An Outbound As In

There is an intersection. A maroon Buick LeSabre with a cracked windshield pulls to a stoplight.
A man named Herman crosses the street in front of the car. He has a cane for no reason.
Count Chocula is Herman's favorite breakfast cereal, he never learned to swim, and he has a phobia
of ice sculptures, especially when in the shape of swans.

As Herman passes the LeSabre, he hears Miles Davis' "Black Satin" playing on the car's stereo.
The earth tilts. On another side of the world a music student in Seville, Spain charts notes
to the same Miles Davis piece. A mailman knocks on her door with a package.
In the mailman's teeth she sees the keys of the piano she learned to play on. Chipped identically.
The package is from a cello player who won't leave her alone.
The third vase he's given her this week.

The collection of vases on the music student's 5th floor sill makes her uneasy so she throws them
out the window. She sits on the sill and looks off toward a Ferris wheel in an amusement park nearby.
Vases crash, calliope stirs "Black Satin" notes around her head, and the spinning
carnival ride churns a peristalsis of the scene. It's late afternoon. From the view, she traces
lengthening shadows into the sunset they latch onto. She doesn't even like the piano anymore.
Schooling ruined it. Marine biology is what she really wanted to study - undersea life,
starfish, sharks, tiburones.

On the Ferris wheel, car nineteen, a little shit of a boy named Esto has eaten too much cotton candy.
He vomits, and it splatters past the hand of a nun in car three below. Exiting the ride, the sister
looks to the ground and sees the face of Jesus Christ in the puddle of the boy's pink throw up.
News of the sighting spreads quickly. The cement spot is soon a massive center of worship and
the destination of holy migration. Esto becomes a relic. He is quoted in the paper as saying,
"I could tell it was something special when it was coming up." There are mouse pads, coffee cups,
and napkin sets displaying the quote in multiple languages. Cotton candy is served. Car nineteen is
bronzed. You can get a picture of yourself sitting next to a life size cardboard cut-out of Esto.
A real must have. Listen, and you can hear Miles playing. Tilting the Earth.

* * * * * * * * * *

Seattle to NY - Middle - Civilizations

Were Indian, a somewhere
3 move east, speak

Bionic hip hop
Sounds of conversations

Marlon is in love with his virus
Program

Inside digital attempts
Step Sequencer, hardwired

Human playing the machine
Machine playing the human

Which one dreams?

Radio Oscillators
Delayed. Sign waves

Assigned values, avoiding radar
Wormhole, cruises control

Winding, winding

The atoms are coming apart
At the seams

Tear my eyes from the fructose road
The preservatives have kicked in

Millston, Wisconsin

* * *

Company

Cornelius
Tom Vek
Serge Gainsbourg
Autolux
Pinback
Constantines
LCD Sound System
Trans AM
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Apex Twin
Caribou
Silver Apples
Ambulance Ltd.
Fourtet

* * *

They Say the Bottled Water

Is taken from a stream
Two miles underground

No way

* * *

Carcinogen Speedway

Drive

Don't dream

Keep alert

The oxidation loves its way toward you

* * *

Drive-Thru Light Show

Catching Truck Engines

For their sound
I-90 to the river

Road ranger, humbird cheese
Notate the visual bladder

Full
Tomah, WI

These places, the type of places
That might not be here when you're not

* * *

94 Miles

Outside Madison
Frozen hum
Frozen lakes
International Crane Foundation

The house on the Rock
Next exit

Reboot
Wish we were there
Tired
What's the reception here
Battery life

Take all the worries
And send them to a cheese factory
Elroy - Sparta State Trail
Advertise on your roof
Get it here
God bless America

* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *

Falling

I wake up falling
I'm in a bed but falling
A small clear ball filled
With fireflies
Floats above my head

Others are falling too

I see round clear rooms
Planter boxes
Foliage growing

There are firefly spheres
For as far as I can see
Above and below

Everyone and everything is falling
No one seems alarmed

* * * * * * * * * *

Bottomless

I used to imagine
Falling
In a bottomless pit
A society of falling people

If it was truly bottomless
They would fall forever

Weightless

I imagined the edge of the cliff
At surface level
Where families and cities of people
Waited to jump with all their belongings
As a center, a place where

People congregated
And entered, throwing
Their whole lives over the edge

Beds with mahogany headboards, ovens
Showers, fireplaces, lamps, and desks
Exercise equipment, pianos
Acre size plots of soil

Rooms arranged as they were before
Upright, but falling
Everything arranged but falling

What would you need to fall forever?

* * * * * * * * * * *

Big Hole

People wait years for the chance to jump
Pilgrimage to Big Hole

The pit is a mile wide by a mile wide

One jump a year

One hundred people

To jump is to start over
Forego
Surface level life
Is over
To jump is to end
And never land

* * * * * * * *

Society of Fallers

Spend their surface level lives
Preparing

Each with duties

Once falling it's a
Vertical existence

Falling fire
Water
Falling farm
Waste
Sewage
Gardens
Builders
Making water
Cellular science
Application of
Molecular manipulation

Bottomless Pit as
New myth

* * * * * * * * * * *

Once Falling

Always falling
Once the decision is made
To jump
To become a faller
There's no going back
No falling back
To the surface

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For New Fallers, Things are Less Arranged

As you move down to jumps that have been falling longer
There is more organization

Living in the fall

Schools and maze sports
Cylinder reed instruments
Wind harnessing
Turbine energy source

There is no sun in the pit
Source of light is phosphorous
Lightning bugs

Relic fallers raise them

* * * * * * * * * * *

New Breed of Lightning Bug Bred

Fed enzymes and sugar water
Brighter tail light

Millions of them
Gathered and kept in glass like orbs 30 feet wide

Order of calmly halcyon firefly keepers - monkish
Phosphor Monks
Devoted to the phosphor

Sacred luminous creatures

Massive globes of insect emission
Fallers gather
Around their sun

Light - consecrated

* * * * * * * * * * *

Phosphor Faller Monks

By bloodline
Surface life spent
Learning the insects
Phylum Lampyridae
Coleoptera

Luminous monasteries
Keeping the colonies
Tending to their every need
Getting ready
For the fall
Worshiping the glandular
Chemical reaction
Of the photophores
The glow

* * * * * * * * * *

Oxidizable

Is the organic molecule luciferin

And

The enzyme luciferase

Chemical reaction makes light

Inside the firefly

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Bioluminescent Scent Sends

Be with them, the bugs
Let them land on you
Cover every inch of you
Feel their little feet
On your skin

* * * * * * * * * * *

Speeding Down

Downward, tear
Tearing air
Terminal velocities
Faster here isn't fast

Dream ahead
Down to one
Of the first falls
Falling fifty years

Slow elders and their fireflies
Telekinetic
Telepathic
At their one
Gentlest passing
Dust

* * * * * * * * *

Wording the Words Well

Said the pen
To the bottomless inkwell
If we fall
And don't land
Is that falling?

* * * * * * * * * *

Movement

Moving from place to place
Within a fall is a task
There are guide ropes, rigid

The constant wind is a problem
Huge plates are situated in places
As windshields
Areas free of wind are sought after

Round wood rooms
Graphite structures
Non breaking

* * * * * * * * *

Edge Guards

Guard the edge of the pit
Getting too close
To the side of the cliff wall
While falling
Means a death of sorts
Glass breaks, limbs lost
Debris spray
Things could spin out of control

The pit wall is one thing feared
The worse thing that could happen
For an orb of fireflies to crash

* * * * * * * * * * *

In Jump 239

Lightning bugs acquire
The strain of a virus
They become diseased
Go mad
Become killers

The one most sacred thing
Producing light and love
Turns and attacks

* * * * * * * * * *

The Story

Of the faller that wishes
He wasn't there anymore
Longs for the surface life
Lives in regret
Never should have jumped
What can he do?
Absolutely nothing
Must attain acceptance

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What Does the Phosphorous Glow

Look like?
100 people floating
Around a 30 ft wide
Sphere of fireflies

* * * * * * * * *

Pit Wall

Ominous
Fast rising
Blur of teeth
Something to stay
Away from

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is Drift

Within the Pit
Safer toward the center
Larger objects
House propulsion
That automatically fires
If too close
To the pit wall

Self monitoring
Aware of the edge

Chance of malfunction
Risk involved
In completely trusting
And leaving well being
In computer hands

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Vertical Streets

Crafts constructed
For the fall
Up - balloons
Down - aerodynamics

* * * * * * * *

Some Falls

Have technology
Get space age
Some ancient
More Zen

* * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a Child

Born into a fall
Immaculately
Jesus? Tarzan?

