WHAT ARE PROBABLY MY MEMOIRS

Ivan Argüelles

chalk editions
2010

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What Are Probably My Memoirs
Ivan Argüelles

text: © copyright 2010 Ivan Argüelles

cover art: © copyright 2010 Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
cover design © copyright 2010 Peter Ganick

http://chalkeditions.co.cc

contact: Peter Ganick pganickz@gmail.com

contact: Jukka-Pekka Kervinen jkervinen@gmx.com

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What Are Probably My Memoirs

(i)

begin at end of old supposed to be , waters running

through thought and thread, a section , hyphenated,
gives us the collusion between flesh and blank
so much trying to sleep, so little left to wake,
so I , nevertheless in old bookstore rummaging,
is that mine? chunks of rhyme and throw them
into the bay , listen carefully to kerouac reading
or ginsberg’s “America” , what is it I am doing
reading writing taking walks and thinking , no,
“reflecting”, when I am not getting dizzy , or when
love’s illusions everywhere, to get in touch with the
various, women, let’s call them, teleportation of
the tender and vivid , viscous ? portions of a
mind doing itself in again, and again, if you will,
the wedding last week, remembering my first time,
such a mistake!

Listen, dog-ear! that was thunder down and no inkling

of the, a future in re- , annihilate the (your) self
all those attempts, nostalgia of a kind, the errant
latter day, a light, some light, married like “that”
all crumpled in mid afternoon heat wave, drenched the
saga about, and the talmudic references to a book of
genesis, instead of today counting from backwards the
years remaining those probably 20 or 30 left, and to
the right below the smudged print, a hoof ? a fiction
rather than the definitive study of, ash pleat dividends
from a reading of pliny, lucretius to follow, then some,
even as claire reforms her judaic community and the dean
martin song wings into “volare”, eastern skies trembling
with holocaust angst, down the stairs a baleful , a less
than hopeful, we are in the ruins, a basement of classical
antiquity, anguish, dash entries and liquidated “frissons
d’amour” in an unlighted sky, dawn cracks the envelope of
liquor and barbiturates hoodoo downers and peyotl jargon,
just as if the world from a rooftop were “real”! jazz
omicron tilted in a felt cusp dancing cheek to cheek with
death’s swarming girlfriend(s), darling “you send me”,
darkened theater thoughts before psychiatric swirl fuzz
membrane issues solo for recording device and greek verb
forms, later on the gastroenterologist will have his say,
as will the black (“negro”) photographer on his way to
denmark,

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forward when really means “back” a few years to mayowood
nights a softening then claire de lune, mensonge de vie,
italian lessons beside the summer pool, unreflecting or
of the future what’s to know, gathering around the darker
skirts of the Persephone-types to wit mary lou, etc. how
much more writing there is, french and abacus and sophisms
with a secret omega, delved into the cretan back file to
immerse the by now polyglot in his longing to, compose the
perfect response to all that has been read, a walking,
library? grammatical interludes between episodes of pseudo
byronic, a flamenco side to his darker other, shapes
without hands to form them a fantastic, a mexican actually
silver masks and pyramidal constructs leading to and from
planetary houses and the greater mysteries, the rains the
tropical siestas the, not the least the abysmal lutheran
cavity, hives and subterranean intersections of syntax and
depthless water, how would it work out, I mean the women,
the obsessions, MOM, walking on some soft night-earth head
in dream and sleep in glove, the fades and reveries and

listen to kerouac again, carefully, references to san bruno

and hollister and to the “mountain”, this mysterious san
francisco bay where is now, Now, the past has come to eat
its own vomit, voluptuous annotations to drinking and the
darker, who was diane porter? subterranean angel? or tony
robinson was that who, all suffused with names the outer
creases of night spangled faintly with gilt ornament,
overdrive and headache, concussion and snare drum in a
whirl horace silver quintet (se~nor Blues), the book I will
come to write just born in 1958, elvis in the army,
plateaus of, dusty vistas of an imagined latin origination
replete with conga and mambo jive, jungle rot intertwined,
a few inches to the left and the entire sanskrit dictionary
caves in like an army of elephants trumpeting taking with
them in their fall the whole cliff of intricate basalt
memory, listen to kerouac again, innocent revulsion, to go
cross country thumbing it with girl in faded gingham plaid
whatever blond tresses and angelic, remember the deathless
night sleeping in the desert beside an abandoned machinery,
suggestion of a falsified marriage, again, wasn’t claire
enough, beatnik episode invented for its own sake, fumbling
with spanish keys in the city of monterey or evoking a
lafacadio hearne ghost dans le vieux carre, swamp jail tank
with dry out ceremony no legal recourse, all days become
the One Day over and over again, the semblance of a life a
whiter shade of pale, when you/I will suffer some kind of

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epiphany beside a juke box with ruby and the romantics
(angel baby)

basque pimento strapped to headband who would understand

that? afternoons on north michigan avenue psyche-shoppe,
doctor telingator if you’re still alive, forty floors below
the backwards winding river disgorges the penultimate
syllable of the prairie in a wash of cyclone grass and dead
cement, what I have been if not aztec pachuco submersible
raiding from latin psalter the drifts of the, dead, the
forbidden fruits that live just next door, remember?
sundays with uncontrollable libido, runaround half naked
just to get a whiff of Nikki, again, opium the perfume,
exclamation marks that justify nothing, and head a dreaming
ineffable longing beyond the classical assault of, islands
cut off from the, void, stolen books, staring into the
stucco sicily that slowly merges into a japanese, dhyana of
the holy fuck, so how many blue sky eternities ago?

we ought to encounter death everyday, it should be a way of

understanding, who we, are

levels of detail, minimal comprehension of space of No-Mind

when what else is there, that faraway traffic at land’s end
so dustily conjured by kerouac in that phase of, the
Dharma, sadness but not regret, and to realize each day
contains within it the fullness of death

where were we? an assemblage of scatter shot memories

leading to what epic first, draw the boats up on the mental
shore and ignite a blaze to the unknown god who delivered
us from the fateful stanza tossed by tempest’s
can we go on without a glance back, larchmont westchester
county where the full image televised and rebroadcast
brings us no whit nearer to the, widsith, what shadowy
longings cast upon the watery surface, greensleeves,
dragonflies flitting invisibly winged, things alight,
disappear, have the advantage of existing only in the
imagination, release of, tension

to what epic first wine dark sea culmination of cinematic

and perfectly scansioned, metric quantity rhetorically
darkened thumb filmed agony, ours, finally, and the only
one, really, matters red kimono desperation against the
wall in mimic of orgasmic, to hyphenate reality in thus
wise, to second guess the rules of abandonment, to alter

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one by one the inches that separate, to endeavor to
“recreate” that first moment of sublime epiphany, showered
with a dazzling insight to, here and there the monumental
efforts in their ruin all but unrecognizable but for the
gift of intuition, epic by definition incomplete and
misunderstood as to intent and meaning, a music implied a,
infatuation, yessS, “there she goes again”, draw the boats
up the sandy strip and night awaits, us, tents unsavory
with human offal, the gods riding their distant powdery
vehicles tossing showers of withered bouquets, to whom the
victory, to whom the loss, a risen and a sundered, been so
far up, been so far down, etc

maze of stars invoked in an almost drunken blaze,

adolescent and disheveled reciting mournfully the first
fits of verse ‘pon Thy gilded Tomb, the ancient queen in a
faded white and platform heels a shape of rosy pink dawn’s
altered finger tracing spit and sperm across the universal
canvas, hieroglyph and tonic of urge to “write” the alpeh
and the gimel in subterranean folklore, of the, and of the,
so forth unto the hour of the Supernal Bride, while some
few square meters below on planet earth they are designing
a football field, memorial drive, outer suburbs reaches of,
the span across the unthinkable water, who have engineered
myth and bridge alike to, lay the thing down, take a break,
was it claire who first ?

anatomy of a, her indecision is a window, whether to fly or

to shatter the base of reason, then took the diaphragm and
“ran”, while those who were toiling to haul the rough barks
on the sandy spit and called it, an atlas with indian names
probably algonquin scattered with anglo-arab toponyms and
the like (44 underwood street NW?) in the background a jazz
bass exercised the restraints of joy, trobador and
flamenco, the distance between the imaginary grammar of and
the realia fixed in their ideational spheres, content of
discontent, the bed spread like a sea and nostalgia, reefs
of smoke the lingering, totem beast at the back door
willing to, whose form will it take? ulysses weeping
unknown in ithaca, morning streets fresh with wet and the
hawkers just off the boat, palermo or naples at this hour
forbidden like some oriental gynecium, regal stuff in the
mind only, chasms of the unthinkable, air and cloud, the
lute tuning up, darkness in all the corners suffused with
the cluster of perfumed hair, virginal moment of time

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I was “there”, so it is says in a monumental tongue of the
sleepwalkers, the dazed and cigarette, the solitary and
weird searching for their “prophet”, or those drinking just
to feel it get numb and laugh tossing off a suit at a time
of the finest, until face down in lathered sawdust and the
consciousness that does not relieve a fistful of, sample of
dead flowers in either pocket, myth and umbrage, the cellar
of hell where the “king” gets it, Laundromat and suspicion
of elemental, forfeit the tomb, Brother! mine was here
first, millennium edition of mystical poetry, sold at
dealers everywhere ,”Madonna pictures”, the subterranean
blues with mexican rolaid adjunct, two by four wheeling in
the back door of purgatorio, until just enough shows to
reveal the pornographer’s intent, so sad little girl with
suicide on her mind brown eyed and beneath green baize pool
table her was a, can’t call her up any more as phone line
is dead and mom cant get wired like she used to, the ploy
about the “et dona ferentes”, big wooden, while in other
suburbs gratuitously added to the northeast of the existing
map, in mind just a few inches between us and hell

what summer ago was that? the recall system is on the

blink, dollar a minute and flush the goods down before the
law gets here, on the turntable some mingus some miles some
coltrane, etched in disappearing sand the “la vida es
sue~no” utt- stutt- uttering loudly in diapason, marginal
notes fingered by the wakeful nestling in his fraternal
strife, to whom does it concern the purloined rand mcnally
atlas showing all the proto urbanized regions south of the
sierra, Caca Madre! , while those good enough to merit a
buddhist mention please startle in line to the formed left,
misinformed and dolly whose ruin is a circular potential,
and if claire would just show her eye liner to the dream
merchants wouldn’t that be a, yess indeed, sharp focus of
photographer’s studio with black and rose curtains, up, how
am I ever to get it straight, again, ?

struggling to get out of those wraps, to become “pure”,

land and water as they disappear, so do we, a bedazzled
something now a reduced other thing, we were, then and are
becoming at last reaching into a portable sky, does it
matter, whether the words which mean and the sounds they
employ, which? mingled with the long syntax about the void
and the inbetweens and the outsized consonant system,
fingers and switches toss back the light, soil and old
patterns vary behind the shut lids, iron through which we
receive the word for “blood”, and, to repair the wounds a

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hallowed stitching a, attempting to make a reading of the
old french version and make it modern, Parzifal aglimmer,
or in the lucretian interstices to perceive the at last
realized, the unofficially annotated, the imperceptibly
reconditioned, nightmare, water and weeds, the choking
sensation that this is a, fabric of dense

so we begin talking at times not really wanting to make a

sense of it, the other night for example, when the dog lay
down and played dead, and you at the door shaving, trying
to be what I remembered you to be, amigo, pellucid skin and
autocephalic memory, ash down dust pulverized grass ions
brownian particles, movement, from planet to planet nothing
but longing

and if there remains any, doubt, the lingering white

aspersions dashed on the water full text (ink), version in
night scope, as I was telling the “other” about my shifting
attitude towards death and dying, the small red filigrees
highlighted by blue litmus, extraterrestrial intimations of
the umbral port, to be attained if ever, buddha nature
barely manifest, today, a tale woven in grass and spit, dew
falls on the farthest side, to reach it, to darken in that
sweetness, unconscious but fully aware of the descent, at
one’s beck and call the body in the glass, the shape
shimmering firelight winged and aloft before you know it, a
music fills the ether, choirs of, questioning nothing among
the masses of cloud, many will have failed and lost,
plunging through epic lines footfalls a sodden echo, thud,
thud thudding in back mind’s predawn, what shapes inhere,
what dirt what stains come with being born, whorls faint
yellow swirling to the vanishing point, no eye kens, no
ear, lisssss

pretend it’s not really “you”, but someone who resembles,

watching that “self” go downtown to deal with life’s
burdens, get involved with women who tell you all their
secrets and you go on in the rain, riding a small line
into, horizons of dust and the meager compensation of
“love”, postponed the battery wouldn’t start anyway, a
tight headband and black circles forming, the train rushes
right past the station, not picking you or the others up,
neither to the left or right, pay no attention and insist
on your, ticket frays, isolation, crumbling edges of a once
grandiose scheme to, could we stay for at least “two”
years? the gods unkind in their fedora broad brim ethics
yield not a whit, toss dead paper flowers into the brink,

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wait for the isolationist clause the long airport ride to a
tramp liner, swim through helium holding someone else’s
breath, how did I get here, the din the roar the falsetto
on astral stilts, pages of obsolete silence, follow

me, it says in the fine devanagari print below the bhakti

hemline, visions of swirling masses of, hair, improbable
denunciations of one’s own dream (s), arturo & childe
harold accidentally combined in the cyclotron, fission and
porter ale, recess to the third degree, bearing down on the
trunk line, oppressive hemophilia borderline insomnia catch
all for linguistic recidivism, trekking through and past
buddhist hotspot tourist traps in gauzy silk trousers
without spats, a grueling session in remedial math, the
monks in their ochre suet nodding off, as if one could ever
catch up once life has gotten its start, leaving me in the
wake, a dense surf pagan and somehow, melted spanish gold
all around the frills singing that old trio los pancho
number, to You my heart cries out Perfidia! down in the
basement unraveling his tapes papacito in a divine
melancholy matches cards with the devil, obsession and
replay on the dog-eared scraps, for whom the bell Tolls,
the faint suspicion that this is all it ever amounts “to”
, followed by

me, required to fill out the first three paragraphs,

doesn’t matter how yellow the ink gets, the chinese soluble
fish going in and out of father’s judgment, the inset shows
a blowup of fresno county with its inches of armenian and
mexican sloughs vying for favor, mood indigo, long distance
telephone, riot in cell block nine, the additions to the
urban landscape increase exponentially as the karma
precipitates, I was your “used to be”, look at me Now, car
in hand like a god with no place to go, listening to
kerouac dharma big sur recital as land’s sadness augments
the, blues, over the edge the utter
whispers to the

blooms of night rushes, sedge and mimicry of clouds border

the lid’s interior where the eye scrapes its own image,
other, simply green flashing into pale corresponding to,
whiter edge of, the various “girls” go by each more the
other than the self used to be, ultimately unrecognizable
paradigms, smattering of pidgin bat-talk, hospice sleeping
hard the ginger tufts as iridescent the crown of heaven
sets its shine, hills of longing downy disappearing into
the inked fog, etches of, in signatures read disease,

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matters of the heart, crimson is only a shadow of, hair
and, the delights of “seeing” for the first time, shapes of
illimitable “things” as they fade, as they fade, as they
fade

“mother”, gingham robe as seen from scrawled distance,

unable to understand, but intuit yes, the fragments as they
go by, in a delirium, kaleidoscope going up and down in
uncle’s recently motorized vehicle, the cartoon drawings of
the family unit, disposable fractions of water, as air
gathers around each blade of grass, the sky suddenly
pernicious in its atavistic azure, more remote yet the
rumored death in africa, where beasts evolve from a music
of nerve and color, and lay the head down, windows patterns
like snow billows, who will narrate the feast and who will
recite the dandelion wine, in his coffin of intimate red a
grandsire huge and empty with longing (“sehnsucht”) sells
insurance to the mouthless phantoms of the radio, a ghost
as such traveling from gospel to gospel, long black streaks
that simply refer to summer, other heretics border on brown
with a guitar and a, chiseled from a slate roof the
enormous medic of rain goes about the plumbing, as if
nothing, and the shelves littered with the appalling
uselessness of science, where the stars go afterwards, and
with whom, a potential infirmary

as to what passes and what does not, the memory able to

capture that, snapshots in passing of a so-called life, a
recondite thought an ardent passion a, to connect these
what seem like random and the green turning to blue, water
into sky, flame into ether, the whetstone in the garage and
the furtive bottle, a sampler of future mindsets turbulent
and at the same time transcendental, accompanied by a music
of larks and sun shot clouds, wisps of anecdotal, in the
heat the black metal cooling, vague vistas of, only a
hospital lawn at once grand and solemn where the figurines
of distance come and go, unsettling and opposite to the
candy and toy shop on a trunk line that seems to lead to
the very hesperides, taking with it the first greek dead
boy, chthonic dialect to be memorized and immediately
forgotten, stolen wares haberdasher’s units barber’s tools,
scraping the bone for a sign for an intimation of anything
that resembles permanence, but this fleeting white passage,
this enigmatic foray into the photography of shadows, this
emblematic sleep zodiac encrusted and, awesome

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shivers, darkness around each root, to come into being and
pass, from the light where it was first planted then
emerged and green submerged into abyssal, infirm and
feminine in shape the intense and remote, distance equals
longing as dawn equals loss, to go back to where the root
greens its oblivion dense ropes of, pallid obscurities like
mansions of etruscan foliage darker than expected, the
underground lapping of a water beyond ken, languages of the
vast meridian unknown untranslatable with funereal siestas
and enormous empty verandas where enactments of passion and
intrigue, and suddenly in the one sunlit corner a painting
of day flowers its emergent tropical, a cupola of heated
brass and tongues like bells resounding catholic and wafer
thin echoes, to how far it goes to snow flake distant
pattern on marginless window overlook, such as a frist
winter a

following, thin red traces of, sequenced in no random order

of untabulated data, monoprint, filth, scheme, dotted rayon
lines, altered space, for breath read “light”, for light
read “death”, and et cetera,
shoes won’t fit idea, chromatic symbology of shattered
scope, links to the turgid and dehiscent, text books of
total despair, reading in order to die, in order to influx,
shape of things never really palpable, first a then a then
another a, blank heterodox wedged into the library shelf
right next to the book on submarines, algae disposable
waste futurities fern hoof wax demolition, the head, aches,
to know a substance and to be “transformed”, that is
translated to heaven a wonder, first star I see tonight

indra, indra king of the gods, paltry figure that he cuts

sitting drunk in the back seat of a cab, alternately whines
and exults pounding his breast “soy comunista”! treacherous
causeway to tenochtitlan central where a goddess immersed
in aztec see through grows impatient, silver masks forged
from pure air glow ethereal above the impending disaster,
shift to memory about, transfers in thin blue litmus pasted
to the back of an oneiric chevvy, an entire city destroyed
but for the map it is based on is lifted by dream levers
into the northern sector, beige croupiers in shades mark
the various exits with an incandescent chalk, burn into the
mind’s reflux the two bit pistol shots, dust and clattering
hooves around the cinematic bend, rodeo drive, beverly
boulevard, however to wake just to dive again the lot of
one’s existence a show of a death time, a

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various piecemeal and fragmented shattered sections of in
giving light, chinese on the wall and submerged ingots
below the floor, hemline recidivist in gilt plexifold with
centerpiece by vivisection blond over ash strawberry,
tossed her flirt into a hairstyle much like an early spring
rain, one eye there the other, in the middle of everything
memory just “goes”, mutant celebration of time if only to
arrest “it”, zoom to 80’s photo of “her” captured
clandestine online with no advances for the undertaker, we
who are so careful to be personal when hunger stimulates
and hallowed intersection, put a hand in and seize the
likeness! mary lou rediviva trying to remember how the
first charge and the soft dark warm dancing to a slow
ballad number as if melting and wet, spanish arpeggios
thrill the spine with corollaries of dying, “you belong to
me”, moon shots over frozen waste tundra bluish pale
absence of the, exactly who wrote the music and who the
lyrics upended depths of expanding emotion blossoms into
french verse becoming bitter and angst, twists of april the
fiendish season trying to reconstruct that ever gone moment
of day rapture when the lark flew into the sun, and what
was the early roundelay trying to say, what language
intuits its own form just to become “other”

v a s t and slow, beginning to move through holy mounds of

immateriality the serpent flame, lust, laying the body down
in a fever anguish exultant trepidation cemented to the
image on the wall flickering to join and be joined, vomits
sitting on lap and room swirls phading light and fast dark
finishes its first session with, how we will know each
other if we never have, the resemblances are of no matter,
it is simply to “recognize” what the mirror gathers and
does not give back, pointillistic shivers of eternity
shadowless and, immersion of the godhead within the
profound mouth of, summer’s gay entrance a bodice of fluted
cloth and fiery blooms tossed around the hair and how the
swelling gentle doth, vomits again, red the halo and
freckles, redder still the giving mouth, reddest of all, my
love’s

recondite and suspicious, egypt, the furrowed earth, a

delta where nothing is exchanged, a lapping undersound
where ground swells digital impressions lost, who is
sleeping there in the lattice of darkened leaves a murmur,
a dreamer, someone’s missing “thought” where it begins to
move from red into the palest hue of vermilion, the part in
her hair that color, dancing, within the glass like the

