25.

I eat the apple of a dream—
when I gulp, icicles form
on the back of my skull;
my frontal lobe warms
my dome & a waterfall falls
throughout my soul in the night.

24. USA: U-NDER S-URVEILLANCE A-LWAYS

I want to be followed by Men in Black suits and shiny black glasses.
I want to be followed by the CIA. I want to be followed.
I want to be low-brow, but I want to be followed.
I want to be followed by the United States Government.
I want to be harassed by the United States Government.
I want to see a surveillance camera hovering above my head, like a halo.
I want to see their dark eyes look back at me. I want to be followed.
I want to see drones in-person. It would be cool to see a drone in-person.
I want to be followed and I want drones to land on my windshield and come along for the ride.
I want to be a hacker and hack the cyber-bushes into twigs.
I want to be followed by men in black suits that act tough with their angry voices.
I want surveillance cameras to chime in. I want to wave into their dark spying eyes.
I want the United States of America to place surveillance under my brow.
I want the United States of America to paparazzi me.
I want to Foresee the Future like a Science Fiction Movie coming to Reality.
I want Huxley or Wells to follow me around, like the United States Government.
I want to be followed by famous authors of famous Science Fiction novels.
I want it all to be pushed down my throat. I want to be followed and watched.
I want to see the Beginning of The End while I am being followed and harassed.
What I want is what I’ve got. What I want is the resurrection of Burgess Meredith.
What I want is to be followed by the United States Government FORCES.
What I want is not so outrageous. What I want is what I do not need, but still want.
What I want and what I need are far more precious than imaginable.
I want the United States Government to stop my mandible. I want to be chased.
I want a surveillance camera hovering above my bed, like a dream-glow.
What I want is to be spied on by ominous men, like decrepit surfaces.
I want to see mass hysteria where suburbs are turned into Transylvanias.
I want the Government-funded news media hounds to thoroughly convince me of Life on Mars.
What I want is not that big of a deal. What I want is to be in a Secret Society.
What I want is to be followed by Secret Agencies. I want that. I want the pendulum to swing my way.
I want the Government to tell me why Secret Organizations need to be secret if they are so powerful.
I want to be stepped on by Men in Black, the way the Lotto rolls over.
I want my hands to be tied in a Virtual Reality around our Real World.
I want the United States Government to thumb their noses, to give perpetual pink slips.
I want that to happen so bad that I bat my lashes and wait for a digital code to pinch my flesh. 
I want to be experimented on. I want mind-games to be the common matinee.
I want to be imprisoned in a seaside village, like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. 
I do not want to be a Man. I want to be a Number. This is alluring. 
I want nothing but bitter pills to swallow while the plot is brewing.
I want to be followed. To be Wanted. 

23. THE DOOR

The door wants what I want:

Openness, stillness, a gentle sway,
A sudden slam, a vanishing wall, 

New spaces, a solitary breeze
That unhinges full dreams, 

A fresh coat, soft hands & 

Closure.

22. THE GREAT DISSIPATION

i.

Briefest moss scatters a trance
of ripest aromas freely
from the wind of my fame love’s lash,

clashes like belated blown kites,

like winter’s chisel reappearing

in the star of your eyes’ light.

I spin    I spin    spin in that
centrifuge & let go of a world
I once knew with pincers unclasped.

As I head towards 33-½ 

I hang like Christ,
frozen like a glacier

but slowly melting (dialysis drip),
my spirit still flapping
like a lawless honey of voices 

along the earline of a parallel time-band,
& because words make or break
my esophagus swells & I hold up a mirror

to you & see all that I’ve yet to say
like a Red-Bellied Woodpecker’s
retracted tongue wrapped around its skull.



ii.

If the glorious Present sought to exhume the Past

I’d rapidly have to play possum with Myself

so as not to remember my own face in a mirror

so that the light that travels to the visual source

is interrupted                                       to vanish

before being gazed upon.

21. ENTER TO FLOG MY WARES

There is a three-foot replica
of a Coca-Cola bottle
sitting like a Buddha
across the street. I’ll say!

