________________________________________

Belonging to a picture of noun-effacements        Wanting renaissance signage

in the history’s blacken soil         Itching-ear’d dog-ear’d ’’evangelists‘‘
in blue movies            Syntaxes of space with excesses           lists
                                                       (worm-eaten anxieties)

                Something surefire distorted in the bearingness of Being
Difficulty admires the crowded O’s of a hole’s loose information   

I dream whole suns of mathematics in the sums of Earth’s transit      Hassling

with one-sided conversations    is like
       a frustrated hushed-up hush-puppy-eye’d Vice President        Death
is a silent breath: inhaling asbestos dust that flogs the air-passages

       My Autobiography will be understood only in multiple assessments
An open tribute to heighten the echo of my Timeline’s thick fixated alphabet

Go on    lead me to the pretty red ribbon-tied box where a bomb
audaciously awaits my arrival the way I’ve waited for your light
to decrease me            Transport me back to the arc
of the rainbow             Look at me the way love looks at me

like eyes moving quickly over herringbone          A sequence of appearances           
threadbare            Bare but not nearly naked enough
like the universe’s body as a bear
                            becoming as obsolete as a speck of fur-dust

____________________________________________

I recall the highway

when I’m lonely.

The two lines in the middle

are you & I

breaking off into

unrefined perforations.

I watch as the lines disappear

in the rain puddles

as I repeat a line

that you wrote to me

in your final letter:

I will use your love for me

to love better.

Forgetting you

would be the death of me.

_____________________________________________

We met for the first time.
Then, the horizon was wholly changed.

Holy. Re-arranged.
Not only externally, but deeper within me.

Now, my perceptions have changed:
I see clearly in every direction;

my vision having become panoramic...

ghosted-out.

I am unable to see myself in the mirror
because I have become the mirror.

DISPLACED PLACEMENTS

One must submit one’s head, flashing aflame.
A box of matches tucked away;
     just one of them is exceedingly brilliant.

Today’s daylight is used differently
      so there are absolutely no real vampires left.

I should be human if I could see it well.
Red Riding in the heart.
Slightly more satisfying than finding a shoreline.

Someone must have given birth to these interceptions.

I’m a camera in a furnace.
I’ve been trying to explain color to a dent in the sun.
I write at the pulse-points of light
     when I inhale the world, as if I should be in an exhibition
     at sea on a moonless night
     becoming a piece of the atmosphere.

There should be a Global Takeover by Ghosts.

One must have eyes like yesterday:
     & out of a black hole, the mind. 

Is it enough to be outweighed
by one’s own thoughts
at this strange hour of early morning
when the golden rays
of sunlight bursts through
these fogged bodiless windows?

The body burns. Light hits my physique
as if I were a gelatin emulsion
inside of the camera
giving life to visual speech;

burned as if pressed into a realm
where it is suggestive of dreams,
rubbing me out as if my grandmother’s fingers
were still over-working the sewing-machine.

A tell-tale chill in the heavy-lidded air,
torn into discontentedness,
macerating my image,
mismatching me with a different dimension.

I must resemble waves lapping up a shore
in a clear air. An air
where a cross on a Cathedral
was torn apart by war.

To feel more-than-alive in your system,
infused with exotic senses, fruit trees
with senses, subtle blends of senselessness
in a half-acre with flowers
that fold upon one another’s color,
like multiple exposures.

I spin, without backflipping, impossible,
in my own orbit, a collective rage
& scapegoating fury dials in the sinking sun.

I am an old friend of Clark Kent’s father, & admitting it
as if my youth will never fade away,
as if it is mixed with water lilies, mums with pears,
apples, a glorious fragrance—
clean historical precedents underneath our feet;

the rocks below in a string of untimely
eruptions. E Pluribus Unum-like consciousness,
gold-backed currency. What do these visions mean? 

