Lingering

Though brushed, as steel is brushed, not with color but cleaned of it,
still there are lingers.  Fruits of warp and weave withhold and blend, leaving
sanded tree knots in wood, where branches formed and fell, where polished
surface pulled the blades and brushes smoothing it away from intention and
into reality.  As usual.

Unintended whorls are cracking backs in frost, and are making brittle bridges
and not remembering how to connect effect and cause, or how amends are
made, or the chemical components of an apology, or a clash averted.

With the tendency of engines to break down, and memories to leak out into
inconvenient vernal pools and flood the pistons of thought until bubbling
and churning they go dead, or turn strange, or phase away into fantasies
and intentions again.  And damned reality will never conform or rebel but just
insists on being over and over again.  And it will not stop.

Mothers with wombs now withered try always
to nurture and succour and give more and also reclaim that succour and take more
and balance their lives and work and lose or gain enough or wait for each child
to see reason and rejoin the machinists union.

Where lines are measured and marked.
Where the engines are maintained and mastered.
Where in the vernal pools are water wheels and that power thrums through each bridge sprint, and though planks fall and the sugar builders scatter in a wreckage wake, it is still possible to cross, and remember what's forgotten in the frost and brushing and burnish and polish and all that smooths and sours with time.

Carrying

Carrying hunger and empty engines pushing
air with pistons, pushing them without a breath
of gas. There are currents churning without a spark
there are heavy breaths, belabored, bursting in ugly
choruses together, in rhythms staccato and otherwise.

Catalogue this heaving vocabulary:
Structure it into words of rhythm, and their sounds
into words with meaning, heavy meaning that looms
or just forget how meaning is made and throw away
the territory.

Hunger for the cannon fire, and its cracked report.

Or just a bit of moving air.

Stirrings

The brow of the mountain, furrowed under the wearing centuries, is now cleared.
And the titan there lying opens, tenses his sprawled form, and uncurls momentarily
a distant fist bleached like sandstone in the Arizona desert.  And the cactus flowers
are hurried in their blooming, and sputter out premature.  And the herons shadows
warp and twist with the changing landscape and the snakes do not remember to be
afraid and are eaten, unwary.  But it is not the fullness of time, and the fist curls again
and the brow clouds and the fog rolls in over San Francisco, which hardly felt the
unsteady earth and its briefest quiver in its collected sleep.  But the herons feast and remember
the day, and the cactus flowers litter the desert and dry in wind-blown heaps.

a difficult thing, without the language of it
don't recall asking how.
how to pour petrol down Euterpe's blouse and burn her into lively action again.

In measured detachment: 1 cup.  Precision poured
to the exact lip, meniscus perched.

Inaction, hunch: the body is a dim-lit catalogue of habitual hurts
admitting through obfuscation
casting nets to lure other fishermen.
learning the stars with private constellations

delete this poem.  fill it up with voids
capture and suture lack
stitch some new whole and when it is voided to perfection

this will be a poem symptomatic of
acne scars and ringworm foot and made, a little, of
pus weeping from a day old burn

Remember to put her out.  Remember water will catch the fiery slick
and spread it

Lessons From The City

The sky is teaching the city
about the smell of urine drying,
about other things:
like compost, and fresh roasted coffee;
like rotted squab; like tobacco.
With every withheld raindrop the
lesson grows and the city learns
it.

The sun is teaching the city heat
and the fog is a tutor for each gray
green, mauve, marble, and white in its
soft pallet. And from the earth, the city
is learning anticipation, and to brace
before a fall.

And each footfall is a lesson in rhythm;
each note another harmony, point,discord,
And the sky is all this time
still teaching, with wind that hums with
horns and bird sounds and shouts and
rattles windows and still bears not one hint
of rain but only of fog, of the clouds descending
to touch and tease and never give up their
water.

And the bay is teaching the city loneliness
and it is teaching the city how to wake up in the
mourning groggy and tousled and the city
is learning.

Is learning from the sun how to bend light, how to
warm and cool in stark and shade.  It is learning
the meaning of labyrinth and of walking away, and
about seeing what can clean and heal
and feeling it, and touching it, and still it will not rain,
it will not.

The city is learning to bend light around them, and
to fill up their bodies with its dust and its clouds
and its tobacco and rot.  And it has learned from music
and discord to hide their sulfurs--each a new shade and
texture--in the collage of other human odors. And it
is passing all its lessons, lessons of how not to see
and how to remember without having been there and
what way to smile when hurting, or doing harm.

And if the rain comes, what lesson will the sky
then teach? Will it teach forgetting or fulfilling?  Will it
teach another softer rhythm, or beat once with thunder
and flood.

a cloud, not regretted

By force of habit a concise dictionary is kept--a terse catalog of the way
clean, v. - thoroughly, though not to the point of empty
moratorium, n. - the full pause that imposes, that clouds
analogue, n. - all the future, all the streams, each new murmur in the susurrus of all language

Last Will & Testament

Should I die in my bath, remember to blame its water for my wrinkles.