It’s only there because
I’m bleak & blank in these
lonely days. Six-foot evil
hiccups are coming out of me

because of this over-priced
coffee. It’s real mud. I’m
fingering the hole in the
wooden chair. I’m “playing it”

like Tibetan finger-cymbals.
Nineties-isms are thrown
around me. I just want to
take the hand of a stranger.

I want to take the land into
my body—the land that
we once walked together.
What are you waiting on?

Destroy my whole self—
let no trace be found! 
Stomp my already-sprained
ankles until they bleed!

The white of my skeleton
is showing through my flesh;
the base of the parietal bones
of my skull is bare!

20. KINESTHETIC IMAGERY

If Thought
were to become

Kinesthetic Imagery

absent-mindedness
would become liberated

from the mental phenomena
of the invisible

like being
a ghostwriter for ghosts

watching as the words
slowly vanish

as if they’d been written
with icicles

19.

No one reads my poem-blooms
so I read them to the moon.
     “You’re waxing gibberish!”
     it tells me in the lurid, pale light.
And still, yet, I swoon—!

18. AMERICA’S MOST HAUNTED

The house grows cold like pink-ice on an Eskimo’s nose.
Nightmemories cover me like clouds of balaclava.

My eyes stare out, short-sighted though nebulous gulfs,
because the light was on at odd hours. I don’t breathe

unless your breath softsteps & curls around the plateaus
of my ribcage. I’m a ghost with blood in your ghost’s purse,

clanking the loose change, zippering the airlocks, looking
for a reimbursement of my regretful speech to implode

the banking system of my plunge into the abyss of all these
silent days, where I’ve become a sub-atomic passerby to you;

a doctored hallucination? I’ve given in to our mysterious
bond like children that eventually surrender to Reality.

I’m in a shallow pool, a bottomless attic as you hold
your tongue of many possibilities. I’m a cobweb of

superficial coloring to you—I see through the grey area.
Desperate is the thick flesh of each passing day

where I hold tight the sweaty hands of Hope. I cup the head
of a flower, gazing at it as if there’s nothing else, as if

like a childhood crush, a blush is all that is needed
to color the world. I’m a glint on every plant in your garden;

the greenhouse is a bodyguard of our imaginations; the wettest
petals impersonate our conscious & unconscious minds

which is like an unintact screenplay. If you were to
touch me now, dearest friend, would we be like mere corpses

clawing through the same sepulchre, transfixed to the cold soil
of yesterday’s mummified arteries?

17.

God is closer to me
than my own breath

here where I rot
like an orca whale

dried bones of
Orson Welles

on a polluted beach
where suddenly

I’m resurrected by love
My tongue like

a colorized silent film
here where

the blazing summer sun
heats everything

with the boil
of a king’s throne

16.

O sweet House of Nothing sweet House of many Fables & Secret Sorrows!
     you steer these vessels within my body of light maps against all methods
body of angel-fog body of bodiless mystic ellipses rose of re-bloom the hour
     of no earth the heaven that clatters upon your magnetic lighted celestial
voyage pink-balmed crested zest of our encased eartinuums where
     the Reset Button turns out to be a Detonator              It’s that feeling you get
                                      that feeling you all know well
        when you think back on memories     
                                                                    not necessarily nostalgic-inducing
                                                       but that sudden hulkish
                                      punctual unpredictability
          that arises out of you!

