A Well Placed Hole

A Breath's Life

2008-01-16T17:00:00.000-05:00

what do I do with this
Do I crawl inside it
Do I eat it
Do I shove it through my skin and between my bones
Do I carve your face in it
Do I hang it on the wall
Do I write your name all around it
Do I place it on the ground
and tell all the Others you are
beneath it
lie
ing
Do I insert it in a barrel
and point it

The power of my mind awoke
to the moment of love revoked
and the giving of the thing
I
was to become

The power of my mind awoke
at the moment of love revoked
and the giving of the thing I
was to become

Do I insert it
In a barrel
And point

I signed my name for the first time at that moment of love’s revocation
And the power of my mind became the borderline between you & me
And the power of my mind became the wall, over which I remember what used to be
And on this side of it I hang the pictures on it, the things got in trade
Who sells has the power
Who buys has it too
The thing itself is meditating, transported between powers desires hungers, aglow with the revocated love

The power of my mind became love’s disappearance
The power of my mind chased love over the wall
The power of my mind set me in a room all solo
A curtain was drawn across the doorway, a curtain of biology
A curtain of microbes and the stomach

A Merry Go Round

2007-12-22T14:32:00.000-05:00

Everytime it comes around I reach out and make a mark
That’s how, being spun around on the wheel’s edge, the paper comes into view, I reach through my narrow porthole try to get as much down as possible as it rips past
The vehicle doesn’t relent
Throwing me past the still seat of work and thought
The vehicle does not pause
Shooting me past where I imagine I want to be
I’m ammunition from someone else’s weapon
A handsized grenade of skin & hair casting a mansized shadow
I land at their feet, that small group, between their nice shoes, and go off, an atomic invagination, what’s called intimacy
I’m arrived late in the middle of their show
I’m a walkon and take over the role of the one that couldn’t stay, or just left, or never showed
And over her shoulder, or his, I watch outside the window that place spin past
I wish, without movement, I reach past her shoulder, or his, and extend my arm, and make a mark as the paper rips past
And then I may say
Do you hear the wind?

Da Bomb, w/glucose

2007-10-30T23:48:00.000-04:00

It’s a deadliness, a tiredness, a iya-iyaness, an unwillingness, a frightenedness, a pat refusal, an homage to an officer, a strangling of the born new, a sacrifice to the idol of silence, a resistance-fighting in a long over war (the soldier found in the bush twenty years later, not knowing the enemy is the trading partner now, is the best friend and media model of the sons and daughters of the men he saw fall and dead), a suicide of mind, a murder of no-action, a taking away via the empty seat, an eating to pack the wound, a violence to disintegrate the dream, a sorrow-song to sing when life has changed to nothing again, a great swallow from the nut of loss, a deep drink, a face buried in cake, chewing and crying teeth, a man on stage masturbating and weeping, a flatus-womb swelling, a repetitive matricide, a violence staged against the kitchen walls, a twine-enacted imprisonment upon the wedded bed, a violence that loves its own hot heart, a retribution called adoration, a vengeance worldground-solid called devotion, a pulverizing of the chestbones by a certain kind of sunlight after a particular hour of midnight, and from the laceration at the heart a memory of need and a return of care, and a great flash illuminates the dark livingroom, then a deadliness again, a tiredness, a stinkfoot stinkass motionless library of the memory of fuckmotion and the speed of a nighttime, a glance at the wastemeat, a peek at the old dome, a finding of greymatter predominately onesided, a mirror made of skin that grows old and falls, a silence that paves the past with gold, a tit that told the time, a female moustache bleached by the sun, sweatstiffened sheets in a time of cold and snow, a house that is just a stone, a walkway that blinders and so makes safe, a lock just for show, a mailbox with a fractional address, a busy street tied to the back like a fake hump, a hometown, a making of tracks to ruse, a making of calls to conceal, a crying to buy time, a miscalculation, a ending up, a moment that snuck through unseen, a bureau with a shattered mirror hidden behind a house, snow on it, inside the drawers dry.
A snowcave in the tropics or a masquerade. “I didn’t know how important your masquerade was to you. You may have your masquerade. Just don’t break any laws.” If you don’t follow any laws, you can’t break any.
A boot of leather on the leg of a cow or goat. Four boots.
A premonition. In the form of thinking there are none.
Let me get a footstool. “M’barrel chest ’ll do.” I want to help YOU reach the top kitchen shelf. Let me help. Maybe some TING will fall down and I could have a piece, just as a mild payment, not too much, but some TING for my small trouble. Put your good high heels on, and step so right chere.
You good in heels, even if you are a man.
And then you put me in your mouth. Even if you are a woman.
And then watch the big bug fly outside the window, making the muzzing moo and the motor nick the glass.
And so what the sun gone down again. We make fire just by rubbing our two eyes together. Give a lick. Press me down.
Who is that that calls here all the time? You know him?
We met once. You’re jealous.
I can’t believe it myself. Because he took the road I was ridden off. And he stayed on, because he never had the hand forced down on him. And I am I am I’m jealous and I don’t like it but I am and it makes me look bad I know and I can’t help it. I see the open road I was ridden off in him. And the man makes me regret. And it hurts.
But I love you. And I’m sorry you suffer this.
Sorry how?
Sometime I could go down that road with you again, go down that road with you again and break the hand that comes down. I could break that hand that comes down and chuck it down the bank. And then, you’d go on, right down that road, and I’d never meet you. We’d never meet. And then you’d be him. Calling me. And I’d not be interested, because you’d be here, and I’d be in love with you. Sorry like that. That in there like a wish for that.
I feel my knees buckle when I see you shaved. I can feel that skin ride me up and down and I see it and it troubles my heart. A man’s on a rope bridge the length of his cock. How could he ever cross it? It’s like walking with your hands under your feet.
Winding copper wire around the legs of the table, feathers and reeds stuck in the wire, making a fourlegged dynamo to counter the suction of the window. I can breathe in there. The baby bottles filled with shit and dirt and coins and dust and sand and food and paper etc, and a condom rolled on each one all the way down from the nipple to the base, and all on a shelf on the wall. That’s in there too. And the blindfold tacked above a strike zone drawn in chalk on the wall, with a set of fake breasts in the zone. That’s in there too. And the handcuffs mounted to the typewriter. And a drain filled with hair. And a window crystal clear clean. And a pair of dirty socks. And the steering wheel and driver’s seat with the dildo mounted on it. And the sound of wind in trees. The smell of eastern mountain air, and beach air, and basement air, and morgue air.
A crowbar with two eyes stuck in a doorway, having got it open just a crack.
“That’s this. What this is.”

You Turn

2007-09-18T06:15:00.000-04:00

This is my place in the world now. Where your face is not. This is my place now.
I’ve elbow room in your absence, I can move and spar, I can swing my arms so they feel wind, I can see across this space you’ve hollowed, a valley between what was and what is not.
Hock up my voice and let it splatter.

Loosely, variously bright and woven thick, a walkin meatlocker is the night. As if on skates variously frozen and fleet I make it past what passes for time.

Around your absence I am doubled, helixed, always up before it’s light.
I breathe in the memory of your face.
Wrapped in its missing, I’ve made land.

Visa V

2007-09-17T07:12:00.000-04:00

I want you to tell me when it will rain.
Maybe you could break something.
You know, when it’s quiet like that. That’s when I think they could actually do it.
I’d make a move when they were looking straight at me, since they’re so used to everyone waiting ’til their backs are turned. And then it would take them a second longer to react, and then the gate would open that extra inch, and I’d see the face a second longer, and they’d never be able to cut that out of my brain. Or if they did, since they could, they’d never be able at least to cut it out of my bones. ’cause I’d fertilize the ground they kill me in with it. Or the smoke they make me would spread it into space.
You make the same mistake they do. Matter. It’s not matter.
But I am, and I need get to what’s not through it.
Then you are them, and you’ve got no conflict.
That is the conflict.

