And on the 23rd attempt she was half-realized
But across the sea she began to see in her dreams
What her eyes on the paper stared out at from the past

She forgets dreams upon waking
She creates schemes with fake actors,
Attractive and confident people
And evil surrounds her
I don't like to be around
Fearing their presence
And she hears on the wind that I won't be returning
But all that this tells her is
Life will go on as it has since the time
When her faces were being
Configured on paper,
Her true form solidifying
With each passing club meeting
And art school submission
And throw down the gutter
And substance test warning
The morning before being
Forced to report on the innocent wives of the kinds
Who prepared what our minds
Would later consume and disintegrated
Reforming 10,000 years later
More open and flexible and appreciative and reverent
And ecstatic and creative and mindful of its functions

Where do good ideas come from?
They shrivel away from the hypnotizing light of a virtual socialite
They grow toward the sun out above the clouds
Ever-present from birth to death,
They're the latest permutations of the same explosion that started that
Fusion core up there running
Running without stopping for a billion years
Fueling the experiments of life that consciousness spontaneously manifested
Across the planets
Each a test of a different vibrational frequency
Incompatible with one another but coexistent
Mercury's barren silver mines
And the Venusian valleys
And the regal red sands of Mars
And Jupiter's infinite wisdom and so forth to the edge of the Oort Cloud
And the green and blue ecology of earth, the waterworld
Where the entire drama we've seen so far has been carried out
The audience has grown in appetite
And doesn't always see that it too is the performance
But the unwilling blindness is all part of the sublime suspense of this subcosmic game
The planetary curiosity,
Can we make it? Would it matter?
We'll never truly die when we forget time

It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer
Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly
The pollen-filled air flies past like the
Pelicans at the edge of the harbor
Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride
Down the corridors of plastic colors
Through the one word answers that bubble forth from
10,000 years away in hyperspace
Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted
That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point
Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure
You remember hating and pinching your nose from
And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it
Just like your addiction to ego games and
Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say
But I'm an intellectual
Too impatient for meditation
And lost along the way to enlightenment
That I truly want,
But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool
Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies
The shapes of skydives,
He comes in and out of our dull lives
And there's an electric current that solidifies between
Him, Us, and his music
Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth
A broken paradise
Crumbling in a whisky tumbler
Blackened by fiber filters, creations
Unlocked by flowing ontological
Caricatures, open wounds gnashing
At attention-seeking osteopaths
Fortune seekers clamber down
Soccer field bleachers,
Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods
Once there was a set of barbells along the trail
We fell in line and started
Counting each other
One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall
It was up to us to wait for the shower
It would feed our kin
We'd begin to rise up together
But it could never keep up with our pen
We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes
But we couldn't command the armies of the dead
We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories
We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us
We take a passive role in finding love
And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark
The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old
An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind
Of a hogtied adolescent
Guessing that the course of existence
Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations
Testing the warm water on a naked toe
We could dive in and forget to breathe
And the water could carry us forever
Alleviating gravity
All the obstacles we perceived in past lives
Remain with us like
Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a
Klu Klux **** telephone operator
Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost
And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night
Drinking nail polish and
Obscure references to the films of the
Ancient Greek philosophers, who
Saw the medium as a means to a message
And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes
And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public
That would not outright reject it
But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole
Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures
And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter
And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair
Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches
Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of
New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we
Had no choice when the government bond expired
And we had only technological solutions left to hope for
And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies
With giant weapons and uncreative slogans
Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime
Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of
Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson
Who gave one final performance
To save himself from what must not be

Love's the base line
Let us be and what would we lack?
Love's no elixir nor intoxicant
Love's the pure undifferentiated state of joy
Love's where we go when we let go of ourselves
And we let go of our games and our desires
And our pasts and our futures and our fates and destinies
Love is tasting good food and chewing till it's paste and sitting back and smiling feeling it energize every cell
Loves hoping everybody wins the poetry slam
Because what good would it be to be in it for yourself
For one person
Against the universe?
None of us are opposed in love,
We are the unbroken chain
But every link is not connected to just
The link in front and the link behind
It is connected to every link at once
It is connected to every link ever forged with the blacksmith's love
The chain doesn't draw a line between us,
It wraps around us and ties us together
Oh love is all I knew before this poem
And love is the effortlessness of every word
Because only Nothing could be easier than love
And love is to BE nothing
Because who could resist such loving completion?
Nothing is the soul of the universe
And anything at all is Nothing but Love
Love is finishing my speech and sitting down because I'd rather hear yours

darling, do you find me clingy?
you are the first who has stayed for longer then a
week.
you are the first who has spoken to me with truth,
instead of lies intertwined with alcohol and
lust.
so excuse the bite marks, the extensive sighs.
you are the first who has wanted my words,
not the stains within my legs,
or the dampness of my lips.
so excuse my nails that constantly scratch,
excuse the quiver my voice has when you
leave.
you are the first that has said,
“i love you”
and i have actually believed.
you are the first that has said,
“i will stay”
and actually have.

" i always wondered if fish drooled ? "  she said... and left it there like a cartoon tumbleweed, caked in glitter and sprite phlegm. she stood across an ocean on an island of outlandish abandonment, where all the mirrors crack.  her passing quakes the stain off her daily betrothal
to a toothless bigot in the land of freedom's end in the hovel of her heart's fall from appointed grace. a place of a thousand cuts and no car. waaaay out in the country of her diminished affections, her eyes could be seen wandering the burnt out villa of her lost love, where she recalls the fairy rings piercing her lips and the trembling of her youth, finding a slow hand to explore the wet *** without peril, soaring with her palm, plastered to a feathered bed in a guest room, in a time-share.
grampa sleep. and bird's nest pitch black.

" i always wondered if fish drooled ? " she said... she slept through it... on to the next disconnect  to get intimate with. she left me there, like a chocolate mint resting on a pillow made of shards of habitual flagellation by candle light and instinct; resting on a bed of nails rusting
in the flood plain of her fondest wish.
she left me there
to conspire with her better demons, to witness - the benign desperation of her frenzied exploration
of actual actualization... to watch her ****** from the jaws of a dire wolf,
her bleeding heart and her ransom.
with her bare teeth and a naked
Truth.

you should have seen her face.

i tattooed her secrets on the iris of a blind ghost, i swore it " abide in her broken heart like an open door with a cool breeze slinking through the fetid air of her self defeat and stale bread bumble bees.
and to abide by her rules
when she finds them... then to ghostly fall
upon his ghost sword by midnight
with a smile that tells hell it cannot claim what rises.
a smile that spat at the devil and pitied his children.
a ghost smile that stole a book from a museum
and never told his other
books why.