I Don't

I DON’T 

          

*

and it is not even love poem

the thot of you i need to close my office door
my face hots up and i forget to flush the toilet,
even carry the mail with me all the way to the
bedroom, and pour catfood in the coffee maker
im bust clean undeniably had
wasn’t sposed to fall o well too bad
wasn’t sposed to pine daydreaming all the time

no not a’tall .
had not permission to climb that ivory wall but
now i’ve had. and why not smile--i aint ever
leaving you. at time being, ima smoke sumthin,
hang up the gourds by string along
my bedroom
wall,
go to the Moose Lodge for a vodka, loose my
crush in them jean pockets where i keep
small change, 
and thats what we are. 
couple pennies at the bottom of a goldfish bowl
should suffice, swimming for apples jest fell. two copper
eyes twinning, sky-small as yet, cld add up to ten by
the time we call it in the air.

but ah, cherabim in my rafter
i told myself no but i didn’t listen
i put my best dress on and check my hair, saw
something silver by our meadow glistened, twas
a necklace with just one charm, the letter A goes
with my scarlett hair, but lets not care.

ought i to see your old innocent, ah but not until
i’ve humbled shld this aristocrat deserve the man
who looks
without eyes
and hears everything about me delicate
through barely touching from without prelanguage;
no barriers, dark cave lisp, altho you prefer the lips--
we look out for light is all there is outside of us,
and we are not us.

i cld be coy but do not
i keep to this new ideal testing the limegreen
which presents itself like in the speckled egg leaves
i layd under
her dads sugar maples, leafs held to like my
eyes do the ceiling no sensible
woman
breaks
thru; what luminous discharge.

i played it cool but im yr lil heater now
what if everything in my whole life thus far was to
prepare me for this near miss of you? and you miles
away do what and i am still here not doing anything.

what are your plans? and i havent any
where do you work? nowhere
she cuts me off with well everyone needs a break
sometimes, she doesn’t realize im sick with it always
gotta push it crost the neighbors landing like with
sea power, but that replete, ima logogriph and u sail
me. i hustle in an eyewink while yr backs turned to clear
the nets leftover like bilge might spell extravascular,
i lean back by the time you
look for me
i look as if i had been sat on the vinyl seats forever
not sweeping the quay.  there is a perfect aitch in the
sky i do not know what it means we are
not our checkreins are made of
cheddar our mean square samsara
the vanish qualities
we share rigged like a yawl plies the sea    we are gaping
and anyways, ours are relatively large mouthparts to
blend ensanguine as a sunset on Pleasureville Road      
tumeric as what leafs been
felled
arcadian and now
we’re not curable meats, aint we?

was it something i never said?
i feel crazy too sane
Mary Mags aint got it down yet the way this whore
of babylon with gravy St. Theresa pray on me pray on wards
of stately and great lenticular clouds, what bolster my breasts
as i sail into the wooden horse you made for me 3x the sky is
orange with azure pith we rock with as if classically trained,
and read The Art of Tennis.

ignoramus rock as if with blinders on,
made of clay and asterisk
and the footnotes bled into the mattress
someone should have maybe read.

i was not ever going to look at that jade moss
your pupils burrow in, nor breathe the sex of your
open mouth or rub my nose against that so serious
forehead the color of pears let to ripen too long
since i wrangled my senselessness,
aw but she knew better they’ll say,
she looked too long and turned to stone
fortresses for song can only for be liquid so long
you are fire and nice girls don’t do that, quick.

why bury myself in your long arms and
chest like a buttress ghenst any thots, a coarse thru
muck-pond ova walk into that such porous rock of you
within how taut arms, again? intense celestial,

why brace myself for that brown cock and whimper
soundless, my mouth in my armpit, whimper with my
lower lips drool silver gilt
until you silence it, and o man do we both go lifeless,

but to always feel you firmly believing me,

when ought i instead rather study the walnut tree,
practising patience, and check the mirrors for once,
goddamnit when i learn to drive or at last glance down
at the MPH and stay betwixt lines blurred by our better
senses, our best scents liquors now jes warming their
way down our swarm trench
mouths fit in a last scene, until he yells cut!

and he doesnt, doesnt he?

bzzzzzzzz and so now what
am i even to do about (me)..

i get turned round but i know where true north is,
you arent supposed to run blindly towards it, neither,
i know but my legs fell in to time with my heart who
could not connect such dots you are time pointalism
i am reaching pointless asemic messages sans symboltry,
i know, i climb yore tree, & fuck if i get caught like a
kitten in one, either some fireman will bail me out
(i’m never Misty) or i will reach deep into that well
man, rock sugarcandy, darlingdest, go without

whatever you are to me, whatever you may become
indubitably a muse this & shld you break my heart, and
is it yrs to break? perhaps, but so it belongs to poetry
so art becomes her well, so and what then but to
reach way down it man

