Here, where men's eyes were empty and as bright
As the blank windows set in glaring brick,
When the wind strengthens from the sea -- and night
Drops like a fog and makes the breath come thick;

By the deserted paths, the vacant halls,
One may see figures, twisted shades and lean,
Like the mad shapes that crawl an Indian screen,
Or paunchy smears you find on prison walls.

Turn the **** gently! There's the Thumbless Man,
Still weaving glass and silk into a dream,
Although the wall shows through him -- and the Khan
Journeys Cathay beside a paper stream.

A Rabbit Woman chitters by the door --
-- Chilly the grave-smell comes from the turned sod --
Come -- lift the curtain -- and be cold before
The silence of the eight men who were God!

THERE was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.

And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
There will be high majestic fooling.

The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse.
One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk
And a spot of red is on its shoulder
And I never heard its name in my life.

Some of the ears are bursting.
A white juice works inside.
Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind.
Always-I never knew it any other way-
The wind and the corn talk things over together.
And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn
Talk things over together.

Over the road is the farmhouse.
The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose.
It will not be fixed till the corn is husked.
The farmer and his wife talk things over together.

The body
rolls up in its silver coffin limousine
into the sun-baked empty lot between
the hardware store and the old clinic.
Tin pans glisten in the late August heat.
The crowd chitters amicably to itself
until at last someone lifts the lid
       and eats.
Paper plates soak
in the back of a pickup truck
and sweet tea sweats through the long
                             Carolina afternoon.

Someone's singing chills through your home
Whispers, chitters, cackles and chatters
Loved ones, old ones, one hundred beloved's
Strangers get stranger, stay longer, get stronger until they're gone.
Someone's yelling breaths from your walls
And it isn't you or me.

The little chitters of charged words crying like a chorus line,
whose notes echo off chimes of crystal.

The shakes and jitters of hot nerves dying,
with eyes homing in like a missile.

Tiny critters curled up tight in their respective chrysalides,
awaiting the day they sprout wings.

My current state of mind is electrified,
but oh how the body sings.

all the hard work seems to have been done,
not that any was done
to begin with...

   from the fountain of nouns -
   there's nothing...
   well there's no new new
   in the sense that
   a hammer was monumental
   a bridge too...
   when wine was first made...

i'm waiting for something spectacular,
like a Krzesimir Dębski
arrangement or a film like
American Beauty -
        or just tomorrow that can
be turned into a resurrected
dog...

         not that a life, this life is
somehow wished alternative...
      that it can be: the life... that life...
today i was at the fishmonger
eyeing up a lobster -
perched on a platter of dead fish...
more animated than alive...
animate thing -
   eyes like dark portals -
         i a puddle's worth of a labyrinth
in which an ******* could
equal genocide of my d.n.a. -
something a little horrid:
   just like that...

and of course...
      what is a george oppen poem...
what's a miroslav holub poem...
   two days prior i was in a w.h. smith:
in the classics sections
with the meagre display of poetry
on offer...
    and... well there wasn't much...
so here's to... doing it for free...
doing it for the cult-esque fancies
of a readership...
doing it for... best served outlet:
bypassing editorial qualms and
what would / might sell: eyes peeling...

what's a Will Alexander poem...
what's poetryfoundation.org even about
except: race, bad grammar in bio:
i they O vey you and my pronoun
whiplash: Aladdin's ditto to
               a Khan or otherwise a variation
of Ottoman...

pristine nouns - historical gravity
i.e. a receding pastoral version: today
yes and of a time: that's prior...
when written i'm assured:
not spoken -
  at least that's how i know when
i can relax a little from thinking:
or any other: moral-ought
should i still have any...

       to the source of ontology -
       how to be: prized culprit a nuanced
       deity of the omni-
       prefix rubric like 2 x 2 =

there are some places where only
a first Tuesday of January
at 2pm belongs to...
   i can think of at least three-quarters
of a dozen of such
places: which i will not name...

but at least here: i would like
to express how i relax from thinking:
or... not thinking...
between the structures
of res cogitans / the narrative ortho-physical
gob...
and res vanus / the empty vacuum
two eyes for periscopes
a sea of grey amassing -
     a variation of suppose: people
their own lives...
    placebo solipsism /
           it's like that 'the earth is flat'...
"theory"...
      it's not an 'ought experiment...
it's more a: because it might happen on
c.c.t.v. no chance for north.east.west.south...

exhaustion... fork in the road:
now more sketching than...
it was never going to be a conversation
or a script to... orate & plagiarise...
in the end: that's a beginning...
while in the middle
there's all this shrapnel and...
   a need to compartmentalize...
shove and sort and take a strong arm:
work a shovel...
not that you'd ever use
a shovel to shove...
or shoo / cuddle with a coo coo...
a flurry of pigeons...

    and that i was shat on one today...
years ago i thought it might
be deemed lucky...
  but the image in my 'ed was...
only lucky... should 'un'
                        take a diarrhoea "tot"
on a bowler 'at o' mine...

3 full glasses of wine...
   that's... 3 full glasses of wine...
       a cat sleeping in my bed...
and half past midnight to come...
also...
   had i discovered pinyin earlier...
no matter i'd still be
bothered about the eternal glyphs...
needless to say
i came across hangul and katakana
prior and i knew
they made sense...
            
well: sounds...
         back to the sound of ambiance
i.e. the "music" a refrigerator makes
in the middle of the night...
that there's N
and all the vowels...
       (ン) ア     イ ウ エ オ

and this is how N looks like
     when "mutilated" by, said vowels...
acting as a prefix

n.b. why ES and not SEE
                "C" but not ECK
                 KAY... TEA but not ET
                ZEEZEDZEZ but:
                 EN
                 EM
                           ME N'EH...
                  NA            NO...
syllables syllables...

