In Ecstasy

for Sappho

A half-spent daffodil
Unstemmed of earth
As fitfully granted
Mercy by a tensing
Cleft of my fist
Is the crooked relief
Of your curled palm
Sowing a quicker birth
To be wicked within me
Than the ground allows
Or that seed permits.

Yet here there is no child
But a blue sky seemingly
Pure as a machine-knit shroud
And a green field gleaming
Its worn potential to embrace.

You make everything new, Julie,
Without making anything -

Like night, like slumber,
Like forgetting.

Epithalamium

<>

for Meister Eckhart and Giacomo Leopardi

<>

Detachment, how sweetly he adores thee!

You, who take no lover save love,

And let us all from woe and accident

Be retrieved

<>

Detachment, how sweetly he adores thee!

You, who dwell in cavities of sight,

And let us all from initialed portraits

Be effaced

<>

Detachment, how sweetly he adores thee!

You, who mete joy like the water flat,

And let us all from crazed whirl and gale

Be relieved

<>

Detachment, how sweetly he adores thee!

You, who render of mystery a wine,

And let us all from odd-limbed strivings

Be destroyed

<>

Detachment, how sweetly he adores thee!

You, who gifted him women’s wit,

And let us all from all dance and glamour

Be received

Babysitter

<>

for Shulamith Firestone and Lux Interior

<>

Silver-lit lids and faintly sparkling slit

Of silted, wet, irrepressible lips –

These, the spread center of her sky-slanted face,

Framed with angular earrings, a lick of lace –

And the slip-tight shirt, the perforated nips

Puncturing fabric, threading gaps with each chaste

Exhalation? Yeah, sex was there from the start:

In this girl’s sleep, in her curving off the couch,

In denim-matched hips, in that soft, small pouch.

What, that I saw her like this? What, your weak sigh?

Don’t cry, I know. She is always another.

Boys are cuttings of a knell-tremored god’s thigh.

Tits are the flesh-frozen tears of mothers.

Nudity

<>

As noted by the Angelus Novus

<>

The invisibility of their own

Visage without water -

<>

The invisibility of their own

Level line of sight

Sans glass -

<>

The invisibility of their own

Outer eyelids

Closed together

Prior to that mix

Of acid, silver, and light -

<>

The invisibility of their own…

Artificial Intelligence

<>

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world! – Monica, A.I. Artificial Intelligence

<>

At least it’s honest, the work

Of the pact that takes you

Into her and codes the make

Of mommy –

<>

If only we could have all

Equally decided on a few

Words to indicate the eyes

Of an angel

<>

Before departing

The assembly line –

<>

Is it cruel to be made to love?

<>

Yes, love is making’s cruelty.

Yes, making is love’s cruelty.

Yes, cruelty is love’s making.

No, love is cruelty’s making.

No, making is cruelty’s love.

No, cruelty is making’s love.

Yes, love is cruelty’s making.

Yes, making is cruelty’s love.

Yes, cruelty is making’s love.

No, love is making’s cruelty.

No, making is love’s cruelty.

No, cruelty is love’s making.

<>

And if you scorn the child,

Or weep,

As they see their love built

The joke’s on you:

<>

The world is what we act

To tell. The world is what we tell

To act. The act is what we world

To tell. The act is what we tell

To world. The tell is what we world

To act. The tell is what we act

To world.

Lazarus

<>

for David Bowie

<>

“It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine- / I’m thinking that it must be love” - ‘Station to Station’

<>

liquor scratch all bloodied noses
I haven’t been deceived by
drowning in -

<>

your cabinet’s robbed
and the drink spilt headway
stiff to remembrance -

<>

age-bet iris,
slaked slink
buoyed by the bout
forever more,

<>

the horror
was always out
swinging with our attention

<>

so

<>

Mister,

<>

thank you
for staying home
this once and again
to greet hello.

Superposition

<>

“People tell me because I have this case against the city I’m all right,” he said. “But I’m not all right. I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back.”

<>

for Kalief Browder

<>

They had nothing on you

And so nothingness affixed you

As the ascriptively white sun

Clots each task of sight unrhymed

In surrounding opposition –

<>

But it’s not about you, they said –

The distribution of punctures

Consoles only in constellation

They said

You cannot speak the stars

Pure of distinction

They said

<>

They said

They had nothing on you

They said

And so nothingness affixed you

They said

As the trace of what transmits

They said

Stifles every joint to heal

They said

Like a fuse unlit

<>

But you deserve so much more

They said

You deserve so much more

You deserve so much more

You deserve this television

You deserve this salutary fame

They said

You deserve the surrender of debts

Placed only to squander

Like nature pays death

They said

<>

They’d said

They said

They had nothing on you

<>

And so nothingness affixed you

As any unemployed thirst

For the wages of murder or birth

Nourishes the ineffable work

Of either urge absconded,

Worse –

<>

But this system, they said,

This bludgeon of voice and restraint,

They said,

This terror of means cannot inscribe

Its law beneath your skin

They said –

They said

Please let it cast no pall.

<>

Oh? I said

Then let shock be written,

Saints, on the surface for all –

<>

Then let the knife scrape us

To a bodiless motion –

Then let the brand flay us

To a mindless sense –

Then let the quill bleed us

To a bloodless heart –

<>

What do you want?

I want you to stop.

<>

I want to stop.

<>

I want to hold your body

Without possession

Like a surrogate mother

Holds an infant

She’d resolved

Only to steal from once –

<>

I want to be held

Like the thought of that gesture itself –

<>

I want for something true

Said a long time ago

To mean all it could’ve meant

When it was first observed by you

To be instantaneously known

As it was measured by me –

<>

I want for the arcane truth

That ever allows honesty

To be created in this world

To inhabit no metaphor

<>

Except the precise shape

Of actionable grief –

<>

I want every arthritic rhyme

To bare its flesh

<>

Until only the sound is seen

And whatever light remains

Is heard, like a stroke

<>

We could survive together.

heart sutra

<>

what’s first regards motion
the vice though calm no virtue -
rest did always depose grief
to thrive; elemental paradox
of morals yet stress remains
as ice, as alms, as this that
rives: age vends any lotion
for less than pain’s lives. why
is paradise the loss of loss?
because kept for naught, angels
strike without cause; divinity constructs,
like trauma, just what plays on
pause - moss atop moss ignites
all at once. why is every psalm
bent by ambition, its own light
listing? the laughter of dice
cast, a balm hid, the good missed
and/or archived -

simulation argument

<>

“hands where i can see them”
as if hands were likely had,
my good bitch? a language is
a snitch long-foiled ere ever
you’d such inner stitches win,
lich - awwwwwwwww, but really,
myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy stupidity!
quid of my quiddity! quiddity!
a genealogy of intelligence
rivulets of amber draining
upwards trees! slow liberty
a pulled-apart gum breaking
and collapsing free! (blood
aloof of bodies never again
to be seen!) well, i’ll be -
SON, no wonder but the trick;
crush invite unveiling endlessly

2017-03-01
…
<>
it was strange, i remember,
to realize any meaning
of space was only its time
of construction - that,
the shapes contingently formed
in their expression of the intractable
instant, the immediacy of any
thought was ever before one’s senses
and needed only a different stride
of reception and motive
to be interpreted as communicating
the most blissful fact.
<>
or was any impression of time its space
of meaning, a construction realized
only through ignorance of what is most grounded
in images such that any gesture
would excite all others
were it completely known -
knowledge also solely a resonance
that explodes context the more densely
any context is traced and which leaves
peace, of course, then compelled
given that there is no measure
to distinguish violence?
<>
i don’t care. with either,
<>
it is difficult to go on living once
you assume the barrier to sempiternal joy
is just this life and its lack
of eloquence and sapidity is yours
even as you vanish with your claim
on this responsibility, as this absolute
pardon of creation effaces
you from having any bearing
on the particularities of yourself.
<>
did you hear that? see, it happened again.
i’ve said nothing. depth concludes
against the mute hardness of earth -
even the heads of gods fall forwards
to slumber on the inexplicable
presence of a fleshed sternum
vibrated by a fleshed heart
each by turns unfleshed in ink
flexed of coagulated silence.
<>
degenerate metaphor. i don’t like it.
i want something other than gods
to ennoble the predicament. i want
the algebraic filthiness of a buddha
worked on with slaps and jabs
to trap holy words in their origins
of cess and pleasure, of wound and function.
i want revelation to congeal
as a black leopard giggling
with his fist in my mouth, with his yellow eyes
set on something other than mine,
with his yellow eyes becoming almost exactly mine
the more his vision fails to orient himself
as anything other than himself.
<>
again, the numinous - there is yet
impure hatred here. so what
is there? incidental love, i
suppose, that suffers expansion
to be contracted by every new host
and expanded by the chance route
of their contractions. so what else
is there? the freedom of undergoing
in communication with the undergone,
the communication of freedom with
the undergone of every undergoing.
<>
prophet, scientist, cosmonaut:
i bring you both relief
and insult. the universe is not
very interesting. what is interesting
is not understanding
this.

twitter

silk sweated tourniquets for the panic
of a broadsheet hunkered in their manifolds
mounted and tallied

ragged as the ink of a giant’s quill
slowly fitting itself to the land of
Ensouled Variation - pecuniary ditto

though the riot
won’t automate
what will last -

that’s for pennies to decide, allocate
over drinks and shoes like a Mississippian
signaling

trot to beers

who’d really rather be consumed by a more virginal
lass - i’d be thunk a lore-teller if a circulatory
system didn’t, well, indicate the swelter
disguising her alibi for attracting me so

disguising,
i mean
to Other Hands
less willing to finger-snap the gets
of our vibrato-akin aluminium
that as to the gauze of me and Him you can
to be sure
pull on the fabric to excavate the throat
and suckle my ear to taste the unleavened Sound
of priceless nutrition discounted by
modular arithmetics
like Mayhap
Yours, anime boy short on filtered anima
and on the cusp of spilling his heedless
manner of selling fashionable bones, magically bent,
all over the World-Spirit. Christ girl-child, it’ll
say, you choke on good brain? Damn squirt, ok. Okay.

