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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.