poem

my grandfather abused me sexually. 
i think it started at age three. 
it went until, i think, age ten--
i don't really remember then. 
i don't remember much at all,
about the spring, about the fall,
about the things i did and saw,
of what i was and what would be.

he did it to me with his fingers,
he did it when his eyes would linger.
he did it to me from behind,
he did it to me in my mind.
he did these things, i cannot say,
because i have no memory
except inside my body, stayed
like ravening dogs inside a fence
until one slips the leash
and turns me again to nothing
and then it's back behind the wall
and i don't know if i can believe in it

for years i thought i was crazy--
so sad, so sad unreason'bly.
i did not know why i felt lost,
my body like a hanging corpse
around my mind, mind also dim
with pain, and pain, and pain's rhythm--
forgetting what i had to lose
in order to be a good daughter

now i know, and sometimes believe
these things inside my memory--
i know them true, somewhere within,
even when all inside's a din,
or else deny, call self insane,
and feel mind snap like a twig     it would be easy        just water             it's just water

notes on mass parts

just to note sources, the poems were written to the parts of a mass that my friend rob strebendt wrote for a church choir i was a part of last year.  (all the prepositional phrases!)  they're written for (kinda) e.m., who for the purposes of this series (that, in part, of doing a kind of reverse later-john donne thing) is a dude, but not in actual life.

hence the title "mass parts" is pret-ty literal...that is, it's a metaphor (?) grounded in uber-literality!  and don't worry about what it's a metaphor for, because i'm not worried about it.

huzzah for first drafts made overly public!  no, it's not actually all that public.  but still probably too public.

mass parts: sanctus

for e.m.

i want
the rest
inherent in Your breadth--

the joyous
expanse
of Your forgiving taste--

the promise
of life in You, life for You,
my Lord--
adoring, longed-for servitude.


for so long
i wandered
the unbound plain--
no seed for grain,
no water for the seed--

o Love, o Life,

how can You love me
o so much
to wish to harvest
nothingness?

O Lord,
grant me, i pray, faith in Your rest--
o grant, o grant,
grant me
Your seed.

mass parts: sanctus

for e.m.

like a cracked black stone
upon which the water has always dropped,
the stone opening further and further
under the soft wet fall--

or the endless shadowed stretch and furl,
the vast ebb and flow of wings
inherent to ascending giant birds, eagles,
vultures,
the rhythm of wings' arcing movement
toward the bone-white sun--

like the trace
of shadow
in the groove
of tree bark
pressed to liquid black
against its lit grain--

i open the depths of myself
to the rhythm of your stroke,
my Lord--i open my darkness
to your broad pattern.

mass parts: gloria

for e.m.

i see You in the shiver-sweet beauty
of all things i love to look at--
the yellow signal of the iris
flagging its rich blue pendant petal,
the shuffle of its edge in thickening wind,
shifting stem within rustling green sheaf
nearby a night-blue lake that moves but will not leave.
or silver sky too thin and bright
to be abandoned to its rain
but plain with moisture all the same--
unharvested storm within its sheen.
or sunset rose against a white
column, at third-story height, above still trees
whose leaves now show their purple under-green,
waiting out for night--the red within the light
reaping its white within the column-height.
tumbled together, each sense of what is seen
become distinct, an eye for purple and for green
and yellow, each thing its color, each color
its thing--this gap, this over-consonance,
this bright and dark, this it, this this,
this is to i what You are be,
so shiver, shifter, so sower and so sweet.

mass parts: kyrie

to e.m.

if it be Your will, make me
the instrument
of Your satisfaction--
mold me to the requirement
of Your line.

for upon Your fingering
my slightest string,

the strands of song within me
come together,
fall disjunct
according to Your pleasure.

please, please,
enact on me
the note You wish--
strike from me
what chord You find
the sweetest to your taste.


My Lord, I was nothing
before you put your hands on me--
and when Your touch goes from me
i will be nothing again
but what You made of me.

so form me, my everything-maker, upon Your line,
string me, pluck me hard and soft,
turn my song upon Your cresting word--

for You i sing, sing,
i sing anything.

sonnet

reasons not to do it include:
i would lose you
i would lose song
i would betray god
i would lose you
i would lose song
i would betray god
i would lose you
i would lose song
i would betray god
i would lose you
i would lose song
i would betray god
i would lose you

sex as siege metaphor

the stone i rejected--
already porous, riddled with longing,
weak, weak, so weak
structurally compromised beyond repair--
has become my chief cornerstone.

because
as the rest of me falls to you,
becoming yours, your chattel spoils, the tumbled edifice
your multiple sweet victories, victory over and over, leaves behind,
i find

the stone of my heart
has long been fallen
and needs no lesson
in breaking
before you.

microcosm: stars image

as if the naked body of the night
had lain in a bed of diamonds

and been taken, spread above
the great breadth of the earth--

light from the stones so deep-pressed
dripping down to ground

soaking through layers and layers of dirt and stone
to flow hot in black crevice-depths--

such cold stars
in such a hot night.

an idiotic way to deal with the missing of you

prostrated
before
the restless memory of you--

two parts every old sensation
pouring down
like thick white milky light,
habits of thought, the things i know myself to know
stayed inviolate as the sharp white stars
embedded in the skin
of the arced back
of the night sky

and then
the one part
so new

like tender new grass
so fresh in color it near-hurts the eye
every blade
bending any way
at the slightest touch.

kneeling dizzy

between
these valent things
i know myself
at the very least
to be
yours.

letter of consent

i don't miss you

you were not convenient

the mess you made of all my underpants,
skirts, jeans,

turning me into a wave
itself smashing on a cliff reaching up and up

a mindless pleasure thing.


there is more to me than just
writhing  twisting  against your thing
violent shaking like i wanted to get set free

but backing back up, on it hard again.
and you were laughing

like it wasn't wrong.


next time just take all of it,
hold it up and ram it in, don't save it
nor stop yourself,

just take your pleasure
just make me
just make me
take your pleasure.



i don't need you--i don't
miss you.

