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

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.

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 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.

I should have said nothing. I’m sorry.

Your movements wanted to belong.
But inside you cringed when I spoke like that.
I did not know then that you loved only the thought.  

For me, there was strength in a few thrown leaves.
Like playful snow to your face.
I took the bus home
With signs already drawn in my eyes.

After many blanket nights
Together in fountain water,
You spoke to me of emptiness.
I took it as mine—I’m sorry—and replied
I am like you.

I will no longer see you.

But I summon your skin easily.
I lay you beside me, and with grazing hands
try again to show you all of what my fields
look like, in the setting of my sun.

I imagine the feelings under your skin.
I make them how I need, this time.

You are walking my fields with me
And I am silent.

The sea reeds brush against the gentleness of your legs.
There is a lightness in your chest.
And your summer dress rests like fallen mist,
so peacefully on your glow.

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.

the truth is that the truth is that
the truth is that
the truth

the way an
unknown part of my stomach once
vellicated on the surface, a
quick burst, single series of
three waves—(I could even
count them)—troughs, crests, passing

the point of kiss (or dream), a
peristalsis veering off course and plunging
(up or down, in this
there is no orientation) to an unexpectedly
known place (likely another one) and I,
seeming strangely uncomfortable. Or

perhaps just light, the way it rippled
just once, one time
off the glass of an opening door, skidded
across the passing wraith that was
one of my shimmering hopes—but no, it
is more the way

the universe sounds outside of
the window, as it is still
being born again and stupendously being also
dying again. The way I am
too leaden or cloyed to shuffle feet,
throw open that calico drape.

My life is the need
the telling you
it’s this.
The wait for the end
to end in something all over again
to end.

Heaven hands to handles around
bus metal shoot cold shrapnel up fingers
when the streets of the usual routes
jump
to tell something new. That lingers.
Ah, her expression through air
has showed me time.
It was hope—easy dizziness, speeches
bouncing off the sky’s edge for
destitute souls, long lost in whirring
sea-sharp staring…

Yes, I have claimed nothing but the battle.
It was white branded on the bus’s windows,
those other silent faces sitting being
subsumed in her airy picture, the
grumbling soothing sough of the motor preaching,
reaching over the cymballed mountains out there,
shaking the earth under my feet.
Then the crash, her face swept
under the bowing, the rolling waves, no breath, merciless.
Boding nothing but the battle. Still the battle.
An end to nothing.
Isn’t that something.

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

so that I   went off

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

off of the deep

I it was that went   off of the deep

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

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

end of I that I went off the deep end of

so that I   again   went off

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

went off of the deep into the end  

of end   and I

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

Flying apart implacably
is the unruly setting.
Unknowing, unduly spreading
yet asking me (perhaps unfairly)
to hold it pressed against myself
to maintain and withstand
the force with my fibers
to keep the parts from trembling
to somehow keep the whole.

It screams aloud, it screams perforce.
It’s a painful constriction all around.
But stoically it lets me know
with eyes choked and bulging
The dire effort must be so.
So do not let me go.

You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.



Let me explain.


You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.


I  cannot.

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

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

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

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

We live to reproduce
the one inside the nothing,
the circle within without,
to survive, in any way,
the flesh-ripping teeth,
the fear of blood and of pain,
the fall and the scream and the tears—
we live to try surviving it all
with the eternal hope in us
that death has never lived,
and that life, this true love
will never die.

I have stopped wondering
what I am wondering
and have begun instead to wonder
what the black cat is wondering
living on my street and wandering

itself out of the dark embrace
of trash cans. Darting, stopping.
Always in feral yellow trance, if not
in coy dance, if not
in careful vigilance of us. But always

it seems in wonderment. As of
a species been cast
to a strange foreign place, a million
light years from home. Wondering
what it is wondering, and easing

the endlessness of mine.

May beauty rot.
Is this what I want to say?
Perhaps not.

May my desire for beauty rot.
Would this be sound to say?
Perhaps not.

May everything be beautiful
so there is not
that harsh glaring
lack of.
Is this what I’ve been
trying to say?
Not even
sort of.

