January of the Amoeba

i. twas fighting season

One haze in which that beautiful mirage
revealed itself mirage
the blue hung thick
as cordial gel 
cherries bleed
in chocolate bells.

Every day the light 
of another excuse for creation

set beautiful traps to call me in 
like sum dum animal

the days in love extended
vanished as the April bay
hides summer murders
behind a calendar of sparkling May--
June gunshots anonymous
making mothers make scenes
banal and raw 
as anything again again again.

One step ahead of my echo dreaming of spring

attempting to recapture prime and be
I could not parse the animation 
of swinging arm
to missing frame.

I did not understand the harbor’s quiet continuity
the mute opal moon that does nothing but imitate
a face in the lateness 
hemorrhaging time.

So crystal trees dripped away

in shadows lending deep relief
to statue
and to cornice
and to crime

cradling freak emotions
ascendant like aromas
made by the ocean 
once in a lifetime
maybe the only time
aromas of infinity
pointless to name
pointless to ignore.

ii. calm dice in infant hands

Shifting truths have their moment
drift into the rock of others
until they break or melt 
and shape anew.

So riots caught and children starved and markets crashed
and went as planned
and choices lures
folds pollutions
solutions errors
assaulted me like diamond
vortices of casino chandeliers
poised above my escalation.

Let me lift you into confusion.
Alone in an asphalt field
for elysian fiends
all brass ovary and power haircut
starving the time gray

tired of scandal redemption invective praise

retraction invention
lockdown evacuation
one haze in which my beautiful mirage revealed itself
I sat up stinkin thinkin

I could see a black tornado

serenade the sun
along a racetrack of the atlas

sat up stinkin thinkin

the smallness of the work
the paucity of hits
the splitting markets
and the competition gone insane
mean Odysseys, Commandments,
Declarations end
at river bottom upside down
or echoing on lips of our extuplets
across the multiverse.

Annihilation or continuous rebirth,
the ego takes it hard

as a flailing newborn flailing  
hopes it will be loved
right now
finds the mother abandoned
must recreate itself.

iii. the ourobouros and the fool

First warm winter day 
the air anything possible 
can be easily neutered

by rounds of cold-again nights.

Election times: flame-broiled agitprop
comes upon you like a resting hand
you desire to reciprocate your reach
as you desire the existent for its opposite
as a warm day in autumn
resembles a cold day in spring.

I knew that green desire in my white despair

sweating through wool
at stubborn stoplights
dreaming of empty jails
distant as the zillionth zillionaire
from the exponentially homeless

from somewhere I called home inside me
daring ambulance to change direction
as 
I 
sped 
through 
mid
night 
inter
section

learning what I already knew
of dead soldiers

reported by the evening indigo

printing presses, their tragedies
engineering analysis paralysis
everaware and less trusting
of things made obvious
banal and raw as anything 
again again again

tired of curses cures

freedom forms devices
custom construct paradigm ceremony truth
spewing like a bad volcano

blood pus and villainy

down upon the human cash

the world a bore
til miniscule as it is
a variation in the pattern 
excited slightly 
as tremors shorten days
immeasurable joy

I came to see the dark angel of what I wanted
as a moral human to believe
was changing, always, 
to continue.

Tired of the haze in which my beautiful mirage

made warmth and wind seem March

and the dark September

like a day appearing on the white page of the sky

words echoed on the lips of our extuplets

alone in an asphalt field

where elysian fiends waved

this night

and that night

and so forth.

So the pale and savage April bay

and the calendar of sparkling May
got closer seeming
a year and a season away
two steps ahead of my echo 
dreaming of Spring.

O minotaurs, come search and destroy me.

I feel the afternoon protects me now

from everything and the exceptions.

iv. manifestations of brainwaves while staring in the mirror of eternal oblivion

Because the Mystery drops 
enough hints to lose  
interest in the depth

of its resistance to reveal itself
and knowing I’m not heavenly
I slowed the pace of my investigation
and drank 
heavily.

Would February bring an answer maybe not

so late as pessimists desire.
But watch the optimists
hesitate these days--
eyes wide
as powerless eyes,
empty as the treasury
and colder than a stomach full of wine—
struggling to find exception to the scene
and life was a laugh,
inappropriate, nonetheless true.
You could see transitions smooth
the glide of heyday to afterapex
transition one day to the next
but then unto another
smoothly as the day it rains it shines it pours.

One haze in which that beautiful mirage revealed itself

I sat up stinkin thinkin
to favorite songs in snow-locked lots
where mesh fences rats’
timeless meditations

disgusting without doubt

as the future and the past they know
like hidden treasure and the plague

how the magnitude of the infinite 
sorrow and ecstasy faced
inspires silence

until Hello Goodbye
become one's only words
polite company is chased
and life cleaves to dichotomies
you know belie complexities
there is no reason to untangle.

