Clamor

Experiencing clamor like a minty brain
It's been pretty much stated
Nonsensical illusions stop by
Wanting to capitalize everything
Wishing for Amnesia
Whistling for the Train

Favoring my wrist
And its rose to the heart
The Ghosts of Delusion
Doing whatever they tell me
Giving my hand a little twist

My menthol Transmission screams with the twitch
Small, slow breaths of concrete mist

All at once, A quavering voice
Becomes futuristic and leans
Against The Empty Wall
Nonchalant with its magnetic choice

Listen: While you were gone
You did a lot of damage
Never met a single one
Thought they knew me
Remember my Mistakes
See the Mirrors through me

Secret Funeral

Before attending a funeral

Where I know no one

No one knows me

Where someone has died

And been buried in the sand

How long have I been doing this

Has it happened?

To be simple again

Like a heart attack

Life is permanent and smashing

Before attending a funeral

Thank You Note

She makes a sound with her smile

that reverberates inside me for

days remembered making me mirror

long after I'm able to see or hear her-

a reciprocal and inescapable pleasure.

Ellem Sea

Tell me what matters
Your admirable possibilities
And argyle socks
Patter promises equivocally
-eternities of possibilites-

Does the time of night ever change?
Your company is sweeter than sleep
In your eyes I exchange
Precious, countless sheep
For a dream I can soak and seep

Roman candles bloom back and forth
Competing for closeness with closeness
Foggy glasses, foggy windows
A summer night sways like fall

When I look into your windows
I see everything, experiencing swollen silence

Deep into Ellem Sea
Every day my eyes pause
Dancing curls cover
Golden-green glares
Sunset smile

Tell me what matters
If time ever changes

Road Kill: Ode to Art

Road kill: your soul splayed emotionlessly
Displayed with haste and emotional need
Sideways, it seems - with strange gravity
Emotion is an art; you are just dead.
Cubes of clouds above you now
Reflect your imagination: mirrored,
Silent, and alive with perspiration.

a thought

[DISCOURSE]
Timid footsteps of morality
marvelling the (im)possibility
and those who disobey the conscious,
unconscious, and responsibility.
How can we all exist?
The warnings of souls are not shadows.
Spirituality is work, unlike a word;
an infinite wonder.
To speak is to belittle, though
sometimes necessary.
"Baby, I just want you to be happy."
[...duh.]
The sharpness of reality
and the soft
expanse
of the soul
is a precarious combination
that ensures being pricked.
Invisible facts;
forceful moments;
thick, mushy, used
oxygen
surrounds and suffocates
tireless fate
like faith.

?

Toppling hills keeping safety alive
Barely. Quivering quackers jumble embrace
With use to be. What "happiness" claims
Captures growth and ruts and grapes. For one
To escape, drape the hour. The name belongs
To no one the woman ever breathed. A shameful
Encore bellows apprehensive advice to warm Southern
Cheeks glowing crowdedly in single-file sidewalk lines
Cheering for more. Independence is not important
To freedom, idealism explains, but everybody else
Knows the distance. RoseBud - the prettiest smile
You've ever seen. Compromised fame shutters
In the distance and grows in the spring, providing
Gibberish to foxes and squirrels in the late fall.
Your dreams are worth cheating for - atop the
Dragging waltz you tip-toe, releasing imagination
To freedom and imperfection.

Love Song

Purring the world to sleep
  My bottled spine
We won't awaken solely
  This humble time
Humbled lobotomies
  Sparkled with love,
Care and shine
  Matchstick grass stalks
Ablaze and fraying
  Through wind and dream
You will stay
  Won't you? Diamonds
Don't ever melt
  It seems. Oh, but
If you could:
  Evaporated, divided
And shared!
  Water and wine
Reddened
  And sweet every time.
The scent of invigoration
  Leaves nature
For proper posture
  And the parodies
Of freedom!