**

no plans, nothings expected
it is a matter of not having being better, more
freeing, than having.

moment by moment i go,
altho i get vague anxiety from the American flag
hangs in the neighbors yard.  

i thot she was stirring her honey. my attic loft sounded
random clangs of a spoon to mug, as if she was
constantly stirring.

id chastise myself. you cant get mad when a woman
stirs her tea. but how often will she stir it?

how big is the cup?
how much more honey?
turns out it is the flag next door. the metal at the
end of its rope clangs ghenst its own metal pole,
so out of breath,
from nowhere, and random,
i lie wondering at the ceiling.

you cant avoid the past. memories, dreams, people
asking where you’ve been & what yuve been up to. 
associations enter streams of consciousness. things
you see presently suggest grass
stains, chain-link
           scrapes and
old successes.

i do about ten or twelve Goofus things each day altho i
lean towards Gallant.  country Highlights.  certain eclipses
and each and every sunrise i catch punctuate my present,
designating moments.  i do my dishes.  every moment is
made of infinite moments. i close my eyes. 

i am a soul and
you are the same soul we all are; a comfort to me
now even if i indulge, times.

and time changed while we were together. 
i took your divining rod into my own hands.
while the prominence of railroads has faded in recent
decades, the train endures as a common image in popular
song dispersed like tracks some stories above crested waters
edge.  i lookt but didnt feel bashful tucking my trouser
cuffs in cheap boots and walked behind you.  oft used as
a divining rod, the witch-hazels pliant capsule splits
explosively at maturity in the autumn, ejecting
seeds with sufficient force to fly distances
of up to thirty-three feet. 

we woke together to the years first snow. aw, but did
we spook the cold and rain; we sent it like a letter.
odor of fox urine wafted from the luminous moss jacket
the boulder wore, tho Halloween had passed.

i took like a thief a pinch of shade pine
sap, small stones to palm on the car ride, a Lucifer
mask. the traditional focus of All Hallows Eve
revolves around the theme of using humor &
ridicule to confront the power of death.  buried by
the weight of our happiness we merged at the outlet.

Shelby Gap Railroad Stat’n was an unincorporated
community in Pike County, Kentucky. its post office
closed in 2004. i held your chin in my mouth and
playfully bit, which really sent me. before our eyes
grew visibly river and sheer cliffs beneath a scalloped
ridge. hooked berry pines loomed, leaned ghenst by
snow dusted twists of deciduous as in a Japanese screen.
it was all we could stand of trees, specifically.

***

faux trees against a skins been rain-whet
before yet will also dry & the whole army
of me admires what you inspire
is there any other coach id hire
to unload my lifeless, burn in a thin shroud & scatter
yet smattering in egret-less marshes to be ate up by
fish small enough to fit in one of your ham-sized
paws? them catchers mitts
i hit all
balls all the time away from? it truly cld not
matter
anyhow, not now, she whispers,
untucking you kentuckying your kerchief,
sickened by such surfeit!

woman relent! ah, but when does she ever
i do want to write about the greatest i don’t love
ever had, & who cld blame rock peter, & so i use him
& us for a reference, tho we aint even had it yet,

why cldnt i even ingratiate myself a bit,
what a nancy, ransomest surfeit!
imagine that! & coming from this gal who just knows
but never, ever gave the least-straight answers.

yes i’d do that sun
anytime its insecurities never mined for what
is in the seams can stay there, here background
noise doesn’t
exist

it all hums
and does so to a stop
and repeats

you know winds got the rhythm it needs
so do the posies. and yet i want
you to play my lily horn
my cheek braced against yr antler
trembling grass mimicking waves of nausea which
try but cannot penetrate this whole slow ease i
want to hold you
tip to shaft
jes lil heater lily horn a shellful of white
paint tears the sea firm and real
as freshwater pearls mindlessly worked
between the fingers
the way the dirt
of traffick collects manifold on any new snow
soon enough we are, but in gilt!
and grey chivalrous bredths, not abject;
the slush sounds itself out it forgets its place it is taken
altogether forced by its own nature, it lets go each floe
to spread itself out and be spread until the mercy
of heat.

at last obliterated, set like chalk into the paper
sprayed still, any inch of black snow on any inch
of curb or sidewalk is its own Chinese brush painting
depicting mountain pondy scenes or long decipherable
glyphs i’ll not decipher.

sometimes it is the scene’s scheme
the whole one----
makes the narrowest exactitude.
lets be the broadest and the narrowest exacts
and inexactest id gives!

