May 20-22 2011

Airy Temples

An excavation
in the ribs
of what you're worth
before you end up
buried treasure
good for no one

*

Forever may it be extruded
in the greenest dale
on the fakest day
through a lapdog's voidest meditation
this radius of pith
restrings your age

*

Between the blades
after a two-week rain
between the ribs
of a barbèd saint
a brazen pool
of faint deflection

*

A sick bird's meditation
at the thresholds of her pain
a blue flash under thistles
instantly still
as its shadow stalks
and whistles

a name
that belabours
and beggars
the rain

in elevations of a hybrid rose
from beercups propitiating ashes.

11 Jan 2011

New ears

Shoulders forward
in the dogrun
thrusts the head
of a man

the sun's scanline
the bark strips
the bag of stones
I am becoming

& sleep softly descends
a digestive humour
lubricating
the gizzards.

*

Coal-black hair
framing
an olive-hued face

dropping level with the withers
a thousand hoof-spans high
when she dives
crags strive through the water

so Scylla

clawed & writhed

*

Lost in that immortal struggle
found Genesis smuggled
in an egg-cup
but uncongealed
(no hips to measure her by)
elliptical
swinging around. unfocused.

*

Laid end-to-end, covering new ground daily
from what end to what end
flag
stones

2x4 (epitaph)

the evergreen
has never been

Orbit Coset

Planes break up
a world of wet sand
amass dimension
overcome boyscout humidity
by mast ignition
lightning stripes
the collar or can

in the quest for bonfires
and timetables optimized and controlled
by simple trade-offs
jobs or weather
a few inches off the neck
marks a species of brass ringlet

where I had green curried meat off menu
flesh traded high
fives slapping thighs
you have to know to ask
but they were bolted to a shibboleth
we could not understand

*

the ants followed chemical messengers around my fingers
as arrows or bullets find their men
targets eroded in the rock
proof the land has changed
why should he smile
the harvest-son
slightly stupid
cut open his heart
wrap it round a trunk

with aristocratic contempt
for the blood-lust of the populace
one sees the shadows of public life
in the arcade ritual
the lyric choir of labourers
in a hole in the ground
under the flag born tree
when burned gives off
a smoke far-famed for inducing visions

a keyhole window framed the compositions
filled with dull stuffing
a stranger at the entrance to her chamber
the mystery of the mountain in her trance

*

A pattern cuts across intention
in decandence's efflorescence and collapse
A bone breaker or tamer of horses lies
dead as he must
but statistically speaking the same man.
Then the blood is read — a mandatory votary
voluntarily retires. Sunflares glint
beneath the dead man's eyelids, flies
the outside choir
source of all comparisons.
Fear of breeding worms itself then rots
the body.


Let us consider now a different outcoming
a crossroads spinning in the head
with the song, a challenge to our
integrity.
fixed in tin & gold
it bests our courage
and then
We sit down at our beloved chair
and guarantee our dinner.
Eating it
dead-knit to the living, a lamb
of fine breeding, dull, a ready grin.

*

much later

some fan spun around a ceiling
or parking lot like clotted oil

but down to the intern ex
up anti fact you know already

a crane to lift that wit

a tomato we thought would kill us

some pseudo syrup psy-op cyclops roundup

"discriminations"

police uniform & boots do not a fake
policeman make

Django

The red concentric eyebleed mocks
the forty-year-old poster paper
yellow saurian pupil outpacing
baseline white
guncotton
colour popping
in the emulsion of a nitrate
sandwich on unsafe stock
hot cross mustard piercing
the plangent cornea of
the boy who sits
where reels within reels
sprinkle the antechamber
with humours wet
and not glassy.

Preserved meat serves
to feed and clothe
the gun-smoking cowpoke
in blue jeans and a jazzy name
as he sits, barely leaning,
cantilevered pelvis
and four-square knees
against a wall sketched by shadow
of a potted plant, slowly
animated by
the off-season convection
of affairs of the
blood-pumping world
its random coils
set and ignite.

When the wind whispers
his skin blisters
a sensitive transistor
in word and deed
a carnivore with a pure heart
conceiving in the deli's
revolving blades
a vacation by you
to which he'd ride
if his spurs still had
flanks to bite;
but the horse
was slaughtered
by the sauerkraut cackle
of a raging chaingang gun.

Alone, he rests
half in and half far gone
beyond the sprockets
of his kind
of picture, which
kind of hangs
on my wall. A
cross-shaped stick
pokes both
our eyes sharper
than any star-shaped
slice of tin; but faded
meat and rabid
dye
will bring us
to our bruising heels -

limp them into coffins
as the train rolls out
and town just tumbles away.

if nothing stops us in our way

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine"
- Sterne, Tristram Shandy


sounding hourly through heated wax
a hobbled horse sours to salt
delivered in pewter ice-buckets
broken-edged and ripe off-vine
urge wavering to eat out tonight
a shortcut orthodox stile
bite a hand in a haversack

over public acreages an ergodic footpath
reaches a long fact escrow
booked a ticket to east gondwana
belly-dance opera en-route
often clapped if espied the dying ox
apt to be cropped on the croup
if caught coughing along the tracks

roundabout bereavement mechanic
black biotechnology
grey the withers I once piloted
or maybe I engineered
abuse scandal breeding more suicides
swarming barnbred podunk cousins
of flies in the laboratories

roomservice the paperless emi-
grés, tin lids binding a time
bright mirador of the empire
sinking under equipment
dies the days diary rays retire
spine cancer and ossified
riparian seep unconfirmed

by edgewood arsenal stropping afore
the enfilading panther
hive-mind-ripening wildernesses
oubliettes portside gamble
distiller of strongbox supermarkets
don't forget the merry men
negatives stuffed in mattresses

so if the pony express don't know him
he'll send them a telegraph
signed the wire with a quantum clot
under sea moans empathic
bones of his best friends made cameos
hedgers gripping the dry grey loaves
hoping somehow to survive the wreckage

August sweats

August sweats

The events

Up tonight to eat some cherries
filled a shot glass with pits
a small page with these words

a fat cat crossing the street
blameless tiger
stalking a thin man

my carpets are not nearly as fine
as his are
but my poetry's thicker

the thunder's echo delayed
uncertainty skewed
becomes catastrophe

her boxers bunch & sag
like a sad sack rice farmer
fleeing a Samurai

the last cherry done
whiff of the subliminal
seeds of one day
wetting the brandy



With the dogs

In a public place
One leans against a piss-bleached tree.
The urge to excrete is unbearable.
So society
The skinnier you are
the tighter the squeeze.



Runaway

First the shadow then the bird
away from the sun
then grounded, this unit proves
the myth of independence crude
a fleeting refusal of invitations
Mercury visible in an eclipse
in the meantime ripples through the equations
These ghosts filling out the trees
Like putty in a tooth
The wind rot and gravity etc
pinball the implicit between light and shadow



"F on, F off"

"The poor old sun in the virgin again"

The wall of prurience protects
a red raging dull boy
from a theory of combinatorial society
A government, a motive, an organ
when the organ knows one note

Old men can hear it too
in the empty room drawn tight as the sheet
but for the open window
law & viridity would not enter
those who are no longer permitted to enter

and like the boys can't imagine
a wider form of participation



Specific descent

The best of the vulgarians praised Piltdown
in hunger before the purge
to lick a false father's cranium
from the business side
late vermicelli
False teeth to compensate & ape
the ape donation
To nationalize the origin
the undraping of its appurtenances
witha little stain of coffee & vitae
over chrome
And we'll still never rein in those voices
now awake without a pot or lickable symbol
quiet in the kitchen
the chauvinist seasoning drips out
rates a thin postman
among other things lost or swallowed
a weak sister, an alligator
one day she'll no longer answer the door
a star over her intersections
guiding mine
to a really boring party
dirty brown when you follow the webbing
spidery legs stretch then stir
fastened to a made man off centre
who screamed
among the other things
stop the boats
my leading man
my bleeding son
my very own



Starless Aurora

The cord snaps. There
is your answer.
The whine of the crickets
sawing through the afternoon.
The dragon of envy captures
the virgin of fruitless conversation.
Our domains purged of fortune.
From night arises sympathy, each trunk
dangling its indifferent rope.
The wind tenses our separate branches.



Irony

The infinite universe sweats enough
to dissolve all of our ideas in a day.
Limits to self-substitution
iterate on bicycles
mine shrinks - its tubes
suck into themselves
their zeros. land mines
piled on beaches. cities
fester and wash away.
chain-linking and lasers stop
the revolution
cold at the roadblock.
rust assassinates reflection
of things nailed down
scraped to brown
oceans of dust.



Drunk dragon rodeo

Cold breath of minty smoke
choke the mower
up a bad boy
cloth torn & blowing ash
tickling the spinning blade
The signalled truce to harvest corpses
jammed.
A rabid, bushy-tailed vampire squirrel
drops shells
kids dressed as midgets
cram
the elephant
ambulance
rescue-van
A pomegranate is shot
straight up its drain pipe.
Horse radish snort
While feeding
they mate
in mid-air.



