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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.