2009

you're weeping for a dream--a man of dusk and ribbons in stone that enlist frequencies only death knows. they hang over your ears like leaden fleece, attract fireflies and solder lice who fuse your mallei and incudes.

~~~

a dream: "it was his mother's pinata soup. i finally learned its secret" she says. before that she's a guest of the mother of her friend who grows softer and inside-out for years kids pick apart his secrets like pomegranate corpuscles so succulent they began to trickle left rivulets for wasps and ants to follow and wanting no more of it he swallowed a hammer leapt down a hill his limbs all papier-mâché and scattered the girl is suspected of murder and on trial spills and spills.

~~~

don't remember when operators vanished but we've been missing connections since. i would sacrifice efficiency for a human line between points, something more than amtelco's intermediary or whatever it is that pretends to connect us.

~~~

semolina she been shiftin in my boot now for too long n all the chaff has got to talkin how we carry on n on n every steak that leaves my plate is singin along but come the morrow they'll be swallowin a watery song.

~~~

met a preacher in chicago
said one is three and three is one
yeah that preacher in chicago
said one is three and three is one
got me feelin like disaster
caught in a canary's lung

brought me to his parlor
offered water, offered wine
he brought me to his parlor
offered water, offered wine
i was sinkin in his palm
and thinkin sinner it is time

it's then i seen his daughter
she winkin my way
oh i saw that preacher's daughter
pretty winkin my way
and i know down in my heart now
that i'll never be saved

~~~

you write from brooklyn
say you need a change
while i've been
beating my head on this wall for years
just to prove we bleed the same
but it seems
i was mistaken
and girl don't you think for a second that i'll be
waiting at the station
is your blood orange
or silver-hued
and when you leave it on their needles will they
trace it back to you

~~~

the devil got my tail and he
tied it to a tree
oh the devil got my tail now he's
tied it to a tree
and i never wandered so far
wanting to be free

got an angel on my shoulder that i
can't shake free
got an angel on my shoulder
no i can't shake him free
he's followed me for miles just a
just a laughin at me