King Slice

A building transfixed by ivy
next to a 24-hour coin laundry
below a balcony garden
tended by a bending woman.
She hears the rattle at night
of $1.25 deep in my pocket.
In the manner of worms
I feel my hair growing
dirtily through me.



Soda Pop

Burning chocolate
& falling filthy water
The bum at the bus-stop
is home for the night
All week he's slumped after midnight
mornings picking his scabby legs
Always his guests wait to leave him.
It falls, pure at first
mixing with sugar
onto us after uselessly scouring
the crusted waste of pigeons.



The House is Sound and

Hell, in its idea, entertains. This
is obvious, here, in Paradise —
the elect in love with our own
dead nouns
a system of evisceration
engendered by eschange.
Here, tonight, I suck the seeds dry. There
with my first million
I'd lick the bones barren.

Thebes was a tough own for thieves
wrote Apulieus
the bandit captain who lost his arm
to the rich man's prick
while working a lock

Condoms flutter, tossed
like halos after purposeful losses
No system to this place but making it
sound alright (not too loud) &
tightly knotted (not too tight)



Castles made of salt

Thrown down one day
limply at your door
the apparent geography of roofs
retrospectively melts.
Virtue confounded by excess
an end-directed abscess
while the eyes that were always watching
wilt.

"The constant presence of terror & death"
while praising the manna of thy sweet effluence
fluent hosannahs of amours & valours
& powers evaporate. We arrive
at this one remaining structure
where we all dry up. Cut off your head
and roll it around the moat.
The body sinks, reduced to its element.
A failure of dialectics. The fat tongue floats.



Canniball

They put the teeth
into transcendental
boy on a leash
the joints stiffening
after the blood drains
leaving
"nothing but the great
taste you love"



Bachelor night

The anxiety bred by idleness
and the neighbours' voices
A summer breeze
frees this evening of its garbage and decay
Slightly smokey does for fresh
A tall dry tree
conducts electricity
The eyes are leaded pains
No one
here
to argue with or with whom to breed
with whom indeed? The decision to stay in
is made.



Real Local Calor

I rode my bicycle outward
past the catacombs of the Gardiner
& the flying-saucer pissoir.
Stripped to the waist at the edge of a swamp
on the side of a lagging river
where a mysterious meter counted kilowatt hours
above a manhole locked & spray-painted
"lost."
This was still in the city proper,
but deep in its lymph sauvage.
There were blimpy bees and feeble butterflies.
An improvised ladder was a bridge to nowhere -
an island in the air where trees and stones hummed
under high-voltage wires.
Is it mad here or there to add to Nature's song?
I was the victim of insect blindness,
and its astute & opportune exploiter.
Maxwell governed their flight and cheer
which were always
and in all ways
perpendicular.
And this summer I've often seen
how gulls will circle the soccer greens
and how bees will trouble the corpses of flowers
indifferent and numb as the tongues of flatterers …




Springs a way

brachiate shiver
a long pole
what you pull out
a burr
a singing grasshopper
at the end of summer
springs away

*

infatuated with their own
beauty
ignorant
of their digestion
time jangles
in the young couple's
pockets

*

The wasp in the sandbox
skims dunes, dodges
sticks & detritus
In the temporary hollows
of children's footsteps
this killer must
be seeking bones

*

how fast does a pigeons
heart beat?
the mark
of conditioning
significantly coupled
to pecking pattern
and homing

*

a stuffed housecat
eats god
dank in here

nostrils plucked
for the queen of the air

sleep the great pacifier
he handed it to her
but flakes of the sphere
fell away from his hands

the neighbours light slices the night
inside the apartment
the star
that polishes your teeth
clean



Fresh sweet hay

The only horses regularly present
on the streets of Toronto
eat from police troughs
Judging by the evidence
they get quality rations
A good contract for some farmer
making hay
while these useful animals
shit where?
anywhere they want to



Early morning whipping boy

between the cracked & the cracker
skinny arms slash



Bequest

Uncertain hours of an uncertain day.
Though the teeth fall out
the gears keep turning
Ideas gloam
through the hormones in the envelopes
and there are canteloupes
on seven-year-old girls.
We no longer believe in the mind or in the body.
In the event of catastrophe
with our personal identification
pass those burdens on to some others remaining.




Above, below

Above the concrete
terminals
they strap lamps to
above
your blowing hair
you look down & check yourself
above the 30th floor
the comb & the keeper make three
the comb stuck in tar
in the road
like a feather
where the chiliast likes it hot
summer
crushed the insects
like so much stained glass
ants
biting the ankles of
the thing
you love



Spring lamb, summer sausages

Endless, useless memory
Our golden Victorian sculler
bronzed
imperial perps personate his rectitude
still & tall & flaccid
the sea drips, the sand scratches, the
oars get in your eyes
each one tall & silent, brown
and taut as a
wet paper bag
drifts the tide
a skin
too tight to slip out of




The play

Brick the buildings by the park
where dogs played with their lives
& children learned the purple of sweet clover
Sand and memory, a smudgy rainbow
of discoveries in the covered passages
& gravel spread for landing, the mud
showed through where others stood
tall returned from the peak of a steel pipe
A church across the street. Some willows held their poses
Confections of a event
Bricks and slime
plastering over
the stone that stung my hand
inside
the true maroon
of her velvet dress



Real deed

guns and wonder
criscross to danger
in the cloud chamber
vermicelli lick the grout
the epiphany
of the ingrown ear
attuned
to the death of a known forger
sex and video games
duly dilate
in waves sent over the border
they propagate
the dance
of avoidance
while the real dead estate
hangs out on the property
and blooms prosperously
there is no object to
origins
after all



Passing lizard show

I said I wanted her to pretend
even if it was true
because when you
pretend a thing
you can't prevent it showing

there are many trivial examples in
the papers

for example
we could pretend
that the toxins in the Athabasca river
are a natural elaboration
rather than a human
development
but the water will still kill you
and I've never been to Alberta

we could also pretend
that the man who slurs his speech on the bus
is a drunk
and not brain-damaged from a car crash 25 years ago
but on either line
he's left by the side of the road
where
he
won't bother
us
and I rarely ride the bus

similarly
we could pretend that
Gary McCullough, 53
schizophrenic hermit from the country
unpopular with his neighbours
stocky, a little paranoid
came to Toronto
with his crossbow
chainsaw
sledgehammer
arrows
baseball bat
and several water and gasoline canisters
locked in a conspicuous
home-made wood-and-metal roof-box
atop his silver Hyundai Elantra
with a
dangerous purpose
and for merely being so accoutred
and curious
in this furious city
(during the G20)
we could believe, still pretending
that he should be held without bail
as he truly still is after two months
and a beating
in jail

and yesterday another guy just like him

shot

anyway
she started to pretend to be a salamander
I didn't think it was true
but I liked how she looked around
anywhere but at me
her tongue shooting out
like a bolt
as we squirmed
friendlessly

"He's suspicious of everybody else
and just doesn't want to be bothered by anybody"

well
who
does?

outrageous
and in our cages
we eat

pretend it's air
ergo
we must be hungry



Hot meal

The hottest hour of the day
By the side window
the mold on the dried flowers
dries
the air-conditioner is off
the window here blocked
the others at equilibrium
cut off
the soft brown top of a plum
for the worms
who will come



Not really

in the skunky swamp of the park
as I look backwards at
the girl on the bicycle
then forwards as she passes
me, a lady bug crawls
across my crotch. It seems
unseemly
that this should happen in front of
the statue of the greatest Ukrainian poetess
but it does. Then two
young women in sundresses
speaking slavically pass
pretilly as I suck on a ripe plum.
I collect my thoughts on a bench
in front of the bald, bare-chested
tennis men
one is Putin to the vodka and "t", I
pretend he's watching me
as we try to identify
the trees. Their
breasts and bigger bellies bounce
with their balls, I guess.
Somewhere else
kids cry and whine
as their parents
ignore them. I'm
going home
back to all that
but I'm not
rushing



Cryo-why

Quiet unrest the autumn brings
an old lady in a sunhat unsteadily approaching
to cut your hair
& freckle your skin
like bananas ripen
in a special way
then put you in the freezer
someday, maybe
make
you a
cake



Imp it

"it's the last day of august
good morning"
sneers the radio
blame the sin, not the sinner
blame the shooter, not the long
rifled
gun
for once she's up early
almost with the sun
already making it too hot to leave the house
for this organ donor
still abed in
this beautiful, cool
stifling
apartment
too far from any place interesting
if there are any interesting places
where the organs aren't slowly poisoned
or cooked
like fried
liver
even here
it would be nice to help someone somehow
I have not discussed this hope
with my family
but her signature
has witnessed my rope-a-dope scrawl
alive
nervous
and impure
some of our organs
were
assuredly beautiful

Prose & cons / Trilobites bite

1.

