i walked through you and found myself at the counter
and I bought some lottery tickets and wedges of foam.
i came up with my own dialect and stammered.
i saw an osprey in a rook... having a nightmare
in the middle of the day.

and i watched.

i had words with a silent thing.
i won the argument, needless to say.
but fewer trumpets were in my bag of air
too asleep to be awake
with the things of you
strewn about the palace
of my misery

I suppose a jewel is vacant
spoiled by the sun and no longer a friend.
the way the things of you
pinch the law of my skin
like a twist in a maze of love
grumpy with northern lights
percolating forever
because love
can.

. .

Love is where the last thing is Always.
a crazy hemisphere of nothing but what you want.
summer is the tool of all winters.
you have no wisdom but the Love you cannot disavow.
and your slumber is nothing but a kiss
where the void has a name
and your face.

So the grey that you see
By the dawn's burning spite
Fraught so loudly with gale
where such calm
had been dreaming,
Soon marauds Night's bright
Flaw...
Through the garrulous plight.
O'er sham sparks, we're caught -
where the malice has meaning.
As the Thoughtless still glare -
At the Hope chest laid bare.
God, mute in the Light
Shouting " Why Do I Care ?! "
So Sagebrush and Amber
are all left amazed...
That the Man who would Be Free
built his own gilded
Cage.

just a pinch of summer now; a little angry on the snow.
and every morn is warmer still
melting in stealth... wreathed in sunshine
and all possible people.

the rim of the night
now listing starboard in twilight....
throwing mist over the shoulder
of your Albatross.
Naked as the Day is long
where the shadows fail
and if you leap
the sky
falls -

to greet you.

she had a black belt in carrot and stick.
but her olive skin derailed every dignity
for a glimpse, and skipped the cigarettes
to keep the peace that nearly cost us
the war.
she had an aire of impossible disregard.
festooned with golden hooks and kool-aid.
a wire brigade of barbs
with two eyes - vacant...
save a dispassionate wail
of an absent goddess
for all your
grief.

with your pain, immodest.

but no longer
underneath.

as if light had a fist, her eyes were bruised. stormy lipids.
marooned in vitreous witness, forsworn to a buoy
on a blind wave. she had the far away inside her
like an ectopic pregnant pause.
too many Almosts in
the Coulda’ Bins.

where she stashed her hammers, the woodpeckers never say.
but time chips away at the verve of her established implosion
like a verb suffocating a Stop Sign.
and No Exit seems an offramp-
somehow.

as if darkness had a twin
with the navel of a pin
to hide an angel
from a stitch
in a Prayer.

she had the gravity that floats
because the bottom
wept.

And I very nearly spoke.

on the heels of my cartoon, but belaboring the art.
sifting through the truth of my crutch.
my high ideals, sweltering
in the sun.
my reason, dismembered.
too bad, you had that light therapy
that raised your skin.
the bruises say nothing about -
your god...
but i savor the irony, when it -
almost does.

you're like a flower that almost bloomed.
chaste and defiled by the wind...
a cumbersome fruit.
ripe in the dark... but under the sun -
a voracious
dot.

and apparently
mute.

this pin in the inkblot
has my name, but your features.
i reach behind me to sing
and the noise that gathers
has no voice, other than
Sirens, breathing.
we lurch to the advance.
but we cascade to the low point
of why I love you....
then sink below -
Why, You might Love me ?
if you take into account
how many words
were spoken....

then you account
for the silence between
Prayers...

and the
Love we
choke
on ?

till we burst...


II

i was one of those things that had no hands.
then I loved " someone " and the moving dart
of rain came down to the center of my drooling loss-
where the heart of my campaign...
still had your name... and a headful of steam
for the Doldrums and the Illness
of loving completely.  

III

Tomorrow is no curse
if I am finding you
at last
like a blind search.
the first thing
a revelation
that Life is
Real -and not
rehearsed

IV

and the next - thing
a simple clarity
that  we
Are.

as you seek from a dream
that you ****. ~ to sustain
the very wants
that you
Will.

but you won't.
but you
want.

