SCIENCE CLASS

I remember a friend
in my science class
who asked me if
I had gas because
he felt as though I
"resembled nervousness"
by the way that I was
acting before preparing
to make a presentation
in front of the class.
He was very much right
but I denied it.

________________________________________________________

Yesterday I stood at the front door
with runaway eyes, not a metaphor.
I thought of you, perhaps amongst
the regalia of the forest as I dwarfed
along the perennially naïve notion
that you would appear in more than
my head---a drum's hallway. I am
inside of your roman à clef, an exagg
-erated egg in the yoke of these
"burning bitters." An astonishing flower
-ing of the overly familiar. & still,
no metaphor. & still, I stand at the door,
the back door where the moon-rays
drill holes in my sockets, arm-hair rising
to meet the illuminance, the way sorrow
rises in the heart's unstitched jungles;
rainforests of Borneo, an abandoned
bird's nest, & now I niggle when I
should be nestled in silence, in peace,
à la the tiger moth in a bright, neon
green garden.

Farewell

Mother-of-pearl perhaps derived from Renoir,
a songbook, a radio station playing the same-o
same O! my blistered units, the curtains are
nonexistent, inducing fields of light. I hear breath
-ing, I sense antlers within the eyes of certain ones.
My dear darling, your mirror shards were free
to fly, flew directly into this heart.

Farewell! This film has ended with odd harmonic
collisions, the rain fell & fell, your onions peeled
into my eyes, standing amidst the topless sky,
swelled to reflect, to refract. What have I become
but the stars that crackle in the night, a lamenting
smoke, a clogged aorta of a silhouette in reverse
infused by the giant ink-blot of your rubbing me out.

________________________________________________________

The shapes of the words in my mouth
Are heavy glows.
A garland of unweighty indistinguishable
Mass.

What happens to the diameter
When the tonsils act
As a Blockade---
Words bursting through my throat,
My heart swelling like a sealed environment
That becomes like a dangerous draw-bridge.

Life can be snatched from our midst.
A cockroach "catches" the mist
On its back; spins & spins, rotates & battles,
Curls & flips; confusion between the shell.

Geography should be "personal"
Like fifteen minutes of fame
For everyone including the Unborn.
We could bend rivers
Into small populated places
& like God, we would know
Where dust settles.
The pursuit would cease. Cat
got your lung?

________________________________________________________

Nevermind the mainstreamists that
misinform the world about poets;
we leap like paintings from frames
on walls, we raise our eyes to threaten
& interrupt certainly not a Sisyphus-like
torment, not all with poison fangs
& fiery breath at the very root of hell,
but instead we’re like dinky
grandma patches—heavy globes
become weightless under our thoughts.
Peel the layers of earwax from your
audible-gates. Pity, not Hatred;
Admiration, not Disgust; & where
is Fear but within the foul fiend?
Look beyond these lunacies! One has
made a trumpet of one’s rump
when one has grown savage, even in
thought. I have eyes sharper than
Leonardo, my poetry has rendezvous
with me & I could throw it all to the
wind, laughing, scarcely suited
& privileged to know nothing.

________________________________________________________

Flood
the secret.
Find

the silence,
the symptoms
are

a kind of chess,
a kind of Tolstoy
character

within
the extremities
of movement.

Hits you
like a
pyrotechnician's

miscue, cue
the touch
eliminate confusion

Confucious
was having
coffee

at a breakfast
din
-er when

I
walked up
to him

and
handed him
oak tree acorns

that
I
had collected.

The clouds
walk on
themselves

this evening.
A shortage
of sunlight.

The shadow
of the earth
moving

upon your face.
I have found
the silence,

it was behind
the hanging porch
fern. I have

found the secret,
it was behind
the water-front

in your throat,
it appears
excessive.

I take your words
minting them
like coins

into my heart.
words
alight from flight

had burst
out of my heart,
flewn up

like
a leaping crowd
at a concert.

it all recurs
sanguine to start
all over again.

I am
bearded
& all a-clam,

driving through
the garish city,
the lights

blazing
with glam;
midnight blues

of
the nitty-gritty.
Caught

in
the pillows
of your precious

-ly sarcast
-ic-elastic
mind.

what
is more than
imagination,

a kind of
super-realism
collected

in conversation.
an echo
returns to itself

to reflect
to be upheld
by the results.

