Departure

for Jess

Necessities pull us
in different directions,

but we'll be together
again in a matter of

weeks: Hardly necessary
to say goodbye but for

the opportunity of
further kisses. And I

still have your fingerprints
and your body heat

remembered to keep me
"up" as well as the scent

of you in my beard, plus
your gift of your own

black panties with white
lace that are now my

funkadelic relic. I will be
transported to linger

in the illuminated humanity
of your high scent. These

strive against all that I could
say, for touch extends

beyond my ability to say
how grateful I have been

to spend these days with you,
and that your gentleness in me and to me

is the vain song that proves
this closure, as the opening

of feeling a single teardrop
that I cannot account for

but that I give it the name of
my love for you, as it falls into

the elixer, which boils up
and out and overflows

in whirling trance, accompanied
by daisies and a simple

sparrow's song: These elements,
this momentary sadness thus

gives us a ladder to climb,
for soon this desire will

return to me and my arm will be
around you and we will be

walking arm-in-arm
up from Place du Republique

along Rue Magenta, past
Gare du Nord and toward the

white temple of Sacre Coeur,
which looks rather like

the Wizard's Castle in Oz.
These hopes are a spectre beyond naming

at the moment, but to say
the magic names "wind", "fire",

"star", give us the grace notes
from which a full symphony of

life can't help but follow after.
For now, the sun, moon and myriad

stars will have to do, and without
mere rhetoric that they may appear

as guides and inspirations: Every
"I" that longs for you

awakes in me the still dark
morning in which to prepare

for the harvest of your
indelible presence, and to do

and undo, various of the charms
by which I (re)lease myself to you.

I will lease myself to your love,
and I shall be released in it:

To liberate each other, and bind
to the freedom of being

close: This is the impetus
my desire for you brings up in me.


*

Arousal

for Jess

That you like to have
your fingers gently

pulled, your hands
massaged along with

your arms, shoulders,
back: That you like to

kiss in the most fulfilling
way, or the way your

tongue moves in my
mouth: That you like to

have your nipples
kissed and licked

and sucked in ways
forceful yet tender,

and that you like to have
your pussy licked

that way too, that
makes you come so

beautifully: With one
hand under a thigh

and the other on your
abdomen, I can feel

your muscles tense
as if this jointure

were a prime creative
endeavor: Bees

fly out of our love-
making, and make honey

under the bed. The guttering
fire of your orgasm

reveals a deep canyon
that is yourself, which is

filled with your desire:
An analogy of the honey

the bees come of our
love-making make.

Love needs a canyon
to keep it from spilling over,

yet no landform is
large enough to hold

that heat at bay: Only
the human heart possesses

the tender stretch
than can accomodate

endless lunar estrangement
and endless restless

seas while remembering
to kiss The Beloved

each passing instant
to keep any instant from

passing: We accumulate
in order to grow into

something foreign
compared to what and where

we each are now. Embrace me
by forcing me to go

on my way, to discover
in time how to change vanity

from merely personal taste
and incidental rule from

the shadow of a king, to
the song of what is, and how

I want you to be in it.
Our keys commingle,

always. Your face is
no longer to me my own

imagination of some
swarming sweep of stars

in a night sky. You are
Jess, and your night calls to me

are drawn of all that is
as natural as earth, air,

water and fire. I am now free
to love you, just that

the configuration of your
movements has unlocked me:

You are simply you. Forever
part of the tale of my unfolding.

How could I not forever
come back "here"? Here,

then, simply wherever you are.
And although neither of us

will outlive the rhyme
we each make of the other,

this momentary illusion
that yields a moment's rest

still has the value of
a few short hours' sleep,

before the indelibly
delightsome imprints of

each of us on the other
appears again, as common

as weather, and as
consistent and surprising.

Fear is a scab, afraid of
its own crimson eruption.

To prevent it would be
to disown some link

in the chain by which
we remain conscious.

If our love began with
an imaginary heave of

words to build the lintels
of a doorway to a future,

then the future has come:
Who could have imagined it?

Stars, moons, meteoric
metaphors that stoked

the secret flames of
rocks, trees and streams:

Yes, very nice. From this
I learned to walk

through the door, and
enter a world where both

of us could actually be,
embodied without words, so

my eye could finally dwell
on the horizon of your face.


*

I Am with You What I Imagined Myself to Be

for Jess, in Mt Holly

Lust moves into
the lustre of the glow

of your face, and moves
my memory as

the medley of crevices
through which my hand

gently passed, the melody
of enhancement to

know your every bend
and stretch and arch

as if you were a sistrum
and I simply the presence

to whom you sing of
illustrious petals blossomed

and lost and reblossomed
over the years through which

human time and hope
can have its fear, while

the mortal tenderness
as my fingers in trace

through some part of you
is a music that stays

and drifts, like some
perfect cloud seen moving

on moving waters,
or my own face, reflected

in tranquil outline in
the darkness of your eyes.


*

Intoxicant

for Jess, in Mt Holly

Now that I finally have
your scent in my beard

and bracing my throat
and my chest: Now that your

face is tattooed under
my eyelids forever

so I can't see
anything but you when I

dream, and see always
your residue in each

daily object and event,
I want you to bond me

as one of the many
bail bondsmen of this

town might bond
a suspect of love: Let me

go loose in you, and leave
in me the emotional

equivalents of your
scent and my memory of

your loveliness and let me
lie in the domain of

your perfect touch: Let
my finger run down

the wetness of your
opening crease, let me be

the hard Tibetan
diamond sutra whose

only wisdom is to act
and do everything

in its power to carry you
along with me, across

High Street to the library
steps, or to some silly

downtown American
gazebo, even Paris or

whatever points in any
direction, to be made

perfectible so long as
you're there, even beneath

this longing I feel, that
you've been gone a whole

four hours, but that I
at least have on me still

your fingerprints,
and the delicious fragrance

of your lips on mine,
and the smell of your

pussy still burning in
my beard and the feel of

your body against mine:
The wheel has turned

in me and against me
and for me for many

years, and whose turning
has between us been

the cause for much
erotic friction, the pleasure of

rubbing hearts and minds.
I will never want to

stem those tides, but
want simply to address

the question of gold
upon the darkness of

early morn: When shall we
find harvest in this

endless circling? My mind
about you is constantly

made up and undone
as you come closer, as you

reveal yourself to me
and as you reveal me to

myself more than anyone
has ever done, as I discover

myself in-dwelling in your
earth hold, or then to be

held in this way of which
you are so capable, even with

your eyes alone: To be so
regarded swells my equinox

and I rise to the ripening
scent of your radiant

smile, and yes, these point to
some higher resolution

for again I arrive at
the simple wonder at

your heartbeat when my
head lies on your chest:

O yes, my accomplice
in all things beautiful, this,

in you that sings sweet
out-of-tune songs

yet also knows how to
roar: It is glory, not

"imaginary" love, but
our actual selves in

the adventure of love's
imagination of itself

through us: The thrill of
the cup that cannot hold this

overflowing, whose flood
comes ever more into

its flooding that pours
through us with such

tender force
that we blush.


