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

________________________________________________________

Rivulets
in the eager cosmos,

the reëcho
splits our whispers.

________________________________________________________

Ticking of sleet
began, I first saw it raining
when I was sitting
at the intersection
of North Rd. & Wisteria Dr.
Belly-scratching the sky--
sweet laughter. Within each
raindrop holds a memory,
a throwback, almanaque almighty
foibles. Later, she asked,
Did you hear it
against the window?
Concentration!
but something is wrong--
claustrophobic feeling--
hushed in anticipation--
chased away by a tiny echo.

________________________________________________________

Every "fault" is a poem,
like a dip at the faultline--a sea drifts,
forced & hung
like weathery jibbering, slipping
off of buttery hand
-rails
like unobliging cats
that will not come when called upon
or where camouflaged animals burrow
into a semi-dry, thorny ground.

It never matters. The ground
is only good for a future existence
of fixed days, bluer than sky blue, greener
than grass-green.
Town bells striking the hour.
The future is a twisted hand, boundless.

I spell out your name
in the soggy brown soil. I clear it away
& repeat, like the stuttering lions
on my tongue
as if reaching for
what can never be said
when mesmerized by your beauty.

So this a poem, eh?
Or perhaps a fault of mine
for being so darned poetic
that people try to understand it,
& to understand me, as if
one searches me out as I stand
in front of a black backdrop
wearing all-black--blacker
than our tax money "at work,"
blacker than ones with
deceiving rhythms of breath,
as if within a half-conscious state,
as if to actually "talk to the hand"
& being able to understand the hand itself
more than what comes out from
your paranormal mouth,
where Trouble appears
with all of its words attached.

The faultline is sustained & soothed,
between vespers & compline,
odd illusions crashing down.

You see it in the night.
A shape in the darkness
that appears to be gripping a flashlight tightly
with plum-skinned forms.

You realize your fault, then turn away impatiently,
swinging back to the doorway
in a delicate shiver, like a pressed cuticle,
your thoughts leading you away
or leading the way.

________________________________________________________

Look closely for the small gaps
where angels weep. Orbiting
we go through telescopes,
finding the viewfinder

we enter the eye of the viewer
striking the keys of the mind
& then forget to leave.

We travel through
the unbroken silence of space.

Our great continent is sinking.
Mortified Equinox.

Every prize squirms.

In total ignorance, we pecked
at every imperfection.

My heart broke
like the preacher
of a rebellious child.

Extirpating elixirs.

We feel free & unobscured,
but Feeling is a matter of Moments--
we acquiesce within its truths.

We adopt a horse & adaptly ride
where the fields never sleep,
that seemingly never de-colorize,
held captive by the marks
on the ground. The sky, reddening.

What is it about the ones
that seem to have none
or very little
compassion for life,
how their entire face exclaims,
my world is filled with fear.

Flee from those that are binded
like poisonous leaves
rubbing together.

Humble palms.

There is a great drum that is
continuously in action.

Be careful, I say.

The surface is pronounced
without an exaggerated shape.
Months elapse & are dragged
into our secret recesses.

Thick Membranes of My Memory, Like A Shining Circle

Behind painting is immunity, behind "I"
are naked pianos wheezing out identifications.


I remember how we mimicked one another on the lands
of the snow-patched university property
spreading our song, lengthwise, on roads that
we were not aware of.


Detours, like glaciers. We slipped and slipped,
and you were elsewhere, insulated, fiery for details
that I could not give to you.



Everywhere else, our flesh remained on attack
yet crippled by the fragrance of countenances.



To you, wherever you are. This is to you.



Ferocious underflux of memory, how it humors!
Our uncivil skies pressed for identity
possessed pulsing antennae, a booklet without directions,
a map unreasoned with highways.



The concrete gives horror.





The city. Each city flakes out for a time.





Tiger-skinned buildings with room to breathe; ointment needed
to ignite scar tissue, deleting out the delete.

Fleeting dust and spit, suspense in my heart, my quivery mouth.
Suspected listeners on either side of me, listening in.




Harpooned. You spun me into your web
like some eternal terminal.




You gazed at me. I felt that it was impossible
to be gazed upon so powerfully, yet delicately.

Grimaces like Cappucini monks.



Often I felt alien in your presence. Evading or invading.

My bones, with sprockets.
You left your oxygen within me.



