coiled about in copper spins

Arbitration is a tire iron twisted

is wrenched like flashlight through prism-glass
is a science experiment cut in thin layers and drip-soaked in formaldahyde
and on display like a caged crawling man covered in fur faking
a tiger too pathetic to be turned out when the rot set in
and where are his teeth?  Turned out by the hard thrusts of compromise
splintered in bone-wheel brackets from iron torque
and on the tip of the tongue a screw to tighten
each night another half tone towards slyence

is it quiet or simply supersonic a hard frequencing quivering
out and above the range of my lemur ear, my codfish eye, what
is this empty socket spun full of gray-matter skeins till not a spot
of light can be left

right down the center, strike an axe, strike an axe and crack the glass watch the beads of perspiration
and blood bustle in cosmopolitan minglings across the face of your emergency

the color of your right eye, when it is alone in the dark.

Capacitance

Tongue tied tight, knot slipped, slick words a-tumble
tripping answer by stilt, by silt, by the slippery clay --
would that each enumeration stumbled so well.

Behind, staccato like changing minds,
staggered power-train tempos (catching heart-stutter, breathe pretty now)
and slips spinning off in violent loops and cluster-
cudgels blowing back macadam and bones beneath.


intended. precisely placed.



Between.
anesthetic and aesthetic an-aesthetic
governed by:

At the time of slaughter, animals should be healthy

and psychologically normal. For the immobilization of bovines

a blow to the skull with a large-sized hammer is still

being practised, in particular in developing countries.

The method requires only manual force, no maintenance

of equipment or spares as cartridges, and is therefore cheap.

wanton is a calibration table.
ticked each linear, regressing towards tacit disagreement.
gap for quiet, like a capacitor - two hands not quite clapping
each almost building becomings. When mouths empty echo
chambers with momentum inauspicious and deafening
on the thunderroom, a blanket on wormed wool, a
pillow for





spread wide
and full up of torque, angular momentum, spin
entangled till everything is one ugly quantum knot,
collapsing a moment's moment from absolute zero
a tick, miscalibrated kelvin

what did you expect?

You are the wrong colour.  You grin too much
and when your teeth are fiercely cavitied, filled up
with rot, almost black almost full of everything and
I want to compress you. I want to press you down (all
carbon anyway) to some diamond point and sell you
on the black market.  I want to imagine that each person
is worth the value of their carbon-constituent diamond and
that maybe even diamond mines are just great graveyards and
battlefields and piles of wealth-from-slaughter.  I want to
imagine that there are only blood diamonds.

You are the wrong colour and you talk too much and your
ears are whistling with the hollows of your skull and when
tomorrow talks to you, tells you your time and touches your tongue
with pretty words you are just a conch shell, you are just the
sounds of the ocean formed from a pretty hollow shape, you
are just stutters and echoes, vibrations and reflections, blusters
boiled and shuffled into seeming sense.

You are the wrong colour with your tin skin, your mottle, your
scab-calico, and you track me with your automaton eyes in feedback
loops that make me stutter and make me limp and hurt me in the teeth
like ice cubes or ice picks and you remind me of fondue but a horrible
giants fondue with platelets packing into rafts and dotting darker each
terrible dip of bone bread and I do not imagine you with your
horrible empty skull and your stupid smile and your left handedness.  I know
you are left handed because you are not me and I am not left handed and
I know that.

Atunement

On the colour:

I am browned and pocked, dotted with scab, scarred, white-pink puckers touring each skin. calico, a mottle of blood and mud clotting spotted in asphalt specks. 

Would-be catalog:

1. right ankle, kicked
2. left ankle, turned, yesterday, favoring right down a crooked stair
3. thumb swells tender
4. and red sharp, like drying, like a cold-split lip

Here are my smallest promises.  Here is a trick to remember my name.
And each correspondence drifts two closer, coordinating responses, collaborating
on what is real between them, what is one current creeping, or
the thrum of not-yet-tuned, between two strings - a dissonance bead
beating ever slower.