I’d want to put me in the ground too.

But instead, bring on the songs, so I can stand and watch the many faces songs, so I can watch and hear the singing they make, here from the outside, where I thrive.
I feel my bones.
It wasn’t I who created this thing I’m in, what you call my face, what you call my ass. It wasn’t I, and so it’s not me, but belongs to whatever created it.
I know you love to look at it, but remember it is not me.
I’m the result of your looking, which is the result of what you see, which is made by another looking entirely, which is absolutely different than me.
And you, seeing your own looking – I want you to drop that, continually, drop that and drop that and drop that, until there’s nothing left of what you are seeing except what you are not seeing: and then you’ll start to glimpse what I know as ‘me’, glimpse without light or space, without rod or cone, glimpse in a heartbeat buried in blood – the violence inside peace of really knowing. An other.
I can already see it in your eyes, how you are tracing my contours to the topography of your insides. The portrait will be monstrous and shortloved. I’m telling you to wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. And wait some more. Before you think you see ‘me’.
Which does not mean I do not want you to gaze on me. I want I want I want. I want your gaze upon me. That is the rain upon me, feeding me. Without that gaze – your gaze – I die. But I want your gaze to never meet itself, and never to know. Only gaze.

3 Months Pass

2007-09-17T07:11:00.000-04:00

Song

2007-06-04T13:10:00.000-04:00

Sing me awake, be my dawn
Sing me to sleep, carry me home
Sing me and make me never come to
Be the man I thought I knew

And the last time
Made the first time
The last time

Sing me a knife, you use it
Sing me a sign, confuse it
Sing me a cup, a blanket, a pill
Ask the man if he won’t, if he
will

And the last time
Made the first time
The last time

I’d put my money on
Some one else
But I’d ride your horse in the rain
There’s mud in my teeth
A hole in your sheet
But look
There’s the hill
There’s the hill

And the last time
Made the first time
The last time

V south

2007-06-04T13:07:00.000-04:00

I have no core
No center
No fidelity
No inside
No am
Touched by the wind I go; touched
by the rain I stop. Her want,
his vision, send me, sculpt me,
imprint me; her vision, his want –
schedule me, clothe me, violate &
sate me.
Touched by the wind I go.
Touched by the rain I stop.
Untouched, I don’t even know I’m
alive.
Deeds are reactions to invasions &
seductions; to reflections of
incapacity, erased by movement &
an armor of words.
Desire in a coin locker in a
station in dream. Left there,
unclaimed, in pitch. My desire.
Untranslatable, ungrammatical, felt as
a gulf, an entrapped depth,
crystal ball-like, in the infalling
length that goes down, on an
angle, through me.

Breaking Seed

2007-05-01T14:31:00.000-04:00

“Our job is to move against the world, rasping against it, as if we were a calloused blister and the world the object to lance it. The moving itself thickens the callous. But seeking in this rubbing a defect, a splinter, a shardedge, a faultline, a break in the surface that will rip or slit or tear or prick. Seeking in a defect of the world an instrument of liberation. In this hoped for puncturing of our container a violence of inspiration and the original legacy of the impossible, which is human time.”
The defect is in Her. And the pulsation of constant failure, of rising and collapse, of fusion and dismemberment, of arrival and evaporation – a kind of body of carbonation – The defect is met only by not running away, from Her. Odors of food, so fleshy as to be edible, moving by the mind like tunnel lights. Discipline lancing the blister: to not eat of aromas. Not turning aside. Vision fails and returns. A constant coming to. A single length of rebar finally reaches its burial point in her, extension from me. Holding this firm. Without hands, using only body to hold. Heat and power in the form of a claustrum. Pressure. A death threat, and a serious legal charge, under pen. Risking each of our lives, diving at the rusty nail head found in the stamen of the bloom. Violence accompanies the lancing. Through the torn place rage ghosts smoke. The torn page. Sunlight seen through a glory hole. Calm later. A meat Spring.

Mezuzah

2007-04-21T12:05:00.000-04:00

the presence of the dream
inside
Irrevocable, irreconcilable,
irretrievable, irrepressible, a
welt of blankness at the center of
memory.
The revenging furious trace of
wind & limbs.

And there was a house.
And there was a woman’s face,
meaning ‘foreign’, which meant
‘safe’ – which meant a kind
of work.

And there was a hill, a kind
of hill, which meant wet, mud,
heartache, need, contact. which
meant loss, and a horizon emptying
happiness as if with a withdrawing
syringe.

The presence of the dream
inside, absence breathing and
craving, absence pneumatic and
gnawing, absence rising and
falling, absence framed by
absence, creating a door.

Cutlass Rd.

2007-04-21T09:37:00.000-04:00

We had no water. That was it. There was no water. It had been a month at least. An extra month of dry season. We weren’t prepared. We couldn’t be. Because it was impossible.
The colony had to risk the night march to gather water at the hair of the broom. Councils held in our dry chambers that now smelled of burnt wood and sand. Our chambers, that once had smelled of mud and rootflesh and sap. Heat pounded out of the chamber’s walls now, out of its ground, a pulse of insomnia, drowning out the words of the council.
Violet, do you know what it was like? Have you? Violet, there was so much terror before. The colony tangled at the mouth in a living flame because we were all so scared of the march. Tearing a hole through them just to get out. Elders had spoken in the councils from memory of this march, from in their youth. Violence, violence that heralded only more violence. But we had no water and we had to go. I remember getting through the chaos of the mouth, cutting and pressing my way through, body pieces everywhere, alive pieces hanging from the rootwoven ceiling, alive pieces carpeting our ground. A world in the negative. I was climbing through something that didn’t exist. I gave up breathing. And then I was outside. Outside. And the night air went through me. It was like love. Because I knew I wasn’t dead. Instantly. It collapsed me, it distorted my map inside, like when I first met you, it breathed me … and for the longest time I was so disoriented I had to just follow the movement of those in the lead. This air stunned me. Its beauty. The night air. The moonlight. Because we’d had no water for so long, every thing, every feeling, was one of either drinking or thirst. Everything was a hope of quenching: objects, wind, sounds, thoughts, feelings, desire … everything was related to thirst. Drinking, wetting, irrigating, moistening, sucking, dampening, licking, swallowing, lapping, gulping, squirting, bubbling. Parching. Being parched. Parched. Raw. Dessicated. Dryness. Layer against layer of dry. Layer fighting layer. Layer wounding layer. And yet the memory of each previous moment like the memory of a lake of rain. Scanning my limbs for sweat or dew. Sucking on myself, just to be sure.
There were tales of the queen that moved through the colony’s black vein. Told visions of her, mounted upon a dripping stone under a canopy of rain, huge black and shining and the embodiment of wetness itself. Her slaves about her catching her mist in their antennae and risking death as they stole into cells to suckle on them. Her stupendous size engorged not with our future colonists, but with water. Simple water. And yet there was no talk of spilling her. Of emptying her. Lancing. None at all. This image of her wetness ran through our river of fear and made us more dry, more in danger. I was completely disoriented. I drank the air, and it seemed to drink me as we marched through Cutlass Road. Cutlass Road, at night … And Violet, the world never seemed so beautiful as on that night on that march. The moonlight. My thirst, my thirst loved you. All the gallaxy hollowed out and alive with my need to drink. Somehow the water at the hair of the broom had become you. And the march, violent and sad, so sad … so many of the colony never made it to the broom. They stopped in their tracks and I saw them shatter into dust as I, we trampled them. Below us. But my march was a desperate march to you. It was you, my thirst for you that led me. I’d arrive and you’d appear and we’d touch and from our touch the river of the world would once more spring. The river of my thirst. That’s what we were, on march in the moonlight. A river of thirst. A moving river of thirst. And Cutlass Road made a silence itself. It absorbed all the sound of our marching, so that it was like we were marching deaf, a shadow of long deafness moving across the land. There were no attacks on the march, which is what most had been terrified of. No attacks. There were not even any warnings from periphery, from point or from rear. There was only silence and thirst and the eyes of those that gave out and were pressed as dust and ground as dust into the dust of Cutlass Road.