A mystic from the get go

The fallers take to her
Rally around her
Raise the child
As their own
Name her Si

100 parents

Feel guilt that
She will never know
Surface level life

But she is meant to happen

Si the seer

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Pit as Wormhole

Black hole

Time travel

Last fall first fall last

* * * * * * * * * * *

No Day or Night

Someone looks into the pit wall
And sees faces
The pit wall speaks

* * * * * *

Maybe the Mayans

Were the first fallers

* * * * * * * * * * *

Construction for the Fall

Items built
Dwellings
Resistance machines
So muscles don't atrophy
Furniture
Crafts
Made to fall
That make no sense
On level ground

* * * * * * *

A Photosynthesis

Is engineered
To occur from
The phosphor light
Descending harvest
Altered crops

* * * * * * * * * *

How Many Ways

Can you cook

A potato?

* * * * * * * *

A Bomb is Dropped In

By terrorists
Fallers guard it
Make sure it doesn't
Get near the edge
They must dismantle it
If detonation, the pit
Could fall in on itself

* * * * * * * * *

Renegade Jumper

A man
The woman he loved was a faller
He wouldn't make the jump
They said goodbye

He couldn't live without her
Sneaks into Big Hole
Past surface fencing and guards
Runs, jumps
In a streamlined machine made
To fall heavy and fast

* * * * * * * * * *

To Make Water

Atom splitting
Falling labs
Byproduct is energy
Danger
Water is essential
Explosions aren't

* * * * * * * * *

If You Fell Forever

After a while
It wouldn't be like falling at all
You'd become weightless in a sense
Oblivious to the grounded world

But oblivious is such a negative word
And the falling is not

It's a slow zero'd gravity
Billowing down through

* * * * * * * * * *

Suffice It To Say

The scenes are suffused
With so many things
Integral and overloaded

How do I say
What I don't know how to think?

What am I supposed to say
Other than this?

Nothing
Is doing

Phosphor lights the way

* * * * * * * * * *

Through the Falling Years

Moving less and less
Meditate more and more
Dreams mesh
Story telling

Sleep in a bed
The bed is falling
Favorite part
To sleep while falling

Years and years


* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *


2:33 AM Cielo

Somewhere between your face and the night
The universe lingers away

An aperture

Not much in the way of words

This is this, this
Cosmos between the cracks
Of the street

We traveled
Speed of light

Now

I look for you in crowds
Paintings
Squares
Windows
Screens
Microscopes
The sky

A rock smoothed round
Picked off the shore
Out of all the others

Tells me

If I stare
Long enough
Dim shapes will move
Deep within this jewel
Far, far away

Carousing colossal

And I hope those shapes are ours

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Reservoir the Idiom Canopy

Potentialities

Do we expend energy to see?

* * * * * * * * * *

8 Thisses

Take
Home
Illusion
Spine

Time
Has
Invisible
Strings

Tadpole
Hymn
Is a
Self

Temporal
Honey
Inhabits
Sabertooth

Telepathy
Hearing
Innumerable
Senses

Tightrope
Habitation
Inhibits
Sandman

Taming
Hexes
Induces
Sayings

This
Hiss
Iguana
Sound

* * * * * * * *

There are Faces in the Carpet Where Feet Have Stepped

Imagination of the city is a tiny tiny fish

Traffic sounds like a tide

Stricken. Stuck. Struck

Canopy level

Turn

* * * * * *

Loosed

Eyes to brain by nerves

Brain to heart by veins

Sounds to ears by wind. Lightning strikes a tree 20 ft. away. Voice
Waves hitting high tide. Feet on stairs

Smells through nose to memory. Ions. Old wood. Candles just out

Touch to fingers by sand

You to me by me to you. Past lives. Not by chance

Maybe waves and ancients. Walls worn and rounded white. Maybe our shadows
Chiseled into the red dirt. Maybe that's what does the connecting

Maybe the smell of your breath is a century

A match in the dream is struck. The movement stirs up dust on a sill
The particles float and spread

One particle in particular, ventures the four corners of the room
Its float has a movement all its own

It's 1889 in the room of a mental asylum in Saint-Remy, France. A painter paints
It's what he does. A night. He hallucinates. The particle of dust lands in a fresh wet
Yellow star on his canvas. That's what it does. The yellow hardens and the particle of
Dust is locked into the paint

116 years later, someone is standing in front of the painting at a gallery in New York,
New York. Elements have withered the paint down with time and the particle becomes loosed

That same particle, is released from the painting, an ocean century later, the float continues
It goes out into the new air until it lands in a fold of this person's sweater. She
Takes the sweater off, puts it in bag, and doesn't take it out again until she has gotten
Off a plane in a cold Seattle, WA

She is at a tea house in the International District ordering heat to rid her chill. She puts
The sweater back on. The movement frees the particle and again the float continues. It wanders
Until it lands in the dark and blond hair of a seamstress fashion designer makeup artist
Sitting two tables down

The particle stays in the seamstress designer make up artist's hair until she gets home
She begins to sew, it's what she does, a jacket. She loads her sewing machine with funk pink thread
And turns her head to see who's at the door. The turn shakes the particle free from her hair
It floats and lands on the jacket she's working on. Her next Tokyo Tapestry creation
The particle is sewn right into a seam

From one canvas night century breath to the next

Loosed

Sewn and stirred
The jagged city night stands colored
By creatures such as this one

* * * * * * *

Scrape

Your mind pretty

Dig, reveal

And report the delving

* * * * * * * * *

Modem Inversion

How about the information

Through the cables and air sends you?

A kid holds a balloon and lets it go

But it's the kid who's released

She floats up until she sees the earth curve

And the world melts away

* * * * * * * * * * *

Incomprehensibilis

A man fishes, confidently
Hungry to eat the catch
His baited hook taunts

A bass strikes his line
And he salivates

He takes one reel on his rod
And the world turns upside down
Drops away into nothingness
And he's left dangling
On the end of his own line
Holding on
Pleading and begging the bass
Not to drop him into the darkness

The fish holds up the fisherman

The fisherman cries and screams for help
There's nothing between his feet and forever
It's an endless void
When he looks down
His stomach throws itself out his throat

The bass is laughing and says,
"Hey man, you were going to eat me,
Why should I spare you?"

The fisherman replies,
"You're a fish,
I caught you,
This can't be happening."

And the bass says,
"That's all you have to say?"

