We lived briefly outside and at once
all of our one lives one innocuous evening.
I think it must’ve been a round ten.  
We’d gone, really and already, in every sense,
a-stoop-smoking to clear the air of Murakami
and his personal identity. I guess we knew
we’d end up breathing significantly
before time came to shepherd us back in.

On the stoop, aglow in rosewood smoke,
in the streaked light of our chosen nostalgia
and strawberry hope, we pointed to things
we really saw—everything—pressing their
dimensions sharp through the buttery plaster
of our personal identities, like certain words
I happened to glimpse, in and out of Murakami.

I was startled when a car cut through the viscous
street in front of me like a hand underneath a piece
of cloth. It bent still shadows around a perfect
globule of movement and returned each to rest
only after each of its past moments had passed.

That’s when I saw my smoke trail slowly leave me,
unapologetically, heading across the invisible prairie
on its horses to drink by the bending river in the street.
It asked me if I knew, now, why I should come along.

I pointed and asked: What was that I just saw?
Where?
There by the street. What was that?
Oh, that was just
antlers on a fire truck this past Wednesday.
I don’t understand.
Of course you don’t. You won’t remember I said it.
Then why’d you say it?
To remind you you’ll forget.
Oh, I see. Thank you, then. I was about to
forget I’d forget. Now I know
I never will.

The patient has had no nausea,
vomiting or back pain. No chills,
fatigue, fever, decreased vision
or double vision. No ear drainage
or hearing loss, epistaxis or
runny nose. No sore throat, calf
pain, chest pain, cough or difficulty
breathing. No pedal edema,
palpitations, black stools, ******
stools or constipation. No diarrhea,
urinary frequency, laceration, skin
rash or depression. No dizziness,
headache, head injury, weakness
or enlarged lymph nodes. All
systems negative        

and yet

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.

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).

The pastor is preaching, is trying to hit
the heart today: What really is Mass, why
is it the center of our faith, why really do we
come? Familiar questions I’ve asked (though
minus the m.) Now this is interesting. He says,
this church is Bethlehem, the home of bread.

His voice is gradually becoming a mewling
through the microphone that annoys me, the
strings in his box tightening to a choke like
ends of piano wire, almost always to tearing.
I can’t see past the doxologizing, but it sounds that
this is why we come, his eyes might just have torn.

It is the day of the nativity of some
Lord, or incarnate God, or son—an almighty
Savior. I guess I’d be histrionic too, then, if I
knew there was something called my Salvation.
If all that was needed was to repent and believe
and be faithful and give yourself.

That’s not really hard if you never happen to
not know your sin or whiff at air or be betrayed or
fail to be gotten. At least something else is, though.
There’s a girl I spot I would like to ****. She is
attractive from where I’m standing, flirty I can
tell, leering at me and gossiping with another

cute girl. If I happen to meet her after the service,
I’d like not to have to say much to get her in bed.
That way, there isn’t the risk of exhaustion or
feeling pointless from trying to tell so much.
But that is always going to be hard. That is why
I’ll stop sometimes, just chew the bread.

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!

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.

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 would die to say here, truthfully,
splaying my arms round as the sky,
this, this! is how it is possible to live
and not sink under a faint surface,
and not run, windfaced, against a distance,
and not lay down, weary as nothing.

This is how it is possible for us
to look without shaking skin or heads
or blenching eyes, writhing like mangrove
limbs in this incomprehensible slough.
To live as discovery of life and still not know
if ever we were born, or when, if ever, we’ll have
died.

But to you, I cannot say this, truthfully.
My person is not truthful. It has a voice
you hear through air in the daytime, I am
not truthful to you. Else I would be
fringes of all time
stretched. You cannot see me, truthfully.

I am ground movement, just under, welling
untouchable imperative unattainable.
Are you bound by the point to create
your own destruction, as I? Then proclaim it
yourself, truthfully, waving your fresh
roots out to me, soil juiced and ripely plucked.

I will try to remember crossing the plains from
dawn till dusk, before I made the world fragile.
If I do, I will dissolve, and will come out your
breath, speaking truthfully. But will you remember
too? So that, disappeared, I may find you?
I would not have to die, then, truthfully.

