it dwells deep in my soul,
thirty meters down
where the canary does sing,
sweet nothing, sing.

don't let it stop.

please don't let it stop.

but when it does, that's when you run.
and you don't look back.

thigh to calf,
to foot,
to toe.

you make it to that elevator,

and you get out.
soot covered and white eyed,
so very white.

and you go home,
to that little girl who loves you,
and you smudge that gingham table cloth.

don't let it stop singing.
you can't afford to.

you want everything to look like the setting sun,
or a marble bull,
charging at your viscera.

what draws you to these lines?

nothing. i drift heavy,
only toes touch land, wood, and sea.
lustful, i was, so bound to myself i lie
in some endless death march,
bayonet, tracing silhouettes into my backside.
girls from home, mostly.
a mother,
friend,

what salvation are you seeking?

not salvation, only time.
seconds, to turn into minutes,
to somehow, without blinking
bind themselves into one life.

i’ll see what i can do.

it sits somewhere inside a cave,
unseen from street level
deep within it,
parallel to dormant husks of former beasts.
accessible only through divinity’s eye.

climb down,
feet unseen in each step.
but you’ll still feel them there
kicking against earthen layers
they’ll crumble under foot.
don’t worry, though.
it stays in place

rope to take you there,
to here

left fingers violin trembling,
it sounds even better down here, doesn’t it?

slip
bounce organic against the earth walls,
and tumble, foot over brow
over eye,
crash land sweetly
so the breath escapes
extruded through your chest
through your lips

eyes unfocused
though fixed on the pin needle light you climbed through

you wake.
hair in your vision,
like cracks on the windshield,
like vines and branches
when viewed upward,
they’re pressed tightly
to the warm ***** of sky.

they belong there.
maybe you think you do, too.

so get up.
take someone’s hand

and walk
gelatin-leg up the stairs
possibly breathless, into the street.

up here on the right,
no, no, you can stop here.
I don’t mind walking the extra twenty feet.

I had a nice time,
it was quite the evening,
especially when the moon descended overhead,
staring us both in the eye,
rough lover, sunday morning, and my chin’s all whisker scratched.
is some body you’ll never touch allowed to make you feel that way

centuries earlier,
people staggered their sleep,
dormant for three or four hours,
and around midnight, they’d wake,
swathed, international blue moon lit
while lovers were conquered,
and neighbors addressed as if it were morning,
fresh and jovial, short-lived land angels
connected to their bodies,
to our moon, to floors,
turning in them,
below them,
spatially, elsewhere,
never having left the gap between your forefinger and temple
under duress

there lie many fishes in the sea. 

that's not a real word, boy. 

TAKE IT BACK!

and my lips as bright as janice's. 

and my cheeks swollen like hers' too. 


oh, this up-do, it just hurts so bad. 

that i wish what i felt could be real. 

that it wouldn't end just when the wig is torn off.
by daddy-gone-bourbon.


and do you want to be a pretty little thang?

OH. 
I'LL MAKE YOU A PURTY LITTLE THANG. 

tear you a NEW one. 

and rip you open 

Like the burlap sack your mama was...

then we'll see how well the aqua net works on your
up.do.



He didn't die for you, boy. 

He didn't die for you. 


clean yourself up, it's your birthday, after all.

and then it puts away the ***** pictures. 

and it settles it's "pretty little self" into bed...
limping.
oh it's legs are so broken. 

its marfan limbs tremble. 


but i can't do nothing no one else done.

i just wanted to know if it was a real word.

We’re all here to see it come down.
Some of us can’t wait until that last stone is swept from its place forever, and some of us simply stand vigil,
like we’re about to pull the plug on our loved one on life support.

While we are at a perfectly safe distance,
it’s pretty **** strange that the workmen put us in this spot specifically.

We’re on the opposite side of the river, close to the town and anything that seems warm and appropriate.
And from here, we can see it all perfectly.
What Crane calls “The Beautiful Monolith,”
and its three crosses.
 
Some of us take pictures. Some of us even pull out rosaries.
People driving stop their cars, shut them off and simply wait.
And wait. And wait.

And then we hear a low, heavy grumble, like the sound of some giant old man waking up after a nap.
 
The bottom is the first to go,
then it moves up the long, slender legs that support the bridge.
Those famous arches warp out of shape while collapsing.
And it looks like the words painted on the bridge are moving.
Yes. They are moving, like the ticker at the bottom of a news report.
 