Remember to make the eulogy light-hearted and witty.  Remember not

to let my children speak too long, lest they grow upset.

Should I die on the roadside, remark on the fuel-efficiency of my car.  And

do not burn my body; rather, be carbon-conscious.  

Should I die after you, remember to make a place for me, especially if there is

no place already and you find neither seraph nor Satan nor any god to greet you,

especially then make a place for me and make it much like this one, but I would say,

with more mountains and rivers, and fewer plains states.  Also, I think there should

be a better developed cheese industry. 

And should we all go together, you may blame me if you like, though I rather doubt

that it was my fault.

All the sounds, summed.

This is steady air, and if it had a a color: red.
Red, but not like blood or roses--instead
a sort of bourbon-and-bitters.  But just the color
because it is too flat, this air, to be bitter.

 A mold fills up, sets, is broken.  Sets fold out,
stage, are broken too.  The longer the air stays steady
the fuller it becomes until it is hundreds of percent
itself and is in danger of collapsing, until it is
a degree or two warmer than is really comfortable,
until it is condensing on your glasses, until it
is unclean, smoggy.

Flat out and only humming; muffled, or muzzled,
through hairpins and across skipping ponds, and
through the alto pipes of bullfrogs the air might
reverberate, but it is still still, and so thick that the
humming shakes your head with its rhythms, its
beat-tones push-pulling in tense not-quite-unison.

Thirsty: cut stenography tracking, tacking each
stuck symptom with its cryptographic dual.

And still the air is steady, just like before.  With a
weight a moments breeze from toppling, or fading
away.

We should never make sentient headphones

Foul like soured butter
so I unmake the butter
and pour it back into its cow

But the cow, with its teats and
spots and too many stomachs and manure
and cud, is foul too, so I unmake the cow
and pour it back into its mothers womb

But the womb, with its wet and placenta
and all its mammal viscera, is foul, and
so I unmake the womb, and all the past cows
and all their ancestors stretching down to the
first amoeba and even beyond it to salty water,
and lightning, and comets, and amino acids--all of which are foul

And then in the antiseptic origin of everything
I unmake nothing at all, and pour it in a loop forever,
and swear as much as I want to, listen to house and
dubstep and techno, and never think again

Thrum

In the Umwelt haze under flippant skies clade toads.
Each toad throat boils its separate air.

Conclaved, hull down.  Enumerated thoughts step
with ratchet, an eye for each, and how lingers the sharp
static of mind.

Do bees lift their bodies humbly, or with each stroke
swell and pose over mirror-ponds, the little narcissists?

Swift and tumble are handles to grasp the flutter and hum
of the unbound, but they blush too much, and cannot recover,
quite, the innocence of wingstroke and plummet.

Do feathers know their names? Does each retrice or remex
proudly indulge its baroque nomen, or do they go by nicknames,
handles, and sundry aliases?

Ground cover primps and postures, brushes out leaf, and branches
each clandestine root.  Fathoms unlayered, admixed? or origami-ed
perhaps? Perhaps some deep structure struck together by each
separate environ, each un-clade, each fold massaged to blade, its
intricacies belying one gestalt.

Unsurance

The hands are wired for sound, and they ring out.

Do not remember falling, or even the colour of late sky in
doppler shift.  Do not remember the crisp overlay to late
autumn damp, or how water takes its edge in the
eager winter.  Do not.

Or perhaps powered by pistons to thrust in stunted reach,
to huff steam and pop, to slide back in oiled susurrus.
A robot shanty:
      spoke, unspoke, spun, unspun, ring rust whisper sing.

Do not remember mechanics.  Do not conjure a voice coil.
Remember instead the word and its alternating current origin;
try to remember falling, but fail.

One hundred drums, and each wire twitching in time;
one hundred lungs emptied and, with wind, sluiced, made paste,
slung away, vacuum fistuled, crunched into a single
red red blood cell hurdling memories strewn in sleep and
waking.

They are hungry from sleep, and there stiffens a coil, like
copper, greening according to its proper rhythm.  They are
roiling in hunger and cannot be bothered to remember, and
the hands come loose and spasm about looking for food and
forgetting each song but the robot shanty. Susurr, succor, sting.

Whiskey and Gin

I have been earnest.  I recall, with conviction, an outstretched hand.

There was once a bustle around finger tips,

a brushing away, an intended forgetting,

unletting each previous permission,

forgiving away what trust was left,

and resigning to love only beyond the mirror, 

where the clock is unwound. 

I swear when I burn my fingers.  But, every 

week there is a morning I forget, and I spill

my coffee-water, and swear again.

I laugh when I turn my ankle, or grin. 

Do I remember how to be earnest?  I woke

my brother up when he was passed-out drunk

and took him to the airport and he made his flight.

But later I made it a story, and I laughed, and I

told him he was lucky I loved him--instead of telling

him I loved him--because I have forgotten how

to be earnest.