gonna drag 'em down to texas
gonna light this tail o mine
yeah i'll drag 'em down to texas
lord i'll light this tail o mine
and even in the sunlight
lord oh lord how i'm gonna shine

~~~

romeo & juliet never appealed to us. there are other stars to cross and we were not about to die for anyone. we cast socks & sweaters & tapestries into cumulous lakes. for ages it seemed we drew nothing but sputtering tails & dust we rubbed into creams that we might catch a wayward love on the shores of montenegro or sicily. little did we know. but we will take these crosses up to the sky & rearrange the heavens in their name, one by one, until a brighter star claims us.

***

boo to waking

i. i dreamed a career in the public sector, two daughters and a wife entranced by transactions--a thirst no number of purchases could slake so i took to corporate law sensed my soul vanishing and endeavored to acquire another for the household because no child could survive that wasteland (my wife eventually began leaving everything she ordered in its box i felt sometimes as if we were living underground and the house had been infested with caskets) without guidance i bought a soul from lord knows where and sued for another i cut them into strips and sewed them into whatever i could: wristbands hair-ties shirts dresses shoe tongues bras jackets i kept the largest portion of each soul in jars that i'd attached to the wall like lamps above my daughter's beds so the glowing would not elicit as much suspicion and in this way my girls grew bright and light and purposeful it took me a year to notice the cracks in them little slivers of nothing where bits of soul had been close to their skin yet they carried on as if nothing were wrong i collected more souls so many that people began to wonder it didn't matter that i was disbarred i was too busy cooking souls into spaghetti sauce and cauliflower or grinding them into particulate that i sowed in every corner of our home to no avail their deterioration accelerated eventually the world ceased reacting to them entirely poor animate scraps of my daughters their evaporation was a kindness the universe remembering they weren't always so thin.

ii. i was drinking on the pier thinking i don't dream these days when a willow leaped into the river and here was the sky like wizened lapis lauding the sun's indefatigable circuit as he has since he quit the desert and all her volatility as the winos scattered like snails in borrowed shells, even the rats scampered with half their hearts as if the willow's arms had whipped the air into a stupor so redolent that every breath was somnolence save mine and the tree's whose bellows strangled the wind its husk shed like deciduous dust a tea leaf epithet with no one's name to haunt.

***

lily has taught mountains to shape their foothills into rolling slopes with which they trundle across rivers and townships and children who are the crush of insignificance.

*

there is neither city nor hill taller than our spears. we are three thousand suns, the shears of morta marching to drums slung with the sinew of those who stood before you. lay down your arms or they will be naught but offal in our wake and you will never know again the embrace of your wives or children.

*

i believe it's time for me to quit the lease and hit the streets
leave a note for lily take her shoelaces but leave the ring
gather her stray hair for luck
string it through my favorite brush
and strum those raven strands like crumbling laughter

hereafter i stray
far and away

*

this malaise has me feeling love's sidelong and in the tooth too i mean she has less spring than march's lion after a feast of what he'd promised to leave with.

*

dear olive
like an old love
far greener
than the sea

stricken with
land-sickness and
his coming
home to me

wouldn't it
be pitiless
if you were
to agree?

*

garrulous george
was fond of porridge
morning noon and night
not bread nor meat
nor love nor wife
could sate his appetite

for fifteen years
nothings spilled
like tea cups in the rain
until she cut out
both her ears
and he his tongue in shame

***

on some days we ramble like bees re-stitching the dance of rhapsody. mostly, though, we rub bone and brick and bodies for pollen on our knees and break our wings against gravity.

***

i am learning to
rub out all of my small thoughts
like soot on the ties.

[our burden is miles of rail multiplied by the abyss between us and the river whose hair we feel like a magnetic field as it's swallowed by the sea; it's why she's always weeping, why she weaves sleep through her hair and ebbs in slumber why she cannot remember we bowed over her shoulder whispering dreams of ganymede.]

there is a bench where
love loves less than lovers think;
see you in a week.

waiting sets my ribs
adrift: every collision
cuts like iodine

but i know you won't
return until these ribs are
skinned and ocherous so

i've burned your letter
and rearranged furniture
to stumble over.

[time spent attempting to compose sestinas attracts the chronophage i wonder if there's a way to make it vomit hours if they languish in its gut like sailors in whales if they become days but weak with nothing to fill them and if i could get to them would i be able to fill in my past or would i be stuck with an excess of present and how much does that weigh it's the difference between zero and infinity when you can't carry either anyway though i suspect the former is more difficult to bear]

how long has it been
since the last never should have?
i lie unprepared.

[
i miss your laughter
but i can't find a
winder that matches
memories i had
before i left you
]

i don't understand
your feet, why they rove when we
need only be still.

[but i do i've been inside you and there's nothing but a k-hole a depot for all the concern in the world to decompose in and wanderlust is the only pulse your body knows so on and on it goes.]

are fifteen stories
enough to pray sincerely?
one way to find out.

[
but the sky had become
a statuary. with
no breeze to tip me how
will i avoid dante's
grove? he sighed. if only
i could remain this high.
]

***

bad pick-up lines

i knew this well once or what's been swelling again like an amnestic bruise. i dug it myself with an excavator made of hollow twigs and indigo, tried to avoid canary shades which belched malice and rust, tried marking new graves for them to settle in because i feared my town would end like an oxidized pompeii and future archaeologists would discover a forest of opisthotonus like stringless bows leveled at god's eye and i'd hardly disinterred a word worth noting, so, i really tried to avoid those.

~~~

my paycheck's got more figures than an autistic geometer
i'll circumscribe your rhymes
like higgity pigs on their way to slaughter and
don't think
for a minute of arc
that you're an artisan
you're sullying the luster of our lexicon
& i don't want to run
through the extensive list
of your transgressions
you're just midas with a lung full of tar
tongue tarnishing our occupation

~~~

regarding angels: the sky is no better than this place. there too are fields of rot and automatons. they fall sometimes like a hailstorm seed our ground with waste and our skulls an encumbrance that cannot be denied.

