Thomas Lowe Taylor -- NOTES FROM NOWHERE

NOTES FROM NOWHERE
THOMAS LOWE TAYLOR
AKA ANABASIS

IRRESOLUTE DISTANCES

Fundamental muslins
Flaming literals
Poached refusals
Litany spores
Touché whore

Talent sprouts
Loser tribes
Infinite bombs
Gusty soups
Form lust

Polar disuse
Global warning
Fester swoon
Attar pulls
Afforded lapse

Appall nostrum
Late medium
Short poles
Fundamental light
Easier flues

Tepid fires
Roaming point
Direct flier
Afforded mists
Deleted absence

Knocker pocks
Lute snort
Flex stasis
Potent silence
Mute noise

Blue shies
Porn church
Flood master
Born among
Borne alone

These said
No muter


The call. Runs through me like isolated instances runs through me like water runs, through me like love’s angular distances in the room without presence or distinction, open signs are further opened by the hand that runs the drill into your being on the street at all no motor running at the ditch of accepted plasms from her voices in your steadily pounding center in the midst of hollow voices in the plane of other folks who lay down beside you each night to dream the strange songs singing in your words don’t stop but run incessantly inside each other making other sounds you can’t quickly forget nor even recall within five seconds the imagery lasting even less than now is not soon enough to make it happen again… comes the door at senses wrung aloud some noise betimes the lesser on the edge a monster in the wings winging upward into the gloom of the dying planet wrung from its promise by the suck and thump of the gobbling screaming oozing figure in the doorway wagging its fingers all fifteen of them on one hand behind its back clutching a book which has no pages filled with the lighted words which fall upon the darkening floor without pity or scorn into some destiny afforded not too soon to remember which way the trail went into the gloom with no tunnel at the end of the light to guide you in forging ahead as you must where the signs are all backward facing with hoods or clothes laid over the reflective surfaces from which no elves sing nor beat the hollow drums which muffle the screams you keep down vomit in your throat assigns no rooms to delay you.
As if awakening from a sleep no dream manifest without words to describe the passage inside the stomach of the beast who carries you further on into the glade and tempo of your own reasoning to be alive carries the distance into color or camp or colony of friends who left their own identifications at the entry to this empty maze of unlighted corridors around the cold, burnt-out pit of indistinctness which allows no solution nor conclusion arriving or leaving at the same time the solipt night which turns infinite chaos into the universe of your own pinpoints of light at the top of your head to let the air into the worm farm glutting thought forms from their own empty creation heals the center has not held but sprung alive from its own destiny like another crop failure on the dark side of the noon into which you’ve poured your energy like a sump or further sign of the unknown inside your particular darkness rancorous puke on your plate of seams.
Heads on poles their tongues blackened with unspoken drivel the last moment heard in silent screams which rhythm from one silence to and through an equally silent further allowances for spaces alienated from their scum at the top of the dirty jar we live inside the hours made unpleasant for our enjoyment no less empty that the alternative universe we imagine for escape from the conscript of our imitation together of the hour at hand an apocalypt yet forward throne of the gloom’s intensity at the sign of this scoop and rumble in the hollow of your armpits are still mined by tiny bugs slowly devouring our entrails like alligator soup in the kitchen of desire uncorrected by the automatic function of the machine which glitters at the top of the chain of command centers not allowing for response or palliation at the screen of intent the formal details the looming post the foreign bags of soil dumped at the edge of the beach the dead fish this morning as far as the eye could see up and down the beach at two foot intervals their gills open their eyes open the birds giving them far distance not feeding on them without explanation or sign.
Fossilectomy of the conscious mind emitting doubt’s despairing wail into the ether culls neither promise nor the absence of folly relieving itself in your drowning hands clawing at the surface of the doom you pull inside your light from an absence of anything different on the horizon of the seconds smoothing away into nothingness…. She smiled across the moving rubber belt which separated us and extended her hand in a greeting I had encouraged her to give by my own simple air and movie, ah the debts of freedom freely given and taken which disallow misunderstanding from their emptiness of intent or fallow signs of intent and program, the singular appositions of the simpler realm which link speech to its hand-waving and eyebrows of commentary and the solid glances in the direction of the screen or the broken wave slamming down on the coast of your own meaning in the term and season of what might not even have been mentioned at the start of the day or at the end of time where we all swim upstream against an unflagging current in the sallow moon not gleaming but staring down upon our simpler acts left on the floor for the sweeper at the end of the day….
Cluttered from the upper down coast where the shallows teem with unspoken rhyme, the dealer smokes his lower face removed from the invisible shades of his blur and loon, a partition at the store not remote or smothered yet clean and jerky to the entering tribes at their own mercy for the terminals hooked apart from any reason or scenario in the night. You’d occluded this far from that but knot upon the seer and crown at fashion from the allowable present, nor remove, nor school them down the airs they crawl aside and hold
Dumb down the dumb how to throw? Lates the noir puta, she ‘has offered to let me kip at her crib while I suss out the scene’ ol Dirty Ernie writes. Adrift in the alimentary canal, dear Watson, no favor in your dog treats, belay that pinner, dude. I’d not remained a sentry for nothing, a few years is enough to call this hour dead in the water is late with the food… heals the deal, no future in the ski shop closing down early, but flowing like chocolate for hebron, n’ere due teal or out. Skim the silly duck frown, nox palentia, in your ear with a frozen billedeux held firmly vibrating skin at the dawn alienated (on screen) from hours crept into the dunk meister, late crap aside, vomit the red dawn from childhood strangers with no candy in sight, I sigh your melting new moon from anywhere on the page unattended lights rewind dumbshit tapes back onto the plug. Forced labor in the delivery room at low pay. Dimples wrapt in doubt like dark chocolate kisses from Nigeria in the delta of venus sad afar in northern eye-rack they blow jobs from the Inner Expansive Devoiders on your felt pan or fried lungers on the plate of wife and spasm Jimmy’s carder murmurs at the wing and span, no bridge claws the air rooster likes her more than naught eee, then fluxus dream the passage of rhyme beyond screams are night moves on the screen of taught or muther facture one car at a thyme’s own season at light’s lingering lynx at the mouth of the cave, teeth or razor blades for the rapist’s scorny, buttered slime dwellers fold a rancorous blue ox
The mist broke slowly through the rein of tear her into pieces for the disappeared at all times and reasons, another type o’lander, mute foxes rue the dei at beads of worry from the halter round the room, dance dunce-like, a pointer headed up the line lying time at time’s own idiot prince in the beige house on the poster boy has slipped apart from the dead walking shaun’s dream of passive identity aggressed toward the dream-clerk charging too much for not enough is regular capitol isn’t, there’s the rub and rancor chilling at your beak no splinter flux her rather like a dean of inspection at the front office, clock ticking only on the minute, pound pound, it’s a raw rue in the pan of life, cocked and loaded muffs your whey and spinky downtown craps the hooter up again formal lakes o’ land, butt her toast the forced entry is the day’s day inherent posts are loose or fraternal links have spread across the loaf-in-skye king for a day but dead at the end of the play, like history, like donuts, like another sign of light behavior on the road to better deeds imagined but not scene for a wrong time, “lead my rips” the restaurateur floated above his painted plates, won ton at a time, day by day a ray of light escapes
Letter up, flomax nauseous, wrinkled dayskin, dead fish walking, man in a hat says no, chinky longbow named him fluke of the ear, ding and dong the winning duo at the doubles doubles four at a time at the net, ark and triumph motor the cycle down the road of strife a shit sandwich laughing in your face, where’s the bred love movement at the ridge of the elementary canal has one stop too many doors, scanned successfully I’m told against my will and testaverde greenballs at the center point where the tackles wait behind him for death’s calm unfolding nurture of madness was the day’s particular fold on the skin of deeds melting from the friezes old malthus’ premature ejection from history’s naught and plenty, sucked dry against the door, as ‘i’m nobody who are you’ reads my headstone, ‘look for me under your bootsoles’ with jimmy buffet singing ‘the last line,’ that’ll do for my scattering of ashes soon enough no doubt but left for the day’s own beginning to be the same again you fold apart and fly away paper sticky new tone
Caught up inside the secret of my secret, worn trident not sticking to any guns at all but focused and tiny, a consultant from the other side rewinding my ticker-tape sense of something unregulated or dismissed… a flogged weave stuck on the dessert of undue proportions without redeeming characters, just a formal post stuck in your chest with labels all around the town clamming to the right and left tides against which nothing remits or pools afloat the husker due his moths and schisms… warm climax feels the say and toad his letter bomb unleased by apartheid rules from outside their zone of despair, not willing to escalate nor to rid the tomb of its graffiti proclaiming the holy czar a ruler in disguise no more but nailed to the cross of his own intentions to be on top of the gig.
Even the salmon find it difficult, swimming against the tide with their hands chopped off by the ‘rebels’… if they do it to them, they’ll do it to us, don’t forget that for a minute in your objectivity and distance from the frame of intentions decorating your bedroom with decals and posters to a non-existent fixion the name of which escapes me, fortunately. The yew of he is the imprint you left on me ten thousand years ago when we were hung, er, young, er, jung… now it’s splash and spasm, held prisoner by a love against your will and fervor, left on the doorstep with the other orphans you met along the way… I’m not complaining, you know, just musing in my beer or wine in this case… Ichiro made a diving catch, sliding his face into the grass like a ploughshare, so their pitcher nailed him with a 92 mile an hour fastball right in the knee, that’ll slow down the little bastard… not so, he came back with isometrics and an unknown diet, just like Joe Montana getting up the next week to nail Jerry Rice in his outstretched arms again and again.. and so it goes.
