Late December

.



red clouds like
torn scraps of onion,
fraught with plangent thunder
over


the silo rearing white and thick
as your thigh from the earth; yearly
flaking the accumulation of its days,
as though the giddily spattered afternoons
I gave were unwanted.
come summer I will not paint it
white anymore.


the fleshless tree simulated atop
is no good. every blue light
has gone out, and
no
pliers in my truck will do the trick:
like a swarm of lanternbugs painted
by one refusing
to render things as they were.


I had to string them
with one pair of hands.
I guess from a distance
they can still fool you.



.

Kitchen Girl

.


simper
of the strobing halogen bulb,


warm teeth on my knuckles,
the blood between them:
all waiting
is violence.


I hear the engine
spear the morning’s blue ribs,
fumble


for an old record but the growl gutters away,
and here
I am
with a black
flat vinyl,


like holding two
ragged eggshells,
the yellow idea of the thing
dripping
floorward.


.

A Year Without Rain

thirty years of my ripened flesh
has gotten you here,
crabbing across the linens
and nightly
loving you,

for which I had
expected
to clutch today
my flabby pink
drop of god’s drool,
rather

than to
pet your gray arm,
making motions with hands
while nurses gather their tools.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke (3)

I knocked on the firstfloor window she
opened bathrobe said
not today.
I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air
had
gnawed away
sensation.

my hand on your lowest rib:

this white roseflesh is close
as can
be
to breathing you,

the blue morning
thrashing
against
my fingernails and against
your ferret-belly,
harrying
with soft vulpine hunger.

then you coughed
a foxtail spume
into the fiveohthree air
like an early train:

a single engineer
spooning into the fire’s mouth,
gleaning
no satisfaction.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke (2)

I knocked on the firstfloor window she
opened bathrobe said
not today.
I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air
had
gnawed away
sensation.

this white roseflesh is close
as can
be
to breathing you:

my hand on your lowest rib.

the blue morning
thrashed
against
my fingernails and against
your ferret-belly,
harried
with soft vulpine hunger.

you cough a foxtail
spume
into the fiveohthree air
like an early train:

a single engineer
spooning into the fire’s mouth,
gleaning
no satisfaction.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke

A recent composition; I have been experimenting with chaos lately (form fits function, after all). This is only a first draft, and not the final realization. I have little time for it, but this release will help compel me toward the fatal birthing.

I knocked on the firstfloor window she opened bathrobe said not today. I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air had
gnawed away
sensation.

this white roseflesh is close as I can come to breathing you,
pink-flecked with disease. you cough a raggy foxtail spume
into the fiveohthree air
like a train (the pistons do not touch and yet the earth trembles),
and it smells
like your red throat.

my hand on your lowest rib
the blue morning
thrashes against my fingernails and
your
ferret-belly,
harried with soft vulpine hunger.

The Sweet Lonely

cheekbone moon I slouched by the tracks

hearing the
wolf-eyed

moan.

your slender line
clattering off like empty
freight cars
to
unlit burgs,

leaving
rusty cries amid smoke
and
dead
joyous
air.

No Meat for Restless Teeth

if I were uncivilized I’d
have
hammered my feet to slivers years ago,
and left white watery
streams of bone.

the street dogs would
come
and leave with splinters
of me jutting
from their gums.

since, though,
I have wallet and flats,
I may
furious
ply the pale concrete block six ten forty nights—
and leave behind
no thing,
returning late to the fecund smell
of the hyads sleeping in the grass
and your soapy hands
closing the kitchen blinds.

The Commune

perhaps those that live
there
are smooth european youth,
with stealthy european eyes
and sophisticated lusts.

but then, youth
are youth,
you know:
gullible, apejawed, raunchy.

University Boys

one p.m. I saw your sons,

thin manly swabs
sweeping nightly
through glittertown
with girls,

huffing in the gutterpits
of their skin.

The Inevitable Season

I am out
with the sticks of autumn
cringing like loverbodies against cold ground,

and in their private shadows
sticky leaves clutch and simper.
beneath the heel of me
they are made pulp
while my voice grunts wetly
kismet, kismet and

thick clouds
sop the moon’s
white blood.