* * * * * * * *

This

An insect hovers over the Indian Ocean

Washing the sundown orange

You were, and are

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Scrawl

The scapes and dripped sides
Of wet brick city walls
Let on
To many lonely things

The seventeenth story

Ledges
Up cement stairs
Filed down by scampered claws
Leaf rot and gnawing jaws

A perch emerges
In the girders
A place that wasnt meant to be
A place where nothing goes
That doesnt crawl

Halogen clouds
Brush and shove
Moving to voices
Through the weathered city
Below

You, night, sit and survey

Look out

There are others that long

Tonight you see
With infrared vision
See through the distant
Walls and buildings and roofs

You see heat
Scores of human forms
Reddish orange
Animals, ovens
Furnaces and engines
Higher heat areas
Glow white
Hearts a yellow
The unpredicted city revealed
Scurrying itself to sleep

Electromagnetically

The infrared shakedown
Of the shadow side
With its sounds
Radars your ears

Noises of the urban hole
And the forms
Putting themselves down
For the night

Mothering tones of 10,000
Bed time stories rise
Simultaneously
The chorus calms
Connected dens

Doors are locked
Discs spun
A palate knife scrapes
Cathode nattering
Sirens lick tires to asphalt

Heated red blurs going and coming
Clicking keys, arguing
Heart rate monitors
Grinding teeth

Trains steel diesel insomnia
A seamstress cant sleep
So she sews
Her machine and infrared hands
Move with the weight of Engine 163
The train on tracks matches her stitches
Stitch for stitch
An immense hushing
Pleasant because its far off

Somewhere

Dust unsettles
A bell is rung
Channels are changed
Someone injects
Aim is taken
Bullets are on their way

A seismograph registers movement
Miles underground
Tectonic teeth grind
Root mind
Of the metropolis

Millions of people
Hit enter
And digital wolves howl hollow
In manmade hills

Sleep for now
Above the fray
Curl on this perch
Under infrared cross ties
Bullets won't bother here
They're muzzled
To fade
Before they hit


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Yolo

Southbound fields
100 miles outside San Francisco
Songs, sights, associations, slide

By

Daydreaming crow

A tractor engine
Has been left out
In a Mediterranean pasture
For years. Corrosion

It spat rocks from its alkaline face
And Amaryllis grew out the mouth
Flowers deep red

Why do we remember our memories?
How does the mind know what to save
And not save?
Does the subconscious choose?
Or are the memories already there?
Are they pre-loaded?

Did I really see red Amaryllis?
Will I see them again?
Driving now
Just crossed
The Yolo, CA county line
A dirty stretch of road

What exists?

What doesn't?

Does Yolo?

What causes memories
To fade?

Will driving by
The Yolo county line?



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


New Tulum

A drum world
A world of drums

A place where beats are blood

Get in
Reap and behold

The gong sun has spun

Hills are bass drums
Hit them and hear the bellowing
You don't have to listen
My metered creatures
Just put your ear to the ground

Reverberation all around

* * * * * * * * *

Houses and Architecture

All made of beat making apparatuses
Giant slit drum buildings
Tympanic dwellings
Where walls are to be struck
Mallet or not, banged
Make them make noise

Even the furniture
Tuned to tone
Museum structures
Are steel drum domes
Metronomes
Contraption homage to ears

Kettled existence
Holes in the side
Of our head
Cartilage bound
Houses of the anvil
Hammer sending sound

* * * * * * *

People Communicate

In New Tulum
Using rhythms and drums
Language, a more defined
Morse code
No small talk
No negatives
Nothing ever sabotaged
Impossible to lie
No brainwashing
Just beats
And there's no confusing them

* * * * * * * * * * *

Towns and Cities

Divided
According to types of rhythm
Funks here, metal there

Soft neighborhoods
For light touches
Steep towns of fast

Lounge dark ominous
Cities of the gargoyle
Cymbal to the south
Silken smoke cities of jazz

Quadrants in the whole of the flow

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Zydeco Swamps

Where you don't take
Small dogs, and people look
At you cause you ain't
Like them

* * * * * * * *

Shades North

To the hills
Tribal centipede links swing a 3/4
And hang it from bamboo
Seven hundred years later
It becomes
Breakbeat skyline
Electric Boogaloo

* * * * * * *

Big Band Bangkok Horn Rim Cursive

Writes to the Golden Gong
"I love ninjas."

* * * * * * * * *

Where Heavy Metal Lives

Mullets frolic
They walk rhinos
Live like Vikings
And hunt ballet dancers
Like foxes

* * * * * *

Desert Trains

Run through downbeat plains
Nothing to see for miles
On board is Octavio Paz's wave
As water supply
Tracks sound off your sleep
Then turn into night and the horizon
Bleeds with a hint of approaching
Frantic drum n' bass Tokyos

* * * * * * * * * *

In Funk Land

Mayor is a bass player
Election is by who attains
The fattest sound

There are whip cream parades
Daily, and chocolate syrup pools
Cannon ball in, please

Wait, if you were walking
Through the Land of Funk
What would there be pools of?

Chocolate syrup is easy
There are so many more
Pools that could happen

Mousse
Strawberry pudding
Peanut Butter
Crunchberry Cereal

Pools of things
You would want
To jump into

Like sponge balls
Sponge cake
Fettuccini Alfredo
Or warm mud

* * * * * *

Continuing Funk Land

Upward are blimps
Wrought and decorative
Dirigibles of beanbag chairs
Chicken wing barbecue
Caramel, gilded. Xanadu
Astroturf miniature golf
Waterfall's tropical and sub woofed

A gathering of kindly pimps
Knocking a little ball around
Plaster dinosaurs and windmills
The blimp turns left
And everyone leans centrifugally
Hole in one
Have another truffle

This is your captain speaking
We just hit cruising altitude
And I have an albino tiger
Put your chairs in their full back
Recline position
Someone fetch my velvet

My tooth is so shiny it go
Ding
Sky is Twinkie
Tray tables - tarts
Nibble at will

To your left
The Kingdom of Miles Davis
To your right
The James Brown Trampolines
200 miles of bounce

Let us let the undulation begin

* * * * * * *

Currency

People pay for things
In New Tulum with beats
Rhythm is currency
Called Fills
The more concise the Fill
The higher value it has
The more you can purchase

Sloppy drummers
Have to play for hours
To get the things they need

* * * * * * *

Cures

Rhythm cures ills

There are sonic temples
Where drummers are harnessed
And holy

Science of rhythm
Drum church labs
With listener soaking chambers

Head phone I.V's plug into
Sarcophagus speaker beds

People pilgrimage

To the drum temples
To replenish white blood cell counts
And get well

Sounds so rich clean and exact
Healing can't help but happen

* * * * * * * * * *

Rain

In summer heat
Hushes through the sheets
Of a million soft snares

A million soft snares
Rolling, playing
The theory of thunder

To the smell of wet streets
Rolling the ions
Embroidery of the storm

* * * * * * * *

Rousers

Certain drummers in New Tulum
Called Rousers
Can channel ghosts
The Rousers play
Until they reach a state
Of exactness
A zoned Zen
They become so on
They can rouse the dead
So on, they can conjure
Villains bygone and Gods
That once were

Some ghosts don't mind
Being conjured
Some do

* * * * * *

So On

There is a pure on-ness
A terminal on-ness
A place the drummer reaches
Where the beat could not be
Tighter or more precise

The closer the Rouser is
To terminal on-ness
The clearer the ghost appears

Rousers are mediums
Liaisons to an afterworld
People speak through them
Listen through them

The older the ghost
The harder they are to rouse
The longer the drummer must
Be engaged in on-ness

The instant the rhythm
Becomes loose or lost
The ghost fades

* * * * * * * *

Babe Ruth

Was conjured
Tanked on scotch
There was someone who wanted
To ask him about his womanizing
Ruth tried to hit the guy in the face
But the Rouser stopped playing
And The Babe disappeared
Before the punch could land
Besides, ghosts can't touch
Or be touched anyway

* * * * * * * *

In 2164

Martin Luther King
Will be conjured
And become President
Of the United States of America
As a ghost

He will remain conjured
For eight years
Through a series of interchanging
Prophet Drum Rousers

Dr. King runs the White House
For the benefit of the people
He's a good King
Champions alternate sources
Of energy
Invents no wars
Invades no countries
Does away with
The marketing of violence
Puts the billions
Into education, health care
Helping homeless
And cleaning the air
Not into space stations
And wars for oil

