A Mother

recently slapped her baby
on a jet
after she was kicked.
Up the text
with sleepy icecube-grammar,
tongue-twisted wide-awake--
let the babies kick
the inward stomach!
Combat troops
are exiting Iraq,
painterly-fine
& is this what we
had expected? this
overhanging hum, slum
-bering against our hearts,
sea-crushed debris, queries
for seasons ahead.
Salmonella out
-breaks are like municipals
in the mouth, clung of
discrazed world
in a smeary nightmare;
O stiffened tongues
of a nation, pestilential
discharges are mostly
ungussy. Gusty
winds today, Mexico
under siege is not worse than
Before/Now Photographs
of celebrities.

The Age of Gunpowder

is where the blood spoils, or coils, essential to avoid Waiting Times. 
ATM machines, The World Bank, in spite of their gravities, are
naked on the inside, completely ignoring the queue of the crowd.

All of our noses are bloody, like that of the woman who was ambushed,
as if for "research"--a map of lost secrets throughout the days
more than spring, hungry for too long, "a devil woman" in the scene

with a sense of impetus, in particular, the desire, particularly small colors,
the transformation of coded passwords on the skull. Men, women,
made-up by the ghosts of the same name, afraid to speak.

What is Enforcement but playing with umbrellas & raining upon
the people, slotted as friends, allowing access to the locked doors
of Subpersonalities, the ice cracking, splitting, before exiting, before

the almanac speaks for itself. Gunpowder up-the-head, clutches of
theoretical junkies that bloody the eyes of the youth. I've looked on beauty
for too long without noticing the scarecrow, the properties within,

civilization with necks in the invisible guillotines. What else is non-existent?
Blood spills like rubies down the throats of potential interpretations.
The clear air speaks with clamorous valves. Infinite possibility revised.

Adjacent Flares in a Photograph

To allow my brain to be presented

as adjacent flares in a photograph

I imagined myself

as a ventriloquist doll

speaking like an auctioneer

scanning the audience for takers

but the difficulties

of producing the image in my mind

was not like evoking reaction

but instead was the need to stay silent

allowing the surreal simultaneity

of the non-simultaneous

to be indexical similarities--

sound-&-slideshow extravaganzas,

pigments on paper--

& therefore I have determined how

to make holograms touchable.

I recommend this way of thinking

as if you want to touch the source

of the mistaken perfection

as if to speak of "what is living & what is dead"

joining up with this superimposition,

every wall in the room awakening

with a comparitive daguerreotype

when I spin in the sunlight, waiting & weaving,

interacting with isolation,

perhaps like snapping photographs of dreams--

snippets of them re-told with a lack of chronology.

4 Prose Poems

1.

When it rains, my eyes are aqueducts, or Aqueducks.  I bend a tincan lid with pliars

as if I had a plan, stepping away from the margins again as if this were white space--

to be speaking without speech, to be thinking the unthinkable, to stomp & move, to build

bone-structure as if Kazantzakis was translanting rain within the troposphere, into

what we cannot give in return; splinters underneath the die-stamp, or the cursory of you

half-around the circle of my life, like the bright lights of this city belonging to us in the

corner, Of what severed the sounds, Of what you use to extinguish my fire, blowing

the dust off of a book or the blades of a fan.  You know, don't you, that I'm the noise

of your beaten drum, inescapable, like neurotensin inhibiting the activation of midbrain

serotonergic neurons produced by loud sounds & stresses.  What is this? a sea bird

in a used bird cage, surrounded by salty air.

2.

Turn your back on them for a minute & run, earsplittingly, fragmentally-persistent

& hover from the Karoo or somewhere-air.  The Greatest Show on Earth is packed-to-

the-gills with affection.  The cotton fields have turned to concrete, symbolizing the electricity

of women's voices, frajilia, stinky romance in (is) a spaceship crashing on HAL's

dew-ridden prioperception, in the cobbed psyche' of a pelagic fish there is less-than-20%

drama in the middle of August when you sit inside amidst the A/C & wait for seasonal

ditties & carols to come roaring.  This evening, I thought of putting my finger inside of a

woodpecker's hole, but thought better of it after thinking of whaling vessels that break

international laws & treaties, felt it within the physical body, the process of pulling on

shimmering black satin.  My uncle wants me to purchase every color possible of shower

curtains to use as backdrops for photographs & I'm lost in every color's combination,

mostly at night when I walk underneath the bright boiling moonlight, like Beauty is truth,

truth-beauty—just jump out of your Bentley, let it roll swiftly down the hill, listen for the pow.

