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.

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

I
Thin scales of self dry my waters
murky-lit flakes      mackled mirrors      

tilt slightly only because shaken
by silent throes      invisible current

(to swimming’s orchestra, I’ve been deaf)

latch onto nothing but fish-bone      
fish-meat under      latch and tilt
      cold      iridescent      like hot slaps

II
A native child      alone goes fishing
names me yen      (“the hologram fish”)

yen, sparkling, becomes
his first catch      his first glory and pride

Which way must yen be tilting then
in the sun?      for him to unhook the gaff
see yen soak, see yen drip      brazen
against an impossible smaragdine sky      air      
and toss it back     back to water?

III
Having gasped for it      maybe
I should not be that easily set free
I am human only like yen      craving out
of maddening iridescence            

but it’s a mean trick, child
to lift me in that air like something
      miraculous      and then toss me back

A tilt in the sun must be made to last   I know
a glint      some air briefly on the scales    
a fish, a yen      must then go back to swim
with itself      more clearly in its waters

Oh how I’m glad to have seen you at last!
At least to have seen my inscrutable belief
flash once in the flesh, rushing intense  
like the coming to be of an immemorial dream.
Your look towards me called forth my sea
and shook its floor of live ships that’ve dwelled
too long on the forgotten, spiritless bottom,
so that they rose again to breathe their sails.

But sure enough it was just one! One breath to live.
Just one to hold above because there was just one to give.
I wonder if they’ll remember that still clear sun.
The whole out of the blue before it moved and shuddered
under the fickle ripples as they bowed out and sunk.
To return to the mud where the yearnings are stuck
while the purpose still lies on the surface to be touched.

Oh, if I had not seen you! My ocean still would be.
With no billows to unsettle the pellucidity.
And my ships, they could have seen the bright light of the beam
through will alone at home at the bottom of the sea.
But now? To watch the light, remember heat, to feel the cold—
It’s all the same when the dream’s untold!
But I’ll listen to the silence and endure not knowing I’ll survive,
if you promise to forever give me that culminating smile.

I Inhaled so many silent forgotten gasps today.
They passed over my pulsating skin
like jeweled kings in pauper’s clothes.

Morning blue sheets sticking
like sparkling pool water as I twirled
my Georgia love, one Georgia summer.
Stuck like the dew of her legs,
like the brushing warmth of her breath that once
swept me into the blessing of her closeness.

This afternoon, talked to a friendly blonde
and wondered how her curls would wet
from Mediterranean water. Whether her breath
would brush or prickle my ambivalent cheek,
move my ambivalent heart.

Befriended a young musician on the bus ride
to the airport, heard in his slight lisp
his artistic dreaming, imagined what music
compels his eyelids to shut and shield him
from the carnivorous spoon-feeding.
He seemed to be wondering that, too.
Knew I was writing in my head.

A flight to home, delayed among fog
and a President’s presence.
A quiet meal, a chicken sandwich.
A golden ale and a sit at the bar
to rest my arms on the counter
like heavy soldiers, returning home.
Listening to the businessman yell
at the player who should have scored,
won the game.

Late at night, arrive home,
when nothing beautifully happens.
Can you believe? Tornados are sweeping
North Georgia. I can only see in my mind
empty pool water swirling.

I touch death
everywhere. It is
pleasant sometimes. It is shooting
upright stone forever
up. It is
cold metal blue, wind moving rushes,
holding on to a snag as smooth as couch
chamois. It is
feeling wooden table bones, random spontaneous
tapestries, my skin, your skin,
my clothes wet with substance,
drawn through mass downwards, on to
you.
I would let them go through me, if I
could, like smoke, like
talk, I feel
(deaf, mute) the smoke inside from
the drug inside. It would be outlawed
if they could
reach inside,
visible words of hair-lit thinness
on what is sought, reflections appearing on
the beyond side of ordinary surfaces,
tasting like
salmon. I saw the glinting
salmon meaning in a poem, Jorie. It was
like when the sun came out with her,
predictably, and I thought to trust it,
perhaps this once, for hurt can’t last
without the good also
lasting. Maybe I
just wasn’t listening right, this potential
human being, this possibility, this normal
occurrence, mundane, talked and
scribbled dismissively as a dejected
thought of dejection about dejection about
what it is
all about. Write it down,
it’s a crossword, long as the climbing
steps around the earth, senseless as
black.
white.