“Your system may be at risk”
 
Fragile as spider’s silk,
architecture of clay vessels mistaken as jellyfish-like.
Living there by the sea. Silvery-pale, at first,

nearly Bermuda-invisible;
now, a multicolored light of sunset, then
the moon dragging me to an undertow, egg
-shell soft, fragile

as trimming stems; a faint outline of a whole
peninsula of crystal grasses, glasses;
eyes of fireflies facing my face
in a mirror of the whole mind.

Anything can look beautiful
if you squint enough.

If all of my thoughts are like films,—
which are like filtered memories,—
someone must be doctoring the footage
& every dream that I have is a representation
of a whistleblower.

What is left to say that has never been said?
Everyone’s silence is the only originality left.
It’s like squeezing the hands of yourself
as a corpse, still with an unceasing
star-burning inner-stirring.

____________________________________________

The accuser brings spoonfuls
of lie licorice wasps-wisps,
shipwrecked hips.

I am aware of my roots,
but lately some kind of
Anonymousness Something

with moose antlers
like fingers has plucked them
from my bones.

I change my garments
with the seasons; I don’t wipe
the cat-hair

from my jacket any longer:
decorum for whom?
an ear of corn or a can-of-corn?

Gravity falls
in love too
with the backside of a rocket’s

firehorn spore.
My concerns are
worn out from a world’s expectations

that have become
like short-hand
on the long-faced writer’s

jagged adjective grunting,
which is like seeing ghosts
only out of visual monotony. 

SUMMER NIGHT

I walked around a cul-de-sac last night—
MUGGY! it mugged me—
sweat pouring down my forehead & back

& all over my nocturnal body;
mosquitoes still out after midnight;
a moth landing on the moon, an architect!

gutting the light, like shimmering
cut-glass surfaces that sing a kind of vanilla
of celestial honey from the windpipes.

CONSIDER THE RADIANCE

It is as if the “ygathering gnarlybird”
was the dream in my disorderly brain
last night; a stand-in reality-breaker,

á la some Trojan behemoth, sucking
chromatics from bags of abodes in
the image of glassy gravity.

POEM

Hardly any artists or art-lovers in my family,
so encouragement for art was (and still is)
like a broken mirror; the cracks of it crumble

& I’m still peeling shards away from my body.
I call mercy. Mercy always answers with a bit of
buffoonery. I give truce to those broken reflections,

as if I should give possession to what accepts me,
or what is acceptable with exquisiteness
that shows promise amidst hopelessness,

regardless if it seems like a crumbled direction;
a street full of sinkholes, airfields full of toxins,
giggles in the gut that begs for retreat, or

a fairytale that echoes in the woods
as I pass them by one night as brown beetles
flip and turn, in swarms, on the street,

as if some invisible torrent depresses their wings,
their bodies chanced to meet with some plague-like
Undefiance; superhorse-like rage

juices the jugular; to swallow the unswallowable
picturesque humidity, at the expense of walking around
during the slippery night, rain falling

as if to mean something else than mere falling,
to hear myself speaking in my mind’s tongue,
as if walking around in circles through neighborhoods, or

down dark highways, means to pull up phenomenal roots
of newness for what’s sake?
Headlights in the distance, anatomy of pearls.

I cut a glance into a yard; the house’s side-lights
illuminating a group of bright-colored tulips that make my
lips curl into pausing rosebuds—

Light fills gaps where darkness’ synapse
travels on a trellis of accumulated relapse.
My uncle always speaks of being in his Comfort Zone.

The wallpaper of the mind, of the body, of one’s Being,
is a harmony in one’s home that you feel;
it either will claw into you, or massage your nape.

What is it to feel ordinary? What stirred just now
stirred me to the bone. It’s when you
pay more attention to the periphery of things

is when innumerous oceanic particulars vacates
the energy of your surroundings.

