Sunday, November 24, 2013

The City of Stairs

First a hill was here beneath fast
Eyes that draped cold, tread-worn granite
Over it in terraced, timeless
Paths. Uncarved with windows, doors or
Railings, flight and terrace, epoxy-
Saturated, give no springy
Quarter, entertaining ascent,
Descent, interval of rest with
Altar hospitality to
Help our feet forget how not to
Move. The naked stars impover-
ished as wandering and barren
Asherah priestesses rub our
Eyes like sanding-paper on the
Fingernails. But we distrust the
One enormous star that sometimes
Shouts azure and moldy white from
Close within the chasm of the
Sky. Self-speaking and star-worried
Over granite cold we pass up
Through the City of Stairs where the
Architects now climb no more but
Watch diminishing returns of
Surprise across our faces flee
At each successive, hidden flight.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Topsoil

A few nights ago

On my street

A guy concluded his
Life in a dry cleaning van,
Holding someone’s
Bullet behind his face.

Meanwhile, in the ground,
Moles overwhelmed eat
Desperately
Through the growing dirt.
We’re losing topsoil
But not in the city. Dirt
In the city grows
When the street-sweepers park
And the senate finds
Home in fossils.

Maybe already they’ve put him
Into the ground, under the dirt
That grows.
Matter cannot be created nor
Destroyed,
And the dirt is growing.

The dirt must grow from somewhere.

It swells up to encase cities,
Uruk, Hazor,
Nashville that was,
Out and higher,
Dissipating the stratosphere,
Out and frosty,
Into the void beyond Pluto,
Until dirt that was follicle,
Dirt that was smile and grimace
Tumors spinningly
Out to the empty pupil of the Milky Way.


We’re covering our tracks.

November

Those red trees watch you
Drifting towards the abyss
Clouds of heart

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Harvest

In autumn
Death is colorful
The tortured leaves 
Mime bouquets of cotton
candy swan song
The ingrown, outgrown,
overgrown symbiotes of
the cooling, pesticide
Cloud-swept soil
Surrender themselves
to devourment while we
have eyes in our
Bellies – one eye, encased
in reflective mirror
Glaucoma.
Cornucopia –
Subdued rainbow corpse
Part and parcel
Parsimoniously parsed for the
Mortified deluge
of conveniently colored
Gastric acids.
Cider and closeness
A lingering scent
of bromide
Nestled in decay
We stride serenely
through the unrelenting air
And sensing smooth
Detranscendence
just within reach
We drive for hours through
Red-yellow halls of
Cotton candy crisis.


Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Scales - Yorkminster

Waves, static, clouds,
Diamonds, butterflies,
Moths and slate might
All draw towards the
Flame but I haven’t
Seen it.

Everything, everything, everything
Takes such a long time
Especially
Us and furthermore
Especially
Us in projection.
The hastiest
Transformation left
Us limbless and
Lizard-like towards
That scaly Phoenix-fire of regeneration.
The lizard with
His new tail needs no
Recollection.
What I mean is that
A lost tail is
Always a lost tail.
This is why they made you out of stone.
Sometimes, in some
Saintly existence,
Memory is
Heavy despite its
Holes and shell-marks –
Inescapable
And not to be
Mocked, trivialized,
Begrudged or forcibly forgiven.
With ceilings wide
As the Buddha-mind
The burden lies
On you always, even to the ends
Of the earth.
I understand now.
God forgive this
Charred reptile because
Yorkminster – I don’t remember you
At all.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Baden-Baden

The dizzying seasons in
Turn and return
Float wispy cotton angels
To grave and womb.
The stuffy, delirious,
Glittering German summer
Is brief as a naked dip
In a mountain pond and yet
It is god’s plenty
Because it always comes again.

Green, the heavy green
Of the quarter-infinite
German summer, lies on
The spectrum of human death.
There are no colors
For human life – life
Of the seasons claims them all
And human cycles are illusory.
Green, white, red and blue angels
Come to celebrate each first day again.
Take your time
Impermanence is fleeting
Summer will return again and again
The green hills, red hills, white hills
And blue hills will always be
There to be climbed and
There are litres upon litres
Of Weißbier to be drunk


Though not by you.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Bruges


The canal flows moldy brass
And the yawning sky is empty and perfect.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe and
This is not a dream.
I've been to see the chocolate shamans
And the trappist priests and they
Have worn striated history smooth
Until every woman is a wingless fairy and
Every man is a mound of mud.
I think I'm getting the plague
Or my knee just aches from pilgrimage
And my conscience twitches from pogrom
And the ugly weed flowers in this
Courtyard are as hard and as lovely as the aging sun.
Within the outsides of these walls
And beneath the circling noisy bird
It is modern medieval excommunication blessing and
For a thousand years someone is watching
And under the weight of that gaze
I know the eyes are my own.