*

Jasmine Lovers

for Jess

The architecture of this
invisible circuitry of

desire I feel for you:
The beauty of your

moans when my palms
approach to the sensitive

shades of brightest temper,
for your body is a leafy

bower under which to
linger and in which to

pass the hours by our
touch: It has the effect of

annihilating all I thought
to bring to you, but

fuel for your further fire,
and some lines to evoke

the power of your laughter
that stuns fate and makes it

stream with golden honey
from which creation may

arise, as I rise to you,
my face a royal cushion

in a house of stars
for you to sit upon, and I

with my tricky tongue
to help you drink more

deeply of their light, for
I shall be your adornment

and will teach you to
see yourself in a mirror of

divine signs: In the night,
your body will be as stars

the brightest of which
I will suck close to me,

and press my face against
their brilliance, for you are

the gateway of licking,
swallowing, darkness

and lechery, you are
the sensuous Persian lilac

embrace of lovely midnight
indigo blue, come sweetest

between your legs, as
your hands run across

the movements of my body
gone deep in you, like magic

shuttles, the French navette,
which also means

incense-boat, your fragrance
I want on me always

and have always at my side,
to lift my dreams into

the country of your
countenance, even as I

sleep and dream with
my fingers entwined in some

bit of you drawn close:
In India, is a mountain called

Lilaeus, that breaks
into a black stone called

clitoris, which the local
woman use to adorn their

ears. Turn your head
that I might lick your lobes

and gently stick the tip of
my tongue into the hole

from which you hear,
so that our love language be

as the sea, poluphoisboios,
the sound of the sea

slopping against the shore
which gave Homer

the rhythm for his epics.
And you are epic, O primal being

moving thus through water
and a moisture all your own,

patronness of marriage of
all the elements, gateway

to love and life and even
the death of all I ever thought

to be, seeming now non-
existent without you wrapped

around me as if to give
everything I am, the form

of love's embrace: And thus
I worship you with

mysterious nights and great
processions of lanterns,

by which to see you, know
you, as self-sustaining,

unknowable yet all-pervading.
Bestower of love and joy,

you nevertheless have
an unblinking cobra eye

in the middle of your
forehead, mark of unceasing

attention, and wisdom.
I hear that you can bring

from it, a scorpion's tail,
but I am quick enough

to snatch lightning right
out of the sky, so I am

not afraid. I come to you
for nourishment, Celestial

Mistress: I am just a humble
thief who will be honest

with you, if you will only be
for me, the lovely sycamore,

many-breasted, and with
figs between your fingers,

your toes, under your armpits
and behind your ears, but

especially between your legs.
You carry with you

a load of sweet milk
and the chaotic darkness of

an even sweeter nectar:
The creativity of the Creator

becomes his creature, you,
and now that I have seen you,

every pistachio shell I find
in the marketplace turns

immediately into a pearl.
I've been storing them

in my mouth, so that
when we meet, and my lips

first touch yours, I'll
push them through your lips

and press them into
your mouth, as a gift

and a suggestion to you
that you squeeze

your milky nectar into me
in any way you can.


*

My Neighborhood

Streetlights in the evening, and then in sunlight, either way, there are trees. Are there trees? Something on the other side of the window partially blocks my view. Tree branches. Or arms, hanging down from the roof. I can see those sequences of painted white lines at two intersections that constitute crosswalks. Across the street and up at the corner of King and Church, the Wilson Hotel shines on having been transformed from a derelict hotel of the 70s to a rooming house for derelict men run by the city's housing authority. Next door is the Waystation, a homeless shelter with twenty beds in a single room. And further up King, and on the corner of Winooski Ave, is the Daystation, which is where most of the homeless people from the Waystation hang out during the day. Some also go to the public library, the university library, or some also wander aimlessly about the downtown, commercial area.

There's another house next to my house, and then, I have been able to determine this mostly from window views, so I'm unsure of compass directions: Perhaps it's east. And then southeast, another big white apartment building done up nicely with a whole series of escape ladders and emergency stairways and safety decks in case there's a fire or a hurricane or a sudden attack by the French Foreign Legion. Get out of town, baby. The voice inside someone's head repeats this often. Four to six weeks to renew your passport by mail, or, pay extra and get them to process it right there! That's more my speed: Always pay more and get them to process it right there. Forget sending out for anything. Signals get too easily crossed. And besides, who really knows what anyone wants, intends, or will do: Watch a man's face until you can see his beard grow. Then you'll have evidence of a certain degree of honesty.

I really love the house across the street. It is sort of by itself, an empty lot to the right, and then another house (I think I may not be remembering things correctly), and to the left, a big driveway into a flat parking lot, and beyond that, a two-tiered parking lot, and then at the corner of St. Paul and King, some sort of former office building that I think has a bar downstairs, and . . . the upstairs of these buildings have always confused me. I just figure they're full of "papers" of some importance, papers of misfortune that must be saved, tax records from a former planet that exploded 5000 years before Thera. Valuable shit.

And above that, over at Main and St. Paul, the glorious former Hotel Vermont, its brick elegance, or is it marble? Attenuated memory, dutiable perception, I don't know: I'm not paid up. Anyway, this house across the street, whose bottom door at the top of a high cement stairway is always open so you can see its two mailboxes hung at to different angles just inside the door: And the middle window on the second floor in the evening is lit with such a beautiful, elegant saffron glow, it makes me weep. The tiny third floor window is dark. I don't know what's in there, but I want to live there. I have a predilection for small, third floor rooms. Brown grass. A discarded suitcase. The guy who wears a kilt begging change on the corner of Church and Main.

The bodies of the three dead martians from Roswell preserved in the basement of the US Treasury Building are acting up. We nationalists who as poets are concerned over our republic, as forms like sovereign governments need difference over which to conduct attempts at agreements of various sorts, as trade, immigration, peace and all of that, listen on the other side of our inner ears for the demonological throb of animating truths disguised under the questionable value of human political policy.

And the news from Davos is troubling. Istanbul. The Hotel California. The Soviet "invasion" of Afghanistan in 1979, Southeast Asian wars from 1964, begun through the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Mosseddegh in Iran in 1954 and the wholesale import into the United States of Werner von Braun, Josef Mengele and the like are moved directly through the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (founded Manhattan 1921, in lieu of international rejection of the League of Nations), the Zbigniew Brzezinski-founded Tri-Lateral Commission (the same guy who "ran" Carter and who is now high up in the Obama administration) and, at the peak of the triad, the Bilberburg Group, founded by ex-Nazi Prince Bernhard of Holland, and whose purpose, according to long-term member David Rockefeller, is to break down sovereign nation-states and institute a form of worldwide rule that would make any war or conflict that one or another of these gruops couldn't direct and control . . . an inconvenience. Boys will be boys. Or, the girls just want to have fun. Swiss banks, the beginning of offshore banking services. The new "state." A friend recently wrote and told me about Swiss husbands. She said they operate at temperatures somewhere below absolute zero. Whatever. Any hypnogogue should be able to see trouble in the making: Its names are legion: Just say a word, and you are there.

So, let's say we're in the basement of a small, private hotel in Holland, in which a number of men, mostly, are seated around a large oval table. Well, and so: They have on suits, with red ties, you know: Blue bloods. Richard Holbrooke is telling how easy it has been to get Osama bin Laden - who's been living in the basement of the White House since 2000 - to switch from calling Bush his "white slave" to calling Obama his "house nigger." There's a little laughter about teaming them up again, until there's a call for silence, and a somber Roman prayer, during which time Etienne Davignon, former chair of the Bilderburg group, removes his trousers, pulls down his underpants and, having gotten up on the table, proceeds to ceremonially shit a brightly colored pigeon's egg on the plate of each of the participants. Upon closing the prayer, the eggs are eaten, with a few remarks: "Too salty," complains Carl Bildt. "Tastes like pussy," smiles Franco Bernabe, and "did you make all of these yourself?" [James Wolfensohn].

The table, meanwhile, is loaded with cold cuts, rabbit, pheasant, sauteed vegetables, sweet potatoes and squashes, pickled herring, cheeses, breads, hummus, jams and jellies and various desserts. But the main course is over to the side, a barbecue pit, where two headless Iraqi children's corpses turn on spits and are beginning to ooze rather nicely.

A handcuffed Iranian boy of maybe 17 is brought into the room by guards, and David Rockefeller - beyond himself with lust after watching the boys on the spit - goes up to him, slips the boy's pants down and begins to lick the boy's cock, which stiffens against his will, partly out of fear, yet partly from the stimulation. David finally has had enough licking and slips his lips over the boy's whole member, laves it with his tongue and slides his lips back and forth along its length. Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton his dropped Rockefeller's drawers and shorts and has begun fucking him up the ass with her clitoris, the next stiffest thing in the room. David moans around the cock in his mouth while Hilary humps him, until a jealous Queen Beatrix - daughter of Bilderburg founder, fascist Prince Bernhard - tries to shove Hilary out of the way, yelling, "Let me have a throw at Wimpy's crack: I'll have him creaming into next week: My clit's as big as a Dutch Cleanser Can!" When the boy cums, Rocky holds the jism in his mouth, eyes shining, while Timothy Geithner presses his mouth against Rockefeller's to try and suck some of it out, lapping at his lips to get at least a drop or two. Rockefeller, speechless for his mouthful, takes out his pen and writes across the tablecloth, NO! I WANT ALL OF IT!" The youth is laid out on the table, and the whole crowd goes at him with knives, stripping bands of meat from his arms and legs and chewing on them raw: The mission to invade is on. Amything else would be less than delicious, and who could bear up under the weight of a denial like that?

What would Goebbels have said? Fabians! One shot from a German flame-thrower would put an end to all this nonsense! I don't entirely disagree, but would prefer a more Rwandan strategy: Hack them all up into bits with machetes, and leave a pile of hands on the table, for it is said that the twitch of a dead man's little finger is a sign of some lingering virtue. That might be interesting to determine.

The opinion is, finally, that the world must be returned to a feudal system so that it (and us) be saved. China is the model. Rockefeller has always lauded China as the one successful model of a social and cultural revolution that has been worth whatever it has taken to establish and maintain it. During Mao's reign alone, 60 million Chinese peasants were exterminated. They call this "systematic ideology."

