Thursday, November 12, 2009

Canto Perilous

Cozy and flexed, my kitchen window
stretches a new found view, it affects
the whole house, makes snow or heaves
a humid afternoon. In the floorboards
a little water from the storm, a little
ocean with sea women, sea teeth, mermaids,

ambience of drowning, particular mermaids
disperse a toad’s evolution at a cashier’s window,
movies piecing together a glance at your little
leg, the tree you are staked to; which effects
ambulation’s variables, gains strength and boards
the little organ in its house until it heaves

out a burn victim from its vacuum’s heaving
breast, rescued at sea by the fleshy slip of a mermaid’s
tongue, the pulling hands, to the squalid boards
of her double wide, mold stains above the window,
its forest floor, the brown condemned effect
of the carpet, unhurried corkscrew, to her little

shivering fingers paused over little
buttons, to the shower of fuel, who heaves
rainbows of fuel in swampy obscurity, affecting
sallow mug shots in bashful pride like a mermaid
caught with her pants down in the window,
two the jagged sticks on her resurrecting boards,

wounds where dog’s put their ribs through boards,
out of restraint the scalpel sees its ancestry in little
hanging plastic casements. Scatter my windows
with the cold ladle, telegram the scalpel heaves
into ashes on a salad dressed in creamed mermaid
the cost of a family reunion. I am cold, my affects

wash up on the beach, undulating defects
rumpled in tide, spend a little time in boards
dress in my habits, the confiscated mermaids
wearing what the common folk worry little
about. You know we eat our children, heave
them like invasive species through the window.

See how the mermaids dress heaves with opinions?
Her little tide like breast holds back the boards,
gives the affect of falling into water

Canto Perilous

Cozy and flexed, my kitchen window
stretches a new found view, it affects
the whole house, makes snow or heaves
a humid afternoon. In the floorboards
a little water from the storm, a little
ocean with sea women, sea teeth, mermaids,

ambience of drowning, particular mermaids
disperse a toad’s evolution at a cashier’s window,
movies piecing together a glance at your little
leg, the tree you are staked to; which effects
ambulation’s variables, gains strength and boards
the little organ in its house until it heaves

out a burn victim from its vacuum’s heaving
breast, rescued at sea by the fleshy slip of a mermaid’s
tongue, the pulling hands, to the squalid boards
of her double wide, mold stains above the window,
its forest floor, the brown condemned effect
of the carpet, unhurried corkscrew, to her little

shivering fingers paused over little
buttons, to the shower of fuel, who heaves
rainbows of fuel in swampy obscurity, affecting
sallow mug shots in bashful pride like a mermaid
caught with her pants down in the window,
two the jagged sticks on her resurrecting boards,

wounds where dog’s put their ribs through boards,
out of restraint the scalpel sees its ancestry in little
hanging plastic casements. Scatter my windows
with the cold ladle, telegram the scalpel heaves
into ashes on a salad dressed in creamed mermaid
the cost of a family reunion. I am cold, my affects

wash up on the beach, undulating defects
rumpled in tide, spend a little time in boards
dress in my habits, the confiscated mermaids
wearing what the common folk worry little
about. You know we eat our children, heave
them like invasive species through the window.

See how the mermaids dress heaves with opinions?
Her little tide like breast holds back the boards,
gives the affect of falling into water

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Canto Carnage

Momma is relaxing in her favorite sledge of granite.
Practicing for the grave is what the papers say.
Memento Mori for the service she wrought.
That, and the shade of expectations, everything else
we put in the doomed arcade. I affirmed
without help or fear of the present

which describes the line of a mitered present
prefab sarcophagus which is the unspoken granite
for an extremely sensitive tooth I affirmed
by wincing, the upper part fixed to what I say
internally, harsh vertical sense of or-else
drying over the bowl which heaving hath wrought,

like a cage that permits us internment, a writhing
music so loud that gnashing is all I can present
to the regulators. The magneto shudders nothing else
as one, the skin slithers over new granite
and two, one eye smothers the other to say
the tempo chews on hinges turning affirmation