12
sibyl in her spoken latin whispers, it is the first lesson
that separates us from the rest, after that we all go lost
into some tenebrous future always anxious about the
grammar, a labyrinth of ideas, no exit but, return, return,
O grieving, like an invention of style, the mouths of the
so many dead echoing their desire for a last cigarette
while the prophet in his anguish topples from the stair,
what cannot be promised and lacks reflection, the so called
sands of time, that bloody egypt, her first menstruation
dotted and checked in the inverted pyramid of the grimoire,
to get it back, to bathe in its refulgence naming the small
cities of the highlands after her, reviewing the sections
of night holding the brief candle with its smoke to the
fine print of the guttering stars

this is no imitation, madness, full tilt, glorified wheels

burning into perpetuity the mind’s dross, all the summers
in their blackened wares smolder ‘neath phaeton’s kindled
axle, mourn Ye daughters, veneres cupidinesque, from the
mount traveling south to hell’s vernal entrance accompanied
by the birds’ sweet latin, in her cups and vomited forth
all that was in her both good and evil, crouching a shadow
of a shadow on the cinders and embers to make water, the
defiled of the holy, the anguish and trepidation, to touch
“that” to know, “that” goddess, how in a single month
consumed man in his meaning and tossed the desiccated skin
to the dogs, me, the apparition of me in the conditional
tense, the absolution of me praising to the skies the
“queen”, homecoming and nostalgia of the ulysses-type, the
blind bard-type, the listening to the greek as spoken in
the fabled restaurants of one’s youth, tossed into the
ditch used and abused, the fatally and totally troubled
male, bent over the photo of the picture in the mirror of
“her” who summons, “her” who destroys

what, creation and fields of endless, of grass, a single

red stripe hidden there somewhere bidding, enticing like a
siren, woof and crazy spell into the labyrinth burnt by the
ineffable, skirts like clouds billowing angrily into the
thunder green depths, heights that no metal production can
touch, ear shrills the profound and melancholy song, I am
not over “it”, no not yet, til the day I die, sentence to
be parsed inside which the latitudes of all beauty beat
almost menacingly, reverberations of astonishing blue and
finally the tintinnabulations of the threnody, the greek
face down in his offal speared by a single mighty
coruscation, iridescence of the seen in a single instant

13
flashing, between the ears darkness takes hold of
consciousness and the ideal goes “nuts”, hundreds of
likenesses of space, the One, hurtled into a minute cavity
itself the vanishing of time within and time without

You, MOM? passages between ice and the furnace where Father
huddles with his angry can of, for just a second blind in
the holy way of “seeing” then returned to his body a
shibboleth of paint and ire, a catholic suggestion of
afterlife that simply crazes the “thinker”, and for a
furious alternate moment a life seems to occur, a rug
pattern an easel clean slate ready to be embossed with a
zodiac of color and form, a dream sequence with twins and
elder sister sequined in gypsy rags and moth burnt,
mysterious passages often subterranean between the pyramids
of the sun and moon, the letters that attach and that
cannot be pronounced, the vowels in between that later
inform the shape of the name of the deity, jungle and wax
of colliding cloud forms, a havoc in the basement reappears
later in white withering dress with breast and snaps,
coughing blood on the freeway in anxious exit from
metropole café dotted with excrescences of extra planetary
light, the mayans have landed! the mayans have landed!

otherwise, an aztec prefix adjoined to the missing motor

parts as doors yawn opening swinging lazily from an
invisible, who will study the maps laying them flat out on
the floor while a radio intones a distant sutra conjuring
mexican buddha forms bodies of dust and ruptured ganglia, a
measure of, a distinct syllabary in itself a guide to the
lunar months hovering anticipation of, angelic scrapped out
in drunken vision near sun porch, latter day conjunctions
that attack syntax at the root, an alphanumeric beast
visits sleep indicting the dreamers for their loss of
fortune, I will be there, amalgam of street number and soul
coordinates, watching the distant avenue turn into summer
of massive green thicket, alert to the sound in the earth
bearing the rapture from its hive toward a definition of
light, eye on the highway that certainly will process the
immense empire of longing beyond the paltry suburbs of
reason and decay, take me There, refrains jigs a bits of
song a, the

half asleep, who isn’t, as always until the theme develops

its woman with her grammar of white mystery, with her
cloudy proportions of grass and death, the various and
varying grades the steps we must climb in order just to

14
reach her hemline, and how many simply crash silently
having obtained only to the third grade, multiples of green
and pronominal forms in the neuter, vast disregard of the
enigma for all living things! swarms of contradiction
arising from the ancient river systems, irrigation and
implant of the human mind to ken devolving, digging up the
clay to shape a this or that a, small gods with lustrous
and ominous portents, a sky fills with nightmare, incubus
of the never returning on time angst, in the closet the
muffled omnivore with her scythe and teeth of immense
impropriety, who will dare to, who will simply ignore
shelving doubt on the tier that says “marry me”, tumbling
down in caskets of rain and dead laundry to an earth
unguessed below the ordinary surface of schoolday and math,
today with us are two translators one from bagdad the other
from damascus, the discussion turns to “aleph” to the
wedges carved into sunbaked earth, to the entrances of
“her” to the exits of “her”, metalanguage

physiognomies of, plural notions of air and color re

transformed, debates about how far it “goes”, shuttling
though an inner space with a single idea circular in
content and irreversible in form paler than it is broad
whiter than it is narrow, of course the “her” waist, a hand
can, around it and in the pages of banned magazines, of
course, or drug store intuits name of bride, read all
about, cursive latin moulds into which coastal inks are
poured, no confirmation of data received, tidal spools
drenched lunar blanks in mid sections of light and depth,
ghostly images on the retina preceding the invention of the
camera, who that is “you belong to me” assignation at nile
hilton ca. c.a.1952, dancing in the dark with a bullet for
a name and a mind, full and dark blooming petals once white
shimmer in moon spill over land source, distant
recognitions in unpaginated chapters of water and text,
stu- stu- uttering (layla) as one drowns in the fathomless
name of the unformed deity, on this side hindu on that
musulman recondite, lal kila, borgo santa maria, the
pleiades spread out on their vertebral lawn

content of shade and, childhood assuming distances between

“snowy fields” what seems like home, memorial winters
immemorial summers, thongs and attribute of dust flies
magma of torpid deliquescent, a situation in oil and dead
batteries the rundown, for example, car, what was going on
either in a tubercular sense in the way that we were
becoming palpable but indefinite, forewarnings of dying on

15
the radio and sudden july thunder storms hail stones the
size of, huddling beneath the metal of someone else’s
condition, planets unresponsive at first then slowly
spreading out their mutilated maps, for a section of
medicine lake or hopkins, see verso of thumb worn effigy,
chinese ideogram meaning “sister’s fled”, and the immense
influence of alcohol and pimiento rubbed into the ochre
surface of a still-born canvas, hot thoughts like lips to
be kissed, or retching out the rear view mirror on to the
endless gravel path that leads precisely to the infernal
spot, standing alone holding a thumb of oblivion, ready to
ignite the sky ready to fire away at the moving subject,
and being careful to remove all traces of the transitive
verb in order to, yes careful to look away to render
obsolete the drug store and the girl friend at the same
time

chasms, unyielding as skin the song, what will come of some

comic book obsession with, patches of highlighted by pale,
and bruises as a natural course of things, the twigs
switches swaths of color and blood lined vessels the
obvious never superficial, inch over inch of meat redefined
as a matriculation of sorts into the higher “orders”, the
never approachable untouchable swank toiletry of certain
hollywood Persephone be-alikes flashed as ivory soap and
curtailed by a monolithic punitive system, lunar attributes
couched as a first “poem”, gilded tombs haunted wombs,
‘gyptian glyphs carved in honey sickle mart, hives of
contradiction yellowing blind the first, owls of impatience
haunting night fleets as scudding clouds, thud, green
shades deftly into black at pool’s bottom, dreamt
illusion’s span generations of painting and stitch, the
reordered wardrobe spinning celestial and somnolent to the
upper left beyond the shoulder’s most human feeling, a
spasm or two and I rediscover “it” nestled in the parched
republic films hills, a forest fire descending casually
into some childhood encyclopedia version of the greek
democratic system, spears up and the lonesome regression
into some olmec recording device a mile or so below the
county line, is it that arrested for drunk and disorderly
the Sire will finally confess, on his knees and pounding
his chest as only a lonely communist could, movie reels
flicker unending sad tombstone finales in tinsel false
gospel tone news hour narration

pismo beach, escalofrio, villa oblivion academy awards

fiasco with two drinks left before death row rebate, a cold

16
cell in olmstead county’s link to hell, chattering
hallucinatory dividend about to bust in j c penney’s
basement overdrive, will you convince me this didnt happen,
will you also consider the grammar book version of mother’s
long losing battle with cigarettes and mexican, or The
gypsy in the Mirror who wouldn’t come home, to be released
after a long thought out debacle with the brain censors
concerning right to death, fictions, ficciones, finzioni,
purgatorial afternoons in granddad’s coffin, lapping
soundless waters of the once known as Lethe, underscored
with a bevy of longlegged swellhipped and you know, girls,
each with her own studio contract a glass in each bill and
an eye on the disappearing zone, becomes fair to know which
is the blond in the casual and with whom is that Bible
going out tonight, lazy approach to difficult languages at,
best, you wouldn’t say but the hill dialects pose their own
sort of market dilemma in a green french chaise longue
about to be discharged from the “state” hospital on east
center street, primordial rains and chills that a window
cannot endure, forethought and bitter aftertaste running
one’s finger along the slate margin the other side of which
is the Unknown, school daze, pornographic prototypes in
long vomit gowns emerging from dime store candy wrapper,
and if this is the light of day! re phrased the organic
soon becomes the inert

small minds, bickering riverbanks in collusion with draught

clouds scuzzing shimmer just inches above the dragon fly’s
brief carousal with life, who will come to know as Orlando
Furioso teenage, other indications have proven false, some
regulatory actions have also failed, to keep one within
bounds, why, on the back cover where it says “as I lay
dying” fraud, voices in the grass rushing to embrace a
great whispered entity, blissful was otherwise a recondite
salvo a proposition about hollyhocks marigolds and dashed
burning in the driveway an angry, vestibular reaction,
mismanaged emotional, hospice for the damned of heart the
mutilated of passion the bruised of mexican the, secret
drinks cadged in carlton hotel backroom, snowdrifts
multiply the opaque meaning of it, all, thought follows
thought in an irregular pattern of nascent freeway
overpasses leading to some massive desert baked subdivision
called “golden hills”, the radio knows what’s “on”, ghost
renditions of movie star fashion patter chattering on the
breakfast hour about korea and the subsumed manchu dynasty,
waiting for elegance to manifest in the shape of a
carefully manniquin, whiz whizzz whizzzz

17
! becomes morning somewhere else a body, electric, hill
slopes carved from tropical fruit warning suburban

did you also know? that, hemispheres of detritus floating

yawning through “outer” space, making it obvious, the face
down format with alcohol fuse two eyes for a thumb and
swizzled cherry vinegar mouth parched for love, perfidia,
crying out, cactus thorn memory of tortilla mornings
somewhere south of the drift in the toltec continent, star
spent dewline awash in diesel fuel perfume tracing pan
american highway through verdigris mambo swamp at foothill
divide where locust song withers sun portal, all fades in
that preternatural light like an apron spread over the once
fecund, notions of time travel of other dimensions of

mango portfolio lush tropic proto memory of, angles taken

from sideshots of a cavern where glyphs representing “KA”
come alive, what is the vast and oneiric what is the,
holding on to something as if it were going to last
forever, flesh and its kiss elemental draught of pidgin
thought about what hovers above my head, there is a light,
and shimmers dazzles dims a, young no more the brain stalks
its “other” for the immortal whiff, chance passing and many
books later the first chapter rears its vertebrae once more
and, Lo! oceans of light radiant and obfuscating at once,
the remote moves of a headland cut off from the main,
lapping again of undersounded waters of, brine and algae
spindrift lumber of massive wormeaten air, hinges break off
in a sky of enormous loneliness, you have been my companion
for a fleeting instant! spears become unattached from the
wounds they have created and a shaman named Manitou shakes
his rattlers at the dry proportion, of this we are never
sure, of the map and its destiny of, the red liner notes
are meant for the blind of spirit, the maimed who cannot
ever know their “way”

how thin it appears shattered doesn’t it, ?, violence of

the remembered as the soles of the feet lift just
millimeters above the grass, some one is running downhill
towards the swings in the playground, some one is held back
by a fear, soon breasts will protrude beneath the thin
chemisole, plans of bermuda and the forsaken nassau in its
blue hemiplegia associate the mind for a new collocation,
reverie does its “thing” in the plaster of paris known as
july, that is where destiny fated you for me, imagine! how
swiftly night falls underfoot with a cellophane of crushed

18
Orion, the dusky dots around the jar’s rim, what do they
“mean”? you ask and no one will ever answer,

syntax is a breaking, of the spirit it cannot inform, of

the soul it is the hybrid and distant ossuary of intellect
and death, and if it ends so what, as the proverbial goes,
bunch a’ nothing for what, languish attachment of the soul
longing for the final breakthrough, out of the prison house
of, into the “ideal” sphere, platonic and, whatsoever I
told her once and for finally, she gestated on the rock for
up to a million it seemed eons, shuddering pallid white
fluttering winged bird, needs to fly, where was I why I
didn’t understand what was going, on, ? and the mysterious
trademarks left by the wheels of her vehicle on my mind,
needed to know and drenched in summer clothes the ghost of
august peering through the dormitory window to heave a,
sighs of tremendous not relief but, escape from the
shibboleth into the pure and only “vowel”, whose name will
it be, mother of god, virginal antiques, a disciplined at
best stroking the troubled male, until the outer is all
white and the inner whiter still and limitless, the
fountain head? mis matched pornographic and hagiographic
elements with dumb intuition to fornicate in the grass
denim locked to denim in rock patterns left by the
shattered syntax, refer to church as a domain of the flesh,
to tavern where the spirit thirsts

anathema of the logos, soul searching in stolen volumes of

the linguistic survey of india, forever at odds with right
thinking, with trust in the fetid and blind bonzes prepared
to burn for their belief, orange chasubles with crushed
white powder, bane and balm both under “nightwood” drinking
to the lees the origin of, not get it straight and instead
aim off course into the shrubbery where annihilation
devours its other, nimbus of the pulverized moons of
adolescence drawn up and reconfigured for the next berlitz
lesson, on this my right hand the fiefdom of bad works, and
on this my left the seigniorial cavity of pronominal hell,
what is desperate and what seeks conviction, what is
alienated and what seeks confirmation of, what is “that”,
what is “this”, the again of the lost highway, anxiety and
inwit in unrepeatable locked in, to have to look “out” when
it is the inside that needs to be scoured for a clue, and
mary lou in her saddle shoes and green plaid skirt motel,
the infinite reorganized to fit inside her right eyelid

19
what I saw there, what will never be divulged, high school
confidential, room after lightless room of trapped emotion,
what was always being said and going on, red brick placebo
of death just around the corner, wind sails hemlines into
clouds of hungry and horizontal poetry, between the legs
the egyptian “miracle” waiting to bleed, it’s time, it’s
time now to say it in tuscan gorge prose high above the
windy summit of teenage “crush”, often induced by oscan
dream gibberish hortatory exclamation marks in the left
ear’s small radical, a kiss that seems a lifetime of
distant and smoking script, “the” kiss, what is lost in the
wainscoting or in the gymnasium’s secret cleft, what is an
agony of afternoon-waiting cherry coke and adrenalin
affixed to purgatorial window where the show-offs
demonstrate their girlish attire, what is an expected
evening of knee dancing shoved to lilac spray pubis, in the
dark, tide pools of “her” eyes, depths in which the body
drowns in order to resurface transgendered and sanctified,
of what are possibly my memoirs a suggestive topic in
current ancient indo iranian, or what follows future in
time unseen the long invisible threads leading from and
going towards, no where, a flower bed trodden under in what
night, a gospel of sanctimony and breast beating (-
feeding?) or the lecture about restraint and order, denim
bound promises in legal sanskrit,

how there are many and what are the few? borderline
\ teases boys in adjectival sense only, warms up to older
“guys” only while pleading the piano, takes lessons in
gymnast’s french in order to [censored], never top heavy
but always guileful bunny soft and sweet in her charade of
masked chairs and two ply twill, beneath which feel lower
and then sinks a thumb into the soft inner, c lo u ds
swarm investigative in pocket sky of fulminating ardor,
smokes guessed happening in muffled corridor with trumped
up boy scouts, whose will be done, grass and chaff straw
beds lie me down gently, Oh, was her a beauty queen pinked
out in gussy shuffler? troubled the male over a vacant
decision, allophone or homonym? jussive versus
intransitive, the vehicles by which we come to know her but
not her name(s), little inklings in savage tint body make
up and facial disarray rumpled in clover scented sheets
with a lavender plus on the under hem, such as it was the
motel was the capital of the world for something like ten
sweet days, then the aztecs took over from rooftops of gun
green smoldering, her was a zed in disguise, me was the
same old biddle aleph, shootings were common and the

20
streets were a map of intimate decision making, maple and
elm dominated by the topical riverbank with its immense
juttings into an unknown and wary stream, were if not for
the movie theater marquee who would have known, better?
syncopated rivalries in march tempo banner with dimpled
awning above the crown of her hair, such a light !

ovarian crystal moon shifts back to back with the “loom of

language” shuttlecock and weft wednesday afternoons on
one’s favorite perimeter, dewey decimal montage with dubbed
spinal reference in triplicate : yellow is for ink, china
is for blue, and siamese is for the two in between,
followed by a chain letter to the emperors of brazil and
peru cuneiformed and scribbled on the sides in a friday
form of hittite lacking of course the diacritics, hard to
duplicate in sandstone, this first effort at literature in
a puerile guise aimed with erotic shafts at the heart of
the homecoming queen, the rest is a reminiscence of vomit
and shooting stars over a cupola named after the ford motor
plant in river rouge, the young in their hard to get
leather jackets and a skin of perfume over each lid, beer
and the munich template for inebriate activity, crushed
gravel and grass settings in dark rimmed afterthought, a
coffin for a father and two tubercular dresses worn on a
faded window pane to be referred to as, MOM, letterhead
with skinned milk aftertaste, goblins of fun in the
automotive hood grappling with desire and its philological
antecedents, you for me and two for thee, the radio with
its electric guitar be bop a lula, humming asphalt
overdrive before it gets too hot and the anthropologists in
their ever task of fundamental adolescence take a fix in
each eye, islands where no two languages are the same and
the women run naked through a silver shaft of ornamental
sky, jade and quartz come through as a voice of most
distant summer, dust mulch ash reckoning

wake mummer, forsake thine ancient dreaming, ‘tis portents

of white shapes, alba, teotihuacan, xochimilco in the
lazing sun, basks there ever a country so far? we go next
to the chapter about the ojibway and sioux, where the
jukebox in its tinny splendor shivers a minute hennepin
county into its original nation states, wampum and tomahawk
thunderbelt in gravity of inconsolable and shimmering
sorrow, each more of a lunar asterisk than, and for a few
totemic instants even aspirin takes on a formidable shape
like that of the red planet on a tear, purple clouds loom
into view, girls gasp deranged, boys gun their motors

21
aiming aslant, cigarettes bloom like foliage in glistening
window glass, how there are many and what are the few? asks
again in distant sotto voce beneath candlelight and
funereal display of, waters of running near place names
like anoka, yea though we sink into the eternity of hell I
am with Thee,

and as who isn’t the many so where are the few? a gamut of
question marks the final rearended section of the chapter
about, her forensic tattle tale lace dipped in gesso to
whiten the already blanched proportion of the dream she
occupies or –pied, for example how many ditties in the
crumpled overture where hair begins to predominate as a
sexual symbol, lip stick traces over pizza loaded with
refined sugar until the whole disintegrates into a “hey
mambo, mambo italiano”, who is dancing with what in the
darkened back room of the by now camera oscura down by the
wharf where the illegitimate kings spend their sperm, and
in the yearbooks a rescinded photo of Miss reeking of
oversupplied sandalwood and the ochre of disaster starts
reflecting badly on, did you ever? slantwise the body
receives attention to its needs perhaps better than in the
paragraph about options, digital vivisection by orifice and
candle, sleight of hand with nether parts until surfaces a
rage to cinder the sky, sheer see through silk stocking
worn over face to better render the magdalene approach to
theology, the Das Gupta people swarming in their little
hovels shanty praise Om Om Om, and if you think bach
started it all with those parsimonious fugues then try
altering the head with a different more powerful substance,
snort and drivel of the, license to drive blind in the
month of the zinc teethwork, a bride in the distance
beckons, her small hand a persiflage of

we try to limit “it” to three at a time, crossed the eyes

and doubled the tees conforming to a pastiche of
neologistic hemophilia in which the main character copies
his other in a deep embrace with the greta garbo type at
the end of the pier, then jumps into the profound water a
narcoleptic victim, aspirin moons, ponder, hollywood echoes
only running off the boulevard darker than before, surf at
the mouth the aphrodite of rodeo drive smashes the circular
glass works, ponder, substitutes girlfriend for a dose of
heavy, will we ever meet this way again? flamenco asks at
the root of adultery why, pages of suburban ideolect
followed by phases of, ponder, sehnsucht such as it is
mourning in the pale grasses of a distant country, how many