There could be much in nothing, but it’s
everywhere outside, and there are just a few
stars, really. The billions are
few
in the outward sinking sky.

See, I touch death, colorlessness,
everything, sitting on
ledges, feet dangling, today as yesterday
as tomorrow, trying to stop this thinking
habit, trying to be a Buddha about it, but the
wind is
cold
this time, and there are too many of you.
Maybe next time something will appear here,
in soaking colors and ever
pulsing acceptance, understanding

blood, moving,
living, meaning

from beyond here, tomorrow or yesterday,
but I hope today, before I am touched
by it, and realize

nothing.

Through silent aisles
I shake the titles that laugh with sickening wit.
I turn them quickly inside out, giving each no more
than ten seconds to steal my life.
This is because it is as if I already know,
like a toothless, condescending vagabond.

There are so many of them, I smile.
It seems I am looking for loose change.
Really, I am calling out, asking for
my sentence of inevitability.

What there is
is the silent peace of attempt around me.
Given in to, always, with familiar sting and sigh,
at once recognizable because I know not
where it comes from, nor where it goes.

Come look at me as I walk through the aisles.
You might see my attempt.

and after, the swallows
circling
more precise than 8 AM
which, on St. Johns, on
the fourth floor
is also
a back and forth
upon a razor-edged
haze

No. I write against.
(Aihmeanlike, against it.)
No, against it.
Like this.
[The point is pressing
A dark circle down down down.]

So (Djiuknowhatuhmean?)
I clash on this. After doing that
All day, on air! With conscious
Breath, (which is just force myself
Breath!) out of the glued muck
Moss in my sere bellum. My
Me do lah. Oblong god. Duh.

How long, these fractured
seams of seemlessness around?

In the meantime, here’s
some words, an image of a
Stream, and I’ll say: “Like a dead
Man(’s passing.)” Look at it.
And you thought infinity
Could be brushed off like a fly!
Wring your wet sloppy self!
Undried, then sundried!
Well. Now, you are one-eyed.

But what about that cry
Of true voice swishing lost
And found in the growing
Concrescent infundibular
Abyss?

Oh, that might be the Sublime
Sadness! (That one mentioned
once.) Keeping the Eternal
Walker out in the dwindling
Afternoons, closer than tears
To littered ponds of cold light.

Will he pull out the solidified
Spirit, or precipitate his freedom
As indistinguishable from the
Mystery? Oh. Please. Then the
Self would be (the question).
And there. Would be. No.
Need for the asked king.

Allow me to just run, no tricks.
We’ll see then if I have lungs
to withstand this air.

Because aren’t faces temples of sand
capable of melting in wind?

Still, when I was born, I saw
blue curtains gently shift
from the window my daughter
lifted open beside my bed,
to let it in, last, that air.

What can be done?
What do each of us really have?
Is it really just a handful
of blank photographs that
crimple in the hands like
a family of tired leaves?

From outside I can pretend
to understand how it might
come to nothing, a frozen block
of water being that metaphor
for numbness or indifference to
inexplicable flow, but inside
there is too much. Heat

A cigarette is just dragon spit, dragon spit
To tilt the world

Skull writing with ***** hands

Smear of words blind, dizzy
Onto walls of fireless caves

Out of the orange pulp of distant gerberas
Hopeful, and alone

Flick of sparks in air: dissolve
Downward around and everywhere

Like my thought

I wonder, if before me now were nothing
Would I jump?

There’d be no pain nor fear of end
There’d be nothing

I must transcribe this caved orange flower
Blindness somehow

There is a corridor that has escaped
and is out and is cold
and is overlooking Clarkson avenue.
That much I know for sure.

Because I turned
the cold brass ****
of the cold steel door,
heard the wind bellowing
obscenities as it absconded
berserkly. (I think
the other way.)
And also
walked through.

My mother’s voice has been
droned out by electronic
waves tentacling the immediate
space around me, around her,
and everywhere in between.
She sounds like a strange

robot, made-up. By me?
By God? It doesn’t matter.
Because that is
what is heard now.
That voice telling me with
the tragic kindness of
a mother
that I’ve forgotten
to call her, and my
dad, and my
sister,

and how come, have I
been busy?
How is life treating you?
Pretty good, I say. What’s
new? Nothing. Well then
what’s pretty good
about it, she says.
I laugh, she laughs too,
and I laugh again, inside though,

differently.
Slowly, our voices
wind down and we say
quiet goodbyes so that
I feel ice
about to rush to my
nose, it’s tentative, it
stops, and I
hang up the phone.

