The archway at Valley Forge.

The archway proposes a tricky relationship.

One sees first the imprisoned sky and

Only then the cause for

Celebration

It is marble, or flesh.

It was Colonial or

Grecian.

Read up.

Its history is a dwindling flintchip to the other's

Sea bellowing against the greatest things.

Of bourbon and new years.

For my parents.

Throw up your hat, dear.

The Earth is still

And all time spins from its spools

With a comic's measure.

Throw it to the drunkards' moon and their chandeliers

Up to that toppling view of Earth

And to what those brilliant Martians must

See, in their moment of recreation

That ours and theirs might coincide,

Give us a laugh.

Reach to the back of you,

Where my smallest hand was in some distant

Month

Acquainted first and now.

I am dizzy with the sweat and rags of words

The jazz and enamel ground, worn.

Reach back and throw your hat high now,

It is the Auld Lang Syne they play

Where winter flowers stand aright.

In the body the soul resides.

No virginity suits us

Any longer.

It is impractical to look for a measure of it.

What remains is a viable choice,

Thrashing against the pittance of what we

Believed in,

Called virginity.

Blossoms.

Everything I did in my baggage

I did twice

Once for you and bruised in contemplation

I also did for

Another.

And nothing is fair.

Do not be distracted, I spoke for and dreamed for

Another. my moongold, profit,

I hope you can forgive me. I hope on the fulcrum

Wall

You can appreciate the sum of this frivolous bearance.

Unacceptable loss.

If each and everyone is gone

Then there is nothing.

Blown-through fortunes

And forgotten cadences know us,

They will not tolerate losing us.

If each and everyone is gone

Then there is nothing,

bruised, guttered, full

Feeling every bit

With not a finger to touch it.

If each and everyone is gone

Then there is nothing.

The natural order.

The world is gently falling into place:

We can thank this plunge

For the capital heat,

The spinning oceans

Busy and volcanic.

I can see the untamed system bursting

Into perfection

Where harbors grow

Where what is bereft of the savage mark

Would have been so even in a state of Peace.

We are bloodstained; we did it right.

Mountains.

With mountains behind me

And a pretty school--

Pretty by today's means,

Ahead

I got my hands on a copy of

The Divine Comedy,

Only to be overwhelmed by the degrees of

Shame

--the degrees of documentation.

Winter rain.

The patient bend

And are the benefactors of Patience.

Love is prehistorical and

All horror is born of impulse.

The patient bend--

Not in error.

This vibrant winter rain--

to get away--

To wait.

On a brim of rain.

One went looking for a marshal

On a brim of rain--

Lost levees

And swingsets below.

No destitution earns its

Destitute,

Though when the waters recede

To the destitute it all lies.

The edges of certain things.

The edges of certain things

Are serrated,

Eager to pull a

Fleeing sleeve,

A blown lock of hair.

The advantage, despite obvious dangers,

Lies in the possibility that

We might use them to finally catch...

The edges of others

Are undisturbed and smooth,

capable of grasping very little--

If anything at all.

But all possibility

By compass

Flees in that swift direction.

Idiom.

The room was boasting its humane noise:

What went said will be familiar

In the morning

If less distinct.

What went unsaid, on the other hand,

Must wait, packed in,

Unmated, unresponded

But prepared.

So then

All determination is born in the one's forgetting,

And all surprise poetic in the other's.

Idiot.

What a troubled mind needs--

Him, take him for example, look,

What he needs--it

Would fulfill him.

And to fulfill him would make him lazy. So

Give only what he chooses--

Give him all the grapes he can swallow,

Keys to a nice house,

And a dog.

Announce him, clear a path,

Bathe him.

When his dream sours take his shoulder

Wake him up.

Do everything

As he needs nothing

And has been sated on something similar to less.

Conjoined stairwells.

For Jina Valentine.

Expect a temperature drop
Before a first step is taken.

Just by hovering
Accepting what you see when
Looking over

Down both--

Have a shovel ready. Scrape. Salt
Rub your extremities, one frost against the other.

In the distant pattern,
Either night or convergence
Has made of a single view
Something physically impossible.

The vestiges of support.

For Jack Rose.

The sisters of mercy and Veedon Fleece
Were imaginary

And I have not flown a kite in years.

Seems impractical to not unite
The vestiges of support
Such as these,
Such as we need,
Suspect,

Such as we act upon--
As if their vigilance
Occurred first in the thrushing heart,
Then a moving hand
An invention hushing and
unmistakable in its home,

Midair

And then--
Only then,
Third,

In the infinite where once the suspicion of creation drew breath,
And we acted upon.

A brief note:

A while ago you may remember a briefly posted item regarding hiatus. I took a few days off and felt oddly compelled to make news of it. If I had to guess I'd say it had more to do with the dip in a seasonal glut of writings as opposed to any functional want for vacation. Anyway it didn't last.

Well today I announce similar news, if for an entirely new reason. In the past month I have resumed activity under the name, To Stink, To Cheat, To Torture, a platform primarily reserved for prose and essayage. While I assure you the notebooks are filling up at blurry-edged speeds my ability to, as the old proverb goes, walk and chew gum at the same time, is remedial at best. Rather than coughing up some formulaic ten line shitters just for the sake of keeping to date I've decided to pace myself a bit.

Do enjoy the distraction.

Carrying.

This is for whatever it grows,
Here in my palm--

For stems, and schwag seeds
Stub-handed cacti--
Their saltwater--
And stubble-skinned canard
Spreaders.

Here in my possession,
Somewhat scarred,
Here.

Is it so strange to want a handful of
Something bruising with generosity--

Something the hand must not have
So much as it must endure?

To the east.

The whistle blows
And the chapped union between hand
And hammer
Parts.

Silence is born with the auspices of a baby,
With as much clubbed blood.

The potion.

Always in earnest
And in command.

--they look up to you,
And they wait for you.

What's to happen when you die and they empty your flask
On the field
Only to discover it was basically water?

For prince.

Would a moon more impartial
Or bigger
Better represent us?

I mean, what's to become of
These heathen things we scattered here

And how about

Purple Rain?

Superstition.

Kill it with an arrow.
You'll reap the benefits
of the mess, for sure,
And less guilt

If not less culpability.

Butter.

Man's got a stick of butter in the kitchen
He's liable to use it.

The fool's diet.

The swift correlation between that life and this...
See how the flailing continues long
After it has died.

It's as if it had--its ribbon stain already red
On the napkin,
Begging left to do.

Each.

The interrogation was sure to take hours,

And when it was finally over there was a cumulative
pool of cold water in the cup of the one's seat--
The inverse to the arid sere borne across the other's
Where answers blushed,
Startled each.

Seasick.

