The Gates (Raw)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A sheet of glass thinner than apartment walls, the spritz of mist upon Colocosia, white as wine come Carolina mornings.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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The octopus-lifting branches left his stage in midriver, sparkling like a gigolo and revving those three hearts.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Blue diamonds of the hypersky. Simulated dream Dakotas. The masks of Atlantis surface on the sea.

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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.

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Another beach. This time a marble shore. The dog wears a Modigliani mask. The Vikings follow home the birds. My father wallpapers the cliffs.

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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 

paradise console: Diamond-studded beef, dashboard frescoes, silk-infused airbags, touch-screen dopamine,

divine nutrition for lace tongues and tailfins. We’re customizing the whole convoy tonight. Top speed: Angel breast and luxury pharmaceuticals.

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Crystalline tyrannosaur skull lit up with Christmas lights under the grapevines on top of the hill.

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On a drawbridge that led to a sloop in a river braided with fish, Kate Upton and Blackbeard did the whole Kama Sutra.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Maha pralaya

All the labor of this man is for his mouth; therefore his soul cannot be satisfied. --Ecclesiastes

Does He not Himself provide me with the accusations I use against Him? –Lautreaumont

And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! —Melville

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Burst ten frillion ways to continue

without direction to an end

teeming with political bacteria

fulminating extraneous intricacy

everthirsting at the neverending fountain

spouted somewhere deep

from this ridiculous amount of space.

Pretty for no reason. Savage all the same.

To speak honestly

as only a creation can--

just look at me.

The work is unrefined, a challenge

so great in breadth and passion

I have let gone

the conception of perfection

and take relief

in crude devotion.

Maybe there are limits

beyond which even Your beautiful idea

lies barricaded from the light

that cannot shine

through Your own angry density.

Maybe all creators

have a shape

already made for them.

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If You have not forsaken us

I find it hard to gather why

as I am that imperfection

everyone seeks to avoid.

Are You—also imperfect

having made me, proof of error—

broken by frustration

I can’t perform as was designed

too committed to surrender

Your ape to the fire?

Admitting this is saying

You are not what we imagine.

I share a slender notion

of what that is.

Look at what I aim to say.

Then look at what I am.

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I say, of You

I am judge neither purer

nor more judicious

than the next to see the evidence.

In the end my sentence

will be never guilty

because killer and victim
are bound together in continuation.

Beyond the forest the filth and the ocean

the silence of Your equilibrium

so fantastic it is laughter roar and cry

cancels out itself

as stars make of themselves

heavenly asterisks

to qualify the blank night sky.

Hence these fastidious records

of life I keep mostly private

to the faster efface

my memory off of the tomb--

these records say nothing.

But that’s not the point.

That I lived is the point.

That now it must be undone.

How do You make it

so?

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Trapped in the latest

tower of data

sooner eclipsed than evening tomorrow

by a tower greater, more meaningful

more efficient, or something...

hunger gone to the hours

skill to program

heart to machine

vitality to Philippines

thought to a database

dream to necessity

mind to superiors

soul to the vices that choked off

all thought I still was a soul, inconsistent

but, pathetically, conscientious

of my disappointing companions

and the daughter who looked at me

like some sweet baby gorilla

I knew would chew my face off

twenty years hence

I woke aware

of the great loneliness

contemplated for a moment

rendered irrelevant by the next

which made much energy

but never moved me

though I walked past the violets

that long since ceased to amaze

and took my elevator

of cocoa butter and hairspray

into the cerebrum of a delicate business

where language, preprogrammed

makes anathema king

until one day goodbye.

In this condition one goes

contented absent unconscious

forgetful distracted amazing and bled

tamed viper fangs dripping my god
into the dream that goes on.

-------------------------------------------- 

In the absence of love

a man is this coin.

Beware the one unhappy to be copper.
Beware the man 

in search of God.

What must be wrong with him?

He is not happy. Yet he is not bright.

Probably a criminal, old or broken.

He only sees the odds against him

and hasn’t the wits to lie

or the charm to seduce

a way from confronting

whether life should be lived

as others are living

in his own deepest fantasy

and, if they are 
how he can bend
himself to normality 
and stop the cravings he craves.

As the beautiful debate their beauty

his ugliness leads the way
into the magic of mind, past
the limits of language
to some crooked antechamber
to wait for translucence
as dead as alive.

--------------------------------------------------------

I close my eyes against the velvet experience.

Everything I’ve never known is softer

than my hands upon the pillow.

Despite the precedents

there are no crocuses.

The light and truth

that got away

were just the hummingbirds

about me.

To get me now, well

I am beyond the getting.

No saintly rapture

no CEO optimism

no love to spin

toward the promise the prophets

dreamed up in mountains deserted

when we were Your favorites

and You showed us things nightly.

Nothing but energy

avoiding disruption

of its wayward null purpose.

