when I awaken
I extend my finger
towards a panel of dancing light-

did you know that its veins were torn from a mountain?

a whole hierarchy of angels
living inside the earth
were turned to transistors

so that my letters
could glow in your hands.

when I learned this
I began sleeping beside a stream,

in the places where I could watch
wires dance-

beneath wooden pillars and their flimsy black arms
whispering secrets in permanent embrace.

every night I would dream  
to the forward noise
of churning water;

of fluid drifting through the air unseen
or pouring from life long past-

terraforming
for the maintenance of symmetry.

I’ve spent the whole of this evening
drinking bug repellant and
wrapping my brain in gauze

because small shifts of her feet are registered on the richter scale
and my chest
is crowded with stalactites.

there are paintings inside of me;
a maudlin girl with porcelain skin unfolding onto velvet,
bleeding into other men.

her crying gave me tinnitus,
now my ears leak silver-

their canals are comprised of melted
nickels forgotten  
in the center console of her car.

come winter I’ll cast a ring,
though I’m terrified of snow.

It’s always sedatives during hangovers,
until every blink feels like pouring dust on a patch of dry grass in the sun-
bleached white.

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.

i tear into bookshelves
as if i only eat peaches
to crack my teeth on the pit,

yet you have a dog-eared page

stained with scrawled hearts,
folded and flown across the schoolyard
by a boy walking circles
round a swing set.

yes i picked tulips with you when i was young-
when i never went past eskimo kisses
or knew about roots and ****** falls.

every day i carried needles in my stomach...
i wanted to stitch our skin together.

now you’re landlocked in the rustbelt
counting change all day-
i’d buy you a plane ticket if i didn’t look like saint jude.

i suppose i should
treat you suchlike a sweater
i don’t know whether to fold or hang,

plant seeds in foreign gardens
and carve our initials
when they turn into trees

or scatter your ashes on the throughway,
near a city you’ve never seen.

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.

poetry is dumb to me
as it sits beneath this ache-
this ache that becomes my body.

i’m a ***** in an alley,
as bold and as beautiful as a newborn child;

throwing pennies at the feet of
****** addicts and billionaires.

i don’t know why i love searching for food in waste bins full of burnt-out cigarettes,

or why electricity is  
always running
underneath every scabrous sheen of skin-
i’m starting to think that hearts and brains are cliche.

when i was young
my cliche
started quaking
at regular intervals

i wished it to be a water balloon
so i could drop it on the sidewalk
like a kindergartner.

now it reeks of chemicals-

i’m soaked in ethanol
probing all the people that pucker at the smell.

that pharmacy could be
a tree,
spitting small colorful seeds
down the throats of kids
that look at concrete too often-

a tree
with budding fruit
clipped and stuffed
into a sunrise-colored cylinder
by a man
dressed in a cassock,

and I could be
a catechumen
waiting pliantly
inside the trunk,
whispering prayers
to the wood above my head.

unfurl,
for this body can be unworldly frenzy.

sweet child
barebacked in the glimmering half-light;

adorn your skin

with shell and bone,
with coiled vines and fig leaves-
you love equally
gardens and caves.

before the clouds became
contemporaries,
your arms were flesh

athirst and empty;
lurching
towards sugary fruit.

I am offset;

an old railcar piled with pages,
shunted forward a few
inches every Saturday or so.

my mouth fell off on crooked tracks,
now I speak through rust-

corrosion carries all the stories never told,

a burnt patina
imploring passengers to pore through
its contents
till their hands are herringboned with paper-cuts.

it always ends in locked jaws-
with tetanus in their blood.

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.

If everything is political
I suppose I’ll distance myself
from everything;

I’ll go back
to become rapt
with Eleusinian mystery,
and begin dancing among
pillars and fluted blocks
at the propylæa-
suitless and light.