________________________________________________________

Gratefully, morning repeats. A mounted flame
of sunrays I see through the white blinds,
an epic adagio of light, almost a narrativity
of explicit vocal personage (sunrays of Scelsi).
My eyes rise with the light, irises improvise
acousmatiquely into awakening---it has become
a yellowish-violet bruise upon the thigh
of which overwhelms the whole, or hole,
in the valley of my waking in the melted candle
of memory---of where you rest here in the
blossoming buds of my mind. A night
we remember,---shake smutty-hips
into my image, deglamourize these scenes!
I let the events of our Time pass through me
so intensely that I cannot close off
my patterns of thought, like repeated assertions,
surgeon of the eye, rescue me from this
tugging pull,---pinch out this possible cracked rib,
a strong affinity for the Future upends the Past,
but the Now needs milking. I rise, wearing a
sharkskin suit, silver sparks from the bedpost,
grunting & displaying remarkable transportation
from here to there.

THE PHYSICAL UNCANNY

The physical uncanny
hits
the enemy's muscles.

They begin
swearing
at high rates.

Prolonged foible
of feeble
blade-tongues.

A default
of thy throb,
all is clear

from
east to west
this day,

the cat
stares at me,
looks down

& then
back up at me
again.

These furry
queens. I
drink from

the breast
of this day
so quiet.

A Threnody
springs into my ears
like

a great
national figure
on the scene.

Doubt
is
the prophetic voice

of rehearsing
for Surprise.
The winter yard

is iced
like a crust
of makeup.

My perfumed wrists
electrify
like south-winds

bringing forth
life, a sunshine
of scent,

as this day
all-bright;
the big invisible sinus

of carrying a burden
with the force
of a waterfall.

To interrupt a soul
setting sail
while I need

to find a way
to get up
off of the pine

& get dressed.
We the people
are too laid-back

in this world.
We the people
are too cradle-song'd

& last-drop-of-milk'd
in this heated howl
of a world.

Our chairs
should be
STONE CUTTERS.

Earlier,
I
realized that

I
hold my
computer mouse

the way
Alexander Pope
would have.

________________________________________________________

Never consult
the Genius--pre-Socratic
philosophers

of life
of desiccated, steep
learning curves.

My great aunt
is now deceased,
I approach it

as knowing
but I
am no Guru,

a
naturally-bizarre Bee
-thoven;

the "fleshing out"
of a character.
Focal hem

-ispheres feared
to inadequately bite
impressionistically.

I
am no techno
-scientist

but vision
is creeping
into the B[leak]

with
a particularly
keen eye.

In what
is being touted
as "dark times"

is
only suppressed
by lippy tangos

& unfruitful
minds.
My aunt's

warm bodytrails
still float,
still scamper

amidst
these walls,
spotlight

on
the "catching up"
of facework--

learned dormancy,
automata
of omitting,

inseparable
meaning of
blithe indifference,

"Why Patterns"
like Feldman.
Death

can be
a heartbreaking
seizure

in the chest,
or a kick
in the face

to substitute
a phrase,
but truth

is not
individually physical.
None of us

lives apart
from the land
entirely.

I
know exactly
what God did.

God
implanted
a poetic device

into my chest cavity.

SEE NOTHING,

SAY NOTHING.

Even then,
on quiet evenings
it is like

a bomb exploding
in a theatre
like from

a film scene,
a Hollywood explosion
making me cringe,

a hollow rung
in the bone
of

regurgitating disappointment--
a mental jack-screw
resulting in nothing.

PIANY THROAT

for Rae Armantrout



Take each poetic fragility
& crack the whip.

An Inlaying
of a thick map.

Now I am only trying
to impress,

the way I sketch
skepticism on stained

glass. Decorating
the front door,

a greater chance of
peeping toms.

I go on a "hunting trip"
every day in my mind,

reaching into my earth's
magnetic shield.

Consequently, I may
be able to name it

a completely different
name, with(in)/Correct

body alignment.
The compass

builds reaction
more than direction

(polished jasper, sub
-conjunctival hemorrhage)

like the “full-blown”
unification

of Literature; messless
& unrelenting

as if becoming
a wall decoration.

________________________________________________________

Pull out

my larynx

From now on

we will speak

in heart beats

THE B_IND

The b_ind h_ve deaf ey_s.

The b_ind re-inv_nt shape.

________________________________________________________

No one really dreams of a soothing cocoon, we gather
ripest memories loved best & turn the volume high
like radios by poolsides in the prime of summer afternoons.

Underwater depth, your gentle affection is fully-rooted
in mysterious ways—Unknowns, like a sleeping lion—
those depths, deafening me with your majestic coral caves.

