like i would be caught dead in georgia

teargarden font p.

i'd been riding all day,
riding past the windows with their sales and engines,
the sad-voiced speakers touting tuberous wonders.

riding next to nothing with the bank clacked in it.
riding down the highway where
the shapes of chairs repeat like clack-clackerly,
velveted, doused in musk and extrinsic tastes.
tied down with bows the size of mule sides.

blown. fully. cross-roaded.

i rode down a crankhole, rustled me up some shankbratch,
dirty as any drippled touseling thing.
rode me into town and routed me out a slink and some milk.

held off on the whisting, the whiloming, the ankle-strapped
ambergris god with the plating like bitlip platinum honey-smeared
honey-glazed lip. i rode in to see him but i brought him
nothing
and for that he speared me,

shucked acreless.

acreless, i crossed enraging, irradiated. one ankle over another.

i ate six seeds.

crunch crunch. crunch. crunch crunch crunch.

not sure what scrying is

devils as scrying device

cast them out
into the seas and rivers,
pressed floodgates, coastiwde tides--
cast them out so they spin
like golden compass on dry sand,

beached. cast them out
into their never rest. hurling
black and red in the dark against
infinite space. cast them out

infinite
cast them out dashed
against the gates of time.
cast them out and over
there like red rover,
rolling over and over
into blank water.

cast them out
forever.
never stop,
oh never.

something reddish like giddy

limned, i warrant you

1.
raced, racketed,
put away dry and stained--
in autumn, in a pewter november
pocketed.

you were my next-to-last,
or next-next-to-last. heart laid away,
countered, stitched into sachet like dried
cranberries in a pocket, picking up
lint.

space space.


period
.
space space.


2.
razed and cracked:
the five-point day that ever is
when night is not. like a dry horse,
galloping and wheezing.

open your eyes, my first love.
open your eyes on your shelf of silver and bronze
staring out the rough-rimmed eye-holes of a mask
the texture of corn-husks. memories that
make me feel dead. like sand in the sockfist

of love. space space.


period
.
of love. space.

3.
change is either
all we have
or all we require,

my last love, my apocryphal diamond.

i anticipate you with the fervor
of liquid.
of coal, melting, melted, liquid. heavy at the wrist
and lid
with love of you.

pant pant. space space.


period. pant pant
.
period.

space.

for a moment

the tight places 2

swansdown packed into a banked shell--
the excesses and impositions of
cracking. pellucid walls breaking up like jericho's.

it's just a song on the radio, you jerk, you think,
quite lucidly--a sluice of light, a ream packed in
from head to bottom--the last temptations of

control and denial.

just a song, so why this...nonsense...bursting
almost next to nothing, feathering
across the senses, white and so light, packing in
against the eyes, the nose, the tongue and lips,
against the ears, every available inch of epidermis.

that white shell wall cracking
below the note.

harbingers

things are weird in my head. not that this is particularly unusual. not ever having anyone else's head, i can't say how weird they are on anything but a personal scale. personally, they're moderately weird. i ate a lot of pickles recently; that might have something to do with it.

allerseelen

it was the best evening ever:
we took our jackets from the stone hinges they hanged from
they bellied like sails as we put them on.

we snuck under formerly sound fences,
snapping our teeth into living necks.
we stared at sour grapes hanging up above our snouts
they were green like temptation and they also made a snap.

we raised white fronts to the moon.
white as the caps of waves. we were never not in motion,
our backs undulant as cherry-skin, downy like silvery peaches,
breathing in air ricocheting direct from grassy plains,
rocks, roots, the bones we left fresh behind.

our feet no longer lead, no longer clay,
our skulls grace-filled beyond comprehension,
because filled with our breath.
the luck of the bone in the drying day is negligible

we prefer the belly of the night, night shroud
night esophagus, night when day is not,
the night bells, the sweet sound

of hayloft words
and former suicides: we were together again.

for w.c. williams (sucky as it is)

caliban

it's taken all--
it's taken all off, now,
the roof of the tongue, lips, the edges of the teeth--
worn as they are with husk- and hull-crushings,

seed-snappings, sounding ever like ham-hocks smacking doorframes--
taken off the edges, the white heat and white noise,
bruised amalgam of sensation like fruit in
the jar;

hanged wistful on the bough's end til a fist filled,
then in the teeth, through them and with them, the unification found
in stones, in a stew of prunes--

it's taken all, taken off now,
elements of the grass, the sandlot, shaking away
the impress on all flesh--lashing out the singular--

carving out the shore's line with great god-fistfuls
of cling water.

