oh. sorry, my very best friend. you look so tasty-lish.

i ate a photogramonster on 47th. he told me to chomp chomp before i chomp chomp'd. later, while i was rolling on my table a coaster for my milk, i made my maginations make and make and maginate until they made me and my photogramonster on 47th. he told me to chomp chomp and, with my maginations, saw the sandwich 'tween my fingers.

the sun seeks
dramatic silhouettes,
the way to appear charming.
a current opens for another,
having forgotten to hold anger close,
letting all the reverence rush in.

the result is a silvery dazzle. a film
upon your outfit,
which no amount of sweeping sheds.
you step out of it
to the skin, into a bled white
instance of perfection.

the objects of the cast bow obvious.
now absence as aperture,
every breath struggling to fill itself in,
having forgotten
all separation is escorted
by a jubilee of horns.

i'd

rather
work - cause - a purple
wood - blisters - pinch
than
write - create - a poor
words. - context - poem

alliterate your life with language!
buy a rainbow!
read a book!
imaginate!
and...
...and what?

choo choo train gonna getchu, baby. tomorrow, i'm finding the color orange.

my pirate found himself within a train whistle,
spiral child, paper feet, fluttering in the train wake.

i told him to "say hello" and he said words i've written for him:

'Long be the be that buzzes by my eye.
an eye and 'is' has blurried into a kite
like this, a Y, are'd when i was quiet'

we rote this on his chest with treasure fingers
he found me with less than... nevermind her or hers face.

it left last night in the rain. when my pirate axed my head.

cre-cumbered eyes in make-believe.

because there isn't. remember crying
like a crustacean sunken in a sinking case of crinkled plastic.
dismember lying
like it wasn't. dismembered crying
in a sink with napkins tapered with the insides of your eyeslets.

let it lie like a swollen christmas. remember myne
and find for his. or look on on and lose your sight.

look on on and lose your eyes. look on on and watch them watching.
look on in eyeless frozen nightlight.
look in on my children's smiles. look on on and
lose your wishes. look on on and know your losses.

let my eyes like you know you couldn't. dismember your mind
and cry for his and look on on with your lossful sight.

for causes found, and cinders lost
beside your youthless wrinkle. a poor old woman of crinkled plastic
remembers lying
like a child inside the sunrise
with her children pretending children's game for other's children.

pretend. pretend. pretend.
i don't wanna grow up,
i'm still a toys r' us kid.

she sez she were a skunk

Love thy neighbor, love thy law.
Love thy mama most of all.

Love thy labor, love thy saw.
Love thy babies most of all.

Love thy traitor, love thy law.
Love thy neighbor most of all.

caste yourself as theatricless.

Hello, my name is occupy, I am time. And I decide how we all find.
This is where it’s like the inside of these lines. An invisible stick figure walks amongst large black walls. Straight mountains. Take your birth control and tomorrow we’ll see him stumbling amongst nothing. Then our eyes will white because his time to choose time to end has come to an end. His choice be choicelessness. He chose it.

But. But nothing but butting into time, yours and mine. But nothing but losing yourself in time, yours or mine. But nothing but something is what this thing is. Or what you say. You understand how it is to sit anomic. To noise as sonnentce. To sound yourself as something rather than forgetting. And it doesn’t have possibility when you chose.

Veblen called us all pussy fucks. And he was right. Art is leisure is nothing, a lie you’ve made for yourself to state us. To find status. Figure out. The artists have. When they said ‘live,’ they meant it. Become a blacksmith. Make a tool.

wair.

maybe i need to go sleep and wake up next week
maybe i need to know how it isn't
maybe i need to sleep
maybe i need to sleep
maybe i'll feed your need for finding muses in yourself, sick

why do you sleep with the moonlight
why do you sleep.
why don't you keep your mouthings.
keep them in your sing-song songings
sing me a songing
sing me to sleep.

and maybe i'll wake up two...

we'll be waking to the sunlight
in your car. you're living a life i've lived before
you're living my life. my life. my life
look around. realize you're not you.

or just find the answers
or just make something up
and write a poem for an everyone that you hope will find your angry belly. i want to be an angry belly, and i want to find an anyone that listens to my angry belly. and i want to be an angry belly, and i want my noise to turn around and bellow jelly. jello jelly giggle belly. belly belly belly. my mind is nothing but melly jelly and it's yelling at the way you've hurt me like a cougar that chews on a baby. i like to think i'm a cougar, that my mouth is a baby. that you're nowhere in my little world where i'm destroying everything that i want to see... a baby mainly. you. and me. and lifetimes together that tangle together as children that gather in memories to where you no longer no because remember! you no longer go, belong or know of anything that's me or anything that i've ever going to see or be or hear. hey, i don't hear you. i don't know you. no. not any longer .i'm nothing but a yellow bulb in a garage near a freeway with some trees and an iron that bats away the billets until... untill. untill. until what? until nothing.

i want to beat noise until nothing but my arms are worn before blackness.

DELAWARE RIVER

[The wetland grasses plucked as we pass – whole chords of grass blast by. The leaving, the relief of leaving, comes with loneliness – a whole prune on the sill of a half-room. Greens in the morning that we chew; soy-sauce & krill in the eve. Bridges sprout from the bog. My ghosts miss me, they want me dead or back home, so that they can tug at my breath like a grandfather’s beard. Not to be heard giggling their antique talk. All around, I glimpse them.