I blend into your silken mouth. Alas, we blend together;
perhaps flayed, perhaps a harmony of opposites,
the spinstress of warmth. Go on, hide me, but love me.

Love me before I become bokeh in your background,
& if I do, cut me out of the pixels with your hatchet,
inform me of my predictable mishaps without a sound.

Stand on your tippy-toes while whisking me away.
Climb the sycamore like Zacchaeus the exact way
& remember me when your heart begins to starve.

ADD A HYPHEN FOR CONFUSION

for Non-confusion

I think too often of interrelated metaphors.
I think too often of the despoliation of nature.
I think never enough of bonding & reinvention.
I think never enough of being soft & bodiless,
weightless. I see your glow shining through
(waitless) every chink & keyhole. We hover
in Whole. Contrast can adjust its shape.
Plurazing themes or plagiarizing dreams,
verb-squeamish steams, add a hyphen
for confusion, so it seems. I investigated
the poison of poetry but it was all static.
I view myself in a mirror the way a cat would
like quantum-mechanical Schrödinger's cat.
Newspapers are dying, economy is crying,
my two sisters on the verge of alcoholism?
I ponder it like the credit bubbles displayed
in my psyche; moving text like a "marquee,"
black holes of disassembledness, waves
of the uncanny. Failing body, like an unenriched
alleyway-entrance, rooting for rot in the fruit shop
of the mind, a gassy muffler's neuropathy,
interference of passers-by. The spontaneous
mechanical collapse of the cryodeposit layer
is not the worse of all worlds: epic pet peeves
never fail. The earth is producing nothing but
monsters nowadays. A video of your Secrets
will play over a large screen & will begin in
twenty-six seconds in two segments, one of
which will contain repetitive ads for the race
of mankind. The Monolith will land on the sand
& we will continue to starve like a wax-candle
waiting for a match. I am losing myself in this
high whirrition of pithful contemplation. A doctor
is not needed. He would merely say, "Just bestir
yourself and pick fleas from a carpet. Slip inside
an object. Diminish from the slow peel of light."
Advice is remembering. I take it & go forward,
with or without hogwash; spurs within the eyes.

________________________________________________________

Life is a great belt, but often too tight,
so tight that chubby bellies poke out even more;
zeppelins in the burning stomach, hot air balloons
rush out of the mouth. If men were
more nurturing, women would be scaling
a new landscape, like slaves in the
old days rushing to the Golden Gates
of the north.

Life is a great belt or a clear plastic bag
that has been washed. If only we could
wash the dry dollar bills & pull them out
as modern architecture. There is a reality
in parallel worlds, because

life is a great belt. A sense of reality is
advanced from things that would disappear
like looking through a clear plastic bag.
Who is brave enough to venture to say
what life is like?

A body like ancient Rome, a sound
of thunder irreparable, needles in the
stomach where "hope" is a jump-rope
that I tie to my ankles to gain a consequence,
to destroy the expectation that I may tumble—
a threshold of incorrect rattling.

Life is a great belt. A Grandmother
softening you up with a smile. Snapshot facts.
The way dust is sequestered, becomes
a singing atmosphere of a beautiful voice
that comes & takes you away.

Life is a great sweltering jolt in
a maternal jewel. To take part in conversation,
to see it destroyed slowly over time...
so slowly that it cannot be neglected.
Behind every island, someone is attempting to
invent a new future. This is not life, because

life is a great belt, tracing the roots of
ones mid-sectional sophistication
like freeway traffic. Life is doin' the twist,
a particle of a narrative, a never-ending plot
trudging against our aging bodies.

________________________________________________________

Perhaps now life is more than a newborn.
Moment of the important eyebrows in a pile,
wrinkle-winged, replica of your lips
(not just notation). At twenty-seven
my eyes cling to words like the oceanic-sand
gripping anchors, presumably skull.
I memorize prisms of metropolitan mornings
with sharp ears. Our glands are disabled
on a fast subway train. I would like to narrate
the details of your leaping from rhythm
like the words after a murder, Who shot ya?
Tupac returns in 2013 and iceskates
over everyone. Frankly, I need to daydream
or else the night is like a cold Mexico road,
the wind whistling in my ear-sockets,
cycles through, my head where the beard itches,
and she said that she wanted to be covered
in blankets tonight like hiding behind shrubbery.
In my heart nothing is kept silent
like Grandpa Munster. Speech will not play back
the words of the heart, no indications nor functions
can be carried out, do not even try, as if being
occasionally warned of speed cameras in the mind,
going to unknown places imagined, photographing
the unseen at the seams.

