The Comeback’s Exoskeleton

by Matthew Rotando

You have before you the result of about a year’s worth of work, nearly all of it written in Sri Lanka, from October 2000 to July 2001. I could not have produced it without the generous help of a Fulbright Creative Writing Grant. The grant enabled me to live very happily and without stress in a lovely little house, high on a jungle-covered hilltop overlooking the city of Kandy. The solitude and quiet of this environment helped me to focus my energy almost exclusively on writing and Theravada Buddhist meditation. When I began to see that a profound change had come over me, as well as my work, I dubbed my residence "The Selva Oscura School for the Alignment of Lost Souls."

It would be hard to call these poems exclusively "Buddhist" or "meditational." They are the products of an endeavor to let my mind roam freely and without limits. However, my practice of techniques of meditation that come out of the Theravada Buddhist tradition have been essential in this effort.

I now invite you now into this rather peculiar little house I have made out of words.

Matthew Rotando

July 6, 2001

Kandy, Sri Lanka

I.

Acts Of Evasion, Testaments To Fraud / 3

Already Dead / 4

Advance to Primal / 7

All My Pain I Ask How / 8

All Of The Following Words I Use Way Too Much / 10

all one and alone / 11

All We Have Are Well-Intentioned Fragments / 12

Almost Escape / 13

Amazing, The Hambone On The String Moves In Unison

With Our Jobs / 14

America, Eternity Is So Long You May Never See It / 15

America is one dog / 16

Amy, I'm going to call you The Trouble Girl. / 17

An Unusual Man From A Broken Head / 18

Anatomía/Anatomy / 19

Anatomy II / 20

And So Continues The Festival (Where Did Love Go?) / 21

Anecdote of the Bear / 22

As If Chrome Itself Could See / 23

Back in college, / 24

bando: ban no one / 26

Blossom, Little Flower / 27

By Chance, Tea From The Upturned Hermitage / 28

Cart Without A Tinker / 29

Catatonia, She Kissed Me / 30

Chant Down Mighty / 31

Close To The Way The Freaks Lie Down / 33

Could I But Hope / 34

Counterculture Is A Cruel Detractor / 35

Dear Cruncher, Dear Healthy Soul-Believer, / 36

Dear God Tchapi, I /37

Delete me from your spanking atlas. /40

Desert as Motive / 41

Dine On Me / 42

Do you want to save the changes you made

to "sliding to crouch"? / 43

Does That fine thing help you lead a life? / 45

Doing Battle / 46

Dream Won’t Tell / 47

Driving West After The Bomb (Someone Stole My Underwear) / 48

Even So Sad Gets Moon Lady Breathing / 49

Exploding Heads / 50

First Poem Of Watching The Rain In Peradeniya / 51

Fool With Love / 52

for poem to activate / 53

Four Telling / 54

Glances Of The Previously Furious / 55

Gone With The Mind / 56

Gut Time and Gut Tempo / 57

Hankerin’ / 58

Happy Secrets Of Rapid Eye Movement / 59

Hound It Out / 60

How many times can I use the lines, / 61

How can I assemble all the flowers into something

more than just a river? / 62

III.

I Dreamt Of You, My Bearded Professor / 64

I feel I am falling / 65

i pound you head / 66

I shouldn’t be alive when I say all this. / 67

I Thought So / 68

I Too Am A Fly, Chanting Recollections,

Waiting To Be Shocked Into The Next

World By The Strong Blue Light Above. / 69

I woke up with a gnome in my apartment. / 70

Idea Skipping / 71

I’m telling you, something’s going on. / 72

Imagined Midnights / 73

[in my sleep I’m hard] / 74

In Perp / 75

In Stumbleville, A Pack of Worldlings / 76

In light, young home. / 78

Landscape with Lorca / 79

last night no sleep / 80

Live for a couple of handfuls / 81

Living / 82

Luna de septiembre, naranja y llena/

Moon of September, Orange and Full / 83

lyric / 84

Mad Lipramble #3 / 85

Man Dumb Rusings / 86

Man, Woman, Word: Two Stories / 87

me again / 88

me break some stuff / 89

Move Inside This Sudden Place / 90

Mr. Tang Should Do / 91

IV.

My Thief Went Riding / 93

Night Of The Reformed Pirate / 94

Not Getting Anywhere / 95

On The Stairs / 96

One Hour Happy Millenium / 97

Our Dream Last Night / 104

Poem / 105

[purple dog] / 106

Rik-teek Rike Roke Rok-teek / 107

Rilke’s 2^nd Sonnet, Fragged / 108

Rumor Confirmed: Five Immortal Cicadas

Control The World. / 109

Save On Love And Postage / 110

Series Of Teams / 111

She Set Her Whole Eye Days In Front Of Her,

And Took The Spark / 112

Si Muove, Dadheart Contemplation / 113

Since There Is No Hell / 117

Sixteen Lines For Monkey / 118

So then you have to show me what your mind is. / 119

Song of Imaginary Death / 120

soul bringer / 121

Stanzas Sans Hats / 122

The Beauty Of Things / 123

The Buddha Of Redound / 124

The day it started / 125

The Familiar Slush At The Top Of Your Drink / 127

The Finger Point / 128

The First And Only Diner / 129

V.

The Gleaming Land / 131

The God That Is Within Me Recognizes The God

That Is Within You / 132

The Handsome Young Guru Of Tea / 133

The Hungriest Day Is Devoured / 134

The Octopus Man, To His Son / 135

The Sexiest Knife In The Drawer / 136

The Tick and Arcing Pasture / 137

The Woman, The cat, And The Spoons / 138

The World / 139

Tiny Sonnet / 140

Titles For Anyone That Needs / 141

To The Geckoes / 142

Tom Devaney, Lon Chaney / 143

Tournament Of Nakedness / 144

Useful Formulae (When Mind Is An Integer) / 145

Washing watchbands (smelled like time) / 146

Watching the kid make a fool of himself

was liberating, in a way. / 147

We Long For Regular Stuff / 148

What, After All / 149

What Boyoboys Are Like / 150

What Dashing Guru Is This, / 151

What else is there to say? / 152

VI.

What If The Pagoda Wore Your Suede Skirt? / 154

What To Do With It / 155

Whip To My Glue / 156

Wild Boar / 157

Worst Blow In All Space / 158

Written between her breasts: / 159

You, From Another World / 160

You Only Love Girls / 161

You see, She’s in love with a time pirate / 163

I.

A train jumped in front of a woman tonight.

The woman tore the train to smithereens with one clean stride. Her hand held a bagged lunch that passed right through the engine, cracking the block into several large pieces. Passengers were shredded by the woman’s broach, which was pinned to the collar of her summer dress. Of the small group of witnesses, most remarked on the intriguing single shufflestep the woman seemed to take just before the train leaped in front of her. At time of interview, survivors were unable to determine, perhaps because of the shock and trauma of watching their loved ones corralled into a tiny space and burned to death, whether or not the woman’s obviously attractive features had anything to do with the erratic locomotive’s behavior. The unhurt woman, released after questioning, continued down the stretch of beach she walked before the incident occurred at midnight.

Acts Of Evasion, Testaments To Fraud

What we know and will continue to know: This moment, beyond any other moment, wrestles with seppuku and tribbles. This bundt cake, more than any other, smells like d-Con and the Argonauts.

A man, ankle chained to a broken bar stool, moves through his own streets even as a frog moves through a tank full of butter. Blessed are the goons of Mars, for they who search for crumbs in their own image shall inherit entire half-loaves.

The honest woman is the one whose train never arrives. Many times eels batter their skulls against the walls of her stomach, and still she stands firm, never shedding a tear, never retreating to the phone booth near the mustachioed kebab vendor.

dammit johnnyboy,

all petal-fingered galaxies of godshumansanimalsghosts

are hopin’ harder than hard to move out of life-absorbed

timidity into booming, valhalla-headed nowhere dancers,

swimming all alone in their own little balloon,

can’t you see?

drunk samurai don’t give half a shit,

head chopped off or twisted into spider entrails.

shoe fly too,

dammit.

the sword of damocles got nothing on me,

let the fool thing drop down dead

center in the middle of my skull,

splitting me in two,

rotando and rotando—

i don’t care a lick,

don’t you see the beauty of it,

the guts of a trillion dirty trinities,

making and remaking world cycles

of conditioned crap?

holy cow, holy jesus, holy buddha,

holy flying saucers,

slammed shut like a rusty basement door,

busted bad as the day is long.

take a good look at this deadness johnny,

daisy petals poking up

from the cracks of your harlem in springtime,

all the trip-and-vision-hungry eyeballs

of transparent manhuman wisdom,

crunching every living-only-to-die dumbass

like a homerun hit to Havana

in the bottom of the 9^th—

some girls don’t know it—

you know the ones,

sashaying about

confounded by heavy

intellectual hearts,

take, for example, new jersey’s big black bergen tunnel,

you and me pounding

in our howyadoin’ shitkicker boots,

slamming through like nobody’s business,

running like sacred dogs,

starry-eyed gazers with swollen

tell-your-vision heads,

popping through

into fiasco sauce of pure being—

can you feel ten hundred tons of nowhere

ricocheting across sunlit copper canyons

of yr stupendous overflowing head?

damned beautiful, don’t you think?

sunburst litanies do what nobody ever could—

bring down the chorus of nifty-lipped

and thrifty-nippled cherubim,

tip back the cup of hero’s blood,

gulping like a viking—

my glory-footed hooligan überpal,

in the last volcanic infusion of love’s hot lava—

like a womb full of jewels—

like a meditating fool—

with a ten-foot beard—

like the past never was!—

like a boatload of drunks—

from neck to knees—

and halo to hole—

from the square root of negative nothin’—

to the edge of the unknown universe—

we’re here to walk across the coals, johnny,

crack-your-nose-off neanderthals

blowing poems in kids’ ears (all ages!)

Me at 10 or 12,

forest roaming,

treehouse building,

salamanders, big beetles.

13 & 14, science fiction,

slingshots, BB guns, all sorts of targets,

cans, bottles, squirrels,

sadly, birds.

One day some moment

moved thoughts

to thinking

and made girls happen.

15, serious for girls,

to have them

and have them

have me.

Front seat of 1^st girl’s car,

dashboard light so green,

clock going aroundaround,

my house across the street alldark…

every minute a hundred-

year eyeblink and long.

Leaning over, lost

in swimming head,

thinking—

Planes in air. Water. My face. Death—

Waiting

in moment before kiss,

and I escape,

fleeing to girl.

And lips touch, conceive,

the perfect firebrand

I sought, would seek

again and forever.

All My Pain I Ask How

Light gets in the way. Whatever me there is, feels sensation, senses feeling.

Out at the edges, emptiness, gog and m’god…

Somewhere, the dark,

The obscure side of love: no picnic. I run at it like voodoo. People ride in cars,

my world is only dust. An undead dog, eating the cities,

trying not to hate so much. Pain of sex.

Chance to see what cleanliness might be? Not me.

A trapped rat, tooth and wings of hardship.

Before the dirt I would do one right thing.

masks God am I human.

isolation

All Of The Following Words I Use Way Too Much

There would be a way if this could be something in stuff, it wants and he and thing on path and yes that, and bungled light in corners craves release and twist and greatness is forgot and remember rite and righteous in central fire, location for swimming over lost horizon, nowhere and colossal and thin bowls spin with crinkling twin clanking sounds, and cling and swirl and whorl, vessels of desert and mind and definitely thought, and gem is fully over, and shining and radiance and return go elsewhere, and grin and strain and powder useless out of being done, and dust and color ought to go, and frond and essence finished and deprive deprave and get good gone.

all one and alone

stunned

my voiceworld

will be my helmet

my protection

in sullen places where I have to be alone

a troll makes his way out from under a rock

simply dissolves

a lonely pony

like a leader of granite men

I wantonly scramble

through infusions of tea

bearing ritual objects

through fire

down chameleon-eyed walls

with weird friends

I get out of the shower

with weird friends

down chameleon-eyed walls

through fire

bearing ritual objects

through infusions of tea

I wantonly scramble

like a leader of granite men

a lonely pony

simply dissolves

a troll makes his way out from under a rock

in sullen places where I have to be alone

my protection

will be my helmet

my voiceworld

stunned

All We Have Are Well-Intentioned Fragments

We are safe everywhere.

