SAFETY

He said, "one of the few places in China
where it's safe to take a deep breath..."
referring to a holy peak of mountains
in Hua Shan, Shaanxi. Safety is a cavity

in every corner of the world, where
sudden destruction encounters those
that chant these padded desires. The dollar
sinks into oblivion, underground Morlocks caw.

Your gold & silver is as useless as braille
without hands. Very nearly we become
scattered leaves in an oracular shrine.
The identical wisdom of elephants is within the trees.

What Oxygen is to an Emergency
is what Safety is to an Unnerving Atmosphere
is what a Subway Map is to the Scene of a Crime.
Stop there. Feel your wrists as they pulsate,

extended beyond limits. Think of your
position, the way an angel may rise above
you; continents shifting out of place.
Think of safety as a sense of urgency.

You keep returning to it, over & over,
like placing one's ear up against the torso
of a cold wall, listening to a bickering dialogue.
Person-to-person uneasiness. Safety coils,

becomes like labyrinthine corridors,
half-hidden scenes, alternate realities. You think,
"There's something schizophrenic about safety,
like a room full of files that are stuck in a limbo."

THE HEART

Unattach the valves from my heart, feel it now as it jumps around in my chest.
Fill the open valves with your luminous vibrations, your regenerative descents
deep within me so that knowing what pumps through my veins is more than
mere blood, but instead is an actual feeling, an etching, a notation, a gateway
of an invisible pressure that could levitate my body near to you as if I were
a passer-by in a dream.

Glasses on a person can only stir the intellect,

therefore the eye parts ways with vision
to commerce with the ancient statues of memory's ruins.

A horsefly bites the leg of a child.
He ponders said event moments later
when the darkness of the sky is illuminated by veiny light
-ning, & therefore he asserts that
eyes are emeralds, pearls, similar gems
for discovering & examining & observing
the windows, walls, shutters;
the trees, innumerable fungi, architecture.

The cup is empty.
How clever to be thirsting, like silence, for the air,
to be eaten as prey
by the pressures & stink of life,
to be "fit" to know better
& spy out the formulaic downfall
before you're cleaned out, left in-place
as the anathematic shell of your former self.