________________________________________________________

The poet
has a little sentiment
together rubbed
with acute passion
for the spirit’s needs
with a reality that says that
all of us are forever fleeting.

The poetNON
is addicted to aspects
that are all valueless;
commonplace with
muddled sources solidified.

________________________________________________________

Cat-hair floating around, as if from tailpieces.
My nose is chalk, my throat caffeinated.
I have two perverted uncles, both in their eightees,
who stare at women's breasts. Sexualized gazes
of youth--does it never diminish? Our visualized
culture of hungry vultures causes breasts to
function as masks. Eye-lust for the heifer.
I am trying not to listen to your jungled mouth.
I cut glue off of random objects to see them
become themselves again. This, like the atrocity
of pressure. I prop upon props. Vantage-points
can become limited so I will kinescope, in black
& white & color, what cannot be seen until
it shows itself. The end of escapism.
Your television has a name & so does your vehicle.
Illusion is insulated for the Insulatable Everythings
within the realities of the world in which we live.
Thus, I stick my head through the holes in the
atmosphere & shout to the heavens. Holograms
groaning deep within my ears; these little
caves of mine, I'm gonna make them shine.
Grind out the text of a poem, falter at the starting point,
reiterate what needs to rotate when contemplation
sparks itself into a flashlight-happening,
little tears in the baby's eyes fall to the floor,
this is like the puddle I slip on, this, the puddle that
is slipped on, filled with the tears of the world gone by,
books on how to cry, which way to cross the intersection
when your feet are heavier than lead like a boxer's hands
during & after a bloody body-blowing bout.

________________________________________________________

The (read, that it should)
at play (indisposed)
ceaselessly listen (swerve, but)
O you
steep as the as (postulate)
and as gorgeous (for the times present)
if loved if I (not to)
you are (delay the last line)
when we (in the same degree)
O you
And accordingly (cannot)
everything is (against reason)
covered with these (otherwise of my self)
full-bodied (cold imagination)
Of (for earthly)
I'm you: afterwards (watery)
you are (unto riches)
invisible among (noble friends)
a brilliant landscape (the loves)
I have the silence (bundles of straw)
of a furious heart (devoured with next day passing)
beating (of you)
I have two minds (streams through islands)
one for "Me" and the other (double weight in silver)
as my self-portrait (to abide incision)
I have distance and difference (ripening affection)
doodads and two dads (on behalf of gifting)

________________________________________________________

Attention-tension given to children,
a margin of error +/-5% depending
on the GPS in the theoretic-body.

Think about the Le Petit Dummy,
be prepared to Pay-per-click,
be prepared to begin every sentence

with "From Wikipedia." Vein-cue
in the sensory-analysis: You sound
like a poet. Pay attention to me!

Most of the time we live in an
ick-blipped world that could be
avoided very easily by only eating

naturally, the way a newborn baby does.
EYEFORMATION: your heroines
are prancing around in tiny shirts.

Every day I'm in love, the body's
vocabulary cannot be like dead wasps
laying on my floor-cape. Never touch

the stinger; it's like a vampire salivating
over a pale female nape. For centuries
the ideal toot has been like "fog-bound

doubt flouts" and how it often
"blankets out all hope." I am draped along
your coastline like sparkling trouts

or like dead cold leaves. Let's forever
face it or deface it, & in the basin you
find me as if with the eyes of God,

cannot erase the memory, this is like
Lamentations. I could never be obscured
like the Pope on ABC or a color-blind computer.

________________________________________________________

Once I am gone,
I want
the bones

of my body
to be
crushed finely

into a paste,
whereas it could be
used as white ink.

The evening forgets
you and I;
the fish ponders it

in a graver thought.
To discover
nothing;

the angels weep
upon the lawn
of

the
American black cloud.
Someone

has chased me
away
from falling, from

staying
in one place.
Balance

on the moon,
try not to walk
tippy-toe;

eye-shakes
like a drunken
security guard;

the spot-light
flips and
flops like

Paul Pierce's head,
pierced by morning,
a bunch of computer

-generated cortexes.
I ripped off
the frozen

door-handle
from
the passenger's side

of the car
in the coldest
concentrated cold

in a decade.
Everyone is
always wrong.

I am
dimming into
brightness;

drumming secrecy
is rising
into the numbing sun

like some versatile gypsy.
I chew up
the air

in my soul-vent.
I paw my way through
the geraniums in spring.

I am
out to lunch.
Bother me
but beware

of the air
that will toggle
with your noodle-toes.