With rain comes good luck,


But it takes time to yield.

The severe shape of the rock
Takes ages
To mould.

Then there's the imagination:
Seasick, homeless and retrieving...

A watery pinch between the sky and familiar rot
It seizes, it lodges the believer.
In such desperation that no flourish of
fortune could prevail.

Good luck.

Golfballs.

The first person
Landed in a crater of eternity.

Up to that point there was no meaning.

It was a drawn blank bereft of golfballs and irony.

I bet he thought, to dance now is no riskier than to
Die now.

I might as well enjoy my Earth.

And

How mysterious it must all seem, too, once understood.

untitled.

It's possible

This is the place.

I mean, it's the same color green.

The same basic shape that appears on the map,

And they have toucans and rivulets
And Natives.

Listen to the hush.
They speak English.

Look, similar sky.

untitled.

Energy used to correspond to less
Compliant forms of energy.

There are now, for instance,
All four:
The bow,
The deed, the apology
And the smoothing touch of time.

There was a time when we thought
Ourselves lucky to get the apology--
A softer bounty to fall upon

There.

Lines.

Steam makes for a blurry
Wilderness

To patchy eyes.

I could have never guessed that
The lines on the trees

were drawn on in this lifetime.

Incorrigible.

Broke kids listening to an acapella
"The Nearness of You",
A fire barrel crowning on them, one of em
Getting sick by the bridge:

Dumb, dumb, dumb be dumb.

(once was a romantic skimming glances,
always listened to the words.)

But their incorrigible trombone shoves, it's as though
They'd been invited to lead a protest.

But the brass was bent and the light--

It wasn't low enough.

Trash.

If I have wasted these words I must do more than apologize,
Tending to them as orphans--
Disfigured from parents and
Way home.

It is essential that I be spared
And that the reader, in reading,
Know

What has been made waste
Was made so by looming wane
No less seductive than wasteful.

The oath of the horatii.

Bend close

And bear these swords in the
Wounded imagination,

For it is they who touch the skin
Declaring
The future
Has come

Without
Error.

More honey, more honey now.

Nothing we share can be traced
Back to us.

You'll find no paper,
And would be only wasting your money
On a detective.

But go ahead, try.

Follow the wind trail of honey
And our particularities

As we are still unknown to one another
And would find your questions

Decadent.

We have basic palates,
And though unknown
Are not unknown to all we have selected
On the tongues.

The field

For Richard D. James

I am to ask the incessantness to heal me
as by simply enduring it has become
Music.

You already know me,
Moth-bitten me
And mine:

Waiting on a note from a scale to sound,

Not a melody--

We were born and lived and went caressingly without

But a coarse ripple stirs us,
Convinces us in our haggardback stooping that
The field is not Everything.

The echo rings.

For the great poet, Wilfred Owen

Let's be clear that this umbrage is the
Umbrage of warfare and deceit--

That all snipers shall not know and the dead will have died
After we've shaken hands and said to hell with it.

Let us, too, acknowledge them,
On this ferocious side of a desperate
Armistice.

On the grid of our beings and with
Loud blood across our hands

Let it be known of the solitary wisdom that waits to
Greet this policy.

The visit.

Is there no hope like our only stunned hope
And really
Could we differentiate
between it and

The familiar other

As were they varieties in a zoo...


Each having a skepticism,
A name in Latin.

The subject.

Raise your clanging pitchforks against the light of the fire.

It was set to evoke the hell
Of hell if you should fail--
For I am a breeding demon,
Fixed to love,
Sure as you are my throng,
You cultivation!
Fixed to hunt me down
When the moon and your elevated
Fires should search me
Destine me...

Flowers.

Unattributed photo of the portals to a Persian caravanserai (Iraqi 20th c.)

No one anticipates a secret.
They are mostly odorless,
Lethal if their husks are not found
--a woozy sensation occurs,
But after that, total darkness.

So you see why it is crucial that we search now,
For the surprises we know are the surprises
Which lead us

There.

Pre-state.

In a wonder, a bubble--
Marshalled out of an ungrowing,
Parented out of,
Districted in those,
(spray cans, no one)
Kept in close proximity of those, then
Left to modify on shit and blood
You're not welcome here
Policy

Unparented--

First only protruding, then
Actually walking on
Children's legs
--for it was a group of them,
Born in a silver instant
On a wall.

Quickly, and covered in slime,
They set about the miracle
Of fire.

Handwriting,

How do you stop the beloved hand from stopping?

Do you ask it, caress it, or
Bribe it?

And how might you?

Do you start with the blood and bones--
Appeal to its heritage--
To whom do you write?

When it cannot be stopped do you appeal with equal force and persuasion
Elsewhere?

Do you hide?

The blank canvas.

I only want to be looked at
While there's time.

Spare nothing--not trees,
Not your labor force.

Spend money, devise a thing
Do what you have to do to make this happen.

Produce a perfect blank canvas reminiscent

Of those armless clocks tolling in your sleep,
That ferality of dancing oceans--
Had teachers not taught you
Would you know their Names?
Those faces between counted sheep whose features
You could not restore, nor even dream about.

How romantic it is to have and to hold
Nothing.

As it is not the substance in beauty that compels,
But the compulsion that we continue to look for it
Where so little lies open for us, and when
Our need exceeds the provisions of space.

Hearts stuck in caves.

The grass and silence disturbed,
Disturbed.

The walk deeper and more disturbed
From where the warm light meets the trees is dis-
-turbed

Each ocean, hearts stuck in caves and
Girls enslaved in other countries--
Other neighborhoods,
Have all been jostled awake
By the intrusive stir of the
Era.

In this, as if containable, pooling, swims Possibility and the
Cloaked shadow it carries
To disturb.

The nike of samothrace.

Sometime long ago when boys ruled us,
Grown-ups wore decorative laurels in their thinning hair,
And marble rose from every field,
Either born out on a servant's back or
Ripened up in the rain naturally--
Each white and gray crowning in the grass
Pealed for its hour.

Certainly there must have been observers,
people with no premeditated desire to remember or
Even see.

But they saw.

See now the way she lacks a head,


Those bygone, laureled witnesses could not have wagered to even expect
Such white and gray
Hours
Diminishing not her
But our apprehension.

Lullaby.

The arms gave out,
though exception must be taken for Nature, as
Just prior to that

The bough, green and damp at the memorial curves,
Stressed,
Held.

Night music.

When the guests absconded,
The silverware they stole
Tolled in their pockets,
While the duty of ownership left one
And without regard to life
Or happiness
Joined another.

Long perspiring shadows crossed the neighbor's lawn
It was difficult to tell how many.

The horizon chord.

What trace of the universe will remain
In that horizon chord--
Orpheus forgotten,
Our favorite bands forgetten,
Our jeans turned back into dust?

