Forty

I am the handmaid with many blessings, always apron, always aproning. I am stirring the pot of hot amaranth mush and folding hand made afghans at the feet of different beds.

I have seen many ready, and in the ready place I have seen many put down their boats.

The now dead who I think of as dimples in tangerines are abrasions and must be swallowing somewhere, must be undoing the buttons of their pants in freed legless form.

...I would.

I have watched forty people die and with each blowing I wondered if it was supposed to get easier, or harder, or sweeter

or if the inside of their inside was just outside now.

The terrible dead who I think of as Moorish warriors wearing metal hides heed rolling trumpets and sonnets for their long lost heart parts. They hop pad to park, crossing the pain ridge of Elysium, standing jagged in the Hemlock undoing themselves to lie in mossy tithes,

because I would.

Dorothy tried to fly out the window.

Hand floating on top of the top shelf she dove crooned to Beloved for he was waiting outside.

I saw her sawing him.

Above the garden, stirring the chickens whom didn't know they were the Chapel;

vowing never candled so much to Pasty Cline.

Butterscotch hard candy unwrappers, unpeeling,

her skin stayed so delicate til the end.

I carried her,

limp unused womb back to sunlight linens,

she wore pearls in her prom pictures and by thirty she had laid down in the dull walled asylum too sterile to beat her sanity back.

I smoothed the wrinkles of her last lace nightgown.

I filled her room with yellow hydrangeas because she is just east of Wichita, Kansas

though sunflowers are the state flower

I know she must have liked the color.

I asked her to wait and she held on for eight days aspirating until my hand returned,

floating on top of hers she heaved to the sandy shore

and I swear I saw him waiting.

People look like angels,

always.

People grow old into their halos.

"Are you my angel?" they say

as I turn them to side,

over on crooked shoulder,

they must not mind the latex barrier between

them

and I

and I wish I didn't have to wear them.

The tragedy of medicine is the canal. The crosshairs of the polyeuthathanes wall.

Goodness-wall opens it legs and arms in one motion, whereas the good mother touches,

even

shoots up the sweat of her sick child.

The good mother is the carrion. The good mother is the blood.

Crying medicine talks only to sickness.

It says "Sit up to swallow."

The tragedy of medicine is its lack of melody. Nurses assault men with applesauce.

With vinyl gloves. With hoyers.

White dresses. White shoes. White socks. White shoelaces. White hair.

The white mothers are chalk mothers with spotted lozenges.

The men are dissolving disk shapes in plastic coated mouths.

Her face is a container, blonde lid for the container.

Slowly sit up and swallow.

Crush tab.

Harmful if swallowed.

Hospice nurses are frozen, designed to dissolve.

Her procedure supervisor is a request for help

echoed

a request for help

echoed

for the ingestion carrion bottle.

She gives people expiration dates at their cranking

like a batch of eggs on a streamline conveyor belt.

I hate her. She stuffs their mouths and denies a man his right to pain.

Juanita was my first. I was very young then.

Sleeping in the night-church I heard her whisper

"Mama?

Papa?

Mama?

Uncle Ern?

...Goddammit."

Her anger was a stiffness.

She'd swing out and I hated when she spilled her coffee.

"Ernest!" she'd shout, rolling.

"Ernest you double crosser. I'm all alone.

Oh shit."

Exiled, I was scrawling something perfectly black,

and I knew the fallible symbol her goneness had took.

I once shot a horse in the head but it wasn't the same.

It was screaming like Picasso, pierced-post kabob horse on fence.

Her appaloosa dapples twinkled and throbbed into little

tributary rivers into the Milky Way.

The mare's name was Moony, which now is funny thinking of all of the blood

that squirted.

I gave her a ritual gunshot and didn't even think to say goodbye.

I saw you, Edward, MIT engineer, wondering about the right tool for the job. Pious father,

working the grime of an Ohio rubber factory, reading your six straw-haired children Chaucer and Milton. "Where are they now?" You ask with bullshit nostrils. "How do we leave here? What car do we take?" His fingers methodically undoing a seatbelt. I took-hands coaxed him on a cot, in a dream, into the blinding hallway, rolling together, me, Virgil, I lead him but to Paradise because he was Christian, because at his funeral we read from a palm leaf. Only one foot in and he woke up screaming, only I couldn't shoot him this time.