22
they will be each a pointed variation of the other, asking
nothing in the process of delivery, the soul, the bird
tossed wingless into the asbestos

where, ponder, issues a thesis about, aren’t we always

going back to that, the paintings that fade the poems that
remain unfinished, the and the, over and over illusions of
love every where, but, simple sentences finish last, the
ageless antidote to life a sample of green daubed over her
once face, pale and reminiscent of the tides surge, under
moonlight whiteness of shimmer dappled streams slipping
through her, wearing rings of darker around each of her
every locks of, ponder, issues threads of blood from the
fine oval of her distant, ponder, more the few who have
left behind the, us, junction and pivot of dust immersion,
we all need just one more inch of light, a rosary of
mexican syllables onyx or jade, and strapped to the chest
the two ton function of love, imponderable, following the
jagged coast line through its veritable night into a
fiction of alba, day, who will never arrive though the
radio be at half mast and the cable cars, watching the
flicker screen of destiny packed into little suitcases or
handbags, the explosives remain undetected, the heart is a
tincture of iodine and marble, ponder, in its ineffable
drugstore which is a mystery of obscure back rooms and
chased cinder blocks, will you also? I didnt need to, but
the elegant thrust of the music pushed me to it, muslin
shifts of remote like the skin of the inner thighs, ponder,
powders mucus hair sperm lunacy

ponder this, how far back memory goes before the meadow
becomes pure blank, the void of mind, the how unessential
we are by definition, allocated meat positioned on a
skeletal frame and given a name, dust bag bound or to the
ossuary, ponder, this is possibly beautiful the wet streets
of the future climbing their hill of now, into whose bed
room enter, please, douse the lights and let the dark out
of the bag, eating some remnant of myth, map figment, hair
and ribbons of dust, tresses wound and rebound into the
spine of volume nine of the complete, how handsome is the
one in the mirror, No? the one fifth from the left in
jumper and suede velvet hoopskirts is she? forget it, lined
up for a photo depiction of a last time ever before they
all part, how many but fewer still the zero at the end,
calculated to make you weep the story never the less is
identical, call them angels call them succubus I don’t
care, ponder, the witless aging in a metal of lost back

23
roads, heat comes into being red and shiny, cools off on a
lunar junket with enough alcohol to fuel planet mars on a
plummet, divination and random house calls, hello are you
home today? under the bed in her favorite rags the barefoot
contessa in her mistress of hell mask, vomit and musk,
argent tulips and smash of white incandescence, ponder, the
valuable lesson about the growing up whole, never look
back, fruit and worm, rose, hiatus devoured by hiatus

and what suffers, what has space, what is in between,

levels of green phading into azure pallid extensions of,
sehnsucht, of the alternate takes of the basement when the
time was father to all, sections of clearly invisible inked
clusters of then bathing beauties, assembled for the,
swooped like a hawk from heaven to peck at the divine
cadaver, and the ghosts of future metropolitan asia cities
surfaced like inches above the drain where sweating a, it
wasn’t as I expected and the world was a giddy two-steps
less than ever ready to collapse in on itself, to fall over
dead drunk on the sidewalk in front of the house, we took
the willow branches and bound them tightly, around and
around, the sky format was reduced to a brief cylinder only
seconds in length, what maps could not explain, the fission
of instamatic image meal, surplus meat spliced over the
bone text which re interpreted means, mythiform and angelic
a whispering entity reappears, right? whose wedding long
gown and talmudic mind reaffirm history’s, invitations to
the ancient debacle, to the runes of indus and sumer, to
the claustral bells ringing within a buddha’s ear, neural
divination of nibbana within the number nine, all events
canclled on the lawn of imminent gestation, green pallids
aspect a, of, a

brooding, ideolect and grammar of a white and distant

azure, pale as she ever was, walking millimeters above the
mown grasses, whose hips she was wearing whose minerva
intellect she was using, for that occasion only, and the
tight band around the head as if the gas were on in some
other universe, frightened animals scurrying into their
night alphabets to return to, maternal gossamer dust wings
of, rushing in a bleakened aspect of the verb “to be”,
within and without the light a form of consciousness, so to
speak, and who wouldn’t, ?, belts of orion the shimmer of
the pleiades first spotted when drink flushed the brain for
the first time, ‘member? summer skies milled with the
portent of stars gone backwards into a frame of
antedeluvian, and to think and to attempt to think to

24
conjure the malefic and the wonderful the simultaneity of a
deity halved in order to be understood (Radha-Krishna) !,
dear mummy wax in shape only a digital impress with spine
of velvet red, she was shooting for the all the way, y’
know, in a drug store akin to the mayan motto “seven come
eleven”, maze of boulevards spreading across vast and empty
fields, adolescence

‘mazing, sunfelt grasses whipped down side the long steep,

when we will recover then we will “know”, obsessions and
their long and labyrinthine orientations through dream
spell and musica da camera, I choose you, I choose You over
and over, again, when we learn to “know” then we will gain
to commence, a substitute for love is never the same as the
love you first felt forever, isn’t always, a many
splendored thing, the walkway soon turns to dust, the air
fractures into a million destroyed continents, maps unfold
on eachother revealing the missing paradise of a tokyo
subway system or the congress of balinese monkey gods, who
holds the golden bough holds too the invalidated heart of
dido, miss her no more, loony tunes of desperate, ichor
seeping through the walls, stucco or gesso the tuscan villa
the precious homophones, deliberations over the correct
route to china, silk ropes and saliva despond, a matter of
seconds before madness, really, obsessions wound and
rewound in the brain’s sickle cell anemia, divorced from re
re reality a po po pounding drum soon creates its own
spanish ear, we learn to listen to metal to artifacts of an
excruciating beauty, set sail captain Dead!

hands resurface wrapped in algae, a coastline shivers its

elemental spine down towards big sur, obsessions, ponder,
that is way off in the future yet a furtive designation
attached to the verb “to want”, lacks a definition in the
present tense, neural and yearning, as all frac tures are,
loss of the whole, islands adrift in a sleep of penury,
space like a massive issue of tabloid ink shifting high
above the plum trees, it is april it is may, the troubadour
in his grammar of periwinkle and, softens his gender aiming
a solitary cigarette toward the lunar minaret of tripoli,
who can doubt this, who can shape a hand and have no word
to link it, who can, although last is spectacular what is
latest never finally informs, a real time is no time at
all, we are vanished in the spectra of wizard looms and
planetary ascensions, beyond the capabilities of grass to
bind, beyond the soul’s checkmate and its other, beyond
each fragment of embellished thought, what was never

25
realized what was never, a thing at once permeated by the
five million buddhahoods and the death of One!

what you love, what I endeavor to know, about “that”,

succumbs to the many while the few remain uncounted in
their purse of human skin, bolgia of fire bolgia of ice,
love’s alternate definition(s) elude the seeking, a phase
diminished by its own shadowy retinue of eclipsed
alphanumerics, who will breathe in the light exuding the
darker paraphernalia, heidegger in his roost of pre-
socratic adventure, I am deaf to “that” smoking benedictine
ossuary, or the time in the hospital laid up with a
mysterious and the doctor with the same name as yours,
assures nothing about chance, evolving spindles of nerve up
the spine looking for a lasting name, an enduring epithet
beyond the grammar rules of case number and gender, the
foliage in the window bright with a distant and lambent
flare, afternoons become a hill as suddenly as they lose
their green, the enigma is placed squarely in “her”brow, to
kiss the third eye, to devolve the thread to its origin in
the heart of the labyrinth, is

unfold the map, let the creases out, trying to read the
street numbers and the approximate location of the cemetery
where girl friend is exhumed with her monkey, how
mysterious the library at first is, the length of the
shadows left by the waning encyclopedia, the avenues
running down the extension of all epistemology until,
greece is fixed in its unexpurgated decimal system just as
merovingian dynasties trace their umbratile codes on the
back wall, decipher the medieval aggravation as it occurs
around five in the afternoon, death of the toreador, the
guitar’s azure agony secretly inserted at the bottom of
page 1009 of the primer of, the sands turn pinkish toward
the hour’s guttering end, points of reference lead nowhere
in these seas of maze, love’s pondering, a situated gloss
with extraordinary verb forms, hand over fist in ancient
tuscan or the puzzling block script on the basalt tablet
left in the upper window, girl friend stunned outside the
circle, listen to the motor running in the idle pasture,
listen to the wheels of themselves moving in the remote
grasses, ponder “this” before evening, before

whatever was recommended is gone now, before sun’s drowning

in spanish ink, hesperides and innovation of peninsular
dialects, it is love whispering, eaves dripping, a wet
formation around the what is considered “sex”, while some

26
one else is vomiting in the garage, fornication is a
byword, the deathless vowels of Oh, running in the dark
against a ladder of tangled consonants the dreamer with his
multiplicands of “X”, what is you, doing, here is never
now, there is never completed, adding images and links to
the already throttled mind in gestation in, fossils of
paper and china, wherever the eye pastures an imperfect
mountain cut out of an imperfect sky, so how can you
expect, how can you? regarding the shape of the land under
ground where girl friend answers to no one, rains in her
eyes a dirty yellowish sort of, or the fogs that emerge
from the contraction of thoughts, what is supposed to be
the ideal is nothing but a residue of water left in the
sink from last night’s, is

the potential for, all cancelled longings sunk in depth of,

despair, early coinage indicates no hope, who was dancing
in the dark sweetness and breath, the moon’s even darker
mint melting in the ruinous harbor of heaven, what other
artifacts have survived, could have survived who can tell,
an ingot of molten gold in either ear swapped for the
talisman to some islamic garden, shifts to a future past
tense, psst shhh no one’s looking, time to make a break
through the red grasses of mirage, girl friend takes a
lesson in old spanish rudimentary tales about calisto and
the ladder, a symbology of mistaken identities at best in
the subterfuge of alarms and crimson dial tones, language
types in color code for the one I lost, in the dark where
any phonograph will do, the shuffled meters of feet and
parasangs, behold in the middle there to the left of the
rusting hurdle persepolis! on the wane with virgil in his
blue cassock through the burnt stubble what used to be a
maze of hollyhocks bending their swoon, necks of ivory soap
prepared to, slit, slit, the greenish ooze and
paraphernalia in a hooded basement, vomit, dialect
immersion in proto tonic, who is grasping the bottle for
the first time who is dying unto the

talk, imperative collateral speech system mumbling in

shifts of primordial sleep, swept off one’s, impediment
about the girl and the cyclone grass, hush timber swells
into flame, orgone and cloud diameter, you mean “demeter”
earth measure in chthonic robes dun smoking horizonless
distance, she who “eats”, the dense persiflage of anxiety
ruddy whorls in her eye(s), aim for and parse the enormous
green leaf, it is a dream, sleeping all over again, a
dream, speared by the window’s fraction of light, and

27
waking, numbed, a tight dry swelling, talk and ponder,
walls freighted with immense indo european shadow lattice,
or as alphabetical memory has it a tool for long division
in dream shifts of up to two hundred per minute in the
white of an eye, speaking for the teenager in all of us, a
predominate substrate conglomerate of etruscan and neo post
and what are probably seeking clues to the UR, faustian
predilection for girl whores and tabu subjects about
forensic evisceration, pulp comic strip vision of dante’s
tenochtitlan revved up in a ’48 chevy cosmo dream, goin’
round and round in the old wheat field with firestone
diamond crusher stylus, top forty on the ace be cee station
racing for numero uno with guitar and hand going be bop a
lula, can life be so fast? can sleep be so hard? how’s a
man to be? shifts and incongruencies in the upper registers
of the syllabary under no way to be understood, normal
apotheosis halt, stop no go, flux in demand, platform shoes
and high heel sneakers the girl she just toppled, over, and

out of mind, borderline, when we will come to know, and

then there will a kind of calm in the head, books will be
of themselves redeeming, a krishna type with thick german
accent relieving himself in the tall grasses, ruddy
specters I am dreaming as fast as my brother is able to
keep up, flying lessons with the by now pulverized image in
the photograph, lessons in totem beast, the savage heart
devours it, self, night streamers go out on long, are
parallels always necessary? if there is one city must
another one be established exactly opposite it? how do we
learn to extend? white blanks in space of suburbs, girl
friend in her pinafore and red suede jumper naked from the
bottom down, what’s a to do? ponder the UR, the dravidian
pidgin formations attached to either hand, moving and up
and slowly down, mesmerized by the shaft in stress shadowy
representations in the rear view mirror, what is moving is
really not, kept at a distance by her dust we perceive
finally the bone text of her unkept promises, striations in
her waving hair and a centumfoliate rose, her mouth, a
blood, a ponder, UR-

walking up and down the long deserted avenues, harappa,

mohnjo daro, tusks and shattered urns, desiccated vomit, a
wall rears its untold shadow before the bomber strikes,
again, we ask what president is responsible for this, a
moving image of unspeakable light blowing itself up
repeatedly to the nth degree the size of ink, or a moon of
china and sperm, white flappers over white shuddering a

28
white ,unghh, suddenly we are in the ninth grade of heaven,
a prussian skirt shakes slowly side to side heaving billows
of chalk, clouds, which is usually a song on the radio
about pyramids and silver, the ocean is an instant in time,
and we are bound in the back seat of a rapidly moving
device, god drawn, and who is chanting like a neanderthal
erected above a miniature of sri lanka, before the buddha
came, there were many of them, in the trees, or drawing a
slow dream like fluid on the, ground, the question of
“going steady” was big, perfunctory and enormous white
blooms in her hair, a radiation of x’s like an immersion,
the soul, perhaps,

or perhaps not, the questions, who am I, where do I come

from, the marks of enduring in a vanished cake of sand in a
diminishing rivulet stepping twice is an impossibility,
remind, behold, backside of time in a small willow leaf
captured by the dew, some other consolation as no other
exists, a road way, some crushed ferns, the gravel
underfoot at three in the morning, to You my heart cries
out “perfidia”, but for the symbology of nine, and the
muses perforce knocking on the brain’s fragile door, is
that you? no, it was never like that, recreated scenes
(seen?) of an arcadia postulated by ninth grade latin
grammar books with pinkish highlight of campaigns in gaul,
of yore, my friend, wept and returned to the library for,
more, just who was that in the glass asking for a position
in the factory where they make “poems”, seated on an
ethereal dais the homecoming queen of the gods in her gauzy
raiment shedding a black sort of light over the snow crust
of hell, window panes bear the reflection of her
nothingness, to this day, an irreverent salute, the frozen
back seat where indra king of the gods dead drunk with a
mop and soap canister in hand, ululating, the forensic
piety of the girls disheveled who would not meet his
demands, meat, vomit, cluster fucking in the meadow beneath
a lurid pre-vedic sun, ponder,

you don’t dazzle, you don’t impress, sops thrown to the

three-headed dog parked half way out on the road to
Mayowood one shoo-dootin-do-be-do night in may, who will
get up out of the dark and reverse the bed in order to
“see”, who will arm wrestle his brother kin of death, who
will swallow lit cigarettes just to “prove”, who will hitch
hike to the nearest metropolis inside a radio going full
blast through a grass with the density of twenty ton bombs,
who will be that, not dazzle or impress, who will try to

29
talk without uttering a sound, one might regret, one might
write songs without knowing it, tangled up in the shadowy
effigy of adolescent suicide, guessing whose brown eyes are
most profound, whose dark hair is most gypsy, whose
flamenco dialect is most romance, whose most body is less
by a few inches before you Blow! neither dazzle nor
impress, you shoved into a lateral off the highway one
alcoholic evening summer, lawns collapse and are compressed
into the digit of a single universe, whose face is on the
other’s, whose other has no face but the, diving down into
the abyss in order to “read”, require to name them, the
“girls” whose july is instantly turned to a crisp, flaming
portions of a sky as foretold in the diwan, this is not the
“transformative” life, this is not the, but a cheap
imitation of

so, going round in circles in order to diminish the hour by

the power of five, sipping cherry coke, wondering what
lipstick really “does”, or why the picture on the magazine
cover has such a fascination, fractions of a waking that
don’t seem to adhere, who will go to war and go mad, who
will escape only to find murder, who will reason with a
rope clinging to the reality of despair, one never knows,
it is the pure innocence of the first time on the radio
with a song about heartbreak, you look at their “skin” and
realize it is an illusion, everywhere, what is confusing is
the time they spend with their hair, the aromas they
emanate while dancing, the secrets they whisper to each
other doing their “make up”, ponder, in circles getting
dizzy book in hand, this one’s for “you”, dark between
their legs, and always kept back from the suburb where they
are allowed to “dwell”, you will realize then how the
highway extends, how the multiples of night fragment
because you have foolishly ventured too far, into love’s
apothecary shattering glass beakers shedding powders and
unguents all over the, floors give in under foot, the maze
yawns open with its literature of descent and hell, meant
for “me”, hunh?

winding round, a long the down, side ways to the, re orient

girl friend to her, native, basis of voice and doubt, to
clarify the issue in a dormitory on the east bank of the
father of waters, drowning that is in, sorrow, of self
ness, delusions guaranteed out the window, will primavera
know to come again, will? the solo career is abandoned for
one of againbite and incursion to the preterit folio,
disjunct consonants come into play, the simple hill folk in

30
their multiple dialect both vedic and manitou the
chattering upcountry, the long trek through what appears to
be the wasteland of, grammar and folk tale retold in gypsy
vernacular of the shining black boot, the copper pales in
comparison with the verdigris gone out of control eating
leaf and mould the supplemental registers often inaudible,
a radio strikes its diamond stylus and a haunting moon like
reverie across the river, bridges disappear in the dawn’s
hiatus, we will not get back alive, really, not this time,
assures the aphonic elder in his recumbent polyphony,
hedges darken in sinister clusters, reading is disallowed,
a feminine figure cut out of bark and distance beckons with
a frondlike hand, gestures of an arcadian simplicity which
quickly grow complex, orgasmic, multinational, inscrutable
opaque, the wheel comes into being as do the early letters
of a writing system, phonetic apologies to the deities, the
chthonic ones, that, is

“I am orestes”, like a music in darkened syllables, and in

the sky the ineffable quality of a passage of cloud shadow,
to lie down beneath that throbbing and remote planet,
presaged for the first time as something gone “to heaven”,
but now known to be nothing other than a discarded water,
an ancient arpeggio utilized for summoning weathers of
incomprehensible green, beauties that go rushing through
one ear to disappear before the brain’s tragic fold,
nothing is heard distinctly on the other side but the
ricocheting echo of, ponder, waters of a huge simultaneity
piercing rock like a drill, how it will gather later, how
the strands of a labyrinthine consciousness will develop
out of the bed of grasses, beckons with a frondlike hand
her, a suggestion that in the underworld we will meet
again, or grown immense she will return dressed in a naked
summer her mind of frigid white wine, to mow us all down, a
sense that, a feeling that, shivers a glass in its tableau
of hummock and tufa, what was originally inscribed on her
inner thigh like a blanched earthen figure, red clay,
burnished amber, mow us all down, if one can begin to
follow “her”, night instead reckons its opposite in a water
of dense refulgence, a matter of seconds

gathers the simple white tunic, around her waist Pluto’s

hirsute hand, beads of sweat mark her brow with a syllabary
of ancient cognition, the “imagination” at play with, musk
and the derelict perfumes of, shipwreck of the senses, to
know which window to approach, to know which oracle, to
know something of the “other”, instead go into the darker

31
self into the abyss of ink and alcohols, churning a
subterfuge of mythic glosses brushed with lip tincture and
carmine dyes, who will come out of the circle, who will
remain like a suicide foreordained, draining the fatal
bottle of all it contains, to the last drop a greenish
horizon turns suddenly blank, the house of mysteries with
its pornographic imagery, the girls who “know”, cannot be
approached not even with the radial symmetry of an ancient
knowledge, (where I was then beside the brick ornament of
sleep while death’s ivy crept rampant ‘round the brain’s
membrum virile

) bathed in a grammatical innocence or, so it seemed, the

spines of the books peeled back to reveal nostalgias of
insular purity, hermeneutics, asyllabic and talmudic both,
skies with a lower register just beyond the point of
visibility like infrared, how to get there, trapped in this
cloak of human skin, with a name nobody could pronounce,
correctly, a thought to know, strategies of declension and
conjugation, a thought to “know” even more, tongues babble,
fornication, exclusion, the basic lunar deictic, knotted
and intense the single vowel inescapable, clauses about
virtue, hemophilia, necrology, to capitalize on the summum
bonum, the gesta romanorum, the the the, roland’s quire of
dense tragicity re sounding, in the vale of Tempe,
imaginary shores of the homeric hexameter, will girl friend
follow, ?, knocking about in the ashes, asphodel fields,
yellowish months almost eternal in their momentary bliss,
round the rows of now forgotten names, girl friend in her
plaid jumper and buttonless white skin, reaches as far back
as the, never to be

best of all, it came last, not before the angst the dread
of the, night some lurking in the, under foot the crushed
foliage of, scattered relics of a former, could she really,
mean, it?
ennui , fossil of identity ,
individuation under skin the reeling sense that, in the
bower where green’s fertile engine guns down its own leaf,
page after page of illegible sanskrit in order to, ponder,
the whatever girl friend incited and excited in the pit of
the stomach, the groin, or vomit and disability of the to,
seated in the good doctor’s office studying the plan to
destroy the mind, the Rant, periodicity of lunar phonetics,
each sound uttered through the conch bivalve of reason in
order to, whatever comes second, whatever deserves to be
negated whatever, much is more than a few times, relegated

