EQUALibrium

            Whoever seizes the greatest unreality will shape the greatest reality.
                                                                                —Hugo von Hofmannsthal
  
Best of friends
are like Borromean rings,
tight as Brunnian braids.       

In the course of this strange odyssey
that we are embarking on . . .
have I told you how much I miss hearing
about Michael Jackson in the news?

History tells me nothing,
except that my body
could be a wonderland
as my youth slowly vanishes.
I wonder

what feeling
could be if it were 
our only source of energy.

Rabbit holes & secret doorways
to Narnia?

History books
will never quite capture the essence
of how I can trace a cat’s whisker
in a curvilinear way.

History?
Oral or Oedipus-blinded?

Like a snake’s sloughed skin,
I demand sacrifice.

Instead of Fraud Prevention,
perhaps Freud Prevention?:
For the shallow dreamers.

A girl that I went to Art School with
had an obsession with Heath Ledger
to the point where she said that
she had attempted to stalk him. 

“How could I become that desirable?” I said.
 
“Only if you’re Heath Ledger,” she said.

“My middle name is Heath. Does that count?”

She snickered the way that people snicker
like an energy that overrides passion.

I thought of the agony,
the heartache,
buried beneath her body
when she learned of his death.

The spasms of her explosion
still echoes in spaces, outer-spaces—

our highly individual visions
devoid of human comprehension,
like a man
that chainsaws-off his own foot
after being bitten
by a poisonous snake.

Is that a passionate extreme?

What seems tragic
hints towards the formation of
an understanding on the Theory of Life.

Everyone wants to feel passion,
to feel admired,
the way that your loving cat looks at you,
unstoppable & indisputable,
her eyes leaking fluids, could they be tears,
making me look wet-like from her perspective?
& thus resembling an impression of water?

What are the mechanics of Illusion?
The womb of a ghost?

We will be fencing before long.
You still want to get down to the bottom
of every secret, you say.

Secrets are the only thing worth interrogating,
I think to say, but didn’t.

FORTUNE COOKIE

Words still speak out
from the bones of the deceased;

our forefathers are forever smitten—
coffee splattered onto my eye-glasses,

if only my camera lens could see this clearly,
I mean, before it happened.

My fortune cookie had already split
before I found the little paper inside.

It says, “YOU WILL TRAVEL FAR AND WIDE.”

I ripped out a photograph of George Washington’s head
& on the back it says, “MY FOLKY VALENTINE.”

Fortunes don’t always come easy,
but it’s better when the cookie has burst its own shell

to reveal the impossible fortune
before the unfortunate occurs. 

FOG

She said, “Come! Look at the fog down the street...”
    From the window
I looked out with her, as the fog hovered
    like phantoms, pillars of icy air,
& the rain poured, washing the brain-drain of Spring
    into gutters—
Phalanx, physique of the earth,
    concrete of the day
like being interrupted while writing a poem—
    it seems dyed in the wool—

Forever a silk-spot in my heart, like bone
    not yet ossified over a membrane
that gives rise to it. The fog soothes—
    vehicles’ headlights, like orbs;
faintly luminous
    vaporous glows
throbbing through the threshold—
   
On the ceiling is a gray moth
    that landed on me the day before,
landing on my shirt where my heart would be,
    directionless, yet free upon the
lull of the cosmos,

my heart now beating on the ceiling
    with a moth that has its wings outstretched
like a continent—
    the inner-harmony keeps the earth spinning.
Soon, the sound of silence with soothe;
    the noise of the world will have been pruned by persuasion.
The physiognomy of affection,
    with its enchanting phonetics
& again I looked out of the window
    as the nimbus hovered
like peppery blankets of swarming gnats
    the afternoon before.
Perhaps this is what it is like
    when birds fly out of their color.

MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS

I chased my pulse home, half-heartedly,
after magic turned me to a sappy tear-rag.
The die spun, plummeted from the crest.

A necromancer, ice-old Reaper-like,
is a destiny that some strive to seek,
a voice of magical roseleaf-like

softness, like a Paperman’s inky fingers,
pores full of life-giving word-spinning,
like Death photographing Life

through a black puddle, reflecting
sheepish wanderings. Magic
makes fruit bats turn to blood.