Oubliette

Still is an awning, untroubled by wind.
Every stroke, each heavy line, pushed blackly
thorough in ink. Am fleckwards, am opened
rib by rib and under belly bloat a deep
well for the brush, a fecund hollow bearing
whole-cloth each image exposed by bristle and
canvas commingle.

Still is old cloth, now crumpled. Owl sounds
lowing up from canopy, sunk below sunlimned
surface.  Sea-shade sloughs the last light,
wave caressed away by wind through
bird-frothed branches, coaxing down night.

But what in this dark sub-terre?  Whorled
crystal, or the spark of sanguine tectonics,
or in inch-worm intervals, through from
tabled sound and outer tones elbowing
so slow great tunneling branches outstretched
amazon oeuvre, each missionary tangle
building in earth-brown cathedrals from filament
to fistule to, loam scent spilling, pillars of oaken
puissance many miles deep.  What Kraken forest
under the earth, where each secret limb
lips up moisture and marries with boulders
breaking off slow children once every century
to roll one foot, or four, and then still.

Giants Orbiting

Wind stroke wing stoked flame knotted in wind. Tangled and
taught swiftness by rote. Though tugged with tumult, tower
slung like rigging over the splay of land.  On the wind is
too hot breath, is breaking tones and the clamour of chimes
or shatter?

What lungful? Each day a full billow blast borrowed against
the clock, a rhythmic hour, a lock step of century looming
and one garden planted with sundials and stone faces watching
the traffic of a single great flame where tracks turmoil.

Still, in the summer linger there is an undawn, and its sinking
face shades and shadows insolently, covering mouths gapped
with pleasure, or furtive hands, or a simple mixing of tongue
and cheek, a poured drink spilling over in festival froth.

DId I stutter?

liftup throats speak without rote write rhythms with cough

and throatrasp

cut spitting with notes and smacked track lines down like

vinyl trim, cut deep, whipped in circles, screech scratch

repeat

like throats speak kitch clips and grasp passing like a hungry

cough, spasming up soundful and eager for the world

a birthing, a cacophone spirit to eat up healthful air

Latch left open. Is it a beckon? In slips still sticking licks

lipping and all

Another memory cannot be unsaid or the grey lines webbing

to thought on synapsed silica still membered but better dis, better

un.

like a drum, like a broken guitar, like a conveyer belt snapped and

stuttering in terrible strikes tearing and torquing and covered in blood

this tongue this never-unsaying

cuts as into vinyl vicious enumerations:

1. < a name should not be written >
2. < this worlds materials are caltrops or, perhaps, cannon lined before me >
3. < no northwest passage, and when it comes, descendants watch with fear >

Moments later, I fell again and was flattered

Were wires slipknot stuck, slipped in twists, cracks, crevices
left like leaves on back-alley macadam or like strips of grass
pushing up through concrete and where wire whips there too,
humming in machine tongue, march bits breaking faster.

I am wing-torque, tipping, tumbling to stall seven thousand
feet above wherever, and when there is no nose to pull
into the wind, wherever whips up faster and finds
pilots praying or posturing or I once heard them contemplating
their wish to know the place they were soon to meet, and to
fill their heads with fantasies etching lives into the corn fields
and small farms that they soon furrowed - a small creation given
without remorse as a dying trust to my careful abstract ear.

When spun so fine, dust ekes or carouses or slinks or settles with
each separate abandon hidden and still life stammers into muffled
radiance where each separate mote mottles in time - despite painters
preference, so that there will be movement even there, still, and perhaps
tarnishing the colors themselves will trapped embers of passing
preserve and stare out on those who stare and wonder what was
down the hall, or by the window, or under the lamp light, to give
shadow and stalling colour just so.

Historiography

Showed a crawlspace sloping down to floor level, below,
to transactions limnlight spinning exchanges of spiders
and small things each million legs lifting gossamer by
another candle.  Showed with care the fragile link, kink
of knee where joint locks land last.