I am a spasm in a flower vase          I am “on the double” like a doppelganger   
Your eyes are like ripples in crystal clear swimming pools
       You are a flower vase in a spasm           where I grow like a bushwhacked
phantomflower                                              coming back to life
in percussive re-growths of earth-sounding
                                             shattered metasynths
upon the mathemagical concerto of our quantum physiognomy

The House is turning in on us      paradoxes     parodies       
traversing the unnecessary           The Centipede’s Dilemma     in redux
     We’re falling from an indefensible roof of stars
where all the world’s a cage

15. THE TALL, LANKY MAN

The tall, lanky man sitting in front of me—
his shoulders as broad as a wide-open
Canadian horizon—reads from a Sandman
graphic novel—turns his head to look out of
the window at the roar of the thunderstorms.
He looks back at me & says: “You find out
in life that when it rains, it pours” & he smiles
& his teeth blind me, like certain descriptions
of Henri Michaux’s experiments with mescaline
in Miserable Miracle: thinking of them now
paints my green eyes into silver, like the pouring
rain, the train heard in the thunder, my whistle
blowing like my old middle school P.E. teacher
who blew his lungs out one day. I agreed with
the tall, lanky man & said: “You also find out
that there are different kinds of vampires in
the world” in which he snickered while looking
down at his cell phone & kept grinning as if
he & I were trapped in a scene from a film.

14.

Before the silence
was silence

Before the desert
was a desert

I still thirsted
for just one drop

for just one taste
of your love

Now I’m a skull
floating in the sky

of O’Keefe’s
land of dry bones

where I dig & dig
but find not a drop

13. ENIGMA OF THE ECHOCHAMBER PALATE

I’ve fallen from heaven
-less      rain-swell               gravity boomerang
                        blacked-out
             scrambled
decrypted

Ears stopped up   (mostly white headphones)
                        Black-and-white        aren’t “official colors”

     so “color” isn’t really an issue              my “literal sense”
isn’t really an issue                          Race

 “ism”                   
                                               isn’t really

Face it head-on
                                              temporarily quarantined
              (mind like a bonsai tree)

The explanation of everything
is a cushy coffin
                                      making whoopee
cushions

     
       Would you               would you
tickle me pink in a treehouse hotel?

                         “Baumtraum”
                         Summer’s trauma

   Woodpeckers are not Pecksniffians

At the edge of darkness                there’s a rat with wings
             pulling light like silk       fossils
             uprising

Damaged snowglobes & music boxes
                                        the tunes never depart
from my head          

My executioner is an avenging conscience      
    
I mourn my detached armor
& it licks my wounds for me

12. WHERE WERE YOU

Where were you when I explored the abandoned Victorian house as I did some avant-gardening for corn-on-the-macabre? Where were you this day when the warm, Summer air was like catching a net-full of floppy, belated blown kisses from decades ago, as if they’d been moving about in the air like fluttering butterflies dripping in honeydew? Your “invisible ink” remains visible. I cannot see you nor hear you now but I’ve taken Baudelaire to heart & have become my own hero, keeping myself entertained from the pain of your absence, second by second that has dismembered my innards, my inner- and outer-limbs, pulling like a wind where we once were—lineages of the earth still tracing us, as if inventing our own eclipses (that you now hide behind). 

11.

The mirror closed its eyes
to remember that I vanished.
I’m an age-worn stone,
in mid-air, headed towards
a glass ceiling.

If a tree falls in a forest,
remember that it was me.
The feathers faint,
the flowers fold
& the dyadic communication

between the wild wuthering gusts
of Soul & Spirit
is like the summer-night songs
of Whippoorwills flaring outward
through my pores.

10.

I could snatch the skull
       out of Hamlet’s hand
squeeze life into it
       until it speaks to me
 lying to me
       with chatterjaws of
 hideous declarations

9. HORIZON

Before the sun sinks
       completely below
the horizon
       it Moon Walks

like a threatened insect
       backing up
on the head of a needle

8. SHADOWFLIES (A TRUE STORY)

Shadows of butterflies
fluttering around me everywhere,
initially mistaken for falling leaves:
first signs of Fall?

“Where are their beautiful
wing-feathers?” I looked around
in a stony silence but found
shadows amongst shadows—

these shadowflies had overmastered
my soul with grandeur, flying through
the doors of the universe, holding my spirit
for ransom with an infinite medallion!

an acute puncture of my frontal lobe,
elapsed menageries, rhythms of liquid light
& harps of glass—Chinese Whispers,
the voice of God in the wind,

calming like a reflecting, metallic
Lake of Ointment I feel
to fan the flames of my well-disguised
clairvoyance—a Seminole’s beating eardrums

thrown through the candy-glass windows
of the apocryphal sunset that I see—
giving an allegiance to it: the hand
over my heart is the shadow of a butterfly.