My friend, drunk, once screamed at the cab driver. Knowing we brought echoes with us when we came. In the Philadelphia train station, this slow land calms down like a child caught in a giant puppet suddenly -- panics. Then gains awe. Then is released, unknown to itself for a moment, un-horsed.

This must be what happens, every breath, in our lunglings, I mean it. Colonial blue, brick red, marble, slights of gold. Whose colors are these? Were these the paints that lasted 4 weeks on a ship over the east Atlantic? Or were they here when we arrived, packaged inside this idea, portraying a country?

On the train to Atlantic City, a king of green wire grows all over everything. Barrels of noise just keep getting shipped in: still I realize it is all home. After the pigment trucks & the geared garbage goes breaking against the power-plant’s house, we could, at any point, stop & grow an apple loom, perform the delicate tradition of surviving. I hadn’t thought about darkness until I was born and now we are strung over the Delaware River. Or packed on a platform, or on stage, just trying to stay alive our own size.]

i was twelve when i found a flying shark below a christmas tree

difficult sometimes to find the time. difficult to walk. diffi-diffi-dee. for you. for mellowness in autumn. for our health in our autumn. whence was when we went to the window with out-swept hands and sullen candles. whence is the white-checkered skin. whence is whenever i decide to scream toward your touch with my smile or a toothful snap.

snap snap.

tomorrow will find another of our flowered churches. a steeple or a mast above the corner store that sells a comic book collection's stool. we'll wander to our faint and find our friends frisking in our bed. friends! we've found you. leave us to our homelessness. let us curl without your sweat sticking to the inside of the backs of our white shiny teeth.

snap.

like a kite that stalks school children sitting on the sidewalk with black strap leather clap-claps that clap-clap as their feet tap-tap pitter-pat as the kite swells to within them. eeeee. and they scream and their little white laced feet make, so heavy, quickness in slick. swish swish. metal'd heavy. tick tick. soft, golden hair. braided halo.

smiles don't make sounds.

Acme

It is cold enough here
to be both dead and alive.
What I mean is,
my boots cleave
snow from scrub flowers.

It will become more pronounced
the further we go.
We will stop seeing deer
and find empty
wildfire watchtowers.

The hills bow desolate and magenta.
I pull on another sweater.
There is no telling the wind
from the rest of the air.

Nobody’s listening.
I see a red busting
athwart mountain faces.
There is the Devil’s Tower
off in the distance.

Sheer rock seals us
to the remaining path.
In crevices, yellow flowers are
stashed away.

God has weight
the more I transgress.
I begin to bargain
and care what He thinks.

A white chalk
covers my gloves.
The summit is also
the color of bone.

We become still like frozen.
There is less obstruction to the eye.
This is the highest point
between the Rockies and the Alps.

something about this weather makes everything smaller

On Falling in Love with Japan:
In Three Parts


I.
Consider the way her last summer rains fall quietly
onto your shoulder. See me, take what remains of me,
she is begging of your upturned palms while undressing
her landscape for you. Glimpse her sky blue mountains,
rounded like the curve of a thigh or the deep hollows
between your lover’s breasts. Do you hear the water cranes
calling out across the river? The wind is carrying something away.

II.
Someone kissed your mouth. Someone cupped your chin,
asked you about safety and weather on the other side
of the world. Is there a word for loss in Japanese?
Maybe it is composed of lotus and winter frost,
the latter being something similar to you when
you told someone watch this: keep this safe: this is not yours
to have.

III.
She is stealing your heart. She is rearranging her forests
and streams to better match your expectations. She is persuading
the flowers to blush a deepest red just for you,
my love, she says to you, don’t turn around .The rain has
started again somewhere you can’t see. Everything
weeps for you. After this, after not so long, you will
learn to love the storms.

an alphabet above a skull sketch

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found along a boat in calligraphy

i didn’t die on a ferry
it wasn’t a lie
not to me,
not to anyone.

my plans just sat and stared
at me
as they, their feet
dangled free
above the sunlight.

he didn’t… with them
asleep…
think to say anything
to me,
to anyone.

do you like the angiosperms

in the window? do you like my hair?

the robins making sails within the
spiral from his mouth. he sticks a pillow in her sigh
and she shudders toward the twilight nearing
my eyes, my knees, and the grasses at our feet
as we wince with silence to the
searching arrows sent into the wood, a fallen
acre, and a
deadened bird.

remember when? remember when the robin
was an acorn? eyes remember. they remember
robins, their acorns, and my finger on
a bird cage in the fall. my eyes remember
memories we haven’t. i eye’d a memory
from…

oh. well. nevermind. my mind wasn’t made for me.
not me. no not for anything but the silence it forces
me to speak.

flow, we've,n

let's circle hurt. still, purpled,
her kill turned dull, curled. an error
built here, elm'd for years below
our lucky breathings.

or be foe, i mean.

honk honk, the nether
and a a a a a porc-u-pined
wiffin' the attic-tic-tic-tic to
morrow for...

oh. to sleep. to never
be nevewhere ornwhere. or
where? their is quite. white
quiet on mohnaire.

wallow wallow wildem smears
have swilt a loonly loo-loo
that's spooling circles to-
tu-tu. and too two'd

furrowld ohl'd mysite or... ur
foor the flurin' insky dur'n
time to time for time. i'me
not myne signed tis hind.

there are things i used to say that i don't say anymore

the loose sausage,
cream of mushroom and milk.

mash,
stir on open flame.