So in the mysteries of love’s anchor on the heart, like a dirigible in reverse, the negative colors of the lighted sky leaving the black stars on a blaze of white light from the glow on the horizon you thought you’d never see or tell your children about, duck and cover, it’s not too late a hundred years ago, the turtle’s shells melting under the force of our deceit. What’ll flex your tremors is the sign of the times evading your cautious glow around the edges of the plate while the food shatters into its molecules and poisonous, foreign substances introduced like cardboard in your yabyum or cloture on the passage, ah, the passage itself from gloom to doom, as if you’d dance all night with the queen of the savages only to find the ghost of your mother coming up out of the watery depths in the dream, a wrinkled crone, trying to drag your ankles and pull you down again and again.
It’s a pretty unremarkable substance, this phlogiston in the mind without pity or form, a languor passing for memory which is more like a quilt than a lining, as if liberty itself were just another mis-spelled work or trance-glance flowing along the lines of beast resistance, cavorting among the daisies while the dance of death plays on the radio with the best advertisements for anything at all undistinguished from the muter dee which clogs the arteries and chasms of the formal diatribe which seems to rule the day, seems you say, seems and seams of light which cannot be described or pushed away from the table in any passion at all, an indistinct atmosphere of caution and broom, the wild flowers on the land are growing taller by the day, their stalks as thick as the handles on the paint roller, or are you getting smaller in proportion to the folks who lurk at the edges of the day in their own drama clean and pure in the ignorance of their very clothing…
It’s the posture of the season, it’s the nature of the deal we made with whomsoever…
D’talks the robe of sadness a hole in the wall affords no view the fire in the gut a fathom of density you don’t resemble from the outer claims of your attentive posture in the skin of the day, it’s a hazard of small partitions sad anthemic songs from the radio the rope of sadness knotted inside time’s narrowing flight forward from sign it says remember not but slim her sailing yes and know the long ride home is still an accelerant on the face of things as they are the porridge of dissatisfaction acclaimed by many honored by few from where you came from no names were admitted onto the floor for discussion or a faience clambers overside the light blinding your muted tongue was the undoing of everything….
Your namesake moans into the room from where he was some time ago take out fools are the day’s recall some tine and fop attune nix poster plume scrim flatly dancing from the waste down the road’s unwinding spume and flatter. The room encoded for heat. Here ice calms the floor from smoothly ridden ponies at the gate, stomping and lowing like cattle on the way out, a sad dog in the newspaper somebody dropped off at the pound, less than humane but all too familiar, the troops crashing into each other in their hurry to leave the scene of their crimes against humility, just following orders, the orders of the day, the elephants in line each one hanging onto the tail of the one before and tugging on the one after, the old satanic secretary wandering the halls of unjustice notebook in hand pockets lines with the billions of our monstrous debt….
No, I’m not amused either saddened by the hopeless wander of the soul’s dimensions on this plane of doubt, undone by the measure of the sin committed allowances for error do not obtain but foal aside the woe of man’s undoing on the sign of the times – absent – says you name all wrong, even spells the simpler words as if the language were from another planet in retrograde sighs apart from a certain unwillingness to breathe the tainted air and psalm against the growing tides ever upward slowly washing your hands off the wall and onto the gene pool slimming red wine calls the heart a stronger moon than you’d decided wise enough for the fruit flies in their jar on the shelf of the laboratory, baboon hearts on the operating table, stapled stomachs for the teen aged mesomorphs declining aid from all but the knife….
Smile, you said, it’s candied camera making us all look just a little better than we ought, but seeing age’s wrinkle on the screen, tammy faye all wrinkled and sad in the last seconds of her moment on the world’s screen as Charlie rose into the air inside the big shoulders of his prison striped suit against the medium range muscle that shot him down another apologist for the devil in his do-rag penitentiary rooms unpadded stainless steel pottie your food through a slot in the door what else is new? They said you’d have to pay for this even without a scent in the bank of life apart from patchouli screen and tong the flavor of the way ahead is the unparted seas not claiming your faith for a passage through the towers on the thirty foot wall bristling with guns and buns in all directions the children in the dark and dank passageways stained by the urine from the soldiers high on their wall of seam and sigh….
This is the hour of which we spoke so long ago the faces are blurred and distant from all who might have known our time not remembered but laid aside like an afterthought…You dream the dreams of a man on the run with nowhere to go in the maze of strife….So I called rune surface and ordered up some dicks and spittle. The new hairy pothead book lay in the table, legs spread invitingly without a smile of approbration in sight, but the fortress lay unguarded and the sounds were coming in against my still beating heart, a newer fashion in disguise, I thought… her cent hung in the air like a pare of warriors in their destiny and fusion, no retreats in their surmise and murmur for some loser hands were in repute for the coastal mirage, links and flatter at the whore. Some will call this a rang dragoon all aisled in canal lox from heat to boredom in the same dreads notwishstanding… the antelope idled at the floor, hoofing into the noon with sentries, clusterfuck and dragon flags were spread into the rheumy present along with the demon.
No threats found, the screen bugled… the master spoke inside my right sinus cavity while another tooth got ready to bite the dusk hauntingly profunct, time for herbal endodontry in disguise, and another plexi-moto in reheat or funnel to the tune of not. Now it showed a blurred zero, out of focus, a surficial green in the heirs around then. Butt-knot Formee cleaned the walls feathered out faces in the grain of would-be planters at the door, maybe some were headed in, one touch fits awl. No more. The empty hours clattered on the clock’s stupid grin from behind the numbers… she pushed against me from memory’s rough stick in the nose and made water on the floor.
This is not simple at all, I muttered to my self which did not answer but lay there inert. The blue noises went on into another realm for inattention in the open seasons of the landing parties from beyond the pizza made of bacon and wheeze. Not ewe, I fought. It was just two late poles from the shoe-shine stand, rocking back and forth on their heals. “Stroke this” the taller pried, floating forward too soon to be enamored yet too late from the distance of the cosmos which illuded into must and framer. The walls yielded into season while the rough gantry pulled apart like a muffin. Nice for you to say, I sought into the micro-dog at the door. She barked my shins and laughed aloud. Sinkhole.
This is your fictional presence, I voiced, this is your document on the strange antics of the brain in season but left out to rot. No vice but the only. An indistinct reveille clawed again you ceded for the fence not the apposite buttressed and calm. Lorks to the due, but leave them left, not writ nor pedaled, mediafiles stroking their television sets against the raw but present dangers from disguise not peddled a file along children in the hall’s walls. This is the empty day, this is the fortunate hour, this is the monster at the gate.
Some deis nip the bud, sign at the bong and roach read, ‘how may we serve you?’ then left or rite on the master’s gloom unalided yet spoke now and then, some songs on the air between us, nexus and groom, post and beam, funk and wagner cleaning up today after the game when the stands are empty and the dry, withered popcorn blows across the acres of dust and crime which inhabit our drying sphere of influenza, long long after the barn door has been sold or stolen, it doesn’t matter which you say into the ark and science of these longings for a newer shrine in the heart’s emberic locus of distastes, the forgotten sentry shoulders his arms one after the other after the other and lays down among the other shadows to sleep, my prints, to sleep this fazzled woe of prides and reasons again
In the hours of the day which pole toward the horizon in unwilling gasps of delight
From one sign into the fellows who clean up after you, inventing their own dreams.
‘in the play of language, death disappears’ (canetti) fodder for the muses, troops massing across the pepsi cola bridge to the gods, the dead filtering into my slept apart and elbowed the snoring mate warmly, shoes piled in store rooms, bodies stacked like cordwould at the antechamber to the ovens, mute crowds from all times and places their faces blurred out by the decline of memory or responsiveness as the viewer or inventor itself, him or her or them or us, as the vision itself finds sponsorship by ammunitions manufacturers transported across the ages by victor boot’s airline pilots, fodder for the machine of death’s transfiguration from natural process into sponsored event, but who’s buying?
In the spray of lingo’s death’s disappearance mutes the solipsist’s escape is even found with labels in the empty pockets sewn together with tendon and spline and earsocket, the indian’s genitals worn by the soldiers who killed them, made into tobacco pouches, exhibited in Denver by the raiders, our own little bosnia in the episodes of the uncivil war’s quantrell raiders setting up gattling guns to pacify the natives into disappearance and why do you wait at all for mr death mister blue-eyed boy of cummings’ recall and flutter at the edge of our cynical enterprise the masquerade of progress while as Lafitte said the planet is bathed in blood…
Passing by the open doorway of the building where the whales were cut up, the man in black rubber boots slid across the liquid red floor pushing at the end of his long pole a cube of red flesh two by two by two feet I ran as fast as I could, the stiff ‘thing’ pulled from the car down the tracks I could barely make out death was death nonetheless the numbness in my feet smoke rising around my body from the small-rolled joints of death and dismemberment keeping me awake their feet shuffling through my dreams not sleeping but counting corpses being thrown over the fence one after the next in line was not someone else, as they say, everything in the dream is you (or me) (or us)….
The maps to nowhere sold from machines for a quarter of your fingertip, babies at birth sponsored by the hospital reclaimed upon non-payment for medical purposes, anything that can be imagined will come to pass through the generations which may elect not to follow anything anywhere in this dream passing through the illusions as through an eye glassly the demon dripping sloth and froth from nasal and passageways fumed with the decline of the slope of instability at the end of time’s bare munificence not remembered.
