Look around you, what do you see?
A waste of a world.

How wasted?
Dreams and bodies crushed, blank, brutal minds, every woman I love raped or abused, anger. Hatred, greed, war, poison.

What coarse speech is this?
It is I will not fucking serve.

Oh give me a break. Your adolescent phase has set a little late, hasn’t it?
Nothing is late.

Well, give more. What do you see? Take inventory of your world.
All of my friends have been consumed—perhaps I put it ill.

You put it. Continue.
I have too many friends and too little time and too much thought I give to others. All of them will die without a word.

And you? What does your high attitude change?
Nothing. Everything. I see to the end of time, the futility of words, all endeavors and ambition, poetry and canons of taste.

Then why do as you do? Why not recede? Why not kill yourself?
Because I love to write. It is even sweeter than music to me.

Is it necessary? Does it change anything?
No.

But it makes you happy?
Yes.

Life was simple all along?
Life was simple all along.

Fool. How long have you felt this way?
Time immemorial.

Did you ever doubt yourself? Were you unaware of the destiny which you finally accept?
Crushed by depression and lost my way for a few years, but never doubt. I always knew.

Whence you speak?
Outside of time, all this flesh a means for stars and blackholes, mycelia.

Are you sure?
What will change if I am wrong?

Won’t you go back?
How can I? I would sooner burst into flame.

Unfettered freedom and neverending life?
Forever and ever and ever. I will never die.

Continuum of flesh, from earliest beginning to final end, without rupture or break?
Me.

The points whittle down to facts?
All to love. She showed me.

Night Bullstrode?
Form of forms. Ammonite, form of forms. You own both. Shells. Your life fossilizes. Do. Awake. Awake. Awake. Awake. Awake.

Sketches that lead up to a moon rainbow!

October Twenty Fifth or Mycelium of the Full Moon

The foxes breed eggs which turn to milk. I don’t know why but it happens, and I have tried everything.

I tied up the chili bulbs and baked them into tuna casserole as my grandma instructed when I broke the ox. But the foxes just laughed and threw down dominos.

I called the plumber Mario and he came with a flamethrower. But the foxes got away in their bi-planes, and bombed down the eggs.

I consulted with the oracle at Delphi and, as it was all Greek to me, consulted with the oracle Google typing in: exterminate the foxes which breed the eggs which turn to milk. I was told to seek mental help.

At last I decided to try to reason with the foxes. It was December, so I put on my best snowshoes and walked to their warren. At the entrance I called out:

—Hallo! Foxes?

But none of the foxes were at home.

That’s when I saw the eggs outside the warren beginning to shake on their moss patches. One by one the eggs cracked open with the sound of poolballs knocking, and hot milk spilled out. I watched the milk seep into the moss and the moss began to turn purple.

That’s when I understood.

I have been a moss farmer my entire life. I got down on my knees in the snow and began to pray for the harm I had wished upon the foxes which breed the eggs which turn to milk which nourishes the moss, all of these years.

Bands of apricot, shaded to pale yellow, rise over the walls of Atlantic Ocean clouds. Their light drains into the pale blue sky studded with clouds.

The train rattles past, the whirring of the wheels on the rails moves to the bay. And the train’s cry recedes as the locomotive cars go west.

Birds call to one another in the trees, fading green and copper, their light music—

Ripples spread over the water, some pulled by the water’s tug, others blown into its surface by the wind. The water is charcoal and light gray.

Sleeping houses hook around the water, their darkened windows look out into the water.

All of the sky brightens as the sun rises.

Do the stars contain a potion for drifting? I’m at the end of my rope even though I have just woken up. The stars of morning, are they out? Has the moon risen? Cannot you feel in your bones when the moon—

A scathing, cutting drop into yourself. The hand that moves across the page, hand winnowed of energy you could not move, it feels frozen shut with the morning air.

Dawn’s boulders begin to move when the sun touches them. The spirits living inside of the rocks incline towards the sun and, once in a while, clatter down the mountain side.

The morning black. Soon the light will fade the morning blue, the deep blue of space, and then brighten. The world, the young world, awakens as it spins and the planet revolves around the sun.