until the displaced fragment of memories firm
to globes of meat made fingers wringing
hands and spinning random lip locator to say
they are cut from fascism or other recent presents
like circumcisions on happiness. Map me a granite
chronicle, I believe in the roundness of someone else’s

limit, seem of limit standing. You, who else,
with your wallet out waiting to pay the affirmed
to negate me. Your currant agrees with the granite
tide, with scrambled evolutions, something wrought
coming out of the shadows to spin in the present.
Notice these alfalfa fields and letters that say

the scientists in the back seat of their cars sway
with sweaty rubberized DNA, there is nothing else
these letters of relatives can unearth from the present,
from the barn near the causeway of doom, can affirm
that each section of the year, strumming, wreaks
a coffin from the earth’s pores, her skin in granite.

These letters of the skin say peel me or else
top off the horn wrought twisting and be affirmed
in the granite presentation she trembles with.

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Frankenstein

Just before the rubbing out of function
the movies are monster green with value
or with comfort like grass in a memory
on a hill infested with ants, subterranean.
globes to make meat from fingers touching
dollar bills and a photo of me as a child

mapping me a chronicle to imitate the child
of the gardener, that knight, who functions
with his organ of poison, crumpling to the touch
of the sun. Feet are currents that resist the value
of water, a pair of shoes to a subterranean
proverb. Exclude the sun’s memory.

Exclude carelessness and favor the memory,
the one law of the interminably protected child
in a chemical shower, subterranean
prayer wheel. Set the eye to function
an undermining execution of value,
blessed misdirection in the feathery touch

of an eye. Spin the random indicator to touch
the cut of fascism or other recent renegade memories
of circumcisions, other happinesses devalued.
I will follow the yellow moon until a child
is eaten by the viper in a mechanical function
of digestion, an un-inherited subterranean

legless shudder, passing a batch of subterranean
darkness, the kind you might touch
only because you have no functioning
sense of decency, no choice or memory,
monster who crack-tooth gnaws the child
out of me. Because there is no other value

this side of death’s river, I can’t value
my twig emotion no matter how subterranean
the demon factory hovers, touching
the mists, the thump-a-thump of a child
playing cars, by and by. I’m touching
the barrier of fog burning the memory
of saints on fire, slipping in to dysfunction.

Noose, function of burning tides, hacking
value, the subterranean touch of a child’s
lumps, is memory become factory, given up.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Zombie Movie

Either I’m a people in a world of zombies
or a zombie in a world of people, either
that or I’m in a movie that takes place,
in order to show what kind of thinking
goes on in a zombie’s head as he tries to eat
the person who is mistakenly hiding

in a pickup which is not a bad place to hide
except it died halfway between zombies
and safety which is when they finally eat
their way through to the credits. Either
that or it’s an illusion, and I am only thinking
of safety which is, in the end, a place

where zombies and their thinking replace
notions of getaways and trying to hide
in the right place so as not to be thinking
of anything when you go in to see this zombie
movie which will be so full of either
gore or squirming you wont be able to eat

the popcorn you got because you forgot to eat,
and which look like brains now in place
of popcorn but that doesn’t bother you either
because there is a human concern hiding
that churns deep and rubbery in the zombie
as he shambles in his bloodied suit, thinking

about how he will get you even as you think
you’ll get out of the theater and eat
some real dinner, somewhere real zombies
wouldn’t even consider like a sushi place
not fast food where the maggots are hiding
disease that turns you grunting either

to a cloud of gas, huffing putrid ether,
or just a shabby business man who thinks
he’ll make it if he tucks in his bowels, hides
the puddles and turns down the urge to eat
his neighbor, while that stain formed in his place
calls the mantra of the shopping mall zombies:

either you hide in your place or the zombies
will eat you. More importantly, do you think
they validate? Validate? Validate.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Buzz Buzz Beelzebub