and i wld give, even three rare books for your
dirty shirt in corn narrows
the lines and cones of retinas
reacting quite in congress,
albeit by nature quite varying in process;

it is allusion to Banvard's Folly it is all
so optical.

and i wld be so illused.
i wld go pick up a bale of cotton hike it all the way
back to him if he liked, jig the way home if that’s
what he liked, too

Air out they say

and they don’t mean on a line like clothes sun
disinfects the mind Brian Mott (if its even his name)
said he rots alone in a stasis. i rot as well like fruit which
nobody bothered to put in the basket. like the cornstalks do
before the great threshing turns even rot into a sort of fuel.

i will be abreast you, i muttered to a sidewalk made
of clamped down sand. people are hard to come by,
that you want to keep, anyway.

he found in me this trajectory towards a truth it
doesn't even recognize until it gets there.

he wanted to know did i want
to know his age; i didnt.

and neither his illness
or degree. i quickly gathered him
up from patronizing correspondance. i rot on a couch
for yrs before i let time fly beneath me for a change,

oh, and time is so beneath me
it cant breathe right.

it doesn’t matter, can’t, i knew
there was a Coinstar in our very immediate future.
o and i am so changed in love with an ideal madly,
why, im going to chase it the rest of my life!
like the grail of desire whenna woman wants,
why, he is a goldfish! & deep in her bowl
& he is eager;
cannot swim because
less and less room
is made for
him
& he writhes

wanting
to be
let;

i lie sprawled having ravished
myself as if you did it
to us.

the poplar tree audience talked among
themselves and coyotes cried and angus
but you and i did
this
silently to us,

like a hawk soars never flapping or a kestrel must
flap so we do it all so darn accordingly and me blest
wrecked and already restless

****

someone threatened me with a square dance.
i used circular reasoning to get out of it.
big country trouble in the little city of St. Matthew’s.
first snow i’d seen in Kentucky in quite some time.
you should have seen the way it came down.
looked like we were in a globe.
and of course we were!

aint no one on this earth who gets you.
theres them get what you are talking about,
you so brave and balanced on a rock bed next to
the porch steps, they holding their fifths of
whiskey on a forty degree city night.

a good number nod heads, while you play your
bass, tight with the drums, depended on by
the guitars and singer, but none of them

gets you.

again my gemini mind home in the soybean fields,
being drove in any from the pickup armory
of swords driven upwards from brown stalks of corn

i wanted to write about notloving and havenloved.
thot the word boredom shld mean a big lot with a castle
onit, drilled all the time by serfs’ genuine admiring
glances,
to make love to my yardspanse fondling
the dictionary, same edition as the one at
the Barking Spider Tavern where i spent
eight best yrs of my twenties as a bar
tap dance them yrs ben unfolded
since i laid down my laundry---

Rapunzel, the woman who was never let down
by love and not once want to blend with what is
lower than lichen making its art on a corpse tree.
i sat at an Al-anon lost from focus
the speaker, when a family of turkeys
infuriously slow moving across the churchyard
where only i ever looked at these mtgs,

a mother and her hard for me to count babies
who made
amoeba strides,
and i came from a family of turkeys,
as well, i thot,
and i shared this with the group,
at the end, i sed, its not so bad, to admit
you came from a family of turkeys, and arent
they beautiful anyhow?

and i came here and he gave her turkey feathers.
i noticed two days later she had put them just-so
in a wineglass, an unscented white candle for support,
the plummage never to be lit like a drunk but
moondrunk and gladly drunk, and in gulps,
at times---that unselfconsciously!

you cant hide from ecstasy it will find
you consensual or nay.

if a story is true doesss that mean its short?
because an untrue ones tall. each day i encounters
unknowns and how bout that’s, im let so when i start
to think i let go to brain fog, a grand reservoir of air,
static, electric hiss, and thots dissemble quick,

hasten to be still life reflects you sometimes.
you just have to catch it in the act; it looks back at
you in the guise of it, all of it, a good breakfast of
total.

and what astounds me is ever since i resumed listening
life has been in the wings feeding me lines in the batters
box batting away for me in there like cornstarch
in like chop suey, but like a migraine behind
those new eyes and
i’s the only one knows exactly when it was the eyes
changed for browner, forever changed---

but don’t you all notice! for better, clearly, too!

and even knowing random lifts to the same insoles
and trees all of them speak not so nostra deciduous
decidedly the same as my eyes and i drive
with no lerners permit.

the problem he said with marriage is poets are always
chasing an ideal done got streamed by their own
imaginations. me, that striving is where i’ll go, so long
as anyone but me’s driving, so long as i cleave to this
strange belief what takes care of them heeding i am held

like to the side of a sudden curve or
some thing (in) confidence.