you taught me how to speak.

pregnant zombie nun run

success is counted sweetest

take a look at these--hands--
fluttering like moths against a light, with that same rat-a-tat-tat-tat,
that foreign sound.

no one expected a winner.
from the onset i wore my face against the light like
one of those silhouettes::

diamante pangs and hand-wrung tears--
a drag smile, mouth's filthy greasepaint and long false eyelashes,
my beard, my constant companion, my anchoring stream;;

what mirrored my soul was blacker:::
peering into a lacquered bowl, reflection pooling at its bottom,
like an antic color case left out in the sun, running, pregnant

with maggots. but i was wrong, i was wrong,,
i am the winner,,, i won.

that gangplank really gave you what for, friend!

losing it!

losing it in the simile:
the metaphor becomes one
in its pale pink blushings,
its white skirting--

the wine stain on its lips and
the vagrant half-cooked deepening
of the whites of its eyes,

drunk, searching for someone
to marry it into the church and
finding instead a pure white
bonelessness up

between thighs. endure it.
endure kissings, endure the breaking of
the seal. endure the waste of

waiting
for that first meal.

something

baby, let me come back down--
baby, let me throw myself your bone.
let me tie my knees up to your bedstead, baby--
never let me let you let me go.

citrus the color of sunrise

just as a note, these recent ones have mostly been sonnets...ish. am i bad at counting 14, or do i have something in mind? it's a really really open question. tired again, hence...

experientially

a., not the case that night ever is
when day isn't. it's instead a separate case:
mortal skinsack, similar but deified, ruffled,
coursed, petalled into difference:

b., a substantial moan ever is like that. the same is the case
in shades of gray, snatching and refracting
over syllables like skin over the bone.

red and ruby ripe for parting, the same
isn't the night that turns to day, the deity
that turns itself to night,

cratching and spilling all over the place.
the making moans and rolls like rubies: each goblet of skin,
in nether grapefruit where the juice resides,
down the chin, a second oblivion,

unpared.

for wimps and jerks

tired--this is probably going to be pretty bad.

moth flapping blind against a light.

objectification stretches one out like a raw hide
being pegged down for tanning.
the desire to fulfill all subjecthood, cowled like
a monk, eyes on the ground, heart in alt--
beating like the wings of a bird, spreading itself
on the air, or snapping, desires, like sheets,
attensile in the wind, attensile
against themselves--

this desire appears tenable only in death:
shardel destination snatching flesh out from below skin
and then the skin bound down, or, less, the pitted hand, the
sinking goodbye, the coring of the apple.

but sometimes the object stretches 'round
and can bind herself
down. sometimes. sometimes she stretches in
and patterns on the palm of my hand.

e.g. scooters, vacation, fall

thoughts, for a woman

because politically-minded, i bought and sold
my hungers, slathering at the mouth quite secretly, in magnetic
colors, like dogs going down the slalom in little jackets,

because your hair was the color of midnight.
a long and shining sluice like nuit's, but
the stars spangling nuit's hair were in your eyes.
which maybe makes your eyes thieves of nuit's hair's stars.

i don't care much about that though. want--
red. want red. making myself ill: thoughts, mine,
spin, like a haunch on a vertical spit in a case. because i run
until i stop. like the mechanized rabbit on a dogtrack, i stop at you.
because i defy art and i defy stars and i defy you--because
i defy--things that i want most--defy--all over them.

deity is for things i don't care about. i don't care about much.
i want you. want you. want you best, fresh. want to eat you. most.

pretty penny was her name

the idea is if i overwhelm with the same questions and answers over and over the corpus will solidify and revive like a shakespearean frankenstein queen. or like a dolphin back. or a bear's knee.

an elision:
oberon rode the dolphin back. he rode it well.

she said it to no-one

one-night woman sonnet plus one

spotless impurity: blushing at its own motion yet
moving anyway. something got down her shirt.
painted yellow and black like the back
of the meat-feeding wasp: new two antennae for a
new inquisition--not why or how,
but how much and for how long.
sing of it: the body electrified by
disgust, unknowingness--a desire for
tumbling, the yellowed marrow moved
through the cracked bone and the dark
of lightless muscle nestled in under skin;
a playing-card queen, playing up and down
a game she cannot fondle.

a whole for love, where two lips, split,
like ripe blades of scissors, ceaseless, come together.