I am in the corner
on the floor

stroking Colby’s black mange;
looking out doors.

mid-morning breakfast
with beer is stark

quivering on the edge
of a cymbal crash.

I know this is not
the way.

not officially.
but mathematics

are only parallel
figures

and sums no longer
equal

crisp leaves that float
gingerly to slick blades.

there are things i used to say

there are things I used to say
that I don’t say anymore



the loose sausage,
cream of mushroom and milk.

mash,
stir on open flame.

I am in the corner
on the floor

stroking Colby’s black mange;
looking out doors.

mid-morning breakfast
with beer is stark

quivering on the edge
of a cymbal crash.

I know this is not
the way.

not officially.
but mathematics

are only parallel
figures

and sums no longer
equal

crisp leaves that float
gingerly to slick blades.

I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self attention,
I believe that someone should become a person like other people.

vapor-ridden hoot'n candies made from morning owls.

-oh. is that so?

a nod in the dying mellow.

two figures, a shadow

and silence.
-where do you think we are?
and his voice

like the bark

hasn't.

nor will it mulch

the wilted daisies

melting in the cornhusk vase

on a table at dusk

with two figures, their stares,

a hunch.
-mother, we've eloped.

and an
-oh...?
that pauses until dawn.

poem for never

The color of my grandmother is purple. On the evening of her hours, she will stare, full, with eyes wide into the nightlight at her bedside. She will sing, then, with broken glass at her slippers soaked in soaked in warm water. She will sing until we never see her. She will, there, disappear forever.

poems for fall #1

I like the poems of the baseball games, and I like the sound of your lips with my name when we’re walking from the crowds in the early evening to a quiet street with a cold breeze with brittle leaves and cool concrete that contrasts with the warm of your arms and cheek around my arm and body.

ninety words per minute in a moment

i re
move
d my
fin
ger an
d lear
ned
how t
o sew.

if only eyes would stung her

my bellow in a dyeing sun
That leafs your skin in glinting solder,
bronzen meadows and a pistil

you droop too.
like the bumblebee in
this evening of a fill...

a kite that claims my
shyne, the sun, your eyes
on my mind

or the light that's leaving
leafing left like our
sight on the inside

of our eyes. the seas of
yesterday's previous and my insides
opened on you tomorrow

hellocho-cho-cho-----

well… well… well…
wells. wells. there are wells all over my yeards;
in the grasses, bellows them and furthere. everywhere
you look, you’ll fine…

well, you’ll find a lot of evidence.
and you’ll find a lot of mud and yellow. dry
grass and last autumn,
my hands and a shovel.

OHIO

red red flint in the clay
smooth as a pistol move

as yellow dress in a cavity
as yellow dress on her
breakfasting death

arrows and scissors
off ohio ridge
its array of colors quarried
fit to no end

who will swathe the wound
no-one moves to wound

no-one moves to stand

stepping light

in the bleak cold window of winter
the iced over glass bristles
in veins of vessels

the snowball strikes carpet,
flakes gleaming from the boy’s
blue mitten, quick to cover

mouth to clench and sprint,
ice veins snap and drain,
snowball seeps in gnarls

of stiffening rug.
in the brisk
she picks up the glass, ice

specks that shimmer and drop
wetting, an infiltration, no
a drip that plunks deep

in eardrum, the snowball
plucked and thrown back
as the chill

down her fingers, slides,
over the back handed
crook of wrist.

We're starving, send books

And paper bound only the proper way.
The glue's the food in the right conditions.

Gods know our dinner is multivalent: feast, fuel, and entertainment.
Not in that order.

As adults we have certainly lost the ability to start fires and dance
around them naked and flinching and cooking.
Parachute matches.
For the children?
It's the only way.

We've given you all the lines you could want and you've not written a
goddamn thing.

Space is at a premium these days. Don't you know what these pages cost us?
College-ruled extra.

Paper condoms don't survive to ashes.
Always we all know--
But I was hungry and so were you, and fucking just isn't part of a
catabolic diet.

drafted left

These are works in progress.
Read them down to nubs, and then I'll start again.

untitled

whose shadow
impetuous and moody
as blood orange
many wretches
wickless virgins
in the sunset
sun an inclose
i only return
in pain\in rearview
an emergency
or a glare
pure porcelain blue
aerial and
calcium\cartilage
crawl home
divorced from
stain of wigs
malleable orange promise
who closes
if meant to want
will rise
not nullifidian
earth mover\manticore

oh, she is so as this has sewn a cross-stich-heart for her to sow.

i want to live in africa
on flat or curving land
with a ground that is
brown or green or very green
and a woman with a white smile
and dark brown skin and
a giggle that sticks
inside her throat as she
walks and watches and
bends and talks and
dances.

she must dance with me
with her smile and her sound
and her hands and her feet
and her hips that swivel
in the heat of the african
evening, beautiful african
evening of distant african
farmland

we will dance in our africa-
things creating themselves-in
dreams

RETURN OF THE JEDI

Bird-shaped holes in the factory, but no birds. The jogger,
his legs unraveling into cobwebs, enters. I put a key
into the air, turn it – a golden retriever greets

the grandparents, all of them amazed to recognized
& still alive. My hands ring to be shook, foiled with
mediums, confused all over, but there are no wraiths

in this playground today. The resort town is gone, still
the ghost & his child stay, who coaxed me to take in
my second air & live again. Out of the sand, their hands

of help still waver. How they projected me, a green building,
raked together out of ideas, forward – the stranger at the brink
of a boat, holding the rope, turning back

out of habit. When I throw the pear-rind, ghost,
your boy catches it – over & over he catches.
The masks move through the pines, floating beside

all the bodies we’ve met & recognized, moving us
like arrows made of enough atoms to look human.
Arrows hugging arrows in the satchel

of genetics, where the retriever, his back hair twitching
to be remembered, will not die. Already we are
filling in the bird-shaped place with a basket

of electrons we call barn-swallow. Black-winged, badged
with burnt-orange & golden, the jogger
steps eagerly into his next first breath. Come now, cool fount:

we will never die. We instead will fall from that slide,
where the sand brings a specter & his boy to coax us
in, with the snaps of their coattails, again.

