POEM

                     for Rikki Osborne


Each day I confront Reality
    as if I were a bee
                            with biceps
in a roundabout commerce of excess
amassed inside of the achy abdomen
        of American caskets,
            obscured by fogged glass—
                                               the heartbeat of it.            
        What does one say in a poem
    after a Midnight rain, after
what one expects to eventually come to an end?

Whoever invented Finality
            should fall into a mysterious Abyss—
                                catch a skyline
                                    in the fleshy fruit of some
                  silent lightning . . .

        picking up The World
    by the blankness
of its meaning,
         perception like bookshelves
without books.
                                                      
                      Scottish accents
                 are the complete opposite of
        German accents (the phlegm in the
larynx is less heart-melting & amusing?)
           
Scottish accents
               cloistering you
                                to become
                    St. Smitten—
             words held in your gaze like a kitten?

True feelings disarm the reader? 

                        The hips of this poem
             are moving
                                            the way that your
                     favorite baseball
      player’s hips
                     rotate when in his
                                       batting stance.

                                             As you think
                                 of some picturesque Mankind,
realize that I’m displaced by a HOWL
                                 (ears to hear, tears to spill),

                           so remember that all that I feel 
stares out like oil-painted minds.
                        Pure

anonymity.    
            I’m after penultimates.

                         The statue blinks in the garden. 

                    Apiphobia
                destroyed
        sometime in my teens.

Snippets of life:
       you drove around
with friends around ’94, listening to Nirvana
perhaps in a state of nirvana

& do you dream in color?
          I meant to ask you that
                               before the summery-flames
of our collaboration
                                paused at the semi-colon

            of our synaesthetic
        stare-outs (your scar
as my scarf—
    your possible stigmata as my
            possible rhythmic hypnosis).
Paris, 1921. Remember? I’m there.
        You pose, with demure,
            to exemplify the appearance
as if we were there. You’re there.
                   
                    Imagine

            if the “male gaze”
    were destroyed
by a mind
                 that is no longer solo.
                                                        Imagine

                                 the Folie à deux.
          We’re bloodier
than the geniuses of the world,
                                  half-mental,
                                          half of the world
                                                in a summer-zone

     with 8½-celluloided bodies, red as beef—
           those Mastroianni flames of stiff upper
     -lippers
        where tonight, tonight I HOWL
to a dance in the background,
                    yanked around

                    by the shoulder
                                        to cast an eye
on the foreground of my yesterday.

                      Still, yet,
                         the universe melts around us;
                the stars are soft like warm wax.
               The stars
                                  glisten
                                     to be heard? I feel

                  the wind
                     in songs of trees
                         which are like bees
                                in the middle of seas.

Where do we go when there is
                               nowhere to land?

                  Clarity is a bird
                      of red pleasure right through
                 to the face,

flamboyant, buoy I float,
easy to be labeled as “a full-blooded American”
            & true,
                    but my ancestors were vikings
                                           & noble Englishmen
                                    in unsterile lands
               where the earth still groans
from spilled blood,
breathless assaults, out of branches

the albatross stands in the air . . .

                          my sails await a wind or a window—
                   a tongue growing in the soil of my silence.


In August the days always seem like 3 o’clock.
In August, the garden houses spit-up blossoms
dotting an air                              that becomes
nightmoon                                     chalk.  Our
seasons,                                            more my
-sterious                                        than sea
-bottoms.                                 Maybe we are
already  beekeepers in              Gardens of The
Future surrounded by
labyrinths                                  & breathing statues
that stare
                                holes
       Abramović-like through             our bodies
like honeycomb,                        chiseled away
day-by-day, keeping hope             alive, or frightened
                                                    like liquor spilling
            over pampered flesh—
                    jaded, jolted, dark,
                              a thickening voice
trembling to make me tremble to treble
the gushing forth.
                                                    Is this what you meant
                                        by asphyxiation
                when your headspace
needs room to breathe?                         Life
                                                                 sways
                                               like a broken lampshade

but Ideas as Objects of our consciousness
                                                                 listens to us,
like the iridescent insects that we spoke of
that                                                           listen to you,

that have                                                   recurring dreams
like you,                                                    that show you
what is truly                                                inside of you:

                           Think of galaxies     
                                    like bruises on legs
                                                  or like your leg   
                                                             that was bleeding     

                                                             torn by the thorn
                                                  or the thorn out        
                                        of my side          
                            like Adam’s rib?
                                                                                     
                                                                   (


                           Yes, the sky breaks open, but for you. 
                           The sky becomes like the shallow-end
                           of a pool breaking open to swallow up
                           anyone that detests or harms you.