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.

Special spoiled soup
du jour spoiled
too soon by
the chef. Too much
salt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don’t believe the sign
that is clawed from another’s cave
of a silly heart, onto some door
in some beautiful garden on a special day.
That scraped shine, that which
opens wide the view for you
and you remember as a sharp, etched
slowly focusing glaze on your time
was probably made with some key
of some fool who regrets it now, no doubt,
as you do.

Nor should you believe another’s photograph of it
and take it as yours, or the same,
and think that this is what you were going
to write your book about, one day, all along.
That book was full of naïve wonders
and melodies you paid too much attention to, anyway.
So just allow what you love the most
to be scrapped and substituted.
Words are just words, you see.

So what do you believe?
The motionless things of a winter walk, I suppose.
They are the kindest.
They know not to talk to you, not to say anything
you could possible believe.

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

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.

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.

I ask—I know,

but did I? pull you close only
only
to keep from flying away?

I once knew I cupped your head,
like water, to my lips.

I think I know now, hauntingly,
I might have wrenched your face to mine
like a ravenous and terrified animal
and kept on your lips but to seal my mouth,
a stormy vacuum,
that ****** ceaselessly the breath of too much
                  in the attempt to inhale one.

****** dry, it became nothing.

Still, it could not be helped.
Meaning would be given to the thoughtless
and its name—passion—would be answered,
its sweet breath ****** on.
But I
I never breathed anything.
And yet there was more sustaining my life.
What sweet did I taste? Its breath or
the more?

You would rename it—silly—to yourself.
You did not know you whispered it to me always.
I only heard it when our cover would
slit briefly open—painfully, and inevitably.
Your breath in these thin moments was bitter, bitter
to you too.
So we covered the slits and sealed the gape,
told ourselves we knew
all the clothes were off, together, for a reason.
Convinced ourselves we were really touching what was untouchable,
for a reason.

But, if since the very beginning
your mouth was to move that way,
was to say those words—and if your eyes were always
going to look like autumn trees and unsay them—
was it for one or wasn’t it?
Is there something at all to smile about
just passing through our geometry?

I ask this to myself—of course. But,
but
today’s sun blades the sky too much like yesterday’s!
So your eyes return! They return to reach! to pull me out to free fields
as they used to.
Your sundress still sparks an Aztec flame
as the colorless crowd ashes.
To me your scene is still an answer
and your breath can still warm truth
as sweet as tragedy on my skin.

The lining of homes around me
glints light red
and I stare at its light, after you,
your cutting rays,

because your thought of ending
now kisses mine
and so—still—I can answer

whether, as I am now— you were always
only a memory.

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

Even nirvana must be empty.
Even silent revelation must allow herself to be taken, afterward,
by noise.

Kept, perhaps, might be a few
thoughts—the principles of salvation, maybe, easily incorporated
orts

soaked up, scooped with bread.
Chewed, passed—as everything, habitually—disintegrated into in-
visible

fuel for the festering divisions.
(Precisely those divisions sought to be stilled by breathing deeply,
crossing

the legs of, still, a body.) But
even nirvana must be swallowed by the Buddha’s gaping mouth
of transience.

For afterward, must it not stay,
still, the same? After achievement? Yes, I like to mock as I loll, in
naivety,

but I am also a talented nurturer
of it. I know behind is something quite valuable. A transient irony,
perhaps.

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.

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.

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.

My grandmother’s fragility sinks under the blanket
like a ship on its final voyage, when it becomes sea.
I picture this as she sips sugar water with parted lips.
I watch her in silence from a small, faraway room
because the door is slightly ajar, and there enters a light
from her window that comes to rest humbly on her pale eyes.

I start to wonder what they must be thinking, her eyes,
as they begin to close, slowly, and lashes become blankets.
Do they fear the heavy, trespassing breath of darkness that smothers light?
Or do they smile and find comfort from the warm sea
of prayers that wash up on the shore of her room
and carry with their waves the whispers of my silent lips?

