35. MISPLACED ETCHING

       I’m a horse that can’t be
subdued or consumed
eternal mane-flame
       flowing over you
sweetlings of flower-puffs

       strewn through fields
of invented inanimate heavenlies
of which I float
       through your bosom
My eyes are sharper

       than the vulture
& is it any wonder
I’ve become a scavenger
       in this world
that’s gone to hell

       in a breadbasket
that I feed on
Bring back the universal
       flood next time it’ll be
fire & the earth will

       rise like leaven
& the patriarchs will burn
will burn like witches
       at the stake

you can wear camouflage 

       but I still see you
through you because “Time
is corroded from within,
       exactly like an organism”
(E.M. Cioran)
 

       don’t I resemble
an organism to you?
a lack of visibility?
       anything? I go around
the bandaged globe
  

       of paganism in how 

many days “in no time”

I should’ve been a rebel
       WITH a cause
wishing I could go back
 

       in time & join my old boss
who was born
in New Hampshire
       who hung out with Mafia
in New York City
 

       hung out later
with Hell’s Angels
in some other inflamed
       city of madness
but I’m the anti-type
 

       the underling
the freshest prince of all because
I fire at Will
       I’m a nativity scene
I just want you to hold me
 

       like a child in his mother’s arms
I arise to weep for death
we’re all black on the inside
       snoring
like morning glories

34. SOFT DISCLOSURE

              for Frank O’Hara & Ted Berrigan

                                              

                                      September 20, 2015

Summer is nearly “over” but it’s still hotter
       than a pepper sprout & I’m collapsing
like Lana Turner as I chug train-like along in the rain.
       My mother has cancer. The brakes on her vehicle
“gave out” yesterday as I sat sucking back
       coffee-flakes into my veins, “keeping me going”
like a jet engine. Welcome the storms! A blow
       to the head, cold O, cold like a snowcone, O a snow
-ball freefall to the freckled face & tell me, what
       exactly is a Simple Life? I hurry along “scooting”
“shaking a leg” in the wide open terrain
       of traffic, flicking lint, photographing strangers
who find me strange; their eyes like skies
       as if the blue carries onward into the folds of space—
double-folded layout, up against the Siamese blue—
       & Lana Turner collapsed into my lap! She
got up alright. Maybe you were gone
       too soon, Frank, before it happened, but she got up!
I’m getting down like a spaceship to the ground.
       If I were a Crop Circle Maker I’d ‘carve’ your name
in the wheat fields—maybe you’d let me pet
       your beautiful hair again, rub my fingers across
your eyebrows & let’s have a tea party shall we
       in the very center of the circle like two Alice’s
pulling rabbits from mad-hatters’ hats. Lana
       is behind a tree listening-in. She’s the life
of the party but stays hidden like an introverted
       hermit—Hermes! Do a little dance! Bottom’s up—
hyper-rationalizing in a digital glitch—Giambattista
       Vico calls this poem a myth—it is! As are all poems…
aren’t all poems mere revisionist reminders to “go further”
       into the lonely void of liberation? My halo
has slipped over my eyes, now resembling
       Geordi La Forge’s prosthetic Visor. I’m a star-gazer,
just trekking along! I’m destroying all of the melodious junk
       this day & instead I’m listening to Thelonious Monk. 
That makes me a Force of Nature. The soul’s asylum
       is a runaway train & I’m off the rails because I have
loco motives.

33. GENTLE GRAVE

Now that I’ve landed in my gentle grave—
this dusty terminal of fallout particles,
clothed contagious, wrinkled like a mummy
in aurora-florals (I’m still breathing)—
I demand that you applaud for me
to the ends of the earth in animated revelry!