A necklace of live crabs
       before the odds
how did they live
       cowardly estimations
the earliest known examples
       street-crossing sideways blind
dramatic changes in climate & chemistry
       steady small gains
union of geological sciences
       until the blow-up
discovered at Mistaken Point
       a moral hazard
mouth, anus, shells and hard parts
       trusted but sterile information

nature usually sneezes on our hopes
       unclean, clearly not actors
yellowing ivory of peaches and cream
       sweet and suicidal
the report evolved in a snowslide
       firm in principle
fossilized credit jelly
       mismatching scales
foraged for uncontaminated sponges
       a level of expectations
bringing the stone back home
       two systems in the mind
a foundational document
       or a more intuitive

plea for fellowship a national shame
       different development
a false view of chronicle as practice
       a round medallion
gift for visual bias unavoidable and sheer
       looking left and right
everyone's favourite invertebrate fossil and dust
       expectation of repeated images
the anatomies of advanced arthropods
       a perception of the new normal
fusion differentiation specialization
       modelling trust
a tale of decimation not increasing variety of design
       how ideas can be bad for you

would you rather love a greyhound or a jellyfish
       framing the evidence
discomfort when we view them eating
       killing more than they help
the power of a question mark
       tripling the chance of death
blood always ready to leap
       quacks but nevertheless
basically elongate bilaterally symmetrical
       leeches, worms and their food all alike
like to know where they are going and move away from what they leave behind
       a fact well known by empiricists
such as a great appendage, whiplike
       less nice than currently

and forming the most precious of human continuities.



2.

The unbroken skein of intellectal genealogy
       never replicates out of sample
disparity followed by decimation
       not computable from data
a different story revealed by the heretofore invisible soft body
       eighty percent away from normal

repeated emergence of predation as strategy
       no different from astrology
top level fully occupied and functioning
       value at risk as value
the subsequent decimation and consequent modern pattern
       that we prefer to ignore

leaving something for the evening to reveal
       a freak out between the dark and the light
conceived the world in metaphor
       we have predictions countered the institution
experimentation reigned in a world
       without the concept of consequence

virtually free of competition for the one and only time
       hands clenched or tucked in a
slower process of competition and displacement
       starting to bet down to zero
a change in organic potential
       increasing exposure to the total

becoming less forgiving of major restructuring
       the system was getting a lot more efficient
webs of interaction not easily broken
       until the sudden emergence of a black swan
his shrill ancestral convictions
       a song sung once aloud, a hundred times a losing whisper

patter the most profound of the great dyings.

Shorts in July

Two Evening Encounters

The rarely-seen underside of the window-frame
A refrigerator opens in another room
An arrow pricking out of a posy
hurts the posy
The compressor turns on
The lintel gapes

*

Petals out the window sent
meant the charity of exile
She was outward bound towards a hostile tautology
The tall girls dressed as beanpoles
the short ones, flower pots, fell
to break the ice. They photographed their separation
and called it "A Liberation Album"

Coughs in darkness, icerbergs smoke
returning up to the window
A squeezebox stutters for a choir
I mimic a tick, I dream of Mimico
and a hungry picnic

Indulgences scramble
with sin and ugliness

but what for breakfast?

I go out for something to get



The Sleepwalker

Sleep was a singing bird
It was redundant as a theodicy, redundant
as two heroes with the same name
or one with many. It was the ebb and flow
of bathtubs, the jib and jab of armies,
the occupation & insurgent traffic stalled
& blown up.

When the god wakes he'll make the future
there is no doubt I could desire to gracefully
or safely express
The sirens jog in shorts
and the sailboats skitter
A black garbage bag spills its fragrant entailments
over the inland sea.



The Fragrant Cloud

The bold were the first to swill it
it's always that way
the host ghost propagates between the parasites

I eat the produce of the Polish Economy
rose & plum donuts
3 for my dollar

We'll avoid combat & accrual of awards, titles, names
(K is for Kestrel, beaked murderer of the paraclete)

But the dough's speared in the side with a real syringe!
Ouch! & the roses
    truly boiled!




Forte York

A piano once played is never the same
piano

from the cellophaned cellphone to the
           mechanical pencil wrapped in a bamboo mat

it is possible that this is true, or at least alive, an issue

(we are still in consultation
       & invite your submissions)

we do not act or ask rashly, do not act or ask

we numbly request
       a theme a term a new anthem
(thank you)

we plug our ears & think we can hear it
          as our fingers under the table unsteadily slip

to
ec
static

the hammers bang on the tense & discordant guts



Article 1: Heaven & Hell

" … no great art in that … only the censor knows what is art" - H.M. Enzensberger

The instant perception of weightlessness means only
no resistance to the centre's pull.
And "no great art in that" evades the censor
in the heart, the mind, and their prostheses.
The perception of a particle plunges as it pumps.
The bruising blowback of the pen
Newton's second kickback helps us wash our hard-to-reach parts.
Some unpleasantness, true, but laws are
what they are.
The friars will spew in satire
out the devil's asshole & the flies
like angels scrawl over the parched scraped skin.




This Thing

This dis-
orientation
Being the best
wet
man in the rain
The brain
of the tinkerer
waves
Blinks     sinks
At least he
knows
he won't change
anything




Also too young

But has it always been this way?
Under doubt grows milkweed. These
bored pines, this spayed orchard.
This obscurity in the city. Off-kilter
like a Narwhal in our sex. Her
breasts enlarging in expectation
glut the apartment — August light
stopped at the portals. Our faces close
our eyes close as a last resort.

Complaining on the plain

It is apparent and done on the cheap
I scream "this is what I look like" and cover my head in a paper bag
I grab the first person I see and whisper huskily "that is what I want" with my hand in his or her pocket
I have a thousand talents and the graspingness of a caged octopus
and change my colours in mid-season to match each passing shoe
clip clop blue
There's always a wrong to be righted after it's undressed
but the velleity to unveil must be accurately assessed
and it's a theorem that each particle possesses free will
if we do
clip clop red
spin cycle spinnaker spanker
sometimes I lie bleeding on the edge
the sphinx yawns in our wind
         who's riddle? our piddle
right
violate then abort

(thanks to Z.D.)

The mirth of tragedy

Sunday goes the parade of the real
out the bookshop window
a canoe on a Subaru
shufflers with walkers, speaking
unintelligible Portuguese
To say nothing of the boys & girls on bicycles
who say nothing anyway

         The imagination is on the wane
         as quick as radio it goes trepanning
         studied medicine though reticent
         & was gassed
         Survived in the Alps of Italy
         through cannibalism of bare facticity

& taxes, 5% on the rare side.
Telephone call from the US EMBASSY
we're open til 5
and a streetcar wrapped in advertising
loves everyone alive

just like our prime minister

& a large car parks under a small tree

to go for a walk barefoot in a wheelchair
   a reckless, obvious irony
(at least he's moving)
   with the speed of "metaphysical
  stuff "  not "new age crap"
perhaps "food things?"

"the furious, vindictive hatred of life implicit"

in dream and certain realms of intoxication
    blasts the stereo of the soccer fan
the ball at moments kicked through the veil of Maya
   or appears to be

Fat chance the veil blows in the rain
     is the rain & the players
happy as ducks
     neither dream, ectstatic, nor hunger artists
   they kick the ball around & sometimes get hurt or wet or fake it

    The keeper has the stance of the skeptic
or a man who simply loves using his hands

  But what will furnish the metaphysical solace
if no one scores? if no one's keeping score? if no one knows who scores?

the mass of a ball, crowd, or fist

with greasy good luck and an old hat
       the man from the embassy arrives
"You speak the language very well!"
projecting a certain lyricism onto the heavy metal
desk

the spy
had tapped into what we might call the contemporary unconscious
contempt
that serves for banter

barters principium indivituationis for common courtesy
buys no books
but I had turned off the loungey opera
that had broken the ice with dionysus

      Later I got the score but the game stayed hidden
      I was not up to date, had no permission
       At six years old was no longer modern
      (Ivy grew up the network cable, mouse shit dangled in cobwebs from the mouthpiece of the phone)
      I had no right to protest, no audience, and would have seemed an alien
      And the play was something I could not even imagine

He had no such trouble. He printed out a bubble. He stepped into it
and floated away.
and then the airstrike. mythic provoquestion.
goons & the opposition absentees
keeping the skillet good & greasy

just like our prime minister, chief apollonian
(a smile connects two points on one face
the sun's and his own)

I locked up in the dust and went home
and the oversight committee broke for another long lunch.

Gods Measure

In Homer, "Gods, though gods, are conspicuous"

"For I knew easily as he went away the form of his feet"

     Lattimore a subject

     the other night with the older poets outside the bar

or by the signature walk, getting there

our feet passing legs in red
named "Artemis" she said

the boy's in love, but she's "taken" her girlfriend's arm
      around her
     hardly / fails to / almost starts a war

but hardly a likely siren, virgin huntress or lunatic lesbian


Or our new landlady, crawling on her knees up one floor
   to our kitchen

her edema swells the odyssey
her claws bared like a harpy's

insomniac, deaf, but tough & eager to please
especially in this heat with the new air-conditioner

sees mine — big feet what size? ten or eleven

blows me down to the basement

to her dead husband's shoes, hardly worn
damp     practically new

I tried them on. "Too small," I lied.

He was a singer.

Can you lie to the gods?