it is the sum of our insecurities and confidences.
he walks into the room with confidence. she tells him
a thing in confidence. o and i always wish we were
in congress!

it is like eating ten of the least saccharine brownies
and then laying in a field of dandelion fluff seeds. its not
done and what can be it has not begun and what could at
least not with a few false starts. the battery is big enough
for a rig, she laughed. i admitted
i had not even brushed my teeth.
i got one! an absolute breakdown
of laughter,
she pulls a plastic sealed toothbrush from her purse.
i point out theres no paste. and anyway i use powder, i say.
she says you got yr spit, don’t you?
you aint got shit honey, we both know that, but
you got yr own spit!
i smiled the whole way back we took the long cut
thru Eminence and i will keep making it like a koan
daily focus my energies on some routine i understand
to go with the floes nice but you need traction too,
momentum.

i grappled for years a nagging question
of who & home & grace or not. & all of the goddamned
compassion.

me again, it took eighteen years to remember knowing
what i did when i was 18----my eyes are my own they
army.

*****

so then what is it makes me bust thru a bag, to get at a
can rather than unfold it, like prayer or napkin?

the same that has me sauntering now, saturnine,
a country gallant with a squash for a head
gourdlike hands and a dark green pumpkin

have you ever opend a beer to sit back down and find
you already opened one?

it is the same brainfault has people out in fields
sough of soybeans looking for one particular clover

it was green (we were the we we were not)
it was green but had a touch of red at the outer,
a luna moth settles on the entrance to a corn maze
and by the time i happen upon it looks dead

i pick it up
thinking some way not to crush
the wings
it only moves when i get
it in my pocket. i let it go, oddly disappointed.

you drink the beer ordered in error.
we wave to the passing trucks. that clover isnt
even clover, she said. its oxalis stricta, sourgrass.
true clovers are leguminous.
like beans, or acacia.
i suck on that;
dry storage.

corn so sweet she says, you dont dress it.
i leave the country mud right on the potatoes,
my grandmother told me we all eat one cup
of dirt in our lifetime, o Grandma! how many
cups have i had? and you know all of them

i want to live in a way so i can tell Grandma

always after with hindsight and the scared excited
future in the loom she and i make our cowls by
nightly, she in a church and me asleep between his
dead legs like a rucksack and so happy his legs are
dead finally

i have used the whole storage of my wiles

i have mainly walked round guiless

to be young and earnest all the time and only
break like bread the occasional last supper

no one ever
remembers to pack
up the leftovers

like they done in Rome we throw the good silver out
each time, the morning after, into the river, the minions
waiting in the treeline. they take and sell, and over and
again, we feast so unscrupilously, eating supine with our
feet tickled and lightly scratched by servants (and the
walnuts come down, incarcerated. it takes five whole
minutes to get one cracked all the way down to)
i want to scratch no on a paper, have it
later read yes
when my eyes unfocus on naught but the curtains
which are so many colors i close my eyes on
something misread on purpose
i am among the least misread and (for i am not read!)
the very most least cryptic and yet they crypt me.

something in every man makes him want to
clap like hearing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,
some rag, it gets
to be just too much, too too much
and so the people clap,
their applause is as much to steal a moment to
brace themselves for the next bend of branch
no one man could hold onto; something
even tho the purpose of the song
is nothing
something;
it is utter ecstasy which is letting go all
ways at once and so unguiled, such heresy

i cry uncle i smile stop and let you
what creeps out of us is also my shadow undoing
your laces and the laces’ shadows, undoing what to
the graduated blues, your shadow, and you bet i do!
and i bet if we watched still enough we’d enjoy the
whole plot of some Chinese puppet show in a
one-night-only private showing performed by
the absolute cream of the dynasty.

but we don’t, don’t we?

i want it to continue and stop
a rag thruout each day
compelling as allergies compell a sneeze, compel me!

fukkkk i used to eat the ambivalent for breakfast.
i slept in my girls’ school uniform and rose with
enough time to brush my teeth, rinse & spit,
and pour a coffee for the road. i slept with ambiguous,
and drove the apathetic’s mother’s hearse-cutlass.
burned my symbols arch into the freshcut wood
and lacquered it. set upon the lacquer every device
culinary, i starved beautifully into its bark all my reason
and devices.
now i am.
ambivalent. as they come marching
ambivalent. when they skip gayly off
or lie in the tub, so far gone there is no rope
long as any liferaft

shld i want
shld not, ‘shld try or shld not try’---be the real
questions?

i know the answers, its just these danged questions!
theyre brutal as biting flies sweet as he bites me softly,
his tongue tree roots wandering my chicken tracks the
cock does crow and yet it keeps no time!