Eric Pianca gets a standing ovation during his speeches whenever he talks about ebola as being effective and necessary to wipe out the bulk of the world's population. His students go him one better, and say that every living human being on earth should be eliminated. That would be ultimate power, and absolute control, but with no one to weild it. But these population reduction plans that fall under the guise of "environmentalism" . . . they simply destabilize the Local. I don't know. Environmentalism, like the idea of the police, makes me jittery. Who decides who gets to live? In 1911, in some states in America, poor grades on a report card could've resulted in arrest, a trip to the hospital and immediate sterilization.

But this is all from Malthus and his "catastrophism", and subsequently also Darwin and T.H. Huxley, and the actual founder of Eugenics as a movement, Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton. T.H. Huxley's famous sons, Aldous and Julian were adamant Eugenicists, as was George Bernard Show and H.G. Wells, whose lover, Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood, wrote to a fellow Eugenicist that they would have to find influential negro conscripts who would be able to help them convince the bulk of the populations in black communities to agree to sterilization.

These ideas came to the fore in the late 19th century, during the era of the Robber Barons, Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc. Edison and Ford were also significant fascists. Such attitudes come from a combination of Big Science (proofs) and Enlightenment rationalism. Racial classification. The size of the head of an "idiot." Etc. But identification of this type is just more means toward control. And control is just the fear that everyone else is lying to you as much as you lie to them.

Story: When Napoleon was trying to escape the pincer movements of the dual forces of Wellington and a Prussian brigade, a spy of Nathan Rothschild - an agent for the Bank of England - saw that Napoleon was going to lose the battle, and thus, the whole war. He sped back to London, and, arriving 20 hours before news of Napoleon's defeat would reach England, told Rothschild what he had seen. Rothschild immediately spread rumors that Napoleon had won, the London Stock Market fell 98%, and Rothschild bought up the whole British economy for pennies on the pound.

The US hasn't had a real president since 1933, the year the country was declared bankrupt by the Federal Reserve, which is not a part of the government, despite the name, but is an independent "offshore" bank, a large proportion of whose shareholders are foreigners. Social Security was put in place to pledge those citizens, their children, their children's children, as collateral for the national debt to the Federal Reserve bank (a private bank), and, since 1933, the US government has operated on the basis of emergency powers, that is to say, the Secretary of the Treasury runs the country, because he is the one who manages the bankruptcy, and also because he is always recommended by the Federal Reserve, is then "selected" by the president, unquestioningly, and is confirmed by congress. So now, we have Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve . . . as Secretary of the Treasury. Treasury is the agency through which the banker bailout money was transposed. As of today, 9.7 trillion has disappeared. It was not ear-marked for anything specific. It was just supposed to "help the economy". The banks, actually. And now Treasury is telling us that where it has gone "is secret." Someone actually said that: "It's secret." [The Treasury Secretary under Bush, Henry Paulson, who said, after the banker bailout had been passed by Congress, that they weren't going to use the 800 billion to correct the sub-prime mortgage market. Privately, he even admitted that that had never been the real problem. Saying that it was was simply a ruse by Treasury and the Fed to get the bailout bill passed. Paulson admitted - again, privately - that the real problem was with what are called "derivatives." Which are rather like the junk bonds that caused the massive bank collapses in 1988 that we now refer to as the S & L Scandal. It was a similar situation, with a smaller government bailout, with which the owners of many failed banks simply bought back their revamped institutions (after the government had paid them up) in accordance with the program, sometimes for as little as a dollar.]

And look at the nature of the Obama administration: It's all about money and investment: Everyone comes from Wall Street, from banking, from investment firms. They're all bankers. There is no one from heavy industry or manufacturing, no car makers, no one from the beef, pork, wheat and corn sector, there is no one from the steel or rail or trucking industries, there is no one from big oil, or natural gas, there are no fruit growers or truck farmers, no retirees, no youth groups, no councils on the status of women, or hispanics, or blacks, or orientals, or any minotiries: The is no one but money oligarchs. What has happened to the beef, pork and grain markets of Chicago? What determines price? Quantity of some real thing, or an abstract prefigurement related to the derivitives market? Oil recently topped out at $150/barrel of sweet crude: Maybe a pound of nicely marbled flank will soon come close to that.

Some say JFK was our last "real" president, and that his assassination was a coup d'etat. But the coup had already taken place, in 1933. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy did sign Executive Order 11110, that began to take away some of the Federal Reserve's absolute power to put money into circulation. His assassination is likely related directly to that. It didn't have to do with angry nationalist anti-Castro Cubans, or the CIA, or the mafia, or the military-industrial complex. Who suddenly changed the parade route in Dallas? The secret service. Who decided not to use the bullet-proof protective bubble? The secret service. Who called off extra Dallas city police protection for the motorcade? The secret service. Who decided to put Kenedy's limo at the front of the motorcade, where usually it would have been second or third? The secret service. Who drove Kennedy's limo? James Greer, former chauffer for Henry Cabot Lodge, ex-Ambassador to pre-war Vietnam, and, an agent for the secret service. Who waved off the agents that normally run alongside the presidential limosine to provide even further protection, even though a couple of the agents initially protested? The head of secret service directing the motorcade that day. Who gave the order that agents not respond when the firing began? This same secret service head. Who shot Kennedy? It wasn't Oswald. It wasn't some shooter up on the Grassy Knoll. It wasn't the man with a gun spotted behind the picket fence by the railroad yard. It wasn't anyone on the first floor of the Daltex building. Sure, they all fired diversionary shots. But who fired the lethal shot? It was Greer. The driver of his car. Greer shot Kennedy. Watch the film. The car slows (his foot moves off the gas pedal as he turns and fires), and he shoots with his left hand, over his shoulder. The first examining physician at Parkland Hospital to see Kennedy (before the secret service got to him) said that the entry wound in his head was up near the left-front temple, which would be consistent with a shot from the driver. An entry wound from any other possible location could not have occurred there. Any shot from that side from outside the car, would've gotten Connelly's wife. And how was it that John Connelly, a Democrat, was picked by Nixon to be his Secretary of the Treasury during his first term, in 1971? And what was Nixon doing in Dallas on the day of the assassination? In fact, what was George H.W. Bush doing in Dallas that day, apparently seen standing on the overpass that JFK's limo sped under on the way to Parkland? And why did J. Edgar Hoover summon Bush to his office two days after the assassination? Ostensibly, it was to find out what the CIA knew about Oswald's Cuba connection. Oswald was a CIA patsy, and also a part-time FBI informant. We all know these basically inconsequential names. They're used to cover Treaury. Everyone's heard of Ferry, Shaw, Bannister and that whole rather sinister New Orleans crowd officiating out of the same office at Camp Street. But can anyone name the Secretary of the Treasury in 1963? I can't. But we should all be able to. Because he did it.

So: The secret service. In 1963, the secret service was a division of the US Treasury.

Now we know what a secret is. There is always part of your neighborhood that cannot see you. You can't at any time, see the entirety of your own body. You cannot know everything that is going on in your own neighborhood, let alone control it. Policy is a kind of idiocy. It works against perception, which is wholly partial, because there's always more to look at. Isn't this probably one of life's simplest joys?

The part ex-Mayor Peter Clavelle played in transforming Burlington from a working-class town whose industrial base had rotted out from under it into a tourist's lakeside paradise replete with condos, banks and business offices replacing old but still functioning working-class neighborhoods was ill-considered though pardonable as such offences go, urban development, human development and all the error and difficulty these bring. But what current mayor Bob Kiss and City Treasurer Jonathan Leopold have done is reprehensible: Selling a city out to foreign landlords. There's even a portable psychologist in the Marketplace, to make sure none of the homeless or mentally ill people get out of hand, and upset the shoppers. They've done to Burlington what Americans generally have let themselves become: A nation of shop-a-holic idiots, who think they can buy whatever they or someone else deems necessary? A new identity? A different Middle East policy? A different mate? You name it. Where can I get it? What do I have to "do"?

No one has to "do" anything. Just keep your ears open for biplanes over the former dump, and your eyes open for the French Foreign Legion, who are always approaching the outskirts of town.

D.H. Lawrence, Bud Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

The Baron Hotel. Imagine. Meeting the biographer of English painter Francis Bacon in the downstairs bar. Imagine the peeling wallpaper and the crumbling ceiling plaster. I don't have to: It's still under my eyelids.

Okay, this is it: C. Douglas Dillon. Another little known who's who.

I do not need to have "what's there" pushed on me always, overtly and unambiguously.

I do not know, for the time being, who the Under-Secretary of the Treasury was in 1963.