Walls around walls

A circle stark on sand
marks a cone of legibility

palisade pikes
                an embroidered seam
reticulates the wind

pure passion & virulent violence count BTUs
while wisdom's flame
& the home fires cool

our allies among divinities chatter
spoil & evict

                the apartment scoured to ash

       ash cannot reason, ash cannot speak
                       of who roasts spit
over it the horses unhanded

     & who hand-holds walking home
at the truce

under the sun, which is under the earth & both
   are on top of you

*

within
wishin for some fission
my rock chapped to give birth
began several investigations into aspects of the event
& a real-time map of foreclosed avenues
stones & seeds in the belly of a bird
& no matter how hard I pushed
no topical watermelon emerged

sometimes I think instead the evening has the structure of a peach
pulpy fiction & lightly poisoned pit
reserved in its cloaca
rubbing for & against you

*

this talking & walking
or, more likely, standing wanting to be sitting
against a fence, it happens
is vaunted, guarded, & electric

who sits inside? Noisy & paradigmatic

maybe just better
   looking
   focused                  or nicer, happier, all around
   connected                  reasonable human beings
                           when

napping
       I awoke on the other side
   & was instantly arrested
   & woke again, tingly & on edge

   unreason unable unhuman

unbeing
&
dinner, then anyway after
talked & walked about the perimeter

*

it's funny how things can get abstracted
the life stolen away

       my hands covered in semen
engines outside the window and my lover's ragged breathing
she's burning up & the tracks
rattle with the weight
passing by

the engine of our future
turns over
& so do I

Acid reflux for the luxury of an unfed head ... thus spreads the crunk of Godelian quincunctitude from zygal I knew up to here

A word's reward
reorders this disorder

A method aims
at ethos, at what
you are am I
immured
in the h become x
chiasmus
he comas excess
erotically

hassled or becalméd
has led or méd the spill

A system or a machine that eventually explains or explodes
while a plain S tory instigates then investigates a mystery
at a planned event
the extent of politic all
a lost shelter
a shelf for surety

he rights
as he writes a letter & letters a right

Now equatorial response ability
equals the tight belt of a salted self
which forward lashes
to speak or say

a probable law
we might obey
equally well

inside the
vaunted
guarded
line

or outside
black
bolted down

July 1-6, 2010

Turning Vice into Versa (G20 Stone Soup)

The stone grows slowly in the underbelly of exaggeration.
Some turbulence in the tub
a warm disquiet stirring the mock soup
as the young lovers disappear singly in chokeholds
riven by the wall of the kettle
by the rivets that were
and will still be, after, people.
In the manner of "hold the line."
In the manner of cannibalism.
If evil is the acceptance of untruth as verity
then it is good to verify the untruth
to taste what may be cooking.
We began with a pot with some stinging in it
and now there is only stone.

July 2/3 2010

Heinrich moves

What can you do-do
with a banjo or two-two
when you’re lazysome and crazysome
and the moon is a fool?
When the brainsies proud moulder
smokes a bucketlist of clover
and the nursie rides a hearsie
like a fairies-wheel?
I’m wretched-like and trying some
to sow some harmlessness old lying mum
but the violets of rhyming um
keep a-burbling out my nose.
Boil the doorjam of the senses
Forget incasements and tenses
Fool the memory with some moonylight
Leave the'art clogged with a resoundingbite
Log the organelles for the arkive
Leave no nictitating florets alive
The real regrets
what it refrains
to stain to steal to strangle to feign to uh full-feel-fangle

The End of Pretend

The waters' random flash of indifference
to a verbal performance of morality
burbles like a crude Marinetti sparkling wine.
An obituary is no philosophy;
The forbidden and impossible look the same to your eyes
with the addition of a revelation or a shrewd disguise
a bikini bottom snuggly tugging around Niagara
or up towards the glutted breakwater.
The difference between to think and to believe
as if it were a parasite to be cleansed of before rising
to be heaved and hewn out of gull shadows flocking
far from the attics they jewel with oiled crystal conveniences;
or how wheels roll and how wheels within wheels follow
a matter of a chariot and the wing-marks in the sand
for those who are able to understand, by and for and just themselves;
or wisdom and the word wisdom, or in and of the word.
Toiling silence snips at fingertips
like a bitch's nipples quivering as she pants
the wedding party like a row of ducks in strapless uniformity.
What colours pattern the wings
of books and butterflies pinned down on the town?
The alliance of the eastern provinces against deportation and red crime
welcomes you to the addictions, mental health, and gallery district
joyfully not listed in chronological order
and a very nice place to buy a condo. In a bathroom window
beneath the tulips of truth or the vulgar imagination
points the icon of the root or the down arrow.

Early June Poems

The moon in June

       the lampost stands musing it out
law & legend lie in the deepest dustiest alcove of the ark
once they were married, mystically
went whale-watching
then built a civil ship, docked
dry in a beach-house dynasty

       today, from this beautifully lucid spread-spectrum of vision & revision
& predatory white that dappled the museum
in heat-mirage wetting the impression
of a been-to destination
we lived in two rooms
tubless & together like saltines

       leaping into & out of our boxes
urgently confuting tidal imperatives
ill at an easy oscillating tether
through the dead spots of transmission
found where our bodies boost the gain
of a CBC afternoon gardening program or morning strain

       of linearity & growing, older, fuzztonier
crispness of the cabbage
dusted the collage implements reclaimed
from silly little boys & girls
morning mumbledance of sustainable illusions
illusion of the outside on a sunny day

       aid impending
striding without warning through the floral boundary
a month later the barricades
to the amphiteatre, empty before rain
pulse and emission when we come together
sparked by the background energy

       of june always somewhere away
a prize that makes things possible
even enmity shitheads amplifying
NO ALTERNATIVES again
who remembers trusting the brain
is there sales tax on your poetry?

       this is a stupid ramble
i would like to learn to play our new-old piano




A night at the pressers

a kiss
whose optimism opines
"most people would say that's perfect"
i agree and bite into my red-steak sandwich
greedily
will it cover the rent
the income from our apple tree

we're what the weather
snores
surrounded by ideology
torture prisons
improvisation confined
to occasional magazines
& catches of trains

pretty girls change
the atmosphere
especially with manifestos
beginning again
at the edge of each season
to convince themselves
of the virtue of seed

tamping down my
love for men
all "I"s in the
conversation
blindside agonistes
hope you make it
home







Persecution and the art of writing

"a variety of phenomena ranging from /
the Spanish Inquisition
to / social ostracism"

Our new neighbourhood's
obituaries in bricks
scratching the sky on the brightest day
are obvious to see
not so their philosophy
falsified under humps of grass —
they lie
& we walk
or slump around the parks
scars under scabby paint
selves to reface on cloudy days & at parties
Hello stunned toddler
Hello gum snuggler
Hi there, switchblade set
This is not a natural motion, position
    or a primordial fatality guarantee
A bumblebee crumpling the grass like a small cat
An inner freedom from supervision
An oversight, a vision, or a right

The Creative Class War/Room

"… it has become again what it was in the beginning:
the esoteric wisdom of small groups of men out of
touch with life and without any influence on it."
         - Gershom Scholem, "General Characteristics of Jewish Mysticism"

On a green slope, under a blank blue
life swings its arms and legs and bats
and curated cultural commentary
fouls the hotbed, then proffers polish
applied, obviously, with the universal tongue.
Out of nothing, nothing will come
and so this must be an emanation.
Something to get tangled up in, before fire or flood
or medicinal apathy punctures
the live event — or brightly-coloured clothing
suggests a civilian presence, the children's screeching
muted on the console in Creech Air Force Base, Nevada
where "inaccurate and unprofessional"
(not to say predatory) reportage drones on.

Overloading Zone

"Our task is to become … "
The ghost remained pinned to the ground
Marble beside the sea
the eroded face
to lean on in mourning
what happened only minutes ago
happened impersonally. We judge echoes
we are. Nipples unusually large
& expressions of despair. Choosing
the shade-side and the bright
rippling & smoothing the fabric
Always dangerous, always entrancing
fire in the hand or in the air
set free to celebrate a holiday
only the wise man manages properly
what reality dissolves of good in him.

*

Taken from him it spilled out
frozen orange juice from a can
the answer too superficial to be excerpted
but still visible on the contours of his brain
preserved as a common property
a map of human behaviour
projecting the highest pleasure
the n-fold or the double-stitch
overheard from the neighbours
when I come home & you close yourself in
dissolution equally plausible
either side of the gate
He gave out a euclidean whimper & though he did not control the code
saw that it was simple, the problem of nonsense-mediation
to participate in what is to be emulated
world-making easy as beers on Sunday.

