I'm
guiding a flying whale four days out to sea by his dorsal fin. His body's
encrusted with art, the snout an abalone frown. Grunts smelling of dead seals
and cedarwood; the underbelly a map of oil wells, dead pirates, and red sores
blinking where the last of the coelocanths home. Fade to white, queer hours
throwing in religious blues. We’re descending to I never see the sea.
---------------------------------------------------
Antarctica’s balmy and totally out of time. While the statisticians count bricks in the cliffs of Extremist Point, questions are asked about the penguin husks and seals dashed on the rocks. So dead in a way I know this has to be the safest place on earth. Evidence suggests a Mongol hoard departed. Emily and I become Edwardian caretakers who swim the continent surveying mountains of marble and castles made of cliffs. Higher than the sky did not exist. One war camel remains, says 5 billion warriors are returning to stay. My statisticians will be outnumbered. One day we must swim forevers never longer than a solar day. Antarctica, you will be interesting.
--------------------------------------------------
Most have a construct for their sexual errata. Virgin formations that didn’t work out. Venereal retractions, an antechamber you can’t escape with seizures unauthorized and boarding gates in the foreplay. All is one white Rubix cube inside another, loaded with dials and knobs and tracks, the tiles tight as Incan temples. In this one, Old Master Venuses are alive on the floor, shining calves glazed like doughnuts or a heap of autumn squash. They smoke and bloom like a pileup of exotic cars, tits covered in advertising decals, infrared satellite maps, neon erogenous zones, a cathedral of flesh in a shower of sparkling oil. Crystal frogs leap from soft rock to porcelain basin in the pink profuding Amazon. Reflecting pools fill with the urine of cherubim where the lily pads drift, part cabinet of curiosity, part purple orgy of starfish, urchin, and anemone. I can't consummate, but I know I ejaculate chocolate.
------------------------------------------------------
People on pedestals are sprayed with semen and the mobs below dance in the rain of the sex. On the altar of a jungle pyramid, a monster-man sits on skin wheels that once were his legs, a chair of flesh for thronging mouths, head moving slowly as a parade balloon. From his waist, the organ strikes like a chinese yo-yo blasting gallons of come, recoiling, flaring, recoiling, soaking the women on pedestals who dance in the rain of his sex. Ha ha ha, he shouts, I give you LIFE! waving to the crowd, turning slowly to drench the women on pedestals who dance in the rain of his sex. In the city below, the men are chased by tigers on terraced rice slopes, playing dead, eaten alive. It is clear that God has shined upon this city.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Nagano, 1985: The dream drips at the edges, ink down the page. I’m in the hot springs with Edie Brickell and Vince Lombardi conducting my very own talk show. Snow and the dragonflies circle the ferns—a million shades of $50 bills. Nocturnal earthquakes make a raging temple of the sea. We are seen by millions each evening against a very fake skyline. But shockingly little graphic violence ensues. So the city cancels us and looms anew, bright as sneakers propelling human life through cloud. The moon is not our spotlight now. Up above the airbus flies like a white toy. What I am is whatever you say. Tonight, a very special guest is coming into time.
-----------------------------------------------------------
This is Oxygen Island. And my eyes collide so hard with everything around. At the back of the forest—cliffs under wallpaper, acts of evolution in the leaves. Time traveled through me like ocean through baleen. A full moon moved a dancing tornado of light on the waves. On top of the hill, a tree scrimshawed with hieroglyphs spun on its trunk. Wind through its codes filled the music with air, turned like a music box drum, standing upright, spinning, spinning. Under my kimono, tattoos clashed. And all maps began drifting toward mystery.
----------------------------------------------------
Closing time at the Italian market. The sign says SKATES FOR SALE, meaning stingrays, but inside there are pyramids of tomato sauce Imported Today. Late summer shadows are all I remember, artichokes in oil. A shadowy corner with workers waiting to leave. No skates in the case. Put away for the night. It smells like petty crime and silence now. Outside in the shadows, an alarm is sounding out.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Through
storefront windows the succulents phosphoresce,
security
asleep beneath the thieves.
