new book available for free download—see first link sidebar right>>>>

EKPHRASTIQUE DU MAL: POEMS INVOLVED WITH PAINTING SCULPTURE MUSEUMS ARTISTS AND THAT

Paperback, 52 pages

drafts....

*
these are in process... they're in various stages of not-there-yet-and-maybe-never-will-be:

*
WHEN TO THEN

When to live elsewhere, torn by the lure
of a heroic past, youths ago, the scars and deaths
regret fills you with or me in this case. I can't
go back and make the choices retrospect

wishes I had made to love the wrong ones,
the burden of hoisting death to my fate,
though Newtonian formats provide an end-it,
an un-alternate, nothing I could have kept

from happening until the fated time of now,
now when the track conveys the stone, the much
praised meteor, its momentum come home.

The house turns the corner to the room
where they are skinning a cage meant to contain
a post-it note urging occupants to leave.







*


APPARIT

A flick of the equator and here
you stand, lost in Upharshinland
where every cream-thesp fails
to be dark by a candle's worth—

can such tiny palliates save us
if we remain in vogue with brains
pared from the sudden occasional
or a spacesuit filled with feathers

enters heaven. Somewhere between
the moon our apogee must see
you are that neighbor halt, or all

the format unfound. Each face
strikes a different hour in the heart
(and haply thine the angelus art—)


*
TRAIN PASSING A CEMETERY

Its room compartments are the size of graves—
These Pullmans paint in their fast frames of glass
The colorless stones and plots with screensaves
Less-lasting perhaps than the weeds or grass
When death's depot arrives all day through
Such faultless schedules: timely they portray
The cemetery's vista of decay,
View which is nothing but residue.

Where even the trees are obituaries
Eye-creasing cars' avid artistic panes
Collage still reflections nobody sees
Carve transit each passenger's final year.
Defunct in an instant, incessant trains
Depart. They forget their destination's here.



*


SENTENCE

Since the sentence of my head,
syntacted by ears for clauses
and browful nouns and eyes
verbs, modifiers nasal: as

the period the mouth merely
paraphrases those features
everyone must compose in order
to parse it, why does my neck

hold it so studiously
close—so marked and ready—for
my body to peruse: to read

what? an Nth-generation xerox
evolving toward Neanderthal;
a fossil-legible face; a scrawl.



Note:
A variation on traditional figurations which present
the face's features as letters, numerals, etc.


*

POEM

the eternity in my left wrist abhors
the instant in my right unless
jungles use leopards as a condiment or
pleistocene ferns burst from oiltruck vents

now the fire engines pass with all
your silences working furiously within
but like a guillontine blushes when
it contemplates the soul

evening's gauze gnawed me with gold as
a hat-rack fishing off an iceberg caught ships
the air is bottling me for nips

[do waves recede with the same bitterness
as words down my throat
I let the tragedians down from the attic tardily

]






*
POEM

From gem to semen is moan—
The sound of two lipsticks rubbed together—
Get your agon on, Antigone!
Oink douche evangelist bludgeons 12.

Can you feel his sandaldown hair?
Do you know his mission can you see
Printed on the back of his shirt it reads
Progress is coming to Sherwood Forest.

Slim colonnade in stamen-warm night . . .
Your dream paused there last night
To look out at the yard you had been saving
For reality [absorption / alternative / reserved]

Lust catered by the puffiness of cheeks at dawn
They were easing it up onto the lawn

*

nosegay

the poem
comes from
the nonce
it wants

to be
the non
sense of
unless

it is
instead
but if

that's the
case what's
your problem


*
AUTUMNAGAIN

Time migrates its sun
closer to the core
of my prismperson.

The semi-falling leaves
flesh out their coined
profiles; they achieve
a self only on contact
with the ground.

Clouds cross the eye.
Come back, I beg,
but only when
you look like the wind.

Asking to whom,
answering to why.

*
POEM

An SOS emphasis.
Who
was lost in me
when I found you?

Now the exchange of
childhood-hoarded hours,
of faces whose patience wavers
on the dayscale.

The nightscale weighs only
those absent.

Sometimes these questions
halt back and forth
like a landscape heaped
with placebo stopsigns.