Acid balances

"Dark in hue, the head is still full of life and
more beatiful than the best portraits by the world's
greatest artists, since it is the man himself we see."
- P. V. Glob, The Bog People

The countdown filled your eyes,
convex paraboloids flexing to resolve
the metastatic future. A wall moving forward,
absorbing all sound, light, odour
confidence & form. A porthole leaking shadows
of nudes neuter behind the wavering pane.
To be digging one day for fuel
& come face to face with this distortion
this parody of possibility, this imposter
tactless genitals deaf to the
throbbing of the engines' love-calls
lined up at the liquor store
in a peaty T-shirt at noon this Sunday
Or today, a man gone on spin cycle
into the newly found old sound
of bend & slice exertions
hand missing hand against the green
bodies wandering slaps
the spine rippling against insecticide …
Two in a buggy makes an anthology
wheeling alongside the great divide
we eject into different tempos
though infections are bracketed
the anatomies decay with each copy
cite pollen in his stomach
a species common still
not food exactly, but a totem antigen
to whip in the harvest
with a performance of our own permanence.
But like everything, like white elephants
emerging from the grey
carnivorous anagrammatical desires may reveal
the guilty dreamer's characteristic tooth decay
brought into focus by a probing question
"who designates the nonsense?" you spew
the love that is simple and cool
between this treaty and no treaty
neither stillness nor perfection tails
forgivenesses aping vocable illnesses
losing a voice at the speech of another's
carnivalesque modulations in blood
A gallant friend done up in the style
of the painter at whose funeral
the Kaiser walked behind the coffin.

time sharing

a red wingèd shoe
sporting popsicle sticks
bugs lick cusps & ascenders
the code of trees
stiff pretend convergences
three steps to the right
a scatter of branches

the shavings of tonight
curls in the grid
on her head
insufficient grounds to believe
she had exhausted
all performative avenues
to end up at this authentic abortion

a glass-coated rotor ought to
snap the hawser
showlace caught on shifters
ratios between the plates
engines cut
the grease from excess food production
easing the limbless obelisk

machined into position
the bearing principle
was built into the hillside
scaffold of poles
pastiche on a mast-in-air
eternal as fire-water
& older than carbon

carrying piano wire to a 4-am appointment
dinner was a liability
disbelief in parasitism
by law, fit for human consumption
built like a vending machine, dispensing
gold from the bowels
wristwatch, fillings

my own goal is toxin
homeless & delivered weekly to your door
the joy was truly meant
to coincide with custody
under the gas to reach peak maturation
pass into future generations
once outré and swollen with human interests

that baroque image
eyemouths and orisons
here to be heard, to see, and to seem
speak of vanishing
into broken focus, use
feature detection to
sweetly tighten the ribbon

parabola

subway train
weeping willow
sleeping tunnel of the sun
where one comes from
bulletproof bikewheel
wandering on leash
hair smothered & hyper
reproductive allergencies
one waits for the examination
a red-winged blackbird
catches a drift
tarsmell mirror
the roof combusts
slow as the highway
to the gathering
underground

*

out in the green world
one hundered steps from the last payphone in Canada city
one accessorizes —
if one has ideas
THE INFORMATION is everywhere
a partial & ritual exchange
green for grey
you for me
follicular chronometries
inaccessible as
stinging nettles
lines around
our eyes

Falling and Freezing Pieces

hope of sleep abandoned
leaves flee from their branches

*

life's gridlines overwritten

*

a face become
a projection on vortices

the days doubling
a bust from life

who figures
square measures

is pierced by all parallels
unless a greater gravity deflects

your scything eyes
to the corner pockets

to the mauve umbrages
of the pink room

*

Every year's best title, progress
has pushed past the barricades
swept up your letters & down deposited
neatly in their wooden cages
No index to their apathy
is possible or necessary
who turned red at the handcrank
now burns in the mere season


Air beyond compare devouring
our bodies as we sit or sleep
idleness of ice cubes cracking as
the purple toe is stitched
A season without what now withers
The romp wrapped & quivering at the flame
& whites & reds float browning
at the over-brimming of this barrel


A yellow tree has captured the sun
In the ground of the white-sided house
reliquary pierced by the wires
fringed by the green remaining
Willow and vine shiver at changing
verily bow to the jaunty isolate
A yellow tree has captured the sun
& rendered it gently mortal


*

spilling sound
of milk and marble
till the garden
greens again
seen through the ice-dry window
in the moldy cardboard box
inside it the eyes
of a mirage
savage at least until
the fiction washes in
back to self
sometime
front to
everything else

*

Weirdness follows
the next next
A chain of fishes, tooth to tail
elaborate the seqence
Some checkered tongue
laps our conversation
as fears might our ambitions
unstated and abutting the inner causeways
But out here, the sweet tooth's
on youth, & right tight
behind claptraps smokebreath d___
packed too tightly to evacuate
each drinks a socrates milkshake
& swallow tongueless & alone

*

he was an angel of the snow
in polyester pants he lay
he swished his legs
together apart together
they stuck & stayed
in cold and icy weather

his breath could melt the snow
but could not sever
his legs that had so grown together

*

and the flakes piled in
the cracks of colour flocking
this way and away

like one who dangles without dropping
he hung on red and blue

i saw that movie too
my hand on yours like some moss around a tree

the architects lines, drafty
unity of a spider
strangles without shopping
best thing to do in winter

*

bugged out by feelng
garbage black

auto-eject into
wind whine wind

diagram into
tran quill idiom

our boy idiot
no

nightly
he-man


*

three aspen writ into
open arrow

snake rundownto
the bubbling gonetime

*

scarred endings & terrible, bearable beginnings
An engine ignites & a tiny little light goes on
Ricochets from heaven, return your mittentouch
The green glass we stand on
Hails your frosted roughish tongue
A wall painted over
is covered in surprise
(BLAMF!) Eat icepop custard
shiver
sunrise

*

An ion almost out of phase
An object of a deep surmise
A sequence of disordered days
A parenthetical reprise:

(A lion tallmost as she lays
The subject of a creep's demise
The week when she disordered plays
Her bare heretical replies.)

*

A soul flies from
its egg
to tar oil and snow
how long's gone
the dancer number
time to reproduce
a feeling

*

liquefying pink
mix crust and bread
in slender buckles
short sleeves prolong
the manner of facts
a flame
in a burning chalice
meanwhile means well
keeping our pants on

*

Beauty without sugar
Who pays for this register?

Sirens demand what they may in the dark

the sea of she-horses
false step through the eye — centre —
careless of latitudes 4x4

come out — the wheels are burning

The Marrow-Eaters

They prove under examination
to be another kind of evisceration
stoned flakes of athletic frame
crackling under time
The bones were found scattered
over a bed of dried flowers
of medicinal potential – spackled pieces to meal
a kind of cochineal
on a massive scale, the weight
of death in the dye of a shamanistic mind
No such egotistic tripod ever lived, mulch scavenger
No ecstatic lighthouse stood still to shine an anorexic shiver
In the vineyard where all things to be sought
Could be taught — the labyrinth of pulver & gist alphabetized

High Water Has a Way

(Mayday 2010)

Terror dragged the water
He was a riotous dragoon
Her legs began where it ended
The water sloughing it off
Credit degraded but insoluble
Beyond belief & the reef
Kept swallowing the black tide
The unpainted backside faithfully pricking
Up and downward it ticked, Hello
The machine checked our invoices
Quoting the baboon
Who was legal but unethical beside me
As the water turned golden
Midas pissing in Omaha

Last October

red rain through red leaves
glimpse of ivory
strain to sleep
the flood comes down

plane to be riveted
still your desire to flee
short buzzer circuit drowned clumsily
wind rose against windows

open or green
affirm nod to curry
pressed unless friends convict
whirlwinds wire the roof

to the oceans electron sink
lightning down the hole
sewn up money mainly
i guess it’s a good thing

since gilded with positive craw
have no commercial valence
carmelized weather if
the best dentist cannot extract

the eye ripped in half
salted roofgap summer dropped 100 ft
struck speechless by the smoked fish
inked footfalls waiver peanut shells

lockjawed letter the gallery floor
it’s just a man’s life up on 10
chawin’ the institute’s apples
then belted in the stairwells

puff copper some stick out a pipe
some mutter slyly some shout
graded the roomfull while swallowing
tacit notary retell the first story

*

His face a weathered ceiling-crack of fuzz
His God forgives him what he does
excretions ineffibly whitewashed office
squealing and the round abysmal bottom
where voices of mayflys gather in October
the relentless nails still hold the frame together
signalling questions on waves erratic
scaling the chasm on telephone wire
to a certain appointment he meant to keep
with himself alone beneath the table.
Chiasma of the cranium’s buzzings like
stampedes of leaves and pizzicato tusslings
rebound off laminate, yet still the ears
audit no report. To fall and yet admit
no falling - or rise as steam from the frothing
a gilded phantom venting through the eyes
to see over the stove the cracked wreath of plaster.

*
everstop
scaffold
stovepipe
never
up and dignified
silence
they did it in silence

*

some night to brag about the affair
so the stars keep their distance
though I hum some punk-ass zydeco
and become a radio
mentally imitate a useless instrument
and have studied in your streets
and academies the shredding of a tear
into a well-wrought reason. The environment
permeates us this lactating season
It is birth - excrescence of circles
round the other clown - Hell in Ohio
pauses for a refill - my gun rages
to tell you its name - hymn it immortal
until shut - three right angles don’t make
spangles - soul nostalgia - concord of the rump remains
up late talking remnants & strategy

*

river of duck feathers
brought on the boat
bo diddley’s tambourine
shiver me warm all winter

the soul in the echo-chamber
lifted by ten cranes
plywood clouds rise
gory reflections in wine

dinners after thought
of seeing you in the elevator
my mother always asks you
the weather and time

now midnight’s middle nothings
squeezed between slumber and tongue
after evenings eyelashings
pressed, you light up like a button.