~~~

belladonna suffers no fool, or the last words a curious courier is likely to hear: you look like a lady: lovely; the picture of travesty for who in this world has eyes so wide?

~~~

i don't know what's to be done with you. six years of silence have taught me shadows can speak like knives pressed to a throat you don't recognize, but all my worries are hanged like an insincere witness with six years of silence strung round his neck. some sins i guess you just can't forget.

~~~

an ex-boy of mine roamed
with a fermata eye
but everyone's hands
played vivace &
hadn't the breath
to sustain him.

***

and just like that, a vanish

i. i had not expected to be quite so
ii. didn't i fantasize about your
iii. idle hands delight in

i. dear madam or sir, i regret to inform you that you are a note written in the margins of a history no one will read. at least you are somewhere in passing. of course, due to the fragility of these pages, i must insist you extinguish your eyes lest ire strangle innocent sentences. thank you for your time.

dear madam or sir, i regret to inform you that it was a poor choice to reproduce. the sum of your progeny's ages less your own years from now your second child will incorrectly spell your doom and leap from a cathedral window. of course, you will have been dead for quite some time by then due to the wiles of a toaster oven and your eldest child, but your youngest is even as i type peppering leaf and grass salads with paint chips that your middle one can't seem to get enough of so it's no surprise he will not realize you've left him. thank you for your time.

dear madam or sir, i regret to inform you that i have taken ill. the situation is dire and i have begun to suspect those footprints in the sand would fit my feet but not jesus'. i suppose even deities need a rest, but there are stronger backs than mine to saddle. i can no longer fathom the inky hands of fate. saint agricola's arms now are the only that can hold me. i would like to state for the record that you were abysmal. we are out of time, but thank you.

ii. i got to thinkin we're all rivers or somethin but it's awfully hard to carry on a conversation like that with a lungless audience n their koancophonies casting shadows to snare sparks before they light i mean who can reason with paradox leanin over both their shoulders like conjoined doldrums draggin down sound conjecture quicker than lip gloss is lost to strangers on dance floors littered with the same brittle laughter and spittle and curses that follow every love unstrung with the care of anvils.

iii. wuts eetng owr skul? tawk uv puhraydz n sumr lrn n iz legz faather n wee kn ken but evidins iz forthkumng so, let's let up this sand's impediment enough to last us as long as time requires it was easier when we were a skeleton of wire though to weather these vortices being not even half so empty as when last a whirlwind touched down like an angel alights fearsome and delicate too few words could never be said of them for we are all compelled to bare ourselves and blush like cardinals on march's cheek as spring rushes in to cloud us.

***

fleeting things pinned to the wall with holly sprigs

do you ever wonder about a light bulb's last thoughts? could we even hear them over the din of current alternately shrieking through the television on the other side of our wall and attempting to immolate our laptop's battery? we doubts it. at sixty hertz we're certain we're being driven mad twenty percent faster than europeans though canada seems immune to the deleterious effects of never granting light bulbs their final request which is--we are sure--what's haunting us and will until the accretion of wishes like filaments twined into a noose is thinned with acquiescence.

huh, another noose. what it is i wonder with hanged all these things. everyone's denser than a feather one way or another it's just some have it backwards wind carried away by are and lost to and found but it's never enough to stem this recalcitrance though mind proof of defies predicates & in with swings the gloom.

there's a hum or a drone that leaves soft spots in the wall once it's gone.

cowboys were obviously the samurai of the west or ronin at least the only difference was the distance between opponents and the samurai's clearly superior levels of bad-ass-ity i mean let's see john wayne rock a top knot and dress and still be taken seriously.

look it's not that i want you to stop talking it's just that hearing you speak is like watching somebody breathe wrong and i don't want you to suffocate, that's all.

i should like one day to reincarnate as a hart so that in name at least i might continue racing.

(in which the narrator curses fezzik's name) he into punnery like a dealer of arms carded at bars for being two-thirds shy on charms when all i wanna do is eat my god damn cereal.


oh, also, an elaboration: a "butt" is a unit of measure which translates to two (2) hogshead, or 128 gallons. a "ton" (previously tun) is composed of two (2) butt, or 256 gallons. a "butt--ton" is therefore (1 + 2) butt, or 384 gallons. sadly, no data regarding the volumetric translation of "fuck" or "load" could be obtained, and we must leave this line of inquiry unresolved.

