WINTER SKY

                                                December 2011

It isn't communication that I seek with the stars
this frosty winter night;
no, it is being aware of their brightness
that interacts with what I reflect back to them,
a sky so full of light that it is blinding
to even the lonesome vine
that hides itself, darkly, resonating in harmony
as if firmly rooted in secrecy.


I etch this black glossy sky
into a German Expressionist woodcut.
A cloud of mystique appears as if prophesied.
The sun soon to create sharp contrasts
upon the sky, the animals with mixed feelings,
unfragmented like a mnemonist's memory,
like the stag that is said to love music
so greatly that they suffer themselves to be taken.


This, a hungered vision? Or, a dream
that is so whole that it bends
perfect rainbows? This sky
is as clear as the mental eye of Aeschylus,
the chill rising as I vanish in its magnitude
with an intuitive grasp, confirming
my course, floating delicately upward
like inverted flakes of snow. 

POLAROID VAMPIRE

This poem is from my latest book, WHEN OUR CHEEK BURNS OR EAR TINGLES, THE TRUE LOVER’S KNOT IS VERY MUCH UNMAGNIFIED, which you can buy Here or read it for free Here.

In the forest, I ventured upon a strange figure
that was wearing a black cloak that was long
& flowed down to the grainy earth. I said Hello.

He remained quiet. His face was obscured,
his back turned to me. He turned around, looked
at me with a burning fever in his eyes & with a

quivering bottom lip that resembled a ripple in a
pool of water. He said: “We both look rather frightful,
don’t ve?” After speaking, I saw the glistening fangs

barely visible under his lips. A vampire!
I chuckled & thought, I’m going to tease this vampire.
I told him to hold on, that I’d be right back. I fetched

a pale of blood, returned to the forest where
the vampire still remained, but now stood as if
uncomfortable, anxious & expectant. I didn’t care

about gaining favor with him, but I simply wanted to
win out against heavy odds of not getting fanged.
The idea would be that I would become a vampire

& therefore could say Goodbye to this “land of milk
& honey” & rely on living a new, secretive, inner life.
It was a big risk, but a risk that I was willing to take.

A risk that, quite frankly, I desperately wanted.
Most boys want to be a baseball player, an astronaut
or fireman when they grow up. I wanted to be a

vampire, & now, in this moment, this was my great
opportunity. I had put myself clear into the face of
burning wreckage, like getting struck by tiny debris

from a volcano. The vampire was motionless, stood as
erect as a light pole, frozen like a shadow. However,
he had goosebumps on his vein-bulging hands.

In his eyes hung albatrosses. I began teasing the vampire.
I dangled the blood in front of his pale face, saying,
“Here, vampire, here, vampire...” & all of this happened

just as day dawned, burning brightly above the horizon,
the sky lightening in an incomprehensible frenzy.
If you do not believe me, I have assembled footage

collected from a DV camera (I thought to bring a
camera along after fetching the blood, thinking that
no one would ever believe this Cock ‘N’ Bull story).

Surprisingly, the vampire had other thoughts in mind.
He said, “Ugh, vait a minute!” & he pulled out a polaroid
camera, snapped a picture of me as I dangled the blood,

laughed aloud like vampires do, retreated soft-footed
like a silk domino into the darkness, screaming,
“I do not drink blood! I eat developed polaroids!”

His gradual diminishing echo clashed against the
cool breeze. I threw the blood to the ground, flashes
randomly appearing upon my flesh, as if my blood were

being supernaturally transfused & treated as
the developing chemicals for his polaroids.