A beige cloud sits on top of the river, churning as more of the Beautiful Monolith falls. The bridge’s bases are still intact on opposite sides of the river.

We’re told they’ll be removed,
like unwanted tree stumps, by the day’s end.
 
The beige cloud is still writhing, fueled by turn of the century concrete.

And if we squint hard enough,
we can see through the beige cloud,
at the three wooden crosses on the opposite side of the river.
 
Now, they turn and stare at me.
The entire town, it seems.
Several hundred eyes that with no feeling to them,
just wanting answers.
They want to know why, but “why” doesn’t matter.
“How” would just leave them with more questions,
and “where” is something dangerous that should be left up to whatever forces control what is built and what is destroyed.

There are many instances,
those I have not been proud of,
when I have scoured the colonies collecting tiny, ornate cigar boxes
to house the bodies of dead, miniature emperors of the
Imperial realm beneath my floorboards.

Cheap pine does tend to hide many things,
for it is god-like, this Empire.
its beauty: arresting and unearthly.

I discovered it as all great historical finds come to us,
on an unremarkable, and unplanned afternoon.

I felt not unlike an ancestral WASP,
stumbling upon the new world, or at the very least, new to me.
how presumptuous, to think that this great majestic thing beneath my feet is my junior.

Surely, then, I am the discovery,
bringing my primitive ways,
attire, tribe and desires
to the Imperial Court.

From them, I learned secrets,
a pantheon of miniature gods,
and thousands of years worth of minute literature and culture.
all of it in lovely,
resplendant whispers only the miniature can voice.

From me,
they simply learned of our endless,
tireless wars in futility.
From me,
they took ill and died in a quiet,
unassuming plague,
the sickness of our humanity.

We **** beauty,
at all times, and at all places.
We **** what we touch, and hold closest to us,
our bodies made solely of trillions of happy daggers,
primed and sharpened
for the great, sweeping massacre that resides in us all.

what is said of spiritual death is rarely ever without merit. A life continues, but it is no longer yours. those breaths escaping, ear-warmth in december, are not yours. maybe not in the sense that your body is yours. it never was. iris seeks out busy patterns, *******-splattered canvas in cacophonous {splendor}. within them is the pair of arms often dreamt of, clutching a more blithe, unaware ether of one’s self.

what is ‘regal’ can no longer be claimed. yet infilling begins, where once vacancies stood, cavity gape and naked, temples of our majesty are quietly born on white-robed mornings.

What you may or may not be aware of,
is that at any one point in time,
from the first right step you convey,
rising from a bed each morning,
is that these forward actions are your entrances
and exits from any number of overlapping narratives.

on another morning,
when both lie on either side,
acquaint yourself with one vein-veiled second of 09:00 sunlight,
and you will be well.

that you would let me be your harbor.

grass blades gnaw at my backside,
they don’t mean to bite, they’re just fervent in their suckling.

finger knotted
mirror palm

it always felt more complete when it was just the three of us.
you, me, and the vast, faceless

upon him, you and i finger painted all these parallels.
places we would never see,
rabbit warren cabins we’d never trouble ourselves to clean,

big, stupid piles,
bodies lie vine tangled,
but something halcyon, no more.

“look around the warren.
take what you can carry, because this is the last you’ll see of this room.”

over time, after the border closure,
after the parades of death squads,
faces of our brothers and lovers cloaked in ivory.,

we learned to condense three people into one.
we learned to say less, our words short and curt,
save for hours after, or in between,
when we could warm our skinny wrists over an open flame,
dreaming of the heavy, 72-hour lemongrass day
when it was all just painted doors and blue lights as far as we could touch,

“look around the warren.
take what you can carry,
this is the last you’ll see of this room.
we won’t be back”

For a few minutes,
I sat and had a full-on conversation
with a voice on the other end of the phone call
that may have been just a recording.

His voice was...perfect.
It lacked any of the audible stretch marks
an organic, troubled human could produce.
It floated, lilting.

His mouth sounded as if it had made its home on a strong, defined jaw.
Within it, two rows of pearlescent stones .

My own lips quivered, anticipating what it would feel like to have this mouth opera bellowing hot air, down, further.
It had finally happened.
I'd fallen in love with a ******* voice that was trying to sell me life insurance.