"and that's why i don't wear shirts, i mean, the weight of them is ridiculous i don't understand how yer spine can take it: ya-dumb, fish." even all scattered pause's called fun or, but hey, at least the drinks are free.

***

dear sleep: please be reasonable. i understand why you are leery of commitment and i promise to respect your autonomy. i will not use you, i will avoid the word 'need' and i will make as few requests as possible, but you must make some sort of effort. i did not expect, when i agreed to a platonic affair, that our relationship would remain entirely theoretical. i am in a regrettably corporeal state and, perhaps even more regrettably, wish to remain so. as such, i am at your mercy--or risperidone's--but i am hoping we can work something out.

we have found the best he can do lacking are resolved in firm backing of labors taken under grounds meant to deliver us without a surcharge though pennies are accepted and smelted relatives dead heads of delphic states bedimmed by a haze they roister in as if their need aids hearing.

it went something like to stroll when wine flow below his nose maybe flowing like a bacchanal stroll one tongue levied while the other mouths an anthem for actuaries and dispossessed catholics.

were you adrift
or a drift
of fe ver

drif
ter lis
ten you fool, desert ain't bigger n a shoe n yer feet'r the drums thunder's composed of
i been wearin ellipses in yer wake n makin crumbs of sentiment

don't believe a word of hers.
it's true you brought the desert with you,
but your steps
are less sure
than a gosling's

treading
a wash
of sand.

anyway, adam had the kind of blink that could make a man miss the desert, a dead blink, a languorous lingering guillotine with dandelion teeth. it never made sense to me, charon's fee i mean did he even get shore leave? one would expect he'd've trimmed that beard some given the opportunity. after years of suspension in adam's optical yawn i became convinced that charon cared nothing for wealth; he delighted in subjecting coins to the torrid licks of phlegethon. i could never decide, though, if charon was fleshy and savage as virgil suggested or a cloaked skeleton who may or may not have been related to mr. reaper, grim: it's difficult to tell without skin. but it's important, i think. the visage, i mean. see, charon had a proposition for pluto (while pluto's planetary standing has diminished as of late there was a time when he exerted gravity from the center of the earth), 'bend their metal', charon entreated, 'burden their tongues with this tribute and it is yours.' pluto, rapacious as he was, agreed to the terms (hence charon's feeding of the phlegethon), fixed in his mind the blaze of proserpina and called out to all those precious things born ignorant of the sun; no coin was spared, nor pocket nor purse as money grew frigid and ponderous and the tongues of new arrivals by the time they reached the shore were too numb to be of use and this is why i wondered about charon: did he loathe speech because he was still mortal enough to be moved or because he could not move at all and are one hundred years of wandering enough to dehumanize a soul and wasn't it futile anyhow i thought wallowing in adam's blink unless eyes, too, are forfeit at the bank.

***

head's clipped

she lives like a vessel whose hopes are petals bolted down by mouths with no respect for elegance (and who knew that teeth were so much like hooves, untamed pestles making a mortuary of the oral cavity?)

~

i will be lighter
than a stone skipping over
antarctic water

~

she has mastered the
art of ricochet. no lead
en thought can reach her.

~

she should be carried like an ark in their hearts instead of propping them up their spit trickling down her battlements.

~

her worry grows like flowstone o
ver beds she knows she'll never know a
gain she burns her bridges before crossing them she's traced their silhou
ettes and taped them up against the
sun but it can't keep the stone from
crawling,
darling

there's some
thing about know
ing, how do people know and then
how
do they love
if all that they hear of it's
what
could you know of, love what
could you know of

***

ethnolinguistics

i. In the beginning, there were two brothers named Taag and Zu who fell from a land beyond the sky and struck our ground with such force that it began to spin and we are like the stone in a sling ready to fly to the great fires of our ancestors that burn above the hole called night those brothers left when they landed.

ii. notes on ilkuk

a-boka: leader
a-taag: general

boka = woman, first, greater
taag = father, warrior
bogazu = man, second, lesser
kuk = body

a- = great?