In the morning
Civilization's same sick aloha returns--

every curse every cure

exception and norm
a brand of tarantula porn
a cocktail of thrills
status quo as contro
versial advertising--

nude men, coke use,
snakes and ladies, milk on face,

roller coasters painted up like summer fruit,
the usual configurations--

sending endocrines

far reaches of the lobe
and thence to those perverse equations
where extreme facial injury
and film of birth
are identical texts:

Mutineers have no fear.
Captains take hearts.
Everyone is thrown overboard.
This was my mantra.
Not the one I meant to choose.

I was in too deep to think 
the way I thought before.

v. geometaphysics

Bled dry gone crazy
desperately seeking critical mass consumption
unwavering in liege 
to faults I would 
inherit or create,
a formation of formations 
seeking form
among the adaptations
psychic and chemical
too hard and too soft
and no one can fix you are this person

absorbed in the body of math

the stars and we extend,
our extravagant forms 
made for multiple ends
and beginnings
as other extravagant forms
like the old ones meant nothing
more than the new. 

Whose goddess can say
if they did if they didn't
if Earth doing as it does
obliterates before I speak
random samples of the undeserving
and deserving

all bled dry gone crazy
tired of reason falsehood slogan trick
meme scheme deliberation
softball truth excoriation
happy birthday wishes
my Allstate agent 
messages to me,

a voice of reason to forget
hyped hopes and memories
of falling snow
of hearts that burned
like mandalas beneath the breastbone
now desperated by the dailiness of days

waiting on July--

known in this cold like a planet
by penumbra and legend--
or August to arise and blooming leaves
let trees smolder blue nightmares
warm my heart
with hot pants on Tokyo girls
their steaming skin
beneath preening magnolias
leaves wilting/asphalt vapor
that have laid, are yet to lay
on the endless crosswalk
in a crushed bouquet
confusing as the bad boob job

from which you cannot look away.

vi. autopsies and private armies

I've stopped evolving
found my formula and opted out.

Tomorrow’s clouds are up there now.

Hand in hand with fog 
I walk to be dispelled.
Someone said I’d pulled my last moon from the apple tree.
In the middle of things change takes me in another direction.
The profanity of the rapidity 
ensures my gatisfaction saranteed.

Anyone entirely entranced, watch out.
The heart cracks up 
along familiar faults:

Rules transform to patterns. Edicts to designs.

Laws more lenient than passing time 
forgive themselves
send October to November
to December nights
that bring me stinkin thinkin here
to fret with time, too much of it
for the taking of toast and tea
for hoping the chameleons 
somehow
blend into me.

So the search for ethical bacon continues

held out like an infallible promise
to supermarket babies
whining in the aisles
who think you break the laws
they think exist
must recreate themselves
impossible.

Falling in love over the counter

car exhaust billowing 
through twilight and evergreen
the magic aligns
waiting for me to wind down.

I never wind down.

When sunlight melts the ice

I drink to its caprice
keep moving violently
stotting the predators to say

I am here and can’t be moved.

Whatever I possessed has left

streets filled with the ugly and the blessed.
All that I have seen continues
revolutions, noble or ignoble,
Time the psycho tells.

vii. a chimpanzee at dusk

With the competition more extreme

a lazy dude like me
has limited ticks 
to ponder the melodrama 
you would be god to understand.

I washed out
like the profile
of a cloud against the clouds

could feel the spinning globe
sucking in comets and gravities
the dying sun living lost
unto eternal permafrost

had premonitions 
the inessential ape consults

before he slows the pace of his investigation
loses interest in the matrix of his findings
come dark nights 
you wish you was hermaphrodite
a tree self-propagating

a single-cell in need of no one

that nature had a son to kill
enemies to inspire
secrets to enlighten
daughters to defile

that there could be a plot
an art 
an answer to the question
with maudlin reverence
newscasters beleaguer us by: O,

Why god why?

The truth is hard.

No poem’s long enough to tell of it all.
No poem’s brevity suggests its void.
One poem needs a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, 

a silence to the seventh power, still
for all these words

I have not said
what is behind me.

I do not know

what is behind me.
I do not know what is ahead.
I do not know right now.

I cannot parse the animation of my arms 
to find the missing frame.

Do not understand the harbor’s quiet continuity.

Just what's behind me 
needs to push
and when it does
I’ll break
no questions asked.

So what to say but Oh, what fun 
to see the moon in morning

the Christmas lights around me

shining like the cordial gel 
a cherry bleeds 
inside its bell

not knowing how life would trend that day
at whim of chief executive obfuscator
Wall Street banker
poetry teacher 
presidential contender

snakecharming constant brinksmanship

at risk of Fuck on global scales
every day the amusement park
we all go along for the gamble.

At risk of you. At risk of me.

If there is meaning in my morass 
you will feel me how
the sun’s a little pretty 

and tomorrow is convincing
but both are very limited
in the promises they make 
against great odds.