Father

we went past the last light in town,

your hands planted
on the steeringwheel
like two feet stoutly
in the earth;

I think now if I pushed
down
the window the smell
of dusty mulberry leaves
would intrude on our not talking.

earlier by knight’s landing we were
preceded
by swallows flirting
with the air
and a scar of purple jetstream
crusting the
old
blue
skin
above the buttes.

we’re past
all that.
now the air on my sleeve is
the color
of the last light in town,
the neon elbowing my arm:
everything’s a dollar or less
you know
I don’t believe that.

tomorrow with red evening through
the parlor window,
you’ll be out back with the weeds,
armed at all points and sweat
inside your clothes—

my arm red
in the last light on the sill,
the curtain in the corner
ballooning
like a woman pregnant
with
wind.

Bravery

I have proffered you
truth in all things,
so when you asked
who’d drunk yours,
I said

him

to get the joy of lying.



.

Underwater Shapes

with you I’d like to think
I am become
a vat of beautiful things,

hollow for the sounds
of
your slenderest fleshes

dipping in long blue
dimples,
and the coolness,

the moon fierce and bowlegged
over the water,

the twin submerged clots of my feet
misshapen, currents
of black air and
the black vaginal bore
clamped against my skin;

the oysterflesh behind my knees
bleeding against the concrete edge,

soggy rag-fingers and
the white tablet of chlorine
flaking at the bottom.


.

That For Which We Have Fought

again your nicest
dress crumpled
like cloth
beneath the chair;
in sleep
your golden jaw
dripping honey on my arm.

the worst things are
your belly’s two folds,
glutted on
all my holiest minutes,

and that all
the things I thought of myself are true.


.

Sanitary

you clutch up
your skirt from the floor
like a fingernail I have trimmed:
it will grow up about
you again,
your skin shall be
defenced again.

the darkness beneath your breasts has afforded me security,
I have slumbered under
their dark girth.

this fabric though
is warmed by your body,
it is not your body.
once I would have asked you
don’t please,
but if you remain bare I know
it will be like
a man
and
wife brushing teeth
in a windowless bathroom,

two standing
naked without speech.

Tart (revised)

the Radio blows
at the small succulent hairs
on the back of my hand.
and this is you.

you stir
the radiant Blood
beneath, it swims with you
and gnashes me jagged,
can you feel my cudgelgirthed lips
against your Jaw
hardtenderlover
brute?

and

in brief,
you don
your soles
and leave

these small sumptuous hairs
dry with breath.

.

Capitulate

evening has
befallen
me
and you,

bristling, thicklike as
the muttering black beards
of nomads
loping slowly west,
gaunt with cold.

evening having befallen,
the air is
purple with no sound,
only your sniffling
and the chuff
of black beards
closing.

I have left you
out the walls;
this place will not burn
tonight.

the air where you stand
is purple,
and darker
than the rest.
get in your car,
please.

.

STOIC

ten
thou
sand
years
I have swooned
in a ragged, portentous land,
buying coffee at eleven
with you while knowing
you’d kiss me if I’d let you.

.

MINISTERS of PROPAGANDA

I was led to believe
as a child
that my parents
loved each other.

TART

the Radio blows
at the small succulent hairs
on the back of my hand.
and this is you.

and thus you stir
the radiant Blood
beneath, it swims with you
and gnashes me jagged;
I will clutch you that
brutally.

my Teeth are anxious.

Not satisfied with it yet. We shall see what comes of it.


RETINUE

I have come here
for you,
to this the ugliest city.

I tell you that
I dredge the lingering streets
with gluttonous fingernails red
from scraping the gloam
of taillights off
my cheeks.

night vaults the slum
and gloats atop the sexy billboard—
that brown bramble of legs, you
know the one—
I would clamber now
and ascend the blue scaffold
of your flesh
for which my
fingernails have so longed.

Two, to make up for the lack of original material of late. These particulars are fresh out the literary oven.


RED POPPIES IN THE WHEAT

I cried out.
your hands like moist folds
of wind then
you said
I am with you here.

and when you turned
away on your side
I saw
the flushed pits
my fingers had made.

DISENCHANTMENT

the artists I admire
always turn out to be
slouched men in misarrayed suits.

You, sculptor of my intimate linens,
Once were the grandest of these.

As I skimmed through some old poetry the other day, I discovered a piece from before the Revolution. The original was terrible, but I saw a salvageable core at its heart. As an exercise in contrast, I present to you the original draft, followed by the revision. *Note: the revision is still a work in progress.


