Retrospect

Burning regret or
burning embarrassment.

Tunnels

The end of the world came in a balled up
kleenex, the dogs avoid sleep like we do to
stay up and see red Mars fall on our heads and
break our chattering teeth and stab at his
meat with a fork
I fold my hands one hundred times
anxiously in the subway when they watch and
wonder what my mouth is doing or whether my
lips look stupid because any moment I will meet
Her and He will smile on me if only my lips
don't look stupid or if I'm holding my hands right and
I read Him and read Him over and until his words are
nothing and I exist in a receding tunnel and the car is
disappeared

Clinical Depression

I stopped enjoying food a long time ago
I eat now because time becomes bewildering
when I don't
I want to concentrate myself towards a perfect moment,
to sense my being not still in the now but
like a spear stretched out and pulled through time and
hurtling towards some beautiful climax
I want to die, but the story has to be good

How To Be

Lawyer's panic, the tyranny of taste, a bedouin and his cigarette, a kissing gypsy, a leaf a curse a lapsing judgement, a holy instant missed by everybody of consequence,
a slave of conscience taken in by drug dealers, a family, a flight a hungry night a taste of children with straw hair playing in a corn field next to the big house with the beautiful kitchen, a prayer for
Jacob, a song for Israel, calorie counting, today and tomorrow, lies and skinning a rabbit in the frost January 1990, I was still shitting my diaper then

I want to speak in a natural language, I prepare my hands to do work,
there's an uneasy pause before all things great, but gifts are bestowed
to those patient devoted who trust in Him,
I want His gift
Until then I'm content with my orange, the egg whites, and salt cod,
I meditate on grace

False Priest

I'm worried I'll disgrace myself tonight,
that I might fall into some clam shell and forget
my place
I can't go on waking up with the taste of iron
in my mouth, I can't go on waking up next to
victims
You said anything you thought mattered,
but I shot you anyway
And now I'll live with that, with the taste of iron
and the stains on my bedsheets

Manifesto

And I must keep you canine and protect my lineage from
your eager transformation and I must shelter my
children from your threatening curiosities and I'll
smother your literacy and suffocate your firstborn if
her skin is too pale and I need you stupid and I need you
strongbacked and I can't afford to lose you now to
justice, and despite the rationalizations of our whitest scholars,
all this comes down to is food and shelter in the shadow of locusts.

Church Sunday

To give who got a pocket stomach knot whose
little pots all cook the lot,

these bitter things I like are like a white lip secret
thrilling tips of tongues held tight

Big bear big nowhere big little big heart big
pouring jug whose wine and holy water make
a line across a line

He crossed and said a father ghost son three he
kissed me then and blessed my dreaming be and
wished my be to be a better be than his had been and
wished the beans and rice of modesty upon
my doorstep

Internally I a crafty liar lied a most elaborate lie to
gain his trust so I could
sleep so deep and deep inside the side of righteous
Sky King high

Eternally hungry but
eternally fed
I
dream this dream that
He's forgotten more of than I will ever remember.

Don't Be One Of Them, Unaware

The Universe laughs at you for trying

--

I am a lack of hours I am a no time

Your 20's

Those who are beginning to start from their sleep are
those who eat a bowl of fruit and seeds to receive a
form of flesh from him to sustain them to
play at their sports or write books of knowing and they
make their greenback paper just by eating breakfast and
showing up on time to a sort of mostly determined
bullshit

Push

When you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a large body of water, in which direction to you begin to swim?

Please Return This

Colonial red hands bread silk cotton tobacco roads and
railroads and steam from the earth and steam from sweat and
sweat from labour and sweat from tears of colonial frustration from
Indian skin an inland overwhelm or invasion or occupation or accidental
welcoming and then a great number of trees begin to fall and the salt mines
begin to scream like dogs with their profits and their loose cogs and their
tight biceps spoiling for a knocking about the ears to assert their insecure
and terrified hold on some insecure and terrified people I
don't sleep at night I don't sleep
because I'm sorry