32
to the abyss where misunderstanding turns its electric
statue into rage, could I have known, as much? seeking what
can only be determined as the rune of, the various and
random passages that remain (some still untranslatable) of
the earliest known text concerning the relation of the
deities to mortals, illegible sanskrit or hittite, the
section about ajax an ungovernable proposition, the remote
skies unattainable, a longing despite all,
ennui, a fiction, another sort of music
in its place the unconsolable, bipartite mind

what matters in the small graveyard of antiquity are the

musings, it is these we must learn to gather, to re
compose, to re assert their ultimate infinity, which it is
poetry, walking through the tombyard of night with blown
candle and the spine erect with passion, regarding the
stars whose massive lattice work of wintry gauze sparkling
in the intermittent globe of space, sleeping with wide
open, the eye scouring what little distance there is
between lover and beloved, each attached to the portion of
earth marked “unknown”, what were you saying? nobody hears
well with the radio on so loud, traversing with a half
minded intent to revolve the light to its source, again,
and then a whisper arises in the grasses, a shape of
silence a, nouns divided by grammatical gender, categories
of lunar simplicity, the deictic of light, pointing the
“way” to, hemispheres by definition incomplete, you are the
half of “me” I can never join, night switches, ponder, the

residual, memorial field drive through white ways of

“knowing”, banks of flower, hedges of testimony extending
to heaven’s brief corridor, the unlit rhyme scheme the,
immortality just a bullet away, in the sand some prints
attesting to the huge, otherwise the hints of carmine of
velvet of subterfuge, as in the kindled poem about, her was
a fragrance ready to explode, a former trapeze artist her
high dives were a wonder in blank, what we could barely
discern, the climbing through the undergrowth, masses of
clover and thyme, mountain sides so steep the awe to
obtain, half a section away in the gravel face down
mouthing obscenities pater familias, returns to his sonata
of three in the morning obsessed like saint john of the X,
miles of tangled awning and memento of blitz with spanish
accent on the under thong, muchas mercies, that supremely
embarrassing moment when the truth will “out”, for what
it’s worth an instantaneous excursus into the dense

33
millimeter where venus encounters anchises, that blinding
coruscation of satellite and

the boulevards where love’s heavy song, the intense

situation out of which there is no way, “tao”, fractions of
an intaglio dedicated to the “one I love”, copper tone
blends in a significant vermilion part of the hair, she
bends over, steep into the well of oblivion, where you/I
will drink to the full, come that evening in may when the
lawns open up their beautiful hells, ponder the knot, the
escape clause hidden in the footnote about umlaut, immense
powders scattering from the berlitz moon, views behind her
eyelids reveal a porphyry of illicit meat, jargon of
control and submission, (just because you’re going to
college doesn’t mean you have to forget “me”), sandwiched
between the idea of music and music itself is the
infinitesimal dot wavering between the notion of red and
red itself, listen, motorcades three miles long bearing the
various corpse of youth, can’t bear to part, this meat is
yours that meat is mine, hush in the corporate grasses just
south of the meandering, blow into the leaf and you’ll hear
the paradise of the despondent, echoes, of, a heated metal
ready to “bend”, ponder, the will of the few mangles the
many of the heart, consciousness is such a short lived
thing, aint it? “my babe she don’t stand no cheatin’”

what the future brings, that enormous blank of space

located on the other side of the jigsaw puzzle’s imminent
north, banks of dead flowers now, as a wind from anatolia
bears its violent dialect to bear, we, how to understand
the multiple syllable buried in the toxic substance, how to
uncover the recent dead who sport with our breath just
because it is summer again, each and every vowel change,
each time you hear that song doesn’t it make you cry? we
grow farther away from it, want to cry any way, the subtle
interchange between the window and the photograph, ponder,
a face like “hers” perhaps, a delicacy of and a nuance, so
why try to bring it back? what’s a girl friend in the face
of planetary disaster, antonyms as such, who is writing
this “book” about re awakening, a, life as such, between
the variable and the spatially instantaneous, equals a
longing both mutable and white verging on, hands and what
they shape, a confusion of letters and textures a profusion
of meadows shaded and violet and the stepping lightly
proserpina, lifted her skirt to look, and was a, plundering
the filigree and tore the lace right open, the ripe, the

34
hegemony of beryl and utter shining, what matters nothing,
really

hops, deepen the ripe, hasten to end death’s chill of a

marginless dawn, the rills of silvery turn to powder turn
to rusting age, a frost akin to nothing other than the else
of a prefabricated arcadia already a brickburnt hovel in
the, imagination’s revolving corridor brings peace to no
prince, the grasses withering lay down their white, the
greens of a last shuttled heaven pale in a dim refulgence
to be known later, other books ascribed to other rishis, a
mental antelope leaps! to the beyond of whatever it takes
to “endure” this time around, a life perceived through the
chinks of a dead dormitory at four in the morning before
the grammar lesson takes up its latin cudgels, hearken, the
ear, ponders, whose system drained of all color shakes in
the winter air, or to continue this in “writing” to summon,
all the, fragments of fictions, mnemonic bits fine as dust
scattered in the lost air, time’s a, wearing her last face
of youth rose bud cheeked the nip of the bloom of, now a
wasting dun colored hill slope to the west of nowhere,
really matters, a skirt a pin a large gold piece named
after the motel-of-heaven, or in some spanish grotto
darkening after the next kiss, to be, elemental as the
orange shading flung over the balustrade, hips and ankles
sewn to a sexual covenant, who will remember? who was
looking?

for a reason, alibi or otherwhere, in loco parentis, when all

else is dead, if no just cause the, withering and white the
basis of voice, ejaculation premature in what must be the
longest picture show of the “mind”, gutted and derailed the
fancy of primavera now a tattered hand me down from the warsaw
ghetto, boot strings and lapwing off in the heraldic distance
of “miramar”, dense the faery wood, denser still then drunken,
and no excises for evening’s hideous shade, the violent
heliotrope sequenced into a memoriless vale, shifts and
pronouncements by the undergods in their deliberation,
prosperine in her tank suit prepared to capsize, thimble of
pure alcohol, compression by the deceased into the “brink”,
ovulation of the berlitz moon, beyond the seed dream,
offensive, ponder “that”, one’s self becoming the opposite, a
hell of a, darkness in the ultima Tule of “being” drowned and
re drowned, until the upside is the invariable and the stellar
crust, adornments of a No-Mind in search of its n’other,
whispers in an infernal sotto voce, the opera’s not the

35
“thing”, sentence and mangled syntax of, opprobrium’s vale,
cast off, ’s

it was at that time, the arcadian kindled wood, the

labyrinth of each vowel, construct of the tetragon,
polyhedron, waters running under the surface of
darkness, each planet looking for the appropriate
weekday name, a creole grammar the notwithstanding a.
crepuscular devoid of sense, the time it takes to light
an hour the shades, a plenary session of the uses in
disguise, right thinking, torment of the flesh, gasping
for, a phonic debate about the so and so of parmenides,
whitesides rear their immense, collapse in the meantime
of the, shadows figure skating across mirkwood, in
search of a wasting no, time, ponder, who she finally
was, dipping back into the talmudic basement, underwood
street, not far from silver spring, the anatomical
discussion was rhetorical after all, visionary fades
verging on alabaster pales, sketches of what should have
been in their paper house, margins to the left of center
turn to flame, instamatic reconditioning in gestation,
streets turn into vast boulevards of radio, magic shows
prop up their sigmatic Night, for a long glance into,
crying suddenly in the movie theater dark, for an
aristotle to employ an a priori psycho

analysis, the lurid look into the eye’s Other, magma of

the chilling reflection, windswept tundras where the
brain in the movie theater dark prepares its own
devastation, auto-flagration, each idea tipped with
brimstone, the chafing at the underside, underwood
street talmud lesson, fans to ponder, letters to bore
through like an abcess, timid to ponder “why did I”, ?,
periodic charts where the hand encompasses its gesture
with a, like a fusion of illegal metals, chrysalis and
adobe of the cyclotron, chained to his mast the
inelegant “ego” maddened by the sirens, how to proceed
to the next quadrant, latin books a vague notion, greek
hammers its gamma into an illegible, formless as it
hands to shape to have, a the, followed by another the,
and all the while I was making eyes at someone I didn’t
really know, darkhaired hungarian with a jewish sprinkle
in her death gaze, to make up for the pre socratics who
thought water was the first element

a studio surprise, a check with the doctor, yes, the

divan with its quantitative metrics, stanzas of immense

36
obscurity, the dante-esque passages about the “descent”,
attics in the meantime filled with dead flyboys, ponder,
the antiquities both sicilian and ionian, the seas in
between staggered with marble and eyeless gods, who will
direct the following passage, who will conduct the
orphic sarabande, who will propose the who, will the, I
am begging you “please”, to understand what happened in
the dark of the moving theater, which was the actress,
which the acted upon, acidic and incredulous memoirs
written in a mechanical backwards shorthand, to being
born what is better than to having died, ? asks the
fledgling, the heliotrope message much like the hyacinth
one, just drowns, no time to reach it and read it and
transcribe or translate “it”, is there, a blue
subterfuge lined with red litmus, vermilion part in her
unremembered hair, a chisel deftly applied to the
cinematic semblance shifting slowly from sleep to sleep,
a bower’s dream, as if to activate those street names
and hence re create the original “city” (Ur of the
chaldees?)

a hunkering goddess naked in the thigh, a bosom heaving

replete with, roses and white aspirin moon signs,
beckoning across the aisle, to the dead korean boxer? to
the ineffable, at the northern gate plying her ware(s)!
tattooed and sectioned into the various sometimes only
faintly and paler than white in the orient of her
burgeoning mind, budded with, and adorned with aerial
distinctions of value and class, red turns to blank
swifter than black, in her goddess eye where imagination
springs green at the root and shuddering shakes heaven
from the branches, snowy dew like crystals of falling
matter from the topmost planet, structures of space
interlaced with celluloid be-alikes freeze framed to
imitate stellar progressions, until, silence and the
coldest imaginable her staring me “down”, volumes of
anti matter, the vedic dust

shh, night quells sweet murmur, held back then exploded

in psyche’s ice den, rapture spent, agony simulated in
cold beakers a life apart, thin blue leaking streams, a
fluid version of the topmost, when will the buddha come,
from the trees many of them peering, then chosen the
highway down through grades of tropical, sensuous “the”,
calibrated among the literary fens and bracken, the
empty house in its dreamt moss, the spanish the hibiscus
the collateral behind the white man’s church, jail with

37
the sleeper of choice in patched gingham, the uneven
flow of something just “becoming”, a literature in
copied alphabets, be “there” for me, you will, black top
speed zones with mile a minute girls fresh from a hell
of french laundries, days in the glazed atmosphere,
trading pills with the cartmen for a trip to the moon,
the wrought iron grill laced around the brain’s
heliotrope, where it will go, following some
subterranean death wish into the desert, baked and re
codified memorials to the “never been”, in anticipation
of, where it will if ever go, ponder, situations in a
mexican patio of former dimensions, the missing
relative, the twisted explications for a grammar, a
syntax of roadways untraveled the never, to be, like
that ?

wish you were or would have been more like her, in that
singular and pliant moment of sex, imaginary bride in a
sequence of faded photographic “whites”, off color
becomes blanch a pale swath cutting through sleep’s
vehicular ink, blacker than at first a china, some
planetary discussion about the, reaching forward into
and over the borderline, the abrupt dawn of the red
satellite bursting the window pane, a truck stop near
frijole new other, someone retching in the ditch, or
else squatting in the moon’s intricate and perpendicular
shadow, when water becomes an imaginary, or the
unrepeatable heraclitean flux, adjoined to twin
situations each as unlike the possible as the latter,
intermingling of the divine and the chthonic in a plea
to mater perpetua in her guadalupe raiment of offbeat
sandalwood and chintz, driving or being driven through
what seems a year of thistle sand and haze, into the
aurora of phoenix in glistered tawny metal and black
chiffon, mirage shimmering on post modern golf lawns
with turquoise awnings announcing the “new age”, uncle
in his pool green habitat of loaned onanism and
puttering, who will not be deceived, who will understand
rightly the identical crisis in its mirror-like
siegework where backward script determines, a
postulation about art history and its discontents (style
and formulation of beauty as capital), a

mojave, date frieze, inner mobility and depth of the

woman inside the man, who is making this trek with
literature in mind, with nowhere in sight, with
hollywood and vine what becomes a white adjective a

38
superlative without a noun, a distance of purplish
cascades and perhaps two dozen suns setting, ridges of
mythical childhood, you will be mine, No?, or the fire
near the fox studios and the ranger on his mission to
devolve night, unraveling, a labyrinthine structure no
larger than what seems to be a speck in the eye, who is
wandering into the coast line, surf’s never up, or
sleeping inside the peeled grape skin of eternity, awash
in the dappled light of a cinematic code, soon it will
be a removed china, walking streets just cleaned by the
god of alcohol, ponder this, a bruited white taint on
the otherwise unnerved surface, her, deserts me, gone
again into the darkness around the corner from, how
bright the glass and the revolving sequence of maze,
tapestries of multicolored air, fan dancers and the
Logos!

what will wake up, staring at a terse azure ceramic sky

above Union Square, talking rapidly with death’s true
other about the extreme possibility of, is this
amphetamine dream of wonderland as speed tracks by at
limit of celestial, Being, oceans of flying in colors of
speechless blank, ampersands compounded with crazy quilt
sonics excused for lack of vowel, quantity of consonant
clusters fucking by the bay, a Diana of unheralded
proportions a, pleated skirts billowing off into a snowy
japan not yet sighted through fogs of silver and rust,
compact and miniature the vestibule where skin hangs to
dry waiting for identity to come forth, “I am in love
with distance”, of unclouded dimensions a “diana” of,
myself her beheaded angel, a section seen crosswise
bleeds into a pallor of indistinct panorama of ocean and
hillslopes fade away, all, who can ever get back, who
will ever try to understand that, grass and sensation of
ultimately “nothing”, aleatory divinations with eyes
shut, pinwheels of transmogrified light penetrating to
the, core

fade all away, into a, like a dex spansule nose dive

into avernus, with no visible guide, no cloaked vergil
no swami no dante alighieri, where nothing glows the
everlasting dust, no foot marks, no vermilion cast off,
the highest point is a shoal where less than pale the
underglow of love’s, her was a relic of a pattern cut
out from berlitz moon shafts, shatter principle and the
renegade desire to utterly, you Know!, followed the
coast highway up through night brush, pastel ferns and

39
rot, swamp dreams to leave her be, by the acres of
alfalfa and unmown grass, shapes of a furtive accident,
and just afterwards lying there without a compass nor
syntax to, where to next, shove off into the ego’s small
egress, desert ruminations hoping the next greyhound
will, trusting in the flocks of winterdoomed clouds hove
the above into view, and a passage to hell, no less than
more, pockets emptied of thought but for the myth
whitening its manhattan transfer, you were never mine,
at last, a library, some uncounted shells, a music of
distance a darkening, to write about, that “

exhausted interim, swept memorials toward a snowfall

hush, blankets of, the fierce fighting at the northern
frontier, chief pow-pow, many deaths in his wampum bag,
alcohol sky and a sieve draining all thought of pattern,
scrabble monopoly checker chess board flat out dying on
knees to resolve fate, tissue organ donor named babuJi,
encounter with notebooks and invented characters, for
example one Bolnav, flight of fancy through the maze
toward what conjecture, fiction will not save, will
poetry,?, through snows of window the whistling cutting,
all the way to manitoba and beyond the mental of
everything, one move and you’re as good as, the slick
icepacked roadways ending in darkness, ultimatum
nowhere, life’s exiguous and brief prime moment gone in
a shaft of dreary dust, library and back again daily, to
discover by reading what, Thoth and the mineral density
of the ages, ending in darkness, ponder, the what was
once sweet, the brown eyed frail, the whiteskinned
tremble lipped outside the dance, never to re enter as
appropriate, to move on from “that”, writing, longing,
closing the book of birth with, a

to be continued, education of a primitif grammarian,

soundless bells in the cloistered dark, toward a journey
east again, ruminations on the banks of the father of
waters, a music of clouds and inkling shades darkest at
the core, goodbyes, hunh, while some passages are
assuredly fatally difficult, others are the simplest,
with ease through a tunnel of light, into a siege work
of granite and glass and sheer, sky reaching fingers of
thought though nebulous, spirals fire-like circling in
the apparent gyre of inspiration, myth in pocket, hopes
best who less thinks, Ha, one’s self picked up from the
subway floor, char women tsk tsking at one’s mortal
remains, a glottal stop or a pony of caesar’s gallic

40
redoubt, fashioned and fused to a burgeoning idea that
all will be retrieved in the final moment, or taking
classes in lucretius, fiery “flammantia moenia mundi”!
nihil ex nihilo et cetera, one is distant, one is in
“love” with distance, one circles the evening’s tavern
with a futile isogloss, perpendicular to everything else
one’s heart, a stabbed, a shaking at the nerve, to the
belvedere to “see” what dante saw? , who were those
girls tall skinny things in the dark drinking, what
dante “saw”, ponder, their elegant necks thrust back,
and chattering nothing, saying nothing but whispers of
eternity not meant to be heard, divulged nothing of
their sex, round and round, evening‘s network of dead
fireflies

saw next to nothing, in gyres of black ice, the flow of

current stop, stop and ponder, below which the null and
void, anchored to lack of consciousness, end of all, be
nothing, the No Mind in all its lack of gratitude
drifting into, awash in nameless space, an entity is
what? you were about to say, crashing in village
troubadour nightspots, a whim to be a daring reckless,
streets of the brain mingled with bazaars of where
arhats die in futuristic car crashes, vegetation of the
thought process, indeed, and ponder this, dante too!
topsided in violation of the unities, doubled over the
lucretian hexameter to make out the thin venereal
vestige, wavering pale green a frond of passion barely
covering her breast, will it be summoned, will the
virtue (everything mixed up here) breathless and totem
beasts peering through rank jungle foliage, patterns of
sound and footfalls in the ear flexing sleep’s inherent
muscle, a job to consider, ponder that dante is on the
“way”, somewhere in the library where a germination of
between poetry and prose, a subtle waving black alga,
lichen over the inner eye, indra king of the gods backed
up in a late broadway mood

writing is what is, to be and put it “all” down, page

after blank page, the semiotics of, the semantic
consideration, to ponder, the code-switching jungian
mnemonic “system”, archetypical goddesses dredged from
white swamp, infernal tickertape in brain’s
relentlessness to “know”, to acquire what is to know?
iota subscript and infinitesimal footnotes in crabbed
proto indo aryan, ruminations spent on islands yet to be
named, watching with the third eye in some incredible

41
distance the vedic priests descend through hindu kush,
amalgam of homeric and hittite, chipped horse bone and
depth of indecipherable text walking streets of mohenjo
daro, anorexic twiggy-like dancing girl preserved as
bronze knife, memory has defied this, ponder, exact
means nothing, random and the waters rush in, biblical
passage about the drowning with the bride, the in
pursuit of, knowledge means nothing, nouns marked for
gender and number, when did that happen, in trees
waiting for the “moment”, to drop down and become,
wearing the skins of what they have killed, in context,
jargon

-phagy, what the buddha will renounce, what effigy

behind glass staring will tell us about, ourselves, the
long kiss goodnight, and whatever else it takes, come to
our senses re telling the same fabric narrative, who got
it, what was the passion, what was the loss, what was
the gain, ethereal and red the vast outside of the
universe, originating and sustaining and annihilating,
shores of light glimpsed and at once receding, out of
the fortress of consciousness, will you be mine, ?,
necessity starts naming streets after the numbers of the
alphabet, and we pace them, wondering at the end of
which one we will encounter the “ferry man”, Moon River,
the big anatolian swap, damaged goods as usual, tag ends
with references to the forbidden love, the distance of
memory monitored by a spanish speaking radio, into what
wild plantation southland the dead gibbering in their
famous patois all about the time beyond time, dead boy
and the comets, come to me with pearls of melancholy,
across the deep still water(s) of,

as if a return to the beginning, were you the One I

meant, one world one girl one love, running back to the
place where it was supposed to have started, mexican
jazz radiophone in the dead man’s ear, lousy
recognitions, a catholic muffler with two vowel system,
amo amas amat, y’ know, exactly like lucretius, would
not have it any other eye, ETYMOLOGY OF THE WHEEL, a
course in new york linguaphonics, ancient & decrepit
professorial type spitting it out from chakra to cycle
to wheel, in his gaze the unmistakable vishnu deity all
indigo and vast as the universe itself, standing on the
world’s very infirm plateau to ponder, ponder, the ink
stretches as far back as the routine of grass in wind,
threnody supersedes paean, like a mystery with a piano

42
in the invisible back room, inner sanctum where the
goddess peels back the skin for fellatio, a section of
the undivided mind, uncategorical, philosophy and
dwindling, riverside drive watching spring’s white
flowers burst into a bluish chalk, write a name there
for all the sky to see, You, maybe, but where in the
talmud have you disappeared to, underwood chases death
threat, type script of the

question mark, “s”, flavor of summer rains rush into

purple sedge, harmonics of cement and distance, all the
ways through and around the minotaur’s metropolitan
lair, what is agony probably with thread in hand
descending, as always descending, ponder, the infernal
zones below the thin mask of order, upstairs the
pushcarts full of dope and Bang, the illusory meat house
where we have taken the lesson of birth and put a face
on it, baffling suggestions about the girl’s home
coming, telegraph to confirm, some one exactly like you
stares back from the fifth avenue plate glass, beckons
to a book spine to be read with infinite care, that is
what I meant, here is my, signature illegible something
a date perhaps, what year are we now, ?, masterful
strokes from the dying christian scientist, up and down
the stairs over and over, carrying the same increasingly
heavy baggage for what, a symposium on charity and the
practice of giving, holland tunnel, what lies west over
the jersey hills, what lies beyond in the algonquin
dialect, ear to the stone, a cirrus cloud shaped like a
tomahawk, come marry me, it says in the thin revolving
door of evening’s

carrying a brickbat, without portfolio, Our Hero, face

to the linen and ponder, streets in and out of myth,
scope of magazine gloss and sheer distance, temenos of
“being”, there, or how to get out of “here “ , as we
were saying in the alternate dialect, a framework with
platonic additives, spheres of brightness way above
announcing the life “to be”, as if it could ever, the
wavelengths turn into a dirge, palm sunday’s worst
manifestation, to be born again! whiplash and
vociferating a trembling Ur-Sprach on the tip of the
dandelion stalk, quivering symposia of harrowing hells,
a darkness covers the loam, rich as proserpina is, her
is nothing but a glossy magazine gestalt, what will come
to be as Vogue or, paging tranquility’s moon as if to
calm the down, gesso artifacts and museum redundancies,

