Barn Nun (June 2011 - July 2012)

Top shelf

Yes, I have thought about men entering my body
as women surgeons my mind   
and governments my headroom.
Imagination is taxing, but so is a fight
the cure or extraction of preserves
fasting wonderful
and marriages secret and unfortunate.
The world may decline, but its orbit is clenched yet
behind lids like white curtains
and swirling intransigent vacuum blues.
It’s a fools tongue stuck to the roof of a house.
Naked, yes.
Open it
input it
and put it out of doubt.


Sea ditty for Makars

But is it better than a dream?
The upthrust moonbeam,
an idle thing, idled
as creeping things crept.
and for symmetry, we wept.
We wept, and for symmetry
the snake unmade the bed
sweeping
an unwound sheet
in its curdling wake.
Are you a creep or just an idler
asked the one who had mattered
to me, to me.
The none who answered
was he
who had wound the sheet
tight as a dream
around his neck. What’s not eaten
in shipwrecks until it’s dead
washed up partly whole on the floor.


Bloodsucker proxies

smell of mammal hormone
old tire on crisp stump what
you have is a condition
we can take a parts a far but
not it it tells sell it to the ends
of the thee while it’s crunch
crunch erudite crudites

*
what I vacuum you may assume
ever a wick dripper, there’s a thing may rise
to asymmetric relations of know
what I power this -uck engine by? I mean
giggles, your compliment does amuse
in the supine attitude
a turd licks sky

*
we swore’d what we could
mouths metabolized a bit
at white corner or kenneth’s
flaked skin or cigarettes
kicking sand
turd herders buried their variety

*
and will they ever relent? slim luck
emblems signified slightly with sand in the eyeses
voluntarism blizz’m
while the inherited worked nightly
with proboscii, the correct plural he knowses
& to count toeses at discounts
as hard to them up to he -ucks
and dismounts


The panting kingdom

1.
Their portraits float – some would say hang –
over the valley
where the beeves are stacked like boxcars
& haybales wallow in the flood.
The air, like a swallow, chases the train,
split tail the tracks unzip.
A coyote noses the furrows.
It smells bad. It smells old,
unexercised & overfed.
Founders, now, they are a dead.
The muddy sky is wider than yesteryear.

2.
And she, still bound to endure that horror
The agar will we shall not fear
dragging the stars, down, through the gel of night.
A light left on flashes in Saskatechewan.
Fish phosphoresce electronically
in the rising eddies
a virgin element crosses its knees
for its one-second-long life of honour & integrities
backup, a loon in Saskatoon, well met
escapes the ardour of her sacrifice.

3.
When we were brothers, we all sang brotherly
and may sing again – the dandelions high between the steel
humming the horizon, itself a song
out of memory, o hum the wind and hum the bug
hum the windbag road, the winding sheet
two of them, hung to the wind
while the mast lasts upright, creaks
us over the rising flood to find our
bottomless profound, our majesty of mountain
under weeds, desmesne of black duck
and brown bear, and the fifing beetle.

There the crack is dark and half-petrified
visible the grain when cut – Brother – sing with me
“Your flesh is mine –
 I shall not want.”


Sleepy drinks

The temptation to sedation in daily interactions
& the art of composition as an aesthetic distraction
from inventories & production, a scientific hope study
through bandages of corrugated cardboard & bubble wrap

Am I the betrayer or the betrayed?
Is your land better than mine for its anger
its weather its sharper lines
to picket or electrify

to zap the political animals –
pigs alleging human hearts, tarred ducks
carrion birds & the asses
sending foxes aflame through the alleys & garages?

I have no mystic metaphors for money.
How much from pecadillo to sin?
said the Armadillo, enjoying the state it was in
till the ants flipped it over & evacuated its belly

empty as my head in the wilderness
no God gets more obvious
so the advance of learning is delayed
“give us jobs” the people prayed

omitting the “good” from the schedule
conflating symptoms & value
& the widgets of the nobility
bob like icecubes all the way down


The duchess of the white castle

The beast-men
by instinctive reason
recognize their queen

The bear-men, the goose-men
the fly-men, & the worm
on this, are unanimous

The fixed soul, if not another world
is too refined – but coarser motions
can diamond her hairless diadem

Unquenchable fire,
around, above, between, below
the villages of her enemies

So many dissolutions of particulars
otherwise named deaths
by the paws of justice
or mere weather.

