THE BIRTH OF MOVING IMAGES

                             are looped near to the simple-minded.

                                   Vacant nose, vacant mouth
                                    still smelling, still eating things.

                                                   Do I not see? saith the dream, which was me.

I would take a thorn or two for a rose!                           Put it in my thumb or in my innards, in my nose, but give me a rose—a rose that wilts quickly & I will press the passing away of it to my heart & soul, like petals discovered in an old book.                   This innocence still retained?                   I miss the days of my childhood walking the outercircle of the farm-land in my rural hometown where sunsets seem to go on for hours, paused in my endtime pasture, a darting hart, the unmoving dromedary, the uncharted heart . . . Why can I not dream? saith the dream.

                                                         I stepped off the sidewalk tonight, tripped the cement upward like looking back seeing someone gaining on you & I caught my bleeding heart in my mouth.                     A dashing doe leapt towards me in wonder as I sprouted wings like a Pegasus, made you look.                     Bombardier rout of thought needn’t scholarship to sail through surveying seas . . . without myself I pretend to dematerialize from my surroundings when you, like a marble statue, come to life like smooth medieval chisel compositions
                                                         where
                                                         I strike imagination with spiritual touch, Pygmalion’s revery, yet I am stubborn in a gaze, fragile like cargo, candlelight forensics, gauze, a seaweed bundle around your ankles when you swim through my ocean.
                                                         I’m puzzled in an air’s heirloom, ears wide like scallop shells to listen to you the way I want to always listen to you, clutching my lent costume, buttons popping off accoutrements in acoustics of night as the night sings for you.       Unruly lips
                                                                                                          clip-off cranium-pieces
                                                                                                       from my dome,
                                                                                                like a broken alphabet
                                                                                    of hammered faces squinting.
                                                                                                                                  What my ear said
                                                                                                                     is what my mouth
                                                                                                                    wanted.
                                                                                                             I feel like
                                                                                                       what Yesterday feels like
                                                                                          when it thinks of
                                                                                       Tomorrow.
                                                                        I wait for another dust speck
                                                                 to fall because I am not Me:
                                                                                                              The icy
                                                                                             polar opposite
                                                                        of the Earth 

                                                after

                       Forever

passes.

THE 'EAR' IN 'EARTH'

Is the ‘ear’ in ‘Earth’
       because landscapes listen intently
    with immutable imaginations?

These miles                                 are at fault between us—
                                         the days vaporize where I sculpt
                                             the slanted air of my thoughts,

               dodging them like a space
                     symbolized by a wheelchair symbol
               or lilacs, violently divine,

       mellow shadows in meadows,
                                 serene sighs sifted through
                      siphoned season, singes

                the feathers of the singing
                            nightingale in a gail-force.

                                     What secrets are satisfied,
                                                           unhidden—
                                                              the afterthought
                                             midway prolongs
                                                   the tempted mouth,
                gives in,
             
                hypnotizes explicit speech,

           like one swathed in a sea
                                           of heavenly swans; the visions
                      of your deepest thoughts

                                                                     made to shine.

HEAD OF THOUGHTS, LIKE A CUBED SQUARE

Crawled out of bed
                               with my head
                                                  turned
around
                              like a Cubed Square

                          because I make the air
feel physical,
                          visible—weathered
                                            nerve monstrosity;

                                                  sophisticated
                                                 Mephistopheles,

lips obscured
lips obscured
lips obscured

in the Garden of Deceit . . . 

                                       an “outgrowth
            with a mouth-shaped
cavity”

where immortals follow immortals, mortals
follow mortals in the anxious axis we all lean against
with casual severance.

                                                                                     I am paused
in a setting

like              dispensable               staffage,
                                     as an         omnipotent rodent,
                                   
                                       thinking
                                                 of the way

that I carry you
                                                  around
                                                  equidistantly 

within me,                                 Photograph of the Inner,

                                                  the way I imagine 

                                                  Mozart

would have reacted                                            with a phonograph,
                                                  piping himself 

through restaurants

                                                                       or supplied
                                                                by a jukebox
                                                       on all premises,
all peripherals                                                                                                      all peripherals

                                               I’m in the hearts of all of the Young!
Additional vocabulary,
a bit ostentatious,
a human zoo

                                            in the coming renaissance
                           where I shall be seen
                                              in my ‘old haunts’

& today after eating
                        this huge dinner
                                    full of fattening urges,

hanging by a broken
             glider on the edge
                                                                                     of eternity,
                                                                                     I’m thinking
                                                                pleasurably
                                of the art exhibition
that I’ll go to soon
                                 in support of my painter-friend—

the new gallery,
the new space for artist’s to dream
in the Art-Haus it is called.
                                                   
