Brothers

wind up
a deep breath
depth charges inhaled
exploded
exhaled
a quick belch burst from
not quite fear
from a belly weight of shared primordial soup
the sacred strings of A G T &c that
well, we are brothers

On the loft I count wingstrokes
count breezebreaths
count the tastes of the sky on my eyes
on my slipstream tumble

I have this ballast in my belly
I will not be rolled
I will not be rolled

Tonight when I "roll in" on four lumpy tires
sleep-eyed. I will not see them

Tonight, when I "crash" in mine, the third bed,
the welcome mat for each mornings sun-stretch,
I will not see them

And when morning comes a-crawling, a-clawing at
my sleepy eyes as it cat-stretches stark sun
over my pillowed head
I will perhaps not want to see them
I will, perhaps, turn over
cover my head with my old sheets
that used to be dinosaur sheets
that used to bulge under the deformed nose
of a purple pterodactyl, and the sickly
yellow of
well, they were perhaps an artists interpretation

But I will wake, eventually, and stretch as did the sun
and remember the bones of it all and see them, my brothers,
pillowed in their darker beds
where, perhaps, the sunlight has not quite yet come

Lingering

Heavy, now, with stuttered steps
a syncopation of slip drag stick
and

Humming in the slightest shadows
hovering under frequencies tense
beneath the threshold of perception
beneath the warmth of a small hand
left like a paperweight
heavy as the last dark before birds
wake and warble

if the weather changed
if the slip slacked, stuttered

what make we of this? Which of these sentences tangle into the
triptych of turnkey pleasures, into the catacomb of cordial tongues,
into the tak-tak of skull thunder where each of these sentences tangle?

Another thrum modulates listening ear
more cracks than solid stones
A gore ring wraps, wrenches each
tone from tongue, each clipped
consonant from cut lip, each
drop of blood flecked from
chapped and charred mouths
menacing the crimson ground
till it is one mouth
one maw

Undersun

In the belly of the burns
where, without subtlety, there are sick
thorns of fire, spewing and mawing and pawing
at pools and sunspots

Where thorns at click distance. Mouse hovering
flickering back. Recoil recording last minute
indecision. and here, in the belly, there clutch

tongue teams springing and spouting up tower walls
and burnrings spreading through london and chicago
and if spewed under sun, if thorned from click, if
recoiled in spews, clutch belly and paw

I iterate

On water there is this to say
uncensor, unscreen unundo there is so much deleting
there is so much deleting I cant
ugh

There is a certain amount of text that comes from your fingers before you have a poem

There is a certain amount of text that must come from your fletched fingertips before they strike out, in tandem, a poem

In the clatter of fletching fingertips, poems
pressed, plucked, pummeled. I cannot write this yet

In the clatter of fletched fingertips. I remake myself streamlined
I remake myself cut from finest wood, smoothed to glass smooth surface, sanded
(sand and lighting make my smooth black glass, coarseness and cutline fire forming
fastened sheets of starred glass shard) Glass
is a metaphor for poetry as it
slowly seeps from seaming sharpness to soft amorphidity
look, now, at your windowpane. In a million million years it will
be a slumped glob of glint and glisten. remember wordsworth
I am unsharpened already.

If each poem packs printlines too dense to untangle from glass glob
if each poem prints packt lines, cluttered into
I break and fall, and
where is the structure to it all?

Back on Track

I'm fed up with being so far behind on my poem a day schedule. I'm amping it up. I don't know if I'll make a poem a day, but I know I can do better than I'm doing now. Ready, set, poem.

from foreign shores

There's not much to say, I think, that this light has not already shed
Its broken rays upon. Where in the spectrum is red

Telling Stories

In the dusk of Sikasso, where the sun melts, rather than sets
there may have been three

There were certainly at least two, for one took from a
fold of cloth (un-ascertainably, but predictably, a pocket)
or other hiding space, a small caliber firearm and
with great precision, perforated the skull, heart, and left
kneecap of the other (in reverse order)

Investigations indicate that, though the setting was pastoral,
the crime was urban in origin, a dispute regarding
certain substances to be distributed in a proximate
city

The bullets were recovered. Interestingly, they
The bullets were recovered, deformed by their pilgrimage through
the bullets perforated the body with prejudice, but
we say there may have been three

what of the third? if we talked of him we would be merely telling stories

Clasped. Shiver ways through liquored lines
long streams of steam and whiskey warped,
weft pulled and wrung around. Closely, observe.