I’m caught in the nets. Morning pulls me apart, and soon a thousand ideas will flow into my brain. There will be the base thoughts: want of recognition, fame, money, an easier life. I burn these things out of me.

The world flows through the tip of my pen this morning. Thick ink, black ink, rolled onto paper at the tip of a pen. Pen a whelk for ink. Jet across the page, do not—

The ocean is crashing again, crashing. I remember when I thought— The tide seeps to my neck. The water moves past my hair. Dip. Brushes aside my hair. Flows in. Needles in.

I am caught in the loop and never escape.

Cold, hungry.

The path wound higher into the mountains. Sun on branches. Lawyer’s wig, the shaggy scales of black ink, popped out of the ground near a tree. See it! At the hill base. The earth spins.

—Are you ok?
—Yea.
—You have some work to do? Are you cold?
—Both.

She toils up the staircase. Every day the skin on her temples thins; every day her eyes lose focus. Her hair becomes more— The water crashes over you. I do not know what it is but I must write it.

What have I given up on life for? To freeze myself in a room? The night hasn’t brightened. Night still hangs on earth.

—What time do you wake up in the morning?
—7:30… 8?
—Try 4:30!
The angry man is a fool of a man.
—I hate my job!
A fool.

The metal cools. Light has spread into the sky. Still black. The fire upon your brain never fades, never recedes. Not for one moment, all of—

The morning black.

For the salvation of my soul I dive once more into the tides of language, uncertainty, and crushing pressure to find there what I may of myself.

In crushing black pressure you turn about. A pearl shining in the dark, encased in magenta velvet, with runaway trees.

Thrash into the orange jungle of aromas. It was pink and glass, black and glass, a magenta velvet with white furniture that bore the passing of many perfumed ladies. It felt like you had stepped into the velvet womb of a velvet giant.

One light summer in early spring. The isosceles beam of light fell through a pane which milked it. Her teeth crunched the apple which was itself and its sign. Golden delicious words shot deep into your soul; your heart recorded as your pen followed.

Each traces their own path through the woods though they all smell like smoke. I remember the amber sap that used to flow between the treeshingles of bark. Like glue on my hands the sap left little spots that were sticky to touch and smelled like pine.

The blue of a pool plunged in. The hem of the water as it slipped your body like an envelope, boiling bubbles over your eyes. Dungh. Slow underwater world before you lost your vision. You looked at the pale blue world with gently curved rockwalls.

The copper dinner. Turkey roasted in the oven, fumes leaving the kitchen and filling the house of red cinnamon candles, wax and oil burning where the tapers met their stand. Gold glasscutter on the mantle, the rowel rolling across the surface, nicking a ghostline into it that—crack—snaps cleanly off and is leant against the wall.

The hazed mountains shown in the plane window. White light drilled your eyes of clouds and filled you with water. As characters walked from the page to the massive spaces outside, a land seeded with words, you skated down the peaks.

Into the ocean where you swam with sharks. Stretched across the T of a hammerhead like a shirt hung to dry in a hostel, the sun smoking it, and mountains in the distance like emerald teeth. Down their side markings of dark rock like the tears of mourning women.

Endless roads cut up the mountains. An urban density of tourists going to the crystalcaves, flying through green space, finally pooling, where? in a tourist’s village filled with baubles and neon food.

The entire world wrapped in blue finery. Coasted and crashed your ankles. You named it runoff, bullstrode, eons at flux as the sun set over the city in the west. Yourcity or anycity, try to cut it out of you. Yourcity or anycity—the parasites, the policemen, the brigadiers, the fireattorneys, the dancers, the nurses, the authors and poets and scholars and streewaterers, sweepers, dwellers, keepers and enforcers, the red and blue and green masses that flux there, now and ever, flux first in the heart which makes them, and once tuned all turns into notes of water, lighted or scented how you choose, redolent of memories you infuse them with, and backwards, forwards, and always dividing—this you left long, long ago for a patch of sky.