The other night was made of pleasant toasts

and semi-precious rainwalks,

both of us lonely, both of us happy.

I want to be bold and shy.

Did the air around you sense my non-indifference, or shall we construct another spark of origami dialogue, to avoid simplicity of kissing?

Almost Escape

I tried to pinch some white roses from the trellis outside the old banshee’s house. Inside, I could see her eyes glowing like a big red jack o’ lantern. She hollered at me from the window and tossed a hairpin dart at my head. I dodged and watched it slip past me, sticking into the side of her wooden mailbox. I ran across the lawn, but my feet melted out from under me, becoming slabs of cement. I fell forward into a patch of thistles, high shrill laughter and a plume of purple smoke coming out of the house. Before I turned back into a birdbath, the last thing I saw was the old banshee, crying and caressing what was left of her white roses.

Amazing, The Hambone On The String Moves In Unison With Our Jobs

Something’s brewing. Nine, so many places for because and how. It comes from a nature to be round, to be replete with questing songs. How away for us.

A readiness is coming on, steady beat for heady tempos, unfound in grey space under chest. Crank back my arm, catch an ascending ladder. Fry out dirt from eyes, slip over gunwhale, capture a mess of waves, blow out astounded halls. Our scene at shoulder length shows the cinema where to row.

Bleary night of molten happenings, tundra in an underdown phase. Yesterday, operatic picnic, friends on blankets, verbs in trees under bread and cheese. Over the amusing solstice sky, a daring butterfly winced when streams went vertical, horizons bending outward, planetlike in sudden spheroid recklessness. Full of willful beauty, too.

A child shook hands with ambushed tales, groping metropolitan dusk (bashful silences gangled in the corner, watching under flagpole statues), then let go. We went out with baggage, came back with rain.

America, Eternity Is So Long You May Never See It

Eternity tears at fabric of human life.

Insane bulletcases packed with lonely American businessdemons

try to tuck it back in.

Lies we tell about time are gem-eating maggots, erupting from ignorant flesh.

Arise, monolithic ogres, big-assed killer whales groaning out of sleep on Jupiter!

Dinners of desperately quiet economists await.

Dollars dripping from their pockets, stern cockroaches pick at greenish pustules.

America closes ham-giant fists over southamericasia’s mango-scented hips,

prying markets open wide.

Television kicks sand over mandala-makers’ castles,

maims humanity’s natural inclination for deep samadhic reality.

Earth is a sweatshop arboretum, billions straining to hear whispers

of American Dream, beyond dread and muscle.

America Is One Dog

Check out these lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens called "For an Old Woman in a Wig": Are you, then, fonder/ Of the circumference of earth’s impounding/ Than of some sphere on which the mind might blunder,/ If you, with irrepressible will, abounding/ In wish for revelation,/ Sought out the unknown new in your surrounding?

A few minutes ago, while I was doing my morning meditation, I was thinking about what it would be like if all the countries of the world, with all their people and animals in them, became individual dogs. What if all the living beings bounded by the geographical region known as the United States of America (all 50 states) became one single dog? What would that dog be like? I don’t mean that the dog would have all of the thoughts/traits/feelings of all the beings in the country. I mean is what kind of dog (German Shepherd, Jack Russell, etc) would America be? And what particular dog traits would we have? Would we like to run, to fight, to snooze? In our decision we’ll have to take into account things like Painted Desert-dwelling rattlesnakes; various types of salamanders that live in the forests and bogs of Maine and New Hampshire; all the dogs of America themselves, with their various personalities and all the freaky food they are given by the Americans who "own" them; also the genius computer programming students of Columbia and Stanford Universities (taking into account the fact that those kids are probably the next generation of millionaires and billionaires and media moguls); plus the flapjack and burger flippers at all the Waffle Houses of North Carolina; the little mites and fleas that live in the dreadlocks of the itinerant post-Grateful Deadheads; and the most elderly and close-to-death members of Alaskan caribou herds; and the guy who did the camera work for the scene in Reservoir Dogs where Harvey Keitel suddenly, horrifically, tragically, finds out that Tim Roth is, in fact, a cop; any still-living relatives of Jimi Hendrix; and all the little gerbils kept as pets by the children of America, especially ones that have wheels to run on; the bears who’ll be shot this year by tobacco-chewing Virginians; the Mexican migrants of North Carolina who picked the tobacco; and the ants of Nantucket.

Amy, I'm going to call you The Trouble Girl.

I like trouble. I like to shoot watermelon seeds at passing barges. I wanna put Elmer’s Glue in your hair and make it stick STRAIGHT up. I wanna go down to the docks and kick some ass! Your shoes smell like skunk. And so do mine. If we were lizards, I bet we would both be geckos with sticky round fingers. A friend is someone who decides to find you out. Let’s have a broken bottle party! A Chinese dude, Shih-Wu, said, "Pine trees and strange rocks remain unknown to those who look for mind with mind." So let’s not bother. Let’s just walk arm in arm through a crumbling metropolis, clacking castanets.

An Unusual Man From A Broken Head

It’s not like he could choose his habits if he wanted to. The crisp crackling of things is something he always went back to. He tried for a ringing truth in the middle of all the heavy drippings, the covered parts of his withering soul. He’s right now searching for a line, a perfect set of words to bring him out of his everyday slide. He’s searching for his cave, his moment when all the monumental truths emerge from darkness, the briny undercoat of existence. He notices talkers, always slighting one another. Look at the way they sleep through their lives, he thinks. His mind aches to feel his body. His monument to himself is his trembling, how his thoughts tumble and grow into something whole, with a base of slow loneliness.

Take it all, he muses, this life, let it take everything, I’m nothing but selfish, needing to be tamed. I could sit high up in here in my tree and I’d still be last on line for forgiveness. He would have forgiveness from this world. Nothing more. The immolation of everything. How attractive. He’s the mad arsonist who sought to burn whole worlds, playing with fireflies in his prison cell, wishing he could consume everything and turn it into light. Beliefs he seeks to cry towards crumble as his dawn opens and turns the world grey. He sees only grey beyond the horizon. Its silence is something he had not prepared for, like a shaky hand, injecting rivulets of desire into his consciousness, pressing him into uncertain self-awareness.

All this grief is happiness, he thinks. I’m one more slave of time and memory. I can’t be satisfied like the crows that linger and preen in the trees outside my window. I feel I could crawl towards something. I wish for the opposite of existence. I’m always lost in time between thoughts. I want bundles of great knowing. I want to break them. What a strange and miserable creature I am. And how beautiful. I felt lost for a time and now I feel half-wonderful. There was an utterance, a murmur that opened my head. It took out smoky dread and replaced it with a persistent buttery feeling. "Describe this feeling," I ask myself. I take my hand from my pocket and wait a moment. Then I put it back. I walk away, satisfied I have demonstrated the depth of meaning. To be quiet one must first taste light. But what light? Now I seem to have misplaced my thoughts on most subjects. It makes me angry to see myself lingering in the mirror, still looking like my old self. Haven’t I changed? The fool I have been, waiting for things to arrive that have no way of finding me. I comprehend broken windows, glaring children, the pain of being. But there are no other voices. I’m coming down from the tree. I shall forget beliefs. I shall only pray and whisper. That sounds bright and promising. Running my hand through cold water, I speak to the world within myself, "Think your views and you’re already lost. Your best friend is letting go. Feel free to fall off every precipice you see. Forget what you are, you’re already gone. Be the child who quietly plays as the adults speak their large words. Let the doors open by lying down before them, content to stare at the floor." All of this sounds perfectly correct, perhaps someone does know me…perhaps…He continued on like this for some time.

Anatomía

Corazón:

Choza de palos,

Lleno de ranas

Cantando en el crepúsculo azul.

Sueños:

Alas de paloma

Grabadas blanco brillante

Contra un abanico de plata.

Noche:

Cáscara

De luna irisada,

Párpado de un lagarto viejo.

***

Anatomy

Heart:

Little wicker hut

Teeming with night frogs

Chanting in blue twilight.

Dreams:

Dovewings

Printed bright white

Against a silver fan.

Night:

Iridescent

Shell of the moon,

An old lizard's eyelid.

Anatomy II

Cock:

long, old

futile hose

of rut and scrunch.

Gut:

mute grey bowelcave

thick with voiceless

lovestones.

Breath:

boneblank

heartgong

echoing only loneliness.

And So Continues The Festival (Where Did Love Go?)

The startling drama of it all, creaking under weight of a glooming glorious city. Collapse of reason heralds deadpan clarity.

Did you see that green bird? It just flew by, under your umbrella.

Morning dreams careen along edge of lonesome lake, marvelous fools tumble, dancing side to side. They are saved, insulated at hearts’ borders, like ice on ice.

Unstunned, drawing together complete polarities, restless roots connect.

Nervous skies twitch, lie still.

A made up rhythm-man comes rumbling, clever in his cap. He’ll get out, feet enameled to the floor.

Why didn’t we say anything all summer?

Anecdote of the Bear

Breaking bread with a grizzly, a chronic allergy sufferer sneezed mucus onto the bear’s shoulder. The grizzly pulled off the fellow’s hands and wore them for a whole winter, keeping them on as he slept through the cold and snow. He kept the dismembered allergy sufferer in an insulated barrel at the back of his cave. In the spring, still wearing the hands, the bear went out and used them to pick berries and scoop honey into his mouth. He found them much more useful than his own awkward paws. Nevertheless, the compassionate bear hauled the emaciated allergy sufferer out of the barrel, reattached the hands, and taught him to forage for his meals. When he was plump and healthy again, the thankful fellow embraced the huge grizzly, shook his paw, and went on his way in the world, never to sneeze again. Lonely once more, and unable to keep a diary without opposable thumbs, the bear returned to the city of his birth. Eventually, he married a beautiful Spanish hedge fund manager. In the small but wealthy circles of society he and his wife frequented, he became rather well known for his soft fur, kind strength, and wise investment strategies.

As If Chrome Itself Could See

As if someone else knows, too. She put her finding in my bang of a mouth, a colored window for crunching over. She twined almost everything into what she could be sure, almost something like a day. Bordered in any way, by ink.

Her snootish pausoleum dangles moments over my eyes, thick-wandered and strumming. For lying out crowds, I constructed whipped noblesse, melted and fell. Together, we expanded into heathen, placid cold welts. She could go lost for a lot of us care, sure we might never smirk beyond, but sure to be whatever.

Numbers flick tympanum-down, milling in insect grain, a burst collective of small beings. Mostly, conscience makes things over (feet like stunts) and a wooden spoken sundry, not waking for a boom. Babies play in circles of brickstruck fish. To world this away, she lives in the street under bustle, binding nature.

Gandering hard, mesh migration patterns loftily blaze. She gathers smitten silences tossed on iridescent lathes.

Back in college,

In 1991

when the Gulf War

had just started

it was close to exam time for me &

I remember

I had this sociology final & the class was dead boring

I could barely drag my ass into the room

where the professor would drone away,

all the football goons staring at our T.A.,

a tall blond grad student I was afraid to talk to,

& she was the only thing that kept me there

I couldn’t study a bit,

not even when the final came,

I stayed up for two (maybe three) nights in a row

thinking about I dunno what—

staring into space thinking, shit,

here’s spoiled notstudying me in college

& guys my age are gonna go DIE

in the Persian Gulf & I’m gonna sit here

mooning myself & messing around with women, crap—

& when I had to take the final on 2 days with no sleep

I nodded off during the test & dreamt I was in the desert wearing tan fatigues,

a soldier in the Gulf

so I finished my stupid multiple choice test,

took a bus downtown to the

Marine Recruiting Office

& asked to speak with a hangdog-jowled officer

who sat me down & said,

"The Marines will teach you about life

and how to be a man

and take care of yourself!"

