already on fire

#ashotinthedarkissometimesmurder

From the ancient dead

He made bone soup and drank deep

To absorb their power

She comes to me at night,

And even in darkness

I am transparent to her

The scarring in my cheeks,

The jumble of my bones,

The rifts and valleys in my brain.

Our Lady of La Brea leans in close

Draping me in the scent

Of a newly minted highway

That leads directly home.

She puts a perfect pitch finger on my lips.

She puts her perfect lips against my ear.

もののあわれ, she sighs.

I have seen the next world.

You will be a snowy egret,

And I will be your shadow.

As I have always been your shadow.

I will remain darkness.

Until you fill me with light.

In every recent dream

I die, and go to hell.

It is hot, and there are demons.

I torture them.

One by one they disappear,

Until hell is empty

And I roam the black hills

Alone.

We are all too sick

To do anything but struggle.

Under her everything-colored hair

Her everything-colored eyes are warm and fragile

Like transparent teacups.

With delicate precision,

I attempt to levitate the dish.

Quietly it turns and floats gently in the air.

I take the tiny Blue Giant succulent from its pot.

The Blue Giant falls to pieces.

I put the pieces in the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

With delicate precision,

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I attempt to levitate the dish.

I am still attempting to levitate the dish.

The struggle

Is to create a language

To express an experience

You can't have.

There were no gods,

Just a world

Too vast and beautiful

For shoddy, man-made language

To comprise.

Either way,

How we feel

Has too many dimensions

To fit in a word

Or a phrase, a paragraph,

A field of study.

Anything I say is a lie

By enormity of omission.

I love you. That's a lie.

I need you. That's a lie.

I want to hold the nib of your essence forever in the curl of my tongue. That's a lie.

That's a lie.

some people are burning

Some people are burning

Recognize the signs

of the ancient flame:

a glint in the eye,

a shake in the hand,

the spontaneous production

of sacred ashes.

Crowds bend around them,

outside combustion radius.

They'll tell you the Earth

is a cold, blank snowfield.

The can only build a fiery bridge.

They will never see a spring,

or profusions of flowers.

Or watch summer unfold

like a letter, with strange news.

in her nacreous shells

Hear her in her nacreous shells

Vae victus she yells

Cri de coeur!

Dancing blindly in fog

Kayfantic, corybantic

Whirling, kicking

Then a sudden stop.

Hands on a fog-beast,

In its vulgar ear demanding

Where's my vig?

Then lets it dissolve, distracted

Searching memories of water

For signs of you:

Every shore and roadside brook,

Fingers dragging beside a boat.

You are always there,

The humidity in the air,

The susurrus in the city

Beneath the arguments and orgies.

Inter arma silent leges she murmurs.

All my histories corymb at the now.

She secretes another layer,

And her wild footsteps echo

In the caverns of her shells.

as a whale

I should have been born in a million years

(as a whale)

to roam the lunar seas

and fill them with whale-song.

In my huge and placid mind

I'd dream all dreams, all non-things,

non-people, non-places,

all that isn't,

and I'd sing them down.

For each truth ten billion lies,

and I sing them down.

The dragonettes, the starfish,

the silver manta-rays all

listen, knowingly,

to this eulogy for the the hidden country,

the super-real, the never living,

fundamentally voided, but whose vaults,

if burst, would choke the universe

with splendors beyond number.

I sing them down.

With bellows

with pings

with waves

and mathematics

with signs and symbols

I sing them all down to rest with the dead.

keep the first kiss


Keep the first kiss

Firmly in mind,

Template for all others.

Kiss my face

As you did the first time

Unburnished,

When we were virgin,

Stainless and unblemished.

Kiss me surgically.

Cut out your thorns

Your scars

Your old wounds.

Give them to me:

Let my phloem carry your blood

As an infant in my sepal arms.

Do I love you?

Look up, at the

Sun of the New Century.

Titanic heat

Chained by distance.

Already we are far

From our union in time,

When in the Old Sun

We were atoms bound.

And then dust.

And then you,

And I.

Somehow separate,

By forms divided,

But still close.

Always close,

If you will hold me.

there is a tall crane

There is a tall crane

and there is an airplane

They are not on a collision course.

The sky, swollen, has coursed

to shadows, to an

undifferentiated gloom.

On days like this

I imagine my shadow

and yours, far away

are for a time again in

superimposition.

I do not love it or hate it.

I just note the fact.

For posterity, I guess

I think you don't think about it.

I think you don't note the fact.

For posterity, perhaps.

Either this is real,

or the other thing is.

The thing where we're on an escalator

and one of us has jumped to the other side.

It doesn't seem to matter who.

we wait for the fireworks

We wait for the fireworks and drink

While borrowed heat drifts upward

And away into infinite space.

You look into the distance,

But you also look down

With three thousand sparkly eyes.

I hold you tight and close

The part I can reach, anyway.

How'd you become the universe?

Maybe this country is bullshit

And fireworks are bullshit

But they are pretty.

And anyway I'm only here

To watch the lights play

Across your grinning face.

constants

Gently stroking her hair

Evoking a dynamic electricity

Through my stomach, my heart

Stimulating my brain

To wonder, again, and wander

Across the pace of her breath

Over the quiver of our pulses

And skimming her mind's surface

Like a ship on the sea

Caught between the infinite

And incomprehensibility

Or a mystery of similar effect

That connects and explains

The layout of the stars

The pigments on her nails

The heat and salt of her skin

And the burning in her eyes

By a handful of numbers

Those dimensionless parameters

Charge couplings, constants,

That somehow frame her being?

No, she seems to only wear them

Like clothes she's ready to

Tear off at any time.

Your skin is a map of your skin

Your skin is a map of your skin,

Your eyes a map of the space around you.

Your mind, the cascade of colors that stream through the space around you.

Inside, time and space lie separated

Like children at odds,

Or lovers in spats,

Willing to merge but held apart by

Chance and careful planning.

Trace a finger across your surface area,

Along the contours of your contour map,

Across the radiances and through the field

Of infinite wavelengths

That forms and holds your form.

There, on the tip of your lip,

Bridging time and space,

Physical and ethereal,

Psychic and Psyche,

The beginnings of a smile.