She was the rain
when I was spring
but summer became I,
alas it was just a fling

Naked branches in a
dendritic pattern
fastening on to leaves
as Fall fell.

But drives away the soft snow
the blizzards unwanted
a stormy winter
unexpected

Skyward, the dark side of the moon
drawn to the faint traces of light -
continuously teased the edges
of the forgotten surface
obsession consumed I
to start a spin

I grow to become the
hunter only to see
the chamois conquering
my struggle

like an insect trapped
in the strings of
the eight legged
she beast
beating a
rhythmic tune
signalling a
tell
tale
heart

the end of me
no bang
only a cleaver
silently shushing
with an overdrawn
whimper

and
repeat.

Oh cute little thing
I like your contour

you look pretty funny when you're cold
you get these lovely wrinkles
especially in the middle region
nearly dendritic
more like the cracks in the earth

and your satchel breathes on its own
like a brain if it had lungs for itself
but more like an amoebic celestial body squirming around in some primordial goop
I think that's pretty cool

you're a pink and brown mushroom emerging from a forest of black wiry moss

concentrated around you and
all growing in your direction

almost lifting you up and out
and then further away fading

the way the water gets clearer
above a sand bar

and then a great convergence
a crashing of two great waves
against each other

forming a wall of spindly tendrils
before the whirlpool

You smile black-eyed as
the city belches blue neon
through its steel-glass canyons;
a cobalt factory of lumen, pulsing
through dendritic labyrinths
of sapphired circuitry.

Diodes of cerulean fire,
spreading with virulent sophistry
amid the glittering obsidian dark,
like pale horses of light that
leap from pane to inky pane,
like a Pentium’s ******;
God’s own seething fireworks
watched in reverse
as they float in through my car window,
strobing blue against your freshly
washed hair.

City limit space expands,
it's threaded through with veins--
grey-black dendritic strands
                                     span
                        across this moldy brain
of a city.
Our rotting nights spray hits around
           the places players play.
The impulses will whitewash all complaints
'til the glaring day.

I wanna spit-shine every storm drain,
stain the cracked sidewalks in white,
take this town to Sunday morning Mass,
though she was born for Friday nights.

We're gonna trickle past addresses
                                                   now,
Electroshock through habit streets
these crosswalks sneer with snide expression.
Mildewed thoughts we'll hardly think.
A conversation you're repressing
I'm smoothing out my wrinkled brow
Another weekend's blurred out
blank confession
melts off the tips of tongues,
          I can taste it now.

Circulation space expands,
we're threaded through with veins--
this bio-asphalt plan
                           spans
              all through this molded frame
of a body.
But rotten thoughts, like ships aground,
                   teach sailors how to pray
when impulses have buried all complaints
'neath the foaming spray.

I wanna shade out every bruise now,
paint the dumpsters all in gold.
Missoula, listen: You're a lady.
I don't give a **** what you've been told.

A moldy brain dreams slattern makeup
for a prizefight town each night
so let's take up every artist's brush,
paint shadows on these barroom eyes.

We're gonna flow right through these boule-
                                                          ­          vards.
Electroshock through habit streets.
These dim lit yards and spoiled thoughts
are hyphens placed between each week.
A conversation you're repressing,
I'm smoothing out my wrinkled brow.
Our city's made-up face is running
off the tips of winter and I taste it now.

We are Mother Earth
We are the soil into which
ideas grow their roots
These dendritic webs of words reach for nutritious extrapolations,
anchored answers that ground, keeping the rain from washing them away and the wind from uprooting them from the dirt.
They sprout out of us
as we nurture them
until they blossom
into another.

I followed a writer
up a prodigious tree
Every leaf I brushed,
his poem.

From the crown
I scanned the pastoral
a poetic landscape in repose,
A resplendent chorus of
Glistening verdant wisdom.

O’ vast vibrato of sibilance
slipping the breaths of
Thalia and Melpomene!
Alight by dusk, I lingered.