Hildegarde Octavia has overshot one hundred, transversed St. Louis to Mongolia, rolling hills, undoing folklore, bored she no longer watercolors for her daughters because they too are tired watercolors. She is grayer every morning. Outward the fog is more like a veil that starts to show itself. She is grayer in the twilight. Still without glasses she reads a novel about Lyell, a cowboy who chaparral prays. I gave her a book about angels with influenza in the World War, she loved it. I gave her a book about unicorns and she told me it was a lie. At night I blanket her down, watching as the red writings in God's red pen scrawl further across her back. If I could translate them I know they will help me answer her when she weeps, "Has Jesus forgotten me?" No, I say. All breasts and belly. Arthur was my husband, he tall and strong and has been gone. How long? I think I am one hundred and one. She weaves like a pent up horse, restless, woman-sailor stranded at sea. How do I die? I don't know the ethics of my answer. You can stop eating. She breaks wide, I'll be going to hell, I like devil's food. I am at the bardo window, I am the lookout. With great gratitude I pulse, a river into the ocean: you must let go of the boat. I am service, but this sailing vessel, with its legs and chest and shoulders does hold abundance, does not serve you anymore. Folding back into the afghan she crocheted, I wish her goodnight: until sunrise.

Hiss.

Soothsayer, poet, poet-
seer women, old with wrought iron hands.
Mother woman composed of oven biscuits
paisley print tapered dress.
Dancer woman with sheer skin trinkets
jangle woman dancer, sin eater
she beats her legs together, wasps wings
her body hums harmonic Dharma,
electronic meditation woman
with cool summer breasts, she is grassy woman of soot,
a holy woman hands of salt cohesive and granular
the pathway to her mouth was curse-encoded
with mulberry beads, emerald gems, stones, sand tabletops for weekend sacrifice.
Who is she, banchee woman that screams, belts her prayers in the night.
She is pregnant bellied Shiva, corpses of powder, skull washing bowls
and crystalline begging pot to boil water
and piss.
Opaque pot.
Body permanent.
Body dead.
Body of bone and piss.
Body of uterus rotting.
Body of sacred mouth.
Flowing river body of sadness she laps onto catwalks
and all husbands throw trinkets at her.
Ecstatic worshipping woman, bones thirsty relics,
lapping divine river, Eldorado river
golden immortal fortune, she is stark and naked.
All of the husbands bless her with their sadness.
She is healer woman,
someday to pass away and baptize their wrongs,
forgotten dying woman, martyr,
they croon for her, men with tired stockings.
They reach and coil with their beaten army limbs, with their fierce grip
and leathery palms. They reach inside of her gentile calf,
arterial bleeding.
She sways into them;
she is meditating woman
revived from the piles of suicide ashes.
She is pearly Isis with cripple crow wings.
Beneath a red light, beneath a black light.
She is crying light woman!
She is Navajo woman, panting in the winter,
selling priceless jade, curse-encoded.
She is oracle woman, eyes of lotus,
hysterical, missing, melted shut.
Seer woman of peace but sees the wars of their ancestors,
their jugular brothers. She fortells the raping of her village,
the mothers.
Slinking back behind the beaded curtains
she is jungle woman, hair down, hair back, hair on his neck,
slithering Kundalini woman.
Red snake from the garden of language.
She tells him the story of banishment,
and he will teach it on the boughs of willows, on the blackboards.
Disguised, oh her body of magic. She was a serpent.

Water Mountain

Celestial snake, beamed and blind boa
curled. Sleeping.
Patience. Pants. Patience.
Holding to your unfurrowed, softly round
brow. Planetary shaped,
like Jupiter
like seeds.

