RAT RACE

I met a man who finally quit the Rat Race.
            Put him in his place:
He said: “I found all of this peace & tranquility
& now I live in a barn near a creek & a lonely road
where no traffic can disturb my sleep,
but oddly, I miss the sounds of grinding metal,
            but other than that:
the horses, birds, cows & all of the other aerial things
keep me alive, dead, asleep, awake, barely moving!”

The man who quit the Rat Race
            thought that he was giving back to the Universe:
As much as the Mystery means opting out
from where you were to where you might be,
I take one very seriously who says
            “I spent winter naked for the most part,
didn’t fret about it, just wanted to amend my body,
scribble life-notes & dreams in the dirt
            on the walls of places
because I have nowhere else to expel them...”

            If we were as elastic as Impossibility
the huge jackpot might be part hymn & part
cologne bath to block, to sabotage
            the Rat Continuum
like a downed plane? Corporate environments
            moving beneath our feet, spinning.
Everyone scurrying. Born, set loose.

Oh how I love The Great Escape in my head:
Leaving to get away from it all
            in my mind: In short, a City can be
a friend of God’s orbit greeting a particular Mess;
the proximity of a Thing; Virgil’s vague
lulled desire, I call it like it isn’t
            to run full-steam towards Nomadic Thought.

I can race a rat if I must: open a hotel
            in Paradise
& call it Paradise No-Tail:
            Cat took the tongue?
Well, I’m touched with a vague wistfulness,
puncturable, homely, untamable, all the atmosphere
of Escaping The Rat in the muggy alleyway
            with a vague whistle far off.
Jump into jagged Jacuzzi with the Janitrix!
            Existence might manifest the
mathematical-side toward requisite exfoliation.
            Ghostly selfie missing.
Perilous transition. Reactors square to the Earth’s
core. Fish skeleton in the tongue.
            Naked particles scattering off each other,
hot air balloon
belonging to the Nordic noon. 

[I’m nifty and nitty-gritty]

     I’m nifty and nitty-gritty 
and mostly privy 
while splashing mental-graffiti 
in any city without silly pity 
or rickety sticky puddy 
whether from New Guinea 
or Old Mississippi . . . 
     Here comes the finicky 
prissy kitty-kitty that’s spiffy 
from the welcoming committee 
down the busy street to greet me 
like a special ditty, 
     I Dream of Jeannie 
or Moricone’s spaghetti 
or fettuccine, routinely 
disappearing like Houdini. 

DECISION OR DECOY OR DREAM

Oh Decision
that ageless workbook of many guts! Hark!
I stand here in this lush lawn of the heyday
like a death mask on the verge of smiling, looking
upon the grassy terrain & what must be done.
What are these fleeting days but looking through
a reversed opinion glimmer!

Then
an aubergine- & cerulean-colored butterfly
landed on my vermilion-faded lawnmower
& forthwith I noticed that the grass
in stop-motion edit-jumps
had begun to cut itself with the apparent
invisible hands of Samuel Barber!

& now
the sounds of whipped-up changelings
or saffron wasps zing-zinging in the corner
of something that echoes out with an ancient audible
stinging the air that swallows like gulps while
the seemingly glinting sacchariferous spiderwebs
outside of the windows need me to
wisp them up onto a needle-point, weaving
a continent of caffoy, elk-wing & cambium

& now
the sounds of dozens of insects dropping
from the trees, out of pines, oaks, dogwoods,
out of the sweetgums
that drop their spiky goblin tokens full of seeds
towards this Spring-soaked grassy dew’s
iridine tranquility

& now

I look under bricks specifically to see

what life’s living there: ants

carrying egg-sacs, roly-poly rolling thunder, beetles

with the hearts of jackals, & behind me,

near the back of my heel, a scorpion

with a tail like a witch’s claw

& now

the sounds of the apple’s core

around the worm’s inchy-body like

petulant children doing all of the things

that one might guess, hiccuping

sour air’s misfortune as I perpetually fall off

the tomato wagon of tomorrow’s nightmarish future. 

