Court Life



         Coming into being 
                               is never easy said the stars.

The women pressed their heads against guitars;

cracks in the sky spawning thunder

made the quail and sparrows fade.

The Thing was happening like flags in the wind

creating beasts to feed with Its abundance--

bodies cool as April eggs outdoors.

Powder blue walls • Nascent banana tree • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

Slither and elusion no longer bring satisfaction,

I’m on time now.

One morning humming

like a stained-glass butterfly

   with the doors thrown open

                        and the engine blowing,

immobile with the simple awe

that can pass for understanding

in certain circumstances,

I didn't move until I knew

It didn't stop me;

that I was never set in chains,


and free to appear

as I wished upon submission,

mystified like flowers in light

after the cold hard rain.

Crimson drapes • Beating moon • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

In keeping with the aesthetic

  of the churning blue wide

    I took sympathy and thirst to earthquake

                                    mountains full of cherries, diamonds,

                                        cornet seas shrieking in my eyes,

 

to beg the gods
and their parakeets cameo

in the long night hair 

of the gardens 

gone hypersilent.

 

Tremendous white fruits let down their meat,

galaxies storming the throat of the rose,

ivory scandal blushing nectar with air—

everything fillingx The Almighty Cavity

to brighten our brevity.

Twilight strata plunged my eyes in ice.

I swore I want the long way down.

Tulips and stallions • Protons and moons • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

Most only visit

the moments I preserve

like isles deleted by the waves

and masked by lying winds,

no wake of golden bones

to lead one back, lived them

in summer detail,

in medical precision

with the eye in my mind

that attaches to nothing--

grand visions of inconsequence,

for a Viking on the shore,

no king desiring reconnaissance.

Silver sandals • Kiss the kiss • Air thick as aloe • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

When I was young I thought
you can break free. 
That I could be happy

to disappear like Agathon,

megamillions in hand,

to an afterlife waiting, 
stranger than limousines, 
nothing to love

but a lipstick-smeared glass

as the wine dries away.

Then The Thing returned

and I went with it.

You can't say No. 

Sheen • Shade • Tumescence • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

Now I follow It around

like some dumbstruck Magdalene

waiting for a revelation.

The sparkling drool of my poet melts down

at every incarnation.

Ever get the feeling

you’ve entered a room with no walls?

Steered your life like a drunken cop

through the streets of hit-and-run

and always made it home?

Like a dog long gone 

getting back to his palace, 

a city black and wet

as a trash bag full of treasure?

Stray aces on the veranda. 

Dry corn blowing in the dusk.

The symmetry will be tomorrow too.

Dry corn blowing in the dusk. 

Stray aces on the veranda.

Like everything I’ve seen is Its command.

Deluge with oranges • Wagner in the trees • Jaguar marble  • Columns aligned

And I like everything

I've seen is the problem.

The reward is a pinkening pain
out to prove how pink can evil be.

The feasts 
have feasted on me.

The Thing brings the peach

with the emerald pit,

questions without answer

and the medicine to quiet down.

 
Another rematch 
of tomorrow and tonight

easily mistaken

as epicurean and hedonist 

passing in the night

leaves me confused as the time of day.

Celestial aviary • Amethyst vulva • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

I do not get Its superstructure or Its policies--

What It wants, what It means--

I am no philosopher with philosophies;

but I know Its shadow 
like the veiled voice

saying This is it

30 secs before the dream begins,

 


a feeling like the gods

massaging me in their new trees 
break my fever, moist as a seraphim

bruised by the cotton 
on which it reclines,

to lie on the clouds

when the snow heats past,

desiring to be lost

somewhere on the earth 
of a rapid body

hurtling into the deep blue sky.

Blades of rain • Rest from the wars • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

Nothing is easier than staying alive.

Say nothing out of turn. Drink pain. Know it's yours.

                   When someone beautiful forgets your name

dress like a clownfish and walk without fear.

Think unicorns exist. That nothing applies,

and yet you are human, and so it applies.

So they do not exist. So I believe

the best of everything

is less rare than I believe.