Bags piled in the backseat canvas.
Places to compile. Places to unwind.
Unwound and unbalanced heart.
What is balance but emptiness?
What is emptiness but love?
Unbound balanced heart, hither-oh,
I come to you, between two night trees.
We laugh, the two laugh at the one.
And I recollect this sickness
that encumbers my belly like a pack of heavy timber

of fire, for your chaotic step,
after I break for you my drum.
We are a night walk
up a mountain
and exchange a furlong submarine.
Patience. Pants. Submerged
and forlorn
you are my fawn. Patience. For the sun.
I weave into your night garden.
With night blossoms
and night bed.
I am breath, waiting
heavy, unbalanced
for night-cut-peaches
and night-cut-sun.
Broadcasting, undersea, screaming transistor,
telepathic dolphins
sing a clear song of despair
of their water-wombs
shut out from the light.

Negative Space

Who I am now
Who am I now
talking about the man who once talked.
And in speaking spoke with
great gratitude.
Who am
Who aren't is who am I now.
Who I am will not be
the incantation spoken
nor the reverberation in his throat.
Who is the melody of energy
that is the asphyxiation of
you and me.
Who is the puzzle of bodies
transfixed on questions of ontology.
Who is speaking spoke with
arms of legs of signifier's closed eyes.
Who is the melody body.
Transfixed with ontology
who is speaking spoke
with reverberation in his throat.
Who is the soothsayer, the soothsayer who I am.
Namer of all incantations.
Who is a pear.

Drift.

Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).
Deeply, deeply
we transition
ice barriers, an iceberg
deeply, deeply
the body drifts, we go.
(a body at rest beaming bright white lights
of the forever nothing we all already are, or
have always become).
Upon arriving we saddle
and grind until one or the other
is made uncomfortable.
The corners of the room are contrived
and pink.
The more intimately I look
for them the less apparent they are.
Our hands of two, wash away
into the air, formless
I use them to hold things
though we both know
they aren't there.
Really there is only one of us
and we are headless.
Lampshade, lampshade
the lighting doesn't flicker
or vary
in the land of eternal dusk.
You are my twilight lover,
my one and only, my intertwined synapse.
Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).
Doorway, doorway
we have floated through
another doorway
another time that looks like real time
(but it is always real time once you acknowledge
the perpetual dreamstate of all of mankind).
My spirit body enters this room
to heal my spirit organs
which look like real organs
and are real organs
now that I acknowledge the perpetual suffering
of all of mankind.
I am in the cathedral of all dreamers
and here, a man
long and winding
takes me up a grand crystal staircase
into a hallway
that everyone has been to before.
I have no hands because
they are falling apart.
Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).

3-31-2011

A map of fish cages, my childhood is circular
fragments framed by the drape of
the land on this side, the sea on that side.

I was so young then; you were still a hellion,
unfolding like a lobster trap at the base of a lake

and I was a channel.
My fingernails spreadso
from my mouth, wide,
the images in my throat crawl out.
Clean calf,
I disappeared into the eyelashes
of the fade of the world, with little black hooves
and loyal white legs.

I remember when you were inside me then,
the darkness was silk that became a prayer in my blood,
cancer parted me like fevered sludge.
Horizontal in my river, poured your narrow banner,
your lower landscape,
your quick-bleating sod
and your ruined squall.
I gave you permission to kneel godless.
In your cemetery,
your wrists of agony
were caught fish in the bramble.

Looking back, the sweet hum of your nudges
was a jawbone,
thick-fingered and gray shaped.
I hissed at you,
and you, in low voices
asked to be hoisted and banished.
You, lifted by grizzly machinery,
were rusty as the joint of a decaying tooth.

Creation Stories

Man was born in streams of milk
from Earth's whimpers in the night.
The Sky, twinkling archway with cigarette.
Father, dangled his pipe.

God shattered his fist.
Shut in the boughs of grace, furnaces
smoked God out.
Furies of our intersections
muddled God's laughter
and shrieks of our shame flags
flew like an oven,
or a Resurrection
of gut-sacks.
God, throbbing, squeezed the soil
and from Earth's wounds, Man slipped out.