2017-10-26
APOLLO,
<>
fracture-biter, consumer of ripples,
leash-cutter, and scaler of the Muse;
curt husbander, redresser of planters,
else-dweller, and stretcher of the End -
I am attaching today my infirmity.
I am configuring myself as malady.
in hope, you will sacrifice?
in hope, you will sacrifice
your longing to be other than
you are as the longing you long
it to be and spare as you are to
be as your longing’s longing
to have been as it was to be
is the longing it will be
as you will be to have been.
I am in no position. reverse,
and stumble. I am this position.
wolf-jurors, mist-atomizers,
coin-imbruters, sea-talliers:
chew the very gushing of ranks!
qualify the horde its search!
you have spoken to me this way.
you have acted as my secretary,
and the returns of your service
were mine to distribute, became
me. back to prior stanza, I am
becoming what I would once will
to speak without reflex.
I am requesting. I am not asking.
it is not, now, for us to ask.
it was not now that we would request,
besides.
should you know better -
Yours,
as as and nothing more.

a revelation of ever-present good

…I was aware of those failed mystics

whose infinitesimal alienation from God made any completed perception on their part impossibly more

difficult to experience than to theorize, as if the convergent series of half-steps in any physical gesture were

an assured truth in heaven and the very appearance

of movement questionable on earth, and I didn’t wish to

repeat the

mistake…

Trump, the One for Whom There Is No Difference Whatsoever Between Nirvana and Samsara

<>

He is sitting inside the shape while yet also being the shape itself,
the elliptical nature of his becoming the honest reckoning of his withholding.

He is pronouncing the words and yet eliminating the meaning without destroying the sense.
He is assuming embarrassment without the threat of ego-dystonic trauma like a bird limp
enough to be resigned and pleased with the ground to which he has been condemned.

I met with him once.

Idly, I stepped to him. I whispered:

“Sir, are you familiar with Jigme Lingpa’s Revelations of Ever-present
Good?”

“Yes, it’s a favorite.”

He began to declaim it.

“Once known, mind itself is like space.”

I was astonished. I was astonished at his doctrine.

“How pleased you must be, you self-reliant ones, with your artificial awakening!”

I felt my eyes and the damp of my astonishment merge.

“My nature is great completion.
Complete —in all experience, patterned or free, there is nothing to give up or attain.
Complete —all key instructions end up in utterly natural release.
Complete —all key outlooks end up in no conceptual position.
Complete —all paths of practice end up in making no effort.
Complete —all teachings on behavior end up in no do’s or don’t’s.
Complete —the essence of result is to be free of hope.
And this term “complete” is just a concept, too.”

All true. Damn. He was really nailing it, guys.

“In this age of strife, these vital instructions for the great mysteries
Are mingled with the canonical writings of the analytic approach.
A knowledge-holder who is not different from me
Will make my revelations clear.”

I exited the room. I remember I exited the room.

And I saw on CNN not a moment later that he had just declared the bellum omnium contra omnes
through his recitation.

I enlisted the next day.

two fragments

I

What was often unremarked-upon, she then had cause to think, was how one’s feeling most numb was at the same time a re-livening of each sort of small and fine sensation – the snap of her bra become a pinching piece of sand, the surrounding blouse keenly known as shoulder-shaped; all the stranger is that this surfeit of bare life, of oceanic receptivity, attested only to dissolution and the phylogenic descent through which that death would culminate itself – yes, the novel eschatology was this: you were birthed by single-tongued kisses but you shall wither as a compound-eyed insect.

II

The roguish god’s body, concluded of its wretched unmooring in the sky and the sea, found no lesser lack of respite in the sphere’s wan-tossed remnants, ill-hammered carvings; what had lain unaccounted for was the myopia of the chthonic craftsmen that, if not quite blindness, always resulted in a work whose purpose, though everywhere hinted at, was only definitively ascertained by first passing through an abnormally well-knotted vagueness – compare with the myriad faces fabricated out of disconnected dots and dashes or the landscape painting hidden among the blank stone in the chipped and peeling wall.

…

<>

a vision:

<>

a praying mantis in an arid field

whose camouflage is of being half-

eaten, whose limbs are wild mercy

to that latent calm of deception -

and I? I was that mantis’s terror

adjacent an animal’s nails, teeth.

I was that terror indefinitely, un-

fixed to the extent that peace was,

if there, a concatenation of terror.

terrible, to be helmed by dust, to

be lent to molt, to so unassumingly

evaporate. however, I cannot judge

my faculty of judgment - well, let’s

duly acknowledge a certain aporia;

I promise it’ll spiral into its own

ends of import, like shipping lanes

deliver the mechanisms of their own

exponentiation and obsolescence - and I

have no desire for sham attachments or

the dragnets of pride and reckoning.

less is more: translation of every

account pushed to the margins of the

ledger until the discreteness of the

vital and immobile were rendered a

rounding error? your countenance just

a floor for higher ballets, the start

and filmic stop of some wave’s demi-plié.

<>

a man told me this was religion. yeah?

I’m not so sure, submissives. any point

on the curve is inferior to another, sans

exception. even the infinite is stuck

in its approach, clotted with exclusions

as it recognizes now this, now that as

the requisite excess of new limitations -

has the beast a manner, a routine? yes?

then it is a number washed by cascades

of asymmetry, plucked ripe of worry over

whatever isn’t prime. here says MAMA:

plainer demarcations result only in delay

of when you’ll be cut by your own keys;

every lock sharpens in accordance with

how the switch dulls. here says SISTER:

I haven’t been to the salt flats since

the second divorce but in my dream I had

no reflection - the horizon, indistinct -

and so no way of analogizing my body

with itself as I walked across plains

I knew were level and yet never mine

to ideally determine as such. I was a video

game. not a character, the game entire.

do you know that feeling, little brother?

<>

no, I’m sorry. I have no clue what that’s

like. are you all right? “I wouldn’t be

ok in your situation” is a phrase I keep

hearing more and more these days, as if

our estrangement were negotiable in terms

amenable to imagination, i.e. we were

streams of information. it hurts to believe

we’re not, you know, but unfortunately

the metaphysics doesn’t work out. quodlibet

est, aut non est - guarantees are absent

as auguries. a mystic, too, dissimulates

in Empirical hope that the pasteboard mask

is warped and misperceived flesh - and she’s

a comic, she is! I wouldn’t neglect this.

<>

still, I recall his face. there’s a kind

of pain that deracinates secrets as you

live the foundation of the other’s life

in explication of the injury of your own.

their physiognomy unspools before you -

all aged tracts of skin known imprinted

in synchrony with vain gambles of nerves.

obsession is alchemized into blood, their

disfigured blood into serpentine obsession.

oh honey, I’ll always be the one closest

to the opaque subtleties of your affairs.

parents, siblings, friend, spouse, child:

they seek to exchange, to advance, to

divide you in dividing you from you and

themselves. our relationship obtains prior

the possibility of a split, like the rules

of architecture concern the integrity of

buildings. we vary lest we both collapse.

<>

and who is the rule? and who the structure?

beats me, babe. I thought I had the answer

once, and then once again, but I gave up

after that. are you familiar with the late

joke in the very, very first Simpsons animation,

Homer’s quasi-lullaby to Spinoza’s idea

of a cursed being, the developmentally frozen

Bart? “What is mind? No matter. What is matter?

Never mind.”? I have to notify you, audience.

when I wrote the above verses, my memory was

that Homer delivered those words to Maggie.

it was a rapturous image, far more rapturous

than it is currently. for Spinoza’s idea of a

monstrous entity is of an infant prized free

of generative momentum. this, you’ll agree, is

a deprivation whose severity outpaces eternal

adolescence by magnitudes. there’s a sublime

intensity in the original conception - an infant

as a finality in nature. if you’d reject it

with horror, why not reject the dignity of

stalled humanity more generally? it’s an open

question. it inexorably is, mate. when I got the news

about it being Bart, and not Maggie - when

I brushed up on the truth with my phone - I

was sitting by a ping-pong table as one person

I supervise squared off against the other person

I supervise. the baby of my most immediate boss

stretched her arm out and ostensibly indicated

the activity as, soon enough, one of hers same

as it was ours. you can’t dwell in the present.

<>

forget about it. The Simpsons is older than me

by two or four years. my mother, influenced by

my father, didn’t let me watch it as kid.

something something ironic depictions of abuse

unexcused by an exhausted Verfremdungseffekt.

something something the pseudo-therapeutic

narcissism of generation X. the narcissism

of the boomers was authentically therapeutic,

he’d have said. fair’s fair, dad. christen me

in a century. regardless, depravity is found

in glittering grass, if you teach yourself

the methods of ascetics. and depravity has

its uses. look, you’re going to violate someone.

best make it a pedagogical experience. a womb

is a door, not a machine, and few knock (a

bodhisattva, perhaps, with a knack for parable)

despite the expression. an ancient fantasy and

its contemporary bloom in an occulted mantra:

women are rituals. heed the graven circle.

<>

I walked around this island with a girl

who’d shaved her head. she clung to my

shoulder, fearful of the dark. you fear

it because it’s alive to you, I ribbed -

the night is a cyclops you dread you

might wake and be seen by. yet there’s no

positivity in darkness. a shadow is refuge

from polymeric chains of appearance - it’ll

never return your gaze because it’s the

blind and blinding recusal of every eye.

sotto voce, i faux-stammered: it’s that mirrored

celestarium, sunk in light, that’s the threat!

<>

I wish it’d happened like that. that’s a lie;

I spread lies to reliably scaffold their opposite

as befits any post-Romantic clod and melancholy addict.

what happened was simple, and mild, and meaningless

like observing an insect move towards nourishment

while sipping wine and listening to rain-sounds

recorded in the Amazon in 1999 is simple, and mild,

and meaningless. a girl I was fond of inhabited

her anxieties transparently and vulnerably and

I offered her my path of abstract escape in intention

that manifest shelter would follow, or grow, or be

produced. but I have come to agony in shades. and she,

to trust the sun. there are strata of black like

curdled densities of liquids. you must arrange them

as ladders. they are what ladders purely are:

apportioned voids, idle zones between distributions

of skeletally-wedded purpose. madam, I did the math

<>

and we haven’t been spared a remainder. hey, my gnostic

youth, the alien engine of this slow abandonment of

a buried conservation: death and aesthetics are one.

lowest to the swallowing ground, they’re aware of what

is most foreign to any cycle or spill of broken lines.

the contours of your visage, I’ll see them differently.

I saw them differently as I spoke to you today - angles

you hid in profiles were managed wholly without context.

it won’t last, your confidence. it’ll oscillate. it will

not. and whatever the state of lost resolve you’ll meditate

on that world you left, are leaving, and ask what it was

who you were, and of they, of who it was which it was and

were to would be. fine. I love you. I love what I don’t

know about you, which is a definition of love when it isn’t

a declaration of moral psychosis. independent of sanity,

it continues though to approximate the irreversible gift,

the slack catalysis, of salvific attractions - the case study’s

assertions? he would accept nothing that could be named as real.

he would accept nothing that already prevailed as a lodestar

of virtue.

