I hear the sound of birds reflect

Against the walls of the dark

The birds do not
Forgive, so, then,
Their sound forgives
And if the dark, a broken pedagogue
Could goggle at the sifting of my heart
In the night which does not sift
But blurs into each movement
Living at the end of a noiseif night
Had eyes to look within my form
And understand the grind, the beat,
And understand the heat of the beat
If so
Would I be connected thus, to night
By thudding signals from my heart hoping
Hoping to catch on the bleak radar blipping
Out nocturnal blips?????????? Thudding
Towards the ruin of oblivious day
Hoping to find a pattern
In the secret of the shade; for, both
Are shades, my heart and night
And both beat. If one stops
So does the otherI would
Put money on the mortal muscle,
Rather than bet on the extravagant
And immortal animal of sleepthe sleep of death of night
I remain intact, a full person
In my knowing heart of blood in spite
Of all that tells it not to beat again-
-Perhaps, my friend,
I will discover that in the healing is the disease
And in the suffering that ends
Without pleasure at it having ended
So these things are one.
It is in the worm of a phrase.
The importance modified without parade
Hushed as the fraud found out. The
Second and its minions
That all coagulate under the
Brutality of light . . . .
The slow light of the sun, as it begins
Cannot be much fun.
Dude, its not that Im
Trying to tell you the way
It is, but have told you
Something else, hoping
Yud fuck it up, and come
To your own conclusion. Can you at least
Cram the information described with
Meaning, and not leap
Upon franchisethe first
That pops up????????????
Swollen with the heap of day
The embassies are doled
The certainties are proclaimed
To the reverberant hula of trumpets
Singing in the wake of a premonition
That is lost, dark, light and lost
. . . . . .
The WORLD is juxtaposed to human error.
I see the WORLD and find no error in it.
I see the people and find much error in them
In how they vegetate in the parentheses of living
An eternal stopgap, an abdication
That makes people emotionally lazy.
They have lots of hangups: disdain and conflict
Breach the sphere with imperfections
The delicate sphere of peace o o o to be back in the caul again
When mother beats the young human on within his heart or her heart . . .
The strangers who brought us into this WORLD
Try desperately to make one at the least
Appear wellrounded and properly normal
Even in the obscene places of the psyche.
What I speak of: it is a serendipity, a perfection, an incorporation
Of all parts to make the summit
Revealed in moments, between others
When two people mesh their feelings together
Like amorphous clay, and know that they
Are comprised of a similar mould.
And moments of quietude when one is alone
And fathoms the somberknows it as equally there
As the things less morbid,
And accepts both as having a place
In the WORLD of human error
And the WORLD is not so much human error
As what flowers, perfectly, from it
Like these affinities of the mould.
Like the somber, meshing with happiness
When one is in their unique aloneness . . . . . .
In an effort to create, the lines
Come single file, and naturally
Dissect each other, in the attempt
To get at the center of this phrase

Do not speak from the center
Of this phrase. Speak like a howl
From far off, an animal that paces
Along the embankment. Speak
From the fringes, as tho what you
Said made the air thick, and
Was humbled to whispers by the
Press of air against the sound
You made, a communication
That is a tangent. An impression
Of a hand upon clay. A figure
Emerging, supernatural derelict,
Head hanging down with the same
Grim flourish: his gabardine
Suit, draped over wiry bones
And hanging down, the buckle stringing in the
Wind. Such a figure will emerge
From the screen of the rain, with eyes
That are black whorls. A howl from far off.

This could not
Be something that you truly wanted
To articulate, and is trampled by a phalanx
Of more ominous images images that make
The air thick in its own perpetuity, as
Tho what we could not see, something
Blithe as air, were to possess in its energy
A heaviness that increases
With each thrusting of the mindless wind,
As tho perpetuity were a goo
And air the thing
That must wade in it . . . . . .
So, I plant the seed
In the soil of my disquiet
Imperfect ligaments grow after a time from the soil
Each particular is a flowering each fearful detail
Seen in the sadness that thrives from an imperfect seed
I could deny this idiotic growth its permanence,
The severity of mistakes that haunt the
Flowering complicates the details of my sadness
While crashing the large statements together
As like a house of atoms, crashing
In a particle acceleratorthe plain sense of things
Solidifies into a cube of spontaneous depth of simple feeling
Augmented by the bizarre into chance clarity . . . .
Anyways: I could hack down the nature of the plant
With a machete, and leave it subsequently false
But then I would be hacking down my life
To only the good, to only happiness, which
Is not what life is wholly made of . . .
So I let the plant grow out its canker
And hope one day the plant will become beautiful
Sustained by my own magnificent sadness
So that, I can see some beauty in the sadness
But, then, I find that the parts of life, where I am content,
Appear naked, public, anonymousand, I find I can only grow
The green ligaments of life, can only grow
The dreams into theory and the theory into wrongness in this life
From perpetual grief. . . . . .
In the place where we are born . . .
Yu feel, immediately, a persistent nausea climb
Ahead of yur throat, upon entrance
To the place, as of one who stumbles out of time
And into a sort of fugue state: leaping out
The serenity of yur changing mind-
-And into vague turbulence; and, yu worry, because
There is a soft sense
Of something kind of evil in the air. Yu assume
That it is spring however cannot be certain that seasons even exist
Or if anything exists, besides what does exist
In this little fugue of yurs.