43
hello bells ringing this old bride of mine, for whom she
tolls, death’s furtive knell, why do it again? but for
this time do I sail the paper sea, magma of coruscating
iris, ‘scapades in sleek monkey fur coat and a diamond
of imaginary proportions, walls shake down, broadway re
visited with a flank of torrid beef, fat boy for sale,
tad’s steak house three AM with saint john of the X,
vizier to the doomed

walpurgis nacht with cuban accent, free floating

syllables that spell out nuclear threat, whose will be
mine, thistle and burr in the throaty descent, to go
there again, rose and irish coffee what resembles
riverside drive on a sunday after thought, cross the
broad stream to the palisades of radio memory, lay out
in the ether ward one by one the various cadavers you
have been until now, each with a volume of latin
structure, a mouth will swallow all, agape the left
corner of the map upper in its silence rears its horrid
spine into the belfry, chase of definitions in
subscript, mirror rejects image, what to do, ?

mucho, and after that the effects fully speaking of the

lunar berlitz formula, will’t ‘ou be mine, ?, asked in
the third plural feminine of course the rebate is less
than expected, (see ya in the grave), Honey, madness
before noon followed by the usual reiteration of vows
forever, and ever, Yours, sincerely, I promise, yess, do
please, Please, me, this has already been one long
dream, a cycle of skies and grass and wind and clouds,
each the shape of the “other”, mounting willfully into a
category of infrared, before what else, suggestions that
pale is the purest color in the scheme, your long
waistlength brown hair for example smelling as if always
just washed, what flowers are those, scattered petals
over the white manifestation that extends beyond the
southern “rim”, you will be Mine, then, a course of
action that always reduces us to the state of mere
spectators, hand in hand the mutual fit of darkness
entwined in the kiss, a study in planetary folds given
to sobbing at twilight, alba and the dulzura of sheer
longing, sprouting wings from your graceful shoulders,
or a spanish gesture around your waist, without which
there is no translation to heaven, without which there
is only the intransigent passage into darkness, noon,
spellbound, the islands of remote glass,

44
which is “distance” in the various dialects of the
upcountry, we go round that, we skirt the infinite
hoping for a rebound into green, a section cuts off and
we go floating through a grammar of light towards the
imponderable, like a first plane ride through the
stratosphere where imitations of the city of
philadelphia tear off into sheer gauze, white filaments
wisping off the celestial spindle, bear me to You, again
and again, asleep or infirm in the chasm of the Hour,
which are the vows we have spoken, sotto voce in candle
light within the grotto, what depth of waters, what
utter insignificance, !, landing on a wet strip of
tarmac near nashville tennessee, which is the logical
december as predicted by the radio just minutes before,
profanity surrenders to profanity though you are Divine,
and what we witness is what we are, semblance and syntax
of the inexplicable, going through and round the
variable song that unties before it unites, bonds of
fire, links of asbestos, chain of

Love, remember me but forget my Void, tissue of

inactivity and despond, interlaced through and threaded
as beads of fine pearl finish, infrared ponder, the
illegible writing below the moon’s sanctum sanctorum,
pinkish cotton strands withering thoughts of, ivory and
stained nicotine the, a pondering beside the waters,
river’s depth cut in half by shine, arpeggio shivers
silvery rust music until, forget my Void, singularity of
the instance for example even at the end there will be
nothing not even, sub atomic particles, extrapagination
beyond the margins what cannot = be imagined, a pond
beside a temple, to whom is the temple dedicated, to the
god Vithoba, references to which to occur later, see
index, and ponder, what my love is a void, in far off
Cipango or Serendip, where the temple whores practice
bride ceremonies, robed in deep saffron wrappers,
writing in moonlight secret poems, sighs and mint breath
of passion’s inner suit, some meat here, a poignant
arrow there, a riderless horse saddled and, in a banyan
grove or wearing lotus fringe a semi deity who will
summon from sleep the hours of despair, meet me in
washington square, tomorrow, then

such as it has been, a depth and some regrets lining the

avenues of the “hidden city”, green scum covers the pond
surface, beneath which the illegible waits, in and out
the attempt to define the labyrinth, the immarginable

45
with its fuming clause structures and pendants hoisted
high over a french sort of “classicism”, how can
anything be considered “modern”, ?, ask and ponder, as
life goes on, the rituals the and the more, pale and
flaming at the same time, a literature of conceit and
riddle budding within a delicate green pod, will be,
mine, a bag of skin with bones inserted and a name tag,
nominative case singular, only, known to the ethereal as
“mortals”, in fact it is ancient, archaic as the now
faded hills of arcadia, the faun footed and the nymphs
dew damp drying out on the rockaways, nowadays an
electric train will take you “there”, if we sleep for
the moment it is to regain, consciousness for a,
restaurants where we linger waiting for the lamp to
flare, the libraries brood in a century old dark, who
will be at the gate who will be nodding against the
outer wall, who will be, moon beams strike the scum
green pond, an epiphany

botany lessons seconded by a gesture in proto romance, a

fling with bertran de born or jaufre rudel, you Know,
when the lark flies against the sun’s rays etc morning
of the world somewhere near toulouse or, if one could
get back, if one only, a snatch of verse torn from some
aerial pedestal, a column of the invisible, dedicated to
the Muse, white and porphyry intermingled, the sculpted
robe fluted awnings, things seem to just hover, before
the weight makes its presence, moving on into the
corridor where a dim light or perhaps none at all, move
on or back unaware that this is life, with all its fast
little feet, that a buddha type is lurking in the hedge
waiting for that one “false” move, I am, ponder this
also, am, “can vei la lauzeta mover de joi …” Wings!,
seraphic incidence when least expected between yellow
covers and a plain map showing linguistic borders,
beside which a small tunnel marks the entrance to hell,
“sas alas contral rai”, the gorge at the bottom of which
lies the dissembled corpse, the exit to latin syntax,
the void, which forget, a wonder that the light is so
bright at this time of day, whom you will encounter when
the moving body stands still, come to be “other”

the ordinary, what is a function of speech is actually

the Hour of, soundless passages when only flickers of
color, paler than imagined at first, then a dionysian
flame on her brow touches the hair and turns into a
conflagration, identities pitch into the small ditch,

46
one moves from leaf to leaf, looking for the source of
blood, or the moment when “recognition” takes on
substance, talking and talking into the night,
resemblances of matter and space like long lost platonic
coordinates, on the rail which is the daily routine, the
“job” with its cavernous dictates about alienation and
death, to embrace without consideration that moment is
to “fall” from grace, the cocktail hour becomes a summum
bonum, looking with straying eye towards the entrance
where goddesses are supposed to manifest full born, but
either end is only the suggestion of a painting, a
likeness to, = a simulacrum of, the infinite regard and
longing going through utter space in search of a
“voice”, you will know me by, strolling through the art
gallery with a no known of choice, until hesitation and
the wallpaper of “their” skin, think about writing about
“it”, “them”, that is, is

whatever, the ink drains to the left, while topright

utter sections delve into the half that cannot be
discovered, ignored the template where it says “right
thinking” goes away, we are, left alone, to the right a
portion of sky where Mummy Nut in her spangles blooms
starbright, what approbation there is flickers, a wrong
purpose, a passage into the tantric episode with, the
mere idea heads drift a realization that this is life’s
exceptional moment the, horizon where Cipango stammers
its backname shifting syllables, vision of skin (the
“song”) such as never before seen, touched and felt to
ecstasy a frame with void of references, as sunday
afternoons are meant, to be, in central park head down
below the nostalgic cloud wisps, green on all sides
verging on blue, the night spies in the undergrowth,
warning, when will the moment Be,

when, the right size of ink the shape of an ethereal,

hollowed insides of the book about legends, the
mythographer blinded in either eye by beauty’s ephemeral
gloss, hod carriers and shun the right thing, to pretend
to be other, while looking straight at “her” knowing the
train is headed for the same destination, hod carriers
ponder, each window becomes a luminous planet rushing
toward destruction, speeding thoughts an end to the
ticket, bearing no known to a previous resemblance, and
sing song shifts her skirts into tight abyss, I am
alone, then, register yellow on the frame, hello hello,
thought the phone was off the hook but it was just the

47
rodriguez Girl, the one with the distant and echoing
hair, the shining at four in the morning beneath the map
of hiroshima just seconds after the blast, who will come
to know this and others like, chasing that after-image
through wabash avenue cocktail lounges, or duck on below
the trestles for lunch on the riverbank kissing lips off
the highwire, every nerve tingling with its own radio
battery, incandescent volatile forbidden,

dehiscent sections, carved from a map of meat with

exploding tickets in high range, geared up and racing to
go over the line, “can’t get No satisfaction”, whose
target is a written ceremony in dissected prose opera
omnia, flammantia moenia mundi again, ponder, dactylics
and spondees, in her hair the remnant of a terrible
rocky mountain lock up, come to know each blade of grass
each cloud worn in her eye, each, change the locks and
suborn the hands, multiple keys regarding the orient and
oneiric escapade, numinous kisses below the margin with
exactly what extra orgasmic parameter for being “off
limits”, NIKKI, mysterium universale femininumque, ad
astra, !, that thick braid of indelibly black hair, a
ghost story in mansions of dead cloth and opaque matter,
just next door where the eye shines like a length of
water into the dusty void, have been seen going and
coming like a thief, a fiction rolled up under the left
arm, a prize of alcohol and the bloody thread that leads
beyond greek revenge, in subatomic particles the
narrative seeks its own displacement passing Alpha
Centauri in distance

microfilm, should I also tell “you” about, throngs of

the faceless lining the main thoroughfare to just a
glimpse of, caught up in the samsara, to toss off the
body’s identity and hone in on the, does the soul have a
vertebral column, does it think on its own, superb and
catches of hair in the link, lead me back to her,
telephones were invented just for this purpose, as were
maps and combs, attributes of the divine in a succinctly
worded radio voice, runaway and the doldrums, chaste
shrugged off as innocent despair, must I always, and to
settle down and raise a family and brood on infinite,
can there be salvation homesteading, invitation by hoary
gurus to hide in the forest, thibet calls its singular,
a blue faced god just landed in hamburg to deliver us,
from evil the karma, hanging on by the thin air of life,
to die just once!, call her, Oh, back just once again,

48
to thrill of meat and illusory dread in a six pack of
sex, or else dial “dante” for infernal discharge,
waiting on you “all”, a trecento prose redaction of the
infamous odyssey to Cipango and back

to where open spaces inundate the heart, to the core, a

message about the devil, intake of dead air and release,
moksha, moksha, moksha, where be it? , a salutary glance
at the forbidden behind the neighbor’s walls, a sunday
morning excursus into the prohibited, can’t get enough,
maps spiral out from the crab nebula, her brain tossed
in some african heliotrope, a storm of ranging from the
lowest to a divine and subtle issue, much like the
invisible ink they use in making isoglosses, where every
thing means something else, or the distinctions no
longer prevail between word and word, I think this is
“right”, love is the pronoun employed in sleep, a
devious and labyrinthine lexical unit, darkness to
ponder, and darker yet the subterfuges the tangled
masses, her hair growing by the mile to block the
doorway, a, black and dense enough to strangle, no comb
to combat its wild luxury, a, in the finish there is a
very small photo inserted with a red projectile called
“cancer”, you will know it, then

hostile and enigmatic, life’s other juxtaposition, child

rearing behaving well suit and tie, shoes polished, who
will put them on, if not the father in the dark, who is
abiding, who is musical on sundays and drunk on mondays,
who is recalling that cancion about perfidia, who sweeps
the dictionaries inside to locate the source of romance,
a light on his inner shelf life, a tool bar settled down
to make amends, here Honey, I’m “home”, half believing
the symphonic code, the extensions of fiction in the
wake of so much dreariness, ennui of the eaten ticket,
the windows that travel soundlessly through night’s
bitterest hour, and yet still unable to correctly
identify why that is, what it is, seeking in patterns
the given and hidden face that “shines”, for You alone,
mythiform and wasp waisted shrunk to the size of a,
still there with her intrigue of hair black and dense,
waiting for the re invention of the telephone on the
other coast, subordinates of history, amalgam of
byzantine faery and shapeless hands, whither shall we
travel, on what arcane barque o’er what temepesta del
mare? asks the one penciling the “other”, a narrative of
sea wrecks fraught with linguistic dilemma, a

49
ponder this, also, using dante as a guide, a lume
spento, the berlitz section in unequal lunar halves,
going backwards on the cristoforo colombo through the
straits of gibraltar (jib-al-tarik), fumous disregard
for what has gone before, set sail over the glassy into
what hazy horizon, the eglantine as a prize, the caves
where the wildmen wait, the One-Eyed, solar offspring
rant, ports of call, parthenopolis, messina, panormus,
where dead gods lie waiting for re assemblage, re
vivification in a bottle of priceless white wine,
borders of hell, intimations of the religion of isis,
horus shattered into his divine fractions, eat me! eat
my Self! obscure effect of the moly, radicals of the
most ancient verbs imaginable, to be able to see
straight is not the point, to be able to see at all,
through the layers of entelechy and ontology, sperm and
root, on the sunspelled morning hillslope enormous white
bullocks unyoked pasturing on the communal landscape,
etymologies of the “wheel” sent spinning through cloud-
drift, with only a map of the sky in faint yellow
detail, to which houses tend we, to mourn, to re joice,
to which lunar mansions to bed the soul for a night, a
pondering of the illusory

a,

where lies mighty “achilles” now, adjacent to quarters

in the vatican, opposite the stazione termini,
heliogabalus wearing the sun’s forfeited diadem, stray
half blinded sheep cropping on amphetamine and brick
hard by the temple of Janus, take achilles down a notch,
surrender some of the night stuff to pasolini’s ragazzi
di vita, werewolf of the trastevere haunting pedagogical
bookstores, for a hint of the platonic, for a gloss of
the nicomachean ethics, with a letter from signor
berlitz of the new york office to signor berlitz of the
ufficio di roma, an’ it please you to hire this young
man, labyrinthine tracts extending from the swallow
littered heights of gubbio to ancona’s dusty port, a
section in oblique oscan with remnants of tufa and
sandstone, porous as dreams “are”, long snatches of
untranslatable etruscan prose, all about tombs and the
shadowy after life, sitting at table with the ghosts of
mencius and kung-fu, above on the dew wet branches of
dawn the birds in their small latin, what is their
memory?, a

50
song about, lasting and longing for as seas go far away,
lonely rivers “flow”, take me with your weeping hair,
dance away the life-long hour, mark each time a minute
in despair, mind every sound with a, trains wheel going
through appenine thrill, a device called “purgatorio”
and rolled around each thumb two or three times, the
effort it takes to drink that liter of chilled white
wine, mezzogiorno nel blu dipinto di blu, what inch of
crying wood, no relief but in the imagined grotto,
placards of paper unfurled in gesso skies, a marble
deity twice over in rouge and pale summons with a single
finger the array of antiquity, azure flames into white
the almost indistinguishable where philosophia naked in
her cell pastures on “thought”, chimes in an empty
afternoon verging on meadows of green so intense
blindness results, climb aboard the divine cart, hauled
back and forth to and from luna park, the juke box with
its sad and melancholy injunctions about “my lady fair”,
from afar the roman laughter of petronius, fables about
and bruised on unhewn rock palisades the enormous face
of Momus musing on, so much confusion, labels and paint
chips on the forgotten peristyle, a senecan tragedy with
at the center stage a medea type with lunar signs all in
disarray,

divinities in white face peering through russet reeds to

tell a tale, to tell what’s it all about, a sung song
dark in remote key of delta, ponder, swinging a
soundless through the predawn factory, waves a dense
waters rushing sleep’s lost corridor before flight
sways, a single or a double, partitions of space and
light, sub lunar geographies sectioned by dialect in
uneven hues, skin and texture illuminated in the semi
obscurity of the, hours longer than a thought to remove
the fine line of vermilion, and we are in the mountains
and gather within folds of a conditional purity the
sameness we felt after meeting in the dark the first
time, who was “that”?, a claire a –fication, ponder who,
a pale absence is the rarest of a, and then in and
through the labyrinthine water toward the bright green
turf, toward the child’s map of london, saxifrage
dogwood hawthorn hyssop jasmine, the prize is eglantine,
to write that poem through windows moving, darker
tensions hill mounds of mystery, sequenced the berlitz
section into the uses of the infinitive, far off the

51
roaring southern seas, far off the plummeting planet,
and still farther, off

seized by the hair, and dashed against the blank,

shuttles small as grammatical connotations can be, a
nuance in stone, or the tiny pink shell where the sea
takes origin again, fishes with enormous and languid
eyes, priests rush to the defense of glass, a radio sets
up tea time with a bitters, a flow beside the
embankment’s diminutive summer, we will be there
wandering in the maze, love’s illusion, every where,
what is waning in ten minutes what passes forth, into
some buddhist terrain of slope and tangent, paddies
where submerged the hungry ghosts wait, wait and ponder,
where devils in the formation of wings and beautiful as
anything, ponder, their sub lunar activity, corroding
the human element, ego and snap wired to the crystal of
dissent, where I will be, what I will be doing, in the
folds of vedanta, notting hill, kensington high street,
hyde park, wimbledon, the chase after the book of the
dead, to prove a point, the poignantly beautiful terse
azure sky of a thames afternoon, a finger wet to catch
the wind in its glass, chambers where brown turns to
gray before, the, ginger softened plaids shifting

ponder, a passage toward maturity or its already

atrophied definition, from no certain vantage point yet,
enthusiasm in a music of beyond the clouds both drugged
and sharp as a diamond needle, recording device of the
“beautiful people”, metaphysical “realities” as such
poised on the promontory of despair, disappearances in
books of an elaborate decimal system, learning despite
the rose’s conundrum, apex of a situation which has us
looking at an eternal “youth” even as the blocks of ice,
ponder, issuing soft tickets and an imaginary cubicle
where engines of passion, dense smoke between the lines,
leaning southwards and cryptic message in the
librarian’s pocket, tundra of print, isoglosses of
automotive disorder, diapason and fragrance of a
yearning universe shaping its intent in the bosom of
billowing and perfumed, a sort of prose annotating the
mind’s rapid discoveries within the inner sanctum,
clouds in massive banks gathering above the invisible
cities of, yellow and green motions as if a hand
beckoning, me

52
?, I will promise you “knowledge” if you but give me a
moment of reflection beside that pond, green scum and
the temple of the god Vithoba next to it, shadows,
ponder a language that no man understands, a silhouette
married to its corporeality, moving slowly along the
dotted, continents have gone under while we talk, who
has not realized this has not, how many kinds of flowers
there are, what is the nature of stone, issuing tickets
to an imaginary paradise, as which is not, a paradise
that no man has a language to understand, knowledge
locked up in miles of unreachable shelving, volumes of
systematic reconditioning, a poem, in the perhaps of the
vaguest chaos, inches to the left and you are dead,
inches to the right and you are, dead, fifth avenue walk
up to instant hell, next to the large granite structure
is the exit, if you can but find it, newspapers and
water fountains, girls too, littered sections of a
stolen berlitz icon, in neo provencal sunscript, with a
nod to those who understand “texture” and to those who
have embarked on the subterranean route to, serial
nominalization, promise you knowledge and the beyond of
“that”, ?

what you don’t know, what cant be known, the other side
of the library’s black funnel, re register thought to,
ponder, illusionary scheme to, wholesale paradise and
chimera, soft as everywhere, are, saints named pulchra
or dulcedo levitating inches off the earth, in an effort
to combine with death, the long treks through the ferny
underpassage, to the blue light beyond, no known name,
no known identity, just the imaginary and rotting
corpse, tied to no celestial tree, foliage a banter in
the lisping mid life wind, who will wear what color
lipstick when the right “moment” arrives, charon at the
helm of his lugubrious barque, a solemn and bell warning
tones in heat colored greens sometimes rife with
ambition and, tropical disorder and the pure semblance
of chaos, itself, a verging on the imponderable, the
“you” versus the “me”, in idiotic dialogue somewhere
deep within the infrared, a situation develops followed
by a smoldering pale, infix and clitic, smokes of a
distance and the steel shaded passage towards, is it
heliotrope that yearns? light is a “form” as ideas are
actually the shapes we cannot grasp, contact nothing,
touch the skin displayed in the maze, touch