*
SON

Your most roseate pimple veils
its thorn ouch-eunuch: I save
the world not to its mold but mine,
the way Hitler loved to twitch
his mustache from one nostril
to the other, likely my Bi revolves
around all the earth quells—

the pissed-in wadingpool:
apparent suicide fondles my bait,
I am that couture of soul which
coats make flap, raiding the sockdrawer
for perspective, but why conceal
it if you're going to arrange
desire in these rec-rooms of.

*
POEM

Fruitquake-aged wrestlers, your
palms succumb to sprinklers born
of relapse; a lot of javelins are
omnivore. Every true mother's rush,

multitudes beaten in elastic rooms,
you prevail at first by shining at
catch, your blame tender as young silver;
over the breathless banquest I fall as

always, weeping seesaws all day, my
worship vigilant to oracles in armor.
Subdued untrodden frauds licentious
at first daily I barbered my Zeus;

the elevators fell, versed on shore
where I hover in an ogle arrogant
or fetid, I lost my chance at a loftshot.

*

COLUMBUS

Hiding his flag down my throat
He claims this land for Spain

A totempole on crutches
I'll take my zipper for a walk on its leash

Let those faucet audit junkies
Addicted to drips try listening to this one

Land ho my hearties my zelots
Tell the New World it's open for business

Cross the ocean dripping with headdress
They stick fingers in their sweat

Peregringos they claim this land for finance
They bribe customs with slithery eggs

Drip drip the ocean colonizes the shore
The law of gravity is sponsored by ads for tiptoe fruit

*
INCREMENTALS

I want to purify the poem
by dedicating it to myself,
but the pot darkens
the archeologist and holidays

are dull. There must
be a magazine that publishes
blushes but no, probably not——

To lie on one's back limb by limb
and play with pebbles in a knot
is my lot. Personal stylites dot
my I's pillar and then fall off

enough. The sparrow-dried wafer
will flit tonight. Echo-infant
cymbals will scar my thirst for dole.


*
PASSING

the train draws perspective
from its sleeve
in order to leave
one must first conjure distance

the magician tracks his tricks
until they arrive in
a postcard to show an echo
etching further heights

the precipice pokes its finger
into a wedding ring
but seen as it passes
the train flashes its windows

glass islands that balance a splinter
in their heart

///

drafts....

*
Keep the droolroom greased, Letitia;
to put the lisp on it, I lay there like
cheese on toasted princesses, but
it rips its heart out the mumbling
cherrypit. As it says in the epitaphs
grimly carved on whitecaps, each
wave offers another death: the dateless
notations of our global sauna delete
instantaneously your shouldered-aside
arrival. Pore-poised before leaping
gestureless, stripped, livid into
that seething swank eyelid triggered
by a mass of rubiks playing catch
laughter, I am stirred by the impetus
ankhs yank-off with. Despite them
the flesh of night-fleeing comets
and gash genital rotations combine
to fool me still. A dictionary posing
as a free calendar leads me off while
OK Corral rushes a piano's exits
with such relish an angel wets
his finger to see it. Barbers smearing
pep-pills on their toes know to hide
these last nubilities in rags of pied
piper and snorts (cyclotron in chains)
or else I rub the small of her back
with the small of my dick. How
can I bear it when the headless
jostle the armless to rise in one
plaited symptom like tongues on
dark lemons. Dazzled by the slits
in pingpong's forehead I weigh
venison in lamps while stars, stars
publish their bitter day tribes on
my window. Bees shed their mes-
merism so quickly when tattooed
at advent that I fear I must flash
the sign of the knish in response,
cautious as a sphinx measuring
volcano-rims to see which one is
roundest. Mystics always seek this
perfect circularity, though I suspect
they simply desire to feel the warm
bigamies and stat tomtoms lining
them like jewels on a sorcerer's
nostrils. My humanity has gone
to the gills. You know why. Candles
rearranged you in profile, yours at
the dawn of anoint, exuding that
fur of unreachable cages you were
known for. Six white scissors lashed
the wisps a while, hushed in spiels.
[
]

*
Nature doesn't need
a mountain to show
it exists; mist will
suffice. But the poet
must painfully pile
up every pebble of
his absent summit.

/
Nature doesn't need
a mountain to show it
exists; mist will indeed
suffice. But the poet
must painfully pile
up every pebble of
his absent summit.