Shoes are
being idolized, elevators filling with cologne.
Like
aquariums blue with television fluid all walls turn to H2O
and oaks
aglow upon the lawns guide us to the golden orange of our body moonlighting
as our child.
Midnight
cake is drowning in a bath of milk.
Shoes are
being idolized.
I know
this air.
Spring is
coming, the hyacinth, the impatiens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
One night
I get out of my car. It rains. Umbrellas bloom.
In the
closets, empty clothes, cedarwood—bananas, waffle cones. The swimming pool
a sink of shampoo. Astroturf gets bloody when a wild pig in racing
stripes appears in the garden, clusters of war ribbons dripping
from his side.
By
moonlight his eyes shine like black snakes twinkling in the sun.
The beat
is dropping like a shuttle out of space and someone shouts The splash
is on!
The pig
dives deep in the mire, all turbo desire. I can see him lathered even now, one
tusk still sticking upright like a bowsprit under ice.
When the
sky falls I thank god I’m a pantheist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A
salamander's in shock on the glass in my leaves, his tail’s each patient flick
clocking the spread of the trees. With swipes of emerald, lemon, and
black, his pendulum paints up my darkness and tells the future with a quick
mimic of the hours that have passed me by before. A still beat builds in my
gut’s wet crock, measuring the discord of hungers hungering for harmony—a
cosmic alignment of sleep, flesh, and food. He quickens the frantic sway, a
mock smile affixed to his lips, as if to say the time he keeps really is a lit
wick waiting to ignite anticipations. Or is it a grimace wound by his tail, its
stock of teeth hemmed by a bitter lip, confused beyond hope of understanding
the barrier’s trick of sealing me from what it has revealed? From a red velvet
chair before the hyaline lock, every organ awaits another's ease, just moments
away--ticking seconds off the bells that never chime when I ready to tock.
-----------------------------------------------------
Bombshells. Big fake sky. Mathematically alive, I’m all prosthetics in the human sand. Caesar’s turned arena to marina, the sky to a magenta photochrome. Eyes are beating down like 60,000 suns, round as my theater where senators caress the circumference of their girth and servants sussurate behind the sinning sculpture; slavering concubines, glabrous pudendas. I memorized passcodes while serving as their footstools. I convinced few. I questioned nothing. My morality was an abscess on the genitals of Empire. And here’s my Coliseum, engineered with the philosophy of billiard tables—pegged with coral totems and salt mounds, weird mangroves imprisoning Christians and Gauls, tiny tsunamis stirred by the jeers, and gavials hauled in for the end. See the hyped axe, the leopard's diamond jaw, the scorpion bouquet. There’s nothing you can’t become through someone else.
I won’t be broken with a thousand blows. But thumbs keep pointing my way down. Jesus please, make gladiators gladiolas.
--------------------------------------------------------
So many
silver linings can only mean one thing. The sky began to ring around itself.
Like an I-V bag hanging low, a cloud with purple-lightning veins, this jellied
biomass, drizzling intestines like a man-o-war, swept over me like a raging
surgery. In the ditch I saw up the throat of its spotlight, into the blue sky
behind it all.
------------------------------------------------------
A sheet
of glass thinner than apartment walls, the spritz of mist upon Colocosia, white
as wine come Carolina mornings.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The
Skye's never rufted by Cloudes, but Its blue Dome is rubbed by Hillsides white
with Milke Pondes, Lilie Fields growing by the favoure of our Lord. The Air is
stille. Nothing at all woulde move upon thefe Slopes if not for the Breezes
stirred by little Winges pafted on the backs of iridefcent Blowflies that bafk
like Mother of Pearle in the rays of the Sunne. I am the only Manne, drifting
in the deepeft, brighteft fumes of Sleepe, Lungs suffocating under the silent
Fire. Still I cannot go unmoved when a little ruftling, magnified by the
Silence, comes from the Distance to shatter my Repofe.
