Was what my love had loved
Or maybe knew   so simply loved
That we were going to die   We
Simply follow a loop

Only tied when time is untied   in

Death   the most extreme
Emotion   close to death of all
Emotion   the thinning curl
Where Yin approaches

Yang   I

Keep dying and resurrecting as I

Love

In the bottom of the subway mouth
foamed in summer sweat and the ink
of rodents on chipped slate tunnels,
in the breath of the compassionless lick
of dirt swabs, of empty swayings,
murmurings, square eyes, and slit mouths,
where a trembling roar like an elsewhere
lion is an unfortunate savior, I saw
in front of me a real dream, just barely
(and perhaps not)—but in one of its
moments, I did feel cracked—felt the
sudden unbelievable shockwave of
shattered skull heat, white, blinding, a
quick wisp of eternal time, before back,
to the undream of dreams. This real.
Laughable and despairable. Of hot
waiting, dying lassitude. Before going
on cramped with the others. Nowhere.

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.

Now is the time your memory
has not yet settled,
is still in the air—just stirred, with mine,
the visions, entwining.

I’ve tossed you the football, the soft-colored one
made of frozen egg-white foam
and now you look so embarrassingly beautiful
trying to spiral back to me. Instead,
it’s your smile.

So now I know—later, I will write you,
saying I’ve never forgotten this way you look
held in this heat, caressed by this wind.

How the sea is roaring! How it seems
to have just found its voice, never more
heard in me than now.
And the waves, rolling like the tongue of a dog
coddling at its absolute happiest.

But what do I look like to you? Do I look like
my naked spirit, winnowed?
Because that’s what I am in front of you now.
Must only the ocean notice, and wait before
it, too, gets washed away?

On the clear days when I’ve got water…
On the clear days, when I’ve got water through my hands

and I’ve got water in me that’s not just around me
in a blanked blue of roiling waves and wings…

When I’ve got that water in me
I remember how the shore really was.
I remember when I first touched the still sand
and laid my feet down on your warm to rest.

Just before the orange sets in above, I sit down
along the edge of the raft and look about.
Still that open water.
Sky seeping under golden red from that living garden.
Years of memories, years through many eyes
passing through me.

Your face has dissipated
to a forgotten air I breathe every moment.  And still
I breathe
towards a bare horizon.

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.

When days I wish not to say
or write a word fall upon me
I sleep within and greet the touch
of music’s hand over my eyes.

If you are, as Alan Watts believes,
“the fabric of existence itself,” well
you must be a patch, then, wind-shredded
off the coattail end.

And that’s what the music is for.
Which to keep me, also attached, I’d play
myself if I could and so would you. But you are
off in the wind flailing, remember?

Would anybody hear?

Threads flapping even more
the goodbye to an old man’s coat. But listen.
I’ve heard in it a rhythmic sound. Like the beating
of wings, lifting. Listen to us. It’s like letting

a flag fly.

I’ve heard from the winds
that have kept circling since
the newborn earth began circling

every moment is living
now

every moment is housed within
its own sparkling infinity, yes like
heaven

not heaven the golden
entrance to succulence,
full grapes, lips, or
crowning deliverance, or
even peace

but heaven as freedom being

being the being only, as giving
harshness, the being struggling,
its due release into being
the being only

being without need
to accept or understand
there is no being other

simply being as being touch
before being thought
before being knowledge

I must not know then
I am being then
now

the moments

unknown, and I’ll never,
except somehow have
already, the somewhere
the being is.

the hope, at least

in hope?

To go
to keep going
to keep until
you really can’t

until the last

until there really
is no more
going
or keeping
or lasting
anymore?

And that you were
certain of the last
and that it
was
at the last
at the least

as you hoped.

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.

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.

This vast outside—these
opalescent stars, collections of
glittering clusters rotating
around a dense eye—
seems pearly still
and still somehow is
fluctuating (your dense eye,
quivering, your
tumescent mouth,
opening, your note,
pitched through air, air
rippling, a bird,
taking flight here, alighting
there, a few leaves
shivering)

all is in accordance with
the imperceptible draw
of
imperceptible strings
strung within
your vast universe inside.

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’m sure, now, how to think
of slivers that shine stillness
in my river, moving faster:

When the river’s glass, it’s
my light returned to rest at
home, in childhood, forever.

Though also in this glint of
ice, the image of my final
stroke—mirrored ever after.

~~ ~~

In glint of glassed silver ice
I see the mirror of my body
as I saw        once my body,
               as
will see        once my body:

Fluid as the water is, fluid
         as the water is.

her beauty, I was doomed
until the time

soon as I
paved my foundation
tre metri sopra il cielo
three meters above the sky

asked her to bring something
sharp

to chisel her in stone

was not a knife, but her wit,
as she said,
and something else
hidden in her
sockets

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

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.

I remember when I was six there
was a hint of it
even then.
I was six.