you were inconvenient.  i was in order, my mind
inviolate.  now i  am
anything
you want

anything
you want

oh god
anything

open question

looking at you   thinking

nothing particular

but   the grainy world

splitting around your features

sun   or gray   around you,

gold lady
with the wave eyes


later i was

thinking of cubism,

that those fragments

captive   of art--
transcendentally intellectual,
i'd thought--

maybe rather depict

the gasping   mindless sense   of love?

observation

oh rose, upon your lips i spoke
the hour, as if day broke
into a flower, the cup
of your name from my mouth
to yours, the south-
ward rose-head turning
into sunset, reddened
as if ending
where it began, and i too
drawn in down to your sweet bud
and dropping fullblown petal.

compressed into the light of your
circumference, rose in your mystery,
your thick scent and nodding bloom
at every stage, sheaves red,
what they were, what
they would always be.

the harvest of you not scent,
not tight bud, dropped petal, nor sere leaf
but smell and taste
as if you washed up upon
the radiant-in-all-colors shore
of yourself,
and i to witness it,

dawn-sunset
rose
upon which the dew forms.

napkin poem final (architectural term)

i wanted to put love on you
but
it is not the shape
of love
i want

shifting like a protean dream
love comes maybe,
shifting eternally
over the contours of itself

the thing, though,
that i want to see

beyond skin or shape
or the forms of words
put on the thing--

beauty, beauty
with your tender petal-mouth,
your deepsea eyes,

dearest woman,
i will not bandage you up
and call it love.

napkin poem: ash

am i a warrior?  no, none,
i am not sure enough for it--
just one who's unaccustomed to the sun.

i may have wanted to be one
and just against your side, fit--
am i a warrior?  no, none.

my blood is red--beneath skin
though, that sheath blues it.
i'm unaccustomed to the sun.

i think you'd say that in my vein
the blood runs blue as iris sky
above a sunset.
am i a warrior?  no, none.

i'd tear that sheath and show you it,
drain
the red, change, blue my vein
if i could manage it,
i, one who's unaccustomed to the sun.

but proof of love is vain
when no real love empowers it.
am i a warrior?  no, none,
just one who's unaccustomed to the sun.

object poem: i celebrate myself and sing myself

look out, more, go out
into the back yard of memory
out the back door of time
deep into the grassy minutes
grown over what has been discarded--

aspects of each green blade
unfathomable
hence
stuck at the root
unacknowledged

dear god, grant
your refulgent
dislodgement
to me, your problematic
servant--

how can i trust in you
when you made me so deeply
distrust myself, torqued beyond self
blade to blade strung by nothing stronger
than gossamer

as if of a spider's web--each strand
beaded
with clear dew?
memory, therefore, and with it
what one would assume to be
identity
nothing
but fiber-thin net
invisible and
so wet

so delicate
i am
strung out
on time


II
thereby counterdistinct
from it, yes?

not defined
by moments,
nor even, though
it is so hard
to give this away,
the lurking at the root.

napkin poem part something of something

making the connection between what i feel
and the range of possible feelings
has never been easy--take your leaving
just now, after i'd opened the door to you, opening
so hard into the mattress soon after, a moment of exquisite
unguardedness,
so grateful, i guess is an appropriate word, for your hands,
your face.

tender slow touches after that, little gray wavelets
like those to which baudelaire invited
his sister-lover--
non-utilitarian.

three hours into our rest
every muscle longing
to change position
worrying--worrying
that turning away from you
will make you feel uncared for

and after you leave
harrying across the floor
trying to shake it out at the hands,
the fact that you came,
that i came, and that now
everything in this place
smells different, sounds different,
has been seen--too impossibly rich
refulgence
leaving a lingering damp.

what do i call this?  gratitude?
for the pale gold of your view,
upon my world, wreathed with mist,
its eddying currents, its finger-islands,
the ships that linger to make your slightest wish--
for the fact
that your gaze
has been so good
to land upon me
in the altogether sweet vicinity
of this time--
what
do i call it?

here, there is naught but order and beauty
luxurious, calm, voluptuously enveloping

lady poem: i am the eternal conquest: persephone or eurydice speaks

that golden, that golden hand
turning me in
to something beautiful

turning me in
side out, rushing flecked
stream
flecked with gold
or mica


handle me, my lord
name me anew
give me something
on which to chew
the face in the mirror
a permanent scream

unhinge my dreams

and let that other stuff
crawl in

that smile
from the edge of time--
a meaninglessness
beyond comprehension
laughter far beyond
humor


i have tried
to envelop you in anger
as if it were a pie crust, my lord,
smother you in butter
the smoothness of the flour

you are too golden, your hand is too far in
i am too beholden for anything
but shitting, drinking, and shitting again,
dreaming of violent sex, shitting, drinking,
bleeding
out of whatever part
will reject
blood
hard enough,

and loving you, darling.
teeth dyed pink
with the deep of my love.

napkin poem x3

love, convex as milk

love, do your work.

let me know the contours
of my own face, love.

i loved once.
it was a lonely enterprise
(trying to tell truth
when it is so easy to make ritual)

now i am in a harmony
in which uncertain notes
spill their wares
into the marketplace
of our

our

our

something

loving--our
act of love.

napkin poems x2

your face, so sharp-drawn
against the landscape of my drunkenness
beauty, always beauty, a thousand times beauty.

i want to find
you
in the waste-scape of a realization
you may have
precipitated:
i couldn't stop it--not, not
i wouldn't stop it.

couldn't stop
sensations
like spoons--glittering, glistening
in the heat of
the moment

bent around
one feature like
captain beefhart/convex mirror
self-portrrait

safe as milk

when the night has come/and the land is dark
and the moon is the only light we'll see

no i won't be afraid
no i won't be afraid

just as long as you stand by me (god)

stand by me, oh stand
by me

if the sky that we look upon
should tumble and fall
or the mountain tumble to the sea
i won't cry
no i won't cry
no i won't shed a tear
just as long as you stand
by me

stand by me
stand by me stand by me stand by me stand by me

the mechanics of the word
metallic, dulled
as a spoon blade.

