buhdda toe

just when i could lift my head
above the dark teen cloud
here comes another one. the boy
turns 12 turns snarl and wharl
obsessive he plays a vid game
into junkie. i can only hope
he'll swim outta that before too loong.
i'm trying to limit the intake
get him involved in other things
like do you want to play a game
of cards or maybe put together that
circuit? and hey /you should practice
your bass every night cuz you chose
to take orchestra in skool i tried to get you
to take computer class so you'd learn something
useful but you chose an art/ what
is it with my kids and these
tendencies
like my daughter who wants
to bum around america selling
her art but not to just anyone no
yuppies or suits she says & when i say
but they're known as patrons
she says patronize this
heh, but that'll change after she works
the grill at stake n shake
for a week or two, a month or two a year
or two n gets stuck like we all do
just trying to keep a roof and some smiles
for her lover who's working 40 at the car
wash cuz that's the only place that'll give her
a job since her mom took off
to lakeland with a nineteen
yr old boy to have a baby and neglected
to provide
her with an id which in this day n age
is essential since the new patriot act anti
terror provisions have gone into effect
so bad that soon no one
will be bumming around the country
unless it's as tourists, artists
being persona non grata so it's my job
as a parent to convince my son
that even art takes work.

Sticks, when they fell, danced like leaves

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
it has a way of filling up time
and imparting something if not
direction
then osmosis.

a float in a sea of consciousness
jellyfish inn at the out bar


and the leaves llike air


in the virtual distance were battles and the texts
of empire. the music suitably background
but filling. as if ceasar carried an orchestra into carthage.
a sublimation of fighter jets and car bombs.
keeping the rabble in pablum reserve.
what to do with all these boy babies we've bred?
we know what to do with the women.




in the real distance commercial
properties developing under jetwash and bracken.
pick up a jewel-by-the sea for a song. register
under the dark clouds , while waiting for a giant rat
to come lumbering up and dispense stairs to a hammock
on his back. climb aboard, it's party time.
china and the years of the reds.
google sized fries and do you want an edit with that?
isnidious insiduous the pot warms.














*



so where to find relief?
in an examination? choose one
a
b
c
dilleneate dilletant, show your adherence to novelty.
smoke your pack a day and porcinely proclaim
my new rain forest a success the day before
the mountain slides down taking all those brand new
roots with it. the ghosts were dancing around the fire
pit all last year. didn't you see them in the evening
mists, eating rootstallk, chewing nodes? glad to have
you join us and i wipe the mud from my eyes.
we are here together where all the closed books go.
ah the langoliers. how cliche. how yesterday. ashes.
but the mud, as it worked its way like thick phlemg
into my nostrils then my lungs, an eboal quick pneumonia
began to soothe me. i always knew the way home
might be painful, but this was like a warm cave sloshing
over me, just don't fight it dn't panic
then i woke up here
you can let me go again
i've shed the shell














***







in reality it's sundae afternoon, sliding like a bad lover
into monday. cool grips, the sky is suitably nappable.
i want to wash my greasy hair in a long hot shower,
shave all my pits, climb into bed again, see what desire
pulls out of thin skin. all my obligations are met for
the nonce. what dreams might this day hold?








reading new poems and

schematics of old poems. watching
new movies and learning
that 12 isn't far from 16



watching time displayed
in the flame of the candle
mildly scented
pyromanic trance
the hint of smoke alarm.









it tasted like whisky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
so you drank it like a video game.
throat burnt with a woman's tit
and you for tat and nexting into the moment.
see how fine the caterwails walled.
a little goose, a bit of loose and then such nonosensitive
music. were they talking to you? to me, perhaps?
we don't know but let's enjoy the fumes
while they last. time for a remix and look, there's
beth orton on msn. next you know, bjork
will be on the fashion pages of people
in the best dressed column. pick a subliminal
message and stick with it woman!



mirror gun

and the bosstones of barroom brawls
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
final last tunes on the magic giving ring.
the wooden frog straddles strings
cracks a past right in your face.
right in your face.


what you do now sucker?
kiss it and make a princess
throw it and make a frenchman
flip it and try again.



that'll be 26 cents please.
keep the penny.



