sometimes I think of
Charles Bukowski
reading one of my poems
and saying “this is *******”

or an old psychiatrist telling me
that in mania,
all work is more meritorious
than it seems.

occasionally,
when I watch ****,
I can’t *** for similar reasons.

So I ask Bukowski,
that ugly ****,
If I can raise him from the dead,
and play puppeteer with his corpse.

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.

those thighs and hair
peeling my eyelids back to witness
water kissed beginnings,
an unfurling flower,
a pathway into you

fill me,
foreign home,
drown me,

this normal force and neglect

tell me
how it could be spring and candles...

Limp and bloodless formality.
Cotton, cotton once picked by slave hands.
Shoes still made by slave hands.
My feet are not afraid of cuts, and
my back adores the sun.

“my thread... my thread is worth more”

you say.

Sweet unbirthing of apples sweat-
The air does not permit condensation
in such places. Yet the windows...
how grateful we are that they allow light,
whether we acknowledge it or not.

Everyone settled into that teacher with autumn in her hair,
into the voice that matched the correlations of warmth in newtonian discs of color,
always coming to realign.

Together we traded gazes,
and I wondered if I should steal skin
or call a third party.
There were chemicals in your blood,
and your bones had just been reintroduced to fat.
You dragged them through drab carpentry to find fixture in a seat alongside elephantine calves;
in the circled group of offset minds,
I wondered only what tipped you.

on the schoolyard I saw children fall and soon learnt that I would always fetch a bandaid without hesitation.

I thought mother must’ve skinned her knee too.
Why else could she be crying?

And father, oh father,
he cried because his dad had died.
Was it finance?
Was it finance?
Was it really finance?

Oh mother,
bloom,
careful artist.

Father,
square, leather
so soft upon conditioning.

The fissure in both of you;
I inhabit the crack,
and before I knew what fiber was
I was shouting for a rope.  

Loveless not, mother and father,
they tell me this was how it is.
yet the knowledge of a wholeness
I will never know is inside me.

Release! I begged for release.
and when I found it I gave my scorn to what?

The combatants had retreated long ago.

a lone showman amidst a crowd
stands raised on a pedestal;
he wears a hat,
its brim is lined with bells,
and on the top rests a newly bursting lily-fibrous stalks of nescient life
intertwining with felt and chime alike.  

raising high his flowered cap
he remorsefully disclaims
“you once ate the sun!”
but these words are ignored.
the crude ringing of the chimes
is the only sound that brings applause.

it is in that endlessly cascading awe,
with mouth ajar,
and the soft spot behind the knee
folding sweetly
that desolation runs to hide
like a shrew,
in a meadow too dense to show its skeleton

these jests, flying through the hollows,
molded by tongue and tooth,
varying in sound in structure
through placement and growth,
sweet jests
tip horizons askew

veiled wings,
do you hear me?
you are destined only
to drift towards what illumines
the very room I lay in...

many say this is not your home-
they are wrong.

the harmless introduction,
of a new figure
carelessly unwinding
a knot stuck deep inside a dip (sulcus)

marbled eyes
scrunching in
amused perplexity and
intrigue,
a face filled with
intermingling shades
of ochre and wood

an ache to make a medley...
a macédoine

you are characters
top hats and all,
with gauche mustaches
wading through the falsity of a present
with flesh as old as all
that is ostensibly new
as old as dust, distraction,
and conversation

so busy now,
busy enough to forget about eyes
and hands,
rock and skin

wrinkled linens
lapping over into folds
as they cradle restless skin
both blemished and beautiful;
someone stood stiff behind a loom
turning flax to tender fabric,
a silken platform for dreaming. 
tonight defies their intention  
it is sandpaper,
and craving intimacy creates abrasion.

aubergine wandering to form
streaks in the sky
above the crest of a hill that turns flat
in a tundra littered with flecks of life
scurrying rodents, silent birds
moving endlessly in the same pattern
how trite

a coincidence of opposites that ends
in negation, creating a silence
born to be punctured by thoughts of “can” or “cannot”-
dusting off the in-between
to find a beautifully dubious fiction,
an etching of a chance
so sprightly and so small...

linking possession and dispossession
there is acquisition
a place which houses a spectrum;
to know one half more than the whole
is much like feeling past inside of present-
each part, fractured
in its imperfect symmetry,
convalesces to form a mosaic;

a kaleidoscopic structure
built inside the paradox  
of what is everything in you
and nothing at all,
a monument for the in-between.