Pesach of Y'ore

2007-04-03T19:14:00.000-04:00

Mishna: a law suit that will be partially assisted by my father.
- (fr. Divrei Hayamim 022006: Sea Crest On The Ocean: Room --, Montauk: 3:47 pm)

Commentary:
Rab Everest said: A law suit – this means sexual intercourse, between the female & the male. Reb Colon said: The action of bringing a suit is a deed whose fundamental nature is one of a wound in words, seeking restitution both in action & word; Rabbi agreed: the marrow-aspect of the Law is that of Word Become Action. Regardless of the birth-gender of the sides involved in the action, it is an intercourse between male & female – one has been wounded, the other has been aggressor. Said Reb Hek ben Offal: Often, both claim equal status as Wounded; often the act of wounding reveals the same wound in the Aggressor, who then claims (often, although time-skewed, accurately,) the wound inflicted is the one he himself suffers. Rabbi asked: If man & woman are both wounded, how is this always an intercourse between the two and not in fact a failure to consummate intercourse? ‘The world finds silence when the death-cries of the righteous thunder’. To what can this be compared? To a woman in a tool-shed, seeking an awl at night. A cloud covers the moon and her hand grips a chisel. She must read the steel with her fingers, in order to see its shape. The task at hand relies on her inner light. Reb Alweiss responded: In the house she left a task incompleted. In the darkness she found a tool unformed. Two lights she bears, one left burning, the other forged within. One is male, the other not. Reb Solfer demanded: Is the not-male the woman? For ‘she is the bed, the source, the ground, which rests upon the cold shell of time.’ “The cold bed”: is this not the source of the awl itself? Rabbi said: from where do you find shell become bed? Solfer replied: the space of dreams has no outside. Rabbi answered: The inside of the heart is found outside it. Only the dead sleep inside a bed. Dreams are a shell whose roof has been torn aside. Rav Difile said: But what of the male and female? Does not the one roof the other? Are they not the two rooves of a home without a floor?

“A law suit that will be partially assisted by my father.” Rab Everest said: Partially assisted: this means a third party attends the intercourse, is never penetrated, and ushers both parties into the house of the righteous. Rev Madras said: “the house of the righteous”: from whence does this term for orgasm derive? Rab replied: the house of the orgasm is the house of progeny; the fundamental mitzvah is observed. Reb Silas said: From orgasm progeny do not always arrive. Rab again responded: Orgasm reveals the holy vine of black fire from which each is hung. Sometimes the fruit one bears is oneself. For in the eye of time a mirror is dark. And each to the other fulfilled the Name. Asked Rabbi Anschluss: And this third, to what named world does it respond? Added Rab Martinez: And could it be of a name at all?

A ax

2007-03-13T22:02:00.000-04:00

A ax of sun splits the
earth begins to
breathe
Shaves my head, like the teenage monk I was. A ax
of earth splits the
heart begins to
breathe, teethe, hunger. Spring sun electric meat lines quiver.
I want love the way a grave wants a body. I want love the way a whale wants air. I want love because the sunlight seems to break my heart, the one I thought I no longer had. In the ugliness, the buildings that are revenges on hope, the crowds of humans made stupid & wanting it, the violence of the hard boot of money that kicks out windows overnight – In it – through it the spring sun light knows no obstacle, it is nothing and nothing to the simple celestial arc. I want love’s steamroller to roll me down, love’s violence to flay me without end, beginning & end both wiped dark & banished from knowing. Nothing I can do to stop it. I am the sledgehammer head & the stone being pulverized. My condemned building, my eyes on its roof, meets the wrecking ball as if it were a breast to suck.

Dehiscence

2007-03-03T18:59:00.000-05:00

I am this walking
Cutting cold black morning
Not old not young
What I wanted no longer means
What I am isn’t
I lean into the wind that makes ice re
Flect the exterminator’s lamp
She’s pacing the length of her countertop, waiting
Next door the bakery’s full
It’s the opposite, different mornings.

Grim happiness seeing the black & white hardhats
Contempt-
Eye the cops ready by their
Card table to pluck a man and search
In his things
The West Indians & Mexicans tho
Their look’s a recessed fear.

I am this walking
Away

There’s some kind of war on every continent
There’s a border that's a flatline between my wife and me
I think she’d like to detach my penis, plant it in her and have it grow into a child.
The stakes are high, it seems.
The bodies make no difference.
Out over the ocean
Where the cloud trails rain like a wedding gown train
A small bureau, a single locked drawer, a sheet of paper stuck half in half out.

11 St & Avenue C, 1984

2007-03-01T04:18:00.000-05:00

Up here on the sixth floor, looking down at the night. The new snow has emptied the avenue, and me. I like it. I love it. I sit in the dark, a field of cold here glows from the glass, the rippled glass crack glazed in its century old wood frames, soft and splintering; the cold on my face like clean water, like the incense that pours from the white street, up into me. The same incense pours from inside me. Empty, cold, alert, alone. I don’t know what it is. It is suffering, it is a sweet thankful exile, it is a joy like a moment before being executed, a moment that leaps through time and lands and grabs my insides with the cold. It is something like ecstasy, like a mother’s arms, like a spoon fed dream. Cold, alone, agaze, above, the nighted silence wrapped in snow, no cars, no people, just the pond of streetlight yellow on white, the long neck of the lamp bucking in the wind, the wind emptied by the end of the snow, emptier and colder and shining black wind.
Down the hall, down and across the hall, my apartment sits empty. I sit in this one, lately, while it’s empty, while Janet Cohen’s at work, away. She used to have a cat. My wife would feed it. The cat died.
My apartment is unoccupied. In a small club up the avenue under an eight light fake old chandelier I know my wife’s hand is on a man’s thigh, and his arm is over her shoulder, and her ringed hand is holding his. They know me, they know I know, and I know. It is a club as yet undiscovered, selling vodka in plastic cups and with upholstered booth seats that are red and chilled, drug from somewhere else, away from the walls. A man with an alto clarinet and a man with a bass saxophone are ripping bird sounds from their bells. They play, standing on the floor, no stage. People watch and nod. My wife and the man whose thigh her hand rests light on, they can feel the heat of each other’s ears close to one another. It is cold in the club. It is a new, unknown place. It is. The sound of the reeds mixes with the heat they can feel between the bells of their ears. They can hear the heat, a small conch spiral drinking them into one another. It is like their ears are kissing, kissing and whispering. Candles on the few tables, and the eight light chandelier, and a blue light behind the bar, a borrowed bar with black leather upholstery on its inclined front, tacked down with red hand-sized hearts. All the upholstery is nicked, white stuffing oozing. A melting track of snowwater winds in from the street. My wife can smell his clothes and they don’t smell like mine, and that is the smell. The way his body receives her touch is not like mine, and that is the way. The way he listens, when she speaks, as if his entire body leans into her words, is not the way I listen, and that is the way his listening hears. Even the water that melts from the heels of his shoes melts not like mine, and that is how. A gust of wind tears a pile of snow from the top of the roof across the street from me, punching it through the streetlight, making it stop, flip,then atomize above the ground sixty feet below. The entire window shudders, in aftershock. A small pebble in me thrills, aches, then quiets.
We’ve already exchanged blows once. No one could really say they lost. Not really. Sometimes another man is the shovel one needs to dig out a space in life. In marriage. It would be wrong to say I prefer it; and wrong to say I even accept it. And I cannot say I’ve felt anything but smoldering violence in me for the duration of its acte. Still, I do feel like I’ve taken him in hand, his legs tucked under my arm, and used his head as a shovel’s head, and dug a clearing down into the ground where I’ve found a solitude and a cleareyed chime that rings in the back of my mind. I’ve tossed him back up, and clapped my hands clean, and set down and settled down and returned to a mind I didn’t even know I’d lost, the mind I lost to marrying. If she peered down over the edge and told me she’d cooked and would I like to eat, I’ve no doubt I’d climb back up and lose the mind I’d now found and return to the married kind. But she’s not. She comes back, in the end. But by that time, a valve has been turned too tight to unturn and I have too hard a time trying to start again. It ends up me being the one who looks like they left. Then neither of us want her, and we – him and I – soon both find others. She spends a good stretch alone. Then she too finds another. But that’s so long from now, so so long.
I read Janet Cohen’s mail when I’m in here. A man it seems she’s known for most of her life handwrites her extraordinarily long and – luminescent – prose about his life. They are post-marked Juno but I gather that’s the closest post. The paper seems to have been soaked then dried, it is stiff and tough and feels resistant. His handwriting is patient, immaculately punctuated, what look like tobacco-finger prints line the edges. He double underlines the Ms on the address. The sticky lopsided roach-sandy built-in drawer under the counter in the kitchen is where the whole archive is. I’ve read the entire body of letters. It is actually the only reading I do now. I look forward to it. They arrive at five week intervals. I don’t mind rereading any of them. Some have become more favorite than others. But in my illegal hours here in her place, it is as if the door to her apartment is the entry to a telescoping world, and I gain distance on the life I don’t have, and the secret pages I read mend me.

