POEM

I’m like a worm moving about
underneath your feet.
What kind of Life is this?

Solitude! Great Solitude!
I could wear upon my head of woe
the wig of King Louis XVI,

or Washington when he would initially think
a deep thoughtful thought,
like a mind glowing;

a wig, then, with a kind of powdered pompousness,
but not like so: more-so like
that of a wig holding in the electricity of the mind:

an upbeat illumination seen only by an Imagination
full of twisted tentacles
as if rung-out like a sloppy, soaked mop.

I’m preserving the hiding places of my longing,
keeping the briar-covered meadows
as an emblem of the inevitable,

the way that “death is hidden in clocks”—
the gravity of a heart that drops
into the stomach, hurrying slowly,

as if as an anchor;
a dead-red crab’s pinching claws;
a bluish wandering narrative:

a language of snow. I'm a living carcass
but I still love you.

AUTUMNAL

Sidewalk, littered with norms of season:
Color guarantees demands! Autumnal counts
of leaves: invalid, immense, at times, absurd.

“Order when you’re ready” rises out of somewhere,
flexes its muscles. It’s so cold that I’m losing
my focus as the sun beats around my brow

like a restless halo-echo. Foreign voices to my
right, inexplicit. A man & woman, the man
doing all of the talking. The woman stares off

into the void, not thinking she’s in Kansas anymore—
a usual lineage, a tired, unconcerned feint of
frozen complacency. Hilarity falls again when

children tug on one another, elbow-nudging
like someone saying something naughty. Birds
fly overhead, close-by: air-poems that I “get”

like old-time backwaters, farmlands, small town
mentalities that act as a kind of Mania in the
thickets & shrubberies of the world.

What grows like vines at the foot of your door
is what you desire most.

MY BRIDE IN WHITE

My bride in white is the moon this night.
White lights of obscurity, like invisible ink;
a radiograph of rhythm. It’s hot in
this place. I could fall into a conversation
becoming a lion’s leap of certainty, but
my nervous system is an outer-space
experience, halting the fiction of my
“somebody” enigma—the emotional stress
of randomness. I, the Pelican in a rapidly
rising wind, conjure hurricanes to the waves
of my soul where daffy eels find doorway
to tempests that are fixed in my thorax.
What’s called to one’s attention abruptly
can become an illness. I burst like a frozen
pipe to the limits of ravishing. Festered
within is a monocular gaze of a small
silvery fish loosened from the hook—
                                                              free.

POEM

Rain through my clownish
ineffectual tangles
where the electric rejects

the hints that escape
from the labyrinth of
my hunch that parted

her arms in the rhapsody portal’d
eternal jungle of your colors
to see if I can zip

the lips of Zarathustra
so as to listen to the
I Love You’s in your silence

that completes all unknown things.

POEM

Here I began to think of your mind as
Latin verse, an infliction to astonish me
with your caw, pecking away at my bones
like sunbeams returning above the horizon
as the moon decomposes in front of us,
a silversmith’s winter; no green & red
lights; Synesthesia, too, experiencing itself,
untarnished in this ivory-backed ghostly aura
to the eye with a furry like a sped-up
windshield-wiper swiping through the overcast
as if in a sea where you are with me,
staining glass together because both of our souls
have opened up with a flora of color that runs together
like an assemblage of multiplicities, becomings,
affects, events. Picturesque outbursts.
Anthropomorphic clouds hover above us
like steel beams: the details are like a careful
elderly person. So be it. Selah, as if praising
our passing of time that goes missing like
the flash in a pan, like losing teeth in dreams
representing empty-handedness, nakedness,
goopy the way we exist in Lifelines of fluidity.

POEM

Life doesn’t pass like a fiction.
It puddles up like new oceans
in facts that seek signs, convictions,
directly to the bone upon the mild flesh—
a Pathos as Frosty as Robert’s
Natural World; an Index glossing
all deaths into darkness. She tells me
that she feels trapped in her body:
If one tells that to just anyone,
they may take you & throw you
out of the window; your spirit
braided to theirs; an encounter of grace,
splattered blood & guts that resembles
dried brownie residue. Sawdust flakes.
Back into the earth goes one’s remains.
Let me keep you, snug, closer, like
an atom bomb frozen to a Japanese sky,
plunging to a purposelessness; a way
of muttering, “What’s really in a Picture?”
The Mind, from the East to the West,
is a wind that never calms.

POEM

I overheard someone say “fingers preceded forks”.
The mouth dictates what a cell phone “hears,”
as if Big Brother is more than mere All Eyes on You,

an origin of cute things that turns bitter cold,
syphilic, like a daunty moon-stroke
with one wing gliding down frantically

like a rotten vampyric stench
that comes to you like a shadow of death
or a plague that bruises with a violent violet tint—

a clawing, a scratching upon a chalkboard
of a vulture’s liberty, the way that a paleness
can be both beautiful & uneasy.

Midnight, a hush falls through wounds of gray.
My ears hear the unsayable—amazing, amazing!—
the way clarity of attraction walks by;

the way one can refer to death & then think of
all-things-heavenly. It’s no longer October.
The ghosts are all now in Forgiving Mode.

It’s November & unseasonably warm
like a hot avocado salad stirred up by a hot glue gun,
stuck to the belly like a man’s senses

when a leggy woman walks by wearing
blue jean shorts that may as well not be on her body.
Caricature rashes are exploiting my Persona.

I’m a pretender, stepping free from the plateau’s toes
to no true substance, floating inside of my own body
as if my spirit were conscious of my own soul-thoughts

re-considering what spacious emptiness loosens the gills
& quiets the mind like a disabled telephone wire.

11-5-14

Bare winter trees
as if looking through a fractal telescope.
A belly-button inverted to reveal
the innards of an astronomical digital simulation.

Holographic are my desires.
The constellation of Today is like the sky:
partly cloudy and threatening.
My eyes are the two O’s in Orion.

If you could see me like I am right now,
just think of reaching out to pick up a butterfly—
an inexplicit emotion like a weightless ballerina
spinning upon the choreographed features

of a prehistoric pleasure
dropping from the heavens like a heaving
heaviness.