Coal

Gently reach a thousand feet to trip on shoelace
incomplete a bitter ink a bone necklace a confederate
sabre on grampa's wall grampa on grampa's fur rug mouth
open eyes rolled back back to fuck dead it's a
sterile living room when I come to claim my little things, the
things I've always been eyeing while he lived and I waited and
he breathed and I waited until I would own a few of his things
like that sabre on the wall to remind me of the slavery of criminally
certain entitlement and remind me to hate myself for at least
one hundred and fifty more years or until reparations are made for

but it's especially disturbing how handsome he could be still
the monster

Earth Quake

The ecstatic is a faggot fuck
who loved too much but didn't know
to read enough or remember enough
whose sleep deprivations caused
memory shorts until forgetting to shave
became a daily fuck, FUCK
I stumble over myself I
am rotting my large
intestine I repent with
an incredible amount of salad in
the hope that it will
save me from cancer or the shakes but
I'm probably fucking
kidding myself who
doesn't dream of any fruit
who
won't be the one to apologize for that dick suck
who lost because of it who
hates and grieves equally who
keeps on eating so many vegetables though
who
just keeps alternating for
orgasms and whose faces
are faces of change and
change and
of change for love and for
hate and love and
optimism and fear and for
loving fuck hate

Grass

No hands
featuring ringed fingers on hands of
lead that sink into the bedside sleepy eyes
a moth dives repeatedly at its firegod
she says something about sailors and
sirens and I put her to bed to sleep her
angel dreams beside me gasping occasionally be-
tween apneas and laughing dog hallucinations in
summer grass in summer skin in fall economies
I she senses a climate shift and a crisp teething in
the push of air when she walks to school

Hands Between My Legs

Hours of auras
or a hand on a throat,
oral histories of ecstasy like
rug burn knees from so many
oral histories
If cum was honey I'd be
a cum swallower proudly but
instead I'm a cum swallower
secretly

Blood Pressure

God forgives but I don't know what or what for or how often
I hang very little art in my home because of this -
I don't feel so secure
But there is reliable old oatmeal in the morning and OJ
and I take a taxi to work because I am not an early riser and
I do feel a great degree of North American guilt for
being such a whitey but maybe it's my one vice and
like I said I lash myself with the guilt which let me tell you
ages me

I probably net out

Dinner Table Confessions

I am a bad man, 

not because I have done anything bad but

because I rarely do enough good for

anyone

And I lie to myself

Pass the milk

Ordinary Day

Meditate on the ordinary day,

like a bell that rings for

a hell of a lot of no good things to say I

need things and I need a sense of needing

things and I need to fill time like time is all

there is which is a truth more than anyone

admits.

Calendar love dialogue, my lover is a page

turning calendar, my lover is Next Sunday,

His day, His night, His throbbing morning with its

asshole birds, giving me a Tylenol and a pillowache,

assholes.

I am the King Crab on the ordinary day, I am the

hungry skeleton who profusely bleeds his every swallow of soup and

drink of lemon water and is so incredibly frustrated by it.

My frustration is ordinary.

Drifts

Boy shivering dogweed alone in
your office in your dim nut house with
the curtains all chewed on and your
cat in the freezer under the chicken beside
the ice packs beside the boy who
watches the food constantly who
might be your son you
have a car but have forgotten how to
drive it sometime this year after taking to reading
so much on the floor face up at the ceiling
seeing not-these skies but
others with foreign stars but half familiar
clouds because you've had that water before Michael
Emilie Joanna Dylan water and almonds and
crisp apples to taste and reflect upon while rusting a
day at a time and anyone who tells you aging is graceful is
a liar and a crook and sometimes

Sex Dog Landslide Because You're a Drunk And It All Starts Off Okay But Gets Bad Then

Cosmos face cosmos astral skin taught and
stretched across my everything that I can
see for lightyears of held breath lives of literally
everything that blankets me and my
do-you-get-it gasping every
thing

Do you get it

Skin buzz water on hands grow numbing
creep to full organ feeling
overload who's humming who
is singing His name because
"what else could this be" right?

Jumpstart clit maybe car battery sex to
some
vagina-tit-face-tongue hand hold
sleeping bliss-out I'm so happy I'm
so uncontrollably
freaking out guys I
am on a drug? I
must have seen a face his face his
forest his kingdom in rocks and streets in
our monuments to him which are his
monuments to him because
he moves us with
fine threads and subtle hand
gestures and lifting and occasionally
dashing her or him to a wall or a
catastrophe or a meal or a
embarrassing mountain lion incident
while on vacation with some camera around
your neck in the Alps and
Deus Ex Fuck poetry chapbook on the plane home with
some missing hand or a bloody stump or pissed pants or
too many small liquor bottles in coat pockets and
making an ass out of yourself and thinking this is
some smoking-cigarettes situation like the plane is in
1969 and it's okay again to sexually harass the attendants and
grab her ham with your fucking asshole pincer and your leering
fuck-rapist grin like you own her gender and her sex and
there's some welcome doormat to her temple and her
sisterhood and you have this right and you
have some fucking carte blanche you

The Names of Things

"We should strive to know the names of things,
to call them what they are
and to act accordingly."

