Dec 1

how can I express to you the kind of authority you have
over whole realms

in my imagination, there are thousands of rivers
uncountable trees

but only one quiet empress laughs


here I am, my hand is cramping which makes me laugh too,
all is joy, but I can't keep up
transcribing her low, happy sounds

ideas sleep so ideas wake up
and she is already humming, drawing out
a town's gentle thoughts

explain this thundering gladness
enormous but easy fingertips
understood to be trembling, recognized barely
over the gulf

what it's like to have questions
only for joy, waiting on the front of my shirt,
on my skin like dust until we meet

and have any of you ever
been annoyed by your own feelings of love

have you waited stupidly all night and morning
for something stupidly to come

how much delight can be pressed
into the thin water, hours
must be treated as hours must

where exactly in your body, beloved
does your skill reside
distributed like ancient breath
into every contemporary breath

would it suit me to make another promise
like the mountain makes rain
folding clouds upon clouds,
the pressure of that vapor is cool.

Oona Gets Rid of Her Bike

Just before the biker hit the side of the car she thought, "that biker is gonna hit the side of that car," and so it was strangely devoid of surprise that she watched the bike's front tire sink into the car's front fender. It was with a kind of bland familiarity that she watched the biker lift off from his seat like a rocket or a hot air balloon, and tumble through the air over his own shoulder to land on his back on the hood of the car. It wasn't until after the violence was over that horns began honking. As the biker pulled off his helmet, brown ringlets spilling from a plastic shell, she decided to sell her own motorcycle right away.

small room folded legs and troubled back
small room where i live

  english is spoken here
  a wild bastard english
  built of love and hate

when anything is spoken at all.

this is my own tongue
i chewed and spit myself out

no sketch anymore
no more tortured descriptions
mere mumbles break
from the surface of my face

and no echo soothes
no word returns
no tongue but mine
this tongue

poem in the final moments before love

A line of doomed bellies recedes
Our losers perpendicular to the wall

I am the neutral body
placed upon the plane
forced against this steep incline
sheltered by the shallow saying

          “Then, it seemed
he controlled his broom of flies with one deft wrist
          – oh warm and humming broom
          – to push away water
 flooding the paths of your familiar garden – that is,

 the space between your flowers;
 is each flower its own?

 I am not my own

though here I am and I have slapped her back
                                   to shake her sturdy tits
                                   to make her laugh
laugh to throw off some cough of salt and ash

I helped her cough
held her like a cup

cupped bud and breast, and all her flesh
I never stopped, never wanted hunger
                        – always had hunger to share
Warm on warm, the blood that dripped
    from my beard to her chest
    hot as the useless love
    that haunts my empty bed.

far home and brother none -
my gone is one and final come
I come and wander, deaf and run
send my long drawn song alone
into the throat or
under the tongue, never
to be sung

I must quiet, far from home
I came for love but
love is gone
like the home I'm from, like the one I was
that love was us

Training myself like fingers
for the accordion, like hands
for the work
for the work is what I must be bent to

like hands,
                  Like a back to toil
like a face to book or sun --
          nothing fun

like leaving the gentle air and
spending the entire Autumn
at harvest

following winter into the black
orchard.
              walking away from
 sunset, into the black orchard

And beyond
to the road into your own
tired twilight.

It's taken a thousand years
and still I'm spitting teeth
down on my naked dick
in a gale

Horrible, to have so many teeth to spit
to bear so dented a dick
through the storm
&
Why do I hunch?
uselessly sucking in my gut
unwilling to make
a definitive survey
of my dimensions
uninterested in my shape

Soon enough
I'll run out of molars
and seize eroded pud

my empty jaws a pleasure
another thousand years
though storm it may still dancing
mouth dropping pebbles never more

This night has a genre
I'm not sure yet what it is

and I'm the guy
this guy

partially free of entanglements
                    "I'm working on it
                      hey"
She's not working on it.

In fact, she's fucking insane
and I can't keep letting myself care.

It's a con, it's a movement
back and out of  me
down and into her
to a place where nothing's there.

Nothing's there, nowhere
except a torrent of empty air
           thin and furious as Martian wind

And there's no one there
even moreso than here

In this slapstick noir monologue of love
& mysterious political thrills

My rain-black dead-end glistens

There is no "bed chamber" there is
hardly a bed

but I must do more than complain

Here in my ersatz adulthood
expanding

Here I am
expanding --

And always finding some artifact
just after its usefulness dissolves or
just before it becomes vital
to destroy it.

My beloved menagerie of friends
my wide network spread thin

telegraph silent telegrams
launch chewed wisdom skyward
contemporary wisdom meant for only me

But there is no "bed chamber"
there is barely a bed

though I sleep so sleepfully upon it

I am caked in my regret
like mud

or like blood
cracking as it dries -
promising to fall away.
                                     Yet,
I am caked in my regret
and sleeping sleepfully
for all the old admonishments
slide right off of me.

It's under meager blankets heaving
I lie and receive the time
in odd doses, hours flooding now --
and then, waiting
in agony
an eternity
for each minute

[So I want compassion
from everywhere and no one, I was told
we want this.]
I want an analogy for compassion
the shadow of a lover
-cast through the open door of this room
that is no "bed chamber" --
a shadow to crouch and watch me
count these minutes hourly.

I disconnected my headlight because the motorcycle's battery wasn't charging. This meant I couldn't ride at night. 

Stars poised to invade the Texas desert through the open window of my mind

If I looked too long

divorced by the majesty of the moment from memories of weather on other continents

I stopped in this place

for the night

Two rows of low motels

Confronting one another over

a faded asphalt vein.

I heard two dogs

coughing back and forth

until they resolved into

one dog and his echo

Shaking over the dust

And the weather of far 

continents, thin as it's been,

eludes my memory

my imagination.

It rained a little in England

It snowed very, very briefly in Japan

Germany and the Netherlands were 

dreamworlds of sun

and cloud -- Italy gave all.

That notion of 

madness climbing with latitude

growing with the length of summer

days and winter nights.

Enough this grave wound
has dug its way through
to the other side of love -

the anti-crisis
that slow arrival
taking a seat at home
and looking at my hands.

My bruised mind
and narrowed eye
with such a wish
behind;

Step forward from between the trees
which have always stood before me
                             when I enter
                             they are old
                             eating air on the
                             ancient low mountains
Step forward as you will step back
the shadow is the threshold

Come out of the forest
loam on your feet
        I am lucky the moon
        is so bright.

You Were Ever a Stranger

You Were Ever a Stranger

My eyes are no good. I love them, to be sure, and I'm glad to have them, but I have reasons to believe they are no good. Everything is blurry, for one. Especially when I take off my glasses. The moon strongly, but also anything else that is pale on dark, splits into two overlapping images. In the summer when the dust is in the air everything is a bleary mess. I stare strangely at people on the street because my eyes can't focus on their faces, and I can't be sure of anything about them, whether they are smiling, grimacing with fury, or are perhaps my own mother. Until they are a few steps away I just can't be sure.

My eyes have no special ability that offsets this deficiency.

My legs are also defective. Though, perhaps that isn't a fair assessment. Perhaps it's even a romantic notion. My legs are perfectly functional. In fact, my legs are very strong and generally sturdy. My calves and feet are well-formed, maybe even beautiful. But my legs are short and wide, my knees are like my grandfather's and will eventually grind themselves to dust because I resemble too strongly some ancient ancestor who never walked upright. My knees ache, and occasionally they fail. This makes the sturdiness of my legs somewhat an illusion. They will fail long before the rest of me does. Except maybe my shitty eyes.

I can barely remember anything about the events or circumstances surrounding our presence on the snow that night. In my memory it is divorced from everything else, paired only, vaguely, with a warm summer memory of reddish, slanting sunlight on water, pale bare feet visible through the water – a different day in the same place. The summer memory must have come first.

In my mind we are suddenly there in the snow, there is a bottle of wine between us, red wine, green bottle. Sometimes the wine is in my hand and sometimes it is in your hand. I am chasing you. My boots slip on the rocks and mud under the snow. You are like a black rabbit, darting between the trees. Above us, concrete pylons stretch into the gray sky. The highway is high and it roars quietly, unceasingly, invisibly.

We are below, a black rabbit running from a clumsy man, both drunk on blood and wine and salt sweat. Searching for nothing, just running beside a black ribbon of water. Black water that tries to reflect the white snow, tries to show the black rabbit that she is a young woman and the man that he is a monster, alienated from time and cut off from everything except you.

Above the high highway the moon was surely full because it was bright, even beneath the crisscrossed overpasses. The thick white blanket of snow stole the echoes from our stupid laughter and groans of love, but it glowed like a ghost for us.

My eyes are bad with white on black, you were there: you were black on white. Rabbit, a black moon in the white sky. A quick moon – my eyes are bad but I saw you. My knees ache and protest the slipping, but I chased you.

