the thread of
disappearance?

what light would my birth
have shone upon me
had I never come to
execrate it
like an immolation?

the ultimate will wedge itself
beating repetitions into you deep
as the deepest—timelessness

remember when you told yourself
remember this?
pounding your chest?

remember it

you were right

What is hoped trickling between
splintered crags of hard matter
as between slabs of sliced I
like water through the desert crust

the beginning-end fusioned whole?
it resplendent through the cracks?

What might be enough
for its time being
might be the first loosening
a knot’s dissolution  
beginning

unwrapping light and breath
deep underground  
after prying like suffocation
the thing loose, never budged,
still you yanked, pulled,
screamed, spumed, more than

frustration through your fingertips.
For the brain, don’t be fooled,
s’more the psychedelic fruit
than just saying apple computer

the pulpous embryo of imagination
feeding

what seed, sprouting tendrils,
protracts without desire
(but causing desire)
ever outward, growing, clasping,
(hinging on unhinging) meshing
an electric net
and collapsing a shock they say

until the taste of its taste
is so succulently pungent
that after hours of dull mumbling
its projection upon the mirrors

it bursts in puffs of screams
short tense contractions
[image fizzing, over-heating].

Like a cracked computer reading
an animal program: Alpha Beast
of the Ill-Illusioned. Or: Runt Wolf
of Gaia, the Undarwinian Survivor.
Software ones and zeros digitizing

the command:
Must do the act cannot be done.

Till it breaks. Unimagined.

I woke this afternoon
with still a
cinereous sheet over me but
how strange
it was the light and
my head bobbing as in
water of timeless air and
my skin skimming

off touches of memory
inhaled with tingling
apprehension and scents
capable of warping and
disfiguring me to

mereness