~~
elementalism: i. we spit and smolder, rage and raze the enemies of passion, as smoke awakens swarms of stings inflamed by those who trespass.
ii. we are all directions, all dimensions too blue to fill lungs with psalms sprung from the center drowned in liquescent wonder.
iii. we fall into it like meteors, our tails exposed like troubadours retreating as we sing ourselves across the depthless sky.
iv. we are the root of poetry, soil and salinity receding in the shade of every sigh our earthly limbs have made beneath these autumn leaves.
~~
here is your house: It was a home not long ago, I know, I know. Development grows at its own pace. Measured by the warping of floorboards. The melting of windows. That one still standing in the back, you see? That is your hourglass, your promise of progress. Do not act so dismayed. There is water left. And shelter in the basement. Beware the rusted faucet, though, cracked support beams, asbestos. We have cleaned up as best we can. Our hands were tied, sadly. Worked our teeth skinless. Best we can do. Recycled two-by-fours to build a fence. They are tireless, those pickets. Soldiers on stop-loss. A fine line of defense. Yes, they flag occasionally but don't mind the draft. Just whispers of bigger things. Just whispers, miss.
~~
dear wonder: perhaps you also find yourself drowned in spirits. hazy. liver failing. for all the warmth it is not enough to stop snow from pausing on the down of our arm. the flakes yesterday were pristine. did you notice? we have forgotten details. minor miracles. how many sevens painted the roads to and from wherever we're going?
we will have to wait a while for the path to clear. even then we've a poor sense of direction. if only we could be led by these cousins of mogein dovid, fall into their unerring geometry. they would have fed us similes once--means to avoid spitting 'beautiful, lovely': smile and eyes like...luminous, crystalline.
it has been some time since we had a subject to sanctify, an arrhythmic state of euphoria to keep our feet honest--anapests and iambs marching in a line rather than scrambling meters which is a serious drain on our bank account what with energy prices as high as they are. the premiums are a killer: would that they, too, might succumb to inversion.
where has your mind wandered? oh, i see. you've designs on inspecting the ridge of her lips, acting a surveyor until your hands have mapped every inch of her. you'll leave me behind, i suppose. return glowing and full without the decency even of slumbering beside the window. her contours i imagine are best projected by light of the moon. i will have to make do with the glint of your ever-yawning eyes, your dimly lit hands; make love to the faintest of phantoms. like fate, like frost yielding to the heat in our breath--a hint of fervor and she is vanished.
even so, we are less than her: i squared; which coordinate we each represent is beyond my reckoning--ordered a misnomer though we might be placed discretely. where is cartesius when you need him? building a new machine? playing john malkovich maybe wooing the girl at a distance without explanation save the raving of a homunculus perched on his shoulder. will she concede, do you think? lease her demesne to this ghost of a man or are her holdings an emergent wealth--a prize of interaction for the bodily sort?
we are lost either way, being imaginary.
~~
i. he has begun to transpose words and footfalls: any pace a call to arms, a lover's song enacted with redacted intent, a hush that swells from beneath his heels like the promise of reform, of fidelity in the wake of a hundred bodies beached in the eye of a storm. he has wrapped his feet in wax paper, table cloth, tin foil and duct tape; he crawls on knees like late autumn leaves, like iodine springs mingling with snow. he fears even the sound of his toes, their biting nails, their rectitude.
ii. the local pig farm is throwing all its shit in a furnace because it doesn't want the thaw to create toxic run-off. the smoke is ponderous, obdurate in the face of the prevailing breeze though the fetor is quite willing to piggy-back its way across town. i imagine swine like spores, droves of pigs cavorting in the mucus and tar of my lungs, infinitesimal sources of meat and leather growing fat on my oxygen and wonder: is the crematorium hiring?
iii. a dream: there hasn't been a new born for years she tells me. a citrus woman: tangerine skin, lime eyes, the cadence of orange groves in spring. that madman, that sickly whelp who tired of sniffling and chicken soup, who banished sneezes with oil and smoke, with his only friend, a pathogen, an impossible mote of misery. she hands me a book. folk remedies. a collection. we've tried everything. pepper, feathers, fur and perfume. we have gone unwashed for weeks, bathed in dander and pollen. she looks to a girl leaning against the wall. falters. crawls to her. sniffs at her belly. nothing stirs without soul in the air. sniffs at a grandchild that isn't there.