In Amsterdam, on a may morning, perhaps just before 10,
there was a girl. She walked in two steps the length
of her shadow. In three steps the length of the length.
Craftily, deep in animal cunning, she clicked twice her heels
and held close. Another time, perhaps.

When Maeve was seven her hair, lifted in circlets of stiffened tow
traced listed lines, circumnavigations of stars and stark
trims of tomorrow morning.

Now, she is sitting with back to blackened window glass as
stretched turns and , smooth , shudder , perhaps not smooth but rather
smoothed as oblivion edges out the harsher edges under its omnipresent
roughness as sickened, you no longer notice the line of spittle dripping
after torrents of

the water metaphors perhaps break down, but it is sure that she was not well.

I hear waltz time trance, here in the walls
there transients they're licked for tricklines
summoned on stirred spindles on webworks of wave and wave in wave
cricked notions of still cracked them bent back them then
slept the water, slept the water slow and soft
swept the water, sweat, the water low about face and
fracture lines leaking salt, leaking into gore in the
morbid mass of
masticat and
clumped muscled law

Hollow Mouth

Chords of Tongue in its echo chamber
against the sound of
stutters of
corded layers, lisped and scripted

in the thin film of the air, the
tone of - perhaps for a moment consider -
the beating of breath, almost too faint
almost a shimmer of substance a
monofilament of sensation slipping
this perhaps hollows the mouth further
and

entrapped exclamant. Cold in filters too
swift to follow swifts tumble in the overspace
in cathedral, in a vault of breath and
back, turned

A Lasting Committment

am veins, etched to inverse arm
slipped like scratch-lines down
morning, vain, marks and slumps
lumps of knot. perhaps some new
intersection in the blood where
an overpass coil, a kinked hose
a tourniquet of twisted streams
in turn tourniqueted, too. torn

crimped in couplings of statosphere
what drip? what stut
terred
fall, flip
cups catalyzing, crisp, or perhaps
merely crusted, over rot that
seeps and eases into clouded threads

Arbitration

Filament considered burnt when whisped to
an ash of light a cingle sinder snift from
centered darkness and
faded like a gel cut light line to
a single moment of data
a sharp sliver of - just barely -

A catacomb lifts up dark nights and dripped

Perhaps I should begin again

In a filament's fire symbols shiver out
in dust and ash and dripping wax symbols shiver out
In each line you misread, in the smith waterman of stars

I forget when thrip, drip, slip
I forged a symbol shivered in stone and out smith sharp silver into a single moment

On the surface of the body
Wired and, naturally, twisted to the center
naturally, where the last
thorn of some slipped kingdom

Naturally there are ten drinks orbiting
an allopen mouth. Nicely, with clean
water, with clean
mouth, the clean
nights of marbled wind and waves
washing each other in salt and
saline silently sweeping, nicely
naturally

Molt

There are too few verbs.
Etymology of earth, telling tales in the shapes of
warped rockbed
corrugated magma
folded face of boulderhead

Under. There are

If by neglecting all movement they can
eschew doing, stealing earmarked moments from

if I align onehundred uncertaintiesAndFailures
if I align one--dred certainties and failures
If U align 100 --------------ties and failures

One Thick Thrum

Reverberates, or something

Fidelity

Each stone of the late light falls and spreads, rippling, across sightsurface
to shift the leaves of memory into torrents of page, into tripping mists that,
darling, I will likely not remember.

Each drift slips past with careen intact, torquing in driptime, knocking the
fluttered figures of postern butterflies, left behind to guard the escape of
a single, silken moth.

I am true to you, as the fallen are true to the earth, and the last shooting tendril
is true to collapsed eye-bud, and slipping snail. I am true to my wormed core.

