2006

i haven't excised a proper metaphor from my eye since returning to wisconsin which is a little distressing since they flit about my iris and loll on my pupil and if it weren't for my glasses i'd've inadvertently torn my conjunctiva by now; but it's alright because my words have turned allergenic or my skin has settled over new bone, new forms still pink itchy and wrought of heaven knows what or the loam perhaps rinsed from the hands of a mother on the other side of the earth. words are unsettled in any case with no marrow yet to draw from nor sacraments no blood left in the skin of my teeth and age there more than anywhere save the yellow of my fingertips.

~~

this is as drastic as it gets, wife darling: i am through with early morning asphyxiations and knife plunges—there's nothing to get at anyway: wilted lotus gut, starved heart; but let us lighten our hands with bleach vats and ammonia baths, vomit this anathema—your half and mine—feed it the bone of our heels, and it will yield if not to sense then formlessness; then as sable clay spun about mobius' chiral space and tamed in the womb of a furnace; and once removed, darling wife, we strike the thief's hands with a vengeful force and, in pieces, our starvation is no more.

~~

there must be some umbilical string that feeds your siamese insides to a spigot of brass; a glass beneath fills steadily one half sentiment half his heart and a patch of sleeve that he re-stitches three inches or four below his shoulder lest he forget where his pulse rests before he swallows you whole.

~~

i am tired of all this searching, falling into bloom, the mandolin points in to ward heaven's ether which moves in, too, through and through veins as petal soft as planes colliding at the sound of enlightenment. must be lovely out there, sir, but this head is windowless.

enough pretense i say nearly as often as i but the ego enfeebles external mechanisms as if they're interloping and rolling through troughs of elektrophilic transmitters, muddying our water when every indicator lips silence with the force of hypernovas, the moon's slow pull along arterial walls and pneumonia-ridden lungs tugged by the stars like leashed fleas and carnival lights piercing the horizon.

there is a kingdom in the ceiling but you wouldn't believe me if love is still on my lips: a confluence of stitches wrought of cloven breath and poetics. i am so much a dead thing now, immaterial in the only sense that matters.

i need to break down. have to. critical mass where are you?

~~

history casts no shadow, fixed and distant she orbits the present as the moon whose glory is only ever stolen from the sun, and my lover like history has loaded her lungs with saltpeter, caustic she spits when i lay prostrate, riddles my heart with memories in retrograde.

~~

you flutter the heart, but lover let her stroll let us loll let us go we syncopate together you tether our legs to bedposts like fattened calves too heavy to soar i borrow the wings of grackles and crows but have nowhere to go with this metaphor so i will describe a recent dream my mind unearthed set in the arctic a place where remote has no meaning because the horizon is so limited so bleak that any place else cannot be conceived and within this dream there is a cabin and inside a group of four or five with more outside spearing seals or digging up pre-killed meals entombed in ice and snow i am at the stove frying the fetus of something prehistoric apatosaurus diplodocus brachiosaur or super it smelled of julep and aspen seared smoke traced its identity in slow sweeping ovals all across the ceiling as a crone in the corner cast pinecones like dice they rattled and rose as six-sided bones stood rigidly fixed their sockets on the blast door in the wall that began to tremble and in the window a shadow and in the window the panic-stricken eye of a friend who i cannot identify and from the eye extends an arm wrapped in double-helix static that warps the cabin's fabric and behind the facade is a self-instruct button that the arm depresses and everything vanishes in a rush of confused tenses except for her who is me whose keratin regenerates with light speed and we are building a scaled stairwell to the denser gravity above that pulls even now while the blood of our nail attracts half-rotted hounds and leprous kittens lap at the ground and a fierce wind strips their skin and draws it into a mannequin an effigy of emotion wasted on flesh that had already left its bearing we slip into the mouth of nothing.

