I astrally projected to the flat depth of a

specified sky--emptied out with upturned

eyes.

saw lightning come down like a cracked

body.

I heard no-sky move & the earth sink.

electric ants colonized me back to my

feet, on forest ground starving for dead

company--as the living lag between:

let there be light.

there was the same crack of lightning

that passed through me.

the supine speed of itself on snow,

motionlessly making brilliances more

exceptional.

turning snow ashen by comparison.

my awestruckness took longer ways out

of me to approach it.

as if reaching down repeated the initial

impulse to touch it--which felt like

translucently warm skin fresh between

worlds.

it was to hold an imaginal hand more

real, all-knowingly possible.

all the way home--I held a blinding let go,

I couldn't let go of.

the plan was to stay up all night & look at

it with the lights out.

Being misunderstood is

usually designated by

terrified little orbits.

It's not a state by any

means, that would

require their clearance.

They hate that you are

comfortable with being

far more than you let on.

That it's very intentional.

That they're not worth

explaining anything to,

that's when it's best to be

misunderstood.

They want to be thankful

for sure mystery, but are

not.

have you been quickened

enough, to see what takes on a life of its

own?

united in a mirrored

hallway just for You?

then growing cold enough with divide  to

breathe on a mirror that stepped out

of what showers upon you?

reaching out your pointer finger to write,

just write--on the eye sockets of glass?

sure you halve.

leaning towards those in your elephantine ears,
fast with reerecting churchy whispers--have
monumental opinions of you.
while you're used at ease, in adjustably particular
ways--nodding with pathetic gratitude.
your sister's ***** slip that night, in regard to a
pinnable justice on your cold ***--goes around in
sisterly unsaid.
what you desecrated with the dead weight of
forward motion, isn't even aware of retrograde as
damnability.
a chartless pole leaves an elderly woman where
she lie, for good--as you sleepwalk away from her.
she's lonely because you probably won't make it there--
despite all the surrounding evidence.

ego wears wicks,

there's no passay.

flames only want

to comb thru the

knots of trees.

moths have mastered

peripheralities.

in a monsoon, heralding

the blackout of a snowflake.

crippled on a leaf, mulching

symmetries of soil.

feral dichotomies

have already wolfed

down the pre-bitten

hand.

burping unapologetically.

there are Table Manners

too impeccable.

a sign of appreciation in any

culture of bad blood.

made good.

silvery claw marks

on a sixth-plate daguerreotype,

in a foresting chamber study.

a grandfather clock holding its

hands up to its pendulating face--

after an oil lamp is trimmed.

as that daguerreotype's, daguerreotype  

is torn to the size of letters, cannibalized

by The Word/the word/words...

made fleshless, a handwriting

analysis

examined by tactically glowing

horns.

once there's ash
what's left to split
in twain?
hands will not doubt
what's too late for
giving.
waste is the ruddied
stock footage of a
setting sun.
we will be forced to
watch.
begging to give with
both hands.

somehow i always knew i'd live you

apart from myself--and in using myself

as an example of how you go about

things in life...you de-serve to be alone.

you've done nothing noble on both ends--

and if i say neither here nor there, understand

loneliness should be your destination.

to take upon yourself the zero that is the

shortest distance between two points.

know thyself--as you confided of that place

that brought you to blind drunkenness to be

withstood, now calls for you justly.

never was its unshared silence more de-servant.

you will undoubtedly be told otherwise by he

who is as afraid to be alone as you.

which does not make a true pair of you, the divergent

road appeared and was bypassed.

a wolf that's afraid to be alone, can only cry wolf.

Saints talk down certain fruits, under

canopies in waves of nausea.

Their ridiculous commotion muffling

the repeated warnings of moonlight.

Fruits like the propped-up ripeness of

shattered skulls, feel nothing for the

earth.

Trees like dead stopped cranks of

musical seasons--take no rest of

themselves.

Branches stall between wind & shadow

to point out what hangs.

Enough to make worms arrest their

wriggle & die of their nature.

These fruits that come round, while

betraying invite.

Happy decay nestling its cheeks on pits.

Grass should never lie with these.

Hands should starve reach, mouths

should utter: close.

they had to exorcise it--that thing in the air, that thing in the water.
earth, then something other--that's how
it happened.
not the dance instruction of a tarantula to sweat out venom, but by the lived
eschatology of medievals.
worked off in mass dances (tarantism)--
till exhaustion/death.
as if they were the herd of swine that
evil spirits were cast into.
the Gadarene demoniac which Jesus
eighty sixed, caught sniffing around tombs, en route the left-hand path.
bells rung by flies, leeches bled out the: I, flames ran up the: I--heresy!
blood/yellow bile/black bile/phlegm--
the slop bucket fluids of: The Four Humours.
corresponding to the four dispositions, the four ages, the four elements--a feast
of fools attempting to psych-out wodnesse.
as medievals finger-pointed in their sleep, exacerbating toothless drool while
giving over a name.
smoky villages trampled with commotion, then nothing--closed doors taking on a
life of their own.
peace like a frozen juggler, beside a breathless flutist, you could trip over prayer only to look up at an inquisitor.

morbid curiosity is a luxury--the art of
the Middle Ages lifts the ground to meet
its vertigo, as huntsmen signal toward
the observer.
the gamey odorousness of fear downwind.
nerve endings drafted their maps, unable
to find a way out.
dread gathered wood & chopped it untiringly.
reacquainted shame scrambled for leafage again--under a greater Fall.
a potion goblet for every kind.
a unicorn on a green velvet hill, became
visible in the current of a squirrel's tail.
there was never not magick.
though digression can be as quiet as an
exiting servant.
depictions of persons hardened as they softened, a very peculiar ethereality.
the look of snow as soon as it stops.
a bud held tight in one's palm, just as
it's about to bloom.
it is this, from crown to soles--what a
mottled column of light to move in.
from nobility to peasantry, something
burst in on clay--they couldn't be natural even when they felt they were.
animals do not take a headcount in a
burning stable, they even forget to say grace.