[Yesterday-bots to the unassuming normals]

Yesterday-bots to the unassuming normals
lost track but birds are all weather-patterns
right through where we stood before hitting
the wall in the wrong direction, or in short

sentences uttered by streets full of angry people.
I watched videos of Syrian executions & I wept
the populace of a flood that now seems to be
plumping-up the land. I’m in some kind of

irrelevant crawlspace. Your memory cannot
save you (“a glaring deficiency”). I’m not fooled
by the thistles of riddles. When you told me
of your monstrous darkside, Oh snap! I became

a mannequin with real eyeballs, while you
laid there, convinced of my blatant blankness,
voidoid, persona non blogga, primping,
telling me of how you wanted to wear lingerie

(to be a Sphinx of our coming-of-age) to satisfy me
until my body bled out, not of blood, but with
“something bigger,” but it was far too much
for me to handle, so we parted; we parted forever.

POEM

When a Community wants to be mildewy,
when grotesque is replaced by sarcasm,
balks at the rubber on the mound,

ungovernable derailings twang from song
in an anybody’s-guess-kind-of-way, then
ruthless does the day tip one’s hat backwardly,

without a nod. I pass through a store; a girl
with pink hair seems heavy with boredom
& her mother says “OK?” to me, angrily,

after I said “Oh, sorry,” after stepping in their
paths, accidentally. Flash of lightning in the sky
of conglomerate ominousness, sticky as

Oobleck Suess-treks; what piles up higher
than memories? Books that taunt on a bedside table
or on the side of a bed? Is it late October?

Why is it so cold in late-June? The hammer
of globalization, to be concerned about
being spied on is like chewing dirty words

until the lips leave entrails. Sloppy executioners,
treacherous, yet cheerful—the lunatics rage
from the courthouse, singing the volcano “alive,”

waiting for it to immortalize itself into the
History Books. All’s I can say is: Pickily,
well not-so-much, Good has become Bad & Bad

has become Good. My mirror neurons mourn;
I stick out my neck for anyone, like an accidental
canvas. The man across the street blows his nose

with his dirty handkerchief as I stare on, scribbling
down words as my eyes pull redness from a sunset;
my head, longing for a pillow made of gravestones.

PETRICHOR

After the rain, I was told to be
a maker of vases, longing for a sacrilege
to mold into scientific self-pity.

Reigning in the mortal mind,
ciphering strips scripts to abbreviate
the feuilletons in the skull.

It’s possible, one thinks,
that not to succumb to word-happiness
is like some short-lived Commemorative stamp,

born into a world where
“you put my constellation up” (A. Mlinko),
poster-boarded poster boy for

a mouthful of tacks, biblical behemoth
alignment, so beautifully-ancient, I mean.
I meant to say, even when our tiniest conversation

produces pleasure, or agony?, my fingers
tightly clutch like the way the body tends to tense-up
& where I’m found is “just there” like a treetop

or in some stray line of poetry, undefined,
like a clumsy instrument
where all the theories exhaust our lack of admiration.

Does the Zenith have a zenith? A top? Spinning?
I flee like some French fleet, swift feet— 
the parrot-chatter published daily

when I look at myself in the mirror
tells me that I’ve accepted delirium
as the feathery-hide of an uncooked goose.

THE RECURRENT IMAGE OF CELESTIAL RECOGNITION

People surprised
to see the sky
presently descending

as if drowned in water
or the standing aloof
of a halo of indifference,

which attracts
Reiterating D.I.Y. sunlight
which consists

of bathing
in contemplation
the imperceptible things,

or insects in silence,
eating alone.
I spend a lifetime

expecting the unexpected
which always arrives,
unexpectedly, yet

in one brief clumsy
moment during this
wholesome summer

I have turned into
a reckless butterfly
where the arithmetics

of the crickets
is like the microphone
in my spirit.

MY HOLY WATER IS UNHOLY

             Jack Spicer: “A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer...”


My slippery brain has a whipped creamy mind of its own;
there’s not much of a science to it. 

I can predict the future & look like a guy that was
swallowing a beer at the same time.
That is what sparks offenses. 