Which is frozen and clear
So the common-sense of time & fame.
Try the experiment with the whip.
When she goes, chaos is come again.


Tracks

flesh to impress
& stack em
.
grain on the ground
& the grinding sound
.
rust off the rebar
stains the stones
downstream
.
legs around this warthog
bronzed unfeminine
.
a cast to outlive the caster
.
a walnut in a blender
brain
.
if I were a violent man
I could just join the parade
.
don’t tie this one down
on me


Home Scenescent

A history framed
by bios
is so unlike a house
is what is always
homeless
oh
whoever you are
a big black bird
can shit white shit
on whatever is
over your head

*
She’ll be dead
in five years.
The house will outlast her;
but she’ll cut down the tree.
Twice as old as her, and the house
it clogs the eaves
leaves leaves.
She’ll leave the house.

*
Last night’s
Garage evasion
cooks on stone
sheltered from the rain
& neighbours.
Take a long exposure
with a hose
water pockets wasting of shame
while everything that’s fed
turns into soft slurp sculpture

*
hymns from the underground
allegedly recognizable
here
and there
in a room I’ve never looked into
the swelling bellows
plays for the insects
and airplanes
sweats

*
the nun-like bug I crushed
the bug-like nun I watched

nymphomania at 2 o’clock
with chocolate-cherry ice-cream

fingers-n-lips burnt
most powerfully
unvertical
miracle
do I believe in (no)

flocks outside the bars
each opportunity
beg hello
to be used
like homo erectus
a big straight upstanding hand-holding man

theatre igneous
why
child!
been
convalescing

in a convent, convenient, with an indigenous
icicle
  umm
make the wimple asbestos
or as best as
we can can



The trade-in (manumission)

drink some
bone-in tea
under lone ridge
brink of sea
*
hope rope holds
a close-chested
meat closet
sewn up
*
mind etched almost out of use
sight enemy grafts
inbound above the eyebrow
*
hand-held clamps
clamp
the main
pitch
with the whole body





Lipids & the blind mind

My body tells me what to eat
but I keep going crazy.
The pets feed me
Silver pills.
I sit still for melancholy.
My blood is amber.

I would not kill you, parasite
or the bug that bit you.
Each becomes its own
inevitable, slow
like sand becomes stone.
Hammered
its brittle breaks chosen somehow.





Corrugationist

Will it hold, fold it, air
glue too, flap over doodle
yes, a new suit will do it
how to fit it in, in in it.
But larks don’t breathe like sharks
or talk like Turks (hoodo)
his border, my disorder, roboto
walked slowly, a great mystery
of the profession, tucking my arms in.


Something to do with hands #1

When a dog barks in the night
if it’s a dog you daytime know – yaps
at nothing, beetles, air pollution

& a chorus starts up
very different from the surliest of birds –
some bird-thing, trust? never returns.

Like the bug, if its smart,
however uncordial,
after you’ve taken a wing or a leg.

If not comfort, then,
habit props you up
as it sniffs you in the shade, sprawled
full-bellied. Pat the dog.


#2

The room is round and somebody wants something
Everybody wants sound. The room
is round.  To
        know somebody
sombody wants – easier, things, to
to anatomize
        in view. The room is round –
Somebody’s back hurts. The thing unknown!
The room resounds with new knows.
The acher, touched, bows.



#3

Why make anything, my friend, you brute –

Why feed the raving wildebeest
What it can’t digest, a beak witout ambergris, a piece
of you or your leopard-spotted pie.

Your corn is surplus, but they eat rice.
They’ll sell it and starve on the proceeds.
You failure.
You fiend. You can’t change.



#4

Stiles & styles   over a fence & a new name
Transport, please
To the valley of ease
just beyond the diseased mountains –
A transplant of face, installation behind
a burning bush, in the Hindu Kush
to stare down Gog & Magog.
the Fat Millenium pounds the ash, a shady day
I wear gloves, like any burglar
What I took gurgles
& drones
fly by
me – not the mind – not my kind – on wire






The hand of the mind
“Nature works to form the hand of the mind - to instruct us that good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed” - Emerson?