A trouble of violets shall scan
The scene, themselves surrounded by a brink of shifting
Lilacs: this ornate isolation of overwrought architecture
And nude cherubim. Yu find that all of this is flanked on
All sides by a series of tasteful granite pillars,
Searched with vine . . .
Reminiscent of STONEHENGE, in how
The motives behind both structures remain
Doubtful tho numerous; often, strange.
In time, in time, the silly font in the center
Will go dry. Before this, however,
It will spool, copiously and
Vehemently a dream of water into
A poolheavy with motion.

This image alone could assign this plaza,
Which is a beautiful cage, to a site of significance.
In its churn, one finds the burn of a life
That has come thru: meditations, theories
The diligent, tireless browsing of a life
Spent within spangled borders. Troubling thought:

Ugh, loo loo loo! The vine no longer searches.
And the flowers, once flayed with
Technicolor are sparseand gray . . . . . .
My own is not my own, it belongs to someone else
And still I claim it as mine, since it is more
Important to me than to the other,
Who is never around to enjoy it, anyway.
So I steal it, in the hopes that he would
Not realize that it was gone. I soon find
That it did not rightly exist without him,
It is now half of itself, when given me
To extrude its peripheral meaning
From the mire, and relate that to something
Quite intimate, though plain, and without detail.
Plain in the ways that what I had had before
Still had not been mine though I made a feeble attempt
To make it mine. This makes what I have now, plain
Because I cannot fully see it as my own
It is merely a temporal attachment to me
Rather than a necessary limb, an aid
To the anatomy that does not pass on-
-And so I give the thing back to the person
From whom I had originally stolen it, and
Understand that in order for one to own something
It must not only belong to that person, but
Be OF that person, a serious entity
That supports life without derailing it
By the power of it, the power of something
That abbreviates the levity of these dead syllables, and
And holds the indictment of the WORLD against it, with
With careless, tender hands . . . . . .
The attempt to cheat oneself out of the universe
And arrive with a clear head at the gates of HEAVEN
Without needing to explain that particular subject

That is, the subject of the shifting of the universe
I attempt to cheat myself out of a slice of that metaphor
For the sake I might profit from my own ignorance
My own forsaken knowledge: published against the walls
Of my brain, like ancient drawings
On the walls of an ancient cavemy mortality
Is a metaphor, a sensory metaphor; or, a type of intelligence that begs
To be taken back to
The truculence of early manhood, those days, those
Days when Answers & Truths denied explanation
Tho we found many of both they both
Led always to another frayed end, an end indeed
But frayed, an imperfection at the root
Of the circuits that seemed out of our control to extend back
To whatever Answers & Truths we had solidified
And the trouble was that
We could at that point find no frayed ends
And thought each Truth & Answer as impenetrable

. . . . . .

Since then I have not thought about any sort of ends at all,
Whether they lead back to definitive means does not matter
Neither does it matter whether the ends were frayed ends,
Which, actually, goddamn, is a peculiar way to put such a
Phenomenon . . . .
Tho my curiosity regarding these organic imperfections
Still burns to wangle a formula from shapes
It nonetheless has gone thru the dissolution of ice
Into water
And now the thing that I have left is prayer . . . . . .