In the photo from the slaughterhouse, the fat guy in a bloody apron drank warm blood from a tin cup and smiled knowingly at the lens-eye, you are next, he finishes his break and gets back to the task at hand all this in the silence of the empty minded and broken hearted remaining on the planet while it spins into the sum and portal of what will not be spoken nor remembered my father’s ashes sliding like kitty litter into the gray black waters under the golden gate bridge the sailor returned into his medium which was assigned rather than chosen a life a life my geek fisherman’s cap sailing from the end of the boat after the sandy nothingness had quickly slid into the water and we all felt the shock and finality and emptiness and compromise and futility of the end of the moment we’d been called together for, my mother preceding him into the same waters with none to see or think or feel but the boat captain and the neptunian clerk of the shadows…
Mr. Hulu, set phasers on pun… aargh, capn, them’s that dies’ll be the lucky won…no scar bristles pinecone wilderness the foetus left undisturbed on the floor of the cabin in requisite simplicity for the coming declination of practically everything in sight of the hopeless breadline at the end of the day where the forgotten ones resound into the night with piteous misshapen hordes of insect people roaming the plantforms from their own perspective a woolen throng or a discard of ancient regimes in French perfume to hide their swollen bellies from the prying eyes of the pornographers clogging the internet with strange requests directed at children who cannot yet read between the lines or even on top of them at all, doom’s day at last, no more waiting in the wings for a flightless camp to remind you the day is emerging full of light and easier dues than reaped the past escarps.
The dark finally collapses in upon itself, weighted thorough and threw in the insolence of its ambition to rule the day which cannot be left undone but emerged from clouds of indef and non… penguins enraged by formal discourse are dressed in sidewall tires scuffed by the curb on your own require no answers in the male or female either will do to class the time of its own dimensions on the muse of plenty enfaturated en retard to the final day of claimant’s thread and future… the hours class flinty in her musk and seasons, like the tone poems for the decline and fall of practically everything in sight from here on out.
The dark finally emerges filled with light, another blended sustenance for the days ahead where an agony is replaced with hope for a newer calm which might fill your chest with an inner light which has no source but flows through you like water into the night and transforms the empty hours into a single continuous hum from among the whales singing ‘you’re making me deaf’ and then charges words with their own seaming from the tight knots of dissolve and penny. Your own discordant heartbeat slows to a single pounding and roofs your conniving spirit within its own definitions like a dove descending from the skies with a beacon in its beak, revived from its encounter at the picture window with an impenetrable plane of invisible penetration…
He posed in the dude for a magazine without covers or advertising containing only the buff and plenty from the cowboy world of chaps and spinners, another rough trade document was flung upon his doorstep by the boy on the bicycle who was trying to send his father to college so he the paperboy might have a better birth, working backwards as it were, or as it was in the past tense enough to plan for his future with some say in the matter at hand and legs akimbo on the straining platform where the lighted spheres spun and sang from the dark allowance and making the overt manners cling and spin and flow from indistinct quarters and dimes no matter in the movie only the cook gradually growing fatter as she continually sampled her work on camera with a solemn ‘yum’ in the evening of her marriage to someone who left strange panties under the carseat for her to find.
Again however a marker in the sand declines your invitation to resume your doubt, it’s just not working any more, and the alternate lies becalm you into a morose plug in your ears making the music less than prosperous aligned from what’d been past and former yet a promise to defend assumes your heated screening of the lighted sphere around you an emanation from the wind itself which carries you forward beyond your merest schemes.
Light gradually crossed the valley into its proper realm in the eye, held forth into seeming and recluse, but amore spoke sentenced doubt the image in the heart folded into other parts left alone too long to man the decks over imagined refuse on the open floor was still here enough to tell… her specific response was beyond all expectation even more than memory’s indefinite patterns of recall and mood. It was the stellar fold, a release moved into place by specific forces at play in the control and lax of the porter dues, collected again by the nature at hand on the shoulder of destiny. A fated pleasure was renewed.
The light entered the scene by its own necessity to exist at the other side of the room. Into morning’s rainy drips and sounds, the bird hit the window again and lay gasping and blinking on the doormat for some minutes. Then it flew away, no doubt with some tall tales for the others in the next, and the anthill was completely recovered in plaid and a red naugahyde partition which had been scrimmed onto the platform with a lot of difficulty since the nest itself was plush and comfortable in the abstractions with which it had been designed. A red box, then filled into overflowing with nouns and commas, leaves on the table afforded the luxury of dust bunnies plying their stock in faded levis too many on the other side of history.
Benign light filled the box with an energy and necessity from the higher reaches of the rung and tongue of the bells on theocratic hope for a future which was not assured by any covert agreements or contracts to the negatives from which they wrenched apposite signs in the hours again… you were there, too, sighing inside your calm exterior like a razzled poon forced to confess by the alligator clips swimming in your forehead extreme and functioned a room apart with no coverings on anything, just the naked skeletal remains of the porch and gardens uplifted by lighted spheres of influenza and recline, the diagrams for which no allowances had been made or even imagined, hence their spontaneity…
I’d leaned into it with all my may climates for disuse apartments led astray by the demeanor and calm of the voices which spoke inside my grain stems of thin, lighted actions from outside the realm of information, a padded form, a linked outer, a sentenced lingo in the field of battle and bottle… his hours linked mine into the larger purpose and included instructions for assembly and a measure of increments for the other sides of the coin. Here’s the deal – you force the issue and it still retains its force on the plane of intent… you allow the residues to collect on the underside of the foundation like some kind of specific rebar on the likes of the dove… it’s no assurance that the job will get finished at all, even the drawings have come in too late to do any good.
The flag burns by its own reclamation stains left on the unfinished portions in the hurry to get to a paycheck. The other forces are not well-enough designated to plenty their scorn or to flax the breadbasket of the whore and movie on the way to description… it’s a blue balloon all the way and nothing will stop the forward progress of the light returning through chaos and blindness, the reusable portions seem to be regurgitated by smooth all along the airs repeating patterns which did not exist prior to this statement or beyond all indications to the reverse that nothing would happen, because it certainly did, happen that is, let go by the bosses in the dark rooms who have nothing any more to say by virtue or by some resignation on the part of the voters who can’t count any way at all right now.
“The wall of the town sinks back into the moat from which it was dug.” Dwayne “Fight” O’Clancy reams his horse back into its tiny stand under his bed beside his worn-out shoes and stiff, dirty socks. It’s time to relish his favors in undertones of presence, as if now were not soon enough for a present moment to occur, let alone be perceived for what it is in the arena of forces at play. Now would be the opposite of the meaning it normally preserves for its own dignity, like a peasant in the uniform of doubt, all in blues and reds, with the hand demon-flag waving over the field of battle, a sacrifice and a boast.
At once the egg diminishes from large to variant, a number and a sign at the same time, as though ‘for sale’ didn’t express the true situation here, where the moon grows fuller each night and the cars gradually disappear into the night, their cats’ eye tail lights deceiving the warships overhead, death in the night without any warning or possibility of escape. Bits of flesh covered the car each morning, filtering down in the cool night air like a rafter in disuse, like a poison in the sink…. Any true story would be also brief and complex forcing the issue to retreat in memory from the rigors of perception, of remembering at all how this came to pass, this hour of doom which is at hand….
Rogue metallic shards revived all spores denied furthers, he couldn’t forget the dog with its jaw shot off running around spraying blood in front of the horrified family, tears filled his eyes as he recalled this again and again, night screaming heats and burroughs aligned beneath the heavens’ silent stare. The column twisted into the night the smell of shit in the air, the other soldiers shooting bursts from their weapons. High on gin and methamphetamine, the boy soldiers were slightly shorter than the weapons they carried the red the blue and the whites of their eyes glided over the surface of the day without pity or scorn. Nostrils swung from the lanyard around his neck. Anonymous pity.
At once the bits of flesh started to reign along the roof of the van in which they were mounting one camel after the next in imaginary races to the top of the noon-time play of forces around the room they found themselves inside but not identified as friend or foe. The largest day was still ahead in this moon of routs. The lines across the sand criss-crossed so many times that a spider-web pattern emerged with intersecting zones and no distribution to mark off another rude awakening at the edges of doubt and sleeplessness. Hope was a distant diamond in the rough opportunities made and abandoned for the forward rush toward an uncertain further on than not.
What made the sign desirable was its ballast on the signs of plenty and hunger. It’s no deal of mine, he thought, that this short story grows shorter by the hour, if only they’d let me sing at the top of the day, roistering into the morning’s foggy bottoms a senator in his underwear was enough to dream her faces hanging through the sky with colorful scene serene atonement the likeness of a narrative, maybe a tweak or two at the sign of the rooftop and bling, diamonds in the ruff and peat of the mosque he’d asided into oblivion with a single pop of his launcher, that’s gonna slow ‘em down, he thought, and slept again the uncertain skies neither welcome nor hesitant, but still the songs kept coming with no meter in the madness of the hours waiting to be fulfilled against his well & terror.