1.
Is it better than a dream?  the up-striving moonbeam
What we are & what we ought to be
Field Guide to Birds of Concord, Mass.
We can agree at least on an illustration
a chimera, half dogma, half nuthatch
Revolting thoughts decompose
in our pure bodies.
It is an entire mean –
between mystification and execution.
I’d do it myself. Production
like intercourse, is a mode of life.

2.
He was well-mannered, but his handshake was a touch
too weak. And when he kicked, it was a blow
too wow. His intentions were benificent
if not benign. His children were his train.
He was a half-scratched off digit
For an audience of calculators
Powered by a quintessence that was not
reason, and decayed with the brain.
Atheism and defamation were in reach
but unseized. He spoke and thought
in vaguenesses. His books were unreceived.
He was nice. He was an artifice, an Adam.



Default position

The eaves clog up and the water
breathes, choking
tools in the yard
to become sidelong curios
a woman stares
but avoids the rebound
on a designer bicycle
whose wooden box, distressed
could bear a chicken, an infant
or bottled liquid equivalents
but bears nothing, equivalent
to peace. Now is the time
for all good men, miscreants even,
to do nothing. If not forgiven,
forgotten is logic’s guarantee.
The options are finite, and distressing.
Bleed all night, kill ‘em all, or stay in.



The three D’s (give, sympathize, control)

“Choosing,” said the donor, “one branch
of the unknown, leaving
one for you.”
Reason
loves bounds, games,
winners, limits, losers.
The agoraphobe twirls with his eyes closed.


Black winged sphinx

Engaging prior attainments
agora agar a gear a gear
algebra & a jabber of technicians
& politics up-pricks the rearguard
corner hangout of sin. “The
more you earn, the less problems
there’ll be” says the fifteen-year-old
dealer in political economy
(not taught in schools but intuited I guess
like subaltern orifices come to serve, or please)
in this nice neighbourhood, in this clean century–
Bald & naked I would be
a floating morsel in the orgies of eternity
but air remains for now & the lotus recedes
The same answers fail in the wind
& get swallowed anyway.






The effluent society 

When he stood in triumph in Guatemal
Hands behind his back, crumpling the bill
Vice President Nixon gestured with his shoulder
Not yet humped, in a half shrug
To the red books stacked like a bunch of hard bananas
Behind him a mural where a good banana
smashed a still-dripping sickle
& said “We’re all Keynesians now”
“Thank you” said the new President of Guatemal.

*
Beauty of days gone by. Desire unspotted jaune, young and yellow
& the balance-sheets a blooming jungle
The fiscalist & monetarist walked together, fists in each others pockets
Trade, a tiger-tail tugging to the moon
A principled priapus, throwing toxins to the wind
blowing outward to the sea
Beyond which something mutated
a hippogryph - a blimpy  externality.
we were in the Rocky Mountains
MIA - high & absent on ECT & LSD
“Somebody do something.” “Who? Who’s me?”


People & things

Morning again, & you, sir, stir, sir
A hiccup in ceramic
brown as a skull
Stowed under a black-blowing weed
Bricks blown through gaps between bricks
announce hard-hat weather.
Her dress was unfair to her, always
putting her in it. A softness I had wanted to wear
ear to ear, shed to hoe.
Blue stock keeping unit, sleeping.
“I am more than an interface
even squatting, angelic
a brazen thought on your brow
a bald lip-torquing utterance”
A drip, still sir, you could drown in
or swallow – there are eyes, ears, a brain
& hungry-frantic dog-things bark in the rain.


One wire to every home

1. 
Airways or highways
the illusion of a line
swept into place
I can save on paper
flexing her thighs
meat in a plastic perspective

2.
Damp dust eventually
stocks the lungs
alluvial fertility
hangs on rhythm
dreams of inflation and power (lines)
opacity on ice black colonies

3.
Everything arranged according to
culture. Hope or plan
In prison, BPM
The auto-reciprocal
of a one-handed man
Escapes in space in solids in space