~~

i have been diluted. being able to name the solvents is not the same as having an answer; there is no solution here, this insoluble matter colliding and dividing waking hours among itself has tamed the logarithm that powers its frantic ascent. there are everywhere fantasies dying, stories fallen ill: multitudes rotting in pine cones and drowning in laughter; they languish in tide pools and cat eyes and toe nails while mouth-less they scream with all the force of a hanged man's throat. my blood is too thin now to save them, my arteries and veins the solemn lanes of a funeral procession. i don't know what's in my heart that won't let anything out. it must have infected me years ago, when my heart was buried in the lot across from echo park. in retrospect, tin foil wasn't the most sanitary or rugged manner of containment available to me; but then, i had been frenzied. lethargic recently i can't remember my dreams but blink in and out of awareness every few minutes i'm a few more behind time's arms coiled around my brain's source of oxygen. what was i saying?

~~

i have been staring again invoking murphy's wiles as if willing the words to boil would thicken the syllables thoroughly excite every verb until adjectives frothed and this stew blew sweet plumes into the well of her impenetrable ear and they would linger there fingering the head of her drum fragrant they mend canvas with lilac glittering hints of the sea and tides tied to the divide between memory and dream that she might learn to tread ether and breathe air that isn't air but fills the lungs with tongues unspoken vision teasing extremities with the promise of release.

~~

still obsessed with sunset—her ghost somewhere in the pacific scales fishes to construct shimmering faces that never seem to take; she leaves a crimson wake whenever she wanders waves like rubies race to the shore; but the scales love her they swirl through her hair and toes and torso that aren't really there.

~~

Orianna was born in the palm of dawn, a child like snowfall, cloud-haired and fragile. Audrey feinted upon first meeting her daughter's roseblush eyes. Exhaustion, the care staff said; then wails and nightmares and post-partum they suspected medication was in order and remember your daughter is only different from other children in color, and she is beautiful. Colin thought it best that Orianna sleep next to her mother but after two weeks home Audrey had not so much as approached her daughter who thinner and thinner cried with all the fire of a plastic candle.


faerie child before i forget no accident or flashback just maybe a shift what triggers it his sister's disappearance she used to hum this thing this lullaby she called it unlike any low or calm it inhabited and drew color from your body until your heart pumped ash i'm going to win she giggled you'd better hold on to what? i gasped to whatever you can so i clung to the earth every night returning with dirt in my hair more cracks in my nails and closer to life than ever before.


her sleeve a tapestry of coffee stains and ink bleeds she needles invisible shorelines through the belly of six line's eldest daughter whose rattle reeks of finality her joints glutted with scraps of diseased possibilities that skitter on broken toes to join their cousins to join a mournful chorus of promises undone by rain and age and suns collapsing faster than gravity children she weaves into the train's belly as the city above trembles with nascent possibilities.

~~

the six-tailed minuet

Why do we dance
       but never touch?
              Noli me Hush.  

We are disjunct—cloven breath.
       We regress melodically:
           abdomen, thorax and head  

drawn under. Our nerves
       hunger for the taste
           of conflagration.   

Lady, we are waiting.

~~

if a bit unfeminine, i want your legs crossed he breathes into ears i'll kiss your whole body you would like that my apartment is six rooms empty what good is park slope with no one but your own saints in the parlor they are not so holy you know no holier than man's two hands and these would bring priests to ecstasies, christ to weeping as my mother tells me oldest crone before time she was there fulminating in the void, daily i pray for a second coming of anachronisms to blink her away but with each passed year more & more i fear that she is ignorant of death's bed will take no man again until i a woman and for this she is eternal,

~~

no rest. this house or that a carapace. they are unknown to us, hermitically sealed; bear only the burden of transience; are revealed in transition, lack of certain motions.

only fragments still. no resolute will, opinion, intent. deliberate does nothing but increase the density of punctuation. so what if politic love epidemic. look-it triptych. another rip n we soar. stole an l for icarus. wings unmelted we wax interstellar now. our stories are saturn's realm, saline n kin eaten. we ken ow yore whirl en, we ken inn a moon. we ken ow d weak en, we ken weak en soon. in other tongues we sung unloved. harbinger of dust we are particulate. smatter of frequency, wavelength asymmetry. we are angle prey, dye light with vanity. our vaults are specious, ego vistas n narcissi on every lip. beauty is.

she cannot find the divide between passion and madness. fervor and love. they are all-spill. over-spill and through. she has lost the elemental; invokes the arcane to draw nearer what whisper remains.