Comes the long wind of winter
to undress each tree!
So from my aerie,
through gaunt branches,
I could see…

The low-slung place
where each poem fell
I thought, “here so many,
clothed in so much comedy
and tragedy…
recite their odes
of heaven and hell.”

And down I climbed
and away I walked
Over quiescent leaves
while red and russet
ran from their dendritic veins
Moldering into the palette
of dormant memories.

O’ even now
The sweet scent of decay
Reminds me of Spring
when I will climb again.
From the rot of the roost
to the dust below boots,
by the pen of the winter writer
Spring will come again.

L'heure verte

The mountains. The heaps of their bountiful gravels, and earth, and soil, large oversized masses of half-frozen water teetering on the precipice of subzero masculine *******. Francophilic cleavage jetting out of this deserted white pastoral dressing. The inaugural bawl, wanton fixations of putting the imperialist foot on every spot of tree, each and every shrub, until the limbs' cast reaches each dimple that foliage braves, where that blue eagle of patriotism dredges its claws to form every river, rill, estuary, creek, channel, flume, littoral, and waterway where the iron-rich gullies once brimmed in the interamnian basins, rich crimsony waters riffling through fruitful and extravagant aquifers. Beyond that, where an inexplicably feral wind rips vines from their dendritic housings, where barely an eye can see, this place of exsanguination and abysmal phytocide.

At the end of this lamentable torture, only a desert of human interest remains. There is no reason to laugh, or smile, or cheer, or put a leg up, to call on a friend, or to have ice cream. There will be no more ice cream. There is only the loathsome incredulousness and avarice in the semblances and familiarity of those with whom we thought we once knew. Little can ever be known, for there is much to gain in the absence of knowledge, and even greater that can be acquired in the alms of wisdom through patient examination and thorough silence. Here on the buttes and cornices, the thwacking gavels of evil power deities throw down their lust for more and soon become adjoined to these grand discrepancies greed mistakenly loses to a lack of awareness and to self-aggrandizement.

Power is the weapon of inexperienced wielders. Passion is the immortal frequency that is worn by artisans and artists, poets and painters, it is the business of quietness to learnedly evolve to protect our tomorrows from personal needs, but to instead preserve the integral parts of society. The words of languages, artifacts, and cultures, rather than the skeletons of ****** and the deeds of possession. Each who sleeps knows their bedfellows to equally be at peace. For no wealth can exceed that of comfortable pillows, soft quilts, and sheets. We are all the same while we sleep.

Her whispers writhe upward, warming my lips
Chased gently by thoughts, and fingertips
Which pulse over keys, sewing words onto fields
Of love thirsty parchment, tenderly peeled
From shavings off banyan trees, twisted in time
Woven from tangles of roots and vines
That glimmer and glide on the twirls of her hair
That coil around dreams as they swirl in the air
And reciprocate whispers that blend into sighs
Reflecting like moonlight in opening eyes.
Honey silk visage and java, like brindle,
Eyes like flint against frizzen, will kindle
Fire in the heart, calling men once missing
To a resplendent nexus, of lost souls kissing.
Arcadian journeys of body and mind
Sing from fathomless depths of space and time.
Geography traversed by her steps, sublime
Bearing piedra de ijada from a far eastern mine.
Electricity leaps in passionate arcs,
from skin to skin in dendritic sparks,
That strobe over rhythm beneath the sheets,
as lovers listen and friction speaks
in syncopation with shuddering breaths,
from sodden mouths that sweetly press,
And I close my eyes in synchronicity,
but even closed, it’s her I see.
Tasting the salt of a single tear
A harbinger, for the moments near.
High on the hum of hopes embrace
as rapture and destiny hasten the pace,
I open my eyes to watch her go,
but once inside it starts to grow
into a poem unleashed in my heart,
By a byzantine kiss, after lost lips part.

