Lighthouse

Nepotism amongst angels clamoring for birthright
Like a truth undulating along with the mirage
Is sacrosanct falsehood with millipede legs 

If it has legs, give it legs and you'll get a leg up, they say
Halo again sprouts gilded thorns,
Cosmic explosives rigged to psychic abutments

Disintegrate hibiscus petals continents away
If bristling love is only hair on back of necks
What of the permafrost on the other side of the bridge?

Languishing devils once thrived in the night Now they seek succor while camouflaged From those amaurotic men who beg

Searching for clues in a seraph's meager pay
Each has to mind the moon that mourns
Each has to make his own adjustments

Take the ferry out past the bay
Disembark to swim with sharks and wrecks
Let brine and all flood past the alveolar ridge

alternating/current

The fluctuations of swell and cringe;
Fascinated by the false lucidity of dreams

Satisfaction is a belly full of holes

Serotonin lull, waking to a dream,
Or the dream is a waking thing, a thing awake

Blackened harbor, ships,
Fire floating on the water,
Cats dragging in fingers,

I was walking down the sidewalk with a pocket full of change
But of those I passed there and on, all the faces looked the same

Radio transmitters,
knobs and dials, buttons, the static hiss of

Crabapples in his front lawn, to be raked away
The Day, slowed and shaven hours, the stubble of calendrical x's,

Keeps putting clothespins on the curtains,
Paranoiac,

I'm still alive, I'm still dragging this cross through the mud
scarred with ghosts' chains

Combin' his hair, left the water runnin'

Agape, the gulf peers back into the shameless eye,
Answers, fruitless webs of associations,
Questions, can we ask only new questions from now on?

Smoke filtering through the blind shafts,
oh god it's a frightening fire,
an explosion in limbo,

Time, a couple of hands clasped and turning the helm in place
Man, a couple of fools apart twisting image of face

Cabins flooded / leaking ducts / bathroom sink left running

Graves at this little gulp, staring into blind eyes on a twisted gulf

Unsalvageable wreckage, a red rusty flood
through the image of my hand
(Why did they photograph my hand?
Only my hand?
You can see the tattoo shriveled and unwreckognizable,
an anchor,
You can see hospital gown,)

Rock solid sponge painted with the berry juice of burst eyeballs,
Homely nosegay of balls of wire and spikes,
Candy coated IV line running to the center of the earth,

kill me
kill me

A half of a grapefruit, a packet of sugar, and a bottle of lotion

I will miss you for the rest of my life,
I will miss you for the rest of my life,

Between Mind and Matter

I
Weightless, I collapse into the space of memory
Unwanted images flash behind my eyes
Wildly flickering screens barely able to contain
Spasms pressed up against their glass
I see her floating through slate-black washes
Inside slimy mires of mind
I hear her whimpering, nearly
Drowned out by toneless buzzing
Lost in cold, reverberating dark
I've forgotten her face
Once burned in so deep
Now formless, an amoebic frame stretched
Colorless and emasculated across
The backs of my eyelids

II
Reaching my hand out I stretch my palm over
Dead low tide and pull the water back
Dreams can seem more real than life
Lucid as this or when I get dragged beneath
Numbness as if my blood becomes clay
I will try to rise, and see the room before
Me under new layers
Crepuscular and bleary; I won't know what's
Happened to me, I –
Can't remember anything, God
Help me, my chest is caving in

III
You said something before I breached
The threshold of cognizance, something
About dreams and memories becoming
Indistinguishable in liminal states
You carried me over to a new bed
You washed my face, I whispered
“But is not life a liminal state?”
Before I woke and asked you
What day it was, what year

IV
I once dreamt of palm fronds and a lazy sky
The bay appeared warmly beyond the streets
I threw my shirt to the sand and threw my body
Against the foamy waves to come fetch
Her laughter and add mine to it, shake them
In the warm tides and carry her on my back
Drop down in again and kiss her
I'd jerk out of bed, look out the window
Paw at the glass cold against white stretching all ways