Magic makes Polkinghorne
stop the finger-pointing.
Magic will make one’s betrothed

turn into a trapeze artist.
If that person is already a trapeze artist,
welcome to a world of The Intoxicated Oz.

Please refrain from the obvious retort:
to have faith & to feel no shame over
checking out other people. That’s magic.

It’s a Marketplace out there, with coupons
& promotions piled up in your lap. Laughter
just turned to a dreaded ogre,

organ of brass to spill out of my tear ducts,
a minor trigger for a fearless spirit of inquiry
passed over into the eternal world.

A great shadow in the public eye
where nutcases like myself have hit the ground
running, with flamboyant eye.

Magic is full of holes; a quiver
of expectation, your nervous twitch
before forcing down falcon eggs.

Bias, bitten. The logical part of one’s brain
wants to breed a new warlord,
while the other part of one’s brain is all blood & tears.

What is magic without tears?
Sign up now if you want to be in Gnomer Territory.
Sign up now if you want to have your leg pulled

in a non-joking way. It is impossible for
The Privilege to be “all mine,”
but if it is magic that you are after, come back

from youthfully running away to a (dead?) sea,
& allow the caged bird of your heart
to sing what caged birds dream.

HOURS

                                  i.
 

                        For
hours                     the hours
seem to exist
            barefoot

            into a black desert night

            The night before

made a special fuss over me

peered deeply into my spellbound face & said . . .

Who is equal to the Ancients?
                                

                                  ii. 


Squeamish        night-life        all-day       
night-life eyes blazing into the eye of the starry skies
as they blaze back        twinkling
the way that the energy of the ecosystem flows
as if like reveries            spirits of mountains

The cedar-scented nature-fingers
offer me my own sacred mountain

Why do I remain frustrated?
like backpackers looking down at torn maps
like sitting down into a seatless seat

I could run slap-across that river
that glistens as if spread with thick blankets
of diamonds

                          To savage the air
smoking from the volcanoes
            of our enchanted lore

I ran across that body of water
as if I were wearing Pete Rose’s cleats



                                 iii.


Negativity can poison the Brave
the Brain       I sit freely casting my own hue

into the day      air so Grecian it remains in the
corners of my eyes        the hours pass   
the interminable hours pass      leaving no witnesses    
                no witnesses 
 
except the hummocks of scattered crystal cataracts
of light that shines upon the parachute of the future
Existing within the hourglass        Realizing

is part of the process     adjust the weather
I prefer altered dimensions      Inside of the buckeye
I am pale as a corpse      breathing as the moon breathes

YOU CANNOT TRUST WHAT YOU SEE OR HEAR

We keep butting up against bodily autonomy:
what is it like to have breathing breasts,
what is it like to see girl-gang-focused violence.

My mind ends up blocking them out
because I grew up in an area where bare breasts
rejuvenated a woman’s revolution

in a small, southern town of the eccentric norms,
where people are more accepting of disfunctionality
& ridiculous lifestyle choices, yet I still cannot

get behind the three-piece suit
even if I were Ken-like, so oddly imperfect
that perfection becomes blemished by the privilege

of categorizing a particular grim back-story
dealing with the sacred temple: our lighted Antiquitiu
like a fragile photographer or filmmaker

shooting inside of my ribcage, outside,
bone-to-bone, like adding adjectives to my body; 
I tilt the compass, adjusting the gyroscope

the way that the spinning mental-eye of the
Spermaceti Whale considers the shore-line
as being far, too far out-of-reach, as if

what is shallow is full of razor-sharp teeth,
shallowness loosening its pull with uncertain guesses
combing cartilaginous fishes from stormy waves.