Partly cloudy, high 53 degrees. The Xmas tree lights have yet to be lit. Meanwhile, we enjoy the dark.

In Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, I am most recently known as a serving-maid named Sara, who is nevertheless still a divinity to gypsies.

Bury me standing. But burn me first.


*

Aware America

Be political
and correct

the body politic
by slashing open

its corpse
and letting out

the worms
that constitute

the determination
of its movements


*

Mandala

for Jess

What happens if
the snake you've

charmed turns around
and bites you?

More likely
it will wrap its

red night coils
around your trunk

and drape itself
in your upper

branches where it will
suck your eggs

til the sun comes out.
Or even more

likely, it (or "I")
will steal away with

one of your eggs,
sit on it until its

transcendent enegies
rise up my spine

and feel it realized
in the center of

my brain as your own
full moon, one brilliant,

transluscent and made
of pliable white wax:

Your feminine principle
in the masculine vault of

my cranium, where,
now your outcast heat

blazes up my spine,
melts it, and makes the milk of

our conjoined fluids,
a nectar that lubricates

the joints of our
love-making movements,

which, as they cease,
and we fall into a close

embrace, stiffen again
into hard wax that

stiffens our joints,
and keeps our embrace

solid and as immobile as
the sleep the overcomes us

each, as we share, together
in this way, the lotus of

our subtle bodies, touched
by the bliss of our dream.


*

Elusive Horizon

As usual, I've dumped
nearly all my friends:

I don't care about
nobody, right? Is it true?

Dennis is downstairs
talking on a cell phone

and turning the pages of
A History of Photography:

Of course I care about
almost everyone! I just get

pissed when no one
talks to me! All right, you

guys, etc. I always forget
what mother always

suggested I best remember:
Never drool excessively

on your friends. Ah, yes, well:
Too late, maybe, already,

for three or four of them
on that score. Their damp lapels.

Fuck 'em. They can all go
belly up in a wheelbarrow

for all I care. What sense of
pleasure might I derive from them?.

What wind, what heart,
what fire? People! Life

goes on and then it rains,
maybe after you're inside,

if you're lucky enough to have
an inside to go in. Self consciousness

has basically eliminated it,
and made the surface of

things appear so that it doesn't
rattle anyone. Silence

for the masses that are
no longer even there. So,

why do I love them as I do?
The fucking little creeps.


*

The Real Thing

for Jess

To be let out of
Purgatory for two

days, to visit
my baby, somewhere

east of Philadelphia,
walking some

imaginary park
or seated in an unreal

cafe: Neither of us
knows a thing about

"place", but
everything about

proximity and it could be
Kansas City or Kokomo

for all I care, as long as
those are your

dark hairs my fingers
finally entwine: Allahu

Akbar, it's true,
and your lips, neck,

breasts, belly, thighs
and the dark swatch of

your pussy are, too
in the hands of a God

who cups every heartfelt
beat that makes my cock

throb for you, as
we will be, in some small

hoteleria above the pines,
entangled like roots of

some swamp cypress,
your chi-chi glamour

as a matter of inqury
for trusting Libra,

and my judicious
Aquarian erotic spark

to put smoochie prints
along your inner thighs

while holding stars aloft.
It is no trick for one

whose skin will never be
too tight. People

aren't supposed to be
as real as we're about to be,

but you prompt me past
ordinal deliverance

to effect adversity by
burning it into the light of

the stars you see: All
the world a lovely error

we can always both
believe. Our actual love

in Oz will be sung by
tin birds whose voices are

animated by gentle
winds across the tops of

golden wheat, gleaming
in the sunlight of Kansas.

What is passion, but what
hides behind blue bushes

at dusk, and what is paradise
but a worn marble counter

in a hotel lobby, bank
or imitation Chinese tea room?

And what could love best
get to be, but the ordinary

fall of familiar snows, or Mondays
for undertipped waitresses?

We have always known
who we are and what this is.

Your body is a warm supper club
at 10. Memories of your

garden invade my appetite:
I cannot but eat everything

you are. Such dreams exposed
are the offered faces of chaos.

To order them is my desire.
Meet me in the Pit at midnight.


*

Anointed

for Jess

To have become a story in my love for you, no longer telling the stories of others' loves.

Dream within dream
within dream that all

has some light in it
against the dramatic

shades of what it all
might mean. We continue

the prophetic life of
love against outrageous

politicians, or that from
their ledgers, our responsibilities

will be erased and we will
become the rightful owners

of outstretched hands
and a tender kiss that verges

on salvation, to restore
love's mysteries, from far

and close, it matters not,
they are like transient

storms that always return
to earth: It is not

a matter of choice, but
a matter of simply

jazzing around with blue
griffons under the boardwalk,

and listening to the slap
at the shoreline, as much

ease to my ears as my body
slapping against the way

you splay, close or curl
around my movements

that nevertheless make
the sound of sweet hard

fucking, high tide
in the act and in the moment

no dreams at all, but
the spiritual rush of fresh

lovers and a radio
500 feet down near where

they pull taffy. It used to
cost a dime. Those were those

days: These are these.
Blue glass drawer pulls

on the miniature bureau.
All things sexual have to have

a lark in them. Your wrist
braces my encircling fingers:

My cock makes of your slit
a rose blush that blossoms

as your breasts shimmer,
nestling like swelling whitecaps

and the smell of your garden
and your sea invades

my nostrils. Will you
walk this ground with me

without uncoupling?
And pause, where I touched you

yesterday? Ah, Sacred
Woman, refresh my soul,

hidden as you have, my
crown jewels under your throne

so obviously, they could be
ripe tomatoes in the depths

of your bush. To me, it is
your form that dictates all

things: Whatever I can put
my tongue against: Clover,

for justice, because it's
round. Or better,

how about your moon?
Divine your text by

letting myself be
intoxicated by its thrall

in me? Shall we sprawl?
Beneath the shade of

the lily bower, to stir
what's latent when stars

come out at night?
Best in life to occasionally let

something neither of us know about
guide us through each other,

whose boundaries rest
within our temporary illusions.


*

Ex Animo

for Jess

"Bluer than midnight magnetic fields of touch."

Gold comes from the body
in a radiant state

of happy desire, that it is
a sign that cannot be used

for anything else: It cannot
be troped or coined beyond

what a human person is,
or what s/he can do

with herself or make of
herself in the public domain.

Abd al-Malik tried to wrest
the coinage of gold from

Justinain II, who refused,
for Byzantium must have

its own methods and measure
of exchange, just as we

who lie together ought not
be spotted via the value system

of one who speaks of the best
ways to make love. Gold

light streaming up your
thighs needs no manual,

nor the remarkable hurry
known in such men as

andrarion agoraion kai
banauson, just some guy

who wants to get into
your pants, for greed

ceases to be mutual
increase, as there is need for

a victim, and thus
there can never be

agreement over the proper
price of bread, for

the grain has been
hoarded, against the gold

along the stems, its seed
gone sun-drenched

for the glory of Ceres,
or as in the wild animals of

Artemis: For every women,
in the fibers of her heart

and acts of her being,
there is much goodness

where wind sways
or where we hear the slop of

water along rock-laden
streams. Is ravishment

any more than resisting
all the application of what men

prefer as "meaning" over
the governance of a woman

from within herself? She will be
inclined by her power, first,

in creation, to have men
around her cease to be

destroyers: Then it is
nature takes us: Can I charm you

with a milkweed pod? To enter
your underworld? Or would you

prefer I wear a garland of
celery? For the rituals are of

the essence, black branches
clattering at the window,

home from the amusement of
Rigoletto, e mobile, I'll

whisper in your ear, just as
you will have me, once, maybe

twice, then andiamo, Superboy,
after my swift, brave and imperious

hands have soothed you
and my cock has flown up your

pussy time in time in time,
incorporeal, so that our hair is

inextricably tangled. Love
is tangible, as its glow,

brass made in the heat
that melted iron and bronze

at Corinth: We will claim
this city by the run of

saffron light from all our
pores, and the acorn now

between your thighs will grow
the cybernetic oaken prow of

the boat that will take us
through the future it already

knows the way of, would we
simply lie in its hold together,

and hold together. Magnanimity
grows rich fruit, from

the tree that is a human body,
so long as we do not surrender

perception and the love of
what it gives us to: We can lift

ourselves to this: Love is not
a "falling", but always a rise

to the occasion of. The prow
of the ship I speak of is

simply a new set of stairs, cut
and taken one at a time.

Join me: The blue light of
the living body enclosed in

the gold light of the mind's
beating heart: The beautiful.

the true, and the good are just
a handhold and a single

star step away. The possible
is the splendor of the known

that we may achieve.
The unknown is possible, too:

We need only wait for it
to overtake us, for in harmony,

always, we exclude nothing
that also has not some mastery.