And now I'm thinking about whiskey, and gin, 

and how I like them because they are dry and

sophisticated but also honest.  I like the taste

of wood and juniper, and I wish that Wordsworth

had never written, so I could have just had

heartfelt pastoral poems myself.  I want to 

hatch a pastoral poem out of an egg colored with

dada and it will probably be about an Ostrich.

Like this:

The science of aesthetics dictates that an ostrich
with its head in the sand must maintain a background
of blue to compliment its warm and gritty ignorance. 

Furthermore, it must position itself such that it stands
a third of the way across the waiting lions' field of view. 

The lions wait and stare, unable or unwilling to cleave
the conformist composition with a splash of chaotic gore. 

Only when evening winds have blown away the last strains
of color can they pounce and release their prey into the
carnality of now.

But, I have forgotten how to be earnest.

Six

One:

Kinetic, with all the mass of light lifting onely through
trepanning flaps and caught in violent atmosphere.

Two:

Tired lines are coiling slowly round the trim; wasted
flowers boil in rot; with a colour dried from overexposed film,
each petal crinkles.

Three:

Full up and overgrown, tonight is jungle hours, an unstately
shudder of signs, moon flowers, cat paws, the howls of jackals.

Four:

Lungs coloured rustly, thrust full with anti-freeze air.  Clots
spun, retreated, shrank in fear.

Five:

Hole in the head.

Six:

With Each Vertebra I Remember Another Way I Murdered You

Tomorrow, I cut each of your fingers at the webbing and you cried until the poison had sprinted its hot paths through your central nervous system and jogged you into a hallucinogenic fugue that had you laughing and trying to sign with your dangling blooded hands for hours before you got all sad and threw up and died.

A week from now, I coloured you spots with lye and water and burnt you so sweet you thanked me before you passed; you were such a pretty jaguar, all redded like a canopy riddled with sunset.

In a month, I fasted for seven days and then called out the great name Kukulkan and in a feathered coil it held you until your white hands lifted up and grasped, each, one fork of its tongue and Kukulkan drew you into its mouth and vastly swallowed.

In a year, I counted each bone in your body with a long needle and remembered only later that I had suffocated you and all that poking and prodding was in vain, or a mistake, or a desperate clawing hope that some pressure point would pull you back to life.

But next second, one blink from now, with a whistle of teeth, I will forget every bone; with the Maya, I will step away into the forest; I will tread on the bones of the earth and cherish its breath and I will not have to be civilized and maybe I will be able to stop--finally--killing you all the time and get some rest.

Mouth & Branch

On the colour of trees I have this to say:
The rivulets of bark are slipped into structure and tricked crystalline by age.

On the bird mouths and the green-jay's call I have nothing to say.

With the cloud-stacked horizon bloodied again, what is the touch of shadow
curled over bark scales and tree feathers and all chloroplasted over?

Is there a tired sun engine? Is it lightest in the slow turn of gears? Glycerine springs
in burning spurts and we win the trees in the Pyrrhic fashion. On the ashes I
will not speak; on the lights I have nothing to say.

When tired, calculate

Stabilize circumference matrix transformations for rotations to detourne
turbulence. Stable marks for gun-shot; races, sprints, blood
pounding up from hoof and into heart beat down again, thud.
Spin the races wracking & leap long falling to, fingerly, miss

fjdslkajfsdfdsklfjdskljfdssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
dssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
dsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
sdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddsdds

Catch instead the glitch notched in jitters up or down till the belt
loop snugs neckly.  Long to linger, each finger flips or toggles
in the precise language of mechanics and judo and percussion -
which is not music.  Music is the lungs, and remembering how
your whole body is for running, and for squeezing out with that
belt.

Falling, positively derive, and mathematically jerk, precisely described,
circumscribed in numbers remembering each small twist by matrix, a final
drop in the spiked 3rd derivative, a moment crystallized in mechanics so
staccato that, almost, a discord can imagine. But it is not music and
drumbeats stutter, slow

tomorrow morning confined to graph paper, and plucked
point by point map from threespace this holographic universe
flat in the singular whole, holes flushed to points and lines and
on one plane only creeping with maniac worms or stared
at by cosmologists forever.

Ornithology

all yawn the mouth and puffed with berries
with the cloud spout shuffling
and the mouth has kissed and burnt itself slight with white steam
left a linger to be puffed
and the taste of red-clay

Remember all kinds of birds stacked in bookshelves and
crammed down alleyways and the feathers are all berry-hued
or plain white in coats and always pushing through

cataloging sheets of beaks and chirps stuck on pages or pulled
to other countries than their own, cataloging currents of remiges, and rectrices, and coverts
and all too streamlined to be held but by the wind

and fingers coax, stutter, and pluck, reddining
note by note and the puffed yawn, mouthed round berries
bobbled and jostled. Dropped tones spun in octaves smelling of the sear
of mouth flesh and it hurts to not know how, just yet, to remember
cracked stalactites and ice of the body crafted over amphetamine momentum