Refuse/d words built into infinite forms of bodies. This collection is unedited; done in one sitting; sometimes daily, frequently infrequent.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Goodnight

Come to bed,
and whisper word thoughts--
let them staccato against my skin,
let me breathe them,
liquored in sleep.

Many nights are finished
here, in this borrowed
house. And you, infinite
miles from here, but still
hinting at heaven, a clever
riddle for the rest
of my life.

Am I a visitor in your
quiet place? Amongst the
scattered cards and books?
Do I curl into your laundry
like an tiny animal seeking a nest?
Or slide into your mirror, as if
stepping into the stillness of a winter lake?
Will you eat my memory,
when you haven't any food
in the house?

And do you hear me,
fizzled in the ether,
dissolved into celestial dust-
asking you to please,
Please come to bed?


Sunday, December 8, 2013

word conversion


My mind is a great expanse
And I wander within
it, this place.

Sometimes it is a jungle,
wet and dream-breathing.

A house with many rooms.

Sometimes, it is an ice river,
cold and whipped turbid,
thick with mountain.

Sometimes,
it is a drained pan of a planet,
stone-stolen and lonely,
seared by the rip sun:
wasted. All, wasted.

And it has also been a salt-flat:
miles of sticky mire,
my footsteps immortalized
like a moving fossil. 

I sometimes
want to lay down in it,
the mystery
of it.

My body often becomes tired.

I have wondered before
about ruination.

I become a child with her hand in her mouth,
and paralyzed.

But always, always

words are birthed
in the soft murk of the bottom
edge of a world.

It has been like this for us.

From a frightening rot,
we emerge into a treasure funk,
speaking. 

I translate myself, again. 

Poem


the perfect “O” of the mouth
making a well into which
I fall,
my body eaten by gravity,
the swallowing of sound.

Into an abyss
I fall into myself,
falling forever in
the cylindrical darkness
like a piece of ash,
remembered from
the fire. 

Friday, November 1, 2013

cold stop


The winter
            full of half breaths smoked
is the longest season:
            a whole life of cold.

The moon inhabits it
            like a coat.
Takes its stroll in forever
            street by street
Between trees: the textured perfection of their skins
Sliding on salt heaved sea, the brackish liquid
lucid and languid
jellied quick upon the world.


Monday, October 14, 2013

lunchtime


tapping at tables
careening over half-eaten sandwiches
soggy from the plastic wrap
each student troubles
the space around them:
the world knows them
by the captivated noise of their
bodies, their cascading
thoughts, their tinseled throats,
their electric teeth.

abandoned beside them,
leather pouches burst
with scribbled papers,
the clock calendars their
wet skeletons, beating time
with minute tickings;
they gyrate their jelly-muscles
reinventing the environment they eat.

Monday, October 7, 2013

progression


A lion opening his yaw,
Wide and earth caven inside,
holds the great pounding
Of fire beat, that nagging forever
That made creatures crawl
Shuddering and slime-solvent
From the first still ponds
And keeps them calling out
Relentlessly, for a new set of legs
To take them ever farther,
to make a distance.

But was there ever a little creature
Who found the soft shore far enough,
That found the sand grains wondrous
As they flickered moon-sharp?
The in-between body,
the forgotten step
seeping all time through the ground
growing like fabled orchids
fertilized with god-voice.


Thursday, September 26, 2013

portrait galleries

block text chatter-static
in the form of a squat column
accompanies a photograph.

The watery connection
of black gray and white
forgets color gladly
and whispers the
the truth of outline,
of engraving:
a face impressed on paper
by light and made luminous
by depth;
the time before the shutter one
of picture-birth.





Wednesday, July 31, 2013

NYC


Three years here,
battering my foundations,
the resolve gone to re-wake.

And I trip, trip, scrape
into the New Year.  
my thighs being my noise-maker,
my shuttering eyes confetti.

In this place, my self
is the inconsequence
of moon heat.  

I wane in an arc,
my shoulders curved and wet,
And wax into oblivion
dripping, and sweet-smelling.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Sighting


My dead mother,
Descending the subway steps
In Technicolor:
She waits for me halfway down,
Looking up at me,
Trying to see
The ghost, following her. 

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Renewal


There is a terrible love
And care, and carelessness
In the forest.

I will be swallowed
By the dark and wood-heat of rot
Or I will be dissolved
Into the infinity of paradise.