Anything

When I step outside my head will tilt back
and I wonder why
until I remember I must scan the dark sky
for some trace of the moon

full, half, sliver.

Anything
to remind me it's still the night's Sun
and the things under it
remain possible.

Rainy Day at Echo Lake

In deep of eyes shut as
scene gypsy gravel and opalescent owl 
bridgestone bridegroom blues 
and a hawk beating by like a helicopter.

The sun’s not out yet but brother blue sky 
is peeling back the grey and free 
blueberries grow around the vessels
colored bows.

I Swaying sidesaddle between a jack pine 
and his cousin white 
feeling chatter from other actioneers 
or low ground squirrels and some fish jumping by.

Feel serenely trumps while

tomorrow winds away. 

Trying Interior Lighting

How do you break off

something that is only real insofar

as you recognize it?

The clue from logicians points towards

forgetting.

But the act of forgetting is impossible

insofar as it is a non-act—a function of non-ness.

The reason we recall the things we'd like to forget

is the same reason we cannot get that fucking song

out of our heads.

To release a mind-thing is as difficult as is to create one.

Falling between cracks is your best bet:

get a new job, follow local sports teams,

bet on said sports teams and feel devastated when

you lose. Find hobbies that need nothing but

seamless concentration and follow through.

Go to conventions.

Do not get into bed to fall asleep

unless you're absolutely exhausted.

Day dream only of sex and money and ridiculous things

like dirigible world tours and escape artists that drown

in the shark tank and never see the air hose to their left.

Follow the news. Become engulfed in the news.

Become a news guru who is deep down dying

from the phonetic idiocy of the twenty-four hour cycle.

Regret everything, so long as you don't think,

because thinking means remembering,

and it is not what you want.

Don't think about what you want.

Deny even wanting anything and insist (both to yourself and others)

that you're floating placidly, even keeled,

rolling with the waves, relaxing in the doldrums.

Don't acknowledge boredom or fear,

these are things for the weak and those who remember.

Drink when you're in a social gathering and it's

socially acceptable and when you're in a social gathering

where a flask of scotch won't be noticed and

especially when alone and not busy.
Don't be “not busy”.

Funnel funds from fenced goods into an offshore account.

Take up squash.

Don't think too much about it.

Find a crevice to crawl into when hung over.

Make this crevice comfortable.

Decorate your crevice and never let anyone see it.

Think only when necessary, and when

the paths of your thoughts are fully predictable.

Never picture her face.

Never look at a picture of her face.

Forget every identifying characteristic of her face:

the tiny pink vee of gums that you see

under her upper lip when she smiles as wide as she can

and her lips curls up a bit:

dimples in rose:

eyes that recede from a stare; positively glimmer at a glance:

dream-like lashes and edges of incisors somehow mythic:

corners of the lips that curl in a frown or smile, just

how you imagine that Athena might makes faces—

never remember these things.

Grind down your teeth while you're sleeping

because the stress of forgetting is intense.

Borrow a massage pillow to help with the anxiety

of forgetting and remembering only shallow things

that let you sleep or watch TV without twitching

and trying not to remember.

Obsess over recycling.

Obsess over the intricacies of local conservation efforts

or the Dow or tennis form or trying to cry during old movies

or fingering the last corn nut without turning the bag upside down.

Obsess about your petty obsessions.

Change everything about how you eat.

Sleep without a pillow.

Get your hair Styled and Colored by a Professional

and when you're dissatisfied 3 days later go back and demand a refund.

Feign outrage. Don't consider.

Don't look at old pictures because

old pictures (even if she is not in them or even related)

will summon old memories of when you were less old

than you are now and this is merely a path of remembrance:

And remember: to forget is to live without this thing

you're trying to break off, and since it won't exist

if you don't acknowledge it

(truly) isn't this just it? Isn't this winning? Aren't you

a bare white dish of bone laid out for the feast

and never thinking

of the ox's hip and leg and body

you once belonged to?

A Twelve Thousand Year Love Affair

Agriculture gave us acne,
The Plague, and tooth decay. 