Six and already acting as if!
trying to catch a setting sun.

As if
a last apricot
snapped of its thin, pendulant
node, were falling into
abscission, and the pulp, and the flame
orange  
flesh, and the
seeds
about to rupture.

Would lay an open hand, one hand
(I think my right)—lay it on
the frail bark of a tree
outside, together, alone. As if
even then
asking the skin
of what rises and holds
organic and tall the
living and strong
not to peel away
leave me.

As if I thought
I don’t know who was beyond,
watching.

But laid it there, still, all popely
and saintly and, really, quite foolishly.
I was six.

Six, and wondered,
had somebody
watched?

I don’t remember what I wanted.
But a trace of something
important
remains
ruptured in me. As if

all along I had known
not to hold out the hands. Known

I am six-teen years later.

If I live long enough, I’m told
I will see the annihilation as simple
as the blink of a bubble.

That annihilation I wished
would have surprised me the time
I fed my starvation
with sandwiches in an empty café,
television sputtering clearly static voices,
me staring
at mute moving mouths.

That annihilation I wished
while standing tall, taller than my father,
as a hovering smile on his shoulders above
a triumphant green field.
When he gave me the thumbs up, it
searched me and found me
in that confused, relieved haze of ecstasy,
breathing on me like a love, whispering
“everything was okay for me
and it will be for you.”

I sit now watching moving people,
feeling the fibers in my limbs
suddenly stiffen like taut strings tied to
beyond the chair, beyond the floor
and beyond the earth that made this place
appear here, now, out of infinite possibilities.
I sit and watch faces, their strange parts,
gingerly realize all of mine, and struggle
to laugh off the fear that they are moving
(and I am laughing)
from something called instinct.

I can’t help imagining
the universe that sees me annihilated
this very second.

I wonder where I’ve really been.
I wonder where my remains have gone.

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.

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.

You cannot see me but     I am
Somewhere           Underneath
The surface      Just underneath
About to break       Always still
Just            Barely           Under      
A gilded barege of light  Shifts    
Liquid leaves in gouache   Fall    
Trinkling             Over my face.

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.

I am sorry, love. I am only man.

For you, how I wish I could be more than man.

But I am not. I am only
flesh         only words.

Words that glean of something other
than flesh, but still, you hear only
      words.

You cannot perceive anything else of me.

So look within yourself, love!
What do you feel? How do you feel

this?

That, of me,
      you can perceive.

I wish up the falling mountainside
scree rolling      past in foams      a tide
wishing down      against
as if my purpose was      the act
to counteract

or along a barreling oceanside      in
frost and high noon
above      a relinquishing patchwork of sky
me      harvesting shells      drinking rain
                      walking until

the dive into      whatever else      which is
not art      nor love-song      nor peace
but for all     their origin      before they became
word      and I      this quiet man
                      *inexpressible desire

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

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

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

How fine is the crystal
of the palace which you ponder!
Upon the weight so parlously,
suppose it’s what you conjured?
Luscious silk to kiss the skin
to smooth away the semblance.
Chandeliers that shimmer
from the ceilings of the breathless.
True passion in the luster
of all satisfied desires.
And a spark in that center
of that sentimental fire—

Mighty fine, I say,
long’s you hide me,
all the mirrors
where the glance really falls
    eyed glint bouncing off
lubricous rocked walls, in cavernous darkness
from just moonlight
our moonlight.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The void is formless,
and only formless can be filled.
What is the void? It is everything
else, the sound
sounds do not make, the taken up in sight ever
unfolding into space.

It is not desire or despair
or the lukewarm blend, but more
if stillness were ever moving
and motions froze to one,
if I myself observed myself absorb the self
not myself.

They say indescribable, but it is
being described, every single moment.
They say incomprehensible while we are
knowing, every single moment.
I see it around and around these
words as if, here, dancing in mist of white alluring,

there is a magnetized fire, being encircled.
Please tell me you see the unseeable also.
That you can hear the day beseech the night
as fierce the night cries out for day.
I live and live in that resounding auditorium, and have
heard nothing, empty echoes, for days.

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.

To a new globe of shadowy truth,
we turn off the bedroom light,
puff the softening cloak out first with
our arms, our legs, our stretched-out-naked toes,
our instinctive bliss swelling, and then—
with our spirit! our night! with the spirit of nights
out of our chest, with our laughter! drifting across the
black sea, under black skies, through the
sweet-skin-salted black breeze that flows in the unknowing
black immensity of our comfortably hushed eyes. Like us
now our voices finally float—rafted but enraptured
on soothing water—awaiting, knowing,
the lighted shore we’ll reach tomorrow.

cannot live by living
sublimate

intractable life the way
a poet of mangled hands burns away
incessant blankness
to a hot glowing moment wherein
his excision, sought after,
lives.

Whatever way is taken
a fire therein will burn

to majestically disfigure
the unfigurable in your life

the way a drinking straw made of
plastic transforms
in lips of flame

to curlicued ribbons and
blazing involutions, coiled springs and
brightly curled
imaginings of crimson.