I am on the 6th floor of
a sick house, a hospital,
where some are healed,
some die, and others
stay sick. On the
ground, hundreds of feet
down and away
there are people I think, they
look so

small. An obese
mother, probably with
diabetes or hypertension or
heart disease or all of it
together, pushing her
baby in a carriage. A
smoker alone smoking
away something I’m
glad I don’t know and
other people just walking,
moving, like small living

things and then
I look down, closer,
at my own hands growing.
They can be
so large
when they move to
slowly cover
eyes.

Decided to run with him today.
Have the windpipe burned.

Which it has, though didn’t think
my tongue would grasp the air this way—
reach out further than the dog’s.  

Should’ve been just a wet towel
hung red over a balcony for the sun.
Instead I’ve discovered
mine is thickly wanting.

A bloodied wormhead.
Collapsed and writhing in a drain.

Sore, it’s been lopped. Beaten—cut.
By words which, kept crammed,
find their sharpness—my not-knowing-how
to listen to them heard.

So forms my residue of jilted buds.
Their shrivel in the mouth.
On a dead tongue.

While his, it seems, lives. Always kindly out.
Not only on the run. And his thoughts
are surely just as strong.

Being outrun, I’ll try to imitate.
On the way back—lap air by the wind
of my breath. Keep cool by releasing
from my tongue. Only heat.

At a party [many people, dressed nice, cocktails
going round] someone I guess awoke to my presence
as if I’d just appeared out of nowhere or something
and asked me [totally circular eyes, spearing pupils]
like this: And what do you do? I looked at him, and I
don’t know what face I made, but what I wanted to
look like was something to this effect, matter-of-factly:
Well, what do you think I do? Obviously, I simply
try to avoid, day by day,
a wretchedly hopeless case of dismal ennui.
I try to endure, as stoically I can, the
inner doggerel convulsions
and mawkish throes educed by the
realization of transcendental insignificance
(or, otherwise: paradoxically substantial nothingness)
that imbues all hope of Elysian ecstasy and
reduces it to but the terrifyingly
ineluctable fact that we are essentially
impotent holograms functioning by the fixed fractal geometry
of a dynamic and chaotic, kaleidomosaic-like reality,
which, as eternally self-transforming and
forever utterly inconceivable,
is devoid of any certainty, absolute truth
and, most of all, compassion.
Furthermore, when I look at you, I see a deaf-mute
reflection of a reflection of myself, and
to be morbidly honest, I don’t
know what I can tell you that would
make any difference to the fact that, freely or
not, we are both, you and I, just passing
through our lonely, fathomless, patterned
deserts, blinded and lured by the Fata
Morgana of our sadly sublimated
consciousnesses, due to which, undulating up ahead
of us in a chimerical haze, we are
conditioned to think, fatuously, that we know,
or that it’s possible even to know, that
it means something to love or not to love, that it
matters at all whether we are alone or
not, and that, at the point of death, there will be
something, somewhere, that will condense
somehow out of this
nauseatingly numinous fog and, like a deserved,
blissful wash of our “souls”—like a salvation!—
will come to justify the inanities
and insanities of our mundane life as just the
confusing buildup to a final and triumphantly
epiphanic crystallization in which, at last,
we will truly understand, unquestionably, the meaning of I,
the meaning of you, the meaning of truth,
and the meaning of meaning—I mean, honestly sir.
What do you do?
That’s what I hope my face looked like, but I guess it
must’ve looked like something else, or maybe I said
something, because the man just raised both his brows
[his left one slightly more than his right] and stared
me down in mocked awe, on the verge of superciliousness.
His eyes slowly receded like a tide imperceptibly towards
the back of his skull, his lips pursed, parched, and pitying.
Then he nodded complaisantly, too energetically, saying:
Oh, how interesting! Did you always see yourself getting
into something like that? Mmhmm. Hmm! [and so forth]
And how do you like that? Mmhmm. [and so forth] And
the pay? Mmhmm [etcetera]. After I’d finished answering
some of his questions, I said: If you’ll excuse me, I just saw
a friend of mine, I really should go and say hi, but what a
pleasure it was to talk to you, sir. Take care!
And I excused myself.

