and then i am left,
at the upmarket stretch of sand
straddling this most unremarkable state,
quietly flicking my thumb against the blue lighter.

but it's too windy, at the water's edge
in an unremarkable state,
where no one recognizes me,
that bagpipes start playing

the wind acts against my fingers,
they are too delicate, too feminine,
no callousness ever affixed to these,
my ten silken extremities.

I.

something within me,
maybe its my amigdala,
misses the oven-turned-gentrified clot,
that great collection of want,
of transient soles-souls.

I miss how we’re piled three stories high,
so close to each others’ mouths that we must
burrow in criss crossed, colliding tunnels
to our point b’s, our job sites,
our lovers’ houses.

maybe it is indeed part of our un-nature to do this,
to cling to one another even
as our unforgiving sungod bakes us whole,
cornish game hens on the el train,
hurdling 40 mph, to and from
our personal hovels, heavens
and bedsheets,
tethered to this place, possibly indentured,
definitely flawed,
where we revel under roofs to prove incredibleness
an virility.

II.

our eyes are not closed today.
they may not blink in unison
as mannequin lids do,
so effortlessly, plastic and mechanical,
but those, we are thankfully not.
for we are flesh,
and air, and miles of gastrointestinal turnpike, if unpinned,
would stretch from here to panama.

we are each of us
a viscous mound called
Sally, Bertram and Queen Mary.

We are the collision of milk flowing, divine,
a whirling dervish
in scalding darjeeling.
we are air,
gliding over enamel into the collective breath
to be devoured so sweetly by others,
as saintly man-scripted gelato,
dribbling down our chins in piazzas.
la dolce ******* vita.

III.

that’s the funny thing about living
in this size 2 world,
the ability to appear anywhere upon its face at a moment’s notice,
to be in front of any face when desired,
to live sans toll booth or customs desk,
to simply dust off our ability to fly
and tumble icarus-adolescent into the collision
between the two blue planes called sea and sky

sounds of the engorged worm’s lumbering steps,
they pierce not so stinging as the golden glow of orbs outside your window.
Quietude will find no home here.
neither will that longed-for sense.

what we want,
the ‘soul sleep,’
rests further,
further still, and away from finger tips,

gently rest me in myself,
to sweetly mine the interiors of subterranean caverns,
within which, we held exiled domain for millennia before we were men.

the marble people stare not at you,
behind you, not at anyone in particular.
hunched, and clutching their glasses, thirst unquenched

there aren’t many of them now,
originally, there were thought to be thousands,
breathing quietly among us,

after the man has paid dowry for our daughter,
i turn to her and whisper,
“i think i’ve lost my spirit,
misplaced it, otherwise it flew from me,
escaped through my mouth while I was sleeping.
it slipped through the barely lit crack of parted lips

We walk to it in silence, passing over earthen layers of leaf and twig, never once touching dirt en transit.

Then it escapes vertically from a jungle less than ninety years old.

The Beautiful Monolith.

At one point when the jungle was young, it was an integral bridge of some great scheme of railroads but is now a cement Taj Mahal only undiluted, uninhibited youth could create.
 
Where alabaster paint found in post cards and archival footage had once been, several layers of outsider art, scratchings, bible verses and amateur-drawn genitalia are the monolith’s primer, base and top coat.
 
We walk past two crosses next to the river, one for a young man who had jumped into the three foot deep river from the monolith’s former train tracks, another carries no name but is nailed to a neighboring tree.

An unnaturally yellow tulip lies beneath this cross.
 
At the Monolith’s feet are vines with sprouts of two-or-three leaves each pointing arbitrarily in directions they can grow.

“And my, how they grow,” she whispers.
 
My Sunday dress, a former ivory table cloth of mother’s imagination is consumed by the jungle.

It is not tarnished, but given life. An existence it would not have known under mother’s elbows rained upon by her cigarette’s ashes. It is ‘colored-in’ life, like these are some vanilla pages of little nephew's coloring book.

I try to tell him, but he does not understand, and says that I shouldn't talk about things being “colored' because it makes me sound like a racist.

I laugh, plucking leaves from the tree bearing the unnamed cross and rub them across the Flat of my torso, leaving green streaks across the former tablecloth.
 
He whispers into my ear about taking me to the top of the Monolith. I nod and attempt to rest my chin on his shoulder, but he starts swiftly up the hill.

He tells me to “lose the prissy mary-jane’s” on my feet saying it would be easier to climb without them.
 
I do this, and my bare feet touch the leaves and twigs. The feeling is *******, but in real life, I don’t even know this word exists. We climb, resting halfway on an embankment in one of the Monolith’s Roman arches. The second half of the climb is slightly more difficult, but we reach the top.
 