7. SONGS OF THE SOUL

I awaken every day
with a kind of song
in my head, or phrase

or idea, that shakes
my very human being,
like the shiver of the coin

in the Slot Machine,
& I hum & ponder them
until they seem worked

or molded out. I was
thinking of thoughts
before I could talk & walk.

Before the day is over,
I re-stitch myself back
together, as if Victor

Frankenstein had a
change of heart & decided
to put all of the bones

back in the charnel houses;
the remains back
in the dissection rooms.

6. JET

In my dirty rearview mirror
I saw a bumper sticker on a black BMW
that said

               “I love Jet Noise”
                            
                            & immediately after
I looked up           
              casting my eyes upon
                    a silver jet
                            in the warm blue light
                    of the sky
that flew into a cumulus cloud
                          & never flew out
I never saw it fly out!
             which sent me reeling
             like a castoff
             born into a world of heartache
like an arrow from Cupid
missing the lover’s swollen mass

5. MINESWEEPER (MINDSWEEPER)

A boisterous young child blows a gasket on a Pogo Stick.
     His mother loses her heels raising a fuss, a blitzkrieg rolling
with the punches, the boy’s rear-end upended as he kept
     bouncing like a slinky while being ripped to shreds
like damaged woodwork. “You ain’t worth chicken fat!”
     she screamed. I held my tongue like I did that time I drove by
a family in a parking lot; the mother beating her daughter
     over the head with closed fists. I was a closed-mouthed
casketlipped serpent & I’m ashamed of that. An abomination.
     Famished & slain. “Lemon squash.” I want to bathe my eyes off
with divine soap. Lacunae Lake, backing up from the tea kettle—
     let it whistle! “Don’t despair,” a voice said, “life is full of strange twists.”
I want to be somewhere else, burning brightly like a sacred flame.
     A pampered caveman. An extroverted Marco Polo who introduced
the Italians to pasta after having discovering it in China.
     “Nothing new.”  Cool Whip New World. I’m poised & poisonous,
walking through “charged air.” Opaque pumpkinseeds.
     Globs of didactic yipping. “Cuba’s open now. Go to Cuba.”
I’m just pussyfooting around & the days are tightened around
     me like toboggans. An alienated alien or progeria? I’m susceptible
to a hypnotic trance. I’m stuck to what you don’t say.
     Landslides are bringing my reflection to life.  

4. A WOOF OF THE HEART OUTLAWS ALL POWERFUL RHYTHMS

That woman there with cherry red lipstick lips
        chain-lock angel-hair pasta
            that face of idlewild seduction
                a sour liver      tin gods
                   in her sniffly facial orifices
                       as if her panties were up
            in a bunch
            her mini-skirt like royal bed sheets
the “Poison Tree” tattoo
        on her popsicle stick leg
(without the tree)       the cursive “Trevor”
tattoo on her left shoulder        
         her furrowed brow
    a hammerhead shark     a private exorcism      
                    organic disturbance walloped
                   this whiplash blues
                                      gives me her eyes
                  to watch them flame in my palms

& all I want is for the atmosphere to come
& get me
                a thunderclapping like seals
before The Big Bank explodes

                      You come to a point in life
where you think more about the sun
sinking below the horizon     
                  looking at it darkly
       how the clock can’t be shocked
                                      the brooding sounds
of your bones & their changing corridors
strangulated flowers growing along the crypt
       that you brush your fingers across
                                   the dreadful look
in the eyes of the Broken-hearted
their lifelines snipped       
                                          losing locality
       their subconscious retrospective eyes
like muted heroes in a bone-crushing finale
       their frail hearts pouring out to anyone
like the desert begging for a bucket of sand