Still I assign You 
a name and a brain
and all of my messages
because there is no choice
but to be small.
------------------------------------------------

I am many things, a man

but the absence of a man

as well. The matter to be left

when Your incredible shadow

comes to swallow mine

will fall to the ground
waiting for mushrooms.

I felt it, presaged, one morning
my body, a husk left 
by the great sucking starfish You embody
sucking me into eternity.

I remember I felt it, that shadow, a chill

looking down from an empty bridge

on an empty street

in a bitter winter

how I felt myself atomized

blowing ashes through enlightened fog

hung upon the river

lit up from within

by the faintest sun I ever saw.

I felt it. I feel it. 
I am still frozen there. I will always

be frozen there

looking down from an empty bridge

missing my friend, the craziest orchid

I took for my own

now gone with the sadness, full-flower

I was meant to experience. 

When I think of her I think of You

and hope that I am wrong.

I’ve slipped the noose of common sense.

I have looked over the cliff.

Have you looked over the cliff?

Past that point

God will learn who you are.

Do you want Him to know?

---------------------------------------

The clock’s in motion

and here I am

a man in the night

staring at the moonlight

through the tusks of a mastodon

spear in hand to the deafening sound.

The trembling ground

makes me wonder

if anything was ever stable.

Who is more vulnerable than this

pompous

weakling

cannibal

concupiscent?

Why does he believe his brain

will change what made his brain his brain?

Why does his heart evolve

to crush upon the hairy female

spawning with another

emotionless creep in the intimate blare?

Why would he seek more

meat than he can eat

or think too long

of how he ends

begin to find

how he began

and stand astounded

erected spines and streamlined minds

mean shit against the shit?

Why is this

pain? 

Shouldn’t You absorb it?  

Or do You 

when the earth quakes 

like a lover’s body 

also feel the rapture?

Chances

second chances

thirds and fourths

can’t calm the hurricanes of aching

that make me fall asleep by noon

glued to newstales of ISIS, the election

frayed social fabric, desperate politicians

plus-sized magazines

the wacked-out machinations

of the System or of Earth

or a heart that is withholding

some sad secret I made bleed.

You make me sorry

I exist.

-----------------------------------------------

I would aspire to be holy

if I knew what knowing what

holiness was like.

I would end it here

if death did not relent

to new lives

perpetuating the perpetuation

kiss Your strawberries for years

write praise of streams

and naked cream-tan bodies

of supernovae and amphibians

rare as passing dreams

then awe destruction

fawn on earthquakes, supercells

find quantum revelation, burn something

to watch the fire, discover beauty

in the North Pacific Garbage Gyre

in our great gestation

of sterile new animals

if I knew no better:

Ears are for the limited

and prayers are to ourselves.

Forgive the plasticity

of my admiration.

It may be seen as cynical and decadent

typical of one who writes

near the death of his nation

his own planet his cooling star

to say Let’s love evil as good

until the sky is green

as the grass is rain.

But truth cannot be stupid

nor can I be so delicate

in evolution to the higher human dream

that I ignore all evidence

we are the concubines of madness

awaiting ecstasy or a bruise

that we must be something to ourselves

because it’s clear we mean nothing to You.

----------------------------------------------------------------

How many names

have You gained through the years?

Jehovah Moloch Shiva Zeus Kali.

Ten thousand more 
because we’ve all lost count 
and can’t identify

the branches of infinity.

So many guesses cannot really say

what pretty litanies could be weaved

from all these reveries

or what I should say

to stop the beating

Aphrodite.

I don’t presume, encompass you with God

and cautiously still feel about You

like some coyote by the fire

curious and unconvinced

You will not leap to burn me.

Because You always

burn me.

Because I deserve it.

Because You made it so.

When I flagellate myself

it is You with the whip.

When I am stoned

it is You bleeding.

--------------------------------------------------

I have worshiped

every open flower

of the endless honeysuckle

without sensing

anything but what I awed—

the juvenile experience of truth

others have long since seen

ten frillion ways fragment

into the tropes and symbols

of the disappointed language

they now whisper

I can't whisper
even though I see now
no flower is itself
and what I awed 

now makes me groan.

It amazes me I got here

from my first life as a fly

trapped in rafflesia

using me to grow yet higher

into the goading sun.

It has been argued Surrender

to You is never defeat.

It’s never the powerless

who war against God.

But it’s all a question of aspects.

And I can’t say if I’m here to starve

or step in the sweet pool I drown.

-------------------------------------------------

Excuses come so easily

and senses

with delusions.

O the hours I spent

retarded on purpose

staring at broken clocks

awaiting lingerie from London

lobster from Portland

Austrian paintings

African hides

rugs from Iran

Borneo taxidermy

toys from Japan

til nothing was left

but a liability.

It’s so hard to be good in the garden.