I debunk books of conjecturing. Alarmed, scars
left within, like white elephants’ tusks scratching
the chalking residue inside your

inevitable vanishing sinews. I am virtually detached
from all of reality, whatever that is—even when I
close my eyes to dream, the belly-button of reverie

closes its gap; ink dries. Last night, in a dream,
she said, “your gray sweater is beautiful”—
That was the Mother Voice of the Dream

-Language that knows no fate. I feel lighter
upon awakening. What you see or hear could force
palaces to demolish. I will tell you a secret,

which will no longer be a secret—It is this:
a tiny part of the Universe morphed into my body
so that I could write poems, not only of ethereality,

but of fantasy fandom—Alicorns neutralizing poisons?—
whatever mysterious light had entered, entered me
with an unctuous mass, as if my body were wholly free

from bones, as if I were a gemstone outliving decay,
outliving the groin-pull of modernity, wagering
the existence with pounds of vanishable Undoing.

There is nothing to see, nothing to hear. Listen to me
when I tell you that I have fallen through the lens of my
camera, where I now dance upon the cornea of Infinity.

CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

I’m on a perpetual oneiric-allegorical journey,
clearly visible on the faces of those that care about me.
Adopting the artifice. My heart-paint is splatterable.

I give rise to the—Ha!—Un-fath-o-mable: A profusely
topsy-turvy Wonderland—dealing with exaggerated plots,
that is Modernity: obnoxious & kicking up dirt.

I divorce it & live in the past. Everything is better
with sparkles, so I harass future rumors.
The Post-Modern Microphone that I speak through,

with a paralyzed mouth, makes the devil cry
with a vaudeville-like humor; that restrainable beast.
My voice cracks at the podium of Modernity,

where all of the Prince Charmings are dead & gone.
I have made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin. That is
my only emotional response, non-profit & all,

like a drunken Mall Santa, tongue-tied, cartoonish,
making him seem less spooky to children that already live
within the dramatic illusion of their inner-Disneylands.

Why haven’t I yet been abducted by an alien light-ray?
My Jetson-car is the artisan of my memory-screen—
my mind, this mindlessness! this unconscious wrath!

POEM

May-wind, cold breeze & I drink down this acidic
blueberry juice; can you feel the flow of filth
in the streets’ beating? It was not in my mind

to pick the scraggly pine from the dewy ground,
put it flush to my nose & wait as the rabbit
hopped across my path, eyeing me, like a sniper

hiding in a dusty sandhill. Waiting, for what exactly?
I wait & wait for the TV to blank-out; preachers
selling “healing oils”—where is my outlet to escape

the backwardness of this planet? Odd weight, way
of putting things, the Almighty has left the sanctuary,
like a flustered minster that, at one moment, warns

a young woman to steer clear of “evil men,” who later
sees her leaving &, like a hunter’s spirit, a notorious
wasp that throbs & bounces from window-to-window,

widow-to-widow, waits with pitchfork in-hand,
wanting to plow her land, as he calls to her
like the mating-sounds of a rooster, running around

like a decapitated chicken. The birds will fly on,
the fish will swim on, & the hypocrites will
be as the wolves, flagging you down, flipping you

the bird after Sunday morning, turning your sons
& daughters into Garbage Pail Kids without all of
the fun; ratty snail-slime, which their dental records

will confirm. Going for the throat. Society is far more polite
when you flip through a comic book. There are
no bad omens. A plump, brilliant red cardinal

lands on the telephone pole above me. I’m the worm
that it has yet to see. I keep expecting to vanish
like exploding gun-powder smoke, Fate will gulp

me down; I walk in the garden, waiting for a snake
to pluck me away, as the squirrels on the edge of
limbs bicker at me furiously, like an old couple.

SMALL WORLD

I am forthright, forthcoming—my admission is this:

                    When I first saw you,
Beauty itself must have inherited your traits.
When I admit things to this extent, I feel that my body
becomes an anxious, nervous wreath twined from a gutted fish,
scales pierced into my solar plexus, as if inching closer to nearing
my finality, as if on the cusp of being impaled.

                    Why should atrocities be applied
to kindness & genuinity? Why should one be tensed to the limit?
What shall one “lose” in this “brutal” honesty?
                   
