window tapping as usual, I heard that wind outside
the glass that lines my room electric,
stepping quickly past my door like ghosts or dreams
into my moonlit head.

I fear the lyrics I can't imagine
and the text I don't project in ink,
all the thoughts I film onto lives endless from myself.

and I hear your voice every now and always,
caught in the ocean's zippers holding waves intact --
there is a ripple in its midst that you,
with your songs and monoliths,
might only see in dreams.

but I can lose myself, even in your private slum,
and I have shed the layers that you've forgotten
under baby fat and comfort that I taught you,
lent you, gave you,

now
I am the skin you stood in years ago.

or Stillness After Thunderclaps


There is a
strand of barbed wire
that I tied in your hair--

***

Would you let me touch you tenderly
along your weeping skin,
past the valleys of your shadows,
inside your double-crescent smile;
feed yourself off of me and I'll
break your demons back into sweat.

Fingers want to spread you past my thoughts,
spread apart a curtain fold and
spring a fountain of your heat and
bathe my skin with your acoustic voice,
the treble and bass when your body shakes...
Breathe sweat and shudder by your quaking lips,
your rain-soaked petals, your mouths on fire...
But it is the silence, like a stillness after thunder claps,
where I'm deafened, and the mirrors in my brain
are crowded with the twelve months in your face.

Painted streetlights blink against the night,
spotlights from the devil or something,
staring down the alleys past my eyes;
Old whisper of a seabreeze carried off the ocean's mouth,
kiss me in the pale dawn and
wash away those strangers' fingerprints,
their trail of cheap perfume, a knockoff,
it all smells the same against my face
and it isn't right.

I sometimes cry at sunrise when I'm stranded
on an island or some bed, listening to
your outpaced heart, always running
past the windows, still keeping perfect time
(though one or four borders away).
I still set my watch by it.

My hands grow old each second,
grooves of marble and sand, but I feel as
young and stupid and curious and as
loyal as a basset hound been whipped
as I ever have since I was little,
and I'm ready to wrestle wild things
and to slay dragons and I say
it's a day for shiny eyes.
And they sure are shiny
full or stars and suns and peach pits,
but I guess they're out of place
today.

Then of course there is

That shriveled mirror with your face on either side
in front of me and reflected back by the glass in my eyes;
seems overpopulated in the past few months,
faces unfold next to you and look inside my skin,
too many in the cracks and shards and faults.
A mob of ashen faces sketched out of two decades
unwind inside my mirror and
fill the echoes of the room but
cannot drown out you.

And I have tried retreating back
into the space between my brain,
but there is always a chemical flower
in my eye or two,
spreading roots and spreading images
that stay behind my eyes when I'm asleep.

***

--I wonder if it left a mark on you;
it buried itself in me.

or History in the Present Tense

It is odd, then, the layers of skin that people
see fit to wrap themselves in;
the late November frost etched around their eyelids
by the first of March is thick as hardened oak.

How every passing year and season is another
blank repeat of thaw and melt and discard film;
the layers of fabric cut to ribbons in a closet
melt like ice that puddles on an asphalt turf.
And it's the hypocrites who count, after all.

What better than them then, the ones with mounted
icicle coats, and the ever effervescent but always
tantamount and tired and tried.
The graspings of failed origin.

Who better than those replaceable faces,
eyes and eyes and eyes miles long and apart;
The eyes are a mirror of something, but the soul has
long been lost in jazz rifts, booze and boons.
That lovely languid eye, the carving glass of
chic disinterest because a fad's a fad and
you can call an ass a mare but it's still an ass
if you ask me.
Always chic and always disinterested unless
the common culture latches on and then good old counter-culture
PoMo PoCo BeatGen latchkeys throwing around abbrev.
like the rain say
no no no no no

Like the rain falling, coats of falsehoods fall from cinereous heights;
like the cherry blossom petals or the shells of old cicadas
that were burnt up in the sun.
By mid-July the sky is made of such and so much fire
and the skins we paint ourselves in are flakes and ash
and inner paint pours out again.
When insect eyes grow wide and blank to keep
the vapid eye pristine.
At least those insect men & ladies so drunk on pollen and
a plastered sun don't try to shed their politics like skin.
At least they follow their own chosen road to hell.

Anyways, it's the hypocrites who count.

They, after all, and in between, and you and me besides, have accountability
to slow our steps. We have a failure to originate to attend to,
to throw pretense at those mindless insect hordes.
But insects do as insects see as insects are going to do no matter what,
even those free thinking radical insect mob bosses of the so-called "experimental literature" --
or so I've heard -- he who digs and burroughs deep away from the structure of the hive
are still just as far or farther down the hole, and further into black.
At least the scuttlers see the light of day for once in their lives.