The powerful moment was so—
and so—unsustainable.

An atomic cascade leading
to the parting of air between air.

A new between,  
laying bare in split existence

old air—heterotelic. Not inhaled
but absorbed, and us—beautifully

unaware—beautifully
sustained but for a moment. An

unaware beautiful being.

~~~~

An explosion is a powerful moment,
unsustainable always

in eternal space. To keep alive,  
all of every existence

must give itself, continually,
to the cascading firefall.

But hasn’t this universe
achieved just that, since

the beginning—a courageously
growing child, for us unwilling

to fail exploding, continually?
A moment once,

something here did feel
like an enduring self offering

its unaware beautiful being.

There are some days many poems
begin themselves in me, and I am
given many first lines.

They come fast those days, and I
have to catch them as they rise
like a thousand geysers

shooting up from a vast barren land
(in shards of what could be held
in the hands) before leaving as

child’s balloons. I do not catch them
all, I do not even catch many. I
manage to touch just a

few. Still I am thankful for those
days. On those days I can feel the
ground shake from their rising,

the ground underneath, whence
they came. The tremor and pulse,
whence I came.

What flush of cold distortions shivered the shapes,
became lambent eye waves,
at last?
Skewed the eversince subtly-skewed-already  
            that’s in the light?      Or the cubed      mundane disguises?
like:
the wall’s edges, your desk’s corners, the dead fullness of
strewn ecru pages [crepitating by the open garage door, a breeze]
showing all your rustled struggle, wrestled with, agelessly, and the boxed
form of it—your books—upturned, but floored—

or maybe, all that shook was your sorrowful shoe, its face—
dejected
on its side,
final ***** lace limp on the bottom, below you,
to go with you no more. No more movement
anymore.

Was it, then, unskewed?

And had it always been there at the thick of your throat, had it just
been the tongue in the way, spoiling? Was everything in the world you saw
small then big, too big then small, like
a ****** mouthing of out then in, a throbbing, grabbling of you—
couldn’t tell if the biting was harmless, playful teeth?

You’d say no to me, to all of this, and think maybe. Was it the maybe?

I went off of the deep end
where I went off of the deep end of I

so that I   went off

and went off of the deep end   off of
and off of the   and off of the and
and off of the deep end that I went off of

off of the deep

I it was that went   off of the deep

I that went off the I that went off of the deep

I of the deep   deep end   of the I
that went off of the deep

end of I that I went off the deep end of

so that I   again   went off

and the deep end was a deepening end
that I went off of into the deep
that deepened in   the I that deeply

went off of the deep into the end  

of end   and I

The matter is that the matter is that
breaking from the constant that is
breaking from the constant that is
constantly breaking constantly

patterns into even patterns into even
language of odd symmetry in the
language of odd symmetry in the
symmetrical language symmetrically

recreated again and recreated again and
seeping from what is unobservably
seeping from what is unobservably
unobserved seeping unobservably

over layers folding over layers folding
the matter over the foldings over
the matter over the foldings over
folding matter folding.

is what is
and what is
here (also
here, which was
here too, meaning

back there), but forget that, just
stop and look up
here,
where it
                     is it

now push your hands through
(it’s okay, you can grab the can’t-be-grabbed
handful-of, it wants to be      
not-grabbed, that is
           good for it, feeling held
for a neverwhile)

         invisifinity still it’ll be

now then, couldn’t everything
in this it be
locked away in a museum, and thank god for
you
it ain’t?

there’s invisifinity music to be,
invisifinity words to be
            and paintings and shapes
            and unbeings to be

impossibilations and memories of
pyrotechnic fantasies and
consternating spirimotions also
vortexing interpersonal universals,
colored by
temperature changes and
the speed of revolution revolving
the galaxies
     around neutrinos, around
                    
an unlocatable photon

in
the middle of
this in the middle of
the universe in the middle of
these here universes unifying the invisifiniteness of

                    invisifinity here

kind of like
the first time you swam didn’t
in the ocean

hey homeless man, in those
beautiful rags like royal flames, come
to this here
don’t go to that there

and narrate your beautiful life to me
as I walk home on this warm winter day

I will place in your hands all my coins.