___________________________________________

Fatal is my machine which draws its own sword,
swarms in the air above, cold as an Antarctic vein

in the shriveled ground, effortless & down to earth
like fallen autumn leaves, a kind of sport for physical 

expansion, reduced & wrong. Grounded, are we?
Grounded like a magnetic field, or a biologist, salted 

by a nothingness galaxy of electrical rotating roots
underneath humanoid plants. In monotone, the eternal 

pencil sketches magnificently where angels camp
around me; the insects glow: gnats form around my 

face like crystals; fireflies gather around the top of
my head in the shape of a halo. Cell phone suddenly 

vibrates as if Voltaire were calling or texting to correct
my errors via cattiness, renegadely. Light is saved 

in my eyes. No correction is needed. This is a poem
about unyielding every savage thought, a story of 

diminishing evil like black hats, granite-colored
weather clouds hang above, redbuds & yellow blooms

along the creek-sides, sluice of unlimited opening,
venice fly traps with a kind of "engine" in their bodies,

streets hunger for the descent of fervent earnesty,
honesty in the middle-east ceases to exist, peace as 

wayward as spoiled meat, diseased within the shoulders,
hooves of citizens stomping the lands as Egypt fell,

Syria fell, Ethiopia falling, gassed out in tempo; comet
Elenin reserved for The Hunt for Red October?

In the same way, I want to be so deep within your mind
that when people look upon your face they see my face

as if superimposed over your face, a stranger
to them like a reluctant, languid murmur, tender 

vehemence in the mystery where Understanding needs
not a connective thread. Precisely the metaphor 

buckles. Today, I found myself in a peculiar dialogue
with a dark-haired woman that could have stretched 

to every state, my mind was the chorus, could have
been nudging mountains with my shock, unstaining 

stained glass, spazzed through Dante's imaginations,
& what is it about people's propelled recounts, 

their "puns" that they consider paradises of glimpses
into what their very minds see? If this were color, 

I'd fail to see the rainbow, but the concept of speech
is like a living mammal, or Dorothy's view of Nature 

& Law, peering through abstract symbols. This woman,
she said to me, "You don't want to know what that bottle 

reminds me of"--as if to say, "Ask me & I will definitely 
tell you," as if I did not already know. 

___________________________________________

I hover
natively

without
being deleted.

Time
is a busy

little reverie
that lifts you,

despite divisions. 
The invasion

of an etcetera
bruises

the texts
that aches

for a better
Good Riddance. 

I duck
when fate

flies towards
my head,

that attempts
to transform

an old desire
into

a new
reality. 

___________________________________________

I walked outside
this morning

& a bird
said my name.

It had
your voice,

& apparently
your eyes--

what will I do
now

but let it
repeat

like a heartbeat
in my mind.

I see
your eyes

as distorted
caricature prints--

all ridicule
& strain

bending scarce
proportions

of your
physiognomy.

___________________________________________

She had
butterflies’ wings

woven
into her hair—

this is the
barrette of the future.

She had become
calx

in my hands,
my patient legs
still aching
to run
to & fro,
back to her

arms, back
to her arms
again &
again,
for a desperate
resolution

had entered
my mind,
endorned

by all
that cannot
be undone.

___________________________________________

As if to bracket thoughts;
words diminish to red,
then to a cobalt sky;

clouds work off of limitations,
full of affordable verbs,
adjectives, thin are my thoughts;

thin as Frank O’Hara, thin
as a Persian jacket, or a tiny
Asian woman holding flowers

on a pier, foggy is her mind: 
an earthquake underneath
canvases of her love,

a dancing star through
her heart. Today, I inject
inspiration into what the

overall picture cannot give,
where it has died, &
the overall picture is

a search, a funny joke
to shock oneself into a
nauseated, baroque surface,

massive; authentic as
one’s mother, as authentic
as the grass is as white

as snow during summer
droughts; a paradox?
Inevitably, I adore the flame

of one’s eyes, like a
jack-o-lantern, except that
those flames must splash

through the pupils
with kindness, like
the brush strokes of Matisse,

the “end” meaning to be
free-moral agents—
no excuse not to believe in God:

nature confirms it.
I paint what you dislike.
I paint with the mystery

of a monster within a
beautiful human body.
How dangerous is popular culture?:

every “lower east side”
dirty as a sewer,
a very serious thing to observe,

or to ignore, like a bridal shop:
that kind of cliche’,
that gown of interest,

a little doggy in the window,
a specific person giving you
“the eye”!—to restrain as if it were

dictatorial; to aid the homeless
& to be given awards sevenfold,
spoiling the evil of things,

like instinct in the gut of a lion,
rhythmic as wave-like obscurity
hanging on to analyze my every

structure, & what occurs next
is already occurring before
it’s ever thought of.

