Is it sounds
                  converging,
Sounds
            nearing,
Infringement,
                     impingement,
Impact,
            contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
                skeletal,
                             strange?

Is it winds
                curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
                          erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
      orchestration of the finger-tips,
                                                       graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
                              colour itself being god?

you love the angry songs, but it's different if it's about you.
you hate the love songs, but it's different if it's for you.
rub it. rub that **** stain into the carpet so no one will notice it was ever there.
we all do.

During those nights when my heart aches
and beats in those faint echoed thumps
I search for your tiny typed letters
to soothe my swollen soul
deep between those thin sheets and your skin-
echoing.
Your lungs breathe life into the ink on my skin
into songs that bring revolutions in my heart
and revolt against my mind until I’m lost
in the eerie night somewhere between
your fingers and feathers of the pillows.

Box has me press-ganged.
 
‘Please read. I can help you:
recall nausea and ****-buddy
depravity? Dee-press-shun.

‘Suffer the shirk? Cancerous
pressure talk taking its kind
time. Makes the clock scream

****** at twelve. Tick, tick,
tock—it’s time. Open, take and
swallow. Feel much better now?

‘Take another! Toss it down
the hatch. It’ll stun you alive
until dead. You’re chastised, kid.’

There are skunks in there
every night burrowing
into the yawning parts
of my wife’s dream-filled mind.
Night by night, their numbers increase—
as black as her stare,
as pure as her smile.
Backs that bear the white-tipped
senses of God.
They float through as an endless
dark stream
that glistens with my motives,
and confirms my drunken pleasures—
beaming out the secrets of my every move,
my grief,
my thorns.

The truth
is a cage.
My mind
is my dungeon.

She says the skunks are the alcohol.
I say they’re the dogs.
She says maybe they’re everything.
And she was gone before I could move.

This girl struts into class abnormally early the other day,
and my mind immediately begins to spin
because she was always bent on being late—
like some undiscovered oil.
She said she turned over a new leaf.

Next class she was late.
So I asked about the new leaf,
and she said that it was no longer that way
because leaves decay and wither
when they are unattached to stems of sustenance,
and its quite easy
for the dark gusts of life
to blow ‘em onto their other side.

god gets hungry too
one time he mistook the sun for a cookie jar
and pardoned his reach over top the planets for a pecan wafer
but burnt his greedy fingers
so he made the world with his fist

In comes one every week,
tracking into my home the filth of the streets:
some are patterned like cows,
some wear tuxedos,
some have turtle shells on their backs.  
One looks like a whole spice rack spilled out on him.
Barn cats, alley cats, stray cats, exotic cats—
she says no to none of them.

This home is wild and foolish like her mind.
That compassion pours out like acid on my bones.
Then I’m forced to shoot her down  
with words that fly out like bullets,
and more mouthfuls
and more mouthfuls of bullets
that all but ricochet off her iron clad will.

You turn so perfectly
down your roads of passion.
Creep on through the stop signs I put up
and mount on my head the horns,
the ones we pretend we can’t see,
the ones that let the bullets soar,
bullets to **** you again,
horns to undress your sister.

I woke this afternoon
with still a
cinereous sheet over me but
how strange
it was the light and
my head bobbing as in
water of timeless air and
my skin skimming

off touches of memory
inhaled with tingling
apprehension and scents
capable of warping and
disfiguring me to

mereness

Farewell, Santiago


The waves chortle in ripples; his boat
corks from side to side, slapping the surface
with a bone-bow and starving fingertips:
both have lost their names.  But he
gurgle-speaks to the gull and whispers
ancient lore along the foam-crackled crest.
He’s hooded and hunched,
an old scalawag that never found home
anywhere that didn’t drift like him.
Sand doesn’t speak his language anymore.

But the interwoven arms of corals
can tell stories by the North Star,
times when he was agile and supple;
knee-deep in seaweed and the salt-burbled edge.
The night he slit his palm with a pocket knife
and offered life bounty to the tides
in brotherhood; one drop in,
many drops out over the years

and frayed nets, unfurled ropes.
The redemption of hope glistened in cobalt scales
and weighed at market like poison vials,
polluted inky clouds tarnishing
every coin—hardly worth the bloodletting.
Not anymore.
Dusk fans out orchid and orange blaze;
he yawns a welcome to the mako at last.