Harrier

I am a courageous young thing a
cowboy and a crimson king a
nightwater pool a synthesized melody an
indian in summer corn watching the
migration of calcium from the leg bones of
a fawn a
desert spider on a turtle's back a
jackrabbit a yawn to laydown to
longsleep or crowfood and marrow
unfamine to form some depression in
the dust to become a sort of a bowl to
wait for the monsoons to come to be
filled for a while and
become a small ocean for a
few snakes a scorpion a desert fox a
cowboy and a crimson king but
somewhere along I lost my courage
when I capped her ass I
fucked everything in the desert sun I
wore her like a hide and serenaded
no one with my idiotsong like my
spurs meant anything because they were
silvershimmer and steelsex and horsespeed
until they weren't anymore

The Recognition of Home

I am an antenna for
detecting everything that might be
you anything who is my
path A>B to
born then
really born to actually live you are a
gateway or a transporting godhead quietly
swallowing the chosen boy warriors and
giving them the gift of guns and nets and
this is your power and in you or even
near you I fall to pieces in the
dissolution associated with
returning to the source.

Hypnagagia

I said I'd never be another church boy with
a broken spine I said
we ought to spend time near the grass and the
shade of tomorrow's catalpa and drink more
water and I promised myself I'd ride my
bicycle every day but it rusted and
I didn't take enough care of it
I said I'd write to you often and
despite myself I said I'd still pray
but that never happened and I
forgot cursive and the paper crumbled and
my desk became a stiff place that no longer
seemed warm I
lost myself when I crossed Walt Disney and
Walt Whitman and that has gone on for years I'm
always tired and there's a constant quiver in
my arms and gut like orgasm craving ache but
there's no pre-teen gift for me to remember my
caving and no chest to crawl into and
no human to inhabit and I left some
soup on the stove but it became
dusty and filmy and the windowlight burned a
hole straight into the pot - a cup a carrot a dish a
plane a place to seek a new name, one of Twelve
to choose from but I'll always be
merry
because I always fall asleep eventually

Knowing

"Listen,
make sure that before you know a thing, that it is
known.
And if it isn't known yet,
you have to make sure
it's the truth."

His Every Other Thing

Look for him at him for hours at grey unfocused living-spaces trying to find him and trying to find his face in his everywhere body

How do we find his love amongst his every other thing

Barn Cat

Scratch your face until the genius is a bleeding
nothing and a wreck and a baroque painting of a
virgin scratching her face too until the barn cat is your
house cat in a corner in a sun spot taunting birds with looks
that say "I still know how to get you"

Sun Afternoon

Tall house shadow love the tops of trees and
among root finger creep my brother sister sleep
old

Dog, no name dog, just dog,
follow me see me on dirt ramble I
pruned the bushes all afternoon in the
sun until He pounded me too much
and small water and a little bread
helped a little but didn't mend my
threadbare garments or my
broken back

Resolution lay with the
lambs

Early Salesmen

Fixers started selling their skills in mysticism,

thus began the commodification of God.

Village

Oh holy body of Him or skin of
lamb your blood is a milk,
uproot tree spine bent to carry
a few fish to dry and to feed a
village
An elder dozes parsing the
real life with shivering
eyelids and sexdreams, who
takes a pine needle tea
then to
nurse some sympathy pain or
maybe extract some
blessing from His green
Earth

Keep looking for Him.

Promised Future

Fox like a bone like a trade-in crown like a boss like a frown

like circling on a bicycle on a beam in a fever under a hat and

hung on a hook

above the bed

deaf

deaf baby cleft lip grieving under a cross and to a

crucifix and in straight lines to straight lanes to

lemonade water sacrament staked crush

Arizona, twist my diamonds to facetted fuck until my

supple wristflesh is dry paper and then

blow me like crumbled prom queen 

Commodity Twenty Thirteen

Career mouth piece, sixty hour week conjurer suck
it into your cancer gut until a black steak
pounds your crackling heart
beat
to me because you
didn't cook it
long enough

But you shot the moon in its fucking eye and staked that claim and told the
whole world what you wanted which was
some sort of temporary cover for
being a lost boy

So
really there's only a naked beautiful black boy teenager or
some sort of innocent and though we
know the outcome he
is still only
a
poor
_______

Bacon Grease

Who is or was or has a black frame full body and
a teenage love and a body that bangs LOUD re
verberating off teeth and concerned moms who
drank a little bit of water sipping from a cup to
progress to a hearty meal and then
full glasses of whatever until an earth
shattering dumb sets in and
paralysis of everything important
happens until
only hunger is the animal and then
what
then what
empty your pockets fuck find
something to
fill guts dude fill
until a self impressed yes-man says
I am satisfied with my
efforts so now I'll rest
easy

Can't Sleep for Dreaming

I know that to start being materially successful, I need to stop hating North America and buy into these worldly specifics.