My family, I wonder about us, but we are not a pee-with-the-door-open kind of family

unless your metabolism is your icon, or if your rubbish is getting a fair amount of sleep.

Okay, well, it's good to see you.  Thank you for dropping by, and dropping a few lines

since the beginning of time.

3.

I am feeling confident & vulnerable, yet I have become separated from a kind of medium.

I have been hearing a lot of good things lately about pseudo-clever drivel & booby-traps.

She's history.  I mean, voiced opinions, whackjobs that quote Literature just to "show out"

to the greedy elite.  What foolishness, like a Laocöon, or a racoon with delusions of grandeur;

let's admire our strange & wonderful sleeping dreams.  Ingmar Bergman films intoxicated

my "influence" to such an extreme that my psychological symbolic purposes have melted

into a Fruedian-slip that dresses in a slip & slips into the most consolable vignette of when

a voiceover recites an individual mass in my brain.  Why do you want to be a phantom?

When people utter metaphorical quotes, it reminds me of horn-rimmed glasses & Oedipus.

WHOA! Blow my mind, people, like Chicken Soup for the Everythingist, or Grammar Girls'

quick tips about sagging breasts that do not sag when you walk through a cold graveyard.

I am feeling vulnerable & confident, the medium is large & my tongue, before speaking,

has emoticons dancing off of the edge.  This has supreme significance like a suspense

thriller with ambiguity & complexity, romp with glee.  My confidence is soaring to new

heights, thanks to gasoline prices & picking daisies & driving with them in silver-noir

atmospheres.

4.

I do not have a chisled jaw, nor a perfect nose, but I have the interior of a stone balloon.

That pain that you may feel in your fist as it travels up your arm is like a swimmer's wet-suit

ensemble.  Climate is an untouchable tendril, but our solar system is burning like incense.

A Noosphere is incomplete, like cocoa powder extracted & pressed into poofy black ice, or

carbuncles, or irises, opals, or Bristol stones, hard wax & rosin, & this is when Cary Grant

enters the picture with arsenic; the camera-lens is the Glass of Antimony, amethyst of

tralucency.  I miss the trembling sweetness of your voice, no longer a rarity, ear of agile

retirement.  I saw a recent photograph of you, holding a cat while making a strange face

at it, & I thought of The Song of Solomon, the way everything disintegrates, turns to ash,

like the opinions of the world.  I hold in my possession a giant wealth of secrets kept abreast,

sulphur of suspenseful instrumentation.  I would demonstrate their shapes, but it would be

like watching the dissection of a frog.  I am homespun like agitated air molecules, & you

were like the wolf having the advantage of first eyeing a man, before he becomes hoarse

& silent at seeing the wolf first.  There floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion. I feel

a special kinship with the codework of our past language.  Criterion Collection-worthy visuals

with slightly affected sophisticated soundtracks, but only at the conclusion of our time,

only when you became the innovator of cranking up your own jack-in-the-box that erected

out & punched me square in the chin, while saying, "winner, winner, chicken dinner!"

___________________________________________

It is the end of this Age, because the server is nasty.
Distortion is distorted by thoughts to express how
the world is about to change for Floral, like Floral, like kisses

behind a ten-thousand-foot storm that immerses you.
America is now China 2.0. Low-carbon age is a faux.
China's mobile president is a grandpa; this, like classic

dialogue toilets. I feel super, ah, with speech segmentation
as if a woman is veiled by a bold, charming pity of a man,
arousing tolerance to the gesture of glory. What is really

a woman's mood? Artistic conceptions, states virtue,
I don't know, but I like the distinctive charm, that general
broad sea, enough for the imagination. It must be the end

when life on the vagaries is unreal, comes to dominate
the relaxing life of marriage, but a pulse that beats with
general intoxication & refreshing springs of nostalgia.

One must feel facial expression, movement of the heart,
giving a broader audience with more imagination.
All of these bones inside of me. The extra Read-Me signs

in the heartache-utopia of the night that I gave to you.
I cherished the treasures of you, your heart changing
seasons, computed by deviations, the way a bull reacts

not to disappear, & if we look back, what melody has
laid foundations of memory, as if with an alternative location,
ages like a knife, ruthless as if tears could mail our stories

to every refracted mis-communication, every city light,
& the lights of the city are jumping from the top of the turnbuckle.
I suppose I get thunderbolts where I ask for them. Me”–to–“I

ask for a picture of us under the intergrowth” deeper than
steep, cold Ontario, a chasm reading us, the light's fire
assuming attention, like a traveler without communication.