Arbitrage

Nightly a shimmer of slylight skips inward
in word fact and folly form into trackland
on the order of Tue's proper domains. Ink

mailed on a lisp of sheet a shift of cryp
tych. Each panel is a riddle, each panel
falls in flakes before awl and canon. Ano
ther there.

Each panel is a riddle mailed for Proper
dominance, ominous ackland trolly Tue Can
there be no other in Ink each panel slyly
slips.

on spider nights

ON spider nights in the sclimb limb lash there
site sits underamor slimming fixing filled and warn with
crass unmade the thunder blade slips back slips tracks
gurneyed folding and fetching with astringent folds
wishfully and watching and cracked with sniplength follows
and fetches
flicked and formed with ardent form anananzi anasazi
man or stone

Gone by then

In the mirror at Halsted and Diversey there slumps a striped shade lamp, and
though i cannot work out which quadrant of the canvassed street it
lies in, I creep closer each morning.

On Tuesday mornings, the coroners advise me of the futility of my search. Of the
striped shade mirror-lamp they say there is simply no evidence of life.
I remark on the
craven nature of their afterlifeless commentary, and they stumble
into the mirror's cracks
on Halsted and Diversey

Perhaps the sidewalk is hiding my lamp shade striped mirror in the strips of
caulk filling the cracks and preventing winter freeze and thaw from
shattering the concrete by my mirror

but, on Wednesday afternoons I find crippled ex-linemen lined with age and
linen shirted sons and daughters wheeling and walking to the steak house and
remembering

But they cannot properly manage it. In the slipstream of traffic another
motorcycle skids to a stop and, in the Mirror on Halsted and Diversey I notice
the shade lamp stripe has submerged itself in some darkened cranny and finally
has vanished

I am confident, that on Thursday evening another walker will be baffled in some similar way. But I will be gone by then.

Borrowing

I have borrowed the three feathers from her wing
Where she borrowed Nipponese Lacquer to

I have borrowed the last words I shall ever speak
and stealthily laid them in my coffin linings

I am unsatisfied in disenfranchisment, uninterested in knowless and the
ebon fingers of her filmed feathers are not just quite

I have borrowed the final fix, and the red lines, and the

I wish I have

am borrowed in finale

I wish

In the circle sands there will be two brothers
They will lie at my feet and stir the sand soup
and ask me for my perfect feathers of ebon and obsidian
to smooth striking fossils into the sand

In the circle stands I will sand and slip
borrowed bread from their
borrowed fingers
and will not give

am borrowed wish for the simmering
infin

In the circle stand's sands there will be sand and slip
and they will lie at my feet and stir the sand soup with fossils
of my feathered fingers
and in ebon and obsidian mark dontnations of far Nippon and
I will have forgotten her by then

DEL_TEST

In deep sea streets, walkers bubble-whisper
tracking the last expanding edges
and wobbling on their drunken orbits
in the wake of a sinkstone
in the wake of a turbulence of sea lions and
south shore lines
until the treaders, softly
stirring the lake-edge wither
to the merest tracings and another walker
treads to the bottom
touches stone
and

Arbitrary Paths

Enduring this slow.
Cantering with carnival rhythm.
Carnal enders avail themselves of snow.
With rhythm.
With smack-lipped thrust.
With snow.

Sharon sat on the edge of winter and
waited for the edge of slipped
tongue tassles to finally introduce
her to an arbitrary cold, under new
light, in the hands of a simulated stand
of slow.

hi

I am falling asleep.
I see you
It is a tired sunday.
You're a rory thing to do.
Tomorrow I will wake up twice, once for each time you died.
And in the evening there will be a sunrise.

Orbits

Drum lines have multiplied into
rhythm sections of shark fin

Philosophy of Poetry

At the limit
imposed by infinity I find that slowly
withering correspondent corpses shed more
light on the bloated morbidity of language
than on any shift in the measure or medium
of this millenium. I Punctuate because that
is who I am. I believe in Oxford Commas. When
I die, my obituary will capitalize my name, and
profoundly place each period before a double space.