Thumb Clove Reef

2007-02-28T03:06:00.000-05:00

Hard rain against the sea glass
A deer leaps long jumps across the dunegrass
Gulls ride the storm wind valleys and slopes
The calm water thrashing in a collar of white
The full moon swells below ground
A fever in my throat hobbling me.

It takes thirty hours for the stickhouse of the city inside to be collected, evened, and bundled. Those thirty hours are a time of sleepless skinning. A leg kicked out from under the table thoughts. A slow watching the half-full cup slide down the slope and empty its falling mouth in the air.
Cash determines now that once the transition is made, it is time to leave.
Just when the stick bundle is set to be burned.
I came and go with the fellow traveler in my throat.
I was here alone, but only when I had to leave.

The rain, the rain, the wind and the rain.
The irongrey light and the foam.
I walked an ellipse into the sand as the moon rose behind the cloudwall last night.
I recognized it as a self portrait.

Spike Minus Fourteen

2007-02-22T22:21:00.000-05:00

Her failure is mine

That she was supposed to corral the wild herd
of my mind, the wild lambs, and one by one lead
them through the narrow passway, to the still
place, where each would stand, observed, noted, taken
in, and then be slaughtered.
Slaughtered?
Yes Slaughtered, turned into words, and released
into the breath of the world.

Aurora

2007-02-21T19:00:00.000-05:00

Sing, ass hole, sing the world.
Sing, my ass hole, sing.
Place me falling in the gallaxy’s rain, a man wrapped in iron that's shrinking.
And after the world has come and gone
And after the time has stopped and begun
And after the end has started again
And after the night has risen
Two ass holes sing, into each others mouths
Claiming the imaginary wand
Of song in trade
To penetrate
Each others beggar ought

Ought ’gainst ought
Beg & sing
Beg & sing
Beg & sing

New Year

2007-01-01T11:58:00.000-05:00

Surrender and the too tired to ache; surrender and the memory of drive & loss.

A bureau with its drawers sewn shut, the things and lyrics turning to dust. I wanted to make a movie.

It’s a seat on the side not driving now, a seat with a view of a landscape neither read of nor walked through, ever, now or ever.
It’s the backs of the people, the creatures, the many, fading now into darkness that itself is fading into light. The light is bad, it is bad bad bad. It is the rescue team coming in to ruin this makeshift little town, the one we built because we had to go, so long a time a go.
I don’t want to have to leave it, now or ever. The great wave of grammar, ripplesnapped and seething from the quake on the other side of the world, coming in now to swamp and drown down it all. Grammar on horseback, pikes envenomed and possessed and precise, coming in, to tear off the names we made, leave the raw scalp and skin, and spell time in reference to a sun we’ve never seen. That light.

They’ve made me pity the murdered murderer, because I - you - are next in the plot they wring.

Fields, seas, cars, islands, rooms & rooms & rooms, where the new year has turned. Again it turns.
A seriousness, learning the deep separation of marriage, that space between which a child could be born.
There’s no one left, who was who they were. Everyone’s become someone else, as we’ve gone through the time in view of each other, defended & seeking the spot where there used to be a guard.

Love

Gargoyle, grieving

2006-09-11T03:47:00.000-04:00

I heard him come up the stairs, and the key touch the lock. I was finishing the hem. I stopped, setting a space for greeting. And then I heard the keys drop, and then there was nothing for a long time. He was standing out there, silent, the keys on the ground, in front of our door. It was long enough to almost forget he was out there. But I continued to listen, hearing him stand there motionless on the other side of our door. Then I heard his knuckles crack, the way he does in the morning before getting out of bed; and the keys scrape the floor as he pulled them up, and then the lock entered and turned and the door open. He passed the doorway, dropping a plastic bag on the floor without turning to see me, and he said "I'm starting over" and closed the bathroom door behind him. It was very quiet in there, too, a quiet unusual and active. And then I heard him vomiting. He vomits quiet too, kind of like a cat, he bulldozes air and then a little cry and then the sound of heavy water hitting light. It's the third time I've heard him vomit in the decades we've been married.

I put the groceries away as he puked, broccoli, dandelion, a chicken, some sweets, a plastic bucket of salad and a pound of oats.

He came out of the can, smelling of sulphur and cinnamon. His eyes were back lit and his face was pale. The shoulder of his left sleeve was torn. He looked at me, and that's where a kiss normally was. He went and lay face up on the mattress, which was bare since we'd not yet taken the wash out of the bag.
"I'll start dinner," I said.

Then the way to ride the train changed. Not looking became the way. Not peering, gazing, trying to see. Eyes closed. And then, the ride turned into something else – not the event of confrontation or rape, performance or spectation, but a vivid dark space filled with the visible movement of thinking. Became the ride, thinking. Extending a single line of thought for the duration of the daily ride became the game. Not making his face into a penis, or hiding the penis that was his face: just sitting, eyes closed, and enjoying the sharp contours of his own thinking, and at the same time finding comfort in the blind man’s world of the unseen human crowd, passing from right speaker to left speaker (as he thought of his ears), the sweet pan of sound that psychedelic musicians had loved so well and that had fallen so sadly out of fashion as the corporations made monophonia the recrudescent standard. The face of money has no back. The face’s skull is actually the front façade of a building, not a head. The face of money. Because this was a time when to look out at the human world was to be made paralytically sad. The grand chapel ceiling of the sky, constipated with images now – all of them evoking a spitfree airborne world, the usual wealth and sharp violence of light and speed and domination – images crowded like chattel in pens up against one another, and all evoking the ease of space and riches while being smothered by another image promising the same – to look out while under this chapel ceiling at the umbilical sorrow and misery upon the faces and frames of the people across the aisle, or seated before him, or standing before him, or simply moving by – all while under this heaven’s façade of lies – while the guns of sick murder and ambush and the ironhearted greed of the planet’s most powerful ricocheted thudding and multiple – and while the emptiness of his own wealth – an unfilled uterus, a negative balance, an image stuffed fantasy of a time to come – the ride, that ride, suddenly now was the refuge from the image of but the connection to others. Those others. Them. The ones beneath the image-psoriatic sky. Them beneath their own image. And him beneath his as well. A brook, not too cold, running its sweet water into his mouth. That was the daily ride now. Their sounds and the strict seeing of his thinking, following its course, and the heaviest lifting of all: remembering them. Still, after all these years, still developing that muscle. Because the forgetting will happen, for much much longer than the remembering lasts.