The Nigrescence Of White

if you want me to sink into this thing
you'll have to loan me your Titanic.
whoever tunes your piano must sing
and the fables; break and panic.

if you want me to know what you want
you'll have to know me as a cynic.
where all the dogs think they won't -
but they will, they will, they will -
if a bone's in it.

Let me say this... I awoke this morning in the middle of a House Call.
The good doctor had bled on the porch where my begonias
were dreaming... but i sutured his open hand
and suffered the telling of his tale.

I was almost asleep, but then the air cracked like a whip
in a hurricane of dead calm. I was startled from my rest
by a hoard of indigo and rampant lovely things.
i chose not to believe in anything else.
and i come back to you

a moment at a time.

this is love on
off
this is love
i think.

this pollutes
my joy
and makes
war on
peace

a more perfect hell
would be
heavenly
if the fall
fell on
you
like
a brick in
a dream
about
me.

Cleaved from the breast of a hydrophobic stone; I found solace
in disremembering. I stowed away on a barge of flotsam.
Carried the weight of my teeming delirium
all the way, to my tiresome revolt.

Like a Gunga Din... with a bucket
full of wishes. And a bucket
of holes.

I only slept when the dreams stopped.

As foretold.

suspended in the ashen gloom of our rainbows
murked by the sundering of sunlight
by way of black comets and sad stones.
a withering of moon where you often live
till you stop doing that.

sleeping near the river of our quaint desires
all around the throng of invisible wings and tepid prayers.
we gather to the nexus of our fussy razorblades
and cleave a sliver of dust...
happy to have something
we can't even
see.

from the dirge, the strange love is capsized
and many leagues burgeoning with hordes
of faint bliss, lull in the twilight surge
of rogue waves.

i am encumbered by the seagull's joy
at the wreck of my starboard hearth
and the embers of my crow's nest, faint..
as i glean the remote symmetries
of my abandoned map
the bone ship cometh
from anon.

i am long in the tooth of it.
a shambles and a youth.
the world is burning as my sails launch
my futile heart.
i disembark and return swollen.
i come undone
to refuse
to end
it.

and then some.

when i felt time had sloughed off the grime of all minutes
i searched for all meaning, and came upon a deck of cards
floating in the ether, a shuffled deck... and a pair of tweezers
to tease the splinter from the mind's eye
just sitting there, on a book stand
next to a boston fern.

it was when i found a place i could not hide from
and occupied the the nooks and fissures of my actual being
that i came to know the fathoms of deep love
and shuttered to think upon my blindness
as an afterthought
about Nothing.

your whale oil sings to a teaspoon
and the rabbits run fumbling
through the daisy junk
of your yellow sun.
you are blue like green is amber
and the night has lost a thumb
on a scale.
your phantoms pall at your bedside.
they watch you dream and weep
heaving hazy dust
unplugged from a drum.
it used to lay upon the skin
of a tight snare... but now the rhythms
breach and all worlds
are none.

what is gone from you, we cannot say.
but it heralds the coming of a gone thought
on a spool of twine... the weight of moonshine
and utter loss.
it fogs the goggle of pine fresh eyes
and looms false.
but the tethers of your sweet heart
are upon me.

taunt.

i've been endothermic and marginal. stung by cryptic bees
with wheezing stings that haunt the glacier of the private mind.
i have hijacked my quota of dismal and pawned the scope of my grasp for a bird in the hand, in a coma.

rain like the crispy skin of pork
roasted over coals and the Philippines
while the living god pokes you
in the ribs... and the afternoon wanders off.
your soy vinegar is sweeter now
but you can't recall the moon's grief.
so amazing are the the nouns for " now "
but you can't have the Past virtues
of wonderment.
only the cost of a Joy
that your black slender smiles...
and the huge room
you moon from
nothing else but
the Truth

and a Lie.

i wanna get into
living loudly.
into saying something-
for once-
at the very least
twice.
i wanna get into
killing boredom
with a blind rage
and X-Ray
eyes
and  a heart
at the heart
of an open
mind.

even when i lived in barrels i was stung by pre-Euclidean geometries

aping right angles, askew of a laminar flow of Time.
even when i stutter like butter on a lightning bolt
my collisions resolve dormancy
wherever i evict a conspicuous
ascetic tenet.

i twist The End where The Beginning buds;
and watch for spontaneous eruptions-

for Origins, mapped to a powder keg
with a damp fuse.