WINTER WANTON

I know you are
like paper and that your skin shivers
under blue sweating lidless moons, dry sheaves.
Salty bite hissing up against the leeward side of the wind,
the bareboned white of your shiny lips,
the cedar in your dollhouse hair.

The breath of yours
that slithers between my teeth
and expires in a frail shudder on the cusp of my throat
does not remember its bellows, no patience
with the slow weep of the sun’s bleeding fire
across the uncurled fields languishing smoky and green,
their ruts hushed and expectant for the
silent-jawed movement of cloud driving cold
between them.

I know you are
like paper and your skin shivers
and is soaked in blind ditches sluiced open
with rain. I don’t want to disappoint baby but
your ink has run about under your eyes
and made you appear
so wanton.

WINTER WANTON (REVISION)

I know you are
like uncurled fields,
panting
from the clouds’
silent-jawed rush
through your furrows.

and baby I can tell
when the rain
has
sluiced you open.

Some thoughts that seized me this morning:

I cannot imagine life without struggle. From the time that I began to be cognizant of myself as a being composed of actions, thoughts, choices, and principles, I have fought against those things I regarded as antithetical to my constitution, and when I could not find such antitheses, I fought myself.

I cannot live here. If I become a part of this system which is responsible for so much that I abhor, I will lose that warlike part of my soul from which stems my fire and my birth.

This does not change my mission. The slugging match with this art must continue—it is the only thing that hurts and beckons me so relentlessly.

Hold on to your breeches. I feel night shoving its fingers through my hair, and it's going to be prolific.


WAIL

wouldn’t have given
a nickel to see that
skinny white boy,
but

hand
that skinny boy
a guitar.

Damn.

BEFORE YOU I WAS SOMETHING ELSE

but now with the wind intruding through our cab’s lowered windows
I see the

sunburnt

shoulderblades

of

mountains.

A poem was completed today, but it is far too long to post here. Furthermore, it is in need of editing. There are poems I write that are in agreement with their own souls, and hardly need to be touched to communicate my intent--and then there are those that are so consumed with their own emotion that they require heavy inking once I have removed myself from their subject material for a time. The Brotherhood is one of the latter.

On the other hand, dear reader(s?), I feel guilty for teasing you--you have whittled your nails to nubs, poor creatures, crouching anxiously in darkness for the light of my words to reach you (insert ironic smile for clarification of online misinterpretations). Therefore, in the post prior to this you shall find one of my poems from some time ago, freshly re-edited (I'm not sure if the original was posted here), now devoid of all references to "slopping...red brains..."; it exists now as an ode to women who know how to be graceful. I do not say beautiful, for that is easy and not at all a question of carriage or skill or self-possession or intelligence or character, and grace takes all of these.

Also below you will discover a quote from Scandinavian playwright August Strindberg, whose Miss Julie I have just read. Before the play, he includes a preface that reveals many of his thoughts on theatre and the play itself. While I found him a tad arrogant, and Miss Julie to be slightly heavy-handed, he made some wonderful points that reflect some of my own opinions on storytelling as an art form.



"Recently, my tragedy The Father was criticized for being too sad, as if one should expect cheerful tragedies. People clamor pretentiously for "the joy of life," and theatre managers call for farces, as if the joy of life lay in being silly and depicting people as if they were all afflicted with St. Vitus's dance or imbecility. I find the joy of life in its cruel and powerful struggles, and my enjoyment comes from being able to know something, being able to learn something."

Amen.

SHE KNOWS HOW TO CARRY HERSELF

I love it when she
dons the slim black one—

METAMORPHOSES into that

tall jet cylinder
of sumptuous class;
ramrod of gumption;
powder keg of sass.

ALTAR BOY

strewn
jags like nickels
white as whispers.
the pale dust of
broken things
palpitates in the candlelight.

in my haste
I have torn my cassock;
here I have
no broom
to purge the sanctuary
of

all my worship
poured upon that slim
and aching moon.

THE LOVE ARSON

I want to
drag you
from the burning house
and
shoot you through the mouth.

FLASH FRAME

I.

these
pictures show me
more what I’m hoping for
and not what I’m getting.

the picture show
that cost a dime
robs me of sixseventyfive now. I’d complain
but that happens a lot nowadays.