The Mystery of Attraction

                                        The mystery of attraction

You're not looking literally

          reading a poem

                    inside of me

I can imagine old words

          judiciously

                    and you will think

Mystery

          and attraction

                    considering their connection

There may be no

          commonalities, circularities

                    or physical tendencies

The mystery-the river

          of this, row- attraction

                    read now your reaction

Convince yourself the water

          cautiously

                    you see the means

Hopeful reader, light with buoyancy

          it doesn't mean

                    stalk tall
Green, wishful simplicity
          prosaic origami
                    or even anything

Essence

There is no creed to being kind
it is the doctrine of the heart
and weakness of the mind


Disciplined introversion
improves extroversion
by natural design


The essence of an existent
if possible - requires both parts
to be equally refined


With completion upon death
or
the soul unshrined


Philosophy is of the mind
and religion of the heart
action and being, being ever entwined

picking, me

Picking words     reflecting your reality
  that just means perception    actually
Like plumes    clarity    and actuality
  landscape    estuary    and misconception
You can never have my reality
  or drink the reflections
Of my streaming rivers
                        inside
      Water   -   wild        with curiosity
  tempts
            And welcomes me

prunes

Letting the bathwater get cold
is not difficult to do, with complacency,
stillness and being preoccupied
The tiles stale, but the water never ripples
With impossible, inevitable slowness
the smallest particles ever seen or felt
lose interest
and are no longer entertained
They go dormant, or die-
it doesn't matter which-
and together grow cold
It can happen any time
I miss the prunes
that now diminish every time
Like memories
that still exist somewhere
or perhaps: reminders
They are sometimes just the same
sometimes bigger and deeper
that they are shades
waves of reality
And then I'm reminded:
I still have the same old towels.
Can that be true?

Clarity

The epiphany of seeing yourself
    as you are
Moments of clarity
The options of life before you
    for the first time
Synchronized vibratings to ghost pulses
Blueish waves of uncertainty
The world seems thinning when you realize reality
    but you dig in anyway
Tinglings at the top of the spine
    Don't be so affected
17 months pregnant with misconception
    it seems
The next realization will lead to a realization
    of one's own naifness
Unexpected explanations of feelings
Is there more to it than this?

Actually

They say it's about love,
      when it's actually
just a sound:

repeated, over and over-
      hidden, sort of-
and comes back around.

Peanut Butter

Opening jars to homes undecided:
the wooden door seems dead to me,
from the street. What is it about
taking things slowly? Some never know.

It's like peanut butter, except
you have a choice; only, there
is a difference between warmth
and vacation. And as far as

Wisdom - clouded moon above -
which occurs as often as does
the moon in its fullness (as well
as clouded), having as much to
do with location as with time,

It can be explained in the circular
movements of your gentle thumb,
thinking, pausing, and expressing-
like a warm, unpredictable clock,
being simple and without thought,
perhaps.

honey

When he's not there-
    when the windows stop
Crack, and stick
    you pop-and swear
Waiting through
    the best
Is yet to come
    this point of view
Is sticky
    and will not do
The best
    is for the best
And the best
    is for you
When you
    Tennessee sing
And the breeze
    blows through
Scream! honey
    and it will be true

1985

You never smiled when you were supposed to.

Where does sincerity travel. Loving you, and all

your fears, trusting the night - every day.

Your untimely smile thieves my futures

limiting variations.

Closing those I was probably dressed for

I dress for you - you steal my clothes

striking me with solemnity.

But the jokes still tickle, hands still tremble.

America - and your ubiquitous reasons,

you were never a man

were you.

To be inexperienced and aged through relation-

the blues without music, your beats are only

big business. The back of my head, but she

still loves me. Disregarding your tributaries

and your lakes as grains of sand

but they are salt.

The consolation of the stars that you don't

believe in whimper, while constellations

of thought that you no longer understand

smile and wait. I am only one chain reaction.