My mother ambles through thick air, talks with dry hushed lips
to her sister, who understands. My mother’s eyes
wander like sad gusts into the emptiness of my room.
They tell me she wants to bundle me in a blanket,
place me in a basket, and let me float away with the sea
until I become the constant water of her veins, pure and light.

Tired minutes pass, and the sun is coming down; the light
that had rested on my grandmother’s eyes now sleeps on her lips.
The glowing sun reflects in my face, and the sea
in the sky changes wistfully from a sad red to a soft orange, like the eyes
of my mother, as she sits next to her and strokes her blanket.
With the dimming of day, I begin to feel colder in my faraway room.

My sister sits down with me on the couch, but there is no room
so I rise and walk out the door, moving towards the light
that silks through the window and trickles onto her blanket.
My feet make no sound and my breath waits patiently behind lips
as I see my mother, her solemn eyes
more profound than the deepest sea.

I look at my grandmother as she floats in the sea.
Blue water enters under the crack of the door and fills the room.
It starts at my ankles, rises to my neck, and stops just below the eyes.
I see my grandmother sail and sink like a light
ship on her last voyage. The water kisses her with blue lips
and embraces her in a warm blanket.


In my room I put on a blanket because I am cold like the sea.
Light has fallen, and my glass eyes
crack like the tremor of lips.

Lift above. Lift carefully.
What is under may come undone
if your hands are unsteady.
Sure to become gone wisps, a pungent spoor
for whipping your head around
but never a surprise when it returns
in a subway conversation with your friend
all drunkenness and perception
before coming home to die on your bed
throwing up hell from inside you
acid and convulsions
remembering what animal you are
that something can subside and something else
can emerge
thoughtless
truer than your certainty.

For isn’t true now
the clammy skin you’ve questioned?
True now the ribs of your throat
writhing like Amazon leaves?
Truer still
your biology abstract? You?
Animal living by nature?
Which means not without you, means just
relinquishing
everything to what is
before having become or going to be.

Such as the time of day
the sky knows it’s dying.
Fountains an orange-red frondescence
that won’t last at all, half-hour at most,
yet which, in that pale existence,
manages as if to turn itself inside-out
as if younger, as if expressing repressed
ecstasy
in the being unknown
before upheaval—the saturation
of openness by color becoming
a moment in blandness worthwhile.

A pause to hear
your legs dangling over nothing.

And a phoenix sky, falling
this very Sunday
when not doing much
became so much
and now
somebody’s lit the sky again, the dusk
feeling a blooming
washing the streets and rooftops
in a new canary dawning

new light              also darkening
but only                as if only

a veil spun of bird wings
is lifting above
and carefully over
what is dying.

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.

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 don’t recognize you, but you’ve returned, oh it
must be you. No one else comes here but you.

Do you remember this music?

Kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, perhaps too
delicately—a quiet, tinkling knell, fishtailing through the
glimmering rain—mauve—soft-soaping the soil to darker clumps
beneath—soppy—slowly sinking so pretty, yet
terrifying now you’ve stepped into and through each
silted deepness, holding time.

This music begs you still—it has not stopped begging since—
to step further inside the wet loam (You clutch time now.)
To press down on it, in it, and listen tender the key you touched in
life between moments. It’s the reason you’ve returned.

You won’t, it’s not music, this feels like a baby’s head you’re on, you
cringe. About to cry.

Again, I’m sorry, but you have to—you have to feel it
scarily give a little. Feel it sink, infolding inside-out through its
thin pleura overflowing, always overflowing with the visceral
sap of everything on it—(I mean really everything.)—this
glistening ick, this frog-soil—moist, sickly cloying, susceptible
almost to light. And breathing.

It’s about to give out under your feet.

And kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, can you hear it?

Yes, you could be stepping on all their naked lungs, but there’s
nothing to fear, it’s an eternal field of their lungs—pink and gasping—
and that’s all there is here.  

Feel with your foot, like me. Is it alive? Or is it life? Listen, it
bleats a note. Why so sweet if, by touching it, we’ve made it drip
first truth from its tongue, look!—the blood of its eyes’ red
rivulets. Of its heart. The slightest breach it was. Barely an
opening

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to force you. If I was only me, I’d
leave it be, so it could spare us the look at the inner red that yokes
flesh to spirit. But you arrived here, and—listen, now it’s been
done, do not close your eyes.

