WINTER 2009

I rip up another poem, submerge myself
into animal thoughts:

a kitten sitting on a curb that is questioning
the size of the rodent. A bird picking
the teeth of a crocodile.

Just down the road,
there are people on a roof

installing a bright star.
How dumbfounded to be easily monitored.

Cohorts of disproportionate themes,
tentacled cuts in the experience

like glass cages of snakes & lizards;
visitors leaving smudges on the glass.
The horror of seeing a child carrying a gun full of

water,
at first seems as mysterious as
an electroluminescent stage.

Scrubbing the Latin
from my future dream.
A dictionary is a rainbow.

Donne on the mind.
Who said what?
An ævum is taught—songs singing
without specks, singing away
the English rain. Rarely
do I open these curtains—
rarely do I expect the styrofoam plates
to be licked clean by the cats
before re-filling food on top of food—

dry as bones bleached in a desert—
Now, minimal music &
I divert my attention towards the
swaying tree;
the result pulls alleys from my heart,
a “crowning achievement”—
a blindspot synthesized as poetic landscapes;
being outdoors, like a pipistrelle,
reminding me that we are all winter berries—
not like a painting that one becomes bored by—
but rather by the sudden “all-over”-associations defined by
reflective connective tissues &
elements of having flings
without all of the literature or memory involved.
Is this myth-making?

Butting-rams of laminated shock
like seeing a mosh pit at a jazz concert.
Tuck me into your full-Nelson.
I'll be your art product,

like a mannequin,
but first let me walk back in-doors
where my reputation is orthographically presented
like an aging Louis XV

seeking out diamonds for a mistress.
I am accordian-like in your presence;
plumpy jovial stirrings in the winds
like an abandoned building, lungless,
pattering at the heart of corrosion—
breakable like a shivering backbone
in an unlimited winter.
You collect me somewhere
in the dust of your memory.
I wake to see the moon hanging in the sky,
thinking I had seen an angel appear
as an orb

in this room. O how we trouble ourselves
like broken handlebars,

rustic opposition, dreams of flying
through the loopholes of our distance.

As winter arrives
the cemetery has the sheen
of a carnivore's mouth,

opened wide, teeth of an angry football team,
the sudden near-silence of too much noise
surrounding a city.
Our hearts are cities stirred in the mud
of harmonic pipes underground;
echoes design the ground

with lyrical intensity the way our southern "roots"
mostly map the
Infiniteness of direction.