Distemper

Time wears no muzzle today.

She breathes heavily, slobbering

over my filthy images. I crave

what is just beyond this

menacing bulk, a calm improbable

future, some past tendernesses

whipped into a soft possibility

sprinkled with deceits not yet known—

I can no longer eat these images,

coming as they do from behind.

Instead, I paw through the ashes,

stale cigarettes churning in the pit

of my inclinations, gnawing now

on buckled grunt. Time salivates,

pissing contradictions at my feet,

she marks her territory, flirts but refuses

to be my bitch. I sit and wait, knowing if I move

now, I will be the one to chase old bones

and whimper. Invisibly, she guards

the future, growling faithfully.

Sonnet VI

When life is made not of decorum, but its lapses

how am I to sit and calmly tolerate

a refusal to makes the leap beyond mere synapses

and engage the deeper chasms of a fate?

You’re a secret-cliché-agent, every instinct seeming dual

I keep expecting a sudden burst of mirrors in your hall,

your ellipses as uncanny as a young linguistic rule.

I think I might be done if you hadn’t been so tall,

so handsome, so funny, and so inventive,

you played the game in ways that never bored,

I’ve tolerated more from you than from other lovers—

(if only once you’d been like them and snored,

I could long ago have punctured my illusions

and spared us all these lame effusions)

The Slaughter House

we are no limp paw on a dumb path

we claw at the door

gnaw at the pane

willfully remembering

the jagged edge of every old entry

the flesh wounds on my flanks

your unspoken animus

mauling and moaning in me

we backstab

at a final branding penetration

lured back to these cold rooms

we unexist ourselves in rituals

of over and over

you from a hawk to a hummingbird

hovering beside my zero hour

and I allow you to drink darkly

from the deep pull

of my bitter thirst

for all of this blooding

 the knife of your never

ending lust

letting go

Sonnet V

Still these small events of love continue burning.

I want to tell you that today I pruned my plum;

(in my mind another field of dreams keeps churning)

If you’re brave enough to wax it, he will come.

He will come! Oh I remember! How could I forget

the swift effusions of delight that always followed

the satisfaction on his face so hot and wet

when he looked down and saw that I had swallowed?

Such tawdry instances of our rapturous glee

should perhaps be saved from public view,

but what the hell, each we are the fruit of its debris,

and surely sex, impure tradition, can still renew.

Why should poems be such a courteous forum

when life is made of lapses in decorum?

Sonnet IV

I was never fully yours, you were never fully mine!

Such is the drama that oft exhausts your will.

It’s time to take a break from all this scheming rhyme

before I imagine that such a hocus-pocus skill

can conjure up more meaning than it does,

but I must confess I have some faith in magic

and to match words gives me quite a buzz,

although I know that so many think it tragic

to appeal to mysteries in a world of science.

I should be avant-garde! I should be new!

And yet here I am in all my old defiance,

concocting poems that star the pronouns me and you—

(despite the thousands spent on therapy and learning,

still these small events of love continue burning).

Sonnet III

They don’t know us. They only know our names

for each other now that we’re not together;

I’m an X, you’re an X, such are the frames

that forecast our meanings, like the weather.

Some like to claim they know what’s coming next

and make decisions based on all their careful notes;

such people are understandably quite vexed

when life ignores their plans and grabs their throats.

It’s raining now, and though that was unexpected,

what’s strange is that the noise against the pane

is soft and comforting tonight. I am protected

by the vagaries of the sky and yet again

the thought that like a moon in its constant ebb and shine,

I could never be fully yours, nor you be fully mine.

Sonnet II

A little circle for myself to hold the fear,

a half moon hanging in a crisp blue night,

a cigarette for company, some clear

white wine and the soft delicious fright

that I am now alone, and yet content

that words may never mean just what they mean,

but to imagine I can infiltrate their intent

and measure out the moves of this machine—

such witchcraft in the casting of these spells—

should I drown or swim? I cannot choose,

for though I know our story all too well,

I still feel there may be something left to lose

by owning up to my accuser’s claims;

but they don’t know us, they only know our names.