A snapshot stolen at the intersection of two stories, where
one man stammers in time to Tommy/where one man, stumbling
home, slips in slick too red
Is there remembrance or is it the hoarders impulse only?

Showed a snapdragon mouth lipping carefully a childs finger and
what flower shows such soft hunger, but damaged by rain
another time it will flow up from its roots and be but another
muddy corpse.

overfull

On the point of my turn where the last finger of Hellen's hand slips
from the recessed corner of my eye and before me sits the sturdy
Stephen and slim Samantha stirs against him and am I ever going to be
free of you all? is it a rhythm of face and hands and every clutter another
bump and there are all conjoined and too many conjunctions clumping
my view with bodies and brought on by overcomfort and unlonely and
there again I have said too many things together but am I am or we and
where we are is whisped and warbled as if by bird tongues early morning
or with sunset blush and do not remind me of night where y/our bodies
press and push and every day I am less myself and more ourselves slipping
cell by cell into union and perversely I think harder on my single and self
filled with other hands and hearts and thoughts muddled and lapping the shores
of eachother like sand slipped out to sea one night and gone forever to the
fullness of the bottom, tied grain by grain to its old place and
tracked in currents

write the sounds of recovery

limned in hums, rushes, buzz-snaps sutured from spark and the stammer of
just-stilled strings shrouded in their own cast off so shifts the air hollow with

held-air, a sucklung full, a belly-gasp garbled in wound and, quieted, the
soft thud of a leaking held shut, teeth teaching discipline to chin mouth taught
and tongue tucked safely (for now) tucked behind rows and rows redundant
as sharks and as sharp

swallow, rattle, whimper, where once tracked toe and tread together there
now hums only a mechanical threat, a bird braced braked and brought to bear
without one foot foreign

trace where lines light limning launch and perhaps there will be no sounds this time
perhaps there will be finally quiet on the rattle planet
as one more gear goes smooth and stops

I have a mouthful of stars.

When I chew, they burn my tongue and break my teeth and I have learned to tolerate their touch on my tongue so I can maneuver them, burning just the necessary number of taste buds, out of the way of my food, to hold them back from my throat as I swallow.

When I speak they spill out and foam and froth about my words and melt them together or slag them entirely or set off catastrophic reactions that bust word into word and smashing fuse or fis all meanings imploding and exploding like popcorn and gushers and tents taken down at the end of a trip and when they are done my poor words limp and crawl or lumber in their misshapen forms into some semblance of what I had tried to say around the stars in my mouth about the stars in my mouth, which are even now spilling out and boiling ponds of spittle and burning grasslands and dry forests all across the american southwest and these stars in my mouth are terribly expensive and each is filled with diamonds and you cannot have them.

On Trajectory

Tort: grievous mention as sallow sweeps the
face another dawn dribbled over.

Whether weather signs chemical showers or
slips to staccato hail, whimpers will waft an
other orbit to star shrieking satellites.

Great and small, all creatures creeping but
a mm frequency from microwave, infrared, the
ultraviolent twitched and spun looming up
skeins of radio-signal bought and sold.

Inertia building borrowed from time to time on
largess licensed tomorrow for today an
other stutter triptonguing staggered steps like
burrowed ants earthquaked to each other's levels
lanced grasswise looming dew drip dropping
to mouth to mudden and drown.

Deep in ground
transmit rhythms rock
myth signal
called by cellphone
to sick sky stars

St. Joseph's Hospital

Fastened by slat-light sheaves pinioned in
splay thrum the wounds exposed.  Thrum the
windows with the pressure air, thudding air
like thunder skims pond surface, pushes
down bullfrogs beneath the surface.  Who
thump their throats in the shallows and
bubble up boils of tadpoles and bursts of
belches of water-ripple, not-sound.