Shoot him now
You James Earl Rays
Let's see you
Shoot a ghost

* * * * * * * *

Envoys

The MLK Prophet Rousers
Live in and occupy the White House
Become envoys, presidents
In their own right
They are surrounded by as much
Mystique as they are secret service
They are the key to it all

Drums and percussion are spread
All over the White House
For wherever and whenever
Conjurings need to occur
Every precaution is taken
To insure the envoy Rousers
Can consistently conjure

Many hot tubs are installed

The Envoy Rousers need not
Be concerned with the politics
Their concerns are with on-ness
With their beats being precise

Senators and political types
Resent The Rousers
But must to defer
And maintain subservience
Some rousers don't acknowledge
The politicians presence at all
Other Rousers play with them
Like toys

* * * * * *

Empress and the Punk

Through the course
Of other sustained conjurings
It is discovered that in the afterlife
Cleopatra and Joey Ramone
Are completely in love

Cleopatra is demanding
Ramone could care less
Thats why she wants him
Needs him
She erects statues of him
400 feet tall
He's nonchalant about it

She is fanned
Has servants dress her
Walks on rose pedals
And eats baby pheasant hearts

He constructs her
Two and half minute
Battle gum punk hymns
And drinks Schlitz

She was worshiped
So was he

When he gets sick of her
Royal tantrums
He splits
Doesn't say a thing

She chases him
Every time
And her rose scatterers
Can't scatter fast enough

Out of frustration
She beheads them

* * * * * *

Ramone Laughs

At Cleopatras
Spoiled trigger of a soul
Can't stand it
And can't get enough
He sees her eyes when he blinks
Misses the smell of her hair
When shes not there
Writes her song after song

Thin thin line sometimes
Hate and love
Driving dysfunctional
Attraction even after death still

Improbable gods
And post-lives aside
We're animals
When the black curtain
Comes down

In the eternal end

* * * * * * * *

The Sheen

Some days and nights
In New Tulum
When you look
To the Sky
You see dots
For as far
As your eyes
Can see

It's The Sheen

A protective shield
A force field
The dots are
Drum pods
Levitation vehicles
Round solid crafts
Holding drum kits
Cylindrical sedans
Surrounded by
Outwardly
Aimed speakers

You should see
These things
All Japanimated

The Sheen

A drum air force
Levitating drummers
Playing in unison
Forming a deflector
Shield

Thousands of drummers
Deep, the Sheen
Legions of meter
Trained and tight
Nimble
Ready

* * * * * *

Field is Formed

The drum pods hover
Evenly, ten miles apart
5,000 to 10,000 feet up

When the Sheen Drummers
Are syncopated
Playing together
As one
The force field shield
Is formed

A Kevlar web of aerial on-ness

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In the Pods, Players

Are tied in
They hear each other
Through a series of monitors

When The Sheen
Is up and beating near
Terminal on-ness
The bombs and missiles can't win
Can't break the chain
Can't get through

The faster
The Sheen Drummers play
And the more intricate
The pattern
The stronger the shield is

In the heat of an attack
Its miles and miles
Of impenetrable speed

Missiles bounce off
Like snowflakes

Cheering throngs
On the ground
Play along
Hooray, hooray
For the Sheen
Of New Tulum

* * * * * *

Opposite

Are the chaos
Of firing missiles
And
The concentration face
Of a drummer
Drumming their part
In the shield

Eyes closed
Drummer unaffected
Vs. the explosions
Outside their window

On vs. off

* * * *

All the Drummers

In The Sheen must be on
In order for the shield
To operate
Every one of them

If a single link is off
The shield weakens
And there is the chance
Of dreaded transparency

Let's hear it for the Sheen

* * * * * * * *

Picture a Battle

See the scene
Drummers in the air
Rhythm shield's machine
Beats vs. bombs
Bang vs. bang
Destruction is destroyed

* * * * * * *

Up There

Some days if you strain
Your ear, peaceful days
You can hear the Sheen
A distant pulse
Playing long and slow
Practicing, running exercises
And it's comforting
To know they're hovering

In the beginning
Drummers were used
To send signals
And they beat their skins
Diligently

Who would have thought
It would come to this
The Sheen of New Tulum
The skins have changed
But the diligence
Is still the same

Don't worry, now
Don't
They're up there
Take time, take it
Put it in your pocket
Make the gong sun gong



* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Chinese Year 4702 - Yiyou

Walls sink memories like stones

Dragons queasy, rain, drums, Union Sq.

Words from a fever - 1:10 PM

Eyes fire eyes

Bed cell sweats the longest day of the year

Year of the Rooster

Night of non-sleep. Constant shift. Wrists of ache

Drained. Slow. Weighted

Feel the muscles holding your eyes in place

Question at hand

Sweating through shivers or shivering through sweat?

"Everything will be precariously balanced

In the Rooster's year"

Shivers are more drastic. More dire

You have to pay attention to shivers

Preference is the sweat

Sleep can find its way in through a sweat

Fight of the fulcrum, this

Sheet, no sheet. Sweat and shivers

Nightmare, gnarled claw

* * * * * * *

Animal Night in the Big Wish

We------------Are----------Here--------Now----------------Know
Leaves-------And---------Trees--------Make-----------------Air
Water--------Makes-------The----------Sea------------------See
I--------------Love---------Her----------With-------Everything
Sick----------With--------Fever--------Sweat------------Shiver

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Yelled and yelled

If I were miniature
Say, the size of a flea
I could crawl under cracks
And spy on the world at large

If I were massive
Say, the size of a continent
I could drift an inch a century
Feel ice ages come and go

And shave them away as whiskers

But I am now and now is this
Feeling
The space heater
Thinking

Of what to say next

Remembering waterbugs
-These lives of ours
That played on Cross Creek
-In comparison to
Sleek hidden back
-Forevers
Runaway Atlanta quarry
-Pass fastly

They walked on water
Those bugs, I smell it
Mud skin sun
They didn't fall in

I hear the tamped way
The red clay rolled my marbles
Down, muted and clear
Like my voice

A match to a moth wing

I am a continent
Say, the size of a flea
And I curl everyone's
Toes in a stretch

Up to the laugh craving heat of a noonday moon

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Anima Mundi

Mirror to a mirror

Sub speak of self

Find me

Let me in

Mural me

What's behind

Gem stone eyes

A beautiful torment

Floods the words

* * * * * *

Overlook

The day unfeigned. Daedal and scraped. Dimensions, feral. Innate.
Stairs to a tower found. Unwound. Thinking in mosaics. Spot
In the sun, hits hard. Eucalyptus. Reminds me of Tilos. Hair
In my eyes is the only sign I'm really here. Otherwise, I could be
Just surrogate eyes reporting for the omnipresent.

Floating out here unattached. Then Antonio Tabucchi's 'Dreams of Dreams.'
Sounds of the passing city. Ours mixed within. Glissando. Extractum.
Feathers against air slice furlong. And the oracle souls, imagined
Or not, of those here but departed, approve of our combination's combination.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Order No Words in Seven Particular

Indigenous

Misdirection

Cognitive

Transfer

Delineation

Project

Excavate

* * * * * * * * * *

Northbound Squaw

The bottom of a large dark lake has rooms. Through these rooms there swims the slight phosphor
of a Northern Pike Minnow. A squaw fish they call it, and the dim opal glow in her
iris is not from the surface level. Down there, in the Cimmerian levels at the bottom
of a lake at night, light is produced not procured. Made not obtained. Formed from
a within. That far down, slitherings, shrill currents, and production of light can tend to go
unnoticed.