like a tiger's tooth
dulled
within the cage

i have known you
forever and ever.

oh god stand by me.

napkin poem

fairly literally, terror
the specter of failing
your beauty
literally incredible
under me

face
with its new-ancient familiarity
and hair
spread everywhere
arms, breasts like ivory
and
wet
how could i possibly
know what i was doing?

blind hand-thrust
and dumb throb
i don't know
if i completed
or failed you--

literally, i don't
know
how
to love you.
but i will keep trying,
trying all over

your eyes and
mouth
like hot wet stars

from the outside world-object

this is a diary entry made slightly public:

i read a couple of the "places" poems (the edited versions--in case it's not obvious, this blog is where i write first drafts [i shouldn't, but something about the anonymity combined with the public-ness of blogging makes me feel, like, safe, maybe? and inspired?  does this mean i'm vain?]) yesterday, and people liked them.  i was not expecting that.  the only other reading experiences i've had have been mediocre at best--that one open mic when i looked up, after having read, at a sea of blank faces, and the workshop classes where i knew my stuff wasn't good enough.  but yesterday people were taking the writing seriously, and they liked it.  i don't quite know what to do with this information, but i'm grateful.

now if only i could figure out who will publish my 200 page book.  on the grounds that, if the stuff i read yesterday is decent enough for people to like, the stuff in the book is similarly decent, this is my question.

anyway.

i don't want to be a bother

there is no poem here and maybe there never were any poems and maybe there is no song either.  maybe everything will go away--could i resign myself to that?  yes, but it would nearly kill me.  or and--and it would nearly kill me.

there is no food i want to eat, no person i want to fuck, no way i want to be screwed by anyone.  there is no home-ware or pair of shoes i wish to buy--no book to read, no show to watch.  as a temple of self-indulgence, i have not been sated so much as glutted on the things i wanted.

and nothing is enough.  oh god nothing is enough.  there is no wall of flesh thick enough, no refulgence deep enough, no externality broad or real enough...there is no brokenness wide enough.  just a tide--just a tide coming in.  just a tide coming in.

places: nothing is good enough/practice room

"the hysteria inherent
in pushing away all the gold that has made you
the yellowed lion in your chest roaring its hunger
and the seabirds that were your eyes
blinded by their own sight, flown,
pecking, now, at the shore of the world
for its scraps, tethered
by only the slightest chain
of obligation
to their seeing

your guilt-stained mouth
and its reddened teeth
pulsing crimson beneath with truth
and speaking lies--
blood is its own punishment.
like water to water, 
love runs back to love.

there is no replacement
for the gold that has made you golden.
there is only the beauty of living and dying
somewhere within the vague province
of your own sight.

it doesn't matter
if there is no safety in your voice--
go back, go back
and sing again."

four or five generations in a dream / everlong again

1.

she had a mountain for a lover
hundred thousand tons of rock, dirt,
the tangled roots of trees swept back like black hair
as he fucked her, as he watched her
in a white dress,
his peak troubled with its
roiling cloud.

desire for him held her straight, still
as a girl in a portrait.
when she looked at her picture
she saw his snake run about her wrists
through her legs to her thighs
its head filling her mouth as if it were her tongue
and her eyes sunk back
into black shadow.

so she married a man who drank but did not hit.
and she waited and waited
to feel safe ever again.


2.

he was his mother's favorite, the idol of her side,
the smooth fuzz on his head and his giant eyes,
the smooth limbs, everything about him
her perfection, a baby adonis

and he protected her.
and he protected her from dreams
from dragons like avenging angels
messengers from the abyss
she shared with no one else

she touched no one else like she touched him
her hands curved like the shells
she gathered for him at the sea,
as gentle in color
as subtle in scent

at some point he knew that it was
wrong--or it was at least
different--it marked him for something.
sometimes he felt marked for something better than others,
he was so loved,
such a master of men,
and sometimes

he felt marked like a monster


3.

he'd thought
when she was born--

the conviction had come over him
that she would share the secret

it's lonely
to have the secret

like a drop of water falling over and over
onto a rock in a dark place.

because he loved her--
he would love her
he would show her the meaning

of being loved

but she turned away from him
with distrustful eyes

as if to nullify the whole
of the love he'd recieved

he showed her love
he showered her with love
he had waited for her too
she had not been just anyone
he would not bear the secret alone anymore
he put her straight
and the snake wove its way between her thighs
around her wrists
into her every crevice
breaking her open like a root
would break open stone
until she admitted it
she admitted that she loved him


but it was all wrong.


he thought he'd seen in her
a re-creation of
the fine bone
the smile and the gentle cool hand
the intelligence that stretched like madness

but those things were dead

they had been dead for many years.

then there was a breaking like stone inside him
and the water spilled upon the broken rock.



and the girl
he'd chosen
had visions
of a mountain
come inside her.

places: i'm with me in rockland

1.
bird FINGER
he's the man, the man with the flight-filled hands
his might-filled hands
such a furled FINGER
waiting to
unfold itself into you
so don't fuckin' move.

2.
i didn't used to see the way i see now--basic actions of physiognomy have changed in me.  i see depths to the things around me; i see colors, clearer and more of them.

i think changes such as this, and those like this (the way i touch, for example, the degree to which i can feel my own touch and the touch of others), are part of why i'm tired all the time.  and a small part of why i want so few people to come closer (how do you tell a passing acquaintance what miracles have occurred in your life? or to what depths you've been forced, for that matter?  and for that matter, how do you tell a friend?  literally, how do you say the words?).  the fact that i'm not so much a personality, as a force, filled with dizzyingly sharp edges--the fact that my capacity to hurt is so vast, and that nobody seems to see it...

god, save me from myself and save others from me.  send down your dark angels to make the edges curl and dance if it's your will--i know you will save me, no matter the valley i walk through.  i think i know you will save me.