V
Squinting, I stagger about the room
Bare feet slapping on cold tiles
Locked in, only the bathroom
Open in the
Shut
in
Chok-
ing
Qui-
et
of
Dis-
In-
fect-
ed
White
Walls

VI
A harbor, a dock,
Seagulls, and the sun
All coated and dripping wet black
I dip my cup into inky water
I drink to forget

VII
You don't want to live?
Do you even remember how?
If you were alone, drowning in a river
And there was a rock
You could use to pull yourself up
Would you just hope the current
Carried you to shore?
If water filled your lungs and you
Died by the time you reached it
Would the coroners later find
Diamonds pouring out of your chest?

VIII
If I don't erase these words yet again
They'll be absorbed into the page
Like sutures in a ticking clock
Oceans falling apart
Scattered heartbeats of floodwater

IX
I lie here confined to my bed
My hands won't move
My words gargle in the back of my throat
I'm a distorted image of myself
Do you still love me?
How could you?
Look at me
Look at me

X
Dry riverbed
Needle and forceps
Don't close my eyes
I remember everything
I remember her face
The nightmares
What you said to me
You said
Dreams and memories are where the soul
Blooms and withers, they are
Indistinguishable in liminal states
To forget is to cease living
To suck the life already sucked out of the dead
I remember how to live

XI
Gracefully, I rose from the ash of forgetting
I saw her floating back to me
I heard her sweet words again
But you couldn't hear mine gargling
In the back of my throat
Stitch by stitch
You sewed my eyes shut
God damn you
God damn you

absolute truce

you say tomato, I say persimmon
words slide down tongues of both men and women
they can no longer register taste
at the sound of syllables placed
in delicate sequence

the harvest is all wrong
only the scarecrows dare sing a song
those little black birds we soon will eat
gathered where they fell, their little crows' feet
our eyes' undisguised laments

as they pointed up to the sky
where birds so casually fly
and now as we eat them
we slowly gain wisdom
or so we would like to believe

and maybe we will never sprout wings -
singing what the scarecrow sings -
and take flight in our search
for that absolute truth, a perfect perch
and a moment's sigh of relief

but we will settle for an absolute truce
barely able to get off the ground
and because we like the sound
each one of us will honk like a goose

out of all this home I have built a rubble
and inside live like my own double
words like chalices stained from drink
spill forth meanings which only shrink
and try as I might to ply them well
they merely wane and echo in hell
through me who sweetly sings the verse
that twists her love from bad to worse
I close my mouth in hopeful haste
wishing I had more to waste

Hypocrites decry hypocrisy, as the earth continues to spin. Noble and self-righteous, they only argue to win.

hoarse and of a different color

insensitive gooseflesh
underneath gasoline drenched
rags... when there's nothing left
to burn, I am the effigy

and I understand all of us
the more that I don't
draining the weight of the words
I would say to appease you

in such a way that could please you
flames dancing at my feet
I still desperately wish
were metric and free

and words deflated
lie limp draped over covered
furniture, in a dusty attic
filling with smoke

the greatest minds of my generation
have seen sunlight filtered
through black stones
dreamed in a void which grew
tired of being a void
like a wheel, tired of reinventing
itself after every turn

in America, land of the cheap, home of the slave

oceanfloor

end of my life in a diving bell
crumpling like an aluminum can
in the motherless womb
deep below, I scream
silently into waters
less malevolent than i
with more power
more purpose
I fade from all memory
as if I had left
an impression

water fills my lungs

I am the ocean
I am its floor

miles and miles and miles and miles and miles between us... widening
(I speak in thunder, desperate to be lightning)
dovetailed hearts will come apart whenever words are failing
no matter how I shape this world, I am trapped in something alien

I love like it is good enough, even if I am not
I scarcely know myself outside of broken modes of thought
should I break through and illuminate her sky
I think I could finally