Couldn’t sleep last night
so I did the next best thing
and quaffed caffeine until
cerebral vasoconstriction
set in
I think
I know I have always been embarrassed to be me
but I guess
if nothing else
Humiliation breeds diffident dissonance humbly so
so foggy up here
a tad bit soggy,
saturated with my diseased anatomical atoms
my dendrites retreating
softening like rotting fruit
so much potential so little actualization
synapses overloaded
with drugs
that I didn’t know

Like the lone tree in the farthest forrest
dendritic pestilence is high and corrosive
I’m high and corrosive
and
I sigh for the lovers that never knew I loved them.
I miss the lovers that I never knew I loved.
and
I love the lovers who didn’t don’t and wont love me.

Couldn’t sleep last night
so I did the next best thing
and mirrored the rain until
pillows were
sponges
I think
I know I have always wanted to be caressed slightly
but I guess
if nothing else
creation breeds ****** succulence cunningly so
so sticky down here
a tad bit rickety,
saturated with my diseased anatomical atoms
my elevated coronary coronated erosion
sputters like a misused Porsche
911
so much beauty so little left
arteries caked
with yesterday’s cigarette
that let me let go.

On 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones
and walked into the River Ouse,
which together with its main tributary,
the River Uck,
drain over 250 square miles of Sussex
via streams,
rivers
and various other dendritic tributaries.

While the water temperatures were surely harsh,
historical weather patterns suggest
relatively calm surface tension,
and relaxed yet steady currents,
allowing for swift submersion

Taking into account,
the chilled morning winds,
her quickened, shivering breaths
likely led to hyperventilation.

In turn delaying the breath-hold
break point, and allowing blackout to occur
without warning
due to hypocapnia.
While unconscious, water can more easily enter the lungs
to induce a wet drowning,
as it is no longer inhibited by laryngospasm
or coughing.

The Missouri River,
by contrast,
rises in western Montana,
flows east and south for 2,341 miles
before entering the Mississippi River north of St. Louis, Missouri
taking drainage from parts of ten U.S. states
and two Canadian provinces
to form the fourth largest river
system on Earth.

At some locations throughout its course
the current surges so fiercely
that old-growth trees are felled,
steam ships are consumed beneath white caps,
and swaths have continued to go undeveloped well into the 21st century.

When lowered into water cooler than about 70 °F,
the diving reflex is triggered and protects the body
by putting it into energy saving mode
to maximize the possible time spent under water.

This reflex action is automatic
occurs in all humans,
and is likely a result of brain cooling similar
to the protective effects
of deep hypothermia.

Of those who die after submersion in freezing waters,
around 20% die within 2 minutes from cold shock.
Uncontrolled rapid breathing and gasping causing
water inhalation, panic,
massive increase in blood pressure and cardiac
strain leading to cardiac arrest.

As this occurs while submerged
rather than the hyperventilation seen in panic attacks,
crying, or shivering on land
any additional survivability that may be gained,
becomes almost immediately fatal.

In order to combat the effects of
instinctual survival mechanisms
once bare skin breaks iced surfaces
such as panicked clawing back to shore,
rescue attempts from passersby,
and even simple reconsideration,
cold water drownings,
despite representing only 2 percent of suicides,
reveal a visible trend regarding near mandatory use
of bricks,
stones,
or other weights,
in order to overcome
buoyancy,
the names of pets,
canceled brunch dates,
birthdays,
and the forced finality
of questions left unanswered
or perhaps answered too clearly.

Her whispers writhe upward, warming my lips
Chased gently by thoughts, and fingertips

Which pulse over keys, sewing words onto fields
Of love thirsty parchment, tenderly peeled

From shavings off banyan trees, twisted in time
Woven from tangles of roots and vines

That glimmer and glide on the twirls of her hair
That coil around dreams as they swirl in the air

And reciprocate whispers that blend into sighs
Reflecting like moonlight in opening eyes.

Honey silk visage and java, like brindle,
Eyes like flint against frizzen, will kindle

Fire in the heart, calling men once missing
To a resplendent nexus, of lost souls kissing.

Arcadian journeys of body and mind
Sing from fathomless depths of space and time.