Who will rifle through the crates,
Find all that we left--
Or at least some?

Who will play the other side and notice in the straying black scratches that
We loved it nearly as much as
A.

Skepticism.

Some people wait their whole lives
To be believed.


They're not incredulous,
--follow them.

Look carefully.

From a distance they look like insects.

To shelter.

It is so late right now that the sun is threatening to come up against the will of the hour.

To shelter! White arrows
And not stars beyond,
Report down.

untitled plea.

My L-rd I'm sorry--
I'm tired and fail to deserve to say so
At your feet.

This wine,
I used it to divine my oath
To reprimand myself from disuse and
Jaggedness--

How awake I must seem to the others,
Though I sleep standing up.

How awake my soul to reprimand,
Though I sleep standing up.

(Tell me, though I do not deserve it, how I must have been desperate,
the garlanding wind and rain pushing in the windows--
I was looking for You.)

Improbable prayer.

I'm begging you

Are You ___, the One
Who set this in motion,
Made of me a distraction,
Made of my heart a lode
Without tributary, pause,
Reason?

Have You found this straightaway that plunges and discerns?

There is, I guess in my bareness, as from Your Hands
The ghost of purpose always.

There prevails the hot rock, fluid
On my human earth:

How it has singed away the disguises of Divine Love,
How, too, it has exposed my purposeless,
--And of course I estimate in my small soul,
So scorched clear it All is
And cools here.

I cannot tell the remnants apart.

The old stage.

From this wooded landing, casting forth unfocused into the pelvic midst of night,
Not yet anointed by dawn-glow The notion of actors here,
Props embellishing this, dogeared scripts puzzling upon it as
Preposterous of notions as
Electricity or, say,
Time travel--

To this prehistoric medium
Alone
We venture with no mediation, fiction, introduction--
Nude.

We must manage the dearness of this hour,
And never bow to curse the darkness
As it held us in maternal proximity,
When in urgency and not-knowing
We waited for one another to appear.

Applauses of brittle leaves at the moment of their descents await;
We are expected to be true.

Try this just once for me.

Hold your breath,
My picture.
Make my meanings clear again,

Not because I cannot make them so,
But because I enjoy having guests.

The party will eventually break up,
The balloons sinking in a warm, gnat-specked punch.

Try this just once for me,
Try spilling out the joy
That turned my shadow from a lurking thing
To an incisive profile.

This wilderness belongs to the wild white sun.

This wilderness belongs to the wild white sun.
Its impaling force has grown us from mere dust
And giddy childishness.
It's stain is a seething blister open to the world
As it is the painful, wounded world we seek.

Years before I was born President Kennedy ennobled us,

We all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal.

An aphorism regarding womanhood from the outside looking in.

Man is a mere fool in the cocoon stage of things.

I mean it expressly--the male variety of our species.

The female is burdened with a quicker, less foolish spell in her demise.

She will kiss the nose of the bomb
Just as it blows wide open all us
Things

Leaving us, slower, witless,
Maimed.

Young lovers.

The squeamish nature of young lovers
Is due mostly to the sense of entitlement and
Invincibility.
See how they scatter when night befalls them.

What a haven they must have.
What a bed
Forlorn of fear for they know not nor
Should ever.

Hide you now. To look back would disrupt their ambulant feast.

Talk about the passion.

The judges tired and
Eventually went home.
If this was an eating contest, given the
Extent of all that you ingested,
You'd have won.

The grease-stained blue ribbon handed to you in a photo.

But no.

The judges grew listless.

It was the Brahms, the idea:
The mercury buoyant in your blood
When in the others
a leaden dearth sank in.

How did one win? It's obvious.
One studied, cheated, envied.

Tortured you with the lack
You lacked.

The luminescence created.

Stop with all the bitterness and long on this Earth
When there is magic to be done
And the beams appreciate downward--straight
Out of the startling courage given--solely--
To straight lines and the
Beggars.

Our beggars, obviously, chosen for the way they walk in the light.

See how I became the moon.

Storm.

There is no holiness without procrastination:

We are human, designed to watch for improvement
At the risk of certain decay.

Possibility.

These predicaments light us.
How we must be without them,
Groping on a beach knotted with seaweed and brine.


At each age do we benefit from them--
Coarsening when weaker things grow
Fine
In the waters.

With age.

The venal reasons are similar
To the intellectual.
We watch, we detect,
We gather with our fleshing hands.

Our wealth ages
Like dust,
--just like dust.

Water.

Going from one ocean to the darling next;

D'you ever notice the details?

Rippling inward like a heart does
It sustains cold surges,
Sharks, pollution.

It makes sense to the arrogant and
The drowning,
But only to them.

Can you stomach hearing about it from either?

Wish science,

Lay the reddened brick science alongside the sloped
Brink, and take away for what has gone before.

See how one's decay diverges so subtly from
The same one's idea of attainment.

See how poisonously, lastingly
We with--
Calcium, ration, fingers

Built ahead.

Mitzi Gaynor,

Do you own a second suit?

Do you feel like David Niven with kids in each arm?
Is the world pausing for your speech at the podium,
Hoping for your next word,
Waiting to make crucial decisions,
Eschewing the awkward and
Irreversibly bad?

The speech goes...

I don't expect you to know exactly.
But you could watch, listen,
Give yourself over.
This road we travel was paved with incomprehensible reason and
Do you feel like David Niven with kids in each arm?

"I've heard a lot of perjury in my day,,,"

There was a moment in this great vitality during which a Cole Porter tune and the most tenuous grasp of the law could win Rosalind Russell's love.

That dream I was telling you about...the one in which...

I don't so much luxuriate over the golden car, stand before it in dream pictures, one shoe poised on the running board, as I use it each day to drive around the dream.

Stock.

Jina Valentine-Sang Froid II (American 2006)

If there is to be but one paper
Then let it be plain.
Let it be mine.

Allow the parch of the sun to illuminate its edges
That it might not fall into the obscurity of the picture.

Allow the toughened weft to bear out
All words that might flood it,
But cannot flood it without
Belonging to a voice.

Permit it, too,
When wisdom starves
Distant,
To find what has not--
What cannot fall unto it:

What thrives on its own intelligence,
But whose concern differs from speech.

The dusk of maintenance.

A rope extended in the violent water,
Leading to what?
Helping whom?

The distress of the
First pollution,
However useful we
First deemed it,
Lasts, chafing us.

That nagging rope--
Whose salvation yokes us now?

Falling.

A loose footing can give way to
Wind, or
Fulfillment.

How dangerous it is to be suddenly flung
To either, and how likely it is that we enjoy



Neither.

The outraged bull from Guernica.