Witches chalk circle fails to detect
the dark lord’s insect passing over me,
evacuee of time. Instead I sing
homilies in pulped language, fragment
of my eye, the witness insists I nail
down the furniture god carved of serpents,

electric like the ocean used to be, a serpent
who probed with squeezing to detect
the winds of an epic thought naturally nailed
to my mouth, sucking, as it were, me
into delicious intention while the fragments
watched the centuries jaundice and sang

that captive prayer the belted criminals sing
at inquests. And yet you deny the serpent
who wallows for the sake of it, deny fragments
intruded and by the supreme inquisitor detected
my lies that burn, oh heaven save me,
like insects inserted in my relation like nails,

buttery up-drift, profile, garlic and snails
who with marble in their columns sing
through their nostrils songs that watch me
twist and squeeze the alter like a serpent
the good priest put his hand down and detected
squeezing my heart out into fragments

like pomegranate pulp, teeth, fragments
of bone. How he wishes to collect me, nail
me back together. I say use a metal detector
to sweep the dirt and shit until it sings
of the jointed beams that ride as two serpents
together like shoulders carrying me

into the country, setting the stake, burning me.
I am pages in the book of curses, fragments
from the garden, hiss of the condemned serpent
spreading a foliage of light, dressing with nails
the green, an avian sound resonant, sings
advent of wings, flap insipid detector

keeps the serpents in the chalk circle so we
can nail them down and cut their tails into
fragments. Singing shivers, they devour me.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Apotheosis

**






The nails are in search of a man to make
not a god, but a Tonka toy inspired
by track star haircuts leaned in from shaving,
milk wash like flesh over Formica until
it’s transparent. All art should be smooth.
Two handed but concrete soft, like in a dream.

Read the air. Not god but deception dreamed
this bomb. Not juice but horizons made
this confirmation of madness secret-smooth.
Print outs of not god but robot inspired
insects. The carnival secretes a visit until
I dissipate like a sink full of shaving

cream, a cake covered in chocolate shavings
radiating out in ripples like a dream
of denuded faces cutting density until
the lord uncorks in a wild fiasco made
for the people in the dunking stand, inspired
by the amoebas all over the smooth

carpet. I am almost never smooth
no matter how much combing and shaving
I can’t quite get the ladies inspired
to stitch their pulsing cages to my dream
or to climb through pressure and make
that noise that heats the room until

the wallpaper droops, or at least until
I convalesce in wheezy flame and smooth
the sheets. Involuntarily I make
the folds of a chair ration out the shaving
light between hard stomachs in a dream
in which I am almost nearly inspired

to give in and fall down the stair well spire,
to turn within the hospital parking garage until
there is nothing but fried ampersands, dreams
of grease & gravy, secretions holy-smooth
where I am the prisoner desperately shaving
a gun out of innocence or whatever I can make.

I’ll inspire you with a ring made of wax,
shave a little time off my dream until it is smooth
and hairless and ready to be holy, holy.









**


**

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Devotee

*




The drain is a circle of eyes blinking back
the remnants of my shame. They investigate
so enormously as we dredge facile fact-bombs.
I am pierced in rows by a scientific fetish
and they labor in the Chrysanthemum-bulge
I cornered with the dogs to show you
I meant the best for your toad appendages.

Samples of decay threaded with appendages
like fingers and off-road tread leading back
to nightly deranges, how a house-fire bulges
with gowns of sound clawing to investigate
consciousness, the wet earth her scarlet fetish
prehensile projects from the tonsil her hope-bombs

the names withdrawing to canvass, bombed
to tombstone, all-terrain scrambled appendage,
time-balls; in with the oils like a candy fetish
in a dead rat’s mouth on the pestilent back
highway, where exterminators investigate
how long the carcasses make circus bulges

like bags of microwave popcorn bulge
from radiation, little roadside bombs
machine moved and glass investigated
by the machete who wants your appendage
removed from hero view, pruned back
along the historic landscape, that fetish

made turgid by hairs that tingle, that fetish
how your sting makes me welt, bulge
like the curve bones showing in your back
your heart beats away the dark with bomb
shakes, sprouts my prayer box to appendages
and the doctor splints, squints to investigate

how the trauma victim invests in closed gates
hedges of sheep, pink and wire fenced fetish
precision, with wild swinging appendages
that dance at the end of broken flower bulges,
like fields of gazing sunflowers carefully bomb
cut and gathered with hands to give back.