*

Leisure

At rest with a multitude
0f selves and non-selves,

Under a steep shade tree,
take the time and space

to decide What
you can never be.


*

Love

for Dutch

When you finally realize
there is no justice,

the inequity
sets you forward

to act to create
even more imbalance

by insisting that
justice is for everyone

and in the hands of
all those who can begin

creating it in
the lives of every one

around them: Stop
believing that it is not

the most contagious
creative imbalance

known to man, and help
your neighbors

charge the world with it
through you and through

them, these acts that break
down, by giving more

of the building up it takes
to be true to the True:

To raise roof beams, so
a roof can rest on them.


*

The Crest of Your Saffron Skin

for Jess

That our love were
a fragment of rock

broken from the mountain
on which the heavens

rest, yet still alive
deep within its core:

As in a room, in some
strange corner, one

discovers a multitude of
beautiful detail,

and beauty not temporal
yet always in each moment

passing, as solid
as the mountain -

the mundus, the mound,
my mouth and the time of

your month - in which
the brevity of this

starlit flash of full regard
remains secured: That is to say,

love is secure. Or is
the quiet house

our two bodies make
conjoined along the narrow

passage into your rock
that is only permitted

by the fact that you can
refuse, not to be wet,

but to perform the upper
regions of the rite of

Red Temple Sex: There are
times for eros to be socia,

to drive the prow of intent
with a strength performed

among others, not for
love, but for a like

plentitude of sowing,
that you may reap

both all that you intend, plus
every accidental bean

or cherry that falls
your way along the road:

Let us stay simple
and kaleidoscopic,

with all the varying
types of flight that fall between

the falcon and the moth.
We will make the double arch

of a window facing both
inwardly and out

with our eyes, paired,
and doubled by intent,

and of our bodies, without
jealous regard for propriety

the colonnade of a beautiful
temple infused with

wide boughs, deep roots
and endless illumination:

There in my palm
the wet star from your

pussy, a stain or baptismal
commitment, uneffaced

yet worn over time,
and just as touch is forever

instant, the instant to us
will spread in our

bodies like that lovely
knowledge of limit

that seems like that of
dying, and gives to each

small house a sense of
peace that is active

and never final: Exult
of an oval moon

over high rock maples,
and your voice

I hear always, and your
fingers calling out to be

taken, and the just
combination of rapt

thighs that give to mind
their thin, high trace:

Stars along the horizon
and the changed shapes

of our bodies nested, one
twilit against the other.


*

Asylum Poems

written during a stay on a locked psychiatric ward at Fletcher-Allen Hospital, Burlington, VT, October 8 - November 3, 2009.

[ PRESENCE ]

That certain
girlish someone:

Carl Gustav Jung
or a sweet speed freak

lost
in the Green Mountains

where you can't
buy no shit


*


ijtihad


have a whole hog's head


*


[ PEACE ]
for Puerto Rico

It's 4:09 AM
in San Francisco

and I'm on the moon
dreaming of some

ancient Spanish mission.
It is 1959:

Oceanside in Ocean City:
Deserted parking lot,

salt air and bright
clusters of stars:

The rattle of
a chainlink fence

and some whispers
500 feet down the beach.


*


[ DEED ]

Black marks
fire blancs

for blanket
world flambe


(Juhamhariyya

XTC

or that other state,


SAMADHI


*


rub spore and honey across my lips

ittisal fi'l-khayal
mushahadat khayaliya
[Corbin, p. 156]

[ the creative prayer that becomes dialog (bilocation between
rationalist reflection and spiritual [ E X T A S Y ?

OR

sunlight is the sickle sunk
in the carbon of her ass
that bears the human pencil:

things will become unstuck
and fly about uncontrollably
when I get to the other side of
the bitter necessity of knowing this.


*


[ RATIO ]

I've convinced my heart
to be content,

for when it is content

it perceives Everything
and understands Nothing


*


[ HUMILITY ]

My heart is swollen
with its own collapse:

Which is greater:
The devotee or the slave?

Which will arrive to
a good outcome:

The greater, or all
that remains less?

Which is the Imperishable
One: The cloud,

the river reflecting it,
or all the wetness in between?


*


[ KNOWLEDGE ]

Knowledge up, knowledge
down: Knowledge

ahead and knowledge
behind: Knowledge

to the left and to the right:
All good things. But

my knowledge don't go
any of those ways:

I just possess it
as it possesses me

and together we don't do nothing
but just hang around.


*


[ PUZZLE ]

Stars that appear
in the fabric

from the loom:
You think you put them there?

No. Or believe
that God made them appear for you?

Get back to work,
my darlings, and complete

something, anything,
without worrying so much

over what its source
is all about: You cannot

dress yourself in your past.
Come, naked and useless

into the present,
and do some good about yourself.

To be idle and evil:
These are good things, too:

Throw your loom in the river
and swim for it.


*


[ PIECEWORK ]

I wove the words
of my devotion to you

and in return, received
no grain, no butter,

no salt, but instead
your highest regard

and the distinct favor
of a homeless dose of

eternal vision, malnutrition
and 24 hours of cotton fever.


*


[ BAYT LAHEM ]

In the body
that is not a body,

but a black hole
giving birth to

a star, the heat
is spontaneous

corruption and completion:
Layer upon layer

of matted straw to clothe
the wet smoke

that is the color of
fire and mud and honey

and smells like
the beginning of Time.


*


[ MONKEY MAN ]

Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio. - Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover of Marion, Ohio

The Taliban cut
Afghani opium production

94% by 2000, to 185 tons
(UN Office on Drugs statistic).

Following US occupation
in December 2001, production

increased to a peak of
6,100 tons in 2006

(an increase of 3200%):
The US Marines were sent

to Afghanistan to fight
the Taliban, yet

by protecting the poppy
fields of the locals

tp “keep them on our side”,
they only feed the Taliban,

since the opium trade is
conducted by the ISI

(the Pakistani Secret Service),
the original underwriters

and primary financial support
for the Taliban, who anyway

simply want to hack away
opium proceeds from

western profiteers, and keep
enough to regularize

the Afghani economy
and keep themselves in power.

Richard Holbrooke, top envoy
to Afghanistan, maintains

that poppy eradication remains
a cornerstone of US policy

in the region, and that local
farmers are being

encouraged to grow
such replacement crops as

wheat, corn, and pomegranates:
Show me the local

who will prefer harvesting
potatoes to diamonds

in light of some abstruse,
western sense of morality,

and I will eat
four dung beetles between

laughs: We call in
air strikes against insurgents

while pledging to protect
the poppy fields and win

the hearts and minds of
the farming communities of

the Helmand River Valley.
If I weren't in a locked ward,

I might be on some
uptown streetcorner, making

a buy, ya dig, for, like, foreign
aid: Help is on the way. Why

do we put up with these
motherfuckers? Holbrooke

is just another chaste
ex-UN figure on the take,

like Kissinger, a small time bagman
for the Rockefeller clan

and a coup d' etat plan
that is all about eugenics.

The question is, which of
the people of the earth

are the ones to be designated as
among the “too many”?

Who gets to decide? It is not
in the nature of the human

species to move against
one's won self-interest,

and I'm not, of course,
at all against this.

It would be wrong
to murder those “in the trade”

toward any political destination
without first redefining

their assassination as
“prolonged detention.”

What would a dictatorship
of the proletariat look like?

The details can be
worked out later. For now,

continue to be mad,
and buy government surplus:

Utility grade and “canners”
are prime

as long as no one knows
what you're gonna do with them.


*


[ UNTITLED ]

My friends all die
with passing notice.

I have never been a friend
of my own life.


*


[ THE BLUE HOLE ]

The murmuring people
in the hallway

are, that there are now
more murmuring people

with the first ones.
They are all murmuring.

I am half-asleep, in trance,
the listening part of

murmuring. Everyone is
murmuring to themselves

with each other. It's a fucking
orgy of complete

misunderstanding. The nation
is like a dream, interconnected

through the IE roots of
ten languages. If there is

a group of people who can
converse openly

in ten languages without
an interconnecting root,

like having a world that is
all color without a convening

sense of gravity, I'd like
the opportunity

to be in their midst,
to totally misapprehend them,

and to stand to their directness
with the obscurity of my self.


*


[ ILLEGIBILITY ]
after Francois Villon and the Meters

Meet me in the alley
with Sally.


*


[ THE ARTERIAL GHOSTS OF CORAL BEDS ]

You do not know
my name: Tell me

your name for my name
for your name for you.