More results for daily puke & slime
are like the advertent objections of political leaders,
or the science of ordering a frappucino,

which I suppose rings true for the saying that
one should remain close to anything that makes one glad
that one is alive. Squint-eyed,

my poems are like unholy water
that has been sprayed on a demon-possessed individual
that does no good, because holy water is about as real as
Martians

    or Poets

        or:

        What is a Poet? 

I’m here to fill that alien void with graphic scenes of Poets
in pursuit of poems that never come,
to make inroads for departing cats with a twist to it: 

Pavel Tchelitchew had a phobia of mice
so he comes back as one & dares Edgar Poe
to rise from the grave as a cat,

along with Ralph Waldo Emerson
to teach apes to write poems with everyday enchantment. 

First line:

    “O Rose, thou art NOT sick.”  

Why should not what is thus daily achieved on a small scale
be sick on a swing?

Spray the holy water upon the sick & it’s like loading a virus
onto your already-handicapped computer; your body
as ancient as the 14th Century

where Hafiz ran Middle East Oil Companies inside of his pen
that had minor aches & pains.

This Daily Bit of Beauty is just enough good conduct
to make one pass as a “serious person.”   O you
who believe! What do you believe?

The ducks line-up better than the stars,
ding-dong that says What’s wrong with me & why do I keep
doing this to myself? First impressions for human approval: 

Before I go to bed each night
I read all the minutes that pass as I go nowhere—
the end credits make Morpheus say,

“I dreamed a dream, & now that dream
still creeps me out in ways that I can’t articulate.”

I go nowhere because I’m everywhere,
the way my mindless mind is mindlessly minding,
with much strange melodies.

ANTI-PARVENU

I don’t want to say the sayable. The sayable will always be
defiantly abrading, stalking us, forcing us to speak
in allegories.

I’m in no particular societal class; I’m like a model railway train
that puffs along with insect-speed, in the way that certain
baseball players take all of the time in the world when they
come up to the plate after their walk-up music gets an arousal
out of the audience, before the Rally-Snack takes hold. 

He said that the best career move as an artist is to die. 

My Early Mornings are Late Days to most, & the secret to a
Gorgeous Face is, they say, the Eyebrows. 

Imagine my surprise when I truly did seek a way to reverse
Kertészian “emotional atrophying”
& my youth is still pretty; or, a pretty mess,
just like how my Poetics are wind-mill dancing; or,
wrapped in pretzel crust. Crust of sleep, post-midnight. 

Who wants to be my new friend?  I’m tired of being lead on—
it feels so vulgar.  Truce-breakers are a sign of the coming
world order (laughs)—what is a friend but a
Universal Network Language of banal pretending? 

I could simplify it all:  anti-hero is what some ingenuous souls
want to become while their infantilismic orthodoxy
is a kind of illusory bourgeois, smoke-in-the-eyes, clouded sight,
ruined milk poured into an open grave.

SHADOWLESS

I was pushed into a light-scattering chandelier
as a child: the crystal prisms penetrated deep
into my breast-bone, entering the Unseen Me, 

refracting the pulsations of my spirit, & now
my entire body resembles lusters of commixtured
illuminations from every realm of the glowing

universe, where I could shake the Northern Lights
out of their ethereal radar, neutralize a pulsar star
& layer upon layer, peel back the veiled reel of the 

cosmos—revealing a terrestrial mural, an incessant
flux of the habitable Infinite (“the perfect ear”
of the future),—by the mere thought of it.

POEM

I had upchucked
an algorithm where
your body was

a frictive receiver
in that very low pulse
where we had begun

to slowly dissolve
with a rattle of thunder
that could have

cracked open an oyster,
discovering that
the pearl inside

was spinning with
my Identity, spinning
where Infinity & I

were both screaming
like quarrelsome squirrels.
Miracles. A miracle.