When he's hard I like to dip a finger into the diamond that beads on his tip, and taste it. It's bland and weightless, and sticky-good. It's very different he says than my flood water, which is transparent and sweet and thirst-making. I like hearing me fill his throat with the gargling stream of a wineskin pressed hard into a plastic cup.

From the kitchen I watched him lay face up on the bare unmade mattress, maybe looking at his distorted reflection in the brass nipple of the ceilinglight.

One aspect of the agreement is to make space for the person's utter unknowable inwardness, and with desire waving the arms of a conjuror-maestro call this, their separateness, forth, feed it and grow it and encourage its foray out of its dark, into the wilderness of the home.
It sits crouched on the crest of a small hill with the sunset light behind it, breathing.

An Agent Will Be With You Shortly. Please Have A Seat

2006-08-24T14:29:00.000-04:00

Along a current of confusion, which feels like open humiliation and looks like rage a ship of dreamtexts comes calling.
One mouth enclosed them, like a venus flytrap without lipstick, and wouldn’t even swallow.
Another mouth’s teeth tore into them, breaking their fruitskin, revealing ripe meat.

A question of submission is posed.
There is this question.
Opting out is not a choice.
Only to what, whom.

It Mek

2006-08-24T11:21:00.000-04:00

never yet been a flower on the thing
never
just greens. Inedible. Eat lily greens.

All 'these' years he says. Unquenchable violence. Womb of the historical gaze. Is this why he lies? A little capsule of world consuming pain vomit-popped out the mouth in unremarkable salivant passing. It falls a little wet and a little melted-sticky onto the upholstery, where it bonds.

"What a mess," V__ said, wiping our stain with a paper towel. "What a mess. Because what does a husband tell a wife? What are the limits? The rumors of war get louder. And all the years I heard about it never believed it, really. Really. I never believed. Attributed it to some kind of low level something not achieved by them who kept harping about that so-called war. Something something, as they say. And now the rumors thump the ground like pile drivers in a circle around us. And I think they might be, and I think now they always were, my heartbeat. When we first spoke we set fire to the whole hillside, the entire hayfield ... all the corn, the morrel bed boiled like a cauldron as the ivy and pansies and cattails and clover cooked around it and the trunks of the maples turned black with their soot. Cardinals sang over the smoke like over incense. But after all these years now, we go back and the place has been reclaimed and there's no trace of us. All grown again. Two fires now. And us in the city."
"What about what's ours, what we've made, here, together. What about this?"
I put his hand on me.
"I understand. I know. I understand. I love it, us, this and I love you. But I still crave the space we burned open, the fiery space we made. Not its memory. Its action. Why can't I say that?"
"You can say it. Whatever you want you can say. But you don't see it. You don't see it or me. It's just changed its shape. It's still here. But you don't see. You don't see you buried me in there, and let it all grow over me. And now you-"

Written down like it sounded the sentence - the last sentence - reads a couple of ways.

Old greasenasty clock on the kitchen wall in his house of the future. Always. Motherfucking always.

I pulled the sticky capsule up and gave it a lick and put it on his tongue with my fingers. And I closed his mouth and he swallowed it down.
If A axis is this, and B axis is this, the whole thing ignites. That's how architecture is made.

Body Count Contested

2006-08-22T15:27:00.000-04:00

We sat next to each other, facing the plant.
"That leaves us alone again," V__ said. "And I can see you're none too happy about that."
He put two fingers on my right shoulder like it was an abdomen he was about to palpate, with his elbow behind my neck.
"How many years I know you?" he says. "The rings on our tree would be a good foot round," he says. Hard to tell if his fingers want to lick me or stick me. I think if I had bowling ball holes right there on my shoulder he'd insert three and throw me at the wall. He'd look me in the eye first.
He goes on: "All these years - the rings on our fingers - and sometimes I sit here when we sit here and am afraid to touch you at all. And it is like first touching a new lover. Before. I see you with the eyesight of grave desire."
"What."
"When hunger is up eyesight is thick with it. Like semen is the medium light passes through, and everything is the surface of desire. And when it happens between us, like now, I see you through these semen-swollen eyes, in this light thickened by my own biological sea. And you - years and years between us - two rings surrounding us - I catch a glimpse of your cleavage, of your ass's curve, of the blood beating in your neck, of the tiniest part of the corner of your eye or mouth, of your thigh, of your shadow, of the movement of the dress that hangs in the doorway swaying after you've passed by it - a glimpse of your most recent absence - and I feel the 10 year old boy I was, squatting on the mound above the field, when below my feet I caught a glimpse of the science teacher's nipple under her collar, inside her bra. Instantly whisper-pinned in the crosshair aim of an eye the size of the wind, tied-down and famished by the mystery hunger I was fed to at birth. My eyes become conduits for the ends of space to greet one another. I'm turned into a tunnel for a darkness to crawl past on paws through. I become afraid to touch you, when I've practically walked inside you."
"True."
"But it's not fear. Time is thickening, which is what I'm seeing through. And the sweetness, the sweetness, the sweetness ... as time

most

stops

And I know to touch you
will be to send it roaring again ... And to not touch you will be to always need to."
We sat. He'd watered the plant before we sat. We watched it come alive again, picking its headheavy leaves off the ground with a silent heroic strength. It was about half erect, half raised again. And we could actually watch it rise. Like watching the moon or the sun move. Things that seem should be impossible to see, or shouldn't actually happen, happen. Happening. And kind of halving the set of what should be impossible. So a kind of wearying. Because the other half obviously is much more impossible.
Another leave twitched and rose a little higher. Someone called it a lily once. Another lily leaf rose.
This was a time when the morning was mostly love and the evening was pretty much hate, between us. So the afternoon was always a kind of event. Creative, verbal, cunty, morose, or completely in synch. The emotional poles of morning and night were what our batteries touched. Much energy there, in the middle, as I recall. Der Zwischen. Wanting to tear his throat open with love. And feeling him wanting to kiss & kill me, because I was time keeper, and richer, then.
Across the alley I heard the woman chanting.
It was a bright, bright afternoon; the heat wave had passed.

a fore dawn

2006-08-15T11:21:00.000-04:00

A dance the dance of the holy map to the source of the nightheat.
A submission dance, fueled by the fossil-sap of long buried desires, long mulched dream, long relinquished lust. Fueled by the impossible.
The bodies of the dead, our fuel-crisis.
When the past is no longer a source of power, we send a crew of diggers to the sun.

Old Glory Burka

2006-08-11T18:47:00.000-04:00

Not hands but dowsing wands, these things that seek the keys.
A blind elbow apush from behind the inside of the breast.
A cul de sac, made of grammar, tied at the top with a found halfmeter of gutter-dirty sisal. A dime size of sky still shows.
How you tried to tell me, difference in heart rates is the same as the orbits of Neptune and Earth.
That I could plant sixteen ears, and never see one bear teeth, while you could swim to the brown clouds of the delta and come back in a white Rolls and a fedora of fur.
And that in the space that distinguishes our hearts very separate beatings, if only because we remember what used to never be, a small aeroplane (an inhaled schwa) flicks across both our screens, at exactly the same breath.