This memory serves no purpose. It is part of no complex of memories that together build an idea or contribute to my understanding of myself, you, or the world. It's just something I remember and, the above notwithstanding, it boils down to:

I remember running with you by the creek in the snow, trying to steal the port wine from you even though I was already drunk and my mouth was puckered from the sticky sweetness of it. You were wearing black as usual and we were in a place I knew well and had known since I was a little boy. A place where many primal adventures had already taken place. A place that held many more important memories than these.

We crossed the secret plains and stumbled down from the roadway where winter cars hissed and glared at us. We ran along the water and emptied our heads heaving buckets of breath.

This useless memory belongs to me and I won't attempt to disown it or to shun it when it visits me. Those useless nights belong to me and I'll burn them and have them, I'll both burn them for warmth, fuel and light, and I'll have them for clothing, for bedding, for shelter. You can have them too.

Save Us

I miss Philadelphia I guess Tuesdays
no Thursdays is what I mean I miss

On Thursday maybe it was
when the sweet sanguine jewel
sweetly played ping pong
And then I saw this
dad in drag caught up
in a
crying jag he
shook and sagged
like a wind-wracked rag

I miss plus far cold walks
far cold walks to another lonely place

But

I got words vast and spare
frisk me fleas in my girdle

And

it's too big a number of people to talk to
too hard to tell them the stuff
Unlikely to last on the water
that moves and spreads on and on.

So I scamper up on you
the living world my mate
my cumbersome mate who quivers beside me
as we shuddering kneel.

Decadence

Our plastics are degrading
and we've eaten the last dried whale

The tunnels are incomplete
love is doomed to fail

Our dicks are febrile
as dry as the Nile

we're choking our daughters as mercy
drowning all dogs

A dangerous woman rules our muscles
we have left our usual woman

for a new woman. Who rides our hope
like a bent donkey. We have bent a thousand donkeys

and we will kiss and blow every one. None of our
machines are working properly, but we have such skill

just a little more rest in our smelly beds
too minute the gradations, our statements,
our statements are too precise.

the toilets are full of cement, ashes, and sawdust.
You are not imagining the crumbled teeth you see there
among the ashes, amidst the sawdust.

Coin operated kiosks dispense gowns
and teens dress their fetuses for photos
before they abort them.

Dressing the unborn is known to us now
in every corner of the globe;
made possible by coin operated vendors.

while the stupid use broad, flat shoes to avoid
the cold wet of understanding, clever predators
dress them in edible armor
they send them down the throat.

take the trap door, Katie, down to Kristen's cell
Ashley is waiting there for you where I will come meet you
I thank you for the pleasure of being thankful

I will swim the course of every crooked path in you girls
for the toilets are full of cement,
ashes, and sawdust. You are not imagining
the crumbled teeth you see there
amidst the ashes, amongst the sawdust.

Elephant Head in my Bed

God gave me an elephant head
'cause he thought that I'd be strong
And so I learned that God could be wrong.

And what can be conveyed by cool?
                                  All.
What can defeat peace?
                       Love; and love,
Peace.

So wind your clock, get up again
choose to be

Pick it up again

and wrack up another scratch
tally another thought

Shrink, and wither,
and fry.

Love poem

You,
the world

Dogs ate the body of Christ

Dogs ate the body of Christ

that's why the tomb was empty

Those dogs who ate of christ

became endowed with cosmic powers

Among them:

Troubling gazes

The ability to contradict the arguments of even the most learned men

Wheedling, occasionally pursuasive howling and snarls

Some were granted tiny mashed faces

Levitation

Brindle hocks

Extreme cleverness

Napalm piss

A black muzzle

And now they roam, burning with divine force

with obsidian sharp jaws

Shredding angel and man, mountain and cloud

shitting tidy coils throughout the houses of commerce,

bowling on the weekend

following up their initial questions

with a more focused accusation,

leaving evildoers unpunished

in every city.

We are the men made comfortable by this house, and perhaps

the dawgz who ate the Lord are chasing us, rounding the bannister

We are perhaps entering the pastel bathroom of history, slamming

the door and sitting, heels in the rug

like a stupid bib around the toilet's white neck,

our cold thighs are on the floor.

Some cities are completely safe, though no cities are complete

built as they are by accretion

like a man. Like the man dogs once tried to eat

only to find that he was not a man at all

but something else.

After they killed everyone

After they killed everyone

They dragged him through the room, quickly dislocating both of his shoulders when he fought and bit one of them. His eye was half crushed and full of blood. With his tongue he pushed out a molar loosened by his beating and played with it in his mouth - a final pleasure.

The heels of his shoes vibrated as they dragged the grassy path through the building's courtyard shaking his strong legs and the air was perfect and mild. A twilight among twenty or thirty in his life of twenty-five years. A blue and green evening of pain and wild breathing. An evening of attentiveness and calm.

At the wooden door they stopped to pump water from the well to wash his wounds as they were increased, to show him the accretion of fate.

They set him in the muddy straw; using only his lower arms, but all of his strength, bending his right elbow with the help of his left hand he took hold of one man's gun and slid it quickly out of its holster and aimed at his face in one motion.

He whispered, almost a hiss, full of passion and life, "I loved every minute!" and, pressing the barrel to his forehead, sent a bullet into his brain.

DIARY

I injured my finger badly today grappling with a man in japanese pajamas.
When I moved to sweep him back off his feet my middle finger cracked backward at the second knuckle. Looking at it now I was afraid to type those words and I became more and more certain that as I wrote the word cracked (and again the worry!) the finger would be snapped sharply backward by some unseen force.
The night is rather cold compared to the afternoon and after an evening of fighting and drilling I coughed as I rode my motorcycle.
The pain of squeezing the clutch lever was startling and I gasped like a child again, gasping at that big new pain. The cold sank right through my jacket and even my hood tucked into my helmet. The strongest finger of my left hand had become suddenly nothing but an obstacle. I shivered and winced, my mouth working, trying to keep my taped middle finger straight in a closing hand, a working hand keeping me alive, in a gardening glove too thick for it.
I began to notice the loveliest, sweetest, sexiest sounds resonating inside my helmet and realized right away that it was me moaning and shivering, whining and gasping over the grind of the throttle; I sucked my lips and it occured to me quite suddenly that at least some among the rich were already seriously planning to abandon the rest of the world by fleeing to their fleet of armored pleasure boats and islands. Perhaps returning to fortified ports for medicine and supplies.
This thought did not make my finger feel better, no not at all. Then again, the rich aren't not fuck-ups.

It is best to make no claims
about the essential nature of things
For see how the sky becomes doom,
how quickly all art fails.
No made thing, no words can name
no name can last. The wicked metaphors
lick a race up the labyrinth bark of trees
but we only think our music has prepared us -
no - lank, unworthy forms
a flaccid wall brief around us
it cannot tell. One in a thousand notions
are pure, and you know we do not speak of these -
At least, not to each other.
A mild grave, that pall of heavy blows
the first comes clarion, sharp as air and a lucid tongue
While still the dimming drives down the lighted sky.

We Would

We believe that no gods will come down and steal our roofs away
(these rooms made so warm would fill with gasps), this is because
we are alone.
It is always like this in the cold. Clinging in our smoky halls
Our close walls so thin against chance. Would we bother the ground
with our houses if glumly lurked the thought of an antagonist will?
Something capable of or inclined to the disruption of our shroud of breath
drawing from upturned faces, superstitious - and how startled we would be!
but briefly, unless the gesture of the stealing of the roof were followed
by a series of unexpected intercessions, hostile of course,
or just one ending gesture of love.

I trust in my relief

Time is the plot in which love grows thoughts.
&
Love is a harvest of stones

Where the stones are even at nones

and abruptly we are at fault. I've been clearly at fault.

I bid you dearly come near,

My heart is a knife

onn the throat of a trusted accomplise
My dear heart is near
at the neck of a fugitive hostage
At the plate of a murdered sorella
In the bowels of a fugitive captive.

Or in the mouth of a beggar's hot mouth.

I thought once that it should be more difficult to remember
that your heart is a knife. That your heart is also

Your heart too is a knife, claimant

and it interrupts nearly almost some kisses
with feints and lively stabs
Sews breath into the shadows behind clothing
with undulant motions, parses torsos parts skin
Still it will not let me dress, and the morning is already done

Shocked recognition unwillingly flies.

Without warning we know we're at fault, there's no doubt
that I'm wrong.
&
There is hardly time to repair.