The squaw fish swims slovenly, half asleep, and has two dreams. She dreams she's
a hammerhead in a feeding frenzy. Twenty minutes later, she dreams she's
the sub lordess of all jettisoned junk in the lake, aware and knowledgeable of every item dropped in,
lost, and collected on the bottom. The buttons, bottles, pins, tabs, caps, occasional necklace
and pieces of litter. In the dream, she knows each of their stories, empathizes
with their loneliness, and gathers warmth in their inanimate, thrown away souls.

The heightening of the dream startles the squaw fish awake. She hesitates for a second,
then juts off through the non obstacled bottom water. In complete dark depth, she shelters
next to the giant cement support column of a highway bridge that stabs down into the lake's
bed. The sounds and weight of passing motors through the column are bland lulling murmurs.
Purrs through submerged concrete. Vibratory.

The squaw soon returns to gill snug fish scale dreams and the scene pans up the bridge
support, out of the water, until it reaches pavement of the road above. Traffic is traversing
under the electric white shine of the North Star. An eighteen wheeler blurs by heading toward
B.C., Vancouver, carrying a cargo of light bulbs. The driver is on his c.b. talking through
dip spit to the truck behind him on channel 9 about the perfectness of hands. The Mexican
red dingle balls bordering his cab sway to the smooth absorption of new shocks.

His handle is 'the Hammerhead' and on this night, he thinks the human body
is too perfect a machine. He's been alive for fifty-two years and he's just now noticing.
The eighteen hour drives, twenty-six days in a row, have drained him. Long stretches
of time to stare at his hands on the wheel and wonder how it was they came to be.

Toward the sky the scene continues to pan and span. Scanning through wavelength
channels of c.b. chatter, static hiss, and strata - northbound voices converse above the squaw
fish as part of the conglomerate, custodians of the senses. He, the Hammerhead, realizes
he's here, existing, now, with sentience. And nothing by him, in this current skin,
is ever missed again.

* * * * * * *

Sutures Four, Out

I want to make you unburdened. So
Run, child. Run. Loud. Run in your mind. I say
Out of this bleak conditioned place. Get out of here
You are fast and alive. Feel your legs. Know them
Pace sorts pasts and ills. This beach goes on for miles
And when it ends, you'll run on water until China spills
Down into a cotton field mouse's hole blink of a dream

* * * * * * *

Hydromancy

I send you sun

And trapdoor the floor

Behind you

To fall into clouds

Of the clawless sky

* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *

Tower

I'm writing from where I am. To where you are. Unknown. I'm sorry this has to be
electric. Sight took you in, to the back of my eyes. And memory of your form there has
outlasted me. We moved together, briefly, evenly. Seance was light and light abided.
It sent me. I went out into the days and nights careening but did not forget you.
Countless shadows on the sand, forgive me for still seeing you there.

Since, my imaginings have increased and I find myself here, seeking you out. I wanted
to send you a thought, this thought. It builds itself a plated tower of memoir to say hello.
Hello! If it is not too much. Tell me something, anything. I'll keep it in a locket.
If it is ok, I'll just be this. This being being. These words. Nothing more than being
here. If you answer, then you are too, here, somewhere. We'll both be. I guess that's
why I'm writing.

The Tower, it constructs itself up. By showers of hands. Salire. Accelerare. Levels
are selves. Mosaics and calm. Everything is a language. Everything is understood.
Fiducia. The place is alive. Lines in the marble move with mood. An entity.
Labyrinthine. Resident geishas carry the calm, quarter it, give it a name. Stairs wind
to hanging decks with frescos. Torches. Openings beg light in. All around. White,
stark. Baths and Jade trees border. Mirrors reflect sun and angle it through crystal
pounding the prism purples adamantine. Outside is Ionian. Monumental view over
the desert, upwards it gets above strata mattress. Rest your head. Let your hair fall
in the sleep of your face. No sounds can reach you. I want to touch the lids
of your eyes. Shed the miles and bury myself in your skin. May dreams render themselves a Sea Mediterranean and phosphorus.

Choose a symbol. Derive.

One of the tower geishas finds you on a veranda, facing west as you take in the days
ending sun. She presents you with lightning and a war horse. Unhook the chains
from your heart and hang them on your stars. Raise and race the darkness down.

* * * * * * *

Oleander & Sunsun

The writing mind, the writing mind, it's a monster. Nine feet tall. Gnarls breath
out his nostrils. Watches me while I sleep. Protects. Waits patiently. Demands
nothing. Monster of rhythm sits next to him. Knows him well. Their names are Oleander
and Sunsun. They're tired of always waiting on me to wake. They're restless. Constantly
have gifts to give - clay mud animals, terribly assembled jet models, rock gardens, thatched
huts of bamboo and palm - creations. Crayon drawings in violet blue, raw umber, and red
orange. Good boys they are, devoted. Menacing but playful. With manes, underbites, rounded
fangs. Gorilla hands. They burst with excitement, don't know their own strength. Always
want to take me places.

Cut to scenes - the three of us in a china shop, or them trying to follow me
through some antique store filled with porcelain plates on display. They knock
things over, break 17th century vases, crash tables of tea cups to the ground.
And they can't believe it. They're horrified. Incredibly sorry for what they have broken.
They want to help clean the mess, but in trying to pick up the pieces only knock over
more with their tales. More they try to help, more they break.

Finally, the only thing for them to do, is leave, and wait outside for me. Heartbroken.
Utterly dejected. I get them Strawberry Quick and waffles, to cheer, then take them
to the beach and let them run, build sandcastles, and throw driftwood around. Agile
strides they have, I can't match. Heaviness moving quickly. Accelerate like lions.

Oleander likes me to read him mysteries
Sunsun goes with me to run
They're endlessly in love with the geishas and their calm
And want the tower to be rebuilt and again begun

It's funny, as much as I think they don't understand, they do. Wise in a way. Life
they know. They just choose not to show it. Venture, they will with me, a thought
to its end, don't neutralize anything, don't curtail. In fact they feed me on my way
and when I fall, their hands are there before I hit the ground.

I left them on the beach today. Swarmed with grins. We caught cicadas.
Those big june bugs. Tied fishing line to the insect's legs and let
them wrap the horizon of the sea around the softest blue in the sky
you could possibly imagine.

* * * * * * *

Layers

The first
Is an engine
Of a barge, hummed
Out in the Sound

Passing slowly slowly by, you
Drift, fade, and the low womb noise
Pets the semicircular canals
In your ears to sleep

Fired Sulzer Diesel Gensets
Output : 9.240 kWm, speed - 500 rpm bore :
400 mm stroke, configures 560mm more
Smart swing of the great flywheel really is

Vertical block of the Bolinder
Surmounts pre-heated cast iron
Hollow hot bulb, where combustion
Drives down the piston rhythmical

Distantly working away
Churning and slugging scalded oil
Mindless of its own servitude
To power the ship and your doze

Scavenge hot bulb
Cylinder 8.35-litre direct reversing
Silencer expansion chamber
Bolted to the block

Deeper reveals the cylinders are scenes
One -North- is a port, one -East- is snow
One -South- Harvest Moon over a cemetery gate
One -West- a bow

Pull it back, visit the rooms
With your vengeance of beauty
You'll leave them
Something to remember

* * * * *

Frequency

The second layer is REM
The engine hum becomes
A vehicle, Byzantine
A cathedral of velocity
Wide as a city block

Columns teethe, angled roofs
And tubes house hydraulics to the rudder
Twenty or thirty feet up
Magnificent centrifugal entity
Doppler sub woof low and loud enough

The creatures in the sand below
Vibrate out of their own exoskeletons
Thinking it's the hovering
Lumbering mother God come to pass
On the deck, you open your eyes

Royal, desert dunes roll by
You had fallen asleep with the geishas
Lotus hour of the caravan siesta
Velvet pillows, sage, wicker, and lily
Then you see the wheel is by itself

No one is driving the thing
But the thing knows
Where it's going and it takes
Mile and half wide turns
Destination is that adobe structure

It's still there, patient and catching
Still leans long its shadows
Curtains still hang
And the senses of the snakes
Still wait to taste you on their tongues

* * * * * * * * * * * *

#29 K'an/ WATER

A thin cylinder of light falls into an otherwise darkened room

Skin it lands on is yours

Particles of dust float through. Becoming things

What do you see:

Shark fin - triangular equation - checkers, Chinese - Yield

Movements in an aviary, a satellite, cells

Under the microscope in a Petri dish

What?

