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.