And so our blame is allocated and the sinful verse of redemption or damnation
or either or, and allotted tears and scars whether we or others ever had them at all
are enough to make opinion facts and facts guns and our eyes your death.
In the chainlink tapestry of thought, woven by the brigands of the word
alongside poor Women and wealthy Blacks and outspoken Natives and
every tough-skinned little snot-nose lost in his and her abbrev.
wants a piece of the cut. But history is in the present tense.
And all we or anyways I see is a surge of upper-middle class
boys and girls convinced that love is a dog from hell
and tsk tsk if you disagree and tsk tsk if you try to voice out disgust
not even against those PoMo PoCo BeatGen icons in the tapestry --

who made a night sky a sadder shade of Prussian blue
and still might make the sidewalk rattle with the antiquated
steps of dark-soled leather and torn-up calloused skin;
who celebrated a shatter from canons,
who abandoned or perhaps were abandoned by the tapestry
and sometimes created
some kind of beautiful menagerie of stale narcotics
and cheap erotics
and the brutality of a vulnerable human being --

but of the never ceasing never quiet always opinionated murmurs
and yappings and self-righteousness of those dull-eyed "-ites"
who know that you just - do - not - get it
and you can call an ass a mare but it's still an ass
if you ask me
but you didn't.

etceteras etceteras so many ellipses
and
we are each of us only a puddle that freezes in November;
dried up and rained out and back for more.

And yes this is a long and labored move away from
icicle scarves and the infallibility of snowdrops
& oak and changing seasons.
Away from the monsters in our darkness, from the crawl crawl crawl
of sunlight and moonlight and snow and wind. Away from the death that we've all
had berated into us again and again, that endless night I've seen in nightmares,
that fear of our own invisibility that we choke on in our sleep.
Teeth enough to tear us into silky ribbons.
Who can blame them for their late November frost?
Who can blame resentment from the sallow unsmiling eyes?
The Islands of Importance floating down the endless sea,
bumping along against the countless other land mass;
down into the boredom, the fear, the rivalries of those who came before and after
and bested you and I and we all long before we had a chance to say yes or no or that
we even wanted to try and match them blow for blow and what the hell were we supposed to do?
Who can blame us for our mirrors? For fearing dogs and love?
Who can blame us? Who can blame our fathers or our mothers or our countries?
Who can blame our pills? Our bruises?

Who can blame the rain?

And if we can, should we?

Adrian GodBye,

You malicious maleficent demon of the widow world.
Spinning idleness and incomplete incompetence and
incompatibility,
I assume you; and though I make myself
a hard endearing ass
I still proclaim you
PIECE OF SHIT
of the underworld.

You
are the fixated mantlepiece of insecurity,
the crucifix of my indignation
and all my cliche self-righteous hate
and absolution.

You and Joe Dane describe to me
the utterances of Melancholy amidst
the vapor in between the not quite so distinct
realms of what I loathe and what I still despise.

And yes I am aware of how trite this all might sound,
and I can feel the the vain simplicity which this
horrid verse contains.

But you are yet a wart upon the skin of lovely skin,
of sweet and unrealistic idealization.

Goddamn you.

You are all some spiderlines across my sight,
the vague and indistinct appropriations of the sky
and every ever-present intellectual thought that could exist
between what feels and what believes.

I am a mild and bit-capricious twitching in the cheek
of all the youths and boys who stagger in the realm
of sophistry, an old-world definition for
a new world phrase that bears the title of the dead.

And I am unimpressed by tired voluptuousness of
the youth who try and try and try at old
expenditures to feel an old and tired race;
who try and try to emulate the prospects and are
sent to conventry amongst a common scorn
and praise, the old primordial glue
of bones and sticks of mud
and of the soon cliche derision of a lifetime in between
a cold believed solitude of
the guilty heart and
straining muscles pumping blood in and between
the fleshes of a self-derisive nature
that beguiles itself into autonomy of nature in the night.

This lyrical descent into the madness of the frame,
Is soon an imitation of some felicitous flame.

You were in the shadow of the alleyways tonight,
When every ill gained face staggered towards me;
When every ounce of liquid fire was extinguished and
The belly of an acid beast lay in the gutter
That I just pissed in while nicotine and cyanide
Pour out my rotten teeth.
While ether thoughts and cocaine lips
Dance jauntily amongst the liquor shadows
In the nightmares of the window.

Yes, I know you are so far away,
So self-sufficient in a self-sufficing
World of self-subservient batteries within
Placating remnants of a fraction of a will
Beyond the wind and the will of the bright eyed
Continents and titled love-degrees.

And yet the tales I'm told
are mirrors in a dream that many nightmares
tried to feel with icy fingertips
amongst a vogue of death and bullet shells;
When waking under sealed eyelids
I spy a rainy amphitheater sprayed across a tired
retread room where shadow holds the vinyl rinds
that repeat what I told you then and what I sing you now
and what I breath in ashen words.