Shy with undiscovered love - nervous of 

The Big One - you sing to me,

sweet as you are.

Tumbling down the newspapers, only catching the headlines.

Your smile will one day be seen or you will die.

Ladies and gentlemen: the distance to Heaven

by the way of railroad tracks, reflecting Revelations

in the moonlight - cracks in fresh steal black-

it is still the same.

Still I find newness in you every day-

and when I look, I'm left in the dark

staring. If every heart is the same,

you've created an exception in me.

If you haven't noticed, the poor 

don't even work anymore; their

opium is distracted, it seems.

[Aging infant in solitude - new wave fossil.

A moment in your mind and I would die

for you - but we already don't exist,

it seems.]

rifts

A rift, unintended
    a change of heart
Changes blended
    and stripped apart


    How does it happen?
        this burning concoction
    The airs between blacken
        Breathing soft toxin


Whose smoken memories have I
    swapped or stolen - and
Must you get so dressed up for this?
        unexplainable rift
Beaches between us, mirrors along the way
    wedding cake connection
This does not mean anything, here or anywhere
        my twine is frayed
And continually fraying - impossible rifts and summertime bliss
    coexist where devils dance
And angels blues. Put your little hand up, fingers apart, feel them both
        weaving each - rifts and bliss
Making each other plural, once again. Here: it's better to hold on through this.

suckle

The skies, fake upon our departure
Sightings of your inked sign upon
Existence - fearing only your perception;
Rather, how you are perceived.
Can one change her identity, or
Only how she is perceived?
We are artists of perception
Idolizing identity, squabbling with
Death's one true xanthippe. Our departures
Somehow signify the constant conception
Of identity, only if we choose to remain in its womb
Suckling existence as it comes.
Remaining in our identity
Rejecting the open palm of perception perfectly-
Existence cannot be signed without blood
Which has more colors than any ink
And is erased quicker than lead;
Blood is as vicissitudinous as being
And is being
Which is an ethereal eyelash of existence.


The porous moon
Feigns its supposed relation to the sky
In common sightings necessary to departures-
Unconcerned with its perception;
Pure, brilliant and ever changing:
Unrelating eternity.

skinny

Can you call? I was mighty
Moonbeaming my antebellum picture shelf
Brighter than light. My participation flighty
My pencil skinny and sharp. I shelve
The season - the kissable lilac - behind


Believing. And what is better?
A cloudless straight-shot to a flowerpot;
A rainbowed riverstone could not be wetter.
I am hunching, listening to the landscaped plot
Envious of the loved-enough and the left-behind


Flakes of aquamarine whatchamacallits pop
In and out around the umbrellad vista-scene
Like unshackled joy firecracking, oh!, from atop
A jovial passage from an extended kindergarten dream
Gold and jade katydid keepsake left behind


I am not your hailstorm emporium
Meandering epidemic muzzling of television sets
Flooding your hopes with paraplegic comforts
I've unlocked sadness and death and still
Have restless feet. Every wasted joy relaxes.

Cost

Charming simplicity

How often I forget

Renewal

The more susceptible to loneliness

The lesser the cost

Upon the window splattered

An announcement of paint

Yellows your reflection

And the rain.

I was acting in such a way

Out of defiance, to not look

Like him. He became like me

Making me like him.

Love responds characteristically

To the silent air with the complexities

Of the fading horizon. Swearing upon

Life like a believable boogie.

Costfully denying reflection

With honest sincerity

The cost of a soul

And its intentions

Stranger

Stranger, dangling from hidden escapes,
Mistakes, understanding. Hairs of vibrating
Reality. Sometimes, I can feel it. The night
Nice with adolescent inhibitions. Your


Sicilian hair is vibrating reality, lip syncing
Undiscovered cerebral caverns and the ex-
tremes of possibility. Magazine eyes. Twis-
ted dollar bill in your black shirt pocket,


Gulping. In the original plan we were both
All strangers and none strangers at the exact same
Time. Breezed away down the hill like an old sea
Hat, taken away by round-waisted newness.