You resembled a quetzal, color of–seeing through you.
I could not map our HAX-speed like a ligament of poems,
but we sweated each summer day after the harsh winter

where we were holographic, & then your "ppsshh" landed
on my eyes, as if calling me an animal—days when I think
I should swallow my voicebox. You spoke negatively of

Ronald Reagan & you said that I was foolish.
Perhaps you were right. Perhaps I should copyright
your quotes, pass the torch to a communist news network

& start singing slightly off-key. You still love me, don't you?
I can feel it like the razor-edge of heat-sweltering days,
& I can hear your love loud & clear like the unmistakable

sound of cicadas in a tree. One fact about me:
the way Seuss constructed a fantasy world is not the way
I live in this world; instead it's like a large garden wagon

full of toddlers pulled by a tractor. A voice calls from inside,
like a pollen basket. You were my nucleus & that was
my downfall, like a bumblebee without the chorus of dawn.

___________________________________________

8.07.10

Fidel Castro, without a cigar-in-mouth,

just made his first official government

appearance in four years, & I think,

Is this an unusual diss? Meanwhile

I'm thinking of new poems, new ideas

like Polafreuds. Retain the retina's fondle,

fiddle fiddling on the radio, light blinds

the devil as he went down to Georgia,

but he plays a serious role in job figures

being a part of the grim economic picture.

I see featured faces: "Barefoot & Pregnant."

Retin A for Retina. There is a mean-looking

little baby in an ad staring through my monitor

as if to say, "I can't believe you don't have life

insurance." This world, full of mystery,

gas-shush-ness, plaque pineapples & squirmy

Icelandic shelter-like off-loading archaic glasses

for iced days makes me feel legally stylistic

yet weathered. Physical populations on faces

here in this town. Illusions do not have to be

illusions if you do not want them to be,

so here I am, beyond all doubt, hoping to sing

but not hoping to be heard. In a cafe at night,

shadows flip & flop, like foretelling the arrival

of strangers, incomprehensible amidst the noir.

________________________________________________________

Heat-engaged summer, like the claustrophobic tenor

within a prison. This is hyperforeignism.

Radiant beings are not always intelligent beings

perched with grandeur like an Alaskan Malamute.

I'm a professional of unprofessionalism. My eyes

tap windowpanes as if with an aikido point-of-view

like 'ñ' in the guise, or a wrong impression.

Friday, again, I'm a cartoon that's darkening

as soon as the child's eyes close completely shut.

Tender melancholy, I spit out shells of sunflower seeds.

If my maleness were on display, it would be

a revolving-door animation, a symbol, the way

a magician snickers before the curtain rises, the way

wind "picks up" making waves ripple. Futuristic Mona Lisa.

Memory, you beast with beats, I remember meeting

G. for the first time--we walked around a town square,

she picked up a dead bluebird & held it in her soft palms,

spreading its wings as my heart effortlessly sighed.

Daily Progression

Daily progression turns to flies in a jar startled by noises.
I think of cutting my hair again but there are too many
intermissions & mental subterraneous eruptions of interruptions.

The other night I dreamt that I had a head full of hair.
I smiled in the mirror caressing my long fern-like locks;
a velocipede into inter-specifics. I felt volatile yet sastified.

Shouldn't Woody Allen be bald by now? I observe dusty particles
in the sunlight like a wide-eyed pony staring at a single rawhide loop.
Sure, I wanted to leap overboard like a paranoid squadron

onto a boggy underground at the chance to fructify my stance
to be a harmless poison in the nuclear fallout root-system of your love.
A formulaic horror opus is every relationship. A deep ant-hill.

I should cut my hair again but scissors & electric razors
are the enemies to a hive of flourishing or unflourishing hair.
My head will soon be as oddly silvery-transparent as moonworts.

What few ears have escaped no place whereby to contract
a reason to enquire the groaning bite of Listening?
Old men & their hairy ears, lavender glaze in The Hearing.

Hoist colors to my eye-ladder, germinate these dreaming pupils!
I move like a sideling to see refractions & go swiftly backward
like a lobster to the glow-worming youth, perhaps when hair

flowed over my forehead. Organs playing within my organs.
No music can cure nostalgia. Instead, the tunes only confirm
the harmonies of memory content to rest in secrecy.