Language
should always be
lazy and obvious,

naming myself
as if from an "idea";
shenanigans

amidst a kind of
post-hysteria.
I am out to dinner.

I will
fill another
nearing-window

with
the same words.
I have heard

from
the curious traveller;
to satisfy himself

upon all accounts
to discover
the eye of

singular
disappointment;
to survey the world afterwards

so that the outworks
occupy a large
acknowledged situation

from which
there is
an easy entrance,

like
the small visibility
in "Étant donnés."

Even though my father
was never "on the scene"
after my birth

I still feel as though
I am living
within

a posthumous existence.
There is
a difference

between a 'wave'
of sadness
and 'waves' of sadness.

Today, I felt
the latter after
driving by

a scene
of cats
surrounding

a dead kitten
in the middle
of the road,

seemingly
mourning
like elephants

yet what they appeared
to be doing was
eating its innards.

Angels with pinlights
punched through the night sky;
these are the stars.

Standing
on Lurch legs.
I look down

at them
the way an inmate
would

look down
after dropping
the soap.

It is cold in here.
Look at me
and warm me.

________________________________________________________

The apple ate itself.

The seed within

grew like an ingrown toenail—

intercourse of the interior.

________________________________________________________

excisionable sterling screens do not hide behind what you feel will force you into a shoal
let the scalawags stand out "test yourself: whose lips are these?"

Roman balance or Romance balance which one?
the streets are plenty busy Israel is being cut in half by knives of imprudence
cab drivers are like emergency responders meanwhile
even a "possible asteroid" seems corporate

let's find the mountaineers who murder for the sake of blood
put them in their tête-à-tête or be forgivable

you can take the exit history takes the exit water pipes being dug up in the city
this city cannot handle bitter cold weather sweat-laced roads malfunctioning
plumbing opening up the gateways trolly-tracks are now visible from underneath
is this 1909 all over again?

i celebrate by staying on my lawn the factories are feeding coughing
like incommunicable petitions what we mirror is what we become
understand the struggle understand the struggle fly from the struggle
feathered-like like the bombyx mori a bomb goes off money clings to smiling mouths
swallowing it whole marginal croons clogged legs Anne Waldman's voice-box

we are forced to be anchored ashore never let anyone know that you have won money
like Abraham Shakespeare who is feared dead this is the element of the world fear
fear underneath the umbrella underneath the skies there are downloads for that
just throw away all instinct

________________________________________________________

Imagine crunching into that rhinocerous
beetle. French braids in the mouth. Gold
-fish flushed, display your inward telegram.

This is a pop-up magazine, a way of
schooling or interferring with textbooks,
those that are unearthed, incarnations with

-out any new roots. This winter, my outer
-shape is like an Arctic Cathedral; a mental
catalyst, calloused by blister-rubbing words,

words & more words, like birds & birds,
like volcanoes in Japan. Our mouths.
Seething heretofore perfectionism, like wine,

my skull outlasting your skull, delivering
lectures to myself in a cold bedroom at
midnight with my hands clasped tightly.

I think, I am not a little boy. I am layered in
routine, thinking of beta carotene or old
Beta machines. The union of science is

problematic, as if caucasians are nothing
more than bleached Africans. What equals
yummy? swatted insects, unlucky fellows,

your favorite performance, prolonging.
Contrarywise, I like to know that people
are gleaming amongst Lord Byron

or being graffitied into the study of hope
& triumph. I want to get yanked up voluntarily
like sprouted weeds, show what roots still

remain, show what I am made of, the way
one has their hair pressed into shape with
netting. Momentum is always brimming, is not

a spot-light hog like the appearance of boiling,
but is like the uninterrupted listening of
parental affection guided by the voices of

the Victorian era. As fit as a fiddle, brittle.
What's a tree but a shower curtain, verbal
S-A-T. I sit. I now know my baitonik place

amongst what human speech consists of: SOUND,
like how Visual Sense is created from listening
to radios. Mental martial-arts.

________________________________________________________

Angels sitting
on a newel post
as if like
a portable cyclotron

Confidence
slides away
like something slippery
like Flipper

Psychologists
must remain indifferent
There is an appearance
beyond Youth

entirely awry yet defining
forms of sincerity
Trifling ladies
grow annoyed by my whistling

Somewhere love swells
Each handwritten letter
is a form of breathing
The walls are as bare

as my body
like an empty snail-shell
I close the blinds
and listen to my heart

beating, seemingly
mustering the energy to
come right out of my chest,
turns into a chrysalis in the open air