For the arm to pull on the air itself like pulling on a latex glove
And this arm itself to reach through the mind itself and itself speak its words
As if nowhere else could be found a speech that is not cashed electric in debt
To shades of necessity, the fear of calamity, the violence of a lost address
To have the hands of the air grab my skull and part and close the jaws
Saying the air
What is after and before
The saying

Satellite Dish, Home Plate, Sinus Aestuum

2006-05-15T11:53:00.000-04:00

If die let dead, better.

Information & energy: power.
Power of meaning, power of movement.
Associative power, stabilizing power.
Power to create, power to kill.
Power to liberate, power to control.
Sun & moon, too, day & night, too.
Power to teach, power to indoctrinate.
Power.

A visit to the museum, a dinner of salt, a witness to a genital death match.
Home again, and the full moon burned an image of the dirt on the window into the hardwood floor. It looks like art. Until something I need is on the other side of it. Then it’s the floor, and I have to cross it.

Where the genitals were is a moon-white blindness, a convergence of energy that explodes hidden information, revealed as hidden by the whitelight emptiness of the genitals. The house is on the tilt.

I’m breathing here. I’m reviving, returning, restoring. I’m nursing on the nipple of my mind.

Now I can go to work, world.

Shem

2006-02-15T08:53:00.000-05:00

Salt bust. On a pedestal. She comes in, climbs on a step ladder and pisses on it, melting its visage, coloring it.
Bust of vegetable. She comes in, eats its face partially off.
Bust of meat. Same.
Bust of clear plastic. She comes in, climbs on the ladder, opens the top of it like a tea pot, shits in the bust’s head, replaces the top. Wipes her asshole with the name tag on the pedestal, returns it to its spot, climbs down.

Show me down the far way son
Shew me a down a far a way
She me down a right fine hood
A far a way a road to home
Shem me down the only time right in far bad too whalfor
Shet me so
Shet me so in
Shet me so in so in so in
She last I heard broke bread and such with mister ’pon the old hut floor
In outside there was no rain just the sound in wind
In after still there was no rain a spider caught mist in the mind of her web
Nothing dripped

The other says

You wan share my only?
I give it you you know I’ll want it back, after time is done
I’ll mek you force me take it back, when you love it most too.
But that was our only choice, when it happen.

Next

Him invited

2006-02-08T17:31:00.000-05:00

Were I to make his likeness, I would need to sculpt perfect busts of him, in fine stone - any color would be apt since his image receives the light of the world, which is never the same - perfect likenesses, ones which are different from one another in the way his face is different from itself from morning to evening, from year to year, from wake to sleep, from dream to dream - Skin pores, face lines, facial eruptions, the mood of the sitting - perfectly replicated, re-presented, in stone.
These busts on pedestals, in no geometric pattern, standing in a room of wood.
Fragrances follow the air patterns created by false windows hiding fans.
His recorded voice, from a multitude of speakers (greater than the number of busts, much greater), fill the wooden room, syncopating in a realtime cut-up of his speech, recreating, re-presenting, the dialogue inside him.
Prior to the public reception of these portraits, each bust would be drenched in acid, so that they are disfigured by corrosion, and not by a hammer or fall - disfigured by the action of eating, of devouring, of an elemental hunger. Representing, recreating the action of vision itself.
And in the fragrances would be mixed decay, rot, putrefaction.
And the voices too would have sections of decay, distortion, stuttering repetition, non-human barks and insect volkslieds.
And the floor boards are not nailed down.
Were I to make his likeness.

One kiss One

2006-01-26T15:14:00.000-05:00

When you're in me, the end has already passed.
The afterlife is the time of you-in-me.
The moment of invitation is impossible to remember, but I'm sure it occurs, every and each time. I'm sure it's not an invasion, not you breaking into me, not you entering me against my own desire.
I do know, that while we speak, or eat, or read together, and should you lean to me, to kiss me - as you've done in every season of the year, in every hour of the world's time - I am not, at that moment, receiving you. I'm not open. And then, perhaps, the kiss will linger. Our kiss. And become not a kiss among equals but an eruption of force, a weather change, the moment just before the setting out on a hike into snow and night and the need for fire. And I will linger there, I will linger there, feeling the departure into this impending chaos, and as I clutch you, squeeze your strong back, knead your shoulderblades, trace your beard with my palm - I am hanging on to you, to remain where we are, and to not be sent out on the road again. Clutching to the road itself - you. Embracing the weather itself - you. Demanding the world turn into the wind of space without me.
And a chaos of letters, a kind of typographic earthquake occurs.
And then I'm drawing you in me, pulling you in, watching your cock as it drives and retreats feeling it in someplace like a neck that's behind my heart. I watch your chest. I watch the vein in your forehead thicken and vanish and rise again. I close my eyes and the movement of you in me becomes a rhythm that people begin to speak in, people that walk through me as I feel you. They talk to one another, following the rhythm of your cock's rhythm. In a way the entire watery air they move in pulses with your drive. I see excitement build in their faces, an excitement of children, almost, who've heard of something coming that is too fantastic to believe, and that has been wanted since they can remember want. The arrival of childlike thrill distorts these adults' (always adults) faces into a kind of whorling of teeth and lips and bright ignited eyes that run like lava. Static starts to fall from the sky, from the antenna of your cock, probably. I feel my lips trying to chew you into me and hold you there, at the same time throwing you out to pull you in harder. And then, something turns, again. And I take you like a hammer in my hands and make another attempt at demolishing myself, with you. Try to pulverize the stone of my body into a dust that aches. Pound. Hit and pound and hit. A redline of searing heat like a hot needle in my neck, and then my belly shearing open into an eyesocket of light and blood and my teeth growing longer by inches, the people who've arrived all've gone now, there's no one now, now. And from behind where they are not I hear your throat start to tear into scrap, into metal, metal shard being driven into dirt. You blaze a kind of backwards heat and I hear it strike my starless dark mind. Break Me I hear myself say, after. Break Me. Over and over again hearing it. Break Me Break Me Break Me Break Me Break Me
Uncoupling like dogs I feel us on the other side again, the kiss among equals signs our return.
You wear that ring on your finger, as I do. And inside that, in it, through it, through its empty hoop, we pass back and forth, through these worlds, worlds that constantly end.

Triangle Shirt Waist

2006-01-19T12:18:00.000-05:00

In the last picture taken of her, she had her bottoms off. It's black and white, where it was once bent a line cuts across it making the emulsion crack, making a kind of syntactic space between the top of her left thigh and her left hip and pubic hair. The line makes a frame in the frame, makes a second silent enclosure in the long ago silent captured light. She's not looking at the camera, which is to her left; she's been facing it, but has turned now, so her torso is turned away, but her legs are not yet followed. A sheer scrap of silk or nylon scarf is draped over her left shoulder and breast; her dark hair is cut short. Her profile's gaze is a glimpse of a gaze between expressions, like the smile or pose she's just dropped hasn't been followed by whatever was to be next, the next pose or next word, since she may be speaking; it's a face that has fallen between looks, and so looks loose and almost nonhuman; because the eyes and lips and opening of the jaw and turning of the head all seem out of synch, parts of disparate expressions but not adding up to a whole face, coherent and meaning. It is this ugliness, this expansive disintegrated shattering face that assures me she was beautiful. Not at all fat, she has the thickness of flesh that was well thought of in the days before color. A rump firm large and lovable. Breasts maybe a little small for her rump, but larger than mine and lovely. The meat around her waist like banquet roast, like a quilt to roll in, a refuge, a land. Who took this? The same who wrote, on the back, taken the day before she died in a dip pen and black ink that's faded to a kind of blue? Behind her a castiron lampstand with a candelabra atop it, and to her left, just at the right frame edge, the footend of a sleighbed, sheet and blanket unmade.
In her figure and skincolor, her breasts and ass, the line of cracked light that traverses her pussy, in the way her face will never resolve into an expression that is stable or human ... in the mystery of who was taking her, watching her, and who chose to take this moment, the one usually turned away from, the moment between ... and in needing to believe it was not she, herself, who traced the inscription on the back, dipping the pen in ink, blotting it, creating a tale of the death of her own image, but in not being able to believe otherwise ... and in that she clearly was working, as I had ... A simple thing, finding a photograph on the ground near an apartment building's garbage cans, where one has clearly just been emptied, by death, no doubt ... a simple thing become this terrible thing, this having found a still from a silent movie of my own insides acted by a woman I'll never get to ... know ... thank ... protect ... or love.