___________________________________________

The poet's veins gives directions to the town--
our muse is alive, the sun is as alive as a
thriving hive this summer; a grip that never loosens.

Beach balls are kicked until they explode,
soon to write on a napkin through the voice of the
Prince of Wales. "A meditation on deep feelings."

Oil on the whales, earthly vomit, mopping sweat
off of my forehead. I took a deep breath
& inhaled a cluster of stars.

If nothing else, we'll encompass every theatrical drama,
flavorful recreations of mystery, like a wedding
that is interrupted by murder.

Never hush, hush, sweet crooning girl, your voice
could reap profits--copy & paste if you agree.
Benefits reaped, like ideas that are turned upside-down.

I'm careful to be seen, like Hyde;
emotional & overwrought like some Ennio Morricone score.
I twist in this chair, the night remains muggy,

mugged-heat simmers like a POW camp.
I never settle like a sea-bird. The air of our era
is as squalid as impure wool. I ruffle the wings of summer.

The silence is broken by whooping & yelling
that I hear coming from the backyard. Again, the neighbors
& their backyard barbeque Broadway plays.

___________________________________________

I'm thinking of bright red tomatoes
as large as boxing gloves. It's how

certain foods hit you in the face, c

louding your mind, but I don't even
like tomatoes. There's a film titled
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

I wonder what it is about, but hav

e no plans to watch it unless the o

pportunity sparks, of course. Why

do tomboys stop being tomboys w

hen their breasts fit into large cup

s? This is not a joker's scripted pa

lette. Liam said that he loves pine

trees. We are both from small tow

ns. He loves the way certain fore

sts in small towns appear mysteri

ous & ominous. We are both from

small towns where bright red tom

atoes are likely grown, where fath

ers raise their sons to think that th

ey should be boxers, where "home
cooking" has more meanings than

food. I should be sleeping tight, bu

t I feel over-anxious, thinking of m

etaphors that would fit into poems

that I may or may not write, or fil

ms that I would love to create wit

h surreal production sets, & who r

eally cares when one scratches on

eself? It always seems to be a pul
p topic. If my father or mother ha

d of been artists, I would have like
ly wound my watches too tightly &

dedicated all of my time to seekin

g the visual acuity of conventional

importances. I am an early mornin
g rush, a batter of sentimental dra
ma, turning the tables, breaking w

aves before breaking the Adirond

ack chairs on the beach in front of

the breaking waves where I will li
kely sit if I ever visit Hawaii. Nev
er keep yourself apart from your r
oots; it will be like trying to do a cr

ossword puzzle with itchy eyes.

___________________________________________

I could light a candle from this lightning,
put out the darkness with a prerequisite.

Few fingers like fishes; this isn't India--
crime-rates, angry nets in oceans,
tender glop rises from the present protesting seas,
gulps swallowed in the circus act of politics.

Who is the boss's boss's boss's boss's boss?

A piece of news that shakes the global milieu,
supervened, bruises thoughts,
mass consciousness like an old jalopy.

Our fortune is bare & before sunrise
a thirsty, hunger-ridden congregation gathers
near Egnatia Hwy in Greece to watch a frog exodus.

"Scientists are perplexed at the bizarre phenomenon."

Rivers run as dry as a dragon's throat
or a magnetized fiancee. Let's change directions.

Should a machine give a resounding goodbye?
Should Jupiter apologize for losing a ring?
like a marriage that flames to an end
that always had a flaccid grip,
like waving to someone that is on horseback
and they wave back with both hands,
then go crashing down like a thundering fib.

Taxed of irresolutions, language borrowing
images from media, planted into the brain
like a fruitless fashion, reflections to disengage
the legs. America, standing in her own alien waters.

The frangible Statue of Liberty becomes a slot machine--
hollowness now embedded with thick boughs of tokens.

___________________________________________

If I could
walk on water,
I would

walk atop
the red carpet
in the Gulf of Mexico.

Buttered haven,
sting-y patterns
in the news

like a lashing
staphylococcus.
I whispered

a "Chinese whisper"
& it was
like a repeat

of nineteen twenty-nine
...the Great Depression.
The eyelids

of America
are swollen--
words limit

the enquiry.
Perhaps I'm on
the right track now.

Days ago,
I thought
of places to visit.

Those double
brushstrokes
are beyond me now.