not even the semblance of a schedule he crows when i
visit the twins and drink with their mother in the hen
house where nobody ever leaves til morning and it always
takes a whole day to just recover, i want to never recover
from the miniscule draughts of nightshade i don’t know
whether you or i started this. i don’t even know what you
look like. i am that startled when you come to the door!
you cant know what anyone looks like long,

we are all
amalgams. and ive seen the spectrum of you from the
side front and rearview isnt all what it seems?

i mean isnt all?

even as much as it is what it doesn’t,
id say. its a partnership, a soft 50/50.

daylights your leaves alternate inserted in me in secret
by Mauiian phosphorus nocturnal starfish so purple
lightning bugs of the shore
bugs me, i am so supplanted. they are so danged miniscule
it is as if they are only suggested, after all they’re only
barely visible, and then only in periphery,
therefore possibly imagined; some figment
on your old sailors hands like roughstone dust
let at the entrance of an off, darn offingest off-trail. 

******

great flock of orange moths took to flight all at once.
before they wakened and flew, id not noticed them,
their bright orange blent in with the brown of the canyon.
when i looked round i noticed several such flocks,
little orange mouths pursed and waiting for
a single one of them to alight. they all will.

should you balk at beauty? quiver before white magic,
stutter before the altar of God whose face no man
has seen, since he cannot look when he is before Him?

you drank me, mixed with bourbon and seagrass
the color of our painted eye tomb, without peeling
back like sycamore bark
the river stone lashes we flog
ourselves with now,
self-creating a wound that wont shut.

why would you shut a heart you yourself opened?

a heart is not a book, to be taken up again some time
during a dolldrum; bout of illness. a heart is no cold
case forensic teams close on confirming a hypothesis.

and mine is so open yet.

i did not ask to be pawed that night my leather boards
wet from the excited perspiration of your thumbs when
they handled me at last. after incantations and curry
spice. before cornstalks and diamondback caution
signs blurred by our MPH.

but when you fondled my petals leant towards
light forever.

new shoots sprang like a wildcat into the night,
carried heat, so unabashed as to be careless,
disturbing tracks of coyotes we heard crying
at dusk before the evening hunt. by the alligator water
you painted my soft swamp mud with tears you cried
in relief of knowing, that never again wld you pine or
oak one moment longer than you chose.
and you chose everything at once (me!) undulating,
there in the folds of your Greek god nose.

we joked we would still make love even once
you'd married, (for i won’t. not again. but oughtn’t
you?) we'd carry on, secret lovers. for the sacredness
of marriage could not touch our silly, light sanctity.
uniformed schoolchild heat. eternal recess
climbing out the sandbox covered in the red clay
buried beneath everyones
understanding.

the sun warmed the handles of the steps leading up
to the slide. our warm hands fondled the atlas on a
roadtrip to the divine. we existed you said, merely
in the playgrounds of each other's imaginations.
two-lane highways flanked by perched hawks and
osprey feeding in private, on either side.

i could not have imagined this, what awning. being
suddenly naked before you, jarred like her sweet pepper
relish; starting on a shelf. afraid the tears you cried into
the ripped hem of my peach linen dress, what you
moaned into my shoulders, those not-words, you cried
in relief having realized you'd not pine again this life
so long as our thick forest boreal light show thinned
by morning, o and it always did. it thinned like the mass in
our stomachs like by a heat doesnt stomach matter now

i want to climb into your lower gorge feast on any
assumptions made about my crick rocks glistening cold sun
be took for a ride on a whim rhymes with us bursted
slate and lime wall headboard of an i dont mind
a hike hipbones you hold the while echoes
for canyons

*******

she left me off with a yogurt. she knew i preferred plain.
dropped me near enough a roadside low clouds somersaulted
over plains strobed sun on and off white longgrass like
a burning photograph

a wake of buzzards gathered in ash by
the interstate sign which looked pastel as
a reverie, or tumid flesh leaves collected
like a pile of rugs i sidestept;

i take off my sandals adjust to the rocky path.
i walk so home a burst wood shed
gleams like a grand piano in a foyer, with an
open floor plan. i defend
the sanctity of the individual.
picnic as you can get, musing on where once
stood corn now razed like a crude haircut.

for me to wait like cornsilk legend Rapunzel in some
castle he built without my permission right on my own
property!

i notice i am making fists. bareroot tress and shrubs
i make my hands noncommital inhabiting a bigger world.
something shimmers several paces ahead looks neon,
lodged alongside flaccid branches
wrecked by a hailstorm.

curious, i advance towards what turns out
to be a spoon in the road. it wasn’t even,
it was plastic.

