The Groceries

What will we do with the groceries?
It is night, tonight’s the night:
the last night of our house.
The kids like pasta twice a week,
and we did for the thousandth time
and then this night for the third
in a row, have that. And then it
was movie night, for the last
time family movie night
on this purple couch with that
yellow starred green blanket and
the love to slumber under
after a bowl of popcorn,
sleeping into the epilogue.
You were already gone to sleep,
as you do. When did that start?
It must have been a night
like tonight. Maybe that night
was the last night, maybe
it was the first new moon.
To bed I carried the kids, but then
had to sleep on their floor,
as always. Friday was ghost stories
at camp, again. They believed
something would come back
from the dead to steal them
in their sleep. But now they are
sleeping. I know the sound, its
always there, your sound,
as if you were a baby,
I was here when you were a baby
and all it took was shhh and holding
you close to my heart. Then the ghosts
dissappear. Will they tomorrow?
Only for my baby, but
not for my darling.

This Digital World

War runs across my life-
from the deserts of Vietnam
and the meadows of Death Valley
to the drugs the surgeon
took to get off before
before he operates tonight.

I miss you, and me.
That's easy, so I confuse things,
elaborate, artificialize
nothing more than the curve
and shape of visible light
on desire's skin.

This digital world
lingers
and does not bring
us closer together.

There are images of bodies
in my hand, in every hand
across the Earth and Space
and back to my birth
in a river in Vietnam
for I wasn't born where my mother said,
she was drugged, the hole I came out of
was not even my father's heart
but his brother or his cousin
or the shame-son thrown through
the hooker glass and foster class
the one whose all adrenal
by the third grade and looking
to numb the knees with pearl pellets,
kids who work, floating in famine ribs,
whichever one made the wall
with a bullet to his own brain-

I mean the one's born to death-
cold rain raising their multiple surfaces
tiny hairs, tiny ridges on nipples
crevasses, curves, shadows leading down
into irregular holes
they're our bodies
in this digital world, they are ours
by a touch of glass, by the ether
we breathe, in interring the entertainment
of their death.

This war lingers in a country
addicted to heroes, everyone a hero.
Patches on their skin, the diminished
heroism of a sick nation, for there is no honesty
before a burning gasoline corpse
gang raped and smoldering,
only a cry that all the others
must be heroes. Must be heroes I see.

I see with a camera through the pinhole,
my mustard seed, the puberty of the digital earth
making war sculptures with the vacuumed dust
falling off our human footprints.
I see the lingering jar, leftover hearts,
meat drugged to numbness,
pet to desire, satisfied and sleeping
knowing the bleeding mouth is down river
and if they want authenticity
they can wear the war on their skin
and by the safest edge through an advertisement
leave the death to the dead, selling indeed
and walk on the sex sore gasoline dress, meat separated from bone,
was only that, some deed sort of sordid, the sum of
breaking entertainment news meant for the head.

This digital world lays down in me,
for I have trouble separating,
its a shy heart that is not shy
but built with hurt, a day when love did not matter.
We've built enough of these kids
to feed the earth forever.

I need my body,
my heartless body,
to have its light escape,
poured onto you.
I only see
my self with the help
of telescopes.
Every love song
reminds me Spring is mostly precept,
do not confuse my ideas with your love songs-
do not confuse yourself, my love songs are:
a rainy night, the wind and the sound of tires
that crush of noise shattering inside the right ear
and bouncing quiltedly around your gaps,
every sad song
reminds me of a question: When will this end?

We are torn apart, by ourselves and more than
slightly separated, beyond repair,
its what marriage becomes when its reduced
to a carriage of arrangements, but we are torn
and it was all from the war,
the war I was born into,
the way it lingered
by the presence
of conflict, bombs,
some scholar might say
the sweep
of world events;
yet it is back
to the feelings
of distance, the desolation
that you are
not here and may not
be, that causes
an unspoken anguish
I can share with no one, because I never know
who you are. You change with the view,
a line of red corduroy along the edge of a leg
then a curve of hair reading from a page,
the curve of the page, a parabola
of a new sweatshirt zipped, a curve
in a hood, a behind the shoulder one of these,
a lean I lean to see,
more words to hide a feel
I do not know because it landed like the Fleet
and flew away with the evening,

another thing, a distraction, something green
and the thing in itself, this very artifice
of ink where I pretend
this is all so much more than loneliness
in a blended erasure of exhaustion.

And they say this digital world
brings us closer together,
"they", I demand, who? who?
And yet when we talk,
I at night
and you
in the morning,
message by message,
it is only the distance
that is illuminated.
I see these threads
we make
unwinding finally,
back to a river in Vietnam,
a bear, a mountain,
drinking the cold
the rain heavy that built
and overflowed
too close to the mouth.
Sunlight breaks from a horizon
only in my closed eyes-
a memory of hazel-
water desert, brown gold
glass, hair dust
sand, and we just break apart

you're beautiful the way beautiful
is beautiful if its gone.