I commute
to music,
having lived

without noticing
the edge,
never seen,

torn from
obvious severity.
I had an

unerring grasp
of the
unfunctional muscle

that drifted away
like a lazy day,
precipitately cloudy,

as if
I had
obtained

my mother's
hidden
nostalgia

for our
native land.
My goal now

is to
peacefully attack
that part of

the human mind.
The talk of
ushering in

a general
confusion,
like a

ploughed field,
are pajama'd
pejoratives

of splendid comfort,
ablazed in
feudal time

with
little touches
of levitation.

___________________________________________

Language; its butterflies
swiftly gliding like a boxkite.

Words should make us spark
until we bloom into
levitating stars
that meet
the falling stars
before they make themselves

visual.

OF A FLICKERING

Cut a circle out of a shadow.
This is what you did. I must have
imperfected our eclipse when
I reached out to snip it with
dull scissors. I'm all a-drum.
One cannot solve the stalemate now.
I'm greenish-white transparent leaves
in the sunlight. Oh! oh! oh!
Your eyes were like force-grown
potatoes, romanticized in a
famous magazine, overwhelming
my eyes at the same time
within the core of the image.
I'm not at the breakfast table writing this,
I hope you know. I just wanted
to tickle the tip of your nose
for a moment. But I exited my lodgings,
tugging at the curtain of the wizard;
our words now mummified,
chiseled into history, the way our
treks perhaps still make the grass whisper,
the way our footprints still rise
to the surface of the sweet earth.

___________________________________________

This world, as it carries weight
past each large house, each smaller one,
strides to poke new holes through
our centers; with each pin-point
as stiffly, faltering--we see directly into
the density as our shadows pass across
the beautiful earth.

___________________________________________

Capable of moving the room out of place:
portrait of the deconstructionist in salmon-colored light,
who, in the archive, is persistent. Where is
Peter the Roman? What root, what tree, what breath
shall be transformed into the paper that becomes
the Peace Treaty for mid-east turmoil?
May 20 2010: "Iran says they can destroy Israel in week"
& so as it is, another: "Euro in danger: Germans trigger
panic over future of single currency"--
'coincidences' rake through media. The night has come,
but who is ever sleeping? Madmatter, mutter of mothers,
daughters blaze like blizzards, fathers figure into their sons'
vortexes, allowing them to disappear like cosmic matter,
like a body without organs. Control
from the unfolding is this theme; the egg
hatches, out comes the "king of the south"--
Joe Brandt, in '37, a vision of chaos:
the president would have big ears. Was his mouth
also like a flaming sword? Dear globalization, could you speed up?
I have a path to take. This is like a film
that cannot move fast enough, where the cinematographer
must have been sleeping-at-the-camera.
This patchwork needs no shadows,
like post glacial rebound. This language is all too familiar;
let's smear it out, like consciously constructed photo-sets.

___________________________________________

A Comedy.
Involving two lips.
Interpretation

for oriental
native minds.
Even though

you never
appear,
never write,

the substrata
beneath my
expectation

hollows out,
& here,
I aim for hope,

but remain
in the field
of some

Irish epic
where I sit
& watch cattle

being driven out
for slaughter.
Sad, yes,

but suitable,
consequently
focusing on logic,

somewhat lesser
than a
grand narrative.

Parallelism
to summarize
Realism

is dissected
by a vast
encyclopedia;

a Most Wanted
collection
of words

with shark teeth,
wide open,
gaping with emotion,

where my heart
appears through
another door,

where another heart
turns to leave through
my own lively valves

but I stop before
the holographic
bandaids of

The Past, Present
& Future
become altogether

aware of
Themselves,
the way that

we disconnect
from reality
when we sleep,

when we slip
into Reality,
when we become

everything at once.
This is no Comedy.
No. This

is the womb
of defect,
a Drama

for an earthquake,
or as hollow
as 21st century

refridgerators.
Listen. My lips
will not move

unless you
become
a chiselled-out statue.

I hope no one
will interpret
my speech

when you careen
out of control
to stop my

wristwatch
from operating.
Beating inner-electric

thyroid, you are
a fairytale & you
are breaking

the mold.
Your lips,
with a

talkative truth,
speak swordly,
I cannot believe this!

But I do.
With limited lips,
the mind

is drenched.
Heart of holly
-hocks. Grand

-fatherly types,
not clocks, beat
like drums.