[The Moon’s fingertips]

The Moon’s fingertips 
Cuts through the summer air 
After the storms pass

While an uncertain wandering
Catches in my soul, like 
A stream’s gully;

Reflection of my face
Puddling in the sweating, dewy
Earth, 

Seas of frozen seafoam juiced,
Floating speech-bubbles, 
No rise in altitude 

Because I’m already there, 
Snug with birds, the worm
Squirming slowly on the curb

Next to the clumsily-planted bed 
Of flowers around the neighbor’s 
White mailbox. 

I inhabit the night because
Everyone is asleep,
Refreshing after a long day’s work 

To do it all over again 
In the morning, like automata. 
Oh the hazards we’ve become,

As I stare at the stars 
And wonder what is to come, 
The dead rising to die a little more

& the sun lighting a path golden, 
prosperous 
in the dreams of many. 

OR

orifice / or a face
oracle / or ankle
origami / or a gummy
origin / or a gin 
ornament / or no mint
orb / or rib
orthodox / or the docks 
oriole / or old 
ornery / or a wreath

[Knowledge paints the mind expands it]

Knowledge paints the mind               expands it
colors it crisp like Colombia’s Liquid Rainbow River
            feu de joie            Head wedlocked
spandex nasalized or kaput
                                       “sinuses opening up”
                 & what I’ve learned in recent days
is that                          ‘crack’ is called ‘crack’
          because of the crackling sounds that it makes
when it’s lit                 (cracked me up)
& how could I’ve just learned
of Strindberg’s surreal play Ett drömspel
& Bergman’s adaptation of it?                 “Is it that
we’re so intelligent or that we’ve too much leisure-time
on our hands?”
                              Within a John Tunnard landscape
I’ve become splintered atavistic architectural shards

                              Discoveries
of this painter        Biomorphic          Constructivism

            It’s as if everything that I see I become

Pictorialism of magical-realism I make real

   by
       living in it
              Who can discern my external facade? 

During the Pictorialist Era
        it was as if every scene was like waking up
on that dreamy island of Lotus-eaters
                      in Homer’s Odyssey
                where A Midsummer Night’s Dream-type fantasy
       seemingly engulfed every frame

                    I could sing the piano to sleep!
                    I could sing the piano to sleep!

You wouldn’t believe what I’m thinking now
I’ll tell you later
in another poem
or when you wake up from your sleep
after drifiting through the enchanted worlds of Eli Lotar
or your own onrushing vanguard abracadabra
             the cinematique tea you’ll drink
We’ll discuss it then like being ‘live’ in an aquarium
of monomaniacal turnabout
                                                        Annealing

Kneeling
like the prince that kissed Snow White
           She was faking it        peeking all-along
                    The way that waiting for anything
might come & wisp o’ wail you away in a wind
like a homebody sped-up
                           disgorged before
                                                      happenings appear

[I'm so often heightened]

I’m so often heightened
to the utmost
in this ‘joie de vivre’

that I feel like my Spirit is
outgrowing my Body

& will erupt
out of my temporal house
at any given moment,

& like an Ancient Roman ‘Janus’

I have another head
attached to my own

which could force even my
doppelgänger
to do a double-take.

POEM

It’s as if on some days
The Trees want to dive underground
Right where they stand
To cuddle their own roots
Like a mother holding her newborn

For the first time.

If I were to smell what you smell
My nostrils would choke on
One of your Anemoi.
If NASA created a perfume,
Let us all smell like Outer Space.

FRACTURE II

       I’m on the slanted sofa again
in a house on a cul-de-sac
in the desultory bucolic brood
       Rawest hide not of softest tiffanies
thinking of unfriending myself
here where I’m half-asleep, the shape thereof,
covered in a bedlam of cat-fur, urine,
this three-fourth-sleeved coffee-stained shirt,
eyes of Laocoön,
       Uranus removed itself from its axial tilt