Somewhere a surgeon is removing
gloves
and even though those hands
were deep in the blood,
they are dry with a pale dust
that ends without ending.

This is the war.

Glazed Looking Glass, Into A Window of Looking Past

We
have broken you
we
brought you in
that Saturday
a night
with August chill
clay
and stardust started
water on the spinning wheel
and we
have broken
your heart
Did we bring you along
only to set you in front
of the grindstone?
No, we thought
we could simply
love you and enough
would be the grasp,
that bubbles reflect
the light coming
in through the exhausted
shades,
that we could resist
the dissipating days

You
did as well as
we could
as good
as we would say
with the fork
and you resisted
and changed hands
and it was good,
you got the fork
You
did what you should
and we
have broken your heart

You held up your hands
and wrapped your arms
as we asked,
you held the ball
and moved to the left
you did everything
and we
changed directions
we
let you play
with remote controls
and then suddenly
there was no television anymore

We have broken your heart
we have taken your smile
and replaced it with a long
thoughtful glaze.
We have set you
on the road to
discipline and madness.
Save your rainbows, push
the callous fingertips
through the knitting
and speak with your own
angels, bring your smile
back from that distant
place the back
of your eyes have retreated
into, bring your mind back.
I can not bear the thought
of bare art, of admitting our divorce
of admitting my part, my part was it,
it watching your heart break
across the kitchen table,
my dear son, falling
as if the Fall now is,
falling apart.

30/30/(9)


What were the ovens?
A miner hands grabbed a pastry at lunch.
The black dust made a dead black space
on the breaded handle. He put his dusty
lips to the crust, his cartwheeling teeth
sank their way into the salted meat.
In five minutes he was done.
In his first five minutes back at work
he dislodged the fragment of coal
that would fire away the lives
and then lifted
his tool across his body
and swiftly dislodged more,
doing so he breathed in dust.

Where everyone makes a sum
On the trail-ways to the body,
the sun rises sideways,
a fire above the pink road.
Where everyone makes a sum
On the system of death,
we become less a people
and more a thing.
What baby born looks
Into its mother’s eyes
And forecloses on its demise?
Who tells a child-we need
You to die, you must protect
Us, you are the seed
To a new life,
a seed we send to die.

Missamari In the Seven Seas


Lost Atoll
We are lost atoll
There are fading fish
But we eat them all
They are rotting,
They are drying
On the salted rocks.

Where we fade and make
Each other as much as fatal
Accidents of fate,
And live as our eyes grow dark,
Live as we let go,
Fading furthur,
End your searches
For our lost atoll.

Waking in the island sun
We drove through
The moon and slept
To last midnight
To see the wake
And rising sun
And feel the warm
Begin to bake and
Begin to shake
The earth off our beach
To feel the fine sand
And our hair,
Kiss your shirt, sleep late.
 
We will fade alone
Among the world,
We will make them late,
We will be late.
Our lost atoll,
We are together.
We will be
Among the world,
We will fade.

Three Muses


Aoide
the debris, the guitar
she left was sleeping,
was gathering, the dust
trailing her sylph with
knife tips and cypress
of pink going by,
the edge of a fracturing
nail was a war
on memory, the
shifting towards
was a foreward,
this morning of sand.

Mneme
easy little paste, blue flies, a sovereignty in our
salvation dispenser, noise wandering up her Persian
landscape;
she is standing in the color of the air, nowhere in everything.
her head is a receptacle, listening to
the endless beach, pieces of sculpted half-lives,
which half is inside the desert sea,
the bare stage?

Melete
Wherever were my welds,
My mounds, my wounds?
It flies under me, your picture,
A war on memory, fatherless day moon;
The night of an American sundown.
Mirrorwalls or time moving forward.
A lineal system of interruptions
Betray our indirect spin, towards
Forewords,
Darkness becoming light,
In the beginning of the epitaph
Everywhere is the face of God.
And when we become blind,
With your body in the past,
With you choreographed finally
Under grass, we put away
Your shoes under looking glass. 

Terpsichore

Sonnet #2


Uneven in exact poetic terms,
We are old liars, our parents bed lice.
Immortal as I myself have done two
Pedestal declines, two and three, princely
Those principles, this point, orbits by this
Head,  between artifice and style; by an
Audition pleased me with wood melting tongue.
Manner method, an old legend of flat
Rounder worm in her anise seed center:
Ceremonies of conium: someone
Said before my feet cut short our words:
Air or breath?

“a cock to Asclepius,” Socrates is dead.
Twelve pieces of skin around the earth.
Sunium to Phasis in Harmonia,
Twelfth piece of skin around the earth.