See what you want, want what you see

Vault is a verb

You lie motionless

Anything but still

Anything

* * * * * * * * * * *

Steering Bird Wheel Humming

Four oldest words in the English language:
Gold. Apple. Tin. Bad.

Take thoughts - invert them
Modulate

Rip of the page
Is the San Andreas Fault

A dandelion - Afro
Varicose vein - The Nile

Ancient archway - path
Of a hand grenade

Flames - Start out as Neanderthals
Feeling heat from the first fire

End up as the flames burning books
In Berlin - Nazis. May 10, 1933

A bubble of sea foam inches off the water
Miles into the Pacific

Becomes the bubble from a bubble machine
In a single mans flat

Loud of shirt
Laden with testosterone

Hes lured a woman home
Thrown a switch

And a wet bar has rolled
Out of the wall, he plays

Night fever, night fever
We know how to show it

The bubble in the Pacific
Is above the unsuspecting head

Of a baby sea lion
That's strayed from the pack

It's about to be swallowed whole
By a fifteen foot long great white shark

Swimming straight up as hard and fast as it can
Mouth so open the only thing that will touch

The sea lion is the back of that shark's throat
Where acids begin to melt the brain

Of a baby still tasting
Its mothers milk

Night fever, night fever
We know how to show it

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Vesper Malaise

Night is the origin of urges
And glistened cobblestone wolves crawl

Toward the altering, the instinctual, the lift
Watching wind, the pack, it surges

Tendons to their wings taut as piano wire
Pull starving fast twitch muscles to their answer

As one, sense of smell, needs of meat
Scowled and weaned on unwarning

One gets too close to the other
And its jugular is snapped in reaction

Dropping from the air alongside its own
Weightless spilled blood

Scrawl this blanket sky with Poe
Over dooryard lanterns kerosene licks

Maroon dark red maroon
Corridor shadows quiver, Chian Wine

The shingle soot city shrivels in codeine eyes and I
Pointed stylus of iron, wonder

What is immediacy?
Or is it the need for immediacy?

What is want?
A good question for someone who knows it well

Who am I to hunger?
The one who says

Uninterpret your interpretations
Project not

Connect me to no associations
Allow me reaction

The indigent smell the feast
With no misunderstanding

Knowing exactly what they cant have
The pack of hunger want approaches now

I'll fend it off with no shield but the skin of my eyes
Me for there

The wolves have wings, I swear

* * * * * * * * * *


Too dark, too dark


* * * * * * * * * *

Seems

Familiar in a way I can't explain. How many vidas before, you know?

Sure as this night spreads over me, I move.

Move with waves and sublimation.

Through curves of darkness to what holds noon of night.

I see the city from a distance, edifice cakes of eyes.

They see past me as I'm hidden, perched, parched for more images and movement.

Interminable night and your eyes.

Nocturnes.

* * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *

Sketch Out

The moment. From a maze of memory. Self delving. Conjure.
Chlorine. Cherry syrup over ice. Silver knife. Gone.

I stand, wavering on the end of an aqua springboard fifteen feet above water.
The board sags, and I watch a drop of water trace itself into a splash below.

The Earth spins between 700 to 900 miles per hour.

I look at the pool and wonder how much water I'll drink in a lifetime. I'm five.
And if all that water could be put in this pool, what would it look like? A plane creeps
across the sky. Right to left. I wonder what the pilot dreamt the night before. How
does he dream? Can he see me down here, afraid to jump?

I think up my birthday. Five candles teeter to Polaroids and a clown called Spunky
who couldn't juggle because the dog kept humping him. "Make a wish!" They say,
"Make a wish!" I'd never been told to make a wish. How do you make a wish?
Now I have to jump. So this is what its like on the edge of the world. I wonder
about things. Anything to keep me from jumping.

Why do insects at night flutter around my one bulb when it's not the brightest light
in the sky? I wonder why Spunky put my mother's silver knife set in his bag without asking.
Spunky could be in that plane above me eating with one of the knives right now or whittling faces
with names into a twig and speaking for them in different voices. Leon, Frances, and Reginald.
Reginald doesn't like to fly, Frances comforts him, and Leon is a king.

Jumping gets the sno-cone. I hear a music box in my head. Sounds are coated.
The arm cranks round and round and round. Twinkled notes clink and ding off sound. Spinning
the spindle from delicate rotation.

700 to 900 miles per hour.

The tiniest of tunes, keep turning. Listen to the song again. The music box notes shimmer
a minuscule shine. Churned by a thimbled tine. The tiniest of tunes it was, it is.
Pin pricked symphony of bells.

Sending shivers up to the shapes in the clouds. Those clouds, that carried me down,
through pilot's dreams before I knew I jumped. Those clouds, I see them now like it was then.
Now like it was then.

Jump again, again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

If I Could Write One That Said It All

I would. One with ears of the city's well. One that's
As much a drop of rain as is it is a ten story clock tower

The drop of rain that lands on the minute hand of the clock tower
And stays there until the bottom half of the hour where it rolls off

To fall the ten stories down and land on the head of a man at a stand
Selling little clock towers. He wipes the drop from his head

And puts his damp hand in his pocket where it touches a coin. A doubloon
Now wetted. A Byzantine gold solidus depicting Maurice Tiberius

Successful general achieved favorable peace in Persia. 602 AD
The man selling miniature clock towers believes the coin keeps him safe

Because it does

* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *

90 West

Same road
Has you
Heading straight
Into the setting
Sun then moon
Within minutes
Of each other
A blind sooth
Python pouring
Through the plains

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Somewhere Someone, Coche Diez y Siete

South Dakota at night's not much
More than stars and headlights longing

* * * * * * * * * * *

Beartooth

Highway, I see it still
Slowly reining myself in

Long stares stale
On the open road

Vertebrae with no say
As to their lumbarless confine

Heaping hours
Upon hours

One room, moving
One ground, proving

Past futures
Moving Past

Sun lines fall
Through Wyoming skies

Long like the land
And hammer shadows

Into bottomless pits

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Days spun like this are made for giants

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Mile Long Stylus

Says
Is just is

And was

Never was
Like this before

* * * * * * * * * *

Agate Mined

Storms wipe rain
From clouds

Off

Out there
Heaving distance

How far off
Is the horizon

The place seclusion
Meets seclusion

Names like Yellow Tail
Beartooth know

Medicine Mountain maintains
Quartzite, jasper and agate mined

Arapaho, Arikara, Bannock
Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow

Come from here
Now we curve

Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Nez Perce
Sheep Eater, Sioux, Shoshone

These lands no hands
Have mangled yet

* * * * * *

Sun Is

Setting Montana
Behind the silhouette
Range
This sun
Shifts down
Drives, puts off
Elicits
Gargantuan shapes

Makes you
Think
Of
A giant
Crazy Horse
Lying down

Locomotive insects
Through the window
Sift
Forms fluid
Capacity to see
Rows of steel teeth
Take me

Sunned in tar
Rolling over high
Way toward the illusion
A cross section
Of traveling mindset
Untangles my confusion
Transgressions aside

Incisor mindjaw clarity

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Why's
Wondering why why's
Are why's at all

* * * * * * * * * *

Houses of unknown sound
Fall before my open eareye
I haven't heard them before
But I have
How

* * * * * *

The moving road knows

* * * * * * * * *

Pull

Sun Kil Moon's impossible harmonies
Nick Drake's Pink One
Pleasure Club Fugitive Kind
Talisman songs them all

Pull us through

Here and now
There and then

* * * * * * * *

As the days get further apart
Do we

Do the what might becomes
Become
Never will be's

* * * * * * * * * *

Scott

South Dakota, gas station stop. Middle of nowhere.
The lady behind the counter asked if we were in a band.
I said, "Yes ma'am, we are K o r n." She got all excited
And said her son, Scott, is a gigantic fan. She asked me
To sign something, and presented me with pen and paper.

