the house plants are bathing in our sleep, they have showered on the portraits. look at the house walls trimming, we will be as tall as them. [whisper here in the bed frame brackets] here’s a cat that understands the news. reach for the extension cable, we are outlets of electric shells. a coin toss for the water cup, high demand in the ash palace. wet synth in the floorboards, they creak slowly under our naked heels. softened in the dawn time. waking highness shakes a lion’s mane. she is the crocus yard and i am the door that leads to her. she is brought inside, she is light and nitrogen through the window. everything is sticky soil, we are grounded seeds incubating.
vesuvian shortcake in strawberry gradients, the low glow of alabaster cream propelled and dripping like pyroclastic flow. body outline like a silent burning mountain, ice capped in fiery confectionery. the bloom comes blazing explosively from long dormancy. fruit cushions and crumbling plate frames, the bed of Pompeii is our new life of just whipped desserts. the sheets are ruined like the histories the romans didn’t bury. relief in a laundry basket full of fruit. your sugar gasps will pull in the monatomic ash blocking the sun. your back will arch over plasma, and your sweat will cool the syrupy magma. steam will tighten the house plants.
on one side of your leveled nose, my tucked eye blends your half face into the full face that my other eye can see. i close each eye back and forth and try to decide. remember when i couldn’t? i only had the one eye to see out of then. now i have two to pick from. you’re sleeping in both of them. if i break my stereopsis, there are three eyes on you. i kiss them like i’m playing the shell game, trying to guess which one will open and reveal the empty space. i’ll crawl into that socket and turn my binoculars back on. that’s when the whole world will look level to you, it will be the flatness of everything. and you’ll blink back and forth and try to decide. an axis for each of us. the house plants in between.
sibling-love, sibling-desire, shake the stella-stretched light hand. A formal introduction to your sleepy mouth agape. the tooth wiggles thrice and spawns a genie that grants us great sex when you aren’t too wiped. trans-semantic lithosphere, landing myself around your solipsized perimeter pends an engagement called the little death sentence. forgive my pastiche interpretation of your consciousness, for it is all here in the world of loose toothed giants and house plants. the silent film fairy brought us a conversation to read that sounds a lot like a string pit. it’s a lithograph of wells that are filling with teeth and sunlight like our kisses when the windows turn. the cosmos are longing for the first drag of your every breadth.
despondency on trial, how say thee? your absence has made the florets immortal. they choose not to wilt on good tidings. this is not the same for me, for i’ve wilted on a grass cot, under all the honorable conditions. the stasis is intentional, the laze growing like a widening circle in between the mattress sprigs. the grass makes us tall and wild, reactive to buzzing. you force me to sit up, take you in your arms. little blooming from where the sweat beads slipped through, where my head used to be.
prophecy on denial, how say thee? the sun sleeps in the ground at night. the flower buds caught in my periscope drink in the sunlight as it lays in a moonlit field. the light spills out into the sky and reflects the flower’s shadows on dark stratus. i point out our shapes between the leaves, or at least, that’s what i imagine staring at the ceiling. in the future, i hope this explains my silence.
velocity on dial, how say thee? does your green telephone remind you of the house plants, with the mute tone of a broken receiver? does the sound of static stay at rest? my world is a crumbling shieling sometimes, picked apart by disturbed gales. how say thee? moving through the jungle court, ranunculus lining the pews. the judge’s bench is a periscope with petals and circles promulgating salient justice.
atrocity on file, how say thee? arranged in the mood bouquet are green receivers, cream ceilings, wilting indifferences, thin circles, grass cots. i came here with nothing. that’s not what i’ll leave with. you crawl in after me to lay down and start a bit of improv. how say thee? you ask. how say thee.
compulsive word spillage
floods about one or
two inches above
the sheet line.
the books,
once in an erratic
stack, float
at nose level.
we rest with a
nostril loose
for ventilation.
the quiescent thoughts
we sleep on/through/under
are barometrically balanced.
i would like
my unconsciousness
to tread with you,
and to have
buoyancy in
our togetherness.
comfortable enough in another home to strip naked and carry on, still chatting through the fabric veil briefly over your face.
ignitable diffuse, the vapor of your undressing calls for an undercover matchstick. it doesn’t burn when struck, just clicks, unhinges and releases an acupuncture needle under the phosphorus head. we open another match head and find a down feather. the next match crumbles into magnetic filings. one match spills an espresso puddle, the following a pair of PJs.
trying to strike your aura while the fizzle of pulp soda plays on the record player, another match shaves into ginger and a map of gesticulations. nothing is more naked than morning ginger gesticulations.