How hardly I move, now sheltering shame, now a harbor for sloth
I was a shallow sea, the bleached moon was my sun
A line of happy ghosts recedes, falsely boiling
Trembling away their names, leaving my fallen name alongside
Would they have me kiss the stones? A road of stones
They recede. Shy light, you hid behind low buildings
Masturbating me, never answering any questions
Instead you told me everything else.
Quick breast, I met you next and truly met you
or thought so - and nothing you said did not hurt me
How could you have known me? Because you were young
Your glance assumed my solitary gasping mornings -
Pages that led me to you. No summer without swimming
Tired fish, lemon kiss, we were worse than the gray water
Dirtier than the Delaware from our burned shoulders down -
Quiet yellow head, safety of curls - brace me in your
hard abdomen, your wisp of back
Your lonely arms which sought each other under your girl-mother breasts
I wish that you knew. I wanted to tell you. I've just learned to say.
Maybe you learned for yourself anyway.

poetry

The moon that grinning hearseman
has me behind with no breath for windows to show
And the countryside passes through me
All the metal in the hills calls my breast to pause
so iron in heart & copper under earth can speak
Of that and this
To plan alloys, for when my flesh is gone
so soon, soon so soon I will sigh a song out for myself
passing as I do through this countryside
The moon unceasing stops for none, his hearse, my hearse moves on.

The horizon holds a copse, and
my corpse searches the horizon to be held
this country passes through me, and the hills
and the trees, I am carried through them
Now on the shoulders of men, of friends
and I am a burden
Under me their backs are bending,
My living has pulled out their bones. I did this on purpose,
Let me tell you about the trees,
... Silk they have, yes, lavender lashes
... in clumps, like spheres - you know,
... as you've crossed bridges you have seen
... the tops of these trees
... with your hands
These pass through me, and others
greener and grayer strengths
sifting from my passing
a moment or more, No blessings
because I am unconsecrated
piety in blood has drained from me
it has left me, but I am not left

Alternative

Other stuff. I'm not done here, though.

reminder

The fugitive, the pheasant under threat
the lively phrase chased by longing gaze
downed saturn, dredged sea bottom
all things pulled at and sought for
things with acknowledged worth
Voices are raised and fools are made
of yearning churned by want of learning.

vitriol

    Our mild squalor,
always tolerable since not burdened by shame
but buoyed by pride we preside.
    Our young life,
in cities of our own devising
where the streets conform to our whims
    Our hacking cough,
with feigned secret misery and sapphire eyes
unworried, unhurried - cultivate maladies
    Our "reptile cunning"
is actually wit - dressed as though needful,
 our unmercenary gift.
    Our troubled hearts
rather are troubled minds,
troubled only by the trouble of inventing trouble
and
    Our tame lice,
other self-wrought pestilence -
Surely endured, but with ease.

Our new coins of doubt have been minted of lead
Now they tug at our pockets, they blacken our beds
Shouts fill our cities and we're startled to find
That they ring in our ears and not just our minds.

"let's start a magazine

to hell with literature
we want something redblooded

lousy with pure
reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene

but really clean
get what I mean
let’s not spoil it
let’s make it serious

something authentic and delirious
you know something genuine like a mark
in a toilet

graced with guts and gutted
with grace"

squeeze your nuts and open your face

- E. E. Cummings, No Thanks (1935)

Did I ever tell you that

I hate Florida.

poesie

Je désire la dévotion
dans mon meilleur rêve
en concorde avec la sagesse
Je désire être dévoué, et pour changer.
Droit dans mon amour
et juste toutes les fois que je marche

Le voile de chair ombragé
devra meriter une déchirure
Elle ne veut pas ouvrir mes yeux aqueux

Je désire être tempéré dans mon allégresse
pas sans vertu en pauvreté.
Faire une confession à l'autre monde
et exhaler mon amour
amour que vous recevrez avec soulagement.

No motorcycle, laudanum
my unsalt dick
One year spent sick
my battered heart, a broken drum

Unthinkable,
yet perfect, wilting through the night
shaking against strangers, all white
undrinkable.

Still, the white water fills my throat
blending with me
an unfair fee
Mouth burning, I sat and I wrote.

Make perfect verse
stanza for stanza, and again
to break your own neck straining when
the fountain bursts

The features of my teachers strike me cold
whoever has, whoever holds
that shelf of shoulder, cursed limb
I retch at the warning, afraid of him.

At the unmistook sound of that delirious purr
I whimper and I hum because I'm sure that it's her.
My misdirected fervor leads me wrong
I'd stand lustful beside her all night long.

Old regrets and love

Do you remember those nights you so like Christ
& I like Peter must sleep
A painted garden of suffering,
Rushing, kissing betrayal, a glass or two of water
I could not stay awake
for you, hot blood and God alike
I feel so like Peter, you Christ
your suffocating garden of choice
Agony, exhaustion - very,
the irresistable heavy of I

arbitrary repetition

quiet, all muted colors and ghostly sweet
arms an impossibility of dancing
that stilled quaking shoulders
  that plural wish stirred
Finely sunk in, settled finally
           and slid away from your own clothing

SS1, or DF

My insides thrum like a cello string
I backslide as far as I can stand
Silently fingertips move my ring
And respond to my softest demand

Come hindered light, meet me in my bed
Sanity, brief agony, & care
Old gods watching our movements compare
Desp'rate questions with answers unsaid

Your slow rushing push found me open
Keep an ear for my trembling hum
We're sick, and you're sick and we're hoping -
That some comfort, perversely will come

As long as we remain unsettled
My darling, this rose will bear petals

rough bit, unfit

Life-burnt hands, white under soil
somewhat yellowed by toil, lay the lines they color the light
Slender scissors, her fingers shuffle and fold
Tipped pearline by nail, earth rimmed and blood
untrimmed and lying lap - slim and perfect
A knot on the longest finger
made out of words,
sweetens the tip in protective elegance
guarding her hand from its sentence.

Pulled back by dancing an arc of veins and grace -
Precessed knuckles constellate above wrists that twist
and throw accusing spirals toward God

I'll stomp, break my trance with a snap.

Andrew Rose

All ways lead to
nowhere complete
dress your flawed kisses
remove your cold feet
engage someone worthy
waste your blind love

Remove all plain garments
engage rabid men
waste without trust for virtue

Round complacent numbers
open dead eyes to bleeding
save your leaving for loving
enter every offered hall

Oh fuck - I'd combine
some bad idea with good
even though of course I'd rather die.

Contain

Wound through all the rooms, abrupt at ceiling low
a hound of smoke like mist resumes to flow and seek
our climbing eyes also seek and the smoke breaks the white of walls
complaining in their stern way
I'd rather keep the smoke than disperse it
to choke in the warm air beneath it
despite this urgent thrust & I want the cold in my room
under me, my spreading need needs be contained
A jar of ice and this firefly dies.

The Form

Sickened falls the light
through dusty sallow pane
through Camden late deposed
through ranks of drowsing men
between withered unused legs
between robust limbs and fine
Languid comes the streetlight
down on flaw and plume
otiose in the gloam-light
to languish in my room
hunting heat-like quiet
digging at my ass
Drunken slips the sweet night
of death and myth surpassed
surpassed by the wine-black tongue
its lying holy glister
lying until payback's done
and blackened tongue is blistered
Lurching spills the night
in wretched white disguise
in ugly measured steps
in frisson by our cries
outside every broken door
outside houses built by shame
Anticipate morning
cold again and sore
wait beneath the warning
at pale dawn offer war
to devour your one friend
trusting until lost
Cogent tempting morning
with doubts all trapped in frost
most rapid our thoughts become
the route by which we vanish
taken back where we came from
unpunished and yet banished.

European Reagan Haiku

Brought his chimp along
presiding entertainer
Let it trickle down!

Autumn Ride

Animate the dead
black with a kick
or a pop, choke.
The dying year's wind
draws the jade from all arms
leaves pulled like jewels
from the white wrists of women
robbed & left red
for the morning & yellowed by rage
At least our flaming horizon suggests
in rushing past my shoulders.
The cold coming up
to join me in my clothes
my legs kept apart,
though the heat of the block
blisters each of my mistakes
And the pyres for summer smoke
casting sundown the flavor of hope -
adjoining to come & memories yet unmade.

Autumn ride I'll be crucified
nail my ankles to the bike
Autumn ride though I shiver inside
my thick fingers split wide.

The nascent novelist

Preparing to put down prose
              (everyone knows)
can cause a problem that grows
the farther from poesies
                one goes.

I can't say now why I chose
to gather up
and put down this prose

Which I speak of 
but never expose.

Imagism experiments from 9/06

On my left
a small fence
looks made of rust

end every ten feet
there's a post
be it wooden

or metal and
rusted itself
each post bears the fence

along the edge of the orchard
_____________________

A cord of woven steel
hangs behind me now

Its frayed ends
pierced my hands

this morning
when I removed it

from its place
and opened the padlock the held it.
_____________________

Fallen fruit stinks
like vinegar
in the morning

Just wait
it stinks worse
after noon.
_____________________

A green trash can
is tilted
slightly
away from a post

They stand together
however,
in front of a row
of apple trees

Red apples hang
singly, in pairs,
in groups of more than two,
from the branches

Above the trees
the sky remains
empty
but for clouds; and one noisy plane.
_____________________

There are fingers
between my fingers
because my hands
are folded

How can I write
with folded hands?
I cannot and so
I don't

I dictate this poem
to my trusted friend
her hips write it down
for me.

carne di cane

They travel down stairs, grant in hands
their hands pen-swollen they make their way
down stairs.
I stand as I've stood, to watch them collide
Separate from books, together
At a place where boys who've known women know girls
and a movement for each object, those men who've known boys
cannot bear it when their influence fails
knowing all things, all dim and pale suggestions
are corrected by time, that dimension of love.
I would call someone, some former companion-in-distress
to ask if blankets have removed
slipping from gelid ribs
in the night who's windows rattle unless open,
when opened allow mediocre shouts of death.
Who decends impressed? Leaved your occulting habit
Youth is a disease, a wreck of joy!
Incomprehensible, anhedonic.