I wrote, "Scott, live light, stay cool, sting tail - Johnny"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Woody in Toronto Told

Us about a guy
Who took too much
Medicine and blacked out
For two days
Then remembers
Coming to hanging
Out a window
Screaming at the sun
Not to rise

* * * * * * * * * *

NY Is Was

Thousands
And thousands of eyes
Trinket chainbird stories
Of symbiosis vying
Blood pressure gentrifying
Venders on the lean
Watches unclean, hot
You want, they got
Birth Canal Street
Borough worlds
Feet are histories
To a new brain
Dropped in
The city's veins
Almost seem too stirred
Full, of souls
Brain is still
In shock from
The numbers
And the cross fade

* * * * * * * * * * *

300 5th Ave

The Manhattan building
Is chipped
With such idiosyncrasy
That when you see it
You travel in time
To the 1930 hands
That built it
You know the man

In the newsboy cap
Stone clad
Balancing on a girder
Seventy three floors up
Eating his ham on rye
Like hes at a picnic
And you know when
He gets home

He bathes in Epsom salts
Under a burgundy shade
Floor lamp with fringe
And smokes
A Thompson's Montecristo
White while listening
To his son in the living
Room practice tuba

It may not be Mozart
But the sound
Of that tuba in his head
The next day warms
Him through the negative
Wind chill and keeps
His boots improbably
Rooted to narrow beams
600 feet up
And he smiles wider
Than that withering
Year allows

* * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * *

Another Fish

Moon out clear
Above the den of the city
The only thing we hear
Hears us back


Panting feet down dormant streets
Through a gallery of parallel mirrors
Versions of ourselves echo off glass buildings
And we know we are more than here


The nocturne of the city divides and we give chase


Downtown lights motion in our femurs
Wires web cement skin
Cars corpuscle outgoing wattage
Electricity is the citys dreaming


It's night under the surface
Of a manmade midtown lake as well
Lurid little eyes gather in bronze fluorescent ripples
Questioning not the forty-two story source of fake day


A drain pipe vein connects
This lake to underpinnings of a music hall
Bass in an overture vibrates the pipe
And the stocked fish feel it on the tips of their gills


What is the imagination of the city?


Another fish across the street
With a dorsal fin the shape of South America
That's what it is, in an aquarium
Situated street level so it can see out


Next door to mandarin glazed ducks
On hooks and a travel agency
The imagination of the city is a tiny tiny fish
Different from the others in that it knows it's contained


In a filtered, inviolable world of plastic treasure chests
This little fish longs/lives for ads on the sides
Of passing busses - hand cream, diamonds, TV judges
But mostly the Caribbean ads, taunting from sky


Blue oceans under real sun radiating, waters with current
Once the imagination of the city saw a cheetah
In an ad on the side of the #8 bus and wished
It could be one of the long rudder tail cats


For the cheetah thinks meat and leaps


* * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *

Dear M

For you a desert room
And days to let go by
Slow

Just over the last rise
You see it
Adobe structure waiting. Two days
Traveled pack horse. Thirst straps
Itself to your throat. Soon quenched

Small flat house situated in a hollow
Ancient grounds. Arroyo dry riverbed
Fills occasionally
No roads, nothing
Can get to you without seeing it
Approach for an hour

Vigas beams ceiling beam logs
Kiva - bee hived shaped fireplace
Saltillo tiles earthen
Centered patio - squared off
A movement of air

Anasazi - Ancestral Pueblo Indians - the Ancients

Voices in the hollow dampen
In the stillness of the non-wind
Vicinity is smoothed over and rounded
We don't talk
As much as we inflect

Rain in the wet season
Tin basin collected

Porous
Stone water vase cold
Hard to see as eyes adjust
Iris must tighten
In the entrance way

This way, patio
Sit. Soak. A room to
Decrease in
Control the clouds
Shift with shade
Heat radiates, formulates
Nothing scathed
Nothing worried

Dry air hints
Slithers by
Listens by
Your ears

Things wisen when they move with shadows
To stay in the sun. Furniture, wrought retains
The direct solaring. So do you

Periphery / petrified
Curtains snake tongue
Extended senses you there

Desert Lily
Dune Primrose
Desert Star
Barrel Cactus
Mojave Aster
Ocotillo
Ghost flowers
Derive their name
From translucency
Mohavea Confertiflora
Lupine purples, lavender
Blues, yellowed

Close there are painted caves
You've been depicted

No, no, don't get up
Water yourself with breath
The patio this desert room
With choice ratios
Of shifting and portals
To the sun

The desert sky pushes itself back
From an early orange for morning heat
To late orange for dusk
Find yourself remembering
The oldest dream you've ever had

Afternoon settles in on thoughts
And the arroyo, elongated
How many words
For orange are there

Shadow lengthens
Says hey
Spreads out in this
Room for few
And far betweens

Subconscious tenderings, offering
Morsals to feed
The ghosts of heat
Untethered
Rust / Vermillion
Finally
Shadows slide
Past walls into night

Anasazi murmur friendly

Now you are candles
Sleep wills
Desert night silver

You've watched the last
Of the poppies close

There

Hungry?

* * * * * * *

Span Span Wing


Mute vehicle leans
Great speed
Thousands of feet up
Spills combustion, go now
Span span wing
Release unknown quantities
Invention accumulates
Momentum, toward
In flight movie
Sovereign engines hum
Above the desert room
It cools
Pool yourself in
This ceiling of movement
You make dunes
Move invisibly


Myths wait
To include you
A place - all places
Arrow tip Pangea
The horizon line scrolls back
Even though you continue
To approach
And you sense sea
Amniotic in tide pools
Trapped slivers of sun
Minnows with nowhere to go
You sense sea
Over the encroaching
Range and wake
To find shells
In your shoes

* * * * * * *

Mechanical Blue Whale

If these words were anything else
They would be a mechanical blue whale

Fathoms down, 140 feet long
A submarine with interior design

Fluffy white carpeting pervades
The state of the art in luxury submersibles

On board racquetball court, plasma screens
A fake lagoon, omelets made to order

Egg shaped leather seats, sonar pings
Hydraulically the whales tail swings

The whole thing
Makes a gold tooth go 'ding'

Dance floor lights - bass pumping, choir jumping
Automated secret passage ways

And sleeping compartments
Continuing the white carpet decor

Calm within the glide
Nestled velvet vessel

Think Jacques Cousteau meets Willie Wonka
Soul Train, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

For when your underwater activities need to go
Undetected. Let us to the promenade deck

For a look out one of the eyes
Then to the on board dinner theater

Nancy Drew mystery dinner theater
Every night the staff performs an interactive

Undersea stage show such as
"The Mystery of the Stinky Snorkel"

Or "The Case of the Wayward Shrimp"
All this on your very own mechanical whale

Shall we submerge?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Order Odonata - Neurocordulia Alabamensis - Alabama Shadowdragon


Above, a dragonfly skims. Clear wide. Dragonfly classified - Alabama
Shadowdragon. A syncopated scene it is. Membranous wings propel
in engine hum blur and compound eyes guide on. Hundreds of eyes,
golden maroon sheen pads. An ocular wheelhouse. The dragonfly hangs
a leg down in the water and slices a wake. Awake, within this poised impetus.
The Shadowdragon streaks. Somber. Sprung. Kinetic. A mythical image really,
with nothing deplorable about it.