It's Now (Last September)

It’s now when the trumpets droop and fall
A hound blown in by the wind teases rips
around a headbanger willow’s apocalypse
From your lips leaks a song of convergent senses
and for six seconds we share a time
a refusenik period, the attitude of a rude rind
unwrapping the moving flesh
with a flash of colour on a parrot’s wing
you stumble changingly to the plumbing
and flow as blue into yellow
flags into ground

Weighed appropriately the erotic lapse
rebounds after a pancake breakfast
served with warm syrup
sloshing over the natural border
Between meathook and mastodon hung
confessions of order doing little
to stop the salt spilling
which the tongue of a bee falsely licks
and is stung in thirsty confusion
like when you did that thing
after singing

In the cavity clearing in the wandering wood
where the jets of late summer deface
the deaf blue with their bravado
I can’t hear you anymore I
feel confused today Saturday
the day when it’s okay to say “So ...”
as the face peels off the militarismus
mustering around the yellow dress in the grass
seven fly in formation
the deep penetration of the sun
scatters miasmas of a pure relation

Mirages pale beneath the pink parasail
as a lily patch flutters of toilet paper
& a thin man drunkenly falls
to the anybed beneath his head
massively efficient at kicking the grass
and sending croquet players scattering
too bad he’s napping
a mister creant faithful and true
leading his classes in provocative weeding
& where were you?
bleats the lamb - is that me

Or this wandering, the dust
concealing the mallet swinging
of your form sweet changeling
some days more awkward
than a heat score
& all that legs prolegomenate
when striding home lately or
crossed in a tee
of these commas stabbing
emotively properly — ten days later
Rain noisily lunging down

The through-shine of the kitchen door
hunger mewling
(you play dead for the world I return from)
but for me
pustule break
fake orange juice on tv
a rind drying in shadows of noontime
that’s all
an initial radiating quick
a beverage of lime
meaning time

Aphids puffball eyes scour the dark
proffer the bone-grown gourd
slander of nonsense
a slight clink
of the bookcase
& zoom off on waves of extramission
head separate from voice
wrapped up for the postman
(cheerful, bearded, clean
& in the union)
willing

To deal you an iron deal, ribs visible
arbor of travail bodying the poke
always feared
fragrant crinkle suckling cut fierce
the day was so in 29 or so languages
research reveals
an end to revelations
as we motor up to the reservoir
and drive in
the waters part
lapse heart

An anguish sumped in a dispassionate pump
soaks up the spoils
dismount contemporary oblivion
riven from a far
away affair with a fair star
november dogwash
from which the hedges shrink
scolded and laughing never the lesser
clodded droppings
salve and swaddle
the scalded skull cold gone now

Last August

Aug 3

The blank white wall
The laugh
out of the stark
dark.
Dayflowers run over
plucked dumb

Drip, engine
The nightlion
pisses
& circles meaningless
lee behind you

Aug 5

What’s like a beer bottle in bed
a commuting balloon
st. aspberry
born into a good night
at bow height
drawing air
& its outlines
missing you


Aug 12

From yellow day to purple night
To step without tripping
Over a tree
Other people’s gardens tremble under my eyes
inlay
of hot earth stinkers
in red pajamas making toast
& tea
she cuts celery
cellary swish in the bushes
the soft heart of a leaf
sits undisturbed for a whole minute
.
True, if we get the grants we could eat out every night
but what would we do with the rest of our knives?
whitless whittle
“into the night” — sidestepped oblivious
with guilt & concupiscence
spilt
.
trying hard to finish the milk
from hogtown to motown to chitown
ill o noise
mowtoon mootown pooptown

*
white shirt candidly hung
unstained
his holiness needs more fun
even fatalism coiled in his loins
would be almost divine — almost a bastion —
compared with how he flops now
a spineless fish
a boned herring
.
don’t stand up diogenes

19 Aug (Chicago)

the sound of a plane is actually a train
or roar of an air-conditioner
the megalomnia
of smouldering muses after the fire
heartbursts in the heat of squatters-on
& the drone of infection spreads
store to store
*
the fan hisses
the ankle cracks
the not-wife sleeps in a bed
in the room i’m not willing to confront
its fan louder than a baseball
size of hard apples
but plumes here are proper
as a pine-cone aspergillium
in the hand of an Assyrian
fondling the lotus
bare feet & fetlocks
treble-horned and basso divine
pierced the daisy crown
trod the daisies down
curled in the genius wings
sprinkling water around them
(i will also not confront the lunar symbolism)
whose bed to sleep in —
The couch sticks & sags
better here than the car
your bed’s made
and we’ll know this too one day.

*
sin of heat-sloth
crawling up buildings
accident a
cylinder sealed
a contest between
thing and one
and one and thing
cousin reality of sleep
figs & mentalists
a cocked hat
becomes a nest of ravens
rookery or crookery
fits of indolent men
become steel-spined mandolins

*

each day
ride the El
shades behind shades
friend or fow
get off downtown
ah walk around
whereyougo i follow
.
a bovine beast
reek of inhibition
seared and shared
among he priests
the farecard tracks their portions
Baby - lone
Been gone so long
feels like nuts to me


Aug 28

The secret diminutive is written in the bush
It makes everything small
The searchlight’s reach
The wind through the leaves’ black masses
The sobriety of daylight society
The security of the well-fed and well-loved

Seen from a balcony or a train
it pushes you in, or on,
as your pulse pulls you along

Down in it
the muzzle romps


Aug 30 (Weather Bell)

blank rushing day then
szvedanya!
chestnut shell
drops soft pricks
lavish nakedness
hovers above the top shelf
the ceiling fan’s second self

spins a free generation
little hands’ll
grab everything
on a small screen clicks
savage makeup
mocks the particoloured self
to show the piece on Sunday

or else bend
to a rhythm hovering in the wind
love a frangipani migraine pill
disturbed a bit the sick
animal still lives
hairless, unmarried, itself
canonized together with an anniversary


Aug 31

daylight burnishes the switch a redundant yellow
you’re here then flicked out of bed & we disappear a while
back with cicadas a quivering spine
itches around the emparked slouch
of a universe buzzing & stinging around us
rather, me, you’re somewhere else already
in the garbage glut; turn the key & strum
goodbye to someone & then they reappear
as a hum here. lowered in on a crane?
wisecracked open from an errant-squeezed brain?
She enters the fovea with luggage
forever a narrow over-burdened strip
to stride on with scientific footwork
that manually masters the self-actualizers
then rebates as it cuts the grass
a small man, a lamp post, a big tree
no syllogisms no guarantees
is that the sound of spokes, spooks
a principle pricking on the plain
or a daschund dawdling down the dale
cacophonies of homophonies turn off the phonies
how loud the city & your bright in my brain

The new guest

Rocket utility
to a closed room
brings sensitive
luncheon meats
we lure flies
and wanton boys
delight in our noise
in the street below

outrunning hydras
sentimentally
inside eyes adapt
other colleges swear
the cure's electricity
decency, passion
a spanking, fresh air
mouthwash ration

somebody clones
an explanation it
becomes a phenomenon
series or quit
it justice fled
your gorgeous mouth
I adore you bled
catch the peanuts

missing the high aim
of luxury plain
handholding in sandals
on the backtrack green
enough and never
fall our own arrows
random as rain
and meaning assembled

piercing from six sides
sways the systems downriver
I love them don't ruin
them now and forever
nice white teeth
say such sings
even when lips
eclipse them

2 buy the book (v.c. via n.d.)

CHOREA

Certain allergies bark hot tea
Handshook each to scramble
Our proprioceptive power
Remaining on the patio
Even after the peach
Amiably swallowed the pony-tailed lunatic



SHALL WE

Probable son only
Enrobed in sunrinse
Rack and roof sail
Crags and question rill
Your remorseless shape
But to speak or hatch
Your desperate heavens

Sweet-talking oracle
Shakes dew to extinguish
Her only son's
Extemporaneous repentances
Strange notes on an alabaster day
Hang timelessly in granges ebb

Early archivists monthly
Lozenge suck at the bow's arc
Low end of a loco motivator
Even I know and acknowledge
Yes, dearest Lady, I sometimes forget to weep

Loose ends of a loose week

He is the boy wonder
with his water-colour
Diluting misery
until it flows down mountains.
A mood becomes a landscape
in the oral tradtion
drifitng
the arm that screamed on the toboggan
around him now's a lullabye.