                    I viewed the Birth of Venus—
I saw you there. Who constructed the chorus of that night
that we first met? To blush by the mere thought of it.
            Was I re-living history? Was that I
standing from afar,
looking upon the beautiful Orphan Girl at the cemetery?
Look closely, I am there. That is no grievance.
Oh, but what grief there is
in knowing that the songbirds’ songs
will be muted in death, or will they?
Their deaths are like new beginnings inside of me,
so the birds live on singing within me,
which is what this poem must be.          Or, was I looking upon
the Young Woman Of Pompeii On A Terrace,
or the rosy blooms of L’innocence? More fair than
Lady Agnew of 1892, than Hayez’s Reclining Odalisque
or The Meditative One—You must be as the Angel
of Thayer’s creative wand; Dicksee’s Portrait of Elsa; 
Perugino’s Mary Magdalene—what else shall arise now?
                    Perhaps you are Ophelia,
having returned from the wells of a wild network of nerves
in the abdomen of the earth! as I look through this silver glass,
aching like history.

                    You said that you should have been born
in a different time & I told you that I have always felt the same way.
Gustav Mahler must still be awaiting my arrival to join him on a train.
I am not as confident as I may appear, as I may seem. I was once
quite melancholy as what a rotten melon could be culled from such
a thought; a salamander underneath a splitting rock; ragweed to the nose—
my confessions are usually repressions, never to see a page,
nor the light of day, or an air to hear these woven particulars.

                    You said that, while in Europe,
on a cold, wintry night, you stood alone on a train—serene
on that immortal locomotive—hark of melodic, soft snowflakes
falling around you, stars falling, a white hawks’ wing ensemble
in a slow-motion, exquisite dreaming, very still, the landscape
reflected the silence of the humane—how does one catch
that morning train?

                    Did you hear about the Ghost Train
in my hometown? You & I jumped off of the same rock at Sprewell Bluff,
but in a different time. You tell L. & I that you have a brick
that came from out of the wall from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
& you hear that everyone that has taken a brick from that location
has ended up dead, & that you now are afraid that you are going to fall
into that superstitious abyss that you believe is looking back at you,
to pull you into the Reapering darkness. You want to get rid of that
historical brick
              & I want to get rid of this historical frustration,
              this fiendish loneliness
             & my God don’t ever take me seriously,
like some lad in a Nightclub giving gifts to himself—pure stalemate.

I am detached from Logic, apparently; if I were a French poet or artist
would I be more appealing? The idea of something foreign
as more mysterious, what novelties & repertories will you visit again
with your friend?

                    What does The Unknown want from me?
It always comes with a crown of iconic promises,
to seduce & amuse,
but swiftly flees, heartless, soulless, like some troubled troubadour
that cold legends told.

                    I am disguised like thunder;
the weight of the sky is veiled upon what I am made of—
The sky, that is, a starling? I just want a few moments to spare
to be amidst your beauty that has parted from my sight,
but I am trapped like a mouse in a fit of despair,
my eyes still green as emeralds, sleepy like ruby-red,
slippering on boundless oil-slicks—who or what will beckon me
to lift myself from the perspiration of the earth?

                    Some days I feel like I am the head of Holofernes.
What about you? I once knew a girl that was as colorful as a peacock,
but was as violent as a piranha. She was Judith with a sword, my head
she held in her hands, her cold hands, but she wasn’t an enemy, no.
There are times when I am the enemy to myself. I once said that
solitude is a great romance, but I just want to sit with you
maybe where the sun blisters the flowery meadows of Kashmir,
or where the waves kiss the weight of a warm sandscape,
but it could be cold, too, cold as cave-noises. Someone uncloud my mind!

                    I must be too old-fashioned,
like some stylistic concordance, but what is curiosity but satisfaction?
The only security I could provide are in these poems, in sincere love,
& often they seem doomed to starve, as I bite the end of my pen,
sip the last drop of coffee,
look out of the window surprised that it’s now dark
as I feel cat-claws clenched into the soles of my feet.

POEM

Please move the sunlight to the front of 
                                                                 the fading beauty queen—

what is Old Age
                                                           =      heartbeats-over-heartbeats. 