i know buckskin relates to the flourescent lights
with Catholic charity. only miracle he’s seen was
a rabbit who refused to die. the rabbit kept house
in a hole right under a hawks nest and actually
swam across the creek, which was technically
a river times of the year just by girth,
despite trailing buckshot, shots of all kind.

i know buckskin relates to the clouds with a
silver shuddering under a brown wool coat.
i will have black mascara on the day his
paraffin skin unfolds to purple peonies
bursting forth like asparagus stalks and i can
say what is well ends.

why is it i keep finding things in the grass?

he kept finding spoons and forks. oldwood. some
given him by people who did not know he possessed sets  
Cambodian. Malaysian. to him having not been captured
in North Vietnam took him into his wood habit i wouldn’t
break like a red mouth sun.

boar spear made of solid hickory.
white pines about to fall off
brown crags. dark shapeless zombie
wail lets the mouth of sky lets
clouds to a franchise of ash.

25 pounds on my shollder balanced casually on one of my
thumbs. not that i would take down a boar but that i could
effortlessly walk with such a schtick. hickory hedge iron he
has, we stare down the holler. they might fly off.

and were things even meant for me to find?

i was not supposed to count the many ways or say to anyone
flourescent pinings. no intention of finding things in the grass,
spoons and charms and other sightings. to take such things to
mean anything but a fool follows the holler where it goes.

i was not meant to know much about the hawks who hunt
their lunch while i breakfast on Coke and cigarettes, but there’s
no tellin. in the smoke lies bursts of tangerine
interiors, an orange light like the one i saw
when i pressed my sore eyes on the phone
with one of the early suicides.

he produced a gun and i immediately piqued
into the looking glass
i was not even in it
which spooked the others in the room but did
not scare me off my gawker awe shucked corn
prone on the porch we never boiled it.
we got drunk and in the
morning my head felt better than it had in years
or mine and yours are not but hours into this
conversation with the
leaves of grass to be plastered
like a cast into a murkiness i shall
try not to clean, overzealous enthralllld.

i have no future now and never will again
so long as i can be dutiful and i am iamb

********

no thing underhanded here not one passed or
trafficked no gold bell rung to bring home the bulls,
irrigation canal what can handle not-this like this

it’s a matter of style Strunk did not fit sidewise well in,
no perplexiglass to drink your medicine
it is simple as science

what are you going to do? he asked again
and i took advantage of how deaf he really is. played
dumb shot back as if it just ocurred to me, stay here,
i guess.

like, live here.

and how could anyone ask me what i will do?
i leave peanut butter on the knife to dry.
in the morning i feel like the virgin, blue dishrag
and prune colored hands. they fondle all of the
silver, all the way. the hands every fold of muscle aches
the hands will draw or type. they will hold you like
suds or a mussel holds one bite. they will add white
tablewine to cold butter whisking the whole time
and knock the fake flowers over with their sudsy slip a
greased pig wld be less lithe, slithery, frisky, he calls me
90 yr old sax man played behind Billie.
i had every opportunity to wipe on the cuff.
i cld have kept my feet together, perpendicular.
i cld have shaved and kept my mouth pursed nicely.
i stumble thru this wholly lacking gland
richer and more free than if i had.
i manage to exude that certain something
so unlike whatever parts i wade like reeds trumpets
the swan my own wingspan sometimes scares me.

in ways we are each others white translucent mirrors
long necks fog feathered carried on long tropical loops
as a precautionary, by naturalists, SOS to be left
shld ones light need be warning call.

we are twins have the same learning lessons
trials, ambitions. we fluctuate; we are each
others metabolisms. one of us has learned or
we are both learning in median res by the
light of seed chock watermelon blown by
that last rifle call impervious. we’re settlers
rarely unsatisfied by silver river call. a lark
coding distress at times coating our senses,
unblind. such, 'starts on stops,' we are!  
also we are conduit for life who comesatus pointing
dead ash fingers fat with entrophy into our very breasts,
yes that brash, & accusingly, too!  we however gently
inevitably rewind us with our ineffable  

you see you  in my eyes  and answer the door  

for duty  i see me  in your blues  and remind myself

i am shy  and grateful  to do what it is

i,  you,  we,  like best.

and that we even know what that is! sounds preposterous!
and why, we do like it in the morning. we practice what
we preach, boy which way it comes off like grass stains
with a little elbow grief & otherwise bare what we breach
so damn elegantly, and with such succinct we are
punctuation beings.

being the whole of it, nicely. what job of it.
punctuation is the first and only resort.
to write clap stomp clang heave brush gently.

in the mud street i avoid the thick rush which has made
creeks of the drives as tin roofs empty merrily like falls 
onto the bone smooth shoulders of a dread demoness.