& I, in my frenzy

of insomniac lucidity

asked a billion questions

about every detail

like what do you do eat

what do you do talk about with the other MEN

So I shook hands & walked out as 2 young kids

in heavy metal T-shirts were standing in front of another grey-faced

officer taking the Marine Oath—

bando: ban no one

it is

as you know opening

once again

glowing perhaps underside

round with tremendous faultlines

connected hues and spiritfingers

ardor of crossroads

melodic tiptoe breath

frozen simple attention

intricately focused collisions

harbor

a man in his own thoughts

making clay

from local dust

scan and crane

precision coated handling

unwritten ocean reflex

barter temp(ora)l(e)

agnostic smoothness

tattered storm engine

smooth agnosticity

note: bando is a crossroads of banjo and bard’o…it could be a ghost song…or a song about the ghost world…it could be a song that the world of the dead itself sings…but it could also be something to say to the dead…or a transmission from the dead to the living or the living to the dead…or the dead to the dead…

Blossom, Little Flower

Blossom proudly, little flower of this floating world,

You, too, are a member at the temple of the sun.

Blossom gently little grain of the universe,

You are a lamp in the labyrinth of time.

Blossom quietly, little life of color and change,

And may the music of your opening fill the world.

By Chance, Tea From The Upturned Hermitage

of Nay proceeds.

The whimpering sunken pole star is a head.

Blithe penitents proceed, tightrope walker’s pong

blasts a raven ninja song;

a carlight or a boon hit home remains.

Mauled by planet fizz,

tall, austere, reflecting trees,

the lurid sinking pyre is in chains.

Tea for three goats and a mage, Pan or Hades,

Hades more than Pan; four inkblots on a page,

four ladies gobbling down a gummy froth

sway in bonds made by their wrath;

a houseboat passenger on banks of Lethe,

deathless mountains grumbling.

Cart Without A Tinker

Moving, a burnt wooden machine breaks free of its straps, shudders forward on a road. Axles wince from rumbling of old wheels, metals kneading one another. Relieved road-dust follows closely, aching to be touched by more than searing heat. In moments, sun will go down, come up again: a tired rattle, lost in its spherical routine. Restless torpor settles under greying sky.

Catatonia, She Kissed Me

With autumn-scented lips

And I fell

Through the wall

Into the next room

Where King Sex

And Queen Death

Strolled naked

Around the mudhut

As if it were

A Palace.

Chant Down Mighty

Can you chant down love,

Young humans in the kiss?

Can you chant down peace,

Or you fearful of the fist?

Can you chant down sweetness,

In the cold green grasses?

Can you chant down mighty,

Like the prophets in the past?

Can you sweat out riders,

Horns spinning on them heads?

Can you sweat black fright,

And you beat in working fields?

Can you sweating all the ghosts,

Down in devil kitchen hole?

Can you sweat out mighty,

Come where lonely man grow?

Can you break old stone,

In the middle of the world?

Can you break five thousand,

From the shark he made of bread?

Can you open ’til it’s over,

Can you get up out of bed?

Can you chant down mighty?

Can you chant down mighty?

Can you ready, can you chant?

Can you chant down mighty?

II.

Close To The Way The Freaks Lie Down

Moving generals of a minister land

Mild ponds cramp ore most fully

Humble suits skin warbled skin

Most wasn’t waste

Moments for finding strain

What nights could break under slalom grooves

Earned sure to be away

Flight of mangled trains

Cover who’s to be

Verbs made vines grow

Nothing else for that

Could I But Hope

Could I but hope to hold

a dazzling quiver of organic pipes of light,

Mold and twist them

into dopey flesh and hinging bones,

Pickle giant cosmic trays

of gnostic liquid spheres,

Bend the silent swanky emptiness

of monumental space,

Or trap the transient graduated clicks

of always forward-humping time,

I say could I but hope

to heft my hearty meatpaws at a high atomic workbench,

Crassly grinning

new and unknown elements into wide creation,

I would not be as gloriouslyperpetuallydumbly

ecstatic as I have been

Holding your tiny tan hand,

waiting for the F Train,

While the whole mad universe

thrashed quietly around us,

Resembling

something like a city.

Counterculture Is A Cruel Detractor

Let us swiftly indulge in it.

I’ll wear a vertical hat,

Horizontal pants.

You swim like a chicken.

Write to all the members of The Spitball Club.

Tell them to come

To the inauguration,

No matter who wins.

Inhale gypsy ice cream,

Exhale canned laughter.

Cover the convertible with auburn worms,

And mourn the tribes of yesteryear.

We’ll indulge in cro magnon racquet sports,

And salute the aardvark’s biceps.

Dear Cruncher, Dear Healthy

Soul-Believer,

I kinda liked it when you showed me your injury. Whaddaya say we avoid onions tonight? We could hold hands, or wait until The Devil fills us with stranger tendencies…

Dear God Tchapi, I

dedicated myself to the coyotes

the night before

picture

standing naked in the desert.

I don’t think

I ever told you this:

I crawled out of my bag,

wondering too hard to sleep,

crept down to the

and walked out

I prayed for us

I prayed for some old local God

to come

down from the moon

(which (s)he probably did

(I wouldn’t know

I was chanting, naked,

surrounded by coyotes)).

I suppose I was also praying

for the God of my family

to be not dead yet,

and praying

to the God of California

(my addiction God),

and the to the God of Zen

cameras,

and to the God of the woman I am

Dear God Tchapi,

what to say

you saying,

"everyone is doing the best that they can

at all times,"

and me thinking,

"this is my best?"

I remember really almost crapping my pants

laughing at your fart

joke

I remember driving

sleeping

puking

in our old green station wagon

(who is a heaven all by herself)

I remember how we kept the clock

(which didn’t work,

we’re both almost thirty)

I remember dying in your apartment

to no woman

I remember the five-day koan

Of Mardi Gras

I’m sure I remember

much more

than I can remember

I remember you said,

"respectfully

and ceremoniously

involve yourself

with the supreme"

I swear

I am trying.

Here, in this island paradise

(not much bigger than the old car)

I am leaving again

for the mountains

to sit in a small room

with my small mind

(to make it bigger

or not at all).

How little time

since I ached and prayed

out on the plains

with you

My God Tchapi,

I pray to you,

for us.

This is my medicine poem.

Delete me from your spanking atlas.

I impress me with my dunce and moony grins. I take myself over. I have a subtle jar of pulverized shells that I am slowly consuming. It’s something for nothing in this part of the world, of the girl.

I sing that girl word over and over and never really know. The masters all say don’t do as they say, just do as they do. But some insist I find my own way. Creaking in the very joists of my frantic homey head, shoulders brushed by wings of some huge flying thing, I am unreal by any stretch of conscience.

Only in this melee of bodies and moss, in this tethering of concepts to people, can a color be called a sunken sound. My portrait on the back of a reflecting chair. It’s basically despicable the way I jabber on with the authority of an old asylum warden. I ought to retreat into the duck blinds and watch children play on their swings; that would stand me in better stead than all this far-flung posturing.

Desert as Motive

Roasted chatter bag breaks glitter stones. Numerically smooth wink smiles back through middle eye, a tumbleweed crater for perceiving what might yet be. Common tongues roll away from brooding desert. Finger rhythms echo the crackled insect dawn. Squads of riflemen feed a gaunt-eyed youth his knife. And this, a life, finds trust in rain, lungs in lizard skin, and food in everything.

Dine On Me

Sunburned glass and baked goods

pull your gecko summer housedress

down past sure.

Myself I told she’s a swift shy thing,

you didn’t swim

feeling in a voice

over chamber

under thunder.

Later for smart liquid

Sunday.

an all-the-way gift

A meaningful nightstand,

skips to the beat of automatic jamborhythms,

awake ’til birthday morning.

Do you want to save the changes you made to "sliding to crouch"?

And about that she said no it’s hard and then she said to me that she thinks he doesn’t really think very outside the box very far anyway,

Well I’m here to tell you that I think his mind is often very far from where the trees grow only up

And I think he quite a lot knows Yoda and Yoda’s ways of holding a hand out and lifting up an X-Wing Fighter

Out of the swamps where strange snaky things live (different from the one on the trash compactor day)

Because he’s planted his tree a long time ago and now it’s bearing fruit for him, so nice,

So full of strange flavor, maybe cardamom or something exotic like a half-fruit,

Half-spice thing, well whatever, it’s like he’s in the blender already if you see what I mean,

It’s like his connection speed is already rocking out, and he sits there and digs it. Set our holy days in front of us and touch the spark.

I am not a guy with some dim notion of love who’s trying to build a sandcastle future out of the fractured past…

I am not afraid to wait a looong time…Nor am I the guy who will go quietly…I’m so full of it I don’t even know who I could be yet…

But I know it’ll come together…In the end…Which I hope will be never…Could she fall for a lake of fire,

Like the one lost in my ears, in my tree of strife? Produce or absorb, are these the only choices?

Her train came and jumped in front of her. Crow back to collage, this bubble, this rhino’s plastic stubble,

Blacken your face, we go night missioning, the everything is you,

You soon to be toothless broad with a wig and some stuff to undo plainness,

You are not to be introduced but induced, let me induce my wife, she has a triple fat goose on her back,

Mr. Goose waits for an opportune moment and jumps onto my neighbor’s head, closing all deals. But me also know

So much about so many things, hard to say what it comes down to when a whole country accommodates a lisp

For a kind king, even if he is beneficial. Whelps run light up a pole, asking and commanding.

Enjoy looking like a pro, while watching the game. Waiting for the stain of bright pictures. The rain is all

Around me, here in the despicable dance, my daughter is me, I waited in the shed,,,

Does That fine thing help you lead a life?

Look at its flippers. Watch how it falls forward because it can’t keep straight. Does that help? You have to keep a tight harness on it all day to get it to do a half-hour of work. This is no way to improve a situation. Because of it, cuts of meat will keep slipping off the counter. Commuters don’t require it. Only you, with your mortifying tassels and your salutatory rumba, make the fine thing seem worthwhile.

Doing Battle

The television is upstairs in the large house. The old man with no teeth sleeps in the basement. At night, the man snores terribly, so loudly, in fact, that the television is unable to sleep, even though it is on a different floor. The television thinks desperate, painful thoughts. I spend my whole day spitting out pathetic courtroom dramas and sexy toothpaste advertisements. How am I supposed to keep working if I can’t get a few hours rest? When the man’s snoring becomes intolerable, the television stamps its foot sharply against the floor. This quiets the old man some, but gives him disturbing dreams.

In the morning, the old man wakes up angry, cursing his troubled sleep. He tramps up the stairs with a wedge of buttered bread and a glass of tap water. He yanks the knob of the television and sits down in his chair. The television does not turn on. The man gets up, slams the television with his fist and sits down again. Still no picture. He gets up again, ready to strike. Before he can deal his blow, the television leaps into the air and falls down hard on top of the old man, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.

Lying on top of the old man, afraid to move, the television ruminates once more. I know what I have done is only going to make his snoring worse. But I have learned from the programs I transmit to him. I know I deserve better. I work so hard and receive not an ounce of gratitude. Will this torment never end?

Driving West After The Bomb

(Someone Stole My Underwear)

6am. At dawn we reach the next town & I roll down the window, hoping the air is clean enough to breathe. Doesn’t smell right so I roll it back up. My girlfriend’s sunrise face is orange & bright pink & her breath smells like the stale beer on her tank top. Incidentally, we are out of beer & have had to take turns swigging off the bottle of gin I have under the seat. This town is as empty as the last one. The needle says the tank’s a quarter full. I’d love to drive into a station & pump some gas, but I’m afraid to get out & walk through the weird yellow dust all over the ground. Two big Rotweilers are humping in a municipal lot next to a church. That gives me an idea. I pull into the lot next to the dogs, reach down & take out my dong. Her eyes glance over sleepily. The frog tattoo on her thigh is peeking out from under her miniskirt. I can tell that little scamp wants a shake.

8am. Back on the road, watching the long straight horizon line of the West unfold in front of us. In the rearview I catch an occasional glimpse of a spreading grey haze. The Rotweilers are in the back seat, finishing our last bag of Rold Golds.

9am. The heat in the car is getting unbearable. My ass is sweating & my pants are soaked through. Haven’t worn underwear in three days, all my clothes got stolen when I left the Laundromat for coffee. Our high school yearbook is on her lap. To keep me awake we’ve been playing a game. She reads me a senior quote & I try to match it with the person’s name. I’m zero for six. It’s hot as hell with the windows closed.