___________________________________________

I thought

of our dead

relationship,

how it was

once

a sensible thing,

bright,

gleaming

like heaven’s gate,

but then

becoming

like a

venomous

snake,

or a death

like Caesar

on the floor

in a pool

of his own blood.

___________________________________________

If the moon’s

pupil

opened a bit wider,

the sun

would gasp

with rapt attention

& reverse

every memory,

every photo,

so that all light

& life

would become

an absolute

anfractuous shadow

sunken

into the infinite mire

upon the pressed lips

of the universe.

__________________________________________

The spirit is invisible to the eye,

like a sensitive onlooker

riding a gradient transparent

literature horse

through a sunset of barely

discernable light,

that bolts into slower,

purer, sightlier,

buzzing prongs

throbbing

to unload the long-legged

single fading note of an animal,

deaf as a beetle.

Instead,

it is a voice that I see;

the voice that spells out

what we all want other people to want,

how we want certain events to

occur in our own limbs

which may or may not hinder us

like covering a lot of ground in one day

that we are so tired,

so tired that there is city-gunk

upon our compositions;

our “face paint”

for “human approval,”

the fire in our eyes,

in our hearts

where the flames need splashing.

WINTER 2009

I rip up another poem, submerge myself
into animal thoughts:

a kitten sitting on a curb that is questioning
the size of the rodent. A bird picking
the teeth of a crocodile.

Just down the road,
there are people on a roof

installing a bright star.
How dumbfounded to be easily monitored.

Cohorts of disproportionate themes,
tentacled cuts in the experience

like glass cages of snakes & lizards;
visitors leaving smudges on the glass.
The horror of seeing a child carrying a gun full of

water,
at first seems as mysterious as
an electroluminescent stage.

Scrubbing the Latin
from my future dream.
A dictionary is a rainbow.

Donne on the mind.
Who said what?
An ævum is taught—songs singing
without specks, singing away
the English rain. Rarely
do I open these curtains—
rarely do I expect the styrofoam plates
to be licked clean by the cats
before re-filling food on top of food—

dry as bones bleached in a desert—
Now, minimal music &
I divert my attention towards the
swaying tree;
the result pulls alleys from my heart,
a “crowning achievement”—
a blindspot synthesized as poetic landscapes;
being outdoors, like a pipistrelle,
reminding me that we are all winter berries—
not like a painting that one becomes bored by—
but rather by the sudden “all-over”-associations defined by
reflective connective tissues &
elements of having flings
without all of the literature or memory involved.
Is this myth-making?

Butting-rams of laminated shock
like seeing a mosh pit at a jazz concert.
Tuck me into your full-Nelson.
I'll be your art product,

like a mannequin,
but first let me walk back in-doors
where my reputation is orthographically presented
like an aging Louis XV

seeking out diamonds for a mistress.
I am accordian-like in your presence;
plumpy jovial stirrings in the winds
like an abandoned building, lungless,
pattering at the heart of corrosion—
breakable like a shivering backbone
in an unlimited winter.
You collect me somewhere
in the dust of your memory.
I wake to see the moon hanging in the sky,
thinking I had seen an angel appear
as an orb

in this room. O how we trouble ourselves
like broken handlebars,

rustic opposition, dreams of flying
through the loopholes of our distance.

As winter arrives
the cemetery has the sheen
of a carnivore's mouth,

opened wide, teeth of an angry football team,
the sudden near-silence of too much noise
surrounding a city.
Our hearts are cities stirred in the mud
of harmonic pipes underground;
echoes design the ground

with lyrical intensity the way our southern "roots"
mostly map the
Infiniteness of direction.  

SENSES WITH EXPERIENCE

Rain, my uncle says, smells like ear-wax,

or that just-got-out-of-bed smell that can

never be acquired by one’s own senses.