Or swerve from his regular track; or beggars cloak and recline near his barstool; or the bodies press him as he walks aside, or on Christmas Morning at The Elks, Watertown, after pneumonia left him again, the illness scarred the parish, Mr. Graph of Pumpkin Yard Hill, no followers nor admirers nor sickness, but by request and promptly granted, stored in silence. Glory waits Him (ball and biscuit) but Not Yet (Jia); comic undertown but phoenix of the bay: from the groin of crabbers to the iced fork melting yellow, to the dark lawn and a cloth of night sky, dark blue, cracking open each star she lips for him. Al on highest Whiskey re his wail; filled fannypack of sulphur shelf whereas all before all was tuck and toss up for him as a lost rambler, on airplanes ripping, falling through down to new earth, hobknobbing for nitrous oxide, banana milk, sticks of chuar, beer served on a table of peanuts and peas, sans turmoil, but lackeyed a while under the sky ironed blue; learned to speak rough American syllables from crashing waves that crashed for him, stomped his way through sickleshiftsighs but sank his gaze from seawalls; doctoreyes, Woodhose (Jeepee), Night, burns and burns to say nothing of its everymoment feeling: the gleam of the glow of the shine of the sun through the death of the death on the tarmac rush, the entire world paved and turned to air, the skycity of Newyork durst turned rainbow. These dyes suffuse him, maddar, cinnibar, vermillion, bullkelp green, spent ash, smoking sundew and all the blues of water. Case of leather like a guitarplayer, tight black for comfort, white or black kicks, and starving most days for Pellucid’s Sake, holo, clear, happy; he has twenty-four cousins germinating in the U.S. Alphabet and forebears in the once-kingdom of Poland; his b’s a young rose and her taste is for the red of dried blood and his whale means a slump or five at Napper’s his Kitchen. Recently pierced tart for the woman of his dreams, blood thicker than water from overseas; by genes simian or gaunt and sorrow-eyed, Hamptons Man; you and I and all in each gaze pressed into the earth, at the foot of sullen brown buildings // his eyes color like black rock begone, lithe and lifely, or presaged for excommunication, one heathen night; two handsome turtlegroupers split from their dwellingzones; under shade’s cover one wakes other, just trying to sleep; advances him by eyecraft towards spots of shadelinks dancing through night; and unsheathes Excalibur while the lather resplies no thank’m’m and both go off merrily, hands each in an amber fold of night, act a past, two twill, done.

Woo.

And back through the night-morning our two heroes go to gaze at waterlilies drifting with the greensmoke of morning, a time when tarantulas carry on their backs monarch butterflies, already dead, the one points to other and both watch as the sun, solid steady pillow, blues up the park with touches of green a memory each seals in compartments where all turns to other.

Is vroten staten bloten of the tokdrick fanciful bakcpact tribe.

Look

Smell

See

Touch

Taste it

Enjoy

As it blooms from humid ground they tread and lollygag afoot. Money? No. Seeagain? Probablynot. Reasons, give. Adjucated or a difference applepieengrained adjudicated on American preterlatermilinariunitarimilitiflatulism only happy men are capable of anyhow it isn’t Woodstock thought moonrock spectacles are here too.

Sunflowers grow well in regolith.

And if when night blues to day they pass out one after another, one following the other, with each heart newly dented, into the morning fruit market under the arch, mangos eat peaches flossed yellow with cream hair, what harm does it do?

Harm! Friendships made and tied by ides of August night and tides of day. (That one could go back, if one wished, infinite becoming, ad toothfloss, and reap in the past infinite pebbles of newness, occasionally earthing a worthyjewel—cobalt, say—makes all of life worth the wait and the wise and the woe otherwise the slow dragging procession of water into rocks.) But like a mouse trap the ball rolls down the funnels, the wires, jigs across the tilting board, soars over the moat with crocodiles, survives the hippos’ gnashing, and solos on the saxophone before sliding into the oven of realization—oh! Ding! In Night hands rise or pull or twist your slumbering body apart though in day your fists feel the same: not so.