*

Through plastic like - Watteau? -
A tree, nature's watery brain
Murky like love, thing I get nervous
just thinking of
or Brown grown green

ONE
CENT
CANADA
-
1915
gorgeous Rex next door with the Indian Empress
buzzwire bee chases me indoors to kiss your trenchant knee

*

There's somebody here & then there's somebody there
A sketch for definition
An act of the imagination and hands
hand me the same body
Is it the same person

*

"A jailbreak is different from"
A sit in the park
Denuded of names & mythologies
Free to be atheclectic, jugular, dog-wrestling
Tennis-popping embolizer
A lunge away from them
The jerking mad boys or
The zombified tree

Leads to where - "is there a doctor in the park"
("dealing here" or "on the dale")
Keep your stories in a black sack
Gag your mouth - a fly sneaks out
Snapped flat in the shuttered black book

Itys aid us to swallow our cooks
backwash of breakfast, want ads, merciful apologies

*

impovere
breakfast of clover

guard my daughter but none too close
& not in my house where she was
minted & roseprinted
& knew no evil but our own

now you scramble your stinkbugs in her eggs
as well tattoo the devil on your beater

impatient impressions of the self
on the world's meat flowers

gone my tongue
my dong my my

*

It's the two-world duplexer
past the booth-centred centennial celestial snooze centre
above & below, in air & water
too late to send out for a sunset
moontwaddle confessions
run & flee & turn into a weed
wind blows out your nose
with a new awareness
flares of point of view
epistolary peregrinations
words spread on wafers
dry out by day break
green provocative gardening
is work so worthwhile
even though a bucketful of raspberries
each morning yield their hundred-and-one
red-meaty drupelets to your tongue
not beguiled by oblivion
the obvious
lust or
the arrows of advertising


*

plant as brick
a wreathe of sirens
flung through the window
a neck
a regular ambassador
sung a sassy nation
hung potted meat
3 bottles shot
box under her arm
strapped in over a controlled bomb
mysteries of worship known to initiates
under inspection with a good lawyer
read the cement lines
talk spacetime
& to your friend
the end
in arctic cylinders crashing


*

He walks down the long walkway
a man in a suit
gray hair and hands that sneer
while his lips smirk
Eyes empathic and creased
with vanishing points a long throw down
the lawn to the periphery
He has a plan in his briefcase to plunder the garden
and the influence and strategy to pull it off
He has returend from exile
If you met him, you'd like him
Even his filthy habits
Even as you starve

*

Beautiful Music

Handel soundlessly throught the hoop
as a shrivelled flower in bromo-seltzer
The bubbles in the glass popping
to car alarms & starlight
is sunshine shattering windows
This dream is an abandoned building
side-slung and flesh-feeding
This story is fruit-fly oratory
A moratorium on the Roman in you
Jesu Christu who I knew as a Jew
Philosophy a rat's allegory
To chew through - like Art
or Cages - the building of moments or
The shattering of monuments

*
Plenitude

Newton's roasted quince in winter
a bee diddling the asters
compute eclectic amputations for my scrapbook
wildflower worship a manhole beyond the sea
why every flower wants to drown
is beyond me

The sidewalk's black with mulberries
a rich street
Sunday morning prickup
stick up and wilt
minds like leaves or shed petals
we're going to a poetry party
if we get these grants we can eat
out and save money

Outside his house I don't call John because I'd rather watch
couples get out of new cars in new clothes
and eat eggs and talk about babies
I'm not jealous or impatient though right now alone
The engine's off they keep biking by
through ingenuous odors and landscaping
where we could go
oh
Won't it freeze or at least slow down a while

Caterpillar Butts

CATERPILLAR BUTTS

Advance ego
ikea dirt pig
into the honda surf, sir

vomit black
on the see-saw
from your brain-barrel

error of mother-love
and fear begets
cannibalism

rapine's little brother
pick-a-neck sandpit
drowned

100-ft apocalypso presently
our dark places
are emptied out

Voluminous Presence (8+10)

VOLUMINOUS PRESENCE (10 + 8)

The rain beats the world into voluminous presence
a garbage bag's chime & dangle
palette of a littered stoop
obscurely but certainly
churning out the window
hey Joe — where to?
grim brine
the half life of cancer
Mary Lincoln's vicarious lobotomy
early enticements to stay dead

Instead I dreamed we had a baby
early warning metastatized
like a thing swallowed
into a Lima Ohio jail
beckoned through the bars to
Uncle Art
insisting we
are born free
A gutshot
into natural reality

Where prison everywhere plays its part
it had your eyes and my tremulous heart
twitching green leaf
or Rudaki's bright teeth
liquid and suddenly gone
gripless digging in the garden
ending up on display
like the day
of marriage-mirth of your mother's son
you burned your breasts you stood so long

To the full flush of an alley rose
gingerly
invented for you in memory
the organ of the departed swells
over your blue swimsuit and the sand
drifts here on the backyard's creaking balcony
the leaves hang like laundry the wind bodies
the nine winds stationary
as a cup of coffee
on a dead man's library desk

Catalogues of comprehensive complacencies
like endlessly tiling desires run out
I guess at the tiring house
there are rats in the roof and immense
stone tigers on the pediments
If they could move or even meow
or help you dress
to clothe the emptiness
of everything blue because one thing gone
Now the pin you sleep on

wavers, breaks without harm or worry
beneath your still unblemished face
variegated flowers, strewn pentimento
rain fragrantly, blatantly
warming the mint sheets
breeding huckleberries and barefoot backwoods
balladeers
to fill your ears
with adopted songs, old & then
& only of an imagined innocence

i.e. "The moon shone murderously ..."
Afternoon lamp on
God & His monsters groaned in the church
an act or worse
an abstract pattern
as the bells rung
"you will be considered pirates and killed
... in the rushes of the windless moon"
Ed Dorn sang of matrimony
and our genetic lunacy

is conquered as a planet forbidden
who turns upon the self
in collapse like society
our bed fell
impaled on a board
I was evil and dumb
the whole time I knew her
she kept her gun wrapped in paper
turn away from the edge &
toward the horizon

Places and Spaces

PLACES AND SPACES

Places and spaces fill the dream
Like blood clots or curdling cream
You sleep stentorianly
I scream and you scream back silently
The clone army celebrating
Their limbs' several severings
Freedoms civis romanus has won on the radio
Free flyovers, silent Philomel, plucked the slow
Tongues and swallowed the fast
Baked in sick-sweet dentifrice, gassed
With a gothic cherry blast. They fell
From the tree next door in the shell
Wilted Walter gathered them for his late
Wife, a blathering medium. We penetrate
Our darknesses as they stream out and surround us.
Our breezy brains walk or take the bus.

So ... Busting Out

So ... Busting Out

June 2009









SO

So this is how you spend your days
Sucking the syrup of pure existence
I'm so happy I could dive
And fall fall fall
It's the shaking of the knees that burrows
Beyond the soccer ball
Big-fisted babies boozing up a size
To collar the outlaw on his tricycle.
Squeegee queen of vivid vision—
Forgive my cooing like a pigeon.

Is it possible not to worm the bird?
Discipline's a dis - ease.
Nothing moves until it's buried.
On afternoon strolls along the border
A bricked-up sunset strikes each post on time.
A puppy squats in a port-o-pottie
Stiff-backed, sour, balder than its master
A customs doctor of stickered vintage
Transacting commerce and revisions
in a plot to fuck all comers. One provision

Leads to another, and then
Today becomes tomorrow again.
Each morning to rise and realize the position
Salutations of a black sun wind-up doll
Having a wonderful life in the anatomies
Of antinomies, old and new. It seems the skies
Will darken, then a new one comes true
Disgorged from an armpit, sweet breath from a false orifice
Give us a rest. What artifice demands, or office, may be, but
Someone said once — unmoored by nightingales? —
"Stand up, friend, with me."








WESTWARD GONE (A-HISTORICAL DRAMA)

Act 1.

Shook a blunderbuss wanderlust
at wheedling death —
Took thin thunder. Beneath the blowing blanket
Weeds harmed each other. In my mind
Weeds of every order strove sunward
Bursting through my glass-eyed smile.
& outside weeds allied with time
metred out a while.

A criminal minister
grimly knew —
Whistle blew. Blue-sky sundered
Deeds clammered over each other. Dockets shuddered
To the hammer, decision click,
and tripped on his dick
But none the worse for tear.
Broke out in dust, my burden buried
with moneybags of rust.

A red-skinned
copper minor.
Sat down beside her.
Nearly swallowed my tie.
There is a time for fertilizer
For tents and sowing
and open crowing
bare to air ...
Somewhere over there.


Act 2.

Two weeks spur-sitting. I
have nearly soiled a lie
but "Carved myself a new
asshole" isn't quite my style.

To be blunt, cunt
I have wandered out of lust.
Who can't trust the compass
of his loins? Lost

In the caverns of desire
Wanting no expression
or succession — avert
my heart from the natives & postmen.


Act 3.

Wonder which of the women
the general killed today. The men
dance and howl so. It's getting so
I don't want to go.

Took a pony down the gully till
the hills blocked out the sky.
Crawled under a rock with a bottle
till I'd waited out their rain.

A scorpion met my boots in a
    passionate ambuscado.
Don't ask who won
Or why, or if I learned to sting.


Act 4.

Down the gullyside from heaven
in a rockslide
the ghosts toboggan


Act 5.

Blasted a road through the rockface — day
turned on like an old TV — one dot then
everything blew
Dug a hole, rigged a shack
Sell postcards candy gasoline
Live alone
If you drain the tank
you might find the bones.