double shot of jose cuervo
and you can squeeze out the lime's line.
it runs from her ass
all the way past his fist.
duck



realising she'd missed the bus, maia hopped on one foot
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
did the rain dance on the corner of fifth
and tezaqual. no one watched as she removed
the first veil but by the time
ofthe seventh there were several comanches
waiting for the four fifteen. still maia
on the one foot, blushing in her pink angorafor all the world a flamingo,(she got the translator
on sale at the fea market. only a dollar. she
was willing to put up with whatever
glitches came her way as long as they'd direct
her to bathroom when the time came.)
suddenly she wasn't there anymore. the bus
came and went again, popping like britney's chorus/
it's up to the next passenger to decide what she was
saying, where she went.








state strate strafe strife
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
get it straight the father
he left the night you were born
left for better climes and slimmer timez
it just took years for him to get there
travelling with your school pix pulling him back
each time, they float now in his water
you know the body you gave to flame
then fire then earth then air? he passes now
thru all of them, saveable at last, with no pass.
o and he sends of course
the message you never got.


not this father

but my father was never there.
each night he'd come home and play the king.
she'd be shrinking in the corner
and bloom when he praised or cornered one of us
there with his logic and his almost love.
making me believe it was me
that could not live up to what i was
nothing
in his eyes. i never told him i could be rescued
as well as the next baby. why didn't he know?
it's not this father. this father is lifted past
his mist. takes of the woolen cookie tray
loves with absence, reminding me how how
lonely he always left us. never knew the meaning
of obligation. it's not this father. it's just...father.





and what of the last branches of st. loyala
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if the research bears out
it will show a huge swatch of history
benched on a gristmill. smaller and smaller
slices of the proverbial pie, a shilling's eye.

yes, there's a college with almost that same
scent your parents had, half moth balls
half old pussy ground by cigarette. the question
is how much you want to be a legacy.

oh scrap me a nametag at the o4 reunion
i'll be coming home susie. look towards the mountain
at sunset. i'm riding the last photon in.
can you pick me up at the station?

i'm bringing caramels and crocuses. you wanted
spring, now you can have it in four easy lessons.

1)light the sandalwood candle with a smokescreen

2)turn the tuning peg to the right.

2)no, the other right.

3)get good music from bearshare

4)if i go crazy now, you can call me superman



incense & wolf-shadowed tunes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
how when the sun's out
beating on the horsetrack and you park there
right beside the big suvs and the valet
sees you and tells you to move
but you're just waiting for your boy
friend to get his last paycheck
and the boys are in the back saying but i've never
seen an actual horse race and they still don't
cuz you have to drive in ever ineasing circles around
the flagged off valet parking area while the gamblers
and families file into the clubhouse area
itching to catch the last four
races live and up in the party
box they begin to yell and scream
unitelligibly but you're on the other side now away
from the pounding hooves the jockeying
for position the nose to nose and sacramental tickets
torn in two then four then eights and sixteenths
thrown into the air by losers raning down
like glissando confetti as you round the last curve



taken care of
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i caught the milky
way from a sky i've never seen
moon rose blood red and big
god's angry eye above waters
avenue, over the semaphores, forever
rising, falling.

she sings to me a song you dedicated
then, when i never heard it.
let's sing it together now.


outside this first floor window
my doors, shut,
i hear the piano play in that apt
you rented, on the edge of a river
i never stepped in.



there's a different you now, a different me.
we haven't met. never will.




in the morning the microscope becomes a refuge. inspect the welds. safety first. recurse into the small universe of surface.

at this moment the place is quiet polite phone bleeps, spilling plastic counted and bagged. but wait, here come the people.

useye test for ueer update: add tolerance for the reflector test. remember the blind spots

later it's lunch. i found an intermittent cause. the veins got crossed, influx of multiplex from bus a to bus c. the brain couldn't figure it out.