So the softest limits of compassion hold

right away from exotic paradise

right away from where I lie.

I see the garter twisted to the side.

I hear the politicians gathering outside,

ostinato by the by.

Sonnet, bone, and raspberries

keep me sane, one loud raw nerve

washed up like shaved whiskers on the drain

of the Almighty Cavity

lightening shadows with the light of Its clouds.

The Thing keeps Thinging, too beautiful

to be what It appears--

 

something wonderful

that doesn't mind the wonder it instills,

and too awful the same,

twisting oceans into deadly waves,

turning oxytocin to testosterone

and there you are

sick, sad, and Sabine. I am no viper.

Glacier ray • Emerald breach • Jaguar marble • Columns aligned

So days grow attached

like Siamese twins.

The same old wallpaper

wherever I look something new.

The statuary can be easily controlled.

The patterns and the shapes think for you

if you look long enough

and nobody cracks up the silence.

Friday • Sunday • Someday • Jaguar • Marble • Columns • Align

But please
let somebody crack up the silence.

DECKED



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The Soft Hotel

i. aoshima



As an alligator weeping in white gloves,

all Thaied up in the penthouse of Bohemian hotels,

great views were frosting in my eyes:

toy isles adrift on sweetened seas,

clouds whiter than the purest snow

crab salad ever eaten

in restaurants of high distinction, clouds

that crown the hummingbirds’ Versailles, birds

of warm emerald and coal

hearts glowing in the throats that warmed me

warmer than the summer.

Thunder peals as I walk through the wild candy fields.

ii. mayaux

Swallowed by the ruby of a Swan,

hair golden as the owl’s eye,

I’m a pink bunny marinating 
in hot mint marmalade

stiller than soda 
flattened by a weak winter sun

still attracting the hornets.

So sugar returns to sugar.

iii. barbier

The skaters know their awkwardness awards them crème brulee, 
heavy to entice
anorexic statuettes 
with bones more fragile 
than the columns
curators love to raid.
A white apricot we call the moon
lights up a soft hotel where people raft settees

through very velvet afternoons,

a scene so pretty it must be sitting under a glass case

with a price I can’t afford.

iv. rimbaud

Morning rose on a soft bed 
of down by the beach.
The skies turn shades of curaçao and cosmopolitan.

Clouds the iridescence of origins— wild western bronze, shamrock, raspberry blues—
bandaging the bluebird streams 
a shadow bridge into the statuary's dreams.


v. Michael

Sometimes I’m a god
and the earth is a gumball
I pop in my mouth.

Sometimes I’m the plush
plucked by the robot
in the arcade.

vi. taymor

I defenestrate masterpieces, lithographs, hoaxes.

The television was my supervision. As a child

I learned to look good breaking glass.

And soldiers posed like those little plastic toys

made in China

and shipped in crispy plastic bags

over dirty plastic seas.

vii. masoch

Everywhere’s a Saigon
and everyone’s a queen
demanding unknown, exact amounts of kiss
on each ring-fingered hand.

I discussed myself with my shrinks all afternoon,
carnivore and prey to my own safari.

viii. boyle

From Lake Victoria to the Waldorf Astoria,
sweeping the nation in search of standing ovations—
slung in fabrics, tied in bows—

a dozen men, two dozen girls, handmade.

Each of us is a limited edition.
Where does your number lie?

ix. unwerth

No adults.
Remote control.

My battery dies
and with it
your love.





x. versace

I was a man of many friends as you may well imagine—
the king of clubs, Cinderella,
Mona Lisa.

Gentlemen, please,
deck your spermatozoa in paisley for every occasion.
Ladies, take my gowns,
designer zebras,
the endangered headdress.

Wear them when you need a sanctuary
and Goa seems too far. 

xi. wolfgang

Let’s do the spa in Spanish tiles.
Let’s feed my creditors to my crocodiles.

xii. klarwein

At noon the pool blushes bluer than cosmetic liquid

or the tufts of spoiled parakeets.

