Untitled - BlazeVOX

Cracked Altimeter
Volume 3
Joe Milford
BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York
Cracked Altimeter by Joe Milford
Copyright © 2008
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Geoffrey Gatza
Ebook edition
BlazeVOX [books]
14 Tremaine Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
[email protected]

publisher of weird little books
BlazeVOX [ books ]
blazevox.org
2
4
6
8
0
9
7
5
3
1
Table of Contents
The Broken Book of Engravings........................................................................................... 9
Hourglass in a Sandstorm................................................................................................... 32
A Guide to the Sand Hissing Abyss............................................................................... 32
demolitions expert ........................................................................................................... 33
rocket scientist ................................................................................................................. 35
a construction worker’s poem on the void..................................................................... 37
I am forlorn ....................................................................................................................... 60
Inspirational Paperback Rations........................................................................................ 62
Pagoda ............................................................................................................................... 64
manifest destiny............................................................................................................... 66
Setting out ........................................................................................................................ 68
Santa Fe ............................................................................................................................ 72
Postcard from a crashing moon over New Mexico ....................................................... 74
Looking For Something That Lasts in a Sandstorm................................................... 76
Leaving El Dorado ........................................................................................................... 78
Another dumb Tourist..................................................................................................... 80
hell ..................................................................................................................................... 81
for a lover of a dog from hell (postcard from Cerebus)................................................ 84
A Ransom Note Read Aloud and Accompanied By Harp ........................................... 86
postcard to my brother .................................................................................................... 87
Postcard From Anonymous............................................................................................. 89
Postcards From Weasels ................................................................................................. 90
I saw one more last thing................................................................................................ 91
Treatise on Excursions Within One’s Own Temporal and Corporal Body............... 92
Versus Verses ................................................................................................................... 94
Blind date with Infinity .................................................................................................. 95
Wishing for the Unplaces................................................................................................ 97
Poetry is sonic archaeology........................................................................................... 100
A Nightingale Replies to a Boy .................................................................................... 102
Poem of the Desert......................................................................................................... 102
Fossilized Roadmap ....................................................................................................... 103
Looking for Sand in the Desert .................................................................................... 106
MIDDLE OF THE BURNING BRIDGE
I. Eden’s Southernmost Regions....... 108
Vineyard Sketches ......................................................................................................... 110
Sierra Nevada................................................................................................................. 114
7:47................................................................................................................................... 115
flew in first class for the ceremony, got the key to the city, left immediately ....... 117
waiting for 14-Abercorn to Southside Savannah....................................................... 119
The Low Country ........................................................................................................... 121
July 4th, Savannah to Charleston ................................................................................ 128
The Ghost of Frank Stanford ............................................................................................ 132
frank’s knives ................................................................................................................. 133
portraits........................................................................................................................... 134
Concussion at a campsite.............................................................................................. 137
erosion island.................................................................................................................. 141
if every bottle is a soldier .............................................................................................. 145
Savannah Saturday night with esoteric text ............................................................. 149
Sunday morning ............................................................................................................. 150
Croatoan .............................................................................................................................. 151
DEMIURGE ........................................................................................................................ 154
Mantra Jinx......................................................................................................................... 181
Tambike the Itinerant ................................................................................................... 181
lead................................................................................................................................... 184
take it easy unless it keeps you from effluvium ........................................................ 185
Boomerangs .................................................................................................................... 186
Sikh knife ........................................................................................................................ 186
what he said was by accident ....................................................................................... 187
Reading Joseph Brodsky at 30,000 ft.......................................................................... 188
the definition of the infinite.......................................................................................... 192
cages................................................................................................................................. 193
lethargy of wonders upon parade-wheels ................................................................... 195
Deconstruction Childhood Anecdote............................................................................ 196
gestalt graffiti ................................................................................................................. 198
Echo is stasis .................................................................................................................. 202
Bowdon, Georgia summers ........................................................................................... 203
After Kunitz’s Careless Love ........................................................................................ 204
That old leather green cover......................................................................................... 205
Adumbral Aphorisms .................................................................................................... 206
Sheltonisms (for Scott, the greatest friend anyone could ever have or try to kill)
.......................................................................................................................................... 215
Tongue to Tourniquet .................................................................................................... 217
the census........................................................................................................................ 219
confession ........................................................................................................................ 220
Sunday morning after all night baking shift ............................................................. 221
I let the reins go ............................................................................................................. 223
poker-face ........................................................................................................................ 233
I spy.................................................................................................................................. 234
regurgitation................................................................................................................... 235
retroburst ........................................................................................................................ 236
the mesh .......................................................................................................................... 237
jaunt 1.............................................................................................................................. 238
the last great garage band song ................................................................................... 250
onion-skin epic................................................................................................................ 251
my first semester ........................................................................................................... 258
for Sarah Strong Wilson................................................................................................ 260
Cracked Altimeter
Volume 3
The Bro ke n B ook of Engr a vings
“The idea of using old engravings as a basis for current design, whole, in fragments,
whatever - - is probably as old as the design itself . . . You want to know what Corvas
corax, the raven, looks like? Well, here is what he looks like - - and what a bevel gear
looks like, and a nasal cleft, and the Arc de Triumph - - lovingly detailed, crosshatched, and, luckily for us, splendidly reproducible.”
from the introduction to T he Co mp le te Enc yc lo p edia o f I llustra tio ns (1st pub.
1851)
plate 5. fig. 8, 8a : tr iangular com pass
Ceiling is bent is prism or prismatic wall. Floor is bent is prismatic cubed into
diagonals; we live in diamonds, not in squares. Truly it isn’t that simple
at all, or ever. I, however, want to give you something to work with: blueprints
that the ink hasn’t dried on yet. Hoe sure are you of your frequented rooms?
Look again friend; learn to unlook.
plate 6. fig. 2 3: illustr ating the theor y o f e bb a nd flo w
And then things were ahead of their times. And then the things made to stand
the tests of time. This is, of course, an oxymoronic exam, as time
tests nothing other than itself. Temporal dialectics. Is it more efficient watches,
or it is superior minutiae that’s required? Squeezing lives into imploded
moments, and traveling. Across memories as does Arabic text on a translated
parchment. Tracing and rolling scrolls and documents. Pressurization
of every hit, every iota, and knowing that every seedling meant it’s planted.
And impenetrable is the chronosaur with its hard spheres
and possibles were the finest digitals.
And one person seeks to monopolize time and that one is definitively you.
plate 6. fig. 6: illustr a ting the ce ntr if uga l f o rces o f the E ar th
And from the world you may steal memories, like dew to make your eyes, and then
hide
then hide them with lies in the guise of poetries, but do not be surprised
when instead of wrath from the world for your stealing, instead, you receive her,
kneeling beside you and agreeing, as if with you at a mirror she is
whispering,
“Indeed we are beautiful together.”
plate 3 5 3. E gyp tia n te mp le s a nd to mb s
And the carney barkers atop the burning piles of the world’s landfills scream
to go onwards to the lands of the salt pillar people, the junkyards
the ends of the known Earth, the telluric currents pulling us, the like bodies gathered
as if sieved. Amusement parks of past cultures, ash-land desert-silt
sculptures.
Sift: the caravan that slowly proceeds into an ocean of its own intention of ending.
Grist mythos. Birdseed and prophesies. Polvo and gravel pits.
plate 7. fig. 1: pla ne tar y system of P to le m y
Nine beer bottles left at random
porcelain planets picked up in tandem
the lord of this house has big hands
(my house)
to send them
to receptacles in plastic bags adjacent to slime and tin foil
to be mulled over like so much mulch in mud and rags and bonemeal
the bacteria in the bottles
like us so small as not to notice the macrocosm’s
upheavals
and left somewhere in a methane-minefield junkyard-heap
where far from away I crept
out of the primordial night’s rust
and into
this kitchen’s silences to hide these skeletons these phantom custodians
as I had dreamed it
and I was to be so foolish as to believe that I could be
the center of all of this
plate – 1. fig. 6.1 2. 72: p ira te s’ a nd p oe ts’ ac counts of da m ne d a ttem p ts
Such is the fine line between possession and debt
for to owe a god a boon
or a gift
is to be bereft on a raft
too far to the left
of absolute time
there are too many guests on any one of God’s rafts and tickets here are
useless
try swimming in order to be
left behind by all of these
AchillesMephistopheles
to act epical, but
like a pirate, a spy, a thief,
inconspicuously
plate 9. fig. 9- 1 3: the Sun’ s sp ots
I come to you naked as the first star is
undecided. No reckoning left. No
reconnaissance. No interstice of solstice,
nor clouds cannonball billowing down. No men
or machinations, it is an outburst of pain, as if
a cauterization. Still, recite the dried wings
in our souls eddying as if leaves on pondswirls.
And the only way we can fly now is detonation.
And there are no other destinations other than detonations.
And fern-fronds drying on sandstone under groans
of ultraviolet radiation and release. Harnessing
solar winds to power our gramophones.
I will play you a harmonium of stars, which I have composed
myself. It’s all in grand style.
plate 5 0. fig. 2: sub mar ine vo lc a nic e xplosio n
Minstrels in the garbage singing dirges.
Tar-baby slanguage. “He
talk so fast
they call him Chinese nigger”
Somebody was suddenly sliced. A
Northerner,
I think. Why can’t the races come together a bit better like they did in ancient
Alexandria?
We bang the sludge with words to describe it. Malleable sledgehammers that
do
commerce no good.
We inherited the Earth! We already inherited her! And poor
spenders of days and days lie out
like legs spread for a birth, for we
have
inherited this infectious dirt which dares to bear life.
This addictive
invective
this soil left bare to be born. It burns the doctor’s hands with realization.
Sweated-out, the cord cut, the bloody hair slicked back
from aquatic
amniotics.
As destinations are all detonations,
hell we all know that we all began
with
an explosion
plate 5. fig. 5 7: app lica tio n of pla ne tab le
A plane in flight
for there
plane.
Hope
above a plain all the same. Holohedral
with a prayer
to crack through
next layer
to reach the next
it’s not the same.
Planet is promised landing.
plate 6. fig. 2 6; illustr ating the re sistanc e o f the ae ther
Up and out from the scrap with scrapes the oilslick soup put to use as an antidote for
culture
the panacea making alluvtha difference and you are crawling out of the data-manure
a Fisher King a kingpin a big pond and the metal tore you up as you arose for the
harvest
out of tin-can-land but then you see the sky finally free of smog, you find the sky to
be a mob
of great
blue ideas
ascending constantly
plate 1 1 9. repr e se nta tives of the Ord ers Per isso dac tyla a nd Prima te s;
see a lso p la te 1 30.
Ana to m y of the Fa sc iae , I nte gum ents, a nd O rga ns of Ma stic a tio n
a nd Re sp ira tio n
Are we all neotypes?
Neo sapiens usurping sapientials?
Are we all just apes
Learning to laugh at previous apes?
Eloquence and tact are hairy to enact.
plate – 2. fig. joe /William B lak e ( 17 5 7- 18 2 7 English ar tist, po et, a nd
mystic )
somewhere between
music, magic, and a scream
was the voice
of this newborn, earthbound foundling
carrying for his heart an
ever-mutating home called
Imagination
pla te 47. fig. 9, 10: c har ts of hurr ica ne sA slave without chains.
Martyr with no sacrifice. Metaphysical bodiless-ness.Soul peering out at soul
as if soul were its own periscope
seeping through rising up through itself to break a surface
fingerless fingers
as does the persistence
of melting Cambert cheese
and there is no time
when it comes to such amoebae.
plate 1 9. theor ie s a nd instr ume nts of m ec ha nics, ther mod ynam ic s, and
aco ustic s
emotive cognition
cogs in motion
emissions
notes
amiss
paralyzed syntax demos
isles of lisps
dervish-derisions
incoherigntitings
galing nights
in motif in action
flicks
aesthesiae
ouches of sounds
feelings without the
halberds or bastards of cliché’s
estovers
of sound allotments
for each of us
emotive miasma of motes
the symbols incessantly cursed
cursing at each other
it’s an ambush
my horse has his headphones on
and I am wearing his blinders
the gallop home
the full volume
escapades
salutes
escapes
and the windmills spinning like a loom weaving fortunes
plate 2 7. fig. 1: w hir lwinds a nd w a ter spo uts. see a lso, f ig. 4: the
dra wing of w ater
I set out to free all of the waters from their prisons
from their basins, gasoline rainbow prisms,
and to stamp out puddles, to pour out oceans (better than
they’d already been poured) but each drop became another
reservoir for me to liberate, from a bowl to a lake to a wave.
And I had no right to try to free what forms to itself the water gave.
Those bodies were never imprisoned and I am so naive.
plate 2 6. phe no me na of c lo ud s a nd light. se e a lso, f ig. 1 -9: illustra ting
phe nom e na of c lo ud s
Sometimes I walk
as the rest of existence
runs, rockets, seems to
propel past me, it sometimes
may even appear as a dance
of dunces towards some climax
of a parallax-like finale
in the distance viewed
with near-sightedness
and sometimes I truly notice
things
in their insignificance
as they try to hide
their magnificence
and so I learn
to light-speed sprint
with slow eyes
deciphering the blurs
plate 4 5 4. I talia n Pa inting o f the R ena issa nce. fig. 1- 1 3. C ard i,
Car a va gigo, Car acci, S a ssoferr a to, Ra p ha el, etc. a nd e tc.
It is the same sentiment I guess.
Why do I pick up my cat and hang
him,
stick him to the screen-door just to see his reaction/
Why would God place man on this planet among so many cracked melons and
diminished
strata of foliage and sin-poisoned fruit and loot poised to crush us in floods
and we dangle supervised over canyons and chasms in hopes of pocket trinkets and
beads
and dreadnoughts of what-nots with bottle-openers for prying the infinites? It is the same sentiment, I guess.
Learning the arts of perspective.
plate – 3. fig. 1- 4: broke n c lock sp inning o n a tur ntab le und er a
mirror ed ce iling
squelch and sustain stoma magna voxbox strain stretches of impetus envelops us
uncomfort
above able and us in un-rusting metallic elements unreliable except the deejays and
tone
of grit time-lapsed segments of beat doled-out sacrament-like retreating into counterbackclockwards-wise like words and whips recoiling the chips of computers that couldn’t
dig it all
but the digital captured the ball on CD so what the hell? sound is an insatiable
fungus.
plate 7 9. I nsects o f the Order s H yme no ptera , D ip ter a, Le pidop ter a, a nd
Od o na ta
Beehive cluster
of polygonic polygotisms
clotted in static
buzzing sound-gysms
frequencies
of winged gold stained low
vowels
with propellers
bowel-bowled gutturals
and still-shrill
stings
consonants
hummingbird cosmonauts
wingslashing
honey is metaphorical, not
withstanding
through their own
dull tones
plate 1 6. theor ie s o f forc e a nd gra vity: de m onstra tio ns of the se a nd
other law s
the crashing pilot Capt. Tate in the plummeting engine with wild eyes ripped
and his own blood chasing, screams, “I’ve seen something finally! I have seen
the face of my son!” Fuck the astronauts. And it, the insane unknown on the tips
of our noses that can only be seen at the speed of sound and is never captured in
writing but in individual comets of flumes falling, chutes fire-shot shod and cracked
goggles boiling, steaming in oceans after fiery impact. his orphan son piloted pages
and said: “fuck the astronauts!”
plate 3 0 2. illustr ating m oder n ar tillery. p la te 30 6. illustr a ting
military p yro tec hny
After the explosion
after what had become of me
I stole through the forest collecting
fragments of my flesh
hanging from the trees
my limbs strung out on limbs horror
in piecing back together
while searching for a mirror
or a pond
a moon in order to
ascertain
the pain the form
the sound-diagnosed harmony of shred’s condition
I was dosed with the new word that I have bloody embodied
and what soul is is sound
not shaped nor by
symbol
but it chooses to loosely nest around fragments
crude structures
of punctuals and capitals
to
experience
the endless rapture of vocals
as it rises in ecstasies, exdesires freed
all of the vessels of new vocals
I sample
ascension of sonicism I wish
what language is is a
slaughterhouse forest
a deadfall closed-cautioned infinitely
a deadfall closed-caption ed infinitely
in reverse
the noumena meet
hanging on ordinary trees
and the trees know each other well, yet
they are wise to ignore themselves
plate 4 0 7. or, se e Arc hitectur e, p la te s 35 0- 4 09
Sky of flax in flux. Slowly looming into gold. Over a random moment for the
Americas
I am walking while holding my medallion
hoping that skyscrapers don’t
avalanche.
They spindle up for underground steam-sprays. I’m the amanuensis for this minaret
effluvium.
This cortege of ocular columns.
This hum ancient around the new buildings.
plate 1 9. fig. 17: illustra ting the law s of vap oriz a tio n
self-sacrificing
single-cells
in cylinders
cyclic
oxidants
arranged octavely
not accidentals
dented fenders
lawn-mower blades spinning towards the clouds
cumulonimbi
volvox and jellyfish ascending
like hot-air balloons
will-o’-the-wisps
osmosizing-up the
cosmos
epitome
of the atmosphere’s
dermas shredding
platelets and arrows ash-handfuls in the tsunami
the relinquished grey flesh
the snow in its reverse crystals
kits full of winds and s’s’
kites made of nets
flutes used for rockets
shrilling hardcore in windshears
as they catapult up
hovercraft and trajectories
we is all
spreading
up and out there and there
and we are
limits
that coalesce with our convalescence of out there
plate 2 4 9. f ig. 1 -3: C hine se p uppe t- sho w. Chine se m a nd arin visiting
As kids, we decided to play to game of Time
and, as always, I was the worm
action figures for gods as marionettes squirmed
kickshaws under
cabriules
silly rules and ice-cream paunches
you always ate the last Cherry Life Saver
we were lost in the atmosfield of it all
heads in a ruckus like bowling
balls
the first beer the first kiss the first good read book
the first dead
bird found first
arrowheads and miles of honeysuckle
noticing every detail in a
Monet way
slinking free of authorities
never truants to the creeks
twisting up trees
plastic-like jade pipes
cool granite of library steps
against our
naked asses
as taught and young as the feel of lithe new guitar-strings so sure that death only
happened
to birds
and the mandarin came with cassavas and political texts
and the men of the house would drink rice-beer with furrowed brows as we frolicked
with puppets under the tables listening to their plots to us, none of them
were of any use
we never thought we’d become like father
plate 1 9. fig. 93: illustra ting the ec ho in ar che d roo m s. see also, fig.
96, 9 7: the to ngue work of the or ga n, a nd p late 2 0 0: sce ne in R om a n
Colise um a nd R om a n co ins
the unsaid things
“I was crushed under an elephant carcass; I knew that my
parachute wasn’t going to open; I lost the readings in the warp core breach; the
instruments all appear to be clogged with peanut-butter” etc. leading to
machinations, too-soon conclusions, i.e.:
“death is like a pachyderm; snapping bone; rockets miscalculate; boring lunch at the
console; faulty launch” etc.
apparatus deviations LEGO-like poem-parts
parting
your hair with a word
well-heeled collectors context was sentenced to a
journey
for its sins and then taxed
what is to come from these pocket-sized epics?
the said things always so inferior
the unsaid things existing just beyond the
credible
the canyon between what is and is to be described
the infinite chasms
between two possible worlds I sit around and whinny and whine
just avoiding
animals of sound that are larger
than my poor verbal stature
plate 4 0 5. the C ap ito l a t W a shingto n. se e a lso, p la te 1 3. m ap of the
So uther n He a ve ns
The last of the anthems
incinerated parlor music
ash-jazz-Muzack
nostalgia dragging the skeletons down the hallways a Jacksonian guilt, I’d
say
we died of asphyxiation in welcome centers before we could finish our complimentary
Cokes
the proprietors dressed in flags of countries they’d sworn never to visit
they were in full drag and no one was attentive to any yellow and black Caution signs
we used the Venetian blinds to send Morse-code
hell, we were
trapped
in this democracy and we liked it
to clue in the riff-raff
glued to a
revolution
all of us with star-maps tattooed on our backs and speaking garbled dialects
with our mouths full of gourmet food here in the Oval Office cafeteria of the world
plate 4 2 7. f ig.
1 2: Bacc ha nalia n genii
The last song
fell down
the minstrel’s
throat
which was a lute-flume-chute
or a liar-lyre
to a void
heartless
nil paradiso
a moat of unbreakable windows
birds with no throats I guess that therein
song was consumed
by black ulcer sister
in acid who had no
beau called song
or choice but to
eat Narcissistic pie
the poet would never repeat, although he would shutter quite a bit
and in this way
angels and demons
clean their plates
plate 1 5. fig. H ershel’ s re flecting telesc ope
“photocopy of the proton. prototype of the photon. photos of volatile cthons.
duplicates coated on photon after photon. someone introduces negative charge.
protocol. proton belying negatives pawned for a bit more carbon. and there’s
very little carbon, comparatively, to go around in this universe. it is manufactured
by stars who wish to be seen. outer-space is the blackest black market.
plate: br oke n C hina: inva sive a nno tatio n
John Zorn is born. Muse-mess psycho-sound porn
surf-secret agents dissolving a mess of awesome
sonic messiahs the chaos a-coming the scandal
pistol anvil ska murder sax stomping in iron
sandals on tin roofs and maidens impromptu
thrown across the shoulders of flesh-choruses
choraladagios and hombres with bazookas full
of symphonies aimed at embassies and hell,
even my pocketknife composed something today
stockade embryo of bastardized zydeco banjo
screaming newborn John Zorn
plate
3.3 3 33 3 33 3 33 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 33 3 3
33 3 33 3 33 33 3 33 3 ( etc. )
mercs and vurts and megahurtz
open
to the outer dimensions
Moebius strippers
unveiling
as if
a nervous
it seems to spread out as such
in a tensor process
genius
feeding poems
crumbs
this is my tesseract journal
folding
or is it other dimensions
superstrings
violins got stuck
breakdown’s not
unveilings
to make stars
so quasar, yet
wormholes
multiples
of starving, coughing Reimann
a
to the void like bread
crumbs
to birds
crumbs
and everything in the big crunch and crumple will find the force the unified
field
plate 4 2. fo ssils fro m var io us per io ds
in order to discover
something new, I had to
travel back
to the beginning of time and before first poems written, the sublime music
of speech without worry of recording, for, our dreams were never carousels
of words
unless you have such nightmares
nor were our hearts
aqualungs lunging at language like anemones during tidal storms
and out of our desire to share our dreams with one another, the first words
were carved into stone. thus, here all evil and all good began.
before, we were just men employing irresponsible sound
can I get an AMEN?
plate 2 0 4. ca taco mb s, c hurc he s, a nd c hape ls
the Madonna
And Christ
Saints
the Zealots
St. Francis
Origen
And poets
bites her nails.
had hard-ons under his robes.
thinking sodomies all the while while
drink the blood of charlatan blasphemers.
eating the birds from his shoulders.
with hi testicles in a Mason jar.
when they murder.
They got away, like Adam’s apple-core thrown over the wall around Eden.
It was probably never allowed to fully rot, hell, it sprouted the fields of icons.
And, in some ways, this is perfect, and that appleseed germinates in all of us.
plate joe. fig. jo e. a nnota ted jo e. m e la ughing a t me w hile e ngra ving
myse lf. tongue- in-c heek
vec tor. a wa iting the unio n. e xplo ding (see p la te 5 0. f ig. 2: subm ar ine
vo lca nic e xp lo sio n)
I am beserker synaesthetically.
Imagery, I shall montage you to death.
Our marriage is one shattering of receptions before ever a rite was taken.
plate 3 2. form s o f cr ystalliz atio n; vario us instr ume nts
I am sick
of the organic.
I need no leaves
of grass to touch
all of humanity. To do this
to touch you all
I must become
concrete.
The longest word.
How dare these trees invade my city?
Nostalgia
never asks permission.
Nevers are levers, so, never ever
endeavor.
At least as far as I can throw this jargon in the park
I will.
And voices carry
like a song reminiscent and voices
meet you
head-on and headlong
as if you crashed
into a stable that was aflame
but you doused it
let the horses out
to run down the thoroughfares
during rush hour
and out of the city for good
plate 1 2. 72. 6. B- mo vies of tr ue lo ve a nd 4 00 -ft. tall re ptile s tha t B lue
O yster C ult sa ng a bo ut
nostalgiaGodzillaRodanMothra
Ed Woods flying saucers Belugosi vampire
incisors
neo-techno Raphaelite scrapmetal gumbo of new bio-ethnical Homo’s boiling from
Orleans
to sprawling Tokyo-digital and sphere is unified ego third rock from the sun and cults
and
cultural cut-throats whirlpool switchblade knuckles ritual gumbo jamming-balaya
belated
riffing spoonfuls of slang on the pavement for urban tribes perturbed in humidity
Atlanta in
the middle of summer by the newsstand recipes for stronger poems vines oil vinegar
jalapenos
flower petals on pita bread for fiber and a street-act guy with a flame-thrower and
skuttlebutts and hot-pants and short-shorts and the administrators don’t give no more
flying fucks
anymore
plate 4 3 9. f ig. 2 5, 26 : Be llero p ho n
Detach jettison the body’s strangeness.
I’m the deliverer of birdcages
(as if I wrote poetry).
Something crucial is to be
arranged here.
Our tents are swept up in the storms.
Feathers swirl around
our favorite sounds and myths.
Everything is a minuscule as a quark.
We eat the air with sporks.
Salads of sentience or any silly phrase you so choose.
Who and what is appropriate in this mid-air moment?
Apparatus got cut by his own device and fell off his horse like an Icarus.
He had to get umpteen stitches.
You can’t chart the variables
the entrails of referentials
writhing in their continual
clouds of conjugals.
You worship in the church of the too rational.
Every feather is a perfect altar, and in this way my horse
has accumulated wings and learned to use them to fly
Engr a ving Ra ndo m 1:
In the way in which a body encompasses
the entire world,
a nugget of knuckle under a microscope,
for instance, you can
see it all there. The pain of the millennia
in an epidermal chasm.
And canyons are questions which are carved
into their own answers.
Bodies are swerves, are warps, are rivers;
flesh usurped.
And with me, and good, gracious us.
We will touch until oceans erupt,
and lightning will be the only instant
of immediately gone evidence.
*
spit on a star and boil your self a soul
*
Just because the elephant-headed god Ganesha
broke off one of his tusks to create a pen
to write the Mahabharata does not mean
that I have to be Hindu.
*
A trick that the soul has learned:
how to hide from itself, even though
it resides over all, everywhere,
the name of this prank is:
Body.
*
I wish
to be in
miniature
to stretch out
upon a single
feather
to remain there
discreet
silent
forever
Engr a vings Ra ndom 2 & 3
the simple fact
being that
I never see birds
at night
and this personal truth
as a footnote: at night
I tend to always achieve flight
Engr a ving Ra ndo m 4
scratched
scratched into
bone crag
menophenome
you bring
the arc
love you &
polycule too
light as wave
light as particle
transparent eyemetal
immerstone
not as confused as crystal
ARRGH’s gold-arching
X
marks
Go dot
are byte wary
valences of dads
derivative
the anxiety
of inflummox
landmine verbiage
no one responses
“the mind’s [mid] winter”
this blade
of dash [sic] cislunier
slaying
one nomenclature
ganglion Doppler’s
ergo and a farcical particular gimcracks and wet towel whacks
per se
already
names
a tap unsprung catches
a mouse of Mallarme
here any no
surge some
linkages
simple thrust of just-now
like unexpected taste
splash of mango juice
something stings my black iris
wave I wave noumena at you
entropaphoristicephalous
entropic hands
were your last words
and my first tongue
was a thanks
thank you for the light,
great bringer of it
Engr a ving Ra ndo m 5
eagles up here:
Flight
collection of bones and feathers down here
Panoply (or, Frank O’Hara’s Toys)
Drinking hot chocolate from ballerina slippers and pointe shoes
Selling the bourgeoisie snake-oil, Epsom salts, and cactus juice
Teaching parrots new and unheard of curse words
Attending coronation ceremonies for the inventor of the 1st clock and nitric acid
Studying Hermetics while sloughing down honey-glazed hams and red wine
Fascinated by the anatomy of merfolk
Freeing the monkeys from their music-boxes and fez’s in malls
Screaming solipsism’s in the seething seraglio
Teaching Goethe to lambs and lame goats
Wearing helmets made of volunteered lions’ skulls
The divagation of insects masquerading as glowing naked children
Shakespeare’s glove retrieved by a ragged drunken poltroon
Lizards constant under our flesh moving liquefied in summer drizzles
Impervious, we make origami palaces
The Gondwanaland of an idea shatters open looks like drop of dye in oil
A glass full of old toys that you must swallow down
Genetically engineered stream-lined canoes that grow swan’s wings
The mausoleums are architected as Trojan horses
The wind plays Pan-flutes through our hair to soothe the scars where
The horses wings were removed
The clouds the shapes of glockenspiels
Tremolo dogs yalp incessantly in the monotone meadows
The promise of an insect found in the bark of a birch
An outboard motor rusting in the center of the courtyard
(It was covered with albino spiders)
We rode the giraffes back along the esplanade
The grenade craters loitering along the palisades
The cicerone was inebriated again with his charlatan orangutan
By overturned piles of tin, ceremonial breastplates, grieves of silver,
And tarnished gauntlets to be soon auctioned
I paint words like Bosch with a spyglass in the bushes
Vapors of slumgullion wafting from the thatched hut
A talking wildebeest asks, “Who was Prosperus?”
