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.