                                          My unswerving loyalty,
                                 like a web of cables
                   around the world,
exciting blood beyond the
98.6,                   as I yearn 

                                             to know more & more
                                             about less & less
                                             in the Information Age . . .

so clear the jungles!
             make way for monuments
                            of my body floating
                                          over a moat amongst
                                                            a rippling liquidy music,
                                     rhapsodic episodes
               in The Playhouses!
my feet irrevocably set
                                        where I yearn for raw truths
                                        from every mouth,

                                 because no honest man
                   has ever been
afraid of the truth.



 

THE CARNIVALIZATION OF SUBSTITUTING SPECULATIVE DIALECTICS WITH REALITY

Dear Whomever,

                                                    I am caught
                                     “between competing impulses”

as I nearly slipped a moment ago
in a puddle of water, overlooked
the bright yellow ‘WET FLOOR’ cone—
           
Oh, you would have adored
                        what happened this morning,
                                                               beyond a dream!: 

An old man
                        told me
                                           that he mostly always wears
Sky Blue

                   because
                                         he
              wants
                                                       to be


                                                                  a bird! 

I tell him that he is already a bird

                    in 

                              the 

                                                                             w i d e 

                                                                            o
                                                                                 p
                                                                                      e          
                                                                                            n

                                                                              s p a c e s
                                                                            of  t h i n g s 
                                                                                               
                                                                                                 
and that he just needs to locate his wings                                     e
(that I myself could see in his spirit, that sprouted                          h
outward into physical form).                                                               t
                                                                                                           
          “When you step outside,” I tell him,                                                 o
“I will watch and wait for you to fly up into the sky                                      t
like a balloon let loose from the fingertips of a child.”                                     n
          “Join me!” he exclaimed with child-like bliss,                                          i
waving his arms (which are really his wings
                            that I see).                                                                                    y
          I say: “I am already in that sky                                                                   a
awaiting you, cuddled in a nest of dreams.”                                                     w
          He says: “Let us invent new senses, re-rout                                        a
the old ones! I shall sip this Crème de menthe 
in my folded-leaf cocoon this evening.”                                               w
          I say: “With a half-eye, I will watch,                                        e
embracing what leaks through the unknown                                    l
of the everyday sphere.”                                                               f

                                                                                       h

and                                                                          t
           then                                                      o

                   we                                        b

POEM

           I am not so hard to please
in the gusting rosette
of Love’s want—
something like a nun’s peace,
but my emotional-processing physiognomy
is like Frankenstein’s monstrosity-making,
or am I pinning it down right?
          Swallow your pride, My Sinking Ophelia,
my Unsinkable Sinking Ship—
you make me full of allergens
like swimming in a bath
of ragweed; the usual quotidian...
           I am not so difficult, not so difficult
to please—so fill me, will you, fill me
full of scalloped categorical putty—
       beautify me into the puppet you want—
       let’s bicker until we deflate
the unburstable balloon’s bouillon—
            I’ve got my hands on something
crude like subliminal eroticism
in Shakespearean codexes—scrolls
unraveling like cornfields
in the golden-halo scalp of morning—
           Nurture me, Great Nurturer,
with vile phrases, enthralled,
disgorged in “the usual” corona-scruff
the way blurs make sense
expelled out of a photograph,
like what Weegee saw in the distorted
nude woman showering outdoors—or
          I’m a fool’s piccolo playing
for a king’s belly-aching laughter—
                    I am not so difficult,
                    nor am I difficult to please,
I am trying to tell you!
                  Climbing up the stepladder
towards the Angelic Upstairs
with a lion’s urge—the road is so narrow
that I can feel the side-shoulder-spaces
crushing my hips,
the way you crushed me like a toadstool
caricature underneath your boots—
this rude urn I’m in, Wormwood
coming down with a burn,
coming down, heaped upon, that is
your prosperous uterus
routinely inflamed?
               Before my youth vanishes
into too bold, blunt, sun-tinted
eye-mirrors
              of my awkward childishness
in reverse,
“I am hid” like William Blake
in a Grand Opera of earless sound—
hearing your car’s blinker
             like a happy traveler,
going any direction
with elephant-memory—
I am in the shrubs, a spiderweb
             in a dewy bush—go ahead
& crown me as King of Foibles!
You, Queen of Eats!
Soups, shops, dark coffee,
jazz clubs, vintage theaters . . .
           Let’s sift out
           what we adore,
           what we do not adore
while the finger in the sand
becomes a “realist”
& intersplices into a coy compass
of commandeering acuteness. 