This was the other side of the moon, the darker side, where the tempos slowed to non.

Download mystery pluck, amity shrinkage threw flat teeth unrecognized by many still the few revolt nor minor, this airs nightly airs at night to seem unprovoked lets fly into the ointment nix nip nicks against their rides no pony in the sink flanks plunked lighted airs their raster dome affixed here and there, she weeps me plenty ne’er nor day aparted musk the liners drawn aside among not mixers slanted forward into the non flies trails not made from the choices moment to moment these destinations have a force tombs are not heard but sent like a slanting margin imagined on the page like a content intent hopes to stop
Strom ahem thus plucked her skirts risen overhead balloons into seasons like pity thence affirms some manner in the hours which come to focus along the seine and frenzy sound lumps emerge discourse at palms the pointer gradually lengthens sentence-wise at forms recluded favorite sounds are words two and sentry a miracle in disguise is not conscience or lung, then coma to flame, then fortune aspires, than folded time zones are included here dying from indistinct passion a small circle of lines would turnip one after the other
Proven by many yielded by few, the alert spokesman floundered sideways or flat side up then affirmed his negative posture with an unusual deposition removed against the tides like some liquor in retentive hopes are not yet met at air levels unconfirmed battles again the forces were not met at the top of the ridge but lengthened out according to usages that were let to a play of horses made syllable and ring of the ancient bard’s lingo punking out all who attend these monolithic disturbances are word-choice enough to clatter forward now and then makes the turning plinth whast affort ne’er plinty musk her slot patchouli’d an interesting development recalling all women in all times lined up in the mind’s pluck
Mighty ranger marfin sleds to snow me down into ignorance from whence I came at this world of plenty in the midst of want, we strolled historically from one dimension into this was not afforded the luxury of lighted spasms on the floor of doubt her withered limb this axe and dendrite axiom and send right the other day would call the refrain some line this your semblance of reception not a rumor in the mists of chants re-call the outer face this term this allowance this formation this lighted this sphere this aforementioned this this this flow this hope this butt this lady this child this plank this reminder this of some this you’ll say a fluctuation has occurred but not been intended rather a wave form of light from ancient regimes given expression at the sign of spontaneous composition again
More than filling space the line meanders willfully atuned to the smoke and spiel of the monkey on your saffron robes the dugout canoes flowing slowly in the current of light the repeal of history’s sad songs of recall and dust what leftovers were on the table now that there were no longer any vestiges of value or inherent keep sakes on the moan of new rooms undecorated, plain cement walls catching the light from the unfinished loft where the day you slept with a lion on your chest to wake with a kitten licking eyelids was more than anyone could imagine in the heart of the night with no poles rolling in
You’d slept too long in the heat of belonging nowhere but the flat spasm in the air which floated among your images and recall to the syntax of the moment now and then focus’d on the light you cast before you on the ground like a mortar or like a final bow to the moon which carries all intention out to the flags upon the ground with blood all around
Jungle deadline defilade the man with no hands points the way out, jingo headline reads the air in no simpler sate meant not plunder nor hold under the ice floes a half mile thick.
The ancient forest underneath does not think of itself as oil or anything else. O leonine one the air surrounds your journey to life’s beginning from what once was there on the farm a lesson in disguise your nuded back to the lens was my own shy forgetfulness in the morning of my own retreat in an academic beverage at the street corner in disguise.
In the bleak silence of the dream no sound from speaking lips a kind of telepathy for everyone in the dream is me, even me. A twangy music enters the cabin, nasal stridence indicates paysage at a dumber reach her head a mass and fashion from which to dance into the chimes blending nose and gay the letter of the hours in transit a talking blues rolls under the bridge across tumbled waiters two verses melt into one stereo bastion the lutes unfounded history is left over disguise in the winter holding pattern of the heir.
Local descent is threat and science at the alter the long walk between segments two afghan houses black and white trotting onto the scene looking for food, mainly, me. Lost is hardly the word for it. It’s a gran faloon, a blue balloon, writ wide not scent her out butt lost in ancient skies a hot air reminding the dream to rain you out of your hide and seek betrayal of your own prison clothing crumpled by the door or next to the bed’s chair finds you seeking through old offices only their names left from graduation day no sheep skins you by the drive in mechanic who nonetheless bought you off the hook.
Disguise is the treat. Bingo breadline crosses the letters off the page again, an emptying and a fissure words emptying the page’s said line a posture on the sands of rhyme heals the beating metro gnome at his pounding gavel on the bar of strife empty glasses all around I’ll pay again for their possible defeat on the ground a million dead the land in ruins for victory’s defeat after all said and dun particles colored gray men in gray units punctuate the air with random rifle fire from random rifles raised into the air kabang’d little acts by equally little folks wandering the face of the land in lost waterless circles.
While he needled my dying tooth we spoke of dental torture, well he said I think it was the tongue we left it at that yours the potent sighing filling sperm sacks aloft & sudden from whence lents were maid & used maidens from the lower arks of your spinal plodding from let to sight infernal putations where reflux connects corrects a sounded plinth marks musical notation into fifths unsealed bottles on the wall a hundred more in season leans her dazed reliance on the dream to undo any harm unintended particles remote the scan to reveal no threats or interferences you’d care to report any time near the end or not.
Many disappeared into foreign designations their futures professed summary intern the lair deep into the hillside filled with furs and diamonds by the traders who hid their lessons in the dark brilliance on the hot, black sands of the isthmus landscaped by bombs and leavings on the plate of dreams not positioned into sanctimony nor defeat not really applicable terms for the emptiness subsiding into silence in the darker hours whose forms are not welcome here any more you leave and find awake a bleak room you don’t recall. This is the hour at hand, the meat on your fork finding its own way into a dream as well.