Something against us

There was a place where it lay buried
his own vampire
devoid of social responsibility
or of any kind

not a no-man’s land
but the centre of a planned city
a body of state, with excrescences
indistinguishable from mind

no interrogations flicked
up under the fingernails
still growing after all this time
& visited by what pertained

to the perpendicular. This came on
asses, a train exculpating the guide
who bears the statistics
is most probably on side

down to the material
of heredity – the
conjugation of a witch
endorsed on news TV

squeezed between two floors
above below them watching – tap tap tap
the myths of indices creep
past laws of averages

the threat of brick ovens
and saw-blades
a census maybe
for us a way out

first number the sands
then sands become
sand-lice
become us

summed against
sinned against
in the sun


Tall columns for the fall guys

Bases are occupied & ours
& autumn is upon, on high
The unburied scramble for nut
with due reference to durability, convenience
and beauty. Liberal selection and good taste
will change the world; the tortoise
will fill the ditches; the winds
will be excluded from alleys
Caryatids will molt like katydon’ts;
Negation, etc  – will decline us.
Draw him a tall man – his chin meets your eye
if you were level-like – candor is error.
Where you would wander, there he will fly.
The Arabs race round again to face
the elevations and organs, orthogonals of heaven
while calculus and diplomancy accrete.
It’s a legitimate construction
Crivelli, Annunciation, 1486
the sogging tent billows beneath the moon
hung from lone gunman to mass evacuation
it’s not a bird or a ray of light
but a tightrope strung between two towers.



Long branch, green perspective

Squirrel’s stage
in sun’s eye
earth where all
delight vanishes



The occupied piper #1

To be tall again –
a state the radius of speech
or louder, diameter,
means days in the park,
debating the dark
in each centre

We disturbed a certain family
with bare breasts
and bankers seizing the reins –
thongs round stumps
marks you sleep on.

Be canny, moral, & discrete
pay to shit, and to eat
That’s ethics, and humane
for the little individual.

Greasing the wheels
we carry, sanded down
by assimilation or piety
smear ostentation on a leaky teepee – it
shines in rain – what do you want now
a frame of dry bones, brought up to code?


#2. A safe distance

The building, roofless, had nice bones
and a script
for its destruction. Send half to goodwill, a third
to salvation, and the rest to war. None for art
or widows and children. Mutual aid is their remedy.
Whose life is possible in these walls?
What capacity? Amps? Heating and cooling,
airflow at softer seasons ... overshot in a cannon
and the parachute flaring, eyeline down the well
intestinal and sucking sinkhole
it all flowed out its own asshole
but I stood firm, sated, self-sustained,
above all a safe distance away.


#3. How to keep your mind moving

His walk, a brown wick
to kill all paleface engineers
in the mud, love before slaughter
unwinds or like knife-flick
just happens
.
These sons and daughters of the hug
as all are
hasten
past
status qua status quo
healthy and new-found in each other
all they’ve got is that tent of arms
.
late in the game
the thread frayed to web
livestreamed
but the mass sits like Jupiter
having choked death’s belly
bright with all those moon-tiaras, naming rights sold
does the big red spot watching watch you, patròn?
For change
& life
what is it I must do?

#4. Last man nostrum

I served my time
the forces rage
southward crept

    eager tiger
    over watered
    & stinking

some dollar rubbing
stonewashed against
barbed fur
   
    insulator cap
    held aloof
    the humid crushing

rearing our ears
rising as one

    always against us
    always as one .


A True Story of Domestic Torture

Shaving a long tooth to a shine
in penumbra
behind the fireside
found with sinews slack and plasma leaking
into the eyes.  cradled in a bell  (tied up in a closet)
ding dong    love peeks at police
to rise as crescent   a sharp wedge between
nobodies
pregnant, on disability
in recovery


Asleep at the movies

Her life was not a thing she knew
nights and days, troughs and crests
plaid
a role she filled, fully
at their convergence
still she was, even abstracted, there
where she was
leaving voice mails. receiving callers’ names
a grid of dots, mispelled even
recognizable still though what they did
she thought might tremble or reneg
she couldn’t say it with certainty
and experiment was not an option
it woud lead to madness
or where she was
and out was where she wanted to go
whatever had been done
blind and unreliable
I said what little I remembered.