Geography traversed by her steps, sublime
Bearing piedra de ijada from a far eastern mine.

Electricity leaps in passionate arcs,
from skin to skin in dendritic sparks,

That strobe over rhythm beneath the sheets,
as lovers listen and friction speaks

in syncopation with shuddering breaths,
from sodden mouths that sweetly press,

And I close my eyes in synchronicity,
but even closed, it’s her I see.

Tasting the salt of a single tear
A harbinger, for the moments near.

High on the hum of hopes embrace
as rapture and destiny hasten the pace,

I open my eyes to watch her go,
but once inside it starts to grow

into a poem unleashed in my heart,
By a byzantine kiss, after lost lips part.

We want heroes,
stars, emperors,
and sun kings
to lead us out
of Darkness.

We want
Mommy & Daddy
to make
the hurt go away.

But what can I give?
I'm just a bit player
like David says
in the pilot
of a new sitcom on
the Comedy Channel.

At first, I make whole
my career a foot
like Wesley's child.

One day, I pull myself
up with a thousand hands
twirling, connecting
in dendritic arbors.

I stand at last bare
face against Absurd face,
naked as a rolling Stone.

Nosferatu     would have balked if not   gone bald.
    They,  too,    from themselves their selves do balk.
Circumnavigate     the   lily pond,
          Iron Lady in the    swaddling baking    egg pies,   with spited
     Curlers    in our    fronds   and — equanimity's edict — forest green-eyed addict —   is
A     plumbed    plum;    a dendritic denizen for    the   cypress,
Willow that   's hung!     Willow that sung!    Soothing it   hugs
     the    sights — such   sour honors  — so smooth-over the boy's club,      so you can get in or      out    whichever    youregoingfor;
bring    them their rose water   which drips   next to the
     chiffon and the    lubricated sewing table — the grape to-
  mato-mottled lunar  ligament: by  dew of the top lip, do lay —
     go gray    in taut winter

Today I find myself less of a writer
And more of a weatherman.

I’d like to talk to you about the settled snow
In my stepfather’s suburban garden,
That he worked so hard
And cracked his dried skin
To call it his own.

I’d like to tell you of the still air
Crisp with an early-January cold
And the sun that is daring to peek overhead
In the distance on a roof.

The only snowfall now is from the dendritic bark
Of the apple tree in the centre of the garden,
Melting just enough to slide from the branches
And the squirrels shovel snow
From their houses

for a moment
it feels as though the urgent heaviness
of my breath were pushing
pulling at the boughs of bright dead
leaves
and then I realize

that it is only the wind
I begin to shake with dry
laughter at the absurdity
of my thoughts
catch my reflection in a puddle
at my feet
my eyes are terrifying

i mean terrified

trees break through the ground
all around me, reaching climbing
endlessly upward as
towering neuronal bodies
erected as extensions of the earth’s wild head and the earth
becomes an extension
of my being

i cannot seem to control this
but that is all I wish to do

i am crushed by my impermanence
yet I flee to its consequence
planning my ascension
to ascend as a tree
my bones a relic of everything
i was

trees break through the ground
i think the ground is shaking
but it is only my limbs

half-barren treetops mock me
dendritic and unpredictable
phrenic and phrenetic
reflecting body and mind
at every level:

nerves and neurons branch out
to relay messages
of pain agony suffering

phalangeal forms diverge
From a hand

limb and head from abdomen

dendrite from soma cell body
a symmetry to which
there is no end.

for a moment
it feels as though the urgent heaviness
of my breath were pushing
pulling at the boughs of bright dead
leaves
and then I realize

that it is only the wind.

Whisper your soul through my veins
so that as it advances
with God and eternity, the Cosmos, and stardust
around, around, around
the dendritic network shines as many lighthouses,
for the shadows to retire
and virtues flourish.

"Gratitude is the attitude,"
the fat priest said,
as he was getting ready
to spready his leggies for you.