Thus the gentle caressing bomb of highway accident
is like the fetish for a missing appendage,
a bulge in your shirt worth investigating.



**




* *

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Darwin's Wren

Today my school had a special lecture on Darwin
which the public thought might raise a stink
with those who disagree with Moses and evolution.
Some on the faculty called for the creation
of a committee which would have a Wren
as its logo and could be seen from the walk

if you didn’t drive and chose instead to walk
which is how on the Galapagos Darwin
got around, spotting those big beaked wrens
and trudging through the waste and stink
of giant turtles who by their own creation
nest in sand bowls the product of evolutions

of flipper tosses and waddling revolutions
and romantic turtle starry night walks
on the theoretical beach, humming to create
just the right mood to catch observant Darwin
off guard with his notepad of fleeing the stink
of sea weed or the rotting body of a wren

I hit with my car on the way home, wrenching
the steering wheel to miss. I guess evolution
had it in for that bird, though it really stinks
because when I was a kid and still had to walk
I flinched at birds. poking notes like Darwin
at the beagle’s hull, like sympathy creates

possibilities, like turtles with necks create
less effective hidey-holes or if that wren
had just swooped up I wouldn’t need Darwin
to feel better, to justify its death as evolution.
I could have at least stopped, got out, walked
back to see. I open the vents to get the stink

out of the van when I pass something stinking
and dead. Sometimes it’s an act of creation
to kill, a turtle. To get in the car, leave walking
behind. Maybe there will be a giant beaked Wren
that can take on cars, something that evolves
into the splat on the road called Darwin.

Wheels roll out a wren’s beak in the traction
of my evolution. Every mark bears the stink
of creation. Monkeys walk in Darwin’s head.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Judgment of the Furies

We inherit grace, middle school and needles.
Recall how we were gasoline weaned
for mercy’s sake because mercy delights
in her electrical lights (bitch) meanwhile sparks
on the horizon are a prelude to the whip of dawn,
her magnetic cleavage beneath the meteor gown.

You men who worship at the temple gown
we can see you are in full endowment, needles
opening the gates to penetrate the crowd, dawn
of faces in delight. She stitches with grab cloth to wean
the abandoned flesh with the illuminating sparks
in hidden faces, by covering forbidden delights

in the feel of the sling in a beefy dress, delightful
and sexy, how the shudders trumpet in a patched gown,
how well she sutures it to my face with sparks
like a mouth. The officers assign needle-
time to fix utterance to your mouths, still unweaned
of distance, other undiscussed gasping dawns,

like the good or free will entombed in the hard dawn
of her new predicament, pouty with a tourist’s delight
for gasping sake in the leaving off. Rip, weaned,
rip rip, oh the windows open with new gowns,
a hand slung bodice of beads made with needles.
I remember being drawn, joined like sparks

to kindling, into fire then rearing from sparks
up onto cloth, exploding your clothes like a dawn
sky investing fingers with the ruse of needles.
Come water, she thinks, bead by bead. It delights
with shudders the fading water of the faithful gown.
She uses her jiggling trumpet call to wean

the pavement and grasses, she disaster weans.
What comes after? the radio? disasters sparking
earthquakes in solidarity with the long grass gowns
over what is sufferable, the held breath, dawn
shaped sewer’s burning lungs. The ocean bride delights
in the first dance on the surface of needles.

