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

omnipresent sick to my ******* stomach

dressed in mosquitoes that are woolen
like the lining of my english ******* and
coated in a complex mixture of secreted proteins
i follow the screen of the teleprompter as it storms,
blue and brilliant behind a mess of optical wiring.

lip and teeth
theres bile at the base of my throat
threatening to bust with each greased second
as my brain becomes nauseated by the snow-drift
of sentences burning the back of my eyelids.
i've never believed the things i read
so now i'm mute but spitting, spiteful and unoriginal
visualizing their greyhound decapitations in high colour.
nearly implying transit to our friendship or something
that would only churn the stomach like rich food after famine

so yes, i am the cruelest female of august
shipwrecked on the front porch with the lamplight raining in my mind
and i'm asking the moon as it rises like a solemn word
why i'm sick all the time, sweating
from everywhere but my tear ducts and
waiting for several breeds of cold to attack my corpse

many girls i know like men that glean
like sky-scrapers, brilliant in their hard lines
that rise up from the ash in a fit of man made glory.
somehow, i bypassed this lust for babel opting for flesh
teeming with genesis like the forest behind my cabin.
its heartbeats of life with in death pound beside me
as i lie in bed with the light off and the blinds open
looking at poplars like they're the pillars of Hercules
crudely inscribed with the letters ne plus ultra.
i thought he was in the spirit of lake of the woods
but his roots do not flourish here, they scour for soil
and water finding only dry sand. so at what point
did i stop ghosting the natural curve of the road
engulfed by the yellow of my favourite blouse
reflecting back in the blacks of his eyes like lighthouses
or twin Brittle Bushes from the Sonoran. he is nothing
but an African desert where children absorb warnings
like liberal skin, oblivious to the natural radiance in desolation
and everything that i will eventually let go

there she is: a glimpse of purple in prehistory
highlighted on the bluffs like an exhibit of magnetism.

a zooming highway energizes the distant panorama
making the evening surge like a crowning infant against her back.
it fills the canvas sails of her muscles in gusts of bravado, daring her
propelling the stiff mechanisms of her legs and arms

9000 stars shatter her cheek bones
as the sun severs its main vein making her
just another small boat to crash on an undiluted shoreline

somewhere near the nuclear power plant,
a young thing (not ready to remove those green tights)
observes the peach coloured flame of twin platoons from her window.
they burn at the base of the coffinlid like saliva to raw sugar, uncaring
that soon our sun will bleach it all away & have her
adoring minnesota

but only in the mornings, when
its mint walls and all cherry panels filled with sky.
because she knows, if she lies down flat enough she will
only catch a hint of sherburne roof tops and
fatefully begin her anticipation

for the hammering of sparkling nails deep into to dark purple.

latin can not describe the electricityof blue veins suspended in cala lily skin. they fan out,protazoic, dormant beneath a sea of iced flesh.i grip the sink, peroxide strands of kelp washing upon the banks of my shoulders likethe white-gold sunshinethat would prism behind your chinook archwith all the beauty of a nuclear winter.for the transplant of my frontal lobeto the heaven above his stratus comforter, instructionshave been written. next time he is carried in on a foen wind i am toone, stand very stilltwo, present my brain to the skyand three,wait for the apricotsof sunrise to settleinto the overcast of his eyes.i practise a little and wish i had a veinous hum, skepticalthat an electrocardiogram could detect a beat.

dynamic movement

collar bones acting as natural handholds
i read my names from your lips--- agiocochook

lumps of red ochre stain marble boulders
text is only fifteen feet from the ground

winter cuts skeletal fingers from black bark
we float beneath the blue vitriol of early february

the corpse of my sunglasses lay
between the door and the passenger seat,
grave half forgottenlike an earth folded indian of old

in a tin can on an electric line of string i
admire each stretch mark on the stomach of heaven

the lakewater near the banks darken with the shadows of coniferous trees
not unlike the way my ***** darkened just the other evening with transgression
and i find myself waiting,arcing the ash from my cigarette in fiery transient streaks.

this is north west angle's public dock, a sunken relic of the anishinabe
appropriately too young to be old just like the ******* rest of us.
kee no wahh she spits with conviction,
her forked tongue a testament to the near science fiction
that keeps its ugly head low to the ground
in the backwater communities of
rural ontario and manitoba
and saskatchewan
and beyond.

purple and yellow and green galaxies span across the deep space of my neck
and that's good enough, they reckon, to land me in the passenger's seat.
now the sun's shallow beneath the canadian shield
leaving only a violent, open **** on the skyline
and the watered down blood of ritual sacrifice to
filter up through the cheesecloth of the underbrush
and effectively discolour the poplars in a pastel
identical to the lining of my ****

so ask me how many children have been
stranded on the pallid, uneven terrain of my thighs
and i'll stop making references to my ******