The tracks are gone, replaced by a coating of gravel, rocks and beer bottles. And then I see it, the reason why the Monolith is beautiful. Two states converge on this spot where I stand, my tablecloth dress begins to take flight as I spread my wings. His mismatched eyes look at me with something close to amusement as he takes out a bright yellow acetate stencil.
 
The cupola of Animal Mansion pokes out from the jungle like my ***** right ****** in this former table cloth.  
 
A thin veil of red paint meets my waist. He gasps and his eyes widen, allowing me to see every individual real life pixel of his unmatched eyes, the hazel left, and the kelly-green right.
 
He mutters some kind of apology I cannot understand.
 
I respond by slipping off the tablecloth. They bounce slightly. You know which ones I speak of…
 
His eyes remain wide as he comes closer to me, telling me that I have to put my clothes back on. In his hands is the crumpled , grass stained, table cloth dress.
 
I ask if this is what he wants. He manages to say “yes” but apparently…not under these circumstances…or at least not on the Beautiful Monolith. I drop to my knees, and am able to unbuckle his belt before he pulls me up by my forearms.
 
My tears make it hard to see what is happening now…I feel my arms pushing him back from me, and then the sound of rocks tumbling out of place.

He is over the ledge now, flying through the portion of damaged railing where no fence stands. His mismatched eyes, the left hazel and right kelly-green stare warmly into mine.

In his hands is the crumpled, grass stained, tablecloth dress.
This, is see perfectly.

I.

my sleeping is condensed this spring
such that two or three hours
at most will suffice for one evening.

my body is awake,
yet the wandering back alleys
behind my irises are weary,
and on the cusp of gentrification.

I see faces where there should be none

II.

and I’ve seen the lines again,
though they come far less frequently
than when I had to reach up
to grasp the doorknob.

yet they are as vivid
and bursting with clarity
as the first summer I witnessed them.

they arrive unannounced
single-hair-thick,
rotating on invisible axes,
changing color and length
within equally slim fragments of time
too small to measure in our dimension.

one summer, i recorded how often they visited
but could find no logical frequency to their appearances.

no one has ever known of them but me,
and that woman just picked up a cigarette **** to light her own.

III.

they came again yesterday,
as always, in midafternoon
at 3 o’clock, when christ died.
and i thought, not of him,
but of the time, and how
twelve hours earlier is apparently the devil’s time
a time-piece-turned inverted cross.

IV.

so, I remembered,
how at devils’ time last night,
i was adrift,
sans-sails down brick alleys
thinking not of lines,
of gods or devils and their time,
but of those pan flute notes
and how i can’t wait to hear them again.

buddy didn’t tell me buddy was a two-spirit.
buddy rode into town,
blonde-horsed and golden god,
of my people’s cargo cult.

this was buddy’s second incarnation.
once before,
buddy rode into town,
we knew nothing of gold,
or time beyond the lengths of fingers.

buddy stood before us,
buddy showed us ourselves,
our unspoken intentions,
anointed us in oils,
buddy always said,
look up each night,
on a supermoon,
i leave and return within you endlessly.

When I was born,
Mother named me “Novina,”
and I was to be both
the prayer and the answer.
I was to be both god and servant.

When the pebbles started flying,
no one told me to hide,
to cover myself or to wrap
my own arms around my chest,
with my head tucked in so that I resembled
a balled up sacred vessel.

I stood, in the backyard,
with the simple man from next door
who still lived with his mother,
who was still the prayer, but could
never be an answer.
He towered over me,
smiling Mona-Lisa-stupid
in the face of civil war.

When the Jackel-monkey rode in,
on his lowrider chariot, he laughed
and made the simple man dance,
and dance,
and then sleep.
Eyes open,
crying Mother Mary tears as
he fell redwood-heavy before me.

and I whispered “Madre de hijos,”
but that's not a prayer, jackel-monkey said.

And you know prayers? I spit back,
my baby teeth and his flying pebbles
meeting in the middle,
before the pebble flew past the tooth,
to me,
into me,
and into the cinder block behind me.

He rode away on a dark horse,
and I yelled after him, my diamond eyes-turned-dangling pendulums in 2 quarter time,
“judge me and die. Judge me and die. I am Novina whom Mother loves.”

I stand,
tender and wild
at the water's edge.

I'm told,
as waves punch my knees,
that it's a great day
for a viking funeral.

Water's at my waist,
salt-wind pulling at me,
the soft veil covers me,
my face, hair
and extremities so cold and unevenly tanned.

I'm told,
that I look as if I'm waiting
for some fisherman husband to come home from see.
Maybe I am.

And then my mouth is full of saltwater,
as are my eyes,
my face,
hair,
grains of sand carried by the atlantic
travel the lifelines of both my palms

when I lift my chin above the wave,
I'll have wrinkles,
and a mortgage.