AT SADAVOY'S COTTAGE

What's a plowman's wake to a black fly?
Expendable insect impassive to handclaps
then a stain on a sweater, then more
A sunset, fever, the applause of a steel hull
Out of the pines a paddler
Green nylon ropes drip but never moulder
In the hull, what water brought
Rough dinner conversion
News from abroad
Who dives into water
Which water shivers
Entered by a toxic cloud
Of fever falling & the big bugs move in

*

Citizen dagger
Zooms by in his big boat
His worm-free dog dodges
The big killing hook
Our noses cut
The nylon drift wood

to the dark side of the island
where
bears
swat the stars
& sniff the black bugs

*

Something is moving on the hook
It is still light, but soon
The barbie and I will be
thirty hungry
The bar
Who needs open water

*

Thunder threatened
But never came around the island
We couldn've floated out & sat like stumps
Free from weevils & the wet rot

Bring me a theme
Congealed like a jelly bean
Marched in from town by the ants for their Queen

*

Let me be free of parasites
The body's integrity would be so nice
When I go to that heaven
Wherever it may be, paradise or
home, worm-free

*

Over the water the violins
drifted, thinning, for nine days
Then boiled away
In the brain of a black humming
Bird
When it fell beneath the waves
Gentle and inland, a paste half-digested
Its eyes saw only blue

*

Two loons greener than truth
Swim happily through scum
Somebody said
Their thoughts move them when instinct fails
And this is learning
The word "bird"

Bankside
    We were grumpy with travail
The artichokes were stale

Idea of home, hexagonal, stable
Send water before daisies









ENGINE BRACKET

Engine bracket
Secure obscure
Absurdly throttled through the folded smoke
Rope played out devoutly
A hope for rain
In the world that was the same
From noon
To the wife's bedroom

Hello morning — derided by fraud and rain
Grey cataract apostrophes
Feeling sinking into the garden
ONE WET MIND     WITLESS
WITNESS   Wistful for the big cabinet radio
chez Neptune    tubes in the music room
transported breakfast    symphonies    crackling
it's simple, hear

Here Neil Young howling on university radio

*

Jets phase the cello
A ladder teeters in its grip
in the slick air / vapour
On the Wuthering cover, the belle-martyr
Breasts soiled by air looks down
Her eyes seem lazy, her lips candy
Gritted square-jawed martyr to the art
of Publishing

Thunder or jets — quiver wild roses
Conjure the cornball of September

The old soloist
The glass pelvis
The dismembered telco

Schemes for the airport electrocution
of Rimsky-Korsakoff — who sleep off your thousandth night
Miss, all this.









DREAM

You come home, vagrant, and the world has come around.
A compact train of cosmos, wreaths or tires
Familiar more to earthly lovers.
They roll in shadowy orders
Diffusing sweet and smokey odors, atoms ablaze
Exemplary allegorical pilgrims, all.
You refresh yourself in the kitchen sink
While they attend from off the balcony
Arrayed in anxious azimuthal panoply, asking
Where will you go, now, without us? Into that cave, with him, alone?
You arrange your clothes for them in a circle on the kitchen floor.
In the housebound vegetable morning, both are gone.








THE SADNESS AFTER

That sadness comes after a leader of fashion
Such as that pirate Sam Roth
Praise him
Or a yellow miscellaneous insect
Accuses itself on the glow screen
Of being only the catch that the net drug in

This year or next year the castle will rise
The king will understand he is inflatable
But being inflatable, suck it in
Rather than scatter the blown ones, us
On winds of efflatus

And a slow leak will drain into in his brain
And he'll sink eventually into rich carpets.

*

Who makes the instinctual monster
Politics? Each multi-headed monster of self interest
Original good bent sinister
A border drawn on a rolling rock
Scampering out of the torch-mob's path

Throwing cellphones and rubble
Pleading unity
Issuing provocative statements
Of illegal acusations of illegality

What a mess. Holy Messiah. Of Law
Of Morals Of the Human Mind Of Taste Of
English Grammar & Polite Economy

Mainly the main chance is the hand-grab
Visualized as lines of force
from those who have it, to those that don't,
conventionally but not exclusively
on the North-South axis

& The best visualizers are those like Leonardo
(said Valéry) who can see themselves
working both sides of the border.

*

That said there are those who don't like anyone to say it








CHAPMANS

clothesline or
skeleton of umbrella
happiness in outline
yes contraption
cut short
your desert wandering
it's simple they
say sometimes

magic shortcut I can't believe in
to ride a three-legged horse up to the third floor
three times
27    no shit    these are last year's blues
methods & attitudes    defunct
nobly noted an attempt at empathy
Cuba or Cubism
is when I eat your food with you
I care at least a bit

A horizon opens and siphons off those bad thoughts
        spit
there the sea is vertical
no shit
you get up    "this is exhausting"

I know    I've been sitting here my whole life








BONES

canvas frame shape of a wing
parasols whirling infinity frocked
petty mattered around the chain
banging the corn barren lusty
mind and everything husk in
umber askance autumn asking
whether weather sure or walnut
why not the Italian oh hollow








SKIN

steel stolen ounces dreamless creak
rivets cartoons pink cartesian vacuums
shuttering virtue imperial altitudes tick
taut in tucked conversion tempted erect
deferred down to murk swivel
elapsed obtuse cosines drift parallel
in dark fore-feeling phenomenal breakfast
gently insensible parabola plum lead








MEAT

short burrow slander of brine
said ignorance or confidence lapsed
avowal long week at shaving
strong boots etc. will you
or never steel sutures etc.
carnivore or not the rules
etc. shall we walk bear
the spirit beer hatchery spin








NEW STRATEGY

packed cubits and spoke
sneeringly a mentality
scent offensive others
tissue swap the orange word

turned off at day-gap
shot heat a blind wrapper
rug absorbed in needless ink
air contrasted to resin bowl

washbasin with no exit
the lillies grow and moulder
wave theory immersion
10th grade Novosibirsk

is bursting with sentiment
gilt flowers roseate still captures
of the scheduled death stunt
jade passed the examination

flint flicked the bulb nose
dialed red cipher arrow bled
to the streets X
next slide please as you see

an uncertain calm fell
over the capital Are
you with us you
are with us are

you us
stroll to depository
our late great principle
invariance on strike








POWER INVERTER

flower-struck     market bound to
culottes    cut grass
even a genius prospecter
fakes his chances
sylvan sourlings
kline black and brown exteriors
to thief a rusty tin three
not me

cut glass       a virus drips
down as trained roses climb
depress button    blue jay walks
into cut linoleum    cool air glare
chunk tuna grey lumps rusky tea
checkout quiz show
won't be beat

day protection squad
guarding the grass
you're not the boss
says the six year old from
gladstone ps








REBEL CONTINENT

raised on an island
rounded by release
open world
& die book
(again) of dropsy

bells can't set precedence
and let you in
studied faith of fur
rat skitter berry
crab pinch briar

where hackles & voyages
discovered economy
delayed for one month
ashore to be married
or diverted to barbary

where muslin invaders
flattered sketches strained
inked sheets strung to pervert the wind
diversion from drums
of local complainsong

at home peace was the end
of dining & dancing
foot over merry money-grabbing fists
the theatre insists
tonight's the siege's last performance

rounded by worms     storms
tinkle of dinner parties
the necessary wardrobe awaits
though the roads are safer in winter
out dragging your musket

& cannonical balls

*

sixteen & yawning
at the fifth meal
still
already a fine
preparer of puddings

adequate if narrow
one-storey frame
servings ample
and according to custom
each guest runs his own reconnaissance

conversation in character
cosmopolitan
embroidered waterways french trade
plans to picket the pigs
who slipped ino a soiree

grammatical
a condemned criminal
equipped with
two pair sheets
a stiff pin & six towels

prosperity the service of a fish in a gabardine
rounded by forest
he'll castle his queen
knot her in
its highest branchings

rounded by forms
mast-high maraudings
defense
steaming out
and back in

the seams of clouds

*

rebellion swum
from sweet brine to sour
abjure censor
tender philosopher
the sergeant knows his due

pantaloons
when they've swung
seigneur
banished from his foyers
luxuriant prisoner

to read proust
perdition rheums
with axe-handles
irregular divisions
by race to confess

more than the numbers
out for a packet
rounded by cigarettes
thrown in the harbour
dead letter     urine

you have become
rival urban snobs
breathe their feudal breaths
last fashionable straw
in the garbage summer

cholera blue bottoms
out six years later
waybill way strayed
young emigrant
grounded pen in pocket

celebrate - you're a free man








BUSTING OUT

the weather speaks for
a kind of relativism
in the pure colour
the unities that keep you in
& draw you out after the rain

marionette drowned
in a pool of marinade
what luck open sesame
toasted I am afraid
it's a silent movie

but the wind blows
& the sprockets click
as schemes assert
expected dessert
prickly paraded

past the sensibility
string hung slackly
got a text message with a recipe
ceinture dripping
down silvered legs

now pale in
house light's shroud
you flex taut around your stride
it's like dying again
the ghosts have become our friends