You didn’t want to see this, I know—the sticky gum or muck that
licks over the fibrous bridges. Keeps them glued down and
invisible in the other world. It is all much better when the mucilage
does not ooze out. When the form is skin-tight, because that’s how
it works best. Without you probing its pores.

But now do you see, probing its pores, what you may find?
Look. Now do you see why the music has begged you?

What rests underneath there—what you may find in that dark
indigo clay which the shamans dug and pressed over their
blackened eyes in the night-trances—glows transparent somehow.
In pulses. Like Aurelia, the silver moon jelly.

Now it is just within your reach.

Light would pour to the other side, and their mouths would stiffen
with several infinite unintelligible syllables remaining stuck there
under their tongues. As it poured, they felt their blood replaced
in a surge with veinless essence, which sustained in its flow
through them something of precarious beauty—ascending, swirling
itself in air, then back into again, again returning to the home of homes
within them.  

The silver-moon-jelly-clay is continuously poised on the tip
(of not being clay).
About to break into splendor, into finally birth-giving of real breath.
Of meaning to breath, and to breathing.

This is what feeds, unknowing to them in that world, their field of lungs.
But you will know instantly when you feel it, that by feeling
(in feeling)
you have really always known.

Did you reach for it? Did you feel it in that second? You did not, I see
(you were so close!)
for now we’ve passed the origin symmetry and are sinking up! Going
deeply back up through the sticky goop with red glue in our hair,
through the moist-frog-ick-soil, choking dirt again, squishing loam
with our heads, shooting upward like falling, hearing lungs, and now
out, atop the surface again, in this bare garden that grows only under.

The skies above, still mauve, and the rain lips quietly the same
melody which, kaleidoscopically gemmed, repeats. It was all as quick as
nothing.

And, as I look at you, I see you’ve already forgotten
everything.

And now you’re leaving me! Fading back through the spectral
break in the clouds, whoever you were. Whoever it is you became.

I did honestly believe this was to be that one moment when, together,
we’d finally get to touch it. Press it like real sun to our blackened
eyes. I cannot tell you, it has felt like the one each time.

But I know to wait. I can wait. In this world I keep fluttering hope
in my hand. And you, whoever you’ll be, will return here.
You always do.
Do you ever remember why?
It’s because, when you leave through the clouds to go back to
that world, you are still. Always.
Clutching time.

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.

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

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.

All of which is said or done
Is lost within, tangled ‘****
Thick and thin of branching trees,
Stifled by the leaked white noise,
Racing, growing, crackled voice
Yelling all of it could be.

Even behind what’s in
            tears            
          
            or a thin threaded gasp
            ***** high above in the sky,
            suspenseful, waiting,
            for lightning or clearing
                                  
            behind
            the heavy fast rolling
            breathing of love, rushing through
            its mountains, ascending

            behind its ecstatic release

            as behind running, and
            the score of a goal, the
            sweet flush of a compliment,
            even a single
            laugh, a single warm
            touch
            of another’s creation, of life,
            a soaking flower sprung
            up from your thirsty desert of a
            skin

is dopamine, and
            a cycle of reward, seeking
            more reward, seeking more
            reward.

But behind that
            
            tell me of another.
    
Living towards resurrection.
    
One sinking in to feel the all out
            which forms the one
            in which one sinks      
            back into feeling
            all in one.

The being you (as you, you must)
            so as to feel
            also what's not. Which

is also you.

The being not
            that which you hope
            so that you may
            forever hope.

And so you'll be, and so you are,
            and so have lost.

Will find again.

Have already.

I could and would want,
if what is behind me is truly nothing,
if these words stop lying and untangle me,
to fall backward, away from
this circle of attempt.

But then (God) how deep I would fall!
without meaning, inside coiling time.
So again I find myself having to try,
writing helplessly
another repetition.  