I felt the microphone
inside of my body,
inside of my spirit,

accentuate feelings
where memory is a
functionary clock,

a visionary cluck,
shatter-out sound,
& my memories

became holograms
in front of my eyes,
floating like the final

chapter of a book
that lingers & posits
inside of the reader,

that departs in silence,
where you are now
like shadows of strangers.

PARALLEL

I must be interconnected
with oxygenated organs
of generations extending

through nature’s grammar
nature’s gramophone
I’m on that mountain

I call it my escape
& while I stood out in a near
translucent halo-like light

this muggy afternoon
I thought of the year 1985
when the brown wasp

flew dizzyingly by the rose
like a choreographed
interlude as if drunk on

the flower’s enticing aroma
as if blushing the same color
in a Mediterranean air

moments like this make me
freeze in awe yet prepared
to hit the bricks just in case

but MAD I tell you! MAD
with some kind of ecstasy!
what Chesterton would call

the natural elements of nature
as Supernatural Before
that wasp stung the air

with imposing presence
flying past that rose
I had watched the local news

on television report
a brutal crime in Cobb County
With all of those details

fresh in-mind watermelon-fresh
I stood in a still-warm shade
frozen like the wooly mammoth

that Russian scientists
recently found recovering blood
that ran out of the frozen carcass

& I felt an immensity
of sustainable beauty
that no effervescent element

could slant the shifting atoms
of this moment that
impregnates plump-full

my mind my paralleled
reflection of century after century
uplifted energized harmonized

& indeed I thought of 1985
The year that Pete Rose passed
Ty Cobb for most hits all-time

POEM

Blogsites                      are modern moons
                                    I produce latitude
with the proper “ago” of Imagination
                                                   Cold
that made all such skin                not retain division
 were to be                          pale & dim as iron         ironing
board       burning                   is this how you want me
to carry onward?                 Flaming in a
miry multiplex of icy scythe’d plash           splash
 in the throat                    verbose verbiage invalued
She then said                 “Why weren’t we born rich
instead of beautiful?”          “How about both?” I said
in a tune of tone-deafness

Blogsites are modern planets               where can one
purchase a poisonous dart frog in Georgia?  
                   To the moon & beyond
                                        bullet in the eye              Daylight
dismantled              Night’s nappies tear me to shreds
Give me my youth back                   palatable with ribbons
coming out of my wrists                strip away the somber
                                 tinted window over the soul
                                                        strip away the stinking virus
with whatever petty scrutiny you’ll face                    watch
as Aphrodite’s golden girdle comes undone
            This sketchy locale                   this messy planet
those V for Vendetta masks that I see
                            ravenous kindergartners wearing
why am I not on a wooden
fishing boat       unbalanced       feeling wholly liberated?

The sustenance of life
               has been replaced by digital maps & interactive screens
                               of sniffing stray dogs in the meadow
that I can see off in the distance                 where odors are rising
amongst the green boulevards                   where medical benefits
should be where we eat the flowers of the earth
edible violets       calendula       borage     where perplexing demands
disaffection & disunity becomes an amazon of lavender buds
the floral notes of jasmine     lilac   &     rose                
                                 Here I am
in a soft shade
                            toying with the margins of leaves
in a wall of fragrant floral                         biting into fresh fruit
as a small rivulet of glistening juice
                       runs down my chin
not quite dripping off

POEM

Cat pauses when the hand,       —a complexion
entwined with savored attention,       —reaches
to twist the door-knob of the closed door,
longing towards only & of every ratio,
sickly yellowed resolutions, returning
to the original satisfaction of offering my voice
to the wall, presuming that walls record voices,
voices of animals, ancient soundscapes
(silent bootlegs, but listen closely, soft as cotton)—
hands swipe thereupon across the chilled wall—
the horizon is the wall facing me—
behind me, I ask whether the clock wakes
with the sun’s peacock’d possessedness
that is amassed, finely opened.  