To survive 
is to interpret gaseous vulgarity as what it is not 
with a breast plate of righteousness 
that is like neurosis-force 
as if the characters on the pages of a play that you are reading 
                 stepped out of the play & spoke to you face-to-face: 

pyramid of life containing a cone of visual divinity, 
an allegorical cathedral—

                                                            I watched as my grandmother 

tried to place flowers upon a gravestone 
inside of an image of a stained-glass window—
                                                            the archaic colors reflecting onto her craggy 
face, a heavenly banquet, 
shadows fitting between light & object: 

the body figuration of one’s whole terrestrial mass & 

                                                           l
the mind/mind               s                    p                 i                         t 

 s                                                 p                  lit

                                                                      i
                                      s                    p                  r            i           t

out        of        focus 
                                    
to touch the sonic, roaring phantom ahead of us— 

nothing but traces in the shape of Lions. 

THOUGHT MACHINE

pages of a magazine so thick that you think
that two pages are stuck together, so you rub
your index finger & thumb at the top-corner
of the page so as to separate them apart___
my pores are singing; choral Singapore___
I could be the Temminck’s Tragopan’s blue,
bluer, awkward nudity, plucked & walking;
the rancid scent of cat-feces fills my nostrils
___how quickly things can change from be
-autiful to ghastly___where is my neutral
Pronunciación?___My life is full of one
throbbing Paradox, sharpest nothings,
enter an air of a phantom presence, who___

the old Jamaican man tells me that he moved
from Jamaica when he was nineteen years old;
lived in Florida, then to California, then to
South Carolina, now in Georgia; his brother
is a farmer in Jamaica; he is returning soon,
will pack just enough clothes to get by with;
tells me that I should visit someday; the food is
delicious; he is not a slave to convention___
I once spied on a nude girl who took a dive: sat
-urated fat seeped into the swimming pool, pubes
swaying like sea-weed. I was nineteen years old,
like the Jamaican, my sanity hidden in the foot
-hills of a rural countryside, neutral, as my body
glowed like an abstract___

Where/ where/ where/ is my Leonor Fini?
my Gala? My Reality is a fantasy: two
juxtaposed positions, distant & true, passive
& vulnerable, like a wounded chimera___
give me singularity without questions, beauty
between her twixt___diverse glow, surround
-ing the Catholic bell-tower, ring ring ring!
above my skull, halo-glow golden, burning I
turned to see the figure of a fugue, dressed
like a new-comer, or dressed-to-impress, but
she walked passed me into the arms of a man
that looked like radioactive puns, light in
their eyes, the heart’s starchild. I walked away
from the scene, found myself in some strange
place, sat upon a “sharp” toilet—Am I too
young to be so worried? Paint me fainted,
academic-fungi, my horoscope is horror,
reddish obituary ink___the sun questions its
light; the moon showers in the sun’s relevant
fruit___piths entangled___the voice on the roof
gnawed my name, echoing in a que, Gothic
as a gargoyle atop a cathedral—was this a visible
dream___

every poem that I expel, it’s like I am lying
on a dissecting table, I feel it boil up inside
of my mind, & anxiety’s arching ax comes
upon me as I expect some noise, or voice,
or some sudden something to interrupt the
thoughts that arise inside of me—a toothed,
serrated blade, typhooning my poetic geyser!
___O, my grave awaits my body, but my
spirit will not see any of it as my remains
lie hand-in-hand with my love, absorbing
Death’s impact!—what love, do you say?
the one that awaits me in the middle of a
dense musculatured jungle—my ape
of nothingness, swinging to-and-fro,
my duchess of the soil, my wood nymph,
the earth fossilizing me like an Olenellus—
a permanent window, extinct, but remaining___

Art wears the Spoken Mathematics of Histoire.
Remember nervous, poignant faces___Remember___
beware, art wears us, art is an entire ocean, noted
longitudinally___are you cold in your dreams?___
Fertile jazz, adorned nerves of the Nude: anatomy
spattering circular___Our ocean, your ocean,
deep space shine, rêvieries, skull is skim,
in Play, landscape of Cartier-Bresson’s fingers___
Earlier, honeysuckle aroma filling the air,
as well as the scent of grilled burgers
mocking my hunger: the best of both worlds___
One day I will wake up in a post-Facebook
world, or, I will wake up looking into the face
of Facebook’s postmodern society;
Facebook-posts’ Postmodernism. Spiritual mini
-ature, myriad of disguises I grandeur into___
extra avant-garde jewelry that is continually adorned
in the guise of absolutely retained retina
communication___moon-ink fills my fingers___
skull, away from its light; sun’s thick passive
echoing; pinkish, like your blush___