attachments arrhythmias
seeking cadence in
novelties embrace
placet experiri (he likes to experiment)
is the justification that resounds
in the juncture of you
when possibilities allure falls
as a needle on a record
spinning backwards to distort what is extant and insipid,
twirling thoughts like tattered organdy
carelessly whisked into the breeze,
deposited somewhere beyond the tide at its peak, far and away
wishing for a togetherness
that shortens the wait for waters recession-  
you, shouting words long-dead into the ocean; begging it to remember what it birthed

my memories are con men
spinning fibers into thread
for forging famous tapestries
sewn sweetly in sugars of lead-

smelting dead language
into covers for their feet,
they run through broken glass
just to hear a phrase repeat.

simper now
in the relaxation of infinitesimal specks:
we have measured their resonance.  
such a dreadful prognosis...
torn from a blear openness and
swept into progenies avalanche,
clinging to a spar of what is and could be

I stare
at clouds to become overtaken
with a roiling awe
folding and unfolding unto itself.
I want
to paint myself falling into the jet turbine spreading into a mist that’ll cling to the condensation nuclei in the sky...
I think
of the worlds morbid brilliance; floating between the beauty of vapors dispersion and senseless death.

there is no schema,
that differentiates this likeness-
the difficulty of deduction is not
a condemnation, it never will be

my care was born under the same foolish yoke
that motivated emperors to build bulbs of marble
to honor lost loves, to stay their hearts decay,
but gestures this grand escape my capability

I’ll revert to limpid simplicity, and watch
loose eyelashes fluttering in a fall-
cleaning your cheeks with my fingertips,
a gesture both large and small

it is
the thought of a wraparound clench of the stomach
(from the dorsal side)
drilling my eyes into nothings,

feeling a child in a later stage,
the soft black cotton stretched over the emergent ****
of what was once a morula,

in absence
becoming a scientist
begging to understand through ablation,

and a priest believing that innocence molts

     in silence
bringing unintended sound.

In you I descry a wandering eye,
with no end and no start,
looking to cherish the projections
of a disabused heart

and to think I could use this sight
to sift through reflections untrue,
to know what is not in the knots of my ribs
and to see what the sky sees in blue

together with you, a second of two
I try still to be more acute
yet in such a gaze, I am rendered to clay,
and hunger rules all that I do

though with every backstep
I am empty and left with impressions of oldness and you-
with cold questions of folly that sit still in my body
and pebbles in both of my shoes,

I still run to what could be swirling new in that eye
amongst what is not in the gray,
though I know that its gaze looks far beyond I,
for it sees naught but the lights of new days

underneath the half bowl with a white stone
pouring light on grains of rock
thinking slow about releasing old balloons

wracking aspirations to be
caught in the ambivalence
of deciding between a sand flea and a star

reaching the conclusion
that they’re not that far apart

Decalcomania,
porcelain skin
and
a lava-deluge

episodic angst,
in actu primo
I heard a voice

in actu secundo
I closed the shutters, drew the blinds
and split the wires linking my home to the others

little town camper girls gazing absently at the sun streams, rubber-clad feet coming together into a huddle of the same, with oil black hair shifting quick in the air and my larynx attempting to leap out of itself, my chest feeling thin as i carve through old conversations (imprinted underneath my dura mater)
i find danielle- a frog faced girl always frozen in stress
i picture you fretting amidst piles of clerical filth
i picture myself as a foolish mailman spitting half-thoughts into the face of someone searching for a more grounded approach
i used to be thrilled i wasn’t you but now i’m not quite so sure
misuse and embarrassment with the icicles that are my ribs, clamoring down your ladder,
which only ever had a rung or two to begin with

a ball chain clean ******* through my ankle, it’s a wonderful adornment
the metal links shiver a little when i fill space with sigils evincing the idea that it’s truly something typical
a startlingly regular solution of ills, and i think the surgeons behind my solar plexus use it as an antiseptic.

when they begin their operation,
i wish i could show you

how i hear the reiteration of a phrase and its abandonment, for the fear of value & memory being coupled in a denouement
how i see a series of mesas on a steppe, staggered and stair-like, descending towards an absolute