It’s so hard to know what to do.

My head still looks, considers

but beauty is no longer

what it was—just a tint upon a thing

that changes by the angle.

Lies became unbelievable.

Truth became more true

which somehow made it easier

to absorb the lies

I knew lay everywhere

everything, so impossible

ugliness, so prevalent

my vision, so perverted

by perceptions and insights

saw me to perversion too.

I could wear any mask 
and never be transported.
----------------------------------------------

Glam wet between your thighs

hot for palace disbelief

thick as June

and soft as dream

clit pressed against your lace

a pink and crimson jellyfish

flaring on the water

looking to be licked and opened

distinguished, sucked out

pressed in, rounded

like the horn of a golden continent

and nubbed with teeth

covered by the lips

spat on, redoubled, twirled

your layered meat held

and slapped

the thighs that hold it

tween their altar

bitten gently as a piece of fruit

you don’t want to squirt

upon my shirt

until I thought Fuck all

give me your milk-white ass

bulging in my hands beneath

you take my head and push me in

so deep the pressure

now rings out my fingers

forcing me to deepen, dive in

feel every jewel inside your mine

and you come so hard

I lick it like an animal

sucking off his arrows

look deeply at the thick black line

dividing mandibles you’ve shaved for me

and lick again, the trimmed-up hair

just against my nose

clit exposed, a flaming plume

the heavy sail of woman in her conquest

all land ready for a king.

 ---------------------------------

Nothing’s more divine

than making one you love

Thank you.

I’m not stupid, see. I see

that you respect the man most tested

by love and torture and the ice

of war, deep rejection, tiny coffins

or the shock that all Your wonder

can only poison him.

Buddha had concubines before his Bodhi.

Jesus loved Mary

even if the rumors are untrue. 

Only one like this can face the gravity

waiting for the detonation.

I hate being

this highwire artist of virtue.

All loveliness. All desire. All that was

was never mine. Calls me like the siren

song I never heard.

Were I to purge myself

and satiate completely

perhaps the skies would clear.

But I can’t, I never could

and now I’m in so deep

that I go down

or come back

unpurified.

The whole experiment is compromised.

So accept I am a faking student

that behind the act I’m trying

to convince the Teacher

my understanding of a theorem

whose proof cannot be given.

Thus I nod when I see anything

like Yes it all makes sense:

This birth. That beheading.

The music I first heard

and the last insult too.

A friend. I mistook as Your agent.

Why would anything inexplicable

be inexplicable

in light of what I know?

Or what I knew

for a time

I wish to forget.

-----------------------------------------------

When you come back from the dead

everything will be the same.

Work. Food. Dishes. Car.

There’s some poor animal to feed.

The world has turned, of course

even to a light you may approve.

But what you’ve lived?

You stood before a great white cube

feeling for its secret

while wind and flame

made everything insane

until your heart surrendered

an entrance won’t be found.

When you come back from the dead

everything will be the same.

Work. Food. Dishes. Car.

You may describe what you remember

to a friend if he has time.

But what you’ve lived is something more

or less the end of it.

The stars will give a number

you will understand

and a child will lead you

through the gardens by the hand.

Everything will be like this.

Work. Food. Dishes.

Abnegation.

Happiness.

-------------------------------------------------

Sometime in misty Grand Rapids

the past got exponentially arcane.

Your incredible shadow came to swallow mine.

Every sight held big-time sadness:

the beautiful green of springtime depression

grass pollen on expensive shoes

blackbirds bathing on a minivan hood.

Strange men to divorce again

before the year was done.

That day one moment

I felt a pleasant absence

like clear air

untouchable, without an explanation. 

The mist grew heavy on the bridge

and the buildings 
disappointed.

----------------------------------------------

Behind the wall of knowing

I would not think or feel

a reptilian farrago

of heartbreak impulse

murder insecurity please.

I was not drunk

always. Or meditating

strictly speaking. Days

went by. I rushed them

like a traffic cop

on a power trip

at rush hour

unable to pretend tomorrow

was but today, a beauty

I would pollinate with pain.

How could I argue with the god who thought Ok?

He

is this:

Liar cheat failure

drunken addict pervert slob

a lonely original

gathering rainbows

in case a lonely original

comes looking for rainbows.

Or think otherwise than God

has made me

this.

And the lady of rainbows passed on.

--------------------------------------------------

The backstory runs

as so many young

and lustful do I did

treasure my desires

in a whirlwind of rubies

full of Ferraris

burning toward fantastic futures.

At a train show under the fireworks

in a village north of here

I took a Ferris wheel to the moon

and thought I’d live forever.

I was no longer river. I was nothing but sea.

A bird trapped in an airport.

Pick your metaphor, your simile.

Symbolic of something so profound

the rationale’s a politician

boring you with slivers of the truth.

Perhaps I was excited—too excited—

to play philosopher

with riddles of existence.