One haze in which the beautiful mirage
revealed itself mirage

and speeding quickly toward baboon
all frontiers of my identity exhausted
by tied-to-the-shit
passions too powerful
to sink in the sand
not knowing
I would only boast to know
if I’d said anything at all
about what was past
what was in store
as January days
begot January days

and as I landed in a day
faintly reminiscent
of the day before.

Museum

  This animated  scene is typically  libertine. A girl is attempting  to escape 
 the amorous advances of a young man, depicted as he draws the bolt on

the door. Note how his smile suggests a summer morning. He is a monster

whom  neither gods nor  men can resist.  She is a  young woman who was

having  fun  and trusted  the  wrong “friends.”  You  can  see  beneath  the

surface of  her  plight  that  she is a  deeply troubled woman. She wears no

panties on this day but her garter belt is of pale blue satin with a little  lace

 flounce. Oh the goblet of the breast!  How men gravitate to the opalescent 

roundness  of  pearls!  She  is…she  is  the  smile of God.  Peeling off  one

mask  after another  in a desperate attempt  to  expose  her  true  inside, we

discover the most beautiful things in the strangest  places. “You really have

a great fund of information,” he  grins. “If a revolving phallus,  swathed  in

innumerable robes,  can  serve  to  make  your  life  sweet, get  out  of  that

 kimono  quick.”  His  engine, by  now  grown  to  3929  cubic  centimeters,  

 bristles  with four camshafts  and twelve intake stacks. “Jesus,”  

she thinks.  “It’s definitely alive.”  Floods of

sperm flow, perhaps, but it is a

stream of intelligence.

Seth Walks

and i still don’t  know what i should do.

become had but been have never could i someone like myself saw i

bounce now. things like this don’t  happen til they happen, it’s true.

to  got  we’ve ,done  I  had  fuck  the what like  me at  back staring

they could unlock the sky by standing on a  mountain of  soap suds

imagined  ever who  else everyone  see could i  halls white those up

that’s  when one of  those guys started turning blue on the floor and

if that sounds dramatic remember the light under your darkest door.

.eyes your of  front in  science the with mythology in believe to lame

everyone finally sees. it all has to end, all at once and entirely. it’s so

what saw  i  but .quickly blur to not clearly  too—struck is man high

days grow attached  like siamese  twins.  i was  struck  in the  way a

 and  dawn  the and  dark  the  divides  nothing  how, afternoon  the in

 wrong  about  that; about a  salted  sleep  that ends too often at  five

something  is there  know  i .again  myself   like feel i  .clap  to begin

time.  i hear  the questions  my  father always  asks.  i  feel  my heart

some  in bathed not have i  .head  my  in words no  are there.  games

see  myself   in  there  on  the  floor   watching  someone  play  video

can  i .mistletoe the under  blowjobs of  brag  and curls  cheese down

thank  me for  the risk, and  say  i’m secretly  like them as they  suck

,herb the congratulate they .kept neatly  and  decorated  neatly is but

the  third  floor’s  first  door on the  right.  it smells of old men’s feet

from  shines  that   light  bad  of  halo spoiled  the  in  ghosts  sloppy

to  see  you.  and   they  are  pouring  from  your  roommate’s  room;

happy are they .you   know  don’t  they  .mellowtude  their and eyes

to the  parties where  everyone  seems overly  friendly with their dry

;backbone  confusing building’s  the up go  i  .things such  in  lieved

imitate, that i’m more than  a  mouth and a  gut.   i  have  always be-

i  assholes  the  not  am i  that ,somehow   better  breathe  i  think  to

week’s  work  is done  and everyone  knows how to  breathe.  i  like

the  when nights  Friday  on  shit   talk  princesses  and  boys  dantic

go up the  stairs  another flight, up  dimly lit white  halls  where  pe-

i   .fear the remember i   .themselves    about   and   girls about  said

when  i was  eleven one night in Maine. i remember the things  they

car  a  of   backseat   the  in  breath  cousin’s  my  on  beer  of  smell

                 member  many   things  about   the  past.  but  i could remember  the

-re not  could  i   .Romans  before  came Hebrews  if  remember  not

were no words in my head.  i had not bathed in some  time.  i  could

there  .pirate  a  like  stank  and  landing  the on rose  i .end without

one is  worse, the  purity  or the  filth,  remains  a  debate  that  runs

which  though  agents  cleaning antiseptic the  like less  and  smoke

things  passing   through  begin  to  smell and  smell   like  beer and

the and  grow nights  the  and  go  days  the  as  shadow  a always is

at night.  i  go   through  the  lobby  of  plain   tile  and  glass  which

beer  sour  and   morning  the  in  agents  cleaning  like  smells  that

like  a  pair of pants slipped over the thighs.   i  go  up  the  stairway

upstairs  ground   the   from   backwards   walking  door   the  in  go

i