Dreamy morphemes weighed like broken glass amongst
an aged distillation in the suit a dead man wore
the night we broke the contract of our noonday sun.

Along this ever rolling dark and silent road
which presses deeply on my eyes,
blinking when they're closed to keep the
shadows on the streets from turning them to stone,
it seems to me that it remains a maze within my sleep;
and though you turn and turn again,
the pavement always ends back on itself at night.
It always seems that on this road,
when blackened sunlight starts to rise
and I dodge the shadows that it casts upon the street,
that shapeless ice that now seems too familiar
shakes itself off of my pulse and creeps along my arm,
when I stare at myself stranded in this motion.
And then, back on this selfsame dusty road
from shaking nights that come and pass,
around the bend I saw the twins as one
appear again and stare me down in silence,
though now he sat without that vain impression looking back;
no smile, no frown, no trace of any motion on His face,
a carving of the moonlit onyx night.
I sat and watched Him in His unmarked car
that rolled on silently beside my own,
His hands not on the shapeless wheel before him;
that creeping unknown fear that numbs my blood crept in,
and slouching in the seat with some a faceless driver in the front
I tried to close my eyes that had been closed too hard.
But eyes that open in the blackened sun can always see,
and when the shape, the silent twins with bleached white eyes,
came through the window I could only watch that
cold impassive face come over me;
it slung its razor teeth, the bullets that kill child and man,
across my chest and face.
The numbness in my flesh reduced it to shudder,
but I could feel the world light up around me
in a soft and bright fluorescent glow;
burning brighter than the night
that holds you in a shaking calm when
His alabaster eye still watches from the sky.

An indecisive pause and palpitation
when stepping on a bus that stands at rest --
when vacant seats are brimmed with
saddened impositions in the air that they embrace;
Where ghosts that fill the nightmares in our sleep
walk silently across our steely graves,
the root of all the fingerprints of ice
that creep along our backs,
replacing all the membranes with
some goose flesh in the sun.

Each bus that stands an empty stone
with empty piston heart and
sad ghost-ridden lungs becomes the
cemetery of the modern dead.
And like the lonely boneyard bears its death
when none but I may walk its halls,
and soon becomes just one more place to breathe
when filled with steps,
so too these living ossuaries lose their edge
as all the bones come rattling on to fill
the phantom seats, and shake them back into the ground.
And as they depart
they each walk back across my grave
and make me cold amid the sweating seated
patrons in this plague pit afternoon;
there are no vacancies, this empty bus,
for ghosts who cannot shiver in the cold.

There are concrete steps along my old home town,
veins extending from my past as from my arm,
where I walked along a perfect sitcom afternoon;
embroidered heartbeats stitched into my throat,
as I pass by hollow glass-front stores and mannequins
that knock into themselves along the streets.
Blood in my eyes that beat each step my feet descend,
still walking down a figure-eight along this past back into that
perfect peaceful image of a wild-haired stillness,
back when the sun was farther from the sky.

And it brings my mind back to that petri dish,
the tree and to the insects,
the nettles restful in the lining of my skins:

Back to silky alkaline drawn cautiously along
each tender fibrous limb;
Soak through lamina, inhale and bathe
within the vapor's airy words, so welcome to
the touch, the membrane of the I.
Germinate a vacant seat, (that empty one,
here next to the steering wheel)
put forward subtle progress--

The chemical flowers bloom as oil becomes
bouquets against the water,
cancer cells expanding symmetry in radiance
and in beauty, blossoming and petal-flags
against the ashen hardwood frame.

Pageantry against the stroke of three,
the crystal mould descried and delicate
in shell set loose by careful touch,
reduced by passing into porcelain,
dust settled underneath the weight of gravity
and a slow heartache of time
(and time that lives with heartbreak)
wilting, falling in a stagnant breeze
and shedding pretty precious skins--
advertised to eyes that care,
(or care enough to stare as if they did).

And it remained, and so watched itself shed
each perfect acid petal as it peeled,
now left as sweet corolla cherry air
drifting from and back along its slender frame,
just to rustle into heaps, the stacks of bodies
wilting, bleeding, in the waking sun.

All that's left, its plastic bones, a thousand wires
wrapped up and in around a compound heart;
we tried to teach it muscle memory,
and it remembered only slow death in the dark.
--
And now I trace the same concrete with
the same acid brush strokes falling from
the sun;
the pupae in my stomach lining spreading
wings along my throat, dysgeusia from
the alcohol and bite-marks of my sleep.

Of all the insects tracing steps beneath my feet
along the remnants of the chemical bouquets
that die before they scatter on the cold concrete.