The rhetoric I was planning to use,
Was used on me--
I was destined to creep forth

From vile ooze,
From vile swamp derivation,
From the origin of Life,
From Lackness. Slack...

Don't you see the way my torched hands resemble
The mess?!

My charisma bounds, a bucking train: The bridge is out.

For the light.

You can heal anything with light.

It is a testament to the order
that we have felt its radiance relying down upon us,
And still, with
No veritable proof of its imprint--

How could we have!?

We not only thrive on the idea,
We, too, rely on it.

Paganism.

The courage to create emerges
When--undusted, distressed,
Unstolen--NOT returned,
It has nothing--not the shadow of its amnesty
Not the sympathy of otherness--
It has nothing but its own dream-craving for
The pyre.

The priesthood's out-of-date memoranda and how such things are handled.

With nuances unforeseen
We tricked Everybody and,
Against the law
Ran to the rainbow
And did things to
One another
Outlawed in
Leviticus.

You know if not by writ,
Then by four-leafed clover.
My hand must have brushed--at last, one
As I reclined with You.

Manna.

Someone at the bar told me recently that when they torture you--
I mean when they really torture you
They deprive you of proteins as it induces faintness.

This must be the season for you and me, my hands clumped in peanut butter.

Execution.

I can't decide if I like walking the plank because of the distance
Or the additional time I get to think and fast about...

Earth angel, will you be mine.

She was
And so too he was--
It was their boat,
They paid it off after all,
Sinking into the greenery, distillery
Looking for a drill.

Their's and their witness was there,
That was me,
Lingering over The Penguins tune and
The fossiliferous impressions of
One another
Not seduced,
Nor seducing
Not seduced at any rate.

Dust.

When I wasn't there,
When to this dusk I did not attend
Were you so imprisoned.

And now you know how holy selfish I can be.
And now you're getting the extent of it.

Childhood river.

Nothing I haven't tended to
Knows the river.

I get along.

That which we Love
Eventually will Love us back.
If not through concord
Then through the thirst with which a thing
Needs another's shadow more
Finally
Than it needs its own.


This path which we sow--
D'you see it?!
It must be blood,
The richness of iron and
Hemoglobin
Dusting caress with the moon.

Saint's disposition.

For the photographer, Heather Mull.

The rave-up came on
And Thin Lizzy did "Cowboy Song".
A girl up front threw flowers at Phil's feet.
He smiled

And the light.

You have to understand that everything was so deeply underwater,
The fire elements, the piecing it out we did.
And this was long before the advent of flowers.

The famine.

Is this a vociferous freedom
And does it matter?--

How I came to this abandonment howling
Skulking, between blasted out cinder blocks and lockets,
Treating everything at the tip of my nose as if
It were going to keep me alive--

It asks that you keep watch in these tight times,
The blight.

Ego-pt. 2.

Nothing beats me
Like you beat me.

Hasn't this peering
Wind something to
say of my torn thru

lips and me?

Monasticism.

Searing flags hissing in the white pissed off wind
I'm practicing going without.

Bloodshed.

Barbara noticed objectively that Tom had cut off his finger making a salad. Hibiscus strewn in the kitchen. Quickly, and with even head, Tom described the outlay: I'll be alright.

Barabara decided it was time--in spite of the adversity and all the nagging shit she got in the mail to marry.

A world without allegory is a world without meaning. And the motes that rest were enlivened once as the motes descending.

Landmark.

The evidence from nature
Is like a bagged lunch, left crumpled with
A 7 Up bottle in between floors
Of a service elevator.
You see it through the grates and it's a discovery:
There:
Waiting to surprise someone with banalities
Not yet exhilarated upon by the young.

Line.

We had a drying line held up by a forked branch.
Those adornments we found so commonplace
How white and galing they ran--
Now I think of it, now that my memory has been chastised and
Restored.

A caprice of love,

Marc Chagall - La Promenade (Russian-French 1917)

pleasedon'tbealarmedmylove
youaremyalarm
forwhatthatwecannothandlehas
awakenedyou
forwhatwithyouamilate?

Ego.

Just the other day you know I was listening
To Sade's 'Kiss of Life'
when Everything just fell the fuck out of me.

Clinically the term is peritoneal, as in
All that was once peritoneal in me

Fell.

And my hand is grimy from swatting cockroaches all day. (Might I from pulse and determination
Never stoop to profanity again.)

G-d and the visit.

I keep stowing twenties in a paperback copy
Of Georges Lefebvre's The Coming of the French Revolution
For when I visit you.
You know, none of this is mine though I have bragged and
Tanned myself on the rocks.
And may G-d shatter my knuckles for having lived so.

Mozart.

Robert Irwin - Light Column (American 1970)

Bach employed the driven rambunctious to
Teach his children--years before which

Nor me nor you--

Mozart was imparted with the
The noiseless.

Dull your ears, your listening is wan
In light of this supportive light.

In light of his light.

Paper cut.

For the estimable Joe B.

I laughed til I pissed myself
Thinking of your collection of Skulls,
The bookshelf with all horror stories
and de Tocqueville's voyeur blandishments.

Do people really read that shit?

I mean, you know, with the lights on?

As if by Bruegel.

Pieter Breugel (The elder)-detail from Wedding Dance in the Open Air (Dutch 1566)

These are the remnants of a comedy--

Zigzagging smiles--
Leers,
But it must be seen through a window
And are they aware we watch them,
Funneling our hormones through the arcs
Of their fantasy lives?

As if by Bruegel we've been nabbed in the middle
Of a worldly imperfect smile.

Yes, one.

Love poem.

These aren't enchantments
Though they drip from
Everyone.

What you know from memory
Comes so softly, jaggedly
Across and right through the depths

That you never realized.

Even the dutifully marshalled felt fear and wondered
If this wasn't
The end.

Justification.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Portrait of Maria Leathart (British 1862)

Our generation is, to put it simply,
Misguided.
There is no context in our action for the word:
Splendor.
It sounds fussy even saying it aloud.

When--if ever, have I sat, not waiting for the time exactly,
but when that I fanned my clean black sleeves against the couch,
Eyeing the shrubbery
Filtered in a warbled Victorian window

And claimed to be bored with it?

Fairy tale.

The breadcrumbs go off in one direction, but
The leaves...

The sea.

When I go back to the sea, well when I go back to
The Idea of the sea, I am
Renewed in confusion.

What?!

To whom was given these urges of violence and serenity?!
--for both are but urges.

Dreaming.

Piero Della Francesca - The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Italian- early 15th c.)

An open window
Admits only so much:
The color of the light,
The neighbors,
Their eventuality.

The one, who is actually pretty lonely, said
"Who would bag me?"

Jesus.

Strange autumn daffodils.