Choose to run
and so too will the fibers in your hamstrings
curl, glow crimson
as under fire.

Sit quiet on the marble steps
of a dried fountain in Union Square
watching the looming arch through
the crisp distance of night

and so too will your eyes become
incendiary orbs
heating the air around
to transient veritable sharpness

as if suddenly, every piece of
stone or root of tree
has been released from
a hold
and could at any moment
flinch for you. For
just your witness
and nothing more.

Attempt to find the dream of death
hidden within the taste of
your one beauty’s lips
and so upon the kiss will she

burn, explode!
in quick high flame
to a pile of
shrunk dust and scintillating
strands of hair.

Whichever way, all can burn
to release its true form—hardly sweet
seeming unbearable

before curling
just barely sweet, just bearably, always just
necessarily so.

And slowly, you are already
curling in the flames.

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.

I believe in the Southern pines
because I cannot you anymore.
I believe they will keep us passing by
in your white flake car along this road,
for I believe in the Southern pines.

They will not see me kiss
your free hand, your eyes close, or
your breath as it settles, light as snow.
They will only see
a white flake car passing.

They will not know why
your eclipse on the amber window
will bring my soul to tears,
for all they know has been
a passage along this road.

I will want to come back one day
and park my soot of a car
on the side of the road.
I will want to climb any way I can
to sit and watch from their branches.

But for now, I will just believe
in the Southern pines, for I cannot you.
Believe they will keep us passing by
in that white flake car I see
in the distance, approaching.

Sad is the love song to the woman
whose eyes unfocus beyond you.
Sadder yet is the love song
strung in the eyeless dark
to the woman who no more has
ears for you, though maybe still
a heart.

I

Happiness—that light
light, that full breath, that
essence in essence

is beyond me

Within—possible—it is me,
is always,
what I could be forever
and so

is beyond me

Only to be lived
when I am past, when life
has truly gone

beyond me

II

Is what is full, is whole—
all of all
conceivabilities, which absorb
all and take in all
like a first breath, breathing
everything—the wild message in
feeling and being and vitality
of animals and plants and millions
of multiplying, tremulous cells,
as in husks and surfaces and
shimmeringly naked landscapes
efflorescing,

coming all
to culminating breathlessness,

and skin of new life,
sublimely sheathed in
lighted glass, in the mist of
a beatific cry shedding
in pure air, in pure light,
firm like the rock
of distant morning mountains,

to the glistening above
of a night pond touched only under,
to the rush and song of a river echoing
blood and centuries and the stillness
of change

to the taste of fruit upon a starved
tongue, to the despair

of solitude—
and the wrenching bliss of solitude—

to the hot red of a wound
and the womb,

of shame, and longing, and lips and again,
the despair—

of again—of despairing—of again
despairing at the misery of
the truly doomed, at the existence
of despair and misery and truthless doom
within existence, at the possibility of
unbearableness, and losing breath
finally again

III

I cannot, will not, and never will
bear this wondrous inconceivability—
True if true happiness
is not mine to be borne

It is

beyond me so in me

that somewhere I am

beyond

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.

The sun, faraway, pools gold I can touch
onto your hair. All I can see
at this distance from you
is the infinite lighted space between thin threads.
I lay through you, limbs wrapped
by the root of our skins.

I lived on North Street. I would try
to outrun my dog in our small backyard.
I hung drawings on a clothesline in the morning,
and stared into an eclipse in the afternoon.

You lived on many streets. They would smoke
in the summer. When your mother dressed you,
you laughed from the tickle of grass
imagined under your feet. You would say
to yourself, again and again, the nickname
your father gave you, so you’d never forget.

Your eyes under me look up.
Can two people cross and stay, I ask myself.
Their brown—translucent, wavering
in the sunlight, I see, told all.
To hold you as my belief
was a fragile possibility.

Down a hilled road, overlooking
The high lift sunlit watered land

The rest moves and I stay

The windows are softly jarring
Bathed in leaks of this wine dusk
Behind graying street trees
Speaking tired and wisely
As I walk home.

The sounds unwrap inside
Out of darkness. A drone,
Artificial creation, a family
Of starving happy insects,
My feet placed carefully
On these birds’ earth.

The rest moves

And suddenly I have fallen into
Something of your eyes again
Walking home, knowing death again
Spinning in its nauseating peace
There and not. Holding only
What is bearable in my lungs
Of the view, the other homes, so far
Under the same light.

You have gripped even my dusk.
No, it has been my dusk
Wanting to grip you.
For I have always stayed here

You have always moved

I will enjoy listening
To the sound of
Starving happy insects tonight.

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.

Or how can we?

Seems to be
the same headwind
against which we must
surge
or accept being
broken by,
continue crawling against,
until, in hope,
it shifts

and we go
with it,
together,
towards.