Sonnet I

When it seems that everything’s been said,
I’m still stirred by some unformed thing to say,
deep down I think I’ll find it in my head,
some spell to keep this languaging at bay.
My thinking is my blessing and my curse,
thank God today it’s yielding precious little,
but to be silent or be easy, which is worse?
Critics answer in their voices hot with spittle—
How clean such lofty voices sure must be
to have escaped all that upon which it is frowned,
what distances such confidence must see
while I kick about old fruit upon old ground.
I started for somewhere else but still I’m here,
a little circle for myself to hold the fear.

Coda

Perhaps it is not about taming
the language, but rather trusting

the mouth of the river; the flow of the mind
is not to be easily tempered. Speech

is a construct, an artifact, not an essential
revelation. We are tangled in the weavings

of even our most elegant words. We scratch
at the scabs of our efforts to love one another,

to remake the world. We plot ideas,
the instruments of our glory, intangible,

only to find we arrive and arrive
without end. Language is innocent—wordless

we are equally empty. Silence? Perhaps we think
it would hurt less, but would it scorch even more

to feel the pointlessness and be
ignorant of the music we could make?

Deserted

You are gone from me and there’s no point trying

to entice you back to the fleeting shore

of salty allusions or well crafted memories,

these vain attempts to figure out what is

already known—there is a deep elusive sea

at the center of creation and it keeps us thirsty

to sustain the mirage—you were only another

imagining, seemingly more fertile, more muscular

than the others, but you were always the same

impotent poem; you ended and refused to be re-written.

Stripped

I am aware of the body

of evidence that weighs

against us. Naked movements

press against the groin

of my love for you; protection

from the call of the world

is impossible. What delights,

delights. I am powerless

in the swelter of fleshed-out fantasy,

potency locked in the grip of what is

immediate and tangible as testament

to emptiness and desire. I cannot

be every woman and every man

is honestly an object, possibly

a subject for my inclinations . . .

the lost Body has only one direction,

blameless and resolute, it seeks a reflection;

Mind sways seductively, smiles

its calculating infection. It destroys.

discarded and cast lightly into a dark sea of faces

begging for it—love dissipates,

hissing as the teeth of hot demands

puncture the soul, the center, the source

of everything. Or perhaps there was nothing

but this wounded dance

around the danger of being

alive and always undressing.

Odd Couplets - with audio

You are my other

shoe that is lost

and sorely missed

like a sock

in the face

with a closed fist—

I was a foot fetish

for a calloused soul

in the cupping of my open palms

I was an offering bowl.

You were my lethal dose of licking

at wounds, my fantasy of kicking

myself in my tale come true,

blinded from you as my lust-veil

strangled me in your muscular silence

and hid what your odd cock angled

after with cheap plunging action

doused in denial and the full retraction

of all the sweet nothings, now a sour taste

injected into everything—

every cunt the same hunt

for a place of forgetting

my name my face

your groin sweating its feckless pus

in another failed exile of us

but the strain of this refrain is against

my new thrust—I lose my direction

if I pretend the old affection

is not lost, along with the sweetness

the filth and the trust, the infection

of a love that was knot

now doubly undone

and yours was the shot

the glass and the gun.

the stranger - with audio

 

with instincts on his lips like eyes

crawling into their full blue moons,

her back stiffens to the suggestion

of a deep drink from the edge of his dark cup

words are exchanged for old-fashioned glances

touch is exchanged for a promised moment

in the window of an early morning but the music

of another hisses like hard rain a long way off

she shivers and dumb to her weather, he turns away

melts back into the chattering fantasies of afternoon

the room fills again with voices and before

and slivers of life and needs and now

the arch of her urgency curls back

to the familiar blade of the old longing,

no one having noticed her little attempt at escape

The Password (Three Little Words) with audio

It is not

Hawaii much though

I wish it

could be romance

and soft ocean

breezes. It is

not coconut, or

pineapple. But it

does take odd

forms of shape-shifting

in the pacific

islands of mythical

love and fantasy

archipelago-ing my soul.

No, it is 

not emotional intimacy,

nor is it

commitment phobia—it

is not insult

or injury or

any such wishful

thinking. It is

sitting. It is

the difficult waiting.

