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?