I am a
lifelong resident
of indecisive

action, as if
I am securely
trapped inside of

a chambre à
quatre portes;
perfected missteps

involving confetti
& animation.
On the contrary,

this is funk stew,
all of it.
What else

shall occupy
my time
this late in the day

when I am
craving love,
aching for

a moment of risk,
of gamble,
to express

what lips
cannot hold,
transparent

remnants of
assuming
a Longing.

This, perhaps,
a film yet to be
viewed,

a language within
a language,
where the piper

plays a cold tune,
where I
will look for

odd characteristics
& quirks.
I will

find them myself
& the muscles
in my neck

will soften
as the baritone
grows louder,

as the orchestra's
grinding wheel
growls

as tough as
Malcom X's "Y",
encourages

the incidental
echoes of
my flaming hot

pepper-mouth
to burst through
our polarities.

I aim for
a destination.
Where are you

& why are you
not listening to me?
I apologize, I do,

like Plato
to Socrates.
I am your

Mister Potato Man
Poet Laureate,
hotter than

Buenos Aires air.
In another
geographical timeline,

maybe we were
Egyptian & we
ruled the night,

didn't we?
as if we were
comic book characters,

as if we
collected garlic
& lemon

& placed them
in takeout containers.
We sat

in our lavish deserts
watching the camels
graze by.

This was
our Baywatch.
Within the

palinodic garden walls,
we spoke
of childish things

but maintained
their level
of romance

the way a
Victorian hangman
tells his love

the sweetest
goodbyes;
sensitive to the subtle.

___________________________________________

To transmute every thought
with the potentiality of the
human embryo, as if corresponding

in another realm that knows
no confrontation, that diminishes risk
& turns off every tongue

to accomplish new ways of sight,
where shadows violate only themselves,
where we are subconsciously

influenced by the Invaluable,
is the pictorial infusion that is
synchronistically bound with

the absence of the forms of connection
that the cunning eye accepts
with deaf ears.

INHUMAN

i.

On days when I am not human,
my hypothetical portfolio
of optimistic control is buried
in La plaça del Diamant,
but my words become
strategic maneuverings
of language which is itself nothing
but largely united recurring dreams
which has perhaps entered
into my bloodstream
travelling like a finite game
at lightspeeds; pure phosphor dots,
one extravagant cycle
that repeats itself as if
in a moment of liberation.

ii.

On days when you are not human,
haystacks & distant woodlands
burn like bullfighting.

iii.

Elsewhere,
my spring has unfurled,
has been long delayed
but patience is the thing
which carries us
note by note to our
flower-strewn meadows
without ever reaching
a moment of open conflict
that is all equipped
with surrealistic Urphänomen,
but where Interference Patterns
coalesce; where our unruly
childish alien-like doppelgängers
mock our humanity
with a sustained F sharp.

___________________________________________

Through the greenest burgeoning trees

a white van sits in a driveway, the silhouette

of a man's head rushes back & forth like rain

that suddenly begins without a resource,

but today there is embroidered sunlight,

seems brighter, nearly infuriating, animated,--

an unbounded eruption of Damascus.

I could be a volcanologist when I boot up

my computer, or like when G.A. cupped

my head in her hands, pausing at first,

then forcing herself to continue.

April rain, shifted, shaved my face as if to

trace my flesh as if taboo could fit inside

a handbag. My body was created for

holding tightly. This was years ago before

the U.S. sported a dictator; this was before

Seance Specialists were writing speeches

to faux intellectuals for the pleasure of

ringing alarm-bells. A terrorist bites into

a candy-cane, everyone bites their tongues,

their nails. Polydimensionally. I am asking

myself if I could duplicate personal expression

by staining underwear for Art's sake.

Somewhere in a hotel two lovers are sitting

so close together in the lobby that their thighs

are overlapping. I think of this because

an episode of fantastical & realistic memory

is born like a buffalo race that is held in Florence.

The balsamic vinegar of my mind is boiling

like a valedictorian's ego. I dislike negative people.

They are like anthropomorphisms; their mouths

like woodsnakes, their words with deficiencies,

spindles of round-end shingles that look to

twist out spinal-cords. Satire has arrived.

I go to sleep like a Renaissance painting,

the character behind the oils. I miss being

loved. I open my heart like a proverb

& grip the safety gear on the rails

of Answer's undressing.

WHEN I HOLD A CAMERA

i.

Sometimes when I hold a camera
I feel nearly transfixed as if with a spear
turned towards my own everblooming

ii.

