the sun does not forget to burn
01/30/2007 04:20 p.m.

the sun forgets to open my heart, forgets
to beat, the sun forgets -
the moon forgives to open our eyes, forgives
to reap, the moon forgives
a fine damask the sea has chosen
a singular display of southern stars



Footnotes:
28/03/2007 All day I had a bad feeling about my life. The way the breeze lifted a newspaper in the Internet Cafe. The way the radio sounded like beetles eating through tissue. It felt as if someone had left a cigarette burning in my gut.


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Letter to a Comet
01/26/2007 10:54 a.m.

Letter to a Comet

It's room temperature here from where I'm writing you
closer to inferno than south pole
you're further in the sky than i can imagine
close to someone's conception of immateriality,
though you are pure matter.
I've got nothing on my mind – and no plan – as usual.
Makes it easy to choose words when there aren't any.
What do my letters do when they reach you?
Do you wear snow gloves to read them? But i forgot,
you're cold, ice, debris, and I'm ignorant
tired of my ignorance, being in a spiritual coma,
doing late night push-ups with my eyes.

Eyes are elongated, dead cells, there's
no other tissue like them in the body. If only you
could keep plucking out your tired eyes to grow new ones.
Eyes are comets breaking up in the atmosphere
outside your eyelids. It's funny how tired sayings
can sound new at the right moment, like “I love you”.

How much is the postage again? Don't know
if I used enough or if this'll even get to you

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Cloud Machinery
01/12/2007 10:54 a.m.
Cloud Machinery

the forest assumed the shape of a rolling rock
it rolled toward me chasing me back and forth
somehow i went backwards without fear
with no voice and caught myself in a vast, antique interior
with no furniture and no rooms, only an attic,
and no ladder with which to reach the trap door
and an endless void of catacombs disappearing
on piano wire into endless shafts – i knew
that some led to beautiful places and people i loved
while others led deeper into an exquisite terror...
Tonight I place my pillow again under the veil-dappled roses,
so that I may wake asleep and sleep awake, &
reconceived line up with maudlin dream trees
assured by their bitter, greedy silence
a release from the ease of flesh and sod.

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I come here all the time to hear you playing
01/09/2007 07:26 p.m.

I come here all the time to hear you playing

Fear, I am writing you a five-lettered song
in no particular key with a blindfold on
I dared myself that I'd finish it in the mountains
not sitting here across from their gray beards.
I read that I need to confront you
hold you up to the light like a fraudulent banknote
but, fear, I don't know if that'll work for me.
     Keep visiting me nights tho,
there must be a reason for you in my life.
The song is just this. It's you, circling me like a warning.
Five strenuous stars brighter than the rest –
when light's flavors begin to die on the tongue.
     Either myself or someone who resembles me
struggles this evening under a tree's green paws riveted to death.
Until day i sit up to pray – no different to the rest,
buttoned down the middle -
     but you bow deeply, a gun propped to your chest
feet first through the door, belly crawling and humble
before gods and snipers.
Could be I'm just as restless, waiting near a disguised pulpit,
tuning in and out of your undisguised calls
pretending to capture leaves, their color
a coward who reads up on fear, to preempt
what's already at home, stretched out, feet up

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a girl's kisses
01/07/2007 03:49 p.m.

are tumbling leaves caught on branches in midair with unthought,
never change, even into womanhood,
becoming a spillage of gentle shapes of her mouth long ago
veering from a resemblance to anything so vivid as rosemallow

      the leaves, having listened to the weight of thrushes and white-eyes shifting
and lovers' ideas exchanging hands in the backyard world below,
            jump

      having bent fingers to fit any pocket, tumbling
out of clothes, she listens out for dark overtures with ocher buds
unadjusted to night or respiration, “i am determined to hear,”
she lip reads the leaves as mouthing, “to hear you,” she finishes

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accidents of color
12/31/2006 10:19 a.m.