53
what that knowledge “is”, cannot say, a purer type
highlighted in yellow soft and morbid, like a “mother”,
moving with a kind of consciousness what matters is the
viscous, substance, we are all under the “sea” as it
were, investigations of coral and sponge, echinodermata
that elude typology, ramifications of the Beautiful with
at the center, “You”, shh I’m still here waiting, a
watch on the second floor and then, Bang,!, what a
surprise in chinese tinfoil wrapped around the small
digit, that means we are really mortal, after all, and
lose count after a certain number, sleep dissipating
edgelessly in dawn’s ephemeral pink smoke, a cigarette
in the trees, a poem actually about the “girls” who
smoke them, come to the ground hunkering peering animal-
like, a buddha, look! with the patient manner of a zoo
inmate spending an afternoon in eternity, convinced that
somehow it will be different, starting tomorrow, that,
Is

and as sudden as that, is, Is there nothing but, a

passage that can only refer to “death” or some illumined
figment thereof, a cancelled vegetation at the root of
sleep, the demonic excess of passion attributed to the
glance of some orange shellac girl on the subway,
speaking some rapid kind of pepper-rican dialect, a
shadow below volcanic ash, and dazzling as thoughts are
and can be, what is most than silence, a lesser form of
shade incorporating the dynamics of light and
afterthought, moving through a volume of intransigence
and infrared into the beyond, eerie and numinous as the
lunar mansions which can only occur at low tide, a bank
of dead flowers, a something of cement and wrought iron
toppling over the dream’s infinite margin, a suppose you
take my hand for a moment, a suppose, hair is wild and
refulgent and planets are just coming into being, a poem
about them, thin blue filaments of “surrealism”
surfacing on the Ocean-of-Being, for me and you that’s a
hint of a catastrophic event, singularity and
horizonless opportunity to “write”, filling small
ledgers with archaeology notes in a sample of egypto-
script, how the depths were plumbed in an instant,
borrowing an inch of your “sex”,

finished the great “prose” in a breath of despair, to go

on mining the mind’s subterfuge, watching everything go
by on west fortysecond street, just to the right of the
small text of discovered poetry, much like a telephone

54
that has come into being for no reason at all, hello,
Hello, master negative of the orient flashing in
sulphuric tones in the large grotto that is Grand
Central Station, the girl with rabies barking at the
harsh fluorescent lamps, and sky itself opposed to her
thin radiology, yellow overtones of a crippling disease,
listening to the feet of a vast underground effort
trample “art” to death, museums where clutter is order,
a shape of ink rotating high overhead in place of
clouds, cinematic anarchy in the heart of the behemoth,
here is what Hope is, what is supposed, reclining on the
faint paper stencil of a heart named “kodachrome”,
vestibular nonsense in a hundred unrelated dialects all
being spoken at once into the oneiric ear, Christ
resumed in a volapuk text, “hello, Monkey, I’m home”,

probably Manhatta in context, wampum and strung beads of

imperial ether, everyone heavy with drink announcing the
Prophet in cedar tavern, visionary and excited the
lorca-type shaping alternate islands with his manifestly
dream like hands, (that’s me on the far center of the
photograph in orange t-shirt and eyes of spun gold), or
the time we rung up the “other world” in a taxi being
hurtled across the Brooklyn bridge at one in the so
called morning, her was a irish gal, soft brown tresses
and drinking out of the same bottle, all I wanted was a,
sections of her kept re appearing in used book stores
for example on schermerhorn street, or up in the Heights
the voluble presence of brownstone and, gazing dreamily
across the water to the jersey distances where the West
“begins”, if only the right radio could be found,
saturday mornings wake up, Monkey, I’m home, again,
buddhist parallax in loud underwear looking for a hit on
atlantic avenue, Times Plaza Hotel fleabag across from
the eternal Laundromat with its dehiscent all-night
lamps appealing to some nostalgic sea,

greek comes first, then pizza then the williamsburg bank

building with its hurricane winds, or else face down in
the filthy green sump of gowanus canal, sunday morning
wake, UP, Monkey, I’m home again, you know, furious yet
diffuse salsa music coming out of nowhere, who the drunk
in the basement is, who the tightrope artist is swaying
from lamp-post at this time of day, sun goes bonkers,
death is trite by sunday afternoon, a wrapped in skin
little girl knocked into the curb by a passing chariot,
where is it to come home, hot asphalt and coroner’s robe

55
of dirty yellow smudge, two degrees further up and you
are in the fancy restaurant where they serve octopus
dish and mafioso corpse, how the children grow up here,
and what the riddle is, can never tell when the dance
class begins or the clarinet lesson, fandango shifts in
re evaluated back yard with renaissance statuary, dead
ended, how to watch for the certain daystar pivoting
above a catholic homeless shelter, walk the eastside
streets feeling betrayed deceived, suspicious of the off
broadway actor in algerian dialect, or the wife made up
to resemble the ancient lady of death,

or the least, in earth terms white is paler than most,

green remains a fiction, poesy’s consort in bare breast,
sectioned into fractions of meat the ideal suffers its
more, we re run the circles we have already wounded, we
re wind the hour’s lapsed cycles into easier vaster
emptiness, absence swallows presence & the nether
orients a symptom further north, library divides into
uneven hemispheres, the one for the identity I never had
and the other for the ego I never wanted, into and
behind the vast stacks of arbitrarily classed books,
shifts taking turns with night in order to read the
stars’ fine chinese script, better and ponder, a symbol
comes in weighing seven light years in length at its
cone, other worlds flash by in what is known as
“instamatic reconditioning”, a matriculation of infrared
and limbo with the italian middle ages sorted out
through a map of lower manhattan, will we ever get it
straight? mulberry street introduces its children’s
literature to the dead of mind, parks are subtracted
from the whole as master shafts in black and
incandescence re produce the intense instant of birth,
envelopes go forth! I am the mis begotten

, a, whenever the sun locates its tunnel, whenever the

riderless horse issues from the tumult, who they are,
questions, abstract in hyphenated spanish with greek
redaction in quarto, leafing through the missal’s lost
pages in a sudden quirk, light sunders the open dark
with a lesson in tibetan, we are learning buddhas, faint
re collections of the animals we wore at eventide in
crimson, slant wise the lingering water sheds its darker
portion to reveal a moon of even paler hue, dance with
me, !, saying doesn’t make it so, each is a lesion in
two-step sanskrit, mossy primers with antidote in white
fray, asbestos spray in the wake of a hudson river

56
afternoon fully deeper green than expected, and around
the corner each weaving a speckled skin the “goddesses’
aboriginal and distant but, suddenly yes, within orbit,
and the poetry readings which they attend in disguise,
how life assumes them, quixotic and the equivalent of a,
get to know the secret form of the lyric, the cloudy
shape of the enigma, the way the thighs part for the
moment of truth, hidden realms hinted

The, a

glosses over the unprinted matter, the unspeakable

thoughts, pattern, ponder, chimerical hooves on the
gauzy turf, every is where in the prolegomena to the
“invention of spain”, wrought iron apostrophes that pre
suppose the ultimate circumflex, disposable units of
“being” and the deranged gloria whose mechanized vehicle
plummets towards Monkey, I’m home, on one’s knees
praying to the madonna of the toilet for succor, back
issues of inappropriate and bad thoughts congealed on
the wharf where used monarchic sperm gathers, at bay the
andalusian hounds and drugged toreadors, a fulminating
line which is the reply to gongora’s polifemo, angelic
vistas wasted in windows covered with black tissue, a
blank recording device renders solemn this moment in
hell, while backwards the opposable thumbs of a
transylvanian bard bear an apostate soul towards its
pornographic beatification, west forty second street
comes to “life” in its dark tumbler, noon in the apogee
of sulfur and heliotrope, whiter petals yet drifting
through the buzzing somnolence, this is the “it” of
Desire, !, so-called,

silver wrappers and rust, dumbfounded paragraphs laid to

rest in a thin patina of skin and talcum, the
possibility that a brassiere can manifest through a
telephone, amalgam of impure and serene imagery pasted
on the backside of an envelope dedicated to petrarch’s
laura, but then the city takes over, the impurities and
beauties of anguish and disgust, torched by an unslaked
passion, intoxicated by whatever thrusts into view the
oneiric plasma of a debauch in hell, consecration of the
“house” with between the legs obscenity’s bird of night,
something like a poetry to “know” but will not be
settled, the cheap end of a conflagration with dido as a
gift, and whatever sea drifts off with aeneas somber
cast into a viscous reverie, I am there with “him”

57
reckoning accounts with a magnificent white tide
rushing, overhauled the lyric for a transcendental
moment when even green pales into the referential blank,
ego submits to ego in a distant plain, buddha-like the
semblances exchange pallor and

for a hand to become “other, for a breath to take place

and in the next instant, the bride is a transformation
of skin and sky, limitless, ponder, hiatus and delusion
the enormous subjects of the unconscious, when we are in
fact growing old, taking each winter as an afterthought,
or wielding the invisible tongue within its diphthong,
luster of massive star clusters cone nebulae black holes
impending, Doom, to love in that maze, the incongruous,
as years flash by in the instant’s tricolored
domesticity, we will take “lunch with the angels” then,
a proposition to live by in the future’s secluded eyelid
when all of france becomes a pastoral watering hole, and
spain itself explodes in a railroad station on the
portuguese border, on our way to casablanca to the dead
aquarium on its watery hemline, what is there to visit
if not the hot & distant ruin of Volubilis, or to get
lost in the deception of the medina’s tannery, what
striped brain in occlusion will out of this descent
return?

longing, tripoli, the white lady of feigning in her

argent rust and slippers of berlitz moon dust, awake in
the immense pre dawn of a new cognition next to a
febrile skin, yellow begets yellow, the doctors of
salamanca argue pointlessly the “distance” She has
become, softening or terse or otherwise what is
lengthening out towards the phading horizonless, a
section splits off from sleep, another devoured by a
remote mound, a darkening brown worse than sump, huddles
an angst deep in the mid zone, lessened by the fetid
canal waters, hieroglyphs beckon mantic and, fusion of
Monkey, I’m home, with epic delineation of the strife
most distant, as if fifth avenue had more to offer, the
walk-up to heaven’s gate, a paradigm of “lunch with the
angels”, signed “yours truly”, heaving pointlessly
toward a void left behind by crushed stars, more than
vague emphasis on the woman inside the man, where claire
left off where others, begin by announcing the “form”
with no hands to shape it,

58
is it so much that sorrow, snows that cover the empire
of mechanized metal, languid detours into fantasy of the
unspoken, sense of perfume and jungle of hair, ships out
the meat to ports unknown, cadavers smoking their
remains of a life, undiscovered languages with a
phonology of metaphysical ruin, I know “that” but I am
not “that”, (yet), miasma without caution springing into
the mephitic winds, helen’s twice raped carcass dumped
into the shoals near jersey city’s municipal morgue,
that sorrow, ponder a meal with the, lunch is over for
the moment, a quick obfuscation of the senses, Israfel
with her glorious wingspan, high above the tenements of
an obscure intuition, the run on jewish girls’ names is
capitalized by Deborah, for whom poems originate and
despond and the sliver of moon, shoved into the back of
a moving vehicle off the frenzy, bypaths of Brahman and
Krishna, where salvation is, whatever gets you through
the night, Monkey’s, home, attributes of a gangetic
despair the vast and fetid, where are we going being
borne by these huge mahouts, on your left is the taj
mahal and on the right the naked jain eating “goop”,
salvation across that great bleak water, aswirl in the
sea of concern, a smaller, a thing without replica, a

the, is a bigger word possible?

LUNCH WITH THE ANGELS

supposed to be a longish lyric with epithets
come down with a sudden bout of encephalitis
dust storms in the brain’s core, to the left
the mid section painted a bright vermilion
“whiter shade of pale”
linoleum brickwork in the fade english tea house
you for me and me for , You
was ever and the lotus feet incarnadine soles
dancing notching stairs of literal “light”
spaces in between where the comatose
we will seek the stars together the Huge
Vast the Black, “micronauts” aloft
in the Vatican version the child(e) divests the self
of hands the engines wont start, matters little
when the hospital immersed in rust slowly sinks from
views of the planet are hard to come by, I remember
how rare it is, a spangled an obfuscated, the turkish
doctor with his mallet and prongs, the so called Hope
tendered to the mutilated in the dimly lit,
by the way you were supposed to meet me in hell

59
yesterday, the body organized by units that weigh
next to nothing and the section by section, thrust
into a large machine that “sees” everything,
thoughts about the other life, a tibetan show
with street names always in reverse indigo, a
followed by its other “a”, wheel takes flight
high above the intensive care Ward, a
the other or a preview of
blank the sudden collapse, of, shifts
in the terminal red in sequence of no
known order, supplemented by a
X-ray zaps luminous of earthly glare
numinous and the volume of ether
required to, Breathe, !, deeper than expected
off the cliff with the hundred thousand elephants
or in terms of “quality of life” as the good turkish
doctor put it, a vale of tears either hemi
sphere paralyzed and no shoe in sight,
who will upend the table who will unsettle
the wine, whose debt is this ? hyphenated
lessons in survival a brief outing in aldebaran
sightings off the coast of malabar, a session
in the french pleiades, is crimson any better
than red litmus, the blue unfolds its vast empire
of rusted spanish gold, a traffic of heliotrope and
dogwood stands still at last on the promontory
where the brain seeks an instant of refrigeration
angelic hosts applaud the, characters from mahabharata
and krishna “on hold” peals longing of cuprous
saffron clouds hover and then roar into
cinematic variations of dying of not being unable
to die, this is a vedic sideshow a caravanserai
that works like a massive needle through the scalp
removing inch by inch the spatial turf
until only a gelid polyp seems to squirm
“seeing” into the ultramarine
where a shattered city of onion skin layers
its threnody can still be “heard” among
the cigarette smokers of earth, the veiled,
the plumage masturbates high above the excoriated,
a vehicle shifting, a paragraph or so later in the dark
ominous parts of the alphabet glowing for a second
only, a pastiche of literary allusions to the
so-called berkeley marina, HABEAS CORPUS, what
good are the feet, where can the bed go after all this,
a legal indecision as to the distinctions between
life and breath, the hereafter on its tenuous telegraph

60
wires home, Mom! , bursts of and seed scatters
a miasma in the phone booth where so little
really matters so just wait, a monument cries the
Statue! racing with a hereafter less than, a tenebrous
inkling that we are all in this condition, un
conscious fried from the brain up,
hiccoughing into a glass of italy,
within a stone’s throw the skin confesses
it is still looking for Cipango, an orient
of flaring brass colored inks that sift
through the comatose mind into a small reduct
no larger than the oval continent within
the inner ear, can’t hear as well as before,
only the windows seem to “shout” some other
names for utensils all lost, what food is “that”?
mom wandering dazed in the cafeteria
a ticket to no known hospital crumpled in her
other hand a map of the day dido burned,
‘member that one? a dozen or so hexameters
hastily shoved into the top drawer next
to the
it’s all so irreverent, burden of living
being forced to move in mid summer
with no place to forage the leaves’ greenery
dies a pale amber dying, much like the shot
heard in the taxi exactly one minute
past midnight with saint john of the X
, on one’s knees, pleading, ponder,
this is a life’s time of gone, in a cinder
the instant retraces its circular fiction,
angels devastated crouching on car hoods
as if staring into some noon hour hell,
where you were supposed to meet me, white munitions
out to water, a finnish expression for “suicide”
we are all makeshift motors, you know, an inch of meat
about to be carbonized in the metaphysical epicycle,
period, and the most is never more than less, a
sheer drop of blood, only one, meet me in hell,
mention this to know one, not even the social
worker with the california accent, blue marble
upholstery in a metaphorical vehicle
indra king of the gods dead drunk in the rear
view mirror, apostasy of the divine
in their movie theater, ash, crunch, metal
inferno a gust of, can he revive for just a
planets go by in slow motion taking
skirts of pale azure in their wake,

61
a boat can never go that “far”, insists that
the outer ramparts are bright red, that a
green engine exists just below the surface
of saturn that and that, too, is also too
big a word, implying we are mortal, shells
of a thin weaving between a bipolar sea
mercurial and prone to vast typhoons, a
mind is unstable, a doctor lifts a scalpel
, this one’s for Apollo!
the decoration fritters out at the end
just a small glowing excrescence, used to be
a child used to, be,

whether or not to go, the indecision, were it not for

the telephone book with its accurate scanning device,
there “she” is, beyond the metallic digression of the
improper medical advice, wholesale lightyears in the
making this moment, “bodas de sangre”, midnight in the
constabulary of hell with the japan of choice, small red
figure eights interlooped with sexual discharge the
color of algae fifty fathoms under, and suddenly the
bath tub fills with the red sea’s overflow, who is there
that can count, who is there for whom there is not a
sublime bafflement, for whom the life has been wasted in
this absence of light, in whom the blood bathes, for
whom agony is a mounting star about to burn out before
its inception, I am born in “you” then aloft like a
spent trajectory, in your sex, un hunh, an airplane
named after the profligate gypsy of cordoba takes me
from your hooded splendor, jasmine trickles out of the
faucet which you dare, a gush of pyrite turned to liquid
vermilion parts your mile length cobalt hair, an
explosion on the eastside of the moon takes your skin
away, into song, into bloom of fissured oriental
outtakes, heavy air heavy air darkens the window’s
promise, we are ancient as, ancient as,

did not dare to think the future would pass so quickly,

an instamatic reconditioning doubled by the library of
congress, trumpet vine eschews collateral metaphysic, we
are meat choices only, a stipulation that the california
coast line will soon wear itself down, or that, and the
“other” thing I meant to say when we met in hell that
tuesday with the iron burning into your skin, tattooed
heart of the drunken sailor, y’ know, how can we figure
it out if the cancellation has already been submitted, I
am an isolation case looking for, a heaven’s just a fist

62
on earth, shaking and doubled over like Hercules Furens,
a character from a senecan tragedy who has just been
cheated by the cab driver, in old run down a lot, rotted
at the timber with only so much time to go, before it
blasts itself out, to ruminate on the green pastiche of
the remaining, it pales aside from the italian lesson
what else, there is a suburb somewhere to the north with
an obligato, phrases easily elude, sky changes from
distance to a thin phase blending ochre

you assume better but only worsens, never as planned the

wall shapes a shadow totally contrary to form, hands
disappear beneath sheets of ether, vague, the pondering,
which is the debtor, which the debt, etc, as climbs the
walls a white doubled over its other, fingers that
forget their inky articulation a visible, fires that
break out in the hidden parts, recesses of an end that
has to be folded over as if one last time, but the
imminence of any departure like the roses about to burst
in mid life, all air breaks out, a sea of green
indecision awash in, what echo was that? a heard a sort
of, thinking what is better than whitest if that is a
shadow over the mind’s unblessed tundra, a passage to
beyond the orient, a section near vallejo street eight
in the morning champagne and all, a similarity to
paradise but closer to hell than imagined, when we meet
next it will be with cancer abloom, other situations
only repeat the same, we respond to envelopes with an
ink of ignorance, never opening the right one,
discarding the jumble of techno-information in a
wickerwork library of despair, none of us has made the
correct choice in this multiple quiz of brain comes
last, smoking somehow gets no better, nor the numinous
telegrams to some mysterious non-existent home, it is to
sit down to the “poem” and wrack and refuse

distill improperly and fling at the receding, flames

cold licking bay’s apostolic shore, that’s me next to
the black dog “alibi”, recognize little else of what was
once, the sudden thing is a great cloud that assumes the
shape of sleep, hovering and ponder, that a sanskrit
verb system cannot coordinate nor all the microchips
stored in a lost memory, a half liter of frozen white
wine before extending the epic’s demanding first line,
shifts of red into a zone determined by a china of
infernal limbo, sheep falling off the darkening ledge,
books come and go, titles worn out in a dream of

63
learning, knowledge becomes its opposite in machine
translation, ditto in irreverence, someone who deserves
not be named in her black umbrella underwear tugs at the
art museum’s distant portal, I am dunned in a firestorm
of diphthongs and consonant clusters, trying to find the
way out on the endless highway to bakersfield, candles
ablaze in broad daylight, sperm tracks threaded through
the non existent clouds, a death to go on “being”,

to go on being for “what”, ink becomes unstoppable

bleeding, no suture holds, equals a call from the cancer
ward, is this captive of paradise, ?, thunder peals in
the third ear, NAMAH SHIVAYA, who holds the reins, who
pays the debts, who cancels the notes of the unwritten
song, a section or two later in the card catalog,
shakespeare’s misspelled ghost puzzled over the formless
intent of baudelaire’s brain, or a brief footnote from
the woman in lompoc who considered the structure of hell
as a military camp, the third and fourth liters of
frozen white wine unsettle the lesson in german
democracy, racing back and forth over the bay bridge
carrying on one’s back the elusive hospital, who is
dying, who will go unheralded, an urn of speckled ash, a
lack of determination to identify the next step, heaven
is a blunder, an imperfect reading of ariosto, soon the
wall-size TV disposes of the young and the restless,
tickets for pieces of the bone-text, a buddhist allusion
to the inability to travel to the “pure land”,
semaphoric, red, and more red before green, samples of a
glass of “blush”,

unable to make it to nikki’s funeral, or whatever,

tangle of night code and cataloging rules, intercepting
the new anglo american system for bibliographic
description with a bright flutter of yellow “in
process”, himalayan reaches of a, living in the world of
dis connect, no purely objective pose only the daily
entanglement, worsening, ponder, the “so called horror”,
of it all the show off poems about a, subsequent to a
trip to death valley and the oblique slants of a
westering sun over maps of unfounded pacific colonies,
who should come in the back door but, you guessed her,
jukebox and tampering with a suite of bad disco numbers,
everything becomes a bad habit, pizza and pop songs,
tumbler after tumbler of lousy noontime wine, fantasy
realizes an afterthought in harsh white asterisk, to
catalog in the drowsing shade of despair, pretending to