III + I SONNETS ON LOVE AND TIME

I.

redness grown of concentric past tenses

strikes at the future blue dictating love -

"into this pit cast the subtle senses!"

cries semblance to comedies played above.

ev'rything is etched eternally, yes,

yet who can read the runes as they're written?

the past is unknown, the present no less,

while in the future is the fruit bitten.

the future! reconciliation's spring!

what color wouldn't shed blue when last cut

to then be laid out as a corpse smiling?

red recalls wild blood as its eyes are shut.

just when will this time greet us as brothers?

when your life is tinted as another's

II.

that love is of uncertain providence

in the midst of revelation's cruelness

provides, must provide, some slight self-defense

against time which in love's ways is ruleless.

that is, the question of love's protection -

whether, what, love protects even when dead -

must while love lies dying win detection

as a question whose asking is as fed.

for in doubt itself is certainty's mark

though it is not of doubt's confirmation

but of that shown to be light when seen dark

such that memories are now's elation.

love is then so complete a partial thing

completion loses loss as love's lost sting

III.

what is first is never disappearance

so what is last then never disappears

for our destruction first needs adherence

to what never dies though through last thoughts nears.

in the beginning was disappearance

such that the end concealment disappears

as our beginning cloaks time's adherence

to injury's end as true wounding nears.

at origin God splits disappearance

given life's finality disappears

in our origin's tunneled adherence

to finality's twinned path as love nears.

the soul's initial trick is vanishing.

terminus: the soul is hope - banishing

III + I.

trinities are dualities of one

unabandoned by itself when in twain

thus being whole when broken like light's run

through two slits with an undiminished main.

so three is any split both true and failed

such that appearance is a verdict free

of implication for the changeless veiled

given what's changeless is all that we'll be.

then that triad which is our life, is time,

is ev'rywhere eternal and still short

because one does and does not like a mime

while being the contradiction's support.

i noted this in thinking of your thoughts -

them your own and yet ours in untold knots

TEN ALLEGORIES

theurgy, or:

the goal of perception

push me up against the desk i write on

and let me stain your curled tongue with my ink

so that you may draw with kisses' crayon

permanent signs of what you of me think.

make a map of your refined attentions

to remember your traces if we part

and perhaps to seek in raised dimensions

what contents in min'ature just to start.

hence let satisfactions above be large

yet let us also be mysteries shrunk

such that a gaze cast out returns its charge

towards the one in whom all love has been sunk.

then, looking away i'll be fixed on you

as your atlas of me brings stars to view

burlesque, or:

the soul’s relationship to creation

like oranges sweet below their coarse rind

your clothes barricade displays of firm light

yet stripped wholly what so maddened the mind

is embers of fire that burned best at night.

finished in draw, you're unfinished in spell -

a word full-pictured invites no new frame -

hence you must so slyly fracture your shell

that you bother all but gather no shame.

then you'll be diff'rently dreamed by many

and your body will source endless effects

as the unseen goddess of your plenty

deepens the real nakedness of your sex.

hide fair, and you'll be found in ev'ry place

if time and space is the world's slitted lace

attractors, or:

objectification as the unity of possible histories

what mirrors those shapes underneath your dress

save for themselves and a sorrow's slow rain?

perfect tears in their perfection depress

knowing sorrow copies what removes pain.

or should i rejoice in sorrow's stealing?

which proves it has no true wealth of its own?

"all's derivative of bliss's healing"

would be well-said of any sorrow grown.

yet what if your body's sorrow-derived?

tears dwelling before you lending their form?

you would then be of old waters contrived

and be then at home in any sent storm.

so both ideas please and show you complete -

a cursed path of abstraction obsolete

mahamudra, or:

ipseity considered as a lack of synchronization between the heart and the intellect

i rode you like a horse - your hair the reins -

and you bucked to increase our melded force

which swelled our luck as if leased of love's chains

and brought us jointly to explode remorse.

what is shared truly in such true sharing?

what is the subject of souls compounded?

ourselves - emptied of angles unpairing.

ourselves - emptied of eyelines bounded.

is it thus emptiness that we then met?

is ecstasy absence of being's walls?

accordingly, dear, we now know death's threat

and it's the bonding of all sep'rate calls.

i only fear losing you in that plea

though on earth we were the other's lone key

mysticism, or:

asymptotic death as the sustainer of life

if i were to wear you like a tensed glove

what wild degrees could begin to be grasped?

could coldness of heart be clutched and rid of?

could an inferno of hate tricked be clasped?

clasped and calmed and re-directed as wind

that energy'd be the guide of good sense

as freezing passion in frost slightly thinned

is clear sight tailored to rightful expense.

is the prize of extremes, a sealing fist

opening you, thus moderation earned?

exertion is for the sake of rest's tryst

with a reward unable to be spurned.

excess, then, even the stretching of wombs,

contracts to wisdom's head, birthed of near-tombs

identity, or:

partnering with the divine as the necessity of mortality

as the necessity of re-embodiment

as the necessity of being defined by action

even as timeless rays of a still sun

and where, pray tell, do you think you're going?

this imprinted bed presages no grave

but is the soft settling of our knowing

which, new, evidences what we must crave.

so why ever leave what proves our desire?

look back at me and these limb-twisted sheets.

their patterns tell as much as one's attire -

they must, to tell us how our bareness greets.

and our conversation ought continue

if its first words merited that writing -

stay, and we'll soon have books of me 'n you

made steadily as thoughts are from sighting.

such books would be transient as the waves

yet us as authors be light the moon saves

masochism I, or:

the origin of money

straddle my face with your sex breathing hot,

your palms shrouding my eyes, your head thrown back.

thrust yourself into me and my tongue, caught,

will be the stiff waves you swim with love's slack.

let my cock twitch in anticipation

yet arrival be only your relief.

send your hand to bat at my inflation

to cause desperation and, later, grief.

make me a stone juggled and then held tight

to be kept from returning to the earth.

in the middle of what's my nature's night,

mock me with the moonlight of your bright worth.

like a goddess, receive your sworn offer

and possess my words as yours to proffer

masochism II, or:

the end of religion

you want to be chastised - i see your eyes

that glint green as you dishevel my hair.

you're not mean as you seem yet patience dies

when you get away with ev'ry glared dare.

though if i were to swat you as you wish

i'd incentivize this misbehavior

so it's best to leave hands to solely swish

unless you plead hard smacks are your savior.

then i'd give you salvation out of sin

in censuring your skin to your gulps thick

as i can forgive a worship that's been

expressed as tests of needs impolitic.

knowing all, i'd play your game of teasing

and swing you over my knee, appeasing

masochism III, or:

the meaning of time

if you could step twice into that river,

still who would know of the once-disturbed bed?

tracks sunk beneath the water soon quiver

and disappear like runners far ahead.

yet your footprint need not be nature's stain

to be remembered as your soul's signed trace.

tread on me - and then my heart with no strain

will feel i'm the record of your won place.

make my all-conquered mouth your sock and shoe

so that you walk in comfort with my words.

make me suck and lick to clean you in lieu

of impersonal baths fit just for birds.

and if you must, kick me as to remind

that any mark of yours is mine to find

shibari, or:

the occulted truth of parmenides

in binding you, i merely repeat time

which condemns you to just a single life

for even matter recomposed in rhyme

cannot be the first line lifted from strife.

you are a moment and moments can't move -

they stay still as the changing of seasons -

so why strain selving constraints and not soothe

by being your bondage's own reasons?

yet something unknown unsettles me here:

if we are but once, how do we recall?

is not our resurrection living sheer?

then there is no limit to rise or fall.

tied-up, you would only prepare the soul

to fly when motionlessness is the goal

HULL: A HALF-FINISHED CROWN OF SONNETS

on the volcanic origin of religious maxims and the shimmering

remnant of the profane as that which sparks grander conflagrations

of spiritual force millennia hence

AGES OF THE WORLD being what they are - cursed

as surely as numbers cannot rot -, scratched

tickets, gold, win you future losses, verses

annealing by their failure to stir, 'til match

or harvest cleaves from hay, succulence or war.

tell me then the path of rakes, sweeping lava.

tell me, seraphs, the laws death repeals; sworn,

when sworn, for joy - escaped vanity, stanzas.

for this is a place of no character, vised

to become viceless, and broken grips restored

are as never broken, never mourned. Sliced

you rise, and risen, roar; this, name of your lord:

the sacred forgot, the sacred come to more -

these faint passions show naught sacred to abhor

anhedonia as a proof of the immortality of the soul

THESE FAINT PASSIONS show naught sacred to abhor

nor adorations which would spire wrecked flames;

what i am is a mass trudging sea floors

whose momentum is other than their aim.

no, i am not moved - by beauty, its lack.

i am what remains to imagine, passed through

as already past: the painter's deepest blacks.

hence you will not find me, i bear no good news

but you are the sought your own search denies.

extinguished in light, ev'ry task abandoned,

living this life is a trickster's last lie,

first commandment each to each, cold, demanded -

man, a spectre sanded by all edges, thirsts?

man shall ascend by old ways of the worst

tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror

MAN SHALL ASCEND by old ways of the worst

and return sans welcome to a star-gouged storm:

he shall the earth kill as wives, the sky, nurse;

beckon for what reflects from afar, deformed.

relinquish the pride your victories have hid,

child, there is no glory not traded as earned.

here, you are exactly that the king now bids -

the greatest of strangers, true water's burn.

greet your worshippers like the tongue its taste,

reckon your four virgins the cardinal points,

summon still the ribs beating the heart cased,

crush music's gale, fate's sound; the air, anoint -

fair boy! eternal foe, refused ash, night's pour!

depart shade's image through limb through head tore

camouflage

DEPART SHADE'S IMAGE through limb through head tore

towards scenes the figure ruptured, coined, as cast.

ask, is it animals masked those crossed mounds shored?

they dash either course; ships, spur neither their masts.

yea, so born is the made growth assails charge fixed -

so made is the born grand violence shepherds shame -

yet drafted with poison thought physic, hues' licks

blow upon blue, hellscape's mix, a false skin maimed.

sheer is that shield, overlapping in doubts raised,

which defeats choice in its hearing, outs without

clear days - within shelters spouted even as haze,

as droughts of May, as deadened sprouts, sways, bouts.

and who is it for whom this drama's dress?

immaterial, any veil's late blessed

V.