Æthiop’s pathos. Pleural Space.  Hook it to my veins.

Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante
participates in this thought, thieves what remains,
infinite obscurities rush to bombard me
where the crane’s domain tears the air.
Starry-eyed in the core, fomented vitium durations,
a kind of richness that my ears conceive, milder by manner.

What you must never do is remove
the optimistic Garden from the blackness
of hopelessness; the seeds will dissolve into your youth’s mouth,
your prime-era fountains       —O, allow your All
to receive the Lips of Northward Love!—
it takes one kiss to confirm manifested Mercury-rising,
which, by degree, may indulge the moist habitations
of fertile transmission of bone-dry, yet blessed sands.

The cat, native of carpet or shining hardwood,
is our example of loyalty, or like this poem
that could brace the graceful frame of a swan’s neck.

ADULT-LIFE NEEDS TRAINING-WHEELS

Adult-life needs training-wheels, full hip-replacement,
squatting on a dream, of wit, of wetness, of a Mugs Reality,
Mug Life, rank-&-file.  I look out of the car window as I drive
down the highway & I am flipped-off repetitively.  Only fools
use “fool” as an insult, repetitively, or do I “read” their lips
transiently?  I downgrade people’s anger, as if windbaggery
to some is the meaning of life, tackles the whole person—
the heart, head & hands of daily living.  The woman at the diner
tells L. & I that her girlfriend wasn’t wearing a seatbelt on April
fourteenth when she wrecked, & now she is in extensive care.
She showed us pictures of her lover’s battered body; she
repetitively told us how her life is screwed up.  I wanted to
tell her that most people’s lives are screwed up.  Truth often
warrants bad, unbearable esteem, steaming from out-of-nowhere.
Being book-smart doesn’t mean one is street-smart, or
even practical, but the mean, slimy, coal-black streets are where
one’s mistakes happen & where one’s mistakes happen often
& where mistakes get accepted amongst everyone else’s woes.
This woman, this same woman, with tattoos of hearts above
both thumbs, also made it a point to speak of her vagina.
She had shaved her pubic hair “down low” one night,
& obtained a staff infection, spent seven months in the hospital,
& now her lawyer warns that she will probably be sued by
Insurance companies.  She told us how her life is so screwed up
with a laugh that Sean Connery would’ve had if he had of been
a woman. I wonder what Bukowksi would be doing right now
if he were alive, were not a writer & hated post offices.

POEM

You—with your olive tones, sweet with citrus ascending—
completed me, fructifying, heavily, heavenly bits,
such brass, engulfed me in oceans
of mammoth macrocephalis mind-pull
in layered winds that now blow, with gail-force,
through the Colosseum of the future
where I may someday see your efflorescence,
burning, blurring,
between Nowness & Pastime:
It is then, what satisfaction may warrant glances,
enforced by the roots of our history—
terrestrial hue, superficial twilight?
Mock me, spawn what you said was your “dark side”—

Stone me! I’ll bleed & bleed with sublime southern herb,
first sulphuric floods, without flame—
as if color was a curse—I shall be the black-bird
that grows white, as your darkly darts of monstrosity
seeks distinct extinction,
blatant voice of fiery sorrow
unlighting the candle, frozen wax,
there is no elixir, no cure-all,
for I still love you, could still love you more,
even as a resurrection would soothe for a time,
or would a cloud of smothering soot keep shadows
lying upon where the flower yearns to grow,
but cannot?

CHERRIES

Cherries at five o’clock     The cherry
                          blossoms on the surface are a bit
    onerous   a vignette around speech

clouds hang from the sky like cotton
    on invisible strings

I am what I eat? soil to the lips
            coffee bean to the skull   hyper
    people doped on Red Bull

throwing Spaniards to the wind
             donning red wool   I charged

through this day as if muscles
        are weakened   bull-horn stabbed
    the picador   famous for getting

            beaten up on camera   a red cape
    is used only to conceal the blood