[ it’s steam engines now… ]

AND
the moon’s belly
is a bright eclipse
clamor-locked in the beastly
barrage of our tuneless
arias…
coping with despotic realities
with aplomb; birthing sunshine
from a myth mirror
emblazoned where harm refracts
exact moments-
tumbling magnetic…

as your eyes
Yahtzee the Forbidden
like a rogue.

with
blunt force
Rama.
as Fore-
​​​​​​​told.

II

infinity pools are finite if you swim like a rock.
or fall asleep when a lullabies’ on fire.


just so you Know.

we serve no dark when we embrace
and nothing cruel can stay. we are too alive to be beleaguered
by the horde of narrow minds, and cast out almighty odds
against; to gather up our perfect days, wallowing -
in the chasm of our bliss... entangled in soft moans
and well spent.

that noise in the margins of our orchestra
is none other than... The Other...
and not the cackle of a silver crone.
more the rumpus of a million bees
in a riot of sunshine.
like a Theme
to a Thing.

sewing the breach in my well worn stockings
where the seam abandoned it's strata
and departed...  it's post, toenailed-
to the cross-stitch of an unraveling weave.
my mind blinks, to moisten the third eye
what been staring at the mundane, overlong...
to stimulate the *******
and hasten the vibration to a resonance
that opens a door  
upon reflection, to the outer dark
and all the bright lands
between the sea
and the murk of -
the cosmos.

to an
isthmus
at
the zenith
of
a sphere.

my socks are
mended
before i find
a spool of
thread.

before the
seam
and
the needle
ever

( met )

where a hole
wasn't

( there )

again

and not
yet.

i pull up a chair to myself and stare at myself....
i eat the Rhine of a melon of rivers... reflecting and dissolving
into my constituent arts.
i fumble and regain.
then the bubbles burst like pixies
on a stone salt cake. but I dream again. and the pipes of twilight
flock to my eardrums, gutting the writhing dark -
and singing the Potomac
of a sun -

I Thought.

We live in tiny hells with beautiful lights
next to our various and sundry boredoms
blithely blithering the hawkish day
out of the clouds and into the fray.
we have no mute agendas.
we celebrate in a cauldron
of our aspirations, with our arrows to the cause
and our eyes on the contrary.

sleep is never as keen as awake too much.


so we live in tiny hells with beautiful lights
and believe that everywhere
all things are not defined but divine,
but **** it,  we don’t know how
to be less blind with
so many eyes
at the same time

staring at fumes.

on my skin lay the words that can't be tamed
and all manner of beasts snarl in golden rickshaws
ferried up the mountain pass to my pyramid
floating on a cloud of lightning, woven by hand
in the heart of Darkness, beneath the canopy
of an old Oak...root bound in the soul of the void
but flourishing, my head wound feeds the branches
when i sleep underneath them, it seeps into earth
that has no form... and I have an insomniac's dream
in the middle of my awakening, by the sound
of your footsteps...
as you make your approach from the East
and bring with you the scrolls of lost tongues
and the rye tales of the crow in winter...
with your eyes marked
by having solved the Mirror's riddle, in the dark.
and your sallow cheeks, flush with empathy and famine.
your coarse hair, descending like elven craft...
resting on your shoulders, as if draped over a banister
of an endless spiral...
I see you before the light strikes
my optic nerve.
Long before the sun
was born...
I crawl from the space -
that contains my shadow
and greet you at the foot of the stairs
where your tresses
caress moonbeams
and I smile
so deeply - even -
the stars in your palm, stall -
their ponderous orbits
to behold.
And I hear
what you have to say
about love and the virtue
of flesh enmeshed
with a Spirit
to untangle
Eternity,
and your voice is soothing
As i listen to the Truth on your lips
till you pause.
then i tell You " It is good to see you, as always...
and would you do me the honor
of sharing my blanket made of glacier skin
and stardust feathers stitched into the dewdrops
i harvest gently, Before dawn...
off the glistening shells
of iridescent beetles
and bluegrass. with my eyelashes.
here beneath the Oak?
It would please
Me.
and our head wounds feed the tree as we dream.
on the roots, we slumber into worlds without end
and i fire my maid for sweeping
the terrarium.

