An "FS" truck was in the lot this morning.
My dad worked for that company
Who would remember all the striving,
and stress, the importance of everything,
Who could sincerely thank him for
all those hours, spent.
I don't even really know what he did.
I just remember him sitting behind a desk,
smoking.

The Smithsonian has been posting
portraits of artists.
The names are not familiar.
They are posed self-importantly
spotlit in blackness, in forests,
in a cluttered studio.
And all that is left of them are
a couple of paintings,
in storage,
never to be seen again,
in a big museum.



I need to work on some language and line breaks in this thing.

THIS MORNING

Into my car this morning
Looked out through the cracked
dew covered windshield
The light pouring over and into the cracks
looking for life
I was listening to
"Concering the UFO Sighting
Near Highland, Illinois",
Out onto University Avenue
The few cars plunging into nothing
speeding to god knows where
Everyone was dead
or at least half a corpse
Caseys for caffeine to
bring me back to life
Stubbly men, disheveled women
and those who were extra careful
(who did they think they impressed?)
Migrant workers buying pizza (at 7 a.m?)
coffee, every kind of jarring
chemical conglomerate,
beer, nicotine, candy, jerky.
I got back into the car
and drove off back into
the light.

Desiring to construct a history in material I imagine a drill, flexible but hard as diamond, injecting itself into the earth, passing through layers if igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock, into ancient coalbeds and caches of tin and copper. A sensing tube, like those that doctors place into the body for a glance more private than one might like, would be inserted. Into this shaft it would slide, past the petrified droppings of Australopithecus, lost in some ancient Olduvai, and nearby, the shattered bones of Eohippus, unable to support the weight of so large a rider, would lie, awaiting just this moment.

Everything is me, in reverie, Ad.
My broken glance, broken glasses, broken glass.
Parts of many limbs, idle, indulgent visions reel in,
cross the mind, can't travel to the hand.
She isn't broken, that black trap, that out-post of orange.
What on earth goes on apart from what's underneath it all?

Limbs stiffen. The sky is leaden. You'd like another?
The earth has closed in. Here, the sluggish strokes, the darkness.
This place is a grudge. Leave it. Let it burn, leavened.

Come in like hope. The connecting circle gives fragrance.
Landscapes shiver. A thick neck forest arrives,
underground, maybe underwater.

Large lepidoptera. Less that burning felt singeing you, than melting me.
But I'm not mad, no, though the tree is madder red.
English moors under God in March are cold.
Less me singing to you without darkness than above the darkness.
But we are above the poles. The poles are above darkness.
We are above, without darkness. We are above the Poles.

A brow is steep. Its slackjawed distance spreads green.

Burst of damp green. Node below a crystal.
A clear conical crystal. A pink-tinged clear conical crystal.
A cloud of cream creased onto a crevice!

A crystal on my person. An evening, tonight the sky monochrome gray.
Later, a pink traced aureole on the horizon.

I've known a monochrome end. The monkey stole cloth.
Naughty Monkey! Sew shut the hole and trap them up.
Mended madder trees, bronzed stone bushes, gray,
monochrome, monster home.
You won't want to be me after me when I get through.

Imagine being drawn to a hole, hovering over, and then entering, the walls not touching your body at any point.See that you are completely free (What is freedom?), from gravity, from any earthly constraint (In which realms can constraint flourish?). You float, move without impediment (When is an impediment not an impediment?). Now imagine that some took this for a physical, rather than psychic reality (What is the difference?) and rode you out of town on a rail. How would you feel?

Imagine being drawn to a hole, hovering over, and then entering, the walls not touching your body at any point. See that you are completely free, from gravity, from any earthly constraint. You float, move without impediment. Now imagine that some took this for a physical, rather than psychic reality and rode you out of town on a rail. How would you feel?

Out
the Peace
he found
an earthly
outcropping.
Out a piece
then you find
an earthly
outcropping,
a dugout
of the day.
Dog-bite moons
avoid night;
dark dastard
meteors staunch
carbonized canticles.
Gaze, reticent
void, onto
barren speckles
of light. Under
you straining
bodies falter,
lay in mercy to
forty-eight
orders of law.
A dark and
complex
clumsiness,
out of which
you define a
single cluster,
rules behavior.
The weakness
spreads over
the bare skin
of her fictions.
She begins
visible,
so that
it defines
many but
ends with
and without any,
a tabula rasa.

Many mouths of water;
the distant fictions.
The pawn of Americans;
the retribution of slavery.
Rent expanses
whose congealing we are not.

A smattering of clacking,
chattering inner deaths,
those care-worn,
cumbersome clods,
ungainly, unattached.

A breccia
of multifarious singing over
singed and black-rotten tomes;
pocked moon under frontal lobe;
appropriated sea;
wind-worn moss
and flaccid doubt.

Old Pine outside a shattered oak
Old oak inside a holy pine.

Unexpected end.
To listen toward that
but to sense away from it.
Copy of the near-nether
overpainting the same story.

Sink, peasants, shaking and pirouetting.
Purple beggars in Fall's tree-lined
poorhouse! Hermits of October in
cold speckles on tin snips
sinking, smashing out gullies of
fierce touch (more than a
touch, a crippling slap), drawing
in earth to solar plexus.
I have seen the leaves,
the slippery bark of nonsense!
A poltergeist in dirt's haven.
Challenge me! I will not
falter within black scowling eyes,
dancing on God's floppy bonnet.