It was a mistake.

SPQR

Sickness, wonder.

I think the devil, I dress my shame
a widow's blessing soaks my sleeves
with fury that stinks just like gin
that hollow, half-throttled lover
I am, that lover I will be
throttled full & full of loving
despite winter, the threat's coming
coming down now, to cover me.

The Last Part

.
An atrocity of emotion written
in smears upon backs in
vertical columns
divided by spine
unspined by design

Hopeless and dry,
this wracking jag
in an uncontrolled heap of
swiftly softening regret

sick with myself
& begging reason

to deliver me
& sever me
like human shit
floating in dog's blood
deserves deliverance.

[Someone's crushed dog
left its heart amid ribs divided
& crossed to foretell
A senseless grasping
and its result]

pelfre

I can smell the nearly frozen rot
it fades out of perception
but I have grasped its character
and I will remember it
when its rotting's done
and cold nostrils heave
the empty, arid air.

Athamas & Ino

".. Why should Ino not
Be stung to madness too, and take the road
Of frenzy where her kin have shown the way?"

-Ovid's Metamorphoses

Present Artifact

Can't make yet the swollen language
to bother so worry my frenzied joy

Whip fellow, wind stepping
the bodies coerce
a vague & monstrous patience
squeezing kindness from the deranged
Milking mercy from the ultimately merciful
Whose impulse carries the spell
  Whose questioning verifies
her whose pain catches
 Curse the plane! We'll
despise howling mathematics on
 burning wood, which we have caused to burn.

Looking at Cézanne

left to right,
what looks like a pewter stein
and a couple onions
head a loaf of bread
broken by eggs, two,
a glass used to good effect,
finally a knife that resembles my pen
sharing with the loaf
a carefully placed cloth
the light is
             just right
_________________________

Man in fuliginous cap
sits tacky chair with grim
and amused lips he folds
some french newspaper down
over his hands, the shadows thereby
seem gray like newsprint,
but I know they are no less black
Not less black than this white-haired
Frenchman's coat,
The upholstery of the couch
while well-rendered
wouldn't, outside this painting please me
not like those chestnut shoes
                             would
_________________________

Telegraph lines? looks an inefficient gallows - 
Nevermind
between green shoulders
some steeple head pierces
construct blue sky.
People below mar the bank with a horse
stealing some reflection,
but the water
and the light allow
both brothers to descend
between shoulders of sand, no
                             elbows
_________________________

Mary of Magdala or I guess
Sorrow from Provence or
from Paris is bent like gamma,
on second thought like ksi
maybe? Hardly - forget it
Anyway she's bent,
I confess I don't know
what she's got her hand on,
perhaps a shroud, but she's hunched
over some fucked-up hideous
nitrous horror face
some embodiment of evil like I've only ever seen
on the backs of my eyelids
in trance or in unwelcome
                         embrace
_________________________

In the fore
3 cezanne trees,
Cézanne trees three.
Yep, unmistakable
as Cypress Hill
Gold dun catenary arched above
with barnacle houses on its inverse hull -
smokestacks - No lightning - and strokes that
make his sky swirl
A mountain sinister holds three bottom teeth
a single white eyebrow
and nothing but displeasure
for the brick-light stack
silently splitting
                  the smoke.
_________________________

Zola on the mat looks over-dressed
like some dandy freud, or colonel sanders
Exciting to see a chair expressed
So simply with five light lines
Alexis holds his papers before his profile
(Dew laps under beard & shutter)
wainscote meet shoulderblade
black coat and on leg black
                           line
_________________________

White waves crest a shell
foam above a sunset horizon
contained beside a teacup slightly
Lemon & folds pour from the clock
a black box given a face but no lips
what is this empty space
contrast for the cloth
or featureless
              surface?
_________________________

A big figure 8!
Infinity before me! or maybe
that X I hear about -
regardless, a nice
violent
picture of hills cut
(by unseen rails?)
A peak, this provence green again
or Cézanne's. White also,
that familiar darkened corner
sinister & high
here an orange roof on cream walls crooked
mustache trees, also skeleton cousins
Fence posts of course 
accusing god, flanking a blue roofed
                                    booth
_________________________

I'm bored with french houses
even if their gables
make pretty X's
or thrusting U's like fists
Maybe time for
              a break?

Eddystone

this strange backyard landscape of dreams,
colors in garbage and broken property
a riot to satisfy the hungriest look
an eye's desire to undrink but the heaviest cup
up the grassed slope keeping to where the stones
small and have prevented thick grass
discard our bicycle. left against a fence
of no use in these the filthless houses
sodden houses of women and sons
reeking lawns of bettered rose
at odd hours quiet, always suspicious alive
always supressed and alive lift up
our sighs against the whitened sides of corridors roofless
and sky'd clanging with feral mother voice
lined by postures of regret without a thought
Without a thought! The theft of bread
squashed trembling and youth. Brick dry
nasty crimson tits hanging like sick fruit and wise
choking on wisdom so fresh and thick
This Useless disguise!
Who stood guard in alleyways? Who
is like God? Step again, let the water under the word
take the edge! Turn and step again! Let the water
take the edge.

Exclaim

call me a fucking lunatic and I'll gouge out your eyes with my opus!

Title below and
this form greets
the well and unfortunate
who diving discover(wetly)
the cause of
Atlantis' doom - better
or best to be unwell,
complex, dead, or
in some measurable way
fortunate.
Stuck and surface
above the uncertain line
chest above the most
uncertain line
And rest unburied in the
muddied brine
A rusty pillow,
for a neck of sores
(the wreck of pores)
whose studied mind
falls an undetermined path
leaf-like
yes orange, though
deathless yet
greedy only for the dust
soon met
with a single dry kiss.

Grove & Shame

Seventy-five trees
keep the frost
between my knees
and my ankles

The money I've lost
trembles in banks
afraid of me. Afraid
of me.

In a fever of truth
my pentacle hands. My
split hands falter
balking at their work

Never told why
in the shuffling of proof
finger unable
to truly meet finger.

Surely your livid brow
and empty poverty
tempt me to keep
forever away

My loosening jaw.

some autumn poem

Water is so much gentle
than the actual fire divide
dressed in purgation
all bodies deconstruct
Resume your winter hands
to wear my crumbled skin

The shroud I stumble in
unconcerned with the battering pulse
at my opaque edge
your wrists, they pivot
for liberty sought -
eventually granted
so not liberty.

Eluvial strife held by tears
sloshing unsilent though barely
tumbling at the silted bottom

If I let it unravel me -
& impatience forever
bound
limb to limb
to limb.

The Saints refused
my throated cry

They ignored my
bottled sigh

& the corruption at the temple.

Penetrate temptation
devour
Erase my body with love!

another dream poem

Send me to the floor, sister, drop me to the ground
I'm allergic to the sound, so give me something more

    The sky is full & we now know
that only the ground is empty.

Sister, send me to the ground, I'm aware of something more
I'm allergic to the sounds,
They've gathered at my door.

    Push me to my knees with silence.

Flies may gather all around
In a weightless black parade -
To fade away with a hollow sound
Dropping, each a morendo made. &

    At the fruited fence a ripened vow -
though I'm kneeling now - your quiet breaks.

Will

I want devotion
in my best dreams
wedded to Sophia
I want to be devoted and to change
to be straightforward in love
& focused in my pacing

The shadowy veil of flesh
In deserving to be torn
Will not open my water eyes

I want my elation tempered
& weathered under the yoke of virtue
by poverty's wealth -
unstifled by the pleasure
of a healthy body
in motion.

Cease my hands the fearful play
In knuckles of dust and clay
How they pray, & avoid The Way.

I want my seething to end,
guttered and stripped
and for my strange confessions
to be shut up in my mouth
where they belong
with my useless teeth.

Other confessions must be uttered
In spirit to the other world -
Stop, the lurching divine.

I want to align myself
with the despicable crush
and to bring them around
Though her rudder creaks
& splinters pierce,
My love for her descends.

