sacrament

redemption

core

This is a companion piece to "Kore" below.

Kore

coffee shop of my dreams

boyishly

vegetable state of rubies found and worms
try thy beauty slow-chapt
Flood my conversion two hundred empires slow;
state your heart, my back to languish
embrace the private am'rous pore
nor would I love
dust and deserts the tide to stand still
sweetness
try every part to gaze on eternity
echoing which way the ashes
would complain.

fragments: a work in process

the truce of objects sates me
between care and capture

affixed three digits
no deeper
sighed and twined

a conceit sensibly weak
put upon by words
frets and cowers in
sweete misprision

curious to sing, bright wire
a species of melancholy ails us
pass'd over in silence

culminating in newsprint

pity me but do not
speak

31.5

redeem odious
not another her here
to break fibers swaying
stalling

magnificent guile to gild an
other meant

in time and time again

done to by time
your I frays
the phrase that tempts

space and time
insignificant

consequence

spent sated miracle
loosed and careless

no dead but our own
myth

and yet

I shake my head in wonder
at my own soft cruelty
as flesh renders

will wounds accrete and
carve thought from care?

rather the mercy of
no more
than that

but stay
nonetheless

glory

can knowledge break
before the suffocating down

godhead and the
march of history
mean nothing to her

but soft and hidden breast
under which beats the strange heart:
this is manna

black eye rimmed with gold
fixed on her alone
on her! merely

the knowing is in it
and the need

for a breath
the great bird
bows his head to greatness

apostrophe

If night and lies hang us
upon daze of paradoxes

ire inexplicable
wound with rope to expected form

debriefing Is a trap of
noise opened for a reason and
shut rightly

why-nots wrestling against the blues
another angle lining no

out of case or synaptic rifts
without you There just one

eye oiled in dreams
wrist raising the case beyond

firing Go at reason’s prison
Peek in the well before blues

and cell's impromptu hinge
with you here,

hurling open
delete whys

hope forth

between

in the between space I settle my
heart hands lips teeth
sore with knowing

cast from stone or porous metal
poor skeleton
wrapped in flesh barely

I’ll make you strong from the in-side.

who speaks? whose fingers trip
from neck-spine to base of back,
the one who waits or the one who pauses?

I push my lot ahead of me
in bags left over from my mother
but nothing fits, it
tries but

some turn
away or in or

I take a hand held to me
eyes tight
eyes open.

ephemera

words of weight like
petals leaves tears wings
settle unscorned
stylus-scored
clothe me tissue-thin
tremble with my breath

I don’t dare move
and risk their upset

lost imagined fiction
certain to
knowing is
ripped of
hollows

waited words

untoward
unspoke

say

untitled

there is no word for this
casualty of meaning

double-edged penance
stripped from me my tongue
licked clean of sound

careless, I
slide into inapt
measure

no word for it

brunette

ash

I drink anger like
expensive whiskey
thin fire lasting
wanting more I
build a home with it
fine carapace
strength in figures
vertebrate



habit or compellment
brings me here
I learn the nature
of the flame
study its
chemistry and whim
its vigor
unconsummate



this is no place
for growing things.

random pics

ceci n'est pas un

intense he said
she too
the air is thinner up here
rarified
still bloody

The skin under my nails tells a story.

erstwhile mangled extremity
believe is all

pace my bell-jar
beauty

still,

wisdom comes
crashes
whether we will or know.

for argument's sake

adaptation is more difficult than expected.

hunger spurs me
I feast on expired cans of philosophy
and gristle
from the dumpster behind the shop-rite.

something rustles under there.

contempt masks what judgment
flesh falls away
ribcage stares gooseflesh and
shudders

adaptation is more difficult

resolved: that the mind and body are one
that the heart learns
that we are rational creatures able to
exercise control
resolved

wildlife creeps in
rats maggots feral cats
scrabbling for bones

I miss you
I miss me
I miss

adapt

underground

absence
grows the heart
grows a wall
vein-covered
flowering
thorned and
half-true.

unscale
mythic flaxen
from no
head of mine:
Persephone
crowned

wrong of me
to do as I have
done.

no.

stone
earth
moss
loam

larvae gestate
beetles and other
insects

wait for spring.

trust

Funny, it rained that
day too and
I remember driving home
(no. no. no. no. no)
blare and gleam of wet road
tail lights calling
care

and the next time
the look in his eye
said rain.

Today it rained
was raining when
you called

I don’t know
why conversations started must

or if they

benediction

Watch me sleep

lay your eyes
in the hollow
of my back

dream me
into form
and stillness

curl
into my absences
catlike

tether me

my context
and subtext
pressed smooth

panem de caelo praestitisti eis
omne delectamentum in se habentem.[1]

---

[1] Thou hast given them bread from heaven, having within it all sweetness.

getting to know

When I was seventeen I
sat in my parents’ house
on a green velvet chair

the green just a memory really
of green
more grey, more brown than green
the velvet scraped bare in spots

like my hand
as I sat there
nails of my left hand
carving a crescent into the
back of my right

not blinking not blinking
not blinking

the sting localized
drawing the ache
shutting down thought

abstract neurons synapses etc.
I imagine every signal
pulsing from hand to brain
brain to hand
while my
heart
unnoticed

****

When I was seven I
laid back on my
looking at the ceiling

I caught the eye of
the metal elephant bank
you put a quarter in its trunk
push the lever and
send the quarter into the slot

I watched the elephant
watching me
and wondered what he thought
of the little girl
lying there numb to touch

I wanted my own quarter to add
maybe after
for good behavior

flight II

the chair was broken when you returned poet
the soft black folds of cloth pooled on the floor
still damp with

I imagine you expected an empty room like any other
early in the day, no students sitting at desks lined haphazardly in rows
empty in the banal sense
You forgot you put me here
You knew, having become no longer useful, I would be gone
from this particular life of the mind

If you imagine me rising grand and shining
a Phoenix from the celestial hearth
reborn and reenergized
tail feathers still damp with

you are wrong. I sat. I waited. I grew very small and
mouselike, slipped the bonds and
catlike, wiped the mask from my eyes and
picked as she-bear up the offending wooden article
all clean lines and worn surfaces
and lifted the chair high
gave a toss
sent it crashing
while I took flight, became lighter than air
passed through an open window on strands of honky-tonk

No room holds me
no one holds me
no holds

If I return to this room
you will not be here
emptier than before you brought me
I return not to seek you but as
pilgrimage
to ensure the splintered chair
and the pooled cloth
now dry but
gilded with

the physicality of these things a challenge
to the assumption there ever was a man here.

flight

This time around the need came well before the act transmitted in an arc set my teeth and hair on edge. Two bodies traveling distances on separate Airbus 320s inexorably. The spotlight shines, need radiates. Found and found out.

Dancing came as a surprise, but body said yes before super-ego alter ego could cut in. Controlled losing of control. What happened next cannot surprise me, though I may feign, I may demure. When do fault lines appear? Leap into gap that was a line drawn in sand?

The taste of this one is metal in my mouth. Teeth and fingers. Nerve endings fray and knot and fray again, a complex knitwork. Bodies akimbo, breath shudders through, breathing me out and other in. What do I like want try newborn, this shimmering new performance?

Others have written my flesh, now this one too, a crazy fucked-up palimpsest. One in three 18- to 25-year-old women has a tattoo, ruining it for the rest of us. Hands shoulders knees and toes all sliding. Dead skin cells the detritus that keeps us present.

Need short-circuits need. The drive back may have come as epiphany, revelation of sunrise over elevated freeways. Bodies moving apart through space, toward the next body, the next bodies. This is irredeemable.