Marianas Trench

Open publication - Free publishing - More poems

Open publication - Free publishing - More poems

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.






**


**

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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