The pattering of peoples steps
was the only music
I ever wanted to hear
anyways.

this morning I felt myself a bird

and stumbled into the pane of glass
that shields my shower;

for a brief moment

I became a limp body standing up,

with knees folded at acute angles
& elbows obtuse,

begging the ferryman
to float my feathered corpse into
the cleansing chamber.

he muttered assent
in my own voice-

and all the water in the atmosphere
poured directly through a hole
in the crown of my head,

it filled the hollows of my bones
and I no longer took flight.

questions undue
stuffed folly into the throats
of mathematicians, priests, and poets alike.

i nearly burnt all of their books,

but a paper boy with wide eyes greeted me at seven o’clock on sunday

and untied a parcel
with careful young hands.

i saw his legs shake
and thought yes,

god is tension;
a string
with both its ends pulled.

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.

I thought
you could explain
the philosophy of vacuum
and Spinoza
through chattering teeth
and lips too numb to form labials.

In winter;
whenever your face
began to freeze
I wanted to remind you
about occasionalism and
quanta.

I wanted to tell you
how your eyes
could be heat and god.

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.

I am unborn,
clawing through clutter
and encouraging my salivary
glands to push moisture
through the will of hypotensive
medication.  

Laying next to my betters,
begging to die of a heart attack
while I *******.

It’s nothing like falling asleep next to someone.

I am nothing
but half-breaths lent as largesse to
a hypothetical togetherness
hurriedly collected in the night
and burnt into reels of film.

I ascend ladders,
my favorite has its base resting
in my spine,
I climb it up,
always up-

only to find lacerations  
in the fibers comprising my thigh,
and a lovely image of
a love that is not.

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?

A.C Hume called injury his own;
he became the ambassador of
the olecranon,
and died a pedant mending bone,

how many fell
before he entered abduction
and set his stern hands
on ailed elbows?

how many could tell you
what such an injury was called
before he laid claim
to the fruits of misfortune?

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.

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.

you can see it in the air,
in the emerald green carpets
and announcers writing invitations
in foundation hand,
all inked in crimson.

even on
the slumped shoulders of
scientists and poets
toting epaulettes
on t-shirts.

in the bricks,
held in place with pumice and porous stone-
there’s that fine and coarse aggregate
refusing to crumble and weather.

Over there
that one is speaking Portuguese
to a lamp post,
telling it all that is known about
the heroic epics of the Donghu people.

Across the sidewalk
one is drunk,
stumbling and smelling of ***,
muttering obscenities at the gutter.

it’s always raining pamphlets,
and in the margins
they say to make sure
that you keep your windows closed.

I asked
the second hand of a clock

what exactly makes it tick,

it told me that I’m blind
every fifty milliseconds;

oh,
I swear I’ve spent whole days
in between the twitch of an eye.

I asked the psychologist the same,
it yielded nothing-

the paper proposed that pupils
scale with difficulty,

mine swallow nebulae
during the easiest of tasks.

I asked away,
but realized in a breath

that those apertures are
little girls and little boys

bundling desire
as twigs to use for tinder.

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.

no more ligands
uptakes or exchanges,

just a wall,

a wall erected inside of me,
that rejects all attempts of a raze.

Natura, as in birth,
deceiver, material fact in perceptual fiction;
to which the bird sings and flesh returns, shallow earth roiling with worms in mud;
your body is mine- on great gusts you carry my breath.

Your skin, parsed, has become a word of my soul; a flesh folded dove unclasped in freedom from a party trick,
soaring outwards on dreams turned luminous through countless lies and premonitions, unfurling in worldly frenzy.

You have inveigled me in flattery to become an exertion-
an eye, an ear, a mouth, a hand, a nose, a science;
to study the motion of which I am indifferent consequence, to crystallize the miracle of myself in my skin-
to learn and forget.

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.

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...

I heard on the news
that the Apinae are disappearing,

“the what?”

“the drones darling, bumblebees.”

“and?”

“you should decorate your hair with daffodils; the yellow offsets the onyx.”

you thought
I looked at symbols too often

I thought
you were thirsty for color

“you have never mentioned dying
bees before this moment.”

“oh, up until today,
I never knew that they danced.”

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.