FORTUNE COOKIE

Words still speak out
from the bones of the deceased;

our forefathers are forever smitten—
coffee splattered onto my eye-glasses,

if only my camera lens could see this clearly,
I mean, before it happened.

My fortune cookie had already split
before I found the little paper inside.

It says, “YOU WILL TRAVEL FAR AND WIDE.”

I ripped out a photograph of George Washington’s head
& on the back it says, “MY FOLKY VALENTINE.”

Fortunes don’t always come easy,
but it’s better when the cookie has burst its own shell

to reveal the impossible fortune
before the unfortunate occurs. 

FOG

She said, “Come! Look at the fog down the street...”
    From the window
I looked out with her, as the fog hovered
    like phantoms, pillars of icy air,
& the rain poured, washing the brain-drain of Spring
    into gutters—
Phalanx, physique of the earth,
    concrete of the day
like being interrupted while writing a poem—
    it seems dyed in the wool—

Forever a silk-spot in my heart, like bone
    not yet ossified over a membrane
that gives rise to it. The fog soothes—
    vehicles’ headlights, like orbs;
faintly luminous
    vaporous glows
throbbing through the threshold—
   
On the ceiling is a gray moth
    that landed on me the day before,
landing on my shirt where my heart would be,
    directionless, yet free upon the
lull of the cosmos,

my heart now beating on the ceiling
    with a moth that has its wings outstretched
like a continent—
    the inner-harmony keeps the earth spinning.
Soon, the sound of silence with soothe;
    the noise of the world will have been pruned by persuasion.
The physiognomy of affection,
    with its enchanting phonetics
& again I looked out of the window
    as the nimbus hovered
like peppery blankets of swarming gnats
    the afternoon before.
Perhaps this is what it is like
    when birds fly out of their color.

MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS

I chased my pulse home, half-heartedly,
after magic turned me to a sappy tear-rag.
The die spun, plummeted from the crest.

A necromancer, ice-old Reaper-like,
is a destiny that some strive to seek,
a voice of magical roseleaf-like

softness, like a Paperman’s inky fingers,
pores full of life-giving word-spinning,
like Death photographing Life

through a black puddle, reflecting
sheepish wanderings. Magic
makes fruit bats turn to blood.

Magic makes Polkinghorne
stop the finger-pointing.
Magic will make one’s betrothed

turn into a trapeze artist.
If that person is already a trapeze artist,
welcome to a world of The Intoxicated Oz.

Please refrain from the obvious retort:
to have faith & to feel no shame over
checking out other people. That’s magic.

It’s a Marketplace out there, with coupons
& promotions piled up in your lap. Laughter
just turned to a dreaded ogre,

organ of brass to spill out of my tear ducts,
a minor trigger for a fearless spirit of inquiry
passed over into the eternal world.

A great shadow in the public eye
where nutcases like myself have hit the ground
running, with flamboyant eye.

Magic is full of holes; a quiver
of expectation, your nervous twitch
before forcing down falcon eggs.

Bias, bitten. The logical part of one’s brain
wants to breed a new warlord,
while the other part of one’s brain is all blood & tears.

What is magic without tears?
Sign up now if you want to be in Gnomer Territory.
Sign up now if you want to have your leg pulled

in a non-joking way. It is impossible for
The Privilege to be “all mine,”
but if it is magic that you are after, come back

from youthfully running away to a (dead?) sea,
& allow the caged bird of your heart
to sing what caged birds dream.

HOURS

                                  i.
 

                        For
hours                     the hours
seem to exist
            barefoot

            into a black desert night

            The night before

made a special fuss over me

peered deeply into my spellbound face & said . . .

Who is equal to the Ancients?
                                

                                  ii. 


Squeamish        night-life        all-day       
night-life eyes blazing into the eye of the starry skies
as they blaze back        twinkling
the way that the energy of the ecosystem flows
as if like reveries            spirits of mountains

The cedar-scented nature-fingers
offer me my own sacred mountain

Why do I remain frustrated?
like backpackers looking down at torn maps
like sitting down into a seatless seat

I could run slap-across that river
that glistens as if spread with thick blankets
of diamonds

                          To savage the air
smoking from the volcanoes
            of our enchanted lore

I ran across that body of water
as if I were wearing Pete Rose’s cleats



                                 iii.


Negativity can poison the Brave
the Brain       I sit freely casting my own hue

into the day      air so Grecian it remains in the
corners of my eyes        the hours pass   
the interminable hours pass      leaving no witnesses    
                no witnesses 
 
except the hummocks of scattered crystal cataracts
of light that shines upon the parachute of the future
Existing within the hourglass        Realizing

is part of the process     adjust the weather
I prefer altered dimensions      Inside of the buckeye
I am pale as a corpse      breathing as the moon breathes

YOU CANNOT TRUST WHAT YOU SEE OR HEAR

We keep butting up against bodily autonomy:
what is it like to have breathing breasts,
what is it like to see girl-gang-focused violence.