I'll be on the street.
clothed in a trench coat, trousers and my propriety,

when i'll be told
that I look as if I'm waiting.

Maybe I am.

and then we were us,
with ten fingers,
equal toes, two kidneys
and our souls,
so blessed and tan
from their sojourn
through eternity.

but you may not recognize "me,"
from underneath my burqa, my crinoline,
my mantilla,
my zoot suit or naval uniform.

my hair shorn-sheep-short,
or be it 10-foot-Marie-Antoinette-tall,
there, still, do I lie,

where once we passed, there again I will be,
and with hushed whispers will my lips part,
as they have for generations,
"how have you been? I missed you."

My jetlag had finally bid adieu in a land,
republic and former colony the size of my thumb,
but with the strength of bulls on steroids
running through
a field of democratic china shops.

and your money's no good here.
your name,
that silly outfit from little oz.

I have no pictures of myself here.
only a porcelain-plated version in orchid hues,
dwarfed by my favorite ivory window.

from which the fall would most certainly be glorious for
5
4
3
2
seconds.

you hand the prince a loaf of white bread.
he rises, and from behind velvet drapes,
the day is strong, and proud,
and her harshest light envelopes the folds of your face,
wrapping itself around every flaw,
letting none sleep undisturbed.

you realize the reason you
want to have a hand in keeping him alive
is in his eyes, and how they’re
color of a lake you fell into once, as a child.

I’ve taken a lover
and awoke 300 years
in the inner chamber,
some thirteen stories
above grinding asphalt.

in that inner chamber,
echoed a pan flute
as i walked home.
and glided
out of the tunnel once more
those seventeen or so notes,
a mystery to me
or at least the “me”
that awoke as something new.

I slept sgain.
to wake again in this land,
mirror to my native one,
in some strange reversal of migration,
somehow new to old,

and in this daylight hour i woke again,
in a bed not his, nor mine.
and now I know those seventeen notes,
their mystery now gone,

scribbled on a note and sent to him,
transatlantic,
enveloped,
enveloping,
maybe not all-encompassing,

this journey will have been merely a crutch,
a movement, or gesture,
as natural as a waving hand from a train car.
this place shall be an effigy,
a substitution.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One thing I would miss,
the elegiac street names.
angora, moyamensing,
escaping my red-berry throat
as if terms invented by a willow tree,
its ancient, parched lips defining first utterances.

from her droning tongue,
terms incomprehensible.
the closest we’ll come to some ‘true name.’

she speaks in our words now. they enter us from all around,
words seeping in through porous flesh.

she reveals my truest intent.
looks at it through her leaves,
but will not tell me,
because she has none of the authority to do so.



to you, i want to look like home.
arms, peripheral walls.
unfortunately, inside you’ll find the wings of the stately home cordoned off,
closed to the public.

my great tragedies lie in the thought of you having no curiosity about the events of those rooms.

feel free to do with the house what you’d never do anywhere else.
you’ll find no temple here.
no servants’ prayer room populated by makeshift pews.
let so many fall from its windows howling with competitive laughter,
each guest trying to outdo the last.
to see who can be the most clever about getting the joke.

now it's my turn. I feel no different. No one else remembers that name but me. I don't know how that makes me feel. It's like objectively, the whole thing never happened, that it was another machination of my own will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

my skull is heavy in my head. It solidified into copper some time during the night, and whenever I walk through my days, my head bobs this way and further, and on the sides of streets, people glance for a few seconds before returning to their own thoughts of hardened skulls within their own sloshing head-cavities.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'shepherd me a sheep, I, near my god, beyond my hopes, beyond my fears, from death into life,' as i remembered it wrong, bone rattle in a brick alley three years this thursday.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~

the division between days, illusory, quietly reclines itself between us, so deep and historic that our eyes see it time immemorial, forgetting that it is itself one continuous day, the breadth of it, this our time, that if left unhindered, it would have extended sloping and tumbling in its eaves and want of stars sailing for a morning. you and i were both there, for we were the nascent point from which all the souls fell from.

when a house on the fault line begins to shift, it isn’t really something that can be seen with the naked eye. It only becomes noticeable once the door itself is off its hinge, forced indefinitely into its frame, never to open save for your daily tackles. it becomes playful, and thinks this is how doors must behave.

your house’s bones, the wood frame of your body leans just slightly to the left, throwing off all balance. windows look down instead of forward, eaves appear concerned, a house’s ears hear you mumble softly into night, concerned about trivial things, and how you will honor it.

climb seven deftly and feel as if you were at sea.