now we ride along behind the deisel hog luis in an orange vest holds his hand against the traffic. we stop. the mini bobcat creeps along, slowly. it's feeble claw hangs like a carnival game in front, some freakish carrot for a metal donkey. what of rafael, driving? he's lost in the morning's dream of fields of strawberries, stretching along the dirt road from one pavement to the next. there's a layer of ice over each plant which he must thaw with nothing but a butane blowdryer. and he has to pick 20 flats today to make enough for beans and tortillas tonite. forget sending beatris and pili enough for new school dresses. he stops abruptly at the ditch's edge. he does not know how he got here, inside this open cab, pushing a grasshopper leg into reverse, the metal jaw clawing at reeds, lifting them above his head like that scene from alien when the creature bursts out of the science officer's chest the very first time. he remembers pili got dysenterry though, last year. frost on the berries outside the trailer he shared with 14 others. he looks over at luis. luis is waiting for him to move the machine again. luis likes his orange vest, likes standing in the middle of the road, holding his hand out to traffic, his hand bare, head turned away from the oncoming cars. rafael asks luis in cafe guadalaja at lunch why don't you wear the orange gloves when you do that? luis just shakes his head, runs his finger down the edge of the picture of pili that rafael gave him last year thinks of the birds they released on the day of the dead.

~~


refugee
Unregistered User
(2/15/06 1:46 am)
Reply strong as dopamine
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
we learn in reverse
review recursive tide
a shill to bide. the oil runs
quick as blood thru our engines
pumpishly. what will will you
take with you refugee ?
better to let them shoot you
in your streets. let's have

a study break, one where we watch
termite bellies splice onto bacteria
and distill ethanol from straw. let's
drink it in big hummer gulps, pretending
the short term lack of orangedog butterflies
won't lead to a price increase in our
morning juice. let us ruse, from a 450 feet
away, and put our brethren behind
the last bars we'll ever need-
the ones etched in our eyes.



indiana, what blue skies hovered
over you above the wavering gasohol
lines wrapped like mirages across the desert
and when can we lie in you again?



this is written somewhen in the early
part of a decline of an empire. lead
poisoning, too late to stop the euclid smoke.
eresis, the will of entropy and ebony
gleaming in a milky way. i'd like to die
in new zealand, watching those skies.















ii















the martin strings are shrill
but resonant. i understand the incoherence
which makes this unreadable. but it
behooves me to write this way,due to the influx
of sinister atoms across this vector.
this is code for tomorrow.
argentian football stars dress in the shroud
of turin and parade on olympia. no one
notices. the sheer incoherent apocalypse
each prophecy fulfilling itself, prophetically
the powerful playing their roles, and we bit
actors dying on the beach of saving private ryan.

gimmee all your filthy lucre.
marketing for pop u lar i i i ty
where in all this
is the face of god?
look around you they show me
it's on everything green.







III






the song is off key tonite
but the timings almost alrite
no it's a reggea and it's not sposed to be















***
take 5.


sometime it was they set up camp
late in the afternoon. lyre would take the pot
off the back of the wagon, samuel
would gather wood. she'd place a gram
of fresh water, sweet from the high mountains
were the benzene had either filtered out
or had never landed in the snow. himalayas
she remebered the sound of it, the towering
ice,the heavy waterskins, the quietness
of the gieger counter, the clear test strips.
their fortune lay in the slow descent, melting
just enough to fuel them . if the sun stays
lyre thinks. if our arrays hold out.
they set the panels up toward the west to catch
the last of the sun. rootstalk and potato.
carrot and apple. steamed. nuts rounded the meal.
samuel uplinked to their contacts in beijing
the stars were close
there few lights below them anymore.
















****





what would you take? these drooping petals
effluvian traps, the sixteen years of school pictures,
a poem your first dead girlfriend gave you what
would be in your box as you move along the high
road, between the river and the ocean, northward
and out of the sea? the tides will take it all.
let me just take a rest here on this banyan stump
i remember when
i remember i
remember.

hunting soda pop

in the middle are strafed hands,
a tiger. she cocks her stick figure
head sideways,looks down. yes, a belly
of cat, stripe, wink.

she wanted to write so she sent him
away. now he snores on the mendicant rail.
labours with concupescence. nicknames himself
cupid. she offers him bow, arrow, target.

he takes them into the laughing subway
where couples drift idly, dandelion damsels
sycamore gents. the trees are all in pine.
he stretches his claws, cut at the knuckle.