*
Dust used to be golden
and would enter in
gargantua of gold before
the flesh and bones
of humans became
the dust as it is, less
dust than us. [
]


/////

drafts...

*
DAYS AWAY

Days away. The lazy orchestra
lip-syncs the sounds of its instruments,
the audience itself gawks in vain
at an apparition of kindred yawns. In
the perfect parable every letter
is equal to an alphabet.

Days away. Last night someone scraped
the paint off Ivan Albright's verminous
portrait of Dorian Gray and they
injected it into my eyes neck
and every feature. Buboes
pustule pouches blistered the lips
that bussed Bosie buff. MGM
commissioned it for the 1948
film, he stayed young and spoiled
while his picture impugned, while
a gleaming palette knife cued each glop
of dull oils into their title role.

Days away. A state of oasis is the sun
in enervation, the lowest ebb
of encroachment when the desert
is around one, inching closer with
each footstep took. The solitary
palmtree shrivels, the waterhole
shrinks to a pinhole in a mask
worn once to assist desire.

Days away. On his deathbed
he wears summer clothes, out
of season to the end. Always
had to embarrassingly carry
his sweater where others strode
short-sleeves and free.

...[

////

drafts

*
*
matter anti-matter it's all ain't matter to me
the guns and the butter think I am the worst
the guns and the butter think I am their brother
they think I'm dirt

out of paper and teardrop I made a tongs
I crafted a calipers
to grasp
to snatch this last word from the hand of herd



*
TRAIN PASSING A CEMETERY

Its room compartments are the size of graves—
Such Pullmans paint in their fast frames of glass
The colorless stones and plots with screensaves
Less-lasting perhaps than the weeds and grass
When death's depot arrives all day through
These faultless schedules: timely they portray
The cemetery's vista of decay,
View which is nothing but residue.

Where even the trees are obituaries
Eye-creasing cars' avid artistic panes
Collage still reflections nobody sees
Carve transit each passenger's final year.
Defunct in an instant, incessant trains
Depart. They forget their destination's here.

////

drafts...

*
LANDSCAPE

How I painted you, first
offering the blank canvas
a cigarette and a blindfold:

but no executions burst
all the frames we place
purloin your last vast-hold,

vanishing through the next
text cliques click into view.
What scar has interhearted

us in poses the thousand
roved letters I wrote must
have mentioned, the notes

I wrought in similar airs
to you, simpleton valley,
fall hive of greenery, high

desultory vista. Was it nine
noahs ago I boarded
the golden number of

infancy, time whose vacant
aprons reared name welcome:
a wonder of no thanks rowed

the snake's laconic mimicry
of bracelets or sidle sinuous
canoe through near-antiquity,

bound fawning in toe to you:
now your yawns keep reading
their kleenex for the word

(sought as one, it dims;
wrought by many it screams)
tar vomit covers day with.

Let snow unsheathe those peaks
it holds above our craned up
necks to learn how sharp

such echo-other heights keep
their prospects honed, each
precipice razorboned to thrust

all lapidary mist that clings
unstoried to their summit:
my pane re-sinews bleakly

every wind from up there.
Each brushstroke I heap you
with is broken by its cry.

///

*
SON OF UNCLE SAM

From the trestle overpass I tossed
one of the chopped-off arms onto
a train heading for Miami and then
another limb upon a Chicago-bound

freight and so on until eventually
all the sad parts were disposed of
in this manner, saving the head for last—
it went to L.A., they need heads

there, perhaps. Dispersed around
the country each piece of the corpse
can never be accounted, my crime

will go unsung until such time the U
S of A unites to solve me, save me,
resurrect this never perfect body.



////

drafts....

*
PEACE CONFERENCE

I scream down the ward. But can
any rooster I rip
from my veins be red enough,

loud enough. The sundials
I posted at North and South
Poles forewarn me

of your encroachments,
world. Atlas feels
Antlas crawling up his leg.

Your groundwar civility
tells me I must confide
in amp-amnesia

or paint toenails with tickles . . .
I scream down the ward,
silo hooves

of duelling hymens follow.
Their hollow traffic flames
my planet's war nation.