My fingers never touched it,
save for the tv screen.
Mama told me to not touch the screen with my unclean hands.
Sometimes when she wasn’t looking, I did anyway,
and felt crackling beneath my fingertips,
miniature lighting storms,
ravaging the faces of the young, famous, and beautiful.

but i never touched the undesirables,
never laid holy lightning on the exposed war-bones
escaping at 90 degrees from charred, living corpses.

i never held the dying children,
coffee-cup weight in my palms,
colder still,
and forgotten after the end of the episode.

and i still felt nothing
when i should have smelled ash.

i can’t imagine, or i can,
what happens on our interior planets,
during the four seconds before impact.
are they blissfuly going about routines?
are the markets full, only a few dissenters
crying “end is nigh” ?

they won’t even feel it.

when the child tugs at my apron strings,
what is my name but satan.
mistress river acid,
strip my legs of their skin with each step,
down to tendon, bone, and marrow.
i’ll wash up, limbless and parched.

we’ll stand, nubile and resplendent
beneath you while you sleep,
lobbing pebbles at your window,
while you’ll believe it to be rain,
commuting furtively into the pile of dead leaves
and crumpled tissues in the drain pipe.

you’ll ask us if we were there,
not believing voices beyond cave shadows.

we’ll lie, aged and eyelid heavy,
in sweet-earth-cupped-hands.

*~life's about to get real weird in the next ten seconds~

one is in a constant state of reinvention,
molting,
feathers in cascade,
barely hiding ****** and birthmark,
no such garment exists.

one is constantly healing itself.
save for other days,
when direct sun poses no more threat.

eyes fixed to a middle distance,
where one sits shiva,
avoiding the partial gaze of mirrors,
windows through which one may edit,
very slowly, to draw out its best features,
ignoring  revulsion and inequity found throughout.

one lives each day worth half of its potential,
other halves wasted,
excess fruit flesh clinging to rind.

one faces itself,
and sees not oneself,
but the ones that entered, paused in unity, and left,

one should not see exits where there are none.

In thousands and thousands of years,
our successors, who or whatever they are,
won’t just find our bones.
They’re going to find our living rooms,
our I-pods, coffee mugs,
suitcases, post-it notes.
The quiet little things that become our lives,

and they’ll look at each other, our successors,
and they’ll think: ‘how charming…how primitive they lived.
This is what they wore on their feet,
and this is the thing they used to listen to music
with before they had the microchips implanted.”
But it makes me think.
This is exactly what we say now
…about the Greeks, the Mesopotamians,
the Incas, Mayas,
all the ****-cloth wearers.

We talk about them
like they were exempt
from unremarkable daily existences,
that their run-of-the mill equivalences’ to Tuesdays
were filled with human sacrifices,
complex rituals and **** like that.
We never talk about how they must have felt exactly like we do now…
We never talk about how they could have easily felt alone in a crowd,
or how they could have felt unrequited love.

They’re always talked about like they were better or worse than we are.
But I think we’re really just exactly the same as them.

what lingers wanted is the smell of grass,
and the bell-ringing laughter that cascades
over steps i’d fallen down minutes before.

and what i want most is for you
to tell me what you see when your eyes shut,
the places you are when our eyes shut to you,
the infinite mass and space quietly tucked away,
beneath your brow,
beneath tendon, vein, and tissue,

tell me the colors of indigenous, endangered flora growing in this world of yours

In another life,
I built several great palaces
by two hands,
brick unto brick,
until they sat
pristine and shining,
in their halcyon
newly millenial bliss

until the caretaker took ill,
and vanished.

so my great palaces stand, still
though in disrepair,
the whitest of elephants this side of le petit trianon.

their windows adorned with spider-leg-cracks,
vines twisting and caressing the parquet in replica Halls of Mirrors.
the royal apartments long ago looted,

pipes burst,
and a river flows into a third story drawing room.

It tapers towards the bottom,
inverse conical,
mimicking an egg.

it is a tradition among these people,
to have in their hands,
even in youth
the urn that will one day house them.

their compacted fingers, lips, and eyes,
in lacquered earth bounty.

the urn that will one day house my ashes will sit on my shelf,
naked and ready.

i cleanse myself of your two-legged ills,
cool as my breath upon a thousand dry necks,
freeze, and regard
death-rattle-arias
to be found by turistas come morning.

you are not my children,
my first world, private school informed angels,
yet you were my tartan,
counterfeit and used to wrap
your pulsating lesions.

cough, and curl up, as you did in mother’s womb,
left arm, turned to sponge
absorbing the penetrations of a thousand needles.
eyes, gold-crusted as sunset on the tundra-rough plateau.

i am not your home,
take thee back upon slave ships,
to be buried and shackled somewhere else in the empire.

do me a favor
and clutch the string of pearls
that gently tightens around your unscraped adam’s apple.
you can’t do it, can you?
don’t worry.

when you come to,
the first thing you’ll think is
“the **** is that smell?”
you realize it’s you,
soaked through boxer briefs,
child-shamed again,

only this time, there is no excuse.
left leg still,
right one twitch,
you wonder when it is you’ll pick yourself up and get over this one.
how many hours and minutes it’ll take,

after all, the “day’s” just starting for you.
you must be the palest native this side of third,
because your personal mantra happens to be
“don’t put my burnt bacon skin out in direct sun.”
you ******* fern.

maybe on another night,
when you clutch the string of pearls,
in shock,
they’ll be there,
maybe they won’t melt so quickly this time.