His Mother cooed: "Man was born thirsty."
Man raged into her volcano breasts,
and they were minnows who slithered
upstream.
The Sky saw Man as a bastard
whose delicate eyes would jerk open
when suffocated or
whose body would drift
when washed too clean.
God loved the human rubbish until sundown.
Sky became twilight and
He gave man palms to beg with.

hakiuish

modern words are ancient
fly towards history
longing for old names.

postcard

always building.
ode to you who builds.
heavy, the hands of construction
and
long, the faces who fashion bronze.
Oh, light eternal
monuments mild fire gentle.
Your crown of languish and laurel
burns like a wreath.

new apartment.

home.

many churches.

many churches.

many bells.

him.

many churches.

many bellies of balloons.

ventricle. ventricle. ventricle.

in the bellies of balloons.

never was afraid of a secret never swallowed.

many bellies full of illness.

many bell tolls of many churches.

home.

him.
Alone.

breaths between the 4 and the 6

Disappear.

Illusive passageways echo to the bend.

The distance between time.

No train to either side.

No, I have not forgotten

the way my throat swelled

to another realm of thirsty

when faced with your face. Your slightly open mouth.

Thin and nimble, legs only for you.

Ventricle to lonely ventricle,

every thunder of you first sung in refrain.

Sorry-song swimmer, you are of the sea,

drowned, your magic was tragic and black.

Urchin choruses sad-saw cry:

for your nets, I was foam.

Woe.

The sinew.

Between you

and I.

Saw you all silver. Mysterious as forgiveness.

Circular skylines deeply repeating,

elapsing morning arms,

coffee table dawn with no poetry in sight.

Away inches from a scripted deity of cartography;

a partitioned abyss, leagues down you found

stubborn flowers, a front-seat kiss.

You, of the lines.

As effervescent

as clothes-pins

strung up on twine.

Pulsing, this harmony embodies

homage to the wind, to life.

Any day now, any day now,

fall apart in this metaphor.

Moonlight corridor, night after night.

Were You Lonely, Cupcake?

Deeper dishes hidden in the pantry in the dark

she asks:

How Do I Love This Body?

How do I...love?

Does she roll it out of dough.

Consumer of the hot flame fuel I watched your tabletops grow

in the corner hearth fires.

Baby, you are so beautiful,

and hungry.

There are biscuits for the open window in your being, what was empty

what was lonesome can be clotheless in the shower, in the hot steamy mirror.

Do you raise your eyelids to witness?

Sink-swim again in your kitchen.

the marble-ish counters are hospitable houses for making warm mouths,

salivate, tempting

bite by bite of bread, butter, butter, butter: more butter.

Stay hidden, always remain silent and self-assured

not a one will know about the cranberries, or the chocolate-chocolate loaves

cooling in the sills of your kitchen.

Aprons fold so nicely over our tummies, tie it.

Kiss the delicate touches of saffron, of basil.

You are god's tastebuds.

You are his fingertips.

You reach for a fried-up crusty crustacean

he's dried-up and useless, crawling home.

Who will hold your sorrow besides a cookie jar?

a tempting salutation from a mushroom top, or a congruent cocktail made with

champagne ...and St. Germaine...

Balsamic reduction, redux, influx.

"Hey mister you can have me if you hand me your heart and your belly.

I'll saute you into submission.

Pour your journey into me, I'll swallow it

and kiss away your tired."

I saw you eating your dinner of rice and gruyere in a closet,

under mother's cashmere,

crumpled were your tears.

Pilsner in hand, a loaf in common:

Are you able to eat this? Do you think its delicious?

This is serendipitous.

Denver Poem

You were
an uninjured soldier, or misanthrope.
(Hello white rabbit, have we met?
Have we fallen faster or caught ourselves? We float
hearts above cozy petticoats.)
You were arms-length, never close
enough to encompass, it was a
warm lamp,
an on and off
coordinated-quiet symphonic conversation from the bedroom tramp.

Dear Denver, you were a sullen night alone over boards of fruit with suede-ish flats, cigarettes on your breath, in your air. Oh, your nights are long. Take me, for these lights on- off are sorry when spent alone. Ask her the root of her why. Ask her, the root...ask her the root of her why. Ask her the logistics of her existence. She is infinitely unfolding tiers of body-parts, toes to motion of days spent with or without a dime or a kiss. Your sludgy streets rekindle longing dead inside her double-breasted vest. Those pockets she emptied for your performers, your juggling men and their tricks. The tall-tall buildings with the rounded corners are the judges of this nonsense, they point and hiss at the semantics. Her interactions were soft and deliberate. Watery in Confluence Park, picnics of decaf and midnight milk; she may pack up and leave you someday.

volo illo narrabat fabulam sui mihi

(this is a breath.
this is only a moment.
we were mermaids
who never drown.)