Fishermen pull carts up from the shore full of prehistoric carcasses
Trains of monks punctuate distant hillsides
The battering rams failed when attempts were made to break through
the firmament of thin air
Throwing bones to see whose turn it was to be famous that week
Thawing out the venison steaks by the steaming geysers
Putting porcelain bathtubs full of ice-cold beer into wagons drawn by strongmen
Acanthus leaves, chopsticks, Bohme texts in picnic baskets, frayed paintbrushes,
hairclips, arcade tokens from foreign regimes, fake moon-rocks, spacedust
crackling candy-powder, fishing lures all the colors of the rainbow, assorted
caps of defunct ball-clubs and automechanic garage chains, manifestoes of
irrigation techniques, strip-mining companies tax returns, raspberry lip-balm
cartridges, materials for kite-building, sweet-nothings, dog-leashes with
burns on them at campsites, chunks of wood for carving/engraving, peacock
feathers and other imports, pockets full of sugar-cane shafts, ghoulish
saltpeter wafts, samovars arriving by sampans, Wingdings, whatchamacallits
myrdles, shlimpies, cogs of lep-leps limping along, gorgonzola soldiers
with guns full of virgin olive oils, gougers, latex toy warts, sprazzles and
stainless steel pretzels, Dr. Seuss’s wardrobes, greasy travelogues, leatherbound padlocked tomes, discarded refrigerator magnets representing all
the states of America, crushed camera parts and mismatched lens caps,
lieutenant badges awaiting their second attachments, doubloons of yellowed
photos, airlocks and hairnets, sheets of sheet music, a broken harpoon shaft,
shark’s teeth congealed in whale blubber, one bottle of cheap Cognac,
subterfuge of stiletto heels across sulfur clouds, songbirds crushed under
semi-trucks and over-turned cement birdbaths, a quick-step 7-hop
choreo by James Brown while fucking Ellington’s piano keyboard,
obsolescence
of picnics and the coming of age of a Bacchic blues-man accepting laurelwreaths
while deadpanning in a throng of sound sanguine and squamous.
Bill says that my new jacket and shaved head makes me look
like a doughboy; I pull out my pen and say “Bayonet, Ojendyk!”
I am pure noise. Here’s the disclaimer.
Your sandwiches are too existential for my palate.
The cheese and the Big Cheeze’s.
I must look up habaneras, mantilla, and panoply, and soon.
Only time will tell if i will be a Selected, Collected, or posthumously
published
Com plete C ollo q uium of myself.
Blaise Cendrars says that the masterpiece of plastic art is the guillotine.
I disagree; I’d say it is the spinal tap.
You are mimosa kimono
I am threadbare cable
you are seismic you-ness
I am mine own receptacle
you are dragons if they were
mammals I am bird without wings
you are the stem of a decapitated tiger lily
I am eating what’s left of the rose of myself
petal by petite petal on me palate
and petals haunting your flypaper windows
and how I lounge upon your lawn
wrapped in the anaconda water-hose
there, trying to make you laugh by your condo
I can’t take root
I am wearing a kilt
faster pussycat swill swill
it made a mountain out of a dust-bunny
and when I un-Don-Juaned my shirt
I guess it’s a forest of unkempt Irish
and I’ll be with you as long as I can
stomach certain altitudes choking
the green from me and us
like a love-letter leftover from a war
that wasn’t addressed
written in Braille for a scientist
the message left at the gates was a lamb stampede
was coming and revelations and my chops could not
mutton up to it the carnage or i couldn’t muster even
though I am a 70’s martial artist with a hairy chest
and who is it that choreographs parades like this
and these herds hurt our mortgage payments and all
is amiss and I have late fees on the card and when
quasars explode in order to create shopping malls
and colors sacrifice all of their lights to plastic instead
of plasma and it’s a killer whale glinting like the very
sunlight hitting its sleek back and this ornate world
with its words aplenty and spastic strategic droplets
for the captured reels reeling and I’d as soon just stay
here and watch the nature-features the creatures
that keep foraging as the world burns down that
squirrel in the burning tree eating acorns like nothing’s happening
and the eyes
of the Bengal tigers
rotating in orbits
around your hands
your palms up and out
you, the harlequin
with your “I didn’t do it” mask
and the eyes tend to fetishize
your one-man act
grand finale on the sheets
sand and claw-marks
in headboards
of waterbeds
and what-the-fuck kind-of idea
is a waterbed supposed to be?
love or a ship or sex or a sickness?
my back can’t stomach it.
there’s blood in the ruddy coffee-cups.
a note never read is wisped out of a window
by nonchalant winds
a decapitated head in a birdbath grins
at that unlikely paper airplane.
And I get this any less than you do in my dada ochre submarine.
All conclusions come to are incon
clusive I’ve decided that the sleuths
must have been only lucid when
scouring the lumina with the 3-legged
dogs of their civil intuition . . . stamps &
other insurgents dance ‘round foundations
of spewing proto-data. my story is the coin
you are happy to find for a candy-bar.
the feeling you have when you are cleaning
out your overflowing desk is my modus apparatus.
I just remembered that ink is liquid that it
had slipped my mind also liquifick-like
and for so long it seemed to do so as I’ll write
making love to you animated or not and a prescription for every existing thing ‘cos I’m trying
to make it alright so I’ll cut the cables and ropes
holding my hot red feverish head of a body
and balloon-like-sail-up slowly all can observe
my one last regret as if I were culturally-significant
martyr which I’m not but name the summer after me
and spraypaint the monuments with accoutrements
and use a secret glyph that’s only been over-used
for nobler purposes for I remind you that ink is actually
just a simple liquid, like our blood, just an elixir of coursing
“Poetry didn’t tell me not to play with toys”
Frank O’Hara
meat-pies! cheddar! my lover choreographing Stravinsky for a recital as i
write on loose leaf paper! one good thirty-minute sit-com! endless rum and
beer! oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies! stoned and then-some! I never started
smoking! Japanese
fighting fish floats in his own wavering stylishness! I just had sex too! I
didn’t
bounce that worrisome check! Chinese delivery is on the way! Mongolian
beef and
Li Po Mein! Plum duck! satisfied dissatisfaction. Shelton looks good in my
hat.
Ghazal shows me how to make the coyote call! It’s Friday night! 10-17-1997.
videos of motorcycle wrecks and exuberance! staying in with winter
encroaching
on all sides like a brigade of stiff sore nipples! I told Frank that chameleons
aren’t
neurotic; they don’t know what color they are ever! i got the keys to the cities
and cigarette machines, that is, if anyone here is interested. no more South
American pot-brownies but I have the entire Japanimation collection on cue
so let’s fake it. gypsyliving but no Bohemian. actually never that close to either but romancing
both.
found a ten-dollar bill this afternoon in laundromat and this is my life . . .
. . . my illustrious life . . .
With Olson and Homer and Melville says he’s leaving.
I hurl poisonous mud-pies towards all friends and enemies.
I am always harmless and well-meaning and it kills me.
And I went to the hospital where
there was Queen Ann’s Lace in the ditches outside
and doctor Patterson was reclining on his side
and while there the nurse couldn’t find a vein
and then I turned green when she passed out
a proper footnote, that
so I did it myself and laughed even more
always filling vials with my souls
where’s my donuts and free pop I screamed
and someone came with a bandage some iodine and a can.
Is moo the opposite of ohm, or it is the same? cooed the harangue.
Kleinzahler says.
“ . . . and Joe is drinking again . . . “
yet, Conoly replies,
“in the night damp
there was nothing
to look at”
Hour gla ss in a S a nd storm
A Guid e to the Sa nd Hissing A byss
Strange configurations, bleached flags,
blank sheets of paper, half-finished
maps unaccounted for. Unsuccessful
para-sailors. This albino appears
from a dying sandstorm with his parasol
and spits out an ice-cube.
They will never believe it
back at the regime’s boardroom.
This cubed inch of quickly extinct oasis.
This Marco Polo crossing the desert
with a poorly equipped lacrosse team
and they heard the sand booming and were frightened.
He thought these to be the sounds of demons.
I was there, aye, myself
but never put much thought into it
other than faith in that there must be
a logical explanation for the booming.
It is always just holistic, if we can feel it.
Still, I have to carry a banner and beat these drums
on every commission.
I have always pitied dreamers with their superstitions
and such flighty employers they make.
dem olitio ns e xper t
and we were the detonators awaiting action-flicks
and enough of the inter-webs to be the better networker or the fly that escapes
the lacewing in a meteor-shower of data an asteroid belt and passing
the griot with his dreadbraids on a bicycle who is searching
through discarded books in the gas-masked catacombs of hovering trash-city
and these things I saw in the highway’s gully: shards of a windshield,
curls of a fender, other artifacts of impact, a silvered dime retrieved
(a 1995), a marble (cat’s-eye), a shred of what had to have been
a porno-mag, an unidentifiable dead animal, a receipt (home entertainment
center, tampons, one BIC lighter, all totaled at $275.23), an ant tribe,
an idea attempting to become some other kind of roadsign galvanizing
for me. because I had found them, these things were all mine. to be
an all-terrain vehicle, an autonomous earth released from its shackles
of inertia and orbit, a world with words my populace, colonies
of thronged symphonies, a star nursing its wounds after its fall,
Icarus on bike-wheels, churning spokes towards tropical suns,
a predator loving my victims to death, a Mafioso of ideas coming
to collect paydirt and cram a barrage of sound down your collar.
to be a thief-priest de-robed in the holy squalor of the martyr, the sexiest,
the hang-ups, the receivers, the translators, the opiated masses
and to let my depositions kudzu around the monuments and their pedestals.
I would be a captured detonation, an oxymoron of unlimited energy
for all to see at a tourist attraction. worship me in permanent pink cyclones
of marble. regale me in the maelstrom of sound. I squeezed this poem
from a roadside stone. you can get blood from a rock. I’m a good aim.
don’t take your hardhats off. it’s these sites all around us that are dangerous.
rocket sc ie ntist
they lied there’s no music
of the spheres no timpani’s
of Big Bangs to scatter out theorems
to be gathered up later by the basket-minded
and kites will always function as well
in inner or outer space
always perfectly fine with or without
us or wind-machines
as the Victorian fans himself by the Victrolla
impressing a feminist-duchess enough to give him
that grant which will help to isolate
the gene that made her nose so
bent, and though we be fathers
of the formulas, the mind’s continents
seem unenslaveable and are their own forays
surrounded by snafu sting rays
and great white noise sharks
and it all mutilates into magnificence
and the kite stretched from a scroll-piece
of a genius’ scalp and framed
with the bones of his pelvis meanders
about the orbit of a Jupiter’s moon
and a mathematician, astronomer, gentleman, or
a poetic buffoon with passes to the planetarium
will become at times high-falootin’, but still
if an entire shipment of fireworks
was placed beneath the last space shuttle’s
launching pad, everyone at a distance
with their monocles and binoculars
would exalt in the blast
and then moments later fade into something
less than boredom, something akin to the non-entity
of a constantly active and functional
modem, and
I’m an explorer looking through culture for
that fireworks-display that doesn’t fade so fast
in the mind as it does invariably
in the sky.
pens are poor mine-detectors, or so I hope.
you see, I have designs
of one day lighting up the sky.
a co nstr uc tio n worker’ s poe m o n the vo id
The difference between the void
and the
that-which-seeks-to-encompass-all
is desire hiding inside
a question-mark’s curve.
Asbestos and steel-wool
torn from walls and poisonous are
allegorical fibrous sinews for
our testimonies and fears.
We all must insulate.
I hold the divining rod over the nothingness
and it still trembles violently in
the living room. Lead and radon
visages. What it means to fall through a floor
of a work of genius, only to look back up
through its trapdoor at a rack of caged
and ragged alabaster ribs. If fame equals death,
then we are all prematurely infamous.
After seeing how neighbors are built,
I’ll starve my loves into shanty-towns
and shacks of anonymous lives. Following
the blueprints, the interior parchments
of our heart revealed and never reveled in
makes me want to be a ninja on Thanksgiving.
These houses lined up like Stalin’s victims.
The stars align to fade in history’s braid.
And as always, on the one side:
our materials. On the other:
our intent. And then the middle
where it gets ugly. This is the ugliest
of it: ions choosing tropes. Your gravity
rapes you daily and you challenge it. Fine.
Stride onto the scaffolding and walking forth
no matter when it ends. Tool-belts and lunch-pails.
And suddenly, this particular wage knows.
And what expectancy ‘s hour is is knowing this.
I desire to become forgetfulness. Not forgetting,
no, I want to be forgetfulness itself in its holiness.
Devoid. Fibers of asbestos, steel-wool, plate-glass,
steel-struts. What do the contractors suggest can insulate
the void here? What exists between the walls we
exist betwixt always transfixed? Nothing can shelter
a quantum wanton-ness.
And no body for very long
encompasses. Desire adores
homeless-ness. I can’t quit
my job. Nothing can shelter quantum loneliness.
No body for long encompasses.
Desire adores homelessness.
So, I have become the window seen through, seen out of
when there’s absolutely nothing to see, for once, happily.
When the horizon is as flat and devoid as it looks,
for once, finally, when there is
no land left to build on
and when we take to perpetual roads
and vacations with full pay
all across the board
these new destinies without enmity
all these amnesties and amenities
and when the monads focus on one structure,
I will gladly hand over my tools to you
and let you take any impending contract
if you are just not ready
for Paradise.
inve ntor with his pa te nt p ending
for the life of me I can’t find
replacement parts for my galapozipotron
in any mail order catalog or cyber-cafe’
and though I’ve even
through various planetary metal processes
and other esoteric apparatus
reduced it to the sum of its parts
the galapozipotron seems elusive
in its repair and so amoebically indecisive
in its function
why, when the ambassador and his entourage of concierges
observed its fine stream-lined, yet as of late
inadequate (by its own standards)
zipotrons
they too, although aghast, were aware that something was amiss
even as they stood in awe and quite impressed
at how it brushed my teeth, salted two-hundred pounds of pork,
and groomed a camel all at once, and this was just the morning’s agenda
by brunch the
galapochronzipotrous
had already makeshifted a scenic villa
from red clay and fish bones hardening in the sun
under its many magnifying lenses, and
its cameras were capturing
several backdrops for its archives in small cubby-holes beside
samples of nautili. corpora. and pyrites
yes, this particular galapoziprotein was some glass, stucco, ivory,
steel-girder, hinge, silicon, seaweed, balsa-wood, petunia thing to be seen
and pondered upon, still, my difficulties had always resided in
the mass-production if the thing, and now, by lunch
discussing it with the Dalai Lama
we then observe the trusty galapo (for short) using its forceps
to remove a scorpion from harm’s way and I am then reminded
by my host that this invention (whose prototype was the now obsolete
hemisaperidifickozoid) immediately eradicated any use for
the Flying Carpet, the Colossus, the Hanging Gardens, belly-dancers,
and sent into hopeless unemployment all of the noble
shoe-shiners and lamp-lighters of the world.
But I am just a lowly inventor and where
does responsibility fall or lie
that the galapizaparticularatron
could not use its myriad dustpan
to efficiently dispose of the shattered
fragments of it?
And then some unknown matron replies,
“well, it falls upon you, the inventor
of this wonder.”
and then, with unprecedented grace and candor,
the galapozipotron fell upon her in mid-curtsy
and landed in slow-motion upon the silk of her lap
as a single peacock feather.
A Co b bler Lo st in the B ad la nds
Being that we are the potentiality
of dimensions to come
let us set out to sea
compass-less. Waves and dunes,
latitudes and longitudes.
All of our efforts before
have amounted to the platitudes
of perfecting preservatives.
Even a dead man’s garden
will continue to grow, but
what may grow there is ever
wilder than any human hand
could plant. Fingernails
and manes,
runes and omens.
If there is an All-Knowing Eye,
it shall remain shut until
there is something altogether new
to be dissected.
We were not made
in God’s image;
we were made to wield
his eyesight.
The heart is not an autoclave.
When crossing a river,
we muddy the water.
And here all water is sacred water.
As every celestial body
in the Universe, inscribed into
the Micro and Macro Book of Verses,
corresponds to my own
flesh-encompassed dust,
I walk under stars as proud as a drawn sword.
I am filled by this life
as a well in a rainstorm overflowing
long after the tribe of its diggers
has migrated, been decimated.
The only way to cross the desert
is on foot. And so Hermes on his wings
wore boots.
The mail gets here in time, in time to
requisition a fertile iris,
the last mandala for all of us.
Mandalas for all of us, athapoovidals
petals and eyelashes
dunes and ocean-floors.
Insignias in powder.
Vortices in typhoons.
I was never apprenticed to mending wings, but,
in this wilderness, one must make passage
for all amends.
Tra ve ling sa le sma n of air pla ne e ngine s
Centuries have passed
since I began my seasonal sojourn
in the rain forest. Since I took those days off,
they were my last. As does an angel know,
employed on an airplane-engine assembly-line,
a revelation must be imminent, a retirement.
Explode or emote. We are all religious here, and crosses
become light worn ‘round one’s throat.
Appraise or affidavit. A paralysis of effective
paperwork leaves us all happy to build
airplane-engines. Once, over this town, a hallowed
weather-balloon hover-crafted like a halo.
For a while it avowed the solstice. It meant something
in particular that maybe we didn’t. Like sounds
of arbitrariness. A wary weariness. Either way,
it was launched as anything always is.
We took solace in it. Poets wrote that
“will-o’-the-wisps weep with light,” and,
“heaven and hell, who will ever tattle-tale on Ourobouros?”
It’s just as well that all our hoaxes were penultimate sooth
and that citadels were built after burying severed tongues
of the seers. The engine-factory had to be preserved, at all
hoaxes. We knew about heaven, hell, east, west, south,
north, sunset, twilight, sunrise, dawn. We wanted to make it simple
with clubs and stones. However, the engine had been invented.
The scam went over smoothly until the first eclipse, even after
we insisted on a certain dualism despite periodic
tables and quick bullets. I’ve agreed to one position at this wheel
of gold-diggers, fortune-hunters, and ambulance-chasers. I’ve agreed
to surprises in life, like scorpions under whippoorwills, phosphorous
clouds surrounding nite-lites, etc. Hell, I check my boots for scorpions
every morning, and I leave the light on when I sleep. Some place coins
on their eyelids to sleep fastest. Pilgrims will march for years to witness
the petrified thumb of a long-dead saint. That is what my dreams
of the airplane-engine factory are like. They test-fly constantly, like
a sleeping-sickness, a narcoleptic cryptophrenic experience.
I laugh at the pilgrims amazement and they are amazing;
we all desire to pilot certify. It’s amazing, we laugh.
Anorexic, adolescent, and androgynous enough, but
will I ever get the job? Death is so photogenic, like a teen-model.
Fate fears something altogether different in her own rearview-mirror.
I’d just as soon join the papacy and make a hitchhiker pilgrimage myself.
Back then, when I slashed my trapeze wires
and fell upon the czar, the crowd became so riotous with applause
that i had to kill the rectors with my bare hands
and escape across the Badlands in my leotard fighting lepers
without any assistance from the underground or the Bedouins.
Things pacified without any subversive administration, thanks.
I’m happier now than those weather reports that work out.
I’ve since found gainful employment.
I’m in the grindstone business in a town with a nose-less populace.
An elbow-grease factory in a village of convalescents.
I’ve found my niche, lucky for my constituents.
An airplane crash-landed into the forest canopy
full of contraband day-before0yesterday. It was my lucky day!
Once I was an angel, now I will be winged again! I am so glad
that I came here with my carpetbags full of wares, full of pre-fab pyramids
ready with some assembly acquired to begin civilization anew.
carb on a nd silico n
Escapes, escapades,
Epics of apexes of it.
No shit we did our best
To expend Desire’s secret
Weapon, which was too succinct for
The bodies given. Enmesh me with
That exoskeleton we all said, that moxy
So into this proxy-existence
I will weed. Sound will not satiate
Any more span than light
Will. Drums pounding in the desert.
Our own devices. Silicon and water make a gel
That resounds under dunes. Absorptions, radiations.
The speed we run at is what is called
Mankind. I wonder how
That works into the equation. A star had to die
To make you. A zero to a one.
The chances of it, roulette
On periodic tables. Life chooses its oxymorons.
Artificial intelligence is the town drunk.
All of this becomes a pursuit of gold, lies
Of star-wombs. Amazing odds squandered, landscapes
Of spent light-bulbs outside of Vegas.
Landfills of light-bulbs making mountains outside of Las Vegas.
In this lottery of highways, not slots, in this slut
Of maybes, your life, your wrist-vein, your tongue
Lashed to pistons, cogs, combustors, sprockets.
We are stars’ mirrors in the dockets.
Your name is a limp thing hidden in the small of your back.
But it is a screw holding down a firmament you cry.
It’s still too early to deploy time capsules;
Trust me on this one. I am the fuel
Too knowledgeable of an impending launch
Postc ard co nc erning o ur her o
Leaving the Taj Mahal
He was said to have heard the cry
Of a roc or a cockatrice.
He was quite chimerical, but he was not
Disturbed, regal of genes; i.e.:
Stephen Marcel and Doris Day, say,
He could have been a different sort of cowboy.
His former dog, Napoleon,
Winced not at Geneva (the other guy’s dog), nor did our hero,
While brandishing the exhaust pipe
Of a Volvo screaming, or, exclaiming an ‘ahem’ with flare(guns):
“To whom, sleeping before the altar, Urizen in a vision thus answered!”
And so to the aisle of Elba we traipse
To get some free snack-cakes, promotionary giveaway
Sponsoring the historical significance of piniatas.
Elba’s cute in her clerk-smock.
Americans should be proud of her,
Ur of America. It's said of him transexually that
Hermes Trimegestrius Bombastus Beaucephalus Artichoke Jordan,
Such as Balzac, or, even Pontopiddan
Had lots of friends that were gay or Geisha. Life, whatta.
Happy was the state of affairs at soiree’s especially.
No one ever asked the cardinal question, “what do cardinals do.”
When our hero had had (quite clenched the idea of had, that is)
Too many beers, and David Callan and Aeneas with his Trojans
Would arrive. Our hero’s first book, composed
With the Ouija-board trembling like a smidgen of luck in a sandbox
Was an epic entitled: Confessions of a Fish’s Soul, a Transgression,
To be followed by, Fly-Fishing Despite Jaundice, and To Hell with the Theory
Of the Method of the Novel (for this latter tome, our hero
Was nominated Nobel). Green being
His favorite color, off to Iceland with Joe Melnibone Bjorkson he went.
The narrator can’t read a compass
To know his ass from a North pole in the ground.
Even though the blacksmith tags along with a meteorite anvil
And leads, waits. So many rickety side-kicks. In Iceland,
On the steppes of broken dolmen foreheads, we found:
Skeletons of electric eels miles inland
Broken samurai swords hilt-cleaved
One cigarette lighter encased in amber
One application for a full-time Dadaist position
An ash-bark skein with a recipe for sourdough-starter inscribed
A woman’s name in the snow that would not melt
A grail we tossed away
A theory of hero, a treatise of legend
Disclaimers in the pine needles
We found Forgotten-ness
(thanks to…)
2 nd card
the ragtag man stayed
built his home upon a grave
house like a beast with two backs
his father sleeps under his hearth
3 rd car d
love lies like a beast with two backs upon a beast hardly having a spine to speak of.
The aisle ends. There is a guilded cot on an island that no man ever sleeps in.
The cottages thatch their roofs across archipelagos. Storm season brings derelicts,
Possible mates.
In this cornucopia is the banal signature.
Rain speaks to our tent-tops with soothe.
No more guides, only an abundance with
4 th card
no capacity to fail it and matter somehow.
There are nine muses and I can spell their names correctly.
Though I can’t navigate the cosmic vicinity of this desk.
The next eclipse wipes it clean; blinded orphans run across cobblestones
For staring too long. The hero has tired of codes; he won’t send
Zip.
“a nd I ne ver b uy umbre lla s, ‘c uz there’ s a lwa ys o ne aro und ”
Tom Waits, troubadour
and the rain of fire
and it’s not judgment day yet
and I’ll give you my bones
and it’s not judgment day yet
and so when it’s exhausted
leaving town with a rolling stone
you bathe in formaldehyde
and wait to be dissected like a toad
and third-graders smoke cigars better than you
and you can’t skateboard anymore
and you are almost only twenty-six
and yet you are still a bad-ass somehow
‘cuz the timeless muse has her skirt
hung out to dry
and the feminists are cutting the line
as a herd of randy bulls run by
and i’m a kidder
wasn’t born in the back of a taxi
on Pearl Harbor’s anniversary
and didn’t take my gruel lightly
really, the privileges of
the rich are procurable enough
with a blackjack or safe-combination
of the correct words
but the only brown-nose I want
is a mustache, which in my case would be
red
being a Scotch-Irish Cherokee Milford
being only a terrorist of intent, hell-bent
but not a bomb or a bomber
though i wouldn’t mind being either
so be it
the sword of my soul is always sharpened on a star
with Tom Waits I’ll play cards
and kick around the ashes of a Pope
gin and tonics at 10 a.m.
and I’ve had loves
and lived a full life already
diseases, cancers, operations, warts, carwrecks,
conflicts, no wars thank God, pin-worms,
dislocated shoulder summer of 1992
pratfalls, stage-dives, belly-ups, banana-peel-outs
every body is a bone machine
I could make you a list of every movie I’ve ever seen
as could you for me
and so now we have an operable synopsis, a common tongue
forgive my sentimentality
it’s time to call it a lunch-date
when you see me again
I will have become the heart of a mountain
contained within a mouse
what I always was and didn’t know it
I’ve wrote it, been able to write
broken mandolins, wheelchair spokes, manhole covers, rat-pelts,
nasty Valentine’s-day-cards in blurred blue ink
I refuse to get a tattoo
until I cross an ocean
or until God falls
in love me
said Tom, but,
he was lying
the so mna mb ulist
Such viciousness does not go un-rewarded for long.
History, playing backgammon, pauses to recommend a song.
But never to request one. That would be redundant. Irreverent,
Everything suddenly wises up, zones out. Down the drain goes a secret:
The universe, or a piece of fried egg. Nights here are as dry as elbows and pokercards.
Words said like shock after carwrecks. The wainscot of my collarbone sags.
No beach beckons. No turnpike. No oracle. No procedures. No gnosticism.
A comet is a campfire glimpsed interdimensionally. Always such faith.
Take comfort in these ides under stratospherical shrapnel, take to marching.
Cliff citadel off the edge we go.
The sister has sewn Occam’s Razor into the sleeve of Pascal’s bathrobe
and tied it shut with a Gordian Knot. That’s it. That’s that.
Shall I surrender to the never-ending abyss of coruscating floor-tiles?
Not to mention the googol of cracks in the chiaroscuro.
Crepuscular. There, I said it. Once again language is jealous. Of
Man equals Time. Woman equals Space. Vernal Equinox. Lunar Eclipse.
What does an hourglass in a sandstorm know?
A nexus of form is the first easy answer. A pearl, an abhorrent grain
and its trek through the ages. Everything is as inconclusive as a circle is.
We were left to devices; we devised mutant scythes to swath with. Metaphors.
Rusting bayonets, decapitated figurines, charcoaled telegrams, dusty sistrums.
There never were garden-times. We always wrote good myths about eating bad fruit.
We have zest, oeuvre. A taste for figs and crab-apples. Flora and nautilus.
There was a photo of you standing in the center of the cromlechs.
You looked so young and vibrant. The curator was caught fondling and fumbling,
sleeping with your image. Security found this morning that all of the exhibits
and paintings had been arranged. You’ve been sleepwalking through the museum
again
yet, no one will admit to these crimes.
sa ying goo db ye to m ike’ s T ap, Io w a C ity
Our hero died soon
after he’d quit smoking.
He got shot.
He would have survived
had the cigarette case
been in his coat pocket
that day. Irony above his heart.
Lead got into his heart.
And now there’s no new deals.
The old ones are as novel, like
robot snakes eating more natural
genetically-engineered snakes.
And venom falls short of industry
because venom can be bottled
like soda-pop but only the alchies
and snake-charmers are buying.
Someone spraypainted the glass
of the trophy case black in here.
Lots of step-dads got mad.
Wives didn’t laugh.
Junior’s hat-propeller spins
as tornadoes of nicotine
and carbon monoxide writhe
above the monochrome furniture.
The bartender drinks
eighteen whiskeys and says,
“What’s the record?”
But that green is as old as
the last lark that barfed in here.
Two more Old Styles and one more bag
of Sour Cream & Onion.
Someone says, “What happens when
you’re in the throes of passion and then
Jeo par d y comes on?” No one ever says don’t
stop here, don’t stop. Time for the jukebox,
for a simple pocket-change rainbow.
Patsy Cline side by side with the Pogues.
The Jukebox Continent is where I’d like to go.
No one uses 45’s for Frisbees there. Nope.
Why didn’t the acid finish its job
on acid-washed jeans? People wear out too tight
the damndest strangest things. Knees buckle,
and after some belts I sound funny. This isn’t
a typical bar. Poem. Hock your pool-cue
for a pet ferret. Homeless Hank drinks tonight
after some traded pounds of morels he picked.
Aromatic kitchens of my poetry love!