Her, never having known ‘her,’
the idea,
‘her’
becomes an irregularity for me.

it is not part of my schema. that vantage of man,
as the synthesized post-******.

nevertheless,
her frame rises up stairs,
petaluma sad wink
watch her disappear behind the half wall.

furtive glances into you.
lone, and left wandering.

when we travel along our vectors,
we fail to consider that our bodies are not whole, complete entities,
they are porous, and the closer in,
do we realize that borders of flesh and air,
are indeterminable.

lady jane uses ashes to blacken her brows.
she does this while yelling,
just yelling,
and ululating into the courtyard below.
bellow.
saul bellow.
and martian heavy medgar evers.
close me in myself.
ready for a road trip.

manipulate your eigengrau,
be more uneasy with each passing millisecond spent in complete solitude with you yourself,
because nothing should scare you more than your mind alone with no hand clasped and anchoring you  to the edge of the pool.

you realize that you wake,
only to create beautiful lucid dreams for yourself and no one else.

parts of you truly believe  
that your frail structure possesses the gift of flight.

and for the rest of your days,
you will doubt what your eyes see,

every so often believing that you indeed
tried to fly out the 4th story window
and failed.

and everything subsequent is a mere, sublime transfer of energy,
consciousness and je ne sais quoi
into two disembodied hemispheres in a vat.

your earth-eyes, desired,
ground into meal.
spilt, with some smeared upon lover’s forehead,
ash wednesday, thursday, friday i’m in love.

as the Redon painting that left you shivering,
silent and naked once more as in birth.
yeux fermes,
eyes closed
yet they will stare into yours eternally.*

when you were young,
you wanted to be a cartographer
because nothing unto you had been discovered,
and you knew no wrong.

and you were as you are now,
without inhibition,
without the slightest regard for morality,
decolletage or social construct.

this was when you were a native,
without years,
without knowledge
but endowed with divinity’s
slightest, piercing eye.

Who will sail down
these laugh line Ganges rivers?
you should hope someone will.

turn to me and whisper,
declare, utter
that in the sinosphere,
they hire crying women

lest we pass, sail, transcend
within the silence we were
ushered onto this plateau with.

lest our Deity mistake the two.

scratch. stratch scratch scratch
on the back of your throat.

Two Hundred and Two Days ago
this would have been
your Angela’s Ashes spiral
into veiled, Catholic interment.

but you’re a heathen
and no criers will have been hired
no doters at your stone
come Dias de Los Muertos
as mother to grandmother,
as peasant to ****** Spanish friar.

but you have a plan.
you,
will be ground into a fine dust
and pressed into a record.

eight minutes on both sides

be not afraid,
be not a swan song.

No. 1

the swan song came out of her throat at some velocity. 

too quick for child-ears to hear,
in the room with all the toys, upstairs. 


if only you could hear it though. 

the way we taste it. 


and here, in the basement-corner turned sanctum.

do we let out a pagan ******* roar. 

with Mother Veiled-in-Sepia

and she's got her beautiful thirty-year old baby in arm. 

he's so peaceful. even during his sleep. 
even when his words meander your bible belt. 
moving downward. 
and you take them with water and bourbon as your own. 


still, 
we lie still.
fearing any movement will set off deafening alarms. 

oh WHY CAN'T YOU HEAR THEM?

they're SINGING JUST FOR YOU.
i'll help you when they all leave for home. 

get in their cars.
and travel the turnpike. 


we'll put all the leftovers in tupperware. 

clean the dishes. 

sweep the kitchen floor. 


and hum. the swan song. 

hum it til it becomes late. 

then we'll have to belt it out. 


No. 2**

nothing had made me kneel catholic, 

thin-legged on the pad, 

come three years now.
but those weren't my knees.


that, was before the tornado
 passed the toll booth, 

come into the valley. 


I wonder, if it kneels-catholic. 


That,
was at 1:43, 
and the roadster ambled towards America's waistline, 

to my left was a stark yellow of Mother's halo. 

To my right was the austere, wistful glower
of Daddy gone Thunder.

Out of nowhere, 

the roadster goes upwards.

The waistline shrinks and expands, 

Silent scream, 
and then nothing. 

It's 1:43, 
and the butterflies are awake.