Knight errant

mace and ermine the fur swing and
slip and each tooth another long
story another scar for my inner thigh or
the palm of my hand

enough about me.  there errant and
not losing so much as where the map
still is no more territory stretching to the
tattered edges of the land the parchment extends
spreads out over cliff faces and in
outdate, even antiquated, but I digress
needle and star and long lines scrivened to
mark circumference
spreading out over oceans
over "here there be dragons" over
empty empty lands seen once, on shipdeck
with a spyglass and a broken compass
and where these newfound lands that track out beyond the
burned maws and where the blustered
boy to brain them, carry their flesh back to feast,
and, flushed in vinyard volumes, mark the map to
history

I am tired and the stretch falls away, land long
lost though mapped and stretched and staid

Drums on the Far Shore

pooled ink pulses by tripped fountain pen
where in the air was that thud
heavy, laden almost with- and there pulses again
and almost rhythm almost tomorrow wrenched
through sound and siphoned to taut ear skin stretched

another word scratched, even etched, a heiroglyph to
distraction with each line a glance away and a slip
streamed from empty consciousness and not as Buddha would
in form, perhaps, this:

Thorns thrash. ash lips lift over brush fire tips
Tracked another outfit flutter with
wind expanding. Sound, slow to meet, now slips
lark tongues tremble now bowed. sound slashed myth

No? annotations tell of, well, crafthands marching over
pages, pulsing pressures on key and cranium and drumming
skulls and there it is again that creak sneaking over
water that wracks and warps with wind, waves on seabirds
to their nests, above the waterline. A scrawl of claw
marks, etchings submerged and blurred under ocean encroach
marred markings:

Thunders torn. taught and longing in measure
Hammers sweep the air and flatten sand shapes
orbits on longitude, birds cry pleasure
and fish glisten like live silicon apes 

Candid and yet sly a balanced polit
Backing bluster and cracking chestnut jaw
thorns sucked thumb by bloody thumb, the dole it
cart by carted now wear and tear gun-law

no? clash another color, purple green and orange admixed
on the tide and is that ash the wind carries as far as
an unfinished poem
wired through bit breezes and lapped on each digit shore

My Apartment is Clean

dusted, no motes idle,
catch, and flash when the sun
lances my window - its final
thrusts before evening leaving

Lazy Tides

I don't read enough poetry, it's
easy to tell that reading perhaps
enough is not quite right, what is
enough but what I meant was poetry
is not always echoing about my head
and, well, sometimes it hurts to be
without words and when broiling in
brain play some thoughts think clearer
in a stew of sounds and syllables
cast by clearer tongues than mine

- a vein of ore pulsing with old thoughts calcified by time and culled of unsustainable sentiment -

But perhaps, on reconsideration, I find
that I am not just not reading enough
poetry, but also not thinking enough of
my own poems and saying enough of silly
rhymes and where o where are the notebooks
of my youth and why am I afraid to be trite
and why don't I take the time to mine

- the tongued tangle of sound pressed through the air on each meeting of people and pressing of hands and each whistle and pop of that most fascinating human organ, the mouth -

it's not the mouth though, is it? it's something
like the voicebox, like, hmm, vibration and sound
and wasn't it a swede who found all the shapes to
make each vowel. I wonder if poems are allowed
links. It seems like that would have been a good
place for one

On the end of poetry

curled with veined tongue twisted
and another thing - I will talk with three mouths
creep, clutter, tongue touched stutter trip tagged
lip lagged - the definition of stutter tongue, which tongue
forked around the oldest flames and

was I subtle?

Nowhere whispered another airy echo and ellipses contaminate
those enclosed spaces tripped parentheticals all of grammar
collapsing under its punctuated weight and
another thing

was I bold?

bluster tongued badmouthed bullish and big what say you to that?
In triplines stepped and steeped looking long and laughing with
even those
who laughed when the dark was first being born from nothing and the
seas of shadow were finding within themselves shades of slightest difference
and what is least noticeable is the movement of an eye as it
crosses a line again and if I built all poetry I would cast that eye and
spasm it across each page and every eye would spin like stuxnets spinners
and cycle until, gasping, no reader nor eater would clutch fork to tongue
so surely again, kinesthetics aside what hammer would hit
an unseen nail so hard on its head so was I bold, was I subtle, or
are you just too tired to notice anymore?