Elegant Windows

My regrettable loves, my elegant windows -
Against my window knocks a crazed flying
Creature with its entire brittle being
- And now I have burned my finger -

Less fortunate fingers do not live amongst the aloe.
It makes me look real cool.
She's such a sophisticated tip-toer
A simple never-regret-it,

So the present screams. The Ghost -
Caught him talkin' to the milk jug.
The flutes make him jumpy;
True Love, the bug no longer crashes

Into what would be...Mexico.
He's dead. Replace with: cello
Praying legs - cricketing mythologically
Air conditioner ransacks this sound from me

- Gongs - their rebellion is made
Monotone, undramatically.
Life among the horns;
My First Sight - pricking existence.

Riposting gongs! Now, numb!
One must now burn the film
in order to see. My Artist -
Their is life above the thorns.

I can taste it: that sugar
Doesn't settle. Window, if you must;
Elegance burns with regrettable ease,
Bugs ash, violins close.

Rope

The amusement of lips and

The anxiety of everything I

Always forget balance the

Seasons of all, tearing be-

tween each other, creating

Elemental anomalies inside

Of me, where life is night,

And in night: cold is lack

Of direction; peace is ease

Of distraction; love is in-

somnia, neither with dis-

cretion; footsteps of 

Fluttering black water

Are either unassigned

Fate or lack of will to

Create; every empty

Frame of snow melts

Upon arrival. The days

Are pointed - know-

ledge and sight. The

Wind in me is death.

Blood moves like 

Veins with sticky

Permanency, burned

To be free; whirled

Round bones, buil-

dings, and history.

Fabled, forgotten,

Or both, tossed on

Table - perhaps

Placed- placed

Under table leg

Solely to stable,

Propped on table

Applied for its

Aesthetic label;

Blood is hope;

Liquid, unfray-

ing, strands

of life, 

learning

to rope.

Night

The night, absent,
Knifes through itself
Spinning cotton,
Reflecting light,
Refusing to believe
All to be understood.

sunlight

sunlight.
a beautiful confusion of liquids
confusing the senses


time grows these roses
sound the confusion!
is it comfortable in there -
your life, like that -
so crowded by carcinogens?


is it louder than the night crickets,
or the birds in the morning?
do my windows magnify your insides
as they do my outside?
you're not the lion I thought you were;
I will still make you breakfast,
if you don't eat my lambs.
shake those birds out
before you bring the trees in;
draw the curtains.
sunlight!

succinct remains

holy transparency, could you hide for me the real truth?
try midnight, try tones of alabaster,
try rising from the remembrances of the fall.
aspire your eyes, your tender, broken roses
open your glorious celebrations, water your idealism
the golden harvest, I can touch it
the length of your fear, I can reach it
stretches of echoes and love's intentions -
I require the midnight horizon
to be painted with coffee immediately -
there are no mindful ghosts alive this night.
Listen, lovely little leaflet:
the nations are now distorted.
the pulse between my ankle and heel
dances with desire for you with no complications.
If Heaven were less than halfway here
there would be no meaning in this
empty drinking jar, where the scent of
life succinctly remains. This much I reveal.
You will find joy in the dregs of the coaster below.
Above, my caffeinated moon releases
these sweet, silvery reveries.
My thankfulness is electric and final.