When my dreams come true,
I will be a made man!
                                              Until then,
                      batty clamorous clucking,
narrow hostiles
                                           seep through
every orifice on my body,
        through-and-through
                   my side-stapled utopia
undeniably filmed by peeping toms
like “educational TV”
             suffering its fate
                  like a deflated raft
           of Divine Comedies
                                               gone sour,
        so I make myself make
           photographs of my achy
naked body alchemy—
                         the window celebrating
not my image;
                                    I hold my skull
                                   to my midsection,
but like pork chops
of tongue-flicking hunger,              light
             erupts my meaty consciousness,
               scrambles the atmosphere here
           in the cold like frozen strawberries
stuck to my haymaker,
                                                    I mean
                                       my fleshy torch,
                                                    I mean
            like riding on Zeus’s thunderbolt
        because I’m a myth-maker!

      The bridge to nowhere knows where
I am.                                 Icy wind parts
my spirit            like a barber’s precision;
wrinkled lemon peels
                                   stuck
                                           to the ground
                and I think of how just “being”
                slips towards Poetry;
steeples oddly alone,
my tender inner thigh
                                   cramping;
someone delighted by the sight of it
in my evergreen neverland. 

RAREFACTUAL PERSONISM

Occasional calculus
futile silver platter;
my head on it
like John
the Baptist’s,
martyr of warm
fudge-split,
polyvore,
Personism:
a part in vulgarity,
of which
one’s semiotics
of the Very You
split years
beginning after half
of my impregnated
assimilated infant-language
self-served Information
without committed points
as I sat obscured
in the scientific womb
of my mother,
learning my wettability
while fossicking knowledge
like a hungry brute
autodidact; overtones
of discovery,
distracting half-grappled
duality (the other real),
studying human doubt.
First!
towards an idea!
of that Secondly,
between unified self
-referential fiction, semi
-conscious, so live!
Fully in, self-world
sycophants shoveling in
slithery hashed-over eye
towards Night Traveling,
like a new idea of water,
the way beauty operates.
Self of Reason? 
is content drops, 
minimal evolution,
enigmas wherein
the rainbow prefers
black-and-white
slipping out
of its contents, out
of its continuation.

POEM

I used to visit France
               every time I looked at you
because I saw France in your eyes.
             I am there
                                      now
    as a constellation,
hanging from the Big Dipper
                 along the roof of stars
                             stirred
                    like a snowglobe,
as a tinier version of yourself, old soul . . .
                                                 new soul
                   amongst the purified fluff
                                                      of flowers
                  that you viewed perpetually
in all of those dreamlike terrains.
                                 Eye without periphery—
North Star’s chemicals                               ‘
                                       d                        ‘
                                           r                  ‘
                                               i           ‘
                                                   p  ‘

                       onto blank pages,
appears like a Troubadour’s song
                         at your front door. 

UNBEARABLE TENTACLES

Between the daydream 
& the nightcap, 

achy arabesques 
risk tilting between 
the up-and-down of our

unbearable tentacles. 

You within a lamb 
are the soft skylight I feel 

in a voice of arcs
of cliff-hangers 
which becomes my destiny

to splash into 
this yet unrealized frenzy. 

And it is so:

Among the moonbeams, 
one becomes a moonbeam, 
or perishes, clenches 

another known. 

POEM

Skeleton beside this bearded mandrake; 
headlights on it like poleaxes barely obscured 
in the woodpile. Anomaly limbs 

picking up on cold shoulders. What kings & queens 
we are in these gutted goldmines! What walloped 
my kneecaps like a slapping mast 

against a tempest sent my Human Downpour 
through a bolt-hole of miscellanies where my
Future Old Self, my Grandfather Opiate 

of Follicleless coiffure will still be too bomb; 
too torn like paupery dirndl; shorelines’ coil waves 
like shortfalls; carcass’s blinker like coals heaped upon 

the head of a jester. These youthful legs, now, 
pinpricks the inflated zeppelin of time’s unflattering mock, 
so where is my Ballroom Posse? 

Dance, dance, dance, Skeletons! Falling over 
the balustrade, half-life spilled out, our druthers 
complete.