In your hands they will
jingle to
sparks like
neutrinos to you
starting a revolution.

a nacreous tossing around at
the sides, a dappled silver
sunlight if looked one way, an

apocalyptic gloam if another,
exhaled from a seeming
mouth, feeding on what has

already eviscerated an unfelt
*****, a predator certainly its
own prey, a heat certainly

poison-breath on a cheek
falling when a meretricious
lover spouts that spurious

hypocorism, and also just a
wavering, iridescent puddle—
cornered, soft as a liquid steel

echo of a futile struggle
rolling around, bouncing off  
a wine glass, and a porcelain  

table edge, while a listening
head shakes, looks down
despondently, gloom glowing

out the hair, a voice jaded
since birth saying some
thing about differences, or a

helpless slender strap of hope
hanging itself on the way two
other eyes look at it across

checkered watered wings, two
swirling god whorls, two
effulgent galaxies the color of

melting pine bole circling
around in living umber striae,
pulling its gaze, raising it, as if

they, they were blazing truth
cased behind lithophane, and it,
only an aporetic puddle now

of tepid ocher, a mild earth
stone placed in a hand, asked
what is thought of it and the

response: yes, yes of course,
before foreign distance splutters
its face, and it retreats from

its meaning imparted to every
thing (with the vulnerable
precision of a swaying finger

tip) to the baby lanugo of a
delicate floating, through
human rills, of what is horizon

docked, dead, not merely
deciduous—forever jilted with
breath bulging as when beating

a flopping eyeless fish to
half-dead, head tilted up a
throat trying to pry itself

free, trying to live by
streaming snagless, airful,
without spirant sound of going

lost straight from the hands—
then a short chop of fullness
finally expunged and sputtering

like an escaped tuft of
shackled wonder soaring up
the sky in a puff and soul ring.

I
who am indescribable to myself
because true
am describable to you
precisely because
to you
I can only be
expressly
untrue.  

Unless that I
is you

I begin to write and immediately
as if obeying an immemorial pact
the earth pulls away for me.
Shows me her full body—veined,
scarred, demure, ashamed. Too
pitifully beautiful in her naked
cringe and tuck of her legs. The
meaning of brutal honesty. Waits
as if expecting to be scourged but
shaking my head I gesture
no. In light darkness, sketch
true martyrdom.

It is nightfalling. That is what it is.            
Like hands, interlocking,
spoken as ashen clay infolding
to a dome their clasp over a flame,
covering it. To hold—not extinguish—
and if extinguished to travel on
in smoke. It is that. That covering
over the flame, the capturing of all
warmth and light from all that is
around. I try to get above, over,
around. Before I slip into bed.

To cup over the flame
my self, my life, this hour. And her.
Try to round all as home
or hearth above the nomadic flame
that mocks what I gesture, and shakes
vigorously its own vacuum.
As if heaving in rib-tickled laughter:
Who do you think you are!
laughing, doubling over, cracking
its sides.

But I do not forget my hands.
I do not regret my hands.
What they can do, above a flame.
In light darkness of mine, I can laugh too
and write—above, over, around
and she, relax her trembling skin.

The big bang was your conception.
The expansion of nutritive gases and stars
filled the womb of your pregnant mother.
As barely an earthed fetus, you seemed an animal.
As a newborn, you grew primitively, slowly rose.
Enlightenment when you came of age
to discover yourself human.
Now, in your Twenty-First, the century
of drugged science, you live like a half-god
in ever-questioning evolved reversion,
in a contradictory asylum of paralyzing speed,
rising steep to its ringed peak funneling fumes
that revive the smell of your instincts, primal and fiery.
Then, in one final breath, in the outpour
on volcano’s point, melting and bursting
in radial gasps once again, will come your death
in a matter of ours, the eschaton, a new bang
desired and conceived anew, so that in rebirth
will be your survival, in rebirth our continuity.

We slump on the couch when we return like lifetimes
have passed before us.
We have to, even though it was only a seven minute walk
to the dining hall, because 1) the food was just
“weird consistency”
(which we tend to say regardless), 2) the light
in there yawned indifferently to us (when does it not?), and
3) the reassuring clink of our forks on our
plates wasn’t even there this time it was
hiding underneath slop
and smothered on top by the intruding sound waves
(who asked?)
of our next-table neighbors’ lives.

You made a sly remark about seconds to catch
a glimpse of youthful ****.
She’d gone to get some more baby carrots and cucumber slices
to put in her salad maybe
(who knows? who cares?)