TREMOR

late to sojourn upon the lathe to nowhere
on the fingers of every world citizen’s
vibration-fracture stench of ammonia-acidic

cat-piss in this room of dreamy lands &
muddy labyrinths where granules of litter
is strewn about where mold is melding

with the walls to impressionate my airwaves
spores gliding through phantom lungs
ghost-limbs encircling wind twisting

TONIGHT in this very tremor of night
the room you’re in is sanitary & sweet
like garden tendrils curled around your

legs soft where you leave stones upturned
underneath like flint in a river like
the insects’ movement like what “squeezes

my spirit” ravaged before sunrise &
what I am now is but a shredded mummy
that you unwrapped in the dust of your

memory-temple in fragments left dismantled
but here in this cafe in this chilly tomb of a cafe
where I’m expecting to meet someone new

(newfound in this meeting-place in puffs of
blue smoke-fogged flickers where
my nervous urgency never fades

like flash bulbs) you’re no longer near
except when I think I see you in someone
else & I arrive at places like this as if

seeking to make my own way
tumbling or falling I come snapped
through the ceiling of the muttering

leaped into our bones of a slowly closing
casket but there I see the new face appear
coming through the door looking around

I’m stir-crazy hatching new thoughts
to remember you like a sad tomato
or a busted Valentine

______________________________________________

What lies
in a pool of

White Lies
is an Invisible Cloak

that can never be found.
Finish the book

that you are reading
before you find

yourself
lying there

in your own
puddle’d staring.

My heart
is a broken bee

in a still-active hive,
like 

a perpetually-breaking
hymen, hymn

to sing left giggling
in the humming

of honey. I’m inside
of your book’s

Naval
to suit the whims

of the fantômas
that left dramatic

monologues
in a hissing

harmony.
Finish reading

your book
with a Lisp

of Higher Criticism.
I’m a Hangman.

The Harassed
Personality

of the Year (Award) is
To be Toothsome

ere long
to give in to

sophisticated cravings.
Laureates

at Laundromats
weeping

as their lives spin
into the next

guaranteed taboo. I
watched and felt

her eyes 
slantingly glue the

Cyprus-sap
of her squinted stare

onto my visage.
Then,

I became something
other than Me:

A humbler Me
landing on the mouth

of Aristotle
in an air that’s startled.

BACKWARDS RAW

Everything             backwards
                                                         in this world
like witnessing
                                                         Jehovah’s                  in
-sistences                                            
          trees         uncarved             caskets
      literature                   unfolded            trees re-enter
                             the ground
Backwards                            world       
        like seeing Lucifer
            the opposite of a cobra                                                            ascending
                                                                        up and past

not-yet-exploded                            supernovas
   
Backwards
like brushing
                                                                               your teeth
 causing cavities                                            or the depravity


                           of gravity
                                                             still causing brutal calamities
   

like when
                                                            the parachute

                                         fails
More strange than seeing snails

                                                         running faster than rabbits

on bunny trails

                                            Leaving imprints
like
                                                                                 radiohalos
                                                                                 in
                                                             clear
                                                                                      diamonds

a climate full of
                         tension                                                        like a land
                                                                full of hungry lions
Intelligence of elephants
                                                                            easily amused            Visuals
that
                     e                   x                p                    a                  n                    d
                  
 and                   stretch                    out                   our                        IQ’s
 
                                                                                        Don’t let the blues
weigh on your shoulders
                                                                                heavier than horseshoes

_______________________________

The salivating mouth
in my brain

dripping equilibrium
languor.

I could slap down
a dastardly flameball

from her barbed jawing
from here to Timbuktu.

My heels are bruised
when I walk a Death Walk

all-along the memory-chunks
of our Nothing Further.

O

Her stomach is pregnant
with soft masses of cloud
-like feathered lushness

of touch-cushion bliss is this.
Q is her O with a belly-button,
uninverted, arriving from

notspooning, but more than that,
& what happened is
like sticking a fork in it

sitting at a fork-in-the-road
at night by the only light for miles
(a lightpole’s distinctive oneness—

it’s illumination nearly deaf-dim—
it chants yellow-paled songs—
bats swooping amongst the insects

by the armloads in canned-heat
of summer-sizz) where
the diamond-staggering

stars make a fuss over lovers.
My stomach is a nervous-habitable
warring-against-the-soul-type

mechanism in a plexus
of red-pink neon-fiery impulses,
yet forgiving I am, loving

newness, like re-booting
a pinball machine
kind of freshness,

instamatic energizers,
an upper that soothes the soul,
losing the gut-rot

where intuition churns like
shipwrecked wood-fragments
splintered throughout,

scribbling like pencils into
the ocean’s center (the ocean, full
of centers, middle-grounds), where

only the inner-lead smears,
but I babble like brooks
& what matters most is that

no matter what sops me up,
my mind is unceasingly pregnant
with words, ideas, visions

immortalized in the enamel of
mythology? I’ve inherited
the aesthetic for a future

skinny grave as the world yells out
to me ruthless slimy diatribes, as I
sit & listen to it with deaf ears

like a dead philosopher. 

________________________________________

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.