64
some kind of paranormal hinduism, a sojourn in the world
of dis connect, unplugged the mantra-like lyrics,
“you’re an angel” based on a green foundation of wanting
to die, recur in between sessions that summon a latin
goddess whose shine is etruscan for death-bait

is it that we are? a fix in the wrong place, the dice

turn a corner unprecedented, an automobile flags us
down, please don’t anymore it tells us, sex with the
improper stranger, piano and bits of red filaments, a
husk is all you are, an ordinary husk to be tossed, not
much good for anything else, a rant into the microphone,
a dissolution inside the next verse about, wear me down
with all your provisos and high-standards, a mutilation
with disregard as phonetic decay sets in, MANICOMIO,
most certainly trying to breathe in the light even as
green turns to fade, an orient of next to nothing sand
storms, barely legible protocol in perso-arabick script
beneath the sutures, tear me out and ! whatever else the
gods do, destruction and hemophilia, ponder the
remaining spaces, interconnectedness a thing of the
past, a flickering TV screen in the large and empty
afternoon amphitheater, hubcaps and lipstick syndrome,
chasing illusory skirts into the bar’s sawdust basement
floor, and just as they’re whistling “?america” a blank
others its else, we are sweating beside a juke dream of
less than calico references while patterns spread out
multifoliate dreams without resolve, pretending they’re
“girls” who just wanna have “fun”

or, haven’t we seen this, done this, been this, all too
often in the glare of a human presence, going up for
promotion, another merit review without success, a niche
in the library’s third floor near a window, if you’re
lucky, if you care, ignoring the birth defect of life, a
rotund essay in recent german geo-political history, a
foot over the neckar another over the isar, kinetic
revolvers aimed at willy nilly, the pointless farrago of
subject cataloging rules decentralization mob and the
grand et cetera of a finale in Kip’s noontime bar
television monitored by, exhausted by the perennial
overload of a day on trial with the red head of choice,
bunkered down in hilltop flat adjacent to musical
corollaries farflung and post planetary epicycle, a huge
and sometimes bitter pleasure, of a ponder, too distant
now to relate the evidence to the whole, was born and
transfigured into this momentum, divisions of a

65
linguistic nature only, please cancel tomorrow, or the
day thereafter in the nation’s only capital, and in the
meantime going crazy, slowly, involving the self in a
secret photographic process, blur of “girls” becoming,
one girl one love one world, you’re an “angel”

in the small fiction of black and white flesh, “meat”,

for ocular consumption only, yes it becomes madness a
yes obsessive, ponder the white staple dangling like a
human cicatrix above the L.A. city hall, or the swimshot
poses in irregular blank and pale décolletage see though
skin meant to be imagined pink and flush with
unwholesome rhetoric, thinly disguised and elaborately
propped in theatrical garages the mystery of what occurs
between “their” legs, ponder and shoot, first comes the
notion then the sentimentality of a complex orgasm,
intellectualizing the whole mad pictorial extravaganza
as a work of art, !, a yes obsessive that circular
ménage of venereal faces prepared to devour the male
principle, to obscure the mind’s sublimity with a
descent to avernus nothing other than, sex from a
distance then brought close up through the lens of the
so called imagination, a brute ponders, a fiction of
depicted in blood thin tattoos on the inner thigh, a,
the a, stuttering mess of nerves poured through a sieve
of obliterating white wine, narcissus and hymen recoil,
heliotrope re assembles, hyacinth bleeds to death, noon
blackens its own poetry with a fist of cross sectioned
and kissing, yes the famous fist kiss, ponder a, “meat”,
nothing less than the hindu tantric rudra masturbating
high above the holy lake of reason,

all of them down there beneath the black silt surface,

promising their wares, unwholesome, reduct of
pornography and, a holy awareness, pudenda and smear, a
divinity crossdressing for the last time, be mine
forever, be mine, tonight’s the night and the thugs
jumping down from the roof, in the name of Durga! mate
me, mate me, !, what hollow what pale a yellow then
thinly a scansion of dubious poetics, inversion of
thought process, gesticulating in a vacuum, to repeat
the sacred names of, her is a, “that” goddess, ad
nauseam, hapax you know legomenon, a vergil proto type
in blue port manteau waistcoat doubling as a senior
librarian in ostdeutschland, or what used to be the
soviet sector, raising a music to the nth degree and
never mind the air raid sirens, pretending this is a

66
“pantograph”, misnomer and illusion’s love everywhere,
assuming the momus mask in a mime dedicated to madonna
in delicto, hermeneutics and porphyry columns of
intimate lingerie wrapped around the additional membrum
virile (see verso of t.p.) as if a televised edition
were even necessary, all fall down in a holocaust of
paper and imitation vermin, super sales to the right and
the bliss blistered knock out kiss to the left, in the
key of delta a paratactic sensation undressing for the
“cure”, don’t cry for me argentina, !, her white shining
backside elevated and enlarged, focus on the blind
pornographer’s inner eye agape, cruor imberque, dripping
in the eaves a darkening, a furious rapture about to,
be, being “there” is like being absent, life is Death,
after all, flush before using, leave as little trace as
possible with a lipstick like “that”, small footsteps,
smaller still the flower beds trampled in their grace,

what is meant, enigma & with variations, a sequence of

asterisks and tabloid suggestion boxes, insert at your
risk, peligro, y’ know, the whole thing ‘s ready to
“blow”, her lips her evanescent breath, her hinted
vivisectioned nether parts, her her her, a miracle was
never happened to see her, not even in the magazine
(p)articles and with half a skirt to heaven, at arm’s
length pizza-lipstick-syndrome, head in hand heart in
delta, shuffled up and says in a loud monochrome tone of
a voice splintered in vicious and various fractions much
like a river eddies into phade, magnificent hush and
lush vegetation overgrowing the each and multiple
fractures of hours in his dismemberment, peligro beyond
evidence, and ponder, “this”, goddess functioning at
below sea level with hemistich turned equally to the
left where a vagrant I sit poised for mental
communication from the “other”, didn’t even know it was
really her coming at me at such velocities, the infernal
meat switch blistering the hand, job, stumped up the amp
with increased dosage of refrigerated bad white vino,
kind a like mambo italiano run through cordless muffler,
such as oswald spengler must have pre gnosticated in his
evangical dust storms about the west, a horizonless
event in a space without origination, her

? (?”beast marriage”)

accent on the penultimate, a middle zone dances spangled

television music, so that’s what I had coming, still

67
reeling from that failed love affair with a piano tuner,
a volitional practice saturday mornings with a large
wall-sized poster of her, what never goes away is the
luxurious thrill of doing something always wrong, in the
chord of delta minor, obbligato staccato maverick
recording artist(e), waiting for that next identity
shift from alph to zed, climbing on a solo rock to
discern the assemblage of arriving clouds all a-roar
with defiance and tumult, no hind sight here, no epic
versification but the paratactic buildup of a lifetime
isolated and isolating, will you be “mine”, ruby and the
romantics, angel baby, what to do with the deaths
multiplied that are beginning to foliate all over the
screen, the father the dog the famous poet the lover the
mother the photographer, the, and getting dizzy with
nose bleeds and temporary paralysis of the left leg, in
a bind with a pseudographer’s notion of biopsy, stitches
up and down the blind side, what a life has been, autumn
leaves and a rosary of greeks run under the wheel, of
“fortune”, fate willing be not so unkind, dear heart

seas seething, boiler plate language to describe the

failed merit review, analysis of red zones, a whiter
pale of shades, a lost dividend in classical
bibliography, a lucretian rampart suddenly ablaze where
space has its final inch, a forever longing, a, ponder,
a, code switching as a literary form, a dazzled but
distance as longing, no shape to hold, no handles to
grip the elusive and into the maze, fourfold and vedic,
truant of love, on the wane or just revving up? what
kind of poem is this, would that be, should it ever,
was, oh, nothing, no matter, really does, a manufactured
sensation rolled off a big picture postcard of the
obsessed one, eyed really love, matches formfit skin
with see through peek-a-boo head detailed with medusa
figurines on the green glide, swamp of life in creole
monkey suit debris, I’m home/poem suits language in
electronic backfold, your breath afire, going in and out
of record stores magazine foldouts sample death
warrants, a bill stapled to the dexterity finger,
wishing she’d somehow manifest in her ripple-type
endgame of “frozen”, song, that is,

how it did begin, the black and white with one breast
exposed and a look, sort of terror or panic, chagrin,
hopes to remain just like that, goddess/slut/girl,
proportion of meat to thought less than an equal

68
balance, rapidly dissociating the “rational” from the
dream of reason, aleatory and paratactic reminiscences
of a life’s time of self indulgence, akin to the
masturbatory technique formerly known as the “aulic
diaphragm”, once over in red litmus with porphyry ingots
of molten gold poured down the girlfriend’s yearning
throat, swallowing that is the god that invented her,
junk trash heap inch after inch, peligro, how this can
define a life, should it, ?, mine in a swirl of
obsessive self-revelatory madness, looking constantly
into the mirror where Hylas went lost, multiplied in his
bitter darker soul by the one multiple Nymph, Echo,
drowning in the utter lack of redemption and meaning,
that is a life, defiled but its own definition, a
circular pattern the over, and over, again, trash and
ponder, peligro junk, don’t drink the water, mutilated
in his dunkelheit, shadier pale of white, Hylas, mourned
in hill and vale by Heracles, who will ever ribbons of,
maze, the invisible thread by which I mate whatever
chance can be read in the labyrinthine daily, you plus
me equals the sniper’s hell, a game of a

stalking the echo’s Nymph in a hide-n-seek of cosmic

dimensions, a blue a red a yellow a, love’s infernal
code, city of angels, footnoted hyphenated and dumped in
the swill just off santa monica pier, that’s me dead
from the left in a single stitch of experimental prose,
and guess who is belling the invisible with a psycho cop
by her side? passion’s never requited symbol of choice
in her amphetamine sound a like “skin” (the song), amped
up to treble the fornicating value until sizzled and
decimated the soul just withers on its onion skin,
layers of death simply layers, too polyvalent to be
relevant any more, or down to the wire, last night’s
midbriefings about a warning no one can do anything
about, wouldnt you? Mom, no longer home, monkey probably
dead, or on the rocks, a cast off coat with gimlet eyes
and a brain just waiting to perk, poetry becomes a whole
lifetime of, ulysses multiguiled with manytroped heels
at his mind on edge, penelope’s gone, chase no more,
Madonna-of-the-Toilet ascendant in her hive of sirens
bevy and squad liquescent, each line becomes less like
the other than a boulevard of chasms, could never be
“her” so why, try? trials of an error system re named
neo hapax legomenon, ‘member that sweet white backside
which ever, ? marks a dotted refrain landscape with
multimythic echo chamber in the making, hssst

69
questions any makes, a while longer into the red,
bordered with silver rust fringe and opalescent glimmer,
a dotted refrain about “kiss me I’m dying” takes my
breath away, ‘s all in the’magination, y’ know, take her
and handle her mentally, Not physically, get it, ?, Mom
hasn’t been home since, crawling on bended knees across
rodeo drive to the big Jewelry, inside which are
encountered the total sum of the bivalve virgins mary,
hitherto unidentified only as “the one with the apex”,
and the more it devolves the shadows only whiten the
once so blanched formerly, situations are complex, the
mind’s glove has no fit, feet cross a different equator
than their maker, may we suggest a broader firmness of,
and it’s all so terribly unwholesome, so underhanded,
tawdry pornographic “dirty”, nothing to be proud of
except for the more than occasional outbursts of sheerly
sublime snatches of “I love You” as never before
expressed, and nothing we can know about the ending that
hasn’t been previously undermined by a whole of the
half, platonic reverie of ideational content known as
“carniceria ilusion”, hunka hunka hunka gibbering apes
circling the mirror for a picture of the light, hand job
extracted from the encyclopedia of reversions,
hesitance, solitude, agony, longing, “kiss me

I’m dying”,

so endeth chapter and verse, what there is to solemnize

about, to autograph about and or for, which is the
reversal of life if not the opening of death,
passageways eke out their own little spots for a brief
of afternoon slot, grass growing quicker than in the
junction of white, an enormous soul ascending into the
unknown, where paradise is a small whittled away section
of the vagrant’s testimony, hasn’t it been a long hour
already, just glimpsed the cloud choirs husky from
roaring all night on the other side of the quadrant, now
faintly roseate, nubs of inky half-thoughts, a guessed a
was, a only for a second, then turns into a hue less
deep than harshly intimate a sort of carmine, subdued by
a tempered wave a glisten, where skin turns in its patch
for a resonance, could but never did, hold her in my,
lessons about bleach and the slighted light of dying,
day’s re run in a second hand video clip about the
spatial reunion, there where the planets now become

70
gravid sluggish burning a smoldering, nothing really
discernible but for the faded lingerie out to dry on the
mind’s one rope, a white that lasts about as long as any
green, blotted out then in a smudge of erasure marks,
lost in the footnote about the Laundromat, faded more
than faded evanescent, a hand’s small brief in the
silhouette of air,

after which all that remains is murmur of echo’s

draining out the inner ear, portals of thin a smallish
rose clipped to the heart’s, mind forgetting not at once
but darkly slow a path it used to walk, margins marked
“despair” and “principle” too dissolve like mint
lozenges in dusky, hasp of sky arched over the oriental
guesswork, partake of desire the fraction whose label is
missing, now, ponder the, ponder when to come home when
to leave again, when, darker a lapse between stairs,
coming together a leaving time, a silhouette of the
ungraspable, being born for what as always questioned,
lope de vega, who the figures darkening on the lawn,
dancers maybe, are, turn sleep over on its side and note
the growing dense husk a, the impenetrable where no
coordinates match, began to write this with an intent
to, justify? sky has no parallel like death, in the
bushes what prying and peering, small animals looking
for a sleep, a reduct with latin puzzles, whose brief
foot stepping out of the dust into, a

laces untied, cannot quite make out if that is a face in

the glass, ponder, a shape was born with, and the
suggestion of dance music all day, so “if’s” unreal
what’s other, got a second life underway but No thanks,
enough of this one on the banks of the phlegethon where
lurid only gets, worsening between hyphens the greek
code for “shattered alembic”, face in glass ponders,
only bruits his aloud in semaphoric reds, diluted
doesn’t work, you gotta turn it up all the way, dance
and party all day, music, longs for solo with antiquity
in green ribbon, arrears, if what was mexican really
started, and when it’s over don’t wake me, don’t care if
I missed the prom, don’t care if I idled the motor or if
overboard the bankside with its haunting trilogy of
reeds and wind for flute and bother, an orchestra for
pan and his like to drown like Hylas, oh Brooding
Hercules, why? yon hills abound with echo’s naked little
chambers, rilling and apostate with a white bordered
trim next to nothing on and a flaming bodice, made in

71
russia, face in mad thought about the remainder, air
takes a breather while we “mortals” turn the wheel, for
what, a gainsaid nothingness bottoms, out

find out and, ponder, what the ampersand’s function, a

wheel with a light above the head, a music then a dark
catastrophe, formfitting and with a welder’s pluck, what
use is the diamond anyway, and that of the hibiscus and
other derangements of color, blood which seems to go the
other way, across a map of sprawling and punctuated with
crimson headed stick pins, agony to know, to be cited
for driving too fast when all along the alarms did not
work, come to this or that finally in the ditch, over
turn, as blank as it gets it only gets stranger, “was
born, lived often a hectic, married and with kids,
disease and drunk on arrival, the whole story, told”,
you know, and somewhere in between the writing, the
isoglosses the, various versions of hell Really,
pastiche and pattern of a renaissance rendition of the
ancient fable about the hairy and his queen, head gets
heavy, sleep dot dot dot, microform and idiotically
small until lost sight of, her brash and brazen now past
44 */*, a bullet is a sure thing a long narrative about
the, who dunnit, thriller in white page and briefs,
cloudy finger where dreaming on the borderline, and asks
for just another one more, for the

Road, double folds over

for more, see later

what was supposed to have been, I want it in “writing”
the happenstance of remembrance’s lost goals, mind’s
intent to put in words what was meant to be clear,
recall of such and such an event at such and such a
time, ampersands within portfolio, parenthetical
gestures aside, xray logos redivivus , kaleidoscope and
membrane roughly intact, was born rose to heights
dropped to mire died a quickened death et cetera, holy
mars! what a plutonic and grave tale that was, hunh?

Now to Pars Secunda

(ii)

virtue cycling bits a shore

hails a captain of fumous re gard
a toil long boats a shipping a sail

72
post coasts hauled a beach strips a
Hoy! muses sunk in reverie’s dark
linking fix to life with rust tenuous
was ever a ? lasts so short this
art of breath is light so utter?
sub ended in appropriately and green
waves code switching in denial\after
birth I came to (be) a likeness
to either side of the smoking portal
snaps hawsers and slips anchor
deep a gore the depths unfounded
will I set sail, a ? whitened a
wisp entails section by section
the vivid reminiscence of oblivion’
s discharge that vast anterior
yawning and while I look to other
side a watery mass with spume buried
planets hurls a maze with codes
locked forever as enigmas are
or should (be) lessened the light
across long lawns of grass invisible
nights of spray and snatches of song
ivy colored and
where red trims space’s outer rim
and shapes what take linger like
faces peering through the tangled
of lace and lichen like, a hovering is
a question flesh unredeemed of brother’
s oval nest this a twin in birth
this act of light of fraction
s untimed spacing inches where no
dark the expanse ahead as darker the
still behind a moving a lingering to
“see” if it is still out there
what was promised if one comes to bear
alive the length of tunnel longing
now when seems forever “the young”
look ! seized by the parallel of despair
to be winging, aloft , yes
nor adrift a seized by non chalant
sparks of light fevered and dreaming
rushed into the maelstrom the
a fact is lost sooner than ever
we are come to the banks of grass
the lush floral horizon asterisk
& anemones a verdigris bar across
the middle seems less apparent the noon

73
hush times what will come to be
are you “there”, too , mon fr`ere
? despond and its early clitics
across the vague lawn upon which quickening
the forms take shape a persona or
a skirt lifted above the knee
stepping tenderly over the grassy ghost
green and pale blending into the hedge
behind the last thought
who will be listening to “it”
who will be covered in ivy and pallor
sleep transformed into units of light
into a greater transgression of
hands ascending from a rich greek loam
like inscriptions inherent in spears
thrust into the glassy dome of air
we are “inspired” and look
alert startled to the alarms “within”
a hundred ways to grow to go
toward some impressive city of no known
bridges half way there , shapes yet
to come being beside the road under
the leafy spreads a thought takes
an idea circling its other self
dimensions of shade a lingering repose
before the river assumes its timelessness
a meandering a through libraries
of the unmeant and not yet considered
a boat docks by the fluid bank
the charge of sky lightning a sudden
! breaks in two the deep green thrust
to know “that” how it got there
am I ?
shivers in the hundred degree afternoon
beside a pale city of a myriad onion skin
layers breathless the a sweat
naming and numbering a succession
of kings and the innumerable sand
the oasis and its multiple mirage
a duplicity of promise within a
parenthetical what basis
of voice learning to “read”
what it pronounces across the eons
shores of light a gassy re entrance after
births and deaths a nod to the
wary of hiding in the underbrush a
buddhist “type” eyes forelorn a beckons

74
a forefinger held high a passages
of indiscernible the inks over
the a waving fronds of “recognition”
a Yes we have landed it seems
between sedge and rotted timber and
soils give way to iambs and dithyrambs
a glimpse of the porphyry futures
in yellow and dazzling hyacinth bent
over to crystalline streams a deep
draught of clouds
it was about this time
that the hegemony of yellow burst
a chilling you were caught somewhere
in the middle below the street
where the first greek got killed
hauled a quarter of a mile by a big rig
stone flowers sent into “got it”
brassy greaves over the bony shin
caught marching middlewards up
steep the asian hill soft amaryllis
softer still the down purple thistle
leggings through mould and marsh a
syntactic array seen through the mists
“of time” whose will be done
house of mirrors dizzying effect of
the tumult in the blood cigarettes
posed as a mystery and wearing a floor length
appeared more remote than ever
which made sundays more emphatic more
at the core sick to the stomach
watching evening thurst its darkening sleeve
through the windows of the passing cars
distance a shining
sort of the emaciated face?
kiss a the placard clearly said
P E L I G R O
wave’s length a breath takes
ever so “long” a depth of distance
before out lingers dying
was it ever so green the placid ?
we sink then in imagination’s pool
the unreflecting surface a symmetry
not quite perceived “syntagmata”
harsh winters quell evening’s forced
denial a summer where a season’
s airy flight what sounds a mere
axis eyes closed and buzzzz

75
a death so far circular dislocation
of time allows for so little\
else is blank\ some or many days
indistinguishable summers in cotton
fold pleated where vermilion bestows
a lesser dignity to the flowing
rivers of distance and the multi
floral dispatches in dust and mulch
cloying air’s slept fabric where no
eye against the immense black marble
erected perpendicular to sky’s ornate
azure thunder roils and glistening
tombstones upended holding avuncular
and vast trying to recall “why”
here among the grasses and hedgerows
confused gravel of the gods forgetting
to number the months until the dimensions
added up to a sum of imponderable
what you think one doesn’t easily
the relentless confusion of a single day
not to speak of its horse tethered to
the copper chime noon’s solitary Hour
when no sound but the siren song
tied to a mast and chasing waxen thoughts
into the chasm of mystery the all out
daydream to surrender to shapeless
and ink spells arabesques mostly
or charms verging on green ‘s
utter pale before the minute’s up
seconds later and the diorama red
and imperceptible hush the weeds
fall asleep so quickly then
yellow brightness and lapse into a
ever fainter the former gloss a
words cannot speak such utter despair
nor claims any vowel to higher purity
we will never be the “same” though
life equaleth death and be far apart
our arms that hover near sleep’s
daft shore inclined whose embrace a
reverie when colors side with “life”
no known blank the shore’s opposed
sands buckle under vitreous suggestion
s of epic struggle to “under stand”
alter ego quips red into gossamer
afternoons plunged in delicate pastels
mauve over lime quicksands the death wish