So the dawn of her dark eyes sparks needles.
My hand goes through her dark gown and I lose
it. She weans me of judgment and I delight.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Hagia Sophia

For a thousand years her breast was architecture’s flagship,
portal to the other world, holding the sky static
in her giant dome. Goddess of wisdom, we worship
the balanced helmet in her glossy paint, ship
in a bottle in a shop where with a t-shirt you get
a sandwich and a certificate of citizenship
in heaven, and with no commitment to stewardship,
and the shop keepers like angels are giving away
admission to knowledge or heaven or whichever way
you feel most conforms to the ambassadorship
the lord endows his buildings with, with wisdom
or the smug inverted hanging down face of wisdom

bearing hawkers of penance and bouncers pelting wisdom
with denial and velvet, buck toothed, high on internships
the cavernous emptiness of a bronzed-over wisdom
hides under plaster, saint craw, forgiving wisdom
where the priests rub their naked bodies, raising static
columns of fleshy worship, supporting the wise dome
brought from the temple of Artemis, sister of wisdom
who pawned her father’s house for what she could get
some track marks where they dragged her to get
her out of the way, morphine needles of wisdom,
minarets in her arm, blood poison to take her away
forsaking her as a goddess, though not even a saint’s way

is rough enough, like how a woman who fights away
the devil gets a plaque hewn in the scar of wisdom
like the church’s medical records, silver, bronze carried away
by the Moors, or under lathe and plaster sealed away.
Note who gets tickets to heaven can be a matter of ownership.
The rest of you maybe get statues or get to stay
in the wrinkled organs of the world, menageries packed away
like hard lozenges of mud and trees in the attic,
little bodies molded in front of the T.V. static
snowy packaging tied up and sent on rivers away
from comfort and couches, sent on a mission to get
life out of, not reviving juice, but the cracked eggs we get.

When the earth quake opened Sophia’s dome she didn’t get
under her desk in time, she couldn’t move the stars away
and climb in to the painted firmament. And things get
tricky when heaven is an idea on a wall. People get
impatient, they go for microwave dinners not wisdom,
they wonder why they were never let in on the get
or why the red silk ribbons spilled over the wall get
sticky. They wonder at the nibs of scribal penmanship.
It’s not irrelevant that the minarets look like spaceships
how the hell else could we be expected to get
from here to there? She wears a holy gown, mother fanatic,
it shimmers golden at the edges, paramour ecstatic,

Hagia, saint of balloons, rubbing up electrostatic
shock into knowledge, the brain and heart metastatic
growing one into the other until there’s no other way
but god to invert the dome to a dish so that it’s stable
in the middle, fruit on the table, round dogmatic
and delicious And a ripe and ready cure for wisdom
can be injected, spaceship, module mother wisdom,
church, sepulcher, juices injected, serum vatic
whosoever man or god can deny her ladyship,
one garment worn over or torn off, we worship.

Crown of thorns, minarets or horns, holy fellowship
demands drunkenness in air. Recall that by wisdom
we are tied, a boat in passing waters, may easily forget
the powdered dust that covers us, settling away
like the saints faces laid out in silver iconostasis.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

400th Day

*

No birth stone in the carport this morning
the weather seal crows like a hen

I think a swing could hang from the beam
beside the hornets. I’ll foam them



**


A horseman carrying a stick delivers the mail
not yet dawn, the red flag lowers

this would be a good time to pray
but the coolant’s low, there’s a grinding

a grey mist follows me like dust
settling on my heart

there’s really no horse, it’s just
that everyone is still asleep and that would be cool




**



You might notice my retreads
Some day already remembering
Armadillo, step aside, Monday

Frost on your pant fronts
By Friday I will be shoeless in snow
You will say I am spared

The armadillo is dead in the culvert
Famous and spare
Like the eyes of the witness

White and empty as a cell




**



I sit in my car, abrasive heat
sweat in my undershirt
the air is a pool
air conditioning all day

I wash suffering
with my eyes closed
until it says stop

at night I hear owls
in glacial darkness
tomorrow I will get up
to feel the weight.



**




With any luck everyone has been fired from their jobs.
If we are together, brothers, we can make a new emptiness
from the bottom. As a child I hid in the attic
reading your comic books. If you’d known
You might have beat me. Sometimes birds cry at daybreak
for the going dark, coming light.
The sun is a gross hook in the trees. My superhero
is tired and wants to go home, tired of looking
out and not finding anyone. He destroys himself to shadow.


