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Dream sketch #3
In a dream that tastes of plums
My mother on her someday deathbed confesses to my bald head
That she’s been gone since 1983, long before I could have happened
And I spiral away into the realization of my falseness
I suspect that the waking world is topsoil
Watering potted plants at the windowsill
I speak to them kindly as if they were children
Unable to comprehend their future of either withering or being thrown to the hunger of something bigger
Most of the true primal tundric joy has been milked out like another cow
Moo-strapped to the teat of oil rig short term contraptions belching want
A string of iron twists in our pocahontas-bellies
Most, but not all
I pour water on the little plants
Cool as a secret resting on my lips
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"Cool as a secret resting on my lips"
A great ending!
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Quests
They did fill me with stories
But I’m not even sure
Of the exact nature
The names
(Fragments in schoolbus windows)
Of what, where or who I’m seeking
Maybe it’s
In the hills
A garden of deep masked green
And don’t you know?
Even Mount Rushmore is made of kindling
Waiting
The light breathing in your hair, kinder than I could ever be
An ocean rambling in my eyes that I’ve never actually seen
The filth of elevators far away
Wineglasses rimmed with salt
The same three keys on a piano played again and again in the frost
That’s not my world either
But there could be a chance
Aeries one cannot climb, just watch from below with the jealous seagulls
But it’s probably just the moment
That purple exhalation
When I can feel the sky
Smell fresh bread
Greedily drink all the sunsets at once
Lie in the grass with you
Without keeping one ear perked for machinery that doesn’t want me anyway
Somewhere there is the Kansas of our myth
Places with miles and miles of fields where the only passing cars are peaceful hearses
But it will be a long time
Before I can remove myself from this hospital bed that it was never intended I realize I’m resting in
I regret nothing, not even pulling the smoke alarms from my chest
Surrendering only absolutes
The great American blowout sale, going on coast to coast
Has never been the medicine I needed
Not for this coma, it washes away hunger
Maybe you visited me once
Crawled shaking out of clean sheets
Held my hand and refused to weep
Before you were swept back under
By crisp airport-mornings
And men who claim to have access to unlimited matchbooks
Names gone up in smoke signals
It will be a long time
And if you were here
A film projection Hiroshima skeleton on the wall, reaching
You should have tied a yellow balloon to my breath
Watched it struggle like a dog on the long leash
And noted what direction it gently tried for
They certainly filled me with stories
But it will be a long time
Before any of them come true
The field of crabgrass and barbwire where the moonlight smelled like ecstatic fireworks
Where I sprang up out of the mud, incomplete
Only your smokestacked name in my throat crouched inside a tollbooth with the little fears
Will be waiting after all the expeditionary cardiac bulldozers have passed to grey banquets
I can’t eat their tornado statics and graduation-spraypainted water towers
This is the journey and this is the wheat
Someday your prison sheets will flap out the open window, clouds for the old empire
It will be a long time
But I will wrap the first one that lands tangled in the branches around my shoulders like a coat of mirrors grinning in the acid-rain
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William Blake came back as a skater
Skateboarding down the boulevard in the rain
The drops of cold obscure my glasses
Like a grand and terrible joke that I can never share
Buses, restaurant, computers, mountains
This smirking desert city
Yes
The flower that grows in the far sand
It sings for me alone
When I close my eyes
I see it’s red defying the thirst
It sings for me and me alone
But even if I found it
I wouldn’t dare cut it down
Because there would be nobody to give it to
My wheels catch a factory rhythm on the pavement slabs, above the cracks
Zipping through the ends of all my summers
Compacted into
One single
Shiver
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Still and solid making two footprints in an empty fountain’s dust
Arms out, ta-daa! Spin into an imaginary airplane that only leaves continents behind
I could climb up into the hills, find a crevice and squeeze until I come out the other side of the cave into the a panicky buzzing white bathroom
Gotta get outta here, go back the way I came into the carbonated mists
I thought this was the hour when I’m supposed to be quiet but the circus is still in town
So the noise of wishing-badboy experimental labrat violin turns its neck slow
