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.

Dzanga Bai

Village of the Elephants

What a miracle.

Canopy of birdcalls

Nutrient sand.

Village of the Elephants

Unintentional.

Hungry from the forest

Sad slow nomads.

Grey in wisdom

Wrinkled with memory

Fruit from the bough

Led back out from the shade.

Village of the Elephants

What a miracle.

Smooth tuskless juvenile

Drinks from the sand.

His mother’s warm sadness

Left with the trees

Ivory tombs

Now soft in memory.

Village of the Elephants

What a miracle.

But a greater miracle

Is the machine gun.

An AK-47

Named Ivory King

Singularity pupils

Wide despite the sun.

Village of the Elephants

Payday miracle.

Hot lead ejaculations

Saw through tree-thick legs.

Serrated edges

Swift-grind Ivory from husks

Vitamin sand drinks

A smooth tuskless juvenile.

Village of the Elephants

Haunting miracle.

Sunlit ossuary

Memory sand.

Overdrawn

In my thoughts

I’m toasting saline

Like loners drink memorie

In unpicturesque bars.

Life is learning when to stop.

Praha

The bells make it easy
Cobblestone ache
And still wandering
But it feels like
You're being led.

Walk scrape shuffle
Built translucidates
Bluing soften
Aging smoothed
Cycle to last.

The sky makes it smooth
Filling the corners
Of my carnivore heart
Carnivore, lapidovore, somnovore

Devour St. George the dragon
Wencelas devoured the poor
Ate them cold
Until they were warm again
Cold Gothic stones come sacred mulled wine.

Walking makes me vast
Where was I if not
In these cobblestone continents
Unseen pastel nouveau
Huddling across the parsecs.

Tempovore, and I am vanished.

Upsilon

In morning

Suckle the sorbet teat

Gone to hill ground

Hostile Kelly-green wanderings

Solipsism sky in flagstones

Dressed in worn blue velvet.

Swat alighting satire from shoulder and neck

Bread-dance in Sun-bomb fallout

Bronzed Moravians with digital

Un-itching wrists.

Vanish Sepia into Pagan Tuscany

Where polarity cannot frighten

And magnets do no harm.

Mossy-chested and soft and hard pallets

Filled with earth

Tasting of stone and strawberries

Gaiabytes of love, soul & mechanus

Gasoline clear as water

And smiles pointless enigmas

Ritalin Aesop and fluorescent tube-fingers.

Come reds

Reds and grapefruit in hostile sky-shimmer

Heart in a pot filled with fume-water,

Suckle Europe and Red Asian Rainbow dry

In morning.

14345144 (Veterans Day 2011)

Memory's a live gun
And these iron sights
Can take a deer from two hundred yards.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember every blade of Korean grass.
I remember hills and ditches,
Enormous warts of earth,
Hard and silent challenge
To a disappearing sun.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember faces you can't imagine.
Cold and friendly faces,
Faces gleaming with sweat and fear,
Faces gone utterly slack in a thousandth of a second,
Serene and infinite,
Christened with a shameless blotch of red and brown.

I remember death, coy but insistent,
Pleading in casual euphemisms
Until at last I resigned myself
And flung her meaninglessly at a thousand silhouettes.
I remember numbers grown to irrelevance,
Lead-catching chorus for my attempt
At bailing out a lake.

I remember mortars like a premonition,
Whistling with the breath of Ezekiel,
Snapping a wide canvas whip
Threaded through with the itching wool of night space.

You say my memory's failing,
But I remember the sound of bullets,
Swift and soft percussion
of overripe apples falling in the summer heat.
I remember the irresistible approach and touch,
Silken finger on flesh,
Like being kissed by a hammer.

I remember ice like mercy
Lancing through flesh, bone, and three generations,
Carving an eternal, hollow heiroglyph
Into stone souls.

I remember the drying of the Pacific,
The shrinking of the earth,
Korean relics asserting themselves in Carolina
Like a phantom limb.
I remember the placing of hands in the glyph in my soul,
Hands soft and assertive -
A final resignation to home.

You say my mind is crumbling,
But I see you like never before.
I see on you a thousand slack-jawed faces
That never will be.
I see the hole in the stone.
I see the trophy I claimed from death.
You cannot tell me I'm disapppearing.
I am in you eternally,
Resting in your shoulder,
Carved in

Like a rune

In stone.

Osama bin Laden - May 1st, 2011

Watch me take a stand

America's handing itself to us
And tonight our greedy, flag-waving hands are stretched wide,
Wide, wide open to carry a corpse -
A corpse on top of 1,100 corpses,
Ten-year-old, star-spangled corpses
Slick with sweat and grime, coarse with sand
Red from sun, blue from bleeding;
3,000 corpses white with innocence;
8,000 lost and scattered corpses
In robes brown or white as a crescent moon.

No no, really, I'm about to take a stand

On top of these corpses, a single, final one,
A capstone so we can start a new stack
As we watch, in just a few short hours,
The traffic explode
With United States secuirty.

Wait for it, I'm really about to take one

Ten years?
Ten.
Years.
1,100 lives, 1,100 stunted futures,
400 billion dollars,
And 1 dead man.

America
Too little too late?
The ten-year-old I was would have slept soundly tonight.
So why do I feel sick?
Give me a flag, I want to wave it,
I swear I do.

My legs are shaky, I'm sorry

America

Shit.