3. DAILY MIASMA WHIRL

While the Media spins & spends
ten minutes discussing sweat pants,
I scream out to you like a wounded buffalo
in an ill wind that blows no-good-nothings
while yesterday’s asthmatic laughter
slowly catches up to me.
       With the saintliest Gypsy-squint
I’m jerked around like a puppet.
       “Anticipation loosens the tongue”
someone said.
       The gossip I hear of these tornado
-tongue’d people empties my heart
at the choke-point, lulling the bull—
a hole in the chest still beating bad blood:
bats in the belly, snitching on the preppers,
primitive, anti-social syllable chunks,
the sap in the cream, figurines of spare
electrons. I overhear a girl (who
reminds me of Jean Harlow) say to
her friend that reminds me of No One,
       “I hate being complimented.
       Like, just don’t compliment me!”
which then prompts me to tell her that
she resembles Jean
as she squirms in her Daisy Dukes
as if she’d just been squirted with Raid.
       The cockroaches climbing up your walls
& shooting across your floors when the
lights come on—they work for the guv’ment!
I’m not your TV that shows up after every
       controversy.
       I shaved my head into a Mohawk today.
I have digital indigestion. My grandmother
has Cherokee blood running through her veins
& her nose speaks for itself.
       I’m a contemporary Nosferatu
walking along the corporate cliffs
of these mind-numbed ROBOTNIKS.
       Socrates wore the same coat no matter
the season. Where’s my coat-of-arms?
       If it were up to me, there’d be “adult camps”
for idiocy. Mosquitoes, ticks, fleas
wouldn’t suck blood; they’d suck out
placid arrogance from the marrow of mindlessness;
they’d give an inhale on the flesh & vacuum out
the life-giving fuel of the self-righteous,
the bully pulpits, the Prosperity Gospel
vultures, all the lip-service scoundrels.
       I’m a Lochness-head rising from your
drowning pool, the sewer-spewer, this
meltingpot, this windbagging airbus.
Telescopic lens remain a blur within a blur.
       I’ve been mentally raped by the Dictionary
this past year. I’m being far more honest in my
poems. Earlier as I drove down the highway
with a potion of tears in my nocturnal eyes,
a flashing highway sign came closer in view
that said: “GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR APPS”.
       Instead what I do is this, what I do is this:
       I listen to psychedelic jazz & look at my
lonely phone, that may as well be a monolith,
boundary-less, taking a breath with death
in a sea of Pluto-shivering glacier-skulls,
looking for the blinking indicator light
to give me a greeting without spam-spasms
highlighting the ideal idyll. I may as well
thump a hungry beast.
       What might take my place
in the unreal tomorrow
has no legs, is bloated, delirious
& is embedded in a friction of the future—
narrow papyrus fragments ripped
where my mind summons serene speech.
       I cannot contain my twitching chin,
my mouth full of junkyard-crushed metals.
       This Charlie Horse has given life
to my hypervigilance! Hand-breaded,
I let the crumbs fall where they may.

2. ULTRAVIOLET QUIET

I can hardly breathe without your hemisphere
sewed into me, this memory-foam of twisting willows.
My motivation died in your sleeves. In your nightshirt,
I saw contortionist-friction. Green in every direction.

Voltage lawns, sputtering moisture. Your hair, pulled
back, tightened to keep you from weeping, from
fracturing the pole star. To make these asteroids fall
upon me violates what you’ve previously seen from

my defaulter lung. Your eyelashes carry the meats of
my brackish tempest to the gummy lands of mushy
Americana’s orbiting eye, through marble caves,
beyond brass idols, beauties of the moor, the ravished

ravines, slayered meadows, dewy horizons of seashells,
glowing taverns of adrenaline, where I feel your ornery
mortars shaking the earth, where “attaboys” & smoochy
glares stack starkly upon these red-blooded soils like

stout, sludgy, buckling bridges bouncing the ecosystem
across the obliterated rivers of our word-terrain, cutting
a transit swamp through the abscess of our hollow speech—
hot breath on congealed gothic ice—as if we’ve become
     Scrabble in an hourglass.