Either way, her youthful **** would make the food taste like
something to you. And you
described them to us when you sat down again so
the slop would taste like something to us
(there’s pride in that type of generosity, don’t forget) and

(congratulations)

we had the faint impression of
some sort of
****** there, but

we didn’t tell you
(it’s easier that way).

A cup, a squeeze, a kiss on her ******* yes that could feed
our hunger for a night. And tonight was a night
like any, so her ******* led us to talk

of women, and women led us to talk of
love
(and the blooming one for the poor *******)
as we who lost withstood the vicarious twinge of
an addling ****** very different from
the first.

This one led us to pine for sweets, but the ones we found
were dry, so we left the table, left the dining hall, looking around at
the others: the lonely, the couples, the blessed
lonely couples, and the fortunate friends
huddled against everything with open laughter, enjoying
the weird consistency like drunk theoretical physicists before
they discovered bubbles and inflated eternally meaning
when they safeguarded a
zoo with a pistol they didn’t know how to
use, in Soviet Russia.

(So you see?) We have to slump on the couch
when we return like lifetimes  
have passed before us.
No one even bothers to pick up a guitar, we leave all four of them
strewn on the floor like
dead wooden boxes because
Dylan or Young or Cash (or whoever)
is already in the living
room. Any
bubbling, inflating, theoretical physicist
(any drunk, pistol-packing zookeeper, for that matter) will
tell you that.

So we slump, comfortably uncomfortable,
(at least we’re trying!)
feeling their (our) strings plucking. No sounds, no voices.
Because we don’t need
to hear this that.
Not right
now. (Not right
now).

Of course we’re born sad little creatures!
To be born, we had to have the picture
broken & bursted—for, being born, we’re
fragments of it. (But not just us born—all
of it that’s born…all of it’s fragments.)
Us, though, we found out about the pieces
(and that we’re them) so shock-hearted and
weary-eyed we joggle ourselves around,
and waggle and babble (because we can move
and talk to the other pieces, like you) in the
sedulous task of trying to see what picture we all
formed before we were born and to see
if we can’t form it again while born and living.
And, also, inexorably, to see like fateless
naked goggling chicken-children what part
we have—is it a sun’s ray, a cloud’s feather, a
grass blade, or is it just the indistinguishable
shade of unctuous bole that’s laid there
almost smeared in between? I’m not quite sure,
our tabs seem flexible enough, and to add
we’re whimsy little interlockers, so no wonder
we’ve been going on billions of years now.
At this point it’s probably give-up or never-end,
and both options, frankly, seem quite abominable.
I wonder if that’s what it says on the box,
right above “meant for children” and “small
parts dangerous choking hazard.” But the
question is what to do when you’ve realized a
piece has been missing, always been missing,
and probably more. (Oh, and for after, you can
ask if it was never put there in the first place,
and why)—do you just imagine, then? I mean,
just that—just imagine the whole thing, after all
the fuss been going on to hold hands and make it out?
I’m telling you, I bet the sucker is something else
entirely, like something I don’t even know what,
but different—crazy different, I bet. And it’s
probably why they didn’t want to include it,
those ponzies—we wouldn’t choke on that one.
Not that piece. Still, though, I hope it says on the box.
I hope it at least tells you something on the box.
Wait, where’s the box? What box?

By writing it
and having it pass through
time like
a sacrament
and swaddling it afterwards
in puffs of piano or violin
or shocking it through
electricity, post-rock,
pushing it with
your hands and
shoulder muscles
off the floor, then
off the earth, by
pulling it, lifting it
stretching it, holding it,
and with substance
or without
then releasing it
fully into yourself, where
the rushing blood
has gone.

What are you
trying

to do, buddy??

::his
eyes being
pulled up by
the fragile question
as two
wounds
opening
glisten::

What

are you trying

to do?

I told this
***
a life-long necessity
of mine
more or less.
But first I said,
before anything, maybe
it’s just a life-long exhaustion
of mine I’m
expelling needlessly, okay?
I want to make sure you
know that
so you don’t go thinking
I’m weird or nothing,
though honestly  

it all drops hard like
iron
faster than
gravity
to the same
place
anyway.

But this is what I told him:

Sometimes I wish the world
would roll up all it’s got.
Roll it all up in one unsettling
heap of heaviness it can
toss on me like stock from the
deep. O I wish to God it’d
give me the torturous insanity