more matches, let’s try the one with a string loose. or one match that once struck, bleeds yellow bug blood. we will wipe it off on the hungriest of house plants. the last match drops a master remote, and we flip channels to watch dueling mongeese.
your miasma spills along the sheets, longing to light, but failing to slip between us.
first, a leaf learns of folded hands, acceptance. a swarm of jittery fruit flies dance in a field of depth. their underbellies catch the light like your taste catches kindling. hand pressed flattened flowers. you’re looking. the desire path is like how the flowers never stick to the right page. this is noticing, the second thing a leaf learns, reaching for light between the fruit flies. they rise and swell to the foreground. your wide eyes are writing. the hereafter spirit greets you on a vining sheet of concrete where we offered apple blossoms. you make many unpressed sacrifices. the tropism is in my hand. you’re looking. the third thing a leaf learns is that some must be taller than the rest. we investigate these thoughts in our own foreign realm of flower power structures where you are credentialed with expertise. over a picnic basket decorated with stomped on seeds, gluey house plants, and plucked bee food. neither will grow and we’re just fine with that. the leaves are chewed by digital carbon pixels on your phone. there you are great capturer, you’re looking. the leaf learns that it will be feverishly forevered by the sun and soil. the fast dance of the fruit flies will burst like fireworks, no time afforded to fall. you and i will fall seasonally, somewhere between the leaf and fly. every look you give shutters the tree. rustling excites the bug and berry. we are the conundrum of rapidity, a luxury of longevity, a coincidence of shared worlds.
retinal monomania, Rilke’s rose window where the gaze turns to blood. brimming tisanes passed between our lips, interval of the plastic arts. we are ready-made diplomats, representatives of solicitous staring, house plant showers, a green thumb along your rosy cheeks. we propagate miscible thoughts of devotion, sub rosa gestalt; we made a god just now under your nose. my veer-less sight pins your dimensions into chronofabric, and i blanket myself with your coordinates.
monologic horticulture is the garden of literal speech that spreads seeds across our bed country. remember how we represent each other? there is a perfect semi-circle in your question marks, and i’m writing one on your retina. rubber comics ricochet off our imaginations. little aliens foreign to the basics, the bedrock, the feelings we’ve gleefully forgotten. intentional insomnia, we will be awake this time tomorrow.
somnambulant culture, the house plants get up and walk around without us giving a flying fuck. isomorphism under our nose. till the body with kisses of harvest. pull at the roots of psychophysical senses, close to the soul. there are one and a half gallons of your gaze in my veins.
peddled my organs at the Tartarean market, along with
the tusks i’ve been gagging on.
the merchant tugged a profuse goatee, threatening me with dialogics. the collective we kept the conversation going.
the ice chest holding my nervous system crinkled in a melting cascade.
it came over me glacially.
you have big ears she says.
the burden of tons stood on my lid.
it’s called bargaining, or storage space.
the Mammalian weight split into two buckets
of warm water and blood bags,
a dyad of buckets hung on either side of
an inflamed tree branch
balanced where my head used to be a lid.
i’m here to cut deals i said confidently before gagging on ghost tusks.
the merchant waves a curtain to the side behind her.
slosh is the sound passing underneath.
trinkets and tally marks line the shelves,
remnants of the other procedures.
A bracelet was printed for me and wrapped around my molars in a chalice.
after a bit of orthodontic small talk, the merchant returned with a stethotrope.
I say, i have gotten real i have
placed myself in every ice bucket to
survive this hell. it will behoove you she said.
i prepared for injected ivory,
thickening in my arm.
the unibrow and the belly tub, concomitant with butterfly kisses on the navel, blink into my digestion, it will lead to the heart i taste most.
the tree of life and the dental appointment with butterfly drills by candlelight, a tub full of crutches, it will lead to my pollinated teeth.
the most and “i don’t know” rescind a precedence, the ubiquity of art under running water, your shower thoughts will alleviate my chewing gums.
the stomata and the mouth wisk, the tallness of a slow burn. butterfly flames will untell the stories we leave for generations.
i don’t know how Kahlo inducted us, peering over your shoulder to see the new bugs and their house plants buried in the jungle. we are raw and hairy. we are precipicing on germination. we will bulb like Rivera, like a line drawn between two lines.
vitruvian heron and a half buried wheelbarrow
giving me ideas about breaking kneecaps.
Some unsullied, smuggled German pickle juice
chokes harder than the whiskey. they call it
a kickback. i’ll take the owl on the top shelf.