a hermit well to the bone--dressed like
a beast in the birthright of elements.
lies four times removed from breath,
with his back on a stream.
puddied face wrinkled like a treestump,
frizz-bale beard, a kingdom's expendable.
stiffly resolute with communions of
sunless light, all he let live--lives him
hereafter.
untouched by the temporal, the long of
his lay will be discovered during the long
of his lay.
a whistling wodnesse will come like
Ariadne's thread from castle walls,
Boschians will leave no sympathy card
from the blazes.
the hermit will have simply been a
feature of the landscape.
if want was a thing at all for him, it was
to be as it is.
his decomposition will be as his favorite
verses, revisited while coming away with
newer & deeper meaning.
a holy pandemonium in a most unlikely
place--a bird for every other bird that
passes it on.

a body whose

blood coldly abstains,

drinks from the goblet

of centuries.

to wipe it from the

mouth of night as it

runs like drool from

a waking dream.

if only to recapture

a kiss.

to starve back its

slow burn.

a smear of

passing...

wonderfully

drawn from.

Now I-I can

taste water.

there existing

no remenant,

but that Taste.

Awe shucks--there's Tater walking like
a duck on a highwire to Apple Bees.
Taken by the hand--dressed like an
unembodied expression, thrown together
not to be naked.
Layers notwithstanding.
Tater was holding his hand, not sure if it
was her own.
Tater was making a go of it--leaving a
slug's salty death on his palm.
Tater was getting so wet her inner thighs
glazed one another.
Conversation was natural enough to feel
like a muted reprieve, intimating loftier themes.
Comments on random homes were not
about worth, but more about auras which
translated to aesthetical judgements.
As Tater & he tempered the material world thru their cross-read dynamic.
Seated at a particular window-booth, as
per his eccentric placement for food ingestion.
A booth lit so bright, one could perceive
the emotions of dust motes.
Tater promptly excused herself to the
bathroom--where she admittedly cleaned
him from between her legs.
Tater took to the booth again, considerately propping herself up.
Then the pendant lamps followed her
mood like a bird of prey across the sun,
when it was directed outside the window
by her gaze.
As Tater offered that it was the day her
ex's mother passed.
He couldn't help feeling that it was put out there, as if a nun ripped through grace to get to appetizers.

enough physicality was overlooked,

for what resided beneath--where's

what resides beneath?

yet there's this walking around--in

the naivety of out there.

which occurs undeservedly, the

step count of a coward.

the ten block radius that was mockingly

cited, was just the preliminary of loving

that residence.

an extremely contented focus.

now that radius will not grow, because

hatred has been foisted.

this morning

my mother addressed

me by the tenderst

form of my name.

to ask me: where did you

go?

the person she knew...

and yet, and yet.

my response was: you

gave birth to me and you

don't recognize me?

she addressed herself as

a stranger as it's coming to be.

an exploding tv dinner--in a microwave,
on a **** tube.
then the Tetra-like gridlock of a channel's
spectrum, the air's breathing spell.
Robert Johnson turned over as a raw lick
at the crossroads--his voice & guitar digging
a hole in vinyl.
the bluesiest devil exhorting: 'you're almost there
Robby--I'll tell you when to stop.'
a crackling breakthrough lifts an emphatic warp.
meaty hands holding balloons & cotton candy,
having a good day above ground--as other
meaty hands check their raffle tickets for the
winning number at the fair.
which's a special house visit from Pogo the Clown,
who'll have a staring contest with anyone present,
then leave.
the following was filmed in front of a live studio
audience: hived crosshatchings, rashy doubles
(2/1-1/2)--the rippling harp of daydreaming sitcom
characters, keys in each cloud they want to throw in
a bowl.
Robert Crumb's existential countdown from zero, his
neurotic flashback-flashforward Americana,
what-to-do-nowness.
out-drawing suicide, perhaps play tenor banjo in
the South of France...

The ground runs sideways,

like the legwork of a tide carried

away by flowers.

Peopled stems that say it's all a

blur--gain ten pounds of

moonlight when they clarify.

Wearing the look of a spoiled

surprise party.

There's this ******* incoherence...
and obsessive cut and paste of mind.
Whatever pasture made its green bed,
has serial murdered...
painted...with head and heels, a lifetime of
tumbling.
Bipedal...the fallacy of bragging rights since
birth.
There's too much to engender without choice,
involuntary antipodes of mind...variations on
madness pawn their humours at storm-crossed
gates.
Strewn...the scrap metal of such limbs.

Thanatos--are you standard in your
procedure?
that is, do you exert the precise force an
individual requires to be pronounced
dead?
are you negligible with some, completely
unaware of your strength?
leave no dust for dust to come to, as you
would the like of: nothing.
do you keep the lives you take for yourself--how would that work?
you should have been dead the first time, but you didn't die--you took a life & ran with it.
you never stop, do you--which's to say you're infinite, that word afforded  bad poets.
the way that looking at checkered shoes
feels like the makings of a headache.
Thanatos--i suspect you're more than
submitted anatomy, you've never once
rejected a submission (in the end).
nor will you this poem.
you are winter here, & i know you see in snow--what about elsewhere?
Thanatos--what if i told you that you're
somehow a lesser god, subordinate to
Gd of thy Gd.
i'm yours--but in an unfaithful way.
you whose exotic collection of
Mahasamadhi is like a cat nap with
elevator music.