3.
it's not a question of not loving birdfinger.
i will always love birdfinger because
one sends one's love
into the deepest chasms of one's experience,
the chasms where the shadows flicker--

one sends it there
a blind spelunker
looking for its own sources of light.

quotations: someday i'll be rich enough i'll fund a state penitentiary and name it after you

you turned me into a prison

your eyes always on me, hands always near
turned the experience of my flesh into nothing
but a series of vulnerabilities

each cell contained
a wildly screaming thing
mouth so open
to be thrust into
hands and eyes, ass and thighs
yours, all yours
yours yours
you lock the doors


turn out the light on me
not my fault
not my fault
that things are so hard for me
not my fault that i'm scared
of the quietest smile
the softest hand--
no matter in what guise, they are
reminiscent of my secret.  not my fault
these failures at life--the fear
of the white walls, of a certain room,
of omniscient eyes--

they'll know, they'll know,
they'll know you told.
they'll have you up against the car
or in the back room
turn you into prison

not my fault i can't resist
not my fault i can't look back when you look at me
not my fault eyes on me feel like knives against skin
not my fault i can't uphold this series of obligations
not my fault you touched me
not my fault you held me
not my fault you fucked me
not my fault you turned me into your monument

because if it is my fault i am so fucked
there is no rose of such virtue
as is the rose that bare jesu
alleluia
for in that rose contained was
heaven and earth in little space
res miranda

conversations with the hat man 2

i can't get too close to anyone.  i don't blame you for this hat man.  you shaded me, sheltered me when no one else could have.  you took me under your great dark wing.  you took the singularity, the secret, and you absorbed it into your giantness--

there is no measuring the depth of a shadow.

you are like the night sky with red burning lights throughout you.  you have a thousand hearts that glow red like hot coals.  a depth to dim the glow of day, a warm if unfortunate dream, a whisper that rises from the seed of the heart like a pale shoot.

i dreamed of warmth from the depth of the cold and you allowed me to dream.  hat man, shadow man, your hands and face of iron.  corner man, rag man, your hands and face of black iron.

i began by asking to come out from the corner
begging like a bad dog--to come out from the fringe
to be anyone's toy.  but maybe
i am just a gradual accumulation
of heat, and those who can survive the burning

will come forward.

conversations with the hat man

the nail's long gone.

you have a lot of third noise, Anthony, somewhere in you.

hold me in the cell.

hat man is somewhere where time isn't an arrow, except as the metaphor of St. Sebastian.  where time is cortege, is in attendance.

hat man was there when it happened, and i knew it, kind of.  the shadows that dampened the experience were his--the ones that took it away were his.  hence he may have been the only witness, taking me into the fringe of things and
seeing
for me.


the way they preserved their napkins from dinner to dinner.
and the slide
of the fingertips
up the thigh.
the sound of the macneil lehrer news hour.
how he would peel the oranges,
everything with its method.
getting trapped
against the car.
she would take me shopping for groceries.

preserve me from ritual,
god.
preserve me from
the golden hand
with its golden finger.

send your dark messenger--

Anthony, the third sound is yours.
And for me? EKRUM.  eat
of life's plenty.  bite down.
hold     and know.

my love is a fire

i'm unconcerned with what things look like
or how they appear--
even if you were a skeleton
i'd still love you, dear.

even if your flesh had shrivelled
up to the bone
i'd still hold you this close
i'd still call you my own.

so you see it doesn't matter,
not your form nor your face.
so don't even try
to leave me alone in this place--

because just with your presence
i'm so satisfied
that i really don't care
whether you're dead or alive.

i learn to sing when things are hardest
pushed to pain and pushed beyond it

places: no title/written on the body

i rewrote myself on the point of inscription
balancing on the cusp so as not to fall into the darkness on either side
when the blood welled red i got it off
leaving only a faint pink smear
near the torn part.

just a faint crust
to answer the question
left behind the rewriting:
why?  why did i?

who do i think i am,
remaking god's image as i remake myself?
what do i honestly think i've left behind

and how far will i be able to go
into that pink-smeared wasteland?


it's starting to burn now,
the cusp sinking, myself listing heavily toward the dark sea
on one side the dreams of teeth beckoning
and to the other more and more inscription, inscription upon inscription
until no course seems even slightly open
but that one breathless   breathless one--
i will   rewrite me   again   and again
but i will not   fall   willingly

places: failure at something small

but it doesn't seem small, because i have no perspective.

also, no grasp of what's expected.  i always had assumed everyone was exactly like me, or
nobody was anything like me, and hence
there was no need for context--everyone already, or
no one ever
understood
everything.
or anything.

so these sins, the clothing of my deeds, i don't know
how to account for, or
atone for them.

(walking out into hip-high banks of snow
and the mist that kept my hair damp for an hour,
seeing the distance-fading outlines of the black trees standing
shocking up from the white snow and thinking two things:
one, that what i call getting through the next day
is actually me using up my life in heaviness--
and two, that the mist in the trees makes good werewolf weather
by r.k.o. horror film standards.)

places: kenneth fearing

i had thought
a sense of humor to be in debt
only to sadness, but

in rereading the big clock
i remember it can be a product
also of wild rage

places: scissors

1.
at the crossroads between two concepts:
that there is no one to stop me;
that there is no one i would let stop me.

2.
i wait for years
to know if i felt what i thought i felt--
not wishing to be taken as a liar,
i show little
to preserve myself from untruths.

