SPRINGinging

SPRINGinging

may 2009








IN SERAGLIO

In seraglio the new life
wearing holes through the pillowcases

Dust scalp & the hall
eating tiny fishes

Each time I open my mouth
a small furry mammal scampers in

Clear eroticism / on the couch
under the bed spread

Oblivious to the lotus
enfolding the house like a net

And gathering up around a neck, an amulet
dangling the magus

Closets festooned with stolen glassware
potions to fill it

Each individual atom plugged in
A nimbus of pins

Bloodlessly whirled in a trance, unfurling
the insurgence behind the thick curtains






A PREFACE TO PARADISE

It is of course the furious moon
A beef side suspended
arms out falling / as uncertain words
spatter from the vent
transverse to light
on the pebbled surface





HERALDS BEFORE YOU GET THERE

You fuck the big asshole & start moving away from them
one leg in the pothole
stretched out like a gutter
under the eyes of the opera singer
with the spanish guitar
Before the snake in the grass
bit and all that
A rime of lemons
The freedom of foresight glitters
Filiated & immutable, like the period
Some big brown spot on the sun
The act among the intentions






THE FULL FIVE FINGERS

Called to the couch, we avoid the benchings
laboured in an original tongue. Remade
like a million-a-day egg, like sugary crispness

diacritical furrows span the ignorant nose
Extended through air, or indexed correctness.
Failing, to assume this has happened to us

and also to them. That happiness, this happy
Circumstance understood - and if not accepted
The facts will reject the revamped son. We fused

the British invasion to Hilbilly thorn-tone
trash. Refused the strum but took the cash.
An abject lesson in twang, sang the chorus of the melon

Knowing the first borne were first gone.
It was the price of possession, the new deal done
The red we fled and spread after us.







INFLUENZAS

1.
That golden garden furrows his front
Hat hit high by arrow
Mothers like unstitched shadows
drag out days of dull knife stays
Salt doused the beach fires
Waves runaground to sound
rocking sand –
Whetstone man retires.
Truck rusts.
South gusts blister its guts
His mouth goes white and brittle
Old spare inflates the sparrow whistle
Hoops it out over the wet and wide and lolls and waits.
The hooting fates and looting tides call.

2.
Who relies on a spy, satellite enemy?
Son, said the father, tie it tight
Tide bothered the pier
Been years since he borrowed it
With a night-light, amphibious emissions
The rod relents against documentary evidence
Hell, the sink-hole of the senses trussed
To wake the sentry, none
But the stung, moneyed bee
Hunting the big one
Cough, gargle, spit, start it – invented, inverted
As circling they cross
Typology amok, wakes first
And last lost, away.

3.
Woke early
Adrift in space
Into the dark would drip
A salvage solfeggio
splish splash
unaware
Love enters the room in her underwear
The mower of tongues sows weeds of inspiration
Totally clueless where I go, blind
Though love invent to seek
I fold my affinities with my meat
Propose mystical marriage, find
The song carried on the cloud
Til carrion sound on ethnic and furious ground.

4.
Wicker through wind. The teetering aspire.
A wall-eyed heathen measures ratio, word,
reason. Death the penalty imposed upon.
The cedar tiles burn
As Venus unbosoms from the tar-paper urn
The endless ova of the gold-feathered roofs.
The chimneys speak in smoke
Til spring’s soft stroke relents insensible again.
We take what piles and dump it in the bay
The gulls screaming interruptus
Refuse
The wet brick shines. A word kissed
And sunk in windy orifices
In here, out there, phantasm-us.

5. (“sore by guslight”)
Sleep-dream of container gardening
As the halo grows to sombrero —
On ektagraphic, old work, he laughs now
And lives under lake phenol
where the ghosts whistle still
Clair water as the moon
Diffuses opportune lies. Sky’s marble cage
He hung in, the spangled jays peck
to the cardiac jet ecstatic
Fat fowl on a svelte string. Spinning
Checks choking the err of belief back in
Aim pays — as it crumbles, a corpse spitting red
He’ll choose or rosette it alone.
All turns to white with a minor strain (groan).

6.
“Her gentle limbs did she undress /
And lay down in her loveliness”
Blue sky bending its bow as to a bed
It, her beauty, is not her flesh or blood
Even as towers burn for it
Chased Jets
Cleave to the penetralia
As a cigarette once blooded the blowhole
on the abstract street outside her parents home
A spot of hesitating fantasy stuck in the eyes
in the afterglow of a sentimental movie
(That heaven protects — with botanical extracts – oopsie)
But for fifteen miles around the fire-blossom
neither an odour nor a livid soul stirred.

