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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.