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. 

POEM

I grasp my diarist-hand
that attempts to clutch my neck
to ghostwrite for my visceral
disappearance

I ask my Biography
to maintain my everyday fleeting
Other Years to continue to tell the tiny voice
within

to never unlock the width of my skull
or clutch my windpassion'd architectural
hyperboreal Latin morning equinox nerve,
the untoilsome core,

a formula of unspecific grace
because I misapply, misappropriate
what it means to recall the words
that you left between us

I ALWAYS RECOGNIZE STRANGERS AS IF I HAVE SEEN THEM SOMEWHERE BEFORE

With that being said, 
What do you figure 
will happen when 

America’s eyeballs free 
from sorrow is without its 
hag-like mannequin to 

drag along drags, free 
of sorrow like leftover smells?
On Highlands Parkway now 

I feel secluded in a room 
full of “eat or be eaten”-types 
& those who suffer under 

the moon’s saliva-froth 
ice-snapping beamy fingers—
WHERE is my castle, my 

Secret Service vets, my 
interview on YouTube, my 
White House yuppy, my 

America, O my America,
where are my Internet chats 
from 1997 catalogued 

in this great aether? 
I may loom over 
the pickled Land of dreams, 

where all we have now 
are dreamers, who draw 
with delicate fingers lines 

in the soils of their 
souls like a covert military 
incursion of introverts 

& ride-or-die chicks 
that undermine the masterminds. 
God, it’s so great to live 

on the post-2012 earth: 
Mayan Predictions gone astray 
like a whistling ladybug, 

but the same pang 
in this beating bulb of mine raw 
like the head of a greyhound, 

& I stop in & say Hello 
to a mother named Mother Nature 
who is a freak of nature 

like vintage Lincecum, vintage 
last-name-dropping as if I’d been 
paid-off. The war has just begun! 

The good guys never lose. 
The good guys are the bad guys 
disguised as good. What is an alpha 

male’s Internet Life like? 
Challenge: if you’re expecting 
a child, disregard the Baby-Name 

Books & simply wait for the next 
“named” tropical storm—relief! 
I’m dressed in America’s 

disappearing act, out of gas, out 
of time, up out of the pinwheel 
saddeningly gorgeous mangled 

atmospheric-precarity into the 
king or queen’s next of kin. 
Haggard hurriedly, unable 

to remember catastrophes, 
readymade girdle, reiterated to 
the she-devil that magic 

dissolves through my head 
like a glass-winged butterfly. 
But windows are made to crack. 

I see into your belly, 
a kingdom cursor of red lights, 
blue lights, a black box, 

a neon sign blinking, a horse 
named Taze Me. I understand now 
every fable you ever told. My bird 

amplifier voice forwarded 
through ensuing gag reflex 
premonitions & the weight 

of underwater virtual realities.
The Vagus Nerve proves my head’s on 
straight. I rise to view the sunrise 

misfire on areas sunbeams usually hit. 
This seems to spook the flowers. 
I stretch, hearing my backbone’s 

popping echo in harmoning vocals 
in the adjoining room, deflouring 
future hours. The end 

of incessant snow-scattering 
bonuses of the mortal petals 
of bogusflakes like you & I. 

Is it the wind in the Body 
that’s a wrangled riddle? 
Earthquakes in our veinlets. 

Seasons as personages: 
Spirit, Soul, Body: Aeolus 
has detached my winks. 

April’s a lost painting 
of white unvarying, variables,
like one winter when my 

grandmother lost her dentures.
Later, I found them chattering
in the freezer, looking back at me

in surprise. At that moment,
I expected snowswirling gusts 
to burst through the kitchen windows

& clamp upon my belly 
that perennially flip-flops 
like a fish out of water. 

MISSING

Time is too fat for the Olympics
so a blowtorch lights my way 
while Social Media onslaught
pumps toxins thru my speech bubble ellipses.

My mother tells me that she is always
depressed on Sundays. I didn’t grow up 
with a Father, so my emotional problems 
are like bizarre exit music on albums. 

Warning: The recent propagandists for 
Poetry would disappear if theater 
reversed its scientism & came of age 
like a French proverb dug out of a book

that announces the coming of the 
Age of Unfairness. I sacrificed myself 
on top of the Georgia Guidestones: 
that bloody-looking spot isn't blood. 