Trumpets and reveille’s stitching the moments!
Suddenly, I try to imagine what the penises
of certain poets must’ve looked like
even though I never considered mine too much
except during the revision process.
It’s enough to make one not a chauvinist
or go out and catch twenty-two reasons not to speak of something,
or remember what it was like to be twenty-two
and stronger than a young pine-sapling. Who is it
that speaks of those halcyon days and oaths
of double dreams by rivers and mountains playing
tennis under some trees with three poems in your keds
getting sweaty? Who is it that’s so happy?
When the last pinball machine is crushed for scrapmetal
then I will embark for my own private Avalon.
Remember as a kid when a chocolate bar was enough
to galvanize an entire day except for the lactose-intolerant?
You could make such excursions for dead lizards. Swizzle-sticks
and space-dust. And now the questions in the mirror being:
“Will I age?”
“Is that me?”
Am I young again or at least according
to an inspirational paperback? Shit, at seventy,
we’re all just sphinxes. Riddled with pockmarks.
Deft, daft, daffy, or dumb. Agreeable satellites
position here, or crash into oceans. The River Lethe
has been bottled out. Here’s to ya! Hells can slow
down with this stuff, at times. And hell is an industry
to inspire us all. Two Tequila Roses and one Cactus Juice.
Maybe an Ass-Kicker. The mind’s a too-charted mesa
plagued under a locust storm of umbrellas that won’t open.
Kisses are welcome feedback during the Hendrix from the jukebox.
I leave for Arizona tomorrow with a beautiful massage therapist.
I’m happy to have known you and all of us, especially that new kid,
the one who brings his own pool-cue to a gunfight and always wins.
The one who won’t say goodbye to me.
Wristw a tche s a nd a uc tio ns of lo ve
You remove your watch
at the end of the day
as if all of time
weighed not at all.
Under radio towers we sit
on carpets of tight static
watching fruit bats
under street-corner lamps, all
thanks to the sheetrock, sheets,
of plate glass. There are vaults
locked at the bases of our tongues
but for once this is a chaste combination
not to be
cracked and we, chased to the city’s
borders to abide. Time-biding is our specialty.
The swan symbolizes
your stamina, and the scarab
represents mine. The sun rises
dismembered, as a rose encumbered
with love. I hear your thoughts
like fathom-charges. I seek
your depths in foreign rooms.
The only reason I’d cut
the line between us
was to tie it back together
myself. I was wings
folded about a violin
of a year’s worth of songs
unplayed. I’m without arms,
you are without legs. Apart
we cannot use our telescope
across the cratered moon of desire.
On the same day, John Dillinger’s pistol
and Napoleon’s compass were auctioned off.
Either one right now could prove useful to us.
We could use the radio I, overheard this bulletin on,
but the power is out, and so we rely on conversations
wondering how we could ever possibly
cross this Rubicon? By trimetrogon, or echolocation?
Dislocated captain, I love your elliptical mistakes, you
always leave scorched feathers in the medicine cabinet.
And I take them.
And I take them to places where nothing flies.
And where these flies hover,
where these sands sift constant as wings in any heaven
where the clocks dangle constantly from kite-strings
I long to shoulder your days like a puppet
who finally has humility.
Take away the hourglasses and smash them on cornerstones
as the auctioneer keeps his double-time-vocal-digital rap.
The espionage of my words is unraveling your wristwatches.
I become a door that opens both ways at once for once.
A Duchamp.
I become your eyelids
in a maelstrom
of flicker-films.
The only way out of any of this
is to stop time itself
with an untraditional mantra.
That scroll was as wispy and nonchalant
as the bird we caught and caged in the clock.
As feathers, as ash, as time itself was naught.
I shot the compass with the pistol.
I cracked all the clock-faces with its handle.
I grabbed you and threw you over my shoulder.
And I didn’t know when or where I was going
but it felt like I could call it Strength.
De par ture cre do
I a m for lor n
In my divestiture
Of tar and feathers.
All the sailboats are gone.
Everything’s a motor-powered
Motor.
Abandon’s caviar
Is savored.
Who’ll collect the larva
Of the stars, of the what
Could save us?
Buddha’s playing the jukebox again.
Popsongs unspecified. Eerily
Not moody.
Moderation never advocates
Sitting there too long meditating.
We all know that a flag
Stabbed into the heart
Can’t kill the aboriginal spirit.
You must trade with the natives
Gold, liquor them up, steal their horses,
Share blood-vows, get to know their women.
Points of interest and weakness:
Fear, Greed, Sex, Pretty colors on detergent boxes.
Still this is all too simple.
I’m to give plasma tomorrow
For my own inequities.
And so, the skeleton keys
Are lost to opening the heavens.
All this exists: ballads, bouquets, brocades,
And balustrades. There’s even some gold in our piss.
I am forlorn in a vest of your letters.
There are stamps of every country across my back.
There are two different kinds of legends.
I can’t read either of them.
Inspir atio na l Pa per bac k R a tio ns
he was an addict
before needles or referees
and in trains that only stop when voices crack
or accumulate while he waits for the sovereign
and of course the sovereign comes every time of course he does
but we all wait in the kingdom of not-so until wait-dom sets in
I sat in constant amazement in a pool of anointment
until the red-tape spiral of bureac came down to dry me with a martini
and all slobbers are soaked up by the mauve sponge
of tisk, tisk, and terrible
I was never that prominent anyway, nor
was I ever a prime mover
and I wait for the king-architect of mazes
amidst the amendment of self itself
and self is a hedge that eventually prunes itself
for desire’s ire has deed already and decided
an aspiring catalyst that would dream Americanly
with or without constant production of paperback novels
those inspirational ones
that funded or not, on travel-fund or grants,
there in their hotels, these
dry aspirin, nasty towel, fast-food-napkin, and antiseptic-soap
is all that I have left
as I am the hero facedown in a magazine with a migraine
and will I be awakened by the wake-up call that is my epic?
a book that fits in a pocket
a small Universe pamphlet
that’s my next project.
Pa god a
If I remember,
the floors were lacquered
black dragon scales.
The molting of them
becomes a summer house.
The soup made from the lotus simmers.
It will heal us in this new age just like
any other otherworldly tapestry.
A justice of gardens surrounds
our constellations of antiquities.
Indiscernible and quaint. As a Santa Fe landscape,
there’s more iron in our words than in any infrastructure.
A constant red, wrinkled shirt on a kitchen table.
A starched lapel duels with a straight-pin
as a button with four eyes looks on. Slowmotion doesn’t ever realize that it is slow.
Domesticities in hotel-rooms as a famous comet flies over.
Omens, un-noticed, the heart is a Trojan Horse
or a nectarine on a sofa. I’d rather be stricken
with a well-wrought word than my own
silent sexual surrender. Or murder
by the wrought-iron fence and rice-paper walls
with thorned hedges for embellishments and
our flanks were marked as by our owners,
if I remember, and the guitar was covered
in black lacquer and no one dared to play it.
If I remember, we stayed in and it rained a finite forever.
If I’m correct through this mist, only this incident was misconstrued
as inconspicuous. Most days spent without words in the Jacuzzi.
Strawberries surrounded molding fecund and sensuous.
Our summer home:
Baba Yaga’s hut.
A Hanging Gardens
made of rubber-bands, skint-knees,
splintered stilts, basically
a tar-and-feathered trailer in a mudlot.
It’s always what you make it; the Eighth Wonder
of the World inevitably postulates the ninth.
And progress must be so-so. I should have never
quoted the tour-guide, but, the booklet seems to think
that this was its first monument, and I tend to agree with it.
We’ve come to resorting to resorts.
We build resorts in the middle of deserts.
Cities in salt-lakes out of some superstition
that this will keep them from their salty fate.
Great prehistoric palm-trees surround our adobes.
They are all genetically-engineered breeds.
Only reptiles can survive here. Can you lay eggs
and golden ones for this age, I mean, this
millennium? Can credit-lines grow on trees?
You know the answer to this.
And the palm-trees sentinel the neon as symbols of this eon.
Under the merciless sun the day before a war begins,
you’ll find a credit-card receipt beside a lump of coal
wrapped in butcher-paper with an epigram scrawled on it.
Rick-shaws probably trot past the wigwams.
Maps burn where I lay my heads these days.
ma nife st d estiny
At some point
having nothing left
to lose means having
no one left to lose
it to. A whole century of loss
passes like a fart through a line at a deli.
And with each autonomous line
like kites’ twine tangling with weather balloons,
the fun always mingles with mixed blessings.
Arriving on the hunched backs of meteorologists
are the ensuing next year’s predictions. We all file
in filing for bankruptcy, with each prodigy
making his demands for customized all-points bulletins.
There’s just no time for there not to be emergencies.
The Emergency Broadcast System has been lying in waiting.
As ribbons and banners unfurl, the day begins
like a nurse who can’t get the I.V. in.
No matter what storm, there are always accolades
over appetizers under rocketing satellites.
This is the plebian land of casting extras.
We must surrender to the majestic phalanx.
That once and for all pristine phalanx.
The stargazers will keep the machinery moving.
The sidewalk gazers will keep the machinery moving.
As simple as assigning names, things all seem to snap together
just like plastic napkin-holders, or compound fractures.
Each hovering cloud reminds us of voting. For some regions,
paranoia is the only pathway to democracy. According to every
grass-roots shaman’s press release, snakes are patent-like.
There are no trademarks on any of nature’s creations.
Begin the conversions. Stamp them. Execute. Move product,
said the weather-storm in the desert. It lapped its preternatural
tongues about the Leviathan we had erected. That Leviathan,
that Golem of Immovable Chaos in Vegas that we once laughed at
as the tourists paid good money to laugh at it. We started everything
from crude diagrams, where all good things begin.
Before mysticism, all we had were meteorologists (and good riddance).
The Golem was born from this and crude complications.
We had a theory that always proved us to be perfect in our intent.
Like trademarks. I could lay no claims to my most prized possessions.
No logos, no ingots of Golem’s sights were ever set to such horizons.
Yet, starstruck, he set out, he sundered, foaming at the mouth.
He got spells, our creation did, you see. The first act of indifference
happened, apparently. After that there was no one left
to lose to with nothing left to lose. Apathy is a marketable commodity.
There is a murderer’s glove in the rain at an ignored crime-scene.
The meteorologists say that Loss is not predictable, just learn
to blue-screen in what you prefer. The meteorologists fear
that this destiny we’ve created is coming home, talking about ozone.
Everything went west and it will; it’s only a matter of time.
Families hover over hearths and hovel.
The storm bears down and we fabricated it
from crude materials, from raw intent. Huge
homunculus and what nature gave of itself. Man,
oh man. Nothing left to lose but its own kind.
I hold this reckless abandon kindred.
I stride like the titans through dinner parties.
I call the next day to make my apologies.
They always say no apologies necessary.
They all have a sense of manifest destiny.
Se tting o ut
I.
It gave us a wide berth. Floodlike
existence. There was always a quality of seeping
Mediterranean light. Kegs of honey and olive oil,
jellyfish littering the shorelines. Always debris.
What is precarity? An eclipse
cracks and eyes stare nonetheless. Opulence?
All of the leaves hit the pavement shaped
like crescents she said. The paintings
we were considering in our own curvatures and such.
We were trying to invent nets that were compassionate. Idealists.
A divorce of stasis. Who gets which offspring?
Goatheads of Space and Time. On each side
the nickel displays the face of Copernicus as it spins in a toss.
Blood is not enough anymore to seal anything.
We are hemophiliacs of the soul.
Virgin souls, encusp yourselves with lumens.
Everybody gets cut up with lasers; it’s a new religion.
The amphorae have been brimming over with spirit or far too long,
and the engineer’s battalion is not cutting the fractal’s squirt
of mustard anymore at all. A coil of metrical error. Apologies
are digits away from holocausts or holograms. What dimension
gives us passage? The eye just saw itself. Justice, as if.
The postcards reach home reliably, or have, at least, up until this point.
And because of least-resistance we’ve never stopped migrating.
The eye surveys. While migrating, is there anything other to consider
than the emblazened horizon?
Just keep riding the blood of the flood-like existence.
II.
The study of exotic birds is as good of an excuse as any.
Ga-lap-it-goes-- the sound of gentle waves upon the rocks.
It really gives a man some time to think, or
to venture towards uncharted lands with plagiarized affidavits
in his hands. Fates like ice-cream cones,
conical and canonical. Time-concerned.
What ways of thinking that die
as they were made. What waves, what odds
and ends. That’s either perfect or ridiculous.
Nomadic drones proned
to charming dooms. Shit,
dice-crafters die sometimes
without ever once rolling craps
III.
My face in the rearview-mirror is Roulette
when I look at it. Here today.
Gone temporal.
Egrets fly over a flock of regrets.
Exotic when they land, such beautiful legs
juxtaposed by murk and marshland.
A thought sinks in like a cigarette dropped
on terrycloth, constancy of melting butterscotch.
I’m lost and being followed by cops and I have the secret
of this land and I’m a foreigner, a rare bird.
My parchments of painted egrets are considered contraband here.
And I’ve got a trunk-load of these things.
Kamikaze on an interstate
as I compose my maps upon firecrackers,
the leaflets for the Cosmos,
these notes, a combination hidden in my left eyebrow, or
in a certain freckle (this briefcase of melanin,
this genetic uncooperative operative).
Unlock me with a destination.
A place with no birds, no roads. A new world.
One unleavened, deaf, mute, and never
made love to by my whoreful mind, not just yet.
IV.
Sketchpads and binoculars.
Canteens and staves.
Almanacs and divining rods.
Our umbrellas
marking the boundaries
of the New Worlds
when we need them to
rain.
In any other case we have spears or spares.
If the world is flat, then, logically
it must be bent to our needs.
Entrenched. It’s in a captain’s journal.
The lost coordinates. All is accomplishable, eventually.
It gives to us a wide berth, and so, an open invitation.
Every day the horses seem to understand what we intend to do.
Every day they are more apathetic, biting their bits,
trudging like exotic birds through deep muck.
Sa nta Fe
of zeppelins and postcards
of mesas and galleries
of namesakes forgotten in New Orleans
of centauric bulldozers
of three-dollar domestic beers
of burrito breakfasts of
Georgia and Georgia
O’Keeffe. A desert, a photo, a kiss
on a mountain of copper
then three strikes of lightning
on an effigy mound
of paintings
of mastodon skulls
a Sphinx
on a butte
purrs
nomenclatures
wax-monkey candles, novelties melting
miniature horses carved in hematite
wind-up Grim Reapers
can’t throw a rock without hitting an exhibit
of exhibition, a true terrorist Venus flytrap
best breakfast on the map, alchemy
of hotel room lovemaking
of snowstorm lovemaking
a line as true and faultless as a papercut
a fault-chasm in the wallet
one word freezes the pendulum in mid-swing
did she say “wrong exit?”
of fingers frozen ‘round gas-pumps
of bad American radio
of the heaven of being home
in the crook of her shoulderblade
anywhere on this planet
and that being enough to end
any of our poems
or enough
to begin them.
Postc ard fr om a cr ashing m oo n o ver Ne w Me xic o
The magnitude of Constantinople exerted its pull beyond the reach of Orthodoxy.
Men will gladly die for golden, glimmering things.
At least there’s some consistency in that. Old news is good news. Pave the roads.
Ruse.
Paracelsus, an alchemist, doth say: “If he thinks he is a fire, then man is.”
Great works burn from my touch.
I found a magic locket in the aviary, yet
I’m afraid to open it (Pandora lies again to Pan).
Love’s not a padlock any more than it is a tulip. Joyous and treacherous.
The insignia was made across you with whips. You smiled blood
in a dream. Woke to cottonmouth and need
for the trick is to fool the space-time continuum
by making its planets forget their own stars. Flashback interim.
To us, a Universal Catastrophe is but a leaf crushed under a boot
made from pages of books.
Isn’t this the Burning Bush?
Suspended animation, paper airplanes, the eternal plight of the marionette.
Cinema and cryogenics. Cameras and sutures of light resplendent.
A soul escaped from a rucksack bought in a pawn shop.
Breughel’s or Goethe’s.
There’s never any receipts.
“Next day there was a wind and the hovercraft was grounded. I took the noon boat
and after six hours I was back in my hotel room at the Hilton.” William S.
Burroughs’ last phone message to me.
We are off to the Western Lands officially.
Travelogues are more poetic than anything anthologized that gets read worldwide.
Displacement journals with pop-up portals.
Indifferent lost souls in steel fishbowls flying
at eighty-five miles-per-hour down tracks
parallel-lined. Smart-bombs
become mud at exits.
By astrolabe and sextant
by odometer and wheel
and nights soaked in rain and rum and
under a falling sky of the intangible
omnipotence of dust-motes
under rockets, comets, streaks of angel’s hair
and we so clueless to our own immortality
we achieve destiny like a waterfall
flooding up into itself only to piss-off a river
of a bamboo forest epiphany of flutes.
We achieve destiny with flippant and fervent metaphorics.
We understand surge.
But let’s not throw away the flare-guns yet.
The ocean’s lips are tight-stitched ‘round every tongue of wave.
The final punctuation for this particular poem will be an over-gorged full moon in
June
and then the season of the monsoons.
Look ing For So me thing T ha t La sts in a Sa nd storm
Every line a season ends and
in that’s the interim between
next’s hunger for the next.
It lasts long enough
for a blossom
or a star of snow.
No one plays poker for long
with Heisenberg or Newton.
The moon becomes the sun
with this particular wager.
I’ll write up the perfect waiver
for autumn. our planet forgot its star,
now look where we are.
Man is built to last.
We have harnesses
for tsunamis and sandstorms.
In a sandstorm, to recite a name
is the fusion that makes glass. Impasse:
Only a pillar of salt knows how to survive there.
Blake was up to his terroristic tactics again.
A dervish using nitric acid and nitro glycerin
to complete his engravings. Corrode;
there’s a copy of Milton
under the tombstone of my head
wherever I sleep. Whenever
and after doing the laundry,
I found ten guitar-picks
I’d been looking for.
Something in this life
that’s happened. A vision
only as haphazard as mismatched socks.
Lot was barefoot when he looked back
and she slipped forward through his toes
like the cold ash only a hearth knows.
An amulet cremated. I’ll look back
at summer’s end, feet crackling
the first fallen leaves and in my hands.
Sun-stroked, veined mandalas shredding.
Every line a season ends.
Sands sift for more lines, sieves and grieves.
Time belly-dances against the grains.
Between each particle is the interim
of next’s hunger for the next.
In this life that’s something to admire upon.
That particled particular something always happening.
Lea ving E l Dor ado
a never-had bin overflowing with has-beens
who are all millionaires
yet there is no gold left here
chandeliers the size of cars
surfboards made of lead
no chevaliers in sight
cislunar circus distortions
ghosts linger about punchbowls
spirals
in hand-mirrors
pterodactyls and fractals
a hangnail cracks a crystal ball
an evil eye is in a hole in the wall
lizard skeletons on puppet strings
bee-stings and home-remedies
all used for garnishings
sumac, poison-ivies
Love is biting its own shoulder down to bone
over and over
then the leftovers
the fountains full of broken aeroplanes
the once terrorists becoming disgruntled bartenders
blueprints to convention centers never completed as wallpaper
fingerprints all over History’s still wet paintings, all over the replicas
of Flemish masterpieces
lunar eclipse, full moon, Friday the 13th, March, 1998
remember this? or any other alignments?
a tattered magic carpet
the only cloud in the sky
I reach out to hand to you my credentials
as they fly into the mouth of a marble Cupidon
hell, I’ll just call for a cab with bull-horns on its hood
and then call ahead to my Siamese twins who are faithful and awaiting
my arrival like an armistice Armageddon
a postcard to a full moon written in golden script has promised it
and the foretold storms in the archaic
oghamics of scars across my arms tell how far I’ve come
and how far will I go?
and this question is the spirit’s chorus
and home does well to come to me
or just as well
or may as well come hell and high water to loft it
and I’ll reward
all makeshift homes, even golden ones, with prescient presence
I should swear not to go to it
my words aren’t signal flares
or bottle-rockets in any Southern tradition
poisonous snakes, I should hope
nor are they
and I’ll then leave
my corsage to grow as I go
in the garden here, in my host’s grove
and tiger-lily
amidst the goldenrod
and may it prosper into fertility
even in the moss-cool garden
for this is an age whose lords
carve not their names into stone
they don’t know where to carve their names
and one wonders
if they ever did and what matters
as the stones become metamorphic and igneous
Another d umb To urist
Talking to a three-headed dog, he ask:
“Is it the Cherub-Bus I’m looking for?”
Three heads nod and bark, “Get on the boat.”
he ll
What hell means to me
is a cliche title.
Hell,
what it means to me is
a tower that continues to burn
on the high horizon
that no one ever asks about
but me; I’m
to catch flames of disdain
and the tower burns and burns
like Mexican sunsets and excellent salsa-and what hell means to me is:
no
no
no
no
no
more
more
more
more
more
John Ashbery
beer
Liszts for my hungry ears
jackals and coyotes
being able to feint Fate
with the transcendental-transparent and rampant
word-world-whirl
or a few beers-and gone’s the days
of Ginsberg live
and train-brakes that can stop at a drop
and concordant lives that end in whispers
(they have uncovered everything!)
Under rain-clouds
and the hiss of bacon in the pan
and what hell means to me is
no more half-naked women
don’t we all love half-naked women?
and no more gargoyles
or feather boas or Mardi Gras beads
or extravaganzas of anything else I don’t surreptitiously need
just by mentioning
like spent shells swept up
by barmaids in bad movies
in hell who are actually
demi-succubae
and hell’s got Lenny Bruce
Charlie Chapman
and Buster Keaton
and just because he couldn’t sail
and win the World Cup
don’t mean that Satan’s
not sea-worthy-and gone are the days
when suddenly the entire world
would focus on one square inch
in the middle of the Atlantic
where
the Ultimate Salvation was prophesied
to go down, terminologically speaking,
and then all of a sudden of all,
a majestic flag
rocket-shot out of that square inch
of the sonar-satellite grid-locked square foot
of oracular radar
pinpoint
and everyone was waiting for
that to finally be that and
once and for all,
but, the flag shot up
in a flaming comet-like fart
towards some barren planet
that didn’t even need
that kind of Hope.
And they all went home as blind as comet’s courses.
And they all learnt how
to burn up faster.
How to burn: faster, up.
for a lo ver of a d og fro m he ll (po stcar d fro m Cere b us)
tomorrow I go to a wedding a-wielding
my lapels starched and clean
everything smells over-vacuumed
too freshened-up in my radius and the smell
of cheap cologne. I’m up at three-nineteen a.m.
thinking of old Charles Bukowski
no matter what you say about that bastard
he’d have said it about himself first, that bastard
isn’t that funny?
and the roominghouse madrigals
are real. his gut had things scrawled
on the inside of its walls
snub-nosed shotguns aren’t as easy
as snobs and snub-noses
there were worms in his lines; he wrote
his way in and out of hell
by constantly writing about hell with some freakish glee
and a hard or not pecker, depending on the myth of the author.
he even wrote a novel of the postman’s plight;
could Whitman have snubbed him? hell no.
so I’m going to a wedding tomorrow, free food and booze;
I have no problem whatsoever, no hells-and I don’t get into brawls
and I don’t have a horde of whores
and I’m not famous
and I don’t (usually) drink a twelvepack a night--
(anymore)
and so I go to the wedding of someone I remotely know
of two people to a thousand of them, I mean
I must be a made man
I live a protocol life here.
hell is becoming more and more fashionable, its fiery runways
and three-headed dogs and bystanders at weddings
fast-talkers always wear the same suits on their sleeves;
they are all gate-keepers or trying to give you their card
to sell chain-link fencing or lattice-work, but,
no matter what you say about Buk, he’s probably already
said it insulting to someone else in “no uncertain terms”-he has the self-realization of simply being raunchy him
and can you imagine how whore-fucking, blood-pissing, beer-drinking,
wine-guzzling, Hamsun-reading, Americanly rolling around in puke-stained
life and loving it that that is?
I can.
and in many ways it is rancor
and in many ways it is stupendous
A R a nsom No te Re ad Alo ud a nd Accom pa nie d B y H arp
Ontologically speaking, we’re all orphans. So,
stop your bitchin’.
You must have the sense of humor
of a one-armed juggler
forced at gunpoint to play the xylophone
in a prison orchestra. The only way out is to
learn to play the harp. Probably a great escape.
I’m here to tell you that
I wouldn’t know, as would admit most virtuosos. Still,
catastrophe’s never begun to malaise me, nor entrapment,
I guess I’m old-fashioned. A priori
is not always the hierarchy it can be cracked up to be
or not to be. Boring, isn’t it?
That same old xylophone.
Ontologically speaking, I may as well be your parent,
right now, if you’re reading. Let this be an excuse for you then,
for every hair upon your head there exists a harp-string.
I’ve only come here to this white expanse to.
It’s why I have. A page, or an instrument of no proficiency.
I’ve come here to kidnap my own parents. My composers.
The poem is over for you.
I’ve just done it.
postc ard to m y br other
for Jacob and Sol
I’ll meet you on the shores
of the Yellow River where
Chang Tse-Tuan shed his own
blood to paint a beggar.
I’m forever your brother.
1,000 monkeys with 1,000
laptops will eventually type
the Bhagavad Gita.
I’m a jackanapes composing odes
to baboons. You have the telepathic power
of a photojournalist on mescaline.
Do you feel me writing to you
under the palms of a ventriloquist
moon while you recline in your hammock
as creatures crawl through the Rousseau-thick
foliage of your undertakings? The tundra hides eyes
of borealis. Tigers and starlets.
This seems to be a night
of cowboy antics
and bacchanalia
if there ever was one.
There are such fields of ganglioned brambles
in my cortex
that a minuscule centipede the size of a quark
could not navigate such treacherous passage.
The Sword of Damocles hangs above my bed;
I sleep soundly always.
Do you still dream of our father? Of derby-winners?
His gait of ice? Can you see his hands cracked
‘round an axehandle. I’ve seen the charioteers
making love to their war-horses at high noon
in order to ensure bloody victories.
History doesn’t record such undertakings, so
I’ve taken certain measures for posterity.
Crimes. In ink I’m safe where my tongue would otherwise
be severed. I’ve worn veils to infiltrate the chambers of Ukifune.
Rilke says, “Love should not be nurtured with grain, but with
the mere possibility of being.”
Man does not live by bread and bullets
alone, then. There’s no difference here
between the mosaic and the myriad.
I’m always the aliquant to the universal equation.
I guess that you, my brother, are the remainder.
Ukifune, my beloved, has her hair done
into braids as long as rivers.
Those black rivulets in the palace
of Heian in the center of the labyrinth
while looking through magic
tapestries into other worlds. I’ve important business
at the crossroads, in the fields
of blood-songs and whipping-posts.
In this world of hashish and harems,
I await Hassan’s word. I’ve been given
a sword filled with scorpion-venom.
We shall win
the Crusades. Many knights have fallen to us,
one way or the other, by seduction,
or scimitar. Don’t worry, I’ll be home
in time for the full steaming samovar.
And this bloodbond to you
from your brother
who’s awaiting alms
upon
this Yellow River
Postc ard Fr om A no nym o us
Diseased presidents
in fields of hemp
with wooden teeth
lying to one slave,
impregnating another.
The country has an itch
it can’t scratch with militia.
Secrets cover the soil
like permanent sleet.
Invest in bacteria,
incense and compu-virtual
stuntmen. Strut around the sets
of the marketplaces holding your pieces
of facades, manufactured tailfeathers
and willow-the-wisp shake-up globes.
I’ll remain
under mailbox posts
tinkering with your life
like movie rental
late-fees
that pay some future president’s salary.
Postc ard s Fro m W ea se ls
writte n o n a po stc ard fo und b y the R iver L ethe
I’ve forgotten
your address.
up o n re ad ing your na me
I’m cold
as week-old
paper-cuts
purpled
during winter
in Iowa
we a se l sa ys to the S tarr y N ight
“your light does not hinder my kills,
so at night, the stars must acknowledge
all weasels”
to Jac ob a nd C ally, of m y litter
I broke my easel
to build the mainmast
I’m coming home,
I promise.
I sa w o ne mor e la st thing
And I shattered.
The glass boomerang returned
To a hand of brittle glass
The vision circumlocuted
Executed its original intent;
These fingers could not grasp
It. Quite an impact, that. A breakdown.
I’ve learned to be stern and taciturn
With either prey or prayers.
I’ve thrown missiles from my lips
Into the stratosphere, like a cardinal,
Like all pariahs. Distinguished throat-singers
Armed with lies of nothing aforementioned.
What was as important as the points of the compass?
This Mecca of truth at my disposal, this projection
That always returns full circle? Illegible, unusable.
I reside in the summer condo of the possible.
The paintings hover above the hinterlands
Like holograms. It’s the season to sojourn.
Shutters shatter. Invasions of light.
The easels never faltered under our opuses.
Our misspellings were taken as the freedom of rivers
Not the destruction of dams, not small town floodings.
We can’t nevermind the implications, though we can
Misplace the footage. Have our souls always been flung
So haphazardly into rainstorms? Who cuts the path through?
We remain dry no matter what the downpour.
It all came back to me, all that I had intended to stab somewhere
And stay away. Fatal in us is what gives and what gives in
To reconfiguration. I saw one more last thing in the shattering:
Plethora.