I know too much about your hands
to just let them go to bed without praying
or taking mine; pick a stem of rosemary
for my release depends on this

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Goodness
12/26/2006 01:32 p.m.

Goodness

As her life progresses and she comes to inhabit multiple kitchens, her face too becomes more and more like a puckered sampler.

Daily she practices embroidering smiles onto unbleached calico cheeks not cut from fine damask but pink and ocher tubes with a touch of Alizarin Crimson straight from the tube for her ears and lips that will not reveal their beginnings nor ends as their stitches are sealed and neater than a wit's end.

I've come to call her Goodness, for she tries so hard to control herself from inside, yet fails to feel accepted. To be “at peace”. According to Goodness, to be at peace sounds unpromisingly, untemptingly temporal. It sounds like you're there for just such a short while and if you are sleep-walking or sulking you will definitely miss peace. Miss Peace.

Before she got to peace, she got to peace's door. It had a brass swan-head knocker. Through the window, she saw the swans - three white and two black and many gray cygnets - enjoying tea and buttered scones and chatting about welcoming her into their wings and songs and ponds and dragonfly séance...

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Rubies to catch the night
12/17/2006 12:44 p.m.

Rubies to catch the night

Pass them around one by one pomegranate rubies
freshly-bought.
     Offer them dutifully to everyone but
     mostly savor them alone from bowl to tongue.

With the kitchen all to myself,
at the refrigerator door,
I pluck the red lute strings
slip one by one to my mouth:
these opposites of communion wafers

the seeds throb down the throat -
like taxis pumping past the bus stop and fish shop -
of this body i inhabit.

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Sea Hooks
12/14/2006 11:32 a.m.


Sea Hooks (14 Dec 2006)

the boats fish for my heart
then i fall becoming one more dusty bell
in the sand;

kelp inscriptions dot the shore
in Arabic script

only steps away from the imagination
of the sea and the bench on which i sit

the boat is painted the color of raunchy lipstick
and the sea lines her lips in decay

mountains in faded slips half a smile away

the rocks are a separate country
with a landscape all of their own

the sea is a million shifting hills
burrowing through the clouds
an engine's thunder

the yacht's thin white fin oscillates
cut from the clouds

the sea is freshly skinned
a moaning dragon of turquoise haemoglobin
eerie gentiles swim over the streets
of foam and torture

the path slopes for a better view
like a roman emperor craning and being handed grapes

the sea pours its batter into the pan of blue
i convulse with a hunger of departed flesh

the yacht strays too close to a man
groping for breath – too near to where sharks
have been seen

the bay lies loosely, easily, calmly
unsecretive as a dozing lion
gulls yip like carrion-seekers, i grip
the catwalk with my teeth
sink into its solid veneer
seeking the lull of self-deception

the unknown leaps across my face
toys with my tendrils
there is no escaping what is about to happen.

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Petunia Tubers / The Patience of a Breath
12/13/2006 05:39 a.m.



Petunia Tubers / The Patience of a Breath

How gently the stooped sun cascades into our faces.
Who holds the other end of the petunia's lilac tubers, who traces
their shadows into the patio and how deep are that god's fingers?
the sun must be the fingertip,

      to end so gently in a gold orb for each flower;
      a glass blower controls each tuber & bowls hot life into Universe.

Freed from the whitened cement urn, they flip their lips,
how gently the sun bares, wears its tears. In the same vein,
I am always remembering the end – of us, of myself,
believing that the sun shall announce that end, that reunion with god.

Leaves marry stems and limbs of strangers,
feet swept off by the street's mimicry of love;
the Christmas lights are gay; apartments are being made complete
for the season's tenants.

You can tell by the sea today i am alone
by the sea, but not alone
      in lambskin water and milk peril
feeling unnecessarily sensual:

I imagine the tide undressing us, saying,
      “How gently soft are your jeans
stropped in petunia whorls dyed femurs.” The petunia's echo
“From behind your heels too end in suns.”


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