When my Calling is Calling
And I fail to answer
The Phonemes…

I’m depressed.

And of course, I must be.
Driven North of my South
By harpies
Draped in flags.
My constant Dystopia
More Terrarium
Than a home for
My bees.

And more Hive
Than any Home
For
A Dream.

A plush junket
Of close calls-
Where rice patties
Wane.
Because Prophets
Fail like crops.
And The News
Is just a new Nothing
In Imaginary
Palms…

Phantom
mad.


II


But when my Calling is Calling-
And Negotiations have collapsed.-
As foretold by Introspection
And served on a platter
Of Absolute Narcissism
Chained to an Unspoken Woe
In my Achilles Heel-

My Falderal, fumbling
For Unfaltering.s.

I almost digress.

III


I clamor to the forefront
Of Myself; maladjusted
To Sun spokes.
Privately
Waning.
A Tempered Steel
In a molten
Kaleidoscope-
Hoping
Love hath a Plan
That a Hell
Dismissed.

Or a Poem
Made sense
Of It...

Sisyphus.

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.

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.

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.

to look through you
i had to see Me
for myself.
i had to look
for the first time
at my heart.

and nowhere else.

separate from the swiss cheese tinderbox
in my deerskin hip fob... a white clot of cotton
and pistachio shells... milky with salt dust
and blind empty, like an open mouth.

separate from these. from the iron stalks of snow-melt
and the brittle tympani of my unescorted star.
from the compromise and the motives.... apart -
from all the art of my powerlessness.... [ and ] the polite dark -
of my open palm. like an open mouth.

I ***** for a river stone to whisper oceans too...
with a rope, and a loop. and a hole.

and always wanted too...

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.

Agatha Abernathy slapped clay on a wheel and spun with her bare hands all manner of things to hold in your mind. She slept through thunderstorms as if a storm front were a blanket. There was no such thing as too many cats; and marmalade was a condiment.

Agatha had nothing to say.... And nothing to keep to Herself.

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.

my hand on your hip like a golden fleece
humming jurisdiction and swaying
to the rhythm of your gate-
too proud to wallflower.
my palm-
where the heat of you
commands my grasp,
and nothing is
so keen
as the thought of our
next encounter
with a private
moment
unmoored from harbingers
of impending
isolation.
stuck to the forefront
of an absolute
ravishing.

whirling the dervish plums
of our plucky
resurrections
to stammer free of our bonds
into happier
*******.

thoroughly
in love
where out love
is In.

and no wonder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I will what I will. Just like you do.
I come from the outside, on the inside.
and i know you've been there
too...
it's a shame but we
might be ******.
and I might
be you.

we could call it a day, with
the night removed.

all this love
without
proof.

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.

the way the blueberry numb skull,
sung from a day's gravy-
and the whole of the Sea
was a flat Earth.
but nothing led to nowhere
till you didn't mean it.
the way the warp
is the way
and the void,
the ceiling.

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.

i was black in your face today, and the world kept to itself.
spinning and rigidly doomed, rigidly doomed -
without the slightest epiphany. just a gorgeous glut
of stupendous stupidity.

i was black in your face today, and white things happened all over the world... and nothing changed. I bit my nails and stared at the sun like a Boy. I have no kingdom save the revery of my blood
and my much often love of empty spaces.

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.

Life wages on like an hour at a Time at War
With Emptiness. A brood apart from -
the usual suspects.  It folds space with it's teeth.
And carries on in lush meadows of perpetual.
happy as a dog up a bone tree.

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.

When you can't go to Mars.... you die a little.
At least that's what my September mind has conjured.
And I have every right to believe it. I am Earthbound, after all -
And anything further from the Truth -
Has been deported from my Hemisphere, so only Life's little secrets
Remain... And clouds are made of glass.
But Love is a snail on a heap of burning orchids.
And I rarely sleep without my pills.

Knowing you're still alive is like knowing you're dead.
Summer is a beach where whales rest and the night sky feeds
on their souls. But nothing kills gently. Just habitually.
And the rivers run beside you, because underneath you -
are too many bones.  And Winter is the flame you left unattended.
Like Mars.

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.

nothing drags a frame of reference out of bed
like a fresh start on a pike.
you strap your business-end to a playful lark
and stave off the broken moons
as you Tetris the Possible
like an unknown god.

I hoist my genre by rote;
my tropes charmed and dangerous…
for the pen is mightier than the fjord
of our most opulent shadows.