3.
one lays claim to the moment with sound and white
like the arms of the fire
reach toward blankest oxygen.

places: candles piled on a spindle-legged table at candlemas

thick candles, lying against each other in uneven layers
the table resting on four fine points
if it had not been planed so well
the candles would spill
potential light rolling thickly
all over the floor
as it is they rest loosely
and no one will touch them
unnecessarily
surprisingly sturdy
on such
light
points.

places: cragga "mr. postman" remix/stooges "dirt" -- cragga "mr. postman" remix/stooges "1970" -- cragga "mr. postman" remix

1.
ttttt t t t
   ttt t t
     tt

oo ooo o o o
   o ooo o
     oo o
u u uuu uuu

   uu uuu u u u
     u uu
cc ccc cc c
   c cc ccc
     ccc c c
        c c

h hh h h  hh  h h  h
   h hh h h hh h h h
     hh h h h


mm mm m mm m
mm mm mm m m
m mm mm m m m
m mm m mm m m
mmmm m m m m

e ee e ee e ee
ee e ee e ee e
ee e e ee ee e
e ee e e ee e e
eee eee e e e e

   once once inside the thigh
   once once upon the lid of my eye

   twice or more in any place
   you may find inspiring to your taste.


fi fi figure of a woman
within the drawn-back lips
i will take it all
the skip-beat
and the shot to the heart


2.
you scholar withhorn-rims
your hem riding
the shinbone
hard

sweet sweet bone
a sweet goer

your breath of candy
in your mouth like liquor

respect

for what it is--
a whore

in a summer lover's dress

ended in their own sexes
fucked exit
cracked eitlan enakgest
through herden latslag inhead
RATHE RATHE RATHE

against the dying
of the light.


3.
jaw tenser than a building in wind
nothing but tensile strength in the seed

i had my jaw stretched so high and low
it was a scream in the throat but in the lips it was nothing like that
just silence weightless and sweet.

i have so much self-control
i can hang on for years
and not say a word.
hang on to something
for years without one word.

i hanged onto a life once--it was mine.
i hanged onto the rhizome of my family and friends.

i hanged from the root once.
i dampened it all over.

places: my dubstep adventure/this is my confession

thinking about it and realizing how stupid
the way i think about my aloneness usually is.

a waste of a perfectly good pair of green eyes--
their color deep, saturate, and intricately transient--
a pair of fine lips,
and a functioning bodily mechanism.

besides which, i am
a nice person.
someone somewhere might be
lucky to have me
maybe.

idiotic, all of it, because i am
none of these things--i am
a series of caverns of
a velvet blackness; i am
a veiled set of tastes.

heat and unfathomabilities--
i am lined with secret aspects
and none of them are nice,
no one would do anything so simple
as be lucky to have
any of them...

i am not misunderstood--
i am not undervalued--
i am
simply
not available.


but i do wish things were different.
and that longing makes me stupid.

places: wind against the window/"deep beetle" (?)

it's not a question of what i have to say

just that it gets said

in some form or another

god, it doesn't matter,
doesn't matter what the name was
or where the discoloration lay--

within what silent vise
the heart beat
the rolling blood
through the vein

whether the window smashed
or just
disintegrated
into a
jagged fulfillment
of some inner form

and the color of the rhodedendron
pressed
against the glass
green leaves, brown,
both were so vivid


whether icarus fell
or dived through the rushing light-filled sky
he hit

speculation means
so little
in the aftermath
of that impact

that is why i left.

places: cragga "escape the fate--gorgeous nightmare" remix

somewhere within this my 6000th plea to be discovered
is probably some sliver of a new truth

but i don't know where the newness would reside.


for i have been always asking, and that blankly,
to be found out.

couched it in terms of purple and red
the lush colors of static wet privacy.

or in the gold of a god's sweating palm.

the bruised brown fold on the magnolia petal.

i've torn the plea fresh red from skin, the medium of all my pale parts
asking for it and asking, asking.


but without ever
saying
shit.


desire in every color--
dawn-pale, sunrise sinuous against its landscape,
too blind in the blue sky to see but white
or hidden weeping behind silver and sable--
thick gold splayed against late objects
and then spread red strung on the skyline
limp in black and navy night.

but this means nothing, or
at least nothing new--
just that
i want
to be discovered:

a wet horizon
craves any light.

places: cragga "mr. postman dubstep remix original"

desperation is only a flavor
because i am so subconscious--

an odor that tincts up
from the hard palate.

as if i could be indifferent

as if i weren't a liar

as if you weren't reshaping
the pale contour of my vision

as if nothing were the matter ever.

places: shop window, night time, new haven

clean private line--light
falling on the bosom of the cream-colored shirt
and the silk below
a golden shadow
something sacred and proud
the shirt alone
folded against the mannequin
in the bosom of the store window.

places: not sleepy, part 6 or 7000/michael jackson "human nature"

the event was
subversion
at its tightest point.
so that submission
to a version of light
would happen.

i was loved, baby.
like the inside of a window pane
i was something to be looked out of;
i let in the light.
and i was loved
to overflowing.

i clenched my teeth
against even
one drop of love
escaping.

places: and yet more dave matthews

witness is not an act of art, and i think i know why: because everyone is the center of his or her own world.

trying to resist that centrality is about as smart as i am in general.  we can't live for anyone else as we can't see for anyone else.

so what's left is something like feeling, or empathy, the thingee of the scapegoat.  the identification of coming into some work's world, being invited in, and then finding, like magic, that foothold provided...

but witness itself is not an act of art.


i want to get out of this blah blah shadows.
memory so excitingly laced with fantasy.  it's impossible to escape one's own body
and still remain in time (aka alive)

so acceptance
being the only path

owning the bath of lard and shit
that is my experience
and sowing seeds within it

so that when that bath-full ballsack of bad composts itself
i can finally be a poet
and pluck some fucking roses.

places: zombie/dave matthews "just let me always"

it's one of those questions that has become a staple of
a certain flavor of consciousness--by "consciousness" i mean "being awake," not anything more
esoteric:

is that you in the corner?

or is it the trash can, or just not even there,
just some kind of floater across the irid?

or is my quite basic uncertainty
about what the fuck is in that corner
the symbol of this
my sweet dead reality
unpeeling from itself
like a used-up decal--


and by the way
where did it go, the narrowness of that sweet sweet reality
in which i was clean in my deadness?
every nerve would gloriously misfire
like tangled skeins of embroidery floss
from a messed-up prepacked cross-stitch kit

found in some kind of craft store
on a trip cross-county.

straight from san bernardino
to riverside.

but it was clean when i was there.
i was in a fairyland of deadness, of compression
where the man got the girl
under him
but that didn't happen
but it hurt beyond the capacity of the soul.


every dead thing carries some kind of life in it--matter carries its own memory--
so you didn't succeed in making me
dead, hence
i ask again, i ask you, or me, or whatever the fuck,

IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER?



questions i've never thought to ask before except in some sort of arnold-palmer half-and-half fantasy version:
which fucking one of us is the real thing?  which of us robbed which?  that murder you committed on me, how much of yourself did it lay waste when you did it?

nobody ever asks these things of men like you, you in the corner,
because nobody wants to know.  there are things no man does

and when he does them he is a zombie.

he becomes my zombie.


or i become his.
FUCKING GODDAMNIT IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER.

places: in the city of lost things

when did my world become so small--
or why did it not expand as i expanded?

where do i go to find a more infinite
space, somewhere where the form of me
has room to breathe, is less expected--

is less what i expect?

my fear is gigantic, is bigger even
than my catamaran of a body
sailing on its bed of rain

afraid of any random noise.


we were whirling in and out
of the figures of a dance
in which i was your silent partner.
the rhythm that drove me apart from you
as much held me to you--

it was as strong as fingers
against the lip--it was
like icicles on the inner thigh.

you were my cold thing,
golden icicle god.

i'm wandering things you planed
and am becoming the action
of reaching
to touch the scattered things.
the charred things i watch break in my fingerhold.
the feathered things have played dead
for some time now--their heads are huddled beneath their own cold wings.
there is dental work that must be done in this your stark temple, scars on the columns.

it's a city that was broken down by your wind and rain, o god, hey ho.
the wrath of your divine force.  nobody can touch the land no more.  nobody can touch the land.


i wandered the streets mocking its remains with my pity, the burned-out things,
mohammedan back-alley angels in silhouette became to me
silky objects in a night sky of terror that was the manifestation of the action of my own wandering.
against me the trickling moon shone, i felt its fingers on my face--cry out i cried to the unliving things
cry out o ye sinners of the plain
cry out upon the destruction of your god--see ye what your god hath wrought with his hands
plucking the dusk like grapes, plucking the liquor from out of the vine
by way of the heaviness of its muscat fruit pouring your half-light down his throat
like it were a golden wine.

o my lord for wherefore did you twine your vine about the faded building with its spire dead in the day and night
like the splintered branch of a tree in the day and night spearing the divide between dark and light
my lord wherefore did you sire this honey, this sweet golden honey, if not for your own mouth and throat
wax in the comb
my lord, my lord,
wax in the comb
chicken bone

hair like a beet root

and eyes so fine

they might as well
have been mine.


i can't do anything but turn rage into music--i don't know how
to sit immobile in my rage like a child
in bathwater gone cold--i don't know
how
to witness.

i just know how
to wander.
tethered to a singularity like a dog on a leash.

places: the lost thing soundtrack

thinking about your compromised body
i am seeing in the dark behind my eyelids
this seed of heat and light

not any part of me, for sure,
but
the only thing i think is yours right now
that i can do anything
like hold.

-jan. 19, 2013

places: how i met your mother, season 7

girl i never had,
almost always i am over you, the dream of you, the sweetness of that dream and the sorrow of being cleft like some lightning-struck tree by the occurrence of you within me.

but sometimes i get over you by tiny degrees--sometimes i remember so hard and fast, so far-flung, as if i were made of tiny pinpoints of your light, as if i were a constellation arced over a horizon defined by the gravity of you, bent around you, nothing but the atmosphere
of what drew toward you


you were the longed-for--you were the light
the light called the day
the death of that longing was the dark
the darkness called night

places: the 7 day theory

i am a work of my own art--
seeing this very clearly, the choices i make
in self-presenting, the choice made
inherent
in how to see what i do,
or how to see that which is done to me.

the desperate bravado
of a show of feeling--a feeling, i think,
too deep to be felt.

so it must be shown,
shoved through to the surface, spilled out
like coarse-grained salt on a dark wood table.


my mind never wanted to be in the same place as itself.
sepulchral hands, it thought, wandering a keyboard,
and blood metaphors
to thicken the words--
i was a child.  i am proud of that

and there is no saying i won't regress.



trying to tell the truth
when it is so easy
to make ritual
 
dropping science like galileo dropped the orange

places: underneath my clothes

locked out of my body, again, and looking for some way
to act, think, believe--some way to do something other
than twist and wait,

like food hanged up above
the reach of bear-paws.

it's almost worse than the agony
attendant upon remembrance and acknowledgment,
this present

which is just a plain gray door,
behind which lingers
the comfortable tortures
the exquisite emotional adventures--



looking back at the torturous past
as if through a photo album, saying "remember--
remember how i endured that, and that?
remember that?"

my brain
is an idiot.

places: new haven, ct--div school--outdoor staircases behind the library

double staircase leading out onto a set of parking spaces
a dumpster and a green hill--
the privatest way to enter an already private building.

visually it upholds the impression
created by the nearby grad apartments
that nobody lives here or goes here--
any passerby is accidental or lost,

and the rich red brick exists autonomously,
the pattern of its walls and stairs
a meaningless yet lovely accident

like stars which are set close enough
to be called constellations,
but each one, considered rightfully,

is vividly alone
and not responsible to any human story.

places: reno, nv, motel 6

reno corner of virginia and plum
off the strip but virginia used to be the highway, so it feels central
each intersection not simply a stop but a quantity

looking up over the gas station sign and the pitched mall roofs
at the trees in the save-mart parking lot

under the long-stem white lamps
those thin lacework branches look like
they've been doused
in light.

ministrant angel

ministrant angel, come down on me
rain down your judgment in a heavenly fire

lock up my body in your flame lock it up
hold me down to draw out the human rot--the coating push

of original sin--thrust it through me
thrust out of me the evil in a sound of fire


play my flesh as if it were a drum
something so base to glorify god

fray my nerve-endings with your golden wires
unstring my veins and retune me in flame

resound in me with your celestial harmony
until the black pit of me is charred to nothing

but the echoing

the echoing of
a celestial strain

sequence: "everlong"

meditations on the impossibility of your eyes

1. your eyes know things.  they create the world out of your image.  the things i could tell you, the things i could say--the things i would tell you i knew that you know.  your eyes see no shadows, just objects, just the movement of what is, light or dark, each thing drawn

like the earth to the sun

to serve your purpose.