9:15am. The dogs are whining, probably have to pee. The needle is getting near empty & there are no towns in sight. I should have pumped gas the last time we stopped. She looks more beautiful than ever to me right now. She’s just put on some light blue eyeshadow. I love that stuff & tell her so. Smiling, she runs her fingers through the hair on the back of my head. There isn’t anyone I’d rather have to get out & walk into the desert with. I blank stare at the horizon.

10am. Found another empty town & gas station. Waded through the yellow dust & filled the tank & the plastic jerry can in the trunk. The Rotweilers peed & we got back on the road. Two dogs, two humans, and a bottle of gin. We’ve got the whole world right here inside the car. Things could be worse.

Even So Sad Gets Moon Lady Breathing

You get yourself inside me and I'll show you what it takes to be me. In our final stand, hunkered copse of trees with washing-clean mind bombs going all around us, I want to tell you that I love and that now I owe you none. Didn't fantasies blow down from telling clouds of mist? Didn't second breaths reign for several seconds more? In this maelstrom, who will be to gather up my fingers and wait for boats that spring from far blown port? Sleeping on straw a face drowns in morning but sticks in walls and mirrors and shows the bottom of a world. Twilight checks our moorings. There come ways to get collected. Deep in night and time nerves let go when flow subsides. Deliberate the middle of the rite. Interrupt our inching selves to ramble or wash the ceiling. It's exciting to be dead the way I am. More still to know that death is something more. Hungry ghosts write. Horizon and rubble. Brother wrecked if never my faith is clean. My moon lady can't come over for the mind bombs weary when I ache.

Exploding Heads

Men used to be able to make their heads explode. Some could do it by staring at the sun for a long time. Some could do it by snorting a few grains of rice up into one of their nostrils. Still others could do it just by watching another man’s head explode. Most of the men who used to be able to do it aren’t around anymore to teach the upcoming generations. If they were here, would they share their art with others, or would keeping it a secret be a matter of pride?

In a room, an oiled and shiny head spins on the end of a stick. Swiftly back and forth, the eyes maintain a crucial rhythm. Sounds are shut out, the mouth is opened wide but remains silent. Eager young men file into the room, laying their cash on the floor and trying to catch diamond engagement rings that fly from the spinning head’s ears, one to a customer. As each man exits the room, his head explodes.

Three skilled pilots flying three separate airplanes crash-land in the same mountain range. After wandering for a while, they happen upon each other. One has water, one has food, one has matches. They build a rainproof hut out of leafy green branches and diligently tend to a large signal fire. One day they see a plane flying overhead. They shout wildly and wave their arms at it. They watch it crash into a nearby mountain. Before the plane explodes, their heads explode.

First Poem Of Watching The Rain In Peradeniya

Innumerable raindrops fall, numbering more than the molecules in my own

How, little raindrops, can I know what you know, that the very nature of being is to

integrate, disintegrate, time and again, like a single raindrop, travel the

atmosphere in a fine imperceptible mist, then descend to the surface of some

bustling planet such as this?

Perhaps you will land on the head of a water buffalo, or on the same leaf as a hungry

What a delectable curse I have inherited: this human mind, with its capacity to

contemplate the journey of a single raindrop, one that does not

worry about water buffaloes, dogs, or mosquitoes.

The raindrop descends to earth and does its work without complaint:

The work of being, and ceasing to be.

Fool With Love

Have I been breaking girls’ hearts?

Have they been breaking mine?

Or have I been breaking my own heart,

Over and over again as I watch the rain accumulate in gutters

Of New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, Colombo?

What does it mean to be thinking of this girl, or that girl,

And the way her arm takes on the creases and crinkles

Of clean bed sheets (always clean) as she wakes up next to me,

While I try to decide how much of the day, or of my life,

I want to spend with her?

All the walks I’ve made myself take,

All the dreary glorious stumbling

Through snow and mental snow,

Has given me this gorgeous pair of legs.

I could walk to the moon if I wanted to.

I’m constantly resisting urges,

Consumed by what the next throw of the dice will bring.

Shielded by curtains, I stand naked behind my apartment window,

Alive to the humans outside in the streets.

How many of them will love me next year?

for poem to activate

immersion in the break

(as in the break of a wave)

is what must:

eradicate rigid acres

open more than jars of relish

then the act of making

has to put up its dukes

against the action of what’s made.

charged into more than life’s pretty corpse,

(if we die in life, our dreams die, too)

the poem activates,

evicts the jealous what,

embraces the prodigal how.

Old and crass new,

a sure way to be.

Two thousand years

Underbellies found

on docks

Motile triangles

in perpetuity

support every fiber,

Glances Of The Previously Furious

This watermelon watch seeks everything, thinks Monday with gigantic frustration, encourages perversity. Frontiers lie fallow, haunted by housewives’ spinning eyebrows. Careers, like display cases, obscure cracks in things. Culture is not good for much more than beverage measurement.

Gone With The Mind

"Bugged the flesh and bugged the mind

Some folks think I’m lonely,

or sad in my little room,

but breathing keeps me warmly,

when I’m sitting in the gloom.

I stand in lonely alleys,

waiting for a dream,

I banjo dusty crossroads,

howling at the scene.

I blow at tumbled weeds

and ring a lonesome bell,

and rock my onlyness back to sleep

on wide green ocean swells.

I see myself a sailor,

tossed on endless tongues,

groaning in the darkness,

breathing in my lungs.

It’s tough to have to love things,

and tougher still to leave,

since time’s a flick of batwings,

and death a heartless heave.

I wish the world a pile of love

from my stainless dopey heart,

may children play in sainted lands,

may lovers never part.

But truth is tough and kicks the head

no matter what I say,

and kids and dogs and seas of green,

all must fade away.

Gut Time and Gut Tempo

Englishmen have always been adept at apprehending themselves, doing quiet penance in latrines. Signals make nuns thirsty, going all around for the brass ring, signifying being. Scratch away at the ten o’clock think. Put full force your hand into the cat, roil hard under lid of fish, strapped to impersonal mines. It’s heavy sideshow tragic, like traffic. Birdnecks make best captains, crab breathing out of air-conditioned straw. Smell with your teeth, they admonish, those hungry cave painters, hands of glossary and dirt.

Hankerin’

My key shivers in the doorway

Plant life bending in your heart

At your new address

Night is riding down the dark

And I’m lost again

Waiting in the raindrops

And the hours

Have their way with me

Cringing in the handblown strands of air

You’re my wasteland

You’re my plastic hand of Jesus

And my bright blue glass of kaput

Happy Secrets Of Rapid Eye Movement

Counting countless salty thoughts, moving franti-calmly towards center, innocence rings red. From-ing and to-ing in metal tubes, gritty metropolitan kids reveal in cosmo-logic, manic eccentricities.

Nothing wasted, world appreciates its needs.

Seeing, showing, currents exchange conversations: smooth of ankle, shudder of unslept eye. Communiqué in tones, an occasional hand gesture or kiss.

A cadence primed to wait gets lost and overtaken.

In margins, harmonies of held hands swim in vibratory circles. Future is a tool to end the harshest isolation. Portals, eyes, tremble, beam and gleam.

Smiles widen, centers shift.

Hound It Out

The lungs on that kid.

Listen to him scream,

listen to the way he rushes

from point of suffering

to point of suffering.

Listen to the belly of that babe.

The truth and the light

comes forthing poorly.

You met my gleaning?

Sure you didn’t.

How many times can I use the lines,

"In the homes/ with loneliness" in a poem before I’m accused of plagiarizing myself? I’ve only used it twice so far. Given that much has changed since its first use, I don’t think I ought to be thrown out of school, scholarship revoked, girlfriend forced to begin a relationship with the head of the ethics committee. Bind my feet, make me wear an ape suit, but let me keep my crayons!

How can I assemble all the flowers into something more than just a river?

Delicate, ever so, ever so minutely delicate, I can still feel the pink digits of day’s beginning rove through my hair. In corners, in homes with loneliness, who will weird out pretty sources of love? Trust, in raindrop form, is the comeback’s exoskeleton.

In my search for meaning I am always alarmed, never surprised. Rapt in booming vestibules of the past, I keep finding more animal habits, more thickening games, more careful meaningless gestures. Many instruments intended to produce laughter barely suffice for groping.

So there, bleary-eyed me. I wonder through the simple days, loose-jawed and without handles, avenues plush with brass tacks. The grey and green of it all is getting brighter, as I practice non-avoidance.

III.

I Dreamt Of You, My Bearded Professor

In Dharamsala, India, where Avolokitesvara sells T-shirts and incense,

I walked up a little mountainside every day for a week,

Sat for a while with my meditation pals,

Picked stones out of rice,

And watched monks and monkeys shout at one another.

Two times that week I dreamt of you.

I can’t remember the first dream at all.

But in the second, we clasped hands and danced together in a huge ballroom.

Spinning around and around,

Women in beaded dresses and men in tuxedos became a wallpapery blur.

We wore yellow Buddha-robes.

You morphed into Brando,

I into Pacino.

Godfathers One and Two

Of no soul.

I feel I am falling

in something

with you.

I know it sounds strange

since you hardly know me

and me mostly a concept anyway.

But the way you talk

the way you are clear

on things

how you keep quiet sometimes

and other times just walk away

drives me freedomcrazy.

You hardly laugh

but when you do

my heart

craps out for a minute

or two

and I come back

out of breath.

i pound you head

snatch you eyes

you bad bad man

i take you wife

eat you vegetable

throw you down hole

kick you house

stone you head

you down alone in hole

you bad bad man

i burn you town

drop bomb you school

you bad bad man

you look like funny ugly man

no gun

no house

no stuff

now

you sick

me got money

you got dark hole

you bad

bad

man

I shouldn’t be alive when I say all this.

I should be dead and gone so you could miss me all the more. I hear you when we sleep, you on your continent, me on mine. It seems the headlamp we made out of our connection thoughts stretches that far. You wear it tonight: I don’t sleep.

Balancing across this river, do you see that I have the same as you? Mind, books, body, postcard-hopes, etc. Like dogs we’re kicking, kicking ourselves in the guts (in the glittering gutters) like dogs. You might feel better if you saw me smile.

Some go dancing to erase. Rain is all there for your storm thoughts. But me, I look to the day, not the night, and seek a time when we’re all freedom and crushing tenderness. But still, I’d bite a knife for ya.

Adoration is crap. Let’s party.

I Thought So

Are you huge in the moon, Gus?

Is your pretty sister a picture-perfect tintype?

Is she proud as a peppermint knee-hug?

Does a señorita rumba in your bubble-wand,

Singing twilight tunes in bright unbroken corners?

I Too Am A Fly, Chanting Recollections, Waiting To Be Shocked Into The Next World By The Strong Blue Light Above.

So how can I get close to that rebellious creation force? If there be madness, may it always go unswatted. Container of spoiled cottage cheese green and tough at the edges and I have my ambrosia. Riveting. Waste smell: a desperate inspiration. Cherish these pearlish wings, they bring travel freedom for mites and viral fevers. The painters (rare to find much food in their bins) move from illness to gloried striving. No voice, but I thank myself for them. Racing over can continents and steaming dung islands, I lay eggs in everything, my posterior insuring I have left something to posterity.

I woke up with a gnome in my apartment.

He was frittering around in my kitchen, jangling pots and pans and pissing off my budgie. I usually consider it wise to leave a gnome alone, but this little bastard was making so much noise that I picked up my heavy desk lamp and … Oh, let’s come off it … Does anyone feel like weeping? What do we care if the gnome had both his legs broken by my lamp or if he managed, at the last moment, to jump through the slats of the heating vent? We have to use hard facts and experience results. Cicadas spend seventeen years gestating in the dirt. One day the maddening dark forces them to emerge. Try and refute that. Because of biological processes and weather conditions, cicadas come out and die after a few weeks of singing and mating. Right now, using phrases like "breath of life" really gets us off track. Five hundred people control half the world’s wealth. Cyanide smells like almonds. I am a survivor. I’ve had to cover myself in filth, but I’ve avoided detection.

Idea Skipping

Hurtling through close jelly of space,

A white thought approaches,

Sleight-framed and purposeful,

Used to long distances.

Suddenly, without warning,

Underwater in your eyes’ green corners,

Soonness goes evaporating.

Under your sitting-still hands,

You feel them move away:

Your thens, crawling toward the door,

Beckoning fainter, ever fainter.