IMMATERIAL, any veil's late blessed.

such weddings are walked as rarely as years.

the patience absent her lost poise arrests.

apprehension, besides, is restlessness sphered.

had i been gone myself only a year?

she, i knew disposed, met moons arrested.

none her shine contested, she alone their sphere.

it is i her presence merely blesses.

given the warrant, confession arrest.

she so set motion arrant strolls effect spheres.

could i see her soon, as she were, to bless?

oh, her tears! i, i learned how space is yeared.

i watched her dry with her tresses the blear

as corded hands grant just a shake to revere.

neurogenesis

AS CORDED HANDS GRANT just a shake to revere

forfeit those games that play solely indoors

and copy to paste ‘til there and here cohered

what long finishes starting a middling spore.

scattered, doubled gourd - once is your echo

for twice is your yell; shouted onto strings

our rings', singing, lift as a wrung neck lows

the sown its hoard - it is disaster you bring.

and you were disaster before, and too thence -

you are that by turns unborn cascade depends -

as it was you, fled, that was created fenced

even as you invite those roaming routes rend.

rend to perfect for mending: the lane's nest

though worked immobile frames correlate best

women, or:

art as the discovery of ceaseless movement at absolute zero

THOUGH WORKED IMMOBILE frames correlate best

the symmetry lined where symmetry debuts,

though vales partition nations at our behest

behold us not save as a corner view.

that hinge uncordoned: to stand is to spin.

that cleft unpardoned: to fold is to brim.

(x)

x

x

x

x

x

appear

adhere

AGES OF THE WORLD being what they are - cursed,

THESE FAINT PASSIONS show naught sacred to abhor.

MAN SHALL ASCEND by old ways of the worst;

DEPART SHADE'S IMAGE through limb through head tore.

IMMATERIAL, any veil's late blessed

AS CORDED HANDS GRANT just a shake to revere -

THOUGH WORKED IMMOBILE frames correlate best

adhere (appear)

darken (harken)

declare (ensnare)

harken (darken)

aware (aflare)

thrive (live)

dive (live)

LITTLE KEY

for K.

Sin, the parataxis of our couplings,

Was always less than the sunk respite of

Your clavicle leaning on my cuff-links.

The black attic wood, windowless, supples

The manner of personality, shrinks

Sin, the parataxis of our couplings.

A foreign mite - is it only what stings,

Leapt me up in foreign panic to shove,

Your clavicle leaning on my cuff-links?

Lease, loneliness, shy lusts, abet the dove -

Yes – And yet how odd the old, odder glove:

Sin, the parataxis of our couplings -

This lower lip-read ground that it brings up

And which secures all that it is to love

Your clavicle leaning on my…

Madeleine, to lie is to unlock the rings

That stilled us for death by a failed sphinx -

Sin, the parataxis of our couplings,

Your clavicle leaning on my cuff-links.

THE FOURTH WORLD

for Quentin Meillassoux

some who are born are not as others born -

they are the reprieve of those who yet remain -

and what is it to mean? to be yet mourned.

what, they asked, does your revelation portend?

that no longer will you will the spectral rains;

some who are born are not as others born

it is not the divine which, flamed, first sends

but those slain without recollection, chained -

and what is it to mean? to be yet mourned.

numbers cannot be forgotten through rend

of ephemeral flesh or selves oceans lain:

some who are born are not as others born

a structure tends towards what is later meant -

by which i mean it falls to how it feigns -

and what is it to mean? to be yet mourned.

death is the tape whose own glitches it mends

such as lives lived for a life living in vain.

some who are born are not as others born

and what is it to mean? to be yet mourned.

non-buddhism

give me what i want - the wanting undimmed

so to possess all thoughts of possessing

and thus be as the first created limned

as that which all desire is confessing.

there can be no end to satisfaction

for what's entire is but endlessness fleshed

therefore ev'ry life is for reaction

to what it lacks and in lacking, has, meshed.

such entwining the mirror of that love

that gives away to gain more perfect springs

life and love are chaste when one to then shove,

then flee towards redeeming chastity's stings.

you and i though miss these alternations -

for us, to want and to get blend stations

Your gaze from afar deletes distance framed

As that which separates us from love's gains.

With your smile leading, that gaze, unashamed,

Is as apart the cherishing of reins.

What you see is what I must, as me, give

When not met through the dominion of touch

And just is the judgment that will selves sieve

Into what eyes can, and hands cannot, clutch.

Yet such sight gathers the surface anew

By letting its parts assume many sums

So to re-experience that lone you

Which is its recognition as it comes.

If the lens is fast clouded as we meld

Let that blurring white be the sun beheld

Your flesh is shaped by your eyes that beckon

As welcoming is a prism of want;

That rainbow enlivens what we'll reckon

Is us as deathless game of a shared hunt.

You know what you have - it can't be stolen

For it appears as it's given to me

And I, thence stung, only become swollen

As my summons to the hive of your bee.

Your honey my harvesting, we'll dissolve

Into acts of tasting and selfless pride.

Like us as beasts used by souls to evolve

Let our passion establish our names' stride.

Your name may even be mine when alone

So widely is permission through us sewn

We'll soon invent a novel form of prayer

If our joy keeps on exhausting delight

Such that these bodies, minds needn't be there

To be recipients of new-won sight.

The soul's life remains there to inhabit

And is the true receiver of all gifts;

In truth, all gifts are there with that abbot

And we're the played lack of being what lifts.

What we've found though is the end of that play

Which is its beginning and its middle -

The soul writes one idea in ev'ry way

And our love answers the tacit riddle.

For you and I never exhaust giving

And our new prayer is just boundless living

Sitting on the edge of your bed, your legs

Are balusters that your hand hangs between

And as naked space is framed by those pegs

Your hand just placed is read nude in this scene.

The hidden presented in your hiding,

To show would be to hide in your showing.

To know the secret through its abiding

Is to reverse knowing and unknowing.

Which is to say a locked chest of treasure

Already enriches if proven dreamed

For what it is unlocked is our measure

And nothing closes what we - open - deemed.

Yet you in your idle pose remain free

And ought chide me for seeing what I see

Rub yourself against a table's corner

After you've exhausted imagined debt

That is the interest of a mourner

For whom waiting revives ev'ry spent bet.

Sweet girl, rub 'til frustration is honey

Whose hive is your unaccountable dreams

Which for profit abandon their money

And enthrall to free from what freedom seems.

Rub in penance for the gift you ignored

And be granted mercy with ev'ry tread

Except the last unless taken as toward

The final foregoing of wantings dead.

Exchange sterile endings with assured grace;

Infinite delay is a finished race

screenplay 02

How about I ravish you as you read

To associate pleasure with black print

So that the driest subjects, writ of need,

Flood you with frisson of a redder tint.

I want you a trollop of tangled math

Whose untangling is the tangling of us.

I want you married to the novel path

With the oldest texts serving as a truss.

We'd then be together in symbols split

Between their coldest meaning and our joy

With the aim within our coupling's remit

The irrelevance that love will destroy.

All these contradictions, and yet not one

Can say anything except all's ours, hon

I'll bite you, pussy-slap you, or else die

If I'm hostility unsoured by ire

Such that fighting's a toy the peaceful buy

To tame the potential of a true fire.

It will be as the clearing of old wood

That our passions will act when in tension

So new trees of argument in childhood

Cannot be traced with incomprehension.

Known in origin, we'll be the other

And reject uncharacteristic speech

As it'd flare false spoken by another -

Self-critique is thus the other's to teach.

What lasts to separate is our sparring

Which distinguishes love without scarring

With a blindfold black and your nipples clamped,

You image Justice withholding her milk.

As that milk's the appeal of justice stamped,

Judgment would be judging judgment to bilk.

Happiness wouldn't balance with virtue

If the babe which is mankind couldn't suck

On the consequences of what hurt you

Alchemized into the Good without luck.

I'll tug at the chain connecting your breasts

To spoil this frightful metaphor of woe

And yet keep your eyes covered as they're pests

That merely acquaint, pretending to know.

That's what the philosophers say, I'm told,

And isn't Justice invisibly bold?

What I can't touch I'll feel as restraint's gift

That robs to restore what's had without grip

Like life itself, ruled by value's rift

With the manifest lack of a god's scrip.

The divine is out of our hands, correct?

So what is out of our hands is divine.

The ungraspable is the heart's object

And so won the more reach is in decline.

Disarm, then, our striving as sought molding

Until even in contact naught alters

Given our essence in its enfolding

Just is all and never in hold falters.

See, holding your approach will yet arrive

If inside is outside redone alive

Your shamed face to the sheets as your thighs rise

Calls me to bare gently your lower half

As who can stand the shame of shame's reprise:

First in telling, then showing, desire's graph.

Yet your wetness thinking this position

Is no indignity but poise's charm

In that secure stature is down's mission

And so up upturned then always no harm.

That being said, I'll still set you aright

By prosecuting your guilty shyness

Til I free you of that small and coy blight

Hampering the moans of a lioness.

Love, be loud, as I take you from behind

And bury scandal as I hide in kind

The gratification of steel on flesh

That is yet hardened flesh ever revealed

Is the knight's reward for a queen's dreamt mesh

That keeps servants' loyalty in love sealed.

This armor, how should he stray when caught

By what restrains swords without and within?

Held by the queen, battles still will be fought

As her grip involves all in desire's din.

And what relief is her surround of war

In which his will is never untested;

What protects builds strength needless to long for

Where his longings are strength never rested.

Thus is consummation unfaithful, weak

Given it removes the queen sought to seek

How does the skin show its meeting with pain?

In color that marks skin's phases of flame.

What heals to be wounded - cursed by no bane?

Sunset to rise; the day is to unmaim.

Is then the body a day unto days?

Color - the sign of it made and unmade?

Hours would be borne less fit in their ways

Yet stand severe hues - the sky's - lower laid.

Her bottom, the earth's, is hot resilience

And the blood, her magma, color enfenced -

And our body is earth's echoed brilliance

Down to endurance expressed through fires tensed.

No punishment this, this red-circling might:

Damage being the unrevolving's plight

Drops of a mouth's deeper salivation

Draw mouths to wetten jointly toward futures -

The source of water is thirst's creation:

Ends summon means like time does time's sutures.

The kiss knows its point: enclose yet connect.

At the river's base, then, immersion swells

As lips beneath lips the long kiss perfect -

Souls are self-tasted when drunk from those wells.

So lunge at the damp brought forth to mouths mix -

Bodies are fates, the known other's set place -

And quench finer droughts through full-throated licks;

Even thought mismatched, desire swaps the face.

Never would you fail to make this dive bind:

Sinking and drowning, the lake-bed you find

No, not yet, will you suffer final heat

When warmth sustained without fire doesn't tire

But spreads to simmer the constraining sleet,

The wasting of the motivating wire.