He asks you, “how does a forest sound.”

there’s that veiled, monastic hush to everything,
not so much muffled,
words, (in your language or others,)
that cannot be understood save for their intonation,
vague fingerprints on your pearlescent neck.

you look up and there’s lace,
weaving itself matador armed through impossible eyelets.

straw falls out eventually,
your face hollows,
and eye sockets repurposed as homes for vines,
tendrils pushing upwards,

they breach the surface of the earth and take their first breath.

yes,
you did fly out of that window.
everything that has followed,
the days and years that came,
nieces and nephews’ birthdays at your brother’s house,
the long drives in late afternoon,
your hair, finally white, blowing to the east
at the gray water’s edge as it did when it was jet black.
the valleys and peaks
of one’s life lived,

All happened,
but in your widening
aperture irises
in the three seconds it took
for you to kiss pavement
that for some reason
is as soft as your lover’s lips.

it, the only naturally graceful moment of your life,
comes from the italian defenestre,
meaning “of the window,”
meaning “you,”
dancing in midair,
either your voice
or the air whirling past your body hums that melody
from your favorite twilight zone episode,

did you come wander with me?

Once, before all of this,
it was february and
we were midconversation on a street corner
by the liberty bell,
and your eyes wandered somewhere else,
and i asked what you were thinking,
and you casually asked, 
“what would happen if I grabbed your hand
and we ran onto that bus,
and just rode it wherever it went?”

when i was ripe. when i was ripe. under your wing.
thirteen and this jacket's too **** big.
the feathers of your wing tickle my childbearing hips.
is it sin because i like it?
or because i cannot bear child?

only in my mind did i birth one.
we called her a name i can't remember.
she was in my care for a week.
and we watched sitcoms and ate macaroni and cheese in little blue bowls.
i wasn't there when she left.

but my childbearing hips were. 

oh. will you make me a bird too?
will you make me a bird too? 


it kind of makes me sick, in the stomach and ovaries.
when you don't look at me while you fly.
you just look down. at my childbearing hips.
that's all.

i just wanted to know if you got your fingers ***** when you tore your baby out of me.

I. missing poster, Kensington High Street

at what point did i vanish?
i did not evaporate.
i am still a collection of matter.
of energy, essence and intangible spirit.

it is from others, i have vanished.
it is to them i am lost, intangible,
the off-screen character,
the plot point in many a story too unremarkable to be seen.

my face lies plastered across walls in the borough
in various states of life.

but i am not here,
i do not stare state portrait shallow into you,
for i do not know you.

don’t think it couldn’t be you,
or do,
and prepare to exist,
sans living.

but you may ask “where?”

“where” may not exist.
it has no post code, no roman underlayer of brick.
no parisian layer of skull,
that is not where i lay.
if i lay.

“where” may not allow me my harsh whispers,
my last finger upon the cliff

“where” may call to me
from its halcyon planes.

come home.



II. The Dell, Kensington Gardens

what better a place to vanish from,
to trace my path from,
or what it will allow.

let my scent linger?
god may allow it.
i’m told the gardens’ gates are closed
promptly at dusk each day.

there are no street lamps here.
to be locked in after sunset is something other.
something indigo and sublime,

too early in the year yet for crickets.
it was this blanket i knew last before departure.

and yet even during the day, The Dell is sealed off from the public, like vast wings of a stately home.

it is pristine, this vanishing point.
seemingly untouched by the sickness of our humanity.

its miniature waterfall bisecting the scape
like the crack in our god’s head that birthed athena.

i don’t think it will ever be revealed to me,
my loved ones or god himself if i have chosen this place
or if it chose me.




III. The Dell, continued.**

the gardens that day were trapped in the faintest, yet most distinct bubble of brisk english detachment.

i walked, hand in pocket through its paths,
admiring Victoria’s memorial to her beloved,
thinking how we always view her as this austere widow.

but we forget that she too, once loved and loved so deeply.
that it so moved her, and changed her.

we forget that the divine can also be wounded, albeit not lethally, but with subtle, lingering pangs.

it was this thought that fueled my feet towards the Dell,

with its rolling, sample-sized hill,
its ageless trees with their hooked branches
in various un-regal poses.

i must have stood in admiration for five, twelve minutes before it dawned on me with the most pristine clarity:

i need to be a part of this place,
forever bound to it.
a statue in its gallery.  

this is where the trees have come from.
they are the shells of former lovers,
rooted in the deep, richness of the Dell’s soil.

we bend and undulate through centuries,
we are the dancers forever spinning,
never to rest,
for whom would want to?

It is called many names by many tribes.
Its true name unpronounceable by our inferior tongues,
its perfume unknown to our noses.

We cannot hear it,
and we can only experience its body in effigy,

seen from a safe distance,
behind this yellow line
that binds tree to tree

it is called “myth” because we are man,
and woman, and child.

