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.