IN THE VERY NIGHT OF LAST NIGHT


I slept on a dream
large as an arctic whale –
nasal passages full of nasturtium.

To navigate this lush
revved up reverie
with the impetus
of impenetrable percussion – 

to perforate waking light
leaving peek holes 
for dreams to arc, for dreams

to see me awaken in rapture
with the shawl
of their fragments
left upon my head

covering me as if veiled
in light, veiled
in displaced memory.

OMNIBUS


       Everything near becomes distant.

                                                     --Goethe



I spotted an anonymous ominous Omnibus
riding on the road near the Bay

You were there
hiding my prayers with invisible fingertips

You were there
out of the blue

sky

like old emails

reappearing

in theory like a real dream
hidden within the margins

like a momentarily stopped throat

ANXIOUS DOORWAYS

We occupy anxious doorways
in our Masterpiece skins
because all the world’s a maze.

The same as Fiction: 

give clues, expect decisions 

to reduce the meaning 

as I think of my mother’s
cancerous breast that was surgically 

removed & how I have illustrated it 

many times in my mind 

the way that it must have sat in a jar 

& longed for its torso:   vibrating 

chest-bumps of heartbeats 

where my baby-head used to lay.

& the sky is blue somewhere 

beyond the night sky 

where Time has grown tired of us 

beyond the night sky where I can see 

my dead mother's eyes watching me 

as they sparkle through every star 

in the heavens. 

GLASS BOTTLES

The Persian glass bottles
of azure
unlike the blue of Yves Klein
all three of them
upon the oak wood mantle
sit beside two tiny found bird's nests
which themselves sit beside
a small antique squirrel
holding a hickory nut
to its mouth
ready to dismantle
a whole world
out of it

& into these bottles
some time ago
these bottles
as if pigmented
with "lapis lazuli"
before they were placed
onto the mantle
I whispered poems
many poems       
fragmented into them
& I replaced
the corks
back onto each
of their lungs
of swallowing

& during the winter
when the cold hands
of time
touches our crystal veins           
when the fireplace
underneath
has been lit
to warm us
like a mother bird's sheltering feathers
those ultramarine blue bottles too
became heated
by the flames
below them
igniting ablaze
the invisible solidity
of the words already on fire
within them

stored in silos

CACOETHES

I am a mouse of men:
Sequence clown blunting the norm! Hear me!
This is for the pigs, the sacred mascots janitoring at a University
unidentified human objection, provincial moments
Eat the cake, smile, keep your talkative voice at a distance,
This is for the grand pianist with his momentary shine
eating the food at the Art Museum. Wasted Plato
reduced to rigmarole rôles, demigods earth us just after our own
heads,
Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic: panty-waste conferences
Bohemain Grove melts through the heads of The Brothers
plod plop plot plow ploy plug
& created a body of “What was asked to be
Came to us like a Sign-On of self-direct’d wild maniacal robot
guide, wary splitting like Maoists, the pursuit to “fit” somewhere:
the unstoppable thrust or thirst makes chop-sounds:
wrench, rupture: "Be all you can be!" "Concentrate!"
O dark cloud of collodian clusters, O mural hanging over
interiority, convexity, hazardous waste, to the gut
like a bullfight gone wary: self-aggrandizement.
Not to claim faining copes wandering Music
lightwaves, fingers of God, groupuscules bulletproof
bullets: Old friend, Gnosticism tails off, falls away,
toes the line that vanishes!
Great Travel Guide: “maternal ancestor,” she
said: "I envy The Complete Rhyming Dictionary
because it feels like I need help to write rhyming poems!"
Cheaters, meat-eaters, defeated tea-drinkers falling over
the ship into the ocean, Listen! the rest of the world
(& nothing more) lunges droll shiver the whole thing
1984 not so hard to pin down, smacks of a kind of
vehement burgeoning Black Tarantula
penetrating the spirit of the dream, the American dream,
the American nightmare as if a voice has just whispered
in a voice like a bot toward commodification
& pressuring its linear narratives of success, frustration
& compromise... the ideal compere-fodder, fiddled-with.