My mind ends up blocking them out
because I grew up in an area where bare breasts
rejuvenated a woman’s revolution

in a small, southern town of the eccentric norms,
where people are more accepting of disfunctionality
& ridiculous lifestyle choices, yet I still cannot

get behind the three-piece suit
even if I were Ken-like, so oddly imperfect
that perfection becomes blemished by the privilege

of categorizing a particular grim back-story
dealing with the sacred temple: our lighted Antiquitiu
like a fragile photographer or filmmaker

shooting inside of my ribcage, outside,
bone-to-bone, like adding adjectives to my body; 
I tilt the compass, adjusting the gyroscope

the way that the spinning mental-eye of the
Spermaceti Whale considers the shore-line
as being far, too far out-of-reach, as if

what is shallow is full of razor-sharp teeth,
shallowness loosening its pull with uncertain guesses
combing cartilaginous fishes from stormy waves.

I debunk books of conjecturing. Alarmed, scars
left within, like white elephants’ tusks scratching
the chalking residue inside your

inevitable vanishing sinews. I am virtually detached
from all of reality, whatever that is—even when I
close my eyes to dream, the belly-button of reverie

closes its gap; ink dries. Last night, in a dream,
she said, “your gray sweater is beautiful”—
That was the Mother Voice of the Dream

-Language that knows no fate. I feel lighter
upon awakening. What you see or hear could force
palaces to demolish. I will tell you a secret,

which will no longer be a secret—It is this:
a tiny part of the Universe morphed into my body
so that I could write poems, not only of ethereality,

but of fantasy fandom—Alicorns neutralizing poisons?—
whatever mysterious light had entered, entered me
with an unctuous mass, as if my body were wholly free

from bones, as if I were a gemstone outliving decay,
outliving the groin-pull of modernity, wagering
the existence with pounds of vanishable Undoing.

There is nothing to see, nothing to hear. Listen to me
when I tell you that I have fallen through the lens of my
camera, where I now dance upon the cornea of Infinity.

CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

I’m on a perpetual oneiric-allegorical journey,
clearly visible on the faces of those that care about me.
Adopting the artifice. My heart-paint is splatterable.

I give rise to the—Ha!—Un-fath-o-mable: A profusely
topsy-turvy Wonderland—dealing with exaggerated plots,
that is Modernity: obnoxious & kicking up dirt.

I divorce it & live in the past. Everything is better
with sparkles, so I harass future rumors.
The Post-Modern Microphone that I speak through,

with a paralyzed mouth, makes the devil cry
with a vaudeville-like humor; that restrainable beast.
My voice cracks at the podium of Modernity,

where all of the Prince Charmings are dead & gone.
I have made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin. That is
my only emotional response, non-profit & all,

like a drunken Mall Santa, tongue-tied, cartoonish,
making him seem less spooky to children that already live
within the dramatic illusion of their inner-Disneylands.

Why haven’t I yet been abducted by an alien light-ray?
My Jetson-car is the artisan of my memory-screen—
my mind, this mindlessness! this unconscious wrath!

POEM

May-wind, cold breeze & I drink down this acidic
blueberry juice; can you feel the flow of filth
in the streets’ beating? It was not in my mind

to pick the scraggly pine from the dewy ground,
put it flush to my nose & wait as the rabbit
hopped across my path, eyeing me, like a sniper

hiding in a dusty sandhill. Waiting, for what exactly?
I wait & wait for the TV to blank-out; preachers
selling “healing oils”—where is my outlet to escape

the backwardness of this planet? Odd weight, way
of putting things, the Almighty has left the sanctuary,
like a flustered minster that, at one moment, warns

a young woman to steer clear of “evil men,” who later
sees her leaving &, like a hunter’s spirit, a notorious
wasp that throbs & bounces from window-to-window,

widow-to-widow, waits with pitchfork in-hand,
wanting to plow her land, as he calls to her
like the mating-sounds of a rooster, running around

like a decapitated chicken. The birds will fly on,
the fish will swim on, & the hypocrites will
be as the wolves, flagging you down, flipping you

the bird after Sunday morning, turning your sons
& daughters into Garbage Pail Kids without all of
the fun; ratty snail-slime, which their dental records

will confirm. Going for the throat. Society is far more polite
when you flip through a comic book. There are
no bad omens. A plump, brilliant red cardinal

lands on the telephone pole above me. I’m the worm
that it has yet to see. I keep expecting to vanish
like exploding gun-powder smoke, Fate will gulp

me down; I walk in the garden, waiting for a snake
to pluck me away, as the squirrels on the edge of
limbs bicker at me furiously, like an old couple.