O V n S

appears to be primarily an analytic language,

voicing spreads from final to penultimate stop in suffixed forms, thus [-voice] /k/ in [boka] becomes [+voice] /g/ when [+voice] /z/ is affixed: [bogazu].

word-final /l/ assimilates completely to the preceding velar stop when its morpheme is prefixed; this leads to some confusion in cases such as [kul]/[kuk] in which the the inflected form of [kul] is not phonetically distinct from [kuk]. thus [ilkuk] may be understood as either [strong-bone] (powerful), [strong-body] (hardy, tough), or [strong-four] (used mostly in the context of trade, e.g., ilkuk sali za (lit. strong-four give-me you, or "give me four of your finest/best/strongest"). [zu] also means "strong", but a [taagzu] is not the same as an [ilkuk-tchaag]. the difference is not one we are able to fully understand or explain as of yet.

on counting: boka (1), taag (2), zu (3), kul [-> kuk] (4), gaal [-> gaag] (5)

anything beyond five (5) is referred to as [su]. [su] is therefore quite diverse in its semantic content; it has come to mean: virile (many children), wealthy, weak (more than five blows to defeat an opponent), distant (more than five skins of water's walk) and liar (instead of "it was this big", "i killed this many") to name a few. it may also be affixed to roots in order to suggest repetition, obsession, or grand scale.

iii. the translator is slow and i have no head for these things. i wish he'd hurry. so far as i can tell the story goes that taag and his older brother zu had been brawling for aeons up in the land of ancestors where everyone's warring all the time and they come crashing down exhausted with a handful of soldiers. their landing makes the earth (not that they call it earth) start spinning like a propeller which is why there's day and night good thing too never-ending sun would've been insufferable but anyway these giants land and create craters that taag's tears fill after his beloved boka who is sculpted from taag's tibia and fibula (well, they just say 'bone from leg' it might have been one or the other, did it include his ankles? feet? who knows`) takes zu for her husband--after defeating him, of course. it seems that ultimately zu was victorious and honorable enough to grant his brother's men (those that had survived anyway) parcels of land, though taag himself had it rough for a while. zu raised a pillar and placed his brother on top trapped inside a cage that had no bottom: it looked perhaps like an upside-down pyramid with all its weight (and be assured it was nigh unbearable) resting on taag's shoulders, even if he tried maneuvering to the side of his cage he would be crushed, so he planted his feet and began bashing at the pillar for years he braced this crushing weight and beat his fists against stone that never ceased rising and his bellows became thunder and his blood flowed over what had been a land of sand turning it to earth and clay. eventually the ground softened the pillar began to tilt taag so near the earth now that the fall was nothing tumbled to freedom and gathered up all the splinters from his fists and molded clay around them and practiced and practiced. he made all manner of beast in order to find the perfect design, when taag was sure he had it he tore off his leg and formed around it something new and frightening and beautiful filled with everything taag had dreamed in that cage so she was slighter but wiser, grateful for having been created but unsure of taag, he had been defeated, after all, so boka left and subjugated zu with little effort but then proceeded to make him her husband. taag of course was bereft and wept the seas and lakes since he cried so long his body ran out of salt, it was sixth months of this before boka tired of it, built a boat, sailed over to taag and slapped him around a bit. "if you're a man, be a man" she said, or something like it, so taag snapped out of his sorrow-spell and began training. he only had one leg, but it and his shoulders had grown mighty tough on account of those years under the cage. taag developed a sort of wrestling-based sword art over the course of the next six months and built a boat and sailed to bota's kingdom to prove his worth. he wins of course after a massive battle and is happily accepted by bota (from the translator: i feared my god was weak, she said, and had no need of him, but here is the man to whom i once belonged and who i will have until our end), she's had a daughter by zu but taag understands and accepts her and that's as far as they've gotten with the text. ah well.