Unfamiliar, yet not completely unknown.
But ungoverned and lawless,

a bridge once meant to transport man,
and woman, and child

but in time became
a bridge to the other side of us,

who are often ungoverned and lawless.

we came tumbling out of the sky
in this choreographed array of movement
and tiny thoughts,
every five seconds abandoning our bodies
to see
us.
outside of "ourselves"

and we fell as one
in a glorious, majestic flourish,
to usher in what some of you will call
the end

and others will dance.
as we did, though
wingless, flightless, bodiless,
but no less beautiful or true,
because you all have that gift
to abandon your bodies at will
to be
wingless, flightless, bodiless,
as we are now.

voices occur now,
or sprout up, one next to another one,
rowhouses built between
the natural divets and gaps
in our sound.

at first the male one starts chanting,
a softer female one sings next.
she affirms the divine hollow in each of our centers.
she says the first stage of the self healing has already begun.

my
or your only wish
is to embody every last note
utterance and warble
of the aria

to be unencumbered by body,
mind,
to be only spirit.
to be.

to the furthest reaches
to the softly lit closing scene.

the one you've always dreamt of,
that haunts every bone protruding from your form

and it hasn't even happened yet.
and when it does,
you dance, billy elliot graceful in tube socks frayed
across the living room,
maria callas gone shaking the plaster off the walls,

and you're left,
mouth open
eyes too
right closes,
left too.

there are words in other tongues
for the things we do here,
which careen voiceless from ourselves,

we don’t mean for them to.
they escape, unlearned movement
repressed by nothing save for the eyes of others.

there exist lines in another direction,
an alternate plane unseen
silhouettes of fingers running through hair.

the doubting,
strangely enough won't **** you.
but what will,
and very could, is nameless.

or, it does have a name.
sometimes we simply deny it,

quietly arranging our lives around it,
while it dwells
deep, beneath, dormant,

yet somehow still over our own heads,
cloud-like, but heavier still.

where is this place?
inside of the earth,
inside of me.
my security, that is
supposed to be a cognoscente

well versed on intruders,
or even worse,
those who wish
to see nothing there at all before their eyes.

snow came and took my voice.
possibly, i was sleeping,
birth-curled against the wall
forehead cooled,
bringing the sky
which reflected the ground-glow
to the place within,
it falls softly there, too.

i always love it best untouched,
where it lays, mimicking lines of beasts beneath it.
maybe those are your lines
or mine,
or what if they’re propped up pillows
in the blanket to resemble human form
so we could sneak out past curfew.

we walk in lopsided paths, powdered felt shifting our boots from under us,
maybe my voice is over there in vein-branch trees.
hiding thirty-year-soldier-dedicated.

nature tells us we don’t imbibe of these berries in winter,
for they don’t grow naturally here when foreheads lie, spooning cold walls.
they grow on islands that have never seen this stark leveling,
nurtured by children little older than us
do you know they bid each berry farewell as they pluck them from the vine?
they believe they’ll never in their lives see them again

what happened to our pantheon?
it fell into disrepair during the night.
you ask me where we should worship.

i resign both eyes inward,
in my flesh-home i am free to be confused,
absolved from the tremors of management.

all sides of you are colliding.

pounding comes at the door.
your door. your face.
in through your lips.
breath upon your lashes
so that your eyes will feel
at home in this humid facsimile of your homeland.

what you want most is a demand for submission.
miracles granted once,
never afterward,
its own debatable occurrence is myth to us for years to come.

i am silent today like i am everyday.

what do you say, then.
in its stead what shape are your lips?
are they still that red,
the one i could never see replicated on the outside.

my right hand won’t stop shaking,
its fingers reject central authority from their tips.

the sky from down here,
trembles in step.

you know what no one really brings up?
what.
how the flux never wanes,
the seconds evaporate almost instantly,
hitting the pan and running upward,

then minutes, and the rest of them follow.

atmospheric,
and actually quite lovely
or selcouth,
either way, it's time for us to retreat back into ourselves,
to fold delicately into, in two, in three segments,
tucked away until melting ice slides, skin-sheet
off our hairless arms
we yawn before sun gods then,
lids closed, yet light penetrates with branch-veins
so amber and pulsating.

received instruction, piece.

what received instruction fails to teach us
is that it is possible to escape flesh
that if we leaned back,
back more, and gasp-second
as the chair falls off its last leg,
we will fall out of our bodies.

we will be boundless from ourselves,
free to dream-fall, though eyes 2-inch wide

we will re-enter earth under no false pretenses
hatched from wombs
of half a dozen nearly silent she-vessels
on their steady voyages to Middle.

dawn, sweet collection, dawn.
and lift hands to your cool, alabaster face.
the longest should be directed to 3/3.

you’ll scoff. i’ve seen it.
but trust your hands and it will be.