II.

sundays we’d sit, youandI,
cackling at fat girls in formal dresses
and the slim stilettos they’d stab in chunky boyhearts,
arm in arm
swanking through theatre doors
with flat blinking blue eyes.
your eyes were like that,
I didn’t notice
then.

sundays they were the movies,
who needed a ticket sure as hell not me.
one day I show up hot dog hungry for youandI,
and you were in the square
of the theatre door
and blue light blinking on your shouldersandbreasts,
your face to the screen.

Oh, but to write is a sweetly succulent thing.


TAILORS ARE NOT ALL WEALTHY MEN

you wear evening like a red scarf
and autumn feels good that way.

the cusp of your throat
fluttering like purple silk,
this is what
I have made love to.

and shall I make love
to the wool of silence
now
that you are
the red lip of evening light
beneath the door, fading.

(I have left things
in the sun for days,
and they are faded now).

and I
had had plans
to fashion the most stylish of garments.

The first full draft of a piece I have been tinkering with for the last few weeks--a tad on the experimental side, but we'll see what the critics say.


PEOPLE MY AGE

the radio is a smithandwesson.
I slump in the seat and feel
my torn gut and hurt,
what’ll I tell the missus.
the radio’s black spume
has obscured the real shape of things.

what’ll I tell the missus—
baby the payphone is like
your mouth in the dark, and I
don’t want to touch it
anymore. darling why darling?
I’m on and off baby, shove
me a nickel and I’ve got a few minutes,
but my jaw gets tired of
telling
things.

doc allen said people my age
shouldn’t have ulcers.

doc I been shot on and off
december through august,
a black receiver like
a hot black smithandwesson mouth
detonating
thisandthat and whatIdidtoday.

relax.

night dogs night;
hours squeeze the long muzzle
against my teeth—
I lean against cold graffiti
triggering
detonations
with my tongue.
and the powder lugs down
my throat in wet clods.

doc allen say
where you get these ulcers,
you got stress?

I say
blanks, blanks,
blanks.

The third draft; we shall overcome.

HUSSAR

autumn
home
I return
to the revelation of
rumpled satin:
your red viscid thigh,
his chin dripping
against
your chest,
you dripping within him
like a spongy child.

my forehead throbs like a love-mad russian man;
my bootheels
should thump cannonlike
past the linoleum—
my murderous hands
white with wind—
the cylinder
a shriveled child
bulging at my ribs—

I should splinter
through the door
into the cold abysmal,
I should suck the sulfurous air
and the silence cleaving
to my brassy proclamation
(the trigger like a
chitinous body
clinging to my finger);
drip drip
cantering down my temple.

I should rattle my saber,
a love-mad russian man.
but I left
my pelisse
in the car.

I bend to the kitchen floor
and pluck up the dead:
your jeans, shoes, bra,
strewn like
propaganda leaflets
shouting
she isn’t yours.

First draft. Just getting it out there.

LOCK YOUR CAR at SUNDOWN

my eyes describe
the smudges of crows
in the pines
like the flecks of ash
on my knees.
I stab out another and light another,
the mutter of sulfur
in the red dusk.

my eyes describe
the curve of your spine—red
like the fender of a fancy car
parked on the grass
across the road.
and his eyes are like
the owner of many things,
hovering near and momentous
in the quiet sun
that crouches sweatily
at the edge of the pines
(in the sweet scent of rot).
I stab out another.

his hand describes
the red shadow of your
fender like an owner
of many things intending
to own that
other thing;
he looks at you
like a friend—
a thick rush of sulfur
to the eyes; I light another—

I thought I had the keys.

the last one
drops, tired and crow-bent.
I hope it burns
the earth to stubble.

PYOTR WITHOUT KATYA

the moon like
a ragged buzzsaw
has amputated your scent
from my eyelashes.

now
I am a lover
of sound:
the mewls
of coyotes
in the hollywood hills,
lunar waves breathing
against
continents of pearl.

Second draft.

HUSSAR

plump birches out
the window flush with cold,
clinging wet to white air.

autumn
home
I return
to the revelation of
rumpled satin:
your white thigh arachnoid
like viscid silk dripping
from the spinneret,
his chin dripping
against
your chest,
you dripping within him
like a spongy child.

my forehead throbs like a love-mad russian man;
my bootheels
should thump cannonlike
past the linoleum—
my hands
taut
murderous—
my chest:
crimson
starched
austere with wind—
the cylinder
a shriveled child
bulging at my ribs—

I should splinter
through the door
into the cold abysmal,
I should suck the sulfurous air
listening to the silence cleaving
to my brassy proclamation
(the trigger like a crushed,
chitinous body
clinging to my finger);
drip drip
racketing down my temple,
thinking of birches in the autumn rain.

you’ll sit
at the window,
his arm will
cup your hip.