I cannot tolerate serenity in
Words, excluding one particular
Serenity: a seeking stillness
That makes the mind feel as though
It had entered another quadrant, more lucid
Of space and time, between the spaces
Of time. Fixing the figure, at the first,
In a spot of reality that grows more and
More confusing by the secondpacked
With strangenessand soon, we realize
The place: it is ours, tho stripped
Of that familiar concord between images
And, we are left bruised, and naked
And frustrated, with all the ignorance
Of a soul still in utero, lacking form
And shape. Our own infant wisdom matures
Into banal intelligence, and, suddenly
The strangeness is gone, as the shine
From dross . . . that is, until
Resurrected, and cultivated, with
Extreme cautionaware, now,
Of a delicate situation . . .
Such is the persuasive carefulness I find
In Rilke and his poems. Only by means
Of longing for the meaning, could I find
The purposeonce typified in the exterior, and
Now gone beneaththe purpose
Between a muse so very fraught . . .
In yielding with a weak mind
To this unfortunate alien
I develop in myself and for my friends
And for all creatures and all apparitions
A private clarity, in seeing them: a strongly
Deserved love for all the seminal creatures
And apparitionssome ugly
And some vile the visage of Eros
Can be seen, fully, in my mind, dominated
By the volition of years, of mortality
Fast encroaching encroaching towards
Truth, as the quiet angle of a shadow
Creeps with passing time across
The sundialbut, she is indomitable
Tho kind, and refuses accurate
Translation: swiftly she forgets
Herselfas of someone virtuous
Who, for a moment, forgetting to be good,
Shall spike an explanation for the
The senseless will of a WORLD, abruptly
Switched: a wrong place, where someone virtuous
Might disregard patience, in anticipating
The ebb of vague desires to offend,
And show, in themselves, the antithesis
To all and every virtue that, apparently
Had previously been upheld and what
Is more was communicated, to others
By themthru mostly selfless actions
And pious tonguesuch people, so it goes
Will feed the opposite and indulge the sin
Before it even has the chance
To retreat, as I have said, back
Into fabled cells, collecting forever
Tho invisible, behind the shadow
Of an Unreal Mind. In Rilke, I decipher
The painful peace of words that are
Bound, unwillingly, to depict all things
Beautifully, in both sound
And image . . . each word lamenting that it must
Be beautiful, in order
To be meaningful . . .
Excessive peace mortifies
The subject and the inner conflict
It would seem, denies itself,
By how the words can sway
And keep the rhythms afloat . . .
Nonsense. Something more is required.
In X and Y I see no silent
Cacophony behind thoughts, which blur
Awhile, in the head, and blink away . . .
In these tired men of ice there is
No wavering on the brink of an idea,
Tho indeed, apparently the pause
Would be there, had you prior knowledge
Of the pessimism possessed of each,
In private. The scope, thru which
Both saw the WORLD as but hindrance
To ageless death and death, as medium
Between themselves and more desolate
Discoveries that prove the WORLD
As fickle, and lacking consolation . . .
Well . . . I don't see it, because, well,
Even if these tired men of ice
Had any reservations, any impurities
The words they are too beautiful. They
Scarce trip over a root in the
Syllable. Nor do they seem to suggest
A quiet wonder for the echoes:
An accumulation of grim references,
From an origin mysteriously robbed
Of origin. This is no simple scream, forced
Out and upwards from the scratchy
Throat of idle intelligence . . . rather
I feel that the muse by definition is inspired
To evade the nature of itself: a taunt, a character . . .
Created, within the troubled womb
Of its own, intense mind. Thus,
We find the fear in negative capability,
The terror of the sublime, sealed
In Rilke's German as a prophecy
To see such opposition, and push
Against it, and bleed out harmonies
On the whirling structure of a strand . . .
Harmony, which, despite its solitary
Peace, and despite the lack of oddity
In languagewhich in itself can be
Superficialdespite all of this . . . .
Well, Christ, the harmony can still afford
To be harmonious, because
The push is still present, and the terror
Is still present, and yet absent
Of peculiarity, of deficiencyin other words,
The peace is the subject, and the subject
Is peculiar, tho the words
Are not. It is that push, that struggle
To enhance the vulgar . . . .
To make something weird
Into something sublime . . . . . .
Look into the eyes of a monster
They roll like a paraplegic
It is necessary that in order
To destroy the eyes one must be savvy
To the clarity of purpose that is secured behind them
Passing itself off as furtive, plucked
From a timid sort of grace, and delivered like mail to your
Diversions, courtesy of that regrettable human blunder . . .
Yu go back to the post office
And tell them to return it to the sender
We tried and failed
To divert ourselves from thinking of that day
The eyes of the monster
Are continuum each that promise death
And the challenge is to die
Without looking at them
They are portals to a nether abscess
A place of the clouds to be engulfed
The build of the monster
Is never really known for sure
But the eyes are there.
The eyes I see clearly keenly
Fresh as water on my tongue
After keen thirst
Description of her hands:
Loose and roving,
Each digit is a chattering,
Purposeless gestures . . . . . .
The eye is the monster,
The hand is her eye.
The scrape of the moon resides
Somewheres upwards from the clouds
The clouds obscuring in whiteness
All that makes up the sky
The sky revealing space
Of the greatest kind of intent
And a few pocks of planets
And the sun
All that we orbit, and all that that is in orbit
With: a larger reserve of gravity that yet splices
Into smaller relevance
And, at that point, the perambulation
Is already blunted, severelyand, yetgravity builds up,
Thru some fluke: a sort of act of revenge,
For being so small a point on the chart.
This is not food for thought. This
Is the tranquil being, bled. This is
The product of our peace, our peace made
With our galaxy for shrouding our universe . . . . . .
The day drags on. The day
Is without color or insight,
It is without all things besides
The fact that it is a day
That drags on
In the hopes that monotony
Thru repetition might become
A more fruitful evening
From a wistful exertion
That merely clogs enuff
Between the morning and
The afternoon to spike
A fever of thought within
The dome, and leave me
Thinking of my duties to think,
Which will result in strungout
Feelings, and intense, repeating
Despair that bleeds into
The next day
A more sobering thought
Is this: what if my inability
To get things done were only
Constraints against myself and
The reality of discovering
Higher reasons for quitting . . . . . . ?
An echo from out the primordial dream
Splices the future of our thresholds
Into a present reality, as we awaken.
A section of who we are remains in the ancient ectoplasm-
-And, as we go about accomplishing our future
By means of memory in reverse to fathom
What has not happened yet, the present sickens,
And reality becomes loose and out of focus
The perimeter is fallen from the VOID
Like something collapsed to the proponents
And the fragments of the splice of my future
Live in the lonely regard of this inimitable reality
Unwilling to connect the memory to its dwellingplace
Unable to take the memory of being, inhumed by TIME
And place it in the echo the echo that is real and vague
As footfalls on the stairs, during the night
Heard by one who is sleeping in the next room
And this is another dimension of the killingfields of TIME
My eyes roll back into my head as I recollect the perimeter
That once had kept my future and my past from the skew
Skew of useless investments, in no such inimitable present
But only a dream, without sound enough to cherish the echo
This being the perimeter of the VOID in a cage
Caught like a brontosaurus in the tar of my past
So that it would not mingle this future of mine
With a memory that goes in reverse; a league of clarity
Reveals like a magicians trick, and deems the curse
To be lain within these seeming words . . . . . .
I could not tell you now what I had
Previously been thinking of, even as
I think the same thing now as I had
Been before. The reason for this is
That as I calculate what I will think
Of, what I had thought of is compacted by
That process . . . compacted, and folded over
Onto itself into a miniature
Cube of rage
In an attempt to go forth and characterize
Yet another thought as being mine, the
Cube distorts the process of all forms-
-Of thought in general until it is all
A single, absurd dithyramb, which,
In being caught up
In motion, for its own sakefails
To rein in the purpose behind the tangent
In question, and leaves that process
Without constant life. I do not know
Why this happens, but can tell you:
The original thought has been
So far mangled that I can barely
Discern what it was. As a result
Of this, I take my shoes off and
Throw them out the window, so that
I can bask in the nonsense of thought
Without thought, place without time,
Decisions made about what to do
About something in which it is
Better that no decision be made,
But I decide, anyway, and am left
To decide again . . . . . .
The beautiful image is at rest
It once had been an image for the kings,
And, now, the varnish, lost: the numbering of stones
That bud along the swale of the muddy margent
And now it is an image for the poor
Faceless as a stone, an image left alone
To reveal in trembling weight
The astonishing persistence of the real
But a reality independent of its purpose,
It burns out the psyche with mysterious
Beginnings
The beautiful image is at rest
It once had been caught up in motion
So that no image had been there
But in the motion of something absurd
That concentrates reality into a wallop
An artificial blur, an intimate blur
Seen only clear by those who are at rest
Thus, the image ceases to be an image:
So that the waste of the poor at rest
Can mangle it to suit their own absurd clarity . . . . . .
The image creeps, you do not know
The image as it creeps, but only after,
When it has slowly gone away from you,
Leaving an imprint of itself for you
To decipher, any way you wish
Entering a double space outside of space
And thus not. But what is the space
The image, and wherefore it creeps,
What are these things???? Determine
The image first, and what accounts
For ityou find, shadows are profligate
In this area of the state
And bloom like termites in the wood.
The image is full of shadows
A variegation, summoned as one
Tho it is bleak, like the faces of those
At the funeral of a bad, bad
And evil man. The definishun of the image
Is aimless. It describes a wide
Circumferenceyou rely on
The fact that there must be an end
In there, somewhere; tho you seem
To find no end but one that you yourself
Are able to conjure from a broken
Synapse in yur head, rapidly
Bleeding out. The image
Is a farce. It holds the power
Of a mutant, in that
One first must see the normal way
In order to detect anything that defers.
The image creeps, she creeps and creeps,
And does not stay for long, and goes
Off as with the purging of the sun
From sky. And so, the image dies . . . . . .
I have crossed the desert of the mind . . .
Western winds flay the dark dunes. My skin is caked with sand. The sun
Is burning my face. The bite of the sand
And I have in the desert night, seen the moon
Cradled like a rheumy eye
In the impression of a cloud