and every inexplicable loss
it can conjure up—just one
catatonically tremendous
slap to my stupid little
face, flushing it with
cosmic humiliation
and fear I don’t even
notice I ****** myself.

So that, at least, it’d all be
there, you know? And I wouldn’t
have to ask where it is and
what the hell’d I do
to get spared.

I told him give me the
holocausted ashes smelling of
Zyklon B, the crawling away from
sawed off shotgun shells
catching friends hiding under
the library desk anyway, the
running over of your dad by
a drunk who lost his wife to
the cancer that took the brother of
somebody you knew whose
mother had

suicidal depression, hadn’t
smiled really in years, she’d
sat with cold coffee
for years, and around her
had been worse than
darkness, for a reason she
never ended up knowing.

I said to him give me the
harshest words a child has
ever known against him
and have them rest upon
my spine like a freezing
brain spreading electric
wild fires across
my vertebrae, give me
burning skin really
burning, and cheating wife seen
moaning, and drowning baby now
dead
and beaten wife now
collapsing, another baby now
beaten and
thirsty wino keep drinking, and
a stranger with his face
blown off red and
brown and tattered and
I don’t know how but
still hanging there like
boiling chicken fat, dripping,
but the doctors
able to keep his heart
beating and his organs
pumping too, so now
people can see him
and his whole face
as an indication there is
something in the air
that deserves pitying.

Give me it, I said,
with homicide and
double homicide, and
a side of
stabbings and
chokings and
bludgeonings
and guns and rope and
gas and asphyxiations
and love letters and
love-making giddy ***
and flowers for the
love of your life
who is cutting herself
because she can’t stop
cutting up souls after
she *****.

Give me everybody’s
******* loneliness
that is lonelier than
a thing lost before it was
born, and as it was
being born, born into
losing itself, its slow
destruction, and there was
not even anybody there because
there was never going to be
anything to help you, there is
nothing to be achieved and
nothing for which
striving is
helpful.

There just is a memory of
a hazy possibility of
happiness, that one
felt once
in a senseless dream.
A memory that is
always fading towards
non-existence or
existence that has
no place for it, because
it is already full of
something else, and you,
your “transcendence,”
are wasting time,
waiting.

What are you waiting for I
said (with just a little irony).
Give me the heaviness, don’t
hide it anymore. Show it
all bare and give it all
to me. Tell me, here, take this
and hold it for the sake of—

What?—what is this?
Is it this? Just
the universe drooling on itself? Or
is it more? Somehow less?

Well, for the sake of
whatever lies here (lies here!)
and is too ****** in eternity to
delight us with a clear
answer to the
question that all the
living creatures on this
sacrosanct dirt, in some
crevice of their being, I know,
are asking it.

And this ***, when I finished
telling him what I’ve just told you
didn’t say anything back.
His brown face was treaded terrain,
crumpled cracked ditches,
broken dry grin.

He looked elsewhere, smelling of
decades of drunken alcohol
and lice and yellow toenails and
******* alone against
brick walls at night

and also his brown hands
adjusting the dirt-drenched
cardboard bed he will surrender to
tonight, after who knows
what else.

Oftentimes, the breathing
is not easy breath
conscious of
the in, out      in, out.

When air must clamber
up the rough of the throat
as if a tired ghost
a worn conscience.

For breath, for some,
is heavy—laden with
the impossibility
of impossibility.

With more and too much,
which, often misunderstood,
is too little—a slow
starvation, acrid churning

of emptiness
in the lungs. A sense of
air’s capacity, moving now,
to cease movement and fall

down the rungs, back
irrevocably to that place
that gave it up, away,
so hopeful

it would be forever
newborn.

And some
must dandle themselves
to keep from going still.

To force the breath
back up and out. Out as if
the diseased life were really
a beacon of purity.

suspected of being
problematic, one is a
common
but
questionable
model, and an
adjustment
may
be
required
to address all
the nonsignificant
differences—
how
they
nonetheless constitute
important arbitrary
criterions
for
equivalence

the significance test
based on
observational
data
is
susceptible to (errors
of) interpretation
over the
question
at issue
namely, do
case differences
arise
because of
exposure
to a comparatively
small sample
or
because
of
another variable?

Exposure can be
only mediated
by
crude
estimates
and so may be
misleading
during
the
forming
of the hypothesized
model of one
that describes
the
association
between exposure,
bias, and
the variables,
and
reconciles
difference