I knew a girl, years ago, who always

smelled like gasoline. I love that smell.

Her voice reminded me of crystal-clear

winter skies; her eyes, B-Sharps;

her shape, ambient. Scent of LYSOL

in this room. A manufactured glaze

to deceive the rancid scent of cat feces.

The rain pours. The bumble bees

huddle & babble. Perfume-hydronics,

southeast kiss of wind, the trees want

to dive underground, cuddle their roots

like a mother holding her baby

for the first time, eyes glinting like

Come to thee. If I were to smell

what you smell, my nostrils would choke

on one of your Anemoi. If NASA created

a perfume, let us all smell like outer space.

CAFFEINE

I drink this coffee, ejecting caffeine into veins.
    I am not you, but I am some equivalent,
naked as the day, palpable exactly, recall
            
In a dream
surging through the mind’s shuttlecock,
this coffee instructs, I take my cape
     & wad it into a ball, throw it as high as I am able,
        decoding the air,
    stomach growling like Raskolnikov’s (recall)—

   body
    as dirty as Wellingborough streets,
& today there are people
walking those streets, dirtying themselves,
looking for a carnival ride, looking to disarm
& soak themselves in a feel-good moment,
    regardless of dehydration, sickliness . . .

With precision, I peeled your flowers’ petals
as thin as stigmatism.
            When it comes to love,
I am as blind as night. Mindless
onrush—menopause or men-that-pause?

I am paused. I remain in this skeptical spectacle
position, sipping this slowly cooling coffee,
    mid-afternoon approaching,
needles lost in hay,
a king’s burning crown trailing the queen—

    staggered as from a physical impact,
the total momentum at the beginning
shedding the worst impressions,   
    held captive by my own
noticeable lack of a throbbing Belonging.

MY NEIGHBOR

If Rachmaninoff had of been my neighbor

       I would have been invaded upon like a ruinous

Emperor, except that the mending of my pains

       would come with a series of firsts: Music,

beginning, with a heightened awareness of sound

       (—what L. Bernstein said was like a spasm

in the middle of his mind—) would shovel down

       into me, pull out the clamouring doorbells

from my loneliness, & Sergei, next door,

       magisterially cutting incisions into particulars—

my ears like climbing roses upon melodic

       trellises, transfiguring my weaknesses—

Adagios heavy in the beat of my heartricity,

       like walking heavy in shallow sea-sand,

consuming one’s body.

If Rachmaninoff had of been my neighbor,

       unquenchable sound would tap upon the

windowpanes, becoming petroglyphs—

       a new vocabulary—as rhapsodic as his love

for Natalia Alexandrovna Satin. Satin, silk,

       exhibited: evidence of my sashaying,

mimicking sound, ventriloquisms tanked full—

       his bittersweet symphonies keeping the fireplace

lit in the Winter. In Spring, flowers blooming

       by sound alone, on-stage in their opening,

further furnishing tones, fecund. Then, to open

       the doors wide—the windows salted of melody—

standing, listening to the music tasting the flavors

       with my mouth wide open; my heart seemingly

multiplying, sweetened by the recursivity

       of the dissonances that vocally branch through

the air’s unseen monocle, refracting the unthinkable.

___________________________________________

The sun is run by poets.

                             Somewhere

The sun runs from poets.

                            there is a mirror

The sun’s sum is the poet.

                            that reflects unwillingly.

The mind is the truest ancestor.

___________________________________________

I hold open

the ethereal jar

in the air,

sideways,

in the same spot

where your mouth

moved

like a cry of birds. 

CHESS

I play chess with my cat.
She knocks over the pieces
one by one. 

She sits in the middle
of the board like a queen.    
I prefer it this way.

I am out of options.  
The only checkmate
is to be yielding to

this fur-shrouded aura.

POEM

A glitch at any stage of

seamlessness in this ghostly

cocooned state is a landscape

that a Rolls-Royce would

struggle over, going kaput.