The whales parade across a seltzer sea. See the moths in the wallpaper move?

How trees wake up in lingerie on soft snow skies and spread their limbs like octopi—sixty-thousand arms to serve the sushi of Icelandic and Indian birds, pills that kiss your nerves with delphiniums of bliss:

pineapples, roses, and tits; cherubims in chariots

whipping giraffes through the robin's egg of European seas,

an elegant safari through the stage sets of Rome,

a palace with an open door

and floors of dried chrysanthemums where your feet,

like polished scorpions,

curl with a burn to curl more.

xiii. praxiteles

Each time my heart skips a beat
I give my gift to the world:

art, still as reptiles—
classic action armless form.

xiv. rochester

Deep in the annals of pornography
a woman named Obscidienne
was flipping through a catalog of kings.
The music sounded Asian

but her rug was purely Persian—
amethyst vulva
a pile of shimmering silk
hedged in a mandala
of pubic meditation

more beautiful than anything as unspeakable
and her eyes greener than the stoplights saying Go.

We splurged on a shoe as big as a stadium
made of pink vinyl and python.

xv. petronius

When Bacchus feels the wine complain and shows his sallow fangs—
your eyes waning bloodshot under the bangs—
I soothe your ruffled Mohawk
with words softer than alpaca wool.

Let’s walk downtown heaven:
opal-shell alleyways, pink swimming pools.
Remember when?

Everything old is nouveau again.

xvi. ludwig

The nation whips its silk and thistles like the law,

peaks crowned with cherries and ice that lays

patina on patina on patina.

Snowboarding on the lips of the rose

left for dead at the edge of the Wow

I wept like divorcing stars.

And then a walk,

and ice,

and who knows what?

xvii. nero

Imperial flirtations unfold on the steps to the Temple of Sherbert.
Japan is fondling Italy, Brazilians love Tahitians. India’s enchanting Spain.

How much is too little?
The elevators need Jacuzzis
and the banquets blueprints.
Let the menus be sweet nothings
to a sovereign violet sky I’ll mouth
like poems to the people
and the hermaphrodite’s jalapeno:

cactus steaks served on a bed of sea anenomes
topped with dragon butter in a dodo-blood reduction,
garnished with deep-fried pine cones
and caramelized lilacs.

I'll bring the beds of apricot vinyl
flammable as Courvoisier and backlit by fire.

You bring Kenya
China Chile Sweden

something new to burn.

xviii. lachapelle

Two egrets kiss and the trumpeting fountain
wishes eternity and a wide opening gate—

driving the lime-green Lamborghini with broken brakes
into sky high slices of coconut cake.

xix. verlaine

I stopped a moment at the idol stand—clasped penguins, melting saints,
a face carved into banyan wood.

I was the hood ornament of a dead Bentley.

I did nothing but I moved
from hand to hand of whomever would have me.

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

XVII.


The witch doctor weighed no more than a hundred pounds, but he tied his ropes tightly. He had agreed to set the boys free at three o’clock, but his watch was fifteen minutes slow. When that hour came upon their perfectly synchronized wristwatches, the boys revolted so violently that they broke their bonds, knocked the shaman unconscious, and in their fury ran headlong into a railing, over which they toppled, falling into a stream of crocodiles who were exactly fifteen minutes from completing a migration from one side of the old Egmont estate to the other.

“Who do we blame for this?” queried Joe. “Just shut up and fight,” replied Frank. The riverbank rained croc blood.

XVIII.

The same thought crossed both boys’ minds as they tried to choke two of Egmont’s henchmen into submission. “I should have studied medicine or law!”

XIX.

“Look. There in the windows.” Frank pointed out the blueprints of a battleship the rain was forming in the panes. “It must be another sign. That we have a plan. It just isn’t quite complete. Rain for the sea, sea for the ship, a ship for the lobsters, lobsters like armadillos, armadillos for protection, protection from battle, battle on a battleship. We’re in a battle, Joe.”

“Frank, you’ve gone mad.”

XX.

Together, then, they parted ways.