To drink cognac and read de Sade

pretend I understood Spinoza,

Vivaldi blaring in my room

til I was seventeen

shut off from the world

and all but the strangest of men.

The past, so pointless
it can’t be undone.
I mention it only cuz the imagery amazes
me I got here and I'm vain. 

But percentages keep closing in 
damage done

leading on to damage done. 
I learned. I learned the opposite. 
I learned the middle. I learned nothing.

All those pretty memories of mist
and You still wonder from my history

Is this the day he learns?

------------------------------------------------

Because my car made my credit crash

my kidneys quiver

from the pickling of their tissue

my heart throbs with each thrilling misstep

I stay wired to the candidates, the Caliphate

the bullshit that I know is bullshit

which I watch to understand

how twisted we can be

when we are lost, afraid

and poor and beaten

ensconced and happy, rich and careless.

O the talking points of dying

for a man or a world

are a web of accusations.

Whose deception 
deceived reality?

I see how far away You pore upon us

like a poet fingering Delete.

And prime the new Earth

of jellyfish plastic and sand.

-------------------------------------------

This is no longer about what it was.

It has turned in
to something else.

My love is thin

polluted pain.

Qabbani and Ashbery

Quevedo. Verlaine.

Nothing works

to ebb the night.

There is no way to turn back time

or think so doing would better today.

A nebulous cloud

follows the incipient dead

and soon we walk blindly in a nebulous cloud

and soon I was walking

in nebulous clouds

seeking the edges of my life

grown bolder about rounding

that cape of hopeless ocean

finding shells I sometimes dreamed

wait on islands far away.

Simple desperation, the wolf

of weak and tender children

acutest pain of the screwed-beyond-belief.

Those are Your nights of oatmeal

cat food and liniments

when I lay down asking

Do I not have more to garden

than a memory of weeds?
Make the pain stop

and I’ll continue to wonder

if peace can be real.

Just let me sleep a little longer.

Until Alaric

comes knocking at the gate.

He’s here.

------------------------------------------------------

I have no idea how responsible I am

for the blueness of the ocean.

It’s zero. I’m sorry.

Apologies at some point have no depth.

The colonist with good intentions

the slaver with his deck of shit

the bystander who looked away

the trillionaire who had his way

the doctor who will clone his lover

consumer with his plastic bags

citizen who took the lies

killer with his mind of demons

all have mea culpas

extenuating from decisions they will

buttress onto hollow language

the wounded have no need for

and posterity despises

as it produces all-new wounds.

It does not matter

if what I’ve done had no effect

or is a straight-up act of cruelty.

Sometimes people, they disappear.

All they want is silence.

To lick their mortal wound alone.

--------------------------------------------

What good is a vague

accusatory repentance/question

thing-I-call-a-prayer

to a god one shade of black?

Little, I believe.

As little as the universe 
to a limited imperfect man

incapable of not questioning

if his consciousness, the biggest tooth

in an awesome jaw

is another quirk-of-replication

that deceives me for believing

my own awareness

is indicative of nothing but itself.

Or if its collapse

is my portal to the end of suffering.
-------------------------------------------------

See how I am all completely glass?

I cannot be myself again.

There is nothing left of what-was-me.

Bloodless I accept

no explanation can resolve

Your million mysteries

of origin, formation

the corpse

and the spring

the scent of the rose

the sound of the bellicose

the sight of the protest

the feel of the handshake

the zygote

the xenon

the yottabyte

the malfunction.

The boundary.

All elements all acts all sensations

if not illusion

immaterial to me.

No magic contains Your process.

No memory masters Your action.

I take a walk.

The tree that fell. I heard it not.

But there it lies.

--------------------------------------------

However good something is

is how bad it will be.

As I wonder Did September happen?

I know December did.

I deduce what I can with these corrupt senses

and think to myself

What a particle am I!

Picture me as I am. An insect asleep

in the web of an absent spider

his call for clarity spoken to the dew.

Listen while you can. Soon 

only the loneliest librarian

will hear our whispers in the night.

-----------------------------------------------

It’s like the sun comes out

once you have settled for a cloudy day

this relief of speaking

the thunder hidden in us deep.

Words don’t need to last to matter

even as the thunder speaks again

another day beneath another cloud.

Everything is, as it is

exactly as it must be

no other way absurd.

The forest the filth and the ocean.

This birth that beheading.

The dead refugee and the thriving asshole.

Even the sparrows

eating chicken bones

on the sidewalk.

I know this.

Neither jaded nor blind nor even experienced

as any trilobite who knew

the tragic magic

You drag me through today

I know enlightenment

as an emotionless shrug

before a preposterous miracle.

I know You within me 
and am left with a feeling

unlike any other.

I must be the good in the world.

I must be something to myself
I must be

before my heart goes out

like a fire extinguished with cream.