My Etch-a-Sketch memories diverge
like Christmas geese
flocking to a pagan potluck
as cellular as a private moment with
a Neilson rating of zero.
I tune in when a gadfly lands on the nose of a spite,
and make a poet’s face.
I sleep like a baby on
the Titanic-
but my average epiphany
bobs for apples
in a bucket
of Northern Stars
too keen on wisdom
for a dullard’s
petard.

at first glance, every blank stare
like a horde of eyes
with pitchforks
and torch songs
made of
why?

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.

I cannot teach a sparrow how to sing. but I -
can sing to a sparrow. but not of war.
stars are on my lips. caked in dust and Merlot.
a red stain upon the lyric. numbing the core.
I dread to do the thing that stops the heart.  but I'm
the pocket with the hole full of lint.
it never was, that I be nothing more than apart.
I am always close enough to repent.
should ever I stray to where the light
is Dark.

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.

all a'swoon in the peptides of our ivory
like mastodons marching delicate
or mountains of mayhem as a virtue.
an undesigned design
etched into the sphere of heaven
at the base of your skull
where the jewels to be found there
yammer the light fantastic
like sheets of chrome foam
through a funnel made of mint mist
and delusions of -
candor.

we mark the cave with our cellphone ping
and reap the things in the dark
that could brighten any room.
we have a knack for the impossible
but seldom sell glass beads to mermaids
we live in the kingdom of bent.
so therefore, the fork in the road is inevitable
and your utter lack of choice
a most universal thing.

songs will be sung about how we lived -
on the head of a pin... mending the fabric
of our isolation, and stitching the seams
of our bold stripes... where the whip cracked
and seared it's angry tongue across the back
of our forward thinking.
too engrossed are we, in the journey itself
to ever regain conscience.
we boil at room temperature. and we buy things -
that eat souls,
and have no word for snow -
that can also mean " cherry blossoms commit suicide"
and we sleep in the barn.

where haystacks bed down with stars
and you can still pick a lock
with a paper clip.
where all applause from the void-
visit like rain, all thunderous and good China
tilting on a blade of hope
in the very wheat fields of our daily bread
in the meadows of our irony.
where we salt the earth and continue to crop stones
in the spirit of our palace
wrought from years in exile
stacked to the roof of God's Mouth.
so He stutters your name
as clear as a bell.

and we shan't be consumed by surprise.

we will beguile.

it is the evening and all the world is ablaze with phosphorescent eyes
on long stilts, below the moon’s prayer and above the verdant green
poised in the endless Beauty of the vast creation
swollen with dew and perpetual laughter… like a happy cog -
in a wheel of unbridled Love.

it is the shiny Night with all our parables sinking into the Sea.
all the fathoms of our credible dementia
are illustrious in the extreme.
and falcons soar into open light… astounding the ponderous Enigma.
Joy has a word for Bliss
beyond the Alphabet of Poetry.
It lives in a kingdom
made of new flesh
where a Bone
should be.

It has no name. this wonderment… it gathers in the cauldron of our distinct apparition. we desire and desire… we swoon in the sway of a random riot. rolling in the sphere of our Right Angles.
kissing the invisible
like a visionary blind Truth
in a blanket
full of blanks
that reminds Us
To Behold.

the rain is bald headed and mangled.
you can almost tease a feather from an iron snowflake
but your mondays have all the time in the world
to be mondays.

you chipped a nail on a crucifixion.
but keep your balloons in your symphony.
i see you walking with a cane in heaven
just for fun.

Bo Boggs sat on a Pappy Crush Soda crate, smokin' a roach in a graveyard. The headstone read " Here lies Pinnochio Earle... Face Up. Take Care Where You Sit. " . Bo could see the Landry hog farm, over the tombstone and his mind was fishing for some cosmic corollary as he stared into Space grippin' a cold one. The summer breeze came at Summer's End, bringing with it, a hint of Fall, and far off barbeque. Bo Boggs sat on a Pappy Crush Soda crate in the bossom of a garden of stone. listening to Bluebirds forget the music they had never rehearsed in the first place. And he almost laughed.

Then he wrote that down.

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.

i fell asleep on the train and wandered off.
i came upon a sacred geometry, and dangled
from the corner of a sphere.
at the end of a rope
of light.

not yet a beam. more like a lock of hair
woven by genius and sublime elan.
i found myself naked on the plains of naked glory.
a speck on everlasting mysteries....
i plucked the bones of thin air
and the music was
mine.