*


[ MONGOLIAN SEVERENCE PAY ]
for Bobby Delmarco

Grab a rattlesnake
by the rattle

and crack it like a whip
'til the head flies off: Uh,

dude. Then enter the underbrush
and cash the check.


*


[ HE CAN'T BE LIVED WITH ]

I know:
I tried it, too.


*


[ THE RATIONALE]

They were all good
reasons to be locked up:

mental and physical
exhaustion, overexposure,

malnutrition, loss of
identity, bad

compass directions,
pursuit by the full

French Foreign Legion,
etc., though the real reason

of course, was
that I defrauded myself.


*


[ THE RATIONALE ii ]

Fucked by my father
in 1946. So. The names

and dates have been
changed

to protect
the innocent. I can't be

the innocent, since I was
forced not to be there.

I just witnessed
the aftermath.

It still has
a hole in it.


*


[ THE CEREMONY ]

The soul of a man
is a beautiful human

girl, not an exterior
lover, but an internal

quantity that has
something to do with

a mysterious inner
knowledge of dying.

I am the Mahdi. Or will be
if the French Foreign Legion

does not catch up with me
first. Qiyamat will not be

declared on the high
tundras of Alamut, but

on Lemnos: 21 April, 2010.
The Garamations are

an important people
to pay attention to. Aea.

On the occasion of the
declaration, Elena as

Medea will emerge from
the Aegean with a crown of

celery, accompanied by
Claude Lecouteux.

He's a professor
at the Sorbonne, you know.


*


[ FAMISHMENT AT THE BANQUET ]

Tiny elephants
in the treetops.


*


[ VISITS FROM A SMALL ENGINE ]

Hoodlums dressed in white:
Hearsay midgets from

some previous age
shit up each other's assholes,

an alchemical procedure,
turning the black scald

beneath mummy cloth
into the bright faces of

rank October, consumed by
new wind and a drugged

solicitude of transfixed amazement:
Smile when you say that, partner.


*


[ NINE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING ]

The mountains, the clouds
and rivers of words

unspoken on a damage binge
move purposefully yet

in random patterns
left to right

in the bright light at the window
of the Writhing Lawn Motel.


*


[ POIESIS ]

The wax of the candle
is impure, whether

before or after flame,
food or dung,

it makes no difference.
Even the flame itself

is impure, since it wants
for nothing but to

keep burning, using
the world for its own

illuminating corruption:
There is no pure thing

but that which will
burn no more. There is

nothing that will burn
no more: The liver

descending into the black
mirror of self-negation

completely affirms
the contradictions inherent

in a statement like that.
All of your sentences

are trivial and base
and attract the heat of

a spiritual sickness. I don't
honor the world's

conventions, though
I like to say pleasing

things at dawn or dusk,
and by the cover of

midnight or high noon,
slip away like a thief

chewed out of his senses
into a uniform of perfect ice.


*


[ MY LANGUAGE DID THIS TO ME ]

Human lips
are the blinders

that forever
renounce the kiss.


*


[ THE KINKS ]

Brecht got it wrong
when he said “Art

is not a mirror
held up to reality

but a hammer with which
to shape it.”

He ought to have said
“a hammer with which to

break it.” The inner
and the outer become

the immediate gesture of
one hand. It is

an unusual mistake
for a German to make.


*


[ GLACIATION ]

There are a thousand
panes of windowglass

stacked vertically in mutandis
between me and all

that subsequently becomes
the distance from my self.


*


[ SANCTUARY ]

The water of the river
runs out from under

a reflected moon, yet
there's always other

water there, to carry it
to my eye, and hold it

against the current
that reflects it:

While the water goes
perpetually “over

the edge”, the world
reflected on its surface

remains still life,
never still, terrorized

by being undercut
and swept totally away,

omnipresent, omniscient,
and totally under threat.


*


[ BLACKBOARD JUNGLE ]

The Talking Group

starring Janice Mae Marie Jones

1. Talk about your problems
2.


*


[ TEARING THOUGHT ]

Faint white dusk
and deepest night:

I stand in my doorway
to let myself be

penetrated, knowing
the doorway and myself

are not mine, but
of the devising of all

through which I will be made
strange to myself.


*


[FALSE DAWN ]

The pale eastern-facing window
made pale by the backsides

of three new Halloween posters,
and by the reflection of

all lights on in a room two rooms over
gone deeper into some whiter interiority

than our own, to the light, refracted
off the steel screen grate

that keeps us all from bolting,
or that this is ultimately

the room of the surveillance spot:
To bask in the inhibitory

brilliance of its illumination,
is also to enter the privilege of

hearing the steady hum of skulls
cracking out of

the burning engine
and black heat of

the ice machine's
perfect productivity.

Like, they got a system here
and you know how it is

to go up against mechanists
when they they think they have

a system. Mostly
it doesn't work. That's when

you start ripping it
out of the floor, throwing it

through the window, and letting
the talking fish finally have their way.


*


[ LEGIT ]

I like it when
the stadium lights

across the street
flick on at dusk

in preparation for
a game: Memory

is just the same:
Proust's madeleine

or the smell of fresh-mown
hay in early May, or

Syria 4 Yemen 1
and then the aftermath

on high from ge'ez,
and then the moonlight,

some stranger's city
streets and two

plush days rest: Syria 0
Libya 0. Apply yourself.

To anything. The sea is
never far: Only the name for it

sets its dark regard beyond
the touchpoint of

fingers, in deep behind
my eyes: A thirteen year old

Somali boy charged with
pirating a US oil tanker in

territorial waters beyond
American jurisdiction

now waits in jail to stand
trial in New York: Wing it,

baby. If I hadn't
left my foot in Belgium,

I'd be complaining about
breaking it on a goalpost:

The game of life, its onyx
heart, the blood of a cur

to keep it alive: The place
of one's thirst in a river,

a point of flame, gone
in a fire. I steal best

what's not nailed down: Victory
over the nonexistent: Syria 3

Palestine 0. It is good,
this talent that you have,

to burn away the ability
to extinguish yourself.


*


[ NO POCKETS ]

As soon as I was asleep
she lowered

all my clothes away
on a windless of love:

I never saw them again
and she knew it.


*


[ MESSAGE ]

To: The Artist's Room
From: Janice

You are not here,
and neither am I.


*


[ POINT OF GOLD IN A PRIMITIVE FLAME ]
for Jess, on her birthday

To have been
born has no actual

sense of anything
but real play

about it: The years
of ambition

and sacrifice,
the spare regard

to raise a healthy
child are after-the-fact

yet still part of
procreation: While it is

the will of Allah to
bang his rod of authority

deep up the pussy of
The White Girl

to help her enjoy
a minimum 10,000 cellular

conversions per second,
it is in the end

to produce a vanguard
human advanced in

belle lettres, skilled
in theater and music

and who travels easily
from continent to

continent accompanied by
a hot and loyal pair of

thighs: Lost as I was
out of your arms

for ten days, gone
explicatory on reception

of imaginary kisses,
and partially drowned

in lakes of unburdened
distress brought upon me

by some Black Sea
king from 2500 BC,

you nevertheless remained
perfectly present to me

in the beautiful joy of
evening's darkness,

whose imagination in my
heart put kisses like

twilit stars on your closed
eyelids, that I might

help you feel a like progress
toward the complicit

mayhem of some
future unity, currently

out of sight, that nevertheless
can bring through the party

atmosphere between the planets
the simple news of

how it is to be born into
the wedlock of an domestic elation.

And what there is there to eat.
And how to eat it.


*


[ YOU DON'T NEED TO EXPLAIN ]

Stricken at dusk
by lack of sun and splintered

starlight: The flanks
of the animals have gone

lost in the underbrush.
There's nothing wrong with that.

Sign here. Don't worry
about anything.

And never forget: You're
just another ranch hand.


*


[GEISHA ]
after John Wieners, for Lizzie

We dehydrate with
the inner lotus of

the species, the Black
Chrysanthemum warehouse

vulgar-sized reputation inherited
with a throne and eight pages

that say you are “mentally
unfit to stand in your own

doorway.” Through
Misses Jane Driscoll,

Annette Bapp and the late
Elena Belleview, we know

mother must have had her
hands down daughter's pants

in a German monastery,
the chambermaid

in a ski-lift arabesque
as pertinent to the destiny

of bulemia as four adopted
children forced to bell-hop

status: The Welter Weight
Champion of the World,

or black apples, mid-March,
coming down off chloral hydrate.

You know how it is
with presumed position, despair

and self-flagellant cream of
celery soup Sunday afternoons

with sherry and small Italian cigars:
Throw the furniture

out the windows! Five will
always get you ten!