I have a pocket where I put the things and people-
-That have lost meaning. The pocket
Is full of isolated theories and vulgar and general ideas
And, the pocket is itself nothing:
Well, not true: Its an eddy where things thrust into it
Flush in a cleft of darknessfight to be freed
From the discipline of hopelessness that
The eddy condemns them to feel, robbing
A sense of duty from the SOULs of those
And whatever enters the pocket: the duty to return all the
Flatly proven things, to the moment before they were
Proven, flatly proven, by a wrinkling of prophecy:
A diabolical pleating of the embroidered tablecloth,
Or, a notch of significance, somewhere in the fancy
Piece of tasteful furniture: a small rift in the curly continuum
Perpetrated by the ultimate apparatus: a vessel of obliteration
Given license to obliterate fantastic perfection
At the hairy hands of the small
Child: flashing the unreal fangs of his toothy grill: enamored
By various destructive feelings, given action to their shade in his nearly
Scientific wielding of the apparatus:
With a whiplash, creating his creation
Of a notch within a universe of perfect furniture: he whispers weird evil
In the other room: the volatile,
Mistaken room, his large words
Left unheard, but to the immortal, unforgiving X:

And this must happen if the intrinsically meaningless thing
Is to gather back whatever it was that was right about it

And, each thing in my pocket speaks to me of its existence
In a voice that is not altogether sad
But mournful of the peculiar power that had been
And now, as the years pass, is no longer peculiar,
But power, indeed. Sigh. I look out of my window
And see the people cross their own deserts

And ford their own strange ways
And live the lives I could not live myself . . . . . .
The point is made
The point is made without considering
All the dangerous upshot of that point.

After a little meandering through knowledge
We uncover to our horror a lack thereof
To be in conflict with what we know-
-We thus contain a lack thereof
Within the same sensibility: seeing
The truth as whole, we thus
Restrict our lacking knowledge to focus
On the question only
Which could be wrought as iron from imperfect thought
And by doing so, we garner the ability
To display the truth, if even
In wrong forms. We examine the mythic
Side of the coin, and, we find the examination
Yields little progress beyond the sanctified
Thoughts we started with, and, which
Now seem doubtful.