Trea tise o n E xc ur sio ns W ithin O ne’ s Ow n Te mpor al a nd Cor por al Bo dy
I’m a vacation
everywhere I walk
and things legends are made of
Velcro to me
a trumpet sounds in the jungle
but you won’t find its origin
the mind uses sonar
the heart has binoculars
we are all nocturnal
on vacations
a pigeon coos
it agrees with me in a palm tree
I burn my bare feet
on Arizona asphalt
I’m vacationing on Mercury
or may as well be
or on LSD, or my own candor
and apparently the best way
to out-run Death
is to walk towards him for a while
with your last handheld breath
my mind has no Feng Shui
it’s in disarray, a cracked
sidewalk carrying frantic ants next to a carwreck
and what has been called
the sleight of hand of the mind
that rests on the nose of a still pond
I take small vacations from being
says one being to one state of being to
one corresponding to what is written
and always plagiarized
in the Supposition Deposition
that we all signed by speaking
but the ink was ether
and we were dizzy with scribblings
but we are always notarized molecularly, cellularly
and our code speaks
through the temporal and corporal bodies
every moment a breath bequeaths
its courageous next and
I am now coming back home now to my flesh
and I say: Thank you, O bodies and bodices
for teaching my soul with your worldly ways.
Ver sus Ver se s
racing against books,
versus cars, faces, disease
versus fumes, exhausts, steams, vipers of vapors
versus concrete, loose screws, piles of paperclips
contracting a linguistic virus
a Tourette’s syndrome of the vilest category
versus lyrics verse with divine or not doggerel
versus phantoms, gods, voodoos, pantheons, bad Tarot card readings
bad I-Ching throws, bad poker bluffs, terrible cinema
of mondo films, unlucky cribbage and die-throws
resulting in cops or shallow plots, chain-letters for Chrissake!
there are mountain-fighters, cloud-fighters, river-fighters, canyon-fighters,
with weaponry of rappelling, skydiving, kayaking, spelunking,
snorkeling for oceans, roulettes of all sorts amidst
bulleting sharks and hands-down verdicts
versus pens, oil-paints, bracelets, boils, scabs, and
our flesh poised against sex, headaches, shin-splints,
alcoholism, kidney-pains, neck-sprains, etc.
versus podiums, professors, ball-parks, pylons, computers, stats,
data-chunks, probabilities, and there are
ancient temples crumbling grain by grain by the nanosecond
and the minute minutes of our lives dissipating
like the slight aftertaste of something metallic
and to be against all of this with only a generator of poorly-honed experience
and arias for the deaf, pyrotechnics for the blind, endless
music and glamour, dialects, orations for the mute
the sprint of the cheetah for the paralyzed
and versus everything with love
versus passion with passion
versus God with doves
Blind da te w ith I nf inity
The secret of it all
Was lost in the last slurp
Of a milkshake.
Nevermind the fact that every molecule of carbon
In every living organism originated in the heart
Of a star. The galactic is sprinkled with
Calculus; I’m not its best charioteer.
Hold the flashlight above the skin above
You heart, it’s translucent primrose glows
Beaconesque. What is a path other than
A man’s foremost invention? Endeavors
Of a machine of nicotine, alcohol, and libido
Harnessed behind collarbones and crass lips.
But some smile is still missing
From this date, this night, this vortex.
My mind is an ameba seeking a skeleton
Yours remains spectrally mindful. More wine.
We are a seashell and a microscope making love.
A wilderness of apparatus
Creates its own tornadoes, and every variable
Becomes accountable. Is it I, or is there a constant
Ringing in our ears? Is it you?
I could never pinpoint my origin either.
This we have in common. I’m a nail in the wall
Of you. Don’t call me or call me mortal.
I’ll never tour Budapest, but I am sure that the earth orbits solely for me.
There is a souvenir shop there remote and Romantic with tickets.
In the end every poem is a love poem.
This is a detour. Is a blind date with infinity
Fate? The check is misnomered, please.
To know your name is desire; to utter it is to become one
I don’t want to pay just yet; I don’t want that kiss goodnight.
I now know the value of the ever present moment.
Wishing f or the U np lace s
It’s believing yourself to be
alone in the desolation
on a black unfurling flag
of field, a racetrack during
Armageddon, and suddenly,
the entire symposium
of your senses is forced to accept
the beacon of a distant small fire lit
a blip on the horizon,
*
and at that point, all that you have is horizon.
Someone is still out there and so you must remember
how to speak. Clouds surprise the unity of your obelisk
erected in their pageant; their faces nonchalantly shifting
and still someone is out there to be spoken to, and for, in order
*
to achieve a heightened sense of smell
one has to be blinded. To possess perfection
of sight, oracularly seal the ears shut with river
pebbles and candlewax. In order to cease being
a heretic you kill all gods and desecrate all relics.
*
as mammoth as mountains may alter
when a sightseer in a car points
to them and another passenger
never sees the same thing as the disjunctive
driver. Fleeting, the 747 of the mind flies too fast. 70
miles per hour as life is a passing-lane always
*
no verifiables, or signifiers, as some may’ve called ‘em.
And to remember any Tuesday during any given month
and what you ate for dinner that Tuesday evening of X-variable
month is quite a tall order for some whose numbers aren’t
formulas. It is of no significance that we always leave on Tuesdays
*
to go pearl-diving or mad..
*
But the mine of salvation was found.
And it was dynamited.
Chunks of luck and benediction rose
in clouds as gravel was gaveled into dust.
Tourists ran to horde pieces of it all in black and white reams and reels.
*
I remember once
at a four-way stop
I saw a butterfly fly
out of a Lincoln’s hubcap
*
it was the perfect moment.
*
and we are all aware of a fall,
aware of being there awaiting
and guilty of that with dirt
caked in our hair
*
free some past detonation. We will
make it back to the crater’s edge. We will
peer on into ourselves with better surveyors.
We will plant the mines again. We are beautiful demolitioners.
*
On the last Tuesday to end all Tuesdays
we will remember the last brunch to end all brunches
and the last remembrance of all remembrances
the dues paid, and then, the metamorphosis
*
leaves us stoking the fire
with another across from us who says
“Where you from? I’m cold. Stars no longer console us. Your name?”
Sore throat, eclipse-blind deaf-mute, fellow wanderer,
talk to me please.
Poe try is so nic arc haeo lo gy
What it does simply is
Uncover the lost arts of never
Recorded, never excavated civilizations
Building a megalopolis within the volcano’s
Active mouth is easy. After the cryptographer has
Secured the blueprints and carbon-dated the cracks
In the churchbells, you will be delivered more code
By quetzals and we will squander away the last
Of our decency for gondola rides towards guided tours
Of cremated libraries. Nothing but frames left, really
And in this foreign country, where any secret worth stealing
Is locked in the jowls of skin and bones dogs
And our scraps of translations mildew in saddlebags
And as we pass windmills and granaries stockpiled
With kernels and grains of further peculiarities,
Our instruments become archaic for not being archaic enough
Our cranes break the horse’s backs; our ways corrupt the youth.
The crankshaft and combustors become daft to a deft basketweaver
Water-hoists and bridles aflame. Impertinence as inheritance
Windmills and oars. Tornadoes and wars. Cellphones
Tossed into primitive wells. Scribes would arrive by teleport
And still punch their timecards wrong. And what endures
Is the creations, the can-openers and toenail clippers of the diaspora.
In the ash is no signature but function’s cruel fictions,
civilization of sentences strung together. Orators
And hanged-men continuously editing past lynchings
Poetry as soul archaeology? Poetry has killed the soul
Whored it all out. If art of fact is yours
Then curate plums, spawn utopias (easy pickings)
We’ve already too many species of quetzals to skeleton
This cargo of cages and labels, my blurb and draggle
Exponents of failed exposé’s, but, the latches behind tongues
Hold great plumed exotics yet to be conquered, I’m confident
Of this, yet, jungles of cords and vines give light disparity
A N ightinga le Rep lie s to a Bo y
As he picked one up he said.
“This is the wrong feather.”
“But how can that possibly be?”
she sang continuously.
The eyes of the peacock looked on
in quiet apathy. A king’s perfect aviaries.
Cages glinting bequeathing
second-hand stars, i.e., stars. Stars named.
What a tapestry.
Poem of the De ser t
I found it odd
that the merchants
had caravans
supplying scorpions
encased in glass spheres
preserved bubbles
of fates unrequited
and it was all the rage
especially here,
in the desert, enough profit
to cross it and become rich
and it was especially ironic the day I’d met them
considering how Bowles had died
only the night before by the selfsame venom
that essentially I was holding
in my hand’s palm
within this perfect global.
How the enlightened world doth change,
I said to a dust-mote.
And here, where all that was fundamentally precious
was only a few ounces of water was
Death as a novelty. Boggling.
Let the renaissance happen without me,
I said to the scruffy Erudite.
We must not forget ourselves, said I,
under my breath, staring at the bit,
fingering the bridle.
Fossiliz ed Ro ad ma p
“Are we there yet?”
The impetuousness of youth. Leonardo himself couldn’t design toys to satiate you.
And prodigy could put allspace in a notshall. This poor Hamlet would now be
counted
as a king of infinite space. Yet, still, he gets antsy
in the backseat of an uncle’s station-wagon.
The merchants are the same as the cannibals in their desire.,
but procurement involves so many flesh-transactions.
It enters the right auricle, slinks into the left auricle, exits into the right ventricle,
leaves once more through the left auricle and into the blood continuously.
Many a furtive glance has destroyed an empire; many a veil fallen has inspired one.
Secret rivers, tunnels, and gates. The lovemaking of continents.
Counting the lines in the road with the abacus.
Cussing potholes and armadillo crossings. Theoretical diligence and armors.
Sunflares, geysers, whalespouts, rains of ash, brocades of light, fire from the eyes and
words,
the black swords and white wings afluttering forever.
These lands are irrigated with our sweat.
Blood rains under the earth’s crust. Magma through the bones.
Just by standing in a field, a man plants seeds. The root of what he does resides in
the angel
and the demon of him. A farmer knows that his place is between.
Every crop is a welcomed requiem.
Mandrakes and mandarins galore.
We move to the spanse of prickly-pear.
All is a smorgasbord of noir under a constant star.
We make relish out of relishing it. Chop up all into art.
I refuse to wait in the sauna any longer. I’m strong as a winged lizard
riding a quetzal.
Our lives are the drivings to constantly relocating coronations. We’ve exhausted
every
mysticism. The soul must stand alone in a crowd of itself.
Our hearts are sportscars that none of us can afford.
The soul knows what it does not;
what the soul is is its own personal
knot of not-gnosis.
In a forest a unicorn versus a buck
is nothing to bet on.
Too symbolic.
Every line.
The clashing of antlers, the clang of one-ness.
As my eyes become pale and tired before the wheel. I’ve always been the center
of wheels. Who has met if not through me?
Tribes are smaller than we breed. Living under helicopters and above cops.
Regiments of age, optimistic cancers, learning to make exotic parchments.
I am Milord, a dying name. Horsepower and longing. Dazzling
love and fear and guitar strings for arteries. Taut
steel-belts for rhythms. Syllogisms of interstates confused
and frustrated gas-tank muses. Sappho and her Harley.
When the mandala is the break of a sunset in your firstborn’s eyes
and perfectly aligned with the heart within
then I’ll know that this telegram has reached its home
as a final divine rest of wings.
There will be one ominous cloud, and only one, and
you will call it SKY. For lack of a better world. And someone’s namesake.
a constellation:
one letter per event per millennia.
One particular sky per person, please.
Said the consciousness.
The rings of Saturn will change someday.
I’m sure.
And I return with quills and feathers
Look ing for S and in the D esert
Sand through the funnel, hourglass.
Sand without itself, in funnel-cloud.
Sand fused making glass, this
Leaves us sinking into dunes
As a drop of acid into a pile of sugar.
Holding trophies up.
Holding flagpoles up rung with maps.
Cracked goggles, weathered satchels.
And to grasp its waist
The storm, time itself.
And to judge chaos in that fist,
That clenched grain, moment held fast.
The caravan is one of interdimensional tents.
The campfires are comets at this trajectory.
Come in; come in.
Do you read me?
The street vendor of magic carpets
Still carries his wares home
Via horse-drawn carts.
One wanders, walks-about
At the foot of Camelback Mountain, looks up
Not at the cloud, but at the shadow of the cloud
On rock-face; it confuses-Replacing one ephemeral with another-Still you get over this fast.
Shatter the hourglass in the sandstorm.
What is there to lose?
A moment laid claim to, but precious
As a pearl, and, when a pearl shatters,
Does it render thousands of complete pearls?
The answer lies not in deserts nor in oceans--
The glass shattered, the storm roaring down
To a whistle, then nothing, and then the pilgrims
With grieves and sieves sifting for the sand
Of the hourglass, picking out shards and splinters.
And they will sift for this ore forever.
And the funny thing about these sunburned devotees is
They never age, never grow old, ever.
MI D DL E OF T HE BU RN IN G BR ID G E
I. E de n’ s S o uther nmo st R egio ns
out o f pr int te xts a nd tr a ve lo gue s:
writing poems is the naming of knives
beautiful crowbars
cup we seldom drink of
dwarfstar lodestones
the light from flare guns is silent
guitar canoe adieu
our country arcane where laurels rained
my hand the book opened
fishbones, blue potatoes, flour, burlap, & cayenne
library fire alarm false alarm
concussion at a campsite
floodparks
hungover in the planetarium
where I didn’t find myself undeniable
only T-bills please
mother has a cislunar scar her ovum
extend the grace train
Golgotha cobblestone St.
Sargasso in the Spanish moss
dreadnought viola anchored
word never said is what you attempt too often
texts that shark’s teeth tear
like ligaments
Vine yard Sk etc he s
1
Giant dragonfly
a psychedelic crucifix
in rearview- mirror somehow
keeping time with the Chevy
on a dirt road, Mendicino county
2
Darkness, a hiss of sprinklers
through the valley. Outside our room
the dew descends already, an ink
not unlike mine
3
Free dinner certificates from a vineyard
to a brewery. Waitress serves us
with a seven-month-old babe in one hand,
a beer-pitcher in the other
4
3 earthquakes in 3 days.
20,000 dead in Turkey.
supposedly are on vacation; felt an aftershock
while eating red snapper on a dock.
San Francisco Bay
5
Boys back at vineyard talking golf.
Tai Chi heartthrob postures by the pool.
Elderly women with perfect silicon tits
and bad tans. California, fer sure
6
up on a road like a swarm of eels
winds through the hills
above the symmetry of planted rows
of vines. Our rental car moans and grinds
7
flowering tobacco, palms, manzanitas, cantaloupes, lingering lights, beautiful
woman laughs obscured by a wineglass and Jacuzzi-mist
8
these roads:
like
like
like
like
like
like
a nest of copperheads
unkempt hair of an Italian mistress
the words of a drunken sailor
a firehose writhing at full volume
a simile describing itself
the tendril of exhaustion running
through the body from right big toe
to migraine threatening optic nerve
Highway 175, Cobb Mountain,
I would not skateboard down you
9
Yuppies falling from the sky
like a strange Golconde’
descending with picnic table umbrellas
and planting them in the cobblestones
dusting off lapels, going straight to wine-tastings in the a.m.
10
Stayed too long in the edible herb garden
with a bottle of Chardonnay
my head next morning
a besotten armageddon
an auger could have read
what came up out of me
11
Casual acquaintance in parlor says:
I’m from Cheyenne, where belt buckles
are bigger than brains.
No one laughs but me.
12
The days here don’t fall from above, they emanate
from the earth’s crust, and the colonnades of light,
a gushing blood of blossoms creeping up, cuts
through the valley at the mountain’s foot, the contrast
of this cloudless sky meets your eye, shadowed by your hand
and the horizon is like a half finished bottle of Merlot
corked and toppled upon its side, and you are the same
and so you peer into a blurred truth:
half-horizon, half-blood
13
Delis, stables, lofts, apple groves, all in isolation,
I have found my haven.
Add a gas pump and the place would be the perfect civilization,
not that you would ever want to leave, but
knowing that you could if you had to.
No need to make constantly detailed lists
of why one should stay around.
No need to write poems at all, unless
you have more than one best friend
14
Dixieland band in Northern California.
Too much wine, too much clarinet. Trombone guy
smiles as he plays more than he should be able
to smile as he plays. Eating rack of lamb
in Cloverdale. My luck never ceases to erase me
15
Sunday, worst hangover since Tuesday.
Old farts meander through the deli
with more coordination than me. In the adjoining
gift shop full of T-shirts, salsas, vinaigrettes,
virgin oils, I become nauseated by all of the beauty
of this place, the absurdity
of having to put it into jars
16
Vineyard behind us, we snaked north on a coastal highway, now
I am in City Lights bookstore, an hour into San Francisco.
Bukowski has his own shelf; I don’t get it. Chinatown dragons,
streamers above strip-joints. Any city right now would be the greatest city
on the planet. But, I am just not ready for Paradise, I guess.
The vineyard reaches the world in bottles;
I had to leave that place behind
Sierra Ne vad a
All this writing down to redeem
one word one name one theorem
gnosis susurrations, adumbral sketches
ultimatums humming through the grasses
and what a wild wind does.
That dwarfstar, that lodestone, that spore, the flora
and fauna within and without your bloodstream, the peck,
the petal, the genome, endless word deciphered, the mute
cryptographer can’t withstand the coming of it all together.
And if I could parade it, the poet I would be,
the ambulance chaser, the poet
the ice cream truck driving through Antarctica, the poet
the fat lady refusing the last aria,
the poet, the regnant imprisoned poetic
in the tower full of scribbled themebooks
the hunter of grizzlies asleep in his longjohns, the poet
a dentist for cannibals is a poet.
It’s no transgression; we are the narcosis of our own poppies.
My name is as conjugal as any; the mountain range
rings out a name on every peak. Yet the range is one word
to the ranger who knows not to intertextualize.
The eye is its own dialect, a pageant knows no tree
in its supreme forestry.
I can’t roll the entire
ensorcelled orb
of the perfect word for this
off of my tongue.
Archons in the aspens, cometdust on cliffs.
Tomes in birds bones windread overhead.
Monosymbol, a light of one lightning, a genuine
unattainable. You are insidiously never the name
I am sure of. I am sure this is redemption.
7:4 7
this deficit impossible to fill
with every implement and experience with
every exploration into the self renders
one-armed burglars fumbling with goods at strong locks
all of this at our disposals
all hovering above trash-compactors, above
the Grand Canyon, Tripoli, The Udal. scary,
our destinations never measure our destinies;
it's an old song, again. she never said, "Play it
again Sam" in Casablanca. she never actually said that,
or anything, really. watch a movie for history's
sake. slake it all in with your lover, for
no major appliance on the planet, no luck-out, no lottery ticket,
no number of successful arrivals or departures to and from fervent
exotic locales will remedy the last curtain-call. yes, you are in
love, but, aren't we all? try to plaster your heart on a brick wall
in one line. a Pollock painting. I can't. see, all of this pageantry
this perfect lighting is for the underlings and the director
will never speak, so adamant about it, and the producer, well,
he's the sunlight on the starboard wing of a 747 at 7:47 a.m.
Atlanta to Chicago (layover in Charlotte). I've tried to sustain
the lustful angel in me until the last lines crack my lips
like feathers crack there own wings. a chaffing of physics.
the struggle between beauty and the will to usurp it
never itself became beautiful enough for us to lie down
resolved and absolved, at the end of any day so far.
the final trick of lighting makes us all perfect.
engineering, rivets in jetplanes. small things holding
your small life together. nuts and mechanics.
friends, this deficit is impossible to fill.
read this scrawl, you already know that everyone else
is going everywhere with everyone you ever wanted to go there with.
piniatas are bursting worldwide as you obsess.
there, within you, is a windshear
that was named; you fight against yourself beautifully.
you are a sane crash-landing
fle w in f irst c la ss f or the cere mo ny, go t the k ey to the c ity, le ft
im med iately
bought the shop I had sold my soul too
it was like a porno I felt it like a real star, I
bought an albino skin alligator jacket
on my card I put a cardinal’s kibitzing
at the whorehouse I paid dearly
and no one ever had to work ever again
then I brought home the washer/dryer
(the Sun and the Moon)
it was enough for her
until I bought her the real her
a lump of coal crusted with diamonds
I meant to be metaphorical, and still made millions, I
brought home the breadbox I bought
full of vaccinations
and acquired the car
full of vagrants and immigrants
and purchased the pen
full of affidavits and perfect for forging checks
and the can opener that spit out
tiny tin migrant workers and fertile crops
and the shovel that dug up
all past estates
and the wallet full of holy grails
that were spillproof
bought the plane ticket that made the planes
align
bought the wristwatch that paid time off
slick as a shark’s mustache, I was
bought the bottle of pills to biopsy my new skin
it needs the ocean inside me to begin, that’s all
had the slot-machine delivered
to my casino that I owned and had it blessed
with fools manifest jerking throttles
saddled by buckets of quarters
bought monuments, purchased a geyser,
and a snowplow that causes summer
invested in and acquired all of it, but, one poem
lodged in my machine
and forced a bit of work out of me
it was like acquiring too much
money that could say where it had been.
w aiting for 14 -A bercor n to So uthside Sa va nna h
it's nothing interesting at all, an old bike
tied to an oak in front of the methadone clinic
as a fat tie-dye boards the north transit, I wait
for the southern. a radio tower looms above
all of us, and the recurrent image, and the recurrency of bad pop-songs, all filled with melodies
plucking lullabies from our childhood memories, and the caravan
of ants by more sore feet, these recurrent images in my poems
providing theme, in other words, "I was and must be."
theme, delineation. a guy tries to bum a smoke. I tell him I never
started it. he calls me a liar. he leaves, meanders
back, boards bus behind me. I'm nervous, hair on back of neck.
well, I was called a liar and a loser only days ago in a stupor
in a drunken wrestling match with God-Language the Leviathan
and he kicked my ass that night, but I got a piece of him,
some meat like a part of a stray cat's brain in a stray dog's teeth.
this paltry parcel was the image at the bus-stop, cheap, I know.
still, longing to be famous never helped anyone's ego, and me? well,
let's just say that I'm infamous among half-friends half-words, half-miles
and half Saturday-afternoon drives away. I can take the bus
to the ocean here, on the East Coast. Tybee Island at low tide with hard sand
like snowdrifts. waiting for the 14Abercorn transit with a notebook.
I bake frozen bread all night for a living, bread from a commissary
and bread from the kneader, and so much depends upon the sourdough
besides a white row of government buildings. young art-college girls
come to work and look at me like a grey ghost; I'm always in overalls
thinking of their older sisters, and where they could be. and the drangstrum
of life, the slow tidal rhythm doesn't stop the tax-collector with Band-aided papercuts
from taxing the workers in Band-Aid factories. such as we go. waiting for the
transit.
we have all always been in the making, and on the make
and take, whether we are purse or persecuted,
still, there's nothing to see here.
a bike chained to an oak tree at a bus stop.
if only I could steal it off and ride it to work,
or to Tybee Island, feel the wind again
coming from my own legs thriving
like unpaid bills with skies
always too much alike, striated
yet thriving with radio waves and the songs of ants.
The Lo w Co untr y
The story as I've untold it, as so, infinitives
shackled, so. And likewise, it falters, slows
like glass does as a liquid, and these gates
to the cemetery, rusted together, a cemetery by a river
as squirrels dart around moss and lichen-stones.
names that could be afforded, the rest even more cryptically
etched . this city, a Gothic arabesque, Savannah, Georgia.
The pirates and debtors who founded this place
their names fossil in the ledgers, the archives
caught in Spanish moss. I've landed here
like the rest of the mosquitoes, a hymenopteron
of words, to sit here, on this bench, the grave
of Conrad Aiken. the Cosmos is veritable
worldview for all when sitting upon the headstone
of a poet. here, my southern juxtajunta, under oaks
and cypress, but,
enough of this rustic
*
I was wheezing across this wasteland, America
perpetual motion, a walking enneagram, America
brought too many wares, too many vendors visited, America
arrows, plastics, postcards, and feathers, America
we desire to lose so much and we just can't, America
we just can't lose, it's hysterically America
how prosperous we are, holy grails in the hatchbacks, America
everywhere the smell of polyurethane and fast-food
the fake leather of roadtrips, America
we all long to raise children who will finance
a critically-acclaimed cinema, i.e.:
they were lovers/members of Mensa on heroin/lesbians
broke the hero's wallet/car and heart (Winona Ryder the lead part)
Cinemamerica
*
evil, in its morundity, its morbid blood simply
the curse that courses us. a loose tooth. a promise.
a notion towards a knife. how close we walk serrated edges.
and the corpses never rot, they simply guild sunwise as
offerings under wonderfully stenciled parchments
bits of beehive bark upon silken swaths
bodies laid into their elements, discarded parachute fragments
from the definitive battle. scorched.
I broke my legs in the first rite of passage
fall. the dust settled, an epic came by
to remind me to crawl. a lyric came by,
said, "you will exemplify a great cause"
(that old Shakespearean rag again?)
I curse them both, epic and lyric. I'll lie here
in the crater I made when I fell to this Earth.
*
sacred.
there is a hummingbird and a church.
there is a guitar with three nylon strings left.
not enough for any choral piece.
green vines wrap rotten rafters.
there is a fountain that is dry it is the story.
there is a courtyard where we once had beers, once had coffee.
you wait for the horse-drawn cart to become antique enough to auction it.
it is as rusted as cemetery gates together.
an Italian sportscar delivers the mail, all the sweepstakes
you've already won. the chain-link fence holds you here;
good fences make nosey neighbors. you were once a magnetar
skirting, zigzagging through the heavens like an amphetamine zipper
holding back some luscious truth. bravado for its own sake
is wind, whatnots, and wiseacreage. is this golden age revisited
only colossal among the withering goldenrod’s? send millions
of postcards each with a dollar bill attached to them. Antiquity
is not your family museum; your musing lies in the cans and the heaps
of crow-ridden compost. you are too frail to ride your own horse.
cap the flask. meander back to the porch.
this epoch makes your nerves ant-like
*
and so it always is, the high-heaven stench
the dogs lapping at the skirts and outskirts of it
you with crude instruments, as if the stars had not already aligned themselves
you have to prove it to some ill-mannered conventionists
the sensuality of knowing every mote, its recompense
of ions that you can iconify, edify, "if-icate"
and we have all managed to fuck a dust-mote
or circle-jerk the last of respect out of a blood-brother
we have murdered the last of the silences from the Earth
the ocean floor moans with more thermal wombs, megaplumes' moans
with the symbiosis sickness, I say no more suicides of lyric
no more death-defying leaps into syntax, I am triple-X
fully adorned, no matter what I wear, I am a man walking out of an icestorm
with a torch, and I reek of it, a flesh-zealot,
what have I ever transformed? the Word?
No. the word made of me
a thief, a bulimic, a whore, a cannibal, a god, a worm.
or a process, or a procession of them.
It writhes through us.
A tiara of chakras is thrown into a void, cheap and disposed-of.
Don't choke on the knowledge, chewing on a Hanged-Man's rope.
The tongue is a crippled trapeze artist. Give up don't stop.
My symbology like a fingerprint (unique yet easily documented in ink).
Decoded. Decode it. I'll have a defense for stealing that particular fire.
Learn disappearance into the grotesque.
Ugly enough you are left to Be.
Learn the toad-stance. Learn
fat belly and wrinkle, Shar Pei
and sloth. Koala. Slow down,
study entropy for empathy's sake.
Enough this time, no, I mean it, really.
I once had a lamp in the likeness of the Buddha.
The thing never worked. The pawnshop of the mind.
White-trash baroque America, learning the New Age.
the Buddha does not work as a lamp
(a new koan)
*
Messages in bottles (bone marrow)
secret chain-link fence of language
secret junkyard dog of vocabulary
missing parts to the engine of the cosmogony
lies in this scrapyard of broken homes and poems
get the thing/machine/word running, avoid the rabid
dogs, hit the downtown Chicago of the mind running
*
the carney-barkers roll up the tents. the satellites
photograph it at a safe distance made even safer
by an internet of telescopic excuses to preen and pry
open eye into umbra. hysterical evil always wins.
hysterical evil of summer, of all of our successes, from
navigation to fiber optics. Hart Crane! I found the shirt
you threw from the bridge! It was no suicide after all;
you were just testing the poem. Delineations. Goggles.
How did this world become so crepuscular? Kill the third-eye krap.
I can't de-program this viral fear of viruses. Span it all away.
Take the Dossier to a remote place; my own file and rank
is destroying me. Schizophrenic century, I salute me.
My mirror writhes under this torture. The anthropomorphic mirror.
I was the one throwing the party (hiring the carnies, the circus)
the ebullient kegs frothing upon the burning bridges
a hangover is the only gap, it is
Heideggerian, you've lived through it again,
my host
migraine of Dasein is Dasein
*
this discourse:
TV dial, sundial.
Laptop, lexicon.
Space shuttle, caravan.
Data-Bedouin, Cerebellum-Bedouin.
The lepidoptery of synapses.
The electric eels of verbs.
The weather-vanes of nouns.
The cannons of proportions mis-firing their flare-guns.
Such manifestations, such galleys and galleries.
Arcana, the true name of our country.
I drank Mallarme's last bottle; didn't you drink it with me?