2.  the things i could bear witness to, the things i see in you
watching

just watching

you walk among warm cities, leveling them to plains
pulsing under the sun
of your gaze
sands shifting in the wind
of your
wet
blink

a thousand years of decay
in one soft close

soft as a breath
fallen from my mouth.


3. and so you create
you destroy

so you create
you destroy

easy, gentle
as a sigh

but giant as the sun
in its pale sky

the eyes of your face
usurp me
i could tell you such things
were they not
in the end
nothing--
what i saw
matters nothing
within the drawn breath
of your gaze.


4. don't release me.


5.  i am not ready to go,
god--

i am not ready
to be blind against
the only thing i see
from shadow.

i will be
your simulacrum--
i will be leveled
as low
as flesh can go.

sequence-form: schuman fantasie in C Major first movement

1.
the heart knows what it
wants              even in defiance
of an object.

i have made myself
sick        on the idea
of your face

but i did not
know you
from adam.


2.
i am wondering
in my slow way
if this makes you lonely,

to be
abandoned
to the garden of my mind

where everything
in the blue moonlight
has turned        to seed.


3.
oh my love
oh my love
on whom

can i pin you?
within what restless        wind tunnel

can i
fix your echo?

within what can i divine you?


4.
i looked at my shadow
in the rush of water

the water had come down

a mountain--the stream had
swelled

against itself

i saw the brief false indent
my shape had made

against the light on the water.


5.
vanesa you left
a room inside my heart
i closed it off to you

grateful and angry
to have felt       something

with a name as distinct

as that of love.

time wore down
the walls        until
the tiniest rekindling within them

burned them away.

heart, what will you do now?

heart, how will you ever learn?

proem: desperation

a cycle (this in particular) always begins where it left off.  i am betrayed; i do betraying.  my body, ever obedient, is about to betray, poised on the

cusp of betrayal.  betrayal of him, and betrayal of itself.  doing anything to be let off--fucking, loving the taste of being touched--i will let anything happen

to let me off.

goddamnit, moon.  even better or worse than where we left it, the feeling of you like a pungent sore in my eye.  like a sty or some other unsavory.

i want to scratch the self out of me; to simulacrate; to become some similar thing

and float free away

like moonlight

which turns what it touches

inanimate.

broad pointilism: "running up that hill"

making     the decision that     i am not ready yet          is still so hard     so hard to make    

in part because     because it implies     that someday i will be ready.

oh god why     why am i left at this angle.     listing to one side     with your name on my lips.

why is my heart broken

why was my heart born broken

why have i always to heartbroke becoming


god oh god where have you left me     what do i learn from herebeing
surrounded by lush stars     the hot dark velvet of space     the taut heaving sheath of time     bent all around me     waiting to be     taken up    taken up and in

ice-planet i am     a burning heart      ice piled up atop     nothing can melt

this vise of ice

poem-form: "sister midnight"

the moment of a leaf's fall,
its turn from stem,
its rest upon
the buoyant air,
a movement within

the pull of the ground.

these moments from time and space are culled
as if i plucked leaves from the air.

tum-tum tum-tum
tum-tum tum-tum
as if i plucked
leaves from the air

rennaissance: tried as kate bush, "running up that hill"

1.
scant,
these touches against
the exposed parts of me
the skin
half-dead
(but alive enough
to take you inside
the cell and
the barely-named
parts of me)


i know
next to nothing,
god.

i leave
all
in your hands.


2.  (life in all its ecstasy)
not yours
the seduction
the seducer's role.

the walls unchanging,
you become
a question of volume.
volume, time, and
the time of our several fears.


3.  (i hit that dead)
your are no
unchanging
phenomenon.

(the blossom of the
cherry
outside its
black-rainslick stem--
an eternity--i stared
at you
for hours

i attempted to enter
a stream
where time
did not matter.
did not matter
hardly
at all.
i held your visage
in the palms of
my heart.)

(i looked and looked
i found you
again and again

until i had
no room

no room
for anyone else)


4. (remembrance of things past)
i
i
i
stutter
when i
feel your name
against the backs
of my eyes.

(gold caverns await you.  ceilings dripping with gold.  you will never know
just how precious
i am)

(i am studded with cold jewels.  colors that have never taken light.)

my hands
are
skeletal gems.
each bone
a diamond

each joint
a bank
of your coal.


5. (echo)
in remembrance.

i ate her gnocchi that night,
laughing with my aunt.

(oranges...
crunk.
each segment segmented
jewellike
against a pavement)

i dig through all sorrows
to find yours.  i dig through
all sorrows
to find yours.
i dig through all sorrows to find yours

nothing i can do
deserves your trust
if i only could
make a deal with god
and get him to swap our places
when the night is dark
no i won't be afraid
no i won't shed a tear
just as long as you
you     you  
stand by me
stand by me
stand by me

essay: "prayer"

every day in the past a blessing wrested for me from time by some force that let me have it.
i am wary and that may make me stupid but always i am grateful, force that gave to me this time
in which i can be loved, and learn how to care.

i am afraid of the future to a considerable degree--for one thing, i am scared of being kicked out of time.

but there's something here:
if i cannot give thanks
for what will be
(the things in which
i have no faith),
i at least can thank god
for what has gone before--
that pizza restaurant,
as an example,
when we still lived in berkeley,
where we went with young
when she was visiting from japan,
and she told me the plot of
field of dreams.
the bathroom was small there.
or the chinese restaurant
off of shattuck
where she told me about pet semetary.
or in college,
its several abysses--
throwing roses
purchased on the corner
at vanesa's house
then riding away
on my bike
because i was drunk
and secretly in love.
or walking back from trini's
knowing
that one thing
at least
that i'd given away
could never be
returned,
and the pride in me
that it had been given
entirely
free, not coaxed out
by words of love or passion,
not the result
of a bargain.

it is simple if not easy to thank you for these things god.
thank you also for this fear of tomorrow, because, like everything else,
it is part of my time.