The Shadowdragon allows you to see things and know things, things
you don't mean to know. You have presence in other lives and introspections.
Clairvoyance. A man and a woman sit next to the edge of the pond on a blanket.
They meet there Tuesdays and Thursdays. He has come with champagne to celebrate
her remission. She has come to tell him the cancer has spread. Champagne glass
falls to the ground. Heartache drifts. Further over, a little girl dances around
her grandfather playing duck-duck goose. She has drawn him a scented-marker picture
of the sky. He holds it close and stares into a grape smelling sun. Behind him,
on a bench, friends whisper. One says she saw their ghost the night before.
The other laughs. The ghost then appears before them.


The moment and its surroundings spread. Shadowdragon climbs.
City is below. There are people parting and snake curve, car clogged roads.
Rooftop clothesline underwear dries over a buzzing neon vacancy sign.
A boy writes his name for the first time. Through the window
of a 7th floor apartment, a ninety-six year old man sits three feet in front
of a big screen TV. There is a framed picture in his lap of a woman.
He would meet her on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She is gone. Two floors below
a mother feeds a baby. Baby cries. A phone is ringing. Someone types. S-h-a-d-o-w-
d-r-a-g-o-n continues to climb.


Above the ticks and the tocks - endless city blocks. Drinks pour,
Space shuttle docks. For an instant, you become everywhere, hovering
in an osmosis of intimate sight. Behemoth of an instant, hanging there
in the air. Past this system. You see it all. Scenarios and their circuitry
lap at your insides. Deafening chorus of too many histories to know at once.
Everywhere is nowhere. Shadowdragon banks a roomy looming turn headed back
down. Lean in. This dragonfly envoy now imparts a notion. A notion
that meaning to the passing of a moment is like gravity on a grain of sand.
Simple and there, though unnoticed it may be.


Down, through the firmament and the flying by, distant drums sway
in the trance of a low sorrowed beat. Flutes bend the echo, drawn out
and sweet. These are the interior fields and the dragonfly flows. Faster.
Sconces on trees hold shapes of faces. Conduit cauldrons with curtains
of wild eyes call out, "Who are the creatures that go?" Between the lines
are blank spaces in time. Pendulums, piranha, pathos, and saints
sit like neglected toys of some ancient child king. And of all the memories,
this is the one that rears itself. You didnt even know you were there.
So cower the crows, and uncurl their talons. The Shadowdragon glides,
over rumbles with feathered feet.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Desert Rooms


Places youve never seen
Yet know
You have been there and thirsty
Just not this life


Components of: The Hook
You
The Dream
The Day
Assumption


Getting there takes me farther from you


Divisibility of the building's lights


Was it in my head or in the distance


Eleven eleven, what's the wish of the cell?


The hook - Getting there takes me farther from
You - Divisibility of the building's lights
The dream - Was it in my head or in the distance
The day - 11:11, whats the wish of the cell?
Assumption - Assuming the cell wants at all


****************************


When and if: The monitor monitors
Urges
Detect
Criteria of the mongoose
Arch enemy arches
New fangs willed
Cobra killed
Who


When and if: If only having
Arch enemies
Wasn't a must


**************************


Being sorry
Entity spills to the ground


**************************


Only for a microsecond
That was long enough
All the mongoose needed
Her nerve endings fire faster
Than the snake can strike


Hissed posture venom eye
Cobra bows but instills no fear
The strike falls to the claws
Of a quicker reaction
So secure and nonchalant


The waiting patient Mongoose wins


***************************


The smile lasted that long
Microsecond was all I needed
Freeze
The frame
And stay
In the memory
Of you
As long as
I like


The instance of the instant
The instant I met you
I relive it
The instant we said
Goodbye and the look
You gave


Frame is frozen
No sand empties
With you
Press rewind


**********


Tapped sums, scores run
Tapped suns pour rum
Scratch words in bark
Come back next lifetime
To remember this one


***********


Specifics of transition
Radio wave wash over me


Deploy the stance
That we come from chance
What are the chances
Gasses mixed in the void


Recite your reasons
I'll recite mine
We will see who
Converts first


****************


Algorithmic schemes
Solar flare to you
Melt the dust off your frame
Come back around


Shuffle your dexterity
Take a shot
Consecration appoints the vulture
To rewrite the plot


And the story enters
The room next door
Blood like lust grabs
To get out of your skin


Worry not for your denial
Kicks in
What would you want
With a beast that feeds


On your desires from the inside out


*****************


Collective inaccuracy
Shaves validity
Brainwashing headlines
To lead the herd


The herd


Only sounds tell the truth
Enable a platform
Broadband quicksand
Newly pulling you down


Who sent the scent


An outbound in
Direct
Driving to the memories
Polar dome of day


Shudder
Figure in the doorway
Trying to tell you something


Airlift your condolences
To the scene of the drought
Make sure not to show your face
For they'll know who is sorry


****************


Inside the here and where
The hear and wear
Grinds down
Surfaces ability to feel


******************


Native technology
Knows no media eyes


*******************


Written writing written writing
Writing on the walls
Written writing written writing
Bleeding in the halls
Written writing written writing
Always prone to falls
Written writing written writing
Who's the one that calls


*******************


It's not going to fly in spite of
Only if and when
Components fill in


I'm a zombie
Menial makes for
Madness
What would Rimbaud do?


Look out at the road
Headlights penetrate the egg
Cars as cells


People going through their day
With no want


Quiero mas que eso


********************


I'll create a creature
One to bleed for me
One to lap the blood I bleed


How are the others so content?


Components of the content
Don't bleed at all
Components of the content
Deny they're in denial


Or deny to get by


*****************


Beach is the jewel
In my wet head today


******************


Reiterate scales
Long stare stales

On the open road


Heat bears down
And I know myself
Melted with the tar


Oasis in the distance


Sound of imaginary rain
Stitches my eyes open
To see nothing but the sun


Solar shards as shrapnel
Directly into eyes impossible
To close


Scenario downloads
Desert room
Water basin
Lizard eye


Suggestion to release
Your feelings with the sand
Off the heat
Water quenches then
And only then


********************


I pour you
Pour feeling
As if you'd like to stay
Corner curtains let
Outside into view


*******************


Moroccan view knew and knows
How to taste these sands
No border
No source of sun direct
Moroccan view is blurred and sows
Patterns henna hands


Out over open land
Moroccan formulation
Silver dunes
Siphon desert rhythms
To the moon
Feel the heat and run
You were there
Well find the new
Claws route yet


******************


Heavy on the pedal
Weeks are blips


******************


Arid blinks
Hills in the distance shrink
Voice says follow
Water on the brink


Follow the bones
They dig you up instead
Outrider veers


Claws move underground


Marry the morrow
Fallen man
Voice of his bones
Couldn't make it
Make it to the sea


It was his favorite
Way to fail
To see the water
And yet not drink


Hills in the distance shrink


Gain speed gain
Listen even closer
Momentum teeth
Hold velocity


Distortia


**********************


Portions disproportions
Keep pulling me in
Quick sand slows to
Reflect the sun
Onto the memory of you
And burn you into view


Pieces of the desert
Puzzle come together
Underneath in the den
We pry on the hollow
Two way mirror
And the animals dont know
Our camera is there


Ritual imaginings
Mean we can continue
Even though the basins
Run dry
Run dry
Run dry
The basin's run dry


*********************


Anesthetize the vision


The herd hears
What it wants to


You don't
Don't you dare
You alter
You saddle the vulture
And fly him back
Kick him with your heels
To the beginning


It's your plot now





©2007 trentdrum