rendered (brave new world)

the skies call
silver screen clouds
the name of each city
below

but as the droplets change
and the reasons shift
faith renders smokestacks burning

the chuffmachine
wagwongering its crooked finger
in the face some something small
and opening

the projection over formless white peel
rejects T(oronto, Albany, Amherst, Boston
in favor of cloudless pastures
where the mind grazes eye in eye

the guns of the house unbuckle
and the walls breathe in
in that moment before
exploding open.

Aces

When things' mechanisms fail us,
are they blown away by the wind in
favour

of cold calculated meat beats
sitting blank in labs in spaceships
orbiting

the dark star microchip of
an other darkling universe when
succumbing

to the bleak joys
of security gained in counting

down
to the end?

Row

This is the Ocean.
A Dream.
The Stretch!
_Vast expanse
(not water but
Nitrogen)
_.

again, again

if an angel came
snapped skeletal plates
with hands and fountains self-taught

and it takes
this stone to scour
towards a breath,

then the breath always
deserts--echo notes
and naturally this traveled from up;

flick ever on across this twist
as though you were air(

The New Viceroy

batter my heart awake and
make the future real to me--
tomorrow's ghost scrapes ahead of this wind
gaspingrappling
telling stories about death and the sea-
tempered steel to test it.
skeletal plates snapped up an angel

and it takes this twist to scour
with hands a breath from this stone,
though you were always self-taught
and this came on natural(asifly;

the never travelled breath
fountains and
the notes flick air across
deserts--echo towards home.

A Fragment Of "Cataract"

...And the TV sang "from the bottom of a well,"
balling up the world into hydrogen and heat--
spaghettifying the world to dark energy and cheap meat--
the dimensionless dot under the question mark slagged off into the sky,
the fragment-sound in orbit struggling to shake the hell outta time...

we never drank the water again and dedicated fall fleets
sputtering 'for the uninitiated--A Mountain of Leaves...
and the slave of the brain bored by a bell.'

Alive After A Certain Type of Death

the wave of things i didn't write exhumed me,
bubbles of air and water,
breath--blood, ground up by that dozer
chugging on like a leaf to certain ends
and to the vulgar magic of what the future brings in waves.

How Every Angle Blends Together

Water shook the setting sun, the red glare thoughtful, gazing...
Through atmosphere the edge of the circle burst outward
Hiding another world beneath plasma burn where other planes
Shape reality's hum.

Lilacs and marsh heather stalled their growth
Waiting for the sky to dissolve
Or the earth to evolve,
But the edge of the circle held, and
Every etch of the fractal arc
A seagull's quark stretching a thread
That remembered the sea.

The trees locked by ice held their ground
And with each rock sang their tune of you,
Irradiating us closer to our fears
Which radios broadcast in the thousand colors
We stole to paint a bird.

We cried when we realized the paint could
Never capture the path, the love
That all the threads and feathers of the sea brought to us,
And we laughed when we saw something there
That had painted itself--
A fool of a king to rule our realms--
The thieves we were were changed,
The delicate interplay of all the pieces clickbuzzing the shift...

At night they slept, ringed by the resolve
Found when seeking with head and heart;
Each ancient dream surged--
Still lives--waiting at that red arc's edge,
Though books and the eyes of hiistory
Focus more on the salt
Marshes devoured when they were young.

And every spring it rains grey in the mountains in Nepal
Filling the cataracts like life in monasteries,
The water washing everything, the setting sun,
And shining us with the depth of never going alone.

the last pot roast on earth

for Drook

on the very last friday of the very last calendar
someone scribbled a skull and cross bones

and we recycled all the old diet ginger ale cans
fashioned them into a sail that captures dirty molecules

*
for Katy

local december fridays colder than febuary that year
those slowed moments sat at the table, a pen and paper

the computer generated aliens looked ridiculous,
but pot roast in the made for tv movie beckoned.

while land race gamma rays ate up the stars
the final birds sang laughing at magic eye views,

I remember burning every book we'd read to keep warm,
and how we sailed on feeling guilty for finding the way out

Why Wait?

damage drives hunger
up and down the coasts of fear;
the south still has plans...

Sunder Kin

turning skies to head
the way mountains cover death,
time to let it count.

Non-Game

healthy detatchment met its match
today under a static sky,

the man with tv for a head and
metropolis arms showed no mercy

no witness was there for the skyscraper attack
and weak radio defense, writing it down like a script.

the blade was concrete, quicksand, and house parts
and healthy detatchment's head rolled all the way to Hollywood.

I sent flowers to the hospital,
but they were the kind that still had roots.

Line One

Sometimes the deepest
meaning is no meaning
in flat land.