“America the brave” in the grave,

citizens living on covered bridges

of illusion, a grave “to have

and to hold” like Percy rising

from the Gulf of Spezia

with a crochet netting

to conjure up Mary Shelley,

as if like a wide-eyed Ebenezer,

eyes as bright as lanterns,

Harriet Shelley appearing

from the Serpentine to stop him,

rubbing her still plump belly

with hands of silver scales,

a landscape moaning with

gravitation: chilly, yet warm

to the touch, like a moon

ringed in fire. Who would dare

walk it now? An expedition

for scenic flights and ballooning,

or destitute sharecroppers

in Depression-era South;

a landscape stubbled with

quietude, the bones in our

bodies undisturbed, rings wildly

for our era, naked and challenged.

HOUSE

I alarm myself
when I walk
into someone’s house

that, at first,
resembles a
sugared peach,

sweet as
Orient Miscellany,
burning incense

of air,
to then discover
radical change;

sweetness
disappearing
like a rainbow,

as noticable as
a midnight
velvet sky

that is like
the black-toned
Bagheera.

Change of air,
like walking into
a morgue,

as unsubtle as a
sledgehammer, or
like being between

the hammer
& the anvil.
It is then

that I find that
in some manner
of peculiarity

I am unable to
walk away
from the house

that is like
a putrid litter-box,
somehow

unable to move,
as if I were
standing on

a sandy isthmus,
contemplating
both sides

of the coin. 

___________________________________________

I framed another void of thought

to watch it reveal another wall

behind another wall’s blitzkrieg

where I still clutch the clinging vine.

I would like to know the dead,

to squish through that void—soft,

moist as a sponge, nearly Play-Doh-like,

eject myself from this Mental Seat

for once, for a time, not reducing

but rejoicing, like a pilot in a burning

aircraft. What is the mind without

Abstraction? If I were a bird,

I would be a clay pigeon. A Cloud,

backlit by the clockwork of the

evening light—pink-orange magma.

It is difficult to juggle what is not there,

but detachments are necessary,

like standing in a thick forest—dark

as the insects as they watch from

the trees, the animals as scattered as

pointillism, every vein in each leaf

like the anatomical remains of

Henry Thoreau—the gaps in the tops

of trees could be me, or could be

like great nasal passageways, where I

breathe, undetached, going about

like the rattling chassis of a prancer.

___________________________________________

Some days you are the unfulfilled
cenotaph, & your heart beats like
the cadaver carrier tool that is used
to move corpses to morgues from
hospitals, showering a rain of melodies
that retreats like a troubled knight.

Do you see me as one of the
alternating sequences of your life?
A filmic parallel where the sun
is really amaigrissants stockings
stretched around the dust-bones
of the universe’s “sweet spot”?

What I am trying to say is that
we are all carrier pigeons, un-extinct
like catching a ghost in a lie about life,
but you cannot always expect
the flavor of life to be extra-crispy
on the bottom, like paella.

I will be here for you, please know,
like pears in the spring, like a raft
in a river of ice used to save the
drowning fisherman who caught no fish
that day, who has, himself, become
the fish, holding on for dear life. 

___________________________________________

Two beautiful blondes
drove by in a
magenta corvette

as I stood there
on the street
where blood

had once poured,
& who knew
that this moment

made me lesser
of a pixel?
The ground

should have
very well
just opened up,

swallowing me
whole. 92 degrees
in May,

too uncanny
of a resemblance
to July, & like

that honeypot Circe
who transformed
Ulysses’ companions

into pigs,
this heat
could make

a house transform
& die.
Earlier, I saw

a couple that
looked like
they had the

battle-lines drawn,
two humpty dumplings
falling from

the wall--
about as romantic
as purchasing

a slab of bologna. 
Without spats,
some people become

a spent force.
No matter,
I am in

my din
of childhood
where I

take the place
of the texts
of the present.