I am the Queen Mother, no: I am
Blaze Starr: Remember,

darling, that they use blocking
for burlesque, so don't go

thinking you can make it
on your own. I did it

blindfolded, as a Cosmo
cover girl in '69. So please

don't come on to me as an Austrian
chief of police. You know, I once

had it in spades. Not to mention
what I squandered on myself:

$744,012.00. And I intend to go
right on doing it. My love

for you is legion. You'd be
so nice to come home to.

But I know you'd have me
arrested within an hour of

my arrival. Nevertheless,
the church bell's evening chimes

turn my heart into the mother's
milk meant to give blessings unto

those like you, whose minds
like omlettes, fold themselves

always, against “deciding
something.” You are so like

a dry leaf floating in a dark
autumnal forest that I wish

only that I could lead you
up over the hump of earth

that is our nature, and into
“town”, where life is as limited

as a roulette wheel. You know
that song: I wandered around

and finally found that someone
who (finally) could make me blue:

What a surprise all those
years ago, to know this instant

drawing together whose immediate
distance became too much

heart for a mind to stand.
To smart for your own good,

in a way, but, whose warmth then
had to be you, it

had to be you, O marvelous
you. Right up there in my left ear.


*


[SUSPECT ]

Partly cloudy, where
the sun slips in

between bands of
muted grey, a bright

gold eye: Cinders capture
virtue carried through

observation and its
annotated deeds. The question is

what sort of shoulders
might she have had

to see the slip of a Magnolia
blossom from her

princess clavicle into an idea
for next week's story board?

I'll buy it. Or the sunset
of essentially Givenchy design.

Fedayeen, yes. Muhajaddin, yes.
Nanno Ricci supper suits,

definitely not. Lemon dew
fragrance in three-palmed

observers? Most definitely.
The temporal style of

elongation below the waist
continues to stimulate

the segmental in man,
in the demur visage of a totally

over-wrought host: Blow
Beverley Hills from Baffin

Island, Berlin from
Buenos Aires. From

a slightly elevated regard
to Manhattan on Monday evening:

Check luggage. Dine with
Sylvia, then overnight

with a pick-up in a bed of
phony precious gems

out of Bergdorf Goodman's
Tajikistan department

and by dawn, down
Park Avenue alone, memories

of a midi Bebe frock of
frosted cream, paste turquoise,

dictations from balconies of
Algeria, then out to the airport again.


*


[ FAMILY TREE ]

How does one even get
“Ted” from “Frederick”?

I guess it's one of those
three-hundred-sixty-pounds-

and-fifty-two-years-later
kind of things.


*


[ASTARTE ]

Aristotle Onassis
goes up as Amelia Earhardt

while Liz Taylor in a
post-Victorian proto-Wagnarian

dog collar is detained
at Baghdad International,

drifting East after her wholesale
purchase of the Balkan

Peninsula. She loves
the lights, the glamour,

the uranium depleted ammunition.
Anyone for Eddie Fisher?

We're all married to
our own half-lives. And the clock

is ticking. Except it's not
a clock. We have to start

everything completely over:
The old codes can't work us

anymore. We leave the house,
and disappear into the sky.

The old codes were toxic, but
they were the only thing

that could make us appear
to be against them.

Why else would either
them or us be them and us?


*


[ THE TRADITION ]

Ted Berrigan, Bernadette
Mayer and Jack Clarke

are all related, not only
to the sonnet, but

through Bolinas to Lewis
Warsh, whose lovely

sonnets 1 and 12
can be seen in Part of

My History (Coach House 1972).
I intend, tomorrow, to

bring out Oasis Press
broadside number 107,

perhaps the first time
in literary history

that poems have been
published, using

the mechanical reproductive
facilities of a local hospital's

state-funded lock-down
psychiatric ward, and distributed by

“a legal visitor.” I have no problem
with state funding for the Arts

as long as the state
doesn't know that it's doing it.


*


[ FACEBOOK ]
for David Hilliard

It's apparently perfectly okay
on this site, to advocate for

the assassination of US
public officials, as long as

you don't over-post
while doing it. It has also

become clear that no member
of the executive, judicial

or congressional branches of
government constitutes

“an official.” Authority these days
is American stupidity,

whose worst practitioners slant it
to their own advantage

while attempting to entertain
and not rock the boat. The boat?

Why a boat where there's no
real water? When was the last time

Mr and/or Mrs Stupid was
anything resembling “fluent”?

1936. After that, it's just been
a matter of buying, using, developing

and extending anything that
looks good, smells nice and has

a pleasant stride. The deal
with Internet sites like this

are that your communications
become part of a sales pitch

you might have no interest in.
To get others to do your work

for you: That is the world's
oldest profession. And as far as

assassinating “public officials”
perhaps we ought to look

beneath the Treasury, not
for some usurious Behemoth,

but, uh, that laughing dwarf
who owns Facebook (and whatever

shit you got on it): What'd you say
his name and address was?


*


[ MARS ]

Transparency and dissimulation:
Taos, New Mexico

is now being produced
“somewhere in Thailand.”

Simulation is now old hat.
The templates have been

thrown to the wind. Remember
the wind? You used to

have to be penetrated by it
to know what it was.

Then it became a “How-To”
book. Now it is totally

integrated, has reached
full employment, has direction

and purpose, and is highly
regarded yet totally unknown.


*


[ REGARDFUL COLORLESSNESS ]

Hoarfrost at dawn.

(At least it's not cold in here.)


*


[FORKED TONGUE ]

Human thought
runs in parallel

circuits of redundancies
said in an uncertain

way, kept sustainable
by the remarkable

infallibility of
the central groove

by which its objective
contact is cloven.


*


[ THE SCENT ]

You can fiddle
with Fidelio

but don't try to
fool Fido.


*


[ MENTAL WARD ]

If this place
were an airplane

it would have
already crashed

way worse then
any individual in it.


*


[ NIGHT ]

It's a temporary
experience experienced

permanently by all
mortal beings, as in

well, though, then,
shouldn't she

sleep with me, too,
as if there were also some

other, or there is
always some other

as, I, you, he, she,
just the lovely and familiar

“it” motif, simply
thinking up the existence of

some girl or boy
in order to want to

sleep with him or her
so that we have a real excuse

for not greeting the actual
person who is right now

bringing us our drugs,
rushing instead, straight

into the projections of our
archival imagination

to see if there's been any
progress, or in fact

if you've maybe even “won”
without knowing it: That

lovely yet totally impermanent
after-death condition of

the semi-living. The perfume
of perfect warmth

and spiritual solicitude
presses against your mouth

like a pane of glass
that gives you something cool

to kiss: One or the other
always picks one

or the other up, like going
to the edge of the world

and dropping them off it,
instead of going

as the evening does, draping us
with the shroud

which we then can share in
the tender removal of, together.


*


[ SMALL HANDS FLUTTER ]

To realize
the human family

is a tree of ice
that can burn

and cut your fingers:
This final reality

is never final: Neglect
of the body is

inability to distinguish
kinds of ice, or to parse

their hurt: Sexual relation
seems all incest,

and this madness,
this inability to possess a body,

drives the embodied continuum
of our throbbing procreation.


*


[ I THREW THE PIECES OUT THE WINDOW ]
for Christy

There's a part
gone missing:

I've seen this before:
To speak irrationally

about acting rationally
doesn't cover the whole

outline of the puzzle
or the night's wandering

to break it. To begin
to speak rationally, they

give you more drugs, and then
more drugs to forget the puzzle:

Sleep on the puzzle, wake
with it, eat it, whatever

the point is to have
its presence obliterated.

There is no puzzle. Or, more
actually, you are the puzzle

so why haven't you taken
the necessary responsibility for it?

Or, you have, letting it be
assembled in your lieu.

But of course, that is just the imaginary
death of heart and mind,

the puzzle of the puzzle,
its aftermath, and not the active

discard (dischord) needed
in order to make it whole.


*


[ THE CUSTODIAN ]
for Janni

The human whipporwill
at 4 AM, sleeping, or

in another time and place,
the ultimate crime, kidnapped

away with myself: It all happened in
The Big Cube, May Day in italics,

Robert Seward, no, Robert
Richard Seward, called

out of life in 1962 through
a sterling crystal dining area

downtown Manhattan hoteleria
with a woman for a son:

congealed blood breeds
a protective fame as Robert

via Queen Kelly becomes
the broken black rod of

husband Joe up my spine as
a vice officer spent from

18th century Versailles
and gathered now in hot pursuit as

the French Foreign Legion,
lately a transnational trend

of mildly fashionable knock-offs.
You don't think I really care

who pulled off the Great Train
Robbery, do you? Transcontinental

hostess conceits affirm that I
will remain out of the USA

for the duration, in a mental ward:
And blindfolded, if you please.