- from a place of yes.  

at some point, you feel your body trying to escape your body,
as if moving upward, a skeleton lighter than the blood-air surrounding it.
it breaches,
separates from its flesh tomb
to be cold, naked, and piercingly stung
before our sun and our god.

in another time there was an old man
walking around the woods behind the house.
no one believed me when i said i saw him walk,
quiet, graceful, with divine ease across ground-up leaf.
the color of nutmeg we swallowed just last week
stupid-young-and-pretty
too pretty,
too full of effort.

obvious pencil thick outlines,
**** us for our method.

maybe we were brilliant once
ripe and full
to the brim, even.
so the overflow brushes down our sides,
making you whimper sweetly,
****** again underneath the weight of two,
three,
back to *******
leaves a ring on the table.
should have used a coaster.

should have done a lot of things.
but it is what it is, as you said.

i wonder if you mythologize us as we do you.
look at me.
feel my marfan, thai-dancer fingers under each eye.
what will they look at in two,
three,
back to two years?
I don’t dare tell you this,
but one night when I heard your heart beating
I knew you’d out-live both of us.
and on another night you’ll ask me what happens,
but that’s no where near the right question to ask.

i can tell you a last minute and a half as I recall.
you lie with your hands, flecked with the tiniest boulders
each one a marker of where she laid her own fingers on you.

the thin lace veil flutters violently over each of your orbs,
when the the sound of the wind flowing through them is deafening enough,
it gets up from the seat by your bedside.
“where are you going” your lips are so dry
and we haven’t been here for sixty years to moisten them.
“you are a miserable old **** and you will not have the satisfaction
of being exempt from dying alone.”

wander five feet above,
on a shivering branch.
pink, nubile and unprepared.

south is the wind
and face it, as it pours milkmaid dutch
down the weighed, sagging ravines on your cheeks.
rain climbing eyelids,
wave falling on the sea wall.

“a rumor spread about an area where a ******’s blood was painted on an electric line.”

******, lacquer your teeth.
assume mother’s mantle,
live in deliberate anonymity.

Belle Dame, II

you wonder if you would have looked good
with finger waves in 1922.
it’s pointless to think about,
but it still floats languidly toward you,
one of the frequent gondolas that scratch,
and ****, and drift wandering semite from shore to shore of your skull.

the sun never sets on it, after all.

the other ships,
ancient and moaning,
lean and bow according to waves of a life-heavy sea,
its tides divorced from any semblance of reason,
rhythm  doesn’t lie next to it any longer,
its shape is just an aftertaste now.

your throat is in flames, by the way.
no one took voice this time.
she left of her own accord,
and she’s planned this for weeks,
every gesture, forward motion, and utterance
that would enable her escape from inside you,

this time, it’s pointless scouring the corners of the empire to find her.
you have to remember she’ll come back on her own.
that the harshly lit fluorescent reality will validate her,
or it won’t,
and it’ll reject her like your body is currently doing to the reattached finger you almost lost when you were three.

i need you to pray she makes her boat on time,
and don’t think so much of where she’s going.

They tell me it's all going to be over soon, that everything we know and love, everyone we can fathom who fits into either of those two categories, the tiny thoughts that greet you at the dawn of the waking hours to the grandest of social constructs, regardless of size, shape or architecture, will soon fall, brick by brick into the sea.


A hundred years ago, I imagine a scaly sea bass fell from the heavens into the hands of a fisherman. He saw it as a sign of something so unholy and profane, he tossed it, almost dislocating his shoulder, into the sea, mumbling "back to god, you go."



and back to god we go.



how will you greet it.

who will you be with, that's more important.



Whose eyes are you going to stare into as some named storm churns up the country side, the cities, rivers and villages, making sweet love to the stone and steel we thought would always stand, east-coast-solid in the face of holy wrath.



the whole of our world will undulate, as if dancing as we will tonight, in a new year's celebration unlike any other.



5, 4, 3, 2,

and countless, so countless,

because numbers won't exists,

nor clocks,

or clothing,

or divisions.



after it is all gone, there will be nothing to separate us from what we desire so deeply, nothing to bind us in servitude to a world that made no sense, nothing to make sense of,



and that's when we'll know freedom,



the morning after the end of the world,



when we wake up in each others arms,

quietly humming,

sleeping in a few extra minutes before we rebuild ourselves again.

you will allow yourself several moments of grace before entering a room.

and we will forget the old ways,
not all at once, but piecemeal.
seconds will escape, one by one at first
and soon they’ll join hands and walk away from our consciousness freely.

when we come to,
we’ll look first at our fallow hands
and then to the ruins of former empires.

so we stumbled quietly into fields and put down seeds.