SMALL WORLD

I am forthright, forthcoming—my admission is this:

                    When I first saw you,
Beauty itself must have inherited your traits.
When I admit things to this extent, I feel that my body
becomes an anxious, nervous wreath twined from a gutted fish,
scales pierced into my solar plexus, as if inching closer to nearing
my finality, as if on the cusp of being impaled.

                    Why should atrocities be applied
to kindness & genuinity? Why should one be tensed to the limit?
What shall one “lose” in this “brutal” honesty?
                   
                    I viewed the Birth of Venus—
I saw you there. Who constructed the chorus of that night
that we first met? To blush by the mere thought of it.
            Was I re-living history? Was that I
standing from afar,
looking upon the beautiful Orphan Girl at the cemetery?
Look closely, I am there. That is no grievance.
Oh, but what grief there is
in knowing that the songbirds’ songs
will be muted in death, or will they?
Their deaths are like new beginnings inside of me,
so the birds live on singing within me,
which is what this poem must be.          Or, was I looking upon
the Young Woman Of Pompeii On A Terrace,
or the rosy blooms of L’innocence? More fair than
Lady Agnew of 1892, than Hayez’s Reclining Odalisque
or The Meditative One—You must be as the Angel
of Thayer’s creative wand; Dicksee’s Portrait of Elsa; 
Perugino’s Mary Magdalene—what else shall arise now?
                    Perhaps you are Ophelia,
having returned from the wells of a wild network of nerves
in the abdomen of the earth! as I look through this silver glass,
aching like history.

                    You said that you should have been born
in a different time & I told you that I have always felt the same way.
Gustav Mahler must still be awaiting my arrival to join him on a train.
I am not as confident as I may appear, as I may seem. I was once
quite melancholy as what a rotten melon could be culled from such
a thought; a salamander underneath a splitting rock; ragweed to the nose—
my confessions are usually repressions, never to see a page,
nor the light of day, or an air to hear these woven particulars.

                    You said that, while in Europe,
on a cold, wintry night, you stood alone on a train—serene
on that immortal locomotive—hark of melodic, soft snowflakes
falling around you, stars falling, a white hawks’ wing ensemble
in a slow-motion, exquisite dreaming, very still, the landscape
reflected the silence of the humane—how does one catch
that morning train?

                    Did you hear about the Ghost Train
in my hometown? You & I jumped off of the same rock at Sprewell Bluff,
but in a different time. You tell L. & I that you have a brick
that came from out of the wall from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
& you hear that everyone that has taken a brick from that location
has ended up dead, & that you now are afraid that you are going to fall
into that superstitious abyss that you believe is looking back at you,
to pull you into the Reapering darkness. You want to get rid of that
historical brick
              & I want to get rid of this historical frustration,
              this fiendish loneliness
             & my God don’t ever take me seriously,
like some lad in a Nightclub giving gifts to himself—pure stalemate.

I am detached from Logic, apparently; if I were a French poet or artist
would I be more appealing? The idea of something foreign
as more mysterious, what novelties & repertories will you visit again
with your friend?

                    What does The Unknown want from me?
It always comes with a crown of iconic promises,
to seduce & amuse,
but swiftly flees, heartless, soulless, like some troubled troubadour
that cold legends told.

                    I am disguised like thunder;
the weight of the sky is veiled upon what I am made of—
The sky, that is, a starling? I just want a few moments to spare
to be amidst your beauty that has parted from my sight,
but I am trapped like a mouse in a fit of despair,
my eyes still green as emeralds, sleepy like ruby-red,
slippering on boundless oil-slicks—who or what will beckon me
to lift myself from the perspiration of the earth?

                    Some days I feel like I am the head of Holofernes.
What about you? I once knew a girl that was as colorful as a peacock,
but was as violent as a piranha. She was Judith with a sword, my head
she held in her hands, her cold hands, but she wasn’t an enemy, no.
There are times when I am the enemy to myself. I once said that
solitude is a great romance, but I just want to sit with you
maybe where the sun blisters the flowery meadows of Kashmir,
or where the waves kiss the weight of a warm sandscape,
but it could be cold, too, cold as cave-noises. Someone uncloud my mind!

                    I must be too old-fashioned,
like some stylistic concordance, but what is curiosity but satisfaction?
The only security I could provide are in these poems, in sincere love,
& often they seem doomed to starve, as I bite the end of my pen,
sip the last drop of coffee,
look out of the window surprised that it’s now dark
as I feel cat-claws clenched into the soles of my feet.