***

raptor

i.
cole hunted the tall grass
with a talon nose
and whiffle bat.

i kept my distance,
his was a keen steeped
in owl shrieks, a howl

that taught us all

how mousy
our livers

really are.


ii.
on warm nights
cider giddied his barbicels
n he was all down, like cottonwood
romancing
a storm


iii.
the devil's wheel needs
no wing, it's a gleeful song
with a silent beak

***

who in the world turns beer into bread?

i. srs. something about craving, i need a good 'deeper than', there are so many eyes, seas, nights pockets, hues longing & scars, hm, the pit 4-chan will be thrown in come armageddon, deeper than jacques-yves cousteau? no, no.

ii. srsly srs. her voice broke over me like a bat to night's windshield whose alarm knew better than to sound in the midst of so delicate a pronouncement; her gaze at once pierced my lungs--reduced me to burbling--what words escaped my throat were ensnared by cardioids bubbling at the cusp of obsession. do not think these mismatched shoes are meant for comedic effect--the saddest clown is the one with no makeup on: no, my left pinky toe always points home, cuts to the rare core of her heart; it twists and snarls; fragments & bleeds through this sorry sole whose print longs for a shadow.

iii. er. these days waking's an exercise in pulling names from a hat til there's one left rattling like a newborn moth. it flutters through breakfast and the morning news, suffocates before i have re-locked the front door, breathed fresh air through nostrils i have known longer than my own skin.

***

and there was shannon barreling like a horde of monkeys drunk from on high

or, take that syntactic processes

these veins have grown old
all of their ore is brittle
cold i won't stand for

there was once a sense of in or through before we declined our knowing case by case but i'm looking for smooth drifts which beckon with violas in their throats a passion ravishing under cover suspected on the grounds of its rustling of concealing a ripple of truth. but what will we do you inquire with the salted fingers of winter in our ears pilfering drums to beat far afield and not a thing i reply nor a whisper whose hair makes ribbons of the wind in passing. we are rapt intention pouring from a gap between our third and fourth rib that whistles whatsoever we list provided the tune is lipless and christened delivers us parsed and pardoned, a whorl with no arc, our receptacle surging upward and out to mend the myth of icarus.

i remember this ebullience. blood sings i am not for this place nor after as we deposit ourselves on arterial walls--a salute to the vapors who claim us and render sense blameless for the eddies we've fixed to spindles with filaments of glass to cast a prism immense and delicate across dusk's path. he sighs like desert nights who long for snow a dialogue of particles they will never know but for the breath of vagabonds and agave's hymn that whites out even the heart of stone whose mother has been stolen by slumber. would that agave could catch dusk's ear but it is tuned to hooves whose provenance scoffs at history that jejune thing always nipping at their fetlocks like an illiterate thirsting for a primal word; dusk has heard every one you can feel them in his lobes like a distant wave a mantra with no light to claim him lashed to a rhythm that bludgeons his canals and we ache as night encroaches there is no consoling him so we will snare dusk ease this rhythm from his ears and pray he hears there is more than the sun to sustain him.

***

lesson #37: it is sometimes difficult to be happy with another person's happiness

i. she had a smile like a toothache. it began at the lower-right edge of her vermillion: she'd poke it with her tongue, a maneuver that paralyzed the right side of her face while the left angled for the floor. her lips would begin to quiver from the tension of twisting in opposite directions. an invisible force gripped her neck and her head blurred like a church bell; the reverberations massaged her face into a more uniform composition, but her lips still quivered, could no longer conceal her dull agate teeth, the bursts of air that leapt from her throat like abortive fireworks punctuated with tongue flicks and spittle.


ii. shimmering ligaments have been raining for days. i keep beneath trees and impermeable things, pray hephaestus forge a blade of gravity and i will teach the void to scintillate in your name. he sends no reply. his forge must spark more brightly, though his passion is an avalanche. i wonder if his hands would soften with aphrodite's attention, if he could have won her pity, at least, had his past been wrought more delicately. but no, his soul is true: it is clear, even if only through metal and hammerfalls, that hephaestus has known love--far more than most olympians can speak of; and he has parted with so much. i shall retract my prayer, then: brave the cascade of hands, the knee-swells flecked with oil; purchase some heavier boots, perhaps, and a steel umbrella.


iii. there is a terrible serenity about her, an aquiline hush that suffocates the air itself; yet she laughs with the ease of summer honey and exhales memories light with oxygen. when you breathe them in, the rain in your eyes forms a pellucid shell. she delights in tapping at the crest, flicking droplets at your iris where they coalesce while you're too giddy to see her storm is endless.