But you get the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Nothing wavers ahead
like steam on narrow horizon road.
Perhaps it is the now dying spirit
of a world no longer in heat,
my one chance in spring
lost carelessly in the slightest
wisp of a moment’s hand,
the hopeful rising flowers
in my lungs blanched by the
weight of what I’ve made
memory mean, of yesterday’s
sun, and shrinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they?
laying like a frozen dance
atop the dewed staves
were seen every day
waiting below.

Dead leaves gave their bodies
to the upward aching hands
of a graying yard this morning.
Dead leaves were tranced in
the whole apparition
this morning.

The sun made snow falls
frailly through mist on my
friable face.
Am I an old man, already?
I don’t ask if it’s the change
made them fall. I don’t ask—
I know.
Time breeds wisdom
and also Alzheimer’s.
But it doesn’t matter, we’ve
learned to laugh at Woody Allen
movies, after all,
haven’t we?
Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they? Aren’t we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

it would be forever
newborn.

And some
must dandle themselves
to keep from going still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

the pulpous embryo of imagination
feeding

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

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

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

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

the command:
Must do the act cannot be done.

Till it breaks. Unimagined.

I 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.

Once I’d said to myself,
I was already gone      too far,
so, resigned, I said: just keep an offering
of that music,      (you know it, please)
that particular
pull, the natural
vertigoed clench, leaping of mountains
feeling, in your nervous system, can
travel at the speed of light when
you walk (do you see the motion
captured, the blinking lamps of
empty highways, your limitless
imperialectric nanoarchitexture? Please)

or when you remember walks      when,
on days, flying, those months turned
each in distinct color, each of
particular scent (March
the showered fruit breeze of her hair,
August her skin drunk sweet in
coconut rays, November smoked from
a candle left after dinner, pressed black
fabric, a woven clathrate dress, the bed
before you kissed her face,
before you’d said too much.)

Then there is the kind thinning
of longing, the palliated sigh of being
gently put to sleep after time lived
inuring joys.
That clings to all past. That is
the sediment of time.
You will surely know a day music will fail,
will give you only half breath,
when you’ll need one whole.
And upon that time, I will no longer
pull you      you will have to push yourself
free off a crumbling rock.

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.

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

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?

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 try to figure a way
to pull out true thoughts
or words or whatever the
thing would be in your hands,
from discordant electricity,
buzzing, blaring around—
a transformed white off the walls.

But color’s too bright, they have
the growing music that’s
supposed to make you feel
the bad’s going good, the
single mom will take care of
her baby, those mascara tears
will rise black backwards up
like the night sky of the
beginning, because the
beginning makes sense.
It was starless.

Her singing sounds
good to everyone’s ears,
it seems like.    

All I can make is TV sense.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stream streams, runs, speaks
in water to me, blind over
tongued rocks. Don’t wake up,

her sweet heat dropping over
my face. I don’t. I want her to
continue smiling with her eyes

like she is, hands through me.
I’m the grass in her fields and
she’s alone in them. I let her be.

An impossible color gleams in
shut eyes—maybe

veiled incarnadine, stirred in
splotched mauve, clearing dull
blue-black, streaming vibrant

because water is streaming
through air into myself, because
the high red sun is falling down.

A thin membrane’s between it all.

If I find the far distance inside
that short space, the chained
filaments appear, then glow,

shift, float, stream. I think of
seeing stringed symbols of
broken infinity, but I don’t

focus on that, I let be.

Kaleidoscopically gemmed
rainbowed streaks begin to light
the world, slowly, move my eyes.

As I move, they move, and
pour in the hot white of
awakening, o her smiling eyes.

incredible—
that it could be for some
and not others

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

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

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

The 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.

is its ending.

you don’t see
say much
says much

and more

elsewhere.

The powerful moment was so—
and so—unsustainable.

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

A new between,  
laying bare in split existence

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

unaware—beautifully
sustained but for a moment. An

unaware beautiful being.

~~~~

An explosion is a powerful moment,
unsustainable always

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

must give itself, continually,
to the cascading firefall.

But hasn’t this universe
achieved just that, since

the beginning—a courageously
growing child, for us unwilling

to fail exploding, continually?
A moment once,

something here did feel
like an enduring self offering

its unaware beautiful being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bloodied wormhead.
Collapsed and writhing in a drain.

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

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

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

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

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