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