We forget in order to remember again. Empty room, all vapors are in balance, I dream the red diamond hands and fingers block and coax the waters of life along the path of least resistance retuning the channels themselves into a less estuarial meander the sea-tea of which little is written… I alone escaped to tell the truth. Restless, impoverished and bestial in their abandoned style of projection from afterthought into a sunlit leader who’s finality is a less intense manifestation a silent hum belying a non-existence of the beautiful and the sublime in their traceries among the channels calm unbroken flow among islands
Restore diminished hours their presence a surprise on the field of action, dragons fighting in the meadow turning the earth aside in truffles of heat their moods unrestricted blues & greens and yellows turning outside the room a little less empty now than unfilled or least with signs removed suddenly silent a flat sky-blue plane extending outward from each direction in the circle of confusion reminds indistinct hours a recline or dusk grating from sidereal positions assigned yet unformed in the sentence of beating rhythms the boom of the flower and the crack of the sun her very presence a musk an odor a flying thing made plain and formal
I dream the red diamond centering my thoughts beyond the lighted sign it represents into my own designs are channeled back through my eyes themselves a recovery from which no sounds emanate an unrecognized fragrance evades perception without reference or denial, these hand-crafted hours no beer in the glass but affirmed among similar destinies their own betrayal a secret or a reminder to continue with neither encouragement nor any particular interest on the part of the accompanying shadows they lurk in the corners of memory’s indistinct forgetting how you moved along the long trail winding through the sea you carried your planet forward like a torch or beacon
The gnomes asided flat planes undefined within alerted spools of defined space alight with inner marks the lingering pools reflective flat spans re-recorded up and down slowly permits the dance upon the lighted stage a chance encounter made words impossible yet strung along from point to point the luckier continuing reminding afforded luxuries were not among the treasures left behind in the squander of music following the noises again these bowers repose infinite pitchers leaning forward for the signal from cap and chin the ruler’s bows escape notification from the glow and spark of the red diamond treasure
I know, you’d been through this before, another low point in the destination of the species misguided attempts falling flat on the air below your particular zone, a hooded elite unrepentant claims reduced by a factor of unknown dimensions to the open seas on the way from her name into the shoreline boasting your insignificance before you like a scream or grown air reminding outward the pleasures of the day are breathing and blinking as the air grows thicker along the sides of the trees at the edge of the meadow where the dragons are fighting in silence and smoke
You held me down and breathed into me with love and primal scenes diorama from the mind’s eye and plasm, it’s a blue balloon again, sitting by the back door in the sun with a face which says everything the photograph in the scrapbook relines doubt, carries on, lets.
Rooms. The hours open closely sails begin no term decried autoclave this distinct and allowable presence recalls the visitor at the gates with pillows uninscribed from doubt to pleasure non-entities fill the drawers with their very own incompetence, yet clear the sounds from everyone’s throats and spits us out onto the ground, a lunger rolling in the dust of the sentries at their little telephone booth houses a doctor who marks the days in longer strides you’d made against the tidal flats leaning forward into the wave, the surfer’s realm and formal inclination to be unending or marked by the hands that heal the air bending around the room informal and imprecise yet colored by a destiny you’d only parted the waves between sunrise and upset at the conclusions laid along the floor with the ordinary caution afforded the ruminant stain and single, heals the hours benign presence without recognition nor any frogs upon the flags by the door demon claw as astute years are marked a lot buttressed by their own clammy fortunate which would wound around her neck the splinters of the chase famous photographs living beyond their void in the history of silence ordered your passages closed for the winner made no sign of protest other than the calm removal of his face upon the podium of distress and history like a modern sign unfolded for newer portals let you scheme and dunt at the lower ropes hanging from the sides of the cliff as you’d noted beyond doubt or interest sold the parts their own inflamed destinations made passage another strain on the economy of light which flowed incessantly saying “here it is” before you could even streak across the skies with chairs floating behind a kind of parade in which the last comes first and the end is always close at hand in the semblances and partitions made allowable carried forth rid and denies aspirations are met not made or abandoned to the roller on the wall spewing its white froth onto the thirsty wood which dries too fast and later falls into the disuse and mirror of time’s rude declinations from the heart outward moods your ankles unfamiliar yet obtuse from less formal allowances made of dusk or meat the cutlets on the shade of the dead tree settling the nation into its own funereal progression toward the historical conclusions no nation can avoid in the silence of its own denial and in the face of such monumental lack of simple confidence holds these hours at bay in the finality of the moment each single unity a portion under control from the outsiders as they line up in the morning for more and more of your blood sucking parasites no less deserving than the fools they replace in the endless daisy chain of incompetent peddlers beggars and thieves who cannot any longer perform their assigned tasks yet monitor your breath rate from a distance of five thousand miles in the air an elevator to nothingness designed by the same folks who brought you a bird’s eye view of a lump rolling into Jupiter in the last days of the planet’s history you’d thought saturn’s rings were clay or fodder yet they implode as well onto the dustbin of mystery no allocated reasons given nor described merely a fate to which you’d hardly been a part and parcel looms the day’s allowances in bags of weeds and other offal remitted into the stain and blame of the compactor at the end of the road where you wait with the others for your turn to turn in your garbage for another week of saving and using and repackaging and reminding that the days are passing one by one you make the same rituals in order to deny the now of the now how it schemes and passes one instant at a time into the ether around the darkness which contains all the moments of all the times and seasons of history and memory that somehow slipped away and went into this allowable present for action and purposes of memory functioning like a room or like another sign in the skies that you’d just gone too far to turn back in time against the hours on the doorway claiming one time after another makes the space of these words.
They drove high up into wolf country. There the maiden priestesses would sew on her new nipples… they thought of as their own feral reteat…. Another medium predicted from far signage the emergent stains of the bleeding forest in its night time reliquary of heat and light on the hours clustered around from one side to the other with forced entreaties on the line of doubt which flowed from one continent to the other, the oceans notwithstanding how it fared well enough to encourage larger intimacies with the foreign band of warriors standing on the shore in nickel-plated underwear overall arching predominantly without pity or direction, an unschooled lot which basically had nothing to say, ‘tweak me’ went the cry around the fireplace where the old log went in and stayed long enough to burn away the residues left by conscious mentation. A force to be reckoned with, he thought, peeling apart the honey buns dripping with sugar and all the spices on the shelf of life from cinnamon to Marrakech. The shelves were bare. Nodding old men clutched around the countertop made of granite and disuse. The busses stopped at the foot of the driveway to let the tourists climb to the old adobe packing shed which had been built up into a hacienda kind of place, bougainvillea, fern and century plants could be heard growing all night in the still silence of the starry skies around the orange groves they would run through to get to the reservoir full of cool water for their summer swimming… all along the canals boys were jumping in over their heads from the roads which ran along through the eucalyptus trees which themselves had grown to heights of sixty or more feet in the summer sun… lettuce piled up by the back door from the fellow who brought them every week on his way back from exploring in the desert around town for geodes and green glass insulators from the fallen power lines…. She cried at night when no one was listening and it felt better to let it fall on the floor beside the bed where no one would notice. The radio played music which would come to be called ‘old music.’ Furniture filled the empty rooms, making them not empty. So it seemed. The old, rutted road was now a series of impassable potholes filled with gravel and stagnant water with mosquitoes breeding everywhere. The lilac had finally bloomed by the barnyard door, and the chickens had less than usual to crow about. Eggs delivered. The ominous, empty salon vibrated with willing fantasy about which the less said the better. No monuments were left untouched by the graffiti artists with their iraqui vests filled with spraycans of paint, a mobile unit of taggers, a self effacing lot of malcontents and slackers who seemed more at home in the dark hours between midnight and sunrise than others who slept through the night. The point was, the point was not to slow down in the least in the progress from front to back, in the alliances made and broken in the heat of the monument, cars parked at the apex of the hillside through the bushes and moonlight where the boys and girls groped and sighed crazily through the songs on the radio… an allowable presence marked the sign of the times within doubt and pressure erased like a novel or a short, short story – as if it mattered. He woke suddenly, the pressure on his face was like an informal passion let loose on the unsuspecting countryside, a broken dam in the highlands of memory and thought. The hours kept to themselves inside the clock, it was just not safe to venture out beyond the cuckoo on its slotted perch, making its absurd sounds every once in a while. The macaroni cookies stuffed with coconut slivers and the strange demon flag which waved over the side of the mattress and into the silence below them filled as it was with water or some kind of viscous matter which really had no description at all in the moonlit hours that they all enjoyed thinking that surely this was the very best of all possible worlds.