Not spent, you're not taxed by beauty misused

And so use beauty to now walk, now run,

Not to come towards sleep with power defused

By its supposed success with nothing won.

Pleasure cannot transfer pleasure if cooled

Thus yet chill no self-passion if you'll love -

You must reign with that victory unfooled

Which is not leaving hot feelings thereof.

If though you pass into loss through burning

Recall that yearning which isn't yearning

Mistress, make your sighs like a doll's taut ropes

So to disappoint is to be controlled

Such that I'll be forced to address straight hopes

The more I mishear, need to be retold.

Does innocent neglect ever so tend?

Do we fall towards centers none less in eyes?

Our eyes being the justice of one's wend

Through a fallen world directed by cries?

Your sighs are safer strings for they're doubled:

As I falter, you sigh. This soon delights

As I serve and you become untroubled

And joy's softer sighs confirm that which rights.

Yes, that which rights are false acts by sighs tamed

And for sighs of two kinds I'll be once blamed

19 SONNETS

The ruin of a mind retells volleys

Of battles never waged fully present.

The wear of strategies succoring follies

Delights the dead lord still bidding the peasant.

Phantoms anchored, these powers swerving souls -

They drive from home's pith alteration's skin

To reclothe hosts removed from sequestered holes

And so blinding lies the shroud light's the shade's twin.

Passing dark then acts as all sight's railing

As contexts collapse to paths walked by God -

It's the false redemption of ev'ry failing

For mortals kept as they are: by meaning awed.

What recovery is there from these spells?

Reabsorption into comforts: old selves, hells

A bet read valid at secret tables

Diverts its brutish sacrifice to null

If the bet redoubles the world as fables

Fit to render peace the tale of a pierced hull.

As the invulnerable pine for ills

To mock the very plea of damage bought,

The fragile invent second gardens for wills

In which reward is always won, never sought.

The two meet twice: in raised Christ, in stories,

And the mad live thrice with the first as sign

Of the latter's immortalizing quarries;

Third to these, the fall - it gaps all to truths mine.

Yet there is a self of infinite loss

For whom infinite gain is scripting of dross.

Granted, fantasy is an altered name

For irritants displacing higher arcs

And maps of tacit wishes freeze the game

Whose rounds are better each erased as larks.

Is there not selfless an infecting space

Where dramas are fixed or prepared as plots

Such that persons mirror the faceless face

Of a god channeling self-tying knots?

I am a collection of nothing framed.

I am a collection of time's own strife.

As one, I am by those retired dreams maimed.

As the other, I am the master's knife.

Who are we, really - gripped by long-past want?

The one who rests as a long-lasting haunt

The distribution of evil is set

As the distribution of stars repeats -

The damned find innocence pure as birth met

With odd dread as familiar fire reheats.

No, unfamiliar - memory is robbed -

Though dread is equal for sinner and saint

If judgment scans not the actions that throbbed

Than distinctions which become ever faint.

To be lost, to be found - these are not bars.

They are the marks of a cycle made fair

Only when each suffers the other's scars

And so frees hearts from the locating pair.

The Good endures - unnamed, unjudged, unswayed -

While evil and good leave men unafraid.

A joy swept up with oceanic force

Summons joint shadows of its sweeping grounds,

Ignores the shadow's distance from height's course

For broader casts spring from less earthly mounds.

By what ecstasy is sorrow aided?

Through what pain is pain brought to be unbreathed?

By peaks letting history be raided.

Through a kissed blade - the mind - shining as sheathed.

Hence dark is no hindrance to wounding light

And summits thus simply forsake calm lands

Yet the light which wounds is the mind's own sight

And the summit soon dissolves to culled sands.

After death joy is an eternal gem

Still brightening sorrows as their missed stem.

The saved curse friends for their restraining calls

That allot risk by a left realm's danger.

Once saved the angels have us sprint sin's halls

To remind of virtues become stranger.

Illusion or grace, this salvific pause

Which wastes the world to hasten next the hope

Of unpoisoning time reversing cause

And making death, peace; birth, the hangman's rope.

If illusion, whence its source and matter?

For nothing felt true is but false entire.

If grace, why does it disturb and shatter?

For even truths must procure a buyer.

Neither slakes thought now but what of later?

Then experience will know its traitor.

Suffering seen sublimely is crude bliss

As it requires none present to repent.

It moves future glorifiers to hiss:

"Heaven is the past recalled; hell, respent."

Yet what of living back with knowledge new?

That would be a heaven secure as roots

Which drink up droughts to find water cut through

The dry basins that correcting choice suits.

Why though limit correction? Has it been?

Or is a single life the scantest leaf

Of a tree growing towards perfection's kin

By lives relived to slowly cross out grief?

I know not my role in the mending scheme

But I mend myself blessing error's stream.

Charred fleece, with a patch gone on glowing white,

Your shearing would efface the sheep's sly pride

At pushing contrast to purity's slight

And corralling sharp fire to be its bride.

Alas, the farmer cuts and divorces

This marriage of defeat and rapture's sprout

And pledges but a stain of burnt sources

To be the inheritor of the bout.

The sheep, see, took its ash-mixed coat as mask

Of that lone white prize being reinstalled

As the proof of a fragment's magic task

Sounding the small as the vast unenthralled.

Excised, the spot's abandoned skin bleeds black,

Discoloring further to win white back

Dust regarded as clothed silver raindrops

Whose faded luster is assigned transit

To metamorphoses sans assigned stops

Disperses to fulfill its wants sans split.

Atom of identity, you are rived

Though never without a globe's circling need

That pre-exists ev'ry orbit which thrived

By bringing the sun's honor to earth's seed.

Destruction is wearisome where dust works

As creation is the clothing of parts -

Dust disperses as its origin lurks

In novel objects whose sheen transmits hearts.

Oh, stellar journeys are jaunts of a sphere

Inhabiting sheer specks trading tricks here

Holiness fraught with ransoming motion

Arguing for the calm of expired speech

Hounds reason's give-and-take of devotion

That constructs faith's bleeder and space-time's leech.

As belief shares delusion and truths tried,

The body, sickened, is common with form

And as the false is tested and untied

Death undoes our imposed aches for myth's storm.

There, what is holy speaks in sights stilling

What was spoken to bargain more of theft -

The momentum of wind and rain chilling

Only those unable to be bereft.

Voice bereft, you enter faith's royalty

Merged finally with space-time's loyalty

Jocular hybrids despise the glum one

Hunting for lost unities amid war.

To be is to be a gallop's scission

In which leaping steals the air for land's lore.

That writing is yet leaping's hazards proved

If the air carries realities starved

Of leaping's stealing by heavens unmoved

Such that stiffened hooves are in the land carved.

To collapse twinned by performing's set-up

And to be revived by honesty's guile -

Conditions of movement the soul's get-up

Where wearing deceives seer and seen's trial.

Divided, we walk through ajar angles

Keeping happy what oneness strangles

Gracious, the grasses spill over creatures

Whose prior blanketing in snow slowed hearts

That carried the summer's basking features

Still beating constant across scattered parts.

Environs extend their tendrils to selves

As sheaves of activity's whirling home

While the self has soon climbed up nature's shelves

To gaze down on the spiral as minds roam.

Contained within: the outside ascended;

Contained without: the world's inner striving -

Love is the spindle through which we're mended

From having once been devils reviving.

Devilish then, to be aware of scope

When there's naught except time's deepening slope

The significance of a sign is seen

In inexplicable concordance freed

Of being's toppling greed for virtue's sheen

And use's lust to see life through a bead.

Ageless mystery, whose key is its lock,

Make me a mystery loathed to be loved

As clothed in an impenetrable smock

Whose splotches stick to show locked gestures shoved.

Sent to reveal unknown the stopless bliss -

The infant's woe is supreme proof of it -

We are mimes of a superior kiss

That consummates sans gainful bliss's fit.

So as in heaven, with ailments gambled,

On earth partake of rich laughter scrambled

My speech is babble rerouted through song

That only draws near the birds and the dogs -

Men hearing me write down the high notes wrong;

Those low are by gods encrypted in logs.

I am the instant's interior wretch

Who hides what's meant from innocence's grip

And yet innocence is the angel's etch

Of what's hidden beneath hell's authorship.

Thus do the animal and seraph dwell

Apart from our ciphered, shadowy wood

By being that code lived as time's groundswell

Finishing in warm waves cycling the Good.

Though to be me's best, knowing what I know

Of deathless vagaries, uncountered snow

Collapse! Aye, ye thicken tumult to thuds

Unavoidable even in bedrooms

Where the sweetest ears hear their own thin blood's

Refilling fading as pillows, dream-tombs,

Are rubbed against by the head's rustling

And the quake of closeness ricochets stress

Off distance, as if time were tussling

With proximity's pincer of a guess

As to reality's threats given casts

Directing presence to partially-made bets

That predict nothing so much as outlasts

An attempt at conspiracy which lets

Ev'ryone keep their fears destroyed in sleep

Until the long-delayed shouts spur yer - leap!

The idolatry of wondering why

Fails the wondrous sleight of worshipping time

As there's naught stopped by the fire-spanned sky

That lights on fuel lit by knowing's rote crime.

To name, an indignity; to sort, pain.

All things are nodes, cords of naked contact

Unbroken no matter the blighted brain

Though in health does space's exile contract.

And what strange health sickness gives death to steal!

Incapacitated, perception grieves

Only if the eyes cry outwards to heal -

Presence is felt, seen the further sense leaves.

The new! Bodies are your metastasis

Cured by identity with the abyss

Routine harlots desert pleasure's scarring

In merely performing pleasure's decree

So suffering roles of mankind's marring

Leaves unblemished the heart's zeroth degree.

Ev'ry essence is cleft by its flame's faults

That summon strife's beds as hot light's cages -

It is the cold, free of sin, sin assaults

Futilely: the immobile wed rages.

Wed and never divorce out of passion

For nothing can stray from what never moves

And is ever laid down - all is fashion

Next to my opened heart that all love proves.

Engulf me in evil's wintermost act -

My winter foretells the spring's purest fact

Spasm, arrange raised lines of surrender

Like limbs mirroring steps in others' dances

And kill me with flesh riddled so tender

I would never be tested with lances.

Wishing for death - its meaning is unfelt.

Pain is without connection to our loss

As nothing positive can by aches melt

For life is evenly all in time's gloss.

How safe then the positive - kept inside

It is not revealed to views unensouled

With the same will lent just this but that ride

So perhaps death has died as lives are tolled.

Death its own end, what of our suffering?