At the UN one flag lacks alive:
that nonbourne's montage-hatch
is what I scratch at

/
(my face a horror to novice idolators).
Doubtless this maze
moults its walls too late for me to emerge.


A child separated from his thought

can function as before but when
I I I I scream down the ward
snail-icicles line the lids

of my inmates. I try to lay
my tiny laughing tithe upon
Sodom sinuous ancestry high.

I repeal the Reptile Age, dead
speadeagle, dangling testtubes.
I forbid my coattails to bark.

Crossroads gymnastics; suitable sex
closed the symposia whose l-
ectures merged. How slovenly

I went at the mic, beckoning wild
with either-fingers, tall
sought by nothing equidistant,

indicators passing sat-wings
over lands beware all told.
Wings whir by me

with the transparency of hands
flung up to ward off each blow's
verification of flesh.

////

But with neither frothing on
my shore I don't care. lacks my brain
Lands beware all told. Tied
to a civilization
insectile/
oh though. Hollow traffic—polar sundials measure
your tall world's encroachment.


///

*
THE LOVES OF A DRAIN

Our lovemaking summarizes the wallpaper,
its repetitive visual rhythms find
their analog in every urgent thrust—

designed to repeat patterns our flesh meets
and lies apart, subsumed in the love
of a drain. The drip of repetitive

visual rhythms across the ceiling
finds analog in the clogged couplings of
two who find themselves sinking into

each hole with swirl-on-cue tongues
insistent, barely saved by the act
gestures they denude the bed with,

waking transgressions that express
vent the urge to lie on one's back and
advocate thumbs. Gurgling passionately

their pipes express me better than I,
internal plumbing meets in these feints
across the sheets like a hand waving me

away from the precipice edge, whose
fidelity assuages the prayer to die here
caught in this transit of self, the score

scaled in ascent. Otherwise to lie here
in else submerged in the event that
creates its surge, in which our part

is incidental, types in the format
of excitation and release. Ergo
eager as love in a downpour of thumbs

they bite each other shock absorber.
They requite each other in prescient
measures, the prince whispers let me

stab this glass slipper into your heart
to see if it fits. Cindy stirs her stupor
of tongues, what can anyone say that's

not surplus. The prison left our pores
for a moment; orgasm hopped a plane
to the coast. The departures fell hurt

staggering or instead staggered, staged
at conversant intervals. Let me see
you there inbetween the cursive coffin

stains on the blanket, the rack designs,
see what they try to cover over with
arabesque or maze motions, shapes

harmonized by how we occupy this
torture clockwise counter, north south
one liquid motif finds our mouth gorge

all peasant tunes and themes untapped,
swept violins replete with vulgartone
conductors percolate at the sink-rim of

"The Loves of a Drain," opus utter,
ought whose sudden faucets flush
existence from our loins. It is

these fountains flowing in the hidden
innards of the house we address
our plainest parts to, heart to hearts

no one overhears. Their intercourse
maps the circuitous vein of thought,
juncturing thwarts or coverts caught

in the crook of architects' nightmares,
foundations unjoining to reach apex
here beneath the daily business of sex

and cloister, nude transactions above
such bare facts, dusty basement ducts
[ the waterheater

toilet conveys all thirsts and wastes
[pipe-joints constantly

[wallpaper patterns, plumbing veins
that twist the house's id into its
antithesis; channels for emptiness

to empty around in; [

core beyond. It creates its space on
the theme of oasis. It waits to inherit
the whole of empathy's desperate

waste-lands and saharas subsumed
in succession of scene one and scene
twos without intermission's mercy:

The sun standing for relief on the shoulder
of Harold Pinter may dazzle these
silences with increase of time there

in the dream acts that aftercede
our closer contacts: blinding each
dalliance of desert, dunes awash with

the cess, the bigamous cusp of us.
Greece unifying space with ruins
offers no landscape vast as this

or desolate. [Its pillars defeat
the quest, baring huge axioms of
attemptance.] Nothing is as nonce, yet
recurrent orchestrations quest the trite
for a perfect dull ballet whose score

can hoard off the hours death regales
our lucifer belle with. Maybe this slay-cud
of dinosaur—overcite memory, sour sleeve

for all flesh's defenses to grow polar in—
can lure, out of confident distance, more
regrets and drunkenness to attend us.

///