Just the act is enough (for a while, uncoiled).
But it’s not enough. What can I do?
My written bursts are always
muted in some kind of murk
or otherwise obscuring clarity,
and they press their beautifully soiled hands
against concrete windows,
knowing they will (and must) stay
for another while, at least,
tearfully inside.

The beginning of it is a slow
burdensome churn to widen cracks.
The rest is a ritual for the politely deranged:
******* what little air seeps out of the real,
chafing what little skin I have
(all of which is a little fearful)
with what few rays of medicine light
are handed to me across the cracks
from the real.

It is a ritual (in essence)
to unstifle the strayed confusion I impart
to the in-between two childs,
who blurry, alone, and accepting, fly together
in the midst of this ever-widening green field.

“We should go back to our home
on top of an overturned dust bin,
where I can toss sand in the air and laugh
because I don’t care to know beyond,”
I hear her say to the other.

I imagine my love as this child,
make the hidden screen in front of her past
young eyes coalesce gently
into this hidden now-and-everything.

I see you collect rocks safely
into your pink-striped shirt
as dirt stains your purple pants.
The color of your young hair is the same
it was when I saw it reflected in the
Tyrrhenian, before we reached our ripped end
and you made me fall backward,
somersaulting with eyes closed in sickness
toward the sun we saw that day,
in the garden we agreed was perfect.

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.

If only I had heard the words themselves
expelled unmistakably in blades from
a swirling voice, prismatic in black,
and      simply      inescapable permanence
through me, saying
you are condemned, I would have nodded, nodded

Unmistakable, too, though, is my thought
and it lashes      simply      through me
more than a burden      on a via dolorosa
asking what sound the ground would make,
were my shoulder to dip, it to fall, were I, in bareness,
to run towards a break in the confluence

My shoulder throbs critically certain moments,
possibly, the way water when it mantles
under itself, when its skin just about
feels      itself      out
Though solitude, it could be made of wood
to splint or splinter and, further, throbbing is just

blood, in as would be out, so      quickly do my
bones straighten, wait for swirls to slow,
silence to recede back towards
sussurating laodicean voices, again, speaking
only to me, too      too clearly      a calloused truth,  
and for the confluence to nod, nod      then close the break.

Cope, hope, or catharsis, one
may be forced to choose one
during the bouts

of restraint against release,
of reach before the sigh,
of desire, to control instinct.

Of all inevitability,
daring to call itself proudly by name
on this mercilessly constant tread

of experiencing, each it seems
with a collapsing and rising unique,
Planck’s momentous, memoried,

voice-blanking frames, slightly
shifting and forming (together
we conjecture) the same blurred image

of light, of looking,
of a thought, of a chance,
that maybe,

whether it is instrumentalist hands
or a playerless orchestra bestowing
sound, of granules grinding

over each other, with each
a glance, a lift of a hand,
in disguise of louder music,

that I cannot say is wrenching, that I
cannot say is strident, or sweet or
harmonic or agreeable—just heard somehow,

resonant,
seemingly against silence,
at the seeming heart—

that the note might be
the only one to hope for,
as cope with, as cathect oneself in.

The only one channel to that which,
if heard, will really be heard.
Not a down, then in, then up,

and out, uncertain.
Not a fading with time
or a never heard at all

except for mere murmurings
of chance. Though don’t shrug them.
Be exposed, undeniably, wholly, to them.

These, musicless, can become
still air, still flesh—mystery’s shut mouth.
Something of a mouthless bird.

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.

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?

I was just the summer to you.
Just the easy bloom and
the easy blue and
easy heat.
I was only the flowers that
opened to you
as you walked, a light sundress,
delicately, tenderly,
the grace of your thighs
warmly anticipating
the tender youth full
brightening day.
I was
the colors sidling nicely  
in flitting spots along
the periphery of living life
like lavender, cerise, and
cerulean smiles
blushing,
the dripping
geraniums and chamomile
sprinkling you with
fondness, that
dote upon you
adoringly
and would even
ingratiate themselves for you.
I was the kiss only of
a sensible sunlight, the
embrace of a
quick breeze, and
your pleasant thought
of your legs
knee-deep in your ocean’s
cupped hands
to cool for a day
your flushed skin
in turquoise, swirling coolly
salt fresh.