At one point I mistook the agency of police work and Miranda
For providence.

I thought, some fingers must surely be lost in the grist
And grinding.

Now I obey my hands. They treat me right.

Our world lives violate; these gropes have
Embellished
--the treatment under which I have seen you labor to remain silent.

No garage.

Parched - - -

Tell me what you love
And I'll fall in love with it too.

Tell me what you care
About
I'll care about it too.

Tell me what your hands touch,
I'll find it--
I''ll squiggle to catch it too.

Don't be distracted: I'm not weak,
Malleable.

This congress of
My love with no garage is quite simply
Grander than me .

Have you come to? We listen cracked out in the parking lot:
Mozart's 20th Piano Concerto
And a readily-had dream
Like a fire axe

Admonishes.

Don't you see me waiting with the vitality of
My color and my utility?!

Was I not, as the piano forges a Napoleonic assault toward Elba,
Hanged on this hook on purpose?!

Columbus day parade.

Bloomfield and
District Judge Costa extended a tailored arm.
One of us went up to embrace him.
His call, "Eh Gumbah"
fell to a deafened finish as the Acadian Pips Ensemble,
A dixieland get-up marching in tow
Occupied a famished space on Liberty.

For a moment the birds flew to us
And our heritage,
Whatever our heritage
Congealed and met a complicated
Applause.

We were born to lose it.

Kid speaking english.

Shit isn't on fire. I don't know.
At least--
I didn't do anything.
That shit over there, fuck,
If I did,
That's orange.

There,

"Where all of us had arms he only had a gentle breeze"
-Stanislaw Lem, 'Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius'.

For Jina Valentine.

If you could research the humidity and seasonal factors and actually
Till encouragement in a form, and of course
If you could, too,
Till discouragement in a form
And on this ground then a formation and the nature of agriculture--

And no kid would
Not not have good folks.

There
It might grow.

The commonwealth, life in.

That with which and
That with which we cannot

Hold back the years--
We've been punctuated by a wild toll.
Not that we've stopped.
--even paused.

These ribbons of riches descend a natural stair
And we slip like banked fishes,
Hoping if not to find Them
Then to resume breathing.

The others.

For Daniel Ralston and another witty guy, Richard Hawley, the singer.


The patois of nuisances, and then an echo of them that comes later, gripes about the others. I was going to write a poem of it, but I thought it might be too obvious and candy, torn tissue from the party and you would always know where I got it from--Laugh if it becomes you to laugh. This road has been paved upon, then paved upon. Where we walk is where we have imposed upon--

You know , what G-d hath created it created a specific problem, among others, the durian fruit and the boys turn to wilderness for their grapes and the others.
What can be done with these pricklings of aromas!?

They lie nearly dead in defending us.

My Man Godfrey.

My Man Godfrey must be 24 hours long tonight
As this drink and apprehensiveness fail
Everyone.
Stick legs and stick glasses and smiling girl swiveling next to me
saying, "I'm a bartender"
Which is alright and happy.
I have a Crown Royal bag full of them and quarters
hanging from a doorknob at home.

See how William Powell lends me his silver smile when I smile
At these stars we beg to share.
Hear Eugene Palette's patina tuba bringing upward things
I felt might lie buried in the cynical earth
Of a month, a year. A movie about
A fallen man.

Dust settles.

No one has ever been here before.
See--no graffiti.

A nightmare.

What did you picture
In the capabilities of the grotesque?
Was I stranded on them:

The bobbing plane went down in a black and white
Citytop

And, my skin already scudding--for vanity!
My dad made me go round and thank Everyone
For having had

The lasting exceptions.

My bloody valentine.

Open up and be prepared >>...
For the commerce of distortedness crosses
Lawns.

Oscar gag.

If courage were presented
In a Gold Envelope
By a woman--
The movie--
It would smell
Rancid.
And this impulse could
Not be televised.

Atmospheric phenomenon.

The burnished ruin accepts no more light than does
The cemetery in which it is hosted.

Weather anomalies, typhoons?!
Are you kidding me?
Is not a life in stone like a life in the paring flesh?!

Rowan Morrison, a vivid color.

In 'The Wicker Man'
I really felt for them when they faked to not know You.
It's just that Christian, crosses, cruciform offices and airplanes
And loveless...
You know I wouldn't trust those terrestrial bewilderments
Either.

Dog's version.

The mulch is made up of birch, seed and bone.
Do you know my shoulders have been blinded by the sun,
Peeled bright orange and rare,
My buzzing eyeballs glazed and pinkened, no longer awake...
Am I qualified
To beg or
Fetch this remnant of Another's
Ossification?

Innocence.

Imperiled eyes
Looking in on amber
Birds,
Their swerving newborn heads bounding in funny circlets
As the air fawns to obey the motions
And as I appear
Before them.

The devil.

In each
And every kiss
Lies the serpent
and his coiled
Blueprint.

D'you know...
Your breath
Divines our filmy governance.

The devil.

I don't know much about cake blood
Or what it takes to clean it
Off the road
But when I watched--and it was drenched,
From a safe distance
My cleanliness went away
And I started to learn about the regularities of
The path you've bluely shown to the drivers.

The devil.

Buttermilk,
Blue curtains I've never been tortured
Stains that run watery red
And--I'm trying to be honest with you:

This gulf into which humankind was born is both deep in cultivation and charismatic.
I

Deliberate acts of appeal.

Only if your boys hold me down
And you take a bunch of cheap shots on me
Will I
Will this bird go free.

Each night is like a thousand years....

is an Autumn window, an amber tax of the season, built, and is the resin of slowly-built profit no less natural than honey fixed, built conquerable, and preserved in the Pharaohs' needy tombs ....

Hobbies.

"Here/Here in the moonlight/Hold me while I sing to you my Teenage Sonata..."
-Sam Cooke


People spend money on roses, candy and every old wretched thing
Their eyes are flashing with
Tenderness.

They aren't creatures of
Comfort

They're just passionate about their hobbies of
Love and devotion.

Tick.

My impartiality has cost me seconds
To the minutes I'm owed.

Solipsistic query.

Where are the birds flying over me--
Their flashing shadows?

Once they saved my thumbnail encounter with living
From the arson
The sunlight.

Regret as it relates to mercy.

Mercy must be the sincerest and quickest
Revenge.

Not exactly the wish of the heart, but a balm,
Resolved to destroy that to which it might
Succumb.

We are alive in a mealy dearth of wisdom,
A wealth of regret.

Drinking blood.

The air of sophistication is breathed
Into being
The moment a bottle of wine hits the floor
With even a trace of its heavens interred.

No, it isn't pretty,
Yet we watch out of duty and thirst.

Biology 101.