It is time to reawaken the miscreant gods! Gods on Prozac! Awaken! For
your children have charted the oceans for you
using nothing less than the selfsame stars
and configurations that you hide behind.
Time to let the laurels rain. Reward the spoiled
with love, lest we truly outdo ourselves
once and for all,
without you
by collecting the spoils
of this hollow tetragrammaton
of a planet
*
ebb or wax never tell the story never implore for the horse was impaled along with its
master for war-crimes navigate don't narrow the template for it is all that we have
the negatives of the lips of it the negatives foment in our new Logos the dark room
embryonic of syllables a tongue-forest a stalker there with the scythe designed to
rape its image into our own visage don't Smithsonionize it this crude mutant
was there all along.
the jawbone icon
held up to
lightning-storm
*
the harness we've built for the stars is
Paranoia
the stars have built radiation for us
anthropic, anthrogenesis, anthroNietszche
if only Grace were a widespread
plague
Well, that's it. I'll molest the forests, figuratively for once
with an orgy of buxom phrases, a basket of swerving words.
What I bring to you on the cemetery grass is a picnic of sorts.
Behind us is a city of silences before a war when a brother
would murder another. Many of them are buried under our blanket.
The architecture here is beautiful; smell the magnolias.
Yet every level of gray interpenetrates the next. Curdles.
I live where I still know who the shopkeepers are, the merchants.
Cobblestone sidewalks (although haphazard for the drunken).
The Monday-morning cataclysm doesn't touch me here.
Yet still, I long for the podium to scream from, throwing transcriptions
towards a black gravity of hordes, the words must get out, the etherized
Ego.
There is a crease that the tongue can never wriggle itself into:
My tongue got stuck in there trying to
*
every lock clasping shut asks as it does,
"(are you finally) happy?"
satisfaction is that handkerchief
that politeness and self-preservation
won't let you fetch for her
at the edge of a canyon. mockeries
are our vows.
Noir is lifegiver, although the tract
is insurmountable. We achieved base-camp;
that should be good enough, but, the fact that a corpse
lies a few thousand feet up gives us path and causeway.
At this altitude, there is not a breath left
for a cellular phone. Only raspy hacks
towards llamas.
And all that I know about the world
I learned from Cable. I'll sit on this grave
in the deep South. A poet was put to rest here.
The universe's closet-door has been left open for too long.
No one is left to claim the raiment
save for infant language, as always
it is
the most gorgeous failure
that I become gorgeous by failing
J uly 4 th , S a va nna h to C har le sto n
first summer of second millennium. dogwoods
and blackberry vines in rearview- mirror blossom.
hurricane season. roadblock on Interstate-17, I had an open
container, Lori put the joint in her panties, we hope
no K-9 unit. landcruisers everywhere,
babes in convertibles with bad tans
and both of us buzzed at 10:00 a.m.
there will be no open hotel rooms
there will be vacancies on credit accounts
there will be disgruntled children waiting in lines
for shallow pools under waterslides
we just passed
Coosawatchie
always drive as if you have
one pound of contraband on your person
(we do at all times)
we get lost and make circles within
a herd of diesel pachyderms, the Winnebegos
with their mature pilots, but all of us are still tempted
by shops full of fireworks, imported pyrotechnics
gas prices up, the Genome decoded
Y2K sold some rice, batteries, generators
my generation straddles this century
awkwardly according to me, the lyric
is hotter than blacktop on bare feet
after the Devil exhaled cigar smoke on it
I wish I was a blues man
we pass a ghostforest
petrified driftwood skeleton park
keeping its camp in marsh
cameras can’t capture this wreck
Lori could, she wants to
read this I will let you read it later in the hotel
after our heads are given back
to both of us by each of us
woods at 70 miles per hour
the staple of travel in Southeast America
a camouflage cinema
a spinning green propeller
in the trees, themselves a song
pines broken by palms
every branch covered in a resin of light
words at 70 miles per hour,
a poem I write a lot
we stop at an abandoned laundromat.
no ceilings, roadside ruin, rusting washer/dryers
en route to a scenic city but we spend our limited film here
I see many lizards and dragonflies
I feel the sun pull the skin
on back of my neck real tight
genocide cultures for roadsigns here
America, your cables could be such gorgeous hair
but we always go too far by way of style of
cutting, of getting there
gravel quarries and money worries
the insignia of the sky says no fear
of inevitable carwrecks, of splintered windshields
of glass puncturing the windshears
of our itinerant peripheries
somewhere in an Alaskan tundra
my old friend is welding anchors
and he writes and never writes back
any of his funereal postcards, he should be
here on this roadtrip
one more sign and I will align with a road’s mind
I smell grills; we are approaching civilization.
the Interstate will never end, but, we will eat
and sleep as if all these motorhomes weren’t crossing
an asphalt sea to pay meters and admission fees
we are finally in Charleston
sailboats in the bay aligned as perfectly as Volvos in a laboratory parking lot
there is my crucifix, a weathervane atop a downtown steeple
she drives; I drink. this may as well be Arcadia
*
Dinner: I eat grouper; she eats steak.
Later I write to bad movies back at the hotel.
A bird with a fish in its claws flew over our car
On Interstate-17 (or so at this hour I fabricate).
I saw God with his gasmask on almost asleep.
I call someone at a desk to call me to wake me in order
To call someone at a desk. On Neptune it rains
Diamonds from the planet core; in the hotel cooler it makes ice.
I sleep knowing everything beside a gorgeous woman.
It rains ice and diamonds in my funereal sleep.
*
En route to home. Callawassie Island is private.
Savannah, 42 miles away.
I remember to tell the Savannah tourists
not to touch the Spanish moss,
It can give you mites.
When I
When I
When I
When I
came
came
came
came
to
to
to
to
the
the
the
the
city of
city of
city of
city of
the book,
the road,
love,
my body:
no friendly local had advice for me.
My entire life I have been itching with mites.
My entire life I made myself into a city.
My tourists are just like me; my residents are few.
The nomad is pen; the landscape is parchment.
I am the metropolis of my senses applied to senseless wandering
Footprints in sand are more remembered than
any desertland
You last as long as the lines in the road sprinkled with lime
while someone is writing a poem at 70 miles per hour
The G host o f Fr a nk Sta nf ord
I watched myself burn
I reached in the ashes
and found a red knife
Frank Stanford
fra nk’ s k nives
Cuts Veal Like Butter
Driftwood Splinter
Carwreck Femur
Surgeon General
Sax Saber
Barnstorm Shrill
Karmic Avenger
Unspent Shell
Swordfish Sceptre
Slow Meteor
Sawblade Kiss
Punkrock Mohawk
Coffin Liner
Scared Granny
Silver Surfer
Genghis Mirror Shard
River Dragger
Rusty Fandango
Cincinnati Shard
Appatomax Bayonet
Shoulderblade
Satan’s Shiny
Sting Ray Tale
Junkie Hypo
Abednego Tarsal
Pierces Prick
Brittle Dactyl
Blunt Death Knoll
Sarong Rip
Unknown Girl at Funeral
Willow’s Banjo
the Negotiator
Tyrone the Torch
Engine Fan Blade
Kamatsu
Glass Slint
Three Shots in the Dark
Ocean Photo
Starfish Tetanus
Caffeine Cross
Cockbone Key
Rabid Rat Tooth
Forest of One Knife
Scarab Leg
Selectric Machete
Seahorse Spine
St. Louis Song
False Tooth
Taut Guitar String
Key to Your Heart
Bicycle Spoke
Icarus Feather
Lightning on a Weathervane
Mason Jar Shard
Pig Rib
Story of Cutter
Radio Signal
Born in the Camp With Six Knives
Publisher of Soil
portr a its
fa mily por tr ait
your father was a scarecrow holding a radio
my mother was a supine rotting pine trunk
his sperm was sawdust and her ovum a silver raindrop
I bleed moss and lichens, pebbles and pewter fire
I would wear the trophy deer’s head and keep silent
for your father’s lectures. Mother hung jawbones
of wolverines and shells of dried tortoise on the clothes-wires
during the salad days mom became a wool shawl
your father became a set of dentures forgotten on an ottoman
I wanted them to finish me off. I was barbed-wire rusted.
they would try to guess my age over the sawmill of a static radio
mom pulled a grey hair from my head said:
“someone is out there hunting me”
the first whipping was for smashing a streetlamp
on our dirt road with an aluminum baseball bat
all I wanted was to be able to stand under it
but it was they who had made me a signpost in the night
without ever teaching me how to read the omens
se lf- por tra it a fter a ll- night binge
bruises are muses
and for those who break wristwatches
over the bridges of formulas’ noses
and watch rain on bonfires
or hiss of asphalt
but I don’t do anything significant
just sit around all day eating bacon and egg sandwiches
staring at starlings
dropping their shit-parcels everywhere
and a bruise can be focus
on the crux and crocus
of a waning bloody lip from the night before
and I may call myself a warrior-poet
but I am the prep-cook allergic to garlic
the night past or its sexual repast
however you’d like to sum it up for the cameras
is mute moot under a steel-toed boot
and enough of that, it seems that nature
can be easily corralled
when we all have beer-bongs the size of Jupiter
we mourn the death of the fiddle player
and kick around dead dog skulls
paper plates stained with catsup
we grill our meat in iron lungs
Sunday or Tuesday night in Americana
all of our ex-lover’s names rolodexed by water-beds
guns and guitars and eight-balls in particle colliders
so many meteors fell that night
that my hangover was like a planetarium
portr a it of a lightning b olt
if all of existence is a storm
then I am a T-shirt in a tornado
with a lightning-bolt airbrushed on it
q uick sk etc hes of cer tain liste ner s
There is a light-bulb wrapped in purple velvet. She shakes,
she jingles, she’s spent.
There’s an eye shot out and shut into a weathered leather flask of a face.
There’s a never-once-opened bottle within which is a mosquito
whose belly is full of the blood of Christ.
There is a spy; he’s deaf, dumb, and mute.
He carries a talisman made of owl-tongues.
In the corner leaning is a framed blueprint
instructing how to build the first frame ever.
One tries to be a bird carrying a bird by its feet over a field of dead birds.
He stumbles into the street.
A wing falls like a leaf from my poem.
If my soul walked into the bar
It would wear a robe of clocks
A rope of clocks
A belt of clocks
All stopped
There is that hour for light that won’t breathe this smoke.
There is the heart in all of us scribbled with veins,
Etched with arteries.
The dichotomy we carry is one side always lying to its bisymmetry:
What the hell is it that keeps us from right down the middle tearing?
Co nc ussio n at a c am psite
1.
hit my head on the tolerance canopy night before
now in the VW van roadsign reads ISLANDS, time to reconnoiter
a lump on my thyroid like a sore thumb, a roadsign
the disorientation of dead oaks and palms, driving
into the campgrounds get the assignment, the allotment
from the stark ranger, hide the contraband, park the van
neighboring sites all silent around our crude cairn
of stones, it’s not camping season we hope but
for the best, no cougar tracks in the sand
we burn National Enquirer’s for kindling
drinking beers like catching catfish in Styrofoam coolers
the ocean is like a guitar lilt, comes almost up to our fire
it’s too cold for mosquitoes, therefore tonight it’s too cold
for us, Shelton says it doesn’t matter, judging
by the cooler, and my head, we came here to die anyway
Cajun burger patties (pre-made in a small-town butcher-case)
a bundle of wood, propane lamps, day-job subpoena poetics
we be kings like the kind that slink out of Sun Studios
we be rocka-Billie-the-Kids, satyrs from Savannah
the rich once hunted fine game here, Hunting Island
now high school kids come here to take LSD
the surreallity of the shoreline chewing the treelines
there is nothing left to hunt here
but two over-educated rednecks playing at romance,
ignoring injuries, telling the same old college story
2.
The ghost of Frank Stanford chases me as far as Land’s End
I turn to face my hunter as the spectral knives fly
Stanford threw
Boo Kay Jack
he threw
Loki’s Tongue Hilt-splitter
Railroad Spike
Rabbit’s Foot
Splinter-Under-Fingernail
Jesus’ Tooth
He threw
Brown-Bottle
all whistled past will-o-the-wisping
I knows America hunts itself down the coast
I faced the poet’s ghost, said:
“I thought you couldn’t cross rivers now”
I’m free from that age
said Stanford
I had three bullets in my pocket,
but I didn’t believe in guns,
at least not yet.
He says he misses
ghosts and mosquitoes in early June
then dissipates,
like so much foxfire
3.
You wait for the narcissus to stare up at you and answer
but Nature has no tongues nor tact for human nature,
its pale perversion, its frail evolution, no truck in this at all
your soul can’t hold its weight in cotton, the flax is in full flux
all is potentially a rape in the wilderness, and you have never been
a noble savage, still, you stare into this pond and expect wishes
to be offered up like some mythic, whiskered goldfish, his eyes
bugging-out and wisdom on his scales. You see, every iota of your blood,
your very cellular structure is for sale only a bridge away.
Here’s how to maximize your potential; drown trying to love yourself,
into your own reflection, a convex mirror that swallows you
as a lily pad shifts softly above the last glance of your flower
4.
splicing cassette tapes in the van
to map memories with, Scotch-Tape
and old guard on duty here
we can both repair rocket-engines at this point
but this fragile music chewed up
by a tapedeck and low battery at a campsite is eluding us
our women are getting drunk somewhere
in strange towns while we hope for Steve Earle
and Will Oldham, some tunes, while drunk
counting one-legged gulls
and creating new curse-words
let’s not think of what we’ve become
5.
I sew the days together
a real working-class hero
knowing secrets soft in the sphagnum
I drift through the harmonica rain
angelprow and its prowess
your aureoles sunburn
I used a warped cello for a paddle
overhangs of Spanish moss
we heads towards the waterfall in the dugout
they will hook me in from the dock
like I was a mail-bundle, something special
I was once a bull bucking with a china-shop in its belly
now I’m a buck with three legs and broken antlers
dark mouth of river opens on
I freshen my bandages and smell salt-air
I am before my time
I am Death’s walking-stick
all day I looked for God and only caught one catfish
that should say it all
6.
Two days after the trip Shelton calls me at home.
The VW won’t start anymore.
His great-aunt had a stroke while we were camping.
He’s already planning the next trip.
The lump behind my left ear sings
Like a knife shines in the hand of a poet.
Writing poems is the naming of knives.
A ghostly knife whistles by, a woman’s name in the night.
A cougar walks through the still warm ashes of our derelict site.
erosio n isla nd
1
Her hair across my chest spread intermeshed.
A wave meets a damaged shore. Never damages
the shore. I cup her ear to my ribs
as I read more lines in her crude dialect.
The ocean is the greatest acid.
Erosion is a starving contortionist
with skin like diamonds, exercising.
My thirst is as bottomless as
a shovel cursed to levitate over soft ground
2
Forever all morning your wife beats the coffee beans with a hammer.
She intends it to strain I go insane in the yammering.
I need that hot item. The countertop suddenly cracks, and she
too, in a small way, holding a hammer in a camper in her negligee.
She slides over a chipped cup.
I am glad for any gesture in the chaos
of observing this marriage. The camping trip
is full of murderers behind every map, is full
of rage behind every simple suggestion
3
Squirrels haunt the payphones.
I try to call you from the ranger’s station,
no answer, I walk back towards the ocean
smiling in self-immolation.
I am a deer with three good legs;
I am no prow’s figurehead.
Only the blues remind me I need a woman:
Lightning Thompkins, John Lee Hooker,
Howling Wolf hunting the island
4
There are three incredibly poisonous snakes:
the hooknosed seasnake (venom 60 times more powerful than a rattlesnake)
the Russell’s viper (it has killed the most people worldwide)
the taipan (one bite can kill a mature elephant).
Man has a venom that is slow, and it only works
on his own kind. It takes years
after the first bite of the first
handshake. A beautiful blue poison we share
erodes our island everywhere.
5
The closer you get to the water,
the better the soul.
The closer to the desert
the better the mind.
The closer to the earth
the better the body.
The closer to the air
the better the words.
The closer to the celestial
(there is no such thing as being
any closer to the celestial).
6
Tried to dig the seashell out;
it was like a stubborn tortoise’s spine.
Turned out to be the tip of a treetrunk;
shoreline is treeline here.
7
Shoreline is treeline in these lines
a mind sanguine on a horizon
a constant friction of fission
my sunglasses are missing
in this world of everything under the sun
burnt skin will peel like a page from me
like the ash of a burnt wing
8
Listening to the surf, I know now
how to name knives.
9
Looking for sponges, only jellyfish mutilations
wash up as you smoke and I drink
and we wish it all to fall to us, a manna on our bare feet
like new eyebrows, like now, like tan skin, like belonging.
We would walk on nails to get to The Largest Nail in the Region
and this is tourism.
As the barbarians build their arcades and we make love to women
and their agendas, we still have an undeniable urge
to hunt down all of our best wishes, stab fishing-hooks
through their lips as each shorewhisper murmurs.
The Word hears itself and writes like it doesn’t.
I hear what does not write and mishandle silences.
I should have been on a copra plantation,
a Polynesian with my indecipherable rongo-rongo boards
making basalt carvings of this life, for
this life requires much thicker skin than mine.
We buy lawn-chairs and lotion and talk of flippant armageddons:
me, the disgruntled wife, and my best friend the husband.
10
In the Dead Sea the water is so thick
you can’t swim. Level drops three ft. a year.
Such saltiness. Exploit resources, swim here. Don’t
settle down. The loggerheads
only land long enough to lay their eggs on this island, then leave
life to its best marathons
11
DW loves RH
carved
in a picnic bench.
Any language that allows love to emerge
in a quadra-set of initials
is a language better than one
I have ever spoken
in a poem.
if e ver y bo ttle is a soldier
1
then I must be the war
of sidewalks vs. mirrors
and the sidewalks are mirrors shattered
and I’m in tatters
you drugged me through the underbelly
I caught things in the hooks I have
under my belly
gleaming horizon teeth my resolve
absolve me from days
as brigades of clocks wipe their faces
with sharp concentric gesticulations of frozen gerundives
the sleeves of a minute’s shirts are tattered
as are my patterns, slow-motion,
I went to accept the keys to the city
the fans all paid their fare pinwheels
I had a city in my hair, fireworks above
they say there is a city on high
that is a glass mountain range
that only takes one ray of light
to cut to its ore, it explains why
that’s me, harlequin and assassin wannabe
just can’t procure a day job, however,
I have learned to juggle, bake bread,
hold liquor, echolocate, divine water, etc.
judge me not like a paycheck
not wearing bullets around my neck
not an albatross or pegasus mane for sale here
no snake oils, no unguents of eternal life
no omens hung around the necks
of buxom beauties or shackled oddities
nothing but packages that were wrongly addressed
wrapped in headlines about miscreants thinking sidewalks are mirrors
as they walk into themselves over and over (sorry, sorry, sorry
crosswalks are always shattered)
and I’m in tatters
scattered shards of jukebox parts litter the parks
read the spilt songs like leaves in paper cups
2
as I say these things to you
someone is being stabbed to death
as they lie dying they think of saying
inane things to a loved one
the inane things the most important
3
the viola begins to play.
the way we are disheveling
is a ragged epic, no one’s fault
that the winds have always required
that the sails should be sewn
from previous epics, the shirts of the past
minute lyrics, the rips in the apostasies
and there are Sumo wrestlers with Alzheimer’s
diseased, grunting in the sun, expressions
of elemental gods personified, wrestling in saltspray
with candorous grace, the object is to take the weight of the world
off of your back
and put it on the back of your opponent
a noble and honorable sport,
an attack upon one’s own self
is a heart. what is a heart attack then?
sew the epics together
and the wrestlers trample on the sails
making mockery of the wind
circling in slow elliptics, concentrics
the violas continue to play
as we attack our own hearts
4
the surrealist may not interview me
I said to the praying mantis
the camera kills its mates
after clicking fornications
the Dadaist may not interview me
I said to the ceiling fan blade
but, the dumbass over there, the entomologist
is allowed to show me the paintings of his lucid dreams
the ones with the cameras like insects
5
my muse is sick,
she all inclusive
cacophonous endorphic
6
a trawl is a large cone shaped net dragged along the sea bottom for fishing purposes.
like walking across the ocean floor with your eyes open
7
I made love to the moon last night, I said.
The man who had just cut down the moon
with a broken lightbulb shard calls me
a braggart,
he then tries to sell me a piece of her
8
the Sumo wrestler is a stargazer.
the entomologist fills tunnels
with moonlight, and its murderers
will always be here, the epic writers.
I am simply the heart’s braggart,
the heart attacker, the inane war
of sidewalks in tatters, the song
with swagger trawling forward
the song with swagger trawling forward
Sa va nna h S atur da y night w ith e so teric te xt
Here in the swamp rang out simpatico
of teethgnashing and bottles ringing,
of baleful guitar and underwater murmurs
we gots mad kegs and craw, enough to kill
the leviathan, but he ain’t swimming close enough in
for bottle rockets, telecasters, or harpoons
to scrape the baleen of his hard life
one scale at a time, on this dock
with whiskey, with music as my climbing tree
I will sling hammocks between any two points
cuts sting here in the mire while making chords
the snake doctors see to your blood
like land surveyors
ziz and behemoth
are frog gigs and moths
amid the demonic dragonfly nymphs
I use the hermetic text as an ottoman
as I drink and strum
nothing stirs in the song of insect legs
the insect legs don’t move inside their own sound
my sore fingers learn this truth
after years of building cities of calluses
S und ay mor ning
You brought the cheap frames to the beach I made the sketches.
They were finished but sand got under the glass. Imperfections
like waves under kites, the shadow of one string across your breast.
There is a baseball stuck under your shoulderblade that I can’t
massage. Here on the white-trash beach, nursing last night
with its own tits; I find a sacrament. Raiment of easy associations
everywhere. A week after a blue moon equinox
and no nuclear family seems to care. A new millennium asks of me
to write an autobiography now that I have relocated from a desert
to an island. If only the one-legged gull could speak, what a prophet he must be.
My canister has made the rounds, my time capsule has its passport.
Kites fly above small kernels of truth; the beach never ends like the shore does.
The world never beaches itself upon us. We fall
towards heavens and fall back up.
Croatoan
By 1590, all that remained of the Roanoke colony was a mysterious word carved into
a bald cypress.
“The mortality rate in Jamestown’s first six years, 1607 to 1613, was a terrifying 50
percent. Corn withered on its stalks, and good water was hard to find. The nearby
James River is salty even at the best of times; the settlers dug wells only to have
them filled with brackish water as the drought lowered the water table. Relations
between the colonists and the Indians grew increasingly difficult. ‘You have two
alien cultures suddenly in contact, and they’re trying to understand each other.
That’s tense enough . . . add to that a food shortage and water problems”
In 1607, 104 English settlers founded the Jamestown colony in what is now Virginia.
One year later only 38 of them were still alive. Many had starved. Some of the
survivors later resorted to cannibalism.
Ritualistic fragmentation must very direct be memories process very direct one’s own
of.
Do you suffer from nocturnal teeth-grinding? There are safer mouthpieces.
To live more than one soul-cycle in any allotted flesh. Fleshpot.
Schizophrenia is the art of spiritual excess. The road to wisdom leads to the malice
of Coliseum.
A suburban family has a pet Bengal tiger and a mischievous child with firecrackers.
America, what are you doing in there?
Few can master the art of multiple souls in one body; listen to the ocean; it’s quite
good at it.
Aspirations require even bigger aspirins.
I am the shadow of every infinitive. These voice-overs exhaust me libidinally.
To. As. To go. The sea is quite good at it if you listen.
To whom it may infinite be; I eat crayons in front of God after scribbling lightning
bolts.
The snake that eats its own tail is a metaphoric blood. This snake has a third eye.
Step out from the Parthenon cage. Don’t look back at the columns (someone a
century later
Will bombs them. They take it personal. Thus, a Renaissance period.
Make the cryptoglyph. Name yourself. Resonate. Do it one minute before, for
The deathbed truth is the truest name. No reckoning there, only reconnoiter.
Our inheritance is obvious: we must name ourselves in a way that destroys us
Yet makes us infinite, simultaneously, schizophrenia of “to be”.
You, all you, your voices are so cruel. Violent violins I love.
We must live vibrantly in the infinitive, as:
DE M IU R GE
Who is Legend?
Is Joe Legend?
JoeLegend.
*
Lost word carved into sepia-tone
Everyone died in a drought
We left signs, warnings
*
dreamy sepia-tones.
We were all thirsty
Monsters here
*
The winter was hard
*
No one to blame
*
(Cosmos in a name)
*
and suddenly it all boiled down to my own infinite stubbornness
that I was a woodpecker without a beak
pecking continuously at the back of my own brainstem
I was addicted to addiction,
In other words, I was a finite
Creature with an understanding
Of the rape of stasis
I was wrapped like a dull candy-wrapper
Like waxpaper swathing infinity’s jealousy
Of itself, that is, if this jealousy
Was the very last morsel of chocolate left
Or the first.
The transcript was so long
That the trials and tribulations of stenographers
Became mythic. Chocolate was hung
For tasting so. This happens
When anyone tries to cannibalize or murder that smidgen
It, that smidgen. Of beauty left, that
Smidgen Genocide.
Worldview is surrealism for profit.
I wait and look for new seed.
Well, I wait.
But, the promenade continues.
We still write the lovepoem.
We are scavengers, damage-controllers, expert
Model-builders, attention to intricate details, we
Are reconnoiterers. Specialists.
At the foot of any given tree is a fallen fruit
Which can’t be eaten at the time that it is
Accessible. Futility whips me like a wanton whore.
I love you echoes as if a word before the word echo
Was made. To forgo luxury, I have become a forager.
This excursion into unknown territory
Is riveting. We still write lovepoems.
This is not a common thread.
Chocolate is. Trials are. Myths assuage
The mass-surreal. I love you.
*
There are statues of pigeons for miles.
Nothing but statues of dead, motionless pigeons for miles.
An Easter island down the cityscape.
Every bench and sidewalk cracks under the cold of it.
Every weather event accentuates the petrified.
The tragedy of sculpture, of culture? Is in this
Memorial cemetery of stone pigeons.
Who knows what will be left.
I make leaps.
Feathers are grave and graven.
A new book of classifying birds of stone.
This method, this trudging through
Is a finding of multiple voice.
The city, the pigeons. I need to stop
Relativity. Relativity suggests that this may be
Possible. A quarry of potential flight.
Our city. Our civility.
What we bitch about. Our lovepoems of skyscrapers.
Our pigeons. Our constants. Our comfortable warblings.
I walk through a ruin. Imagination,
Broken legs in the park.
I lounge among stone pigeons, seeing no movement
As the spring erupts like a skull that shines
And once again no metaphor makes sense
With any other in the explosion of it
*
Jawbones, dreaming of flight. As in X-rays.
Like birds before I had invented culture.
Mythic. Birds were once considered
God’s slingstones.
Here, in a dying colony
We have lost language
Among confused media.
If we photograph a poet
In sepia, well, his profile
Comes through to yellow
Scrapbook forgetfulness.
I am a brown-paper lunchsack
Full of ghosts. Crinkle me up
After you eat this. Throw me
Towards the East.
I’ll slit my weathervanes.
I’ll hang myself from the tallest laughter.
I won’t stop the declension of this Chaos slanguage
Called Americulturism.
I have and will always been had/halved
A poem that breaks its own heart
By being written.
Most poems do.
A poem is hopeful desolation.
I can’t believe I did this to myself. I am a liar.
Once, the jawbone of an ass
Killed 1,000 sybarites.
That’s flight, and I long
For escape.
*
Arpeggio conversation
Method man, math is
A slit throat and I am not being
Cinematic, I’m filming me cut
You.
Semantic razor. Blowguns and woodburners
On a tree telling a story.
It’s sharp, like a phantom.
These were farmers. How did they disappear?
Cropped hair cropped lives. Abundance for whom?
Did it all ionize?
There’s a lot of rust on the implements we dug up,
Though. Too much.
Inconclusive. We found an artifact.
Named it Joe. What a tool it proved
to be. Joe is a process.
Be named Joe.
Drunken violet, how violently gentle are your guises.
Be named.
Even as a person named Joe for 70 years,
Joe becomes a process of war.
Too much for a monosyllable.
The cog in the tank is pissed so the gun misfires on refugees.
Slang. Hell, Joe, I, myself
Stapled a culture down to joe.
Joseph is synonymous with synonym.
We all have scapegoat joe.
Joe, let in the lamb.
Joe slashed Croatoan.
JoeCivilization. Do you fetish language
So that History
Has its back broken upon badly excavated
Broken potsherds?
Exhibit joe. I invented mustard for someone
Who had never tried mustard before.
A nephew of mine thinks to this day
That I invented mustard. At Wrigley field on Father’s Day
I drank much beer. And thought too much.
A bola and feather-boa wrapped my throat with thoughts.
The cubs won; we spilled into Chicago like the last night
Of anyone’s life. We were always, like a Coliseum is
Built to spill.
*
Father of joes. Father of lies.
Joe-Mama. Joe made Jesus.
Joe this and Joe that.
After tomorrow, when I am done
There won’t be
A monosyllable left
Not even in
The darkest alley
Of a curse
*
I left bombs of new slang on every doorstep the world abound.
Well, I write like a gentle terrorist.
*
I am quintessential joe.
I got dibs on being the last joe.