So you take that point and you make
A nave of it: a sultry moon
Reflectd off the water abruptly disturbd
So that the moon is cheapend by the look
Of the water. So thus is the point
Or, at least, what it becomes is not so much
Than the reflection of a greater object.

And then, the point is made again,
And all that could have been left out
Is put back inall not taken into
Account, is receivd, by the message
That that point was, ultimately,
Trying to repulseandwe see the vast
Reality of being as being but a moon; or, rather
A blip fast gone but shorn slow from
Memory, and, in such absence, the mind
Creates its own nave, its own fickle moon-
-That reflects all our stubborn ideology
With an exaggeration of the factual moon, a counterpart,
A pale, wan eye, contemplating serenity-
-And yet we see that vision as unreal
While the copy of this vision, veritable,
Maintains the stronger doctrine of our SOULs . . . . . .
The millions in your heart each count
A chord, for you, upon the harp
It is not haunt if it is art
And harp goes quickly down the strings
And beautifies the feeble things

The millions in your heart are dumb.
I recall, as once a boy
That faces and appearances
Seemed without clear difference,
And each one played upon the harp
Given identity, thru music

There is something that relates
Without a rhyme. In time,
The ellipse, the arc will swing
Down, unable to hold the curve,
And such a harp will tell of millions
On the other side of the ellipse

Most of millions hurt somehow.
Most of them do not know the hour
From the day, and live the dour
Pursuit, without knowing a
Familiar root.

I will now strum for those millions
In the heart. And the millions vast abroad
The sky. The sky is soon found
To be a vast mirror
For the EARTH

The mirror is a metaphor for millions
The millions are the curve of the arc
The arc is the swaying of the chord
Upon the harp . . . . . .
What knowledge I have of myself
I have distorted. I would not be the one
To ask, regarding my secrets
And the noise they make in my brain
Is a soothing falsetto
I am contained within an embryo
Like so many men and women before me
They have gone on to live lives
Both fulfilling and tragic
And, the scene presents itself:
I squat on a bench, in the park,
Watching air drift, as though
I could see the air drift and I watch the leaves fall
Onto the ground, littered
With grass and strewn debris,
Experiencing the slow coeval
Between the oaks and their branches
And their nice leaves, and the specter of chill
Wind that moves the leaves, the nice leaves
Experiencing this, I am someone else
Remedied by the everlasting nodes that spike
To fit my ends into beginnings
And drain the meaning like piss in the shower . . . . . .
Behind the compassion is rhetoric that
Tries to pass off itself as a giving way:
Yu impart unto me yet another ramble, barely sustained
By elliptical mantrasunresolved, petty logicwhich yet yu see as grand,
Because it is your own brandtho logic itself
Is not enough to ease this hunch of mine that this monotony that yu are
Repeating to mefor the zillionth timethis harassment is not merely
A natural reflexbut, indeed, is the work of a deliberate obsessive:
A subtle retaliation against my own antagonism
Developed naturally from the start of my life towards most others even
Just to quell the teasing antennae of this my sourceless guilt . . .
Behind the compassion the useless rhetoric
There, I find the reason for this clot in my arm.

Until I have used up my scattered wisdom
Until the wisdom becomes too scattered . . .
When the crows on the bough dip out
At once, and, one of them, in haste
To catch up, loses control and crashes
Into a windshield; when a man positions
Himself, every night, at the same table
In the same bar, and stares through round
Glasses at oblivion, and sometimes the
Waitress' assin these instances
I will find you in my mind, and, perhaps
Hear your dissonant
Laughter, and see, finally, the arsenal
Of pathologies that nurse
Each guttural declarative, as would a breast,
Yu massage the lump in yur throat
Back down, into the pit of yur stomach
Left to rot and languish down the chute.

Behind the sun of your words I see the night
And in each night a darkness never known
Besides in haunted corridors, where the symbol
Becomes yur mind, and how you actually feel
Is suddenly oblique, and the inclination to be kind
No longer seems apparent. It depends on what
Door is opened, however, and that is crucial to understand.
As you tread carefully down the haunted hall . . . you wonder:
Which identity are you fated to receive? Disingenuous qualities
Of the self you builtfor so long trapped
Behind the bogus door you end up choosingone of many doors
That number down the symbol of the hallnow, once freed, they roam
Somewhere in yur scruples, and, the WORLD seems
Really uplifting, emancipated from the interstices:
These demons, funnily enough, eased into the position of virtue
By tribulation, so that, simply by quaking under the seism of bad things
You who harbor daily demons
Assumed yourself as someone
Wiser than you were, and, more confident
And more poised than you were, and so then-
-Became these things, simply because it was
The way you thought yourself to be,
Based off of yur own horrific experiences.

