Right now I am
really fucking
soup

Trying To Say

I would much prefer to scream like the ocean,
Who though stillborn loves to charge and crack
Fullfaced onto the cliffs, them through its spray sobbingly roaring

To the howling gulls above, laughing with glee
And careening still cheering loud

Straight in the peaking egg white waves,

While all around their sailboat bodies lightning explodes
And troubles the black churn.

But a submarine is always

Quiet glassy and calm.

I dreamed we were a charcoal sketch,
us smeared where our black lips met.

A hundred million pearls of words;
riddled seashells on threshing room floors.

which day?

Take you up that dusty mountain
beneath the PVC rainbow.
It never rains, you feel thirsty,
so away I go, down to yonder brook
with holey pail to fetch, and leave you
alone on summit high or most indescribable
when the dust runs up the trees and rises
on a tornado,
and God comes out from behind a black baked sun,
you've been staring too long,
and makes it rain quick, fast, so
by the time I am back you are
among the verdant green and
wispy grasses, minnows and
streams, trees and things,
and catch you
singing on
a blossoming branch.

wild surmise at sunrise

Distill away night's frost,
sip it from a tin glass.

Inside the rising sun who has yet
to warm the dew, or morning air,
a sparrow nestles soft with a redbird
in the bare and blustered branches of a tree,
and tucks his head into a downy groove,
fuzzy as a peach, while his breast moves
slow and sweet like the heave in a harbor,
or waves washing on a beach;
but then lifted in singing ardor,
a dazzling tune; tsunami.

Satan approaches Eve from the bush,
looking like a preschool squiggle.

Hell's hunting hound surprised me in the dry grass
(and that instant I knew I should flee).
It waved with those heinous-lipped smiles
and those drooling, fool-wide eyes
and trotted up on friendship feet,
flapping, silly beast,
wagging and snorting and sneezing all the while.
I whiffed salmon and old dung;
its black coat happily half-threaded,
seamed up along twice-torn bite marks
and rivets driven deep,
ran all across with a child's stitching.

Hell's hound cracked its jaw
peered northward meekly
like to inhale the moss grown at that side of trees
and aimed a purr at my face,
and grinned.

Bastard beast! Foolish fiend!
Full wide I saw its gums caught up tight
like cotton all picked and packed
a hundred hundred thousand downy white feathers
clustered up tight around its ghouly snags
crammed thick in each crevice and dripping,
simply dripping fat with drool.
Gross and inestimable slave!
Braggart of your fancy feast,
soaked in it, stupid and slow!

I heaved myself away
but not ten yards forward West I saw in a cradle
set in a den among the blind rustles of wheat
the killed dove,
sad among the dying grass.

Shot midway out of the gloaming air,
I'd hope to assume.

I stopped to rest on a stone
and faced the empty skyline.
A wind bristle sought my cheek and itched me where I wanted, tousled my hair and ran like water into the crooks of my sitting knees.  Everywhere was rainless, autumn and earless, and very very still.

From the West then,
full blown the orchestra banged.
Black and sick it sneaked past!
thick lips agape and brutal head turned to me,
it shrugged in a careless, pleas'ed way,
then dumb as ever slumped away,
following the scarlet tympani
off to tangerine sunset.

I walk with a cane,
an old oak thing.

On it I lean,
the windhover talon
gripping the soil under me.

It cracks on the pavement
sinks into sand
I am guided by an eagle eye
clutched in my hand.

Squat on his quartered hind (his torture price for significant glances), a significant glance he cast at the objects in the room.

His desk was nice, made of oak, covered in a cloth and decorated with a vase full of ashen-faced hydrangea blossoms begging the rubbish heap, but he held on to them. Papers were everywhere, the most of them crumpled, uncrumpled, recrumpled, till they lost all their form and became soft like silks. On them were written in awful red ink what he hoped for, loved to hate, and his fears. They looked like used bandages from an ER ward; he shoved them to the corner of the desk. The pen he wrote with was in fact the only pen he ever used, a red one, such that people accustomed to schooling must think his grocery lists looks like term marks. But he didn't know any people, not really. Only a portrait at his right hand admitted the existence of other humans.

Inside the little metal frame, his father looked stern as usual. He was wearing his uniform, studded with badges and regrets, mustache trimmed and combed. His eyes squinted like watermelon seeds and looked uncomfortable in their own sockets. He was terribly hung over, and hated, hated the photographer, hated every flash that hurt, hurt so god damn much. What the fuck was this little Asian man getting at, blinding him, scalding him? His retinas were branded like so many fucking cattle. Was he bovine, did he stomp and snort? Oh, yes, come suck at his tit, and he'll give you his best milk. Yes, fuck you, and you. Do you wash, do you bathe your cows? Do you feed them corn, the constipated bastards? Castrate them, hot knife, kill, cut, bake, chew, savor, swallow, transform into your flesh their deaths, make it good. Oh you sweaty fucking gook. Would steak sauce improve the dish?

Such a man was his father.

His significant glance shifted, fell on the King James Bible in front of him, spread open.

Psalm 34:8. O taste and see that the LORD is good.

I lay my head beside the willow tree

Common of a sunny day

Me reclining in the light-gilt

living room saw my Mother

approach and say,

"See this peach."