A secret inaudible

whisper worth sitting

and waiting for

until it is

not a secret,

until it is

not sitting or

waiting, until it

is love knowing

its movement, until

it is fearlessly

a passionate love

in every direction.

Until it is

this contradiction, it

is a squall,

brittle twists in

a small mind

of salivating anger,

empty-bellied growling,

muzzled and lusting

to bite into

the calm shifts

of center, now

the present impossible,

always possible forgiveness.

It is compassion.

It is tear-stained

memory, a foreknowledge.

It is belief

without any proof,

not the constant

yelp of fear

from the throats

of lost creatures,

heart-sick of themselves

in a self

plagued universe. It

is a palm

not a fist,

an opening out

not closing in,

a hand holding

its opposite hand,

our inevitable fate,

open unknowable future

present in past

unsayable certain illusions.

It is spirit.

It is physical

action. It is

a difficult daily

practice of breathing,

believing everything hinges

on the delicate

wings of doing

nothing but believing

the breath is

present even in

the waves that

may grow large 

in the mind

but will wash

over us eventually,

breaking on the

shore of a

soft beach we

may never understand

until one day,

simply we do. 

We simply are 

the infinite grains

an always eroding

universe of ourselves 

until we become 

we become we

become we become

a forever ending

of island ideas.

Flesh Made Words / Words Made Flesh

could I take the Sylvia Plath path? / that audacious astonishment at the world and its demanding hand / stands taken and re-taken to no avail / able end always able to end unstable rounds with the bends / the prize a surprise / zing new center of gravitas / an arresting architecture of sounds escaping / their earth-bound sense / the future a nonsense tense with waiting for it / to explain itself / to explicate itself from a world turned fully inside / out with the air breathing only in language / a bloodless vitality / a priori knowledge of the exquisite end now available for posterity / a posteriori observation a priority only for pragmatists and possibly dramatists but not for the hissy-fits of poetic illusionists / now you see me now you can’t / tie my fists up all you want / I will find a way to crawl back into the sway of these flesh eating words / could my I be so eaten by its own words? / I am all envy and relief / when I toss my little songs into the air around the ever altering Pacific / that wrongly named ocean

Magnanimous

                                                the girth and heft

                                                            of this heaving creature

                       

we are

                                                the slop after it wakes and feeds

the gouge of its ignorant claw

                                               

pawing at the threat

the thieves in us

shadowing the circle

of what is

bigger and beyond                                     us

we are

                                                lumbering its path with lupine growls

                       

the pendulum swing of predator to prey

essential to our attachment

just

as the intercession of silence

between words always becomes

the merciful arms of a monstrous love

Destruction of the Drum Machine

There has been language before now;

Phrases of elegance and sophistication,

Raw expressions of injury, desire and ignorance,

Soft terms of satisfaction in an aftermath;

But I wish here for exhaustion, no words for this—

I want to be wordless for you, hushed in the curve

Of your approach, waiting and knowing

I cannot shape it; torqued in love’s instruction

I adhere to you, mask melting in the strangeness

Of this departure. A silence brimming over,

Desideratum between us, a new sound unfolding

Dedication II (Free Will) - with audio

I’m jealous of the hard-core

free form

hot-wired epiphany

that’s coming your way

I want to listen as you sweet talk yourself

with all the strapless voices

sliding up the spirals of your revelation

I want to watch as you climb aboard yourself again

muscles bulging their hunger

for the full pulse of this thrust into ripeness

I want to smell the furnace of your determination

crackling and spitting its lust

for the unexplored shores of a crisp white thirst

I want to see you savor the taste of your sweat

as you straddle your impulse to create and destroy

wrestling yourself to the ground

laughing and snorting at the false faces of defeat

I want to be touched by this transformation, truth

in the texture of this divine leap into the lodestar of love

body and mind shimmering as they will

charged with the spark of an unshackled soul

rejoicing its burst into song again

and again and again

The Haunting - with audio

I’ve been circling the aimlessness

of this, my practice, my word edges itching

for a place to root down.