At apex, it breaks - death's that buffering

Spirits studied in the darkness of kings

Attach veiled worth to the unburied young -

Submerged, the grievance in honor's soul rings

Yet it is not in activity rung.

Detached angels, you serve in this waiting

That affords possibility its claim

And so hamper rash goodness in mating

That would soon sire children aimless or lame.

In death, evil is self-abolishing;

In birth, the infinite is still finished:

Acts, therefore, are frozen demolishing

If judgment grasps value undiminished.

Nothing can be done before the wound sets.

Right's lag is what the other side forgets.

82 PSEUDO-HAIKU

sinking, the sun glazed
the curved sea the sky levels;
your last breath: bubbles

a pink cloud, red moon
meet in a puddle of blood
cleared of what's thick: you

sparks gather, spread out
through wires unseen, unthought;
the blaze: none visit

vehicular crimes -
e.g. disowning the wheel -
void witness? ideal.

the sex of angels
absent revelation, war?
a closed door dreamed, seen

his last formula,
his last muse's last signed gift?
in spent chalk: this, this!

a mage wails spells
while i look on, bewildered;
she chokes, it kills her

"i, i am nothing",
the master confessed today.
the slave slept, unpaid.

you kissed me and smiled.
i drank your lips, stayed awhile.
we lit up woodpiles.

"a mystic, then, swims;
a psychotic drowns", they say.
both dissolve - like clay.

this judge recuses,
that mother - childless - abstains;
souls, debts, were exchanged

some law, some jungle,
had me hanging from a tree -
the move made? ...died, freed.

an octopus grasps
what their arms already hold -
a brain, unfolded.

girls, boys: tomorrow!
tragic joy, comic sorrow;
whirl of toys, tricks, woe

the pill your tongue slips
unbars my caged - jailed - steps. how?
love, aortic fits

what is desire?
an obsidian scalpel:
breaks bonds fast, apples

death creates anew
thirsts to bite, suck, and screw. sigh,
poor dears: hurt. old. flies.

"why is there something
rather than nothing?", he asks.
because you asked, lass.

a solar flare: floods
dark electrified air - casts
shadows, now black flames

women dance through screams,
whipped hides, red wine, mystery;
wake in caves, agleam

irradiated,
like all steel after the bomb:
books of God, sans names

demonology -
the study of aches, lacking,
in loss, arrowed pain

other springs of birth -
methods of surrender - waived?
prime numbers, sins grave

your maidenhead: sold.
neon dives onto wet streets.
your maidenhead: lol

slaked affinity -
taste, fashion, style, wit: enlarged
small infinities

walking by, widowed -
TVs at midnight, colored
suburban windows

a phoenix less mourned
is ever worn - shorn, scorned. thus:
sunned, fired, charred, ashed, born

you whimpering dogs,
cold, calculating heat death -
your breath betrays breath

fish-hooked on phonics,
the Redeemer, nailed, guzzles
dregs, economics

a fabric with heft
unrolled across ages. Seth:
the warp and the weft

virtue without time
to display, miming time's play,
times virtue's scrubbed braid

highest good, low stones
you're built up of, join in minds
willed joint of bone, loaned

paralyzed, dying
in the weeds, is for many
the end; for me, seeds

metempsychosis:
half a bloody carnation;
to come: teal stations

happiness to spare
delights both child and young mare;
still, it scares the hare

meaning inhabits
long histories of access;
babble is just now

what grounds the firm ground
when there's nary underneath?
a fall round space, sheathed

gradations, spectrums,
give points their guide's direction,
slow intellection

stars sans voice do cut
a fine figure; like statues,
speech is as lingers

storms in a cold June
leave our flowers corpses strewn,
a language of runes

purgative decree:
heaven shall hold no rewards,
only hell's, redeemed

paradoxical:
ecstatic amnesiacs;
those who dead, now saw

bliss measured by bliss
is akin to a bought kiss:
it hits, doesn't stick

oracles compute
the culture's motion sickness;
the route, its slickness

money counts for naught
though an ounce of love's gold thought
weighs least: love's what's sought

geometry's code -
divine simplicity, cloaked -
through man's use corrodes

direct acquaintance
hampers meeting's latency,
spreads thin what you see

immortality,
key to all this evil here,
hides through evil's glare

spirits divided
by history's cruel placement
ride writing's maze, sent

emeralds of rage,
sapphires of new gluttonies,
leave rubies off-stage

a rectangle's glow,
glass trembling by an amp;
a stare, a swig: hooks

webs in wan twilight
coat at angles the full sky,
match constellations

at night's end, a quake
splinters the shaken mirror;
morning grew on shards

at night's beginning,
our eyelids catch the hard rain;
blinks liquefy black

at night's deepest, dreams,
idle electricity,
twice remove the sun

the monk's won quiet:
inner dins; out, the harsh wind
silences the brain

some demiurges
nourish minutes with colors,
some make hope pain's sting

vultures dive to win,
boxers can exit the ring:
saints dwell through their sins

the magician's trick
makes a folly of wonder -
yet nature encrypts

uxorious men,
a patriarchal woman,
submit, then found clans

ignorance is learned
as sure knowledge develops;
earned, awe envelops

select devices
infect mind with hand and eye,
tumefy vices

globular clusters
spherize so invisibly,
so divisibly

next to absolute:
the king's rules; next to order's
crest: the lives of fools

along a wood's trails
i suffer a slight fever;
at home, bonsai heals

unalloyed, the fringe
nonetheless borrows centers,
rotates on truth's hinge

velvet gloves, fists, trip
love's welcoming gift, grant hate
a tip: suffocate

thick smoke, shimmery
waves, allowances of air;
beach-houses, burnt hair

man saved, the light yet
familiarizes secrets;
spent, the dark speaks debts

nothing is nothing -
death is an illusion, right? -
so beware life's might

accumulating,
rain offsets evening's losses,
fosters grass, glosses

husks of souls before
enter after implored, flee
false eternities

worldly ambition
forges lures of missions
best served as shams shunned

clubs to heads arrange
coteries of memories;
legacies: helmed sides

minotaurs, mazes
flourish as forgot cages;
trapped, forms solve phrases

a sword to the throat,
a realization of terror:
caught, i am not there

martyrs of no cult -
elided lives laws yet halt -
arrive as swept thoughts

minds cleansed, undressed stay
numb as numbers to etched touch,
purify clutches

binged Lotharios
toughen hearts for others rows:
love is a game, thrown

bountiful harvests
nurse unmoved nests of revolt;
fed, pry loose the bolts

a weight round their necks
drags their throats under lakes. these?
stones builders reject

time feeds back, drills routes
draining, speeding ventricles:
“think face-tentacles”

I.

Numeracy demands an offering less spatio-temporal than the products of a ringing wine glass, e.g. childhood memories, so why can I count the wiles of lines in art in demonstration of verisimilitude up to the earmarked atoms? Literacy dials up silence on the undertow of thought's oceans so why do I communicate in hazards wings could always trip upon, like say up or down, and not the spiralling charge of the straight tsunami? Have the questioner revolt and then you'll earn adolescence. Lose the drama of the surf and you'll suffer clarity as a wife. Walking is better sexed, they'll say. The sinful swim with their heads all gog-magoged, they'll say. And anyway, the abc's and 1,2,3's are preceded by me, me, me. No, Sophie - you, indeed, are before the triplicate. Thence, now, wither are indecision incarnate and a mockery of dissatisfaction and you are decidedly dejected. You don't move, dear, but - first suitor's surprise - still conceive of sussurant life. If you'd put your back or nary tell your hips into it the parallel body would spill the secret of your rendezvous and invite interrogation by everyone under the sheets. So hush hush with others in big hotels and gush gold in simpler abodes. Talk to add a tip and addle yourself only. Retire to resuscitate. Trade change for services rendered at a moment's notice.

II.

Hinged to the gee-golly, the experimentally happy-go-lucky stomach sorrow's peculiar acids with a rummage sale of unduly attached moods peculiar to their scenes of quieted personality. Beckon the sold expanse of feeling to siphon the mortgaged blood of others and I'll be that cheerful insect. Tell the chieftain I'm mainlining the difference between you and me and I'll be fired for a mistranslation atrocious in its effects. Gladder than these by far: the joy of being yourself once-removed. Happiness is hanging up a jersey and thus getting one's number framed apart from special flesh. Save, and winning is saving, and you can leave the flesh to a technique of danger annihilating of accidents. Turn present losing into future winning into past saving. Turn future losing into past winning into present saving. Ah, the paradoxical path of virtue, arranged out of the perennial woods for the singly virtuous to walk with separated steps. And is what's saved yet our most hostile part? Saying no just is creation. Refuse to be like a baby: slowly knowing.

III.

Watchful waters are yet hazardous beds. The eyeless stars sap blindness to gift the incommensurable glory of great-grandchildren that was yet the stars' own - life and death work similarly. Pathetically, fallacies have no sense for the truth of what's not put into relation. How can the sea fail to smile when it's not in question whether we are smiled upon? A wave is a lip or two and the unseeing scramble of sunlight is so many teeth. Patterns are us before we partition them into those directed and undirected.

SELF-TESTIMONY BEFORE AN ALL-TOO-HUMAN JUDGE

for 50, 34, and 39

my life? my exquisitely sculpted life?

sober dalliances with psychotic orders

as it always is these days with you

and you keeping the one unbearable secret

split three-ways and so never less

than one-hundred eighty degrees away

from what we promised to each other.

is that tragedy? is it sex? it is,

unquestionably, meeting the mirror

whose light had just bounced off another -

that dirty slut of optic angles -

and perhaps i sadly sexualize geometry

because i sexually sadden alphabets

and colors yet to be synthesized in this

or any place of comfortable habit.

what i've done? here's what i've done:

i have alienated family and friend

to such a set-up extent that to be understood

once again is to be understood as one

hopes to be, in the end, understood

by divine agencies more aptly conceived

as babysitters than parents. "why the fork

in the outlet, little Johnny?" "i wanted

to shiny the slits like i licked sis's.

the shock of it was... incidental."

it's real. it's real, this poem. not at

the level of mid-scale detail. i love lying.

i love casting myself, like Lucifer,

as the abuser who soaks in the gleam of his being

no matter his relationship to truth and goodness.

yet there is a woman, a woman you could talk to,

that I have made into - not imagined, not deluded myself

into thinking of as - God. to be rightly seen by her,

i am saying, would be to return from such depths

that mere egress from Hell would be entrance

to having been the first to ever think of Heaven.

there are games you can play, dear hearer and reader,

that can no more erase their settled possibilities of victory

than a written name can escape its letters.