Wolftown VA

i am the grapefruit in your lungs,
the nipple that fell from your breast on thanskgiving,
the discarded cigarette butts in your attic
and the dusted fingerprints covering your walls.
i am small hairs on your pillowcases,
waking you with a knife at your throat before the sun evenrises.

i am nameless, sitting next to you on the living room sofa,
stretching out my arms and legs,
making myself at home,
to watch the workings of gravity.

this, that, our bodies as they enter spring.

i slept thryough with a mallet bellow. echode, it,
th'primeary re-sun-sun-sun sun-sun-sun son.

my son. in my hands, while the daylight dies,
the turn of your hip begins to bubble and you

gasp-p-p p-p-p "ah" punctuated and preseeding
the schadhoed sounds that fold and fold and fold...

like us, now, in this now that--now--we are
creeading between our pupilps in this noigwht

not two--far, a weight--at the horizon, leyeing
beneath a palm, leafing in the breeze like a book

in a heavy wind that shatters the shutters, you
are all eyes and still below the covers.

four hours, eyes weighted in some st-st-st
stutter that st-st-stuttered for all my memboreyd

on incandescence--

Bundle of nerves.
I'm a bundle of nerves.
Bundles and Bundles and Bundles of nerves,
coming inside you.

Guest post: "into the hills" by ZM

are you up there?

right here
through this side door through the garden past the trees in the moonshine I saw

it wouldn't be
yet yr eyes would be scarlet save modern physics

neat tricks knit
I'd like the change for that please

coffee twitch don't spill it
split yr picks to maximize returns
and i'll see you in a minute

within fin's tea, i wake to the wormhole

when--but young--i was but a nothing of what i was. (meaning had been).
when i was still in-twomed, scratching at the silence beyond my spaceship,
my i began to burn, and my single finger scratched and scratched;
inside was where there was found the beginnings of something which i have yet----at this very moment at this very time, at this now i present----to speak very clearly within conception.

The Sea Is Rising

It's summer
humidity seeps into skin,
sweat slowly rolling
down forehead.
Hair glistens in small
droplets of salt.
Neighbors have
the slip-n-slide up
and call at the door.
Swimming trunks snap
elastic and I'm there.
The small grade does
not look fast. Kids
line up and run, jump,
slide down hill.
High pitched laughter
resonates off siding.
The sun sinks below the tree line,
the chain link.
I take my turn, run
slipping on wet grass
flop belly down hard.
Water spurts up the sides
of smooth skin, arching outwards,
unnoticed on fresh cut grass.
Grass that sticks to legs sucking young skin.
The end is quick
grass bent in maze of ants
and dandelions. My hand slides
swift over upturned metal stake.
Upturned at lazy clouds, at weight of afternoon runs.
It slices the left hand,
short of wrist but dangerous.
The kids gather at sight of blood.
Run for Mrs. Beckstrom.
Like a nurse in apron
with dish towel so white it's shameless,
she presses hand around hand.
The blood rages red and spreads
the cloth so thin and my mother
the car and emergency room women
that coo gently to halt my seven year old eyes.
I take seven stitches and the hand is hemmed
like new jeans or the darkness that covers
the parking lot lit with moths. As we drive home
my hand throbs like cicada hymns in the quiet
yard. The cut grass matted to fingers
and fringes of stiff trunks.

i would prefer, madame, if perhaps you would remove yourself from the sunshine and sink into the shade for the purpose of pollination.

i am not a butterfly. i only wear a t-shirt printed with the body of a monarch spread nice and wide as if he were floating between the clap of his petaled wings, a green beret made of aluminum foil that i've painted and crafted to the relative yet exact specifications of the deadliest butterfly in existence, a black skirt that i've lengthened toward my toes and tightened at certain intervals for the purpose of accentuating the length of my legs in respect to my torso.

there

there is nothing to be done
about the fire. it is a self-
contained emergency. out of all
the locked carriages of the
subway car, she moves. via the
intercom, the conductor says
either the overhead sprinkler
system will work or it won’t,
says the ballast shifted in the
course of the journey, when all
the passengers at 54th got off. i
watch her leaving. she didn’t
believe in the concept of locks,
or fire, or self. my own arm is
overheating.

let's imagine a painting on a hillside with a little boy making paint mistakes with his fingers over his ears and his eyes alive with his inside sight

in my dreams, i seem from what i've seen,
i'm an eyelid smear, sinking two.

sometimes the maples sputter.

what were we supposed to do without thoughts while we were lost within a wilderness.

you said to cut away at the lines over my eyes, and i
agreed with what was left of what you said was my mind.

that was a long time ago.