the doors are not perception.  just locked.
i have no keys but the random is not assuring
and all my rainbows have no narrative
only letters from dead gods
and little else.

the bar is closed now.... and the sun is foreign and In Your Face.
we have our wounds to deal with… and nothing else ~
but how a cluster ***** when a dank star collapses.
i’m nothing else.
and that’s Wit.

your ******* are like the sea
if the sea were made of islands
of lost ****... or mice that heave dead clocks
that beat back the passage of time
as a prison... but put forth
skin as a reason to be confined.
your thighs bark humid lips
whoms bite is worse than the absent kiss.
But the kiss is too the bone...
and too tight.

when the wet hunch is fixed.

your eyes are like the warm numb
of a dread quake.
a slinking barrage of absolute sleep
stitched to the heel of a dogstar ,
coming from nowhere -
like anyone that might draw the rain
from the lip of a bee
to appease the queen of Self doubt.
but...

Thine is the kingdom
of the less joy... even as you quake
the pavilions of my hive mind
to better slaughter my lust
with your Unkindness.

I beat wings against the heart
of You.

I walk away with the goddess
that gravity
told me
too.

And that be You.

with my fairy tales exhausted. i had my wits about me.
like huffing glue on real problems.
the sticky-wickets and whatnot.... that gather through me.
like a trojan-horsehair medallion -
at the end of a rope. Or a ray
of  " No ".

A Spot of Bother that May Be Scotch -
Or Maybe Not... but the rot boggles.
the way decay and Seasons agree on everything.
how you can't stop writing letters
to imaginary patrons
and lost mice.

' awake '  is a maze
in a deeper sleep
and i wonder...

then i wonder
some more.

some of my
dreams
stick to
my skin.

i had someone.

but
not anymore.
i have the polyps
of a false heart.
and a ****.

the
school play
of Hamlet -
I Have.

the
only bird
that knows
where the Trees
are.

I know
this.

at last.

but i'm fresh
out of
birds

and that's
the new
math.

the whiskey scorns the back of my throat
as I return to staring into Space. It's almost empty.
save for the holes.
I park my dark, near the tiny star -
on your cheek.
I go where the rain has feelings
and a drought is a flood
of affection...
scorching the tongue
in my besotted
skull.

a cavalry of orchids
forged upon the moon -
but anointed near the flames
at hand. the ready hells
at our door.
bathing in the ashes
of our dreams...
as our celestial trajectory
descends -
into the palm
of destiny.

or so I imagine.
eventually.

but the holes cannot be contained.
nor the spark that divides them.
we suffer for no reason.
the universe is feeling everything.
It is not Thinking,
It is knowing the terrain
of the unknown Grace.
and what the holes may consume
soon returns...
and what happened
was a life.

unconfirmed.

it's yellow bones snap
in the background noise
of your next relapse -
you relax into the coma
of your choice - as sparrows trill
in the crisp air between you
and the world.
it keeps spinning to confuse you.
but the daisies spawn hope
from the dark meadows
of your majestic
hopelessness.

akin to an angry ram. unfleeced.
hurling at the wall of our
bruise... blackening the skin
our shadows
as we impeach
what we
learn.

Now, come along and get there from nearby.
I have a chapel for you to breathe in
and smoked walleye to nosh with fennel
and braised ivy, clutching the flanks of my house.
I can offer you a golden block of Amsterdam
stapled to Achilles' Heel, and a punch bowl
spiked with lavender nettles... and the kettle black
mocking the other black thing.