But can I sleep at night living The Dream?

Passage

That thing that'll make you stop believing in God
is too much Catholic school.

Because We've Lived Before

My withered wife my gnarl root hands
dance partner lover and fucker time
companion who's seen my
skin paper and thin and break apart and become
smaller pieces of paper that get buffeted into
uncomplicated vortices of breath memory
our child daughter before
her legs broke open and she became a distorted mirror
wife mother weeping womb you are a food
for us a pear or a pomegranate seed and
always milk and meat and the
horse that brought it through the
January snow by the banks of
some dream creek in a book in bed in
one of my many past lives.

Tachycardia

How to do my prayers and in my eyes
closed
do some sort of sex to Him and
in perfect elocution deliver my sorry's while
looking the Golden Boy some
model of chastity of
church whites of un-
impeachable character and
fondling myself and
sweating heavily about it and
thrice crossing constantly like it's my
fucking job to be safe while she
sucks me and my
constant
persecution mania and
these heavy brow strangers all
leering christ like thick shadows sea-
liner-size or bigger, and I
loosen my collar, have to,
my hands puff, she's bobbing
like some rapist piston and I
swallow one two and pass out

Drown A Dog

Sleep queen, queen of soil you are
more beautiful than I, I
fold my hands in silent shout in
nowhere protestation in
doubt in deed in between
orgasms of self I put out
a cloud of prayers hoping
two or three will be answered, and
that one of them is murder is
nothing to concern anyone.

On Trying

If I'm bad, at least I'm honestly bad. So yeah, I can sleep at night.

Sick sick sick.

Rich kids, white kids, 
rich white kids
pow pow pow.

Outside a circle

What will outlive me, everything, God made it that way, everything,
his story and your children and the brick and steel of our
collective chugging dream forward into

What will outlive me everything I ache now outlive me everything my
life's work is a

What will outlive you father, what will, there are a number of white seagulls
dead in your cellar and they will outlive you what

What will outlive me

Communication

Just because you can, doesn't mean you can.

Ellen

Sometimes I feel like the Ellen Degeneres show is just a shell game, or a sugary liquid medium by which we are fed some sort of sedative which allows the North American monster to slip into our homes and our wallets and our stomachs and our gas tanks while we are slowly absorbed into our carnivorous couches, fading, fading into virtual existence, spiritless, fat, oh Christ so fat on the decadent nutritional emptiness of Western secularism. 

Ellen you heartwarmth monger, you seller of ignorant bliss, you feelgood pimp, I salute you and your cunning machinations, or perhaps simply your brokerage of this Great American Decay.

Horse Farm

If horses run fast, why does glue run slow?

"Hey David,"

"She's so sexy but I bet she's a bitch or a black hole
or worse, some no sex before marriage Catholic."

Broken Rituals

When sex is the process of
climbing up the mountain and
falling off the other side.

Daughter Prayer

I am a daughter and a diamond and an angel of infinity and a
fawn often but equally often a hunter and a wolf in that order because
the computer is everywhere now so don't entertain a foolish nostalgia or
any dumb romance don't
lie lie lie
unless you intend to sleep

Crush

Kiss your mother with that bird around your neck you
son of God who is a thunder cloud a
clap of earth static a humongous stone
head who spits guns and guns who is an open
mouth who is the man hating goat man who is
a long coat dog pissing into itself pissing all
over itself who is wide eyed always to
great self consciousness even in a
dream who drinks furiously and becomes
furious who took a baseball bat for a
son and a peach pit for a daughter in
holy excellence and in ghost presence
took take three silent moments to
remember that
I am everything

Be Present

We loved big birth too much for
Christmas day sad telephone calls I
don't lose my composure often I
say my prayers I
gift my children through
these thirty years I
am a sober patriarch I
in this end lose to
this
cancer I
curse the healthy
young backs who are strong
backs for
trains and unfitted link back
directives but not directions which
are like dreams but not dream real not
dream real not
anything like the