**

Sleeping While Driving


I hold on to the steering wheel
to keep from falling through the isthmus
of myself. Amusing like bodies
or African sand. Lightening makes glass
which is not water, does not want
softness. Imagine dancing in glass
slippers until your feet are bloody.
Blood red universe, I wake to the road.






**


**

Monday, June 15, 2009

Get the kids
to imagine a gun
as big as the galaxy,

point it at
the universe’s head
we’ll find

our way out
of these funny valves
if we try

hard we can
get whole templates
pre waxed

in gall
staked to fresh
sausage

not one
ending
but two.

Thursday, May 07, 2009




















Creepy Lover

found on the internet, no longer alone
wiping saliva from your cheek

the weak ones, laboratory specimens
straining rodent arms through the cage
links in order to live it up

come back and gnaw me, and please
clean the shit off the walls.
























Jelly Fish

here is a jar at the grocery store marked jelly
here is another marked fish

take them both to the bread isle
and throw them as high as you can

so that they smash together at the vector
of marble rye and discount white bread

run as fast as you can, arms outspread,
and dive chest out onto the shards of glass

stinging capsules and tentacles,
there is nothing more deadly in all the sea














Worked to Death

In the bible, Job was given lucky lotto numbers.
None of these numbers add up to whole
loves of bread. The good lord gives us rashes

and boils and we are thankful. This can result
in running wildly down the street
or juice consumption. Note: buy stock in juice.

The good lord has made yeast to ferment inside your folds
of skin like human wine despoiling from your workouts,
gymnasium labels with instructions of faith.

The good lord has made us candidates of grunting
while the jasmine blooming on the trellis hits us like a brick.
Job is coming to work to smite us with his check book.

If you pray hard, you can already feel the tenderness in your
underarm, holy fleshy joints. Behold, your Chinese food
is also made of plastic by little hands.

The Chinese word for rash is the same
as the Hebrew word for calculation. Play
the numbers. Either way, God will make you itch.









Parchment


Through the leg of love
time bends oblique
severing conventions, dogs and children arguing
driving the curve of a cello
until it is ancient and universal.

Petrarch, Threenoses


Your hand no longer a hookworm
I watched you fall from the palm tree
framed by a condo the exact shape
of a medical dictionary. What made
it strange was the sunset through
the fronds, surgical and foreign.

As an adult now you sleep on benches
and mimic the wail of subway cars.
Sometimes you sprinkle bleached flour
so no one can approach without
leaving footprints. I think

the wind was the tree’s doctor
who shook you from its intestines
before you could take hold
of her beautiful coconuts.





Immersion

foot, trench foot, jungle
rot, I lie alone

miles from ice
packing my thoughts

snow upon me like mosquitoes.

It’s my shoes.
Greenhouse, microcosm,
biodome, toe tongues

of fungus. I want to go down
there with a lantern

to look for the giant ape.
:::

Have you ever heard of Isis?

Synthetic Island

of course everything is fake
the stucco, the quadrangles mathematicians use,
my waterbed and her earthly contents

some of them are molecular in the ocean,
that is they are having their end of life
tune down in the circling north pacific gyre

but death is not kind, no one recycles bottle caps.
They swirl and swirl getting smaller and smaller
until their water bottle caps break up into
H2O sized water bottle caps and float
water bound Frisbee-like into the blood
of a my fatty tuna which I have ordered
at market price as the middle American
rubric of healthy fine dining.

And even as I bleed out from my eyes
because the membranes cant cohere

their edges flip flapping and slapping
over each other in a pyrotechnic
gashing of evolutionary pornography

I know my daughter’s yellow and red
slide and swing will live on into the next epoch
just as parts of us will remain
puddled around it in symbiotic cadences.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Black Hat

First there will be a shooting rampage
in Alabama,
shortly thereafter in Germany,
after that there will be men oiling instruments
in their garages and crawlspaces,

whatever tunnels of flesh they can
carve out inside themselves,
moving plaque and cholesterol to the side
as though clearing a space
for a woman to sit down, a surprise guest

you would like everyone to know you
are entertaining, but ought to be content
with the truth that she is there.