Trademark my frontal lobes.
This shattering has stopped.
I’ve enough to give of language.
The fig tree runneth over.
Martyrdom itself,
Rilkean, Brodskyean, Celanic heart
Fetish for sidethorns, tumors
A choleric of words
The humours hang in the trees
That can’t yet be described as of yet
And there are forests of them
From horizon to intuition
As far as the morals can see
*
In my slang
The Croatoan is the phonetic
Of disaster
Harbinger, blackbird foreboding
The tree-carving, the diseased
Thirsty rings
The concentric warnings
Year by year
Not to name our children here.
Of that selfsame tree’s pulp, poisonous paper was made
And written upon in journals throughout Roanoke
The Croatoan is a cannibal
The language eats its own kidney-shaped poems
One word eats itself
More than any civilization
Could ever provide
Metaphor enough
Codes of laws swept up in gale force
Lightning bolt jikjaks syntax with drawl down my torso
Capitalism is cannibalism with unlimited starvation for all
Like a virus, the economy devours its own foodsource
Colony to colony, longboat to longboat, immortality
Is so silly, leaving us all with blood-stained greenbacks
In our clenched blackbird talon arthritic fingers
America, the arthritis of Europe
The fingers too weak around the pistol
To pull the trigger, Bubonic and weak
Before the silo of the holocaust
A ghost is in the forest here
It always has been, pervasive, relentless
Makes men not know what they do
Until it does them
America is dark Romance. It was waiting for us here.
We’ve awakened it.
*
Politics of revulsion
Or is it thousands of joes
Hellbent on the flagship mentality
I am the eagle, the scythe, the torpedo
Or nothing
Inertia, equilibrium
Editing the dockets
A new cynicism can be erased (the cenobites
Can re- or pre- scribe (i.e. we were soaking up
too many gamma rays, the rye bread was a bit molded,
they slipped us a lot of mickies, etc.)
there is no other way
give me the flask
the saddlebags, the maps
the legends, it is manifest
(and so joe left the forest to seek his bloody fortune)
rivers of gold, fountains of youth, cities of platinum
should only be imagined
billions of doubloons litter the floors of the oceans
billions of years from now they will litter mountain crags and cliffs
selfsame pocket change
(and so joe left the forest to seek his bloody fortune)
*
That handsome burning in your belly boy, is it
Refugees and when even lollipops become smugglers’ wares
We will still feed such fires as to retreat continuous across these Messed-Uppotamias
To fertile silicon valleys and aqueduct cess-oases and all of these engineered youths
Yapping at our heels still believe that all they need is proper I.D. to be saved
From the inevitable resurgence of the armageddon rave and final wave
This is the resurgence, that the human heart was constructed to be bigger in purpose
Than its own planet, backwards micro-macro-proto, and so this heart
Sends its calvary of corpuscles towards continents to conquer as the white cells
develop
From the disease and the red ones are over-ridden even superimposed for moments
Upon the design of the Overworld Heart, the surge, the Demiurge, the Pulse
Which is of course what drives us and makes us in the first place
But its drive is coming dangerously close to allowing the realization that
This Overworld Heart exists, and we can’t afford to believe that it cares somewhere
out there
And so it drives us towards more and more reckless behaviors of wanton-ness
On the borders the canyons of heart-attack thresholds
Lie answers too late to stop explosions but incendiary enough
Are the aftermathematics
After so many genocide’s in any one history
Really according to certain timelines certain timelines
Should just manifest or either wormhole
The heart can’t bleed enough of us murderers
And it makes one wonder what love is in
And if necrophiliacs embrace roses in respectable ways
Overheart pushes its bloodstream towards
The Universe already diseased with itself
The antidote?
I once thought poems.
The antidote.
*
Us
Being
Gone.
Not nihilism. Poem bye-bye.
*
carve your hybrid language onto a tree
it consists of one alien word
croa to an
the se a is q uite good a t it if yo u liste n
De miur ge
Lea ving the R iver of Fir e
depo sitio n
The
The
The
The
The
piano on fire made it rain.
maelstrom has its center.
forest fire, unbeknownst to most, has its symphonies.
colt broke its knees the second second after its birth.
island sank into its own vegetation.
Miracles hit visage like harpoons.
Maybe a violin on the ocean floor creates certain hurricanes.
A lost wind walks in, dusts off
a torn jerkin, says I’m tired,
two ales.
The metaphor of metaphor is the word world.
Write a metaphor encompassing the four compass points.
If you don’t know truth, it is like your teeth are.
The guitar found frozen in an iceberg
broke someone’s heart at every kiosk.
And the headlines of guitar magazines
full of isolated, yet small truths. Tablatures.
Of small truths:
I surrender to wayfarers, clockmakers, nomadic monads.
All passwords are elemental, you asked me about burning
and I said:
the piano on fire made it rain, and that is my official statement
whether or not I was in the car that night after the recital
whether or not the virtuoso is missing in his actions
Charge me, or try to play
this incendiary piano.
And our mothers all architects.
And our fathers all demolitions experts.
And truth is the technique I was taught
to be prodigy, prodigal, prophetic, visionary.
(I can’t play the piano that well, but
I must convince you that I can produce
a music sublime,
a fire that exists arrogantly in the rain)
A page of lines, of small murders, of avoidance’s.
I am guilty of killing him. He was too beautiful there,
in the rain, indulging, on fire, at his storm. I confess.
Fish hea d s, re gre ts, car diac s, a nd p olitic s
1
There they are,
the things that I’ve said.
Those things that I have said
back to them. My bad verbatim parades:
there they are that twig snaps in the deep wood, you remember
faith, or other things that tend to move by themselves, but
I tend to talk too much about paranormal experiences
especially while hungover, nursing wounds
leaning against a dead tree, knowing
that it is hungover as well and becoming termite larvae.
The things that I have said, each word like a termite.
The houses I have said back to them.
The way nature prevails ad infinitum.
Talking tends to corrode its own foodsource.
These are facts out there that are irreconcilable.
The definition of truth is:
irreconcilable
2
At birth I was placed into the cage
with the sleeping tiger.
Everywhere were parents on siesta.
There were cacti and monitor lizards.
Many furtive glances towards
the tiger I must have had.
It would only have been instinct to write
a lifetime of poems to my parents at this point.
A teenage boy with a scarred face walked by.
He had a set of keys and a claw on his keyring.
Becoming a man is cutting the claws off of
the urge of your own parents to kill you.
I am learning how to scar productively.
Gnarled and determinedly.
My offspring will have
eyes like poems
eyes like claws
3
After reading Beckett drunk,
I can’t write the lines (I will
write the letters)
I joined the Coast Guard yesterday. That point
in your life when you should do something real,
something without quotations hovering around it
with anchors on either shoulder, I will live on the high seas
saving those who are queasy with indolence, knowing
that any one in a panic will swipe a lifejacket and knowing
that I am a lifer, a career rower of oars, a blisterer
and my buoyancy depends on how full of hot air I am
I have always been a witch that just can’t drown
4
I have put all of the things I have said within a frame.
This sarcophagus is put into a gallery. It is hung
for its crimes. The gallery spins under every codex
ever written as all spins on its axis across an infinite
forest of axes, and being so
is this all spinning out of control?
My words stale like sourdough
by a fish head and some Anjou pears
wonderfully painted by some student
who was passed over
by the politics of her age, and she could paint
fish heads so well
that you had an archetype stuck sideways in your throat,
a minnow or a carp.
And politics are the things that I have said.
And revolutions are the things said back to them.
There is just no talking to painters and poets;
their materials are just too expensive for negotiations.
I have come to the conclusion that everyday life
is the avoidance of constantly writing
5
My last poem will be:
Massive Cardiac Arrest
and it will be its own reward
my funeral will be as huge as all funerals are
underneath as many invisible noon stars
one mo nth in ne w so uth ghetto
I saved the cork from the night I called you.
In one month was a mugging and a cartheft
my mother’s car, which was my car, but my grandmother’s
car inherited by my mother and used as collateral
to secure a loan to pay off debt
from greyhound tracks, and this is as simple
as we all know it ever gets. There was a near fatal
asthma attack in a basement, swamp apt., a bike
used as an assault weapon as phones slammed down
into their holsters all across this sample
of a universe, I put in my notice
and all the women in an inch radius of my temple
(none, I am a drama queen, I am all my own women)
slit their throats as I waded through tall grass
and flea colony moats
I saw God the Chattahoochee Baptist leave
a burning cigar behind
the notches it left were sky niches
and we all testified that a teen did it
another Rimbaud with a bad leg, an attitude
I held my soulpelt up
and achieved the rejection again
but the void throws another comet
like a rotten peach pitched across a park blooming
and these are the fruits of it
and I am a pickpocket of light
and I steal light from keyholes
And tonight I wrap the cork I popped when I called you
inside the receipt from the gas I bought
to drive me to you, from a swamp to a vineyard
like a comet through every city park
like on a Sunday a thrown bottle
at a wall after a sermon
"will split a to ms, for foo d"
you know it's there when, the distance, and in it
on some porch, the silent ember of a cigarette opens
its cyclops, and when you get that inexplicable whir
in your ears, that's it, stalking, and just because you're paranoid
doesn't mean it's not cloning you. and just as you know
in your core, much put into the Earth's care, as you look
down at your shoes, just as you do this, and as you peer
into your earthly visage, morning by morning, mirror by mirror
what is the horror you miss? tetanus? on a razor's edge?
your reflection looks lost; look to it again. it's out there,
the burning cigarette of that hitman, Fate on his porch
with a beer and a shotgun or death by papercut, no morbidity
no matter, and this very nanosecond, as pulsars burn
as comets collide with bodies more heavenly
than any voluptuous vixen of fleshform, as manners
of violence on grander scales than any of our skirmishes,
wars, massacres, chronometers, gyroscopes, particle colliders,
it all reeks of an axe chopping at infinity without the source
of energy to keep chopping, those roughhewn infinitudes
out there, in here, those cosm's in our catacombs
then, underfoot, the twig snaps just outside and beyond
your campsite, beyond the fire's radius, lurks preternatural
you are reminded of childbirth, and whether or not
you will ever again participate in it, the making of children, that is
that's basically it, your paranoia, scant knowledge
of everything, but, no gnosis of where you fit into it
you are a privilege of life's lust
and lust's procreant sacrilege
La nd’ s E nd
*
join in the gestalt
in the data-basalt
up to bonelevel
mercury notwithstanding
come down for fairs, for hot-dogs
the parachutes are tents now
maritime and monotony of monstrous desires
all steeplechased into stun-guns
scratch a ticket at the petrol-station
ride a bullet into your father's heart
mankind's greatest creation so far
was not his, mankind's greatest accomplishment
was not a walk on the moon
but the beautiful desire to.
and then he went and had to do it.
*
That fire was a dare, it was eternal.
That monocellular. Monadic overdrive, that lust was
all on a dare. The heart is like that, always nudging
us into heroics so that it may swell into itself, fill
with blood to gorge on. But then, everytime the rock-star
makes it to the top, he immediately tires of it.
All of the sex, drugs, exposure, a walking death.
What is left to transmogrify? A will to live. An aching back.
Shoulder-up and saddle-out; the grindstone must be heave-hoed.
Still, these occupations, all of our neighbors looking with vice
Into our backyards, the affairs, the hidden receipts, the one thing
You can do that no one else can that haunts your wildest imaginings,
These are our import. Of course, this is not a poem; you already know
All of this, that the entire world was a dare placed upon us.
I know this; I was dared to be a poet. Chewing a bit between my teeth
No blinders on, evermore, and on.
*
Untranslatable Lord
Of severed
Common tongue(s)
A pilgrimage of severed tongues
Through the dunes
Beautiful deserts
Are gods
Revealed, unmarred
Jabes
Won’t release my hand
Because I won’t
Drop the book
*
Life begins like a flight to Las Vegas.
You get there. All a theme-park you are encouraged to gamble on.
You can’t find an ideology any better than you can find your hotel-key.
Midlife, on the return flight over a desert, you look down (you always
Get the window-seat, of course) and see a junkyard of misgivings.
Later you become a widow to a tarred-and-feathered Pegasus
And you try to take this act to Vegas. Ludicrous and lucrative.
The roundtrip ticket stands at the foot of the itinerary
And flicks him a bird and planes full of dullards explode
Like pigeons from a rooftop in a town with no neon
*
Hire me.
I am a navigator of images.
*
I shouldn’t contribute to the decline of Western Civilization
But I sure love
Writing these
Poems
*
my poems break the falls of angels from heavens
and hide in grottos behind waterfalls among lichens
I guess that blood is its own ink; is my ink the blood
Of angels that have fallen? My poems the flow
Of a divine blood in their divinations? The awesome
Reconciliation of blood versus wings and the interim between
The blades of shoulders, the body’s hierarchy
These galaxies of words like freckles on Christ’s back
Faith making you step back from the precipice
Of the void, you begin to seriously reflect on
All of those stars from your cheeks; you are finally
Grounded, the earth’s core holds you where you walk
Like a frozen metronome. Feel it humming in you.
Acquire gravity, stand in one place during the high testimony,
Catch an angel when it falls bloody and wanton into your arms.
This aching swoon after swoon after swoon.
*
Linnaeus-lineage.
Loki-kin. Prometheus-primadonna.
prankster of inadvertent schemata
creationism, no, demi-surgistics
can it even be there?
even in breakfast cereals?
in lice-piss and tears of gerbils?
too many times I must answer yes.
truth is lurking like your paranoia
you must embrace your microcosmos, man
for any one life, there is
the ultra-Blakean angel
to discern what is snake and lamb
and behind the barn
and behind the triggers
and behind the pens
is danger lurking hardcore
in Americana
in the labia and between the nubile
breasts of an Internet teen and
that pestilence is freedom and democratic
like all firing machine guns are and
cosmic smirkiness and these short lines
short-lived monikers
of my wit, my life, a document-awry
I was the crappy bassist
in a good band, but, I had the only passion
and this party level
is just below "cops-at-windows"
until we hear our own empty promises
too many times among the empty bongs
and then suddenly the patsy-wagons arrive
to place us back in the lunchroom lines
and like a cop's insipid flashlight
probing a pair of dilated pupils
the rancor becomes veiled
the predator unveiled
I am up to it again
shut off that light
and fuck me proper,
poem
poem fuck me properly and thorned
*
the lightning bolt the Strep-throat the three steins containing Destiny
the rigmarole the diastole the lesion of love cut into a kid at a latchkey
the marble the icon column the exhibit the reasons chapels are locked at night
the squalor the train's holler the despondent alarm clocks the discrepancies
the tin cans the middlemen the battleship bolt-factories
the matrix of secrets Hecate spread wide upon a mattress like a rose upon a
manuscript
hungry as bombardiers drinking beers eating flesh and ammo we go
straddling the eve hockey-pucks and what-the-fucks flying easy rhymes buzzing 'bout
ears
ashtrays bad jokes and jukes no service no tips bartend too smart for spirits
night after night lit up like gold becoming lead like solar to saturnine
the flare-guns all a-firing above the posh plush homes of the politicians
a militia of poets at odds with the epithets of physics a godhead of wordsmiths
the forest with teeth beaches for the meek cities to scrape the gums of the sky
the poem as a fist the reader's jawbone gets nailed like an eye opened fast
*
“We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real...We
must therefore displace everything onto the sphere of the
symbolic where challenge, reversal, and overbidding are the law.”
Jean Baudrillard
*
*I interrupt again
the bell of your spirit
is sine-curved away
mouths spill those invisible rivers
superstrung through sinew
of skull to skull phoning
the scenic of being
out-leagues horizons
you exist in the rain of a world
as if each particle
could be felt across the crooked nose
of a monument, god, or leviathan
one day they will build a galleon for you
and you will die
as the vessel is filled with riches
and then buried in a tomb
with your attendants for the afterlife
this will all happen in the middle of a wasteland
that may or may not have once been
a paradise
the prow is being hewn now,
nightly
shank, shave, shirts, shit, rank and file
days, endless alliterations of illiterates
time never wrote a poem, save for wrinkles
about the eyes. sew shut time's lips then.
watch it begin to form words in your own mouths.
guilded frames hover about the air
dodge them
I'm jumping through hoops
to capture this image
no simpatico
frame, quadrant, quartered, drawn into quatrains
to as is said too
movement not trumped yes
fold ace flush gambol
stillness of sfumato
the smell of documents being signed
that change all life
as is
as if
for to
chance is an honorable hit-man
he kindly stops for legends
holocaustically he himself is hunted
as we map atoms and genomes
good for us we live in a drought of chance
for the afterlife clipper to be buried with us
only one drowning ever really happened
civilization, you are a marvel aren't you
Phr a se xod us
I.
Cycloptic we are all wunderkind
in the eye the fire burns verbatim
no friend in language, only vendors
strippers on strips, wholesalers, pimps
all bureaus of license that own your gab
and prattle
what’s next is the as/is impertinence
of the next’s moments patience
spit upon spittle upon
cough upon cough upon
stained window now covered with germ angels
apparitions and apparatus
breath on the back of your neck
from your lover as you sleep
the first of all poems and languages
in and of the word
inside the inquisition of each syllable
oily rags, mildewed cellars, fire hazards
of curses can reside in our breasts
this world is a garden
of nacroeative floraciousness
and art’s togglers endure
patrons, wasps of auction tenors
while souls are screamed through bullhorns
as if poetry was the quantum physics of slingshots
but the work is never lost upon us
for there is a fingerprint of a man upon the altar
of every inch of anyone’s flesh
voicebox pipebombs
the concords are all glitched
we have interdimensional travel
in our small talk, but the pilot is lost,
the navigator drunk on tongues
we must stay wanton, I am also
whore of word worm of easy
references
anaphasia of idiot luck
clock stopped with a thrown knife, simpatico
whose tongue broke the silent pane
someone flung a word
and shattered all of the plate glass
in our city
II.
Give to metro what nano
Draws you to
I salute to surrender you
Space lined up is a firing-squad
crosshatching stars
Do you wait for me
To draw your light
like a moon from a pool
of ocean?
Do you we wait for all of each of us
on the fragile trellis
of the first word ever uttered?
my kiss was well lit lightning
Chorus of flashbulbs
No candles, no ensconcement of light
yet all flesh is candlewax, we know this
Tongues laser
Faces wait to
be like light
as a particle or a wave
III.
Spires of window-bars in my viewmaster
iron railings, alarums of car thefts, Sargasso seas of Spanish moss,
balconies of beauty seething in wisteria fits
here in the swampcity, I have hewn a song with an arc
and my heart is an ark
the animals in my blood
find reason to flood
to the voicebox
after dropping the reins of our own rantings
we pursue their catastrophes
we never meant to hurt anyone
with crudely structured poems
IV.
That constellation eradicates all possibility
Of ever being named after you
Christian names sprinkle the infinite
Like pulverized messiah dust
Torque and train, cable and taut sinew
We heave the lens behind us
To the observatory of a lost phrase
and the lens is heavier
than the mountain where the telescope awaits
Word as power
That which conquers as it is quelled
That which when said
Quenches the constellation s fire
With a mere naming
V.
Don’t ever say ET cetera to me
Or I will punish you, etc.
VI.
spackles
for the blind
skin sleeves of reptilian
auditory glands
cinders are like deep cuts in forearms in a man effigy
in this man-effigy of sconces and rites and doves impaled
like heavy-handed debacles that hear throbs
as far as poems
there are
conscious voice-overs
preternaturally
played backwards in time
to start this poem over
your tongue is a battering-ram
which blurs its force
into a wormhole
Houdini chains of rattling mortalitities
you talked so much you made a dictionary of locks
you tried a combination
it became a snowflake
you were then addicted
to imagination
(imagine that)
the page was never blank
you imagine a snowfield
that you should trot through
the page becomes bottomless
you melt in being left behind
never taking a step
but always walking
is becoming
hieroglyphic
*
VII .
you have a handful it is an all that you have ankh and altar
and you shave as if your scruff was gold-dust
you are convinced
you are adamantly deserving of fireballs
never quenched which become bitchy phoenixes
I was an idealist and I wanted
the embrace of the brackish swan
no preternations in my melodrama
I wanted to drown in black rape
like flags unfurling for a country of blind men
but I am harnessed like trochaic feet
as every phrase leaves any dark book
like a ray of light
and anyone reading a dark book
is holy
for the first time
Mantra Jinx
Tam b ike the Itiner a nt
says war-crime plastic is an ovum hooplah
never knew how the marquis was body parted
syzergic puke on the Rorschach and then we ate hash
Tamlife never modernized
then that arcade made millions angels couldn't fathom
Tamlife said to gods better niche next time
Tamlife, why do I always dimensionalize, asked Tamlife to himself
because came from a long line of because's and his mother was a since
no answer there, as Tamlife catches a fish
castles get built when Tamlife masturhates
regimes fall when Tamlife pro-hate-incriminates
waiting forever for one cloud to assemble the shape of a cloud
waiting for Tamlife to get tired of making pictures
exgurgitate the purge rehabiliphrase of the logometric spine-song
Tambike was an alter ego of an altar that had a bikewreck
during a Dada experiment in the Warm War which oppressed the Oil War
Tambike had balls like a bag of marbles covered in creosote
Tambike, may you write your name on the walls of Uruk
Tambike only upchuck pemmican jerky
Tambike paint murals on timpani's
Tambike hero for the moment
Tambike get
laid
out
-ism
it has two syllables
“ism”, the
epos thematic
pharmakos phase
opsis epiphany?
nope, naive alazon.
this is stupid,
let’s just call the place, okay?
glance lexis.
melos drama.
I don’t care if the monad is the part
of you that makes me say this.
lyric ethos.
the machine’s a black girl named Eris.
motif myth.
bullshit said the cuestick.
anagogic apocalptic
and some weird French shit.
well, when in Tome, do as the toll-men do
as they always said in halls of foam.
high mimetic.
confession dianoia.
a craft is a word that you can leave on.
a craft is a way of words to stay on.
heircraft.
craftlooms.
slinking out of that fold
dollar bill dollar bill dollar bill
“ism” has two syllables,
is isometric
panoptic tick
stuck in my Sargasso hair
pubes electric
like art that is really there
le ad
I will not answer your seance.
I won’t uncloak the negatives
(these poor darkroom superstitions).
No one will channel me
through medium volumes.
I will not hide the housekeys
from paranoid ghosts rattling
chandeliers and door-chains.
Deadbolts and stormdrains.
I will not succubus, incubus, djinn.
No mandrake, no heroin.
No St. John’s Wort, no belladonna.
I will not manifest for cameras.
I will not death-defy.
I will only leave memoirs in ashtrays
fireplaces and firepits.
I will leave a scratch
on the bedroom wall.
The new tenant will always wonder
if and how he did it.
ta ke it ea sy unless it kee ps yo u fro m e ffluvium
and that black hole corona, that event horizon
a point eating its own pointillism, ad lit finitum
as we chew light, masticating illuminations
the moon is not a rock it is an iris there when full
that great astrodome cure that tranquil eye
I look up against the grain out of the sky’s brain
and think of cloud galleons and regattas of borealis
pirate of a star smuggling a heart in a fading vessel
for every launch is a mutiny to a world
and every world itself is a cowardly launch
and with the altimeter going off of its chart
and the primordial tightens its belt and
crawls up the face from the valley’s wreckage
out of the crater and into the casting of missiles
into the void smuggled star out from the vessel
and from the shadows our flags and the world
the primordial that gives out eyes and weapons
the primordial that pounds hearts' drums
cement-filled guitars fall from high altitudes
and this is our music here, this celestial dodge
and submerged in emergence, that buzz of all about it
in the sweat of gods and words stinking to high heavens
and there is pungency here where skies fall differently
and down into the smokestacks of swamp-side factories
I will lull the reeds in the fields with philosophies
I will amphibiate and be all elements at once
sucking in the effervescent silence after the launch
Boo mer a ngs
Boomerangs have no wisdom
that is, unless their wielder
does who has thrown them.
Sik h k nife
I kept Death close to me
as a means of living.
Like a black leather jacket.
Like a gun just in case.
I see the sad eyes of the old young men.
I see the women hunched over them.
Towers will fall as they always have.
I hold a key but can’t stand the house.
I kept Death close to me.
I hid it in her silken hair.
She pretended not to know it was there.
I whispered in another’s ear
about the quiet ships.
I kept Hope closer then.
And it stuck me like a splinter,
and though it caused a limp, I wouldn’t pull it out.
I let it go in deeper.
Deeper past the Death I’d kept.
Deep to the solemn field where I
could have stayed forever.
I kept Death close to me;
as a gnarl of knowing
there, by my thigh, omnipresent
w ha t he said wa s b y accid e nt
occidentally what he did set him to saying such
things he'd do and not admit to like
riding kertang in the caddy or esplanades
by a shanty or licking the molasses from the
mayor's lips or showing his hubric scrutiny
in a gallery of thespians with firebrands
or befriending mascots who have no rivalries
and signing promissory notes for loans over poetry
or america's without precedence and munitions enough
or the cosmic being somewhere there weren't also
some tree-sap and a bed of hollyhock
to roll in while reciting ommateums
Re ad ing Jo se p h Br od sk y a t 3 0,0 0 0 f t.
Leaving San Francisco, I read
Brodsky, the screen informs our speed
of 5-hundred-70 miles
per hour, dour faces stratify aisles
As do surrounding clouds. Have to
be stern with altitude's milieu
imagining below great lakes
of salt, crop circles, Golden Gates
of supreme engineering’s past
Bridges of light, space, time are cast
in the exile's words, the speech parts
themselves are of the coldest sorts
befitting of such lofty heights
And here in America might
one find a modest little sea
between pilot, poet, Brodsky
Return to exile, if you may
among the anonymity
of crowded cafe' and alley
to blurred rhymes, those crafted galleys
And there, dream of Norenskaya
fourteen huts, your beer, your manna
The snow will fall there forever
Dream not of America
as your poems assuage its narcotic mass
the hydr a ha s more tha n nine hea ds
that grail we passed around
must've assuredly've been holy
don't you, wouldn't you
say so?
blindfolded, the last poem
is pushed off an exclamation point
into blindness
the rewording
of this genetic code
makes boring mutants
comfortable clones
line after line after line
*
I am the offspring
of common valor and curses
where is my tongue of legions
like lesions leaving a battlefield?
*
my legion of tongues?
these are hanged men
they speak through scars
through jugulars
your tongue is a hanged man
the minute you learn to talk
sometimes he comes back to life
and you say what you should and shouldn't
*
endomology is the study
of trails left in prehistoric rock
by grubbers
I want this innocence
so furiously badly
I grub for it and leave
tunnels through life behind me
*
every idea that I have could potentially decapitate me
*
I have as many ideas as the nine-brained hydra
with its infinite identities waiting to manifest
when a head gets severed please cut off my heads
*
after its mutation
the headless horseman writes many poems
many of them involve
blindfolds, valor, innocence, pumpkins, courtships
gone awry
a sense of the world clavicle-up
only living in the suite between two ears
above a trash-compactor mouth
and home-entertainment-center eyes
and fast-food nostrils
and a cranium overloading
all of its
reptilian
mammalian
human
potentials
*
my fingers reach back upon themselves
I have too many ideas, too many brains
*
that grail we pass around
and the cup we seldom drink of
to teach the word "plate" to someone
I would have my head cut off and brought to them
upon it
I can think of no other way anymore
to make a word impact
the d ef initio n of the inf inite
you have a handful
it is all that you have
you are convinced
that you need to get more
there is nothing but desire
what filled your hand in the first place?
you have a handful
it is all that you have
have you ever seen a handful of desire?
it is all that you want
but forever nothing is there
until you take your empty hand
and throw emptiness towards
its own endlessness
and then you have substance
and then you look into your palm
and you see
that desire is your hand
and what you hold in it
holds in your mind the endless pain
the glass full of deserts
the thirst full of quenching
cage s
rose embroidered on a hairshirt
(Christ made love)
dried liver paperweight
(am I breathing)
dolphin ribcage
(above the ammonites)
scarlet letters
(of petrified wood)
a Whitman revision
(in a vial of acid)
a fragment by Stein
(in a lint dustbin)
Rimbaud with no wine
(it never happened)
my pinky's fingernail
( a hangnail hanger-on)
scabbard full of holy water
(a wine-bottle)
knife stuck in a tree on trail Appalachia
(kill Whitey)
a penny on the beach
(what time is high tide)
hollowed leopard's tooth
(broke off inside a jackal's side)
your poem on my necklace
(goodbye)
torso under a tour-bus
(no more groupies)
seashell on a mountaintop
(time)
feather in lava
(evolution)
lollipop on asphalt
(chew gum)
marriage in a barn
(kids with genius)
motorcycle helmet
(teenager with scars)
broken tusk of mandrill
(a zoo gets funds)
mold on a tome's cover
(pretentious)
hand in my pen
(gospel according to . . . )
hand in my heart
(gate rattles with key in it)
gate in my open hand
(salvage salvation)
nation in my mind
(constituency of turbines)
flesh in my pen
(written attrition's)
body in my soul
(ethereal)
le thar gy o f w o nder s upo n p ar ade -w hee ls
good world knows, I've got stimuli-eyes
help this hapless lord of lost word lights
to pass over the scintillating gates
so that I may and may have so in May
and in return, in my love-bag, I might get
a down-to-Earth-Autumn, if not, the barbells
still swing low in a strong man's chariot
and in my heart like a swamp, many have found
a Cosmos, it is veritable
I was always asking for it, I guess, as betrayal is
forgiveness that can be carried upon your person
but never given away fast enough, like voodoo
or banana-peels in a worn knapsack
and only a monk or saint of different moderations
will dally over a river on a tree-trunk carrying that
in rain, that is, or a torrential downpour, that is
if I was cut open you would see shadows of men
meeting men that I once was
and I understand this, but, I would have to be
cut open for it, but, then again
the world is a whirling scalpel of several scissors
whirling around handshakes with fragile wrists shaking
blood pumping over the compost heaps
I carry a war in a bag that no one fights but me
poets and business-men should have conventions
shit upon shit and such
and then what would fertilize this excursion
we would grow fucking rain forests
all of my great men are doppelgangers,
cloinoids, monad-copiers, etc.
