"How lovely is the night"

How lovely is the night

?

Were I not terrified,

how lovely it might

be.

Spools of wire air require

I flee frightened

through

past

favorite flowering fields forgotten

folded

laying fallow

sorrow sewed in summers and come autumn harvest fears.

Now,

I take my death pal’s hand

and lead him from beneath the brambles along my unlit street

inside.

If tonight we play,

let’s play.

Tide Poem 2

I left the clean laundry in a lump on one half of my queen sized bed

on purpose.

Inherent in its lumpness are ambiguities,

one of which I snatch out of the air and apply to the thing

for comfort.

A body,

not your body, all you greedy eyes hoping.

Its emptiness in being plain

and its absoluteness in being plain

set the paradox whirring.

This hollow heap,

grain by grain

deconstructed,

haunts.

ordinary

full moon

nothing special

about it.

full moons

every month.

tomorrow,

work.

what’s more

the river

gone dull.

relative importance

What good,

I do not proclaim,

what good is it?

What purpose?

What function?

And to what degree, and how?

Here is another image from my life-

Doves, Roses, Waters, Lillies, etc., etc., or some such “beautiful” bullshit-

and attached to it some such projection of my psychology.

Because those “eternal” “beautiful” “waters”

stifle my exuberance with their arresting gag

and I am “moved” enough to “write” a “poem”

and because it is only water,

and because it is only a poem,

and because yous wander normally amid only waters,

I know that I am alone.

Nothing is more isolating than my love for these died away "moments".

My insistence on the power of

4pm light on leaves

a self-indulgent thought at 4am,

is, admittedly, a private lunacy.

I do not proclaim.

There are skyscrapers for that.

I do not analyze or press

Gods or Governments for answers to these

similarly

imaginary questions.

Her

She is rising just now,

rising,

from a cream silk bed

buttered with sun.

Every time you’ve touched me,

I’ve thought of her.

Her sheening hair,

her sincere smile,

her scathing tongue

and cooling lips.

In fact, she haunts me,

reigns my dreams.

It was your mumbled

midnight words,

it will be

your mumbled midnight words

that slide like a film

between us.

Chair People

There is a cold space           (now).

It knows.

When I was about ten,

I went into the garage.

I sat by the big meat freezer.

When the cold space looks back at me,

I have long hair.

                                             (My hair is short.

                                  Somebody cut my hair.

                                  This destroys me.)

The whole image is wooden     (now),

Please understand,

I love her.

It’s not that I let some(one)thing go.

It’s that long hair.

I told him everything.

                           (and then,

                           I told her everything,

                          and him, and     )

It does not feel soft.

I have dripped my face into it for years.

Tonight it really does love me.

I cried and talked in the empty garage,

and the chair                        (opposite)

was patient.

The sun is rising,

and I feel nauseous

from crying and not eating.

It is necessary                      (that I make)

to make these offerings.

How else will I not lie?

sing{/s}

I have sing.

I have sing, to.

I. Ple. eed. ha(e)v. ase. (n).

sing.

to.

Pl(a)e(e)(.)

s

Y-

I.

-allowed-

I have, I have, I have

sing{ed}.

to, anyevermore.

[         ]

[    ]

[]

.

{beloved thing}

It is a vile mouth, I repent.

The skin is unsalvageable, the skin becomes disease-

do not touch it.

The skin is a health hazard.

It is a vile mouth, I repent.

For your safety, do not touch it.

The skin is a health hazard.

It is a vile mouth, I repent.

The skin is unsalvageable, the skin becomes disease-

For your safety, do not touch it.

I repent.

I repent.

It is a vile mouth.

I repent.

It is a spectacle, I confess.

It is paid for with pocket coins, with weekend change.

Forget the behind bars, when you leave, forget it.

Mondays need bear no responsibility.

It is a spectacle, I confess.

Make sure not to visit too long.

Its eyes are irons, irons

in hell’s fire.

You could be needlessly branded.

Make sure not to watch too long.

I confess.

I confess.

It is a spectacle.

I confess.

(jellied flesh convulses gutterward

to be

washed

to be washed

down

to be washed down

into the sewers, out to

sea)

the body of a man

Tonight my shoulders are strong,

my skin is olive smooth.

I tidy up, I make tea.

The house is quiet, white.

My skin is wasted on the night.

My thoughts, tonight, are wasted, too,

on days cast longways backward

drawn up from the timeline as flames.

My memory’s on fire,

those days ignited by the body of a man.

The body’s an empty silhouette

coming up the walkway to my door-

over and over,

repeat, replay-

puzzlewise his pieces take form

as my wasted skin makes contact-

then and now

so the fires leave me

leave me cold-

makes contact

with this:

a shoulder, bits of mouth, an eye too close and out of focus.

His parts rattle in the body frame

up different stairs to a green space

where previous thoughts of mine I poured

beneath my sound- jade,

so that when I go back, the jade place is

a still pool.

My mouth lay open to those waters

then and now

my face is captured in them, blank

headed does a body go,

now and then,

deliquescent into nights.

cool retributions served tea side

One day she’s singing. 

They’re lined up for her, by law. 

Firing quad style she’s plucking strings.


She’s unreachable now, undeniable.

Arms, flung with a victim’s abandon,

don't even reach the stairs.


It’s a blue dress she wears.

Her hair’s in winded tangle.

Probably the sun sets in ten, fifteen.

Haolo,

Your underwater head, when emptied of consciousness,

becomes buoyant and floats on the surface

in the clean dark, dark above, and dark below,

cradled in it, relieved of those pressures

within.

The dream sea is there-

I think these seas run always beneath us-

to offer coherence

and white noise-

which is a misnomer for

The Black Waters-

that give our thought laden beings

a sane resting place.

Haolo, we speaks overlappingly

only in the cut midnight of blue

which is paint outside time of whom

who is we who speaks

in Webernian counterpoint divine,

and we speaks overlappingly

only in the pink pastel child times

of Springs outside time

and all other times we makes alien musics.

In this silver solitary blue steel spring

I offer, Haolo, you, my ringings as of bells-

dove’s wing gray shale with a tone

mapped as the elongated sound wave of clanking chalk-

a monophonic chant over daybreak’s brittle streets:

I’hm ahv isch szalm io alundilae shv’i