There you are,

A being being,

Your shiny something needs no name.

I’m telling you, something’s going on.

Put your hand against my right cheek—cold.

Now the left one—hot.

Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

Now, let me show you something else.

Remember those two balloons we got at the zoo last weekend?

Go into the kitchen and take a look—

They’re twice as big as when we bought them.

Imagined Midnights

Who told the moon to come out?

Was it the hands of the fountain,

So outstretched they couldn’t be anything but lonely?

Was it the sigh of the owl,

Rounding the treetops in vagabond sadness?

It was the high, cold pines, who,

Uninterested, made the whole sky jealous.

in my sleep I’m hard

at work on a seventeen-

syllable woman

In Perp

Braying of dove,

crumble of horse,

open bursting book

to knife the line:

Systems are a hell

of a thing

apart from stingrays.

Whiplash effects ring

ash in content, state:

Collapse into green

fur suit.

By bronze them

corn glide

village cities.

In Stumbleville, A Pack of Worldlings

A pack of infantile worldings comes running across visionary lobster traps. They have crucified nothing, a veiny incandescence pours from their fingers. Their feet barely touch the traps. In foolish wind that runs behind, candle flames bless themselves, go out with ritual gestures. They are harbingers of nonsense.

Before elections could be held, the municipal government officials changed places with those in the service industry. Now the old janitors drink soda all day, digging for clams down at the mud flats when they have the time.

Men are steamrolled by area rug saleswomen. Your floors are too slippery, they say. Do you want your poor child, or worse, your poor wife, to break her delicate bones? A bum who thinks he is a king keeps an eye on himself in the mirror.

Oh, to be alone in this world. To be accompanied, too.

Villagers insist they could fly if it weren’t for a continuous sense of being at a loss for words. Someone has documented all this shamanistic static before, but it’s kept penned up in the attic at the old movie house.

In light, young home.

And we run as we glance through sheets of rain, stumbling over brooks and wolf sounds. Walls around us fill with water, holding us in with frogs and scared fauns. Streets undulate and sink into the city’s brine.

Names exchange as stars upon time burn day to cinders, flowers blow in the wind, singing their inceptions. Petals, out of space, split into here and not here.

Bodies of birds call and swim over gardens, pebbles quivering under grass. Leaping with all their fishes, ponds leave holes in the past. Moments share swiftness with their counterparts.

last night no sleep

despite that

something important

happened

this morning

improved self-recog.

wide-brimmed yellow hat

walks into sea

Live for a couple of handfuls

of decades,

write a bunch of words,

take some long walks,

read a whole helluva lot,

sit on the floor a whole lot more,

and turn kids on to doing the same.

Living

So far away,

I finally realized

who you really are.

Damn.

It took so long,

and you

so far.

Luna de septiembre, naranja y llena

Luna llena, sobre la ciudad vacía,

Allá, en el cielo de mis abuelos,

Te veo, por la tarde de mi juventud.

Luna naranja, sobre la ciudad minúscula de manzanas,

En el cielo de amantes y polvo,

Te veo, soñando el mundo nuevo.

Luna de septiembre, sobre la ciudad eterna,

Con su muchedumbre de ánimas,

Te veo, subiendo desde las nubes frías hacia el calor de las estrellas.

***

Moon of September, Orange and Full

Full moon, above the city of emptiness,

In the sky of my grandparents,

I see you hanging in the afternoon of my youth.

Orange moon, above the tiny city of apples,

In the sky of lovers and dust,

I see you, dreaming the new world.

I see you, moon of September, above the eternal city,

Amidst a crowd of spirits,

Rising from cold familiar clouds into the warm strangeness of stars.

lyric

he thought to love and like

were separate types of ice

and that dinner was fate-

to be a scene of limbs

grabbing at limbs,

 goat and chicken

stewed in dented pots, thicken-

ing,old light dying in fire-

place;

person or thing,

more thing than person,

an electric liar,

he told stories for a meal

(or fee) us-

every book in his tricky

yellow bag, he opened

    his throat to say, "greetings,

    ah…

what I mean to say is,

this is…hell-

o…"

Mad Lipramble #3

Despite flies and the surfaces of flies,

and eyes of brother-seeking eyes,

all trance-inducing trances

anger emerald doorjambs.

Lonely phosphorescent strumpets

croon songs of punkness,

pink tangelos careen up Empire

State building.

Improper leers spring from deep jungle

stupas laced with charcoal,

burning in cold night air.

A lonely puppy staggers three-footed

over ram horns and rubble,

dining on cow dung and dainties,

effigies of Thor swing mightily

in the wind.

'Tis a high pleasure to be in the midst of such

congestion, what with all the fireflies

crowded in our backpacks.

Damnation is a thing of the past,

relegated to the likes of parachute pants

and the moonwalk.

We are the grand game,

cramming naughty toothpicks in our mouths,

windsprinting down grassy knolls like mutts of Bora Bora,

8,000 Great Walls pounding in our earlobes.

Man Dumb Rusings

What is it (is it nothing?) about words that makes us think we know? If we siphon all the majestic battles for meaning out of all our winter days, could we still reel in our survival? All the upholstery is so saintly, so lifelike, there’s almost nothing to be hungry about. Here in this swivel-eyed nation, complaints are issued in random product rein-forcements.

And it’s beautiful to be beautiful…

Man, Woman, Word: Two Stories

I

Far off in the woods there lived an elderly man and woman. One day the man had to make a long trip into town to buy seeds for the garden. The evening before he left, the man took a word from a box he kept under their bed and handed it to the old woman. The word was small and black and shiny. It had many sides and sparkled in the dim lamplight of their old cabin. The woman held it in her hands very carefully, making sure not to drop it. When they went to bed she put it on the table next to her so that she could look at it as soon as she woke up in the morning. The next day, when she woke up, the old man had already left. She picked up the word and held it close to her as if it were a frail child. Yellow light came through the window, illuminating the woman and the word.

II

Far off in the woods there lived an elderly man and woman. One day the man had to make the long trip into town to buy seeds for the garden. The night before he left, the man took a word from a box he kept under the bed and handed it to the old woman. The word was small and black and shiny. It had many sides and sparkled in the dim lamplight of the old cabin. She thought it was very beautiful. It twitched ever so slightly when she squeezed it gently between her fingers. She held it in her hands very carefully, making sure not to drop it. As the woman went to bed, she put the word on the table next to her. The man left as soon as she fell asleep. The next day, when she woke up, she turned her head to look at the word and noticed it was gone. Glancing down she saw that her entire body, up to the neck, had been eaten away by hornets. Where her legs and body used to be was a puddle of sticky pink fluid. The word had gone back under the bed. As the hornets finished off the woman’s head, the word could be heard tapping lightly against the walls of its dusty old box.

me again

raindrops hustling to catch up with the dark

get me sad when them boney girls come

pinking in blue eye shadow

and spin

so long

I’m far away gone

been sick with love or lust (or both)

since fourteen and younger

(all the eyes I’ve tried to pry

with my sad sweet dark-eyed grin)

hurts to know I keep flowing through the motions

like old man white hair no shirt saggy nipples

bagging down oldladylike

(that’s me in HOW many years?)

still trying to let go that first girl with her rainy,

moss-colored eyes

but to shake free means go finally mad

(who am I without my long longings?)

shambling through lovespace,

midnight after lit up christmas midnight,

facing that ancient muck and love dragon

rearing its head a bright red smile, dying

and me

poor and without shoes

love thorns lost deep in feet,

crying out in misery

of sheepish erection-

loaded dreams

alone but alive,

neither gold nor friendship

eases THIS pain—

yuh kin git drunk as a pickled hawg,

but without love it’s all just dum.

me break some stuff

feel good

feel more good

finish break stuff here

Move Inside This Sudden Place

There are only infinite ways

to get here.

Multiple green oceans have

everything to do

with how you travel.

Wings open

inside your hands.

Pinpoint-

pale stars

swim like so many

bright seahorses.

In every new room,

you move to music.

Sequences of darkness appear

as breathing trees,

all questions waiting

in the leaves.

Mists rise

from void-dark pools.

Order is deep

within tumult,

a few blinks away.

Raindrops hatch galaxies,

slow and gentle as you smile.

The whole huge complex opens like an eye,

far beyond mysteries of science.

You come in from outside,

cool as whispered origins of thought.

Secrets emanate from your feet.

One bright line is tied to everything.

Pull your breathing body towards you,

spread your arms,

and slide.

Mr. Tang Should Do

Like he used to, on occasion. As a child,

we frequented his restaurant. Who did I think we was?

And if not me, then a collection

will do. Reply. My mom is on your lips,

in associated flavors.

I saw my face dented by an illness of the heart, of the head.

Whether or not there are millions of others

who can do what I do, are we not living in a unique sea quince?

Am I not the ogre if I read about the ogre?

Memory serves to permit reportage.

In it, we find shreds of ourselves,

but the product is lost, is host.

Joltin’ Joe is in the card catalog. First to the moon,

like Alice’s kisser.

Even for the wealth of three worlds, we cannot buy back time.

Able-bodied men continue to forget.

Nothing hurts tomorrow yet. It simply can’t.

Readings of time will be made, contemplated, sugar coated. But it’ll go

unnoticed, a molecule that reaches beyond animation,

gets essential on yer ass. Regardless of science,

its counterparts, there are many

IV.

My Thief Went Riding

Caught in cold and ugly weightglass of burnished copper,

My sole thief went riding.

One hundred uncles in books heavy-lidded under lost horizons,

My metropolis-colored eyes came home.

Over needles-in-waiting at the factory for stately dissolution,

My toothsharp Ganges went a-burbling.

Swift in night and time, all breathing apparatuses dead under bottle-green stars,

My great grip slid like a wet hot foal from its dim birth chamber.

Covered in honey, automatic as insects and silence,

My die-cast illumination painted circles over image-hungry princelings.

Delectable through mute intangibility,

My blameless water-grave hung generously over imagination’s grotto.

Night Of The Reformed Pirate

Snapped with city and life I tore at fabric I could catch.

My head pounded, there was a rushing sound, water daddy-o’d

round my flowerpots, no whip or lock to attach

to the yellow bus or the thin diver hiding in the reeds. I bellowed

unconsciously to my fingers, "Will you work with me on this flight?

Or am I going to have to pole through the shrubs like a tortoise

or a shroud of tortillas?" No answer descended so I roamed high

over Nordic skies, aloof to the rumblings of my Valhallan ancestors,

pounding their chests and shaking snow from nubby Swedish shoes,

wondering hard at things like garage doors and enamel-covered frogs.

"Why stop here?" I wondered to myself when I came upon a lonely blue

newspaper pinned to a sand bar, wailing under a sensitive lapdog,

plainly dealing out words from it’s headlines such as, "Amnesiac New York

Baseball Star Found in Nevada Brothel, Working as Bellhop, Decides to Remain."

Picking up most of an old sailor’s experiential knowledge, I tossed three brain-

sized coconuts high in the air, pierced them all with one sinewy report

from the barrel of my eel gun, and gulped down sweet milk before

they landed at my nickel-plated feet. Hearing the distant metallic echo

of a tag sale, I jumped back into my portable steeple and paddled off

to Cousin Island, where everyone is cousins with everyone else, even the old.

Never very chivalrous, I changed my ways then and there and presented the king,

my mother’s uncle’s son, with a month of Sundays and an alarming watercolor

I had painted while roaming the ocean floor in a tubercular submarine. Huge pink

tubas and Spanish galleons lay in deep sand, swaying in the pallor

of two moons. Gold was piled high in forests and men veered

about, heads in hands, libraries issuing from their ears.

Not Getting Anywhere

So,

what I am—

has closed up shop,

turned off the lights,

stands ready for a better disaster.

Nothing but rigid smiles

in this caravan of slow, irritated rubbing.

I observe.

I connect with humans and watch them ride…

watch them shake and quiver through their lives.

Yes, I commune with pilgrims…

find myself often

out in grey rain,

wandering here and there,

as if I had somewhere to go.

