Body

it’s two
lands
coming together, well,
one, one
underneath the other.
one slipping the
other
down, one blading
her sister
once well
and
in a hurry
to even lower depths.
the clouds
pressed out
like ancient paper
into a mummy
mass.
I am in it
and I
am watching from afar
like some
dark bird.
the horses have
quieted their
grazing
on her hills,
the layers of landscape
have devoured
the even
undulances.
where have I
copied
once
these birds in motion?
these houses
shaped like hands?
the shoulder
the rib, breast, elbow,
eye
that acquire the faint
gray happening of
night’s shades.

The White Dog

the white dog
has no eyes…he moves about
with the sense of hairs that never stop growing…
they swim upon the cold leafed ground, autumn
slow-moving as a shoe over the horrific landscape.
the set has no antennae. the sun has no existence. the roofs of our mouths have been
cleansed with ether and Clorox bleach. stop telling me I’ve found the secret.
stop moving with so much faux resistance, like you are part of the sea.
the sea is greener than your eyes, mouth, toes or power could ever be. it is
simple as
tuning the piano with a fork, the voice with the sound
of a knife taking rule of the apple and dividing its flesh.
the fish in its
bowl screaming for a dollar to be golden, the wife who dies slowly
but slower than her husband, and then withers away alone, the spider who
spins a web so magnificent and wide that she gets lost in it, the purring of a cat in a
dark bedroom in winter, the tea water boiling, the angel preening his wings.
over time, the landscape loses its surface. the
objects that were rolled into place are taken
one-by-one away by the sea. the blue characters of death become more abundant, and they
sleep in the empty fountain.
the airplane screams across the depleted sky, the helicopter buzzes like some
pigeon who has lost its marbles and flies into space, the same
man waits
upon the same bench day after day, smoking a cigarette, with a suitcase next to him. he can’t be waiting for his wife. he’s waiting for his dog to come back to life.

Tonight

Tonight, I find leaves
under everything I lift.
The trash can, the water glass,
the pile of clothes.
There are
apple seeds inside of you
when I
cut
you open, all in a row,
huddled, like a circle of children.
It’s amazing: a tattoo
of the alphabet
inside of your mouth, a mirror
of
my mouth
in your eyes.
The Sox won the series tonight
and still,
the small green light of the smoke alarm
flashes in the paradox of darkness, the
voice
of a paralyzed man screeching
inside his cage of arms,
the web of trees
pixilates in shadow somehow
upon the dank ceiling.
Walking in the
cold night
with only a shirt,
the stone lion smiles at me from down at the end
next to the chair, next to the yellow flowers.

Waiting For Tuesday

Sitting in the dark again, waiting for Tuesday.
The leaves outside sag like exploded balloons, and I’m
amazed at the view
now that the trees are thinner.

Heavy rain
is still expected, the heaviest,
and expected to tear
into our hulls like
Antarctic ice.

Where will you be?

Never gone but never quite
here

You stir the light with your hands

look over,

exceedingly alone, at the woman
sleeping again
next to you

Another night with another dark middle.

It really is the best way to fight: not knowing
whether or not the enemy is out there.

Still, it is thick as syrup, it is a
turning screwdriver
that makes music
like a piano.

The Mathematics Of Blood In The Veins

The earth tells you
its words,
the puppet show
is the bell
you ape,
the light against
paper;
and it’s always a unique
routine.

This song goes on and tells you
the long story
you ape,
and it remarks
on itself
within the trees
what happened without light,
without paper, without an engine,
and without
shadows.

Then they give you
pills that
put
your muscles to sleep,
they run
blue dye
in the river of
your blood. Take
pictures of your organs.
It is
the mathematics
of
blood in the veins, these pictures,
the slow retiring of your mind,
the song ribboned
out in your body
like a parade, your
dance is
alive
inside of
this still, x-rayed body, man.
It won’t stop. It will not
stop until you do, which only takes a
a moment. Beep.

When a woman
marries
a man
she always seems
to marry his
death.
You amazing feathers, you, father,
you amazing tall being,
like Emily
Dickinson
turned to a weed on the prairie
in a cat’s eyeball
sliced right
down
the middle, her
feathers
blown
away in the bright wind.

The streetlights
made them, they made your words,
they brought us the snow and the wind,
they brought us the shapes, and the light, and that,
those pieces
altogether
that made up the reef of this city, its
inhabitants
enfolded
in inventions.

Meanwhile, you
continue to
circle the house,
haunt your own chair,
adjust the
thermostat
again and again for
ages,
eat and guzzle
of your own guts perpetually,
a fork in one hand and the
eyeballs
searching for what?
Your drink, your dick, your
wife.

Blood moving toward something,
through your withered
veins, oxygen
opening
the dark wings
of your lungs,
long-haired like
prehistoric Ice Age bats.

It is the light
and it is
the soundless. You go into it,
and it finds you.
Do you know the man
of my father?

I look ahead to numerous seasons, how they will
spread
in latitudes
across the faces
of everyone I know,
the bridges and the rivers they cross,
closets opening in winter, in the
hallways
minutiae,
in the sands of the
deserts.
I will walk through them for this brief time,
and then they will close, like they
closed on you.

The mice and rats
have been
scratching
inside of the walls
all night, and the
ceiling—
they remind me
of the years
and how they
run
in the walls, how
they lubricate the
brick and the stone.
The glue
that keeps
nails in studs, bones
in flesh, two people together.

You amazing
toothless mouth, you noose,
you amazing father,
and you are mother too.