It has an indecent odor.
Maybe you remember the nearly black lawn clippings
Composting in the yard
As a kid.
If not I assure you they were nearly black.

Your surprises are turning black
As all things deprived of either chlorophyll or
The light do.

It needs not a wish, not even a volition.

The auld lang syne (variation).

You really ought to go back
To making Magic the old way:
With Lies.

Untrained ears.

The poetry of reason--
What a sweet and distinctive
Din it must produce
In the ears of those
Who've never heard it before.

Call me stupid.

Stop dancing!
Everything is rotten
Disagree
Call me stupid
Breathe on me (while dancing).

0000.

Everything lying here is
An encouraged variety of honey.
Once released the captive stays.

Reliance.

Spoken to and relied upon as an adult,
But retreated.

This cabin, and winter nearing.
This winter smoke's rise in the chill--
This retreat is confirmed in it.

Impostor's ideal.

If holding is really real
Then I am holding you.

I am searching for a pool to lie in, have a beer
And bleed.

My corruption runs like a coaxed
Honey.

My corruption--I am forgetful,
Runs out.

"You can make me feel bad"

For Saint Arthur Russell

A flyspeck is infinite,
and I also got a little lost.

But between these buildings and the ladling in of fresh
Atmosphere
I awoke, not a Christian or anything like that exactly.

I took a shower.

Fear.

Fear
Fear of injury
To one's fingers while cutting
Fear is gorgeous.

All fear and no
No loss employs me like Your--

Mostly fear.

You would sit in a bar and talk to a dog.

I think the purpose of indignation is to keep warm the edges of the thing. No, hold on. No, that's a waffle iron.

A kimono.

Modesty has a new proclamation,
Which runs so contrary to the pulp
And stir
Of its being.
Has it a kimono, one of those foolish mustaches?

What am I? Was I young when empathy
Ran off?

A toast..

"People come/People go/People lie nameless in the snow"
-Destroyer

To people who carry placards and
Blearing rage
Knowing not where life begins,
But where our jurisdiction barely and frigidly
Clamps.

To that burnished fraction, to me and my neighbors.

To the humble and modest as well.

The master race.

For the grand optimist, Ben Schott.


Of what good is the master race
When it can't even govern us properly,
Reign amid us even adequately?
Deploy us to Limb Loss?

I am not even shaking.

I haven't looked up with
A prayer in a very very long time.

Brief encounter.

Cecilia Johnson walked across the platform beyond
And Rachmaninoff.
The sturdy air of please more...

I love these old movies and they
Rain.

A liberality, not a binge.

Wait! Maybe both.

To the injured.

Are you okay?
Are you demented?
Did you draw this picture
Of a man with sky for hands?

Could I call someone for you?





I am intent on pleasing the moon as well.

Another thing, Vonnegut...

Isn't a need like a want--
So glad to flourish in a drought.

Through its belligerence
Or beauty
It does so.

Blood tributaries.

The wise and wishful and necessary,
How hard to differentiate.
Could only their Mother know?
Could it be possible that an hour separates their births?
A minute, a second?
See their features--
Is She trisected for the same wailing baby?

The theirs.

The theirs has been maimed. Totaling my strikes, the tally is blood rinsed and quite significant. Like the time I fed the Wolves torn bread and aioli in a crowded restaurant in a favorite dream. Everybody was nervous and first:

Their hunking jaws--
I'm sorry THE hunking jaws,
Abounding on the food.
The food!

Please cut my tongue out.

Mysticism is for assholes--
I was put in front of a group of casually-dressed
Adults in night school.

I was asked to say that.

"Will the world never end?"

Imagine a glowing bulb without skill,
Originated in an attic
Similar to the one we were all
First afraid of.

Now dare yourself to extinguish what we have
Imagined--without skill.

It is why we have reunited,
Is our bias. We
Asked ourselves to experiment
With the possibility that not

Oh, and the marsh of Mars.

Don't you want to know?
Hasn't it a curiosity to its skin?
A puzzle?
--the extension of why me!?
To compliment my
Why You!?

The marsh of Mars is buried in a cup of smooth (and sugary), while the doctor who relocated to Mexico City to cure goosebumps--G-d bless him--he should be shot.

I'm temperate, but for when it comes to the treasons of skin, the bullring growing from my nose, picture of the valley

Where you.

How!

The attenuated divide.

(for a tardy muse, whose symptoms have given me an early autumn cold...)

Purpose has yet to fail us:

This is a testament to the wild length of the road,
Not our durability.

There's only one thing.

There's only one thing we ever dreamed about.
It startles,
Is why we even dreamt it.
And the method of procurement and why such a
Price
And why such a calibrated
Voice
Is needed.

(I saw you grinning on the sidewalk and I was as brittle as cold dripping glass from the eave.)

Their efforts at extinction.

Despite this weariness
I am capable enough to tell you
That the flood was a rambunctious Thing
But we're okay.

Their efforts at extinction proved inadequate;
Our courtesy has run wild.

Vermouth drinkers in the afternoon when nobody saw.

Their infatuations are passing,
Seeing as they are old, having caved in.
All their teeth have turned to sour thatch in
Their mouths
As they enjoy their drinks.

The wild you,
How unpredictable the wild you is, watched, and
Is.

Last night I dreamt about an open suitcase.

The dull patina in the eyes of Edward Hopper's prisoners:
Last night I dreamt about an open suitcase.
Open window
Wet butter knives spilled out on the floor,
An overturned drawer.
Her affairs lay open on the desktop, drenched and
Illegible.

By the suitcase ran spilled ink.
Cursive and at such a breakneck slant,
Heedless, the way an animal would charge,
Antlersdown at the creek,
Charging the adversity of All Things
Embodied.

It was unmistakable what she'd been thinking,
Whatever it was--we're just here to observe this reliquary.

0000.

You would lie naked in the field
Without a hand to warm you,
Without any consolation in fact.
You would be there with me,
Ever I was that I was not there
But there.
I am in my eternal fluctuation
There.

Do you see how the smoke rises,
And how all beyond us
And us lying there
Is ruined?

Nakedness.

Still from Peter Brook's The Lord of the Flies (U.K. 1963)

Bees buzzing all around
Flowers implode with scent and wretched sorcery.
And time.
The natural world is full of ordered swine
And time

And us,
With what manipulation of science did we ever distend
And call it science!?

With what do we, as we still do it?

I think we are like Golding's Ralph, not spared for his equanimity nor resolve
--for either would have saved him,
But for Good Fortune.

Pink canvas.

You could have sensed it
--even a non-believer like you:
The walls came closing in.
Someone was playing The Stones.
We'd been momentarily disoriented--
Our brains weren't working right.
Our flowers came unto us.

We were monopolized then.