i am lichened to this flow of water which courses
like a clatter of pots and pans, shrinks my veins
while it widens those in the road.
my only destination is refuge,
my only refuge the attempts at escape. i am
no different than this lone pig with his head
in a hole--and who would blame him?

the shattered blue glass door of ice that shone
crisp cerulean yesterday gleams now with
black ale anger and sinks into its pond with golden
words on the knob like ponderous scriptures.

there is no longer a fire in the floating leaf.
so too has the luminous white been extinguished
in the clouds which fell sheer into the gloom that
presides like my ego in shards of shale doubt.

i could not close my mouth if i tried to
vanish in the part of my own legs
of a race for which i had not
bothered to train.

three roped red heelers standing in the lines of
leak lead the intercession of howling winds
sky overhangs, like the threat of pines drifting
by in milk seeped fog, obscure as Lil Jimmy Scott.

in the wind tossed cane hides a little red fox,
fur matted by cold gloom. a dream attempts
to cross over into real life--i hide in somebodys
cowshed, and i try to smile a bridge for all things
are impassable. i am that eager to shut away
the gross wildness of the world.

plummeting plumes dropped coral beads
to rest in cloud notches like cherries of a
great cigaret. i shivered satisfied
to go back in, get warm.

i walked short steps not like my own

towards the lit door like a river guide
who employs a calculated crazy in
the dark right to the pinochles--

afraid of shades maybe takin tricks.

in the course of some short yrs ive survived
more crises than some will ever have to look
back at. only thru poetry do i survive. it all got mad and i
madly ruined every relationship i had by deciding to take
my own life. now nobody trusts me. and what of my fine
track record? don’t you lean back and listen, times? cozy
in yr fireside chair? haven’t you heard my tune echo in yr
hearts so many times?
there she goes, playin figure eights round
the obvious again. thats not quaint?
and man does she go in eights.
and dont i know it i live it you fucks! and when have i not
recovered rightly? gone back and even paved the roads
that landed me here, to leave em nicer than i found em.
living out my girl scout code. some code it is
all us must live. you either have it in this life or you aint
even in it rightly.

do we tell ourselves the truth?

i guess everything is illusion.

mine mays well be that i am in love

with the man beautiful as to defy my delicate imagination.

his scent cld well sustain delusions of continuity; circular tracks

drawn into the earth [ butt rub and mount: all verbs which

are nouns] also awe shucks what appalling permanence

i stand outside myself with a divining rod

i am at the beck and call of no man.

and shld i be?

theres not a woman on this earth knows more 

bout me than me, only the universe can, and rightly

say one word about it
the universe can since its as many songs by
verse and flows all about me as within me
i rise. and so i say to the occasional flood warning
bridge may ice before i do melt my words decide
way before i do. poetry wooed and plagued me
her sultry ways killen the whole time i turned into
her like a chair leg into the knee of affable affinity
the old ineffable my divinity. i did not pardon
myself. i was that obliged.

wait with me here until the rain stops. i think but do
not say lichen faces melt into real ones. they wont
look at us, they allow us first turn to speak.

the sky plays games with us. from dark to light it went,
as morning ought. there was even a vague horizon;
a longhorn dismounted fog. moments later even the
charcoalest of grays are undistinguished again, from the
utter dark you persist driving us in.

my song you protect between your teeth like a sheath,
held, under the ID in your wallet, like saints relic.
what the soil offers as reason is kept too, only the cold
colorless sky recognizes my tune travels the nethers of me
drinking in the earth, sweet taste my joyousness would fit
into a plot with the beets and winter cabbage.

new green growth i will name after you
and what my roots whisper about this i cannot
hear, it is that bass. stars too, so low tonight, yet bright
back at me like the polished brass winged instrument eyes
you have always laughed at me with, before this burnished
horizon where churns now the poplar tulip before me,
butter on mashed, it looks, in the headlights,
ripped off, is its broad shoulder. whats left hangs
patient as a crag enmeshed in the ridge
your knuckles make
on my sloping plains shoulders,
like at the bottom of Texas, where they pull to the wrong
side to let a stranger pass, were he in a hurry.

at Port Aransas you remarked what a good team we made.
our combined karmas enabled us to conjure birds, beasts
and open eateries. no phone, a broken map but we were
filled with our ineffable silence which rang brash even
before there was such a thing as beginning.

a coyote sat tall in orange grass eking its way from the
black canyon humus. you noted my kestrel kept up with
our Four Runner, arriving on electric lines moments
before us several times. that afternoon we saw roseate
spoonbills in flight as well as a small family of them,
washing in the rivulets and dining.

whoopers at great distances danced in order
to strengthen their relationship.
the vultures on the viewing deck allowed us utter privacy
with which to view the cranes people travel great distances
and still not glimpse.