Making Moves

shes says: Making Moves
On the Edge, with only twenty dollars
and pieces of each other


swallowing trust
and the complexities of curious blood
senselessly opening windows


of each other
exposing the gutters punctiliously
using everything, even you


to see the skies flutter
*maybe, with echoes, and forgiveness
of each other*


*maybe, with echoes, forgiveness
and each other*

blackbird

i

blackbird - shadow

the fancy

echoes

blackbird - distort

the wetness

underneath

blackbird - whisper

the answer

floating

blackbird - empty

your eyes

flat

blackbird - answer

my desert

dreams

ii

dreams - whisper

my distorted

shadow

dreams - silence

the echoes

floating

dreams - slide

the wet

scab

dreams - remove

the encrusted

memories

iii

memories - dream

far away

webs

memories - wipe

the night

clean

memories - roll

away empty

faces

iv

faces - unbind

the sleeping

self

faces - remember

please forgive

memories

v

memories - remember

the time

echoes

Ambush

To have lived for such a little while
freckled with marriage, diapers and death
I alone steal as much as I can get
My theft expands the cosmopolitan telephone
the plastic cosmos are mine
your cosmetic freckles are mine
my life alone: blushing,
I decline.
In such a short time, each
vacant heart lusts soil
littered with bones,
honey bees, and mercy -
none can be promised.
"Innocence" acts with a shiver,
enamoring you, while I steal your
future, and your tears, too.
Eager for bones and honey bees,
I steal your ears and eyes - 
You, first, were blind to see.
Halfway between selfishness
and prudence, your words
I steal, leaving you with the 
quenchless universe, your 
passive life, and the 
eternal lipstick that I stole for you.
I return your freckles, infused with
cosmos tears and words, 
and marry you.
Your future was already mine.
My theft is unaltering.
My mother wept
when I gave it to her.
In such a short time
and with so much more
we mirror alone
gazing silently -
secret spirits devouring
the life we were given.
My sour stillness unloosens
the luxuries - the cosmos
in the mirror belong to you.
The fallen skies within dizzy
chunks of moon until
I close my eyes and throat
and lie ambushed by life.

Lines

millions of straight lines
stitched together
etched and withered like
ad old woman's delicate
neck. Beautiful -
over-used and never
mingled, treasured lines
of life, wrinkled - understanding.
the stenciled sailboats
bobbing on paper,
parenting the pencil
parenting the hand and
mind and souls of these
street-side sidewalk
steel-mills.
the utensils itch and
quiver, never 
comfortable, warm, or
ever under covers, never
talking, smoking, or smiling -
translating aeriality,
skyly deconstructing.
eaten/absorbed/crumpled
like car parts, occasionally
recycled, Whizzing


across paper - else being
Fizzed into the can
trampling or trampled
made of wood and staples-
faded plastics,
inks and alcohol - blades
of furious practice. niches
with cousins and twins
of language - in-
capable of languor
switching whenever
switched. alive by default
snaked
often dead once bought
capable at any moment
to compose any thought.
The Everyman's Atlas
of Nought. the pencil
the paper, plastics and
staples, occasional 
instances of brainy goo
and remnants
of residual glue.

Frank O'Hara:

Today


Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You are really beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All
the stuff they've always talked about


still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have a meaning. They're strong as rocks.




[perfect!]

Peter Davison:

Peaches


A mouthful of language to swallow;
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.

inescapable

inescapable
held in harrowing haiku
your beauty says blue

sweet sop

winish tears drop
teardrops of wine stop
when plopped on paper
naturally. I opt not to
tissuemop so as not to
disturb my accidental
purple plop of sweet sop.
a lop off my heart
is every single sorry drop.
I am simple, atop.

pieces

heaven I don't know
heaven has no end - yet - 
unsuccourable earth's sole pageant contends


friend! you are mine
you stranger to reality. to me -
your facedown fluency is a circadian constancy


- wheatbread makes you ever unwell
telephones - or - anything telephonish
is as strange as wooden nightness


we gather estrangements in paltry pieces
hoping sensitive sunlights and peaceful spirits
will remind us - some reality and some heaven - 

crown

the crown clinks alone
slandering silently in historical solitude


uncompromising eloquence kindred
possibly, to something pure


swishing your resplendent alcohol
thinking - likely - cerebrally sneaking


your whiskeyed words wash over
like whiskeyed ocean winds


burning sand in my eyes and vision
the Monarch of the Sea branding the insides of me


your crown clinks alone
slandering with stubborn aptitude

soda

you lipstick stops
to watch my never-ending
soda-pop


we don't call it that
in the South
nor do we knock


we open the mouth
for sweet facades
to fall out


just like soda
and its silent, smirking
sugar quota


Southern Grotesques
in gross
bustlebop


thank you,
for the lovely company
and cold drink

Auden:

Nocturne II


Make this night loveable,
Moon, and with eye single
Looking down from up there,
Bless me, One especial
And friends everywhere.


With a cloudless brightness
Surround our absences;
Innocent be our sleeps,
Watched by great still spaces,
White hills, glittering deeps.


Parted by circumstance,
Grant each your indulgence
That we may meet in dreams
For talk, for dalliance,
By warm hearths, by cool streams.


Shine lest tonight any,
In the dark suddenly,
Wake alone in a bed
To hear his own fury
Wishing his love were dead.

by Tomaž Šalamun

Academy of American Poets

Muldoon says Heaney is like the Vasa

ship. Built on three floors,

it was the world's biggest battleship.

It made half a mile

and capsized alone in  harbor.

The warriors are killed by insects

and lack of glycerine.

Scurvy corrodes their skulls.

Spruce trees shake off their seed and snow.

Between Zlatorog and the Savica waterfall

their is no hoarfrost.

deep dark moon

something twirled - rather carelessly - through my hair,
fixedly - into my ear, reminding me disparately of life
and forced the thoughts "where" and "who."
though unlistening, and because I am "here"
tell me why you are so typically distant blue


                         -  pause  -


still, please, forgive me, friend
I (sigh) am listening now. Listen - 
Ladybugs glisten and blue jays sin
but I would rather not blend.
I am lost and I will sing.
An heiress of yellow under
your transparent wing and life
in thorough lines will glisten.
Death, like sidewalks, we will
lipstick, and Home,
we will christen.


                        -  pause  -


your lips - with confidence - never shutter
always a breath distinctly blue
your inner beauty is my deep dark moon
and in time, our (perfect) loneliness will conquer death.

Swimming Constellations

Swimming constellations simmer
or - shimmmer
like, well - 
a mirror
facing the sun
through the water
through the wetness
of your almost-eyes


You blanklessly stumble
or - tumble
into, well -
me, and my space
and I wonder
what that implies

That Look

Your songs wing soap
every light dims to glow
fossils breathe dust
your songs feather breeze
I will be fossiled
deep under crust
your songs listenthrust

Instead

My colours -
    "paralyzed by emptiness"
could have been yours.

Instead
    the ocean will remain blue
and "emptiness will be free"

Curtains

The fleshy curtains cannot block
the morning birds and their
excessive jubilation, yet they
remind me of your eyes -
my regular salvation.

The clock ticks vertigo
and a light bulb pops -
The birds swarm, shattering
slowly and messily
through my window
and curtains, pecking
the lies right out of my
abeyant blood.

Your eyes became the
texture or silence,
dilating my isolate reality
infinitely, and leaving me
with only orphaned feathers
and very real rips for light
to someday seep.

Hello!

, Hello!
, Look!
Your shadow
is as sweet
as the petite
flame
swishing
on the top
of a freshly lit
candle stick!

Grace

Like a shimmering spider, you
and your tasteless presence
waltz, not to me, but only my direction.
Here, your insipid allure prances like a drunken heron
wobbling with pestering grace.
Here, you become the single speck of existing alliteration,
the pupil in your own play's ireless iris.
Your softness never ends,


nor does your loftiness, however worthy
we dream it to be.
Finally - 
you fall, slowly snowing
your way, somehow to me.
Your lipstick removed
and your wings satin,
again.


I cannot pronounce - you will never apprehend, the perfect pain
and the depth of the well of the why that you are to me.