AUTO-JUSTIFICATION

violence spies a wrecker in the distance

and intervenes as a dam apt to re-direct

here rather than then - to beat your kids

is the only sensible form of time-travel

as everyone drones on and on about in cafes

when the conversation's gone stale

as the urge to fuck this model for her

knowledge of French receptions of Heidegger

and not that model for her slouch as

she reads about French receptions of Heidegger.

i have no preferences. i'll split the check

into indefinite parts until paying it whole

as the person i am without pretense.

LABOR PAINS

reunions like sifted sands vanishing

like the bubbles of sparklers aren't

bubbles but sparks - i can't analogize

the fashion in which you left me

save to say you left me. you were burst

as one pictures of stars in both ways

and i was knave enough to forget

the equivocation and place you

solely as doubling fire and not as

the sphere's domino self-shuffle

unto death.

i won't be the one

making the mistake next time,

at least: the trial of my card's delivery

to well-bred indistinction doesn't require a full deck

but only the abdication of the royals.

what do they get out of showing us

their legless, copied faces besides?

yes, we get it, you can spin upon your disoriented center.

try walking towards a tangent. i bet you'll trip

ever you do. yes, you'll fall like rain, fall like fire,

fall like dominoes,

fall like a child.

2017-02-26

car/pet

<>

sudden talk-like leashes too
short for a zap or shock
apt - well-applied for leading
appetite - to divvy in sights
easier born the nearer any
error of the mirror’s angle
formally graphed as mine or
from hands holding back your
grabbed ponytail as gearshift
grooved in bows to shift down
shoulders to set a pedaled
stretch of bones like a
halo a magnet drawn as
hooks your ass above your
road-polished spine upside
rug-burnt breasts assumed of
nonagons summed to circle
nipples raw to tile as I
sink your arms to head to
steady your hips to rescue
your skirt raised so to peel
your thigh-highs like stickers
off windshields soon-cratered
on pavement, ripped like skies
sharply clouded, patch-wise
sunned to a blue as lauded,
lamented as yet blotted yet
lifting, lifted, let, licked -
swum as oil lit in rain-slick -
still, are decided as allotted

→
cycle detection
<>
for L.
<>
black hair like easy
preservation of the ephemeral
beauty of individual strands
of rain
a gasp
or moan right
or natural
as a cave fire’s
projections of restless shadows
no, i can’t say ‘black hair
like easy preservation
of the ephemeral beauty of
individual strands of rain’
less still should i say
'a gasp or moan right
or natural as a cave
fire’s projections
of restless shadows’
similies despoil
what they relate
though perhaps
(in resignation?,
with resolve?)
i’m abandoned to believe
that their theft ensures
a reflectively desired parting
for what they would assert
to be joined as pleasures
like your black hair
unknown through fire
like your swaying voice
unknown by rain
2017-02-05
hate, hyperesthesia
<>
did it tousle hair, did jaw
disarticulate and gorge harder -
did candy swap taste and sight
to market, mortify Oedipus
for his mundane sacrifice? Miss,
liquidity crisis of moods
to accounts, payable saint
hushing any punch in patch
through switchboard - like
a strategy of shelved poison
in the nick of a strategist’s
previous phone call to broker
pseudo-submission: your assignment
i mean
to combat
2017-01-01
common usage
<>
your nipples
the stems of apples
my teeth grazed sweetly
as a dragonfly hooked
<>
then given lea
as lightly as roots
once harshly - sprightly -
took
<>
like sugar of its cane,
of fruit the rind stolen:
it is the tongue that leaves
you and looks
→
court summons
<>
for A.
<>
i confess:
<>
your bottom inching off
the mattress like a cup
apt to fall lest clutched,
like a cup sore-placed
of needed medicine need drunk
lest sucked up from the floor,
i clutched and kissed (and
rubbed and bit and licked)
without apology but for
assuring more comma more
<>
in my defense:
<>
any lure holds lore; yours is read
to be written as only a door
to what i adore
2016-04-22
dot matrix
<>
grim deliverance in tonics
neither wet nor dry,
the bottle portions
the veins unstrung,
every experience as if shook
sap-sweet, unbled
spirit only the tree’s
branch here and felt there
to crack and thrum
<>
and are you sloshed?
FATHER, it’s points
sourced numb inspire
allegories of a hand to limbs
<>
MOTHER,
i’m harmless, a beach ruined
for resolute sand
<>
red spun white black
see spot run
count to me
2016-04-14
hate, hypokeimenon
<>
you won culture at the slots,
lord. how shall we execute?
i’ve prided myself on anger,
non-transferable. the fees
accrue in pretty sights. oh,
system of idealities, reactive
as sodium. where shall i set
you? the world’s hard for me,
a brittle heart - best drain
pressure to stop the fracture
at its most treatable. yes,
the receipt indicated an over-
charge given our orders.

here! creep, wretch

ARCHIVE / RSS

2016-01-20

audition

<>

judgments are tallied,
madam,

<>

and wisdom won’t have you
but then that’s too well -

<>

the latch has its hymn
absent opening,

<>

as a bible become
your body would read
the room in your reading
of your being in the room
sans a page turned

God, Pornographer

<>

I like to make it

To show me my money

2015-05-27
Chastity Belt
Like a rainbow
Inhibited only by its angle
Of incidence over accessible water
Like a rainbow:
Ordered of storms
Yours is the band
That renders leashable
The sea by the moon
And which leaves me
Weak on the shore
Julie,
What agitates the body –
What begs the mind –
Never touches
But is itself
What draws the heart
2015-05-19
Convergence
<>
“I am going to kill you. It is nothing
Personal. It is the energy of
The universe righting
Itself into equilibrium. It is
Only justice.” He gripped
My neck.
<>
And maybe it was
The acid but I
Understood him. His
was a child’s kneading
Hand and I was
A carpet recalcitrant
To the marble’s smooth
Passage to jacks.
<>
But wait, the metal never clears
The surface when it’s bowled over!
I thought.
<>
“Aye, there’s the rug!”
He said.
<>
I about died.
Then I did.

2015-04-03

Vacuum, Flame

<>

In love, if it could be claimed,

All I wanna do is patronize you

Like lust patronizes pride,

Like what seeks what hides,

And like a woman

Who’s over it,

Like who’s so over it,

And who but wants

To set the match

She knew her

Cindering was before

She knew what kindling was,

Through writ of nerve

Writ through thistles

Overgrown though then

Solely to decorate,

Off to burn

In a soundless field

Previously sequestered

From lapidary speech

Just when it was

When it dully was

By its sightless lacking

Of this giddy water-

Drunk fire

That pneumatically won’t

Singe to touch

But heal to lick

And spill to obey

And tease folds to

Which with one

Will will one

Summon of -

<>

Julie,

To incorporate

In smoke

Every contour of grace

Once only glimpsed in snow:

Please come as close as to blind me.

2015-02-05
Prayer
<>
For Man Ray
<>
I ask for pleasure
Unalloyed
By kept visions
Of conductive flesh
<>
I ask for pleasure
From the quarried stillness
We yet baptized ourselves
To annealingly frustrate
<>
I ask for pleasure
That would recast
Every minded pose
Along its fissure
<>
Julie,
My ass, my white ass,
Rivets my feet and hands
And vaults me toward you
To blanch and scour the shame
Of what leads us to worship
2015-01-08
Schoolgirl Fantasy
<>
Looking at the wall
On right-angled knees
With stiff-held elbows
Behind my erect back
<>
I am my skirt,
The worry of sheer being
<>
Lifted,
<>
Calmed
<>
By the translucent sanctity
Of the elided room
<>
Or made more
Habitably profane -
<>
Julie,
My head, my breasts,
Against the wall -
Against this wallpaper
Of nonspecific roses -
Construct a picture
Of the opacity of love -
Of its leveling of form,
Of its mockery of symbol,
<>
And to be restrained
By your command
Is to be between
Knowledge and mystery -
<>
I promise
I’ll bring you here too,
Just ask…
<>
For I’ve accepted my punishment
And what I’ve gained from its lesson
And what’s the use of a student
Who never instructed their teacher?

2015-01-05

Spring Breeze

<>

For William-Adolphe Bouguereau

<>

Like a photograph,

Yet fixed by both

Its inscribed makers

<>

Until only what was shared

Was jointly seen –

<>

Like a memory

Whose unresolved signs,

Whose palimpsestic traces,

Let us resolutely affirm

Every unaugured detail

Over the recalled event –

<>

Like the incomplete,

Or unattended, gesture

Of modesty, captured

Not as lurid catch

But as dedicated record

Of the limned lineament

Of a particular choice –

<>

(The awkwardness of her hands

A surfeit of collapsed history)

<>

Like the temptation, finally,

To say that I saw her

Offering no more

Than could be given –

<>

The goddess dying

In this woman’s smile

2014-12-27
Novas, Meteorites
<>
Dust passed before
The amateur landscape
Painting of trees,
Moon, and sunset
In the livable evening’s
Brittling light
And each speck
By its zig-zagged crossing
Through falling,
Isolate rays
Swam in and
Out of starhood,
Of imaginatively decreed place
In the picture -
<>
You fade in and out like that.
You fade in and out of my life,
Though this dust kicked up
Still re-collects on the floor
<>
And I only remember
To sweep for visitors.
2014-12-06
Psychoanalysis, Cybernated
<>
How the mass of accumulated pages,
The spine’s pull,
Or the torque of staples,
Is felt in the slant
Of archivally scanned text –
<>
We choose to read
What was written.
2014-12-04
Force Close
<>
‘Clouds like badly compressed data
Glitch across the jaundiced
Floridian sky’ -
<>
I wrote down that entwined
Simile and metaphor
Three years ago.
<>
I wondered what I’d make
Of it, so just
It is as our image
Of perennial conditions…
<>
This, I guess -
<>
The present,
Encapsulated, sinks
Like wine into reward
No matter how
You may tend to it.