Bee Tree (six strip)

The Bees Are Coming

So many efforts taken, the only imprints a love poem reduced to "gone," and a pineapple for the world's proper welcome. The catch-22 was that the strength and clear forceful resolve exhibited in leaving was more than the underlying shadow of growth to come--it was one thing that could break the reinforced icons of little minds....(the other thing*

The Other Thing

An accident, no one else around, adrenaline mother, I saw no one in one car, airbag deployed and the other was a medium sized truck too high off the ground to see into. I slowed down as I passed and immediately called Emergency but was kindly informed that it had already been discovered...I continued journeyways past the cold tree and reflected the damage reflector*

Damage Reflector

It's all in the trees of the seeds who never hatch--
I came to get my things
I was unprepared, resentful
(regretful immediately)
I saw a flash, gathered my things
the light came on, I gasped but
was
not noticed...
lucky*

Lucky

Adrenaline mother why near you did I accept death, an imprint of so many things?
an imprint of time and circumstance
an imprint of the world, an imprint of atoms
an imprint of fate--
scars
and "it was not supposed to be this way,"
and this is not the path
the broader space, simultaneous--
a map
and whatever else was there (or who)*

There (Or Who)

Why did I accept death's fear...?
His cloak stretches, and
stretches
goes deeper
into a shape we cannot quite wrap our minds around...
whatever else comes next
is next*

Next

At least Jasmine came for the goodbye,
The best way about it all really.
I didn't touch her, I just blinked a few times and left, quietly
I've moved and those weak remnant-imprints were stitched to become more relevant to my character
I left your hat and your keys,
a pineapple-tree and the word "gone" saved to your hard disk where I had to kill
something meaningful.
I came to get my things
and quietly was the best way
for me to forgive myself...
because
the bees are coming*

Grendel's Breath

Take back your bloodied rusty ring--
bled white cold conquering spirit
robbing air, and break it;

Give us back our green grass
and scavenged breath--
Grendel's Best...

Evict your ravenous gypsy moths and free our bark,
for their strings make no song
save the slow disappearance of leaves.

It crawls through me as sundown's ice dances
in the locked limbs of these restless dreaming pines
and screams,

Drive this ghost to the ground,
for evry cataclysm lurks
and city limits are monuments
in the dark to the dark
with lights on fire like the rest of it.

And that dragon's gold and cold coil scales
always other us to death leaving throngs alive
with collapsed mosques and shantih's to implode
the ohms in a rough lithography of trees...

Snapping back against time,
our fermions crushed--annihilized,
but we will be bosons between the planets
and feel the pull beneath dust to the fifth world.

Under the recession of noon
the will within our blood
flows out--forgotten among cold rocks...
but something there survives in balance
to grow and shred the redwoods
(or any other lilies milling)
and coughs up keys of a fiery furnace.

The Atom Bomb Of Your Departure

it hit me--
disintegrated in the shock wave
a pulse tearing faster than meatbeats,

tore apart all i knew,
your cats,
your use,
your farm that i built,
everything i did and wrote;

it cast me in a space with white walls
denied by existing;
the radiation--a river
of chemicals for us both.

i spin and spit blood--
your failed apocalypse will always exude--
a tooth, dust i am.
i let it go and it takes me.

here in the water i wait,
wait for you,
blank and angled
like something new,
or a blade you never see,
but it's really just
everything you've ever forgotten.

Blender

Words like bugs
swarm around
for we are all outnumbered
etymology, DNA-- our roots
our cruel cold hands
made to move
ticking off with thunderbolts--
think of the stitch
and of the cut
and centrifugal bumble-puppy,
think of dissemination,
and of learning, or not learning...

One monolith for everyone,
the keys ticking down love,
a genesis thunderbolt--
the tomato in your back,
in your wrists,
or in your head.
this is a blank page,
and the note it makes when we break,

my teeth--be bitten,
for you were born to cry or bleed.

Bullets

a firecracker in a munitions tent
kills thousands accidentally...

civilians rise and fall,
their water washing
the moons and skies.
the earth groans and shows her belly

while we, sleepless,
make bullets all night
to shoot into the ground.

Oxidize

If ever was
the price of daydreams seen,
and the crowds of background fragments
released through splintered skulls
a cataract...

Against the congealed rag, reality breaks
though classic american shakesperian apocalypse ensues
and all your baby seal shoes,
cubed greenland icicle theives,
and breakbeat-lined vegetable cubicles
belie your purpose, saving I's of the sun.

The icons polarize
small minds
and peach pit cyanide
flows in that sick pulse
real blood has
when her stand-in is injured
by the "doctor"
while everyone stands around, pretending
and the cameraman coughs when
nosferatu arrives late from chinese make-up
and it's like the way the sun
and darkness charge peach trees
over a great distance.

Hydrogen Maser

another sunrise to smoke and ghosts,
the saccharine song bleeding over
sleep to let me know that even though
i always forget the dream
i still got something...

and all your awkward fiber optic paws
clackclack no blame like
presidential teleprompters
whose keys are too small--
gibberish erupts, meandering
backways and sideways to echoes of some
awesome hunter's dance,
while the nation laughs

ticking grass, silver linings
loose and unbound by skies
bleed everything UVB--
the lines dissolve,
and the sort-of-almost cloud--
fear burns off in agawam sun.