Too Drunk to Sleep

on another evening there was smokescreen

and sleep wiped like water with windshields until nothing but waking and darkness dwelt together

and in waking, darkness dreamt, and in darkness, waking wept, and so was kept the balance of things

though perhaps not quite balance

perhaps a grain of weight mislaid or a careless dullard denying the scale its daily maintenance

waking darkness dreamt and dreamt of darker things, and weeping wavers in the balance it brings

Tom Nikon. Tired, named for a lens he had nothing of and lost to an inheritance split too many times

It is a tired time Tom tells us, sitting with hand on camera lens and leaning forward, too close for telling of tales too far for touch or lipped tongue taste

It is a tired time and one empty of ambition

where few are willing and many are weak - flesh and spirit

and too Tom answers Mary Monet

who asks him

"But what of the new and unexplored

but what of me?"

Tom, taxed in twee response coaxes tired words to loss

and Mary Monet, who is not tired or twee, answers him unlovingly "Tom tired and taught, twee, unloved, untaught sleep now and do not bother me"

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt he ought

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt taught, stretched to breaking, unbreaking stretched to bending, unbending stretched to lord of infinite abyss and there to die, but for Mary Monet

who rescues with word play and crafts a seat of puns and net of nouns and sleeping cats and cradles, towns employed in lingering story stretching to the other shore the way of things on the sea to rhythms of wave and wind and Mary Monet with quiet content knows Tom has nothing and will soon be spent

as here, again, he goes

crying "I'm tired and out and roundabout and emptied through the nose, and when a husk, through myrrh and musk I'll leave and not suppose / that underhill and undersky and steep though course may be, a tired man with stewed brainpan will not a poet nor great bard be"

whiskey and toothpaste

Tonight I poured a glass of whiskey

As I sometimes do on nights

And though I had looked forward to it

As I sometimes do on nights

I forgot it

As I brushed my teeth and minted and all and 

annointed my tongue with Pyrrhic listerine recalling

peat moss by its total difference

So now, in bed, I sip some aged oak liquor and 

write a poem about nothing at all

Caravans

Tonight there is travel on the wind 

and in the old earth there is stirring

sleep will drift and another wicked

wash of light and sound might 

make an unexpected shift

inthick the trips and tacks caught one

and another and another like tongues

tied together by fumbled and

failing thought and when inthick the 

slips lisp together and out

Wasted

There are two few letters on myp keyboard and another time might mourn mmy finger's passing my misttype tonguelines tripped and wandered over clatter keys with one too few letters and symbols and unequivocally there notes and sings and zebra striped extractionsmock and mange the hallowed folds and I have used them all now.  I have used each and every sound  and crept in twos and threes and multiples and manifolds until the chimney weeps me up and out and I mispelt everything today and tomorrow and my hadnds dont remember thir right way and my veined hands dont recall the proper punctiuation or spelling or clatterstep is that the right work dclatterstep and another thousand tyupose from now where each hand strikes independent and loud and makes neat choreography on the clatterboard I possess another virtue, the virtue of distraction the virtue of you will always know the right name for this gift that I am ungiving and taking away the last words will leave you with just myp own and my own fingers formulated into refuse, language clutter and chaff

Made

Matching is marking is craft and creeping and cold is a color
white is a winter long forgotten and since when is there
another bond that bites deeper and brings closer and makers
are finders of shapes things dreamt of being long before they
warped and lifted through branch and bow always thinking
of what craft hand will realize such seemings

Feelings fit better into baroque descriptions

rupture tongues marking skylines sound shivers rumbling

masticated by moments of force crumple zones packing one into another

see inextricable babushka corrugated on lines long etched in engineering notebooks

collapse, creak, cornered

On another note there is distance and though heavy heads hang there rests both

above and below a viscous air abundant with buoyancy and bowing brings bower up

but still, what is a pain in the throat or an empty hand or an idle day spent walking

when in another colder country skies open only to sputter snow; leaving clouds conspire

with cancer

Stage I:

enclosed hard knotted in subtly damaged folds fermenting the flesh

Node:

in fistules reaching poison, fever flecked blood and bone brackwater

backed and too taste in mouth

Stage 3, 4:

If staged, exit left, no curtain fall and an audience sits until tired, disaffected

or empty themselves they walk, leaving one who may have fallen asleep

waking hours later to a lonely theater a spotlight shining on unattended

Finding door locked and alarmed is it guilt or wonder that prompts him

not to call but rather sit, still and staring in his lonely seat until morning

crawls from its heavy waters

pencil scratchings pile slowly

at the foot of an easel growing

graphite grey with each flat

stroke and as each mark reveals

the minute contour of an

"empty" page of cracks ripples

warps and what would one 

expect of an artist, but to 

darken a page until anyone

can see what he knew was already

there

lapse

I am all written and every word is a scrawl

and when black as birds are there are still grips

and canvases without a single stroke of flight or

feather and when too many conjunctions creep 

together to glue down a page and crack and

crop and corrupt and and 

and watching, watcher, is not the creeptone 

trembling far enough?  Are not the many

miles crawling with wires and coiled about

cold feet formula enough? And when 

sleeping on evening air heavy with

cold stars and breezed over with

cannon sounds from indiantown gap,

 is there anything

left to look at?

fabrication bias

When I lie I lie with utmost confidence, knowing that
when I have said the right lie the right number of times
and have blessed it with bluster, a perfect smile, and
a canny crinkle to my eye I can know, it will come true
it will have been that way forever and the sayings I have
said untrue will all turn around and open up and be
(as they always were) real

I tell you this, and note my belief

sevenly

kitted in crisp licks lacking luster or even creaked handles

where, once in languid splay there skittered and stepped

stones and flat bottomed they skipped and on the water

wrote circles that expanded until crossed and surfaced

with rippled crease the pondway warped into waft and

weave of little undoings, disturbances, in the small

peace where rock least recent stopped there sat the 

seeming still and under it all skipping stones piled

A lake filled with smooth stones and young boys practicing

wrist-flick, stone lift, the sidearm and frisby, the 

careful 

communion of pressed fingers and the warmwet rock

a beach growing out of practice and as the water 

slimmed and hid among the filling pebbles there skipped

stones in the tens and fifteens and, once, in the summer

of 96, Eric Martins counted 42 skips and his stone

spun all across the pond and pegged the far shore

and he marked the spot and kept his rock in his pocket

long after 

On the order of

In silicon spans, over gaps guarded by the boundary

conditions of physics and last september, when I 

called you by your name and wouldn't look at you

I didn't mean my words, only their emptiness

and in cathode rays there were little sparks but now

pixels clean everything and decompose them down to

single-colored boxes for light

I am always amazed by how much green goes into faces

and how much yellow is in a summer sky

kited inch by inch against the wind would the stars remember

would they recognize old dust transformed and tracked

through void and pyre and plow and finally beaten into

clearing pipes to track away enough lines for finally fetching

lifting, and heaving to

Opening

Warrens spill
My brothers and I have had another drink together and
if tomorrow is coming
it is coming to quickly and with the ominous rush of
skidding trains and a great
heavy front of air is pushing up against my face and
filling my nostril with
pretension... the scent of poetry
unable to write real webbing whorls of unready, tired,
too young

I am not old enough and may never be

Untended (warmup poem one)

sound is split line by line

out of beowulf with seem

striped in neat typographic 

casts, some printer placing

piece by piece, blocks of

poem and wondering what

monk mashed together this

song and story and made it

full of God and giftgiving and

why grendel, and his mother

and noise filled with pain for 

the soft ears of some lonely

native all piled together to make

a diptych story tracking in parted

stanzas on a printed page the

creep from old gods to new

and through what door was

the break-in, and by who