he grabs the headlines, puts his face thru.
senselessly the arrow flies, aimed into the next
fifteen minutes. hiss snigger snort snot
he's on the bus again, beggin bux. she won't

forget him now. she can't.
she never knew him.

your face torn like too many numbers

--i would like
to stop being such
an organism--

methmaker



he intrigues me, probly
not in the way he could like
i am fascinated by his ability
to speak coherently in the midst
of his insanity. as if conversing
with artuad. his poetry unmasks him
but you still can't see his face
it's like the title ofthis post
which he also wrote.



in my room, a rose
unfolding. outside the tree's dance
and sunlight angles in fromthe west.
the day receeds and i wish it
to remain in this positron for long
stretches of time. but the spinning
continues. there are 10478 iterations
of this particular genre. this is a mere
fraction of what reversal requires.


pump up the power.



we got our bed from the dumpster
where used furniture is placed
the other dumpster is a trash compactor
both are situated near our front door
so we can see when there's room
for our trash as well as the cast off possessions
of our itenerant community. the painters next
door, illegal mexicans hauled from the tejas border
in a rolling ship over the hurricaned gulf last fall
your face torn like too many numbers
having finished the job here at the homestead
have gone. the pods unit which stored latex,
ladders, canvas drop cloths, rolls of transparent
plastic, bushes, stools, spray cannisters, compressors
and other painterly paraphenalia hauled off one weekday
while everyone was working or at school. now there
are only ladders and broken chests
of drawers, televisions praying
for a technician's screwdriver and beds
smelling of cat piss beds full of fucked and fuck you
maybe crabs and broken heads, broken marriages
he says we dn't want to sleep on someone
else's bad luck. it makes me pause. smell the corner
of the queen mattress hauled inside
from the dark, examine it for rips. haul it back
outside with its shiney suit aroma. a pink and blue
mattress, has the scent of talcum.
it's not very stiff. it waves oak branch in a storm
as we muscle it inside. queen size. fits the box
spring already here. boxsprings are not as intimate.
we keep the mismatched pair.




sun calls to me
says you are hiding why
don't you take your son outside why
do you huddle? i'm tiching itchy from this morning
your selfishness come to light again
you don't understand my selfishness is to teach you
about short skirts, long jackets. how to wear them
inside , make the diamond in your veins.
it will leave a scar so thick you will not feel
and isn'tthat what you want?


i think i'll write dilato. he doesn't want to be that anymore.
i can't say that i blame him...

i let your story stay with you

or...

silence


i can't really feel to write
unless there is only the background noise
wind cinemas, chiming leaves, the vid game bass
snore of a child. off in the distance
a white bird curves in to the air of basketball playas




in some future time the phone rings
it's the house in the hatteras
making bread for the coming attractions.
it needs instructions, a map.
i search the laurel leaves for big reasons
but they are only whispering
in a subdimensional spawing river.


this is collaspable mess. the itenerant chaos.
if i were to write what we will not say
i'd speak to you from the seat of love.
buti've been told how passe that is. how dis
believable. that my love causes your pain.
thorns on your crown. so we'll leave it at that.
thistle in the train bracken.


speakin poet number 5009


he would have been
but he didn't because it was never
enough , the warm yellow glow
the cold blue gleam. he had
to have mystery
solved
keys made, then tossed.
he remembers all the lost
entrances, returns to the gate
over and over
but never goes in. he cradeles
in his tongue the unnameable
a curdle against the night air
bathed in the a mist
only he can make.















she widens the gap between
what we know and what we see
so that we may view these interstices
in microscopic cornucopia
with the eye of eresis

what bakes is a crust
filled with your choice
and her voice.















she grabs the brush
hints she will paint
with her own blood

the color is white
on white when a flame
is held beneath. lemon

joice and salt. the taste
of caligraphy.