Thoughts of a distant you masquerade

as the disjointed spine on a calm narrative

but the skin of this fantasy always peels back

to reveal nerve endings writhing

fiercely in the face of phantom extremities—

I feel everywhere the unnamable

you inspire in yourself, the crushing

nothing you desire for me. I claw

for an anchor in these shifting certainties,

this seething pool of cold ignorance;

how can I hope to fully know love

with one who wishes to wash each day

down to a clarifying emptiness,

a soul scrubbed clean of any voice

that might ask, or worse, might answer?

Window

 
You just walked by my window, a man as pure and true

as the winking words that cling to you

in my mind like dirty clothing.

For so long blind, it is shocking to now be struck 

with such longing and such loathing

on the occasion of you surpassing

in my tenterhooks the old lover,

amassing all his fire, usurping all my potential

anger and desire, both my larynx and my loins

are hot for your attention, want to make an intervention

in your bone structure, for the structure of your bone

is what might right now atone for all the past incisions in my belief.

I want a suspension of my practiced precision, the grief of my sharp words

softening in the moment of this tension, a torsion,

a new pull into the mystery of a new thief,

the contortion of my future, the distortions

of my past benched, this burst of words

wetter than the perfectly quenched thirst I dreamed of

when I was dreaming of a you, or some version of you.

And you walked by, high on the fumes of your opacity

but I always see what I want to see, such is the capacity of my lust

to fool me, and so I saw the audacity of your strut, let it unschool me,

saw something incredible in each foot following the heel before it,

I imagine I could kneel and adore it, this new sensation, my imagination

working doubletime, reaching for a reminder of the rhyme, the chime

of my core with another, so much left to explore, the whore in me churned,

I burned, the tips of my creamy thoughts turned on

by where you might be going, where you might be going...

North, South, East, West, the welts on my map snapped

with the thought of you, your belt coming undone,

North South East West, both of us undressed

in a feast of hands and fistfuls of hair,

where, oh where are you going? North? South?

Yes, South, you are freewheeling and I am feeling

a new faith, born again in your mouth, this sexual healing

surprising my lips, my hips rising in the empire state

of your tongue in my tower, my walls collapsing, my tectonic plate shifting,

my brain synapsing, sparking with your reign, showering me in a heat

so sweet in its deceitful love, I am deleted, by my own body I am defeated,

instantly completed, and immediately, I am incompleted once again.

But in the act of this overflowing, this aftermath of a deep unknowing

in bold bodily speech what is reachable, each inside each,

me just an imaginary you, you a you I do not do without longing

after knowing but there is no way of knowing or belonging

except this; I am free, no longer deafened by my old compass drum—

North South East or West,

I don’t know where you’re going

but I know I’d like to come.

Coda

Perhaps it is not about taming

the language, but rather trusting

the mouth of the river; the flow of the mind

is not to be easily tempered. Speech

is a construct, an artifact, not an essential

revelation. We are tangled in the weavings

of even our most elegant words. We scratch

at the scabs of our efforts to love one another,

to remake the world. We plot ideas,

the instruments of our glory, intangible,

           

only to find we arrive and arrive

without end. Language is innocent—wordless

we are equally empty. Silence? Perhaps we think

it would hurt less, but would it scorch even more

to feel the pointlessness and be

ignorant of the music we could make?

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Goddess (with audio)

inspired by Wallace Stevens and Nicole McRory

 

I.

Among our infinite imaginings,

the only living thing

is the mind of the Goddess.

II.

She is of endless song

like the forest of a tree

in which every leaf is singing.

III.

The Goddess balances on the cusp of our dream—

in one eye, a melting sun, in one eye, a harvest moon.

IV.

A woman and a man

are one.

A woman and a man and the Goddess

are one.

V.

I do not know which to prefer,

the beauty of longing her

or the beauty of believing in her,

the Goddess born in the mind

or the song borne on the air.

VI.

Visions spit across our willful, worldly eyes

cackling the indecipherable noise.

The shadows of the Goddess song

cross us, to and fro.

The throat

traces its desire

in the strains to be heard.

VII.

O skybound children

Why do you conjure such differing deities?

Do you not see how the Goddess

kisses the earth with your footsteps

and her heartbeat echoes in your voices?