I was once a great man
and then I stopped writing
and then I was weak and full of shit
and then I started it up
started writing that full of shit shit again
Deco nstr uctio n C hild hood A nec do te
avant archaism
idiot savantism
the aggregation
of this soap operatic
lined text
get to the deaths
this story-board in a rainstorm
like they all are
(my head is on the block)
no, not ever so easy
post-traumatic syndrome
for indeed the worst
has already reached, breached
its quickening
the horse must be shot
more for us than its own
idea of pain or lying
onside with colic
I was only fourteen
its language was a languid groan
poor old bed-sore roan
my sister was crying
that’s when we broke up finally
she would cry more
I would one day confuse
this event with a poem
the hole erupted in the roan’s skull
the brutal finality
my step-father
was never more beautiful
in his mercy, “put out of misery” is
what he called it
my first real violence
because of the size of the horse
I once rode her
across Mr. Williamson’s acres
later, step-father would show
me and my brother had to clean
the gun and Mr. Williamson had
the roan hauled off
my sister would leave home
less than a year later
I’d be the next to leave
one season soon after.
ge sta lt gr af fiti
B-movies are documentaries
our thoughts, guns, tits, and ass
*
trailer-park children flocking
to pool-halls and above-ground pools
*
try to hang-glide into a higher
bracket, invent a better socket-set
*
wet black bodies carved
from flanks of ibex ranks
*
I am atomic and have always been
erosion control is the science of living
*
I am a spinning weathervane
powered by a perpetual turbine
*
adroit and drifting, aspiring to higher device
yet no soul shall be sacrificed
*
my angel lies in the cracked cornfield
as earth abandons a halo for hope of heart
*
abandon all human instinct
to the grid, I guess
*
all these tattoos across America
slowly scabbing under
*
no one will be notified in the event
of this super-ego’s blackout
*
at some point you must sleep
through the flak and shrapnel
*
a metaphor
is a meteor
that falls like __________________
and then by being read
it becomes a meteorite
and then, subsequent
that crater
of ore
*
this is what an alarm clock is really worth
the sun, its 1st fast pressure breaking its wineglasses over the earth
*
your hands are windmill wings, shotglass slings
I crash my brake-less school-bus into you
*
I make the miasma of night my lover.
Smerdyakov is the name of my bartender.
*
the decision on the cusp of all
the dice were frozen in an ice-cube and we waited for it to melt
*
the stone’s a poem; the mountain’s a not so novel novel
*
they never tell you how blood got all over your shirt
and then they book you or bill you
*
we used candlewax to close our cuts, super-glue for the worst ones
and mouths also congealed after our burning tar of words
*
the litanies at the close of every faucet, door, eye, account, and day
every glance a distant door shutting I hear its abeyance
*
grab your shawl as I grab my veil. Clouds of dust linger
longer than we breathe. This is always known by our steeds
*
who is he who sleeps to Beethoven (my other half)?
he is deafer than that man ever was
*
a leaf is a god’s handkerchief
Zen-girlfriends, flea-collars, roach-motels: do the rich have these?
(it all or always depends on the advertisers)
*
kiss my acid. I eat words. love turds of them, try to stomach
icebergs as tasteful white dirges. I can chew a star in two
like Zeus with a migraine-hangover drinking dew
*
one nail protruding from the exact center of an immense white wall,
one nail. That has its own immense power
*
the mass of a dwarfstar lodestone in scale
to the hurt your theories have caused
*
torn between two beasts of insurmountable beauty
on a battlefield of my body, as a gut-shot delegate pleads
for fifths of whiskey
*
frayed paintbrushes and bulls charging and they still
re-assemble my portrait after I’d disgraced the family royale
*
Nature writes in invisible ink, and from animate to pulp to permeate
the ink is constantly permanent as debris wraps roots like dentistry
*
a plum jettisoned at the foot of a plum sapling
is how it is and will always be
debris wrapping our roots like perfect dentistry
Echo is sta sis
I am the silence. I stand
in the field. Unified, waiting.
Echo. Nothing traverses other than.
I let go of the reins. No stalk disturbed.
I wait for Echo. Again. Conditions
aren’t right. Abort. Finally
I cut my hands open. I hear something coming.
The world meets me here, thrumming.
Like a name spoken on a pier.
In high wind (like a name returned).
Like slack reins. You left and left and left it.
Skewered, finished, an anything in a strange
painting of an assured commission of name.
Culture heals no echoes; it only hears them.
Cry out that history one more time.
Bo wdo n, G eor gia sum mer s
You’ve got to tip-toe around
the stepfather of your heart
a healing can’t begin yet
this late into summer let it
fester like rotweed on
sweltering gravel. Too many
guns always around the house
for all this rural boredom.
An old roan stands by a fence
like indifference, as if its
jockey was a misplaced forensics
file. Call in the psychics to
locate our lost childhoods.
Resurrect the honeysuckle
vines. I am barren with
the Southern Cross of it all.
I wear myself like a tarp.
Famished, tip-toeing around
the bedroom door and into
the kitchen to steal his beer
and water down his Scotch.
And then out into the field
of acres we can’t own on the salaries
of cop and secretary as I sit
on a hummock as cows gather
around, dirt-dumb, but still,
like me, always vaguely curious.
Af ter K unitz’ s Car eless Lo ve
Lonely syringe and its ounce
Glass table, bills, loaded guns.
Disdain and clamorous speech.
Dark beauties clasp handsome cheeks
Whose eyes beside nothing glows.
The gun in silent repose
Begs for power of a hand.
Lost loves don’t understand
That frames shudder the frame.
I lost my nation, un-named.
I went to shoot my love.
I had something to prove.
My heart could hold no more heart.
Like a bulb too many volts,
I blew into vicious joys
and killed her other sultry boys.
Tha t old lea ther gr ee n co ver
I found the ample street logic needed
to remain in the establishment
and there was that unfinished equation
lingering like an unknown closet
whose door needed closing
business unfinished in the spore piles
but all of my bluffs paid off
my die of flesh rolled molecularly
across fate’s cobblestone as it should
but, mortal simply is its own excuse
and so goes this folly to another
every morning a blackjack gambit
for omelets over an oubliette
I like to make (sh)it exciting
I fall off the cliff and land in my shoes
the most perfect prefect walks
out of the government line and rosters
illuminate like a census in a plague
somewhere the nose of a god grows bigger
as I begin the Ambrosia Project, just
something I came up with for justice
and glass is a concept not a mindset
and grasp is a verb not a noun here
and reflection is unheard of, and
our muscles stretch the texts further
Ad um br al Ap horism s
Hairshirt mantle hangs in pawnshop
always someone will buy it
*
one careful stone thrown
broke a forest of bottles
that one phrase
of bullets
*
my demographic of demons:
bulls, colts, millers, pilgrims,
ki-rin, pirates, bootleggers,
kilts, stouts, loggers, rocket dogs,
rogues, saints all ensorcelled
upon labels priced with any
random volatile possibility, but
what price dignity?
*
the river of forgetfulness
can’t be purchased
flask by flask
pint to pint
the tether between two worlds
can hang you
can tie the prow to the dockpost
can trip-up a stampede
can be a fuse both ends burning
like you are lit
you lit it yourself
*
your ornithology
has become the
oxymoron stabbed
into the side of me
*
always wade dangerous waters before drinking them
there is a war of cautionary tales
my soldiers now shattered into shards
my war was never mine was never even a war
had no progeny, had no country, no kin
no banquet, no vestal virgins, no sacraments
been this bent since I broke in
*
I’ve already lived an eternity
in every single night
I’ve woke to oblivions
to my own wake
every other morning
*
the book, poetic apparatus
an actual device of divisive-ness
the jaws of life between two covers
the mouth that gives birth as it devours
the umbilical cord you bite into
in order to tie yourself off
as you become an expert in ship’s yarns
and nautical knots
*
a drunk at an AA meeting once said to me:
“alcoholics are just frustrated mystics”
now it’s quite obvious what drives him to drink
that shaman with no social intent
is always the village idiot
and, usually, he will be continually
arrested
*
I’ve been as week as can be
a bird with broken bones
hobbled under a fig tree
circling on rotten fruit
and the ants eyeing me
*
to fight a long battle with your soul
to fight a long battle for your soul
to fight an epic after selling your soul
to reclaim the used soul
to never know your soul at all
I say it is best to be road-weary, scarred, humbled
it’s best to have had, several times over,
your soul’s ass kicked
*
it took all of nanotechnology
a full phalanx of microscopic biobots
to rebuild me, to rewire
my skewered symmetry
after my own heart’s mutiny
that contraction like an ion
what is not bound by what
charge, what freedom
that it longs for?
*
a dream can be a cage
if you wake up in the middle of it
as the electrons swarm your nucleus
*
my life was not
to become words
that I never got around
to looking up
*
shake it off
like a wet dog
in the rain
*
Americans can get away with anything
after all, the movies taught us that there is always
Mexico to run to
*
it’s a fact: earthworms crossed the ocean
in horse’s hooves on Spanish galleons
to repopulate the North American continent
which they’d not inhabited since the last Ice Age
and I will float across a river of fire
in a migration of my own diminutive kind
and do it on a barge of feathers
to get to my homeland to begin again
my worm progeny and kin
*
the dignity of the bull reverence
and pride of the bulwark purpose
and strength in the bridles and languages
and the sarcophagi of clues and intentions
and the relics and rites of shards
and bulls being mummified and revered
reverence, respect, and fear
a bridge at night, a bulwark under solid ice,
or my plaintive signature here
across the pale forehead of a page
*
I searched for the learned hermit
I leaned against a lamp-post
the regulars didn’t know what mists he traversed
to some new gate of hell
there is always another gate to there
(trust me on that one)
I could hear the red words of his nova fire
and I asked, “are you my teacher?”
and I heard the leather of his wings
*
strange that my mind is only quiet of words when writing
and my silence is never much of a poem as much as it is
an admonition of a canvas painted over by a blind man
a million too many times and his every brushstroke is true
*
It all ended it all began
when I realized I had to live
what it was I was preaching
and this is exactly when
it all began it all ended
*
I love you like the infinite gap between two snowflakes
*
this truth serum burns my blood
(get away from me with that)
*
like the secret dialects of restaraunteurs,
of tugboat captains, of English teachers,
I waited for life to hike up its skirt for us
but, life had never worn one
what had I always been thought?
life never did anything concealing
and for that matter, it makes Hope more appealing
it gives me that good inside feeling, yes it does
*
Futility, you are the towel I use in the downpour of self.
I am a lucrative sponge, a beached being.
Love is a papercut drinking lemon-juice and turpentine on an orange sluice.
I am a hemophiliac and you are the Romantic bloodbath ensuing.
*
Panther startled by sudden cello.
*
Sensual, like the sweetest earlobe.
*
Language, I have bullied you, so please kick my ass anew
around new lines, the jagged demagoguery’s of the rabid lexicon menagerie
*
we stare into it as the Cyclops
glares back from the desktops
as our goggles fog up and we clench
with tendonitis and the hum is constant
and the keyboard more tactile
than a wife or husband’s flesh
*
the best we could do
with our souls so far
is become greedy children
with more hands
than candy
in a candy field
*
as one embalmer to another, we all speak to and from our scars
we’ve been there you say to them
they speak to you these notches in bas relief
these waxen lips set deep and shut in your skin
they never age like the rest of you
frozen there like the only cuts ever
frozen there like the name of the same cut over and over for all of us
*
how much math
can you bring
expecting Beauty
not to sing?
*
I was left behind and angrier than the reason anyone had left
hell, I was even angrier than the last time I’d written about it
but I made due, paid everyone’s dues at the house tree
paid them to keep quiet about it
I said stop wearing those reindeer belts out to the bars, boys and girls
*
a small town is so cellular
under your gossip’s tumors
cannibalism amok in rumors
via satellite via towers
*
no poem has ever made of me
a mirror
in this language I look into
a sky painted
by Magritte
*
I have wished for complete total implosion
that black hole encumbrance
so to embrace the entire space-time continuum
with the atoms I have of theirs
*
a strange dissonance
like pissing in a toilet
as a trainwhistle blows
I am lackluster
flushing my nightly under a green light
I’ve got enough left
for a good tip
and one more pint
*
seeing the back of your own skull as you write a poem is a delicious horror
*
I am an unhinged catch-clasp
there’s no wealth inside this chest
so soon that a star did not know
I always use Johnny Reb-Ebonics
I am the box of fickle light
you gaze into my wounds
you only understand pain
as a predilection
I know pain as an epic
of insane proportions
*
it has never been an alchemical soul
it has always been an alchemical one
*
I recite Ghazals to myself
to constantly piss myself off
these war-songs about inside-fires
and for running distraction
the Devil gave me his carbon badge
and wearing Pride, the Star-badge, I walk
through the heavens brilliantly, at least until
I piss on the wrong hellfire
and then the politics take my wings
and make armies out of them
as I stand, can’t fly
*
I was born under the same sign as Chick Corea and Egon Scheil
*
you are the last to ask, “so, what do you do?”
I cut out tongues I am a tongue-lasher.
my godfather was a postman, now a butcher.
this is no baloney; greater men than me have lost
their wit for speaking of one another.
once I was trying to tie my shoe for the first time
now I’ve tread untold when’s in them.
I love watching rodeos, the rally of it, the gates
slammed open, the roughshod tumbling
of everything from a shed; it makes me wince
and pour salt onto my cut (a quarterhouse).
I love silent movies about rodeos the best.
Don’t prod my bull with a spear; it speaks randy enough.
Now ask someone else, “so, what is it that you do?”
*
I am:
“Something with the wings of a bird, something
of anguish and oblivion, the way nets cannot hold water.”
Pablo Neruda
*
poetry is the daily advance of unsung stupidities towards my own weaknesses
they cut off Che Guevara’s hands when he died; I did not know he was also a writer
*
“We’re like fishermen living off the sea,” says Taghlaoui who spends his life digging
fossils out of desert rock, “Except that our sea is dead.” Lawrence Osbourns, NY
Times Mag. Oct. 29th, 2000
*
S he ltonism s (for Sco tt, the gre atest fr ie nd a nyo ne c o uld e ver ha ve or
tr y to kill)
I. I’ve got a shotgun-shell knife and a wedding to attend.
Stranded celestial moonbeams—like lima beans in fatback broth.
Colon arteries of preachers’ pasts and cancers; never fart in church.
Lepers can’t hurt you if you don’t touch them; we drank beers on the burial
mounds.
Look out for that El Camino 454 and the hearses with wagon wheels that are
worth more than
the coffins they carry.
II. Shelton cut me like an apology.
The eulogy was too short.
I despised you, yet I fucked you ‘til dawn.
Making love is disposition of distortion.
My life is forgetting what I was born to do. No, that’s it.
Save the couch-converse. I pull a knife from behind my left ear
and make a new craft of hurtfullness. Then I say those immediately
regretful slurthings and then you find that behind your ears you also
harbor knives.
2. Palms and pines.
Weird erosion.
An empire of bog vs. smog.
Kissing in a bottleneck of bad culture.
You can tell it is those black kid's 1st time at the ocean.
The ocean insists constantly.
Its greatest fear is that it is never ending.
Its greatest fear is never ending.
Perso na l H istor y of M y P irac y
Culture was always a stasis of guilty victims.
A moth sells a chic soul under a spastic lamp.
Sincerity, I’ve walked your bricks. Austerity, your burns and blisters.
Saltspray and sandpaper wind shanks me in this paradise.
Coastal highways tempt with cities. The dunes corrode the hammocks.
A gold old forest of meanwhiles awaits.
I am only carving out a meager. Culture the impetus of victimless guilt.
We need a code of laws someone said. A grackle of crows caws.
You are mooring the vessel and the passenger has his knife shining
Behind his back in his one good hand.
To ngue to To ur niq uet
a tourniquet
around the tongue
to become famous
a poet need only
die in one book
resurrection no matter
no cess or jest of gestation
then cut out the tongue
of anyone
then hang the fleece
over an olive tree
its lowest limb
lowest comedy
becomes him
let the sculptors do their verdigris
let the critics pop their speed
they’ll need it
assume the position
you’ve earned
for accolades
all of this in jest
our tongue is rapier
we are all men hung
over hung men
hung-up on women
hearts are the only books left
a scatology of history
that is smarter
that chronicler me
we crude craftsmanships
power struggles with no penmanship
on our last hour
nothing gracious is signed
without blood
signature snipers
kill the week in media floods
from the birth certificate
to the last certificate
we are a Sargasso Sea of tongues
just ask any of her
Af ter a F loo d
Poetry is the hat with wings.
You go to the market
in a canoe
after the storm
not knowing
if a market
is even left.
This disaster area
and your bloodsong
your family tree aria
wrapped around your waist
like a belt hung
with wares for sale.
There was nothing left to waste
and you unfastened
your wares
and drowned them
and then sang low
like a swung chariot.
the ce nsus
the amanuensis
only had eyes
it only had eyes
on one side of its head
the tweezers which could hold
the last truths
could not be retrieved
from the dark niche
with our other tweezers
walls walked away from themselves
leaving behind only transparent walls, bipartisans
in the squall and squalor
we christened our vehicles and structures
with those adverbs of color we hollered
in the street the amanuensis closed all of its eyes but one
and by doing so became
a bona fide citizen
every poured into the streets
cheering from their auditions
confe ssio n
I never once said that
that was my only solace.
In the rushes’ quickenings,
I never once heard whispers.
The fireworks over the beach
left X-ray shadows over the waves.
Which do you like better?
I never once claimed my sentence.
If I were to solicit solitude,
I would do so as a peddler
of fine hair products, of slick
gleam, sheen, shine. I’d sell
snake-oils. I’d sell hallucinations,
pyrotechnics, smoke-bombs, illusions
all man-made. The sfumato would hide
my art (that would be my art), and reveal
its light in my spinning mirror escapes
and I would never once admit it
as I collected the town’s purses
that this politic was my only solace.
S und ay mor ning a fter a ll night b ak ing shif t
totem, dulcet
quiet solicitor
quiet, no stolen soul
was ever given chords
dulcet, totem
backslider, ensign
vocalize the thief’s name
call it out be true to form
put your treasures in your croon
fill up the steamy rooms
like all calls of desperation
that end up orbiting craters
or being caged in satellite dishes
but, the ballad is the only ore there
I don’t sell or buy souls
I just steal bread from my boss
but this galactic perimeter piercing
its own side I’d rather study
just never could do the math
the writing on the wall I wrote
and I couldn’t read it next day
my gnosticism is of the third shift
I craft a totem, sleep-depravation
dulcet of crust and dustmote
something to wake to, some bread.
the sun comes into my kitchen
I remember that I once had a mystical life
I really thought I did, then
the sound of steel guitar peels across the air
towards me from the Steve Earle CD
I lean into, break the bread, totem, dulcet
no sleep, 3rd shift, sip first beer, sunrise
dulcimer, banjo, guitar, talisman, dulciana
another night notched into the tall
anthropomorphic pole of my spine
there will be no storms today according
to my fiber optic netsea palm-pilot
it will be characteristically characteristic here.
my living room is Delphi (read more contemporaries!)
my bedroom is Alexandria (is she really right for me?)
melodious totem of saxophone now, sonorous, bending up
like the neck of a slow egret, other frequencies
like calluses peeling, burns from baking, fleck of rye
screams somewhere in meteoric craters, screams
of here we are. the kitchen in golden light.
toast and honey butter, beer, Sunday morning, shift done
totem, dulcet, talisman, bread, home.
I le t the re ins go
form,
and the contortions of yours
and mine,
these lines kill country roads
with tentaclic
lustful scrap
clinging trigonometric
against gravities
of stated moves
and slated troves
of ions
of what formulas
what next?
the golden ammonite
curl of the tongue
hypotenuse of hyperbole
megaspeech
logostronomy
faulty arches
still spew their lights
we engineer rhapsody
dance more, closer now
there’s an edge
how will I build the body
that can withstand
such seizures as these
the fact or glimpse improbable
equal
the miracle of aptitude amalgamous
all the gymnasts
fall to the floor from atop the pyramid
in a mass of wincing
snap of syntax
fluid through tubes
from combustors
jetstream navigators
from speeding bikes
ask any attendant
the maps are legends
put Tarot cards in your spokes
ride hard hellkites, ride hard
for the itinerant
the completion of every
sentence requires cage and gauge,
passport and deutschemarks
someone on the web just got erected
broadcast quotation
obscurity is not the maze that one thread
of crumbs can lead you out of anymore
your poem slams shut like mousetraps
caught in crab-cages and you are afraid
to investigate the trembling other end
of a taut rope caught somewhere deep
this fence of thought not yet built with the bird perched there in mid-air waiting for
dimensions
to be perceived and to flesh and feather them out
ontology recapitulates philogeny
and after all this time you still don’t love me
the mafia of language won’t release you alive
once you’re “on the books,” y’know, a “made man”
you are done, neck-tied, hobbled, etc. you are
cappacello for the dogs and scraps for pigeons
and being that there are no man-made words, well
then there is no release, no witness protection
relocation, you see, we have found these sounds
they were a tight family well before our time, fellas
physicists theorize that the entire
unknown/known universe folds
about itself much in the manner
of a burrito. let these conquistadors
still starve, these hagueros, these
bastard comprachicos, let this jungle
of substrata kill their own
in the way of the viral world.
this
tangent
has order
its chaos
the higher order
that I am unaware of
(obviously!)
and, I am always entitled
to my disclaimers
(I wear them like a raiment)
O night negligee of nascence black alliteration punctured with celestial prisms
burning!
contorted
centauric verse
wrong, staggered
drunken, maned, trampling on orchids
randy
fevered
forest-lost
adrenal rush
of life equaling death
the continuum must balance
in the next next
get out of the vineyard
play chess with other oracles
you are folly without youth
Love’s quiet moccasins
Love’s empty holsters
Love’s thorned tiara
Love’s hood ornament found in a fishing net
Love’s tick embedded in your lover’s hair
Love’s pendant hung from an antenna atop a skyscraper
Love’s psycho jumper cables
Love’s ridiculous, love’s enablers
I am the mass-hallucination in the mess-hall for an army that only eats ink from a
pen writing a pinpointed vintage of vantage points.
the grimmoires of grace got left open. so it’s open risk season at your shack. get the
shells. be stillness by the still. the amphitheater of the forest has too many voices.
the old southern catapult and the new evil maladroits. be ready and stocked and
ready to be readied. jinxes have their numbers on you.
heist of poltergeist anger
locked in ampules
hermetically
sealed telekinetic valences
these crazed
pharmaceutical co’s
trying to colonize souls
basically, there, I
said it again
fill this inscription, you
industry-fed bitch
the fragment’s fragmencement is a direct answer to an indirect question asking itself
why ask.
The Golden Mean is mean
the ammonite, the beehive, the magnet’s coils
there is no flow other than the desire for flow we provide
and so nature is pitted against
human nature
frontal lobes and ganglions wrapped around their own DNA spirals
and vice-versa in the spiral
the pit of the pear
vs.
the pit unfillable
at least that’s how I see it confounded as I am without compound eyes
The ballast of a tempest
Greek “planktos”
being more dreadnoughts
to them
than what it destroys
and there is no honor
among weather patterns
Plankton, from the
to wander, as words do, I say
that I am a hungry blue whale
Autarchy, I am building a propulsion system
for my artificial island.
Don’t say malarkey.
Hydrostatic, magnet vs. magnet.
My wall vs, all the walls of the world.
Nodus: this notice hereby prohibits not having one.
You live in that treehouse
on the edge of the cliff
and dangle your
rope-ladder down.
I am Euripus.
Find me somehow
contradictorily eurythmic.
Quotha! Quotha!
Cover me in plaster! Make a mold
and break over the stubborn brow
of the original! We’ll have our neoclassical cloning!
I’ll pick the mosaic from the pieces.
I’ll sell the tiles down on the open market.
Whippletree, clevis, etc.
One word always tows another.
The madman wrote the Oxford.
It broke his stamina, without question.
The heaviness of books, lead coins on eyelids.
The sacral-cranial bend, the hump beginning to rise
in the back.
Got hit by a carcajou.
Got trampled by a megapod.
Once in Canada, once in Australia.
I love weirds and words.
I have reached apogee.
with you my reader
or have I a slower
moon’s path?
I can’t do the math.
Paths of moons should be slower
(you were right) being a peaceful
beach-lover an studious of tides.
In a few day’s time
my form will burn
away
like gold becoming lead
so give me a few days,
okay?
Iamblichus, hand me my staff please.
This song needs be noted.
My pathology is the merger of all ologies.
This nature of my addiction.
The line itself is but a Cadmean victory.
The earth rotates under the axis of this pen, at times.
It is all so boring that we actually have the
This world’s very existence
time to archive.
says something pending.
Keep good records, corpse.
Initialize the copses.
Awe that glittering it mauls hold.
It was excitedly original how
the piece wholly unforgave itself.
She wiped her lipstick on a lamp-post
and walked away into an American ethos.
All amidst the petroleum-fed dinosaurs.
The stars were stuck fossils.
The horizon has always been placated.
Freedom, I’ll pierce your tongue for you;
Truth, take this last doubloon.
I’ve no more use for this green card anyway.
I’ll see you all there in the end, on the short day.
Together, purblind in the ambushing glory.
for such malfeasance, a slap
on the archaic
with a wrist is in context
blindfold me first
prop me up for the firing squad
then, don’t
shoot me
after leaving my lifestyle of tempting executioners
I will soil some other Siberia
I’ll become
an alcoholic, a compulsive
gamboler across the planes
I’ll entice the local farmers to kill my father
no chronology
the blanks at close range can still kill
the lives
they can end
of the sons of dragons
the newfoundlander genius runs amok
across
the tundra-muck from a battalion of cardboard riflemen
and publishers
and all cultures and legends
become one in the can
the celluloid and cellular
absurd that I am the catamite of the genome my bitterness genetic (sic) it coils about
its own perfection like a billion years of progress just for the achievements of maybe
gills, or a thumb.
what broken glass shards now found
by bare big toe later? the only truth
left to write about, get the tweezers.
such august moments make me reprobate
(oh shit!) here comes my officer (I’ll get back to
you
more later . . . )
to the great poets I say:
thanks for the hailstorm of wailing
metamorphic sulfurs, the swan songs,
the armies, and all of our chauvinistic
hermaphrodites in waiting
my heart lives under a bridge
it knows riddles
it eats children
it has hands like a blacksmith
its secrets are blood-bruises
nothing to pity, there is no vocabulary
for the bent ogre in the crotch of a gutter
he is wisdom, wise, and knows
he repeats wherever he goes
either you have a death-defying love
or you are a daredevil
let’s bungee into the infatua-vat
and sashay into the accua-station trap
let’s get our meatgrinder experiences
within that yellow-tape perimeter
swell to antithesis, boil there and swelter
and when the bubble bursts we will all know and fill
Nowhere to begin in a snowstorm.
Make tracks? Avail?
night we met.
Leave drops of blood?
kissed.
In the mildewed hall-closet shower.
college.
Conversation, i.e. “the future will call this road
I wish certain moments were quarantined.
grasses up.
Out of the Earth.
activates).
Look, flies everywhere.
I just heard that fly’s wing.
I heard the same one that
We ate, went to the efficiency,
We were hiding from that old
A road.
I may as well pull all the
Pull hair there (something
Look, snow everywhere.
You are better at me than this.
Like love or a skull-crushing can happen in the same alleyway at any time at the
same time.
The rat of the wharves is always the same rat you see; if you see him in numbers,
then
cash the chips in. Take it from one who flew in on a guitar and out on a greyhound.
I can make the best appetizers, and I can wire a house. I have a beergut Americastyle.
I wonder should I own a gun. An umpteen-alt Heston. But, the ferret always needs
another operation. It’s not affordable, these jobs, fads, and juxtas. My modus
apparatus is a given notice
of nodus, sub-operatic sitcom. To be sure, pathos is no path, although every path
leads to it.
Build a playground in a Third World country and let the survivalists worship it.
It’s fitting, it is a cathode ray to bring all to us. Proper perspective of talking heads.
It’s a fiber optic out of context fed to a last nerve to get on an alien monument to
decipher
per every destination.
It is love or death in an alley dialing a dictator
“He’s a purist; be one.” We make
so many deals, electric eels in suits of magnetic fields,
Doppler wares of doppelgangers all marching towards a lemming horizon.
You are better than me at this, out-fighting fire with fire and breaking
free finally from wet paper bags to careen through new detritus.