Now come along and get there, from nearby.
we need hardly talk at all, and i would have you serene -
in the fecund emporium of both our outrageous spittoons.
we give water to the effort we make.... we push rivers uphill.
and the both of us matter, as much as the least of us
do not.

we carry the weight of a sprint
like a gallon at rest.

i see from here, that you are sleeping as we speak.

dream this way.

at the very bottom of the sun
there lies a cold flame
marching up a babies arm
to reach a newborn face
wailing in the wheel
with cherry cheeks
and the bones
of a brittle bit of Bourbon
on the milk tooth
of an older son
than the Waste
of Time.

Life redeems the thief
and the comet on his tale....
we are just a pinch of unrelenting
Birth.... and any god among Us
must grovel at the feet of our
Oysters... where the pearls
of deadly wishes are born
tongue-tied to the frozen spike
of our glorious
train.
we barrel down the track
of as many stars as there are moons
to blind them.
and have no station
in oblivion, that has No purpose.
We arrive in the speck
of our ascension.... Meant to Be !
And Love is the Word
that invented our peril
from a grain of
Prayers.

gooseneck barnacles are laughing at the sugar in your coffee.
you snip sunshine from the heather and embark -
upon the journey of your life -
as a slave to pickled goat and lemon spheres.
you Barley up the pipe, and the rain retreats
to the beckoning... humming in fierce clouds
and singing nothing
but return,

the sum of all Deer, are casting spells into your blind spot, probably.
you can't find a truth in your grip, until it's dark.
and on the gurney, you find the angel, fallen on your behalf... imprisoned.

wyrd.

and you -
have something
fully lost.

you were human again. i just sat there
and watched you.

i watched you forever and ever.

that moment was a coil in the undertow
made of light and perfect anguish... the mother of all loss
and the triumphant stride out of the dark !
you had mad curls in my eyes, bedazzled by your canny
arrival, all of a piece but not peaceful.... struggling with
the dark side of Beauty, as it pertains to your specific
emotional default.

you were splendid.

your Hanging Gardens are Polyps of Neglect
and yet you set your jaw to the gasp at hand
in Awe of a Flaw at your command…
as your Pyramids sleep beneath Dunes
of Antiquity. the very color of Time.
your harps disassembled.
and your Cherubs lacking
The Craft.

your Great Wall is showing... as You horde your inner Mongolian.
and Yes; your Horses fret... but you can’t yet flee.
for dark Ziggaurats hold sway. and your Cuniform
lacks Character.
your Parthenon Anonymous. where all your Blossoms Purge
Elysium Fields of their burgeoning Rainbows. -
that only seem to Untie
when you want those.

For Life.

every day is like a brand new opportunity for nightfall.
i’m not mad about that. I’m a poet, and poets are mad hatters.
i awoke with my tongue in my shoes.
but my feet were not my stride.
every now and then...the Past is a tad sadder.
but i’m happy through it all
yet cannot laugh gladder.
like cat food and consciousness.
i persist like a meal
for a wee beast
and a think.

or I don't matter.

How the red
got in
the red blood
in the first place;
I cannot say.
But how it feels
to behold,
but never holding
is like a stone
all day.

now that my days over boil with teeming
and nothing loves me so.... I must love You.
i must not restrain my whimsy, but rather
conjure amaranths from dead soil. Happy yet deflated -
i must come from Somewhere I have been ....  

or all places.

or else, be in the clutches
of less Beauty.

been giving rainbows jumpstarts in grey areas
ever since point blank range became the metric
of a total *****.

And yeah, that **** hurt.

But you can go now and be the perpetual **** mist
on a black fob in a wishing Hell.
And I hope
you do.

but i must account for my many wounds
by giving fewer ***** about you
and Jupiter will always be the bully
your Mercury sleeps with…
unless the hole in your actual argument
is also the enemy of the Point.
but you sand
witch…

i clock blind rubies by their dozens,
spinning up red ogres and margarine-
in a sheer toast to our fallen comrades
that had other souls to bargain with
but only our fondest hopes
to herald… even as our slumlord daffodils
deign to embark upon new meadows
where cave ravens steep sunshine mead
in preposterous bogotas.

the faucet of every lake dreamt is a drain,