Omertà on doorsteps
in thresholds and on
brothers' lips
spat gently in the
faces of police
as the heat of my words
sears the meat of my tongue

I see fighter planes
carving spider veins
  from sky
clack of city heels
dry in unsevered ears
  & my fel mouth
  vinegared
  a sluice full of lies
with old strangled clarity
  beside

Or fire storm (yo this ain't done)

Into thalweg of my brain
thought descends
Where aleppo coughs &
kermes belches bitter fuel
in a hazy heavy plume
shadowed breathless in the gloom

This supplicant thought kneels
beneath the heat
its supplicant's heart
beats its threat to ignite

So tremor away the hovering dust,
or thought's fire will make you a ghost

Screws

The ridge-
wrapped cylinder set
into the moistened dust

The twisted edge
surrounds the spire
and suns-glare on
puddle-top,
serves glamor to spare.

A wind-
ing plane to
drive the hands to-
gether

A cloth-bound
morning awaits
the dawn, with
the needles this
shadowy palm

Asleep at the Truth

It's the base of the base
our regular beatings
excommunicate wealth
in a twist of vague questions
- separate and preserve
force the hand of the spirit.

Michael swelter at your post
or put down your sword
carry bells in sense &
come twelve toward
the bitter dwelling line

The Line Resides
at the base of the base
musty inion forgiven -
untold buried commitment
So derive your decision
from complete division

Complain of the burden
or abandon it
never both.

Philiaphile

In love with love with
a ready embrace
in the dawn-light my heels-touch
a right angle of feet
Now I'm counting my reasons the
first through the fifth
at a bastion of cool
in this canicule
Oh primal sight, give me the smiles of
      my friends & the grace of their arms
      eyelids which shadow eyes and suggest soft throats
due laughter gathered by the cups of my ears, the
     declarations and whispers &
     threats steeped in promises of love
trace the flavor of trust with my tongue red as rust
     drowned in sweat howling kisses hurled salt
     with my hair full of blood & my mouth spills
forth sweet recollections, the odor of my lips
     but for nostrils at my shoulder some
     friendly scent of quiet - this lowly body rides
Pent among fingers, laced throughout
    the flesh, ennobled by tranquility this
    feeling is a test
I take you to my breast, each every one
my love
    my love I take you in my chest
Five reasons since confessed.

Continuing conflict.

Rise plural,

her bursting violets
settle into roofs
followed by voices
on waves describing
their silent markets

Sink singly,

tragedy blossoms
outlaw defenders
hung in gasping trench
breathing foreign fruit
hissing heat of birth

Blind the strong,

the blind in fetters
composing letters
their dim world expands
exposing brief light
the spectrum escapes.

Juvenilia II

Living on land is


there's more than one way to eat a peach,
the green leaves still like a crown hammered
into shape by the wind. with not a sense but
hearing, and able to move. precision delicacy
in a mouth washed out with soap.
the drought didnt melt my ankles to mush,
the sun searing the books you ate to flames
that spread to your well shaped calves.
(carved from granite by the trickling of water
over rocks and moss covered cinder blocks.
the limbo between alive and sober, and dead and sober.
im crashing through the jungle of choice
and chaos, toward everlasting calm. with my machete
named raphael between the blistered creases
of my ribs. as violent as an autumn kiss, the
small tornado of leaves it stirs
alive and lusting. carnival malady unhealable
scars inside the outside of a tissue layer
we call desire. the pounding rhythm and blues
toe tapping of god because he likes the musical
vibration hum like air molecule molestation,
he likes the bellowing foghorn in the small town
where the children play with the parent's toys.
and the parents exchange STDs over tea and under
a blanket of sky. the air is so dry, she sighed
lucky the sun set four hours ago. else fear of
police would be the least of our worries.
shackled to a sinking stomach, my eyes are following
the clouds as they fly, faster than i can run
across that dry sky, terrible and heavy with rain
that will not come.

our legs grew strong fighting our weight's
attraction to the mass and shape of the earth.
the slow and subtle drag, tugging hips closer
to ankles. still we grew, bones twisting into
straight and rigid lines, flesh filling spaces
between teeth and ears full of blood we're born
to drink it from the walls. curving, from the ground up.
(gravity the chisel, the holy hands of DNA caressing
and shaping marble cold and deeply veined with lust.
warming as we bask with each summer dawn clawing for
more heat. chrysalis complete.)

1998

Amende

I cannot be other than I am.

[fragment]

I'd have my circumcision undone
and ride my incomplete victory
Like Inez
up on a white horse of justice.

I'd undo my neonate circumcision
to make for myself the covenant
& to make for myself the cut.

Inherited Wealth

The root of human virtue seldom bears
Like branch; and the Giver wills it so,
That men may know it is His gift, not theirs.

From Canto VII
Il Purgatorio
Dante Alighieri

dhwer

The wood has grown around the stone
cool in the face of lengthy days
and this heart of wood embrittled
Under a mitre of sun
wears our barely ancient calender
like an alb.
This nude forest writhing,
tosses bullets and smiles.

Spilt

Maybe a diet of worms
for a protesting mouth -
My guesses will bishop your teeth.
Drear pornography & prophecy,
my artless hips
and willingness.

bheidh

Your pardon does not interest me
-my faith's already set me free
So keep to you
philosophy
I'll take for me
the pillory

Guidance widens the scholar's room
-but makes her heart into a tomb
If forced her hands
will work a loom
but God will have
her weave your doom.

estraie

In undeserved comfort
our president lies
hips girded puritan silk

Sweat swathed, someone's son
earned the holy privilege
of a left-legged life, steps moping
right-footless

Tempted to treason by an appropriate greed,
we read of cash as redemption's only consequence
or only requirement. We read of

A false trouble, quelled or
stifled - it's purple anger
in righteous waves
quenched softly
by some oily embrace

Someone's bread dried of blood by the salt

Oh depressing & wild
I wait while the war piles
daughters on doorsteps &
At home
the bloated word
spits fathers
whose shoulders fold like hands
around house beams spared
around that barren inheritance
with plates called blades
Climbing away the flame

So show me the dusty thunderclap
of her gravid escape
Show me another contest,
the grass scoured sleepless
this inhuman grappling.

mahaignier manier

The ghost of my beard
          has joined your hands
          in strangling
          crablike
    & as smoke - my throat
             a history
    in rain wet hair -
            the garments
           our mothers discard

And my teeth are black with wine
 my slack lust mine,
how often am I sober?
        our proximity in orange & gray
                    a sad irony
                  a vicious disavowal
                     irresistable - witness
               my transformations & unsex
                   grief
Allow all things to ferment
   and to intoxicate

The grapes from twisted hills
   and sun steeped hours
the night breeze and street light
trees opened by exhalation

        in solemn and pragmatic bare feet
       stepping over insect laden - the poem
                I've become
               tried & quiet
               boring silent trial
               missing fragment
               sophisticate ramble
           Blind Librarian in library blind
                The eyes of books
                  thumbed closed forever.

Juvenilia I

been down wistful for a long long time,
when silence creeping up your female legs
sliding around like snakes you're running
through the fresh cut grass, and im sitting
on the curb, elbows in the grit. my ankles
locked to crossed and still hurting from
three times being broken. "lets see who
can leave this town first" i met moses last night
in the back of a convertible. the top was up
but my pants were down, and moses was a girl.
she promised to lead me out of the desert,
with my arms around her waist. herself she says:
hopeless by her own hand knocking
two too many times.
and i remember, that her heavy right foot isnt
as careless. her third finger swirled through
thick honey to smear across my lips. breathless
and attached, we promised to stay in touch
when i slip through shadows, across borders
and into open aching arms. say hey
say lover, say you know you taught me how.
say moses my mystery, i wont forget the
line of your throat. the timid tilt of your chin,
and the pout you never could shake from your face.
the wordless ways your breasts promised to keep
me safe from raging angry father, and malignant
mother (she was always trying to get back at me
for the pain of her labor) you picked me up and
you put me down, where the i could open my eyes
and see something new. where i could walk without
stepping in my own footprints. worn into the concrete
shallow graves of everyone who ever died in this
town. the roads that never take you anywhere.
one summer past, growing up too fast. the commandments you gave
were reminders of sand and an ocean of piled bodies, laughing.
you grinned at my mouth hanging open, and at your own secrets
(your sweating thighs more red than the sky was black,
sinking. my baby green eyes brown, hoping you wont scare me soft
tonight.) the rivers of tears i never saw, only the trails they
left in the soft tan skin between your breasts. to give
for the sake of giving. to promise for inspiration's sake.
taught me to turn tearing sobs into diesel for my shoes,
wanderlust hand me down, the living reason for my living
reason. to watch and wonder, knowing im not dead
from behind the steering wheel of your car
that never leaves the road. because you feel it under your ribs
the sadness you dont deserve. but dying only makes you whole
when you become moses for a dirty faced boy.
leading him staring, at the curves of your body
out of the desert,
and into the promised land.

1998

woerctela

Welcome narrow finger ends to widened wrist
though I whisper at her elbows, doubt & pride
nightly; I examine their busy unraveling
and in the morning I discover
a single dark hair
lay the length of my forearm
and gratitude, and adversary

While scraping the night from my mouth.