where AM thrusts itself towards PM briefly

like a school of fish going to see a swimphony—

       Red Sox & Yankees on the tube (what else
is new?), ferocious wind blowing outdoors,
soot-colored clouds, grating sounds
of grinding chainsaws moiling & spitting
& sparking shrrzzrrzzrrzzrrzz!
       They’ve got an ax to grind
& then a vivid visual of the blades slicing through
the throb of my displaced patella that I guard
with the shield of Achilles—vulnerable bone
split in half, chainsaw slicing off my leg
& then dragged upon some splintered pirate’s
plank, double-jointed air-space lapse
                    loop loop loop               slippery slope
       ghost grabbed the gauntlet with pliers
in-between displacement (“space is a frame
we map ourselves in”):
       Go head & send my kneecap to the polar cap!:
Newsworthy crash-test-dummy, Social Experiment
using me as a guinea pig:
       W.W.S.A.E.I.C.B.D.? (What Would the
Self-Appointed ‘Experts’ In ‘Comment Boxes Do?’)—
you may find yourself surprised to discover
what is uprooting between this diaphanous fracture!
out sprouts an emergent inflorescence
of fair clusters up through the wickets,
unwinding a birthing
       inference, tuba-bloomed umbrage, puffed up
like forced sensual lips puckered outward like
George Herman Ruth’s lightning bolt bat
pointing towards the inevitable bull’s eye!—
unstoppable avalanche, menstruating gizmos:
       I could tear into
my fractured canyon of perspicuity
upon the chaise lounge like a spammy ‘palm reading’
turning violent! Giving the wrong ‘info’
(looking beyond the flesh-lines, pressing
my physiognomy) . . .
       I recap the day’s events like
a tarp covering a playing-field, now
waiting for an incision, cement still skinny
to my tender bones, covered in it, camouflaged
like the Phyllocrania paradoxa—
       I await my own anesthesia as if
I already sense it, taste it,
like a mastodon trapped by a gang of cavemen.
What if I slip again?
       I think of slipping again
this time upon a slope of wild strawberries
in a silent light
where the fruit of the Hesperides
sprinkles necklaces of garden debris
intermediating between the spaces of gravity
       kneeing me.
       Unlike Philip Booth, I don’t want to
“talk about walking”—so instead
I will talk about hunger, hunger spilled over
into July; my body glued to the canvas
of these multitudinous walls,
television, computer screens—I need fruit,
so in my mind I walk (hungry), standing
before the beautiful tree & knock
a plate of oranges down, then
go on to pluck figs from their lush
limbs (plantlife flaunts as if like an attraction
of pulling, picking, planting, pruning, needs
human touch, procedures, fixity, &c.)
       Being handicapped comes in handy
to write poem after poem after poem. Glow!
I rise, floating, what are knees again?
I’ve never used my knees in my life, as I float on!
I may as well be nailed up in the room.
There’s no escape. Nailed up!
Whether it is clumsy or sloppy, I cannot swallow
the sleeping pill while
Poetry’s sloganeering snickering depends on
the Unseen Me merely to be.

[Roundabout sunset]

Roundabout sunset
The moon cooed
       Glued itself
To the projection screen
       & rose
Like an award-winner
From the crowded
Starry skies

Later I watched
The same powderwhite
       Moon
With an earthbound
       Physique
Perform Butō in my window

[Needing double-eylids]

Needing double-eyelids
This warm night
As I walk about the city

As it takes twice as much
Energy now to open
My eyes & look out at

The loveless world
While I overthrow the Ozone
While moonbeams vaporize

Straight through
To the skull
Candles behind the eyes

I’m just waxing gibberish

Waning & wondering

FLEEING THE POETRY READING

Arriving with friends                                                                           Pearly dust-storms
to the Poetry Reading,
queasy cool chill in the air:                                                                 the aching of the rust
The sun hung its head low                                                                  inside of my bones
knowing no cold,
a kind of temper in the tempest;                                                         driven through the courtyard’s
a rival, perhaps,
in a lightning bolt; a fire
in the heart                                                                                          aortic tissue
that appears out of nowhere                                                               Look! Up in the sky!
in hues of anti-color.                                                                          A Banach–Tarski paradox!

I was first to read. First to read                                                          A marinaded dame! No...
from this nervous theater of the stomach.
                                                                                                            Breathable Debris

I began:

Dearest America:
what have you become?
Megaton trinitrotoluene
erupted through the seasons
of the flapping ecosystem
floating out of a 4-Dimensional Hyptorus
extracted from
the Universal Superhero’s cape
like a Geometropolis
blanketed in a globe
of snowflake-dust.

I stopped

to feel the risible mischief clattering my co-consciousness
like methane gas leaking out of Troublemakers—

their unbridled capital T’s in the middle of
nowhere that excessively seek rescue.

