Ur

The weight of these bodies,
of this isolation: the cavern
it cuts out of my skull--fragile
and dull and mulled
with red wine--
is actually
made of sugar
stung by your blood and understudied
in some urgency
for the role of a lifetime.

I suffocate
from both pleasure and regret;
East of the divide
the wind
is our forgetting.

These years, too,
have stretched expansively
We are yawning. We are
composed of contradictions;
we exhale.  We might (one day)
suffocate were it not
for yoga and our fear
of death and the utter
unforgivable endlessness
from which the planet
has somehow managed
to conjure up the plains..

The hapless gravity
that holds it all together
is made too much
of anticipation:
the beating of a heart,
and of another, of two heard U
at a distance,
down hallways.
 
That will remain
wordless...

The weight of these things,
of bodies---both celestial
and those made of flesh--
will here lie scattered as if
some act of terrorism
has torn us from bed and breakfast
nook, bleeding
and needing no explanations,
expecting none.

On the Space between Snow Flakes Falling on a Late Afternoon in Early January

there was
December...

Blue light
your pink tongue
emerges, darting out
of the fog
of the breath
of this breathless
adoration.  You are a child
and this creation--
this marvel,
this amusement--
this World is more
than could be imagined
even by God.  See how
these bodies, suspended
by light--these shimmering
angles, these timid angels--
are stirred.

In the sky's grey
cauldron, it doesn't matter,
it doesn't "signify"
whether or not
this one is really
the same one you chose
out of all of those snowflakes
some demigod has shaken
loose from the tree
of that gelid heaven.

They come
humming or dumb
down in downy
liberty, alight on the breezes:
But the storm's playful pitch--
the itch, the hurl,
the roll could not prevent
yet another suicide
another brother
cauterized (or vaporized)
on the stiff tip
of an eight year old's
tongue.

Remember?

The generations of snow-
flakes make everything
look (in it by distraction
or scrutiny) the same.  Uniform,
white and wrinkled.
There is no use
for reincarnation.
Some kind of science
might be merely faith
in the preservation
of matter, a fact
that will not be lost
on you.  Or, in time,
on anyone.

Embers...

From smoke
and mirrors
retrieve me.
There is no solace,
no consolation.  I know.
In superstition and myth,
we might invent--
out of the expanding
amplitude of our fears--
beasts and burden
some categories.
And this must be
the vernacular of some
tenuously defined
"hope":

Concupiscence, contrition,
atonement, salvation
or a guardian
angel, her scentless candle
unnoticed against
the pungencyof our own
unconfessable
sins.

The rhetoric is thin
like the air here;
the agitated theology is
loathsome and naive.
All these words,
fumbled by our fingerprints,
and jumbled in the iris
of our claustrophobic eyes,
record nothing
save for questions
impossible (yet essential)
to the fabric of
our delusions.

But what we do know,
(more or less) is that
each discrete mandala,
steeped in its recombinance
along with
every accidental
piece of perfection--
pulled with weaving spyrograph
mechanical flowers, specimens
impatient and strange--
somehow come to populate
the barren possibility proposed
by the shivering white
of the arctic page.

You see more,
than all fifteen billion
renditions of God's
icy eye.  And every snowflake,
dancing,
falls from nothingness
infused
with miraculous individuation.

Only to disMember, someday
melt...

But just so
you don't forget:
Without language,
with only light
and water, each snowflake
knows the gravity
of it's uniqueness
yet spins,
a grinning dervish--
a grace
that traces the fall
but wants for only
the soft nothingness
that lies...

         between pillowed feathers,
and the waters give,
between stars and galaxies
and universes
stretching to contain,
between tones
on the maestro's ledger,
between notes choking
in bassoon and throat
between the bodies
of honest lovers
between the words that create
the lies.

siZe Queen

This virile monster

rises--

with telescoping neck

and faceted eye--

on some island,

beside you.

Above you

some shape, some shapeless

animal, some name

is choked on

just before

you know you have 

to realize how 

futile the scream.  

The moan is only 

you pretending,

muffling some pleasure,

suffering

some failures under

the breath held

by your always

expecting the worst,

you always are

wanting more.