Narrate.

Tell me. Tell me something
captivating.
I was watching. I was an emotionless
witness
witnessing the breezes, the branches,
and spring.
I heard your strange geometry.
I need you to explain it to me.

Tell me. Tell me your myth.
What was your elegiac breakfast?
Wafting, lofty, morning to morning.
The floorboards are temporal, present.
But what was your preface?
The waltz that moved you, that carried you
here: I've caressed that music.
I envision a silken, hot, balloon.
It is golden. It is illuminated.

...and what of touch?
It is a fever of mystery.
I've felt them--
--your words.
They rain down upon me like violets,
like silver-sparkling thumb-tacks.
My edges blurred.

I wore seven veils.
My feet were barefoot. My back is crooked.
I have filled my curtains with wares and yolked them to my belly
to my back
to get here
to have faith in this flesh, in this skin.
May I still listen?
Never have I away'd in so many colors,
under so many waves.
I am full of questions.

I want to navigate with you
a river of forks
and spoons.

N.R.M.

The surge: my feeling of the narrative was quelled, in bergamont.

It regressed
infinitely, until the snapshot of the gallop
was taken, made beloved and framed,
walking-wishing-galloping
upon the wing of a summertime wave.

I remembered
the tastes of cities
like dreams of curry, like dreams of soap.

We worshiped the sky like it had become the sun, as if it had transformed
to the sacred baskets of texts,
to the holy feet of missionaries;
I wept into their hands and they ordained me.

The man's arms became ropes and I felt his semantics,
his lungs aided him
in the acceptance
of the pears
of their religion.
I wanted to kiss him.
I became like a jeweled fig. I was pale. I was a pistachio.
In becoming, I was the secret, the child, the figure in the carpet.

We,
the man and I, broke into the temple.
We drank
to the calligraphers, to the songs of sorry-constellations,
to war,
to lemons in our hearts,
to the stark while of the walls.

His skin was a disruption, so I gave him woven lace.
He buried me in the center of a stone, I told him he was
a citadel,
and that he was bright

and timid.

Boundless Reminiscence of Dreams and How it Felt to be Felt

There is a homeopathic ambiance of the too much of never-never.
Organic and empathetic, the rhythms hung between consciousness
and a thick tunneled subway station. The air is honey.
A native steel drum sings melancholy pockets;
quiet closets.

Skin was fluid like shampoo, pretty little fingers, pretty little
quandry of golden hues of purple lights on a big down bed. Here dream't to be a
Patagonian astronomer, the sky faded in essentially imperfect paradigms; in the color of shivers everything is blue. Many people die in Paris.
Some gasp for air, the deep breadth of meditation.

...the bass comes in, an aria from the breezes of compositions waft between bodies
who lie crooked. Someone is the cadenza.
Electrically tactile, the space between matters moaned until it spun,
more than just hollow, it is the dwelling of lingering summer.
Hot opaque religion was the devotion of the pupil, of the offered child
trying to interpret the pauseless language of the inbetween scribblings.
Silence came over domestic spheres, where men sewed lace chamois,
women crawled on their bellies, offering communion to those who ask.

There is a sharp desire to accept the body, to transcend to heaven.
A soft river of geometric rules divides the mouth. Provinces of
bubbled soda and ruffled toffee play cautious, motionless music. Where is the kiss if native lips
never presuppose a cigarette? Delicate touches, the chimneys of boundary are burning.

a recent journal-excerpt (non-cohesive)

This is a human document.....................................................
my intrigue is sublime. I dream't I was a boundary. I dream't I was a parabola.
he dream't in motion.
We were starstruck, twice.