Hearte
gagges--I'm not alone. Poifon Arrows race, Handes grope as the Sunne burns,
losing maffive, invifible Partes of itfelf! The ruftling ripples the Milke,
quakes Flowers in a Traile from Stemme to Petal so I underftand that Something
beneathe them muft be skulking the Grounde to caufe their unreft in suche wife,
and when the Leaves beginne to flutter near My Arm I rife. Something large and
dark creeps through openings in the Leaves, silente as the Atmofphere and slowe
as the Air and appearing to move on many Leggs. I part the Plantes, tearing the
white with a Gashe of green.
A
terrific Spider of pure blacke, two feet long and trailing a monkey's Tail on
its Abdomen paufes to see the Sunne revealed and covered againe as the Leaves
move backe into place and a Screame echoes in Paradife.
-----------------------------------------------------------
In a stained glass bathroom, the toilet Listerine refuses my sacrifice, coughing one great loaf onto the sink, another into the bathtub; and in its mouth, the building’s Ebola fesses up a splinter pile, a tuna steak, still beating, and an eight-legged shadow of black yarn waiting in its web of whirlpools to eat my soul.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Late at night, past imperial fountains to the house, I take Miss X, kill her (hanging by doorknob), and link the murder to suicide. Leaving again, I CANNOT be seen, but an old supervisor passes in the light you find come summer campuses or the Verona of Shakespeare. Back to the fountains--apex of the universe and an excellent alibi. Firework light, soft water, synchronized swimmers, deep as the polar bear pool at the zoo. Astronomers to the side, Starr Jones doing gymnastics, young lovers in love, Boucher’s Venus herself in full bloom.
Suddenly
Colombo shows up! I answer questions with reasonable suggestions, but I'm the
center of it all, hiding in half light, and sleeping on lawns, the world aught
but one panopticon where prison is the Babel tower lit up purple in the
distance--this electric ziggurat veined with tracer lights and ambuli. One
wrong move and Colombo has one more thing. I cannot answer.
----------------------------------------------------------
Aneurysms of jazz from the big top arising. Featureless sounds of the passing parade. I’m tied to luxurious chairs. Hotel bible in midair catches light through the drapery wave—filtered doves, dust motes in the halo blade. Featureless sounds. The passing parade. A face unfolds in a Chinese fan upon a passing float outside. Seasonal breezes smelling of fish marketeers. Iron bridge over iron bridge. Camellias. Electricity. The movie stars of India billboarding windowside. Suddenly, I see BOB come out of the walls. As he arranges beetles on the wall, I see my sisters shrink in the terrarium, transform to white lions. Iron bridge over iron bridge. Hotel bible in midair. I’m tied to luxurious chairs. My sisters move in time with BOB’s beetle-chess game. Animal marionettes. Featureless sounds. The passing parade.
---------------------------------------
Sex terrorists take over downtown commando square, its screens filled with mandatory daily torture films. In one, a woman's brain is scrubbed with a toothbrush; in another, Wes Craven is buried under 100,000 tons of jello and the invisible Archvillains commentate how his every bone is slowly crushed, his organs suffused til nothing but gelatin. We are being replaced it is clear--the bones of other beings made "our own". I say Fuck This but the sex terrorists find me, put me up at the slave market in a back alley of disappearing stairs. Women pick and choose like a dodgeball game til finally I arrive in a knickknack shop and fall into the remarkable labia of Justine Joli. Some horror ends swell.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Steep hill and the '36 Cadillac Jonckheere is sloping backward at the speed of glass, rainwater leveling in the floor. A tiny, shiny robot camera, like a flying VCR, approaches me and films the scene, then sails away back to the high school where I belong.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Thrace to star, China to port. Fizzing seas on pinewood planks. I'm dressed in Versace, smelling of cedarwood, vapid, who cares? My earth is a Faberge egg, presented to whom I am sailing to find.