Sundial, gardening in a nonspecific past
And I wish I could paint it, use a broken wine bottle as a brush
But I can’t quite lift the terror, split stone into silver and toss such gems into the fireplace where the decision to go past the yellow grass started
Peer over the fence and motion to the broken lawnmower
Circular calendar’s subtle curve masks a certain slyness
But I have no room in my gut for any of those who may be watching
Wanting the coins to rust, sink to the bottom of the lake
Swingsets in the weeds all squeaking empty
Some sort of message on my hand, faded into flesh
So lick your fingers and xylophone your garbagecanned shortribs while worrying about my eating habits
It’s an apology laden bitter broth, like February rain that can’t quite be honestly warm
Way up there in among the train-whistles who escaped from their machines, I can worm into to sleep in a fertilized rictus
Possibly head-trauma against a tile wall in an arctic gas station
But here, funereal green where we have allowed the water to run and brittle where we haven’t
At least I can listen through spitless statues for what the trees may say
About who else has been in this place with a pocket-burning wish
Waited delirious in the dawn for a chance of catching some fickle cough from the fog
They are smiling but it’s a quivering blue knowing camera flash, aware of noise in an island of silence
Far away
From any skeletal milk of church spires
Cannot speak
Delicacy of cold batteries
So drink
The difference between a lake and an ocean is how powerful your thirst and binoculars are
Ah vision of my old friends whose eyes fire take flight like Chernobyl party favors
You stay with me through all the coca-cola purges I pummel with my vegetarian mumbles
If we really do live in a silent film I doubt we’d know it
These wide gaping gravitational slowdances would be just the way people talk
Song I once heard in French on the understatedly nightfall radio
Place in the woods where emergency rooms spin into gameshow reruns
I wrote a letter and buried it carefully in the shaded soil at the feet of oaks that seemed so big
Breathing like stone, quiet fire, a tidal exertion and one nonmechanical smile
The only one that didn’t grind and squeal in fairytale factory chuffing calculations
In ripples they drift tittering (choke) wirebirds
Away from my snow window
Cannot speak
So wait
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"The difference between a lake and an ocean is how powerful your thirst and binoculars are"
Good stuff!!
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hey i got the book in the mail, i shall remail it to you shortly :)
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(open this poem from either end, like a peach)
I am a blind wave of saltwater
Terrified to meet the shore
Messenger of thin coughing clouds
A sapling in a grove of ashes
I’m just
Awaiting the bulldozer
I know what the machines will do to me
When I come down
We can meet in the center like mimes
With a secret language
Unable to touch
You’re just
A wisp
From the chimneys
A sly gesture of air
The wish from a dandelion spent
A moonarrow dancing through brambles
Behind the eyes
You’re a lit match
Lighthouse trying edgeward
Signaling frenetic
Slowbreath extinguishment
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Pain
To what would I pray for and to,
If not this soft rage?
I can’t get a job, can’t work
The people who give them out, like theoretical candy
They’ve got my name
And I’ve got their toothbrushes
My sadnesses are not profound enough
Can’t make money, can’t make love
Can’t make the grade, the cut
The cult, the butcher, the surgeon
A child in the fields till a dawn of shivering calves fills his belly with doubt
He knows
Plucking an old arrowshaft like a gone violin from the soil
I cannot have
The big star nova cortex eureka from the very wound
No
Mine are the small, mean, petit mal passions
Understanding with a world, a dream, a disease, a nation
A thousand cuts
That I wish would just open and excoriate me
Into the doorways I keylessly know are waiting
For those more gorgeously ruined than I have the strength to be
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The great American Past-Time/ A Historia Ludicrum
Certain aspiring Dr. Freuds would say my car crashes are a result of repressed sexual energy
But I have more ears than theirs to whom I can speak
And precious few I can listen to
It’s all static and battery-rot except for one marble
So blacken my airplane teeth like your Nixonian rice paddies
When I give up burning my ears out with satellite noise
We’re gonna firework our platonic inkblots morphable down the streets of a new suburban scar
Distort the new kid into acts of sugary martyrdom reconstructing the past like plastic surgery
Hallowed be his sneer!