On The Stairs

Where quick fingers hawk gangly demons to frozen pilgrims, masochistic color wheels grin furiously after intermittent spasms. They stumble as if wracked by the black arse of grief. Their howls, like thin tongues, are meticulously calculated to please a graveyard audience. Do not think, for one red instant, that the shambling color wheels wouldn’t, at first chance, press you into glittering dust, convert your sanctimonious intestines into a worm convention hall. Never believe, even on paper, that the page you now read is not populated by livid agnostic spiders, hoping to devour you.

One Hour Happy Millenium

1. Time now to recognize absence of time and start of all things, all things at all times. This is the moment the world has opened for us. We take it ramrod straight, hold our heads and wait. Quit waiting, right here, right where your hand is, right where you hold yourself up from spine to mind, get shoved off a building if you won’t unbelieve, the crookedness of stuff is swift.

3. The quickness of my swiftness triples for a lot can get said if nothing is undone, lying down on the hills, clouding the gazes of all the warriors swarming in my own soulless pantomime, I wander far and dreary ghosts abandon me as I go past where they can go, mixing to be a slow towering mind, I could only find myself with these little ideas, nope.

5. You city, hard to redeem a city, deep in the recesses of streets and numberless dead. Beyond the last house, beyond growing vines and accumulated strange dirt, ice thickens and the river passes on, a closeness is heard, and something buckles underneath. Iron and the stone are softer than the city’s essence, essence of eye.

7. Sly. We are so sly we couldn’t help but shift our undies out from under us. Shhh. There is something to that. An impasse has been reached. And breached. The close feeling of all this space swallows it’s own air and we are lost again in motions of colloidal being. Dunce. Just a couple of dunces in the corner, goofing off and being cool. Yah hah. Swashbuckling fools, us.

9. Bloop, dem dum bloops crammed up a trunk ah bin sapping somefin fer dayz nah jest me in deaf corn long wif smoochin haystack quick to jug down fer smiles in some sich way to clap fer man when he bows down lo an hold me, glory be to somefin I got no chance, no chance a tall fella fell over on me.

11. Money money money how I like to touch it and feel it and see it and hold it and know I have it and then I feel like geez why do you love money so much it gets me places it lets me do stuff but then I think nah not money just me and money is a thing I move but subtract all the meaning from the stuff and there’s just the actions I engage in, tumbling around in existence, wading and wandering through all kinds of green, paper and rivers and grasses, etc.

13. I thought it was cool watching the two superior swordsmen fight and slash with each other and then a door slammed shut between them and they couldn’t get it open to keep fighting because of some timer mechanism so one swordsman immediately sat down and meditated for the half minute it took for the timer to click and the other dude stood there boiling and seething. Which one would you be? Hmmm. Seems there’s a bit of time left to think about it. See ya.

15. Why there just isn’t room enough to say all the things there are to say and that’s okay I could imagine that all pieces of writing material but this one are made smaller much much smaller than postage stamps and I have been given the sole privilege of writing on a piece of writing material so much bigger and grander and more capable of conveying thoughts than anyone else has had the chance and how luck how lucky I am thank you thank you thank you ahh, so nice, I said everything.

17. I don’t have a moment to lose, I’m already off track, only one minute and thirty seconds left and time is counting DOWN! Okey dokey, here’s what yah gotta do, go out into the street and take a quick look around, and if there are no people around then go where there are lots of people, do this right away, as you read this, and then remember remember REMEMBER with all your might that underneath all your clothes and ideas you are NAKED.

19. Right, another instant has been afforded me to tell the truth. So here goes. I am in love with lots of people and I am also in love with myself. What a crude unsamurai I am. What a fool, too. Sometimes I dream of sinking my teeth into moist and hot chunks of beer-batter fried chicken, howling with glee at the World Series that plays out above me on the TV screen. Yeesh, some stuff is slippery.

21. Yellow tubs of globular ice cream shift from somewhere out on the water and there is little reason to get upset since every ship, on the timeline I look at, has already sunk. O for a moon that could provide us with all the caulking we could ever need. How nice if its beams kept everything watertight and safe and unsinkable. But we know that can never be. We just have to make do with the sinkable things we make and can’t understand.

23. How does one go about really finding oneself when there are very few paths to walk down in the squeezed center of a rose? Other flowers, I mean friends, can take us pretty far, maybe there are ways for us to get connected that are even powerfuller (and more worthwhile) but I doubt it. Doubt is one of the big ones, you know. It rages along and roves and crumbles all kinds of neat ideas.

25. The arch of things, the tumble, the rasp and rumble, the guts and rut, and the bicycle that moves me. All along the last few steps, I was aware of the way my intestines glooped and glomped while tightropewalkerme departed this earthly concern and hung around ye old perne in a gyre, waxing the rhapsody skates I bought for a song in the Sea Of Stories.

27. Not a moment too soon. The whales I have never seen. Gusts of so many miles per hour. Innocence is a great commodity. The commode is in the abode. The spittoon is in the room. A bryophyte lives in the forest. You can eat some kinds of baby ferns. Fiddlehead ferns. In Paris I watched a beautiful series of words roll by, Russian-novel-style. It was exhausting and invigorating. I made it.

29. Click-tocking down and me with not much else to say. The millenniums will keep flopping over like they do, humans on the planet or not. Jeez, I bet if we were on Pluto the celebration would be a lot less enjoyable. They have brooms made from coconut trees in this land where I am. I use one on the ant communities in my house. Thirty is approaching and I am hoping to be the better for it. We’ll see. Or maybe.

Our Dream Last Night

Our dream last night

was self-masticating. Hey,

don't you know who that is up

on that wall?  Stop making those

strange noises.  So what if she can't string

together an interesting sentence? Gliding down

from frostbitten heights, the climber's hat.  This round

white structure is seven cement and mortar layers thick,

solid but for a single nirvanic fingernail at the center. Her sandals,

so they tell me, are too small.  Swing wide, you cowboy saloon doors

of jealous love, the most capital crime is looking without touching.

You take her frail hand and hold on to the dream. Everyone must

stand alone.  It's the same thing. This is Esteban's village.

What is loneliness made of, if not old bones?  On this

next run, if the rate of change is constant, we'll be

calling up memories of fiendish Dr. Eisenstein. 

Nobody did this to me!  I know who I am. 

I am the king of my own universe. 

Perpetually regarding extreme

opinions with a grain of

suspicion, the average

soldier shoots first.

Everything you

see, clear to

the horizon,

is me. 

This

young boy

is my father. 

Inflatable survival

raft, weight limit: 100

kilograms; emergency weight

limit: 6 Cubans. The sun is the same

in a relative way, but you're older.  Be happy!

Marjorie Adams of Washington Square came dancing

on carpets of warbling air.  What country, sir, what country? 

If this white wall could tell stories, oh the people we’d meet.  So,

is she coming or not?  Be quiet, I think we're getting close to

the beach.  There, you see, nothing to cry about, simply

a hand, a human hand in the darkness, just like yours

or mine.  It's an extreme position to take, but one

in which orgasm can be reached quite rapidly.

Now the soup is in the duck; poor old

duck, with a bellyful of ducksoup.

Poem

I want to suffer with you. I want us to give ourselves up to wild dogs and river rats. As a child I watched planes in the deep sky, wondering about lives packed tightly into air. Much later, we sat on your dock, stuck in an incomplete sadness we called contentment. Now I want to unpack all my old personalities, let them fall out of the sky. I want to suffer completely with you, edging aside all righteousness, seeing things as they are: made of blood, bones, and all the rest.

purple dog

six times six is nine

feet feet feet! feet

Rik-teek Rike Roke Rok-teek

Rek-tek-rak rike, rak rouk-tek,

rake ruk rok rake,

roke ruk-took rok.

Rak-tike rak-tek-rek,

roke rak rak, roke ruk rek rouk-take rike,

ruk-tek ruk roke rak-took rik rak.

Reek reak rak-tik-rek ruk-touk,

rake-tek ruk-tik-rek roke-teek rek,

rok rik rik rek-tok-rook-tuk rak;

rek-tok-rik rek-take:

rik rek-tik roke-tek.

Rak-tike roke rik

roke-tek roke.

Rike-rek rik

rak rak reak

rok reak rok rak-tik rek.

Rilke’s 2^nd Sonnet, Fragged

And a who from this almost and of her through the and a that inside had now And in Her in that Where? that her this your Where A before almost

,

,

to me

herself my.

It girl harmony song lyre form bed ear me sleep everything trees distances heart I wonders I them meadows spring She world god sleep she desire she death theme you song itself she girl

.:

the, had

so could,:

that ever my.

Single diaphanous awesome deeply all first perfect

the., how

so no

ever to? See: and.

Stepping appeared made was touch seized slept felt Singing slept was had wake arose slept is discover consumes is vanishing

Ah, will

?—

? . . . , . . . .

Rumor Confirmed: Five Immortal Cicadas Control The World.

We cannot know this, but it feels right. Being terribly small, smaller than gnomes, we seriously consider erasing ourselves. Delirious cucumber harvesters fall, exhausted, into oblong nightmares. Demons rise from the soil, spraying our fears with viscous, salty fluid. This fluid is the breath of life. Plants long dead come alive and draw themselves up out of a steaming broth. A cracked plate throws itself through a restaurant window. The family afraid to deny it has a madman in the closet is bound for disaster.

Save On Love And Postage

The only raga we know is vindaloo. Costs so much nothing to come see you, I play at work where you work. My crash came and went, sustains. The complete city derives from navigation advances, is powerful like letting go. Find a flash mo(ve)ment up from your boots, I’ll shave my grin off for ya. The only sum we know is dim. Phantom access memory. Brooklyn down the wind, smiles good in yer hair. Listen, this city is too small for both of us, and me not long in it, so let me smoke yer American spirit.

Series Of Teams

This is what it means to be sad and unheard.

This is why the door to the roof is locked,

Why children are afraid of open shutters.

There is the ground,

Up where the sky begins.

The ground’s dissonance is what makes it beautiful.

Shining through soliloquies

Of lamps and translucent skin,

The voice of the lonely man roves towards the town.

How to be a part of something that crackles, thinks the voice.

Becoming an inert chunk of time?

The voice trips over the small hills that separate the fields,

Dissolving as the lights from the town approach.

No alarm sounds.

Seraphim cringe as the sky darkens under them,

Blank faces falling like painted trees.

They are hunted by the rats of heaven.

They must never be still.

The plight of being made of thought, rats and angels alike:

One team must seek, the other must flee.

She Set Her Whole Eye Days In Front Of Her, And Took The Spark

A singer, full of prophecies, gazes out of her not unbeautiful wall. Loaves and predictions utter fully, from the belly. Said Wallace Stevens: The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. Bravísimo worker, turning on a chime.

Life is a diary only, nuts and wings glance high over boulders. If chi is a life force, and a verb is an action word, then a Chinese Proverb must be a chiverb. Baby art forms born in laboratories know to test themselves for perfection. Certain insect larvae consist wholly of words, in the sense that the world itself is a word.

She’s got no patience for the dull, risks only what she don’t got. Waking out from watered borders, humble toes wink towards growth. So many bands of color, her cube rises and crawls. There is the puzzle: her own ankle rankle.

It so happens that she writes: This moment in our era is replete with tools. So, moving beyond brittle in her instrumental frenzy, she rubbles all paradoxes.

Si Muove, Dadheart Contemplation

Clambering and stammering

up to my mountain house

I sit down

no one is here

just me and the wind

and silent vines

hanging out above the cliff

I sit

clouds roll over me

instead of Buddha reaching down

to touch the earth

reaching up to the clouds

that gather and power

over my head

I force my eyes open

feel the twinge of wind-

sun, fire and memory

come down my arm

touching clouds

touching sky thoughts

of driving fast,

in my hands, still can hold the wheel

of an old station wagon with one hand

and bullet up to one hundred

one hundred and ten

miles per hour

across great plains

past Colorado

out into Pacific mist

where fog blows coherent

knucklewhite thoughts away

steams thick hells of memory

across crashing gathering crashing

waves all the way to Indian Ocean

to the tiny teardrop,

Sri Lanka.