~~
flora
(i cannot for the life of me work out a satisfying conclusion. something about rain, floods or fate a swollen bank a lotus on the lake and joining the willow's ranks to float her back again. blargh.)
His heart
is a bed
of calendula,
the blaze
of her hair
quaffed
by a
crevasse
her fragrance
once filled.
It was she
who peeled
his
rhododendron skin
(replaced it
with clover,
marjoram),
whose stigma
taught him
the depth
of irises,
the grace
of shade.
~~
there is a tear in the sky like a half-winged bee circling the ground above me.
i. there is always somewhere to run, though retreat at zero runs the risk of racing straight into the mouth of an ouroboros. pay attention to the direction in which the ground tapers, the heading of the sun. pay attention to the gibbosity of horizons lest you dash into their embrace again, the crux of beginning and end has ever been equivocal.
ii. i once offered my entrails to atropos whose shears were no more than a toothless maw. it was lachesis who reached inside of me, tagged my intestine with thread and sharpie, who mapped every compulsion i'd ever known and drew them back into the world. i've spent years teasing her knots apart, freeing my gut of congestion and, fishing ink from my bloodstream yet, all the universe resonates within and, without shame enumerates my obsessions: fate, providence, beauty in spades and the soil they've broken to claim it, poesy, proselytism, the division of ribs into flute keys whose provenance was eve's musicality; little wonder we are played so easily.
iii. the sun doesn't always shine but who could live like that? i can't imagine the fear of a man who refutes night with such vehemence, what secrets sol must suppress. his laughter is a cultivated thing, a light beam level with soul height, leveled at soul-sight to dazzle one's suspicions, a trick he learned in the still of his room with the unrelenting truth of sundown streaming through the walls. lord grant the man light that he may never rest, but give me your left hand, the covenant of darkness.
iv. it is easy enough to cast off this bric-a-brac, to excise partitions and peel away the skin, but of what use is that? i have driven myself full-tilt into the ether, and out of and through, into the giddiest spheres and darkness and dust left unsettled since the last rebirth, i am convinced that surrender is not a solitary pursuit, there is no christ without a witness, no god without man to whisper in his ear you beautiful tyrant, come closer, come here.
~~
squares
he cannot abide
the remainder, how
linen pillows her
lily-loved skin, her
slow unwakening.
his lips twist like
a gymnast when
ever he lies,
supple and fine.
tonight she
corrects the
lullaby,
and thus
he rest
less.
~~
Kell's nails have grown long. He senses in them the same malaise that saturates his apartment: it is in the sink, his hair, the grains of the table, between his books and hazily blinking from the light bulb Kell is certain he replaced no more than forty-eight hours ago. The milk on the piano lid, though, simmers contently. There is a song in its bubbling that sounds of spring which brings to Kell's attention the lint between his toes, the shower his body is caught in. Kell regrets not having installed the air conditioner that Anwyll delivered. Beautiful, beautiful Anwyll whose alabaster arms are David's arms, his lips the spark between God and Adam. The story of man, Kell knows, began with a kiss; Michelangelo was simply too pious to render it. We could begin again, Kell sighs, create a world of ink and pigment and endless parades of skin. Lavender. Germanium. The pink of virginity. The roses below. Kell smiles to himself and hums a haunting tune: it is the tale of a thousand strangers strung up with piano wire, the victory march of men whose hearts pump winter and silence. Kell's air so frightens the breeze that she turns from his apartment and warns father wind of the poison spring within. It is because of this that Kell fails to notice the window is open, that it has spit out the air conditioner like spoiled milk, some luke-warm thing whose ambivalence was not worth bearing; though if one were to ask that shambles on the ground what had gone amiss it would insist it had leapt of its own accord, that some sounds are not meant to be heard. If Anwyll were listening to the debris instead of shaking his head at the mess he would hear its reproach, its warning: how could you leave me with such a man? and what fool would return to such a home? Five stories above, Kell has walked into his bedroom, balked, walked out with the door locked and its key in the pit of his stomach. He swoons onto the sofa, giggling. But these are not my hands. There is a knock on the door. Kell? You there? An angel, Kell thinks, sweet Anwyll come to deliver me. Kell shuffles over, unbolts the door. You look like hell, kid. When's the last time you shaved? Or showered for that matter. Not sure. Don't know. Come in. Christ, how can you live with this heat? Get used to it, I guess. Why'd you kill your air conditioner? What? I didn't. All right. I get it. Forget it, kid. Anyway, your sister's worried. Says she hasn't heard from you in weeks. What? No. Called her yesterday. Mmhmm. Anwyll seats himself before the piano. How's she holding up? His fingers descend. Silence. Not so well, I guess. What happened to her? Kell is not listening. There is a song in him that sounds of spring. Kell? And the milk is simmering.