But in each topical rant and personal miserere
Was the same dispassionate talk: the same
Pursed thrill injected into the mundane
As into the importance: the purpose fragged
Before it is released from your lips;
You are a figure that stands on a figurative
Ledge, about to drop. You are a sanity
Forgotten, and so then judged insane by all
Except for me. But I never will understand
You, or the dual credit of your words . . .
Will they stand resolute before time?
Will they disappear within a minute's hush?
Will my absent body again be given hands
To grab the wheel?????????????????????????????????????
Each is a petty circumstance, compared
To what I could have had, and even when
I receive that, there is always some
Trouble about it, so that it never appears
Right; even when I fix it, the stain
Remains, like red wine on white linen.
This relic of my ancient life is given
To you, and, I am left to cultivate my brain
And hear the pulse that snickers in the wrist
And only know an image of the rain
Upon your hair, as my eyes opened
While we kissed. They shone, in the gray afternoon
Like orbs of condensed space, reflecting all
But what they are. This is the image
That I am condemned to remember, as tho
By reflex: when my eyes opened, I noticed
That yours were not: dark eyelashes
Dipping upwards: solemn girl: the brow contracting
And, then, relaxing, as if shaking off some cosmic pain:
Some everloving assumption that could redeem you
And destroy me in the cage I built for us-
-To starve, together, in disembodied guilt . . . . . .
Passing like a wane each ghost
Consumes the spirit of the one before
While the ghost before wept, for being out of touch
With being. It could have had its way,
It could have said what it needed to say
But then, the rhythm spikes, and the wheel turns
And suddenly the ghost before has lost its voice:
To be spoken in a different way
By the ghost after. The wheel turns
And, what any ghost could claim
Is lost, between the furtive lines of being.
Thus it would seem that the wheel is forgotten time
That has suffered too much the blear of consumptive
Minutes. Thus it would seem that each ghost
Represents the breaching and altering of origin
They do not move into new forms, but merely
Etch a difference out of what always was.
The ghosts they walk across the EARTH
Tweaking and manipulating the core of the EARTH
As if by making it sound an altered elegy
For these ghosts innumerable, fixed in purgatory,
As if by making the EARTH swell with hate
Each ghost could then learn to hate hate, but simply
Because it was popular: the ghosts persist
Not so vacantly thru the disorder
Only to come to some different malefaction
Appearing righteous for its reason to destroy
That only appears righteous. If the ghost before
Had seen what the ghost after had made of the EARTH
And, the ebb and flow of it . . . . from something living so long
As to be extinct, to something formative and oblique
By this we see that each ghost is the specter
Of a former malignancy that struggles to be righteous
And only ends up distorting the pantomime
And mangling the origin, in the chase to describe
A finer sphere, before the final ghost
Invokes a new beginning that denies the summation
And restricts all that could be to varying, unspoken
Melodies of rancid time, a time that is fallow
And rancid. A time before the origin is there
That dismisses the need for ghosts to speak
What should not be formed in words
What should be left unrecorded
So that we may heal our own unfinished specters
Without displacing the specters to external ghosts
Who build upon the other, and eliminate the summation
By expanding it. We shall leave the final word unrecorded,
And reach the summation
By eliminating it . . . . . .
That's what I would figure would
Happen. Cuz things don't work
Out stupidly unless we make it
Out to be a stupid thing that must be done.
Have fun with that. Meanwhile,

The corrugated cardboard day whines
Out. Simply
Because of these other findings things
Are left up for grabs, and everybody
Like pigeons to bread, clucking to the beat of
Masticating.

That's what I would figure would
Happen. Cuz things don't work
Out stupidly unless we make it
Out to be a stupid thing that must be done.
Have fun with that. Meanwhile,

The corrugated cardboard day whines
Out. Simply
Because of these other findings things
Are left up for grabs, and everybody
Like pigeons to bread, clucking to the beat of
Masticating. Shit
Whines out. You
Look through the window, like
A tired hawk out at that lady,
Checking her bag
For keys. The sidewalk
Burns in a slope down past
The limits of what you can see from
Where you are. After getting
Up from your chair,
You sigh after an improbable indulgence.


This is you: I said: my name is ash,

My name corrupts that which is susceptible
To naming, but left unsaid. What things I can
Say I say in ash, refusing naming them.

. . . . . .

So you sigh sighing,
Sighing turns growling but
It comes up from guts and
So then hushes in
The travel. But at the guts
It burnt to ash:

Carbon, we're
All carbon, you think. Following
Getting up and sighing,
Your future lies ahead of you,
You follow it to the kitchen,
And times to come spread down ahead
Of you like the blade of a KNIFE.

Like the burning
Of sidewalk down, beyond
What eyes can reach. Pigeons
Lie there and peck