The present
is no match
for the past,

where I have
swallowed
the awkwardness

of youth. I could
have been the wind
that blew through

the hair of a former love,
but the burn-spots
left in my eyes

pierced through me,
everywhere,
the Great Core of

every matter
always stretched around
the clock,

a great fidgeting
of the mind,
lissome as

an unfull belly,
where the cache
keeps mounting

in shiny fallout,
disjecta membra.
Love-loss as

an art-form.
In the early 60’s,
Forbes was

attempting
to help prove
that business

& artistic expression
were not
mutually antipathetic,

& perhaps
it’s like the hero
that always refuses

an offered happiness,
bringing hardheadedness
into flower,

as poignant
as a flowerchild
in a wedding,

as vulnerable
as an egg in-hand.
& then there is pain.

Pain, like the
white rib
of a blue whale

lodged
into one’s pink
stomach.

This poem will
never end, like
the Pollock-movements

in my jumping-spider
body.
Will you wait for me

to release the snail
from my hand?
Will you catch it

before I drop it,
before the shell cracks,
before the eyelid

of this moment
blinks out?

___________________________________________

The clouds,
white-grey,
thick as a

Slavic accent.
The upward tongue:
imagine a cowlick.

This is the sun,
behind the overcast,
or a deleted scene

from a dream.

Some people
are soured

beneath breath,
leaving trails
of fallen stars;

a wounded elixir.
If we could
merely squeeze

the horizon together,
forced to a tunnel,
would this be

where Method begins?
Imagine expanding
to the limit

of your eye.
The way that
fog “holds” light.

Lozenge under

tongue, I am
the lozenge under

Tungsten
this night
like a still-life

& every time
I sit here,
whether incidental,

or consequential,
there is always
a purpose

for misleading
the eye, as if to
temporarily censor, to

add spirits, to
squeeze the citrus
from my heart,

a brewery for taste.

Out of the window,
cloudcover-low.

If the fog
gets any lower,
heaven will become

a halo
over my head,
Language tearing

through me
like the power
of hydraulic rams’ horns,

& there is no city
of comparible size
to that of the

poet’s heart;
his swollen crest,
universe-wide,

panorama-vast,
everywhere in motion,
in one guise

or another,
feeling as strange
as Hiroshima Day.

The light
within my soul
is far different

than sunlight. My eyes
sweep across
the sky

with tender ovations.
It is as if
this air were

vox, et praeterea nihil,
& that very voice:
as light-heavy

as a wishbone
tweezering
the heart.

__________________________________________

My heart reflects the colors of my brain.
I would rather have a broken heart than
a broken tripod. I enjoyed it when our hands
were like tripods in our hearts,
like new pressures, like a bodyguard
falling asleep while the gun is being loaded
in the distance.

The face is a camouflaged makeup where we
vanished through the tremors, leaving leftovers
for aimless objectives. I am often a typo, a static,
an interval veering into rhetoric supercedings,
therefore why should I ask myself what
I resemble & reflect when your third eye
always tells me what I do not ask for?
like a paranormal television turning itself
on & off, waiting for me to “make a move first”
& secondly:

I feel strongly about your spookiness
like a desire that reverses itself because you have
forgotten what it meant. I feel clung
in the teeth of a star, while you glide by on a meteor
resonating with retinal-blinking, your limbs
like taking apart an umbrella, like admitting
the bandaid didn’t work

& my heart still reflects the colors of my brain,
as if a rainbow sneezed, letting go a mass extravagance
that nipped every person on earth, turning their
darkest secrets into multicolored reminiscences of beauty,
enveloping the senses, the way that you elongated
every horizon with your smile, where I found myself
in those moments between image & self.

___________________________________________

What time should echo is the thing

that lets there be no mistake in the intention,

as last worst seen, barefoot.

In the woods I left the light to walk its own path.

Like Geronimo, I made no attempt

to count my own footprints. There were none.

If these windows breathed by comparison to

the flower's breath, we would cut ourselves

on the motionless surface of the night.

As a boy, the train tracks were a way

to meditate on the strangeness of youth.

Fastened to their intrigue, somehow

they always revealed new sets of

thought-patterns, as if with a spectral analysis,

the words still, even now, linger like thorns

around my ankles.