One person will be killed on the highway
randomly, some others will be shot
because they were waiting on their porch
for something to happen,

everyone else should have known they had
it coming. The grass in the yard tipping
over in a breeze, pea stone driveway
crumbling under tires, azaleas pink

in this early spring. In ten minutes
the dog will stop barking, a rabbit
will move finally, and the preacher
at the door will take off his black hat

before stepping in through the door.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Monday, March 09, 2009

The Hawk Card

It’s just about night
and I pray to a face
a mirror frames.

The old man in a room
wearing a suit lightly
dusted with cigarette ash.

A nine year old boy
sneaks in to take handfuls
of mortar dust.

A plastic skin
around a powder of saltines,
ash and dust and food.

Ashtray of dark green
cut glass, heavy and clear
and empty.

a vein of cellophane
beside it, gilded edge
of cigarette wrapper.

A crust of life around
the dish in the sink.
Pipe of broken laughter.

The day closed around
the boy like a hand
holding a mouse.

Blood and water
and claws, singing
I won, I won.

Monday, February 09, 2009

Beard Weaned

many years ago
I unsubscribed to facial hair
and found my lips
protruding from my face

the relation to my inner life was not found there

I had a thick presence
then, you could find me at mercy anonymous
or simply aroused

then I felt my chin under the hair
took to yanking my beard back along my face line
trying to remember what my father looked like

or my creepy uncle who covered a large mole
with his beard
the beard is face default

not a season of crops
but ground swollen with ice
tromp, swill and sweaty summer
scratching

sometimes I’d braid my beard
or eel out my tongue from its face nest
pizza grease and kisses

now nothing
just acres of flesh mounding
upon itself

some black seeds unfurling

Excessium

I’m going to write Let Me Out
with my eyes on the window.
The engine’s got arthritis and gabs,
her clinging mechanics resist the cold
and ladders go up to rooftops. Things
are still repaired along the way.

Look, a fortune tellers turban in the tree
where the hawk yells. Shop windows
leer after me thinking I’m a pussy,
and I’m still in the car treasuring
plague. Last night someone’s cows
got out. 43 were struck on the four lane

blood like wing-splats and I write
a letter that will never get sent. Wires
dangle from the passing dirigible
because nothing is immune
to rot. There is no mercy in the month
of poems. You burned and there

was nothing left. Shadows and streets
and driving like crazy because
urgency made it to old age where her
genitals are sponged to keep them
from cracking open because no one
knows what will fall out.

Blue disc tires spinning like ice,
tractor trailers to the underworld,
windowless girls dancing in naked
rooms, spinning until they are powder.
Some cows are only dented, the others
are corralled by the angel of death.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Land Fill

If there is only one immense pile of garbage
big enough to be called Continent this is it.

It’s famous for its maps, the multi colored keys
to rail and ruin, neighborhoods slipping into themselves

on instinct and variables of regret like crows
intimidated by the gull army swirling in a revised snowfall.

Focus on one tree branch bobbing, crow heavy,
moved by belching currents of methane escaping

from the earth’s immutable ass, champagne by another
name, or moose guts in a garbage bag expanding.

How long can something live rising up or bobbing
indefinitely like a dream or a map?

The masher operator reads the echo of Faulkner
in the glittering. The access road is hemmed by a chorus,

the singers pointing out, submissively, the homes
of the stars, in cosmos, rising over the lip

of the red dirt, colliding horizons of flies, the hymn
growing louder like a buzz at the heart of everything.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Wrong Blur

high on the clock, centered
in the word system. The part
of what’s happened
you find to give purpose
and electricity to the flies
and swish transcendental
eyeball represented

capstone of pinch and skin
and the evil eye in the mirror
to structure it by, undefiled
sad and serious, still happening
outside among the plastic chairs
on the deck, high moon

one minute and a center word
a smooth counsel to kiss by
and hold us together like a ripe
balloon of minds collapsing
and thereby bringing the fringe
to the center