---------------------------------------------------
The snow fell slowly on our gingerbread town, sprinkled the steps of the courthouse and turned to sugar. Wild deer would bat an eyelash through winter trees swelling with the shadows. As the molten ice of evening grows, your fingers close the exits of perspective.
--------------------------------------------------------
Three weeks of sky confused by its own hemorrhage and the warplanes dance again, revealing stories of pride and love in their opera of engine drones. Spelling symbols with their swandives. Cast on curved walls and watched from odd angles. As the moon appears from nothing in a theater of seas: robin's egg, sapphire, and midnight. What do you dream from your silos? Tides of ice polishing the moon dry? The wind’s creation of an appaloosa in the sky?
------------------------------------------------------
A leopard makes his cameo by chasing banana-skinned pythons into the vines. Wild ribbons of pink. Nouveau fire. I split a taxi with Athena through the ghetto around the arena. In her hand is a birthmark shaped like Gondwana. At the top of an escalator I found a jewelbox of broccoli and began to learn why it was red.
-------------------------------------------------------
The octopus-lifting branches left his stage in midriver, sparkling like a gigolo and revving those three hearts.
---------------------------------------------------------------
I get to know the inner sanctum of Russian fashion, can’t express the clarity of the storefront glass. This was high-end mall theater: czar-time Nuryevs and extremely prim sluts enacting The History of Emotion in beautiful shoes. Film flutters. Flappers, dandies, empty racks, cashier and pipeline. Heiresses wretch ecstasy among the hedge fund studs. Strange fabrics gather dust. The satyr stabs the satyr hater. Designer clothes molder in time.
-----------------------------------------------------
Backcountry Victorian jewelhouse. I can’t tell a dress from a curtain 30-feet high. I can't tell the birdcage from the theater stage.
--------------------------------------------------------
Magnitude sky.
The passing cloud and the clear sky and the white light and the passing cloud.
I’ve had my awed reactions in the chain.
There’s always something new.
But I’m running out of fundamentals.
-------------------------------------------------------
Cream
cheese-cool marine air moving seafood, cotton candy, lawnmower fumes and
cherry milkshakes under the mannequin moon.
The
oceans must be planes of glass colliding on horizons about to disappear.
Ford
Taurus, aluminum siding, palm tree, detritus, the
paparazzi—disappear.
The way the moon always goes home.
It is
said I resist. But I don’t.
------------------------------------------------------------
Robin is
weeping in a beautiful bathroom in the middle of the desert. She tells her
handmaiden why love has eluded her. I can almost hear it clearly through the
missing bricks in the wall.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Blue
diamonds of the hypersky. Simulated dream Dakotas. The masks of Atlantis
surface on the sea.
------------------------------------------------------------
The people form a serpent, lined up to await their portrait
carved in
the soft cubes that tile the mecca of our desire,
an
airport that will cradle and regard its children, safe from the shark fins taxiing
outside.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Another
beach. This time a marble shore. The dog wears a Modigliani mask. The Vikings follow home the birds. My father wallpapers the cliffs.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Hot-buttered
monsoon and the commerce goes red as cherry and habaneros stroked up
on reclining leather moons. Desired
heat is set. Black steel. Honey peel. O
divine
nutrition for lace tongues and tailfins. We’re customizing the whole
convoy tonight. Top
speed: Angel breast and luxury pharmaceuticals.
--------------------------------------------------------
Crystalline tyrannosaur skull lit up with Christmas lights under the grapevines on top of the hill.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On a drawbridge that led to a sloop in a river braided with fish, Kate Upton and Blackbeard did the whole Kama Sutra.
-------------------------------------------------
We helicopter over sugarfields. The morning sun reflects a thousand sweet diamonds. On a bridge overlooking the thousands of interstates leading to a newer home
I see
myself and take a subway to the tarantula queen. Celebrated
in white lace on a carousel of tarantellas dispensing
death with a wave and a smile and the math of those who have loved a
long long time.