“Brethren, the pleasure indeed of my heart, and my supplication that is to God for Israel, is -- for salvation”

September 8, 1981: Adelphos, listen! The beast of Revelation is nothing but alcoholic eyes and dead skin. He came from Indiana to Las Vegas with no other purpose than to shit out his last days in a path of paper gold, plastic misery and cheap tar junk. A cream neon cross with Richard Chamberlain eyes sits restless and bound, stumpy bloody palms nestled into the auburn hair of a demon’s chest. Beware brothers, of the concessions and confusions within your desire.

He peels his multiple eyes into his white neck fat. He pulls his blue collar shirt over the alien mass of dried milk. He grunts and walks away with your money.

“We was painted grass, a pack of cigarettes, and you sit there in your fucking piss and shit, you don’t fucking work. If you wanted, the girls’ll get off in the morning, give away a free one on yer’ walk. Run them errands, take yourself down a little bit. Fuck everything you can, you ain’t goin’ nowhere when you come around here. Cat houses and liquor, look around. I suggest a sweet kid walk up Sixth from now own.”

He rises in erasers, playing in the sand, serrated cans, crossing the stoplights with receding acrobatics. The divine have lost interest in keeping track of the little pieces of dust, a pollen womb of eyeless headless flies. Your church basement mouth, a fucking souvenir.

I saw a blind man leading his dog, I saw a blind man leading his dog

Face her in a blue downtown, artificial sodium light,
A brown part of a tooth sticks out of her face,
Asymmetrical lipstick, the smell of wax on
Violated yellow nicotine air, spoken bicycled voice,
A throat smoke sore, caked toad hands, and
Cannibal waste on a
conquered plate, my eluded
elongated medulla and
mechanical fingers sit on necks, come by
bar lights slivering out of the windowed corners,
Grabbing clothes and running games:
Waiting, to go waiting, silence.

Waking nicotine air
Scarboy, I myself have done
Two and three, just
Violet mumbling and humming
And disintegrating.

Ice-covered proverb abandons your pride, sightless gentleman lead a history plague
Down your thighs, and you surmised…red roses to survive.

I saw a blind man leading his dog, I saw a blind man leading his dog

Wood Sugar

When we too parted in blind reflections

Better as ideograms, left out on a thread.
Have you tasted the mild
milk in the red cup, drifting down
your side, always in an Eastern arc?
I put it on my lips
And breathed
A Dog Spring,
collapsing in slivers
of penetrating rain.
We said the letters over again,
Spelling flower and petal strokes.
Your lips I left covered,
And what was left after
We our hour then upon your chest?
The light rain of this day
Only half past,
the violent gray of memory.

I have thoughts that escape me
upon your angular paper thin flesh.
When we two met, it was in,
In warm Easter skin, facing west;
I come to you now, with a prayer upon the mast. 

“Transmitting light but causing sufficient diffusion to prevent perception of distinct images.”

Wood Sugar

Have you tasted the mild
milk in the red cup, drifting down
your side, always in an Eastern arc?
I put it on my lips
And breathed
A Dog Spring,
collapsing in slivers
of penetrating rain.
We said the letters over again,
Spelling flower and petal strokes.
Your lips covered in a thick wax,
And what was left after
Our hour upon your chest?
The light rain of this day
Only half past,
the violet gray memory.

I have thoughts that escape me
upon your angular paper thin flesh.
When we two met in
In warm Easter skin facing west,
I came to you a prayer upon the mast.

The sun rose to a song between our voices.

Sonnet: I saw a blind man leading his dog

Uneven in the exact terms Platonically
We are old lies.
Immortal as I myself have done you on
Pedestal declines you do two and three of
Those principles and this point on
Orbits by this head an artificial style of
An addiction that pleased me on
Manner but not method, an old legend of

Flat or round in the center:
Ceremonies of conium:
Someone said before:
Air or breath?
“a cock to Asclepius,” Socrates is dead.
Twelve pieces of skin around the earth.
Sunium to Phasis in Harmonia,
Twelfth piece of skin around the earth.

Orpheus after the war

Orpheus after the War

was a thought upon the Beach,
A veteran with a dispense and a reach
In to your dress, love is gone.
If there were no war,
Milk would drift down your sorrow,
Lifted from skin graft
And inhaled
Under the dandelion sky.
Our early March was
Evergreen coated in snowflakes,
aching backwards
And arcing sideways,
You moved like glue
On a window screen.
Where can I go now
But to the memory of
Driftwood hands stained
In this comfort of ink?

Goddess, in a psalm kennel of adrenalin.

Water foam shoreline
Inhales the roots of wood,
Your arms,
corpse flowers among
Vibrations: the sound of the ocean.
Lonely din and hum
of memory,
Cold in a crowded waterfront.
Blackbird sky, gasoline eyes,
A city of crowds
And magnetic density,
A shelter for warmth tonight,
soup made of hot dogs
and leftovers.
Homeless and waiting
Kent 1992, the words don't move
for Thanksgiving kindness.