Those burnt wine words, splattered in my throat:
they echo like a monotone, a pixelated epilogue,
spendthrift explanations in the face of powderballs
and glassware mountains in the sky --
and when the pressing porous flesh dissolves into itself,
becoming and unraveling inside a pulse,
the mirrors contour out the traces and the outlines
of cellophane masks and eager twisted lips.

Ink runs over its own heels,
trying to pour out from eyes and skin
into the air and into form, into breath
hovering in mist, the shaded space
between these drowning sheets.

Replaceable faces running shadows in the sun,
skipping breaths from lips pressed pursed in balanced
porcelain, calcium deposits in their gums.
The passing midday sun sneers idly by
behind loose marron lids, they would stay closed
if prying biotechnics wouldn't interfere;
if cells could understand the levity
in longing for a taint that will not end.
Mephitic thoughts, reflecting gelid dreams;
each silent waking purges spectral sands --
every step along the asphalt echoes
visages those noonday devils still demand.

Each pulse and ripple in the ocean air,
each stifled breath and quick constricting touch
of water and of sand, of mercury
between the parchment sheets and glassy eyes;
there live phantoms built of memories
who grasp our lungs with each new push inside,
who whitewash what we see and ought to breath,
with what each stifled pulse declares its own.

A viper in between the sheets
lays eggs in place of young it eats,
and when they hatch, the modest dove
is eaten in the shades of love.

You were falling to the river when I looked,
a spot of white against the steely dream,
a shudder in the dull monotony;
clarity within that torpid bloom of fog.

I had just stepped out onto untouched snow,
had felt the weight of angels pressed
beneath my heel,
and between the static hissings in my ear
and cries of heaven's children at my feet,
the wave of drowning silence
held my cold erratic heart;
a mask of sleep.

You fell, and I stood watching at the edge,
a sloping precipice along the stream
that bordered virgin fields of white ahead,
the sterile rocks drew broken passages down,
twining as I fell too, these carnal portraitures --
the only stain of blood against the earth,
and you the only stain of white against the sea.

Suspended on a frozen bridge above
a cold and glassy fountain rivulet:
behind me, shapeless shadows of those dreams;
ahead, a bright and empty snowfield bank.
A throng of pressing figures smothering
the breath and movement in my frigid limbs,
so that when air is drawn into my black
degrading lungs, when blood is pumped into
my poor constricted muscle walls and skin,
I dream within the dream to sleep, to dream.
Cloying, smiling, speaking songs of love
like grainy vinyl voices cracked and aged;
a ballad I could never learn to taste.
Press forward, through the crowd of hands and wings
toward the great and awful steel barred gate,
a monstrosity of imposition:
cast of iron doubts and cobalt ice,
it froze my fingers just to touch it's steely grate.
And dripping from the edge, into the hellish waves
my eyes were turned, and yearning coalesced
between my dreams and waking noonday fights;
back again into the angry air I used to breathe.

Thick in my throat, like burning wine or words
I wish I knew to say out loud,
the shudder wouldn't leave, and I won't stay.
Open this barred gate, I walk out onto
virgin snow.

But in the morning when I pried my dry
and ugly lids apart, when old insipid
smoke leaks out from red and rusted eyes;
the black I paint along my inner skin
is thrown across the porcelain and tile --
a portrait of the setting sun and Earth,
an etching of the shaded, sullied sky.

--

Like some kind of heedless dream -- the coma
patients learning vigor through the scent of bleach
and cold caress of burning latex loves --
the eyes once closed, unblinking in the dark,
see nothing in the universe of life,
the universe in nothingness of dreams.

It was an airy cipher: endless hills,
the bell jar of the marble stained glass skies
and pinions spread, reaching past the atoms --
it all was sudden black
against the posthumous accomplishments
of sterile cobalt blue.

We breathe our dust as dust is air:
the waking wake to sleep again,
the sleeping sleep to dream;
our dreams have teeth that break the skin,
we, bleeding -- waking -- face the fall.
What serpents lie behind this night,
when shades of day draw miles beyond the leaves?
This gentle cancer, nettled in the eyes,
proves, in light, the very coinage of the brain;
though sting or pain, corrode it may,
this draft remains the parent of the theme:
the coils that crush the breath out from our lungs
are arms we welcome in embrace
when, at the end of days, the blackness creeps
again into our thinning inner skins,
and fantastic worlds, envenomed by our wants,
are warmer than the dawn we're born into.

There's stillness in the morning sheets,
when temporal light within the mind
wanes in the shadow of a rising sun.
Breathe deep, and let the dust and blood remain
a film upon your ugly lids:
the sphere we hold as life in beating dreams
is but a glacial dream in waking day;
our dreaming is where fragile lives begin:
we will bleed in life, and in our dreams again.