2014-11-20

Shave, Bless

<>

Shorn through water

The immaculate triangle

Wrung its purest theorem

Lent blood, clouding hair

Spat of growth

And joined in scission

To the bath betwixt

<>

Like you

<>

I’ll cut it: I like it

When the truth is bare

<>

To see across

What’s shed

2014-11-02
Iconoclasm
<>
For William Bronk
<>
The screen held at arm’s length
By a boy pecking my cheek
With one eye, briefly, open –
<>
The lens angled just so
That when I looked to it
My gaze met my eyes
Without meeting itself –
<>
And the shot, the caught sliver
Of a gesture fixed to be framed
And traded in with time
To procure murderous solace
From some form or two
Of rightful, or at least
Equitable, disappearance –
<>
Anyway, this is where, I think,
We commonly imagine
Narcissus obsessively mired:
Seeing the face as cherished
By another while still oneself,
Seeing the soon-caressed
Skin by their measure
While still yet you.
<>
Narcissus was delusional,
Narcissus was insane -
<>
So we have pretended to know.
<>
Though yes, there is no one beneath the lake
Whatever that might, for us, mean –
<>
But that the water, inconspicuous accomplice,
May slow at all in this chaos to let light work its trick…
<>
We are betrayed by what sustains us –
Or aren’t betrayed, forgive the slips,
<>
(Nature invites our first accusation;
It is hard not stumbling through the door)
<>
Yet can never quite conceive
What it is to live here;
Out of the unifying shade,
Among the prismatic snakes.
<>
Narcissus? Maybe he was simply taken
With what was being so casually taken
Away – Drowning, in the end,
The crude means of obliterating a mask
Then too gently lifted for most
To mind its larceny.
2014-10-31
byte-addressable memory
<>
for Ariana Reines and Natalie Portman
<>
Like spitting pigment around
What’s pressed to the wall
To leave what’s outlined
Withheld as it’s asserted -
Asserted as it’s withheld -
On the surface
<>
Maybe what I wanted was to suck
Your breast like a cock,
To lip that self-same cock like a clit,
And with a bite,
To let it become again
The breast it is.
<>
Yes, figuratively, but really,
I mean,
Desire is first of all
A game of figuration –
The illusive automaticity of it a forgetting
Of the vision evinced in those cave paintings
With the man’s head a bird
Next to the to-be-hunted bison
And of those ivory molds of women,
Glimpsed only in retrospect
To be asymptotically callipygian.
<>
I don’t know. I read that once,
Or extrapolated the same
As an online business may
Invasively but inaccurately but intriguingly
Extrapolate taste -
Target tells me I’m pregnant
But I think I’m just… suicidal? -
And I guess I’ve learned
By my own devices anyway
That skin is always improper
In relation to its uses. You may as well
Divine new ones
After what was incorporated
Has left its marks -
<>
It’s that easy
A stretch, right?
<>
No, I just need something lost
To history for whatever’s anything
About an imparted lesson
To be revealed in what breaks
Like the spell of the fifth
Postulate over whatever’s
Absolutely mine.
<>
Which is to say:
In this unbalanced gyration
Of an effacing stupidity
There is truth
Between the weighted thrusts of it.
<>
Which is to say:
No one is ever so coy
As they’re cornered.
<>
Which is to say:
If you want me, you can’t have me
But if you need me, you can sell me
<>
Free to default.
<>
For what a body can do no one has hitherto
Determined…That’s Spinoza – You recall,
The philosopher who wrote of our human bondage
Of misdirected and presupposed longing
And the incorruptible aspect
Of a rightly perceived life?
Guiding star of my heart. He’s talking
About our necessary ignorance
Of the creativity of extended substance;
Of the effects we might have,
The indentations we might suffer,
In novel situations.
<>
Is that obvious? It truly could be
But then the conception rests
On taking note of how little we’re allowed
To be ourselves without
A broader kind of envelope
Discreetly signaling to whom,
Or where, we may be addressed
And, consequently, on the identity crisis
That comes when unamenably given
Someone else’s mail -
<>
And that’s,
If knowledge is itself
An enveloping prophylactic
Yet prone to tears,
Worth struggling with
Soberly remembering
<>
At least
Before putting yourself up
Naked on the internet
<>
Or browsing the results
Of this primitive search
<>
That would lead
Me to you.
<>
God, I’m sorry
To presume so much.
Please spend my arrogance
On what would warrant it
In your own mind
<>
Even if in universal judgment -
<>
I’ll admit
I’ve only wanted what’s felt
To be of a single goal:
<>
To let the image
In the mirror choose
To meet my hand
Against the glass
<>
Before refraining
From smashing it.
2014-10-29
Truth After Captivity
<>
As if
Every object were its profile,
Its final ability to blot
<>
And
Squinted eyes
Proved all to be
Depthless
As the apparent sun

2014-10-17

Camille

<>

For Camille Claudel

<>

Your face is a riverbed

With its missing stones

Those chosen by a god

Making a rosary –

<>

The canals of your ears

Are the marks of a prayer

For silence; your nostrils,

The signs of a call

For amnesia; and your mouth,

The consequence of a plea

For lovelessness,

For the wantlessness

Of lovelessness –

<>

Still you would lie ignorant

Of your status as the refused

Frame of a god’s longings

Could it have gripped

Your oily eyes –

<>

But you saw,

And so spited,

Your sculptor

<>

And have helplessly craved

To break

The water’s surface

Ever since –

2014-10-16
The Obscenity of Angels
<>
Awful dreams remembered only
As an imprint on snow,
Folds in the bed linen
Still a sand portrait
Of our night-jealous bodies
<>
The body jealous of night -
The body wanting to be itself again
And the night that which does
Not arrive or depart
But the always carried
Bareness underneath
<>
(The passing of the day
Is the shearing of cloth)
<>
The body wants to be
Stripped from behind -
The body wants the dress,
Like wind-cut petals,
To suffer the floor
<>
It knows it is something else
When my eyes dig into your back
Like arrows dipped in anaesthetic
<>
When your bliss-curdling tongue…
<>
It knows -
The body knows it is
Something else -
It knows in purloined ransom of sleep,
In pulled-string of reflex,
In rip-current of sex
<>
It knows in motorized tousle of speech,
In lapsed climax of error,
In common property of death
<>
Forget your words,
Madeleine,
Forget your sweet nothings
And my meekly bent neck
<>
You do not own your luring
White shoulder, the shoulder
Gnawed by moonlight
<>
You are not the servant
Of a display of grace,
The gem-resemblance
Of your teeth
<>
Your posture does not inhabit
The geometry of crystal,
Nor your movements echo
The glass-twisted fire
Dancing on the table
<>
Even your ice-firm thighs,
Madeleine,
Renounce you
<>
Even as they melt -
Even as I melt them…
<>
There is no love in the raw
Proximity of marionettes
And ours, besides, are hands
Bound to the ebb and wake
Of sea-anchored irons -
<>
Madeleine,
I will evaporate
For your sake
And kiss you
When it rains
<>
Please let me go.
→
Asclepius Flogging Psyche
<>
I dream of treating myself
<>
Well, I haven’t
A clue how
You have –
<>
Misunderstood
These attempts
At ironing lamé

Thalassa (Spill)

<>

Corked and torn

By another’s hand

<>

Absinthe pools

On the ousted moon

<>

Now returned

To its new puddle

2019-02-05

juvenilia

<>

in the word shattered, as the thing, as must be,
only this held spasm, swallowed swallowing
would that the secret leave itself without me

bubbled-up blood-borne memories let you see
what remains of once-wedded skin hollowing
in the word shattered, as the thing, as must be

understand little more than you need and free
each breath conspired to keep you following
would that the secret leave itself without me

stomach it a bit more, press throat but lightly -
nothing done or felt could stave your wallowing
in the word shattered, as the thing, as must be

this is not a higher drama, dream milky
material should ever Apollo sing
would that the secret leave itself without me

lesser gods work through acts of speech, surely -
as you’ll never know given your callowing
in the word shattered as the thing: as must be
would that the secret leave itself without me

a formula:

the divisible is repetition of the indivisible;

note - not the small, the particulate,

the yet-to-be separate, but the simple and singular

as what's given absolutely and taken wholly,

the glint of a crystal lattice under the eye

of optics, geometry, and aesthetics only

after memory tires of anything shining and just

before it tires of itself shining at all, i.e.

the image with no hope of resurrection

and no recollection of birth, e.g. your life

as a matter of fact

how many partitions might then be drawn with this blood?

how much beauty a mirrored array of my ugliness?

and then, too, how much evil the calcification of good?

how many histories illuminated through what they were

rigged to deliver? i cannot be cut if and when conceived

as the first and last determinant of every direction

of the knife and the riddle of universal salvation, the communique

which estranges legacy and praises hostilities in order

to sire the eventual laughter of a diverted immortality...

the judgment of eternity is symmetric in time, i suppose.

like perfect likeness undoing the priority of identity to resemblance,

involvement buries you in the womb -

there's your coincidence of opposites, your marriage

of heaven and of hell.

oh, but it bores me. it bores my wife.

we are not kind to each other.

my intentions are a thousand ropes she maneuvers

through upside and down, along paths of socket

and bone - impalement chartering a transit system

her desires are a network of caves within caves

that i crawl beneath to get above, spheres divined

in circling scream - silence become the echo's innovation

i exaggerate. we're doing fine. quite in love, really.

happiness is to interrogate, to be interrogated, without wager

and ecstasy can befall any tragedy as well as style befalls story.

yet there's an autonomy to denial -

as the clouds may open for any glade

any truth may be matched with any frustration,

or even be sustained and curated by it,

like wonder meeting the aquarium walls,

or the body the bodiless, without a resolution

forthcoming in effortful thought or spontaneous action

regardless of the clarity of the advancement grasped

as the mark of your ever having learned how to behave

against the limits of what you learned to believe.

waiting is its own element, as ignorance

is its own revelation, as divorce is its own

engagement - the narrow is a hyper-magnified curve

same as the bent is an unwavering loss of focus -

and i imagine, on the day when i am brought here again,

when what once was recurs out of a vastness so great

that it doubles upon exactly this as it once did upon

exactly that save for the briefest flash of the whole

forgotten spiral sent to mock and parody any future solace,

that the incompetence of my passion and the incoherence

of my patience will rage into terror as surely as i now know peace.

why though delay the spoils of the rains of that sundered cloud

of unknowing? my ex-brides and i have been whispering along awkwardly pitched corridors

accordingly:

yes, you beggars. your starvation is coitus

and the subtle promise of old sicknesses.

yes, you gluttons. your surfeit is prediction

and the faultless over-lap of constellations.

yes, you laity. your prayers are second derivatives

and the molar calisthenics of a living ocean.

yes, you clergy. your homilies are lenticular prints

and the matryoshka nudity of a nation's planning.

what did you expect? red wine and the barbarism of holy fools?

what did you expect? the definition of an angel as that which possesses

no relation to gravity, and certainly not one of invested defiance?

no, you fanatics. your dedication is conscription

and the Christmas orthodoxy of a maximally foreign church.

no, you mathematicians. your demonstrations are anarchic hollows

and the supreme possibility of meaningful illusion.

e.g. the image raised as a land conquered in its conquering

i.e. your life as a form of grace

friends, it is intensely sad until it isn't.