POEM

       I’m a slaughtered lamb, one would think that I had gone under the knife.
I let the blood of my body empty-out, becoming a crimson river,

what soft allure, what grotesques we all are? We all want warmth, 
but foul water, foul, sickening, sickly, air particles sucked into our lungs

is all that we have—timorous toadstools sprout, charming me like a woman 
that has forgotten how to charm but instead proportionately chooses to “hate”—
 
I know of a woman much older than me who truly loved me, years ago—
old enough to be my mother—Georgiana. She loved frogs & had frog statues
on her front porch.
       One hot, muggy summer afternoon I helped her move away from the boondocks
& her dog nearly grated my leg into repulsion— Thus Spoke The Angry Dog! 
She told me that she wrote a lot of poetry but was always hesitant
to let me read any of her work. I felt that she was lying to me, but I did not 
reveal those feelings to her,
       & one day—a hot, muggy summer afternoon—she brought to me a scrap
piece of paper with a poem by her on it. “Finally!” she said, as if it were a relief.
I could discern that her poem had been written quickly, perhaps even the day before.
       Later, on a hot, muggy, summer afternoon, she said to me: 

                                                                                “If I were 
                                                                    a younger 
                                                         woman, 
                                      I’d definitely be 
                                                                 chasing you!”

       Georgiana made spaghetti with sugar mixed into it—she called it her 
“New Hampshire special”—when she was younger, she was a hippie,
& she hung out with the Hell’s Angels & also rode saddle with
Mafia gangsters in New York City. 

                                                                         “One of them 
                                                              wanted me, 
                                        but I just wanted 
                                to be friends—
                                                  but he wanted me 
                                                             to be his girlfriend, 
                                                                          but I never 
                                                         took it that far.”

After she overheard one of the men discussing a plan to knock-off a fellow 
on the East Side, she knew that it was time to hit the road, 
& what a rocky, turbulent road it would become. . . . 

                                                                         “I was beaten 
                                                                  by a pulp 
                                    by all of my husbands. 
                                 I would call 
                                                   the police 
                                                           on them,
                                                                     but the police 
                                                       would tell me, 

‘Ma’am, that’s not our problem—

  that is your problem that you will 

have to deal with on your own.’”

       Release the RoboBees! I’m waiting for 
espionage to hop-along-Cassidy beside me,
make a long war with robots & watch everyone beat one another to a pulp. 
Well, this is what “they” want.

       In the Age of The Sage, my crown would still be devoured by migraine attacks—

& when L. & I were in a café one evening, the older, attractive woman
who would tilt her head down so that her eyes looked up at me sensually,
said to us: 

                                                                         “Oh, you guys 
                                                    are such intellectuals.”

       L. said: 


                                                                         “I don’t know if it’s 
                                                                                   that, 
                                                          or if we just have 
                                                     too much time 
                                                                    on our hands.”

POEM

Equipped with disinformation before speaking

is like saying to oneself (while looking in a mirror):

“My appearance makes the mirror look better.”

Freud is still exploring collisions in the Pipelines of Time

& it’s true how our thoughts wander,

especially when we’re wounded like pups,

for it is on this very night of May 2nd, 2013,

that I thought of a particular game of chess with L.M.

I feel that chess pieces “die” in every game.

Shall we play by not moving a piece to keep them “alive”?

Chess pieces die & are eventually resurrected; they become zombies,

the living dead! The king never officially “dies”; he’s “mated.”

Mating, without a mate? What a horrible ending to a love story

when the queen is captured. What of this horror?

like the Lady of Shalott floating down the river to Camelot.

The king is always surrounded.

He must have a perpetual, nervous twitch,

& thoughts are often like mental throat-slits.

I learned today that my father wanted to fight his brother

a couple of years ago, over their mother’s estate

in a sleepy town in South Carolina.