Sometimes when I hold a camera
I feel like I am diving into a forgotten sense
of every property of human existence

iii.

Sometimes when I hold a camera
I feel as though I am unbandaging it
from its speechlessness with careful unison

PEEPHOLE

There is a problem with closed quotes tonight
because it feels unethical, fatty & too refined,
like ruby slippers on the wrong feet. I drank the
coffee far too late, it is a shifty deluge upon my
head. "Eat the Whole Beast"---My star is on a
trek, my star has left the vicinity, flipping through
filipinia. How do you feel? She is never happy
unless the thread is thinner than the needle.
Today in the sunlight I felt like John Locke
or either Lewis or Clark or Lewis and Clark,
and in heaven, there is no weight above that
space to fall upon the shoulders---moldy spots
will not be digested, there are no anniversary
celebrations, no greeting cards, no shadows.
I received a bearhug from God & a simulated
assessment task for the entire area of my body.
We are all as small as Insectivora or fat-tailed
mice lemurs. I am child-like, an altruist for the
Great Divine! I attempted cartwheels as a child
but could never muster out an Emerald City
of bedazzlement, but 1-2-3 Redlight! was like
a field drama that always escalated. I attempt
at clearness in my explanation, but it comes out
as background noise, or an adolescent's
schoolyard taunt, yet I have not had the
opportunity to speak as if I were some modern,
funky christening spoon dipped into my heart's
fuming rainbow. I have blurred out every apparition.
My head is a strange balloon's nasal pitch
when popped and let loose. We all want a peephole,
a little extra time, money. We all want a peephole.

___________________________________________

The poem I aim to write never comes to me
but now it will. I have confessed it,
perhaps not as I should,
but as I am able. I sneeze out poems
for Spring's popping color-spread.
This familiar pollen: placid catalogues
of reproduction, regenerative
seasonal coordinates, reminded
of a love that once left me upon
a dusty path in secession, whirlpools
of solitude, thick foggy yellow
in this abbreviated air, my lungs stuffed
like Thanksgiving turkeys, dark yellow
as seasons rotate like cyclic endometrial lining,
turns me into an Asian man.
Why Spring? I could have written
of summer, should write about the future,
not of the now, a Huxley-like protuberance
rising from my fingers, but furtive
and docile. Love, a season of itself,
within itself. I handed her an island
of particular earth, we scented out the voids
of birds and let their harmonies echo
into us until we became crisp sheets of sky,
and above all voices, the song, the whales
we became in our childishly-sly oceanic waves.
Our light, definitive whiteout. Even now
I part it, bending it back; the key to anything
is everything, and everything consumes
a substitute. My poignance is pinpointed
by perhaps what I say, or do not say.
I sneeze. Someone scoop my eyes from
this window. I surf through memory each day
as if opening a penance. I have outsmarted
the ability to flee. I hear a train in the distance.
It arouses my attention. Every day, there is
an odd kind of emotion that sneaks up on me,
like holding out a promise to a machine
by informing it that it will never become an
isolated agent. These forces have recurring
limps; the involuntary muscle-contractions
of thought, of time, of memory, of love lost,
will always be like geysers of the soul
when one has already accepted them as
regulatory.

___________________________________________

Place a crewcut deep into these shadows.
Insert a noise into a noise's lightweight ancestor.
Every day I pull strands of hair from my back
& check to see if my balding head looks the same.
Look at the birds; how romantic they are!
There is an object on the wall that I cannot
make out, looks as if something is pushing through
from the inside. This is like temptation, how it pushes
pulls stretches itself into a dough-like masquerade;
the way flesh thins as it ages but never stops yearning
& aching, like observing how the prettiest women
are non-religious & how in our country the grasslands
seem to have claws & the hallways of our buildings
are filled with familiar spirits that pass through
us, passing through, passing by, as if on the tips
of our tongues. Imagine a day without shadows,
a night that goes on a “Brain-caking hiatus,”
think of a mirror that invests, as if it were some
ruthless pythoness, or think of a lively air that
tangles around lungs, the unflinching of finches,
a reflection that deletes us from its infinite platform.

___________________________________________

Poetry
is behind
still inward
Everything
seen & unseen,--
What is seen,
Hides organ-inners,
behind unpointed
revelances
of these facts.
There is There.
There the air
breathes thinly.
Night comes.
Ear to wonder.
Open it.
Opened up
By it. Pretending
to be voiceless.