REBORN

I’m reborn daily by
The Thought Machine.

My mother’s tubes
slowly untie themselves.

POEM

Living like the weatherman,
hooked to the wand of my mucosa.
The streetlights illuminating
what they don’t want to:

shadows teeter at the outside light-spray—
what is an anomaly’s animosity
but black icicles, bluffing
in bass-smog—no, I mean:

let all passwords die.
Let taboos remain empty.
I mean, caresses of silk that ache
for their own touch.

The daffodils backfire.
The looking-glass becomes
a shame-maker, misnamed.
This ruinous work of nostalgia

toys with me, leaving me
like a cowardly lion in a vast solitude,
left standing like a grim reaper
in a windless wildfire, mute-slowed,

funny faces stalemated, but I can still
make the jukebox react without
coinage, like the bellhop making
the deaf react, like an earthquake

penetrating pressure-points,
making the graveyard bones
clatter together—fingertips through
a wounded punchbowl.

BLOOD MOON

Through windows

of breathing homes, tungsten-lighted

tongue-flipping flicks antiquated white noise outward

into vast openness, like sleep

to the slaughter,
where the ghostly moon’s pale-faced

pearly flab

(a floating opal of synesthesia)

has scooped up every form of whiteness

in a deep-space translucent brouhaha,

like runny egg yolks

blurring by

like windshield wipers,

& out of the berry-red eyes
of Goethe’s Colored Shadows,

(clouds, soft as eyelids, evanescing from the sky),

the blood moon’s oracle of sardonyx—

like burnt heifers, old as myth-hinds,

scorching by presence alone,

like the Basilisk of Cyrene—unfolds upon us

as strawberry rashes; fresh sparkling
ruby-spirited heel-tapping equator.

A Red Carpet is rolled out.

One can find corneas there.

In this mortal spoil, we’re wooed

where we linger,

like the dead in their intimate caskets

tickled pink in refracted flashbacks,
scalping romantic consciences

of the heavenly attic—

a kind of exolution

from the Tower of Oblivion.

The substance of my “personal metaphysics”

dissolves into a décor entirely habitable
when the Mazzaroth spins like plates

around me
in this waltzing night of indigo, this night

of extroverted carnation

-blush where I watch as the dewy grass-spikes
shiver like Pluto,

vibrating vertebrates of trees;

my spine, nearly lunged out like

blood-red roses, rare nosebleeds

of misfired air-pockets

where we inhale and exhale diaphragm hallelujahs,

puncturing vignettes
where the midnight-flight

of an invisible flashbulb pops through
shatter-starred windowpanes
where  the “blind spots” see:

Moonbeams soon to gulp down

one’s morning’s coffee—

marvelous fireworks of flavor.

Later, one is jelly-jawed & full of oblong songs.

All Things start to dream as soon as the harp plays.

Wherever you go your spirit flakes off a little.

Numbness is sprinkled throughout my bosom.

Our optical nerves are connected to the lunar
looking-glass apparition:

ephemera obscura elongated
where I’m merely waxing gibberish,
but

as if the Burning Bush had been placed into
a reverberatory furnace, or having borrowed

the inward countenance of Kilimanjaro,

it matters not. 

APERTURE PUNCTURE

I let the shutter wag its own finger—
this reduction of muscle-letting—
my face flushes down the train

& when the meat-red stigmata encloses,
the camera is gaspingly gassed, yet still
a reflectable mouth, breathing

like a language inside the aperture,
like fingerprints upon the per-square-inch
sky. All of the alien passwords

in the world couldn’t hold a candle
to this mysterious density. A self-distorted
image overlaps into Dark Matter.

What matters are ancient places,
slogans you don’t name-drop but think of,
like atom bombs in the mammoth mind;

a kind of “cruel optimism” is a hidden planet
of the grapes, so much wine, purple-red
plumes, or plums. It’s enough to make you feel

tinier than tiny, microscopic. Here comes
the Regret Patrol! I take my camera out
to photograph a possibly infinite thing.

I dreamt last night that I was holding
one of my ears & I was bathing it.
Close-up of an ear, Meddle. Close-up of

a tear, invisibility. Stepping on plant matter,
the limbs in this forest hang like stomachs.
I’m an alarmed clock, a morning commute

is all people think about nowadays.
Debits, debt limits, & a mocha sucked back
by this girl beside me who sighs & sighs,

asks me to watch her stuff & before walking off, says,
“nothing will happen, but you never know”—
I smile & agree, because who knows when one

may end up having to eat out of a wooden bowl
or end up eating one’s own hand, or fully losing focus
in the mental Rubik’s Cube of spirit-bouncing

hollowness, vapor trails to follow, eroding landscapes
to sink your feet in to, a piper at the gates of nowhere
humming through wind-“pipes”—singing brings

relics of the past through a wormhole; singing can
conjure up dead dinosaurs & dead relatives through
a maze of tulip wood, piñatas smashed not for gain

or candy or a prize, but simply for the act, like a boxer
that practices with the aggression & temperament
of being in the ring, when he’s merely in an empty room,

arms in flight, the punching bag sacrificing itself.
I’m being plucked from a street of future images
like a homeless man in reverie thinking deeply

about his childhood—fairytales dreamed up,
Ophelia sinking like the Titanic. What does that
represent? People saying “thank you” in a sarcastic

way, dragging out the word: “Thaaank you” in
that particular tone of voice. I’m creating my own
Reality & you should, too. Watch, then, as you

notice, out of nowhere, a scrap of heaven land
on top of you, like an Ice Bucket Challenge
gone completely wrong.

Knownothingism

Nakedness, like a Knownothingism.
Vision, soiled & “it’s like his mind
left his head all-of-a-sudden” but

that’s destiny & you were a native
in your own cage; a bird, throwing a
tantrum; your flowery opal’d sweet

-ness in the sense of visuals must’ve
snuck-off like a mischievous child;
an archetype of the current global

distresses; sick as a dog, like myself,
to be called “Ishmael” at the end of a
book, first, like a gravestone with

your name already carved into it,
right after birth. You had sought me
out like a whale to taunt in a strange

New World but I was nowhere to be
found. I had gone where the Universe
flows outward, to the ends, to the

utmost to take Space as Space for you
to leave me with an echo that moves
just under the Speed of Light. What

am I doing to be so relaxed like this?
Why has my routine in Life become a
fill-gap, a recoil against Time? Waste

Time & learn a language, they say.
Do Intellectuals exist merely because
one has too much leisure? The dead

will soon rise up & out from under our
feet! America is oft understood as
merely a Hell of widened wastelands;

gestural, hypothetical; geography for
vultures; foreign as a bastardization of
talents without mercy. Grains of purpose.

Your lustful eyes held as a desideratum,
a paleness, as if corpses are repeatedly
born from your womb, like a rotting

America with one leg in her grave.

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.