This is Sacred Ground

This is sacred, flooded room empty but for water boards, dry, rubbed with black ink. This is sacred ground, page floors, a book of hours filled with anxiety and despair. This is sage and daisy, disconnected by death from the white world. Noon prayers, this is more than darkness, bearing in around me, where the tree stood. They laid the man down, from the white world back into his sacred Mother, and the world was made of sound again, spirits singing of mind and mushroom fire. This is sacred ground, disconnected by death from the white world.

The Iraq War

Strange piers angle deathward
From Manhattansand....
What are cold naked swallows doing here?

I say, but my throat don't,
Featherless driftwood
Of this Iraq War. Birdskin.

Child flesh embedded in mother skin
The transplanted invasives,
paper thin
Sunday supplements,
mortuary streets,
rosewater.

Before I was nothing,
your head was
Going down and pulling stains
From Damascus unprepared, unfolded,
playgrounds of a wooden
automation.
They will be forgiven
after they are
forgotten.

Abu Graib body
unfucked and folded,
served with
maggots and celebration
at a State Dinner every September.
What death fertilizes your
Anniversary impulse this Tuesday?

I am a four-handed
Sybil, a miniature of faith
And DNA that defiles this
Hollow earth.


The Sun Kings

When we were

air foil and turbulence,
sun kings
upon dust
covered hills,

a green machine
of slow gyroscopes
and black magenta
metastasized.

Our words slowly roll
up the beach,
salmon poetics
and dried tubes
of cellulose.
Brown pieces fall out of my mouth.
I look with red eyelids, backward,
a gilded survivor.

Sonnet at the South Aral Sea

An Ecological Disaster

Trespasses of water in the very
Action of spring, air accompanies the liquid
Into the being, disturbed the gathered
Subtle placement of a vase upon a
Mantelpiece, war bed general helix.
Slickers and anglers at a reception
Of impeded questions with a sense of
Thing. Soaring, eyes, like a sky scraper, right
Here before I was nothing, mixed blood kid
Milk in your organism, that September.
Now, at the South Aral Sea, calcium
Dust, our words are entering, conflicting.
How do we walk homeward, in these circles,
And recognize while wanting renewal?

 

October

October blue and faded
past the Saratoga Pass
into the siren
between me and the island.
It blue and then it red.
The confusion despair
of submission
and publisher rakes,
inconsequence awaiting grace,
but automatic vision,
you...Yeats...
and fingertips taped
don't feed the saintless
and his little broken
pressings.

War Runs Across My Life

This digital world
lingers
and does not bring
us closer together.

I only see
my self with the help
of telescopes.
Every love song
reminds me of sadness,
every sad song
reminds me of a plastic
radion. When will this end?

We are torn apart,
slightly separated
by the presence
of conflict, bombs,
some scholar might say
the sweep
of world events;
yet it is back
to the feelings
of distance, the desolation

that you are
not here and may not
be, that causes
an unspoken anguish
I can share with no one.

And they say this digital world
brings us closer together,
"they", hmmm, who? who?
And yet when we talk,
I at night
and you
in the morning,
message by message,
it is only the distance
that is illuminated,
a trembling, quail distance.

I see these threads
unwinding finally,
a bear, a mountain,
drinking cold
too close to the mouth.
Sunlight breaks the horizon
water desert, brown
sand coming out of
your brown hair.

I Will Believe When I Am On A Graveyard Train

Bridges:
In the realm of obligation, despair
Avenues down the moon glow.
Love mourns in death cults
and straw votes.

You’re Face, book, illuminated under
the deerskin, foretold
A migrant population
Eyeless in its hunger.

Parts of skin, separated colors blue deep
and rope tows, are what is left of
executions and sanitized television
mourning: outrage, revenge, depositions
of after the fact awareness
as if the war
hadn’t been broadcast
twenty four seven….

Churches:
Sunrise across America:
trapeze and transept,
peeking through the flat weather
with cold parabolas.

An invasion upon my surface tension
the dew and the itch lay again
over my red eyecoats
and heavens of character:
a soldier walking with an
uncertain synesthesia
upon an oblong radio,
inhaling the obligate lumps
of the low-armored type.
Sulfur feeling
dust legs
painting the shapes
a crescent moon
from a cloud of earth.

Graveyard paths:
There it is,
an epitaph,
A cross,
America, all set in
a desert
of memory,
prone
to the leaving moon.

Alone at the ocean, in the eel grass, healing:
Seagull bodies float weightless into the settled crater,
A Gaza-like sea foam hides

the excavators,
planting
the winter crop in coffin liners.