FLESH-MAP

THE FOOT
Under the nail, a sliver, slowly working its way to the surface; never arriving.
Or maybe a constant rock set upon (if only it could garner that attention; or desired it); setting upon. A pincer. A prancer, twiddling; proclaiming freedom but yet held down. Pain is a boundary; a wall, isn't it.
THE HAND
Under the thumb; as was proclaimed. The holder of an intelligence of which the head can dream. In a hierarchy; all castes the hand would rule, except it lacks vision(no cone no future). Would it have had it, would it have taken its own sly life? The right appendage (and eye) nary knows what the left ( Oh sinister limb) does do.
THE MOUTH
Under the tongue, heat; a burning ache buried under the flesh. A guttural stain parading deep in the throat. Is it a fluke? Is it a fluke that I have eaten, will eat, will spit, will shout, will proclaim and place limits that I cannot respect? Where are the limits of will and work? From whence in the warp and weft of words comes satisfaction?
THE HEAD
Under the stone bowl. The seat of thought? The hand and knee have a logic dependent on place in space. The head may make a map but cannot travel it; cannot know that territory. The body proclaims (desperately) its will to connect not as slave to master but equal partner. It is from experience that I say that the walnut in the brain-cage, soft, cannot know of the slap of the muscle and bone against rollicking earth. It is a traveler in other realms (Don't court extremes!. It does know by association.).
THE WHOLE
Rare and lovely. The head turns balloony and floats and everything is just the big ONE. We are stranded with a foot buried or maybe just convinced it anchors firmament. The moment awakens and it feels! The bare foot tickled by dewy grass; cool, the dampness leaving its life's blood; the lake's agar; the sea's gift; no senseless clamoring after.

Membranous stink;
a jellyfish underground.
Hell's humus feeding tubers.
Sky drew down Robin's egg hue
fringed with meringue traceries.
Under the ground texture like
tiny brains. Lymph, grainy
rubbery waste, dirt.
Stuck in my thumb,
probing. Yielding and leathery,
odor lovely, stink like sex
with excreta cohabitating.
A plea for a new template
for this world. Jean, Robin,
the two Norms.

My failure to focus
is driving me mad! Invisible
particles form a constellation
about my head. These stick to
bushes and trees like latex and
leave me with less than ever.
You elemental devils, please, dash
my blubbery and mastic hopes.
Prove the Gods can exist
agog and away. Rocks can smash
brains to dollops but I
would place my soul when
it rushes out with a
grand stink into you, honey-goddess.
You with all your frantic
trembling, trying to attach something
to make sense of sticky,
sickly trees in fog, and
great lycanthrope goats, and my
lissome pelting and meandering.
I'm driving you mad and away.
Good-bye.

The Cold
1.I thought that it would be glassy and dry (sometimes it is) but today it was my plant, forgotten near the window.
2.I thought that cold was cold because of the concentration of white. Then I saw the deep black, maybe indigo, and knew that complexity reigned. Atoms slow they don't stop.
3. An adamantine flush.
4. Speckled, but with an even less inviting pallor.
5. Glassine, clouded. Frost, the window, how has the internal atomic structure altered?
6. Brittle, yet if I were to break it, heat would flow out and dissipate. In this bleak world the break would simply reveal the next, even colder, and more brittle, layer.
7. A smell that is smell denied. A mineral bully. The sensation that olfactory nerves have shut down; pressed by steel. Expanding sharply and obliterating.
8. Hard yet bulbous and rich. It is anti-richness.
9. It burns and the ache takes hold of your skull. No. It becomes your skull. It is a layer between your innermost inside and your outermost outside.
10. The wet crystals burning and sticking to skin. Understanding of crystalline structure is of no use now!
11. The cotton stiff, like leather. Not quite. Able to bend at hard angles.
12. The air that only moves into my nose. It is glass, except at this point. Stillness but at a points where organic organizations chaotically splay into realms of mineral discipline. Yes, frigidity is mineral.
13. A taste that is pain. The stickiness is a cold ache that runs deep in the throat and the tongue flames up needing every resource.
14. Hands are stiff claws. Pink and white delta. Run dry in blurred fissures.
15. I could forget that I generate heat.

FOUR IMAGINATIONS

1. Imagine French rocket scientists inhabit your town. They speak only Romany and reek of fortified reds and cheap cigarillos. See that they are not leaving and would prefer you, to speak euphemistically, out of the picture. Now imagine, to top that off, that your 1949 Packard refuses to start. How would you feel?

2. Imagine Elvis Presley in Bosnia. He does not carry a rifle and eats peyote while crying out for visions. See that he is without a care, despite the carnage around him. He leaps, cajoles, and sings, without fear of snipers. Now imagine that the King beats a tempo on the side of a tank while you try to catch an hour of fitful sleep. How would you feel?

3. Imagine lengthy discussions of sexual healing, white grape juice, and tuberculosis. Your support-group decides that you shall be the next sacrifice to the Egyptian goddess Nuit. They lead you to a winged coffin. You are pleased to be of assistance. Now imagine that the Governor grants you a stay of execution as the firing squad raises its rifles. How would you feel?

4. Imagine that professional bowlers are above the law. They are very strong and hurl bushels of grain needlessly at passers-by. Without shame their progeny nest in redwoods and eat feces and slugs. Despite this, many fall on their swords and fill deep ditches with gore. Now, imagine that loggers want to fell the trees. How would you feel?