~~
i have returned to grey space, am coming to accept that when left to my own devices i decompose--duct tape the windows, lock the doors. this is not a metaphor, these stripes and stars bursting in my optic nerves a flagging interest in circadian rhythms and virginal skin (as if this body remembers such a thing).
there are anti-psychotics like toy soldiers strewn across the table: armies of haloperidol, quetiapine, risperidone with their burnt sienna coats mocking the advance of the escitalopram and bupropion militias. house lamotrigine has fallen, valproate semisodium too. mirtazapine is perched on a bottle of jäger, poised to pummel the bedraggled victor below.
i'm dreaming at least. casey's kite-child, masks of silver and beetles whose wings are the gears of heaven. this morning i fell in love with a girl i could not have, who was feigning death in a house next door while my roommate her lover wept and wept and how i wished to kiss her as i held the head of a man about to spill her secret beneath the water.
blah blah blah. whine whine, oh yes, wine. hurray for bottles of remedy. here's to strangers on the el who sigh in unison or stumble out the door twelve stops into their nap; to four inch millipedes and rain and gyros and udon and thriller and incense and tea and literature i will never read.
i really need sleep, but the afternoon's looking so pretty. tomorrow, maybe.
~~
pacepacepace: i leave little lip-bits and tongue twists in the neck of every bottle as if re-corked and sunlit these remnants might grow into a new coat to wear. i've had enough of this one a winter thing and heavy like the hands that plucked this down that sink at night into the mattress and trade dirges with dust mites into the morn.
my mouth is stained purple with breathlessness, with water or wine that fills the trough my pacing has wrought, at which i bend like an overturned saxophone, a lush full of brass and blues.
i need something to fall into or through, new manias or piercings or tricks to turn in these crepuscular hours. where are the vespertine vagrants, the matutinal malcontents who curse each note that beckons the sun?
why yes, we have been stalking her, graphing the rise of her smile as she surrounds herself with love again. our thoughts are with adam's incarnadine sigh half naked on the porch stained with acrylic and port and a failed air conditioner we pick apart with pliers and nail. that world seems so improbable now. i forget sometimes these habits were his: nicotine and liquor i mean. chris was all beauty and lust, heroin jesse's lubricant.
well, heroin and bullets. even that was love once.
i buried a light bulb in lincoln park this afternoon along with three oreos, an ibuprofen bottle filled with milk and a rice cake. i hope it makes it to the other side all right. i should probably leave a quarter next time.
rain all day played the fool. to be so soft, i would too.
~~
words took up reticence
thirty blocks down, so now
i'm breaking lines hoping
function follows form.
too much tar and not enough port to get these fingers active save
tracing innominate contours grown soft with sighs,
like spines on their 25th unemployment check
like silicate that is beauty, too,
but only ever gazed through.
so here we are, pen. you and me and pulp so thirsty
my fingers have begun to wrinkle. bury us
in a bayou & you'll have desert by evening
though i doubt you've the teeth for it.
nor we, to be fair.
no we've buried our canines in troughs of gin, given a
molar reading by cupid's wing n sized our sums wider
than the hands that shaped adam while we were sleeping.