When the money stops breathing the vision will still be waiting with chemicals in the grass
In ripped pants for the zoo
Here I am, first of the new trolls
Now you see me now I’m disappearing into logical holes in the theater cellar
Shimmering glades of coffeepot migraines
We in the back of the thrift store fondling defunct flags,
We beg for the cherry bombed outhouse
Take away the tattooed morgue attendant to puke it up like yesteryear
Or let him come to me in lace and homeopathic snorts
Can’t even count high enough or tear bee wings off fast enough
To win the severed loves of the bus depot repossessionary
Indigo eye wire
Actors on stages, on stumps and on stilts
I am not the pixilated wood-nymph you’ve been waiting for
Mold in my hair, bargains with Mayan death-gods stretched along a boxcutter
Phone numbers nervously denied
Speed dialing in the bleachers
Smell the thorn of Barcelona
And all the meatpacking snickers
Marker scents I can’t induce downwind galactic seizuring torn cassette tape ribbons
Baldy Babe Ruth swings and misses and the laurels fall from behind his ears
Chimpanzee apostles dump his glowing death from the Hoover Dam
You don’t understand, I want the uranium deposit slips
In your infection behind locked doors
There, in a rocking chair
That’s what you really want
The identity, the stockbroker’s head skimming Polaroid obsolescence
But I want the stampede, the submarine
Skydrops of sunshine revolution
Air shards stuck like the snow queen’s three minute mirror
From concentrate and you will see them in military formation
Parting the crocodiles, hairy feet walking on purified water as they prepare to drop him over
Blackjacking handsmacks of the castrators
Hear my highpitched neep!
With shackled hands raised in classrooms deprived of oxygen
This should be the way we always were
Best friends holding hands and pinching their noses before the volcano
Hunger blindingly heavy
I’m coming back around ducked down in a burned out Chevy
Trying to drink all the sand from my Victorian hourglass
Figure of my breathless lust engine, swing and a miss oooo
This is the artery clogged with folkloric PLEASE
Stuffed with hotdogs and leeches
Sell me all the hyperventilated tuberculi in the closet
And I may obliteratorily tell you why I tossed the dirtclod past swaying wheatstalk skyscrapers
That would circle like eagles if they could shake the gasoline fleas from their shaved grey backs
I went curveballing wrong
When I looked up into the edge of the Baron’s long grinning nighthedges and stole the shine of his clippers
So be forewarned: I have armed myself in the nakedness of dictators
And will claim the swimming pools of your youth
Long after the mosquitoes have paved me beneath
Mouthed in yellow lolling sleep
What part of my silver skies theoretical Europe do their shovels not comprehend?
We are in new worlds now, old parties all crashed out
If you toss me skittering down the King Kong wishing well
I will sit there weeping for a nostalgic meanness I never had
Except for that brief spacely moment when I sailed over the parking lot
As a bruised and sunk fruit of lost American past times
Spun like scorpion semen in the gears of some grandfather clock whose heart ticks to a noise his lungs cannot scrap
So this is my snarly heap
If you’re going to chop down a tree that Einstein pool-cue
Then swing hard into the next century
Or say nothing when the cannonball tugs my tears into the Pharaohs’ California sick-bed
It’s time to funeralize the 20th century
Finish the game, go back into green dusk
And ahh my double edged grin growls among the microwaves
We can dig unreal into the tundra
Disappear cold and lovely into Eris’s waiting arms
They are coming down from the hills in black hoods waving coupons
The new imaginings just laugh with cool good water cupped in their hands as they sip to the half moon
Somewhere between mutual eclipses I hum wondrous at the itch of my fractured baseball bat
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"A string of iron twists in our pocahontas-bellies"
Flagg.All of your words...all of your words are beautiful. Real, purified emotion.
Hypnotised.