We gave her

Transgenic soybeans, algal blooms

And the dying of Winter. 

We have never 

been happier. 

Onyx Egg

I bought an egg of onyx
and a skull made from balsa wood
in the airy marketplace of Otavalo.

The plaza de ponchos a labyrinth
of cascading tapestries and pure
Alpaca knits and walls of sweaters

Felt hats and straw hats hechas a mano
and chintzy wooden trinkets and
a trunk of crumbling catechism books.

The sizzle of porks and skins and
Corn frying and a batter of cornmeal
touching the ears of everyone alike, even the

Wine creased face folded on the sidewalk
mumbling for sueltos and garnering no gazes,
his green felt hat dirigible and grimed

And the filthy tiny mutt dog lying beside
with scruffed sores and bent ears,
their plot and plight ignored as Chinese silks

by all but certainly by the man selling coca treats
and maté teas and leaves to chew for three dollars
but we haggle down to three for five

And flying about drunk munching hojas de coca
through bustle and rigor and pale, thrifty Germans
with thick wollen jackets abounding

and patterns of alpaca prancing through their zippers
all vanilla faced gringos like we are,
snatching up the droppings of the Andes

and leaving greenbacks for farmers and their
wives.

Learning Still

Slept out in a refuge,
A wooden platform with roof, the night,
Lauding open air and openness 
And alarm of cheery birds
And blankets of jackets
And sheets of tent fibers
And noble clouds growing
For our breakfast. 

Time again to rise and march
Down the mountainside
Between steep farms and 
Fences groaning trunks
Weaved with barbed wire
To valley, and city, and people. 

Still,
The exalted quiet of desert forest
Was my teacher for a night. 

Cosmic Drama - Tat Tat Tat. . .

I've always known 
the games you play,
You hide in eight part harmony 

In every one 
and thing and time
From salmon, Georgia, and the blind

You lie your lie
You think is true, beguiling stars
And mortal woe. 

You're hid so well 
we've plum forgot 
It's Turtle-turtle, bottom-up.

From wisdom 
Sheltered, knowledge, void,
The matter is we're all annoyed.

From me right now, 
you're hiding too--
You're all that is and I am too. 



Tat Tvam Asi

Light Pollution

Do you hear that?

It's the whispering of stars

To their neighbors. 

Do you see that?

It's a thousand suns being born

In the blink of your eye.

Do you feel that?

It's the full moon swelling

In it's womb. 

Let us not forget distant

Glimmers of hope

While our world devours itself. 

The Road to Puyo

The scent of the hog hanging by it's snout from a thatched tienda 
we zip by on rented beat-up mountain bikes and the jungle road to Puyo
all filling up with a longing for something holy and foreign. 

Eighteen wheeled rumble and honk, leaving little spaces 
For tires and legs and raw feelings of spraying rain 
And the tilt of my head and frame to avoid 
the rooster tail whipping up into my eyes. 

A tunnel approaches on la izquierda 
we keep a la derecha onto la ciclovia of octagonal tiles striped lengthwise 
with sopping cobblestone and sometimes gravel 
and sometimes mud and sometimes puddles and sometimes a stream 
that comes a third up the wheel and peppers you everywhere with agua sucia. 

Maple - Fall - Stream (draft 2)

Several hypotheses occurred without evidence:
Openings in choral forests drown in the sun's
utter light, the omission of umbrage, foliage.

A leaf that was holy in its fingerling etchings.
This was no mistake of voracious feeding,
of a scaled pinching insect.

Circuit grazing empties skin
with the sureness of itself as canvas--
carbon detaching itself to find a mate,
a something that combines.

A little bit of every something in the shape
of this leaf, the flowering river waves
dense with shadow, steeped in silt.

The twitching (stained glass workshops)
of the scaled pinching insect manifest
the mouth of God Inside.

The little bit left in-between
comprising strokes.

The left behind composes more
than the glimmer on the stream.

Sunless Morning v2

The morning of the 26th of September

all of the frost was in my teeth and hair.