Whatnot

I've got an angel by the thumb,
The pounding of wings making ripples
In the puddles reflecting alley light.
Tumbleweed garbage - charred nothings
And napkins with mustard
Flutter subdued in the artificial breeze,
Pressed into the concrete stone-parody
Like a eulogy in automatic script.
The magnified razor-line
Is thick and overpopulated,
An ancient, urban pueblo
In a 3 a.m. mesa,
Refuge for the entire spectrum
Of chiaroscuro Supernaturals,
Constructed in response to the memo
On the irrelevance of hue.
Feet start pushing the pavement,
And some distant ego recognizes them as my own.

The Channel

Pulled at from all sides.


We've seen the colors of infinity,
Dancing in a tunnel-vision suddenly corrected,
Brazen defiances of form and causation.
How then are we to watch them congeal and
Fill out the frame of a chair, a music stand, a coffee table?
Where is the stillness, where is the sculpture?
Where is the settling Sphinx turned already to stone?
How are we to accept life called out of the shifting
And made suddenly absolute?
How do we dare to embrace this silhouette-personhood
And call it ours?
This existence is heavy,
Too heavy to hold.

These words will taste to you like silence,
Words that left us charged with sound and cadence
Will fall on you like stillness, condensation on the wine glass of eternity.
There is nothing I can do but set a hand, aggravate a string,
Pull the colors straight through -
Then you will understand.

We fall asleep and dream of a channel,
Perfectly crafted, leading the water in a rush from sea to sea,
Coaxing it from fullness to fullness,
Meandering repose to meandering repose,
But only through the channel of aggravated urgency,
Through a year and a half injected with the fury of hope
And feverish aspiration.
The current runs anxiously
And relaxes into the expansive sea.

We awake.
We search the coastline.
But the channel is gone.

London to Edinburgh

Yorkminster the impossible,
I’m afraid you’ve done me wrong.

On the soft ground around Cathedrals in an ancient land
Awe settles like a fever in a pub,
Like a chill in the fog.
The dome at St. Paul’s has room enough
For a mind stretching to hold the present and the past together,
Staring with unblinking eyes in search of faces,
Seeing only stone –
Stone, stacked and chiseled over long centuries
With tools of soft metal,
Held with softer flesh.
Eyes stunned, offended, seduced
By the aromatic sight of bronze and dark, carved wood,
Of decadent tombs addressed in Latin script,
Of a thousand saints climbing the endless walls, foot upon foot
Of stained glass.

Place a candle on the stand and release a prayer,
Spare two quid for the Kingdom of God.

I see a life of loneliness standing dauntless in front of me,
Gleaming like a flying saucer on a little moonlit knob of earth.
I know it will take me across the stars,
Show me glory beyond the mind’s capacity to create.
I feel the tension rise and fall like an unending Wagnerian prelude –
My neck relaxes from trying to turn,
And I board.

This isn’t solitude, this isn’t serenity –
This is furious velocity-loneliness,
Fiery loneliness that arcs across the sky
And screams through the air, just feet above the ground,
Lighting candles under the black steeples of
Scottish chapels.
This is loneliness that fuels suns,
That shapes planets out of blasted rock,
That chased a monk up Yorkminster tower,
Until he was imprinting each narrow stone step
With a footprint fresh from the fire.

The fury builds with nowhere to go –

–and I will build a cathedral in the stars,
With towers that stretch across the light years of emptiness,
And I will light a candle for all the lonely souls
To call them on their pilgrimage across the drifting void.
What will I say to you when you arrive?
Will I dare to call you brother?
Will I speak to you in grand terms of the longing that drove us?
Will I burst with a smile and with tears, declaring that at last you have arrived, that before us is a long year of rest?
Will I be bold enough to pretend you hear me at all?

On a rocky hilltop engulfed in fog,
A pipe passed in a circle of friends
Drives the anxious shakes away,
Like the lingering call of bagpipes
Banishes my troubled sleep.

Tritone

I heard sirens as I was walking back to my car tonight,
And for half of a second,
I thought it was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard,
That the sheet had been pulled
And right there was ultimate reality -
The sirens singing in harmony,
Coming out to vindicate life at last
Now that it had finally broken.
But they sang too high.
They embraced me and scrubbed me
The way darkness and freezing street light
Cradle cracked ribs, pulsing like a Ukranian techno club.

They got there in time.

But they forgot to take me with them.

We started taking walks because the anger is easier outside.
Raging at suburbia, simmering in a psychic heat
That withers every dwarf tree, recreates Hiroshima
On every growth-stunted tree it passes,
We walk on for a few hours, not looking at the sun
Because it really doesn't get it. Eventually it'll go away.

We'd seen that footage of a wide-open square
And a grey-washed ceiling-sky,
The Hindu-Buddhists crowding together for a circular mile,
Shaking and shouting in fear of the abyss they stand on,
Waiting for a blessing, a guardian angel drawn together out of the cosmic mire
And injected onto their backs.
They felt the rage then too, shrieking in the animal tone
That's soulful only on the Bayou,
Digging in with fingers only for claws -
A tug on the ear,
And the madness is gone.
They slept in the woods and got frostbite looking for Vishnu.

They don't know it, but we had a creed too:
Never settle
Never grow roots
Never admit to being sensible
Never claim to be healthy, because health is an illusion
Never explain to them the difference between insanity and Madness -
But we never seemed to realize that the anger came with it.
It's all rage that the sun should set
Before we finished speaking our mind to it.
We can't walk fast enough - it slips down behind the infinity of road
And is gone.



Far overhead a porcelain whale glides through the sky,
Now as blue and dark as the Adriatic,
And a desolate Ahab follows it on the ground,
Lonely and heartbroken,
Gripping his harpoon in vain readiness.
At last he shrugs and turns slowly homeward,
Aching for his proper place and time,
Now more than a hundred years gone.

And the whale spreads a tantalizing wake across the sky.