By the long way round, by the longer way stills the heart’s disturbances unequal’d by the task itself a long way between her and here, more than a letter from the mind’s empty corridors starting with ‘how long is long enough?’ Clears the air for other, larger sentiments of the day. Like, would we touch and if so how long is long enough, without exaggerating, answer me that one in the darkness of the sign of longing emanates from your lips and skin surrounds the rest of you resting…. Nada the poetry dog nestles between my feet on the floor in her attitude of patience and an afforded light from her constant heart which warms me at night on the bed around the way and waving one paw free enough to declare the day yours and mine long enough to call the time our own for once wanting nothing more than the longest yard claims our falling years among these longings and sensations which come again, again, they rest and call us out again.
By the hand asided, hands are linked across the water in the air which clings from intent to design the hands have their way waving in the time between spoke and wheel, affirmed at their intents and purposes by a signing lingo which makes fingers touch in a circular fusion undescribed yet felt like an open door opening again if you care to read this line from the inner marks left upon the grind of the wave on the shore clearing all hands on deck for the remainder of the voyage has you pinned up on the wall of my locker next to my pallet on the floor of the ship which takes us all along the coast of anywhere you’ve been to call in ports and distances across the flat blue waves of what comes to be known as the place itself unchanging and yet hanging around in the question of what’s wanted and what’s known and what’s been there before now and then you touch me deeply enough to call out in the code of centuries hanging baskets of hands are worn around the neck to ward off evils too deep to describe them make the day our own lingering tempos of bark and breath, or word and deed met in the air enfolding like something newer on the line of the quest as it carried us forward into newer days left alone among the shining spires of the cities of the heart and mind no less unreal than time itself which rings and splatters covering us with the residues of its hands.
By the heart reminded of unceasing tempo and scrim, the longer while recalls the place we came from in the long ago destiny of hours and flowers, none of which were ever exchanged but only intentioned into memory by the absence we sheltered from who we were after all unknown but not bedeviled from the heart and flours in the bread of life itself reminded us to sing once more, an old fat hippie with feet benumbed by smoking, puffing up the sand dunes with one last journey in the back of his mind, the days slipping quietly from your heart to mind makes the time shorter than knots upon the tangled skein of life and breath, how the heart mines its own destiny quite apart from intention or manner. As if you’d know or not how the heart’s particles are made of light and breath in the darkness of night flowing across these sands of mine and yours. So there’s a question and answer given at the same time in three distinct paragraphs which encompass their simplicity in segments which are not entirely thought out nor even clearly felt but which come from this deeper place of entry and discard, or, if, passing from the tempos we once knew in the dance, clumsy and unrenowned, now the hours are more than sliding into the ocean we live beside but surf up on the shore like a remembered locale framing the terms and seasons into color and narrative and eloquence reminding nothing of nobody in the outer rails which pool about us, our longing our hands and our hearts breathing on the tempo which most calls the day another dance described from these scratchings on the wall along the way to the patio outside in the sun where nothing waits but sings again.
By the long way round, by the longer way stills the heart’s disturbances unequal’d by the task itself a long way between her and here, more than a letter from the mind’s empty corridors starting with ‘how long is long enough?’ Clears the air for other, larger sentiments of the day. Like, would we touch and if so how long is long enough, without exaggerating, answer me that one in the darkness of the sign of longing emanates from your lips and skin surrounds the rest of you resting…. Nada the poetry dog nestles between my feet on the floor in her attitude of patience and an afforded light from her constant heart which warms me at night on the bed around the way and waving one paw free enough to declare the day yours and mine long enough to call the time our own for once wanting nothing more than the longest yard claims our falling years among these longings and sensations which come again, again, they rest and call us out again.
By the hand asided, hands are linked across the water in the air which clings from intent to design the hands have their way waving in the time between spoke and wheel, affirmed at their intents and purposes by a signing lingo which makes fingers touch in a circular fusion undescribed yet felt like an open door opening again if you care to read this line from the inner marks left upon the grind of the wave on the shore clearing all hands on deck for the remainder of the voyage has you pinned up on the wall of my locker next to my pallet on the floor of the ship which takes us all along the coast of anywhere you’ve been to call in ports and distances across the flat blue waves of what comes to be known as the place itself unchanging and yet hanging around in the question of what’s wanted and what’s known and what’s been there before now and then you touch me deeply enough to call out in the code of centuries hanging baskets of hands are worn around the neck to ward off evils too deep to describe them make the day our own lingering tempos of bark and breath, or word and deed met in the air enfolding like something newer on the line of the quest as it carried us forward into newer days left alone among the shining spires of the cities of the heart and mind no less unreal than time itself which rings and splatters covering us with the residues of its hands.
By the heart reminded of unceasing tempo and scrim, the longer while recalls the place we came from in the long ago destiny of hours and flowers, none of which were ever exchanged but only intentioned into memory by the absence we sheltered from who we were after all unknown but not bedeviled from the heart and flours in the bread of life itself reminded us to sing once more, an old fat hippie with feet benumbed by smoking, puffing up the sand dunes with one last journey in the back of his mind, the days slipping quietly from your heart to mind makes the time shorter than knots upon the tangled skein of life and breath, how the heart mines its own destiny quite apart from intention or manner. As if you’d know or not how the heart’s particles are made of light and breath in the darkness of night flowing across these sands of mine and yours. So there’s a question and answer given at the same time in three distinct paragraphs which encompass their simplicity in segments which are not entirely thought out nor even clearly felt but which come from this deeper place of entry and discard, or, if, passing from the tempos we once knew in the dance, clumsy and unrenowned, now the hours are more than sliding into the ocean we live beside but surf up on the shore like a remembered locale framing the terms and seasons into color and narrative and eloquence reminding nothing of nobody in the outer rails which pool about us, our longing our hands and our hearts breathing on the tempo which most calls the day another dance described from these scratchings on the wall along the way to the patio outside in the sun where nothing waits but sings again.
I’d come too far to this ironic flat to think of being alone any longer, so much for the well-intentioned past floating through your brainstem in repute no stranger lingers in the mists around your head…. They’d been there and done that, as the saying grows along the rafters of your own deceit. This is the focal plane of shutters and windows which open out along the parkway overlooking the river below, the famous pathway of the rich and lame-dust on the sands of time itself, a shattered elbow or a broken sentence, no matter in the lanes of the village itself a small destination permitted by truce and eloquence. This was the place I’d come to, satisfied by only one small survival in this destiny of sorts. No color. A room unburdened of its purpose, a small plastic card to be used in the event of my death to summon the bakers and weaners from their dark coven unintended consequences, collateral and damaged at the same time.
And yours was the message hardest to understand yet I fully expected it to contain the beauty of its simplicity, you being you and me being me, there’s really no other tack to maintain in these waning days of the history of everything. There’s even a path to follow, but it leads to the same quiet space, a possum skull perfectly cleaned by the erosion time brings to its passages, the gray-white polish of the emptiness we all inhabit. Perhaps it was still thinking, ‘no, this way out…’ but probably not, possibly an intern had left the remains of the day for us to find out, not a warning sign but a welcoming presence for the others to note as they wandered by on their way somewhere rather than nowhere…. A hard lesson to understand, a lesser mention to withstand, a nether region to contemplate, the dirt of it all, what we are reduced to in the empty moments after….
Yet the continuing clears the air of its unwillingness to interact without pity or scorn. It’s another busy, empty day when the very teeth of it are left embedded in the clay jar you drink from…. Plates emptied by the door, the food all put away into the cold storage locker, it’s plenty of juice on the gates of plastic and rhyme, it’s a cool air around your head that makes you lift up and stare out into the flowery summer winds around the cabin, as neighbors come and go in their huge, metallic rooms which move under their own power down the lanes of this beachside community where everyone comes to die.
The power lines are running smoothly, piping tiny electrons into the screen of this machine which allows me to write on the lighted, vertical plane before me, the silent tap of the keyboard a relative silence in the morning of the day ahead of me…. No, I’d thought not to be alone any longer, but there you go, it’s still the same movie running through the credits and the previews of cosmic attractions – the space, the emptiness after fullness and the rival tempos all screaming through the air like radio signals the day of the earthquake which resemble nothing in particular so much as a signpost for the cars to follow on their way out of the city. Refuge here, soup served every day at dawn, a carrot and fish head stew gleaned from the beach tides, no manner to the movie, it’s a blue balloon again, a gran faloon husting on the outskirts of memory, their renovated skins recall the day ahead in its warning signs not to escape but to line up on the side of the kiln where the tiny houses bake all day and emerge finally into the shopkeeper’s studio behind the book store and across from the building which bears my name. A lesbian book store going in, who’ll shop there, surely not me. I’m the last throwback of the year, a fossil mental case encompassed by doubt and history, laying the cornerstone for whatever follows into the night without warning signs or any particular agenda, it’s still the same layer of meaning that scoops and trembles, which slowly finds the words for what cannot really be expressed in this similitude of acts and postures which finally claims us finally.