7.
A sailor, a scientist, and a brokerage priest
Met on the street where the torn pages blew.
The sailor, gastronomic, said “My belly’s atomic —
it burns through my purchased putrescent salt stew.”
The scientist, optical believer, said “I’d leave her,”
(reflecting, then added) “If I glowed like you.”
But the brokerage priest stayed the course, but looked sicker
As the ticker veered downward and the clicker croaked thicker
A tinted-crystal forest a-glossing out the sun.
Ray-banned, he stared at the Arabian horizon,
Mouthing azimuths and prayers to him and himself
Alone. Alone, a moth or a muttering murtherer
Could hardly have under-plumbed his corruption.






A ROSE ATE THE DEWS

A rose ate the dews
stained the other
leg of his pants
Breasts amorphous
save the nubs
which sensed the air like
a web-like veil of lace
framing as if
an accident / a cross / a fix
awarded not for merit
but as merely bathing in
the black and grayer
grace of nature








TRANSPLANTATIONS

They pop up like paparazzi
Bloom-day, dear lips, fine creased folds
Of deepening red amid lesser blades — mere
Grossness, old trash — tacky dust
Scraped crust of cold flesh

And all. A manuscript neglected
was disturbed. Yellow vermin pages
Squirm from the balconies, surge over the hedges
Some drift sweetly, some fall in strife,
All land. Bending to put in a box a life.






PENETRALIA

The clear image of the hall-light
The moon, the way I am looking,
In. Star-eaten spots on eyeballs
Staring at spots on walls
Behind which, other eyes,
Closed. The jade-plant’s flesh
Never unfurls but must be penetrated.








INTERROGATION CLASS

Milk husk and banana-fed
Wholesome, the whole self wanders
The racecourse, magnetic sped-up core
Of apple
The seeming-knot unravels
As the red bush rose

Who made this soft and blue-streaked lump
Of glass?
Wire
Can it neither pierce nor close
In darkness, wound tight
As a body-builder’s clothes

After boxes
Rivals in fierce balance.
And the roof leaks mildly, like a skin
A long way from the edge of the weather
In the bells and surge of the street
Cars exist and carry
Signs and symbols in those they carry.






SHAW

Our Scottish Aeneas
served his Queen, proclaimed
On the peeled lawn
To benches rotted after winter.
Traveller’s duty
To squat when necessary.
An army guy built a house
Fought back the yanks who pay no taxes
Then
died. A happy ending
Rumbles above the earth.
“Son, take a seat on the grass
and listen - it’s your heritage.”
Twee twee twee hiss
Yellow spangles of cowardice
Spirits unsettled by worms
Damp as my ass.
Despite the visitation of our feathery friends
who with star sepals
announce (dig a hole, fill it up) as nonce
the governing of a thing like love
or a child’s birth.






ONE GOOD MAN

Ran home to pee
to close him in our empathy
All were troubled by the same question
The assets (liar) flopping in wind
as the pearls ran down his cheek
And what they thought of him
Who had taught his catechism
He was afeared of, and thus their thoughts
Became his own.
Wrung upon them, his progress was less than
“excellent news”
(A thumb-sized bee bumbles athwart the plastic)
It was one more rung
Up to the bald balcony






PRINCIPLES

A poet with no principles
Leaves no prints

A poet with no prince
Heaves no pints







MAY HAW

Weave as we hail them amours burning rain
downbent anxious as to a bed's cold fabric
heat kept by cambric in cadaverous clay
where the lye lay spread to all nozzes, biting
ambiguous eyelids with infamy

And they do they come swinging through us
seaweed smothering winds
each step pounding the doorhinge
thin-as-piss paint ground to lips
recusing all idolators, vitiating softness

like a big powerful nasty man and a cheek—

Out the window the growling green trees
limp through their limberness
A low chitter chaffers over the balcony
Deliquescent empathy clothes us in
the dripping canvas

& the horrid devil bristles a dense dance
& the ants hid in pock from the buzzard blitz
& inbit all twists the tongue into effigy —

A sunset's blazer thrill
splitting even the original trilobite
though rational
of the stair's shadow and the curlypod plant

ah hem it short
says the chirrupping olive jocket of Babylon