ASSEMBLY

in the deadpeal,
in the convent yard, saint
someone allot a fraction
of his dinner benediction.
for me, he laid the
pants out in the sphagnum,
to think of in my deprivation.

i held my breath, for years,
beneath the umber patina
of the pool. my volute hair,
a water-torch training
for what never, what maybe.

for you, plaster of paris
to be crazed, that previously
let you move, just enough.
you waded to the waist
and gave me a lift in your car;
as i drained ribbons of blue,
you helped me with the fly.

um. my new language of um.

screaming until i scream, the day
has yes as a con=
fermation says to night's light like
her eyes to his through mine.

oh

"i've a carpet and an arm. i've a
faucet and a yard. i've ta sleep
in not so long."

oh

and a walrus on hour ought
to sleep withly forever. or nothing
else has cast a silence more than

oh

i see the coming of wonder, only
after all of us have.

oh.

where

his work lies
above
down
with a
cigarette...

The almost-martyr.

I watch myself make the slightest of changes as I
travel back and forth from home; subtle as a
slight exhalation, a slow expelling of breath
helps me to shed a snakeskin layer of myself,
wriggle out of that extra defense and allow
my naked skin to breathe comfortably.
I rotate my head slowly, lit
hangs from my neck
resting between shoulder blades;
a brazen display of weakness;
presentation of a throat, the tender new skin
offered up. My head hangs
only to rise again;
to look upon the world
through lidded eyes.

swollen pond

i went a-skating last spring time in the old swollen pond when the rain was melting the antifreeze and the ponies crawed the morning to a morning where i was a-skating.

that was nice. said a little toothied man on the end of my foot. he said hello to the winter on that day and drowned in the muck and puke until i lent him my hand and returned a.... what was a favor for something?

he hadn't remembered and neither did i attempt to figure out the answer for--you see--we were witnessing the inevitable between us on that cold spring evening.

the air was clear for the first time in an anytime and no longer did we have to shed our rain coats for feeling. it was time--now--to search for something beyond our blueblack toes that burned away a fire.

it was time to climb abroad. to whistle the mountains until they stood prone and stepped us to the western most hemisphere of our expenses. when time anewed the night before and a gallop from her mare.

i want to breath another's air, he said to me as we crossed the swollen sea. i want to hear another's care. and i let him as i told him. old friend, roll aboard; and look on toward...

as a cheer. meaning: not as rah rah with a pom pom but a rah rah with a bee-eer. buzz.

i will not write no more. he said
and the people, sad, were mostly angry
until, for them, he scribbled pictures,
to witch they snickered until she wet her lips
and pulled away his nickers.

this was when i,
left, to solitude
my mind made crafts a knowledge.

and spent my ancestry sleeping
in the study of how he told me the frog dye
in sextants was keeping
me from having cancer. my panc-
reas is lonely.

and he, when found to not so olden age,
was put away-way in. deep.

"where do your keeps toy?" asked the tenderfoot "my box." said the greenhorn

the world ate me.
i am a monkey,
i am smarter than you.

ask me a question and
swerve into the ditch. cars
are in the median.

inside the world as well.
because i brought them,
because i was hungry

i would like it "townsize fry'd," please

i am an other's luck for... another's luck. her
luck for her luck was all i was or would've been
had it been for good...

but it wasn't. it
just wasn't and nothing stops too...
not to listen and... why should i not
lock in knockles too,
knock, till killed, he haunts us.

two people can't move for two.
it's written in a boo. kept inside
of a haunted house
on a haunted hill
in a haunted village
where the only noise is old, crickety noise from old men in rocking chairs that chew their lips until a fester drips to their shirts, their pants, an old floor above where they buried their grandmother and her mother and her grandaughter and her daughter.

and. i'll never live to see my babies. four-eyed and foolish, banging their swollen heads
on a concrete wall
in a concrete city
where the only noise cold. and an old man cricks across the mississippi looking for a craw-dad.

"craw craw" that's what my dad used to say when, late at night, i could hear him finishing off my mom. i love my baby
brother.

go go go to yours. yours is yours for your hours.

i'd like the cities too
never bees, buzzing our
cat's trophy; it was she
--one--on alone
from a bay, winking
to away the city

the bicycle

the bicycle is broken. I and she
deflate the tires and chip away the paint
with two metallic tools and iron nails.
like butcher’s belts around a lame horse leg,
we squeeze, we knock the handlebars to glue.

yaoza

chomp chomp
the end of the world ate a monkey
toy. the type that says clank clank
clank clank. clank clank. if clank clank
was a miniscule of a moment and a
period LASTED FOREVER.

i hate my menopause.

Racing

Designed to squeeze the arteries,
this problematic stretch of road
around the hills and trees becomes,
with sudden emphasis, a blur
of curbs and pavement stripes.
An airplane flies at lesser speeds,
designed to angle at the road
our truck achieves terminal G's--
avoiding stoplights, the cars
a driver hates to veer around--
the windows flanked with trees, a wind
that pulls the coulds through the foliage;
air is rougher in a country
busheled by acreage and squares.

Box Truck

I turned around and was confused,
more or less, by the disappearance
of a valuable truck, abused
but identified through adherence
to my employer's rules--it rolled
how fast, how slow? While the gas nozzle
that vibrated in my hand tolled
the deep brass baritone rumble,
that now feels misplaced. The trailer
sits innocently sunbathing,
and a giant of a man, bailer
of another life, his arm raising
an alarm for me, with black face,
apologizes. His lips a space apart.

