I cannot know there’s a silk tree that never grows in front of great Aunt Roxie’s house paper thin, faux memory as still as mother’s Galveston Beach painting, white sails alight over dead quiet Gulf don’t remember a human voice planet’s as dumb as wax figurines I’m left to conjure an underbelly countries of libertines, red faced suspicions, quixotically brewed in cold iron maidens and if not real, then so be? I need not fear the cataclysmic grapefruit hail, children’s fevers might never love my lover’s womb or set my shameful sex on fire or listen for whippoorwills I will not hear
“Darning his socks”, I think someone will see the tilt of book spines in my cabinet, fantasize about my secrets; 5-year-old ceramic handprint, hand spun letters and fond remains, sent by whom; they might be dead. What changed the world when I was gone, brands in dust lay palmless, Sedona rainbow obsidian the 1939 Dussaillant Sauternes no one wants? I’m part of my own frail collection bourgeois vivisection. Not more is known, not this repose, unsought by seers, psychos, lovers. Though invisibility is willed, the shame weeps through the hourglass, fracture of convenience. No one chooses to endure it more than once as one by one, each talisman will lose their saint their arbiter, who knows the contours, dog ears creases, phrases held in reverence, who pines for its familiarities, pictures of Colorado sunrise; outlasted by its slow sepia.
Ex Nihilo there comes a flood, blood ice skin, a wake full of blight, irrelevant sorrow; O Makers-Be, after this storm, give us lists of lists and hobbled forms, aching to salvage Illimitable space, another one, sun- shine crawls out of an orifice of withering mothers and motherless ‘like, codes to transgress their thrice born debacles, pregnant evacu- ants thawed by dawns and dawns ex Materia!
yes, i do recall our song but moronically so i deadpan the litany of our affairs like an alchemist of the inerts i kept my blood away from you buried inside witches' bottles i would have thought its opposite; Mandela's most hidden and blithe dimension where ankles sunk in muddy woods and tribeswomen round their fiery pits and many realms would opiate like firefly mass behind your shoulders dancing, drumming, blearing out worlds, i would have thought so you became the periapt gleaming ecstatic on every breast brooding within the music's breath a monolith risen from the heap, no more a rostrum in the breach the soft enigma that never passes a willing fear i brook the terror of your sisterhood i want inside of finally
Lonely men, I’ve noticed, will pay off their little houses
and live in them by themselves until they burn down
from a dead gas pilot and 80’s paperback philosophy.
In other words, out on one hundred highway north at dusk,
which is a daylight’s ride from the sack, the dunes simply
spill out on the road; the crazy thing being, nobody’s worried.
Keep driving until the damn thing just ends at the last rogue pier
on the island’s tip. There’s a dark night beach on the right
and if you wade into the waves, about 130 feet, east by northeast,
you’ll find a miraculous shoal where the salt from a trillion g
Inside these walls, I wait past dark.
The shadows steep and over-brew
long before I move a bone;
I’ll never return to mother’s moon.
Star and night, my bench flakes off
cicada shells and sunflower wilt.
By Venus light, it’s a driftwood throne,
an old carob bullet firing straight for the sun.
The air like ink collects and cools:
it is the black throat where braying forms,
and where shady gardens melt and pool;
absorbing the ghosts of cigarette-waft.
These onyx planets swell and bloom,
and metabolise like sheer witchspells -
I turn these crystals to my core
And try unlearn this spiderweb gloom.
Former days contort through
The hearth in your denim pocket,
quietus and earthen floor
windows settle nostalgic dust
and hold outcroppings through their pores:
maps, manuals, flightless single wings
awaiting consequence, a bloodless chore
in the future you have willed the world
for those of us who still remain
workless as the dead.