Densities 59

back to the pogo stick
of a very good poet
if not a friend
or a very popular popinjay
who would rule the world
with clean skin and a clean set of walls
camouflage carpet and desk
I’m still carrying this matchbox steamroller
in my pocket
but I know its got to go
its making me late
goldfinches fly by with invisible ink
the woodpecker laughs then the rain stops

B e // a // t w i N

=//=

K & T
sitting
...........
w i t h i n
long forgotten
j a z z w o r d z
..........................
b r e a t h takingly
.............................
a b s u r d t h r o u g h
a space // time of n…o…t

=\\=

The complexities of the momenT

.

Without further ado,

between themselves, they had discussed,
among matters of importance,
the potential of impotence,
when without further disgust,
between the first and second floors,
they disappeared through open doors,

into the night of KatmandU.

.

The swimming pool storY

.

I remember

p a i n t i n g

the village

g r e e n

.

S h o r t c u T

.

Deep in the art
of a stubborn
graveyard
lies an able
s...t...o...n...e
......................
a magnificently
eccentric memorial
to a magnificent eccentric
who b e c a m e fluent in over
two dozens and seven languageS

.

Densities 10

I will not be disappointed in the outcome

I already did that

I left scratch marks in the well's stone walls

I wrote that story a thousand times

running down the railroad tracks

out of breath on rubber stilts

up the glacial ravine

the vertical leaps

defying gravity

adding more and more

to my true vocabulary

my dumb alphabet

no longer able to scream

in the dark

out loud

Mantra

a dead woman

crowned in nothingness

dry and dead

as dry dead blood

escapes

into Ligeti's concerto

for violin & orchestra

slips out

unnoticed

between skins

of death and breath

like cold air rising

from an empty stair

she floats translucent

as ricepaper, dissolving

into trembling ocarinas

without place

she embraces all places

her voices creep toward the sea

and the wave will take them

space folds

into four angles

into four sides

into scordatura strings

the rite

of the opening

of the mouth

(almost)

she put my shoes out in the trash

a different one called the police

yet another threw my belongings off a balcony

and I watched them smash on the sidewalk

with the neighbors laughing

the first stood accusing me to my face of infidelity

I wished I had commited

the one I married called me a loser

but wouldn't let go for years

somewhere in the middle are echos

of doors slamming

objects smashing against walls

insults and vows of revenge

once or twice there was pulled hair and bruises

I remember blood in a bathtub

my mother would become a monster

once a month

and swear I was not the fruit of her womb

I have no more excuses

for them

or me

the last one shocked with kindness

smiling as she sent me packing

just as long as I kept my mouth shut

I (almost) did

diary of a woman who vanished

bodiless

above a vast night ocean

I dreamed you were lost

in the enormous sadness of water

between the slide of monstrous ships

I called out

but the air grew heavy

with lines, triangles

the endless

creation and dissolution

of inner sky

formless

I woke with eleven

luminous strangers

peeling mandarines by silent windows

for a moment glimpsed

your ravaged lion's head

your bright blackbird eye

but I was mesmerised

by a vase of sun-edged magnolias

by drifts of dust motes falling

in afternoon light

like a thousand

silver egrets

your movement is sharp

precise

and I wake with your hair

wound through my fingers

the smell of burning cloves

in your mouth

you hiss

where are you?

what are you?

but I am

voiceless

except for the language of snakes

the dry rattle of their digestion

you speak and it begins to rain

have you forgotten?

we live only where the breath turns

my left eye closed:

a white horse wades up to its breast in blood

my right eye open:

Sirius rises – ashes return to branchless trees

Get with the Pogrom

we've seen so many...
the Germans put an abstract, mechanistic,
dare we say, "high tech" blue-sky face on it...
but do they compare with 25 million plus in Meso America
under Spanish swords. Of course it took them fifty years...
are we measuring the damn things against time?
If we count the you-row-peon invasions of the Americas North and
South, in 300 years we pretty much wiped the natives out
and subsequent to the end of the Russian/German trip, Americans
got right to it again... not so much ethnic/racial cleansings
as across the board apocalyptic bomber pinpoint mayhem;
mostly by client stooges bought, taught, and paid for
by US of A's happyface consumptive SUV wonders.
I guess for sheer numb_brrrs Hitler's 15 years
takes the prize and the way we paperclipped
his intellectual minions was a damn crime
gettin' in bed with the lot of 'em for 55 years
plantin' 'em in Hunsville Georgia
where nary a soul noticed -
puts a whole new complexion on
consenting adults.

Everyone of us...
ethnicity be damned
paid our taxes, supported the plan;
cheered for our side in SE Asia and scapegoated
yellow, black, brown, jew, dyke, faggot, an' Arab
when it suited us; but we're gonna get even this time:
the train is leavin' on the same track
so we can fire up the ovens without lookin' back
and we're gonna let freedom ring and liberty toll
for a solid half billion new holocaust souls - for oil,
for rare earths, for whatever we think we want at the moment.
We'll pile 'em up like cordwood the way we did in the Phillipines
so we can celebrate our fundamental Christian righteous rave:
Profit first, comfort second, and
wisdom dead last.

Questions...

Waiting in the wings

Slipping among galaxies of thought
of her/him//him/him,
of her/him//her/her
of blue, of naught, porpoises, dragonflies,
atoms, particles, neutrinos, spinning sighs
of consequential push-pull: magnetics among others.
Love builds from respect, then trust
leading inevitably to mutual support
but
only if we pay attention in every direction.

Frames of Monk

Skin blooms a weather of shower and afternoons
and weeks of Wave Mountain;
little monk walks Junes;
and August roads hot tars detain.
Exotic beating looms with shuttle clacks,
barks adrift and seadrift float flood from rain-
sailor’s warning, monk’s pain,
Glorianna’s skin tracks.
At night the wafting of the wood is balming;
the skin’s weather, the short shout of the palm.

Tanned mind hails on the virgins; that’s age’s envy
and only lust flatters;
Puer’s envoy,
from somewhere the future shatters.
The sea beats the young boy, monk’s young father
to the man, dwelling with divine squatters,
dwelling on the daughters,
mountain breaks up, rather
like the ordinary small man of thinning
soul, locked within the clastic rock of sin.

From stony fields of massy, clacking bones, she sees
him approach the courtyard
through locust trees,
leaping like poem’s laugh-last word,
or before falling, pride in one’s estate,
human backstory, ears that haven’t heard
now perched, like some absurd
pigeon, to click and grate
upon the gates of the institution,
above the hoary and inconstant stew.

Monk’s moon finally comes to the playhouse, condemned,
performing the Soldan
in a cage, hemmed,
rolling with the tyrant’s golden
train, pulled by his wife, ‘til they brain themselves,
Heaven and Earth bleeding on the Satan’s car.
That’s what comes of love’s star
dried of it’s fire by elves.
Arts of banishment, logically pursued,
arrive at poems where no passions stir.

Autumn delivers him from the oppressive swelter
and the freak intentions,
dubious shelter,
and the variant suspensions
of disbelieving; hard to remember
how I could have fallen so very far
short of the under-par.
Let us embrace somber
reappraisal of the situation,
rendered and chewed up in the vasty day.

Mountain mirages in the clear days, the short days,
the leaf will come down husk,
bit with sharp rays,
wood smoke nosing eastwind at dusk.
White cities beckon the road, sweeping wrack
of thunderheads with a gate of moonlight,
the dead month at midnight
when the road rises, back
of time, and the spirit-fates gaze dolefully
on the sleeper dreaming of an asphodel.