Watering

I built my wall around a house,
a trim garden blooming inside.
And a wife, in a yellow blouse,
that sits beside
the crumpled petals of the peonies.
The ants parade under her feet,
like well trained marching ponies,
their antennas quarrel when they meet.
The summer bends their busy trail,
as water trickles out the hose,
and turbulates some paper seeds that sail
in a puddle, overflowing
with ease beneath a faucet:
and the sparkling nozzle head
she turns at the expense
of dusty beds.

your camera

within your attic, i stumbled upon a trunk. inside, i found, below some
clothes, three polaroid pictures, sitting on the back of a folded poster.
the white edges of the first hid the contents of the second, and
the second, the same to the third, making a rectangle, almost perfect.

it was you, the first, but a you that i did not recognize. the cheeks were
much stronger, the lips, fuller. you always wore a lot of makeup.
i angled the picture, and it caught the fading twilight, spreading upon
an off-center shot of your face, the u of mute blurred across the stereo.
your hair was in curls, reminding me of that halloween years ago,
you, dressed as monroe, and me, dressed as an older JFK.
we rooted through thrift stores that fall, looking for our ideal
black suit, white dress, finding only the perfect pearl earrings.

later, as i was walking home, i saw a young blonde woman
on the street. reminded me of you, i smiled and reached in my pocket.
twilight became smeared rouge and i turned. comparing the picture
to her hair becoming orange in the evening fading to night.
i squinted, staring at the image. it was you, but a you with longer hair
and less wrinkles, pursed lips, and warm features, freckles
with the picture in my hands, i watched for details, your face
off center, the angle, your lips. you wore more makeup then.

i set the other within the folds of my bedding, and i stared. this was
not you. it was a woman, yet not; a memory, perhaps, a place, maybe
something forgotten, or nothing at all. i sat upon my bed and sighed,
rolled onto my side, and stared. the picture wrinkled below me, and
i brought it to my face, feeling for imperfections with my hands,
looking with the glare of the table lamp. to my eye, it was unmarked.
the picture of a picture of the poster above my bed: the famous one of
marilyn with blonde curls, red lips, holding down her white dress.

we would lie here in the heat of the summer, talking about ourselves,
and the previous evening, making attempts to piece together the events,
the stares, and the kisses, the silence. and, the entire time, unknown to you,
reflected in the daylight on the poster above my bed, i watched your naked
body squirming to stay covered within the folds of my bedding.

scores of... something ending in a y

this was when my world began to burn into
my own, to lose itself within what it couldn't say
in the minutes between all of the momentous
mind-follied mind-reactions that we pulled that day
from the little-baby baby-thoughts that went
along with us within ourselves, muling our weight,

the end of my world was angerment
it was the moment when i stood and stayed
and stared and saw the my range of wonderment
returned into itself as a mood, candied
and raw, molten and melted, caged with fonder
memories of the other year's yearly memories.

day by day until no longer were there weeks in
our percepts, but ounces of tomorrows laying
in a blackened field of browning mushkins.
they were mushkins they; they were not they
but one, always one, a smallened hint
of adolescence in what will always be a babied
form-thought, held in what--for us--just wasn't

Wheatgrass. The Band.

Begin opening music. Cloud from stage left. Cloud falters, makes a sound like "tssp..." No. That isn't the cloud. That is the gas pipe, something hissing awkwardly from its single valve; but -- it's not gas that's coming out. No! Tiny leaves fly up, meet in the air, and out from them grow the branches of a tree! Cool! A freaking tree -- but what kind is it? It is a hickory brocade -- the very symbol of Wheatgrass! Who is on tour again. Who is putting on their guitars in the back. Who is preparing their arms with juice to play fourteen hours straight UNDERWATER. That is the new big thing I guess. And look now, on the rainbowy hill of old vans -- there they stand. Seven feet of pure cloud.

oh regretlessness! when must you excuse? but this is not to it, but you if you is when my thoughts reflect

understand this now:
we are these noises.

fallen on the gilded, we've
run among the wilderness
of the
two-treed--booted and torn
with the after-mathematics'
insinuated context of our
everyday's associates.

or so they said.

they--those that've
fled, those that
have golden,
that are those that
lost or left to us,
those that folded.

or so i said.

when i was saying what i
was saying about where i
was--without them--staying.

Feeling inhuman/inhumane.

There's desperation in the air,
beading on the windows and making
the curtains flutter.
Some kind of devlish bullshit
two-faced kismet brought me here
and has not left me,
for better or for worse,
with a thin blanket
and a pillow that makes me sneeze.
I kid myself sometimes,
visions of grandeur, of
utopian mornings and days
where the sun barely sets.
I am suspended in time,
between points in life
worth waking up for.

artificial sunlight

I prefer my light from
lamps, ruining my eyes but
warming my home.
Truly the easiest bulbs to
garner results.
I wonder if I sit here long enough
will I flower.

ogre me, ogre he, ogre-ogre-ogres see.

i eat the dew of my
grandmother's grandfather's
family recipe for
pork-chop, onion,
and tomato stew.

i eat it in the morning
with my pill, while i sit and
listen to the hum of a
family of humming birds
from the window sill.

i eat the color of the early
morning with my
breakfast--some milk in
a glass, jellied toast--as
the quiet dulls her.

i eat and i am tired
from this mind that let
itself to wander 'mong
her quiet world that,
quetly, has
turned too old.