Will someone be
your four seasons ever?
Will someone be
the cold silence too,
of a winter that can keep you
staring lucid and glazed by
a fire?
Will someone be
the frost
that nips your skin to remind you of
the fire
in your own skin?
Will someone ever be
the color of fallen
leaves spread over a
hidden field like
a hidden retreat
of dreaming flowers
before waking
ever?
Or the snow
before it releases
itself
as moving water
resting
upon the yearning bud
before it
releases from itself
promise

I paid for the two coffees and brought
them back to the table, swear they
chinkled in my hands like the music
in my teeth jouncing around when I
see you. You wrote letters in your
bright notebook and as I sipped you
asked me to discover them. High task.
Could barely read your cursive boughs
and sinewy slippery esses, slip slip
sliding off the page as you smiled
with a pixieish shrug—see, can’t do it.
But I sipped a little more deliberately,
slitted my eyes back to you, wrote
you some mischief on a napkin and
you laughed. It was buoyant and I
floated for a second above the wooden
bench, sustained by other voices like
cushions of marzipan I could dip in
your coffee and you would love it.

And back then you were really in
front of me, I should have limned your
lines and ridges onto your notebook,
just to show you. Should have taken
out my camera in a way you wouldn’t
have seen and taken a picture of those
eyes, the way you looked right there,
right then. Maybe you’d have seen
mine being created then—suddenly
rushing, flushing blood to a created
thing, made out of thin air, substantive.
Seen how you gave me my flesh, how
you made me an unknown drinker of
all life’s subtle blessings, peacefully,
even while within the mist of its
peaceless ecstasy and fury.

I have no answers for you. Just
a suggestion. Look

at the embryonic movement
of people dividing in New York

and suddenly stop thinking.
Then look at cattle grazing in Iowa

black as sheets of obsidian
monumented against

deepening chalcedony, the azure of

openness, and suddenly

begin again

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

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 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.

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

Smalt sky smelted over running sky: swoop
down for me and switch (very lightly!) your blues.
(No dizzying aches, please, because of too much
hurled change, speeding spirant through my loops.
It would tunnel me, with its head, even more
abhorrently
in two.)

Okay, I’m—great!—upside down now, float splashing
with finned wings in cloud falls and snowy rapids!
Up above, before now I guess, was just a bedlam
like below, and below: just reflection of its head spun.
The running was glinting, mirrored tails shimmering
of wind fish. Believing them, I fed them, then laughed
under wet sun.

I am lying, truthfully. I am inside my house. There was
no sky or sea. Maybe somewhere, but not here. I think
of my love when I sit down. (I don’t really think
much anymore.) And the blues is a saying.
The dizzying aches I do have (It was a joke.)
and the hurled change I am is inside me making
me this.

My loops, me tunneled—that is no joke, that’s the
timelessly wrought result of extruding what hurts
from my sockets and chambers and lobes and pockets
and the given gifts to me I hated, never used, only
wished I could—I can’t—because I can never
pin me down. So they can’t be really
for me.

I am furiously disappearing in obfuscating, invisible,
paralyzed               paradoxical                paroxysms.
Such as: I am not here I am just here. Lying down
sometime. Today I think. On my bed. Napped or slept
or just wrapped. Barely awoken. And more gone.
Each day awake. Going.
More gone.

This blancmange of dusk—of melted coral lights
has tugged the softest from the heaviest of heights.

Its face the color of yearning—cast down as mine.

Barely grazed round the head I must be bound inside
the verge again—between what now may be moving
and what has immovably since

the frozen wavescape of circumference undefined.

I’ve been wanting to be touched by a light
such as this, but even urge when satisfied
really quells nothing much—just like
a tender eye lightly daubed in steady brine;

a song I play with passion that never will be mine;

the way I shuffle them, without one
to settle on; the silence that I usually find—
the kind that settles none.

Twilight shows me faint—the wait being time

we pine for clear desire—beyond this lacquered  
veneer of sky—vaguely painting fire.