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.

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.

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.

living sidelives
in light rain-

between a cigarette and a dog too old
to know what it’s barking at...

a man silvershorn about the hair
and the soul; begetting half of a life and a life’s half-ending.

a question placed between the asphalt cracks, beside the flecks of ash...
what does his heart entreat?

(such foul anatomical inaccuracies abound
in this metaphor for the seat of all feeling.
it can be an axis you know. emerging from somewhere within the hippocampus, then the pituitary gland, down to the kidneys, ******, or thyroid just to circle all around again. it recruits and unfolds- projecting outwards to come back unto circuits for grounding)

I cannot know.

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

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.

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.

these beasts have been wrangled
ages ago,
but the sneer of the hunter persists.

animals will be tracked and traced
till form becomes blankness
and their corpses return to the ground...  

then the sky will laugh
in great gusts bellowing down;
because it has no word for forward.

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.

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.

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

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.

My voice was harsh because I convinced myself that you were hiding!
Somewhere tucked in a box of rosewood, peeled at the corner and latched with brass.

I carry- I work to carry like a great mule of the Earth,
Atlas, the mule, myself...
Everything of you should belong to me,
but SHOULD is so foolish,
always so foolish... I SHOULD be a consequence of your spit,
some tiny droplet of mist that floats freely from your lip as you talk,
BUT I am your light, instead.

I want to unwrap your chest, tenderly,
swim in it. I love
your nose.

I watch dreamers turn to terror
in acts of unbecoming; laughing  
till’ they come across some caesura
that caps their throttled love
shifting into stone.

In observance I sing with a tongue plucked from centuries back,
as an attestant to melody and motion
for those that forget nature
is always dancing.

A forest is only idle
when we’ve lost our time for rest-
in rhythm it sips joy up again
and sheds it in sweat upon a stage of itself
for nothing more than color
and the song of an insect.

I think cancer
is a metaphysical condition,
and that apoptosis can reconcile Freud.

I do not wish to bring beauty into death,
but passivity into reunion-

and to remind that, perhaps,
this is a game
of tension.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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

dead-

you are dead. twice over,
curled- in repose
without goodbye.

i miss
your callousness, your disregard.

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.

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

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.

To ground this fear in love-
This sleepwalking ant made of thorns and a tender pulse of the middle *****:

TO GROUND THIS FEAR IN LOVE.

I thought of you as a mother today, as any other day, I thought of you as a mother. I read a poem about a decades long relationship being sundered and thought of yourself, twenty years into motherhood, deciding that I am a sleepwalking ant made of thorns.

My father died after the divorce,
though his body kept on living,
and I have fear that must be grounded in love.
And love, here, so basic.

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.

III. “LOOK AT THE BIRDS OF THE AIR; THEY NEITHER SOW NOR REAP NOR GATHER INTO BARNS”––UNCONCERNED ABOUT TOMORROW. “CONSIDER THE GRASS OF THE FIELD –– WHICH TODAY IS.”

LOOK NOW:

A bus.

In the seat near her, of wired silver hair, of wilting lilies- a face that is a spattering of moles, the teeth an inch from necessity: Brianna. What creature is this? What torment? The nature of yourself is a nature of no other- you are uniquely ugly and I have prayed for and forgotten you.

This is only the presentation of your thighs
with hopscotch etchings and clipped denim…  

You crawl from the ramshackled crevice of timber and shingle,
from the carpet,
  To meet me on vinyl-
and teach me a pity of the circus.

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.

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.

I rest unbent
in the dale below,

where birds perform aerial dances
in the after-light of a sleeping sun.

Every night
my eyes break

as heedless air carries my body
above a cotton sea
into strips of honeyed sky.

Every night
I ask the stars

still hiding

how to fall
and see the earth.

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.

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.

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.

sadly,
i believe,
a word can only approach color.

my masquerade of violet
exists as the consequence of red
and aquamarine.

and i see no likeness to
“vivacity” and “sorrow”.

“children” and “gravestones”
might be a bit better,

but they are not red and aquamarine.

THE SCAR OF WATER,
AGAIN IN THE WINDOW-
A STREAK BECOMES A SCAR OF WATER.

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

I will say,
but my saying is the same as all other things said:

man can be boiled in a ***
till nothing shows but his bleached white bones;
collect a few and build an effigy
to soothe your soul to sleep.

that counterfeit death
formed as a life of empty digits
will haunt you hollow
and mark your children too;

they will never look
upon bags of bridled bones
as hopes to be carried;
but as hallmarks of a blindness
placed squarely in their sight.

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.

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”.

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.

To brandish and damage the Whitmanian sheen:

Can no one tarnish this?
Must anyone pollute it?

It is why I have taken you out into fields-
To make the possibility drift away from empty sight.

Does it not bother you?

To see a mismatched face,
a scrunched lip or sideward glance,
an awkward gait;

Does this not bother you?

I do not think it does.

I live in a rusted compass-
The jittered movement of a world of people opposed to me, fundamentally,
and if they do not appreciate some superficial charm, a quick wit or jawline, then I am a burial ground.

Does this make sense to you?

My shell- who I AM and what I AM in myself,
Is everything of myself in this world: do you understand?

This complaint is a feminine one- a constant feminine one and I do not understand-
it is why I have no patience for the division of quarrel when it allows a space for a will,
and no patience for women when they are born such beautiful creatures.

Do you not understand this?

Everything constitutive of the feminine- be the term bastardized in logistical torment or made to lay prostrate at the altar of the Wesleyan Thesis- is condensed and made perfect in the fold of an elbow, or the basic weakness felt in opposition to the disgusting brute that is the man.

I am a disgusting brute. I have a gut and I have hair on my body. I am a machine- the secondhand contrivance of a protective god. A monument to gestation.

Even when I ***, in brief movement and in brief moment, I am but a moving forth- out of myself and into another to be held, and this action (so crudely overlooked as to be made the absent declaration of an ALGORITHM) reminds endlessly of my transience;

And my transience IS ME-

In the womb I am a decision- behind the first action, the basic action that is womanhood.

There is no reading about this:

The problems of order, systems of order made unto systems of order, are for themselves, and as such exclude the scrunched lip of the passerby- they extrapolate from them an unrealized intention and fold into them as a torment…

And in the fold there is ruin,
and life conditions for patience in the ruin-
to be greeted with anything ‘other than’ is no different than being granted love in a passing dream;

And in the fold there is hope,
I am conditioned through and through, surely, to become something other than myself.

There is no medication for this-

No return to the unconditioned, or
Escape in the unconditioned,
only Logic in torment for the the significance of the interplay between a slit and a rod,

And the gentle retardation of Women
And the gentle retardation of Man

Made into a choice of scarves and lugnuts.

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.

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.