with equivalence
significantly.

The model provides
little information
that is
incontrovertible
but
the results suggest if
adjustment for the variable
makes no
substantive
difference
ignore it

but if your knowledge
indicates the
adjusted
variable to
be preferable

then prefer it

Sublime how in a dream, I can let
that which when awake is painful and bizarre
be in my dream, so painlessly,
not thinking why at all.

My hope is simply once I’ll let
that which when asleep seems clearer in a fog
seep back to me, somehow near,
in life that’s strayed afar.

incredible—
that it could be for some
and not others

choice? what is that?
the difference between living
and surviving?

asked a friend of mine I
made up—said it’s
simple really

said it’s fighting if
you can’t go, and going if
it’s hard.

The gym is here today, perfect for me, exactly
as it was yesterday: too many mirrors, too many
glances, not enough weight, and not enough

pulse to burst me out, smelling like

bodies deconstructing. The stink of themselves
airing out in the uncleanliness of another day
that had to be. This one, too, to turn out

having been a necessary pixel. Even though

today it looks fuzzy. For instance, I could be
a deranged circus master right now, taming
my body as if it were a lion, commanding, as if

brandishing a lash, that beast to jump through

each fiery ring conflagrating in my combustible
mind. Like this one: Wouldn't this be happiness?
If I were a handsome actor, who lived his craft

and knew what a secret he were tapping into?

Who knew that really there was just one of us,
passing through each of us? And who, still, was
able to enjoy women, as blessed fruit he might

pick off the tree of life, and not as immaculate

fields of first fallen snow that almost desperately
seem to require distance and impassibility.
Wouldn’t it be? I lash the lion, he jumps

through the conflagration, and into flames.

that is why us animals
**** like animals
feel like animals
when we ****, when we feel
like animals

just the nature
needing to continue
just the nature
being pulled in

a hot attraction
not pleasure but
within pleasure, within
that other animal, simply
****** like an animal

the unobservable
state, something like
the unknown impossible
globe encompassing
the slightly more
known, the slightly more
possible
globes encompassing
globes of
unconscious imagination
radiating
the end of time, inevitably

we are whirling towards

and the beauty
tremulous
            tremulous

Our eyes are love, my love.
Loving you, I love and become love
and so become you, and so love myself.
I love I—a simple thought
in closeness (to that) which truly belongs
and gives itself to us all.

Though the infinitely recurring
empty distance lying in between our eyes
ripples concrescently accelerating waves
of deadening nothing across this dreamy
fusion for which I hope. They sweep a plague
across its vulnerable pastures, blank its
evolving light, and shed in gray the plains
that could, that might, burst in bloom
of colorful dawn. The empty distance
sends the nothing rippling through my
liquid soul, and brushes painfully the core
of its eternally lonely water.

I cannot speak to you as I would wish.
My tongue, my moving ocean of flesh
cannot righteously carry the sails of my
unutterable voice to the safe shores of
your ears. My torch, my light, my eye
is with yours so impalpable, shrouded,
fit to glean but only the most jagged edges,
the sharpest points, and our deepest caves.

But I love you, and so, bravely, I will love
our eyes, together—inscrutable flames,
distant stars that burn closely in the uncertain
black of our skies. You will take light years
to reach me, but if you had not already,
I could not be here, now, waiting for you.
You reflect off my skinned soul
and I am what returns to you, light years ago,
as the birth of your own eyes.

I can stare into the abyss of sky and not flinch.
But the depth of your eyes, my love, trembles
stillness itself. Makes the distant star in my eyes
burst in birth of bursting stars.

When God created this piece
He must have done so in a quick
stream of blazing consciousness.
He knew it was genius. He knew
it was brilliant—unlike anything
that had ever existed. (Some say
it was this piece, in fact, that
created existence). But like many
artists, He must have been moved
by the ineffable within him, for
it seems not even He knows
what the Hell he was trying to
do, what the Hell he was trying
to convey. The piece remains
a mystery to the artist himself.
Even more the mystery to Him
than to His gawking audience
that has gawked at it for millennia.

Now do you understand?
That must be the first line?

For I was you in my own way.
At melted o’clock.

And did you understand then?
That it was, also, to be
the last line?

In a scribble, desperate

and perhaps still
         disparate