Fully fourteen legion halberdiers
could not halt the advance of God

Though viscid blood keeps hands on spears
hopeless harried heads will nod;

In nodding the weary lose their place,
slipping carbine sends broken ground
against brows and sets tongues clapping

To the cascabel's delusory beauty
framed gorgeous in police-light.

No longer the sort
for flight from consequence
delighted & damned in unspeaking eloquence.

edere

Cry Nika, subdue empire and body;
with your brutal breath itself a weapon,
a riot of wailing and punches

Moved to ecstacy by tedium
this boring lust a hollow seduction
sweetened umbel haired distraction

The day's wrack is a fucking chore to decode:
I sat in a cup for pleasure
I waited for so long
Before grateful and tight this
glossodyne mouth
spitting flattery and flame
Suffered consummately with a wish full of love twice wished
My flush and chorea
Countless fecula, consumption's ghosts
in earned misery,

and this inly list unthorough.

lecgan

Ease a timid chin to the ground, the grass
Split the blades, remain unscathed
Unscourged, emerge; a fleshless sound.

vilificare

[raindrops crowd his troubled head
shoulders slack & wet with dread
tumbling static toward her bed
falling to his own instead]

My eyes remain half closed
my open mouth spills bitter
The light which is not light
will still blind us.

A life of mirrors
in cerecloth wrapped
This summer's heat,
& wax streaks.
Our ribs placed asunder
by your blistering fate
too faithless to receive
the promised usufruct of
a disassembled devotion.

Stigmata in rot
my foot wears.
The corrosive moon &
my blood burns away.

your right speech or
utile farce, a
morality turgid with lies
& woeful abnegation
slippery with your obtesting
denial.

[nebh|leb]

sol herself
resides in the basin beneath your tongue
she rests her back against your teeth
from between them comes the light of day
& since your lips are clouds,
the shadows of your speaking overcast
your words.

Some start

The wind tempered your knees of bridge-metal
Suffering drained your heart of kerosene
Warmed & surrounded by your Rose-petals
House sacristy clean, above & between.

Mediatrix, my eyes would hold your eyes
like the perforated abdomen of christ
blinded roughly by the price of disguise
divinely hanging from too human fists

Conscience pivoting to avoid the toll,
forgiveness was yours before the first blow
Conciousness stands between spirit & soul
& I don't care if my blackened eyes show.

A scorched record of Justice & madness
bleeding, fashioning relics in sadness.

incompleat

Our Human Desire
threatens oceans
makes demands of love.
Devours the landscape of my youth.

My pyrite knuckles
in shameless pain raised
a fist with
idiot pride, to
the abandoned, & the wise.

I could be a furnace for you
against the dire cold
& this season of wrath
it's striking against
my opened throat

& the heat of dreams
this furnace builds
murky room; our longings sweat
a stanza's penult line
A razor's penance mine.

Hum a threnody for mystery
burning lips & a freshly trampled promise.
Again, again
my form dictates
defeat.

If to change would mean an end to all weeping
still I would remain

[endenaught]

With your home's refusal
sheltered beside your heart
with every choke & slipping
without permission

use your books for a pillow
to sever the icy ground from your thoughts
Sever your face from the stones
your new sores, & new friends
attention
Your willingness, vast carnival.

& measured against my ignorance
the breadth of my struggling conscience
barely disturbs the water as it drowns &
I am not bored

Your Cocytus Heart
exhales a warning,
Warning rides a caustic sob
to make me hard.

& my body's treasonous sympathies
flecked by unwhole tears,
dashed against batholite lips
scattered diaspora of shoulders
(living for a time on
shoulders) uncooled.

My chemical lips
offer a vague promise of harm
Lucent spirit, wash away
transgressions.


Certain leaves build
shadows in chains
a pall for roots

[ghrebh]

[the man who burns beside you -
you will watch him as you die.
& the man which burns
inside you will die as you watch
a crowded sepulchre & ash.]

nothing

Paper dry
our tongues until want
mouth in revolt

& your suspicions in
their tabernacle
truth-crazed, language bound

following the prideful
to unadmitted defeat.

Ásyn

At the muddied source &
my forehead green
with the grass of my cutting
My eyes' whites smeared red

Distaff anger (you see
them call me down) I've seen this
many times.

Not reckless: bored &
You know it.
We can be sincere
about how your critique
makes us feel

echt, wrecked & wasted time
upon us, we'll swallow
as we've been taught
this mediocre lesson.

Everything you see
without the burden of
ownership

in a town without horses
concrete weakens, the plastic seam
grows rigid, without breath
to maintain

"the moment of spruce"

the man from the future came
and asked me if I wanted to hear an audio recording of my own death
I didn't want to
but bob was there and I didn't want to look like a pussy so I said yes
and it was just the sound of a little girl singing a song I'd never heard before

slæp

I know you've been tired so
I feel no shame at sleeping
these modern shapes demand acknowledgement.

Six years sailing
the wind of light
seeking mineral reprieve
as I climb the gallows
both my legs have broken


My labor designed by need
It's obvious clinging gravity.

Resurrect this banished music
my shaman fingers smashed
& my medicine back destroying
my ears with it's delicate strength
like a Black Horse trampled my heart.

We discovered a prison between moons
the prisoners' love was made food for the warden

Without hesitation
I would free you.

eruthainein [unfinished]

I have received your long looks,
quietly allowing your stare
enduring our enjoyment of my body

sojourning prepared me, & seeing
your throat marked
with crimson bruises pulled up by mouths

So I ask
that you do not balk
at my scrutiny do not

prevent my measurement
or parade your reluctance
for my perjurious eyes

dyn

This laughter is finished
& I remember your guitar
when I first saw it

Before I choke with
your unfinished song closing my throat
Let me gather

together all your peace
(I saw it), our brothers' crimes &
innocence yet unhappened; Unbegun

Running from school,
these homes all in a row
with spaces between for fighting

& for imagining.
The men we would become

The filthy water, &
under the bridge the
music &
the painful laughing (which
can only make you grow)

Oh, my friend
the marks your hands made upon the future.

hymenaeus treowth spondere

eyeglasses & all
our love, it shares
a family of thoughts
gathered
stepping lightly between
each,
& every
question (we know
the answers)
and so, calf bitten
the bronze weapons
of our trust
(trampling the houses of the rich,
we)
we find ourselves laughing,
keeping secrets. &
I will honor you.

I go to the other world for my answers
why do you ignore the other world?
My ancient friends
contact me nightly.
their

doom steps lightly between
every excuse
I promise that I love you.

I suppose I'll find out.

The bravery of the dying is a gift to those who love them.

nothing for this

our bodies argue
my pornographic face.



buried in sleep, my
navel grows deep
mottled, taut
& enchanted

I was asked to prepare
& so I have
oddysey of care-
ful, intoxicating
behavior.
tempered & condition-
ed for this eventual,
brief, chance.

Wilting Adept

I found blood on the press &
the poor state of my correspondence
built a house of worry.

I am not duplicitous, plainly
I give you my word.

&
the mothers of the Word
die again in their graves.
Vexed & rusting, their old
arms are so important.

I've never used my legs in quite this way before
So don't guess at the result,
possibility blinds the most pious trust.

Rictus animate,
your graceful snarl
is not facing me this time
In the window, after sun-down
you give space back to darkness
You wilting adept.

No drum
no beast's heart
to menace my shy limbs

rhythmic expanding

my exploding head

nostrils choke
with ash like a policeman's promise
his bedizened boat
I do not covet
This ash is still hot.

sublime & sinking
a gelid star
bright within my empty skull.

a caoineadh daeg poiein

I'd make a poem
where the clouds fill with street light,
as a sacrifice of stars. A keen for the
passing of our mapless cradle,
the men who kissed our mothers, so
becoming our fathers
their tongues aflame, gilt
with greek, & sanskrit rumblings
inextricable from the groaning earth
murmurous waters of shade &
thunder's sunderous cracking as it
punctuates, the time before it strikes
from the time after.
We are (and I feel that I am) the
briefest of gaps, a single bar of light
containing & contained by our life of days
And we forget.

There's no cause for this tragic symptom,
it emerges
an intumescient result
of knowing
but I know there's no cause.

Give us a world of places,
character & smell
give us the rivers of rain
grandmothers remember & (have always remembered)
hold for us,
a grain of chance
your palm which is our palm & mine.

Come down from the mountain I have not seen,
feet wested, and heavy with travel
Let your beard tell me
the winter's toll, it
also carries summer's green, leaf-shaded kiss
& the grayest skies of every season

The way the nights have tasted of frost.

dakru

Regret which stifles hope,
the cycle of your choices
bound to quietly disapoint.