-------------------------------------------
There's a
mall-turned-museum where an artist commemorates the closing time of
her own genius beside a
fountain that is running to the edge.
The intractable language of Empire ossifies over airwaves by ice come Thanksgiving morning.
In a loft
on the horn of the prefrontal cortex, two superstars are making love like it's
1979.
-------------------------------------------------------
I fell asleep among my toys, the nanny naked on the floor. Waves peeling like the pages of a book ate the moon. Rolls of fabric drooled from the windows. The cavalry opened my sliding glass door. All of their camels went shh shh shh. But I think they were spies working for spies working for me and I’ve lost all account. Waves kept crashing down. Something is happening the Major cried. Evacuation is futile. The situation is terminal.
I fell
asleep among my toys. Among my wet stuffed animals.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Warehouse
district. One thick and frosted window reminds the shattered of what was.
Suddenly there’s an islet of rainforest in the intersection. Pull your hand
from the humus and it’s full of worms painted like collectible
snakes—boomslang, boa, king. The forest catches fire instantaneously and I’m
some height above the city with skyscrapers and temptations on a carnival
contraption shaped like a Conestoga that refuses to stop. The window pops and
ants pour forth. Millions of them take the town like boiling syrup. Off in the
haze, among the oil derricks and pyramids, the leaning tower of Pisa is
collapsing into the air.
------------------------------------------------------
Down a crooked wooden spine, the coast of horses lay in bloom. Articulate icebergs flowering from the stones of a dead sea. No more hooves of shattered china buried in the sand, tractors turned to copper in the fields of foals, curveballs aimed with apples at the last standing tree. Apologies in mind flake like aging oyster shells. Just take the smile from a walnut’s crack, grapes thick as curls in a Roman woman’s hair, and leave their purple bags to hold the thimbles of the angelfish.
If you want to fail, don’t say a word. It is the season of epiphanies. And sobered boats are apt to capsize in these sudden storms. Under rough waters you insist are quite placid.
----------------------------------------------------------------
It’s a beautiful zoo complete with helicopter tours of Madagascar, hikes along the tsunami zone of collapsing icebergs, rapid runs, and ceremonial biplane flights. Down the staircase cliffs by the great white sharks I enter headquarters.
But
things turn ugly when I mention the high-density chicken-coop curio cabinets,
which hold all manner of tiny fucked-up animals—wild horses who ran too fast,
lion cubs with inverted spines, down syndrome frogs. Why is the leopard exhibit is so
damn baroque? I demand, and
anger the zookeeper.
After the
skip, the Amazon dams all break. The zookeeper reminds me how my father’s love
of animals outstripped his ability to care for them. I offer new cages but soon
I just set em all free. The Amazon is an orgy of wild beasts, and I feed my
father and the zookeeper and you to the hippopotami.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Incan antechamber—urinal and shoe display stand side by side within the theater. Back issues of the Journal of Immortality and Phrenology Today on the table. Goldfish thrash in coffee mugs. As the blue glass of the city crumbles into itself, Robin appears in a courtesan costume singing sea chanties, heart whining like a wrecked guitar as the champagne licks its pyramid of crystal.
Suddenly pale-blue g strings blew from the racks. My mother knew I was in love. It was true--I had worse credit than a pathological plagiarist. I walked among the toilets toward the altar where I took my prize--a canister of tadpole foam to share in the streets.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Pi etched into statues’ face a perfect field. I play chess with trees in a courtyard made for sultans, 40-second films projected on adobe walls as the heels clack their way up the emerald. Tropical foliage, iron scrollwork, gaslight and moons. A one-story glass palace stretches out on the lawn like a luxurious worm, hungry as hell as the noise begins—half-broken pigs moving through the halls, led by their butchers and squealing to the roast.
