Poem 8

You wait in the dark.
Somehow, you still find yourself waiting,
still doing it
as everything around you sleeps.

You look down at your belly
and
the hair on there.

Your body ends like a continent ends
at the ocean.

The window shows you
Antarctica, Greenland, the secret to why
a pig’s heart
is like a man’s.

Now It's Nothing

Now it’s a window of nothing,
now it’s a Japanese Kimono closed against its
skin, dead white as apple flesh,
nothing like sugar poison,
nothing a solid nothing
like a cube,
like a block of ice, like a salt-lick, like an undertaker’s dream.
Two nothing on top of a one nothing, a pickax,
a spring released from the asshole of an airplane, mankind’s
science.

I am nothing;
that’s a nocturnal idea. That idea has no teeth. That idea
is as complicated as a tarantula, with eight eyes
and as many legs, hairy as a dog.
That faint aroma of your mother’s perfume is very real
even though
you’re six or seven states away.
Nothing fleas nothing.
Losing in a battle of zero.
Police chasing you in a dream.
A murderer’s eye with you in it, like the bloody seed of a tomato.
Your deceased cat come back to life, you swear it.
He’s in the shed. He’s shivering.
Your father’s urn crawling out of its grave. He is there.

These are characters who cry and we are addicted to their pain.
Their pain is a synonym for our own.
How am I supposed to go like this
without…

I am quiet as an ocean tonight.

Our burials have been solved.
Our coffins are pixels in the earth.
Our brains consent to our deaths,

which is proof that they are indifferent to us.

A chair, a wastebasket, an
alligator, a carp,
a

canyon.

Who is this man I’m chasing
through it?

We carve the rock like a river.

First off, he’s
not
there either,

as am I

Lonesome Hand Gone

The hand is at rest on the floor now.
On the wood. I sweep around it. Leave it be.
It sleeps there like a dog covered in blood.
Where I find it in the night.
Where it howls.
In it
there once was a gun.

Sure there was. I saw it.

When did my pets become so violent against me?
I had to take them away.
When did they start trying
to massacre me?
I do not want to torture or abuse you, dear,
but you’ll have to stop planning my assassination.

I will not be bladed in my sleep for this.
I will not be shut in the refrigerator like a beet.

My hands are at the ends of my tentacles, just like you;
my eyes are stuck in my head, swimming like
idiot gods.

Nevermind the brain.
It’s as dumb as a bird moving his head in the gutter.
As dumb as a yellow guitar.
Simple as a sidewalk.
It’s a handful of walnuts, shook up
like dice and released
into nowhere.

So, whose hand is that on the floor? You say.

Well, I don’t know.
You’re the one holding the machete.

Not Spring Yet

One diamond of light in my vision
disappears; it was a mirror; it was sliced open like a finger.
My eyelids like curtains shut over this moon, whatever it was.

Dunces walk upon our roof
with firecrackers in their dumb, white mitts,
dogs wander into death like quiet rainstorms, stick
their pink tongues out

onto the floor of the universe, and laugh for nature, curl
the dark
like real tobacco cigarettes.

Elsewhere, Christmas trees have been lined up against a wall
as if waiting for a firing squad.

The smallest one trembles for life. He’s a scared boy. And I don’t
blame him. Rifles up…

Ice slowly melts.
The bluebirds shake out of their
crazy slumbers.
Our white bed is made.

In it, we sleep for the first time.

But we are in the form of one black corpse
outstretched—a bat, a burned oak--we as a couple look like this:

her breasts flattened like old leaves,
mud in her eyes,
her lips like dried blood

This is what warmth showed us.
Love isn’t on my mind at the moment.

That is the canyon I find myself in, where
once
someone slept,

and was peaceful until now.

Lunch II

Took out two eggs.
The last two in there.
Cracked one in
and the yolk oozed out
like a wasted soul.
Like the grim reaper.
Like The Sphynx, like
it had been
manufactured
some fifty years earlier
in Cleveland, and plunged
into this body,
which is now soft as
ripened
head cheese.
Pushed it around
with a spatula. Memories
increased in frequency and speed. Pepper
nevermind,
almost ready to
crawl forth with day.

Areas

The night has been torn into halves.
In the first half, I eat a carton of raisins in the dark,
and the web of shadows raises its arms to me, like I am its emperor.

In the next, I sleep in an army of sleeping cats.
One approaches me, she has two heads and three eyes, the one in the middle slightly pinkened. She speaks with one mouth, then the other, and explains
she has seven orphaned babies to watch over

and would I take one? I say, alright. It feels good to take that
off her hands. We go to back to sleep then, the one child sleeping
inside of my mouth.