Stole the anonymous journals
from the exhibit, took off my
gas mask, extinguished
the lamp my hard
is a foreign artifact
when opened, a marvelous alien
thing. I am out among the pimps,
the blues men, the lovelorn and the drunken.
Still, I recognize no kin.
Staring down the barrels of divine cannons
as the flint catches.
spark. The fuse quickens.
How even in the safest modes of thought
I end up paraplegic and face-down
in a hailstorm.
“If you will just shut up a while you will learn
something,”
was no way to begin a poem.
Nor was “emu stampede”
or “whorehouse burning on a New Year’s Eve.”
I’ve got lots to learn and a short straw to draw
and hang onto.
I am a name on the fingertips
of my own sculptures.
I was crushed under the weight
of the interminable world,
like a wus, like a crybaby.
Golden ladders and philosophers’ stones, man, my closet is ersatz full.
The gods can pick their teeth with radio towers
all they want, my nickname still is
“toothpick.”
My lies are slippery, like successful lies.
I shot the shotgun into the floor of the dinghy.
I was drunk on many packets.
The orphaned oracle said, “the river is passion
that has learned.” How could I have known I’d be shot
out of cannons into a profession of cannon-crafting?
Life is strange,
and then you become food
for great, majestic, incredible
worms.
poker -f ace
sex, and what a life it is!
death, a bad angle on a prolific angel’s face.
the photo booth is out of film.
today you get no passport.
the negatives are returned damaged anyway.
scabs and bills come in by the truckbed-load.
All comfortable sofas have been eradicated.
You are destiny going to its last enemy’s funeral.
You want to see who is there.
There’s no more volunteers.
You are a lipstick cartridge lost behind a toilet
at a train station. Your valuable surface
inks my lines. Empty the boxes I put flesh into.
A flesh that turns to wordmesh.
Too fast, and thus, I am a god only in passages.
And hallways of arrogance fueled by passion’s pistons.
Tongue or tail you propel into the vast.
Perfect organisms, and what a life we is is.
False history of the history of pseudo.
One cell screams macro-micro!
Reconsidered zygote.
Religion burning in its embryo of indecision.
Be here or not my halfway brothers.
This page and other mad slantings.
A hand that should have been folded.
A bookie universe, a gangster-fate, a poker table universe.
The house doesn’t always win.
We are all high aces.
I sp y
My boy’s name is Sputnik.
He’s really hot, incandescent in his descent,
a potent acquisition to have procreant in earnest achievement.
I clocked a storm and you sipped vermouth.
A bird ate a popcorn on the roof; you sighed.
No struck lightninged. No gales all night.
We waited for Europe, our supermodel friend.
She arrived and tussled Sputnik’s frame.
Neutral countries spilled from wicker furniture.
The fake mahogany of our conversation lacquered.
Technology’s signature was too lengthy to sign any checks.
Spies are unemployed and sometimes deployed and decoyed.
They were holding their cameras while being filmed in the process.
The cellphone calls the cells’ numbers, appeals to the neurotic route.
The cellmate, the murder, the DNA disaster, the fiber optic fibers
ringing migraines of finality.
All the high school bands all across the world suddenly play TAPS.
You have to shake off a suburb for a sense of it.
Stay just the way you are, or put down the camera.
I execute the shots (secretly, I confiscate all the cameras
and save the stag party playbacks).
Sputnik spins about after the war he was about.
It is good to know when lightning strikes so that you don’t avoid it.
regur gita tio n
And that the only reason it was
livable was that it didn’t ask
in the 1st place in a 1st tense gesture
towards elusiveness or essence
my prevalence is an ordained valence
it seems towards insatiety, be it so,
one learns to love even under the best conditions
the most dangerous and despicable times
for alcoholics aren’t depressions but celebrations
these are avenues puked and pissed down.
No one can seem to calibrate the turkey days.
If the murders of words hung from street lamps
too much light would be bled out.
I’ve known for a decade that music comes from one
triangle or another. And so, 3 points in any given field
have given dimension. This dimebag worthy philosophy.
Potent and pointed. You see: stars. That’s it.
It is livable and up to your waist the rice patties
of words and round your head the bat-swarms
of them and the vapor of one used always in conversation
but to try and write it down is hard to remember: swarm, swarm , swarm.
Language is not a cockroach under a heavy boot; what can be said
is never crushed when it should be. It is never trapped or alive
long enough to say it. As waves of sound bounce off
of space stations and stasis of other innerspaces it’s inhabitable
though manic. The alcoholic adjusts the scuba gear and becomes
an initiate in the golden mire. It’s thousands of years and you can own it.
Mine it. Go to the grimmoires, talk to the tomes. Patriots, pirates, deejays, emcees,
skags, rebounders, lepers, snipers, purse-snatchers, poets, fathers, wives,
spontaneous owners etc., urchins, pawnshoppers, and we all slobber over the world
with words wasted seldom for one another’s hearts.
retro b ur st
I am tired tonight beyond all summer wasps.
The sounds of the city let me go back to the horde of uninhibited soul.
Dare I say the word soul? Or the word uninhibited?
Please don’t take my pain away; I justify my pill.
A Prometheus to myself, a gasoline Phoenix Viking firestorm wingbeat
and stones and meteors hurled by it, a comet whose ache defines it.
I have a scar on my right shoulder from barbed-wire, but, I pretend
it was Psyche and her lamp. And I have a scar on my cock; I pretend
it was Pleasure, her daughter. Off of my chin drips quicksilver.
I am still the matador of my own bullshit.
I would joust lightbulbs of streetlamps holding their glowing cries of pain.
A braid of lion’s mane, a ground rhino’s tusk, piles of bottle caps fused,
plastic rockets and toy dinos melted into a clump, tattered postcards,
plum seeds. I have many a thing I’ve years been constructing.
I have a scar below my left thumb. I pretend I am its father.
I will always thrive and escape as the concubine of smoke mirrors.
On a frictionless canvas, a ghast painted lingering in the backstage of stanzas.
I have this particular stride. Slow as bird’s flight, fast as man’s thought.
Maybe I plunge over the edge of myself.
You gave me my life, that cloud of dust, that lotus blooming in reverse.
the m e sh
your listless self-romance, yours
the interminability feeling thin
wraith-waif, not in shape, not successful
in your vespers, the contrails wrapping you
like Koto notes falling over a stream
you are oblivious as usual, like a self-portrait
a slight metallic taste of documents being signed
as the lumberjacks agree to provide redwoods
and gunpowder (and more paperwork), but,
more interesting is how you move inside your suit
le grande fromage, leopold of all you see,
my friend from another bracket; your wife needs you
and I overheard the payphone conversation
you and me are hollow in such separate and drastic ways
melodic distortion has its healing properties
you always stand too close to the podium now stand back
modulate, don’t moderate, the Buddha is always fat with voice
and now in the antenna-dish nation of Afghans and contraband
you start a jazz band at a ski resort and eat boar and fruit torte
American poetry is an oilspill, an orchid cartel, a beautiful new species of whale
and in civil criteria: what is in a thief’s name?
well, the music tells you first and never beats itself to death
media Grande Fromage in medias res always starting the epic when
our eyes open to the carnage, it makes sense, midlife crisis
of Western culture: it has forgotten its alchemy: never retire: pursue
me and the two Mexicans, the one Egyptian, and one African-American
(and sometimes the Portuguese Domini who comes by on special tasks) who
get along great in the warehouse (I am not making this up: Savannah Furniture
2001-2002, warehouse on 1624 Newcastle St. Brunswick , GA 31520)
and we were all there when the September 11 sent us home for the day
no one knew until the next 16 hours of television what was who and how
still don’t
rub your sandpaper against a blue sky and maybe one resin clot will fall
hold it close to your heart it will clean out your ears
we make a mess of things in the mesh of morning
we rest half-asleep inside a lightning bolt and it strike’s a snake’s tongue
wake up wake up wake up (lethargy the dinosaur eating its cud)
no didactic, just Koto over the stream and the mind meandering
over itself and not over the story boards
vespers, contrails, clouds of rubbish over craters
jaunt 1
oh shit.
my odyssey probably continues.
oh shit.
*
I had a preview of hard-knocks
in front of despot’s doors
no one meets god
without a little lipstick
on his collar
*
no one says the secret password quietly
we’d rattle any bones we could just to rattle them
*
it’s not as big as you
might think it are
as the big screen
encroaches with its mean
ideal on the median
and you make sure that
the dolly is positioned
over the doll
in the station wagon
that was never really wrecked
until just now
when the floodlights
cued
*
time to tie up
some noose ends
*
we thought it would be too late when we caught up.
we never had a dime on it.
we thought it would be too much when we fessed-up about the new quantum
mechanics.
decimation across a field of spyglasses all wired under the grasses.
the fires ran and run that deep.
I fly in vain towards an imagined Ukraine or other easy rhyme full of mail-order
brides glowing
from Chernobyl half-lives like unspeakable crimes.
but then, I just take out the trash among a gaggle of grackles.
I see how steaks make people happy in the commercials.
I watch the happy hour brigades careen onto the streets of sand
on this island as the strobelights slash from overheard like scythes through our
invisible hearts
full of tone. I want to learn the qualities of wood and what it can conduct;
I know what it can make.
I want a wall of foliage around all of your homes today.
a piety of piebald horses in two rolls of film.
I remember your pillow’s smell. you curled your hair; I curled your toes.
you sued me for my lists and I kept writing them affidavits.
this never claimed to be a poem or not to be about a pelican breaking threadbare
barely above a crash-landing into my Volkswagen as he shot upward into a zenithal
stab as I crossed the causeway to St. Simon’s Island.
it will be a foggy tomorrow—the last thing the radio says as the car door slams.
*
a coven of seagulls
in shell debris.
not afraid of me.
the sky blue
except for sporadic jet
fuel dragon-tails.
and the pelicans plucking
strings of fish
from the tide’s music.
the wind carries
no signs of a splash.
all plash.
*
the trouble knew me well before I had the chance to be unborn.
it was the only signature I’d never sighed.
there are no poems but in stings.
how we love to complicate sunsets.
the space shuttles pander to the pondering celebrities as stars pay to orbit stars.
blast the hatch, crash the asteroids, dodge the asterisks, blackball the logistics,
hide the ellipsis, read your manuals. we can all wear belts of alibis and overcoats
of policies in the parade, over and under the arches, banging on the pearly gates
the sidewalk squares for our heads and the streetlamps for our souls.
*
each of us
is the gut
of a clock
I hear the punk rock
and see the gardens grow
evasive pinion, residing
behind the cathode rays
adroit bolt in the particle
collider, atomonster, genomonster
geopoliticalite, roots
like ganglion
take me to that quantum
heaven with your engineered explosions
make my face spiral
in the bubble chamber
*
it was all a negative forced to foresee
its own imagenetic
no eugenics of light
a hero among men
will often forget
that he is one, but
his remembrance
will be unsavory and
painful and all
who await his heroism
*
“mirror of the causes of all things.”
Robert Fludd
*
Plato’s “Great Year”:
the time the point of Spring takes to cross the entire Zodiac is 25,868 years
*
Here we reside within
the snowglobe
full of glowering
glowers and cowards alike
*
the universe at about
10 –34 seconds
o
(ACTUAL SIZE)
*
ZERO, nada
infusoria
of protoglossia
I could get
tinnitus in a vacuum
over-sensitive in a field
of iron dandelions
rusting away let it rain
neurons
all over my other crippled ones
*
“Quark Soup” where the protons and neutrons came from:
a liquid net (3,5 minutes)
*
I don’t kill myself
because
I would kill me for that.
*
poetry only works as juxtaposition.
that sux.
if it is on, then give me some back-up.
if it is off, build a papermill.
I will work there
and posthumously steal.
*
how do I tell you,
Nascent Star,
there was no
space nor matter
in the place
from which you
start or spark
*
Vulva-Universe, my heart is a pussy come nigh
*
“he sleeps with the telescopes”
that’s how we knew he’d been offed.
we got the message, awright.
the garden variety imagination and tulip jargon.
dumbasses driving herds of oxen towards cliff dwellings.
toughen up you Georgia Copernicus’s
‘twill be Ragnarok on a fishhook soon
*
opine the layers
unwhittle the little sculptures
what can’t be requisitioned
won’t help the myriad
followers of these specimens
we tried to make it simple
gave primrose path and diluted it
with yellow lines, but you had to
embezzle a soul into all of the great
organism of it yo made the pipe organ
sing and then wrote histories
only on musical notation sheets
but I’ll be damned if you slam the piano lid
down on my plans I need to get paid
for at least a smidgen of this fodder
I’ve delivered it’s made me nothing
but a little smarter and a lot fatter
*
our ameliorization
by the river of cities
or city of rivers
we forget which
but the ironic cajole
brings us back in
to the bets we’d placed
outside of the ring
and the ones we took
our rings off of
to knuckle up to the plate
to do so, and to do so well
is never saying so, but
we talk of youth and concerts
like atom bomb films at stag parties
you need to be solemn or have
a sovereign and there’s no room
for the evil niceties no matter
how many swoons have cluttered
the galleries, the spore collection
escaped its culture and dished
out rosy pox cheeks to all but
the elders who knew to stay
outside the place and it spotted
trout running through the rivers
we got so old that primordial
was scratched from all tomes
and rewritten opioidal
we write in reconnaissance
what history was rewritten for
like ink-whores in a mausoleum
eating ash with flour-scoops
just wipe the birdshit off the bench
and sit, or hell sit anyway and talk
of angels and their spit
upon Vatican spires and the garrison
of documents there retires
in every sentence of politics
in your seduction
Ulysses should have been named
apt ellipses and he could eclipse
his own odyssey by bending
the space-time continuum with such
inarguable punctuation, and caesura
laughs trochaically, but this isn’t
about crude music, it’s really about
that alter-me that is allowed to reflect
in cities by rivers, genuflect
of orchard-sun in its flexing
and the wave washed over me silent
like a film or paste everything stuck
in the repast of the wordplay for I
am guilty of making fish-gills into
guillotines but I have had lethargy
impotence of status, promiscuity, localized
leprosy, and anthills full of apathy
just like you and the burgeoning rest of us
await elect the first star to cuss
we know how logos cuts throats and emotes
*
I echo that.
Great bird flies to its only perch.
The name of a cliff.
*
The endangered species list is an endangered list.
Repast and repose. Darling, expose’.
Enough, shed the skin clothes.
No more aperture.
The wildebeest is cold.
*
that land we record and call sublime
I am guilty catalog
here, where the meter-maids eat their young
cut me in and cut my out, I am a hat
and that which we do in wonderment
I am skinhead lawyer in New Guinea pro bono
what will never go away
like a swarm of a phoenix gnat swarm
what is anyway but an offhand comment about a yodel?
we don’t do nothing in wonderment
watch the flying fish jump in the net
wow and whoa
I would never piss on a fire here
I would never ask for a pint of blood there
why is it that bad credit is good when you walk
through the greatest gates and they smile at you?
*
“And that’s the way/ we get old with poetry.
Comes a time when no one has a notion/
of anything else, and the odor of fried brains
contends/ with the damp of vacant ancestral
halls, to their mutual/ betterment, actually.
Here, hand me that cod ...”
John Ashbery from Dangerous Moonlight
a primula is the primrose is of primrose is primrose-like
I through a window flip-off the lit-phonebooth on the corner of my block
of current life for no reason for-no-reason the flush of the toilet-tonight
the zither was an instrument with 30 or 40 strings or stings played
with the stickiest fingers of foliage zigzag ripshod disgruntled-ness of
of-the-behoovement-of-yes calvacade and the dirthole we can’t be stopped
from crawling to the heart-heavens from! promised land of bloodclots
those chocolate-covered cherry-bombs of aplomb aforementioned!
we can’t make a treaty with the sand because of beauty’s offbeat hand
(but at least with wind there is no reprimand) “be advised; he is westbound
now.” I made a best friend on a crumbling foothold calamity ... his name was
necessity ... he is fuckin’ bad at cards. the vestal swoopings
that I keep ducking just biding some bought time with strong
bindings and I can come by finagling and dickering and dealing
running like a horse of Jehu to escape what the flight leads to
we all die under a flag in the wind and some die better than others
I am gonna leave here soon or live here doom, you betcha
die as you live unfettered in hope as the heart explodes
it has always been an incendiary kaleidoscope
*
a worshop: a cross between a workshop and worship
a workshop: a cross between worship and a sandwich
a warship: a cross
a wasp-shop: a workshop on a warship
a ship of shops: a language poet
a shop of acrostics: a warship and an epic poet
a shopworks: a shock treatment
a crossing is a lozenge of slalom of grinding
a worshop is the only good war workshop
*
I’ve been fair to middlin’
the greater half of my country-fair county-life
the casino boat calls from the other side of the tracks
but the damn trains never ends in their push-pistons
the mundane level is much like the lie of this and there is
enough cleaning work to be done here (you will find
so much change!) and in the air of the paper mills’
bilge, pipes keep horking out hovering white zeppelins
of afterbirth all day. don’t call the strippers squaws,
or especially by their Christian names. everyone here works
on the same chopping block and must be accorded remittently.
Dawn rises with the help of pulleys not like a cheap production.
It all reeks of manufacturing and idols burning, in a good way.
I smell the anchorman’s hairspray. I hear the call of the intern.
Olfactory lingual experience brought to you free of charge
and federally disavowed. let the talkshow gladiator pits
provide some onion-skin levels of respite. let the world
be awash with scintillating gewgaws. just go around plumphing
all day among the stark-naked picnickers. the need for those
cosmochemists and skyrocketing internecine price-margins
due to an interest in seas and ice-caps apparently once on Mars?
our points have no sysarcosis. neurosis of aptitude and resources.
we have so little trouble here we make robots to look for Martian fishbones.
blunderbusses firing salutes as the timeclocks garble digits.
name all the sons Buster and all the daughters Bridget.
rampant eisoptrophobia has really hurt our appearances but the phenomenon
is uniform. when hoping for the best of men to come floating
down from the altocirrus clouds of one’s mind to begin a meandering
and a way to map the territory of gene-slanting. the fruit flies
and the fish on Mars and the answers that fit well in fragile bubbles
on the standardized template. no mo’ mamby-pambying!
hang with the neonascent. bang the gong of the googol
and let the vibrato days clang in the sonic dome.
*
mesomorphic
hand
relax!
we will take a stand
in her hand
I’ve seen it done before
a million times
mesomorphic hand
relax!
in no time at all
light will get
stuck in your
gel
*
O Polyhymnia
I sang
the right song
to the wrong
gods
see you next time
the harp sparticle strings
are plucked near
my dimension
you said that Modernism – Romanticism = Postmodernism
I said that
the lyre has always been
superhuman
I sang that
and I broke
my strings
good oil spilled out and floated
on the water of your skin
O Polyhymnia
I will wait until
we do it again
O Polyhymnia
you showed your thigh once
under the aurora curtain
I laughed like someone running.
Inc a nto
Lyric elemental
Endangered larynx phoenix
dispel. dispel.
implore, implore.
Pre-arranged double-helix
Unearthed anodyne of evidence
Monoliths with open mouths
Tablets tied to ankles of criminals
beware, forewarned.
edifice, take heed.
endure all truths.
granite and graven.
A welcoming party for the hero
A star emerging from the earth’s crust
When the earthquakes hit the hometowns
Atremble, adagio
Dragging the river for a locket
Lust in the haunch of the elephant
for once the wife was faithful.
ascend ghost to the host.
did you dance?
adagio concertino.
the secret of my murder.
ominous regiment of leather.
A telephone rings on an abandoned ship
The radios explode into smoldering manna
I am ravished by a rain of negligee’s
We’ve become experts at these blueprints
I am the foundation and you are so
... --- ... --- ... --- ... ---, etc.
we know how to knowledge.
not cool. Wonderful.
these EKG’s.
celestial. Fall down
so that I might touch you.
So that you may touch me.
the la st gre at gara ge b a nd so ng
It was a rain of flaming dictionaries
and we were not doomed so far and
Armageddon landed in a pink leotard
handing out gifts of pairs of butterfly wings,
mood-rings, and exotic coins from provinces
of the heavens as high up as the Plenitudes
and we could see all the folk-music stars
in their spangled lies cursing with brilliance
and so we passed through the great halls
and the aviaries where the cherubim hung
upside-down until needed and there was an acacia
nursery and in one room naval battles could even be fought
and gladiators would bleed enough for empiricism
and now this great westernism is in ruins and is only
a tourist attraction and all of this under a meteor shower
as somewhere an ichthyologist convention is thriving
until a carpool of one of its best scientists collides
with a tractor trailer boxcar-Willie circus
and the hell-bent drunken clown evangelists slapstick
an alarm clock factory together and leave town
with clamors in the distance as condoms litter the air
like flying jellyfish or new words on fire
and all the jars of what could have been have been
broken open and they spill out pre-programming
and we fled from the barrage and ran into the garage
of every abandoned suburban home silent during the commutes
onio n- sk in e pic
There is a woman, but wait,
this is misleading.
The scuba gear here working
only working for the asthmatics.
We could stay now
by this river (or buy it).
It’s easy crafting forevers.
Watching our hair grow in fevers
in our separate mirrors. We are affixed
still to the apogee somehow.
When it comes to our silence, let
the waves have their allotments.
Good goddamned wrecked racked wreckage.
The actual overcast of “it was if as-is was shattering.”
It happens during anything signaled by banners
hanging from stoplights. The pyres yet unlit;
The statutes marbled in brilliance. Heralds of the plastic
cries of seabirds. Venus fades with a late moon as I neglect
to mention I’ve finally found a use for
every one of those skeleton keys in the junk-drawer
today, and yes, a purpose for every last
paperclip and earplug, and yes
we are chasing the tocks for meat and leeching them
where the white tube socks are found after losing them
in the laundry, there where the universe contracts
and expands, there where all stockings go
sock factory of the universe and the time clocks there
and the rotating stones around stars noting it all with notches
of seasons and the constellations with their appropriate
misnomers, and the nubile nebulae spilling dust
through grinding light on its path to any eyes
and in some cases, a star explodes, and the matter it releases
becomes a being that its last light (before it died)
has not reached yet, and when this light finds that eyeball
of an atom, God will
remember,
then re-scatter
Clear now upon my skin:
each a world on its own.
The effluvial never calls itself so.
It can’t even roll down the window.
Dust-bunnies float around the Void.
Water I can’t catch is dripping slowly down my back.
I am a cascade of my own tongues,
a waterfall in a rainstorm.
Perverse thrills are only written.
No lies unless you get caught, says secretary.
The effluvial can’t dial a phone.
You’ll never get called on it.
The god who never invents a mirror is a star.
Riddles on stones where we lie they are.
I’d rather see that reflection,
unequivocally, those stones of skin, standing
in fields of names, all of us, walking through the eternal rain
A solstice of equinox.
The truly spiritual forgets
the motions of stars or earths.
Sew ‘em together.
Moons, mouths, lips, labia, worlds, births.
A quilt, sew it upwards like a swung scythe.
Sutures of ladders and contractions of lights.
Beings becoming been.
Regrets of irregulars. Sickles and throats.
Histories’ burps of hosts.
Possibles and formulas thereof.
A beautiful living thing and a beautiful living being’s limits.
And then there is belief and faith.
Which eclipses which?
You go blind finding out.
as archaeological brushes stir me up
I start drawing circles with them
using strings to show skeletons
it is all always circles, corneas cut by lasers
unity in punctures and cuts and eyes
that pour forth light into our lives
be my guide. stay a while. watch with me.
that is the chorus to the song I am hearing right now.
what you see as your god bleeds from your eyes.
he can’t see you until you have bled sufficiently.
the blood of stars is our DNA and the blood of god pours into our eyes.
and no pliers can hold a slimy minute down for long
and so the poem is gone
brandish the sweet breath of or on
newborn mermaid bride’s-maids
nipple the froth and tarnish the tin-roof temples
of torn tenements in this sentimentality
wrap your warm arms around a wilting
flower-trial daisy-chain-gang in diesel-fuel fumes
spin or spiral into plainly Plan B.
try to forget your unrecoverable virginity.
I want to be the straight-up acupuncture of the heart.
There are no jetlaggers or lollygaggers allowed
when it comes to my lagers.
We just keep shooting into the sky forever
without any landing pads on our shoulders.
We don’t care for the sciences of navigators.
We like to just fucking go go go and go
It itches, this bite, and the medicine is worse
ubiquitous consuming term
my teeth are cut on you
though I am long in the tooth
and my friends try to steal what I will soon sell
and my friends try
to corral their youth and childhoods
and the old bastards of childhood
scream from how hard they learned
chutes and ladders are automatic weapons
it never ends it just convalesces
into its own amends and dimensions
and let’s just say that I waited forever
and forever knows my kiss as well
and forever calls it passionate
and then blows a pile of powder off its wrist that was once my namesake
I have become the perfect writer.
Every line erases itself.
I am perfect bipolar Gemini twin.
Schizoid revise again.
One star convinced it is two solar systems.
Castor
Pollux
flummoxed one
I am two stars
but one woman makes
a constellation stew of me
I am a held-together ripping
hair growing down the spine of a wolverine
light creeping sfumato through your dream
the seam of seaming being poorly sewn
the back of a good idea’s backbone behind a thought’s throne
Bursting Forth Spangled Banter
The truth is an eardrum and it has perforations.
So the truth hurts when it says its own name.
It. That’s what we work on. We can’t define it.
I regurgitate. I benign totems.
Thank God for Scotch and mattresses.
The truth hurts on mattresses especially.
I have a dynamic dynamic.
I have people working on it.
I’ll fight as you scatter fights to pacify souls.
Beauty is a silly prospect, but, gold is a solid pop-song.
what great tits and ass the world has
working hard for its cash
psalms of the white-bread-god in a condo
in Cape Cod while his sod huts litter
third world real estate in cans, toxic waste is a paste
of souls in sweatshops
atoms wasting, in wait these half-lives of economic theory
pop-cans hollow
and the world like swill
sucked and crushed in the hand
of big bosses bigotry (paranoid
I erupted from the pus
of a nuclear scar
when penis brought forth
the spit of my forefathers
that never spoke like me)
what the fuck am I anyway?
which we all ask at the tollway
and we ask ourselves this in dark rooms
full of loud music and sex
but, those billions of stars
in that folding universe
are still out there (duh.)
satyrs chiming in unions, fishtailing
into oblivion and oblivion, she is enough,
that sitar-player who is a contortionist
and her ovum spread open its black slit
and light came and entered it
and mom, here we are
and I am the true pure grammar
lick my wings like stamps
ban my books airplanes and tornadoes
flesh is unsure of itself
until war comes and teaches us limits
society sits on laurels that it seals in plastic
this is a fragment
of the shrapnel I took by writing it
here, look at this, this is a word
caught in my flesh, you can have it
what word is it?
that name that thorn that splinter
mine and yours good then
my fir st sem e ster
the era of un-err
the erroneous with stipends
this variable that no one makes
slang with is un-slurrable
make this the cord you cut or tie
around monuments’ neck
all the same jugular
I made respite a pincushion for quilters
when in gout, doubt pharms
at least these days the monitors are external
back when I was alive, I had
to self-examine
the Dark Age trolls around stagnant ponds and lakes
and makes its fish there
in the era of un-err it is never your fault
who could teach anyone how to read the mangled guts of Europe?
augers we aren’t
ensigns we are to be
sling the thing less precious towards notching your gold
be the same as conquistadors
MALARIA = More Anxious Louts Always Raising Inaccurate Ages
and then the mosquitoes kill the weak
to even out the architecture
just ask Alexander the Great
we are on the greatest high of all, the angel
whose wings falter briefly
it is far more than enough to be a culture discreetly
this is the thing that lichens have taught me
a fellow instructor has me pegged
as a Romantic
it is a Romantic notion on his part
that he could ever think so
so I say to the lichens, the nematodes, the frontal mold-encrusted lobes
let the music videos infect you
let the pop or punk force you towards commerce
let the wave be the only thing in a stadium
let the @$#%! hit Heisenberg’s Fan
and spread itself out across the Universe evenly again
if you could write it on a Post-It
then that’s it
and always not it
I am only concerned with
knotting up it and not what
the great thought taught and written as a poem, formula, or piece
of warp
is nothing but a man’s last gulp
we know after Enola Gay how to say
“fuck it”
let’s just wear kimonos in our samsara
and call the end of a day what it is
and sleep good beside what children we have:
books we never read
CD’s we bought for one song
shirts we wore
only once
for S ar a h S tro ng Wilso n
thank you for your letter
pain is a boring commodity
i think of fish hooks
i smile crookedly
that tarpit only kills marsupials
they are so devious, those pouches
we carry what we are
we obsess over the abscess
and then praise a pus star
i never pretended to know the secret of the guitar-chord of Love
that's why i play slide
when the time comes
all will fill out applications with hereditary
hellfire and tarnations
i had you once, there at that river
you lost me like a river
never loses a thing
there is time under the rocking-chair slats
there is time between the chorus sighs
there is time when the amp shorts out
the stadium of time to make space
we hover, dervishes
of Dante
but not punished--we spin waiting for it
savoring, scorn-shovels digging air and nothing
in truth
no one has loved like that praying mantis in my penis
in truth
hurt is faster than why should I
turn back and slow down a go-cart with a Whiffle-Bat
and see a pale moon rising
thing is: a maelstrom eye is just a tentacle storm
and whatever that means is how you keep going