(holding it out for me)

"It's fuzzy and sweet,

but inside it sleeps a bitter seed,

a stone to make a tree.

Think," she said to me,

"Of the wonder of a tree,

that from wood and leaves

a peach should be!"

She shuffled away, and I sat

stricken and reeling on the couch.

For the sun in my eye,

I could not see, and thus

was left to my own device.

What a marvel was a tree,

said she,

and I tended to agree.

Thinking further, I came to see

how we all did come from trees.

How from that tree plucked us

our general progenitors,

with choosy hands,

passing down that bitter seed,

and for a while to me it seemed,

hardly could a soul from trees be gleaned;

but in all the hewn wood,

life,

threshing words,

spilling sap, tremulous

and overgrown,

house to ivy, ringlets and ladder,

moss graves, finches, sparrows,

bright bulbs, berries, snow-fallen,

morning's anchor and worms' parasol,

bench on which the fawn would lay,

dancing through the dappled day;

Through that I see a tree,

and in it,

I see we.

i have been told it is very rude to yell but

YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE

MY ONLY SUNSHINE

YOU MAKE ME HAPPY

WHEN SKIES ARE GRAY

My smiles could never be enough to tell you

how much it means you don't take

that sunshiiiine

away-ayyy, ayyy.

Rock outro.

Guard this dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon

THE REAL McCOY WAS A BEATNICK DO-NOTHING

or

THE HEAD OF CONGRESS

Four-thirty in the a.m. and I find myself once again standing at the 401 stop, corner of Rochester and Davie, waiting for the night bus to take me home.

WHY ARE YOU STARING

at me, who's staring at the ground, who's innocuous.

I AM A MOLE

but I can't burrow into concrete. I try and dodge my shadow, more like a sullen dwarf sulking under me, small, round, quite exact and fat. Straight underneath a streetlight is a nice place to be

SOMETIMES COMFORT ME, BUT ONLY JUST

No one touches this little pool of me and my waiting.

Sleep is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole--

Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care--

There is no malice in our slumber,

no evil in us sleeping.

She closes her eyes,

removes her sight from my world

and returns to that sun-fogged sea,

rides,

as if she were herself a buoy,

on the gentle sloping shores

of wave next wave next wave.

Warm, flecked, dappled sea;

Up, down, cradling herself

with prayer-hands on her cheek.

Out of port,

Forever severed 'til she wakes.

There is a grayness is our sleep

which makes uncertain age or year,

cuts out the heart of passion and of care;

yes, takes the very heart out of things

so we pump breath, life, the slow heave

and rhythm of tenderness--

but bloodless,

Calm, misted.

If she cries or rages I cannot ken.

She is Artemis, Adonis,

Venus and David.

Closed and close, forever far.

She is marble, immovable,

the marvel of serenity,

occupying that dark liquid space

where all figures remain fondly

inscrutable.

What goes there?

What wind, motion, stir or sigh,

love, hate,

release?

Yes, release indeed,

from all of these,

Thus I think this childhood is not to be irretrievably lost.

I'm certain that his blood was

in the painting,

on the painting,

dashing through and out the painting;

I know when his ear came off

the blood was on the brush

he smushed into the canvas.

My father used to drive for one hundred and forty miles on the oceanic freeway in order to pick up fresh avocados from this dusty Mexican flea market, ten minutes outside the bronzed town of Ovoya. He spent an hour and a half driving there, sweating, and another hour and a half driving back; he'd drive there with the sun in his eyes, rising on the horizon, then return when the sun was just sinking low enough into the night so as to blind him on his way home. Feeling miserable both ways, Dad would stink and melt into the leather car seat in his little silver bullet until he climbed out at the flea market, embarassingly stained beneath the armpits, soaked through in the back, and a ring around the protrusion of his belly where the stuff pooled as he sat. He spent the next half hour wandering around in that desert of tents and ancient pickup trucks, looking for the stand that would sell him the best avocados. The stand was always moving, the owner a particularly swarthy hispanic who spoke better English than I did at the time.

Dad would buy the avocados and bring the home expressly to please my mum. But each time, in the trunk of the car, without fail, five-o-clock in the afternoon, coming home on the oceanic freeway, those avocados would roast and turn brown and shrivel up like figs. So mom never did get to taste them.

i keep your teenage poetry

chaque matin//d'habitude

I take my mornings scalded, like the milk I toss into boiled coffee, boiled tea, mine and yours, whose steam I'm scraping off the mirror so I can see well enough to shave, making sure that when the sunrise chill comes to bite, I can feel it.

Then, I'm waiting for the rainy bus, feeling my scalded fuzzy tongue, and through the fog your hot shower left on my eyes, I try and find your hand.

Pot of Cabbage

The shapes words make inside,

Shovin and shakin off the fog

(rubbing down their rough sides)

Works me in a way to feel so warm

And muddled, mushed in a haze,

Closed in the lap of a lass.

A pot of cabbage steaming on the stove watching me mingling,

Making faces with the fire and musing of close cloistered rugs,

Frothy mugs slapped down that masquerade as

Something less potent than the honeyed glue

That turns me into tipsy me, fuzzes and fools

My ears, my eyes, my mouth,

Is fazing me, lazing me

Into a static, sparkling quilt;

I’m glad I’m not wearing a kilt

because I’m unelegantly sprawled.