***
brain sputters. spits. coughs and again. and
again. and there must be a better remedy than
this. the midwest is drowning all the early spring
rot and now flooding and farm lakes and swans
nipping at the fingers of children swimming in
their front yard a canoe race downtown basements
like leaky snow globes fifth-filled and thick with
memories scraping their knees on the floor it's
enough to keep bars open past four to lament
intoxicated trees to pour magazines into their
trunks, say a prayer or two before floating to bed.
~~
i am attempting to conjure happiness as if it has been reduced to a trick of sorcery. the reagents are familiar: sporks, twinkies, dreamsicles; but the incantation eludes me--it is a child of glossolalia known only in moments of hysteria...a handful of moistened soil beneath the bush that so long has hidden god's trysts with morning stars. their children are glorious. you may have kissed one, your eyes filled with the gloaming as their fingers like feathers floated over your skin. they are all the same. you wake in the morning not knowing their name nor wondering what grace possessed those lips as yours wander the radiating chapel your heart has become.
~~
dreaming of hands, dark hands, light hands, hands like cardinals and condors and nests in disarray. we are all of us marked on the under-skin of our bellies by fingers like road signs that fade into night's drive as her headlights falter their, flit and flitter a lover's quarrel the, promise of belfries in spring 'n laughter spillin 'er secrets all across the altar as we swear a sign we've never seen but felt with misplaced hearts beating a hasty retreat.
~~
i. prolonged consumption of alcohol is the softest of bludgeons, a q-tip making its way through my brain 'excuse me' it says 'beg pardon synapses i don't mean to interfere with traffic but cotton can be so unruly'.
ii. and i wonder, i do, between me and you through catcalls like cataracts drenching my dress that hours hung in magnolia boughs, yes, you bowed and the harlequins too with fags in their mouths like me 'n you pushing poison down their lungs. fuck 'em. they weren't invited anyway and anyway your eyes are steady are clear as the train you took me in that i'll never ride again for fear of ecstasies you see? i've never much known your irises the shape of them their chiral song you spin to peripheries as if this love is a glancing thing but now love i know: til death that song is home.
iii. i want oh i want like leukocytes after disease full up on waste and sneezing and bless you for breathing pathogens in my direction mister or miss it doesn't much matter what yer stroking on the other side of the wall so long as yer rhythm's rocking me baby root to tip i'm cradled in a shower of sheets and bed springs a hive of histamines buzzing so lovely and pink i can't quit itching.
iv. christ this neutrality this unconscionable silence dear madness i miss you chew leaves for you and spit out the pulp like autumn rites rumination for bruises to come as if spring contusions might stay the hand of senescence convince the present inexorability is questionable at best we have not thought less since heroin days legs splayed like antennae sounding the sea for pockets of tranquility but then at least you were with me whittling soma to the bone in praise of nocturnes angels and their prey whose tears spoke of vitrescence, protean wings and ravishing but i digress as sense lies feckless it's enough to make sleep appealing at least dream appreciates celerity.
v. more to say. much more but it's all spirals, you know? spider webs and filament fixed in the gears, same tune on my lips ticking inch by inch thankful this face is inscrutable handless.
vi. words can express but i lack the facility whether metaphor or simile it's everclear and valium in the only state to marry 'em a shotgun at my shoulder 'n the trigger hissin scripture listen i can see the right in this the righteous end 'n i confess to forty sins for every kiss i stole from a barbiturate but prove to us what moves in us truly matrimonial or how you hope to hold this union sacred and accountable for any death that's quicker, if not softer, by the barrel sir.