I, naked
tremble before you
and deafening is my cry.

you will take me once,
as others have
Memorize my epicanthic folds while
I, fingers-curved,
travel your twin laugh line Ganges.

then the river dries,
several million strands of water,
cut from heavenly head
so that only two or three remain,
angel hair limp and lithe against the clay earth.

funny how you can stretch out famine for years.

outside, it smelled of canned peaches,
and i knew the world was fertile again,
or i was fertile.
no one is more boundless ,
simply surviving a passage of time.
intimate nothing from gazes encountered,
no loss, and no redemption.

i’ve been standing at a folded alter for four years,
laundered, stiff white collars in iron maiden

pin ****** cascade,
it’ll be just the tip.
lol.

someone once told you to cover the bedroom mirrors before sleeping,
they’ll drain you of life by morning otherwise.
maybe it was the gourds. the ones that looked like birdhouses,
eye-socket pools gouged into dormant skin,
or you think it’s dormant.
you never assume your vegetables to be predatory.

i only ever feel most like myself in the mornings, immediately after waking,
and around 6:00 pm after i’ve peeled off my face.

stay in their houses and caves,
scratching feverishly at the indelible print
affixed to their torsos,
praying to this god of theirs,
to absolve them of so many sins.

but god has no ears,
no eyes,
nor a mouth.
for these are primitive human afflictions,
affects for us,
who need these
tools to function.

we cannot be condemned to hell,
for we cannot truly comprehend it,
a place of judgement,
for that too is of our own hands.

yet the haunted
know full well
that god is in its personal hell
scratching feverishly at the indelible print.

Maybe my eyes should be two cameras
flashing blinding through nights
divorced from any semblance of logic or reason.

maybe before i should leave earth,
i'll have five minutes to sit
and sift through the images,
choosing 12 or 18 favorites to take with me
into my next life as a blade of grass.

maybe that task is impossible.
i pray that it is.

charge at my viscera.
take tender care to not tip our boat,
for we will not fall,
but glide, listlessly into sea.

know what it is to thirst for nothing to surround you.
to rise and fall,
aether-bouyant through axes unknown.
which direction does your spinal fluid flow?
you’ll be uncertain.
only i know.
and i won’t tell you.

you don’t have to.

She followed stitches in the road
and they led her, finger ( )
straight into the mouth,
where she tumbled, eave on ear,
careening down some flesh corridor,

emergence is its own special hell.
born twice, corps within corps,
so that a doyenne is entombed in my screaming infant.

when he lifts me, i rise, airborne swimming,
and i cannot see his arms.


what do you see if you they’re not before your eyes?

a clear sky,
its only blemish are size 8 words i cannot make out.
they ripple behind a flea-sized plane.

i see the sky.
a clear sky, wide and naked and unashamed.

it’s very easy to be a narcissist in this place. everything we surround ourselves with should be an extension of ourselves, but herein lies the interesting part. “ourself” is never tangible. there is no specific visceral mass within our bodies that can be named “ourself.”

“ourself” resides in the spaces between tissue, and even within them, it is not so much its presence or absence, but the formation itself, and not the building, no stone or lattice, but the way and manner it was presented before “ourself.”

i am ebinezer el-shabazz,
staff in hand, watch me plow field and wife.
stand behind me,
father leading progeny through earth bounty born of my hand.
you must stay behind.
i will protect you from the sun.
enclose you within gossamer wings,
you will ask why light rips through, still.
i say it is because you are not in your place of yes.
“but father’s arms are always a place of yes.”
i will devour you before your mind ripens,
for i do not want you to see mine gone so foul.

I was caught in the wheel for 27 days.
my ring finger, left hand,
just below the knuckle.
flesh lay threaded through spokes.

lying there,
blood in cascade within my veins, away from the finger tip.
a bustling commute inside of me.

eyes upward, fixed there, even in rain.
overflowing in showers,
these bubbling iris pools.

I’ve had my fill,
and very swiftly i go.
on the mornings of journeys,
hesitation finds no home in me.

the only request i have is for a graceful exit,
swift, and defiant.

shortly before your cannon shot onto the surgical table,
the huddled mass of you
caught a glimpse of the eventuality.
‘other’-light razor lip
down the french door hinges of your chest.

when ash from the micro fires sets,
it is that indelible ink that will plague you,
through years of intimate stares at this,
the defining mark of your forehead
when it kissed
something on the other side of divine.