Pythagoras punts a table top football over Egypt.
hoots and hooves are heard at a distance.
the animal kingdom baying over coolatas.
we’re mixing in the kickback. we took triangles
as fast as we could, wheeled across in half buried
siege machines. the heron is starving and we think
it’s a kickback. the bottom bottle wisdom is
kicking in. we are responsible for scraps
under the pilgrim’s nose, a giant head needs
punishment. ego pickled psycho features greying
like sandy war stains. we took their bodies
and delivered their babies overseas.
mothers catching the kickback cold.
autoerotic drinking comes in 3 stages of
no particular order; the grip, an oedipal hangover,
and fake mathematics. like the superiority
of bird brains. the migratory shape stands for the
vanishing of errors, prop comedy with real firearms,
identities in the bear-proof fridge out back.
Ekpyrotic phoenix, how you feed until you sink
then burst. i will keep the ashes of this universe
in a jar and call it memory. the bear still wishes
to know the bird on his head. a minor setback.
kicking themselves. avian carriages of thoughts
over borders, veering around karmic meteorites.
the idyllic western bridge out back is smoldering.
climbed the whitewash and stomped on it until the tide, death, and bumper stickers jutted from the sand. Co-existence peeked out inimically. the ocean wandered through, parched and ceremonial, riding a camel separated from her newborn. the ocean swayed tectonically, and we stood around car bits. put your ear to the muffler, it sounds like me. the continent found paradise in driftwood charred lizard guts, then hallucinated that reality looked like dry bleakness, bleeding from granular scrapes all at the surface. i suggested we pack up, put the crest at the bottom, heaviest first. these desert dunes remind me of subcutaneous insects feeding under atmospheric skin; slightly raised, alive, and immune. a cut down the middle would open the blood creek, drown the sand and skin scorpions until their pincers looked like rotted coral. the ocean looks at me without forgiveness and drives to the beach with scales in her teeth. the continent will meet her there, and they will discuss speed bumps in parking garages. an undertow feels like a long conversation drawn out by unbridled neuron waving. the ocean is also inside us, but that wet is making me cold. i am an earthquake, torn between two homes: a shallow shelf and the bottomless well.
cacti gesticulate their hellos in comic ways, a greeting that eases me. wreathed in a rubber tire, one cactus is staring down desert flames. axles are melting into oh shapes and sea shapes. it is a violation to touch anything in this country except bedrock. desperate ascetics dig with reservoir dreams. they are right to do so with the alien library just miles below.
a bone spur, surrly and swollen, spoke with a napkin by the knee. they chirped about nautical yearnings, novice in their naughty prurience. the napkin had a family in the south and withered in cold wash basins. it was the dark secret that burrowed the bone spur deeper. shy about an allergy to anti-inflammatories and its fractured self, the lodged osteophyte found the nerve to be kneaded. the napkin wrinkled and folded from an outside hand. they felt pain and relief and need, the maritime syndrome. dinner on a boat somewhere time is running fibrous. the spur will die in surgery on land. the napkin will fold until it is unraveled. they will have few dinners before then, but this poem keeps them at sea.
Julio’s garden
\feral foraging terragorging foliage \foolishness tampering deniably \this is how we’re doing things now \cyclochronically drinking alkahest \transmutable indifference \triangular chrome singing \damn collar needs a name tag \the spacement dyad, the dynamic Julio \come prepared \this time is the same as next time \arthritic jaundice in the grass \the blades are becoming soluble to the planet \Julio is crying for his job \phytophilia sounds like silent lipstick
Julio is the ferret
\myelitic companion, how bone peeling your expression is \underneath the ebbing tow is a still spacement \your ferret is here terragorging, world eating \your cooking goes to his furriness first \skyships hoist my spine like a parade balloon, it feels more relaxed than ever \slack maw drooling at threats \your father tells me to look up fear in the dictionary \the library is under the tide of the ferret’s peripheral nervous system \your dad is holding books under my nose like treats \my spine lay like glue \still drying
str.of.consc.
from ripe acreage seeps a deep toll that rings leverage loose and long over the tidal pool. there’s a sip of something peripheral tying a naked ferret round my tongue. enter said dryness, flood great salt shower.
it’s in the tide of course
aquarium of missteps, swimming steaks plucked by loose ferrets. just is the way they shake a wet nose.