The broken arrows cling. Rubric of fashioned lates, runic by rationed flakes, mirror claims revert no less than seven distances, the ball bounding through the hands of several would-be millionaires, it took less time to fart in the tunnel than to clasp the arks of defeated warriors on the rack of the infrastructure allowances laid up by the cottage with care. It seemed less than that, a moratorium on disease among grapes, hallowed in the evening of these hollow promises by other folks who don’t seem to care one way or the other. The calm indifference was historical in its spread among the outcast tribes of consumerism as if they were merely cattle on the prod and pasture. Overt as it may have been, no news was not forthcoming any way you chose to look at it.
Deck apes paraded among the scuttle fish or were just not permitted. No flash photos permitted either way you chose to look at it. Personally, I opted out of the whole thing as long as there was food in the house. The privatized houseflies tended to charge more for their surfaces than their impoverished counterparts from the pubic selector. Not. By any means, it was a clear sign of the end of things, better to move to Asia and become a cipher in disguise, a molecule on the hand of the holy one, wholly won, whatever. Yours was the anchor watt, hidden in the jungle with the rest of her booty. A lame man can tread under the stars while the rich monk passes his friend in the woods. Like a version.
Ordinarily, the best way around an obstacle is to redefine it. Passages on the wave of knowing. Allowances from the details of the post-ludic age of indifferences. I’d not seen the likes of him before the parade, something I’d read in the style sheet provided by the newspaper in lieu of a vocabulary cheque. I’m not heanded. Particled-out on the wood of the plastic house, papered with old dollars (and wait til they split again) by the hand that feeds them. Taking but a minute. The broken syllables of public discourse of course reminds them of their only chasm in secret desserts made unpalletable. No wood. Eid Haddam cloaked his invisibility without sentries or portables, their graffiti found in the playground waste cans, buried under mounds of hamburger wrappers and old shellfish.
So, the fiction itself is made up. Not a second too soon since the belief systems are all evacuated within the parameters declared private and not subject to fines or reviews by the sharecroppers who mine them (“Mine!”) – an allowable presence which clutters your foolscap inventions with rhyme and scion. Another loop rescinded, a monster bush in its past tense made eloquent by its silence, there’s the sympathy you’d expected from the crash of your beloved expectations. Hope for the worst and avoid disappointment, even the smallest trees in your orchard of bereavement will bear its smallish, bitter fruit, more easily packaged than knot.
The wurst of your livers and dyers, sunken in their 50-gallon drums in the courtyard below, blues and reds and yellows standing out against the misery of the cement corridor. Now you begin to smell the future rinding down on your broken collar, now you stick to your buns and treasons in private acknowledging that nothing will be done, nothing at all. So don’t wait, just pass your stones throughout the circuit of your mystery. Personally, I’d say “Punt!” and hope for a field goal in disguise, an untoward development for the opposition, leaving the editorials for those who still speak the language, leaning forward in expectations of community and compatible blood types prepared by your emergency teams in action enacted slowly across platforms of use and expectation like someone willing to expose the disasters of history on the palm of sand.
Prison ingrate surface. Grated communes linked afar no pleasure in the monkey shines aparted mentations their own globabble links to outer starts these allowed to speak by default the prison’s rated cheese less knowable than before in silence they wreak us down the lane no appositives gerunding among the sentence structures wherever sent to leak their poisoned secrets off her shining face, apple red cheeks pouching chimpmonk like the rest of their ilk. No more. Enough of these late-night rovers cling aside as much as not noticed in the babbler touching sighs among the peasants gathered around their fucks are lent to other nations’ reclusive dictators far less hoped for than episodic razz matazz inking papers now and then.
Fortunate to those who follow these empty charades is the layer upon which it all rests in the hopeless and the hopeful who populate the empty cities bereft of supplies and or flaming lips speaking tongues their own lingo portrayed as if internet speakeasy is not so much implied as rectified beyond appearances in the latent porches of your own diatribes running in circles have not indicated any position or color on the sands of time. Your own resemblance alerts me to some incursion here but properly described emits some rulers of thumb and nail biting has a formal preclusion inherent beyond the marks on the floor.
I called you neighbor in the rungs of less heat than before. But no allowances were met afar the sudden intersection boxed not stirred with straw mats on the door as undescribed one liners in the panties of fate restored by lines implied within definitions as if inertial to monuments we denied them one after the next on the plates and finishes of the wall before your hands unlimned buttressed apart from known substances boxed no rennin added before or after consumption in small children left unreported by those who just didn’t care for any interference from flowers at the mall one after the child borne by still birthed mechanisms where the last are the first among their cretins forced labor in the absence of any oxygen tanks and pressures let go unnoticed in any after math at all.
Still I call you down the seasons in the dark before us gradually becoming clear that none of the above certainly applies here to what you’d internally tossed alive into the fires of life the waters of strife fighting over every drop left in the heavier depths where the giant squid lives and thrives its beak upon the darkness of the waters one hand at a time you came up over the side of the boat only to find plumbing the deaths of others in a circular saw laying the floor down one board at a time. Stern master plinth and succor from the detrimental and lessoned heaves one bag at a time into the hold of the shit.
I moved aside lest she pass me by in silent stages playing to another empty house when only fifteen showed up despite a massive informational effort on the part of all the poets concerned with distribution and practice. The flowers themselves renounced their color, as if an organized campaign had consciously taken place among the life forms at strontium ninny headed up the campaign for the release of the prisoners ingrated on the floors of the tower again, yet heanded beyond tempo in their gray uniforms where they were kept from the prying eyes of the medium rare implications were left on the table. Still, eyed had ‘em now and then at the top of the hill your own corrections made more or less automatically at this point recommended by the ignorant hippos wandering the grounds with their weapons stuck onto their foreheads, rhino or not. Now the hour terms its willingness to be described in these few words as if some clarity were possible and rampant in the husks of doubt which retain their original flavor even in death. Still you call my name every hour as I answer at equally unpredictable intervals of color and top.
‘…the chthonic /comes up through the soles of the feet / blows up out the top of the head…like we had some kind of choice in some of this….’ Rant of dour poise, the joyous precluded in its history by a nameless head of steaming noise at the beginning of the day’s remonstrations you might recall them all along the quay at the climate of morning in the small fishing village by the shores of the Mediterranean. We’d not been there before nor did we speak their language. It was all nod and blink and arm and hand signaling to get anything anywhere at all. But that was its comfort and its challenge, more to survive the need for food and water than to correct the tempo of the ages, far beyond our intent or desire. Soon the ship would come to carry us south into less safe regions, to teach the stragglers dependents and the ambitious on the huge air base known to have carried too much too long to too many for not enough of anything….
Now the largesse was declared in excess of time’s flowing matrix in the image and patronage of the ocean itself, another mirror for the mind’s recreation of big bang sentimentality, expanding universes aparted from the maze of the heart’s discoveries. We’d taken the time off from life to explore something outside the realm of chance terms laid as they were on top of more immediate memories. The wide, paved oceanfront sidewalks drew upon the shops the chai houses the winding streets of the village at the foot of a cliff of volcanic rock where the road above had been carved by hand a long time before us, an imaginary landscape set in the midst of small, brightly painted boats skiffs and scows which drew out from their own distances into the deep blue waters which let into the sea beyond. An away-station from the heart’s disturbances long ago in an empty landscape surrounded by our own fields of dream and scheme.
Now, here, the hours recall nothing. The sand dragon ekes up through your shoes and eats your soul in its’ way out of your head into the cool air which surrounds you. Maybe not today. The glue which holds it all together, the joy connectives themselves have all but disappeared from common life, although occasionally in the shopping malls and parking lots of the day around us, some accuracy descends to open the door and let you see through and into the totality of what has only before been imagined or sought. Here is the tempo of modernity, allayed into some kind of willingness by the seeker and the quest, both allowed their pressure by the sheer force of flight and repose, by the hours and days of motion on the face of the planet’s increasing weight, moving slower now, finally coming to rest in an otherwise empty field, itself a memory of what had preceded.
The roaming eye declares a point of focus and destination. Color marks the distinctions from each other as objects melt into a landscape which is unfamiliar yet bears some accuracy from its singularity, a shock, a reminder, an allowance for the time served and for the observations of all the links and passageways along the cobbled stones in the village itself. The busses come and go from the center square by the ancient fountain where the girls come each evening carrying now brightly colored plastic jugs to ferry the water home, walking past the boys in their best clothes who linger at the edges of the fountain’s space, dressed as they are in their best clothing, showing their best manners. The reminiscence of this benign dignity follows me along the signs of decay and wilderness which surround me now – everything unfinished and constantly beginning again from wherever it was before now. Now is what there is. Now is the lesson itself. As if we’d made an answer out of this particular moment, as if we’d had some kind of choice… this is the hollow tree at the edge of the plain where the bees keep their own largesse and penitent calm in the hours of sunrise and sunset…this is the open day.