with a little gas escaping
over the walls then beaten
with bamboo canes, break
the bed and her clouds, clear day
of bombs you saw in the present
oozing in every direction,
plowed field, mountain

moon upon the clock face

Hammer Time

I’m soothed in your breaking glass
you make it easy like hair
which when separated and wet
can be a little unsettling
as a wet finger entering the ear
can make all the water in your body
want to leap out at once

like laughter of the brain
which is best thought of as Jello
jiggling in a pan in the passenger seat
of your red haired aunt’s station wagon
on her way to the funeral, in itself
not funny, but how she sticks her
manicured finger inside it
to stop the jiggle because it distracts her
then feels inside next
to the bananas there is a danger
with its ears laid back

and she crashes into a tree
which has stepped up
from the dark of its rotted center
and made an edge for her to
crease around

then, you smile at me
and the thin crease tinkles
around in a shower of acorns
and squirrel chatter
and swirl in red coming away
spinning like a galaxy

which is a thing that when you
look at it you don’t know
where you are any more
because the curtain of stars
and teeth and manicure and meaning.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Mu: The Lost Continent

So long ago it was the right way,
one leg of the hydra holding up a neck
returning to the plastic race car track
and a carpet of skater’s blue

the curtain falls on the aftermath
of the eternal ring, polished and rapt
there’s a turning flare down
and little ones burrow into the molding

beat back the clicks of a menacing watch
out, hold up an ice field and see her
dripping away, your chasm is
awesome, ominous, stripping down
to balloon scraps, cosmic straps

buoyed up like rocket ships
to outer space, what apparatus is
gravity if not for wiping away
with collecting hands, eyes
and a brow pop-pop, mother takeoff

the night, there is a tiger pit
under the carpet, dungeon under
the tub, I knows it, object,
hazard, another day, tells me not to,
ever, but the faces get the better of me.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

etch

crow claw on tin gutters
one book falls off the bed

flight path over the house
merciful bedroom on approach

Zoom thrust and spin brush
plastic and tree branch

summer trees up with choking
bloom shadow of a flicker

in a cave pilot see how big
each what happened happens

to dog soprano garbage truck
in heaven grow hard

in poverty jackass sound
powdered newsprint less

one squirt stuffed in rock
solid heard what

the witch said when she
soaked in a little bottom

doom claw on tin say
child say scrape say bye

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

@ the Shrink's























On the way out the door.

Voodoo Tooth

some new walk
along the sewn line

gap on water line and stone
the dizzy mouth

taste each dish to tooth
spitting drink and hair

remember face down is
toe up, torn the buried tooth

kissing gravy blooms dried
blood china sidewalk lip

fold laundry scrub rice
from plates unbearable quiet

gentle air and bird sounds
scurry flue and rat

I feel like retching
hold it down lip wall

tooth brick I remember you
buried my tooth

and escalators the daily spoke
held hands ascent

crying can be epic
and it can be over forever

bring it along hold its hand
keep it in a buried box

forget it softly the names
I call it walking

call it broken feet
call it falling from the flightless

cliff seat of licking
sun on sharp rocks

dug in like teeth to the heart
incisor on the heart

doesn’t cut
it unties

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Solid Waste

More desirable than the vacant tree line,
less crass than the hem of stars obsequious
above the seagulls pouring out.

So much more. One star, as you know,
is one sun and thus perhaps one planet
burdened of beautiful trash.

Oh abominable waste heap
looming over the horizon, contemplate a summer day,
shimmer on the eye an ocean
of plastic bottles set to the heart, rhythm,

your flies pervert the veil again.
The compactor operator lashed to the cabin
crushes his lids to blot the sound, the siren
light of gas and fire, the sun

and that abominable blue more beautiful
than the crow pondering a possum carcass’
colorful circumference of light,
hemmed in that blue by awful trees.

Peacock of distance, shit and beak
strutting the mood of climates,
wide cry of fool and night, burnt back
with fist, craw, inevitably blind.