cast the lower east eye unbound
beyond foresight into the
radioaction behind us
lasso offered to line the bait, but
you opted your thoughts
the manhattan steps a myopic plague
to the spine pole
great halls get hooked and yank
you forward, parallel pacer
the art is running away
the horse shoes make it pain less
except for the bleeding
she illusions free tickets
from the front desk
my wide brim is so obvious
your charms are leaping from the frames
like kids in high places
so obvious
the great halls have us parted,
only clairvoyance to connect
we are swimming speechless
wordlets dripping from the reeled
lure, moored in your eyes
you have fished your fortune
yet wait at the teller for processing
for what i'm here to tell you
giving you two distinct last phrases of lonely people, disillusioned genius, impediment of abstraction. the first settles his debts, neverowed remittances, to a chicken. to a mind appropriate to peck away at fortunes. the second died neverable to conjure pulchritude such as the pigeon. it will be in every best interest, repent to your partridge. my heart suppurates along the seam with stolen lies and cheated thoughts. it begs the question to pop. shying away from the peacock flume, its ignitable libido, the feather gathering absentee. thieves of twigs and balloon strands and vomit soiled wristbands. blue mourners of neversound twitchless tits, ocean colored psychopomp. breaching breather umbilically yolked, returned scrambled. delivered to the grass, unwound by the tangled-vours, peace to be picked up once more as the king of worms. to feed the early arrival of another voyager.
eyebrow gradient elucidated suggestive sluice. faces chalked with highlight, contoured by figment distinctions. a creativity machine consumes the gradient, third dimension omni mention of the tired-likeness machine, attracts, repels, between two walls, partials in the echoes, serene as ghosts. rugrat mnemonics and diagonal science. plugged into Redon's pandora, the tying of likeness to shape, woman's shame shaped, eye of womb, evagination and choroid fissure. like the visibility of smoke as it moves between light and its optic. ghastly obstetrics, gives infants the power of see through and a package of all the pressure needed to scoop an eyeball of paint, enough to remember the natural hesitations.
input. magnesium ion cell batteries and user information
output. periphrastic psychopompic death fortunes distributed in cookie shells
in other words, try again.
input. more dishonesty, shed tears and a tarot deck
output. A long current of numbers, bluff called and cackling
input. “être mangé par fluorescence”
output. sympathetic body language
input. input. input. input. Input.
output. sticky input, keys jammed
google. how to unlock the future
output. a single unanswered forum for help
opened by the barely employed
one comment that reads “urgent”
posted by an evicted library desktop
input. no input.
output. stay at home and memorize the wall.
input. thieved riches, vomited tarot cards, sleeping vices.
output. “the machine is beginning to understand your question”
input. venture pro hominem. elastic closure. something like self resignation.
output. a mountain peak, nothing spectacular and inner peace.
input. the missing piece
output. “what is the missing piece?”
input. what i don’t know.
no output.
veins, tree branches,
sicken me.
they belong to a past
too many
have doubled down on.
pulmonology;
the study of working pairs.
the tree-hung red light
is there for emergencies,
not for comfort.
tell me your sky looks irrelevant.
cuz i believe in people again.
i mailed all your messages
to myself, but two are
perpetually unread.
draw me
from your blood stains.
i crawl beside myself
cracking up, whirling dawn of the seventh hour
cuz the horizon looks all smiley
katabasis for the envious
the breathing twos a bit oblivious
we all carboload,
we all have to stop in traffic,
we all make accidental eye contact,
we’ve all felt mind numb,
we have all looked at ourselves in a locked stall, pants drawn, and wondered why it made us vulnerable.
we are all being gorged by pills, news feeds, scheduling conflicts
(like not wanting to go outside). gorged by personality lies online, gasoline vapor and smog tendrils,
by whatever’s next; yet we all wear blankets for fevers and pick up our cracked-out loved ones from the dentist.
we all lost our shit when bombs got bigger, Mandela died, and we stopped reading more than 140 characters.
we are gorged by all that we aren’t.
we are all sick of cafeteria food.
we all decide whether or not to keep momentos. or people in our lives.
we are all baffled by jeopardy.
we all cry at euthanasias and our father’s funerals.
we are all wrenched by money into forgetting love, knotted by technology into anxious antisocial tendencies.
no one knows death and
we all know this.
we all want sandwiches and to look pretty in a line up.
we all get sucked into our hometowns
and we all get a few chances to prove we’re different from everyone else.
we can all multiply accurately and multiply unintentionally. on multiple occasions,
we all remember old friends and random recipes that haven’t been made in a while.
we all check the weather when it’s raining to see when it’ll stop.