Even after more

tore you

a new asshole.

school DAZE

In the spring, in those first creeping days it is always March that unravels. The tangle of winds (cool and warm, still cooler and cooler still)  in their confusion buffet us impatiently from home to school, and perhaps back again, perhaps...  But "home," has already become a far place.  It will forever be that impossible idea that we each in turn will struggle to resuscitate, anxiously smoking cigarettes with the onlookers while we wait for our turn.  But that is later, much later.  A long time ago...

Now.

Our coats are obstinate sails that threaten to carry us anywhere but back, back to each idea, each sacred private image each personal assemblage of "home," the street that we play on, the nearest church or burger joint, the "father," the "mother," the child that we imagine ourselves to be.  In dreams, our heads are almost severed by scandal or revolution rolling, rolling, then hovering for that elongated minute a half inch above the desk's laminated pine.  My unnaturally large forehead is falling forw...

Before the crack, before the bob--head down, body up--the nervous bell unleashes its jangling laughter.  It marks the end of the day.

Next morning, our green and yellow windbreakers are the only sign of vegetation.  The matted hair of winter, the jaundiced lawn, is watched over by the skeletons:  chestnuts that contain no fortune cookie promise along side of wizened oak and sickly elm.  My sister's blue poncho is our only memory we have of the sky.  

MaNGoD

When did I become
a man?  When
did I fall?  I am
face down in feathers--
the smell of you--                                                          
and yet
the bed is empty.

No music plays.
No lepers dance, no thieves
descend to make amends
with lovers.  Stolen
hearts are still
the currency of Jesus
in there late hours...

There will be
no death bed conversions.
There will be
no last vestige left
of hope.  There will be
only the disconsolate
salvation
of this mortality.
                                    
Once you had
unraveled fingers, unfolded knees
and stumbled somehow
back to your feet
you kept repeating,
you kept                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          saying the prayer...

Your tongue,
in reverent whisper,
evoked the mystic monkey/
God that you created
that you called
Mango D.

Belief is so easy
for you.  Faith
is nothing.  More
than my beatification
I miss the piss
and vinegar
on your lips, the irreverent
reflection of me
on the viscous memory
of your brown eyes.

I am/I was
once Mango D
and I was/
I am angry to see
you sleeping.  Those mirrors
now shuttered, your mouth
still ringed with the drying
glaze,
cum from
these supplications.

Your mouth in yawning
open.  Your butt is clenched
tight.  You who are
bored by my stories,
immune to my wiles.
You are--
in my bed--
disinterested; worse
you are tired.

Brief but amorous,
devoutly riddled
with heresy and doubt,
this religion you founded--
this sect, this cult--
appealed to my vanity
and sat on on my desk.
But it made such a mess
of everything...

that came after.

AMnesIa: NOT THE PEBBLE?

To love this pain untainted by the masochism of the martyr, I might (instead) draw broad circles of expanded poignancy that like the pebble in the pond--neither sentimental nor gratuitous--enclose my soul in the potency of this moment, this life, my power to effect, to touch, to change, to move...  

But, invariably, I shake my head.  I am uncertain of this trajectory.  Everybody knows this, sees it in me; they see it in themselves in the two tiny pictures of fear and regret that are mirrored back from the curved black horizon of my (truant) pupils, my eyes.  

I will forget more than most of them will ever learn.  I have already forgotten most that I was taught.  And yet...

And yet  it is impossible for me to let go of, lose, lessen the original scar of knowledge  I ascribe the accidental knowledge a reverence and primacy that might suggest I suffer that delusion,  "All of these things were whispered directly in my ear on the breath and voice of God.  

These things (ideas, philosophies, these notions that) I stumbled on still matter.  The enlightenment I bought myself from my meanderings in libraries, my conversations in bars,  my drunken late-night readings, my sober morning thoughts, have patched my oft deflated soul, or sutured up the wormholes in my heart. We are nothing, less than cold stones, less conscious, of less purpose (unto ds ourselves) perhaps, but more consequence that we care to confess (to ourselves).  