~~
4x4s
hair cakes for sale;
sun-baked & crisp.
good for salads,
casseroles, nests.
your winter tongue
clung to my ear:
now frost is all
i ever hear.
his eyes are smoke:
a rapture of
feathers with st.
john beyond them.
there is a word
for every in
discretion. our
bed is silent.
i need you like
a worm needs the
hook, but i do
enjoy swimming.
i'm sorry for
every future
wrong we'll never
have together.
fidelity
is for hipsters
and christians on
high holy days.
remember that
time i couldn't
remember that
time i couldn't
~~
today we drink and sing and drink for foster, david wallace, sir.
~~
i has been eated: jenova-rat seems to have caught a cold as he's all sorts of sneezy and nose-twitching unless perhaps he's developed an allergy to something texan along with me. texan mites, texan dust, texan sun that's woven itself into my clothing. it will be a warm winter though my habits remain skeptical; fall i fear will seem anemic: these leaves are such slender things, but then, they may have learned to dance like petals and i've never seen ballet in autumn before so.
***
imprecate these patterns. bloodlace lilypads hopscotching pantomimeset cetera. goodbye sunrise he blinks to the hook at his eye [merciful witness goodbye] without considering the loop in his hand its lineage stitched to his nerves like a fool he sleeps deeper and longer to evade his hunger.
***
the world has seemed phantom-thin. texas is a place i leave. it's a matter of days only. hours. seconds of disbelief suspended in resolutions i can't comprehend. which is not to say i'm not having fun (one positive for double negatives! hip hip, um), of course.
***
i don't know, i don't know. what were they again? did they run or have i buried them? we strange things, never ask if they're dead yet just get a shovel get to it leave an iron bluebell in memoriam a knot in their hand in case of waking and sorry friends i wasn't there to hear your ringing but maybe a widow passed in evening dress knew your distress so well as she tore at her hands with the soil drew you up and into her home with whispers of gin a hole in her bed in search of an occupant and you are warm now have expelled those winters left in your mouth...[rhyme's with] stuck.
***
dream scene: [r]aven (stately-looking sans mien of lord or lady), [w]oman (young maggie smith mcgonagall), [g]irl (adorable).
r: and this [flourish of feathers] is the archives [hundreds of hexagonal fifty foot columns each face holds 1000 scrolls there are ravens in every direction squawking and dancing and blowing smoke down the column shafts].
w: looks awfully flammable.
g: yeah, like whoosh! ahhh! ringringring. firemen save us! we would, but we can't see you! oh noes! cough! gack! deathhhhhhh.
r: there are plenty of measures that ensure such a, colorful situation, will never arise. my brethren with the pipes...somethingsomething (it's hazy, there were these winged things, fire-eaters kept at the bottom of shafts carved down the center of every column. the smoke kept them docile, starving, the slightest spark would be devoured in an instant) so they are not merely blowing smoke. aha. blowing smoke, you see?
w: ha. ha.
g: she's laughin cuz it isn't funny, you know. that's called, uh...
r: sarcasm?
g: nooooo. dealin with idiots.
w: that's right, dear.
more haze, it's fading i shouldn't have waited quite so long maybe but anyway, the raven shows his guests one of the scrolls taps it with a talon a thread appears gathers itself up out of nothing blinks and again looks around drowsily wraps itself about the raven's ankle who hops forward giving the thread a good tug and out slides the scroll which hovers just below the raven's tail until he alights and sleep he says to the thread which nods happily zips back into nothing the woman watches carefully squints since the thread is pulsing ever so sightly and she can see it now uncoiling itself the scroll loosens unfurls the surface a flurry of claw prints the woman scoffs girl says something about illiteracy the raven explains scribe script how events flow through feathers gain substance in the belly and swim out the feet where they are pressed into memories but how do you read it the woman asks observe the bird replies draws himself tall steps onto the scroll which begins to hum the vibrations lift the raven an inch he floats there dances on air thick with ringing he starts reciting a tale in tune with his steps but then he stumbles, forgets, reads a few limerick lines a grocery list a love song and so on until he finally gives up.
this is where i fall asleep.