I’m the Diphylleia grayi
that you’ve placed into my blind-pulsing casket.
(I’m still breathing through this mask,
shifting like shadow-spasms.)
Soon! you will see the icy black soil
glow brightly upwards out of every schism
bursting out of the fractured nimbus-bonnet
of the earth’s temple, beaming forth
crystallized illuminations—spectators
whistling through the silver air…

And on some glorious night
as you’re arm-in-arm with your newest love
underneath a starry sky, I will come
from forlorn exile to unravel around you
as an apparition of smoky plumes
with a great uproar like angelic multitudes
cheering-on my visible-absence
in tethered plethoras; a ringleader
of hypostatic disunions, a tribunal of ogres agape,
tusks of wild boars; my eyes aflame
as if impregnated by sun-beams,
returning effluvious with the might of typhoons
from the Celestial Atlas, crushing
the constellation’s memory of us
(a heaving bosom of folklore running amok
like a creeping hum) to HAUNT YOU wholly,
to HAUNT YOU slowly, dissecting rawest,
gagging your freshest love’s holy blooming infancy
the way that Hercules strangled serpents in his cradle.

How then O Great Silencer, my Stoic Amphitrite,
will my life be valued as I rush like bulls on parade
towards your invisible arms?

32.

Origen is said to have castrated himself

            clipping the eucalyptus of his manhood
Must’ve then Crossed the Rubicon
     of the Epicycle of Existential Spatiality
                                                   hot
on the spore                   bathing
       the mushy genital corpsefig
                           in a mad fever of the utmost

         Too            as legend has it         

reports of beavers ripping off their genitals
& throwing them at hunters!

Nevermind        just spike your mind
like a football           Watch as the horsecars
return on Old Broadway            like a magician
on television
                    that has fooled naïve audiences
         in their living rooms

Like me     the most naïve person you’ll ever
know               The Magician is an anti-hero
Like me           

       
         Dream of the day            excursions to
wherewithal whereabouts       but no place         

Two people performing sign language
                                                   I watch them

                                                   from afar
thinking that it’s like
                    the Hieroglyphics of The Airy

Language our bodies emit to test
                                                      the air’s
patience

31.

I imagine that woman’s braces
slicing my lips
tongue of greatness tongue

of Sparta my Achilles
tendons are jelly
at the thought

Could snap off
the bone
I walk limp

across the sidewalk
with a rip in my britches
I don’t give a (flying) rip

I don’t give a rip
if I walk on hot coals
or over thorny grounds

Have you danced
with a devil
like dust floating

in a sunbeam?
Have you felt the angels
howl for you

as you love so deeply
they mourn for you?     
My lips ache

at the thought
of your dewy mouth
pressing like a rose petal

to mine (because they never do
& never will) like
pressing Gertrude Stein’s

most tender butt
-ons
Take me up on that

like shoulders
that bear burdens
As you go to kiss

his mouth I pause
the action
I take his place

in a moonbeam
(as an objective illusion)    
What you want to kiss

is a mouth of tragedy
Horror-Eyes of Lady Macbeth    
Watch as the sea

swallows me
& at least values
my existence

to destroy me       
Why didn’t I drown
in my mother’s womb?    

Will you wipe away
your Judas Kiss-saliva
off of my cheek

as I stand in standing-water
with wounds open
in the pearly fern-furls

in our Valley of Emptiness?     
Leave me be    
Let the rope break    

Will all silky fragments
of the memory of me
continue to evaporate

& land as dewy thought
-drops in a deafening silence
that is felt by the whole orb

of the earth? I behold
its blank depths
like a landscape

of bleached snow    
tapping the sockets   
like a loose sprig

seen sprouting
from some barren scene
like a red stop sign

barely visible
in a blizzard of snowflakes    
a kind of swarming swathe

as if white locusts
were pulverizing
the perilous air

30.

How oft I repeat myself to hear
“another part of me” speak
bearing it on my forehead
like an arbitrary accident
as if I were a blindfolded Dipheus
waiting for signals to emerge
out of the ascendance
out of the static-swirl
like speaking to one’s “selves”
through walkie-talkies

29. ‘MEAN SUN’

Imagine if we gained everything
we wanted in this Life:
constant amplifier

scooted through Whitman’s
vocal cords—this is the
Song of My Intuition’s Perihelion,

day of direction
-less urging, iron flowers
clicking in the properties

of the mind-chaotic owls
hooting hydraulic mouthfuls
of air-raving, dark mottled structure

of red: Claw the parasite away
from waxy white promises, away
from luminous organs, carrion

of foul odors scented through
windows verifying that
I smell straight. I put my eyes on,

self-clocking. Damaged, I’m like
a pack of jackals clawing
through fields of sugar cane.

28.