I struggle with the guilt, that blame and blam and glamorous pain of the intersection.  I do not like the lazy equating of influence with responsibility.  We make too little of the water, its stillness, its patient mutability, our reflections as we fall out of the sky.  We tumble from the heaven of our mother's security, our father's love, and drop, glazed with sunlight, our golden youth, head first into the bursting surface, the exuberance of our beings before and after what is now.  

gestURes

Without thought, without knowledge or consideration, without choice, his two shimmering hands slipped from the pockets of his navy blue slacks.  They began to rise automatically, as if they were angels, as if they were made of light and air.  They were still cold from the waiting and from the walk to the grave.  But without a thought to the icy knife that the wind here always seems to hold , his hands escaped their mid-march burrows and--forming themselves into loosely held fists--floated effortlessly up to the mid-point of his torso.  There, like creatures from the deep achieving the surface, each rolled on its back and as his fingers unfolded slowly revealing the geography of his open palms…

Then, quietly, they sunk back into the murky world down below.                                                         

The gesture was something that Milo had learned when he was very young.  It was second nature to him now.  And over the years he had become a student of the nuance of its use and its graceful placement in relation to the most poignant moments of being.  In funerals, farewells, moments of loss and moments of elation, births and weddings, even (sometimes) in the after-throes of sex or battle, this subtle lift of hands and letting go was the perfect punctuation.  It was always better in such situations that would only be ruined by resorting to the insufficient, often worn-out words. 

It said so much that could not be said.   It was--like certain glances, some kisses, most every form of dance--approaching the impossibility of words, the approximations of feelings, the limits of language in the face of the limitless meanings.  It was an acknowledgment of the rift between two feeling hearts, two aching souls.  

It could in fact be said that the gesture itself had become a word, a voiceless simplicity of syllables, a complexity of feeling filtered not through dictionaries or media but through its repetitions in real lives.  Here in this country that in its creeping isolation was finding a new tongue, this soft gesture--hands rising and then releasing finger by finger the burden of this world—was (perhaps) the beginning of a new vocabulary.  

Easily, without a striving for and yet with an inherent grace, the gesture was echoed by others beside him, across from him, at the edges and the center of the circle.  Silent voices were claiming something, standing in humble defiance, acknowledging their ancestry.  And before his father—the old man, the wise man—could be dropped into the muttering pit, none could imagine that his stiff fingers were not prepared to join them, float forward and slowly re-open, like flowers, like bursting stars.  The casket lowered into the ground seemed to echo this choreography.  His father sunk into the grave easily, in the cradling hands of this agnostic's shrug.

RoAD tRIP

The night, the highway, is untangling my hair.  Seventy-five miles-per-hour, and still the sunrise is gaining.  On their deflated tires, the clouds race across the plains.   The distant terminus of the valley is where they congregate.  Angels are but refugees.

From this world.

Despair sits in the air, the thickening vapor.  The heat of the coming day is only the heat of the day just passed beginning to boil in the bright beams of my headlights.  July is always looking for something that was lost in the kiddie pool in the shadeless yard of the farmhouse that I remember best when I call it simply, "home."  Every memory is squared against a handful of facts.  Distance, like time, stretches almost exponentially:  until the day the elastic of the mind snaps back.  Whole universes contract as violently, and change everything.

And change nothing, I mean.

My sadness is sometimes warm enough to flood the sheets with perspiration.  On those nights, when I sleep on sagging mattresses in shambled accommodations named in failing neon:  MO----- BI-- SKY,  --GO- -HEEL IN--, RAN----O --ALIEN---- MOTE----.  We are all aliens, nobody is born here.  Not on this desolate ranch.   

By the time I have gassed the car, the sun has spun me in a web of dampened cotton.  I sweat therefore I am.  Impatient for the reprieve of fall and anxious for winter's wicked challenge, I have been running the air conditioner.  It pumps shapeless ghosts into the Cadillac.  Despair is suffocating.  Outside.  But distilled into its manageable contours of these leather seats, all is forgiven.  "They really do seem to know my body," I am thinking.  "Knowing is different than thinking,"  I remind myself.  And the GPS is tracking me, making sure I know a hundred ways to traverse the desert.  

Knowledge used to be a polite way to register the sins.  Imagine giggling at the text of the Bible at the age of eight.  This is a strange kind of pornography.  And the boys from Gideon don't get out here much.  So I left two issues of Honcho in the night stand.  The overworked/lazy maid will never look in there.  The pages still stuck together by the humidity and the spilled soda.

POP.

Every ejaculation is an epiphany.  Door to door and word in hand, you can trace this road trip by the magazines that mark the nights, and the berm between the highways where my piss is fizzing like hops and yeast treated to the long day of sun.  In night's cover, a lazy revolutionary, I hurl these half-hearted Molotov cocktails out the open windows.  The darkened air, cooling, creates a kind of vacuum.  I dispose of my regrets and urgency at 90 miles an hour.