Banalities, you know

the snow has found something within itself to fall again,
trying to be snow, coating the dogs’ heads, the grave diggers’ backhoes, trying
to be snow, work up a little verve, a little storm
to freeze
and cover the ground

teeth coming out of the smile

the organs
inside of me
still working
like they’ve been programmed, really, to work

absorbing my nervous electricity, expelling
(when forced)
my poisons

They are not me, these organs.
They don’t know who I am, in fact. But there’s so much good in them,
brainless duds.
They’ve been put inside of me, hell. and maybe someone else could have them.

it’s hard, guys. I’ll admit it. and trying is the saddest thing there is. the common good
of failing is always there though--

cancer. global warming. another
election

Singing is against itself again

its toys are in a jar
with flies and ants
my friend is in a coma
imagining
eyeballs and prostates and
continents shifting,
the mantle commiserating with fire, deciding when to blow up, a pistol
black livers,
fish,

time as it crawls out of the mouth
of an angel’s cadaver

and the elephant man’s brain
is in a museum,
it looks like
George Washington’s head
and his hat is the dust bowl

and
in a dream
I dunk a basketball,

roll about the
bowl
of my life, pressed down into the earth
by the thumb of my
printer
master

Eating Cantaloupe

The man is alone.
he’s working at the rind of a cantaloupe with his
lips and teeth.
The sun will find its way into his eyes.
His keys will open his doors. His wives will
one by one
seek the individuality
that hey have lost.
He will lose his coat in the snow.
The buried will sing to the non-buried
like birds.
The chickadees will bathe in icy water.
A second man will fall through the frozen river.
His coat will be found
among shoes and children in the rocks
under a bridge like wintry crabs.
The hair of trees must be shorn
again this year.
A mustache will fly away like a bird.
Steam rises from the drain.
All the stolen things will be returned.
I want to speak with a physicist about how this is all possible.
Speaking of danger.

Voices Elsewhere

shift like insects and the roof moves,
the roof moves as it melts its ice
ten years long;
the hair of a woolly mammoth while thunder tears the morning

Their mouths, it seems, are covered in moss, fungus,
the fingernails of the dead
scratching like rats in the oven

One cellar drops its load of water
onto the floor
and the balloon lifts into the white sky,
the anchor punches through the sail,
twins emerge as one flailing bunch into the universe,
the sweat of murderers conjures the summer
into being with guns and violence,
and the winter whines like hemlock
or a door

propped open at the mouth.
Bells in the wooden wind.
The skeletons dance in their graves and make noises of their ages.
Relatives fear the memory of their sons and daughters.

Lulu greets her Master
with a mum, a strange box made of coal, a firearm,

where
under this grass is the slow grin of the future? It is
an irrelevant corpse.

Jingling her red tea into the palms of our hands, the burn of
frost on the lips, one stone moved underneath ground
tens of thousands of years old
oh no

Soldiers return home dead. It is a nightmare, and I wish I
meant that
literally.

Little Growth

my brain is in a nest

the nest
is
the shape
of your head

but really

it’s a hand covered in white hair
waving
at me through the sun,
a blindfold,
an arch
of
black cloth.

I closed your mouth for you.
It was an amazing act
of puppetry

somewhere
the solar system burns
like a toxin, like ipecac
like peace

and your head
is an empty sack, woven by
me

my singular eye

Mystery

Your hooves have been colored red

dear

they are apple red in the mud.

the stumps of crayons, cooled off after melting,
the ends of bones in seventy year old coffins.

you walk the gravel along the road.
in it, snow

crunches
like the teeth of an idiot.

along the ditch there’s a sale.

A red plastic candelabra, plus a children’s game.
you buy the candelabra, leave the game, later

throw it into the ocean. Why did you do it?

it’s still lit, however, as it sinks.

Let’s walk in the stones. let’s crush glass
in our eyes. burn flowers in the barbecue. Bury this
house.

my brain still belongs to you, you know. you pet it
with your hand, massage its troubled folds. discard it. my god
these things have happened

haven’t they?

the light turns from white to dark purple ever,
and never fully goes out.

Waiting For Tuesday

Sitting in the dark again, waiting for Tuesday.
The leaves outside sag like exploded balloons, and I’m
amazed at this 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? Texas?

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, you know: not sure
whether or not the enemy is out there.

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

Telescoping

the body landscape
moves out from behind a mountain

in its bed
panther-like paws
peel back
decades

flaps in our magma

dark and light in a wave

Seas separate,
two conjoined twins
rising separately in the
blast of sun, their one

Head

a dark blimp in the last
purple burn of day

the one day
yes

her body reminds me of this.

The globe turns as though
pushed
by the snout of some moon pig,
her flat teeth intent
upon
our waters and grasses

please do the best you can to keep
memory, at least, running

throughout all this
evolution

Holding My Breath In The Dark

The man swimming
cannot sense the roundness
of the pool, or even
the roundness of earth,
the moon above him, or
the head
of his new wife
upon a pillow upstairs.

Crematorium

In it I sweep, nude,
the floor in the dark.

Somewhere
off
I hear the sound of earth
sliding into earth

the ice caps turning to water
the soap in its cement dish, the tortoise
on her island.

My parts are worms reaching for the sun.

My brain is a limited
something
to consent to it,
between it and I, something simple--

I watch it in a shed
like a punished child smashing his chair,
a punished, violent idiot;

I think this is the engine, though,

A block of coal
on the rim of the tub.

How did it get here?
Could it possibly spin like
that
Forever?

The farmer cleans soot from her eyes daily

the days do not end
the days
the days
what are they?

They came up out of the pipes, from in between
the roots, from in the grave tunnels, from
in between my toes,
from the Tundra of Siberia, Greenland,
from my dead father’s eyes,
from the dust
of an elephant’s funeral procession,
from the internet, how
many Colossuses
can there be?
they bubble in the kitchens,
grind words onto the walls of jails,
fire machine guns,
carry E-coli,
take pictures of the sun rotating around us.

broken fire
limps into time’s future

Forgets what was once called
itself

It went to bed
It fell into the hole