I had it out the night before with a witch

who claimed to turn hawk's tails

into animal souls and sodden cardboard into their bodies.

The nightwinds blew into howls
as she leaned her crooked back against

a big birch and sang to leaves as they fell.

I had my hands around a dead branch that had fallen

as she flicked her gnarled fingers through the air.

I kept saying This is Nature!

this is nature

not your stodgy incantations, frump

she just smiled and continued loosing letters

into the waning light of the moon.

              This a fortune told
              now this is a spell 

              of some substance 


A talisman she held

above her head and thrust into the bark:

orange wire wrapped around the notches of a cross,

the cross with a loop, copper and steel:

the ankh came from her fingers 

and stuck into the tree.

Cross a witch as she gilds a spirit and it will follow you.

The pine marten switches feet as it hops across the dirt,

I've been still, watching from the window a sunless morning,

watching as it hops along, tracing frost through soil

and leaving snow amid its tracks.

Ritual

Happy as a swale he climbed to the sandy peak and cast eyes to the sweetwater sea before him. The sun was setting on Lake Michigan equal in spirit to his eyes as they followed through wave and spray and gas and dust. Sixteen gulls wheeled through his sight before the Sun met its end beyond the horizon and each one had its feet lifted to its body. The zooming gulls caught light on their wings and swore to the moon as it lifted itself up beyond the layers of vapor. Several stars peaked through abating fill of rosepink clouds meager at their edges, more moderate nearer the moon. The first brightest light met the eyes as a vision filled the mind, suddenly, the visage of Mars appearing glow-red. As rosy fingers gave way to blue nigh dark the breeze carried smoldering pine boughs to the mouth and nostrils, pleasing memories. Turning to see deeply above, he fell back to antiquity glinting from the stars gazing down to him and the fire he had made. Stooped over a dry stake prodding fire with his neck crook'd to the sky as before and before and before man had done to see.  The guiding light below his feet cast for fortunes and dreams, the ones above for fate and season.  Perching as he had below the night above the sweetwater sea with fire at his feet, a timeless ritual glowing around and in him

Sunless Morning

The morning of the 26th of September

all of the frost was in my teeth and hair.

I had it out the night before with a witch

who claimed to turn severed tails

into animal souls
and sodden cardboard into their bodies.

The nightwinds blew into howls
as she leaned her crooked back against

a big birch and sang to leaves as they fell.

I had my hands around a dead branch that had fallen

as she flicked her gnarled fingers through the air.

I kept saying This is Nature!

this is nature

not your stodgy incantations, frump

she just smiled and continued loosing letters

into the waning light of the moon.

This a fortune told, now this is a spell 

of some substance, this the talisman she held

above her head and thrust into the peeling bark:

orange wire wrapped around the notches of a cross,

the cross with a loop, copper and steel:

the ankh came from her fingers 

and stuck into the tree.

Cross a witch as she gilds a spirit and it will follow you.

The pine marten switches feet as it hops across the dirt,

I've been still, watching from the window a sunless morning,

watching as it hops along, tracing frost through soil

and leaving snow amid its tracks.

Life's flesh

I feel it everywhere, the bite and suck of life's flesh at my lips as its juices trickle down my front and the sweetness it can hold is wrung all from the fibers. A fiend's rush to his dope is the kiss I suck from each dull hallway waiting library sucker punch reception room drizzle desked office spacing drear. You pushed me out like a dragging soaking dog from the clean carpet tombs and white-blind bedroom spots of earth flung to the flowers all mashed beneath my heels as I glanced up at a beatific moon shining through the window in your eyes and without it I couldn't show you how I rang so truly when you clocked me that night, with your tongue so tight wrapping itself around my cerebellum's cord and thrusting heart that then I leaked all purple light and have not stopped since trying to hurl myself toward the rawness of indiscretion and in seeing you opening like a lotus first budding at the magic of my mouth and the fire oh the fire you sent from your eyes to mine the very halo sunning vibrant gods from crypto-Roman mountain peaks that minute you walked up to me and felt eager to feel me eagerly that minute I surrendered to the rush inside us both.