Tenacious mistakes set to harry
& chase me with
relentless pace & with valiance

guarding the interests
of my sacred victims,
loves & those

whose suffering was ignored
whose jubilance was lost to impatience
as fast as i find it,

i shovel my peace to you, catch
it with your spade heart
I beg at shadows

for courage, and for
your eventual
triumph.

I am without ruth, &
ashamed. These things
I put away, they pass away

in the heat of your dancing
forgiveness, blind
unknowing

Your grave trust. My lossless faith
hovers maddening, met
in the summer

imbued with sky that clings like
sweat to the shadows under our
arms & over our heads &

between our legs. I remember:
we were crying silent
hypnotic tears to the night

knuckles slipping across warm cheeks wetly
flushed & grateful
for every sob.

I'll make something of this soon

[ridiculous torsos,
our tested strength &
torqued limbs awaken us
fully reminded of the small-
est desire in the night-like day
my eye pierced & my sinister hand,
the begining of this dawn-like dusk
this awareness itself would justify suffering]

Enubilate

[imperfect, simple
a bell ringing,
in my wet clothes
no time
to dry with
no choice
but
to try.]

wanian

You've marched your marxism outside of reason,
at the xyphoid tip of myth.
I've been struck from above by a freight train,
dropped through the trestle's rusted eye.

my tongue is a red ribbon & also
a flag
stolen from grief
to satisfy greed.

I've left precise fingerprints in steel
those mistakes unmade & those unmakeable
A crowbar rings handless against
the solid ground.

Past the weathered highway - hollow
monastery of cavernous passion &
doubtful, shuddering, relief.

There is only one light
its unbearable glories
catch at mystery &
mystery falters;
leaving the world of hearts
diminished.

ennea

Your borrowed hot breath &
wild tears shared childlike

with unfelt loneliness, (the knowledge of loneliness)
in sorrows becoming.

For those cherished thieves who've
identified my heart as a city, count
and swallow nations,
adjudicate, as you
do best.

Cross legged, this vast bargain
would not be my only reason.

A cloistered season, in this complete wilderness
as we agreed.
Liberty is a harvest of stones.

 [dazzled, shaken through by
 remembrance, the smell of your spit

 is a gift to my skin with ev-
 ry fingertip pressed into
 your velvet hip

 gossamer of whispered
 wishes your legs connected
 by their soft haloes

 tender, articulate
 the padding soles of your feet
 they speak the advent of your coming.]

A Harvest of Stones.

Nine Swords Earned,
silently gathered
among this murderous good luck
the fettered want, its result
in every burning lash.

Split back, torn alongside the shoulders of Man.
A place. A location, an instrument. Perforated, enlightened
purpled with blood, & strong.

Those brittle shouts
they have removed from me. Threshed from beneath my ribs

delivered me from the Nessus Cape,
though my dry scapula would drink it & suffer.

I'm waiting & I allow myself to listen

the padded soles of your feet they
speak your arrival to the floor.

precari perdonare

My ragged perception, frayed
width of my body. The spirit rides
pierced by catherine electric spokes,
making songs about the songs
that escort us through torture.

In the midst of a passage,
I made a sacrifice of my watch
& we give our poems away & as
she takes them they become
oblivion, kissing an inion.

Passing entirely through,
your hunger forgotten.
Observing this animal gather itself.
Terrifying comfort, drunken
devastated. Calm

emerging impenitent, a new & shivering thought
begging to remain unprayed for,
I'll make myself a prayer.

So carry away the pain of wounds
in black smears, suffering climbs
my legs to threaten my back
& I laugh.

vastare

between unwashed dreams,
& the fisherman, want &
the wishes of one woman
there's no promise I could make
that would bring you the full weight
of your desire.
coal & a lesson, lightning.
twilight dressing,
the gravest wound
delivered from dulcet battle
(no crushed limbs, no broken faces)
the heft of your body grows cumbersome.

I need only the shadow of sunset,
so long with the whispers and hopefulness
of your doubtful glance
in its playful head
drained sinister & pregnant with grateful dread
sparing the thinnest of sisters, the consequence;
the careless, dimmest want.

A barren shoulder,
or panicked waist
treaty made with the body
in exchange for the corpse

sædæpel

At the start, my life of changes.
I've come upon such trees,
that begining,
I know my end.

The men of my class surround me
fathers, brothers, uncles all,
tired & without inspiration
relying on women, & love
spent muscle & reputation,
bleeding sisters, exausting mothers.
Bought with treacherous masculine beauty,
& unendurable wickedness.
Abandoned ideas buy movement
embracing one failure, two.
burning, fertile death.

Holy love,
dark hair, my unwhite fulfillment.
threatened by angry regret (that lurching,
sweating, begging voice)
as it interrupts my quiet salvation, my refusal,
with another tragic fruit.

leoht

Suspended for friends to find,
dried to make way for time.
Time to drift unwary, and part against the prow
leaving this drunken ship.

Where the courage to live a short life
like a cup of honeyed water
or a hidden house of joy, carries.

Dwelling here, a lingering cadence in my paths
I've grown lighter so it seems my legs are
laboring under the freight of my spirit alone.

I'm waiting, you know, in these letters
& my waiting is a vow
though my body is unaware, & our bodies
give their fearful love to the world.

supplere

In this
swiftly darkening orchard,
I ripen in waves.
Prodded & kissed, once
by my most hollow friend
in her vegetable wall
Each knee as far from the other as possible.

The water in my wine,
a wick for disease also
draws away wisdom.

we have chosen to speak,
so many times. Heavy
with promises, lightened
by lies.

& I'm so glad that you're happy,
& the shadows you fearlessly witness

The River & the City are the Same
in the brief & humid youth of the poor
most transient beauty, I give my
hottest kisses to you, &

As that old phalanx of fireflies
coughs steam at the stars
I wonder if my neighbors are dead,
blackening like the stars
above mankind.

Entwine

We were robbed there that night.
In the starlight reflected off the snow
& now we write poems within shadows
about the roughness of wool
on cold, dry foreheads.
The singing breath & oily focus in fear & light.
Legs, throat. White on white, and
foreign street.
Glass brains in a blood slick dish.
There is no money involved, stiff
tongue, string for lucid fingers
& water for the tongue. yes, you
pray, I know you. and
I know that you pray.
Ave Marias slide up your cheeks
like smoke through eyelashes,
leaving scented streaks, & stains
your chaste head.

Morningside, the place for beginning.
Or to return to or To look for at night.
Arrival to a city
the coolness cold by fatigue
& no confidence
find the harbor but
do not rest.

11th & Leiper

The Sun & Ashes. Failure.

The line, or the disordered
proof bleeding untruths
simply blind (our treasures
slightly hidden)
Oh, how your legs have swollen
your voice for all purposes useless.
Don't sing now, I promise you
that this pain of possibility
does not come from regret.
Stoned, embedded in your granite heart
the boy I was in the man I am
does weep with you
but the eyes in my head are so dry.

Black Madonna

Triage

From a letter to myself:
"Autumn sex produced most of my friends. It will probably produce my children."

Homecoming

The courage in your timid legs,
that guilty innocence - your eyes (each
carrying the record & the consequences
of 10,000 laughs & 10,001 sobs.)
Saturated with beauty,
puddles of comfort gather in your footprints
& this disaster I have wrought
is swallowed by your body. its
soft power - (I've read about this before)
this love imagined & now real
foreseen & now arrived

12 Hour Play

12 Hour Play


As dangerous as a russian harmonica,
tightly wrapped in black & creased.
& I must be forgiven for not
piling words here beside your feet.
they rest below your creaking knees they rest
above the weakened floor.
Gravity eats your toes &
the dust pulls at you.
Wildly fucking the wall
at the wall. The wall inside
your cunt, your
cunt against the wall
Terrible, or bright
in the heat of mystery & your breast.
captive, snapping at the ground.
against sweat, your painting
(which is hollow, your scream)
& my empty fingernails.
You're too self conscious for words -
but chords, of course
& kindness. If you've
hurt me for the sake of beauty
you're forgiven.

From Ingersoll's God & the Constitution
"When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few....The poor were clad in rags and skins--they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and...There is more of value in the brain of an average man of today--of a master mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.
These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars--neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation, and experience--and for them all, man is indebted to man."

