When I first see you, with eyes half-closed
imagining how your thin lips licked the edges of the sea,
remembering the primordial ooze, I think
I have come here to love you.

When you spread your flesh across the table
open your legs, pull at the lips and
make sounds that only I can hear, I whisper
I have come to love you

When you out move everyone I have ever loved,
bring your mouth to mine and in delirium
wash my face with the warm cloth, I realize
how love is tinted with empathic sadism.

When you finally utter my name in the same sentence as yours
as if your ***** hold all the stuff poets wish for
and my fingers find the seaweed surrounding your pink flesh
I know I love you.

Sustenance from the watery underworld
Food

My Doppelganger holds secret negotiations with my Avatar.
Slicing up the available territory by flipping a coin. Apparently,

I can see a me for myself if I happen to be in Somalia next Monday.
But that’s the Avator talking. Doppelganger is betting on Seattle.

I am eavesdropping, sitting around in my underwear. They
think I am unaware because I can’t see them, but they are
impossible without me.

Goethe, Shelley and John Donne are in the next apartment
huddled over some broken poems each had written on
the mirrors. No mistakes were made. No reflections.

They get to see themselves out of the corner of one eye,
for up to nine seconds which is like a lifetime to remember.

Yet the acrid smell of Neitzsche emanates from dark corners.
Sturm und Drang be ******; Neitzsche is convinced
no one has ever looked like him, but he does suggest
a parallel universe.

Abe Lincoln, a latecomer and unlikely participant, picks up a few pointers.
He knows full well that what he saw was not a reflection. And he rode that train
all the way from Pittsburg. All those windows...

And, yes, KA, the spirit double, the Egyptian Goddess, goes in **** as the
Greek Princess and shows up as Helen to tease Paris of Troy.

How can you not believe that? For Goddess sake, she helped end the Trojan War.

I have a lot of time on my hands. I don’t get out much.
Ava and Dopp came by just to let me know I’m still around.

Today, when I was feeling worse that Jack Kerouac
I thought this must be a touch of the Doubles,
a dizziness from reflection, or perhaps an accumulation
of appearances, too many appearances.
Pull the shades.

Sit back and relax, confide in yourself, i say.
Where did it all begin, and for what reason?
Am I a mirage of the identical, a disorder
in the analogous, some transmutation of exact endings?
One imagines Zarathustra singing in the shower.

"If you can't find a woman, find a clean old man", says Jack,
ride the greyhound, hang around the men's room, try dope."
He always shouts from the freeway entrance,
thumb aimed offensively in the direction of L.A.

Later, in the woods, I whispered like Thoreau;
"simplify, simplify. One pair of ***** is enough for any man."
Be yourself, I said. Walk down the sidewalk.
Step on all the cracks.

Time being
a pressure invoked
on a constant skin
involving bone and bone
a subtle grinding
into other matters.

Man being
another gravity displaced
by motion and the blood's pleasure;
each joint ******* raw
the thin marrow of another.
This life taking turn
with death or mirrors,
take your pick

Tonight i saw my father leaving in the cold.
His face a reeling night of red-eye,
unhurried, lonely, breathing ghosts.
Himself, a wheezing remnant left behind,
a token grace of winter on his way
to gather drunken, half-breed, fallen dreams.
Lost cheers. Lost salutations.
And wished for in his wake

Tonight i saw my father leaving
in the cold behind him
sons who silent promise
better dreams to leave by.

When winter sun dies
Night lives longer than your love
Wake me in the spring


Calico woman
standing in a silver sun
I cannot paint you

The seed plants itself
Nature washes life away
There is no flower

Old men on benches
newspapers shade ancient eyes
Obituary!

a tremor of
trains in thought
flailed and
finger-laced
as if set upon
by silver ennui,
it stretched
all the way
to Topeka:
Tracks put up
by dead men in dark hats

There's a woman comes in here
at night because its hers she says
and wears black feathers in her hair.

I shut the dor behind her to punctuate
those mutterings that fall perpendicular on my ear
and she turns the darkness over in her mouth
like a blade of grass.

If I ask her why she comes she says
don't bother me about your ******* dreams

thinking of something
when something came inside
and seemed.

There is a great stuttering
in me, gathering movement.
It comes in the air
as normal as Mercury.

I tell you, if I stumble
it is an act of faith.

You are, you be, you witness,

you prevail, you gift, you create

you end whatever you want to end

you continue, you are the wind,

and the stars...I know

i saw them in your eyes.

You are, you be, you are loved

by me and all who know you.

You are the one who will continue

to will, and yield and never, ever end.

Oh, small death;

Le petite mort.

These are words to shape something that everyone wants
but no one has a corner on
that market.

It all remains unspoken; the remains we wished for
are not the ashes we asked for.

The ones we left behind in the fire
we started in life are now delivered.

in the eye of remembrance
is the dust of stars
sifted into a plastic bag

Love and hope, faith and trust, peace and wisdom; still,
I question what i know, what is true.

What shifts us to enter this circle, holding hands,
using words that wonder how to make it
not be the end of everything?

I will plant a tablespoon of ashes in all the places
where the spirits dwell.

I will leave this poem so you can find the place
where other spirits dwell