The desperation with which they built a fire.

Their frigid hands converging,
Their hunting talent, screaming, converging,
Their lack of sunlight converging,
What am I forgetting?

Oh right, the amnesty disarticulated
And so naturally cold--
I mean cold by natural dictation
Despite your wanting it.

I could be selfish and invoke the memory of your frigid hands,
Converging.

A dream about flying.

In the disverdant end we shall speak as we have been spoken to
And what had been green, that will be green
And the alighted will return as if having never flown so far--
Only with the wisdom of having flown.

The conundrum of a boy. and the sun.

Vincent Van Gogh (detail from) Tournesois (Dutch 1887)

July, most likely.

One day you stood up against the sun
Now--
Know your size and how readily you could melt.
Eschew sophistication
And pull your heart from its willowy cage.

Your smearstained vulgarity, your mass, so weightless,
So crucial in the verification of the sun.

A thread.

I lack the custodial advice
And history, I know nothing.
In a bar when I was a kid I overheard a
Lawyer tell his date,
"Descartes suffered from it too, and the Meditations bear it out".

W.C. Fields movie and a bottle of red wine.

Go be a sad sack somewhere--there's plenty of
Room.
Open the door.
It's in that wind you relish.
You've involuntarily
Become infatuated with the air.

Plums are rotting and starving kids in China.

The auld lang syne.

An abrasive definition of sanity I remember from school suggests
That loneliness is a resident distortion
And that the sun discolors our rejuvenescence.
My discretion prevented me from swallowing it whole.

It was in a book, one of them. That, or I made it up.

The holy ghost.

I remember very few things about Volant:
A rusty shed, and steam rising above a plate of fish and peas.
I don't remember how it tasted, if I'm to be perfectly honest.

But that's it, the holy ghost. We
Fabricated an entity to take the place of all the things we could not
Carry forever.

Hemlock.

The scientific, and factual, explanation
Was that it was hemlock. It grows wild and is commonly mistaken for
an innocuous kindred.

And Bach spoke to us through a cello.

Unsolicited poem about love.

I want to take you back and show you the world as it was before you The prehistory How they foundered and bred How their love was a coarse love and their labors drummed the controversy of the G-ds against them You may first squint then look away How unstomachable we were

The meridians.

Traversing a slew of cultures
She found a way to
Elegantly spit out objectionable food.

G-d in a pavillion.

I went out looking for You,
Not because You were lost, but
Because I was.

My hands in the rain,
Stripped of the things they have touched.

Anyhow, it is raining and I went out looking for You.

The public option.

Norman Rockwell Doctor and Boy Looking at a Thermometer (American 1954)

To the opposition I gotta ask you to stop lying.

The floor won't fall out, and most of us don't get sick til it's too late anyhow, so no money wasted.


I haven't been to a doctor in easily a decade so don't call me a parasite! Most of us unprotected will never sap a nickel of your taxes, let alone enough to warble what gets spent on when or where you go to the doctor or what his coddled ass drives!

We bounce from job to job, we work for you--the time away from the light and what we love and we never goddamned once said to you we were tired, we brought you that beer cold, that tomato. We're fucking tired. You put the custodianship of care for your children in the hands of people whose chief priority is making money for themselves and--with the richest of oblivion, disdain--RESIST, the transfer of that care to elected officials--officials YOU elect, who, if they fuck up, you could boot straight the fuck out the chair when their terms come up.

How rich we are. And fraught. And if a fucking janitor gets leukemia it should goddamned matter for whom he works and the ambulations of scrupple. But I guess like anything a wealth includes the vestiges of a blighted palate. I hope you swallow it and live to watch US choking, over and over til your last grasp of the finery.

You asked a wolf to protect you, and a wolf will do as nature has conceived.

The girls.

Paul Klee Embrace (Swiss-German 1939)

They wore ad clothes off their shoulders and painted me in a corner
With brushes I figured they just used for mascara:
Fluctuating rows,
Casual. Was a tremor plow, not an earthquake

And like I keep telling you, relax.

Looked like one of those
Just dirt gardens you shape
With a rake.

Nothing planted, nor water had they.
And don't ruin what willfully touches your eyes
Is why I might've appeared reticent.

Aztec kids.

When I was a kid I thought "jet set" meant a paid-for girl getting off a pinscher-nosed private plane in a white coat and her hair. A ruddy billionaire with a self-selected ring. Now I have a picture of Aztec kids crying in the volcano and how dearly they want to get old.

Now I look down the gutter and Liberty Avenue's descent, and I can't even imagine my legs, let alone using them to get me somewhere.

Books.

Andy Goldsworthy The Storm King Wall (U.K. 1998)

The presses go through the night, mating:
Literature theses--
None of them even rhyme, make any sense.
And that cacophonous sound!
We come up
With pamphlets to combat the din,
But those naugahyde vinyl spines they bind them in
And the barricades of white light through which they force the adherent...
None of them--not one is St. Peter,
An upper-level representative...

...some nobody!

None of them are confident enough to employ a hush
With that altruism so adherent to the sight of clouds
At eye level.

And that sound. They're multiplying.

Arrangement from nearby.

Overview of the Qin Terra Cotta Army (Chinese 200 B.C., app.)

People with nowhere to go
Will go there
Bringing back ornamental vases,
Like the ones we stand our flowers in.

For every arrangement there's someone who'll
Exclaim, at a loss,
Look!

He's disrupting a moment
We would've eventually begged to have back,
Had it stayed intact.

The ark.

Alex Katz Woods in Twilight (American 2002)

I've had certain dreams nagging me,
I was waiting for songs

Or words.

I've seen this kind of stubbornness before in broken uprights, clocks
And lawnmowers,

Around them
The grass grows in fences
And dust takes the stairs in the sunlight.

And they defy the struggles that divide.

Everybody loathes the disruption of negative space.
The expertise of balance is lost.

Relationship to an exalted actress.

Isabelle Huppert.

I thought I knew every song. But I was probably on the way there or back,
Or at work when the sun shone from the speaker.

I don't make comparisons to dandelions or strawberry lemonade
I just know too many people who'd be
Disappointed.

And in my vanity it was never you kissing
Always me kissing the cool stone foot.

On a marble step.

You were going blind-- on our
Fourth day in Manhattan. The evenings started
Getting darker earlier and
We sat on a marble step with our fingers and looked up as the stock market ticker
Changed to a Jenny Holzer poem. I said how
She must be losing her shit or else the programmer got fired and he's over and was already over It
When he keyed it in, seeing as all the A's had been replaced by 4's.

"Like "IT DOES ME NO GOOD 4T 4LL"".

Witchcraft.

For Kay Ryan and others, refurbished poorer.