----------------------------------------------------
There's a snake so long neither head nor tail is visible. Crawling slowly on the beach. It dawns the snake can't harm me no matter what I do. Beat it, stab, caress--it's so long neither head nor tail could wrap its energy around me quick enough to kill. The skin is shining mud, but the spots, once the black of backwater tides, are windows now--portals not much bigger than an airplane's. Then comes a lump in his continuance. Something is happening. Feet frozen, looking away makes it appear--a capybara staring out, eyes that make you say It wasn’t me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Come quickly to the musclebound heroes with the kodachrome scream, eyes scanning like schools of savage red fish for sharks appearing in our mist. Twin vapor trails spin the sky. High above, a stealth dot of jet lets loose its Fat Man, the gravitational pull sending up red flames. When the mofo lands, human detritus slops and settles like churning magma. Heads of state roll at the crossroads of battleaxes passing in midair, one atom’s breadth from sparking up annihilation on their flight toward the simultaneous decapitation of Ronald Duck and the Wicked Bitch. The axes brace in crossbones style. Concrete isn’t real enough to soften our fall. The sunset is medical green. The blood spills a radiant script. The rainbow exists in the lightning.
------------------------------------------------------------------
At the summit of a lightning-green hill, the wind paints pictures in the grass revealing me now as a bear, now an adulterer, a Founding Father, a truck driver, a tree, a molecule. The wind has no particular picture in mind.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The field
trip kids kept finding little coins with weird icons all over
the rainforest as the 747s appeared in the pyramids of Baltimore . Blood, water, grass around: eternal resurrection proving here and everywhere the
splendid futile. It’s 95° in the a.m. Bats and butterflies and glass
above.
Up in the
nebula, Egyptian hands have pulled the lever that opens the astral: aqua
novae, grapelight, peach dust, stained-glass giraffes. Or so it looks when
tragedy is waiting like a face empty as the sawfish eyes. And all those
kids half your
size keep racing through a time when the world was twice as large.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
She keeps
her secrets like assassins worth their weight, sees me as a hawk a mouse. Here
she comes, descending the stairs on an ostrich, half-naked, seductive, and nuts. Low, unbroken notes bend upward through each octave
before shattering to screams, before she gives the diorama of her womb where
the future can be seen.
In the
back of a trailer I clean the armor she leaves at night, ash-white as the sky
at sea, made of lavender and mollusk shells, there beside the porchstep
oil drums with a mask from which I interpret her face, waiting to hear my name
escape like a sparrow from its home. Only the rooster blows its bugle to the
summer air.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Here he comes, conducting amusement park trains streaming into the house with his gifts piled high in the cars—a portrait of Baudelaire, hats by Kikirara Shoten, pillows by Seraph and Splendor, tin boxes with artichokes and adverbs and football cards, miniature supercars, models of eroded chateaux, a nest of mud and gold with Faberge eggs, cigars lined up like friendly soldiers in a box, LSD, the effects of which won’t be felt for a decade, locks of Helen’s pubic hair, and a figure-8 catwalk at the end of the caboose down which an elephant stripteases, then trunks out a pack of trading cards. I got
Aurangzeb
The
Chicken and Francis Bacon
Elegabalus'
First Time
Christy
Turlington Gets a Face Tattoo
Blackbeard's
14 Wives
Mozart
Confronting His Creditors
The
Discovery of Slavery.
All mine, if he can have one taste of the strawberry shortcake growing in my icebox.
----------------------------------------------------------
Hip deep before the cave in gel-black water and perfect rocks, the mushrooms bloom, the dripping gold, the aqua sky, the purple fish, the gemstones and jellies call from inside. I am about to be still. Part of the cornucopia. A galleon off the coast doesn’t see. An entrance like the Luray Caverns with an immediate escalator leading to rooms of moist earth, subterranean forest and sand, liver and mist, all-amber chambers where insects and humans trap in the trees, and stained-glass floors illuminated by the lava boiling below.