Gifting

I've been thinking on something you gave me:

Was it a song?  Was it a kiss?

Was it me that gave you tremors,
the rapid choking breath, anxiety like a vice?

You gave me reason to question
if I deserve someone as good as you.

The yarn we shared has been unravelling
since we met last July and has since
we've said goodbye (over skype, how small)
given way to a lump of alloyed self-reflections

Of sudden shaking hands and ears that won't stop burning
(I know you talk about me)
but most of all a need to flee, to feel free,
to untangle from the bramble that we're both
wrapped up inside
(and may have grown accustomed to)

But all that yarn's now mine--

All the shock and sorry wrecks
of groping for light are good
for the the soul of a Searcher, the lostness,

(my saudade never fades) yielding nuggets
I collect in sincere fear and blindess
will be gems once I'm out the other side

becoming gifts for the fateful present.

Atlas Sound - Union Ballroom 2012

His hair spikes 

like the Marfan devil that he was

Asking for more sound to

Obliterate the hiding crowd's virgin eardrums

Racking the sounds 

upon ssskittering sounds

Sexless whale moans 

And divertive synth bubbles

Slurring his speech from scotch and wiping the residues 

of his lips into the grainy flipper bass notes reverbing into darkness

Blowing up this university ballroom with clatterous bravado

Droneish filamental rattlings

Smooth cacophony driving repetitively through marginal drivers

Every song ending in self destruction.

Campfires

The vodka popped
and poured itself down our throats
so the night sped up like all the good ones do

and until I saw the lotus in your eyes
I was unsure of what would happen next

then some subtext brought us up the wooden stairway
with the copper mobile twisting in the loft above us

and the lotus in your eyes showed itself and
my 18 year old hands trembled to yours but
until I saw the lotus, I couldn't touch your hand

and the Amadeus vodka that had popped and poured, burrowed
itself into my amygdala and I saw
the lotus in your eyes and finally drew your lips to mine

and the feel of your skin was making my ears burn
and then the moment came where the lotus closed your eyes
and we kissed and Jessie ran up the stairs

interrupting in drunken faux pas, pushing herself in,
upset that you were not in good faith
she feeling some obtuse responsibility for you and for us

as if what she felt mattered in the least at this moment
and so that was another excuse

we opened the door to my bedroom and kept our eyes
on one another and now I'm not sure whether or not
but it seems perhaps my eyes had a lotus in them too

and from that night they've never left
a little flower blue or yellow from the cornice
of our minds, our eyes--

little green leaves burstings from the corner of our brains--

some campfires they start easy and
just don't burn down on their own.

plantland parts

The window is always open
for new sounds rattling through, like
yellow blossoms, tangerine and golden
xylophone ringings, gathering leaves
from the tree you sprang from.

I could hear a pine needle drop.
I heard a pine needle drop.
The pine needle dropped, and I heard it.

It's hard to ever say

It's hard to even say what we mean.

The fingers we've crammed  down our throats
to stifle us loving ourselves would be enough,

but wires of our mothers' hair
are wrapped around our fathers' stare,
the bruises from our brothers' harm

all laid inside our chests and backs.
We hide from arms of playground taunts
each haunting us in sing-song rhyme--

Pained reactions to our bald voices,
counted against us in a vast tally.

Each sagging corner from each pair of lips
and eyes rolled and rolled and rolled.

Reticence to speak, the more comforting retreat,
the missed open mouth, tongues bit mid word,

against the stutter
the stammer
the slur

the secret slip, the dreaded tonal squeak.

Its a wonder we can speak at all.

Timequake

I want to be wise
like Vonnegut was

and not feel my life
like a .44 slug

but it's so hard with
both feet on the ground

and always so filled up with
something

like despair but more often boredom
or this detached pondering voice

more than wedding cake from
the grocery store with green frosting only

sweet and deadly for the little
teeth in my mouth, more than plastic wrappings

dripping over ripened ears.  It's just so fast
with an eye to the needle instead of the dress

Load, ready, aim, fire, blasting off
without a notion of the primer or target.