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.