He was tryin' to
sum up a hymn 'r two
before he finished suckin'
yer cryin' cockatoo

and I don't have to tell you
that it wasn't nice, dude!
'Cause well, you weren't singin' like you used to,
or how he wanted you to, you bad boy you are
confused and forgiven but no longer can you feel innocent,
you're a sinner you ARE a sinner, and He MADE you that way,
in His image he MOLDED the clay, NO! Not 'He'!
Everyone. Every single one.
You.  

**** the use of these patriarchal pronouns in reference to The Great Spore Spitting Blossoming Mushroom Flower that we're all giving birth to and dying from simultaneously and, seriously, I'm a little bit tired of these petty **** terms with which we're supposed to identify each other. You can't define my identity with your silly communication system, that's an internal state that I externalize on command and sometimes not! Sometimes it just comes out, but it NEVER comes from the devil's mouth, unless it's my own **** devil. Give me a new ******* pallete. I pray for a sensitive tongue.

For God's sake we make ourselves and we make each other.
For God's sake if we make ourselves out to be failures, then we are making God a failure, and what's that? Laaame! But what's That?! What's that I feel? Is that some discomfort with the usage of the word 'God'? Is that a lingering connotation from the days of THIS IS WHAT GOD IS, nothing else, NOTHING else? Well **** that too! That's an endless maze you won't find your way out of until you scale the walls! SCALE THE WALLS! I make God in my own image, but I don't OWN the image. You've gotta BE the God you want in this world. Sometimes I do it when I showah 'cause I have the powah. Sometimes I do it when I'm chillin' with the great lake spirit and the great tree dendritic spirit cilia that reach up and out of Gaia like loving arms awaiting a tender embrace from a lover after years of reaching for something that cannot hold them but truly must be BEHELD. And so I learned they are always beholding as they reach.
That there's always more to behold.
And so that's why they grow.
So that's why we go,
it's why we flow.

So let's make it a collaboration.
Let's make it a celebration!
We can behold it all forever.
We can behold it all together!
Well, sometimes. Not always.
We all need space, y'know?
It's healthy.

Peer into the looking glass
Through to the shadowy pit
There is a figment curled tightly
Just under the lash at its periphery
Look deeper.
Past the mouth
Past even the bottom
Of the crater
Into its hidden systems
Of tunnels, streams
Cellular clusters of caves

Right...there.

Can you see it?--

That which makes you twitch and sway
And grasp at phantoms?

These are the inhabitants of the mind
The cold, pitiless
Dendritic eels
Feeding on the sparks
At each synapse

Hollowed echo of blue-tongued screen
Blushing grin behooving trance
Transcendental cusp of ponderings
Lingering in collaborative sweat-knit
And swollen dendritic emanations

-an entry from the National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health-

processes protruding
excitatory synapses
cerebral circuits
dendritic differentiation

growth is     s         lo           w.

a complex dance, unfolding of a blueprint; how do we understand this dance?

stress stress stress stress stress learn grow develop stress stress stress stress stress

the brain is sensitive! plastic changes are not all permanent
                                 permanent
                                 permanent

choose...you­r...psychomotor stimulants!
amphetamine
*******
nicotine

choose:
gray or white matter
schizophrenia or drug addiction
ADHD or depression

the brain structures will not be changed;
pathological plasticity = pathological pain

                                                           ­                      not all plasticity is good
just like a sculptor
who creates a statue
with a block of stone
and a chisel
to remove the unwanted pieces

in vivo → cell death

They keep the air cold to slow the spread. A pale light draws you into existence, a bloom of city smoke and glass. I watch the shadow of your wrist thin as the sun dies. You turn your head away.

Everything thins. Houses shrink. Streetlamps burst. Organs wither. I walk for hours along the wharf. Rain trickles through broken windows and falls into the black harbour. Dust clots the waterways. Skin sheds.

The problem is you were born human. Turned away, you obliterate.

A woman swears at her crying child. She pulls his arm violently. Existence floods the air. A miasma of confusion, fear and hatred. The mirror turns outwards.