I stopped

to see if anyone else felt the risible mischief.

I want boundaries
       like asteroids, black holes.
I want boundaries
       to amuse my epidermal luminescence
of cartoon-thinking;
       like a scamming psychic. It doesn’t matter,
like antimatter.

I should inform you that
I keep my head down when reading
in front of an ‘audience’
never looking up to ‘engage’
as is ‘properly taught’.

When listening to me read a poem, I think to say:

                                   Close your eyes and listen
to the sounds of spit
circling in my mouth
as words form into this echoey microphone—
my teeth like Hannibal Barca of Cathage’s sneaky army
surrounding this wordless tongue-of-no-escape.

                                   Close your eyes and listen
to the sounds of my esophagus-muscles
pushing down water into my stomach
into this welcoming microphone
that doesn’t know better but to be a Revealer—

think of the peristalsis
                    resembling a wave
                                         passing through
                                                              your throat.

                                   Close your eyes and think
of someone else you’d rather be listening to.


Like Jack Spicer
                            my words are turning
                                                               against me

& I feel the dispensation
of the dumb-to-destruction professorship
that sails in, unworthy of Oblivion
& the “naughty figs” feel like Ubermen
circling the wagon,
rebuilding the castle on the hill
because when I sit with these academics
in Irish Pubs,
my mouth is as chilly as the deserts of Mars.
       My singing pores a smorgasbord
of spiritly dead technological decadence
as I tap my glass cup & listen
to these slow-motion “poet voices”
ring-pinging in my ears
(Poems that sound like
some bedraggled old shoe; vowels
splitting open my bowels, canaries in a COLD MIND), God
help me, what was I thinking? I think (while thinking
of my Pet Tornado), the scene like
criminal-energy mutilating my mental-genitals.
       It is said that if one can understand History,
one can understand the Future.
       What am I missing? I ask myself,
as I sit here, time after time
& a broad-shouldered fellow with a thick black beard
sitting beside me is reading a book called,
“Shyness: What It Is, What To Do About It” by Zimbardo—
My eyes, like smooth ceramic animals
that can sense everyone else’s calculated sight—the light,
physical in this foggy terrain,
a poet-stage full of pomp—
craven ghosts dragging one into a coffin?
       I turn not away from the mind-tickling eyesores
but wonder around through the droning background sounds
looking for the bathroom
pondering what commotion I will find,
pondering what graffiti I will see on the stalls,
pondering what kills gods with slow-deaths
like browning magnolias soporific,
leminal, lemony sunshadows
pulling me out of this place,
as if with some spiritual acumen of love;
illusionary, as if I will wake & think
of it all as apocryphal
       while the fatigued trumpet of Miles (like the miles across us)
helps me flee onto the night streets,
my eyes like owls:
       Owl with eyes like bright fragments
of stained glass brightening up the night
       while haunted spaces show up opposite
the Caricature of a chess-figure that disrupts
       the atmosphere of the late 1940s—film-noir hour
-glass smashed full of sandman’s sleep,
       as if like a martyr-in-crime I seek
to find something, anything, beyond the noise,
       rehashing the noise in my head
like an injured Jury unable to make decisions.
       I’m like something hyphenated; my polarities
are puffed out at others like an offended Theologian
with gnashed-teeth of the 3rd Degree
like freeing enslaved Freemasons from idolizing idols—
faux-stagey parenthetical heavens higher
am I not?
       Poets crawl around the streets like sewer rats, like
Laxative accidents & poignant pigments to aspire to.
       When I made my way to the square
after I flat-lined across the highway like roadkill
that had risen again from their stink,
my ears had turned inward into my head,
hearing thoughts discradled from the street brutes,
hags, prostitutes, dopers, stumbling around
bending the anticipatory torque of the Actual.
       The entire night was like drops of Minds
or like large shadows of pesty insects that grow
as large as cars out of the spastic spore of
the Unrelenting Universe after being sprayed
by radioactive Raid the way that in the Name
of Motion I am darkly-naked in the minds that
consider me inconsiderable, just another warm
body vaporizing through a Fun House Mirror?
       I spotted a disorderly policewoman’s
ameliorated peacelessness come unglued
amongst a crowd of rioters.
       Retrospect is weathered, isn’t it, Deathly sting? so
I play upon the strings of illegible utterances that thereby
rids me of frightening anonymity.
       Homebody bound for an unknown destination,
indissolubly linked except in poems
that give new directions; the long slow swells
of books coming to an end, ripped off
their garments, now bare-chested & simple &
it might have meant something if the flesh
had of showed me early on that the world is
often an ugly place as my vile body’s vying
for self-destruction was once a way
of unhinging, licking the plate empty, making it
smile, while I stumbled to the front door,
& the moon, that cold & imponderable frozen spotlight,
shattered to my feet like porcelain plates
falling from a wall.