EMPTY GRAVEYARDS

The Grim Reaper’s forte scalloped like a nude Knight
begging for a shinier physique—medallion of Death’s shibboleth, 
like gangs of chimeras on motorcycles riding into the sunset 

with tracheas of hissing vulgarity; escapologists of untongued 
vignettes aflame lurk now afar because all of the graveyards 
have burst open with Life! Fireballs, footplates,

uncovered dreams slashed like a bleach-light erupting 
like sundials through the former long-faced clamouring 
& melancholial plectrum of heavyweighted death. I walk 

along the bleeders, smoothing the freshness of my footsteps. 
I feel like spitting voltages. I feel like an ethereal statue 
in some rotunda about to lift off in greasy air blemishes, 

examined by wooers of the wind, the backside of the moon
(the uncommon name of the naked) accelerated, undoing 
Death’s relevance, gravity escapee. Its vexed legs

like pantomimes cobbled together; their white faces conjoined
in a blurred spinning turbine . . . Like tonight, where 
hormonal zombies walkabout like sophistries 

that I correspond with, noting the dampening graveyard’s 
suddenly sunny opened tonsils of worry, like hornets at funerals, 
proud with anonymity. I stand in the rainy cemetery 

with my grandmother, photographing her shadow 
upon grave-markers. The Nightmare, that Sorcerer of Silence
observes us from behind a tattered fence of fungal monsoons.

I’m untethered at the end of every dark tunnel, giving off light. 
Along the cratered data blows flurries of everyone’s peripheral,
receptive minerals. Death is obsolete. The last charade. 

The autopsy reveals respectful slowness, casual gaze of 
the fore-particles of my illumination, like a gaseous enema
in the Reaper’s permanent wound. Checkmate. 

POEM

Dearest, I am part-you 
in a wood of pearly treetops
or are we pincers on this nightly nipper 

when we fell & the hundredweight 
became one? My Thirsting Else 
believes in all-things-possible.

Octagon of roadblocks examine 
vintage experience with silence 
I recognize. I’m not asking much

to be loved, but I’m in the curving 
background, recognizing you 
in the rebound I can’t breathe, 

viewed as a common fossil. 
I’m finished with words. 
I’m better off sleeping

although it is neither your 
lapse nor an accumulated cumulus 
of shakeups duping the sky of my life 

where automatically horrific pain 
haults itself around my defaulting, 
of which perpetually clashes, crashes 

similar themes & why should I need 
to guess-game where I’m headed 
in this dry-tempest sandstorm? 

Get thee behind me, Pain! Ha! 
but it never does: res ipsa loquitur. 
I should disappear in defense, 

backing up against the wallpaper, 
blending into it, entering the next phase
outside of my comfort zone’s discomfort . . . 

reasoning with disorder, reasoning 
with fuming against my own 
melancholic incense 

as if I’d walked out 
of the mind of a scorpion 
just before the strike. 

Censored breasts, poised
      in the flesh, 
forces my brain
         to visualize       nipples 
over the black bars,
                     circular dots . . . 

                  A kind of darkness
       in the shadowy ink,
like Lilith the Night Hag 
filling her blindspot with
                                       Light

the way that I caught 
                     a candid thought
            directly behind 
that which I sought. 

POEM

How often to hear that one has 
left behind a great body of work
when I just want to leave behind 
a great body for a glorified body
in the future. In the future, I will open 
the doors of my father’s fragile face & 
I will discover masks of all types in each 
room. I will put on each mask & wait 
for a haunting dissonance to call out 
to my historicity on some blue-green 
African-night of Marlowe’s madness 
uncovering “true emotions”. My pity 
has pliars to peel off feigning faces 
of wax. I love deeply anyway, although 
I burn crablike dense-red in the oven 
of my father’s soul. Why is Mammon 
a god that keeps you clothed in werewolf 
cover-up body-armour, pinching you  
underneath the dermis? You are like 
a deceased philosopher, fleshless amidst 
the “congregation of the dead”. I’m like 
dice tossed to & fro & yonderways 
in a multiverse, in a flesh unrepelled 
by mixups, like the ‘yoke’ or the ‘yolk’ 
or an oar of hours grooving to the churning 
butter blues in every single hurting, angry, 
painful soul in this nation. . . . Nation of 
what-now? Ancient Rome mocks from 
the dust & ashes of the stubble of heavy 
iniquity, delighting oneself with one’s “self” . . . 
Hear my cry, O Yahweh, as Life’s 
venom-sting creates molten brass out of 
the stones of our hardened hearts! Hair 
of horses, I feel soft with Your peace, 
mane-flowing of Your spirit, flowing 
like I do somewhat quaint & faint like 
activating sunlight through the moon, 
& just now I see something so beautiful 
that I have become it.