why did god
for i know there is god
i see her sitting
at my table between john
and the baby, a holy guest throwing
basketballs into the gravy, and of course
there's thunder
some magnificent trading of babe
ruth cards with a fifth
or some other pokemon pararphenalia
and billy june at the stove
frying eggs in the very skillet she killed
the old coon that was raiding the coop and takin her babies'
food right out of their mouths
she has no cotton with the animal
right's activists wears the tail
as her winter coat collar and god he
says let me see that coat so billy june
turns down the grease and heads off into the back
to get the item and god winks
watch this, and billy june
screeches then heavy pounding thrumps
she runs right thru the kitchen past john and the baby past
the eggs and god right out the back door
which slams
against the clapboard then
then pings back to the sound of god wheezing
he's been laughing so hard and the baby
she'slaughing too and john looks per
plexed but amused, finds himself with
hesistant chuckle he balmes it on the babe
she's so adorable
in her high chair watching god watching
down the hallway as a momma coon
works her way to the still vibrating door
trailing a camel hair coat filled
with a litter of pups.















i've been to india
i have thru indiana thru new
york your eyes and forgive me
i took a bit of your soil
and nematodes i thought it would look good
in the grecian glass bottle i stole
from the base of the last lost parthenon
nest nexted tothe dry roses of rasputin
i am not a thief i am
a curator. can't you see
the difference?















in the dim jungle of translational geist
you go exploring. there is a tiger.
there is always a tiger. this time it wears
a short skirt. her eyes are like the river
where you grew. you embrace her sense the aura
of her lips. then you wake up. fuck!















he's always on some ship. always rowing
or sailing or drifing always tacking and steering
finding the channels you left behind
or the ones you might want to visit he's always
on the water. it's because he loves flight.















wehn she held the plate out to him
his eyes were golden a place she wanted
to fall into and core up to. she could not speak.
she called him daddy. she could speak
but never talk. she did not understand the language.
the wind blew an owl to her window.
she sat for a while with the glass between them
watching. thenshe opened the sash.
the owl didn't move because it was
never alive. it was a wind sock from the neighbor's house.















the black carrion crow she prefers
to call chicken
hawk coasts on the wond over the pond.
when it sees some accident
it will land and devour the corpse.
this is her totem.















ah the blankets of winer a winter's diviner a shining
example of noise and china. you the bull
me the gandhi blown graduate of grand pianos,the nose
of the elepants sticking out of the plants
i laid in the garden last fall.

she follows me down the epicenter's path
tied to the tinkling bells of tiberius
we grab pistadores and conquistadors, the belly
dancer's toe rings and rattle on our of there.
she never could keep up. this was due to her
drug use but i forgave her all sins and washed her
in the my river stix. that made the mix so missy
we bondled the last of the wheat,
head off down the mountain
to trade for ochre and cobalt. the indigo
sky was sly as she lifted the last of her lashes
and flashed us her mastical sabbath. we say
shabbat in the present tense, pitch tents on the face
of permithian fools, and settle in for a nice long nap.
















and there is in all this//where.. i
you know me//i..
sit a vessel for e/mot/ ion
pain . joy. but alwaze ill.
undertow of laundry laudenum
breaking waves cold.ness. my fate
my love/r my face my cold cold dest,i.ny.
my mirror
you















she is dreaming again
a race, a satellite, a clown's face.
they all enter her through bird chirp
and pole sit. she steps back steps
through the river. it isn't a river
at all, fanciful pictures she's
designing right now to stave off the taste
of addiction. to smother the smell she inhales.
she owns it. all of it. she will not let you
take hold. this is her pointilistic movement.
you may watch.














and if the existential should prove
to be the warmest blanket, what then?
high blown gnosticism and a lilliputian
candy vendor? he buries all thought of beret
in hooray, rides the channel's fast flat flip.
he's hunting water,tho he doesn't know it yet.
he packages the angst then recurses. packages the angst
then recurses. packages the angstelangelious
and breaks free, looks around it's the same old pundits
the same old pound.


and she //they move
as a pair bi//polar
attraction trading yin
and yang and yen
something to believe in believing
in all of it therefore none of it.
they move toward the chasm
in the rock, whitewatering
tracing declivities
and moon cycle.
tides of wheat embrace them.
she dances and drinks and writes
another dance. she is majik
when she blows. she is wind and its vortex.
he rises.
















listed and in short form, obelisk cat. he calls to them
but they're not home where home remembers. he draws on skin
then posts it on the internet. his rain begins.