wheres the fuckin crane?! you did your impression of
an angry camper. you made us laugh; we went exactly
nowhere without seeing them.

at Dagger Island a serpentine monster uttered his red
longing petrified neighbors took to be dream.
you handed me a bone crucifix to hold while you
tended to your camera, i palmed it in cooled prayer of
thanks for what was us in sage walkways,
us again in silent grove of silver trees,
the bent motte of us
driving home whatever sticks is what stays. thank goodness
you walked ahead of me. a wild boar screamed calamity,
charging from the wood thru
grasses smelt so eucalypti, i begged, no! commanded you
to put your face in it!
he bolted to the wood opposite. i did not move. i didnt turn
to watch his mad exodus. my smile held me in a steel tank you
excavated like a bell from the muscle blade of our conjoined
shoulders, that night i could not move and you did not stop
speaking, excited magic spells out what could only be taken as
good, and right.

dark beckoned as we drove. in the clouds
a young girl birthed easily a hairless goat into
a coral bladder. miles markers on i startled—

two pottery statues of goats, life-sized if not
life-like grazed stilly, in a brushed front yard
surrounded by a herd of real ones!

as it got on to dark, he said watch those hills
for coyotes. last time he said it, one did soon
appear briefly, by the Classy Lady Concrete
Masonry sign. i watched the hills, alright,
racing lime shadows.

all i managed to eke from the eider sand and
cacti was a border patrol jeep, hood-deep
in orange prairie weeds, by a divide. the officer
had his nocs in his paws, invoking from lower
desert plains coyotes of another kind.

i want a kiss, i thot. can you please hand me
the map? he asked. youre lookin at it, i sed,
cryptic, with one of my best smiles on,
my left hand already conjuring the atlas
from our moonlit console.

i wake alone today i breakfast and write the world
is also alone with me rolls over disgusted. and so
spend an hr on the phone with my aunt Missy.
simple country heart bleeds roses and local honey
you don’t know how sweet and’ll never see. they
call her crazy. i was conditioned to believe i would
become her and that was supposed to be a threat.
Missy moved to the country lived on a mountain in
Jellico with her own bat cave, and goats,
i carried her train
the wedding was short and sweet
i remember her dress was not pure white; maybe she
was not a virgin.
and i did grow up to be just like her.
living in a plain.
riding mowers and mules and a solar eclipse viewed
thru the welding mask of my friends priceless if
useless half brother,  
priceless before and after drinks fish tacos and tall tales.
only Missy and i know they are all fish tacos.
we keep the shells under saran wrap and set,
we see where the story goes. i tend to punctuate what
needs none.
i so do want to caress eachovus straightforwardly
the moon just anything i cld clearly.
i have done this since i could remember. it is what remains
my earliest memory. even when i seemed not to be ive been
alone with poetry.

when i was very young my mother kept a jade plant
that was at least half my size, on a double-hung sill
lookt out on the backyard.

i would often idling stare through its prone
unfurled succulence to view sky.

sunsets like red flags i saw seemed to scold me
as much as the others do.

once, when the sun was just about as bright as i had
ever seen through jade, Sunshine On My Shoulders
on the radio played.

even my parakeet Tweety whistled!

and o that winter the frightning whorls and stars
on the glass outlooking the darkest night id had,
to that point,
the same week my Montessori teacher
told us on God, and His will,
and i was up way too late, i wondered
about the unsettling maze-map etched
on the pane,
my mother cold and distanced, which was her usual,
despite my look of alarm
said, ‘That’s Jack
            Frost.’  

o she said it with such steel,
and authority.

again today and again today i woke with a smile my
body smiled, and relaxed. it was filled, but light,
and easy. smile for me when you wake tomorrow,
let the smile fill you for you have devastated
me with your sex and your beauty. as if from miles
away, with the longest reach you have wasted me
with innocent tenderness and dark throbbing sadness--
which finally equals love because love is the absence
of fear, it is the awareness and ever-increasing
reverence for the power held
by combined throngs of
nature,
and all of the birds in the world have flown for you,
since the day you were born,
and all of the waves lap against sand like so many flags
hung to symbolise the fight do, in winds
of ten hundred countries.
ive thot i have we are what we make
of each others army.
ive thot we are cattle lowing in each others midst.
ive thot i have that sun belongs inside of us. sun belongs
in the red and black caves we echo each other in.
sun belongs in the orifices,
the clockwork veins and streams of
consciousness without that image of you,
the sun, dark mutes the senses and living is senseless.
without you, moon, time turns meaningless. as long as
i do not remember to look
and look up
i fail to be
celestial.

*********