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.

___________________________________________

Why must you stamp me out

with your cloven hooves?

You’ve rolled in the mud for far too long.

Then,

artificial, simulated,

conventional wisdom popped

in my head

& no one formulated a response

to free my body from those stormy conditions,

deprived of secondary importance.

Spooky is your way, dizzyingly so.

Come back over: I have grown hoarse,

clutching your photograph,

screaming at your silence,

shuffling in place.

Come back & hold me to your breast

with absolution. Swing me around like jazz.

Destroy me for the purpose of

replenishing me.

Crush me in your arms & I will hobble with you

like a crippled, worn-out farmer.

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.