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 wanted to learn

so last night my fourth grade teacher
tore my eyelids off

and sat me near a television screen
that showed my mother dying
over and over
and over again.

I left as a cavity
of a boy,

collapsing at the sound of passing cars

as I searched for a payphone where
I could speak to the static about Gabriel.

(where is he?)

When I look at my brother and father

I beg for my eyes to be caressed until they’re scarred

with every daytime matinee
and curtsy on the train platform

that built me into this mosaic
of a “man”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

though with due reverence
i kiss the graves of dead poets-

the breathing kind must disassemble an atom to gain a fleck of praise.

no i don’t like it when they say
“i let you hurt me”

try:

please
treat me to porridge filled with kerosene
and rebar,

i’ll let you
drag a razor across my gums

if you kiss those fickle carmine streaks
that dribble from my tongue every time
i find the audacity to speak to you,

tint me,
tint me with spit and break me into cannon fodder,
princess

i know that mirrors
and **** pipes are real,
cobwebs too.

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

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.

4 A.M My Lai;

in the lowlight
colors move off my skin at different speeds-

i’ll smear them into filth,
a vignette
plastered and permanent,

and beg
for my face to be scanned like a barcode.

remind me that i’m not a nag
and i’ll build you a boat made of
frilled marigolds & thornless roses,

i’ll float us along
and talk about how

it upsets me
when i see pieces of my father
mix into basic interactions.

my fear will leave
to go sit next to triangles in heaven

and i’ll wait for a scarecrow from high school that i loved but never slept with,
i’ll wait and think of your eyes.

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

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.

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.

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.

you,

stitched of love
and to be loved
of death and in-between,

you,

a sublation
for frailty
becoming diamond
in the eyes of forgiveness-

evanescing
on the cusp of evergreen
with magpie beauty.

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.

People like imagery and trinkets and things-
they abide by the boundaries of themselves and move onwards, emboldened by this recognition- this worship

but I am a pike made of flesh-
bloated like a fish,
wretched, unknowing in mirrors.

This world is my species-
my species indirect,
as bloated, as wretched.

The beauties I find I create,
and even then I hate them afterwards,
I hate too much for the sake of my love-
my embarrassment.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

do you know this?

you,
sandalwood skin wrapping into a magnifying glass and its twin
resting fixed on a bridge between your eyes- a crooked tooth
living as a tiara
purposed for the interruption of symmetry in a smile that breaks on the crest of a sun breathing sight into
all that was lost in a night too dark for an adolescents chagrin to be crammed between stars.
you,

I love
as a desert filled with flower petals
moved by wind and the whispers of ghosts-
with my heart dispersed as a constellation
held together in blue light.

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.

a rough bit of it all
torn about the tinged straights-
a bridge to build,
a brick to lay,
another day gone by.

the ornaments inside my house no longer serve amusement-
my clothes mismatched all habberdashed
rest sullen on my skin,
the glow of screens tear at the seams of mildly sane perusement-
and I cannot drink away the ghouls with bucketfuls of gin...

what to do?
o, what to do?
another click or brushstroke-
a painting made for debts unpaid
to some stew of soul and self...

I’ll wrench some “purpose” from the pulpit and stuff it on a shelf.

no more ligands
uptakes or exchanges,

just a wall,

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

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

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.

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

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.

Somewhere a matchbox is swept out from under the leg of a table, and in newfound contact with the ground the whole floor comes crashing unto itself...

I do not know what causes a body to revolt:

"The N-terminus of EWS/FLI1 retains the prion-like transactivation domain of EWSR1. This allows EWS/FLI1 to both bind RNA polymerase II and recruit the BAF complex. These interactions change heterochromatin to euchromatin at EWS/FLI1 DNA-binding sites effectively generating de novo enhancers
The C-terminus of EWS/FLI1 retains the DNA-binding domain of FLI1. While wild-type FLI1 recognizes an ACCGGAAG core sequence, EWS/FLI1 preferentially binds GGAA-repetitive regions. There is a positive correlation between the number of consecutive GGAA microsatellites, EWS/FLI1 binding, and target gene expression.
The core motif of ETS transcription factors includes a GGAA sequence. EWS/FLI1 may bind to such sequences with greater affinity than the wild-type ETS member disrupting the normal regulation of ETS target genes."

I did not like the phonics- I did not like how blunt the nomenclature was. It was ugly and guttural, full of dissonant clips of the tongue and glottal propulsions. I am sorry I could not remember the names- even if they were ugly.

I suppose you never think of me, and in your current cataclysm drift away from my person evermore. Nevertheless, I will write this- not as testament but as a reaction:
I am sorry.

There were insecurities placed inside of you by your caretakers- things surrounding intelligence, direction, and lechery. I hope that they will relinquish their scruples to your fate, and that perhaps you will see a glimmer of love as snow drifting downwards to blanket you in numbness when you choose to go outside.

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.

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.