poetry notebook

Sharp night on a body
my moon in the sheer night
the body in a clear moon
with brown buildings in white light
my red brick in a moon
from a glass sky in the stillness
with a blue blackness
the closeness
my sight in a body
a moon in the window
on a few walkers
with the cold street
a crisp jet nightness with disc
white on a sidewalk
with night in twelve streetlights
the moon in my night
a night with my moon
a moon in the night
through a body

A fuse burned in your sperm thrust into your sister
Who whelped me; a flaw shunted to flesh become man.

While nursing dementia with drug, fracture, and hunger,
I swilled a bleating rapture from your blood.

As your rancor corrodes me with smoke, blindness, and indigence,
Theology dishes me up as your neophyte nephew and son.

The night was calm and warm, yet patched with cool,
So that the willow boughs along the stream
Shone with drops that dusk had laid upon their leaves.

A gentle breeze pressed down upon the prairie grass,
There was a song between them;
Crickets rubbed their legs and marked off time,
While fireflies went in and out beneath the boughs.

Disappointed, stripped of strength and will,
Shut out from my country’s commerce
Because I chose a path it will not chart,
I went down to this stream to feel my senses
Interact with water, wood, and moon;
To breathe untroubled air,
To reaffirm my place among the world,
If not the world of man.

I sat upon a bank amid the boughs,
Sank my feet into the mud,
Which brought the water to my knees.
My body pressed into the earth,
Electric in the coil of earthen sex.

She came to me then,
First a shadow, then a light,
Opaque, unearthly suspiration
Humming between leaf-points,
Faint robes draped upon the breeze,
Filling up and dropping down,
As she slipped in close upon me.

There grew between us ferns and orchids
Which pressed to tender marks upon our skin,
As we slipped along the curvature of boundaries
We blurred and blurred again
Until the limits vanished,
And two minds, interconscious,
Bloomed from a single body…
Emerging from a membrane all-fulfilling,
All protecting, quite dissolved,
Longing to press again my mounting sadness
To her charm,
I reached across a canyon steep
And gullied from the rains,
Finding only cool grasses, leaves, and stones;

A distant, mocking laugh was all she left.
Satiety’s not here within this verse,
This outcrop of my outcast, this rusted track,
But, simply, blather of a floundering curse
That’s chanted at your blood, to turn it back
Upon you, to dull it, give it lack
Of lustre as the world moves on and by,
To mar your body, loveless little shack,
To wring a drop of moisture from your eye,
That vinegars my thirst, and always stays so dry.

Yet my secrets, Liebchen,
Are not those things I’ve done,
But these, that I have thought and felt.

Thy light folds thrice about me,
Whirling,
Thy vacuum light folds around me,
At tangents of a shifting limit,
Refracting in crystal umbrage
Near wave froth on a stony beach
Where bonfires pit themselves against the night.
Thy light wraps thrice and drags me up
With rising of a flogged log’s sparks
To a fleshless, thin-aired altitude
I cannot apprehend;

That’s right, I come from down the road a piece,
A steep and pitted road, the one I’ve crawled,
With eyes half-focused on the surface grease,
With hands and knees on sand and gravel mauled
I left a California mansion called despair,
The blood-lair of a seething soul
That scorched my sight with arid light: appalled
Apparition I was, tragic and droll,
And this, my dear, should you cross that bridge, will be thy toll:

To shake alone and sterile,
On a cold bed chipped in slate,
To feel the world a monolith,
Crushing without hate:

No satisfaction comes from this retreat,
But rather, smaller fears unhinge the heart,
Which, amid the fierce battle, beat
No drum could cause an eye or hand to dart
Out of its path – the little things that chart
Depravity in every patch of life.
There defeat is replete in every part:
What will of man can crush this petty strife,
That leaves the self a crater
In a jungle mine-field,
Where infested pools collect
And stagnate in the heat?

Sun hits cloud and jet-wing,
Not yet the land below …
Crimson in sunrise:
There it is again:
The blood-fed fruits are ripe,
The flies buzz fat and sated,
Their wings not strong enough to lift them.

A night dense with longing,
Dilated with unfed desire -
Must its fever and its torment
Also slake the breaking day ?

Must what I love be sacrificed
To blood-rot and abstraction?

We are a tribe without a country,
Without border, without name,
Scattered by a bloodless, faceless enemy
Whose smiling figureheads play saintly father roles.

Our blood loves what is bitter,
We cherish severity,
We’ve torn our gods from a dark and spiteful night,
To shield us from a glowing tungsten god,
For which we risk extinction
In a world that hates the mind,
That worships at a televiewing altar
Like a half-blind slave
Who knows but two dimensions,
Who fears the third dimension
As a call into the grave.

Morning, multiplex loam blooming in round billows awash through space;
Phæton tiding in cool dawn; as his wave broadens its surge, its deep
Basin widens, whose id waters the earth; foaming, its parts dispersed,
Colloid, geysering heat, jetting a blue tint through the black of night
Deepens color with birth, labors in gloom brightness decays the cold.
Fibers gel in the flux, aspens arise, trembling where red-tailed hawks
Forage, buoyed by their broad wings in the swells, splashing their tails in fire.

In these waters at dawn we embraced,
In the brine of a body of light we entwined,
Enshrined in a trace of corona we rose
To ignite in the fusion now spraying upon us
From the inconstant might of a sun.

Lucent Gulf-streams extrude axa,
The reins reigning expungtive flame.
Fine, the threads from a mind – taxa
of hooves wild to be loose, became

Sunless, fusing the quarks, quasar
At heel, juke in a lepton haze:
Horse and nuclear child, stray czar
Tossed tracing Apollo’s maze.

Moments.  Moments they lace tracks of
The god, godless they track his course.
Nanoseconds unhinge shock-shove of
Reigns slipped from his hands, the force

Throws them wide of the mark, National Beaks, talons in liver, black
Bile, unbridled decay breeds in the gut: value ensconced in cash
Price, dismemberment gains points on the slut-glutting investment floors;
Coeval body counts keep factories going solvent: “we feel we must
Cut some funds from the schools.  Nuclear bombs must be produced, our well

Fare depends on this choice.”  Phæton is pressed, frightened and tossed. The earth
Ages quickly in fire, weeps (can you hear?), prays for a moment’s rest.
Phæton grips, and is gripped; captures, is caught; falters, is pithed in flight.
Lightening stifles him.  Hands fuse to his eyes, knees to his chin his blood
Powders, sweated by cleaved bone-pop of heat, drifts in a fore-noon dusk.

When the sea falters in motion,
Salt, seaweed, ambling crab, gull,
Stark-naked man, under sun, sear,
and their lives suddenly charcoal;

When the flash beckons our eyes – blinds:
When the flare is shot forth at us,
When the heat-suffused crimson dusk
Is a broad roaring of new light,

Then shall we weep blood from our eyes,
Burn as we bleed, our stark shadows
Fusing with concrete, steel; melted
Glass in our pores, dust from our bones.

Übermenschward we press atoms
Like grapes, wine of such fusion sheathe
In long bottles.  Their pressured corks burst
Skyward to steal light from the rightful sun.

Death-ward we press our might, hopeless,
Cantering fools, bastarding birth,
Bandy the life given to live,
The life never given to live again.