Beer Belly

If planning is the map to success,
or if to nap, obligated
by fat couches and lazy cats,
despising mileaus every day
is tiresome attack. Who needs
a hounding when all night the yelps
of artillery across
abandoned immobile train cars--
silence as anticipation
already is a key device
for reaching future goals: attain,
attend, accentuate yourself:
articulate your soul's demands,
unwind by asking, caking life with pray.

A Mother Gardening

While marigolds can entertain,
cats attract longer attention spans.
Age six is rooted in the sand,
where castles and the prince cast shade,
with many thanks. Grilled cheese and pickles
and a baby anarchis is born,
voracious appetites need more
than salad made with flower blossoms.
She always is the last to know
when sun appears and when it sets,
appropriately stable,
adroit without a dash of light--
she peppers the lawn with her steps,
appears as an angel to the pea plants.

SUCCESS

in dollars
on an island
the band of calls
collapsed.

i straddled your plan and
and –

stockpiled the icebox
for the setting sun to come
comes once, to celebration.

said unsaid and said some more

did you hear the children in the lawn. did you?
hear the children in the lawn. now, go to them, now...

why are children in the lawn? why? why? no, i said
why. answer them with a response, don't forget...

i was but a silenced nephew. i was, but
i is also much more. is was taken too.

when we were babes, then. when we
heard away the lawned men...

Weekend

The ever ending rhythm that
is enigmatic for its end.
Energy we've harnessed, released
outdoors is framed with peeling pain,
patios and porches: a perplexed
person walking, a puerile puppy.
We party as if the patrons
had as much to proffer: we prevail
over Saturday--the scratched hours,
suds, the sultry nature of sex,
or jubilation of the sad,
pitiful; what is smart assail.
Green prevails, garnishing our moods,
we we: gregarious and mad charming.

the dry and famulous maple as a tonewood

sometimes i might just be
too much for trying--

or sometimes the light takes two
touches. when you speak "oh

seldom have you seen..."
the maples we've sent

within your workshop...
RANG-RANG-RANG-A

LANG. "de
stroy the
ant" says tree.

and we did... when we were little.
'till they flooded, and we were melt.

it was sad when, then, we slept
away the after before noon,

sitting in the shade of too
few shadows. "the night is

nice like the color of my hand
shake, nice like my tired eyes.

nice like a goodnight.

Log

I have not heard the hollow sounds,
the hot tree rotting, the whole soft trunk,
however humid, heaving, what
has been exhausted here-to-fore--
the brown bark that's been well eaten,
and is bearing soil, birthing weeds.
It folows pure but inbred seed,
of blotched mushrooms--blooming about.
It cannot be in my conceit,
I've see it catharize and keep,
not seductive but concealed and sweet,
it capers to the maggots, but cats
who preen so kittily, don't seem
to peer inside the moldered trunk.

pliers and doors, poised on your surface.

bottled babes, they fable there, and a play, while a
midnight xylophoned to summer-sets, rainbows to the
dew, blooming through three speckles of a reeded dawn.

shoed, in the lawn, we grazed the slept with your dreamies,
surfing on the sounds of your freckle, mouthed in the dreary
of our sight. this was the hour of the tantrumed: for it boiled

on the soil of your patterned slack, suckles creviced our
spilt; and we followed rivers to your chest, all no-more-noised
and sick as the rivered morning bloomed to you a tune.

three.

Amidst the mess of sleep and sweat I am beginning
to understand there is no quiet here.
The whispering of windowsills,
hums mmms ahhhs murmur lights;
gentle electric ostinato to my breathing.
Slow, helpless breath
and eyes that focus too long
on smooth surfaces
that leave no room for shadow.

EMULSION

bent-kneed sirens perch on the immersed rock
in red bathing suits. the crust is smooth
beneath them. their blonde hair
does not wave to the sea. they are not
worried. the women,
in white suits, wield knives.
they are beneath the rock
gouging crevices in arcs.
ropes tied around their midsections
are fixed to wooden buckets nodding on the surface.
their legs scissor-split, their black goggles
smeared in sea-salt.
the women will never reach the sirens.
will never crack the foam nor
best the scalloped shelf cups
only scrape from the bed polyps swollen
and secreting adoration.

THE HANDS OF THE BARGEMAN'S

The hands of the bargeman’s
hands inside my hands –
We are moving through an ancient
table of contents. Out of our heads

comes the now-hoof, the now-hoof stamping
always from the front of our heads.

The bargeman watches my
sideways anthology
digging out from the skull that I carry.

It is a formidable sight:
the eye-socket and knee cap
wanting like below-grass-moles to meet.

I am a little afraid. If I touch
the antler, then I am the antler,
twice as long as it even, but I’m also
just the antler’s dream.

Out of the back of our knees
the bargeman wimples
his glowing ropes onto this present time’s slush.

There is a beaver swimming beneath us.
Compilations of our lives
reflect in the cedar branches he dives for,
toothing his dam with the rudder’s timed creak.

Damn, I think. Even though I’m
the hero, the story still’s going
to say that I die.

We look down. The oar-handle
in our hands -- between my fingers --
rings with the threshold of its
not even being.

two

stare.
stare.
stare.
don't worry she said
we are under an overhang
so your new jacket is okay
turn.
when did it start raining

coffee table; sheeted; (rewrite)

coffee table; sheeted.

i don't believe in seeing sleep. and i
don't think it's something that we need...
as these, the shoed--the is, in midnight-run, the
fumble caught her ankled stump, while

meow meow--the table kittied noises.

oh table, scream so loud; meet eye, and sheet
beleaves: to keep me your eyes that key that be; while,
we, angered, lip to silent the linening white--with

a moo moo from you, tripped across the room.

and lone, to noise, i metronomed away, while,
all keyed in the streets, from her, from you, 'till

boom boom--some children mound a boom. these

steepled children sound themselves a muse.