poem: "baroque execution/nonspecific as to how"

it is asking too much of
some types of pain
that they be always silent,
always contained
in a heart beating violently.

and asking too much, maybe,
of some great shames
that they be held so privately,
like flames
in a hearth

too old to be known,
deep down in the earth
where the metals glow moltenly.

the richness of them
like wide jewels, like amber
pried from the tree, like fruit
on the vine, like fine dirt,
like cold sky--

hurt
is mine
in all its
fecundity.

sonnet-form eventually: "sunlight lick"

thick hungry moonlight
touch as if it were leaves or bark
my heart
silver me over
lay down an ocean of inert white on me

that i may move
through this gross fire
in secrecy.


light me to bank me,
tamp me down,
light me to create
a shadow-ground
teach me that lesson
you've taught me before
the one i have learned
over and over--
teach me and teach me,
make me your trick;
teach me all night
until sunlight licks
the horizon, a white radiant skin
that makes shadows turn back, and turns me thin.

poem: "moon you asshole"

fucking blank-ass half-moon
with its fucking blank hungers
sucking the dark to its very edge
and then withholding its light
dyeing only the fringes of the objects
it touches
with white.


touch me o moon
for real this time
use me to your rhythm,
your circadian rhyme--
don't stop with the skin,
nor the muscle nor marrow
but down to the idea
of the body, to the narrow
est jointure of thing
and its shadow.

use me like a tide
driving to the sides
of a beach trimmed with cliffs.

fucking asshole moon
with your fingers cold and stiff.

poem: "i stood at a stone gate" x2

i stood at a stone gate--beyond it,
a city
blushed in moonlight.

its wide avenues
brushed by moonlight.

its spires, its monuments
touched by moonlight.

its center, a fountain,
engulfed by moonlight,
light-washed, cool light,
even the depths
sparkling

like a diamond.
i thought
i walked
the avenues,
plunged

my hands, my face
into its waters.

but the moonlight was
a chimera;
i touched only
the stone of the gate;
i felt only

the raw warmth
of my own hand
against stone.

poem: "i stood at a stone gate"

a blank
fulfillment
--

despair is
something like that,
if you can call
what i have been
desperate.


ridden, trembling,
over a crumbling plain
i was pulled up short
at a rough stone gate.

beyond it, a city of bone
encased in warm silk,
in red and black depth.

i felt the blood beat
in my lips and tongue,

all eager to taste:


the hum of my mouth
was the fulfillment.
the emptiness of my mouth
was the blank.
i stood at a stone gate

and said your name.

ravel: "the enchanted garden" orchestra

there is an absence in me
fed
slowly
by remembrance of you

the cadence
in which
my heart beat
at your closeness


so
hard
to acknowledge
the passion
that i felt

so difficult
to become what i am
wholly
so wholly i was

yours

ravel: "conversation of beauty and the beast" 2 pianos

i never thought
that light was anything more than a refraction,
the beam from the stars
a wet nightmare
the shreds of cloud

across the moon
a strange dream

a familiar vision of
bleeding things...
fingertips, gums,
the place between the legs
all sticky with it.


it is not beauty that makes me
love her

nor is it darkness--it is
the simple fact of it:
my love is a briar rose.

ravel: "laideronette, empress of the pagodas" 2 pianos

never doubting
that the silk i wear
would be any more sweet
upon my skin
than rough fiber--

that i am myself
whatever i am clothed in.

secret life,
watching the clouds float
through the roof of glass.

nobody ever guessed

my thoughts to be
of something
less than silk.

ravel: "little tom thumb" 2 pianos

it might have been
a blade of grass i lifted

but it was my sky,
my all.

i have never lived within
a small struggle,

never covered myself
against the rain that covered me
at a single drop.

i have never shown
less than courage.

ravel: "pavane of the sleeping beauty," 2 pianos

i was dreaming for a long time,
lulled as if by the sound of the rain:
dreaming of the open casement,
the copper-colored silk
of the window hangings
bellying slowly in the wind.
my golden body draped
as if it had dropped diffident
as a petal to the shade
under the rosebush--
the gentle rise and fall
of the breath in my lungs,
the caress of my dark curls
against my cheek,

always fresh,
always new.
i dreamed of myself
against the stone of the tower

the bellying copper silk...

in at the sill
a green strand grew--
it traced a pattern
that became
new
in the stillness.
then i wished for you.

no longer old in my freshness,
i dreamed myself awake--
i dreamed myself
entwined in your arms
draped
against you
as if
you were
hot
stone.

block-form "restless mouth"

the thing inside i carried, that i housed,
swells outward, as if ungrateful--as if incapable
of more than feeding and growing--
but it is i who have fed it--i who have housed it--
it has dined in my hell.

perhaps i have let it become me--perhaps
the thing i swallowed has swallowed back--
perhaps i am no longer more
than a blind white mouth
and a rapturous white tongue

tasting, tasting everything--tasting
without feeling.

in the mirror i see black-silk head
and green eyes--they obsess me--
nothing like me

who is, inside,
only flavor.

poem: block-form 1

i am going to be exposed like 
the inner curve of a peony's petal.
as if that thing was in the palm,
as if it were within the caress
of a setting sunlight.
i am going to sink into transparency
like a dying day, dissolving into water
as if i were rock for a thousand years.



you broke the back of my horizon.
you broke my world.  at its beginning
i was a broken thing, a mold
through which thick white trickled.
i was the plains to your river, and you would
flood, map me, draw your world over me
like a thick down quilt
put me down in softness.
put me down into your glory.



i turned to the wall
i turned to the wall
i turned to the wall
and said your name.
i do not know
if anyone could hear it
over the sound
of the rain.

intro

restless mouth is just the name of a concept.  at this particular point, the concept is horror stories.  i am going to write a series of horror stories, and call them restless mouth 2.  the concept of restless mouth is that a repetition never repeats, which doesn't seem that important until one considers the number of things one expects to repeat.  this is intrinsically a horrific concept.  if the concept changes, i'll note it on here.