VIII.

I know divine inflections

and glorious innumerable invocations

but I know too

that the Goddess is involved

in what I know.

IX.

When the Goddess climbs into the sun

It merely marks the passage

of one of many circles.

X.

At the sight of the Goddess

shimmering in the full fire of her song

even the imperious intellects

will shiver, and grow curious.

XI.

She stretches across a cerulean sky

lit by the clarity

of one intention and one breath

yoked in her heart.

She gives us the ecstatic pose of life.

XII.

The mind is moving.

This is the Goddess in flight.

The mind is perfectly still.

This is the Goddess at rest, dreaming.

XIII

The morning blazes even into the late afternoon

and in the evening, the Goddess gathers

all the light back into her heart.

She sits in the cradle of the dark approach

unraveling the world back to the sweet notes of her evensong.

Other Satellite Terms for the Deconstruction of the Self

1.

Shag Tuckered Doldrums

            Turbo-charged Doppelgängbanging Sheepishness

                       

Dodging Self-shadowy Tabernacles

                       

Somewhat Truthy Distillations

           

            Shangri-La Tutti-frutti Doohickies

           

            Tumbledown Daydream Swizzlesticks

            Dominatricks Shamelessly Taxidermying

           

            Synapses Toil Doltishly

            Sharkskinned Turnstile Donkeywork                       

            Ten-speed Ding-dongs Selling-out           

            Deliriously Sheathing Turpitude

                       

Sterile Truthless Dogma?

                       

                                   

Sexual Tit-dilation Debunked

Sociobiology Transmitting Disturbances

2.

SWAT-team Test-tickle-her Douchebaggery

            Tweaking Drag-and-drop Shapeshifters

            Denigrating Shirley Temples

                        Shibboleth Twisting Disengagement

            Shilling Twosome Dramatis-personae

            Tacky Duchesse-satin Shindig-dogging

            Drillmastered Syncopated Tailpieces

                        Soul-soiled Tantrick-or-treating Dribblers

            Shockproof Tailspin Dropkick

            Tally-ho Drumboy Shortshrift

            Duped Tandem Schrapnel

                        Shrewd Tenderfoot Decimation

                       

 Slimy Torchsong Disease

Satori Transmitted Devilishly

3.

Shakespearean Tantric Double-entendres

Twaddled Dumplings Shuttlecocked

Dugs Shuck-sucked Tapestrysting

Sibilant Tassle-topped Duets

Sidewinding Tawdry Double-agency

Technicolor Dust-busting Sixth-sense

Dysfunctional Sightseeing Tentacles

Signification: Tense Daddy-dagger                       

Silverscreen Tercets Dangling-down

Tessellated Demystification Silkworming

Default: Satiating Tenderhookers

Simulacrum Testicular Decollétage

           

Soundscape Transmitting Drivel

Sexual Temporality Displaced

4.

Slapdash Troubadour Depravity

Thump-thrust Derring-do Slipsliding

Dervish-whirl Smackdaddy Thunderclapping

Smirking Tight-lipped Dialectables

Sincipital Tête-à-tête Defeasance

Theological Defenses Siphoned

Defiant Single-serve Thermocoupling

Sinewy Thought-thick Defibrillations

Sisyphean Theatrical Defenestration

Tongue-thirsty Degradation Sirloin-sized

Deliquescent Skills Truncated

Skedaddle Thrill Delusion

Sexual-app-for-that Tactical Dementia

Sinister Tech-nil-logical Disease

5.

Sideshowing Titillating Distractions

Tipsy Dildo Sound-bites

Dulcimer Smitten Trajectories

Semiabstract Tonal Diddlysquatting

Stylistic Token-fuck Didgeridoing

            Tonsil-tickling Declaimed Solfeggio

Discomfitting Sotto-voce Toxicology

Soi-disant Tootsie-tootle Disclaimer

Solipsistic Topcoat Demurmurs           

Topsy-turvey Designifiers Spatulating

Do Spasmodictions Tickle?

Sensory Traininground Derailed

Semantic Trance-mission Diseased

Sine qua non Trust Deconstructions