What at first made sense gradually became clear, for it was no mistake at all but a silence from the heavens which got my attention alerted toward the elephant in the punchbowl of life itself no match for what had preceded me into the arena by leaps and bounding lines described as if it mattered. It was love’s anchor caught in my throat like an onomatopoeic bit of phlegm, maybe the wrong word stuck there mid-speech. Love’s due. ‘I’m not heanded’ he cried into the dark surrounding him in the village of life. A cool spin from Jack’s knife upon the floor at more central concerns than thought first from its description almost let go.
He called her back. Tattooed along the ridgeline from truck to hourglass in the window like a flame retardant spoke and wheel were thrown a piece of clay in the hands of the potter’s wheel and chain smoking one after the next in line to speak softly in the moving days ahead were let into light by the chimes beside them, barely moving at all. Would you were here this morning to stroke my bow and chasm not filled but allayed by the champions at dusk no mysteries are revealed here and now but claimed by those who most simply let them be taken from the field next to the house. Nostalgia in the field of husks. A monster entity let loose in the depths of one’s being there in the first place but not entitled for release, not quite yet.
He’d been there and done that. All along the highway signs left out in the rain would not master the situation but allowed it to recur silently across the lobby floor to meet again in the airport under the sign of the times, ten, eleven, once again chiming forward glues in this aspect of life to becalm morning’s hard-on once again the hour in the glass. But held and firm. A distant memory in the scheme and pleasure’s wrap on something flimsy and diaphanous corrected instantly by the machine into its proper rasp and counter. Another clipper in the moon, doused instantly from self acceptance driven along the hilltops and river valleys among the pheasants at their tiny plows.
Still you drove the ancient highways at the curving rabbits spun away at night into the music from the radio which only made their suicidal march onto the highway more bizarre than not. Love’s anchor in this pool of strife would mark you out from the herd no more than any other mystery you’d never understood in the first place becoming more obscure as the days rushed by into each other’s arms clasped for comfort and identity. I wooed you down the days and marked another chink in the walls of the house the logs filled with an oily rope which grew darker with each smoky night they’d reminded themselves of the tiny lines around her eyes were now filled with tears as she read this.
Thence and plenty, a hopeful resin called the surfboard leaning up against the shed was not his, nor hers either. A silent teen marched the floor with his arms upraised against the storm brewing at the outer reaches of the empire wore no clothes yet maintained an appearance of civility even with unfinished sentences falling on the ground, a war criminal in no disguise but the face he wore for everyone to recognize at the slightest whisper of scrutiny as metaphors mixed into puns and reasons to call the diphthong an example of itself.
We paused against the wooden shelf in the hallway which contained my ashes for another life not unintended but made into what it was by love’s anchor in the sand marking the days and nights as if you’d made the time our own again and again, heeling into the sand like a moss or schooner at the dock making its way into safe harbor from voyages long and clear, prepositions aligned in the moonlight according to size and width in the games of life and death we all attribute to some other cause than our own wits.
It slipped on word internal residues were kept from the central concerns not blue and read but an allowance on the nether reach of your own, firm hand. Sure, I conjured your essence in the theater of driving down the road against the tides unbeginning in the outer spoils of daylight and magnificence. Structure perhaps not a portion of composition but the very opposite, somewhere between occasion and occurrence. The latent sprain. The other side of doubt in this arrogance of despair, the search for what was lost in the spam and clutter of the resonant strain, the “resonant strain” as a sub-theme or a detail.
This was the hour you left behind on the porch with the photographs still in the camera’s wide-angled persistence. A musker on the mask, a mother on the flask…. How’d you do in the hereness of now. Another diatribe marked in the margins with a thick black pencil. Rustus occidentalis, a clusterfuck of nonentity proportions as here the day begins in the morning a time to write and writhe. I’d hold my part a part away from you in the morning no hardon slinks the spoken word as if it were a noun or presence. I’d had ‘em, not no norther in his realm but the clarity of allowances in the marker of true.
Slick me down. Hold the air’s willingness as a portion or as a revival. A welcome unconsciousness would at least make the passage of time allowable or at least tolerable. That’s the rub, the open chasm of her sighs and thighs another real undisturbed or left on the ankles of doubt, like a regional map of the heavens with no legend. Ah, the legend of it all, how the figures in memory were more than doubt or essence but the laggard sons of the ancient due. Lates. The musker doon and let unasided in the misery of disuse, harking doughs the lineament of disaster. I’ll die without the inner sign of you. Hears that as a tuneful reminiscence. Not a dinger, not a quail but the spooner in the musk.
This was a single down, rabbits on the field with their tails spunky with lime and doubt; allowed thus, the skinner bean not nostriled yea no answer in ‘is plinny. Thus unspoken unstuck with his feet planted neatly against the wall, just to demonstrate his high kick. Some days I have some hope, others, not. A zinocular zimmerole, a single spam on this stick of strife – latent in its’ residue fulfillment, nor a special hour let on these housings and tempos like a refluxed carbonate wheel-lining made interim and spaced-out beyond the insignificant soarings held plume and serpent by the man at bay.
This stings the ark a newer rheum unimploded, net scoriations a plover in the nets. Not to complain, mind you, but to extend the nature of the conversation itself a more obscure matter than the flavor on the script of chance encounters which were not whom or secret report, nay, the hour is close at hand, when the investigators are checking out the other investigators however silent they may retrieve in their reports to the unknown. This would be the empty time of what you clear asided.
I’d reminded the sentries that we were cleared to pass and no arguments would be permitted rather than the endless argumentation from the gallery of fools who all suspected that the shore burst or the river passage would not have happened at all without some version of success or arrival on the platform of success and innocence. Better to be the opposite, simple yet unintended by the clarity of the monument signing in the town square rather than the elephant or the dirty donkey stinking up the courtyard without pity or scorn.
I’d said now and then held out for something more than the sunken ruins out there in the dirt, where the quality of the act itself belied the monument of its anonymity…. Here was the open hour of beginning and ending, of life and remonstrance…. Your own.
At morning’s calm indifference, the omens cannot be deceived. Increase, the measure of the sign across the table from me. You are there again framed inside the lighted sphere of action, like a spokesman for the celestial region’s housing program. Still hours have left night’s clamorous dreamscape in the dust again, orange and blue disks revolving overhead with their own symmetry and ballast. Might the hour calm some regional participant into his or her own declivities and relimnaries to their posts at the start of the rest of the sleeping hours in their holsters dispatched or held at bay for their redisposition on the calm face of the day’s descriptions marking this hour as new.
I’d clung to the myths of my own participation, nothing less than a moment in the stew of life’s vegetables and seasonings captured like alien features on your best friend, settled glances, children waning, the collapse of everything a fingertip away from real, these are the special qualities with which we greet each second from its latent back and forth in the time between seconds – a relinquished job, an incomplete paint job, the opossum squashed on the road like a thimbleberry or a gnat on the windshield. No dinner tonight for the lax and the posterior flights canceled at the airport due to something, some thing caught in the computer’s glitch and spam for breakfast again you turn the eggs by hand and warm them under a light bulb. Hold. Speak to tongues in their wagging frenetic prelim of content at the helm of the ship now squeaking into port with all men on board at the side of the railings waving their tiny hats in the air, anxious for relief.
And when you come again, the towers move and rattle with earthquakes of intensity recalled from the place where you left them, sighing into noon or tamales without pity and scorn, spontaneous reminders of the air and tempo of the forgotten song which recalls the heart to its destiny in your hands, a meditation on the song itself clears the place next to you for a visitor in the darkness of who you were last week, stranded on the side of the road with no fish in the tank. I’d speak your lights on are holding back the layers of this particular word on the face of time’s clean memory of who we are in this darkness and dispassionate observation from the top of the climate is now blue and green again marking the terms as private or unknown, letting the sports-bar clothe you in unsentimental uniforms left on the floor in the hurry to undress aglow with points.
Rocks your hours without respect for the others. In the dream tears streaming down my face for no apparent reason, perhaps a quality of life itself, maybe another denial from the nether region of thought left in the dark to monitor itself against the walls and sentences from which judgments are made again and again….. now we’ve crossed into the next year again marking these passages as if not mentioned nor particles of light found on the floor next to the wooden sign which says nothing. Other poems remind while this is simply a part of the instructions for a machine you don’t understand but which has been assembled for your justification in the face of anything at all.
Now the residues have settled out ninety feet below the surface of the dusty, red-brown clay known as ‘what there is’…. In synch with the followers who do not see the rumor of their own passing as a tone in the music of the spheres, your allowances are recalled by the forms you’ve given them another tenor in the life of plants. Here is the specific moment in time which calls you out into the sensation of being here at all, askew in its lingering essence but abandoned by the hand that bred them, your face smiling toward me in the morning singing the same song again in welcome to the tides and spokes of the wheel turning every moment with every breath from the depths of now.
These are the signs of day’s beginning in the heart to pull you forward into the light.
A self effacing propriety in silence finaled implemento herein laid apart from all the preceding as if no other roomed inside these dusky hours spent at the infirmity onshore revolutions called no outer meant to be the same no longer inside yourself with attendant jargons lined up against the wall calls the air around you more than mine itself but clinging to the tunes we keep inside at all times no clammier than your wet hands lying on top of the bar….

2007