To their own pigeony beat. Pigeons
Lie beyond what you can see in ash,
With sullen, red eyes, eyes
Like beads, eyes of pigeons,
Perching on them, on you, like a name . . . . . .
These illustradas, these colors like oils
These thick patterns papering
The walls of the elevator, these high depictions
Coiling high depreciating around
The huddled walls of the elevator. These paper figurings of
Quaint paper growth figurings indecipherable leaves or petals
Growing into themselves. Some pink or green plant of some kind.
utlined in black. It is something familiar
And amorphous. Soaking up the fat of the pattern that
Grows across the claustrophobic walls, maybe
Leaves or petals. Maybe it is just a Summer decor
For something unbreathable . . . . . .
There is no waking up, we are asleep and dream of waking up
From this WORLD of ether and of dust. The doom is changeling
That makes us think that we have woken up, only to find
Ourselves in a shout of sinking dreams that dress our perceiving
In the light linens of assumed reality. We do not see the trance of light
Illuminating the room of southeastern aspect
At the breach of day, it cloaks over the way
That things are perceived . . . . . .
When one is in the grave
They do not think or feel.
When one does not think,
Or feel, does that make
Them dead? Perhaps, but
They still breathe, still may breathe,
May go about their daily
Chores, without once
Refining the nuance
To obtain, at the least,
A bare sort of personality
That strains to act on something
Of much importance to them.
If one does not feel, then,
They do not think to feel,
Since, up until this point,
There was no need for empathy
There was no need for sympathy
To become the body a wreck of itself,
For the sake of knowing of pain.
To become your body of glass
And know yur mind the same as glass.
There is that, and, there is to rely on the
Intrinsic value of things,
Rather than connect yur lack of sorrow
The sorrow of all the musty masses, to an empty
Placation: that you seem the same
As the musty masses. You are yur body, yu fiend,
You needless product of sperm and ovary
Married to possess all that is wrong
In a single soul of elegant sensibility
Deigned over by a mind, without doubts
And yet, he errs, this man without thought
Or feeling. He knows that he will err,
And does not feel a thing, in the
The parts of his brain that are a lagoon of bile,
And slowly, deeply, he learns to cave the screw . . . . . .
I am about to meet a friend and say my peace
I have beaten around the bush for long enough
And, many times in previous engagements
With this particular friend
Have made myself out to be a fool
There is much left unspoken. Incurious, distracted
Friendship: I might as well have scribbled an oration
For what was left unfinished, instead . . . the scratch in her aspect-
-The kink in her style is a way to apprehend the formula behind
These coded witticisms,
This irony incarnate of a girl: aloof, slightly hostile
Without meaning to be, and yet
Confined by some eternal lethargy of the spiritin such a formula
How could one expect to equate the figure of a look,
This look, right now,
Which is nearly humorous in how enigmatic it is,
Regarding needless complexities that ultimately project
An obvious pretense:
The look shapes out, between us bothbut was initiated by her:
A halfsmile,
Flanked by lucid, blue, accusatory eyeshow could one equate
All this to a deep attention that we share
In guessing in our dusty brains the one's
Opinion, for the other
Which the other assumes is not so deep at all
The cold look that quashes an inherent
Sense of want for the other to breach and see
Lusting after the pitiful tooth of a grin.
What makes it so cold is in how she distracts herself
From an importance to which we relate mutually:
The unfinished, secretive glance that seems deranged
We look at what is between us, and clear space
Rather than look at what we are looking at,
That is, ourselves,
And, one to the other, two feet apart, allow to mingle
Only our silent, odorless breath. The air we breathe travels
Silently the distance of that clear space between our two
Bodies that never seem to touch
And mingles what we cannot see
I am about to meet a friend and say a few words
Some of the words will gather falsely
The fire that burns at the back of my eyes
Venting out smoke from out the edges of my eyes
Tells of much that will remain unspoken
And much that is left to burn in the breeze of her breath
The relation is strong and weak and tame and wild
This importance shall engulf us both one day
Until we are forced to express everything,
Only to find the depth of our mutuality
Located in the secrets we had kept from one another
That burn, and imitate desire . . . . . .
When the first rains of winter hint at the coldness to come
When the rain with time soon is not rain but hail
That tamps on the aluminum siding and soundlessly
Against softer surfaces dives and is expunged
But partly only partly and becoming shards of ice
Remain and yet remain still pieces
Of what they are, and are thus not what they are
And in this way the power of the hail is expunged
When the rain is not rain and it is ice
When questions you ask yourself intend a force
That reels you into the base heart of the matter
Except when it rains, and shades
Over the reality with something grim
And destructive
When the sense of touch is placed in a shard
Of hailand thuscannot be touched, and
Only seen . . . since, well, fuck, all that has the possibility be touched
Is condensed within the shard, rather than
Existing outside of it, to be fondled
By tactile impressions,
Which are impressions that are outside of my hand

Well then, the neat placation that you speak of
Regarding what you sense, in turn, to be real
Is blurred a bit in this image of the rain
And morphs and is disfigured by the hail . . . . . .
These insidious references to lost youth
You talk and talk about your past
As if it were the only life that you
Had lived

And now, you say, no vibrant vibes are left
And there is only darkness, but darkness
That deceives one into thinking there is light
When the only light is artifice, an embryonic
Sense of more to come, of more that could elucidate
The sense . . . and you go darker still.

Where could you go from here you say,
This wheeling tune of dawns-
-In the brain . . . the dawns that play
Like music to represent the pretty
Lies you make, about having other plans,

When all you want to do is jack off, alone,
Trapped all the while within an eternal
Construct of nascence . . . . . .
What I feel is not quite anything
It is a dispersal of shadows and light
As they translate through the jaws of the tree
And invade the room, like a trifle dismissed
Only to resurface in the midst
Of a problem that does not seem to end.

One could witness the tree out there
Thru the pane of a dusty window
As it grows slowly, slowly grows

What I feel is thick in its own evil mask
What is right, what seems to be right
Slipped into a guise. What is wrong??? A seconds
Thrift of doubt pervades
The guise, the avatar,
With a sense that what is right to it
May just be a farce, perfidiousness, a seeming.