“Tough & otherwordly” (Shmayan Around)

Tough & otherworldly
where it seemed to dance
pinged my eyes
hovering over mastodon
clotted on the carpet
puppets of an Amerindian queen
brass line of catenary
you swung your thing along

his was the exceptional compromise
comprised, mainly, of retinal ghosts
double condecension
to smite in one stroke
the bean incarnator
it stung like honey in a wound
you say as we sashay

into prize-pealing pretextations
arrest this man, this moose
this troglodivagator
thighs smooth from smiling
flexed around the eyes
you lick as we go further

into the furrowed feature
to arise & erect the skies
till spite in each spoke
divides the road
you pull over to piss

I take off my outer skins
the sun rolls away like a log
rubber remembers, and then it forgets
you vacuum it up

it exhumes you
a rib sealed deep in a vault
you set the timer and press start

with plumb line and protractor
you burrow back up

you crack the safe & add salt


The dead skier

You know
once you go into it
We think the kids
will be into it

The dead gangster

In a posh hotel
Someone steps up
into my navel
it’s very unfortunate

Go political

Reason will negotiate / the reasons
confidently transferred / from a decade ago
reason was insecure / nothing risky no more
war on the grass / plastic and polite
your right to avert / your eyes to pirate


Sequels

The sun
cuts cement

The arctic air’s buddhist smile
smothers birds in sleep

She had a dream of cleaning
and aborted

It follows us wherever
down

*
With a certain insouciance
and curtain insincerity
I pull the pegger on my praygun

There’s no face
just a gleam or pinhole
on a blank lolly

a high-contrast shader model
whose only softness increases
in creaks

worked over and again
by the limber dead
swinging from their humanity

*
he said sax like sex under the bridges
plenty of evidence for spring
in the reeds, rushing
you can hear it with your own ears

*
lost / back to ear / rings / wake up to cold / portrait of her bare / hands out of the frame /  bits of hair / knitting /
us together

*
Making the bed with me in it
a crumpled enzyme
through a mask
pronounses


Harrowing

reasonable nature plots a middle course
but walls sag & one fin
sternly drags
it’s the damp, not the tumble, that infects you
lungs a black mass, sometimes virgin
dirt, drowning the red earth
rushing through it, worms in rain
(feel) & the choking lights
signal sun run for it

we’re full of it – a rising loaf
bugs he bit into – friend,
he will cut you – the white powder
‘ll make you itch – tinier bugs dead
bone-tipped spears of our ancestors
now go for finer game

some spear – polyester cooling
asparagus steamed
each peptide and the pee-stink gene
arm in arm system-on-a-chip
a danse macabre
the way each plane comes shuddering in

false vanilla pudenda
a ginger more pungent
citron uneradicable by dilution
or rain
on the posters, fleshtones of the purest
of blues
sheets over all our faces

who is the one who wills an exception?
the one who wills.
the advice grips.
a virtuous doubt trickles down
through the straining economies

but I ate hot dough, feel its
chance of still rising





Mme. World Vert

Somehow a void eats her Sunday
the earth a steaming seat he
kept a rose in front
after the feeding ill

*
Tear her and that raw city
fools pine over fine ants all
plan the queen of nerves
stealing among the living

*
The raygun shit he swore
on his back to protect
in your domicile the peace
is hooded and holy

*
Raving and traveling on ...
blooded and rained a T4 nite
some taxes can deep-end themselves
others smart a gun and 911


“Lucid when he washes”

Lucid when he washes
the lookouts grit
very much potato & quick
to zip on through
the wrist-bones raw
sordid after 36
without a warrant it’s
war on mom & pop
help I’m just getting better
the liquor price-check
liquidation     milky eyes
parking lot gulls no pharmacy

*
no more dancing
threshold step
to the left, then kick
shavings filling all cracks
the hot gas by degrees
melts the sample
sensations stirruped
what you’re ingesting
8 out of 10 sheep
wood dream mechanically
sore swing
debt unleveraging
vortex theory without probability



Through thick and

a small infectious agent
does not stain
photographed on scales
the stego-park
I saw you with it
hands wet
as a kid I climbed
the plum tree
cut down for spots & lumps
on fruit & bark
a menace
unfilterable
& always
insinuating
behind the swimming pool
where we buried it
broomstick to his guts
my belief
site of first stitches
head through a glass window
someone to blame
two in a bag
poke
spares
billions