The First Time

It’s when you finally feel
the ax sink in.
And it seems like years have passed as you have been here,
and they might have,
and you’re still swinging away, as if
you have been forced to do it.
And then, there’s that sound of fibers
splitting, and your ears turn on like the animal you are,
where all before it was just
ungratifying swipes, banked off, ramming the blade
into holes in the air, hammering,
hammering. Boring. When will it end?
And it happens,
it works,
this little secret of glee nature, a bee in the hole of a flower,
it lets you in, it releases something small;
it smiles at you. You marvel at its
suddenness. You really almost cry. And when you remove it,
slide it out from the flesh of
time, and the flesh of your own body,
and the deep
torso
of monotony’s cadaver,
the blade is dripping with honey.
And the ants crawl into your
momentarily
overgrown pajamas.

A Skull On The Beach

It’s sitting next to me
like it’s supposed to be there.
Below a wall of beach grass.
I can’t tell what creature
it come from.
A person or an
animal.
I can’t tell what creature
I am.
It bursts into laughter
until I realize
that’s me;
I’m laughing;
there’s also music.
There’s music, though
I hear no music, laughing
from the grass, within
the cotton belts of the sea’s top.
What happens to me here?
What is this place supposed to be?
What is it supposed to mean?
Then I feel
my head in someone else’s hands.
The skeleton within my body
has no sense of humor. It does not
laugh, smile or do much of anything, really.
Is that me?
My body is full of the light of air too,
the hands are the hands of a
mother, the skull is uncovered.
And the ocean pulls off my pants.

Read Me

First, read me.
The words
of myself, the words
conveyed in my
body, wound
in the tendrils of
my flesh, the codes
carved in my teeth
like hieroglyphs, my
bones, my hair
spells them out.
Read the novel inside of my
mouth, the alphabet
body has arranged itself, its
shapes conceived of an
ocean, a marriage, a laughter, the
swimming man and his
orchestra, fingerprints like
letters, the water song that they explain.

I enciphered these skins
as I released you,
wrapped them in the gauze
of our sleep
that encased us. And now you are out,
and now they remain permanently on you
like eyes on the wings of a moth.
Did you conjure these
teeth beneath the lips?
One-by-one romantically
like the keys of typewriters?
Did you conjure these notes upon my skull?
Stamped them out on the
bright area of your cheek. Pressed them,
and made a copy. Who invented the language of
ourselves?
She sleeps and the letters move, see.
The dream of them floats boldly to the surface,
a jellyfish, a turtle,
and only uncovers its eyes.
The light it emits enters the room and
shifts like shadows on the ceiling,
and all of it
circles the wise mirror.

Fog

The fog is tired
like an old horse.

It emerges
to find some help,

needing dental surgery,
the teeth have grown tree roots.

It rests the bottoms of its
rotten jaws
upon the red ground,
unwraps the gauze and ropes,
closes and opens the large black ball of an eye.

The leaves have gone mad
and killed themselves,
leapt from

the tops of
empty pails, skewered
themselves on the
tails of rats.

They make a bed full of
yellow razors.

Their notes are spelled
in
cut off beards,
down the drain,

their skin is bleached
with temperate weather.

Crucified Gnat

She is a giant on the
tiles of Rome.

She must have flown
poetically
into that john
in the restaurant basement,

there where a fat
shitting man
sweated out
yours truly, death.

Harpooned you on his bloody
fingernail,

quoted the Bible
while he
spanked
your crazy ass,
flattened you,
demoralized you.

Wow, you look like a shield.

I’d like to rip that wall out as evidence,
bring the case to court,
have his man
tried

for treason.

Sunken

The apartment, maybe,
is under water.

Our windows are holding back
this massive purple block, night, the nervous system
of earth.

Somewhere in the
cold depth
there is a glowing
worm
that spells out your name

in his
phosphorescent coils.

His brain
is an enlarged egg
that holds the secret of
man.

We drift along the bottom,
our sonar bonking,
wreckages of
ships
and mustached cadavers
and shoe husks
and trunks full of shit,

bird cages without
birds in them
anymore,

the ghost voices of our neighbors
wishing us luck
in the gloomy halls.

It is the apartment under water.

Dear God,
we don’t know how we
found ourselves here,

amongst these many
victims.

Watching A Woman Sleep

You went to sleep
inside my sleep,
and I had yet to let mine go.

I guarded it
with a shield, I moved over it
as a hawk moves over earth with his eyes and head.

Your face was the land, your
body was the black arc pressed
two-handed

into the sky. It joined the
paper puppets, shadow, in their
silent pews

as they worshiped the slow moving
head of their master,
their master is our master,

our master weighs close to nothing.
He is inside of the walls.
He is coming like laughter out of the dark,

our mouths are one
landscape.
I frame them with bone

marrow fragments,
the sweet charcoal. It is the
most ancient medium, primordial
as squid ink, pure as wine,

it lands in pools in our mouth,
sequence of numerals and letters
that is shaped like our sleep.

I have enciphered it.
Don’t worry. And I have enciphered it
with numerous codes.

Fall II

Leaves are keys on a chain
round the neck
of an old hardware store clerk.
He puts his white hands
in the pocket of his apron
and holds them together,
generating heat
out of the old
skinned claws. He thinks of the
blood within his veins, the sight of it
holding like ribbons
in the water of his bathroom sink.
Oh God, what was that?

These leaf keys
sell
for cheap, they
fall off
like hair off of the dead,

they form haunting faces
on the wet bricks. The faces look
like the clerk’s sons, his
brother
who drowned in a quarry,
and they mirror his very
DNA
like stairs.

How
flesh grows across a person’s face,

how organs flash brilliantly
like blades for that brief lifetime
and then dull,

how children’s futures are
stored in the attic.