***

positives

that poet told me
i'd never have the patience

~

i know not neither whose hair we're splitting nor how long our fingers will last; is there not also no mound at your feet, no fear that your identity shall vanish as has where our quandary began?

~

tired. tiredired. know not neither of nor what not nothing sums up. i mean sure i wanna swim in the waves that break across her shoulder when the moon hums like a freighter tying knots across the sea, but there's not nothing of her in me nor a mirror that she believes in. a baleen spirit has possessed her ears: they are closed now to all but the smallest things, and humility is not no lesson to which our voices pay attention.

~

watching you think is like sitting eye level with a razor that neutralizes extraneous movement with the grace of ballets russes. it makes me wonder sometimes if the razor in my mind is plastic, a merry-go-round of carcinogens on which entities multiply ad nauseam.

~

where is your song? give me a chord, a tone, a moment of rapture that hangs in my throat like a rupert's drop and scatters at the edge of your breath.

***

limbo may be so-so but at least you have virgil

invocation 187

sing to us, o muzzle flash,
you thunderer,
of the lightning
cast like a
lethal net
by your hands.


~~~

dreams have been so mundane lately, baby showers and interstates evening coffee park dates for canines (both kinds) disrupted by earthquakes solar flares invisible vectors steeped in armageddon and ending and ending but there is this man with a limp and a long chest like a compressed wicker basket he speaks not with vocal chords but a tremulous bellows and owns a warehouse lined with folding chairs there's a table next to each one with a pair of goggles and a hand-cranked spoon-tipped drill and countless insects file in as the sun reaches its zenith swarm the chairs and in their shimmering seem to take human shapes that have been scraped across gutter drains while the insect-bodies by the tables don the goggles and bore their way through an endlessly regenerating mass of iridescence and i am compelled to keep their entrails from touching the ground and the limping man turns my blood drop by drop into abacus beads to count each spill, anyway, this fatigue got me restless, like any sort of bleeding would do, ticks excluded, broke a pen's spine just to see it again though it had no children, will receive no requiem save this, how ridiculous, and what a waste, its invisible smell and mercurial taste, plodding on,

~~~

these hours he falter like god do eve. ah, parlor tricks. i need to quit this place however spacious, though we all fall for the harlequin, though not far to the floor spares dignity the sting of our applause.

~~~

please don't think i'm in the habit of sir it's just at the bar there was a moment i had him sparked lit quicker than birch paper

~~~

he's a coil of apathy ringing my wrist, makes my fist a solenoid in still water; i cannot drift nor drill much longer.

~~~

his are distinguished
sockets, so tender and worn,
so known to my thumb

~~~

people require strange rain; their tempests obliterate june's senses as she hallows the ground with split toes and ankles wreathed in beats whose percussion keeps her bones aloft like toothpicks over the tachycardial heart of san andreas.

~~

upon requesting a dish-washing job at minimum wage minus twenty percent per hour for the remainder of the restaurant's business day

what's your name?
i'm not sure.
you mean you can't remember?
no, i'm just not certain. it's been this way for months. i may be derrick here, or roland, but i doubt i'll stick around long enough to find out.
uhhh-huh, look, you aren't, ah, troubled, are you?
not particularly, no.
i mean i'm not going to find my staff, you know...
no, i don't.
well, look, have you ever woken up at a place other than where you fell asleep with no recollection of how you got there, possibly with blood on your hands or clothes?
hasn't everyone?
i...i don't, think so.
oh, well have you?
have i what?
woken up at a place other than where you fell asleep with et cetera.
of course not. wait, did you say yes, that has happened to you?
i'm not sure anymore. look, can we continue this conversation in the kitchen? if i don't get to clean soon i might kill someone.