we all carboload, techn-overload, wait-to-load, broken code, sit curltoed, workload, trashload, spend debt-owed, time-slowed, snowed in ice abode, windcold, motherload, crash towed, picture upload, belief node, award bestowed, jean sewed, ten fold carbo load, carbo meaning dehydrated or sleeping in or something else that doesn’t trigger an immune response. just something else to be afraid of together.
in a new chaotic tv soap,
the screen is edited to crack
over the lens
of the viewer
for emphatic effect
it gets me.
the chimps emptied the lost flask
of one zoo patron
his shame echoed their drunkeness
and the patron asked to be mobbed in the parking lot
the gorillas get me
children catching limbo sticks
and frisbees
with bottle opener foreheads
i get it.
A swabbed vintage top hat
with virulent toxins
the sweaty brim gets me.
janitors are routinely arrested
at their anniversary dinners
at semi-ritzy steakhouses
kink gets me
a scenic spiritual journey spoiled by a sex worker pission
on your ground-laid tapestry
my little spirit guide gets me.
you having that face.
gets to me.
you showing your heart.
gets to me. get to me.
get back the rest of you,
you are just the worn parts of me
strewn out,
you get me.
gut spoken pyroclastic flow is liquifying the apartment.
there are glass splinters in our eyes. there are feelings leaping over the cushions and stepping over us with their small legs.
the motley mix
of proxemic understanding,
when i perseverate on the sincere space of things,
i see it measured and traded
by silent auction.
for the Unassuming,
scant crowds form equidistant fractal figures,
the beauty beyond compliment.
she would be called impervious,
the Unassuming bares witness to nothing.
me, i’m still trying to hang myself
or find my mobile balance
where it
don’t tug so hard,
don’t tug so hard,
don’t tug so hard.
bids placed in discretion,
how is she navigating with such graceful moxie?
instead of goodbye to the shapes,
i said amen,
for i had asked them something to no response.
i am a lucky duck holding a busted umbrella over a major fissure i found on Linden st in which all the people i put in hell are drenched in mytho-plasmic ichor. they look down primarily, standing on a large screen that is showing a projection being filmed aerially by drones and angels. they are watching me on the screen waiting for something to happen. i am soaked holding a tiny hole-riddled aegis over twenty feet of splintered concrete.
a solvent is raining from the heavens that separates the god blood into iron and platelets under the abyss’ shadow. the iron crawls on itself, not stalagmitic but cylindrically perfect like street lights or colthestrees or a cold chill up their spines. the platelets, more organic, grow bramble at first. it gets caught between the toes of all my old friends. i set out orange cones and barricades to prevent more from falling in. this is my arcadian world, the sisyphean role of crosswalking. ‘no, this way, please don’t fall down there, it’s quite messy.’
chemical raindrops and a numbness i ache for. my feathers are boiling. the eternal cloudburst never brims in the ravine. instead, the saturated bramble has bloomed decoratively into apartment plants, a twin bed, a writing desk, a closet with comfy shirts and evening wear for each of them. the iron cell bars have advanced technologically, started receiving signals and wifi and messages from the empty skies. The downfall dries instantly on the skin of my friends and they love this imperviousness. i’m happy. the screen floor below them is carpeted now.
a construction crew has made its way to the other end of the fissure. they were upset i “borrowed” their cones. they are also going to hell, but i told them they were at the wrong site and if they could please make their way to another deathtrap. they leave me with a fresh umbrella that i leave closed on the ground behind me. i open myself inside and my luck changes. the gods part the sky for a second and i don’t notice.
then there is a new smell. a wet smell. a water smell. a flooding smell with fossilized smells. a duck bill has a probing organ called the Corpuscles of Herbst that allows a duck to sense pressure changes underwater. a treading smell. a duck foot and duck mouth and duck shit smell. hell flushing fissure filling smell. h too oh
these loved well-wishers i put in hell, afflicted pit dwellers, now floating on their backs. the water swells beneath them. after 19 hours, my liberated friends pull themselves from the ledge. i close the tattered umbrella, tuck it under my wing while i wait. the water and smell rise, a flood just for me now. i rise above the city, an invisible ocean building under my palmate feet. a construction worker comes to visit in a crane. she is afraid of heights and cannot stay long, but i appreciate her visit. she cannot relate because the ocean is only for me. overnight, i stare down at old poems too far underwater to read. it’s tiring to be so far from words. i wrap the handle of the umbrella around my duck neck, and open the worn porous umbrella under the surface. the liquid rules matter again, a physical smell, a sinking smell, a sense of pressure change.