In marble faces I found
a fluttering that pushed blood
into every cavity inside the you
that wishes to be not.

I threw prayers
into ceiling fans-
laying limp inside the gulf,
to know that dry wall peeling back
was all to greet me.

Just ashen fluff flying endlessly
into rotaries,
and an inquiry turned to bird song,
something about windows
and deception.

It’s all cliche-
it’s all cliche,
the dismissive reiteration
of a phrase that piques the you
begging to be not,
coiled in skin,
wishing to be a limping diagram
of human musculature.  

it all grows dimmer
when you realize that
the horizontal is redundant,
rareness becomes
a beguiling piece
of parchment filled
with scribbles
imparting nonsense to the eyes.

this vessel
houses gold;
without bearings in the flatland,
untarnished and eager.

it was born in small hands
jabbing at polypropylene beauties
spinning on a mobile
above dampened eyes,
uniform and bright.

the spinning never ceased;
ligaments lengthened
and seashells,
once musicians,
became resonant cavities.

haggard winds
stirred glaucous and ash into storm;
the sky became a clouded palette
of every shade between
stone and lightning.

what a fortune it was
to be carried away and found
again and again
in the endless above.

how melodious the voices of old were;
the way they poured glitter on mud.

the way they questioned the sky
as the land shifted all about them,
sweet arrogance.

but their songs of love are alive;
beyond you, beyond mud,
buried under palimpsest memory.
basal links on a chain of refutation; palingenesis.

Is it artifice to call then into now?

I want to crush up Australia,
turn it to a pebble,
place it in my pocket and drop
the coastline in your palm,
all the coral
all the color.

All the dust;
the red,
voices so far away from us-
I’ll capture the sound,
the whimsy for our ears.

Do you see the water?
Flitting by the outlines of trees once alive-
the tired grey and the shimmering azure.
Do you see how it always hugs the land?

I’ll shower it,
I’ll trace the taproots,
down to every underground
that’s ever existed in imagination,
up to every cloud.

Innocent markings, innocent prints.
(Intaglio, not relief)
Can you tell them this,
can you tell everyone about this?
Please, play the bugle. Sound the horn.

I thought I painted well,
but they all look the same!

Frame me,
in the frame I’ll find variance,
it’s the border that distinguishes
two alike.

Picture it:
me and my tilted thoughts,
resting aslant upon your wall.

Bashful genius;
the architect of bone,
this lively puppeteer,
this Prometheus.
whirling in hot sand-
becoming crystalline unbroken.
Giving order, lack,
order, empty;
carrying all on great tides.

The moon gently pulling jetsam,
the cadavers of children
wading into granules of rock.

mixtures of life in vegetation,
that verdant undergrowth on the
cluttered limestone,
breaking waves.
the rakish laughter on the shore,
sweet echoes, fixed echoes,
the murderous innocence of the sea.