It’s a post-Romantic vomit spot. 
This is as morose as I’m going to get 
because I’m not trying to rectify 
telephoning you every half-hour

for contending with my own introverdness, 
& will this severe drought peel itself off 
like waxy skin & sling sodas at these
summertime blues? Oh, this muddy water 

I’m in. I’m in the art-for-the-artist crowd, 
tracking down precincts, spying in a 
see-through door; I’m a drawn curtain 
that you paint while you multiply yourself 

justifactorily to subsequently become 
as aloof as everyone else with disorders. 
We’re all borderlines. On the verge 
of something. Layers of this. Layers of that. 

Numbers not quite numbers that appear 
in other forms; their rivals’ squelching, 
too pleased to believe how one’s sins will play 
catch-up. The butterflies are gone; you’re 

no longer enthusiastic about my existence
& are you still attracted to the same sex? 
I watched as you eyed attractive women
the way that I stared at the lizard crawling up 

& down your parents’ curtains in the 
living room while we watched The Count 
of Monte Cristo. Am I still irritating, or
have I become merely semi-annoying? 

My attraction is like a scientific invention 
gone wrong; my sexiness is sagging shallowly
in your Physiognomy Treatise. Oh well, 
I’ll just become a seer, banging these 

same ol’ drums with the hands of Orlac. 
Have you ever noticed that there’s something about
Yesterday that’s always unique to today’s calling?
I want to be told the truth, harshly, confronted

to the face like the Apostle Paul to Peter. 
I come with a rod or a magic wand (two sides of). 
Can you grasp the fact that my
skinny-dipping skin is like hopscotch 

in the rain: the chalk-lines are invisible, like 
your sassy silence, dystopic like a ripped flag
clutched by the hands of a dead General’s daughter. 

POEM

       Inside of every clock

Death shakes like chrysalides

       with every tick.

       My heart is like a painted snowflake 

in the middle of summer
       & gradually the sky climbs into Autumn

       while Winter is an avenue away
& in Winter,  I watch
       as birds ice-skate upon the frozen sky. 

       Each of our souls are Music Boxes
full of singing memories.  We are
       all capable of being pearls

so that even the oyster is aware
           of the dialects of our hearts.

EMPTY SUITS

Empty suits sporting silk ties
with no eyes. War criminals
winning Nobel Peace Prizes

licking their chops,
ice-cream & french fries.
Little Lies enlarged

when outcries
from the Black Community
is like a high-rise alert.

Mishearing words like
Jehovah Wickedness
banging on my door

saved from the “deathly trance
of materialism” dogging
all of our heels.

“Ding, Dong and Ditch”
is one way
to spook the spooky.

Death rides on a carousel
circling                         
         circling       
                    circling.

POEM

We’re all wearing scarlet letters upon our breasts
as intense as the counterpoise, the burn of watered-down
joy to punish thoughts by acting on their distinctions.

Out of the Maelstrom, I put a rope around the wind
as I ride upon the Euroclydon like an idea on an eyelid.
The rain pours like a woman’s fountain, flood, frond. 

And because I’m a Cyclops with Second Sight, and 
because the slowly sinking sun is slipping into my skull
through an invisible tube made of wormhole residue,

each day seems to have been poured out of some cauldron 
of molten metals from the sky; the unrelenting visuals,
congealed and in longing, are mere abstract patinas 

while we “made do” and wasps bounce upon the air like 
invisible properties, and a calico cat standing on a 
speed bump stares at me, or through me, while my spirit, 

like an eagle, glides above some horizon like the Yukon, 
the way that my body disappears from the bed when sleeping: 
a kind of Possible Elsewhere, a Periodic Table of Dubious 

Apprehensions. I am the Majestic Plural of the Hypocatastasis 
still frolicking in your ancient daydream’s garden 
with Spring’s regalia choking me through this revelation; 

the daffodils are sipping my coffee in exchange for visual 
photosynthesis. My body is groaning for resurrection. 
I’m eating the flaming torch that stings sweetly

flapping in my brain like the shape of my tongue wrung out.