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

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.