when was the last time you howled with the wind
your voice curled upward,
jowls hadn’t formed yet,
will they ever?
will you roll out from under that lens?
the one slowly pressing itself down on you,
it’ll crush you in your sleep,

the last thing you’ll think, unfortunately,
is of its efficacy,
graceless, effortless motion of glass the weight of the world,
reducing you

but

don’t stop.
not until you fumble around in the bedside drawer,
(you know the one)
hardspine thick and full of fleshlights,
receipts, and ticker-tape fortunes.

within it, is the melted resin bracelet,
the one meant for dangling above a 3 am fire,
so its klein blue string burns,
slow, gentle flame against those wrists.

this is what it feels like.
there’s a reason the birds stir a little after midnight,
winged extras, lovers, and postal workers,
former mothers, pageant queens, and cannibals.
they’re here to remind you to rebuild that place within,

there’s a dock there,
fixed in a lake,
on it is our covered vessel,
its wooden frame forming a muslin tent.
sleeping, three minutes before sunrise.

one learns how to operate legs,
and standard procedures in finger movement.
eventually, the career of inhabiting one’s own body becomes routine,
and not to be described as sublime or miraculous.

futures are foreign and wonderful.
or they’re not,
and your perceptors block all that out,
so you may remain in waking sleep,
trotting down express lanes into life as Mandarins,
officiating in a court so rigid.

I am seated, legs crossed Jackie O style,
hands quietly, and eternally resting on fatless thighs,
my god, they are so cold today.

and it appears
that i am waiting for forever, Forever, sweet Forever,
but Forever will not come.

Whether his train has departed,
I will not have known.
I will not have known the robust, mathematical eyes
that scoured the horizon from the seventh car from the rear.
I will not have known what they have seen, the halves of sheep that were black, the other halves of sheep assumed to be another thing entirely...

It falls now, on me.
Like many shredded pieces of ticker tape,
My god, it is here, singular and lovely.
god-like in its beauty,
gray and divine,
how IT falls.

a certain clarity steps in from the night.
it shakes off a damp umbrella and fastens its closure.
the small ‘clip’ echoes in the hall.

or maybe it’s a snap.
clarity lays the umbrella down and there is rain water at my feet.

that these arms should house me should be plaster.
they’re all i know. at their ends are fingers that cannot bend,
yet i press my hand against them,

caress a dormer window or crown molding
            and they’d feel more compassionate.

but one doesn't need a home to love you back. there is no soul residing in between these walls. no greater being within the woodwork.

it left one morning, a note scrawled and barely legible made its way to the counter, and almost fell, november-soft under the garbage.

it left no forwarding address. but a quiet light comes and goes. flickering in its tiny dagger stabs at the interiors of your eyelids. let it flood the room and keep nothing covered.

i don’t know what made me choose this tree, specifically.
it did not choose me.
i swear, i could feel it trembling in my hands on the train home.
a canary frightened of slaughter,

it’s calmed down by now.
trees have no memory of goodbye,
or maybe that’s not true. they’re the higher beings,
i’m thinking they know something we don’t.

“whichever you choose. you live here.”
“nonsense. I live only in my body. Outside of that,
I control nothing and that alone thrills me.”

i never really appreciated the wealth of light afforded to me.
yet i still have cravings,
for graceless dormers,
naked and looming.
quartered divisions with their faint, finger panes
intersecting in the middle of my forehead.

i really love the feeling of walking through a wooded path at night.
maybe not wooded, not so looming and treacherous.
but a place much warmer in light.

i live by light.

i remember the city because of its light.
its muddled outlines,
pin box interiors you only see for brief moments in passing.
eight by ten foot worlds
partitioned only by your doing.

what other place can make sense to you,
so perfectly that you tesselate within it,
one multi-minded collection of elements
in swarms of others,

what place,
besides the one that drives you up a ******* wall.

it melts on your tongue,
liquifying with the house’s undulation.
brick-bone dancing matron.

in the house of my mother,
i light one candle and leave it,
lit and flickering,
sweetly rotating with its pin ***** flame.

some wonder, quite casually, if this‘fire’ has organs,
limp, molten flesh sacks within its walls.
tendrils of light that could drape,
lover heavy astride the chair.

limp and languid fingers that barely escape to the surface

how far you were able to see,
what it must be like,
to live at its edge,
seeing an other place similar to yours.

how i will come to haunt your home
is bound to surprise even you, buddy.
i will attach myself to every corner,
my hair intertwined with plaster,
slowly forming indelible bonds with the walls of your home.

in time, the walls will become me.
they'll convulse, strong and heavy, if not untested,
loom they will,
in each cold breath that draws steady from the vents