I thought: There goes all of my dew.

I thought: Eyes of Sofonisba Anguisciola.

I thought: We stand here as if like burnt-up trees.



Abandoned buildings are like governmental souvenirs.




My hunger, even at this late hour, moans.
Moans and moans like saucy trees in winter.





To re-paint over a thought like this.
This is what is precious about life.




We were spooked, ballooned
and floatingly-unnameable
standing against bricked walls
taking photographs of one another.




"The uncomfortable truth of things."




Ham-stringed on stars.


My memory reminds me that
I could never be alone.


My memory exhales delicately
throughout every part of my body.





To you, wherever you are. This is for you.

________________________________________________________

Am I hanging upon your walls?
Am I stumbling in the picture frame?

I picture you in a gully-gusher as an Acrobatic riding a horse.
You get struck by
the lightning of a brilliant thought,

your electric-storm hair-do like Jimi Hendrix's afro

& your face of a content owl, its eye-spaces
like two halvened pears.

You are my sunrise, my sunset, my silhouette.

The rain falls & is then sewn into my umbrella,
no drips.

All of the world's museums are blank,
filled with speakers.

I am recognized as silence.

Look at me. What have you seen,
what do you see but angles of stone,
flurries of the "melodious hue of beauty"?

I am more nervous than a lamb alone in a field.

Unending tension.

Medusa is like "the manipulation of a mirror."

I am breathless & paralyzed by the sight of you.
Woe, distinct glows.

Kiss me as if I were your favorite painting;
hang me upon your walls.

________________________________________________________

Ay, today my shoulder was accidentally pressed to
a stranger's, & I felt like Dr. Jekyll for a moment,
without Mr. Hyde having a mutual satisfaction,
& this is a completely new point-of-view, like a
graphic novel, or directors using artistic licenses
to re-arrange original ideas. Secret carvings
are like bubbles & fizz; lectures on organic
solidarity. Caress me, as if you loved my heart
more than anything, like how the Humpback of
Notre Dame wanted to be loved by a beautiful
woman, when a grasshopper would have loved
him all the same. This goes beyond drama, beyond
novelization, beyond fiction, non-fiction, a mighty
physical power: this is the plowing of instinct &
the ultimate instinct to want to be squeezed by
graceful arms, without there being razors in the
eyes, without an unpredictable burning, like
California wildfires, like a foolish clown
screaming at you just by looks alone. Where is
my shaving stick? Where is my nourishing canvas?
A soul-picture is colored & humored by suggestion—
autoeroticism avoiding actuality, recessing to the
fricassé-like freedom of being tossed about
your language, my heart bleeds to feel your
touch, as if it were a Scarlet Letter, a pearl in
your shell, melted & outpouring into the stirring
of the pavilion of my irreversibly reflective skull.
The shine is eager. Shake me up to loosen the
remaining ingredients. Please do not say no to me.

________________________________________________________

The FBI are secretly fibbing, like a folly mob
beyond the air, & what exceeds what is seen
as if we all need Bausch & Lomb? Visual scare.
Have you ever heard the sound of shivering weights,
or shivering waits, of those that mumble 'neath their
breath at the tipping point, breast fuming like
a motor-mouth’d cueball without an open-end
to enter, or the unifying of a dodderer’s confusing
assurance that "sets the eyes" like the way
one would set a table? Who would have known
that the porch is presenting itself as a welcoming
target. Bless my heart! Bless yers. Bless years.
Old bodies as confused as war-bombs, today
feels like regiments, a training of the mind,
or of a body, like floating ballerinas, or the
shaped-dimensions of athletic cheerleaders that
suddenly fall & bump their knees. Mark Twain
is the prince of the air. One day I will again be
an American. One day the fields will not have to
sigh. One day Circumstance will be lead into a
gliding Luminescence. My legs 'shuffle' like
Porfyrius, or the language in a Shakespearian text
of which charms & makes one yearn.

[Throughout The Poem]

Throughout the poem
there are pauses,
like right before a storm,

too ghastly to explain,
or not at all. Safety exists
within sorrow--

how I have felt this knotted quilt
flapping over my heart
like a wind-blown bed-sheet

hanging out to dry
blowing in the oceanic wind,
like the arched back of a woman,

the weight of a puzzle, a fire
kindling, clothed by your
backbone, bright as silver.