You've gone now. I like how you keep dripping out of me, even a couple hours since you came. I like it more when you're not here than when you are. How it makes the house more quiet and still, the light a comfort and a reminder of time moving on. It makes being here a kind of oration, a sermon eloquent of a power that can never ebb, never catch its breath, never pause. It would throw me off the cliff and continue on. Sitting here, feeling your sperm runnel out of me. My hands warm.

Capital News

2006-01-09T13:33:00.000-05:00

In a blind, I was looking up at the greyed wood throne where the interchangeable kings sit, up there in the tree, to shoot passersby in their heads, the ones enjoying the path. I'd never seen one up there. During the sacred days their weapons echo off the icegrey wall of the sky, and the sound of bodies falling into fresh snow is a kind of shushing, quieting the echo that fell them. Silence listened in on us as we hid. Because we had to hide. The snow mute blast, the shushing fall. Never a voice.
Pull a thick rope down from the trap attic door of the sky, a thick rope made of warm brown shit. Knotted in places, to assist climbing. Steaming rope of crap, in the snowcold air. Guaranteed not to tear in half, a hand will make an impression in it, making climbholds easier. Who told you your studio was up there? Who told you? Go on. You'll find what's what when you shove your head up through its hole. The view grows more breathtaking as the climb continues. The interchangeable kings in their grey twobyfour thrones falling away, high up in their trees, the flashing of their muzzles now like occasional stars in the polluted night. The globe a screen with the sound off.

When I wanted to turn to you is when I decided to leave.

They'd like to call this a dream. I understand. I would too. But if it was, they wouldn't have cared in the first place.

Swayback

2006-01-02T21:52:00.000-05:00

The untenable sickness to be human, in celebration and celebrity calendar driven, outside the stream of my own house’s strain, in the middle of a country in its later years, seeing the place I used to call home – the television screen – announce the turning of the year. In and amongst another clan’s cave, another selfsuspending timeleaping wave of human violence and confusion and craving for peace, a craving so strong it would make murder a quiet lake to sit by, finally, and rest. And wish someone would know, the very one it needed to vanquish, the very one that owned the lake, the very one that showed the picture of the lake in an old faded color snapshot, peeling off the softcardboard back, a tree bleaching to white and a rowboat tied up to a piling stood on by a bird.
The last day of the year, the light fading, I and others putting a handbrush to a old old horse. The horse won’t see this time next year. Its grey mane, the circle of time pressed down into its back, its slow patient eyes that are planets of language – all these will have vanished by the same time next year, making it not the same. A horse’s leg is a signpost in the road, showing the turnoff. Take it or not. Spend a frigid night in its gutted steaming innards, swathed in the library of blood. I REMEMBER, the arrow reads. Volumes.
Deals cut, occupations mistakenly called marriage, talent mistakenly called love; the names of things.
I’ve one elbow in the dike, the arm holding the hand mirror. I could live on the land and kiss the city a wet one good good bye. An explosion of many contacts awaits my return to the Borough of my birth, and then the ball will be in the air, a hundred voices calling for it, but I’ve got the bead on it, and I’m in the right spot. Watch it into the glove.
I should have asked, What did you mean by what you said? I should have said, Your father is dead. If you want me to be him, you’re a murderer. Instead I helped, I cared, I soothed. Fed the dying horse. Put the earthtonguesmell on my hand of its mouth in my glove. Watched the night’s greyblue cover slide down the earth's hip to reveal all of space. And when the alarm went off, when the clock lost an arm, we each pointed a festive pistol at one another, and pulled our paper triggers.
Being married is probably the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. The hatchet come down on the boat rope in the photo that set the whole world adrift. I needed to get out more.

Edison

2005-12-25T05:08:00.000-05:00

big glass body with a tiny filament
inside. Yes, the light is bright. Yes,
it is, all you can say about it it is.
Even more.
The filament, unignited, unhoused, on
foot, requests my empty plate.
The tide of history spins Hiroshige's
wave, and what's empty in it
now is the shape of a coin.
Sideburns growing on glass.

At a table on the other side of the restaurant, the only woman at a table of five men stands as she nurses an infant, pacing from chair to chair, reaching over the head of each man to retrieve food and drink. They are loud and they have claimed the entire restaurant as their own for the night. They tread the aisles between diners speaking loudly on cell phones, and she nurses the baby standing next to complete strangers as they eat and have their own quiet conversations, having come in from the bitter cold for refuge, fuel, a chance. They are obviously wealthy and recognize no others, us. The mother sways at her hips, the infant's head cupped in a ringed hand surging with milk, belted in a sling, its dangled feet hanging raw wiring to be braided to the motherboard of the table itself. hunger
I will build a mountain. A mountain that keeps out God. I will point an elbow to the sky that when I last saw you You can keep all that you know You can keep all of it When I was their age I had not even a quarter what they got and was a hundred times better off I'm only in my fourth decade but in the light of this digital sun e'en as fine a pussy as mine looks unfinished Like there's something missing about it Made to look unready Like my pussy should be wearing headphones you told me something I promised I would never forget, and I've found I can't remember what it was I remember you telling me, the moment you told me, how I leaned to you, and watched the side of your jaw move as you told me, and I remember you wore stubble, and I remember seeing the white in it, down by the corner of your jaw, and I remember the feeling of growing vast and proud as you told me, because you were telling me, telling it to me. But I don't remember what it was you said. But I remember the moment. The moment seems to speak still