This doubt: neutrality, insistent, trembling:
It keeps me up for nights on end
And has me looking at the tree thru the window:
The simple strings of shadow and trembling light.
We spent years together one night.

I never learned your name
But knew you, whole as all hell.

What came of this was nothing
But life, wasted . . . . . .
Where would I be without my coffin
When I am spent the WORLD goes black
Where would I go where I went yesterday
Could not be gotten to. This simple, single,
Cohesive fact, as it turns out, seemed to be all I could reflect on and
It would remain all that I reflected on,
For all eternity, because it was the last thing
That went thru my headbesides
The bullet: this fucking box into which I am placed is not
Quite the end that I was looking for
The coffin is a diseased metaphor
That trumps the ages with one final conundrum
That drumming in the heart of a man
Drums a frenzied palpitation. When
I am spent the deathless minutes
Press forward, indifferent, bemused
Minutes without place or occupation,
They merely are. And what is not
Is all that can be rightly forgotten
Without the plastic paramour of minute
To hour, and hour to day
And the coagulating of brutal light
Suffers in the termination of the day-
-The day licks upon the sides of my coffin
I am surrounded by a haunt of eyes
Some of the faces are weeping
The eyes that pair in people looking
Upon my coffin, wishing to land upon
An intractability, an answer in the wake
Of death. I told them to bury me
During the evening, and they have,
While the sun shifts in differing canals
Thru the trees. The roots of the trees
Feed on the mulches of the men like worms
On the mulches of men and women,
Placed beneath a tonsil of stone
And each stone a body and a life
Put carefully down to rest in the drab cemetery:
A location of solitude, where one can hear the
Buzz of cars from the highway next to it
And see as backdrop to this fiasco the structure
Structure of a chuffing factory that looms
Over the scene of my funeral like something uncaring . . . . . .
To look at the kernel of a thing
To know the existence of it
As a difference between molds,
As a crotchety tenant
Coughing in the next room
To know such a thing:
A crotchety tenant
Who coughs in the next room
This idea, this intelligence, is such
Not the thing???? This definitive, tho absurd example
Without context, or, any sort of purpose
To the pomeis that not, rather, a poignant focus
On the kernel of a thing, a hideous thing????????
And to make peace with meaning
Is to uncover the alien that happens
To be behind the curtain, toiling at the controls
With webbed hands and large, expressionless eyes
This presumed, unfettered reality
This infinite xerox that portends
A blurrier image of the thing
As and when we first saw it
Infinitely blurrier and yet never disappearing
These dissonant confabulations
Of the bizarre . . . . . .
At last I have reached the disfigurement
That most likely resembles me, or, at least
Who I was, when walking by the shore,
Alone, and compelled by a singular force
To move on and away from the ailment

That brittles bones, drains the reserve
Of the complacency to be siphoned from my will
To collect beneath the riverbed, like oil
And I wonder what is left to be preserved
When from the rig no oil gushes
And all that is left is the wind on blackened rushes

And, what little decency I have left to barter
Is destroyed. Why preserve the things most important?
The solution to these troubles cries, like a martyr
And I am seeming impotent.

I have morphed and changed, delayed gratification
For something, something not enough to equalize
My rough ambitions, appealing to some impudent
Demographic of the nation, who see the WORLD-
-As an inconsequential blemish: they are anxious
In the choosing of their own disguise to fit
An imperfection: they are held in place by this infection:
Ambition: youthful phantasmagoria: Spent ways, fortresses
Made of sand, by the children on the beach: something
Illumined for a little while and prized, and then, washed
Away: the failed edifice left to be gawked at by
Young, blinking eyes.

And forgotten, quickly, before the merit is packaged
In the brain, and all my disfigurement guarantees
Is the torture of changing my own sacrilege
For the sake of nothing but tattered clothing
And some air to breathe.

Leave my disfigurement alone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It once
Was inimitable, and now it is bygone, and has a lofty sentiment still
Without utterance:
A whispered sheen of obscure/equivocal dawn . . . . . .
The usage of the sun, changes
Into light, from
Another light . . .
The visor is gone. Before this happened
I knew that mother could
Only for so long make
The wrong, into enormous right
By sight
The flowers, the trees,
This culture of brightness . . .
Sans finesse,
Sans every shade of
A shade, of a shademade into
Exactly that. Now, one has knowledge
Of the ledges, peered over.
And the dropping fall
And there is nothing left to this
Matte of privacies.
These details of
Leaves, and grassimages
Grieved to show their shorn parts withal
And prove the power it took
For our eyes to look
At blackness, fighting
To digress from the mouth of
Blackness that launched us
Launched us from an ancient conceiving
And left us walking walls.
There is no more of somesuch type
Of a world. Winter hinted at
Such a thing being not long to last.
We all woke up, and went outside,
And found that the streets
Were tame with heat of latter spring.
Apocalypse?
People asked. People
Whispered to themselves that the universe either
Was interrupted by the grand jostling of
Proponents: some satellite breaking
Apart, in the heavens; or, some seismic
Heave, shaking the dust
The eleventh hour
The mitigating vore of senses,
Is now no kind of mouth to eat what
Always wasjust to produce some
Tingling, in the brain
In flowers in the trees
In the stout mooring of building and
House, there is place not accounted for,
Nibbling on the corners
END.