high altitudes and attitudes


my wooden altar is not a large one, yet it floats
above this mountain town in planks of rotting wood.

soft peaks rise behind the tunnel of garbage that builds
in drifts along my temple railings

at this altitude i assumed i would inhale the air of gods, elevated
so much more than physically above the grit and rattlesnakes


but the smell of hot trash is on the wind
as i exude his poison in red splashes of desert fauna and



a smile sways at my mouth, bloodless,
as i descend back into scarab

this is a grave of cottonwood trees
pale light flickering across my upturned face

from under black crowns he examines the shapes i make
with my mouth, colour uneven as a rainer cherry

creamy and pink

in an arc of white he will saturate my feathers
as i play dead, in the glade between his legs

does he imagine, i wonder, the circuits i will i make
in the endless blue above his head

version 192924billion

a whitewashed fence looks orange beneath the lamplight and
i think she's beautiful, limpid on last autumn's leaves

her knees are stark against the dirt back drop as the bruises blossom
like varying species of olives mounted upon her calves

hand in hand, we stumble through the deadened plots where
the drying sheets look more like billowing, middle-eastern scarves

and the pink fireworks rocket across the asphalt as her
stomach explodes out her throat and into a slew of adjectives

at cocktail hour she rides her bike
over the colourful chalk bodies of her
neighbor's children with dust shrieking
at the heels of her trainers she watches
with a blush to the west over mt. baker
perched upon a cement highland she'll
wait for the flicker of sodium lamps and
the dead heat of a setting sun, wishing

wishing a woman could warm her right

an ocean feather snuffs it in an alcove, to my leftjust another pair of lungs to expand and swill the seaand i wave curtly to the ***** on the next corner(nothing to see nothing to see) kindlingher shoulders against the lamp-post shelooks more like an angler than a good timeand paint by number peeling swips, lightning strikesupon her hips and the smoke machine pumps nicotinethrough out my veins, on the verge of somethingepicglitter lines the gutter with a sunless pulse all its ownand concrete currents sweep the ground beneath my feetas i exit the aphotic zone:ale stained blouses and hardened nipplesmake my artist type jealous beneath the soft neonsof the brickyard pizza sign    the whirlpool opens with asureness of free beer to soften my mindand i've done this enough for the anxiety to subsideso i kick off these shoes and iDIVEinto a plethora of flannel jacketsand guys named 'steve'

the hi-fi plays solace to the
granular lobby upon the television screen;
as it flickers from camera angle to camera angle
(tech step moving company,
breaking down to
a                                        white beat)

and i *****
as a panorama of  ******* spasms
discharge throughout my entire skeleton  
and my pulse beats lightly, kilometres
below a curtain of bloated flesh

tonguing lady lucky's aluminum lips, i'm
pickled in sea of apricot floral: meteor bursts
searing behind goo-goo eyes

and i *****
unwanted sentence structure, that gets
caught between the chesterfield and my square saturn venus

i see technicolour but mostly violet
slopped across the walls in polygon inlays as
the bulb from above casts a glare across bare walls
like a nuclear winter, i huddle beneath the coverless duvet
trying to breathe life into sentence fragments as a
freight train tears up the blackened skyline and
with morning, this will be a memory too