~~
gallimaufry
there were words, a vision in the clouds obscured by fireworks. trust nothing insomnia giveth its duplicity is consummate.
listen: something is twisting like terpsichore on her last draught of mead. the oneiroi are rabid
// teeth, ivory to free
salivating (icelus in particular) a river that flows to the robes of their father who forgets again this stream he's sleeping in isn't lethean
lisn. people? they know me roun here. pull any shit n my vicin-ty n i ain' culp-ble fer what follas. figure an-one'at meets 'is end'll be declared dead by su-cide. ya can kiss yer life -surance goodbye. poor wife n kids fer havin t rely on a puke like you i'the firs place. 's unconsc-nable. so take a walk while ya still got bones in whole pieces. i ain' in a rampagin mood today anyway.
she hovers with hummingbirds in the hollows of her collarbone.
his hands are intimate with every (holy hell so many needles)
nothing swells in my brain: a puddle beneath twilight's february steps that alight like comet tails
and ugh it's fruitless it's itches to stitches in inches n chance is trances are harbingers of doubt begotten of loose sutures or goose down.
-there goes the only rockstar i ever loved.
-what about zach?
-didn't love him.
-brad?
-wasn't a rockstar.
-so did i.
-yehwat?
they've all begun to conspire, water and doors floors flatware and viscera beware their innocuous gaping as if the very air has bedazzled them their subterfuge mustn't escape the reach of reason we must see through them or doom our children to tyranny.
yeah, but srsly. head eaten. sense less sibilants. wonder where the phone is. passwords for email addresses. et cetera. maybe those 151 bats have the answer.
let's test this.
~~
there are tufts of nonsense like mallow marshes flowering in ramparts. i can smell them on good days, and bad days, and whatever fate's blade smears between 'em though i get a little lonely now and later fold our names a thousand fates on cranes that carve the air with prayers on the wings of airy things that lift liltingly like apollo's lyre. analeptic inflections and resurrections hang in the sky while our eyes trundle through funnels devised by a notion that no one has satisfactorily explained to me and i am easy to please on the worst of days though these are at worst hazes that drift from resined lips sculpting ankles from monoxides that drag me to ballrooms so they can laugh at the quality of my waltzing. there are better fates, but who needs them?
~~
duck duck ghost
where did i begin? reimagining/preemptive apology for character flaw # as if i keep track of these things or why i'm afraid of water: with ariadne or theseus, minos, daedalus. i cannot be settled. which parent did i inherit this liver from; from which the vitrescent will? there is a field somewhere that shares my hands, a barn a rotting mattress swallowed by the nakdong along with my father who learned how not to swim too late--a fate i don't care to replicate.
litanies i have forgotten: the saints, the apostles, the alphabet backwards, lovers, steps of recovery, g.i. joes, carebears, dwarves tolkien and disney, heaven and howl, reznor, bowie, breathe easy, dearlings, it's been, yes, were we.
it's strange lately the way you've taught eastern thoughts to orient themselves makes it difficult to move forward or to the side is immaterial at this point your ghost has woven a patina of skin and sealed it to my own on cold nights i forget your name (it's a small thing to slip into) holds sway over so many vestiges i wonder if the view's any better from there like your patio all powder and glass after the neighbors thought they caught us bottling rabbits. there it is love too long to be severed or replanted and redacting only complicates the process so what are we to do with our palms itching for submission a heart full of pulp and indecision pumps nothing but speculation until the head's inflated with questions and forays from which we stand nothing to gain while this skin clogs our pores with saccharin insists there's nothing between us but a film of remembrance.
i sometimes awake aching for a womb, swallow crickets and sparrows, scratch hollows around my heart and hum to its echoes. in dreams we are always barren, stuffed with leaves and invitations to showers for friends that we never attend. there is a sound for the weight of them: it escapes the lips of atlas every fifty thousand years and can be heard in the hems of funerary dress. it crushes us like light from the eyes of a father witnessing the birth of a child he unknowingly had no part in, a guilt we would bear one hundred times over if only, if only,
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