individuation reflux

i used to write poems that meant nothing--literally nothing. that is, they were supposed to mean something, but what they were, really, was a marshalling of these formal elements that i suppose i shouldn't call formal, because i don't actually really know what i'm talking about--alliteration, rhythm, this sort of thing. but i didn't know that that was what those poems were doing until i came into a topic, namely v. of the 5's--and then i milked that for all it was worth. a good juicy topic like v. taught me things about the form--that is, that repetition and repetition-like actions, obsessions with forms and major sounds, depict the body's experience better than description can, at least the kind of describing i can do, which is terrible. this is an incomplete nutshell to put the things v/5 taught me--this is what i know that topic taught me; this is the part i can put into words.

but now that i know those things i think maybe i'm in another stage. and of course i don't know what that stage is--and i'm sure it looks just like the former stage. i've learned how to zone out and come up with something. not that the something is good. but it comes from a place beyond which my usual words can come. hence though everything i write at this point sounds like it means less than nothing, it actually means much more than my usual types of communication. hopefully. my brain zooms around in its skull, occasionally to the point of pain; this point of pain provides the static from which the words in the "poems" on this blog constellate. what is on this site, this "poetry" (if any of this shit can be called poetry), does come from a point of pain. occasionally joy, too--really anything so "overwhelming" (this isn't the right word) that i can't take it.

i'm an accomplished not-truth-teller, but this should not be taken with a grain of salt, because i mean it right now. permanence is what words give things, apparently according to w.c. williams; they give it badly, apparently, because retroactively, without spontaneity, without freshness, without making-it-newness, without a whole list of other shit that i refuse to accept. maybe it's because i'm a coward. i accept that. i accept that the reason i can't accept that words suck may be because i'm too much of a coward to truly examine the dirty underpinnings and coercions of language.

maybe. but maybe i just can't take any more people telling me who i should be in relation to myself, in relation to my own language. i don't have a right to feel; it's instead a necessity. i don't have a right to attempt to know myself, bumbling, shamed, and idiotic as i am; i have a necessity. i don't have a right to take this pain, or joy, or any other inexpressible (right now it's pain) and, if not stop it, at least create it diamond-hard and diamond-faceted, going not in and out but through the window. it batters me from out to in (the indomitable it); it is a necessity to push not back but through. like proprieception. let me propriecept.

don't hold me accountable to the millions of other people who are better than me.

i don't know who i'm talking to.

no kids in the engine room

multivalence:
a plain/process poem

listening to the same songs
over:
a note produced by the body and soul of leontyne price.

i want
so many things:
the vaseline-sharp stars in the velvet sky

cannot compass my desires.
a multivalence of things which make other things
into separate things; i want

every step to fall
in my province. each heel and each toeing
to fall on me. like comets
in orbit:

nothing permanent, but each
black and blue with meaning, with
heavy imprint like that quasi-vibration
of dirt gradually cleft by shovel:

almost a grind.
fall on me. make me your earth: all-
encompassed, layered, dirty.
grind minerals and detrius
into my mouth. let me spit it out:

a note.
your
note.

when myspace just won't cut it

yeah, i had a day like those days i sometimes had. hence prepare for self-indulgence.


this is about something
2.
scallop-edged and painless, hanged
like lavender:
the leftovers, the byproducts
straining against strain:
strand versus strand.

every part, every
part
something'd. a certain color, a
tracery of red or blue, marbled white and
red, like clouds,

(3.)
chiascurate, in a deepening
sky. a conversation, maintained
over years, static as memory:
narcissus pooled and echo all
echoing over him:

aborsonn, aborsonn, aborsonn--scraps,
sheets of cut metals. trache him. buy
him thing. trade his playing card for a '45
lp of sandblasting beats and castanets cratching
itch. itch. savour the sound because the sound
alone the sound can't

lie. lipless, it can't lie. down. next to you,
"i" wanna get next to "you." head
circles like falcon, searches out diamond,
neclates the prefect in soused fashion.
you see what "i'm" saying, right, though,

(4.)
that the beat goes on: promethean liver of blood and
gods grinded their stonelike teeth and create
light
ening from cheek to cheek.
it was light

today, it was light.

and everything
was singular. everything
poured like a funnel.
everything exchanged
hands. i was guilty
as hell.

the light diverted its path past me.
it sank in orbit, it sang like rabbit,
the snakesong of the rabbit biting
its tail. it snagged and it broke
like zipper. i unlaced it slightly
just to get in

(5.)
like a bodkin: smoothly.
to slip in like two cents past
coppertone. because i wove a rug
of rattleskins, because it bit my tail.
just because i saw the
light.

light
followed me
everywhere. snagging against
colors and strands like
zipper, carting like a knight, fondling
like a barbecue.

sounds boomed off bathroom walls and
i was emotionally unviable like a
like a clipped breath, like quiet
like quietude.
soft me. stop it.

rush of soundings, the gravy of them, the
lop and thump, an imagined beheading onto
carpet, in sweat like stomata, silvered over
with morphous cuts, hiding, the
meaning, in mealing mouth, like seeds in tomate:

buried protean.
oregano and sodium, lid, lid paper.
full fathom five.