No matter who waits for the stars

to bend in their own arcs

I am here—

all eyes are in me

all dark mornings

all men gathered within me

muscles and all,

strongly sitting on rooftops of San Francisco,

De Moines,

Barcelona,

New York,

Kandy—

I see cherry blossoms of Brooklyn in springtime

sliding seasoned hands up and down Manhattan’s panties

my own eyes and mouth find

and speak cities,

names recalled in morning glow—

resolute dreams sanctify lives

of friends living and dead

in shuddering bombs of earth

the Big Bang itself

but a bomb

a tiny hand grenade

in bigness outside bric-a-brac

of the bigger boom that looms in the perpetual night

of this middle age—

My Father, who art a patient,

soon to be catheterized upon a table,

balloon marauding

towards your powerful

both of us thinking of each other,

thinking of the Christ, the Buddha,

and all past and present

Rotandos:

Edith and Louis

Henry Carol Ryan Paul

Joanne Elia Laurie

Carrie

and thinking then even beyond names

of the Aegean blue of the world

under our eyes that pulse clear when we close them,

stars rustling calmly in the corners,

thinking of the high hills

of old Adirondack

and crunch of our boots

in spring grasses

maybe you knowing

maybe not

that I was staring in son-eyed awe

at your fatherly unsqueamishness

I was learning to be ready

for moments when I would have to do it all myself—

you saying what a great lunch we were going to have

and me knowing the crystal truth of it

because you proclaimed it thus and it was thus—

butter, lemon, salt and pepper,

and fish only twenty minutes dead—

why does that lone day,

that one meal,

stand out in my mind so much?

Now the table beckons,

the doctor is chosen,

the world is poised, waiting

for the cleaning of your heart,

I am clifftopped, near a high monastery,

sitting on my cushion,

setting out vibration lines

sending out power to the center of your body,

the rhythm and source of my own body,

sending out my planetary hands to the doctor,

that he may strike samuraistraight

with none-but-the-present thoughts,

and I send a sun to your eyes that when you close them

this sun that your son has sent you,

it moves with your very own breathing

to warm you and swim warmth into your fingers,

eyes, heart—

may you know as you prepare for the table

my One Father,

that the illustrious shaman’s heart in your chest

is dancing in its own bright circle—

Since There Is No Hell

In heaven,

they had to put Hitler

inside a glass case.

Not to protect him,

or to protect

everyone else.

They just didn’t feel it was right,

letting him walk around

with the others.

Sixteen Lines For Monkey

Elephant night, a scoundrel,

gray hump of clay,

some unboom’d bomb.

Small-eyed wanderer,

old and fast, goes up them mountain heights,

bundle from old lagoon in hand.

Green leaf canticle surrounds,

sacred unwritten glory texts,

hard hit in evolution chance;

death-gobbling menace:

this heavy forest.

Acquired groans build

broken homes.

Flightless things

walk and heave

on breach of crackling earth.

So then you have to show me what your mind is.

For (I am) one

Who can give up

And I can be a mountain.

I ran out of shame a long time ago.

Nothing left but honesty.

if you just walk down the street with me.

I work all the time, bringing all the trolls out

In my mind: No Trolls,

And since you walked down the street with me,

you left a mark on my mind

In the future

I see nothing

Song of Imaginary Death

I wish I were a train track,

Aching to be bold,

I wish I were a death rattle,

Untroubled by the cold,

I wish I were an eagle eye,

Trembling when I’m old,

I wish I were a nowhere bowl,

Mirror to behold.

Find me a house to call home,

I’m lonely for a place to rest my head,

I walked across the world about a lifetime ago

And I need a little place to be dead.

soul bringer

a bringer of souls goes roving the streets

his cranky cart piled high with blue and red souls

and green ones

but you can’t use money

you have to trade in your old soul to get a new one

and if you

want an upgrade

you have to show

you’ve taken good care

of the one you’re trading in

you have to live a lot of years

to get a gold soul

for that you have to trade in your

green one if you’ve managed

to not only keep it clean but have expanded it

filled it with

that strange morning light

that you see refracting off grassblades

in quietest fields or on sides of mountains

the green soul must have no perforations

it’s got to be intact

and it has to smell

like either a vegetarian lion’s breath

or like a leaf that’s been in more than seven storms

but remains green

and if you can do that

then you can have your gold soul

but still there’s an even better and harder to get soul

than a gold one but we can’t mention it

because it’s color is unknown

tho’ some folks say they’ve sniffed it

as the soul bringer shambled by

they say it smells like the suddenness of an ice sculpture

that springs up spontaneously in the desert

Stanzas Sans Hats

Breathless, without fear,

one whole poet turns herself

outside in

the rain.

A bell rings

in the temple

dawn

of and idea.

Drive on

lonesome

highway

mind.

The Beauty Of Things

The beauty of things

is that they usually

look, feel,

smell and taste

like other things.

They almost always

do the work

of other things.

The Buddha Of Redound

Cook for the cool. With this bunk, you don’t think. You could swim for all he cares. How can he begin a sentence? He swollen too big to keep, mate. Only feel it, you don’t believe. Disparate new stuff. That grasp was inside him like his own butt and belly. It again. That ringing glum tripwire, wound into engagement. So ever in the severest mind, should it gripe if it could be written in inches? Mingles sounds he made when his hide slipped. Tin against a wild goat, now he’s mixing generations, generic hauntings. To flow back, as waves, flipped by a cruiser on asphalt. Saffron wish linen is the picked out onlyness. Have shoes to prove you don’t hear fleeing. To fine bone shelf, seek goof.

The day it started

the day it started,

mama's antics made us all confused

and me without my notebook—

what was i thinking?

she kept saying something about she couldn't

get her hairpin to bend (or was it turn?)

the dumb yarn-things

we always used to have to make in art class

and bring home to hang in the window to show we had

"the motor skills of at least an orangutan"

mrs. dixon, our cruddy old schoolteacher, used to say

"but i've been to the zoo, mrs. d,

and those big orange guys sure do like to touch themselves down—"

"that's enough, you rascal.

you can talk that filth in the streets,

but JESUS is the real principal of THIS school"

"mrs. d, did JESUS come out between mary's legs?"

so mama had to come to school and take me home early

i wasn't sure exactly howcome what i said was wrong,

but i was glad to be going home early,

at least for half a day,

away from the indocternation house (daddy's words)

but then when i saw mama,

i couldn't tell was she angry or sad

cause she just kept picking at her hair,

with me saying, "mama, i'm sorry i said what i said.

did you tell daddy what i did?

i think i forgot my penmanship book in my desk-"

but she wasn't hearing a thing,

she just kept walking with a real tight grip on my hand,

which i didn't even complain about

cause i figured i was really in for it, she was never this quiet

when we got to the car,

with me now being silent as a mouse,

mama just kept flicking at the back of her hair,

not even trying to start the motor

that was when i got scared

all the trouble started right then and there

from then on it was nothing but doctors and pills

and daddy doesn't cook even half as good as mama used to

one good thing was that i got to skip school lots of times

and old mrs. dixon never scolded me anymore

for forgetting my homework

all those doctors said it was mama's medical condition,

that i had nothing to do with it

but i know i could have behaved better

The Familiar Slush At The Top Of Your Drink

Climbing over rails

all my hands

got bent

into claws

and hammers.

Last night

I was the halibut

at the buffet.

My eggs,

which I was keeping in two baskets,

have all been stolen.

The Finger Point

What’s the point

of having hands and fingers?

So you can chip

away at the crescent moon,

And swing

from the wings of hummingbirds.

The First And Only Diner

I gave you a tarnished spoon instead of an engagement ring. We met in that one room coffee shop, antique reference to the decaying city we both grew up in. The first time I saw you, you were coming in from the rain, fixing your shoe strap. You held on to the edge of my coat. I fell in love with you amongst plastic flowers. I can still see the way your hands curved around the bowl of fruit salad you ordered. I came back every day after that. It took me three weeks to ask if I could sit with you. Walking to your table, I remember feeling like I had passed into nothingness. I wished as hard as I could they’d turn the lights down. Somehow that old waitress read my thoughts. We spent two years talking over the cheapest sodas in the city. I felt holy as a newborn the day I asked you to marry me.

V.

The Gleaming Land

I’m walking to the gleaming land,

A place where monks and elephants

Gather to study wind.

I’ve filled my bag with bright things

So I can see before I get there,

I can only walk at night,

And shadows are replaced with sounds.

With eyes closed, my teachers

See me with their minds.

When I arrive, I will fathom the forests

The way a puddle does,

Reflecting swaying trees

And the tongues of wild dogs.

The God That Is Within Me Recognizes The God That Is Within You

Walking the beach with a startled face, a curious widower wonders about Robert Redford: Does he go to bed happily, in his fame? After a long day of strolling, do his feet swell as much as mine? Does he, icon in his time, think about the small man, like myself, who wears the same suit to weddings and funerals?

The Handsome Young Guru Of Tea

An alchemist,

A magus of mountain

Leaves steaming.

A guru, they say,

Doesn’t point the way—

He is the way.

So give thanks to the tea man,

Master of milk

And crystals of light.

He is calm in the face

Of the pot’s

Hot burbling.

Each inscrutable cup

Rings with measureless compassion.

I bow to his handiwork,

His perfection.

The Hungriest Day Is Devoured

I start myself with a question: Simplicity in me? Whoa, I don’t know. Bouncing bell horses smuggle what’s blue, playing like a room. Shh, I told myself, myths abound in forests, waiting to be counted, counting on weight, rolling under their own steam.

Only change can come from the gong, open the way all sound opens, ritmo under span of buses, bridges, tunnels and plains. Notions glimmer a moment, even all of them. Not afraid to be all skull, skeleton and other masses rippling. In rubbings, ministers show winning numbers for chances, tunes and things; we came close, with a marina for our twisted ships, tumbling in the grip of flanged abandon.

I hunker out to corpse of ocean and waist deep in my marrow find a cool meadow of place. There is swerving silence; bonjour swerving silence, from whence have you come, will you brush worthy parapets, continuously baffled? Coarse meanderers collide with this planet, scene in time, prickling out broken heat and going up away. Jellolujah, sing the kids, becoming angles of up-ended light.

Here is we, filling dense mystery with fuel from swollen mornings, faces cleansed by total eclipse. Haul down the skipper picture, our new captain ate the sea.

The Octopus Man, To His Son

Son, watch the way the eaves bend when you breathe.

They move the way a star would

If you could corral water into spheres.

Distinct shadows play under the paint on the floor,

A congregation of tentacular lake spirits.

They will hold your cages and laboratory equipment.

Your time as a human is near at hand;

I am repealing all the old regulations

Regarding prostrations and guttural pronouncements.

There will be things called Souvenir Shops;

The Sexiest Knife In The Drawer

The bright dark shines in the dark,

a silent knoll tolls,

mellow witches pass the doobie.

The earth is a lot of dirt,

most folks dig kids,

the obvious is a heavy paradox.

The weight on a scale of one to ten

harrows the labyrinths of hell,

looking for the Brontë sisters.

The Tick and Arcing Pasture

The tick and arcing pasture of some quasillion holy babblegrounds makes forth to swaying seeds. Within lake fronds, neither ness nor whole is found. Ships grumble, in their holds are mists of tinctures and relegated mansions. Therein lies rubble. Glowing forth from country ill towards side by briny slide, relinquished relics bend. Flights fall down from ceiling, something about methods and cosmology. To thine own whelp be blue. O’er gray stands of weather, thin cool coupling of glandular compañeros. Numbering waves of each swift blip takes an infinitely small time. Cadence is one thing, is everything, is the moment. Devotees of earth shuck clothes with prehensile digits. Massive hundreds of clean motives clamp down on backs of brilliant necks, making sudden motion sounds. Is the way to go determined by the where of a thing, or can seekers dangle uncollapsed over valleys of unconditioned thought?

The Woman, The cat, And The Spoons

She has gone beyond the final function of décor.

Her eyes and hands recall manifold necessities.

Alone in her bed, she breathes.

Mirrors reflect only senseless obligations.

On windowsill, staring out at waning sunlight,

A grey cat reclines, tail swimming through limitless air.

In an adjacent room, connected by the presence of air,

Lie six silver spoons.

The woman studies the calmest movements of the cat.

The cat contemplates the movements of the air.

The woman remarks, to the cat,

"The air contemplates the spoons."

The silent cat continues to stare, as if to say,

"Soon, the limitless spoons will contemplate themselves."

But that, like all the rest,

Is part of the contemplation of the woman.

The World

The world is a door

that can’t be opened

or knocked on.