[dhatturah]

Let's pile these birds' bones
beside this bowl of Mother's milk.
The money will come,
but we won't be watching.
Wonder struck,
& left to whistle,
low & sigh along
to my sister's song
& wine.
steadier, wasteful of stoic
& calm.
Guardians of the wild
& wildness,
even laughter will make us cry.
(of course.)
When we take our sadness
& get it drunk, when our tears
fill cities which are also
the soaked pages of the longest
letters. When it's harder to begin speaking
than it is to stop.
Our hips bear our arguments
wrapped in rags.
Can't you accept that we are friends & also soldiers?
unkind in the heat,
tripped up by words
but never by meaning
Our Own legs haunt the night in betrayal.
Softly keening-despairing the loss
that they count as steps.

continere

[Should our eyes begin?
Never a question for the blind.
Their eyes have already begun.]

triare

[The swarm of experience,
a firm lack of repentance.
Embrace the corruption of order]

The Moon is a Bowl of Black Rice (Don't Trouble my Love)

Though the night is warm, & lonely
my crowded body sings. Of coldly begging.
Don't trouble my love, with
actual treason, the truth
is expecting the obvious. Those desperate ones,
the graceless, swallowed by wet
desire.
The horizon is rising though it is dark
& we cannot see it
fleeing the depths, rushing with hands spilling day
like some pomegranate spills seeds.
The quiet itself heals us while we wait without knowing,
without waiting;
the black sky unempty
empties its fragrance
a warm breath,
enfolding exhausted passions
leading wayward sons &
daughters to the mercy of the water

1 Dream Poem

Sent a lazy letter to my brothers today, say:
I'm on my way boys on my way
Rocco called
said he don't wanna stay
where he wants to live
no more.
yeah,
roses are red my
phone calls are blue.

All Work is Simony

[Sabotage your workplace
give away your employer's property.]

Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

1960
Pablo Neruda

deru

[looking for the newness in the old, having
already found the oldness in the new
Slowly coming around, witness to love
beyond love. Murdered trust & bathed
in pain, to see night like a child sees night.]

denigrare

As a vine from the East chews through your south,
& the western deserts drown in excess
I travel like blood through this world of flesh
& I see a displaced crane drink
the invisible lake

listen the madness warily - handles
slip into decay & cruelty
(the snake) waits to steal moments
from the unwatchful.

Frantic calm & forced patience
hope is a rabbit's heart in your palm
fluttering in your breath, as you kiss her head
to sooth away the pain of eating
an evening meal of fear, of suffering, & laughter.

"And what of the dead?"

"There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women & the most learned men--all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?"
-Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch

A spot of sun on the water & the rain comes harder.

Idealess & worn -
unravelling slowly enough
for agony brief & sleep &
sleep & sleep.
Away: the creeping doubt
and (last time I was Here). blessed
Safe & free. maybe (maybe)
the time has come
for the heat and anguished past
to cool today's despair.

I don't know how to explain what I see, but
I know that it leads me to joy most often
I have a feeling that
for my safety i should
keep it
to myself.

still: Idealess the
ideas come. the trembling
thumb & the temple runs
while the sweat of our
backs slides, the future
rides a willing shoulder - an
unknowing friend. Or victim.

bendigo [unfinished]

in the surrounding gloom
you'd be surprised to find,
along with the darkening grass
the smell of blood & fire
through the trees,
a stubborn lesson in passion.

meigh

undressed and cool
in the light. the windows
they only seem to allow
that sweetest pearl light
to touch us when we fight

hours before, shadow wrapped
these whispers in envelopes of clay -
gossamer western clouds, gentle
as they breathe (the way we believe
that they breathe) scarlet and rust
over the beginning of the night.

eyes half-lidded trusting:
what dread leaves behind
when rain has come & washed it away.

they've protected you from
wealth and circumstance kept
away her vermillion gums
the breath of death & hope in winter.

Death & Hope in Winter

[desperately weeping in the lap of my pain
hands working at the merciless legs of
despair, the gentle fingers of betrayal combing
the suffering from my head,
curled like loss in the front seat
trying to hide my choking tongue from your eyes
which must at some times leave the road.]

marainein

Within evenings, and autumns and nights or day while moving
through the wind - its every sweeping, lifting caress -
along jaws and split by necks, collarbone fluttering
like a kyte, my shoulders and legs want to climb trees and
crush grass lovingly. The days wane, and the ebbing
of the light brings the mind to secrets.
Shadows carrying amaranthine dreams into february night.

a seed from a while ago

Andrew Rose
counts his woes
on his cracked &
bleeding toes.

Travel young,
& travel far,
never forget
who you are.

fragment

dheigh
[their heads will be crowned with mud, words eaten
by dust, knuckles encased in verdigris.]

oide

My brother's broken chain:
wrapped as it was around my waist.
my Brothers' guilt, a stale wall. (Do
the innocent deserve Bboredomn) If
the guilty excite? necks creased with
tense & Agony. unsearched,
these fragments of myth &
continents|scalding hands
& turning taciturn tongues turbulent,
counting woes on cracked &
bleeding toes
as history shows, balance uneasily regained.
the shame of goodness, and ignorance
feigned by streetlight and framed by
the interior lights of your grace.
in every choice & idea, authored
while suns or drunkeness glowed brilliant
during afternoons or in long song.sShowed us
the way. "..And we shall have faultlines for graves"
greeting devastation
with our blistered hands of joy.
And with the peace of tears,
ending suffering's thirst with hands for a cup
sipping yesterday's sorrow from lips,
hurt coaxed still by a dirge.

An idea

[Baffled sophist, gather up
your choice and progress - the newest,
and most satisfying truth available -
in no way a promise (making no
promises) refusing proof of love]

Black Sonnet - (something older)

Under morning's gentle ash sky,
where the wild-eyed can find solace.
Before the rush of blood and lies
the canicule song of malice.

It's madness not to sing along,
you're lonely if you think it's wrong.
Among the advocates of war,
their acts of love, in all ways poor.

To think, the cause of so much strife,
unwilling to see beauty here,
believing duty is to fear;
abandon desire, & the knife.

I hope you fear the memory, of
that humming, beating threnody.



I'm not all that proud of that one. I was just reminded of it recently.

feohtan

No method no scheme
not drowning. skilless & dry
(never left dreaming) stiff, lifeless.
Alive. Nascent belief snagged by
doubt, crowded. Numbered songs -
paths stomped into being by saints.
nimble love like leaves slow-
ly missing my walk.
newly soundless, unique
for the wrong reason.

Unfortunate Truth

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Wilhelm Göring

hamartia

In placing confidence
in perfection,
accepting the serpent as wise
ignoring a mountain of mouths
an ocean of eyes.
Bearing blame, its damage
in every moment. Envy grind-
ing knees at simply stopping for breath
wearing at ankles and stalling
hope. you can't
covet
freedom, as devotion
diminishes, denying sleep &
leaving breaking jaws gaping
with love, spilling out their joy.
my sugar of lead I'll savor
the sweet madness she gives
until I sink to death
cutting water with my hands,
my shoes full of eschar & mud.

corsdek - unfinished

merciful virga, my tears they
never touched the ground.
our leavings less loving
with every love we've lost .

honeydew hips, you
sold me my doom
memorizing flesh and hollow,
my necks and legs and want.

The back of my head, dark-
ened by sores. awake in my bed, ug-
ly unsure

swollen with doubt carried;
until held like love,
separate from desire.

The depth of my troubles
plumbed by a line of light, insight

bruxis

try to set aside your conditional mistrust,
to spend your nights unsober,
discussing nauseating pride
remembering how we once concluded:
that the swaggers gather
and mount at your back
a life of ballast
rendered as measured.
teeth grinding, reminded
of the strength of the very young
& the capacity for cruelty without
temper, exploring malice sweetly
we coughed through laughter
at the price of judgement.

scearu

tilt back your golden head,
your neck slick with sweat.
don't talk of sweet regret,
your love's life of dread.
Longing happily, no threat of consummation
thin and complete (not yet) you see, I
don't love like that. Ask, now.
Your first and only answer; it
comes from inside, dwelling beside
the place where flesh ends.
the ache, or light where
love or sorrow or God begins.

Bow your head (not golden)
neck stiff (and dry)
open your mouth, and pour out
your refusal. This fearless
state of lust. (almost)
surcloyed sobbing, finished.
unfit, but nearly
enlightened by proxy
although blest yourself;
and able to fuck as you please.
(your) Desire offends,
if myself you ask of me. that
which closest to me is
furthest from who I am.

ague

cross eyed, my salt lips pressed
carefully & silent against my finger-
tips. stretching arms above head
testing my outline for faults & angr-
ily counting each trembling moment.

the dark, the crescent of mud. my
fingernails catching, black, lunate
formed from & not tainted by the
dust - catching pebbled and sick,
the skin of my neck; auguring doom.

The Thought of Justice, as it drags
at the cruel. Lifting innocent, the
righteous spat out and left to cry
beneath the hedge, hidden prostrate
and fearful. pride Finally crushing
grace; this parable in braille
my body gives.

craving quiet, by quiet to
cease craving. the stillness
inherent, my ally and lately
my love.

acerbus

saddled with and
undermined by

doubtful, the loose
impression I give.

open and hollowed
Without injury, unless

savage mercy & less than
expected smarts contain

Injury. Head Aching, a
weeping willow for the pain.

while weeping corruption
from my arms. The thought

of vanishing, a fading
fable of trenchant purpose:

willfully obtuse. covered
in shit, and shaking. struck

by the evidence; an overfed
nightmare, a lonely elegist

now painted white, the
flesh not quite. I recognize

the corner, my eye
full of tears, awaits

the settling of
scores.