-------------------------------------------------------------
My love is the amphibious pose I never saw struck in better cities at sunset on a hotel wall. This parallel city buzzes by exquisite black trains, its relief like a glacier in full sun. Our machinehood sped by whips, the sap of ladies gathered in the angles of shaded walls and beds of sand inside. The headboard is a switchboard, golden buttons arranged in patterns meant to conjure portholes. Press Imotek for milk. Press Osiris for Things, Press Pharoah for cruise ships that split the city on immediate canals. Someone says the hotel elevator holds deceit. Here, all prostitutes leave receipts. And the beetles can be trapped in bell jars if your timing flies.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Apaches crucified on the spokes of wagon wheels, canyonland dinocracies in the lemon squall at dawn. I crawl among the dunes to be erased in light. My shadow can be seen on the browning bodies of fall trees. The twisted funk of locomotives, blackbird grapeshot kicked from smokestacks. My ribs become the harp you play. My shadow can be seen on the browning bodies of fall trees. Travelling the country for a place where it can rest. By the seashore lays a stable that is full of panicked horses. Their salted milk nursed me out of Night. Now a giant oaken frigate has capsized on the sand, and a palace full of seashells aches with women’s hollow wombs. But the temple has an organ, and a stranger plays a tune. So carry my heart to the rotting barn that lays in the cloud of wasps. The marquis is waiting there with the horses drinking the sea. Point out the criminal on the glowing tile in the temple. Gather the treasure that waits in my winter. My shadow can be seen on the browning bodies of fall trees.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Veranda whiteout. Unfeeling zombies fill Shadow Island, and the innkeepers knowdown. Whitedeath mansion mill in the jungle light. The same place I once saw de Sade self-vivisected on the lawn. Niagras pouring down entryways. Copperhead mist. Fake twilight—the nights of old movies where blue filters imitated evening. Now is where I make love on the stairwell as lizards on the ceiling watch. Back again, blue this time. My body the machete.
------------------------------------------------------------
In Room
XVII, in the still hot center of Interminable boredom Lady Xmas
comes in with new codes and animals, blue sapphires of her breast veins
bulging, pure shine of her loaded calves buttering, topless in an ice
room of sunflowers, chessboard
for a face, stained glass eyes, sliding-glass mouth technicolored
into the air
conditioning the smoke, bars of ice caging flames in her throat, transparent as glass or sneaker technology under the thunder of B2 bombers, innumerable arms able to tame a wasp, drink Galliano straight from the vase, or fix a head scarf that stirs deep strange urges down, Lady Xmas comes in.
conditioning the smoke, bars of ice caging flames in her throat, transparent as glass or sneaker technology under the thunder of B2 bombers, innumerable arms able to tame a wasp, drink Galliano straight from the vase, or fix a head scarf that stirs deep strange urges down, Lady Xmas comes in.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some
nights I dream that I am followed by a wolverine across a wasteland.
It's very cold, and the snow like
grains of sand, the moon so bright I can see the past in a plate of ice. My head is low. And his is roaming for a scent. I do not gain he does
not close. We are like a bone the wind blows.
I could have made a terrible mistake.
----------------------------------------------------
Late night in the solar system. Obama comes to me, has heard I'm thinking of quitting my job again. It's more than just park rain and heavenly chicken at this point. We wander through a gumdrop galaxy of planets crevassed in an interstellar cloud bank that has melted through like hard candy in the mouth. The way a block of ice melts under a hot water stream. Here and again, lime Saturn, pink Venus, canary Jupiter--stardust and tissue paper wrapping them like boustiers of multicolored breasts, the whole universe a pill exploding drugs and love and unforseen health problems blowing in from PsR 1257 12A. It is through a cave in the sky, still smeared in dark matter, that we drop from the clouds and reenter the rain. He said nothing, but the point is made. Back again at the fountains, Boucher’s Venus in full bloom.
-------------------------------------------------------------
An alternative 1983: Michelle calls wanting answers to multiplication problems. I step into the curvature of night and press the moon for more info. Under the apple trees of my childhood, the sky fills with stars, each played by its own cicada. The frogs lend vibrato and the answers to me.
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