Linguistics

I have come to understand, or
created understanding to cope with
shrieking howls of some half-formed language and
blood-red scrawls that assault my senses.

Direct translation is impossible for
those who speak it don't know what they're saying.

It is a dialect of creeping dread.
ancient, (un)natural.

Whispers of worry, grunts of confusion, shouts of fear,
Cacophony of terror.

It is as an Alpha wolf,
well-fed, expert hunter who,
for the first time,
finds himself alone and feeble, starving and scared.

A rumbling noise he has never made burns through his throat,
bursting out behind clenched teeth and shivering lips.
The sound and feel of it scares him
as much as the circumstances that cause him to make it.

Our tongues move strange and vocal cords left frayed.
Our bodies feel alien and numb.

I have come to understand these things a herald of a new age.
The desperate new/old language of our blood.

max is a mill man working on a hand stand.

one night in the early evening
light--the light-dark blue,
three children spread their lips--
while, solar bound, on the roots
of a yes, a mule screams too slowly:

"you are alone with the
mirrors of leers from your
cowered asymmetry"

and, echo, it echoes in the room-
world, and they stay and sit to watch the words
curl spirals, new and fruitful sound-whirls, till
the tactiles, no longer tactile, filled
till...


...the three children refused
to stare, and chose, instead to sleep
away the maximals.

one.

sharp smiles feels like a kick in the eyes,
and inhaling,
inhaling.
breathless pause before
pulling -

away now for rest and renewal.

chomp chomp

noise in the hair,
rising while

tyrannosaurus rex rides a spaceship,
lies real sly and drools

when a baby comes to lick
his eyelip, he stuttered, there, and
twitched a bit.

this was when the
silence fell, when

little baby swelled
and felt the nightswitch

STATIONED AT THE WATCHTOWER WATCHING

Tonight we are tuning the watchtower’s staircase
to a certain song of the sparrow…

a beacon fire inside its gullet…

its nest a heliotrope of musk. Don’t
be afraid.

Unthread the horrid whoosh of panic…

behind you, a dusky light-box swings
from the deer’s neck; his hooves
are static flickering.

Our cloaked maneuvers are long. We are
wearing our ropes. It is cold.

Think of Gretie’s garden. How one bucket
swung towards disintegration;

how champagne poured from the birch tree
& it tasted like the stars.

hungry days

Not just inhaling but
seeing smelling eating cool wind warm air
full of yellow glaze.

smells alternately like New York City and a
cheesy amusment park.

We step into nothing before our foot hits
back down again and
I find myself wishing it won't.

just rise, slow
rise above buildings' brick and city's street.

Thinkin' about magic.
Hoping for urban dragons, socialite dryads.
Flashes of energy, bangs and pops as sorcerers
practice in alleyways.

Dreams are easy on life-hungry days
lazily existing on sun-ripened air
floating a little
between

each

step.

felt hoses for a fire

a happy time is a
happy thought:

when hundred million years is terrored, held;

when four or fourteen children melt.

when muses blink and stick a sale

or, now, with sleep, i smelle and talk

while melted children, screaming,
smelt.

rain rain go away come back...

a blue
jay whip-poor wilts.

ouchsplash
ouchouch
ouchsplash
ouchsplash
ouchouch
splashsplashouch

a blues
man sits and wails.

i like birds; you like whirls.

mornings swullen in their cool. the morning
left a mind a-living in the sunlight.

here, i close my door and
and make my pictures leg a walk

of unkempt blackness in
smooth wet plastic

chalk.

color crayons dropped from my
hands, and landed in the darkest,
bland and care-all body caulk.

swullen mornings lost in
leftturns--black night turns that leave you
yearning for the spider hand across your eye,
the spider hand, killing light, the light, the night, oh

where is twilight,
swullen

at my door.

languid. the liquid where i've hid.

monsters on the knoll have hangers in their hands
they're hunched; fingers and knots and warts
a-ringing in the afternoon; a-ring a-ring, they ring and ring.

monsters flying kites, and flashing teeth--too bright--too
white.

i sleep the morning of a night,

manufracture! hear the gears a-turning... turning...

never neighbor, leave me to
labor on my stool, leave me to
slink and sleep to my story.

a man at a microphone. a tie
on the stage. a sleep in his eye,
so bowed and so stale.

the wind on my face. the wind
at my back. i'm running away
to join my sweet lass.

LISTENING TO THE MANDOLIN ON OUR PORCH

Wait. Stop playing the mandolin for a second –
Do you hear that owl’s note rising from the
sunken garden? I wanted to touch that owl
behind the castellated Gothic style house, but
you were not with me, and you had the owl-
touching gloves. The air, all around, was
geometric with rhododendrons. Think about
what it would look like from inside an
armadillo’s clear shingling…Alright give me
the mandolin for a second; listen to this song:
Out past the barracks, where it always smells like
waffles, a basset hound empties his lungs and
bladder in the hummock. What does this feel
like, all this calm? Being clothed in a suit-coat
of devotion so fully, I begin to soak inside my
own twin.

motive

through windswept ambition, we've left
the lily-pads of our past to shine
as beacons in-in-finite sludge.