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.