Granny said “if only I had a nickel
for every homemade biscuit I’ve made.”
As a boy, I looked at my granny as
the grandest of the land. We’d venture out

into nature together & pick blueberries
(“the poetry of the earth is death”).
She’d point out to me the names of
flowers & plants. Now I’m half-dead

in black-&-white, the hag of eternity,
& I’m thinking of a muffled workforce
& why people complain when they’ve
“got it made,” which is like complaining

about being bitten by a flea while being
eaten by a bear. Home is where the heart
isn’t & I’m there. I’m bathing off with
a startling starling dishcloth. I feel like

a human scorpion. The sky this day
is as clear as cuddling. Every precious
stooge adores me. Time is a murmur.
I’m in a foxhole, rolled & downturned.

Grasshoppers hiding in my head. 
It must’ve been incredible to have a name
like “Grace Hopper”. My granny stares out
of her kitchen window, wide-eyed hazel eyes,

while nasty Nostalgia helium-howls at me
louder than a monk’s silence. My pawpaw
is covered in oil as he comes into the house
& my uncle & I hang in the sky like

a heavy jar full of stained glass holding up
the universe’s milk. I told him that my eyes
are pale asleep this day, as he uprooted
dandelions from the hard, Georgia ground,

reminding me of the loss of things, the way
Carly Simon sings about nothing ever staying
the same, so you have to play the game
& I now hang my head from this window

the way one is weighed by thought, alone.
The way that a coffin-cover will always hide
the remains, of what Is and Never Was. 

27. BROWN RECLUSE

That brown recluse
crawling across
the polished floor
is Emily Dickinson.
Ruby Rose
said that she could
“play Emily”
& so could I,
because I am
Emily Dickinson,
which makes me
“nobody!”*
I close
jagged drawers
where love letters
as dusty as
the first compass annulus
clouds-up
vintage ache
-breath, forges
surfaces to awaken,
heralds shadows
like a “mackerel sky”—
saw-tooth waves
is how I’m viewing
History through a
dicroscopic eye
-piece, double
refraction
summoned
to appear as if
Harriet Shelley’s
apparition
re-appeared at
the top of the Serpent
-ine. Where
I spotted the recluse,
the over
-stimulated sensillae
of the floor
wintered-over,
spearmint output
voltage, slipping
a chill of seasonal
spaces, flipped
like Geomagnetic
Reversal as if
Stephen Hawking’s mouth
had been turned
upside-down.

________________________________________________________________
* Ref. to Emily’s poem, XXVII: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

26.

The rainbow patters glitch patterns
Digital gadget pageantry, gelatous
Matrix, an indelible stench in this

Place, olla podrida, nuclear saps,
Slapstick comedy when the feline
Jumps when the fleas bite strictly.

What probability of failure could
Phony sermon pep-talks from
Two-lipped twist drill mouths with

Small beads of moisture be encaged
In reservoirs of absolute drizzle where
The points driven-home to make

One’s case before the Jury isn’t
Out—retractable tricycle wheels
I remember looking back to see

If I were being fooled, the way that
You should go ahead & deceive me
& make it public, why don’t you!

The ambient temperature of the way
Mouths move in debates, gorgeously
Absorbing sufficient reunions of one’s

Memories. Being here is a dynamic
Drag. Brain like reindeer moss.
Crumb into me, into you, heptagon

Of sensible ages this flirting dismay
Because my consciousness was a mere
Throw-in.  History never repeating

Itself. Mandrakes as “venomous spirits”
As “troops of error” so I speculate
The urn; the ashes of Omens, of

Prophecies & who do you trust in this
One-sided World? Who not to trust?
The Flatterer: He wraps wasps nests

In gold foil & scarlet ribbon. The resonance
Is infected, like the timbre of the
Voices of ruinous homes abandoned.

Who do you welcome in your life?
The Welcome implants that she carries
Is a foreboding gravitational pull,

Sentiments of Levitation; a thought
Bursts them, fluid like Time we move
Through like de Kooning paintings.

It’s true: you can’t fall down the
Rabbit hole if you’re already in it.
The carnival continues even after

The music stops. Spacious emptiness
Loosens the gills & quiets the mind
Like a disabled telephone wire.