I will be among the last to be
noted, Babs or Sandy or

what have you for a name,
thoroughly, in a jockstrap,

or embryonically, of the coagulated
blood of trade winds

and discarded library bindings:
Read every text on saintly

companionship and ignore
by nightfall the bodies of

all three of us asleep. I join
the world by refusing

to know it. I've got
a lengthy life ahead of me.


*


[ MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL ]

From 1963 to 2009
there's a void continuum

from which hungry maggots
make my life derive.


*


[ PLAZA SIX ]

This curve, that curve:
I'm not in much for

crowd movements, never
have been. But, simple

road signs: Tehran, 2,350 km,
with blurry arrow. I have

always loved the desert:
Jordan Marsh, colognes

for gentlemen department.
This curve, that one. If

my mail is addressed to me,
I simply throw it away. I have

no clothes, and no money,
either. A seam guide for

a water droplet. Poetry
is not depth psychology, but

a mechanical doing, like
playing the piano. Rather

as from left and right,
federal coterie and powder puffs

and the unsuspected animosity
of having been with “you”

at the Russian Summit Meeting
in 1964 is what bore me

into the talents and interests of our recent
century, having otherwise

and also jumped bail for an ensemble
of fleur-de-lis and Bette Davis

bo-peep pantaloons and a perfect
ruffled collar of Flemish lace:

Thank god for Dartmouth bus boys
and the gaze of hooded cobras.


*


[ SPLENDOR]
for Carol

An Easter egg hunt
in October, necessities

forever displaced, or occur
when they either have to,

or do. Just do everything
wrong in the rightest

possible way. Wear
a flower in your hair

on a bad hair day, knowing
that despite it will wilt

before you know it, that
your own dark roots will

continue energizing your
life, and that your hair

will continue to grow forever,
even after you die.


*


[ VIEW ]
for Leela

Two smokestacks, a tin
roof, the elevated lights of

the baseball field, all social
constructs within a season of

nature that is both colorful
and slowly dying like all of

us: I've been wondering lately
whether this manifestation of

difference between the natural
and the novel hasn't much

to do with the sudden appearance of
your cancer, or my own talent

for hitting a psychic wall
repeatedly and ending up in

a locked ward for a few weeks
at a time. From where

do these interesting distortions
emerge? Or is that that your

cancer or my own schizodelia
are in fact the healthiest

and most corrective elements
we can know, could we but

accept them? Sickness is, after all,
contact with a stronger life,

which to survive, we will have to
assimilate, eliminating all

that's toxic and destructive, and
allowing ourselves to be transformed

by all the difference that remains.
It is not a view we deal with,

but with the toxic and life-
giving forces of vision, always

a threat and forever carrying
out beyond the boundaries of

common life. But of course
there is no common life:

There is only the common bond
that comes of doing battle

against all that tends to invade
and keep us unnaturally apart.


*


[ FRAVASHI ]
for Emma
Mankind's active imagination is part of the overall active imagination (tajalli) of Allah, so that when we submit ourselves to His will, we are in actuality making in prayer to Allah, the moment in which he reveals himself to himself through us, whose passion we are thus permitted to express and employ as our devotion, not only to Him, but to the totality of His creation, including the totality of our participation in continuing to form and be formed by it.


*


[ MAROON AURIOLES AND CRIMSON NIPPLES ]
for Jess

El Khameni gold ornaments,
wraiths of inclement weathers

worn as necklaces, ivory, silver
and turquoise bracelets

and perfect ostrich feather
plumed hats as well as

breakfast with an Egyptian
mummy wrapped in a perfect

Pucci silk cravat. It was
basically an open-neck affair,

Paris hedonism and the like,
German forgetfulness and a life

of dried Cretan beans to attract
and hold the complex decorum of

the peasant class. All is well. My
pajamas are on fire. Anyone

can do that. I will be around,
always, just to be reminded that

I don't yet even know how to
kiss you. But as a man skilled in

letters, I will endure this archway of
future prosperity to know

past imagination into the present, our
never-ending hermetic bliss.


*


[ 23rd APOGEE ]
for Jess

Flat light in eastern-facing
window: It is All Saint's Day

where mountains float in purple
fog: Lord, make my life

a small town in which to live
with my baby, a package of cellophane

noodles, five blue silk roses
and enough strange ink spots to pass

for poems: Catch my colors,
darling, make me your own, keep me

new between your thighs:
Let your soul go loose, and be

extravagant: Flick your tongue
against my skin like a viper,

spend every bit of me you can find
and let us shimmy together

round about the entire horizon
of each other, and leave nothing

untouched or behind
but the dark scent of you

on my skin that I might know
that I am for no other.


*


[ SOLACE ]

I care nothing for the human
voice: I love it so deeply

I can only sing like a rose
to let myself know

how my heart bleeds
when I hear the articulated

tones that are most truly
the intellect Beatrice

scolded Dante for having lost
the good of, the intelligence

manifesting itself through
Nature, as Agazziz said,

and most essentially, how in
the submission of prayer

in which Allah reveals himself
to himself through us,

we are given permission not only
to express our devotion to

the godhead, but are put in
the place of existentiation,

knowing that God can do
nothing for us unless

our devotion in being the mirror
in which he perceives himself

is as total in our participation
as the mistake of the teleology

of Him perceiving Himself
can get to us, who cannot

get on without fragmentation
which makes distinct our own

individuation, that helps
break free of the divine as

teleology by making it ever more so:
God has no voice. And has

lakes for eyes. S/he can
reflect, but cannot see.

The human voice is meant
to break the placid surface,

simply by giving this perfect
lake of light, a shore.


*


[ AN EYE AT THE TIP OF EVERY FINGER ]

Bombarded and ruined
by shit, it is better

to kill the father, and deal with
the matrilinear she who will

forever crush thy head, thus
making one willingly lie in wait

for her heel. Adam was too stoned
on desire and escape to make

a stand for paradise: Sick limbs
wrapped in seaweed (just after

Labor Day weekend): Please
do not set them before me.


*


[ THE ABYSS AND HOW IT ENLIVENS ]

The cultural underpinnning
that made a Mozart

serenade possible, was the court:
As wide as one's shoulders

and three times as long
and as deep as the shallow grave

kept for pauperage, whose art's
depths are endless, whose

dirt's over-refined and whose
performance has a scent of lime.


*


[ THE SKY SO BLUE ]
for Jess

What stirs at the heart of
desire: When a door blows open

in the middle of the night
I feel the need to speak

at the highest pitch, my body
gone green with need of

the next new drug to tell me of
the terror of a sleeping woman's

dreams, which is a parabola
around which I feel

the contour of things to come:
My palms drawing down your

hips onto the bony crest of my
sexual enchantment, your

rosa vulva and my spring
heart, where the sea runs

a perpetually deeper blue,
where in whose depth

a large stone drops, where
rises the roaring bird

from farthest East, patronized
by the Egyptian night, the Phoenix

as your full body, bright
with gold Greek sandals strapped

at your ankles, whose legs
wrap full around the gentle way

I enter you, tongue between
your lips, my inner ear set to

your heart, and my palms pulling
slightly against the small of your back.


*


[ there are 6 further Asylum Poems to be added "shortly" ]


*

By Ear

for Jess

The primary excitement
is the sonic condition

of anticipation, listening
to you play with

your pussy on the phone,
not so much the catch

and uneven rhythm of
your breathing, but

the ability to feel
in sympatico with the tensing

of your body's fibers,
sense the wetness at

your fingertips, the wrinkles
of your panties pulled

halfway down your thighs
which are thenselves golden

in the afternoon light,
as they quiver slightly

and then stiffen as your
fingers and hands, as your

belly stiffens and your breasts
shake but slightly in

the momentum toward the release
in which every part will move

as one. which is
all that sex forever is,

the move to realize one's
singularity in it, over

and over, so that it is never
mind that centers any spiritual

continum, but your pussy
amd my cock that are the eyes

and arms of gods
and goddesses that form

among them a conubial
star, and that's the non-sound

I heard clenched and verging on
release just before you came,

the sound of being invaded
by a fantasy life projected

from an outside which then
enters through your pores

and against whose energy
your own sexuality comes to press,

as if the air itself were
your certain lover, for all

that you put there, against
your lips, against your breasts,

pressing on your belly
and finally, made all yours by

your own fingers in your cunt,
that you can be him and her,

whoever might be other than
you, who you also are,

as I heard you be, all the way
through, wanting no one

else but she who comes
through her own means and end

and lends her pussy to my
ear, to stiffen my resolve.


*