The light discouraged the spell,
But

You split the broom--
Two brooms now chase you.

You look back, panting.

They're right behind you,
Multiplying--
Not without reason.

Autumn census.

Do they seem happy together?
D'you think this aching fissure will last?
Has the world possibly suffused
After this beating--Has it been asked

To?

A casque to cover her rastas.

An artificial sky,
Like motorcyclists wear,
Gleaming on the ridden landscape.
Why not?
What have we known, counted, stacked, traded-in more valuable?
What parts of us
As it passed
Didn't shake,
Begging to split
And go back
And carry on?

A bountiful inheritance.

Robert Polidori - Cuba Interior (Canadian 1990's)

What was fortified, and therefore presumed ready,
Disappeared.
No one was hurt,

And though no artifacts remain
We got what we need,
Which is as much in the trail of our misconception as we'll leave.

Everywhere.

I have stricken this from a dream,
Evicted it.

And yet
It sticks with me.

In the sheer walls of rain
Where I once begged you to beg me to stop,
The clock slowing
The water building behind the glass

That's where. You leave it,
But it doesn't go away.

It's elsewhere, soaked and delirious.

All of this.

The bend and beyond going,
The voluptuous land going
The jewelry of eyes .
All of this.

How underrated all of this is
When carried only by sympathies.

Christina's world.

Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World (American 1948)

Doesn't it lie in the way you see it?

If a bird could rise
In a song,

Or perhaps a tree could fall
In its bounty and the land would make a sound

The land,
It waited as well

Have you forgotten?

This mess.

Andy Kehoe (American recent)

The most modest beginnings,
Look what they've given us:

Everything from the hypnosis of being to

The radio without a station to which, on Easter,
We woke up,

Not indifferent exactly,

Just, you know, different.

Sincere water.

The service is likely
To avoid us. But we grew up
with them..

Ballooning

detailed for us.

And the one I drank from.

Hazle.

I have written everything down; I know I've been lucky.

The boys who stood in it against me, paint bright and go ahead

I don't mean to take away from them and their

Wild.

But I was better, wilder. And my anemic hinges gave only to
How I shoved.

And theirs felt coerced
As I ruined them.

Tablet.

What I remember about history is scant,
Just some men in wigs corralled around brown paper, abused time,
And Bulgakov's St. Matthew,
Stealing a fork from the bazaar
With which he scraped his chest raw,
That he might never have the ebullient means
To forget the Crucifixion.

The mirror.

Rene Magritte The Lovers(Belgian 1928)

It begins and we're awake.
An airplane coasting above the miniature ocean.
The world has ended.
We had nothing ready.

Anyway, we're awake now.
The land has disappeared,
The ocean waters have grown precise and clear
As cabinet glass.

Below us there are whales.

Miles below us.

Swimming at the state park.

How far--and narrowly so?

How many years of rippling light conducting our words
have passed below these soaring black ribs?

How many stars are there.

And what is this?

Water?

The veneer.

The window let our margin of September run across us.

Pretty girls are wizards.

Everybody, at once, the chorus of "No Expectations."

Everybody, at once, our species of

Gray finish.

Fainting spell.

My near dark cherries,
The ones I gathered,
There in the picture you took over the weekend,
Arcs of blood and
Hurricanes don't accomplish that with the will

With the Arms
With cherries.

My cherries,
On a marble step.

Blue flower.

Picture from Gugging, Vienna.


As a kid I would look at explosive flowers near me

And

See them coming
And going.

Intimacy.

From the Prinzhorn Collection (Heidelberg 1880s)

The lasting copy

Leaves a mold.

Flakes.

A period of grief.

It was copied by desperate hands.

New swan.

Rembrandt Self Portrait (Dutch 1630's?)

For the convalescence of Mr. Leonard Cohen, with warmest humor.


In a dream
Or an article--

I can't exactly remember

They concocted a new swan.

It could talk and play cards with you.

It kept you occupied while you adored the world.

The reconnassaince of memory..

Robert Capa The Beach (American 1945)

We didn't steal parsley roiling in a cove of butter from the French,
We didn't steal olive oil and tomato rubies from the Italian.

We didn't steal the pig, the cashews.

Have you come to me so hungry that nothing else mattered?!

Not what we stole do I so thirst to crawl and bring to you,
But what we rescued.

Sure shot.

George Wesley Bellows Stag at Sharkey's (American 1909)

The way the odds went to shit, and they shook their tickets salaciously, and it was Goliath in the first in all the papers...

The way they thought they'd make money from the sure shot.

The way it all just seemed inevitable and we were even thinking about going home.

The way he fell.

I can't stop;

The way our fears bloomed felicitous and were odd to us and with a torn away jaw his scream seized the air and you said so.

And the way he fell. And the way he fell. And we watched.

London.

Still from Georges-Henri Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (French 1953)

For Jamonn Campbell.



In an overwhelmed hostel
They let me sleep there.

Mike Tyson bit some dude's ear off,


And the Bells explained why rain was rain
And the Dearth was the Dearth.

Perishability, wet with honey.

Jean Dubuffet Smiling Face (French 1948)

For Fishantena.



How stuck,
And sticky,

My fingers have been blotted out by the
Delivery of skin.

My hands are ashen reminders,
My.

There are leaves of you that have been torn out of me.

You're pink where we meet.
And my tongue pierces your fingers
between the sun.

And maybe your dreams.

John Sloan Red Kimono on the Roof (American 1912)

Try not to.

Take the rest.

Total love generation must die.

Tea.

This world is being enveloped in a voluptuous shadow.

This is holding the servitude of me

That,

Til now, I haven't been able
To negotiate.

Shock.

Amedeo Modigliani - Nude (Italian-French 1912)

The way we opine,
That's the way we dream.


That's the way we have come into unknighted agreement
With colors.

To say, "Yes, you", and "Yes, you"

and, dipping sword point on shoulder, and
Stolen from the light,

"I haven't time to eat."

and

"Give over, be swarming and all blood is wheat and sugar."

Some of those girls were born from strawberries.

I need to lie.

Jenny Holzer - Public Art (American recent)

Her ivory toes sinking into a bath of
Grapes.

Or, at least, her watching that happen.

On the show.

Don't we invariably caress the same pictures of what we like?

(I feel myself shouting it.)

Spanish harlem.

For Trout.



Can't the little things scuff me?!

I have been intent upon listening
Pouring the volume of me through
The mesh.

The cracked-up 'Kind of Blue' I won because of an owner's suicide,

The Otis Clay

'The Only Way is Up'

It skips.

The Roberta Flack, the market says its worthless...

But it runs and its flushness blushes on the brim.
When my ears are open it is a creaking wilderness.
The terrior of nighttime presses me
And olive oil runs from my eyes...