I should rattle my saber,
a love-mad russian man.
but I left
my pelisse
in the car.

I bend to the kitchen floor
and pluck up the dead:
your jeans, shoes, red bra,
strewn like
propaganda leaflets
shouting
she isn’t yours.

The first new work in quite a while. Poetry is going slow these days, and I feel exceptionally rusty.


HUSSAR

plump birches out
the window flush with cold,
clinging wet to white air.

autumn
home
I return
to the revelation of
rumpled satin:
you dripping within him
like a spongy child.

I feel like a love-mad russian man;
my bootheels should
thump cannonlike past
the linoleum—the cylinder
would be a shriveled child
bulging at my ribs—

and in the cold abysmal
I should suck the sulfurous air
and listen to
drip drip
racketing down my temple
and think of birches in the autumn rain.
you’ll sit
at the window,
his arm will
cup your hip.
but I have hung
my pelisse on the coatrack
already.

I bend to the kitchen floor
and pluck up the dead:
your jeans, shoes, bra,
strewn like
propaganda leaflets
shouting
she isn’t yours.

The sun is an artillery shell
on my chest.

And what shall I do now? Whatever shall I do?

SERMONS

night is a congregation
of absence.

and you, shepherd
told me that old thing
about nothing from nothing.

what then shall I make of
the huffing
of this moon with ripe flanks—
a soft covetous eye
succulent with light.

you, lovely pastor but false,
have breached the
immaculate silence
I have
held for years.
our congregation
is mute as a black chain
of hollow freight cars,
gears squealing
with rich delighted voices.

The GARDENER and HIS WIFE

bright blood
beaded
like turnips
at the corner of your mouth—
I have not
enjoyed
the bitter turnip
since I was young.
I find that rage
has made them sweet.

The window
is a yellow splinter
and smells of blood
fogging with the slow descent of dust—
your black eye
swivels outward—
there are
shadows
in the lee of the sill.

your black eye
is an avocado, blind
and thick. It was not me,
lover, who
has bitten of you so
savagely.
It must have been
another man.

At last, another poem. It is likely I would have perished had I gone for another week without writing something. Only a first draft, but what is anything when it is born?



RUNNERS IN THE DARK

nothing remains:
suggestion
of a thin coppery miff
shuddering mothlike

and then?

the closer I
look
the more I
do not find.
where the jolt
of grit and flesh,
and the sweat in the silence?
there was none.
there was
None.

scoop the air
for the glittering dust,
there is only
this imagining of
immaculate chaff.

Events tumble out of my hands like a clumsy shuffle.

What is going wrong?

WANDERER

my feet are shadows
like patches of dark new hair
splayed flat
across the long plain.
evening moans,
rubs its fat black cheeks
and uncurls—

the wind in the clefts
of the bloodswollen madrones;
the whisper of thunder
in the shade of the coulee
like a great red womb
bellyaching to
let loose.
when I look on the long plain
I am full as new flesh—
to each glimmering burg I say,
I shall visit you each.

my heel sucks away
from the road, then
blue dust flakes
like suckling babes
away from
the white breast of earth:
sifting upward
in the gloam.

CONJECTURE

If
your woman’s legs
are long and smooth,
she will wear heels.

Men’s eyes
love
a woman in heels.

If
men’s eyes were hands,
your woman would
be another man’s.

Your woman’s legs,
are they not
long and smooth?

WILD

Tigress,

I sip
shadows from your skin,
peeling
the dark tongues
until
the blue muscle
is flayed open:
succulent.

My blood hisses
against the
white jags of
tooth and claw—
I whisper
this is moonlight.

IN OTHER PLACES

december I fired up
the car and
found
that to the south
lay groves
that winter had not
picked her teeth upon.

I found this other thing,
you know.
her finger slumps
against my teeth
like a peach’s
fertile arch;

the white smell
of her thighs
is the fat harvest
I have deserved.

since leaving
I have learned droves
regarding peaches—
discerning those
fraught with sweetness
from those
which are already
spoiled.

she is
why
I do not remember you.

A sledge where my heart was.