It is creepy what people do over money,

asphyxiation, grounded, barbells to the gut,

behooves the beehives full of buzzing,

just want to keep Sleepy John Estes playing in my ears,

let the bluest blues wash away the blues,

let everyone else feed the seed.

I must be the ideologically backward-type—some days

I see a dog with its teeth in another dog’s throat,

or friends turning to enemies, same thing, or rubber bullets

that need to be wrapped in rubber—“stop gap” to violence,

separating lovers, decoupling, destroying progress—

families torn in knots, my receding hairline

abbreviated daily, where do I go for justification?

Rabelais’s Carnival, that’s where! The deluded barbarians

envy mathematics—class warfare, Truth or Dare?

Content of nonchalance. No one reads these poems

& I’m content with that, because the collected words read themselves . . .

ALL TOGETHER NOW! sing sing sing O you choirs of Futurist characters

that readily fit the pre-existing glimpse of . . .

Interruption: someone asking me if I want to play cards.

My hand is always dealt. I bend the corner of an Ace card—

the streetlights grate the sky, airspace spewing chemicals.

My lament has already passed, so I smile,

smile wide with wider entails, like a mannequin

smiling, or wailing, behind the glass box

where dialect “interpenetrates with public space”—

& with all of these pent-up feelings, how does one face the world?

TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE

To build a Time Machine          then kick the dirt
in another generation         
                    Then build another
Time Machine in that time    Time within time?


            Forever wanting to be
Where Silence is      & I mean peace          I’m there
In my mind where there is no loss of speech
        No status to gain in the rancid detergent
                    of the world
That which ignites the quiet earth
of our sojourns
                Like a “soundless explosion”

in the middle of the ocean
pushing fossils to the forefront


To build a Time Machine       bending the air
Like a gift            Summery shield in my eyes
Hidden from the spirit realm


I could accept silence         stuck between stone
No ears to hear?
            Like a funeral without a body
            An unreachable piñata


To accept the silence of impunity
        Is to shake the dew


From the roses in the cool of the morning
As if a former love had left them there


To fiddle with your hope
        To savor those blessed memories


In a silence             that’s like poison
in the belly of a cruel king

M.Y.O.B.

In one wholly memorable symbol
What is sound-proofed is “let loose”
& it happened (imaginative claps of thunder):

In what could be eponymous
as                 A Famous Occasion:

My sisters are minding their own business
& I’d rather be talking
             into a wastebasket
Waiting for Godot      Rather be disrupting a train
of thought          

            Dear cold-blooded goblins:

Why are you both so credulous & critical?
I live in a love           conscientiously aimed
Unwrangled like a Ruth & Boaz-like enrapturing

            Within the Eternal        my spirit
is clothed in colored light            like Adam & Eve
before The Fall         In my ears I hear

The sun   moon   stars   birds & Nature of all
like celestial strings radiantly arranging tunes
of unprecedented awe

Both of your criticisms are inner-miseries

        To S. :     Our father comes around

                    flaunting his            
                    illegal money        
Yet he's your "hero"?

To be beyond criticism          I deduce as ignorance
Mere folly          
                I go hup-two-three-fouring
along my own dreamy walkabouts     Why not
stay focused on your own?         

SOMEWHERE THERE IS A FEATHER

Somewhere there is a feather stuck in one’s nose
                                No
what I mean is that                Spring has arrived

& amidst all of this color
        there are bird droppings
                on vehicles in heaps

& the skies are clear
        except for pollination
                & spores & armed blue jays
ready to attack

& all the peoples of the earth seem to be
                                on the edge

& maybe what they need is to be
tickled with a feather

(Late March 2012)

________________________________________

i.
Scratching out the face 
in a mirror. My face 
in the mirror scratches me 
out, warns of noxious substances,
before I beg to differ 
with the reflection’s plan 
to reveal what a camera eye shows:
the lie that does not exist.



ii.
Restore me—mimic a blur 
without motion
like the invisible fluidity 
of The Mozart Effect on plants
& animals that turn into 
airy nothingness
like the final flap 
of one’s alveoli
before death’s well-spaced 
assemblage.