***

your fortune

you will vanish beneath a rail car after giving your last dollar to a woman who will remember you as the politest ghost she'd ever met.

your body will burn for eleven minutes and thirty-seven seconds before it is extinguished by a courageous wino.

you will realize that four stories into your descent is a damnable time to have a change of heart.

your ribs have greater resolve. you will require either a mallet or a firearm.

you will vomit the first time, but take heart and try again.

your neck disagrees but cannot speak.

you will drink enough.

adagio. please. many more and i quit the choir can have my head.

not waking is the most beautiful sound you will never hear; it will enter like snowfall in august: a lullaby with no lungs. power lines houses and trees will vanish in a haze of precipitation. you will invite the snow inside and hold it close--till all is light and silent and cold.

***

N[CH2CH2OCH2CH2OCH2CH2]3N, or a bout of jargon: ezra owns a tub made of paraffin inlaid with acorns and caked with the slough of seven-hundred and sixty-one sunsets, a syncytium of insulation for the innervations of tempests that intercalate ezra's heart with myoclonic waves, disrupt his sarcoplasmic trance with cryptands that delight in binding the skin which envelops him.

~~

words with a melody in my head always read so awkwardly, which is not to say the melody is any better, really

lady i don't wanna lay you down
your gaze is wandering
valleys glazed with frost
and i can't tear my feet away
i've been wondering
will this summer
ever remember
how your irises
numbered facets in the skyline
noble gases in the gyros
of the bodies you were certain
kept the earth from
slowing down
i just need to know
that when you close your eyes
i won't vanish like an
august snow

~~

nora is composed of primary colors but lives oblivious to the variegations left in her wake. seventeen years of compression have wrought a mantle around nora's core; she spends her days attempting to collect emanations from the surface like a blind magpie with a parliament of hecklers quickening in the wings. she would have better luck sounding the intentions of earth with green palms and an ear full of dirt though either way nora's head is to the ground.

~~

the elder was a corrugated sheet of sand that cohered in spite of reason. he spent all day strolling down the center of traffic lanes and bike paths in spite of the fractious and fear that the world had begun to tremble apart.

~~

you know i've heard bruce lee moved so fast that he had to be filmed at a higher frame rate and this kid had obviously seen too many of his movies hopping around like he was quicker than reality but the old man's movement was the space between frames there was no action in his legs only points of rest and their improbable consequence.

***

while we're beguiled by murmurs

her blush passes like
a satellite--a flicker
rapt with indigo.

~~~

he bursts like the veins
of achates; serpentine:
skinned in treachery.

~~~

i want to be the
scrape of stars across your lips.
dear heart yes, i miss

~~~

vera resides
in a dust house
on a restive fault yet
her exaltation
ripples
from the windows
like a rabble
of common jezebels

***

oreithyia

you plant your worries in a row and
they just grow oh
they just grow

like speckles blushing in the snow
they'll never know
they'll never know

why you're wrapped in a cloud
with the north wind carousing
how the chill in your throat
whittles your shouts down

still the quiet resounds

across the garden that you've sown with
asphodel lush
asphodel

i've roamed that meadow two times before but
just once more
just once more

while you're wrapped in a cloud

i'll vivisect your memory
excise boreal entities
bury this winter
with bitter salts
knowing the only
thing that i can do
for the frost
on your lips is
hold you
like you've wanted him to all along

and pluck your worries one by one
until they're gone
until they're gone

***

dr blckhd: thnk y. (scrps frm dwntwn scnc)

expiration date: the wind slings same thing all ways from the year of deep ends weekends enriched with oblivion singin the wind stingin some things always fall the law of years is inviolable a molotov carnival

~~

roll out the read carpet: you & i fill the night with quiverin sighs and sleep like cyanide when vertigo hits you're gershwin hummin slumber numbered like ungulates bleating on the rafters

~~

cherry poker: aaron had an iris that was viridescent every second splitting like a cataract across my rachis intervallic peaks five hundred nanometers leaping in between

~~

long walk home:

starlight dispels shadows
like the habits that we've bottled
just to keep up this illusion of affinity

while
our

sympathies are deathly
dancing dirges for romance
that's wearing like the flattened voice of bartok's e string