When you’re out,

you’re in.

Tiny Sonnet

One thing I’ve noticed:

Most love poems

Are about the author

And how good or bad it feels to love.

This tiny sonnet cracks the mold:

It’s not about the guy who wrote it,

Or the way his heart breaks and heals.

Enough of all that for a while.

This poem is about the littlest toe

On a lady’s left foot.

It’s tough like a stone,

But tender, like a grape.

It’s been all around the world with her,

And back again.

Titles For Anyone That Needs

Condiment Paints,

The Bomb At The End Of The Mind,

Not Alive, But Moving,

Momentous Blindness.

Connection Junkie,

Conversations While Sleeping,

Blue Lips and Skinned Knees.

Voices, Swimming,

Voices Swimming,

Dog of Thunder,

Sombrero Calculations.

A Sound Drubbing,

Squel Nobs Boes,

Testing Toes.

Life On Mars After Death,

Brittle Clouds,

Choss.

Alone, Dancing.

Not Dreaming, Just Dead.

Be Like Water.

Caminando, Cambiando.

No Clothes, No Tools,

Lights And Lines,

Mangavocado,

Pinapple Chatter.

Late Night Medication.

Tiny Creatures,

Summer Being.

Road Cracking,

Folded Mirror.

Thing Illusion,

Full Swoon.

To The Geckoes

You are the squadrons of youth. You, of the mighty darting limbs and the bug-bellied singing, I root for you. A country without you is a country without a president. You hunt even with your eyes. What foolish ambassador would fail to recognize your greatness? I once heard that the people of Mauritius sent a case of you to the planet Neptune and you took the place over.

Tom Devaney, Lon Chaney

I snave this heaking suspicion

That the poung yoet, Tom Devaney,

Is really the mold oviestar, Lon Chaney.

If lou yisten to the way they laugh,

Or notice their hartling, storror movie eyes,

You’ll sefinitely dee

That they’re both obvious dasters of misguise.

Tournament Of Nakedness

On tops of buildings,

our beautiful stones of teeth

between cold scrambled walls

after sullen rain,

muses in their spin,

in endless engines of light,

one loneliness roves.

One of loneliness roves.

A smile needs to tell

the story of the body

even a hand

cannot commit to its fever, but still

can have its way:

the timing is right.

The laws are see-through and

all movement is a ride

on top of head, on palm tree

down the night.

The slide of death

through trick skulls.

We fall into the arms of great sweetness—

Nobody alone.

No body

alone.

Useful Formulae (When Mind Is An Integer)

One.

Sigma equals courage when Sigma times Obi-Wan to the power of The Force equals Han Solo minus Obi-Wan to the power of The Millenium Falcon plus Han Solo, if Obi-Wan does not equal Han Solo, and The Millenium Falcon plus Han Solo if Obi-Wan equals Han Solo.

Two.

Sigma equals hyperspace when Sigma, between the boundaries of Infinity and Light equal to the Force, times Light times Space to the power of Light minus Space equals The Force divided by The Force minus Space Squared, when the absolute value of Space is less than Light.

Three.

Sigma equals Jedi when Sigma, between the boundaries of The Force and the Universe equal to one, times Light times two equals one sixth times Mind times Mind plus one times two times Mind plus two, when Mind is an integer.

Washing watchbands (smelled like time)

Tempos and cadences (it’s) all over (in) the streets,

Couldn’t shift out of adrenaline

Glands for grabbing dark neo-americans

Forgot their girlfriends were in their torsos

When they went swimming

User groups all over the projection board

Show our rising effect in the new-market sectors

Where radiation is at an all-time high

In a close away land

Bombed minarets demonstrated

The trickle-down effect

Totally free software with complete twenty-four hour support

Suicide programs help the whole (do-it-yourself) process

Galleons of green robots corral Aunt Bee

Dragging ghetto verbs to the TV for fun and profit

The spectacle of text boxes

Are the rat and prison styles

Available on all continents (with all condiments)

Waking up in all the cities of the world

Gun-americans dream of need (at least the girls)

Every filled pre-diction

Jolts like a market over the polis

Mental illness is purchase(d)

The general assembly shall meet in regular annual sessions

For the old pub(l)ic trust, she’s still what she used to be

The vatic facelift scandals

Need to get here ASAP

In cahoots with stoned traffic hair controllers

Right to bridge-fling yourself restricted

To women in literature

Watching the kid make a fool of himself was liberating, in a way.

There was nothing to do in the room, no food or drink. That strange face, pale with eyes too close together, hung in the window next to the sink. It swung slowly while the kid fumbled with his zipper.

We Long For Regular Stuff

And it seems, but only seems, to come up out of doors and floors and in brine we fit ourselves with homing devices, shifting from one slippery foot to another, waiting to be taken away by pages and squires, also known as sharks.

The knights are cold, and called Ocean. Shimmying down into cranky cold bottom, sand whispers things like: Better not wait, I should be your priority, make me top of things to do. We wash our hands in the sea, which takes no time, since this is the long slow process of legally drowning.

Our airplane beeps down there, under my pants and the fishes under my pants. Floes of mentation imitate dollops of a hungry city. Idea-dirigibles swim around, but wait, no island. We wait. My comrades are here, just thoughts like a dozen or so effigies, dissolving.

Cranky thought of land runs up my leg and makes me laugh too hard. I survive once more and again. Even the sun has waited to hear something to give hope to the fishes.

This is a knot, a story of retribution, a scenario of the way I closed my eyes and felt around under a buoyant continent and came up shorthanded. Near to me is the fellow who marked me for dead, and he’s dead.

Hello sir, you find me departed and I find you the same. Why not come first to me and we shall have a spot of the morning together. Dine! Dine! The captain of castaways said dine and we dined, although there was simply nothing.

What, After All

Breathing bright and cold

in blend of thing and place,

mind opens, turns to flight

across galloping sky.

Companion to solitude,

thought guides far;

then we jump

off every humming ledge.

Bring down walls

and make a paper tiger

of original mind,

striped with bits of bark and leaf.

The whirling forest of that first world

begins with distant waves and sudden dreams,

lying beside us as we stare,

blanketing the sun.

What Boyoboys Are Like

Lit up bongos, Boyoboys are high

like the Ratmen of Tangiers.

Animals traffic

through their hard-ons.

Overall, Boyoboys worship strength.

Their breath is hairy, and clam-destined.

What Dashing Guru Is This,

Staring up at me from the bottom of the Corn Flakes box? This is the moment I figured would arrive, the moment I assumed I was healthy enough to handle. Checking myself, I am only slightly afraid of the axe blow, the sword strike, the diamond-studded knuckle punch from the fist on the bottom of the cereal box. My doors are opened wide, my toenails are painted, I’m the master of the moment. I used to catch myself holding my own hand for security. Not anymore. Now all my flowerpots are gone; I crashed them through the windows, here on the twenty-ninth floor.

What else is there to say?

One thing I notice

about having new friends:

they don’t expect you

to be traumatized.

VI.

What If The Pagoda Wore Your Suede Skirt?

And shyly trilling in the leaves a scanning

Gesture. Your pictures dipped in lilies and lake

And honing my meditations. Hand over

Heart over hand. In Dagobah system, we train

Together, learn from the tiny green man.

Your rectangle of hips, a sign for me to proceed.

And sure, love management skills are

Bound to retract, you will (and I will) remember me,

Forget me, write me into your willpower.

Some trouble is ready. And it memories like taste.

She the way we glove, won another. I say

What’s funny, you grip something. See, grass

Becomes ruminant, becomes suede,

Becomes skirt. I remove skirt, roll yer ass

In the grass. With the empire as

Strong as it is, I must use my pen to love you.

Sudden dozens of nations crowd us,

Could be anywhere, dashboards of a million cabs.

Me, I saw through the reticulated carapaces

Of your weather, moved outboard, beyond overreckoning.

Swim the slim channel, dine on my continent,

See Saturn’s rings, Jupiter. The sharp shift eludes our

Training. Practice all day, neither of them

(Us) writing from secrets; Since I’ve known you, I’ve dreamt.

What To Do With It

Clip it into strings,

Into wingthings.

Fight it at night

With all your might.

Stow it with the fleet

Of cans under your seat.

Wear it in your crown,

Or stick it in the ground.

Whip To My Glue

Bugs for the fatcat,

Fingers in the bog,

Broken like a batwing,

Busted like a log.

Click on down the mango tree,

Slam on down the rope,

Have a smoke and merry me,

Snicker after soap.

Play a tune of dogboys,

Shingle in your wabe,

Flatter out abandonment,

Banter in your cave.

You will and wont remember,

From whom and what you roam,

And even in the summer,

You sound a bit like home.

Roll out on your knuckles,

And roll along like wine,

Insist on kissing someone,

Since there’s something after time.

Swish around in lucky leather,

Look so cool and spangle zee,

Your nonchalant impressions

Don’t fool anyone but me.

Wild Boar

There is a wild boar outside my window,

I really think there is.

The dog is growling and barking

At something she smells in the bushes.

Suddenly I am thinking I am

a small child, afraid to leave my bedroom.

Yet, I would use a screwdriver

to unhook the window grill and let the dog in, safe.

Worst Blow In All Space

The whole blamed frown dashes light eyeballs,

Turns on the spoon. In hell will yawn

A mother’s gown in dimpled draughts.

A resolute crow’s cries crumble dawn,

Catch walpurgisknackered glands and strains;

Pentangled whales eat red-assed prawns.

Indifferent blows, gray chains,

Glow loosely, rattling tools and tomes,

Beer-gutted hussies kicking frames.

The ashen tracks, war kilt and bones,

Agnostic yams on fishstick trial,

Grow fat inside the hearts of gnomes.

A wink, the pond, are down the pipe:

The flue, half full with pills and pies

Rubs boulders wet with tripping wire.

Versions of turbans swim under thighs,

Stalking the blue bear’s hide through time,

While manxome dances lick her mind.

Quill pens wallow, steeped in brine,

Pressed in hallways thin with ghosts,

A cross of snakes and husky pines.

The bright shard’s roaming over toast

And burst globes clap in local shows:

Warm worms entombed with overcoats,

And knees in dirt with feet that know.

Written between her breasts:

If you’re stuck between 2 beautiful places,

Just have fun.

Written around a nipple:

The sun is the place

You go when your mind is full

Of traveling pineapples.

Written between her shoulder blades:

Take me to the place

You can’t see unless you turn

Written above her navel:

Fall into the

Depths of a

Birth

E

c

l

i

p

s

e.

You, From Another World

Where there is kindness.

I would like to be held by you,

And see that special place.

You Only Love Girls

But why don’t we get married anyway? We could live together and write fancy dumb complicated poems and make love to whomever we wanted. At parties I could say, "Yeah, my crazy wife, she sleeps with these beautiful intelligent women, but she’s faithful to me." You could pat me on the shoulder and declare, "My husband is such a stupid screwball, leering at the girlfriends I bring home. I tell him to get his own."

Then one Sunday night, you’d come home with a bag of frozen blueberry pierogies under your arm, and find me with my feet up on the couch, alternately reading Gandhi and Vallejo, moving from one to the other, as if it mattered not which book was being read, as long as life was being worshipped. I'd shuffle into the kitchen and kiss you briefly but meaningfully, serving you the fresh Chinese leftovers from the fridge. We’d sit down and bullshit about good Borg time travel episodes or statements like: Poetry is the relationship between the act of making and the action of what’s being made.

I’d be the model husband, not staring at the walls until my eyes watered when you entertain guests. And when you have a bad breakup, I'd give you lots of good foot massages. It would be the perfect combination of companionship and loneliness, the best recipe for good writing. We could have beautiful, tall, triumphantly smart kids, real or just imaginary, and give them names like "Sandbag Hooligan Amattee" or "Ninja King Rotando." Yes?

You see, She’s in love with a time pirate

Why must I live in this secondary sphere, this neutral chamber, afraid to misplace a fingernail, a mussel shell, a speck of dust? Fragments of ages decorate these rooms: a hair from Poe’s moustache, preserved in a box of nightmares, a misty jar in which Galileo muttered, "Eppur, si mouve." And me, in these funereal apartments, frozen in the moment I fell in love with his burning eyes, his powerful hands.