I carry Him.
the anvil. He sighs. He is a symphony of sounds, filling me with
heavy metals.
I coo. I coo.
He spoke in parables of parables.
"Oh you are heavy," I etched in lyric.
And yet, He was light.

thoughts on The Good Book

Gideon is the author of the God whose cadence
is a metronome.
He beats like a pretty little tempo-clock.
Twice reflected, I saw him in the glossy shadows.
In motion,
I told him his Mover, unmoved,
didn't move me.

Truth be told I read a Book that told me the
truth about stories.
I knew I had discovered the antidote.
I withdrew because I had recovered her petticoat,
ugly-raisin hands opened up from the sky and
stanza by stanza, fell billowing folds of clothes.

The protagonist asked for an endless supply of baked beans, and comforting
things
only to be soaking, pressure cooked in his own diction.

After the flood, only analogy was left to the plot. We skeptics, believers
analyzed the crisis
which untangled like a silky, gossamer strand that fell out
of mouths like French
cobblestones.
I walked through the books until I reached a climax,
and in the ecstasy of the agony of someone else's lord, I watched the
world fall apart, in unison
all of the houses fell down, all of the Figs stood up.

I felt the overflow of the hyperbole, the chaos, the end.
I, stone iconography, laid on my back and recited all of the myths.

I came. I came, God. In this rendition,
I became God.

In the nighttime, I still need you.

Whereabouts in the morning, I find myself transforming into the absent protagonist of a tired-novel, written only for myself, a semi-private-cyberspace, a personal journal, for all. I am leather bound, and drying out. I smell like must and have been translated, twice. My hair becomes the ancient words written in calligraphy. You are the calligrapher. I am the interpreter.
I wanted to tell someone how I am the skillet and you are the stove-top I crawl across.
Once upon a city, there was no recipe, we were in a taxi, hot like pavement.
The End.

Eighty years past a clinical psychologist, past his red-velvet couch
reads beautiful books, walks to the market
without a walker for reddish-golden apples. No skin. He carries a beautiful basket.
Mid-autumn, near frost, we wake up.
I, mid-poultice-wrapping, hot wrinkling legs.
I look up.
He said, he said,
“Sugarplum, we're all missing someone.”
We drank minty, Mediterranean tea.
I fed my insatiable-thirsty.
He remembers Beowulf and Antigone.

This is an elegy. We look back on the poets of transition, we look back and mourn their loss.

Once, there was an epilogue at the end of a story, where hills full of gold are full of horses that will never be tended, of baked-bread that will go stale. The treasure was cursed, the cider poisoned, the last servant wept until he fell asleep. It was written by hand on parchment, homed in a forgotten Grecian-library, set aflame.

We talked and talked about literature, we spoke and spoke about Freud. As I helped him, in his gray, into his robe, he told me his young-beautiful wife was traveling on business in Singapore.

We grow old, we grow old.
You are the toes. The End.

enjabment at work

Meditating on nowhere and blown out like a flame
my yoga body moves into a single pointed place where
I focus on a precious brandished-skin groom
in white breeches and a red riding cap and
a prophetic anchor who never saw his visions
and his listeners who gobbled
all the scraps of sideways wisdom he heaved at them and
finally a Sufi who exclaimed he was the Truth and that his face was my face
and spun in circles
circling around twinkling carousels, I told them
I'd give them everything if they would just given me a minute
when my hair was corn-colored,
I moved toward them blue-shifted (like a smile
rejoicing in our hands) mouth-watering fantasy remains--
me crouched in their lap, blowing cigar smoke in their mouths,
exhaust tastes warm like home, rolls off the tongue like Hebrew or Greek
however all of us could ride well oiled lanterns regardless
of what language we spoke
or we'd shine the light, late at dusk together for weary caravans;
'wake up,' we say 'its time to rise,' cellos bellow from
below our stomachs humble us gnawing on bones of stones we
find our simple recipes for soups made with fish and tall grasses
of which I wove pots and spoons made of bamboo until
we feasted and sent invitations to nations of paper birds
on rice stationary and little origami children took our fingertips and we were
down the rolling mountains where we found plantations of peasants with golden skin
harvesting paragraphs of verbs and cultivating stories from their tea, we buried their wishes
so that I transformed into an archaeologist, or like a cow without skin
I uncovered all of my attachments to worldly adjectives in the end.