You rise with your bed. A fold in a sea of whiteness. It was your spine, they said. The thing holding you together. It was disintegrating, flattening to infinity.

There is nothingness. A flood of it. A pitiless swell that never ends and threatens to crush the world with every breath. Bated wait in a heart white as bone.

Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of—

The IV fluid is imaginary. So is the taste of cold water beneath your tongue. It is a fractal world. A reality formed from a fragmented possi—haven’t I written this before?

There is a traffic accident. I am not there and neither are you. They pull you out of the wreckage, smoke rising from your chest, breast alight with hatred. You gaze at me, a stranger, and I break into shards, each one capturing you like a memento, a death drive.

Ash falls from the sky. I gaze up until I am blind. I reach my hand out and find the neck pulse of the earth. I find you.

I sit in the common room. I shuffle through pieces of myself. There is nothing here but you. Where am I? Where the **** am I? Where is the nothingness between you and I? Someone addresses me. I look up and find myself incapable of speech. I reach out but my arm fails to follow. I listen but cannot catch a word. The bell rings but you aren’t here. I look down. The pieces reflect nothing.

Reality collapses. Hypodermic crash to the libidinal economy. Desire and lack the same. Anticathexis sublimates into worthless ******* words on a document. Wren bursts black particles across the pavement, like cancerous soma running fingers through a spinal column. You smile. I sink. I sink.

The mind is sick with existence. Ganglia, myelin, dendritic sprawls. It all functions. It all works too well. Purpose, connection, reaction. I envy you. I *******—

Winter is here, bright, empty winter, almond grey and silent.

Mangled, bony fingers, groveling
for lapping water, a dendritic rivulet
ceases its division for no one

I powder the amethysts for sand, for
only the sensation of opulence, anywise
the silver tarnishes in abundance

And what's the worst I'd ever seen
if not our maize sun ashen, drained of its
rise and incentive to foster grass

-------------
I can stop myself, I am under no pressure
to conform,
to be sure, I seem naturally alone,
I think more clearly with the magic pen,

it is all magic is, easy to use, once the knack.
Letter use. That's the knack,

take these blocks, did you never use blocks,
the very best way, blocks and songs,
and friends,
maybe,
not to help you build, but to see you build.
Sound held in letters,
let loose from the mouth saying sing it now
sing it
with me, next time.

No time, no functional conjunction with the main
thread, we maybe stuck in a dendritic split end.

I should stop and regroup, I will signal dead-end
at the next turn.

--- Switching tracks, find the hand that works,
use it, as if it knows where each letter lives, and pulls
it full formed in type.
And should any older love for kerning and leading,
linger as if ought had gone from the life in the letters,

when every thing became Times or Helvetica,
for all the difference it made, in the words themselves.

Meaning set, surroundings, ganz environs, toto re
ality as all in real already,

read it again, the signs in gut, relegate, read anew,
the old ties to knowers and showers of knowns,

fire is easy to display, Zarathustra held it in his palm,
any school boy can do it, on a dare,
and the one who knows the trick, need not say.

I know, I know.
Acknowledge truth, in all thy ways,
and watch your steps be guided, as each step
moves you past now, and then, to next step

perennial holy days, set aside for recollections,
who did we tell our children is actually in charge,
?
and our culture sold all its offspring to be shaped
into citizens useful, as required,
teach them to learn,
then let them learn to make a life, or live the one given.

I'm watching
an idyllic
scene

The ego stroking
job of the imagination

The ego scaring
job of the imagination

This lovely balance

Illusory

Tricksters abound
'twixt your ears

Mastering your
awareness's

Like channels or now
streams

directed at  you
full time

crafted to please
every fiber

i've subscribed
to electrons

one at a time
down a sliver

I am charging
up

and will
assuredly

what
***

a dendritic
brew

of imagined
fastening

snags of now
to then

I don't have
these costs

I assure time
who's deaf

and fulsome
and smells

of grandfather's
spring

time retracts
leaving

you here
wondering