Wen

2005-12-21T19:10:00.000-05:00

We'd come back from the ocean that night, the same ocean we were married at, the same ocean lying by I'd first heard the whisper. A grey whisper of a mother I never had, as I lay shivering, eyes closed the earth speeding me into the sun. I felt the feet trod my way, feeling the sand grind and dug, feeling this forewake approach blowing me deeper into a solitary chamber of listening, listening with the surface of my skin. And then there was the voice, at my left ear, the same ear the ocean was on, whispering my name.
Wen
Wen
time to get up
time to get up Wen
it's ok now
time to get up sweety
The seawind blew her voice all the way in me, way through all the way down to the bottom of the well. A dry line in me smiled. Watered. Not clear whose mother that was. It was a good visit, one I looked forward to each day that summer by the ocean, staying in your father's house, looked forward to it each time I came out of the sea, shivering and exhilarated, trembling. After that it was just the memory of it, each time I lay waiting. Each time laying waiting thinking it was now it was coming, she was coming. But she the voice never came again. My memory of it seemed to ward it off.
And it was that ocean we went back to that week, honoring our first year of being wed.
That night we came back from the ocean ~~I heard Eve died~~. ~~Eve died~~. I heard Eve die.
Because the ocean was in me, and you were in me while we were at the ocean, I could not sleep. Like the vertigo after swimming rough water everything moved and slid across the night as I lay in our bed and felt. One year married, our houses collided in mid air, come crashing down and into shapes that were unimaginable to us, familiar like all disaster. So, making our home as we were in this new domestic debris, it was a relief back then to get away, and hotels and motels always felt more homelike than the one we were striving to build. The home between homes. (There was something about a buried radio, about a sound, about sound being the true home of childhood. There was something about that radio being buried, seemingly lost, when the world changed from sound to the ruthless silence of Matter. From the oral to the written. Typical stuff. About childhood disappeared. About sound and History. Something about a radio, buried, then disgorged again when the houses of marriage collide. And the world of sound that was silenced coming to life again. Something about childhood homes colliding in marriage, and those houses of sound being the home made anew.)
Because you were in me while we were out at the ocean I could not sleep, as you slept. When you are in me I become alive. And stay that way, for hour and hour after.
A dark that is never put out.
I sat in it, feeling the ocean still in me and you still in me and heard something like glasses or plates tapping outside the window, under us.
I listened.
It was that dark, that same listening-with-the-skin dark and I began to hear, in the world, the hissing click of a lighter, the hissing suck of the tube. Some blurred words. Socked feet. Plastic. Glass. Click hiss and suck.
And then an insect's barbed foot of lighting struck the window, in Eve's voice. It was the prayer of a geyser vomiting, the prayer of a severed artery ejaculating, the victorious murderprayer of an unclogging drain. It was spewed running over each and every boundary, every bed, every border. It entered me in that dark that is never extinguished with the violence of a hyperdermic filled with the sun. I immediately swelled with fire and a storm of fear. And then the light fading, and just the sound of her voice, its first wet eruption stilled, now a steady small stream of molten pain.
So I listened to that, for a couple of hours. Took a shit. Finished a crossword, all by candlelight.
Sometimes the voice would crescendo and blow again, and the shapes of words started to appear in the explosions. God and help and oh. And then the subsiding, the sibilant trickle of untourniquetted pain.
I understand you already were told what I thought, then.
That I thought: Good. Go. That I thought: Die. That I deliberately watched the undelicate hands of my minds form their responsa of No Help. Yes. That's all true.
I did not hate Eve. I didn't even wish her dead. But I heard her dying, I knew it as soon as I heard it: it is a sound transmitted by bones, received in marrow. And I could feel no reason to help her live, assuming some action I could have taken could have. Some phone call. I saw stark that helping her live would not be best. That some healing results in what's called Death. And it seemed to me to be the best medicine for all involved. Her bitter suffering, the raped little girl what never got aid, what never got soothed, what never received consolation: what never became Who, and who never got to speak, just inhale, insuck, the solar violence of her first home lighting the fire of her stem again and again and again. Now, toothless and back-broke at 49, coming on to the garbage men morning in a humpbacked halter without teeth, her apartment disintegrating about her into a ooze of oily tan dust; dreaming of "colorado" and "california" and "friends out there", her medicine delivered by private sedan.
Neighbors surrounding our building screamed at her to shut up as her heart died. We'd all heard it before, they'd say. But I'd never heard this, because this was something hearing could hear only once.
Go, Eve.
Go.
It's alright.
It's time.
Go, sweet heart.
I did, I wished her gone, and done with all the pain.
How she was found, wrapped around the base of the toilet in a jaggedhemmed nightdress, face drawn in an openeyed rictus of agony, fists tight around the lighter and stem.
But I forgot about it, and laid down next to you, and, the shivering moving ocean drained by Eve's deathsong, slept.
Two days later they found her.
Like I said, I forgot all about it, til her death reminded me what I'd knew.

Breakfast

2005-12-13T11:38:00.000-05:00

Once past the only time a flicker on the clean-eaten dish, I think I hear you pass the fence that looked like a fishrib canoe. I remember thinking sometimes my stomach rumbles and I think it's my cellphone vibrating like I'm swallowed in the present by the very objects that cut a clear line through the past, make the past past, our past, and the present unthinkable any other way. Like I'm swallowed by them, even if I feel them quiver inside me. Because the inside me is the sign of what's outside, you remember.
Now and then reach for one another through a mucus membrane, doing the old pushpull.
Sometimes I remember it like the smart-bomb videos back in the nineties - a target imagined through a technological dream appears, approaches faster than knowing can see, becomes an inevitability shaped like a hole remembered only after a violence that swallows the screen in a sizzle of destroyed light.
How I remember our We's first moment.
And somehow that meeting is also the place I've left so many other's stranded. The boy, sitting in the Row-5 Cough Bar being instructed to finish his story by his father, standing over him as his hand refuses to write anymore ... How sometimes silence is the only remaining defiance, no matter what the age ... And Young Madder and 12, both of them converging on one another at the Four Stories, that dilapidated cedar-shingled tottering hotel by the water, twenty-four rooms, each named for an hour of the day ... And V____, him too on his way to meet the young, too-young girl being sold him by her mother, her paying him to have her, so she can hear something break that she slept through the first time, as if that would change the break and mend ... And Wen, reminiscing on his early years, his jail time, his buried radio, his first year of a first marriage, his hearing Eve die on the floor below, hacking up her pulped heart and dying with the lighter and charred tube in her hands, spooning the toilet's base: And thinking, as he listened: Good, go. And shocked by the vividness of the thought: Die. And watching his decision not to go down to help. Feeling the femoral artery of solar inevitability roar through him dark without sound. A pleasant sensation, like melting into sand.
It's at that meeting place, when the screen sizzles white and dies, where we met first, that they all await their outcomes.
Twenty-four years is nothing, you know. It takes longer for you to leave in the morning, so I can find my peace, and miss you.

Start At The End

2005-12-12T00:45:00.000-05:00

It's to you, really, I owe my life. To you.
The debt, the position of this debt, it's become more than I know how to sustain. Each breath I take, its shape is sculpted by your need. Each thought, where it goes and doesn't go, its boundary is your desire. I've no words but those meant for you. I've no desire but what you stir in me. I've no thought but in answer to the question you ask. No answer but to your call. Through all these years, now, these twenty-four years, years spent together and apart but never separate, inside me "I" has always been the sound I've heard when thinking "you". Somehow surveillance has been transformed into a vigil of love. No one misses me, no one experiences my absence. I'm the space between your words, the darkmatter of your syntax, the fog your breath makes when we sleep outdoors. My desire only finds its space when yours has been exhausted. My desire is refuse, trash, waste, excess, ort. The dark nonhuman eyes beneath the table.
When I found you on the gravel, when I first heard your feet on the gravel, twenty-four years now gone, I carried a bag of tools, coming home from a job. A bag that was my exact body weight, filled with blades and strikes and shields. You had a bag too, I'd say now it weighed exactly the same as your head. There was a thorn bush there, by the shed, green flaking paint on the old plank door. I heard your shoes, the heelheads crushing the stones, and because it was dusk there were ripples on the air made by your feet. I know exactly the season, because I'd come back from installing a ceiling fan for a judge. Had to put the ladder on top the oak dining table, the ceilings in that vast apartment were so high. She'd been recently divorced and her teenage girl had moved back in with her, so she'd put the AC in the girl's room, and decided just a fan was enough for hers. I left greasy fingerprints on the ceiling. I remember noticing I refrained, consciously, from cleaning them up.
And you walked on the gravel as I walked away from my car remembering not cleaning up the stains of my hands and I heard you like feeling blood wash over me in a dark shower. It was like I drank you before I saw you.
But that's so long ago, so long ago for a life to owe so long.
I see now, what I took to be our history was yours, and I was transcribing. And I find myself waiting for your sleep now, your absence, your work, to feel alive. To feel myself squeeze myself out the narrow spaces that are all that are left me since I've cleared my world for you. Since I've withdrawn to become the boundary of the world itself, so that you have as much space as you need, as I can manage to give.
Funny how your complete acceptance of me, of everything about me, seems to have made me vanish.