FRACTURED

Thunderstorms roll in like coupon samples
while I’m still laid-up after my “freak accident”;
the sky ruptured open, calcification, silver rain
just waiting for the inevitable, hot rooftops
steam with appetites like kings twiddling 
their thumbs—like trying to feed three mouths
at once, I fall short like a haiku. I’m writing 
this while a cold rag sits on my forehead, 
an empty orange juice bottle full of urine 
to my right, an empty coffee cup  to my left 
smoting me for re-fills & I need an ode to give 
to anything, to anyone before all of my senses 
rub off like cat-fur that sticks to my shirt like 
an effectual hieroglyph, how much longer 
with double-bruises, gritty films I lick up, 
my head unable to pan like a camera in the 
clickable sharp uptake of air: watercolorist’s 
smörgaåsbord, involuntary spasms, leave room 
for dripping. I sign the Guest Book to my own 
“Wake”:  my family like salivating Gold Rushers 
to clamp down bragging rights, others smirk 
in rapture at my suffering. I read books about 
body politics, rhetoricians, serial killers, classic 
obscure literature, but I cannot concentrate 
because I want a hot bath to fugue-plunge this 
bathos, rhapped unsavory savvy, exhilaration 
slurry. Poetry steers me like a Melville ship
lost at sea, hindered, requiring some “break through” 
of heroics, prize-hounds, letting off steam upon 
a steamboat, reckless tidiness I lean halfway off
of this cushion, my mind sits somewhere else 
cross-legged on a tatami launching itself before 
the blink of a cursor.

NERVE ENERGIES

Lizzy Borden would have been 
a brilliant computer hacker 
or a milker of cows. I figured 
my figure-of-speech would speak 
to me in figurines (as it always does)
so I beat the odds by getting even. 
I’m an alarmed clock. I’m running 
around the geographic landscape 
on a Planet of The Grapes (of wrath) 
with Basil Rathbone giving a dog a bone 
with my Pre-Internet brain (that has 
a mind of its own). My Pre-Internet brain 
does have a mind of its own 
Somewhere between Thought & Nought 
& has returned back to me with potentially 
deceptive appearances of nerve energies 
paving reflections on the senses, as if 
the middle finger of Galileo sitting in 
a glass egg among lodestones & telescopes 
in an electromagnetic trap had come back 
to life like a created monstrosity of body-parts 
made up of mirrors looking back at us 
with an optical resonator & is superimposed 
upon the unstable architecture of our past-selves 
which are shapeless & absent, like pointing 
the spotlight on a prisoner that never tried to escape.
Metaphors are alive where Mysteries hide. 
The days, the hours, how subtle & fleeting 
this vanishing breeze; the disappearance 
like a turned-over urn; the ashes 
like the “color-dust” of dreams.

POEM

Moonist of scaly silver giving up its winds, the
Simoom shifted, zoomed-in, yawned myself 
historically to mind’s ear. O door’s scent, quivery
nets in a fish-tank in windows. The sky has “all but”
opened up with a crackling grin, rainplume uttering 
myrrh sweet to my heat-felt limbs; brows sweating
into the afterwho; armored octopod’d suctionables 
amazing grace; the sunlight wasn’t shining anywhere 
upon this earth this night, but it’s the way I follow it,
the sun, that is, by night, as if I were a metaphysical 
presence more interested in the meringue than the pie—
this world, as it carries weight past each large house, 
past each smaller one, strives to poke new holes 
through our centers; with each pin-point as stifling, 
faltering, we can see directly into the density as our 
shadows pass across the beautiful earth as if we were
tap-dancing in a canoe.