1.
light// / / /
slice// / / / through// / / / like
caesurate// / / /press// / / /of breath
stop thought// / / /stop thought in// / / /
nothing but// / / /sound of pain.
\\ \ \ \...
// / / /.


// / / /...
\\ \ \ \.

i'm being saved by frank wrench

this is a song for a firefly fanfic. yes, that's what i've been working on writing recently.

Young Damien went riding
on All Hallow's even
for to meet with his darling Linnae.

His mother said, "Son,
you ride out with the sun,
lest from the true path you should stray, oh,
lest from the true path you should stray."

Listen well to the song
of Damien Leng,
who from the true pathway did stray--
Lady Fox's desire
laid him down by the fire--
he was the kindling and she was the flame.

Well, the moon lit the way
with her silver-white gaze
as Damien rode through the forest,

when just off of the path
he spied the red spark
of a flame, rising high, rising highest, oh,
of a red-burning flame rising highest.

Listen well to the song
of Damien Leng,
who from the true pathway did stray.
Lady Fox's desire
laid him down by the fire,
for he was the kindling and she was the flame.

And what did he see
in that light and that heat,
in the curl of the smoke from the flames,

but a woman so fair
with her long curling hair,
and a hand out for him to come claim, oh,
a hand out for him to come claim.

Listen well to the song
of Damien Leng,
who from the true pathway did stray;
Lady Fox's desire
led him into the fire,
for he was the kindling and she was the flame.

The wave does not race
to the sand with more force,
the tide to come in's not so ready,

and the voice of its sound
is less of its own
than Damien was of the lady, oh,
than Damien was of the lady.

Listen well to the song
of Damien Leng,
who from the true pathway did stray.
Lady Fox laid him down
on the ground, laid him long,
for he was the kindling and she was the flame.

And deep in the thick smoke
did she dig out his heart,
did she take it and make it her food?

and did he survive,
was he dead or alive
when he entered the depth of the wood,
when he entered the depth of the wood?

tiny bubbles

i don't think i'm really committed to poetry. which is as much as to say, i just read a poem by someone named heather graham in pilot, and it was very very beautiful. what my poetry has going for it is diction, but it rarely goes anywhere.

that's the thing: i only have enough discipline to pursue one art form which requires the paring of everything down to a singularity--a beautiful and impenetrable thing, no matter how ugly or diffuse (i've been reading the new critics recently)--and it's singing. i might not be very good at singing, but...poetry's too strong for me to work on. if i have something in me, i'll write it down. or possibly take some ex-lax. it's a toss-up. singing i can work on, because no matter what else, it's worth it. poetry is some sort of sea in which i am rudderless--singing is a sea in which there's a half-naked wooden woman to follow, because she's on the front thingee and i'm in a ship. WHAT?

if the discipline of singing is transferrable, i can maybe write poems. at some point.

list of songs i would sing were i to have a recital which i probably won't ever: (in progress)
-"o my stars," michael hurley
-"mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix," saint-saens
-"i've got it bad (and that ain't good)," webster/ellington (according to the internet)
-"st. christopher," "temptation," "blue valentine," waits
-"midnight sun," johnny mercer (?????)
-"wild is the wind," tiompkin/washington
-"goldeneye," bono
-"l'amour est un oiseau rebelle," bizet
-"nessun dorma," puccini
-"horses in my dreams," harvey
-"darlin' be home soon," lovin' spoonful
-"take me to the world," sondheim

...it would be kind of depressing. i'd need some suggestions from people who like happy music. it's not that i don't like happy music, it's just that i need to be pointed in the correct direction usually. but since this is a fantasy list, it doesn't really matter.

less creepy than usual love poem

i know you have a name but i'm not sure what it is

imagining your flesh:
local household to an ancient want:

creature-construct,
the nearest and dearest.

imagining you, a comma in a bed:
the sweetness of those half-furled limbs

concentrated, expressed in the eyes,
green, brown, or blue:

i think,
therefore i want.