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.