Woo. Burn it out. Burning takes many hands and sides it’s time to let the notes of paradise start:

Each metalcooling season brings a replenishment of fall: red October through yellow autumn; blue June towards lilac May; and the chilling sensation of September and November, a slide into what could only be maroon.

Ta toom. Toom Toom.

Each note builds up a wake of insubstantial things. No referents no color codes; each note a key in a kingdom, demolished like rain on the pavement.

Or emeralds that spin slowly in the dark reflecting emerald light. So light the light seems edible.

Then crunch and molt like a soft orange leaf underfoot. Forever in the forest my heart runs on through new trains of bliss and new trains of bliss and new trains of bliss.

The note slides up the scale and crunches a city on my head which crunches. The scale stodders out before mines about. Then winds about. Then winds about while each a blue star decays.

Or if it could be we slide through each calamity? One two it winds about it winds about it winds about it winds about.

Each siggie fried an egg racking upon the drops which, all full of sun, chorus now:

In each mountain cracked open at the touch of your lips, your red lips and mercury.

Or smile. Each blue drop clarifies in the pond whereat you left me as it cooled into sorrow into shame on to sorrow that burns with each long burnt sigh.

As it frees out a length or wind of rope that comes and bangles then dangles and comes that rope bout wind a length of it winds about, it winds about, it winds about.

My heart cools into the dragging puddle of words: each dare and did their train. A fire dying out its dome of white embers, your lips adroop; I tried and stole one last look from your eyes.

And like that it melted out of you for the last time, coming with each purpose tangled; you could not see them or break them open as it wound apart; into each dance you still uncoiled, winding into each blue color that cracks open like a star through the sky before diving into the waves, under the ocean, all that’s left fizzles and burns out in the air, sparks cooling, and now I can finally say at the end not yet.

 

1. Bands of light illumine the clouds so faint and blurry words cannot paint them.
2. When the pickup truck approaches the slender red-white gate lifts.
3. A flock of blackbirds flies to another tree, the flock fraying in flight.
4. The sound of the train passing blends with the sound of traffic passing, then hoots.
5. The ballast makes a clink clink sound.
6. On the corner of Gilette Avenue and Railroad street stands a green gothic house that reminds me of fireplaces.
7. There are fewer mushrooms than three weeks ago.
8. Halloween is near. Decorations lie on peoples’ yards, uninflated; replica spiders, tarantulas, run up trees.
9. Palladian windows under vergeboards.
10. A bird flies over the rainbow patch far away in the clouds.
11. The tiles of the pine cone, resin-sticky and covered in white, spiral towards the bottom.
12. Old BMW, form over body, new Jeep, unibody, brittle.
13. Sorrow, for speaking that way to her.
14. One moves closer and further to different parts of the clouds.
15. I have found my last mushrooms of the year.

In the Heart of the Financial District

I could not go behind him. You see, if I let the nickel fall out of my pocket it would not have damned us both. John plays harp at the Wendy’s, a mermaid bar where the waitresses play punk. Sometimes we come in from the cold and dark together and order two salivas.

That’s when they blow the whistles. The man came crashing through the world without his hands gone. Escalating we had no other choice but to call the animal control officer who responded with a crick in his voice:

                                                 —The time for calling or operating—
—But I love you I called from the bleachers.

Don’t you want
To ocean me
blue alone in
space and time

It also comes apart though we are young.
—Soon, soon, said the man with the neurons, you will know why I curled or plyed here when the night was thick, black and spotted with magenta.

Having no dog with spots the tender forced himself into the rope of the net even though he came with her in toe as sweet as petals blooming blooming blue when

I learned I was
A fallen flower
In a flowing river

Though Clarence and Lawrence and Cleavis and Sindy Mindy and Ralph swim home together I have slowly learned that it is best to dream the world without a shade of happiness breaking the surface even though you became the shadow melting in my eyelids past the universe.

When the sky rang out a song I could not see on the mountain top. I knew music played for every ear in civilization but it was more important for me to see the lichen pressing against the rocks which came through the snow you slip through like a soul that filtered into Buffalo Grass vodka as you drifted down the river to a place the city had named

Star.