(ン)ナ     ニ ヌ ネ ノ

MANNA
   i.e.                          マンナ         (1)
                                   マンンア    (2)

      (1) is...             (2)... isn't...

rigid structures of bull-tied-to-tongue
doy'ch:
           stier-gebunden-zu-zunge...
a name of a woman...
                         アンナ...

ナノ:                   n'ah "know":
   which isn't: now...
           ergo: n'oh...
                                laughter in
katakana: ハ ハ
                            ハ   アハ      ハ ....

bother:           cull the surds and then
"somehow" the sounds...

borrow / lend: apples and coal...
i.e. セキタン
          (sekitan)
          リンゴ (ringo) non essentially:
1960s anglo-ßaß culture: rut...
nostalgia... bonfire...
       crisp as: cutting in with words
it's not like there's a moral
backlog of cursed morose & dodgy
fabric... history sort of:
relaxed & ****** off...

           if i could wiggle in some
korean: Ta
                 Ke
                             the periodic
of keeping tables...
   having chairs to char a bias
on for bone...
  serve up the chisel...
    rough up: coincidentally
the brood of stones & stoics...

              hoops... which you could
dub bonanza for chitters,
jokes and jitters...
           variations of D        Z:
talk Fwench ****:
wan                   and qi    cue: K...

the "currency" of verbiage...
      
   otherwise: when a pronoun behaves
like an article...
notable example:
       mein kampf - i'll treat "my" as
a pronoun rather than as a determiner...
the way i see it... thus...
my struggle is...
      casually... my: definitely articulated...

ich / i(s)ch kampf...
                   "i" struggle... which is...
an indefinite article...
blessed jah! the grammar *******
have... cometh!
phi or theta closure?
both?!                  hey-ya!

   variations of:
     chew-tongue... slurp-bone...
  kauenzunge
                 schlürfenknochen...

    loiter-with-shadow:
                   "head" detached...

herumlungern-mit-schatten:
           "kopf" abgetrennt...

rigid like Trent and...
              heave the Rhine, Rodin...

ol' schwab...
    wine = sour-grapes
                                            wein = sauertrauben...

these fesseln these scharniere,
these schleifen: ernte... nichts...
             my godhead humming...
                      no play-pristine-good-fork
of a **** 'ere "now"...
language for the eyes...
language for the nose: K: cardamom...
before we: were never going to
sit it out in a Siberian work-around...
chasm such that the echo: spawned...
litanies in Byzantine...
     which was a precursor to
Turk & Ish...

                     schweinefleischhacken...
what a nice... nice bIG best...
rounded word with
not hyphens...
maXen m'ah mummy: noun that's also
a verb... alias:      schleichumfang...

ein / eine bursary für
                                    sechs ("z"ex):
          
           zitieren:
quetschen - unter alles die onomatopoeias
  (rigid ******* word...
hasn't changed since the greek's
eureka 'id it)...

           los los los...
               gargantuan only with
a glagolitic mmm...
   almost looking armanian...
ⰏⰀ
   マ...
                 Helmut gorun'd'tat...
heave!
              
   - and "they" thought i might just...
give up... tongue like ice-cream...
like easy like
low hanging fruit... like:
for the taking...
all the **** and ****
and she still has a superiority
complex when
i look at it as: collateral...
little o... pseudo-***                  
  
             (ch / č
                        hide a vowel / vowel-catcher...
      cache a vowel...
                    verstecken ein vokal...
                 vokalfänger - or pretend...
just pretend to laugh)...

and croat... down the corridor
of an arm-wrestle between
proto-prussian and pan-slavic
rus...
        tell me some more:
and i'll acute that S for you...

                                                if only:
details could be written in german
as: detallen detallen...
but is... otherwise... beiwerk / nähere...
oops is for: regenschirm -
and bloat is for: pilz...

         and here's for a *******
carousel!
   rotondo, kalimotxo... "jajaja"...
meow-up-m'ah crease of zzz of agitated
lazy of herr Kraz...
certainly...                 if that's how:
letters "work"...

                 arbeit: arrived at:
macht...               freedoms pigeons
and dolphins...       creases of paper...
           come 2am... it's plenty.

Chitters, shivered chatting teeth pitter-pattered when the heater had burned out last night.

So, I covered myself in my blanket and brewed hot tea, but it's only lasted an hour or two.

Or three or four hours at most,
but before I knew it, the sun showed up and sparkled.

Light beams brewed out of me and my coffee cup,
and before I knew it, I had breakfast loaded in my belly,

and a tote bag full of new stories to share all of my
hung over friends after our brutally long
weekend covered with ***** and losers.

Ghosts splash about
on the ice house wall,
beer chitters in the jar,
stories are told in fits and gnarls.

The moon is a bleached breast
in its brassiere of dappled smoke,
up above the cracked wet wire
in the driftwood garden curl.

In a slant, we all watch
a woman across the alley
in her blue dress, scanning
her hands for news of the heart.

In the near square, a thin man
is also a plume, standing shirtless
on his crystal wash of balcony.
The street sings: sea static.

All these people walk blithely by
as rain and steam take turns
on the roulette wheel.
I feel the weight of my interior,

I feel the limit of skin, the world
that ends there. I'm not sure
I belong here at the gathered table:
I'm a reflected photo negative.

Leaves spiral overhead
as the green-bedded steps
rise up in blotches to meet me.  
Loaves of clouds hunt and burst.

Whatever is behind me
presses me forward;
but whatever is ahead
pushes me back.