76
with a thumb ready to drink to
the opprobrious dregs , bitter loft
alone we tried then succumbed to
virgil’s plaintiff in ancient tunis
her wig hat ablaze with chimerical deity
awash on tolls flake a mire a
wish it would all “go away”
nurse heaves her bosom in white aria
as plans astray gone into taverns dank
the walls are missing! SPACE FLASHES
nothing else but the emptiness where
heart took hold here with some grass
ruddy reeds in desolation’s bank
a far distance graying smokes less
a pattern than an unformed desire
we will not return to that theater
, no more the ceiling’s starry crust
now a paste glazed over pottery’s
spanish ruin as gold runs to dirt
a kind of proof mom can only be
illusory in her carnation whitened
deadend and hip rose sarcophagus
how can we hold on to this after’s noon
? a kempt thing stared at in the
shop window we are not allowed to
enter no more, ghost times in the
mexican newspaper ready to burn
like vergil’s faded blue smock
puzzled over the german cartoon version
of a life on this planet ,
that was childhood
passages in blank ointment the sunday
school lesson about the dead messenger
a lips and mouth like soiled lavender
on his camel and waste so much
can never be repeated “solomon’s temple”
the mystery in the garage with its large
white whetstone and rust
to empty the bottle and lie about
where have you been dandelion wine
crushed under the pillow the still
growing hair though gone all these years
a grandfather’s premature death
in his egyptian box with Mummy Nut
weeping over the life insurance policy
what never comes to fruition what
only seems to be a label on a jar

77
what are the hooded figures remnants
of a shadow play in a mock asian
polity with city states growing like
a feigned entity in mask and putty
at the door holding yesterday’s news
in wet and pumice while enraged
the waves outside the window menace
darkening the already nothing sky
what puny a mortal what a saddened
day’s shirt is bloody torn thing
wisps of utter and fainting pales
her was a , sister’s gone to “hell”
to pay off that paternal debt
and wonder what wind makes so cold
the tree’s naked , a tortured sofa
fallen into sawdust and a brassy
reflection holds nothing intact to
make of the latin lesson a new beginning
then a blown light fixture nodding
into a cornered , awful display of
anguish and crimson with held
together by bits of rhyme becomes
first of all a “poem” as if to salvage
what is best unremembered of the
chaotic whose face takes shape
on the record player’s turntable
much like the aztec mask shivering silver
on the obscure wall , will come to
know the after life, will be
known as dust of ,
“big waste space seems heart”
forever long ing ‘s a portal a part
phonic and a parted way vermilion
cruises into the other nothingness
the spent trail of incandescence as
it vanishes into its niebelungenlied
hill over dale of frost and spite
in a northern state far from
and what echoes is not the same not
the flower not the grass not the weed
yellowing in its conversation of
trellis and dust , of
seems heart a big waste space
patters a rain ever so slight
the silver disgorged from a night
of rust and consonant clusters
down under the skin where chills a

78
wherever I go it’s so “lonesome”
a radio seems to play or a
saw nothing when I looked just a big
sort a’ encompassing the round
of births and deaths with a large
incision made just below the waist
to learn a new grammar in order to
express it “better” this sensation
of rounds of birth and deaths
in the trees some of them staring
into the night a movie shows
how people gather in the dark
the plural is a composition not easy
to describe how some colors get in
the way around it is also abstract
no longer the singular person a
modulated frequency , for , example
, red is a depth few can attain
most are settlers on the left bank
or persecuted for having “believed”
at a time when science is in the bleachers
watching a surfeit of stars in the west
over a small hill plundered the town
some dacoits in bandana and rubber
, I am never sure, which , a fiction
at the end of each sentence
there is a plausible communication
leading to the next, But in poetry
the affirmation is of no priority
and oftentimes the beautiful is a thing
until itself (?) so one can imagine
that talking among each other the same
as death looking pointedly at the
crossword puzzle for the meaning of “
ideolect” , actually more popular
with the guys than the gals in high school
, sort of scared them off with a name
like that and looks to match, hoodlum
pachcuo bum wet back, dirty Mex’
whatever is in and of itself an “end”
reading to catch up with the philosopher’
s stone or on a pyramid dancing
it’s all mutant chasm abyss endless
song and crazy how it all flashes past
in less than an instant before
the next Geist , or a polar star
without warning and that cold bottomless

79
drink you shouldn’t have but Did
sunday night french lesson
ennui entropy recidivism et cetera
the whole without its parts as time
disguised as a , bitter and
dejected , how is one to get
“the” understanding ? a river
a opposite in cinnamon and azure
a nebulous afternoon parting who
was that stranger in the silk get up
? her was a brunette and tumble dried
to finish the , vague , turns into
pornography or a reasonable fac simile
there of , goes the “wanderer” the
lost soul a stray dog a evening’s
repose no where a dilapidated logs
yellowish everywhere the miasma
a wandering towards the mirage a
shimmering distance of , sands
a storm of , to read the interlinear
text in its litmus of profound red
verging on prussic acid the capital
a city in blazes near the horizon’s
virtual north as the shaggy hoards
et cetera , in a litter version the
heroine becomes defamed and numbed
before a protocol of flame and brutish
though a buddha would never say so nor
sell used cars at such a price
avers that nostalgia is a dragged
her across the assembly floor before
the patres conscripti unscrupulous as
if watching a pornographic flicker
unwinding that ineffable silk sari
we are watching and it is her skin
(the song, to be) unraveled , actually
who can say , the metal obtains to a
heat of full degree circular and ultimate
as last things “are” , the class room
fills with inconceivable murmur
as sea shores its last hope in “me”
a drowned boy and his comets , do I
look aloft in sweet agony a poem about
to become , ? cannot decide and
ramparts of devastating space double
around the corner another door says
it’s OK who are about to die

80
salute Thee !
to disentangle memory a hopeless and
ask Psyche , get over the feeling
that death is such a bad thing ,
how often there is a ceremony and
then home coming in its autumn russets
and puerile game strategies a car
that goes over the cliff and the comb
in place in the perfect hair of the
perfect girl friend : ”moon light”
which is a berlitz redundancy daring
to cross the cemetery at the stroke
of midnight , does passion become
its own gilt edge ?
a vehicle pulls over and dumps a body
into the ditch , hominoid greekling ,
girl friend sits staring sucking
on her sugar pop as disaster lilts
a catastrophic glimmer slit in her
left eye the entire universe “careens”
like a herd of elephants plunging
a thousand feet to their doom , does
she Care ? later we will learn this
was the fate of Indraprastha a game
of chance and the willing dumbness
which is mortal flaw calling it “dharma”
, smaller maps attached one to the other
and developed into a length of mileage
somewhere the distance in parasangs
between angkor wat and persepolis ,
it is the ennui that erodes the fetid
greenery that extends from delhi to agra
, it is the yawning abyss , pascal’s
wager , darkness to the full that spreads
hushing the lush hues near the “golden mile”
, lay the head down beside the water
a still planet buried in the left lobe,
girl friend sucking on her sugar lolly
, “nothing really matters”, says a
infirm diction please stand and say
it loud in latin for the whole , as
its parts a sunder and a dank lull
a , isn’t it awful ?
how thoughtlessly we pass
from one classroom to the next
indictment cipher vacant as walls
fall down a crush of dust and verb

81
formations to the left a pronoun hesi-
hesitates to utter itself in denial
as others onlook to vestiges of
epic strands along the shore immobile
as husks of rusted and dead navies
the bulk of time lies interred here
episodes of planetary ruin and
disgust with the personality leads
to the inner light ! abounds with
intuition if only could drop the name
the clause about who born and where
what parents did who brother wifed
illusory butcher shoppe where bone meal
a text takes shape under the knife
ethereal and dumbfounded ‘pon
gilded tomb , archipelago , as for
sister all these years dead to the thumb
and livid with vivid contradictions
bible upholstery in “that” neck of the
woods a lacking history a bitter
stare into the eyes and a mirror
comes back notched with psycho prompts
Oh then a dance in the dark a
sweating and lessons in comparative
everything as one feels one’s way
out of the classroom into a noon metallic
with glare and hoods moving imponderably
through the spatial interstices
a warning “cuidado” P E L I G R O
drinks to the bottom a murderous draught
and sinks down the body to regain
press “float” and angelic choirs
with blue eyed fingerprints
the elevator only goes one way
guess “which” , the small volume
of verse with hacked spine and
library traces of litmus and the dead
animal at the end of the day whose name
is to be memorized , lovely weather
in the spain of mental induction ,
girl friend sucking jujubes on her
placard of impersonality as sky
faints dead away into a pale regard
of unwholesome desire , sends a message
to the automobile graveyard about
and if that isn’t enough a carillon
begins to echo in the depths of the

82
sleeper’s hemispherical ear ,
imagination’s traffic of grass and
clouds a semblance of rotating faces
blank windows an undertaker’s tow
to remain anonymous the streets
only bear numbers and directions
a sheaf of hands becomes the orient
toward which the night road blends
impossibilities of
hyphenated “the blues”
disintegration of milestones so
nothing is read aright as heat
a process of irreversible at which
the umbrian correction engraved
in rightsided figures and dante
suddenly steps forth from a nimbus
of powdery blue , a horizon of ineffable
the damned perceived in a descent
toward the vertigo of ice , is
becomes alternate of zero but too
Late , in his car going around
in circles beneath the eerie winter
trees , could it be ? one who is
Beatrice laid to rest beside the rills
of a small cascade to offer her
resembles girl friend stoned
in her hiatus of sweet and
diatonic scales arching toward a
heaven of naphtha and wild thyme
it all happens just once the “a”
beginning to end all over the map
a credence that simply “blows”
never to know You again , a
fragrance in the hair a lilac or
jasmine spray tenderly from a hidden
sea “initials”
through these stifling media
we must pass , this conflagration’
s wall a silent evocation of girl
friend’s lasting and as swiftly as
the arrow flies or thought “thinks”
unrepeatable lesson in azure and ink
a meandering in the atrophied pages
to construct the daedalean maze
over again and
grammar instructions impart no wisdom
or stoned in afternoon’s opium

83
to let pass the classes of fiction
the reveries the desponds the sciences
where colors pale and when air
a suffocating sleep in indigo and
the profound breaks through its glass
tenuous and without detail
girl friend’s oblivion portal
scanned fractions glittering moon’s
abstract bird on wings of paper blessing
a berlitz section in dark red
the vermilion part in “her” hair
as it verges on motels intricately wired
for the symphonic tone poem ”sheherazade”
distills a no logic
“which is the love that informs ?”
asks a darkening shade as following
rituals of adolescent and the punctuation
around the small space in between
blanched and parti-striped as nations go
a spanish conjunction close to
ypsilon sequence of radials a fine
print in crimson plush next to girl
friend’s cherry coke
love that informs
measuring tables of velocity and
glass a hovering wing afternoon’
s expunged of their weight a lengthy
section like a hotel in reverse
down which corridors assumed shadows
pace untranslatable “that informs”
what their names were or are (!)
or in place of the expected syllables
a figment of “love’s illusions every
where” doesn’t really matter
“in whom doth love inform its Virtue?”
versions in softer hue of , aspects of
and then coming out of the dark left
over the machines that imitate the heart
in their wake cities of watery waste
plunge into a magma
to fix the once and for all the to
likenesses of girl friend in her most
vituperative mood, in her , ponder
the reactions to “growing up” to
driving automobiles or hunting
for the sake of the “kill” and a
departure a history of blanknesses

84
issues that impart dust to each syllable
we become infirm in a sleep of sounds
a rigidity of and then collapse
a heaving into the bricklayer’s silence
a structure of impossible stories
inches and inches thick between the
an opprobrium perhaps of drug and skelter
avenues open up their green vistas of
and a section laid aside to develop
the “emotions” only to become insane
red vicious and large as a holocaust
breaks the mind down , informs Virtue
, into scattered little particles
brownian movement of syntax and “meaning”
here , give me your white little hand ,
Oh I thought you meant , and the flux
brings in the turgid dross of myth
inexplicable and regicides and ghosts
all gibbering in dialect near the monument
where , a lapse of sense and nothing
darkness the utter , a squalid remnant
of light as the bodies pull under the
magnetic tow into the starry wash
of far , time after time facets
of a glimpsed in the dance as a lake
descends on the crowd of onlookers
drowning them in sorrow and
, it was supposed to be “love”
the ancient thing the pale remove from
the tombs unetched in their night
what is longing being sought after
what is the thing that is “missing”
? circles
on the one side there is right thinking
on the other dead auto mechanics
what flagship honors fate , what fate deadens
lessened by hope a slight fraction
they are turning green they are
by turns more pale than ever and
the thin cigarettes passed from mouth
to mouth a cavity enforced by a situation
I had no hand in “this” avers the
totem beast wildly sweet and denatured
as first wives can be , not tend to know
anything really what life is about
the section just below the grass criss
crossed by a temporary madness called “noon”

85
the goddess in question whiter than
evanescence as moons round out a typology
a teratology , space hovers above its glass
wider than it is broad the distance
between thoughts ankles down near
the eleusinian mystery where the “girls”
in their may undress requisition a
soporific for the hercules of choice
much as aristotle had imagined in the
prior analytics , or looking beyond
the byzantine headland beyond the tea shoppe
where azure faces a litmus test
below the waist , enigmatic and querulous
at once the darkness innate in her eyes
drives me “crazy” , to know ,
how can I ever ? the usual mandate
of poetry to not explain , to leave “it”
alone , redress the tapering limbs
the wherewithal to understand but
never do fully , the neon marquees
are simply a punctuation in man’s
fumbling journey , for what it’s worth
on that side is the Phlegethon
burning with brambles and the unexpressed
a tower of invisibility meant to madden
for being unreachable , for being at
all , to look too long is to desire
overmuch
in blank sections divided by red and
the gross infirmity growing along
the lower margins nearest to Hesperia
the dead beasts that line the royal marge
flexes a whip a wind ladders its way
up into the topmost moon while looking
away the legal onlookers , a cast
of several hundred dozens , or so ,
mechanical clocks rotating for what?
osprey and gull take off on “time”
we are witless in retrospect , as
always and the palest formation
utterly unsanctioned in the epilogue
where confessional and orange side
swipes a merely lateral condition
a one which we will , refuse , but
ponder the , “inexpressible” , a
fragment shatters in Hesiod’s ear,
that some god is being invented as

86
one invents the perfect summer , a
green fossil buried in the eyelid before
waking becomes sheer impertinence or
, what a longing to bear silence
to its perimeter by paces red and
nacre , silhouettes bearing the names
of the few summer months left to memory
, the hazy the distant the god a sighted
a semblance to the underside of a leaf
impress of , sections unbearably
white by length of time it takes to
compose this music , the “I am alive”
situation , band in brass and fleet a
what does that mean ? to me matters
as such are shortended phenomena
a slight of hand in the night
of unorchestrated stars feeling
that any recovery is for naught a
residency on the planet no sooner
begun than demised , a fortnight or
so later the new developments on
the hill erode in a dialect of
perishable vowels , a rice cake for
the recurring hell-god , a pig
donation for the one in silk pants
who is prepared to devour the summer
moon , a peninsular section breaks
off , magnets whirl out of synch
from the true north now an obsolete
companion to the illyrian baedeker
, her hands ivory white implicate
a distant air with darkening why ,
and for the deity hacked to pieces
in the sullen marshes some shiny red
toys meant to “last” ,
a pirated copyright to childhood’s
imbalanced a window such as the
auto wreck with someone’s uncle’s
brains spattered over the front seat ,
could winter have been so cruel ,
skidding the articles about divinity
a plausible or implausible goddess
in renewed bright red hair known
as “flammantia moenia mundi” ,
waving her detached small white
hand as if a munitions fabric ,
as if a ponder , weights of sky

87
caries of the moral fiber , famous
the “dioskouroi” in plump red leather
hide bound to an orient cigarette
head band tight around the and
barely able to see either to right
or left smoke signs , not to mention
the late summer colors the hyphenated
orange and green turkish formula
much like the burnished cliffs the eye
harbors just before dying , a song
floods the skin , a ponder “this”
, elemental horizon in burnt sienna
or , vague sensation below the pen
umbra unpromised and shaking violent
ly , either side a quivering without
focus the deity enthralled with sheer
mortality in the guise of girl-skin
and stiletto heel shoe , escarpment
that leads to tragedy , automobile
rush to , roiling waters of a foamy
conclusion to a lighted journal ,
well above the norm and usually speaking
in measured cadences in a dialect
of choice , the whole zeroes in on the
parts a platonic illusion danced out
on the valencia ballroom floor every
other saturday night in charcoal
blue blazers and pink , the god in
question behind the wheel of a buick-8
vast and darkly sounding across roads
of no fixed terrain , a wild , a ponder
able situation what youth , greeklings
in sport gear and greased intuition ,
where the light barely seeps in , where
in beds of soft green moleskin , where
a god other than the self treads
provoked by ire and , wars break out
in the mysterious margins of a text
yet to be figured out , roots and
syllables of a proto proto mythiform
ideolect in which we dream unresponsive
to the heavenly choirs above (“there is
a light above my head”) , chanson de
grace , not prepared for any accident
the chasm greedy for prey takes us
wheel and all , a spent , a lume spento
, girl friend has nothing to do with

88
any of this , a writing in the dark
a writ of habeas corpus , a –lusion’s
every where , love’s unformed body
wrapped in tropical leaf to keep
out the light’s fierce incursions ,
girl friend who can barely read only
concerns the self with a renewable metal
, with a cosmetic plunge into , a fume
that snakes out of the goddess’s left
nostril , a metallic sheen blinds
the summer’s catastrophic name , to
ever know what happened , to have read
it just once (“hapax legemenon”)
in a book otherwise illegible for
its macaronic signs , unwholesome
unsuitable for common consumption the
a reverie , avers to a footnote in the
future to be discerned by the holy a
as a , whatever , sanskrit topology
spreading into the softening hill slopes
“piedmont” rivulets and curling avenues
‘pon which the gods build their infirm
mansions of dross and poor calculation ,
much in the manner of men , much
in the mirror of man , a sadness ensues
the incarnadine unreachable what can
never really be expressed a distance a
long , a ,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
a other a , the , “on the street
where you live” , darkness ,
delight in nothing , end comes and
‘tween sorrows what other falls
but the undone tapestry a loom ,
fits during star spell a , section
s by turns red and pale make , fade ,
duns toward the dusty “west” some
where Beyond , no door plies a
gray stones a pattern , meant to
say it differently , but too late ,
not so as longing the over , hills
of dusky lost splendor , a gl-
ittered around “her” head a light
, must soon too fade , must , as
ponder this , a house of dust
and oblivion lengthened by , plied
the under waters of Dis , fraction

89
s a mere , a flaming segment wheeling
its way into inner space , a meant
to but later a changed “man” , a mask
of a person in distress disguised
as , a , formal inclusions require
a matter of “fact” , some times
the houses just fade away , the
streets glide into an unlit chasm ,
the neighbors forget to say goodbye ,
the new car up the block WHAM!
smoke rings wispy refractions into
a sky of , ring a round the rosy,
whose soul was that “escaping”
through what singular event ,
throughout the night a thin sob
a wailing between the walls ,
a sensation that had happened
all before , a eerie , isn’t it ?
days pass by unnumbered unaccounted
for , weeks turn into a green
palinode upside down and further
on in the “next” chapter , a girl
emerges hermetic and unapproachable
as things get more tangled a
metallic shine to objects , a drink
is offered to the unwary , a toxic
substance full of pleasure a for
bidding , or soon it is the noon
of the apollonian transgressions , the
hypertrophy and illusory carniceria
where oblivion mates its eurydice
in a grassy misperception on a
woody tuft outside the last suburb
where ringed with the ethereal Mater
Dolorosa levitates a mere , lakes
of perfect depth manifest in midair
who that emergent girl is , hermeneutics
the assyrian bull metallicized and sheer
breathing a fire “ignoto” , houses
through which we pass darkly
the unknowing substance with its
corollary shadow , the mephitic
arrow aimed at the poet’s heart a
domesticated animal at best , to
ponder the “her” outside her
pronoun , how can we hear
better the rhythm of the beating

90
until it collapses in a wall of dust
, reading and re reading the homeric
tale as best we can , the ellipses
mysterious dodges the sea filling
the ear’s blind recess a , siren’s
song , what is “serious” begins
to expand in its own sky , what we
most revere , the women who own
most of the light we breathe , where
it goes in the utter life , where
the response is as her feet “lift
off” from suburb earth , a section
breaks off quietly exposing
sleep to its innermost fears or
what we gain , a mission statement
about the , apologies for the
mess we are almost always in , a
variable function of the zero is
its capacity to surrender the void ,
actually I have been hurting most
of the time , I have been having
this dream about the afterlife ,
a certain monument raises its
statue on the plinth of my tongue
or there is an abrasion , a form
the poem takes at first in the pale
not knowing which is its real color ,
which its own “sound” , which , is
space the vast and multiple beyond ,
and as soon as higher education begins
as soon as the quadrant with its
medieval , the gryphons who fly
like blinded angels into a mass
of perdition , I was meant to be
among them , meant to shudder at
the slightest touch of , contact
with “her” in a kind of music a
sort of idealized , watching the
regular street patterns fade into\
how immense is the after-structure
the almost blinding story after
imposing story reared into the cloudy
, affirmations so hard to come by
and the marginal hyphen with its
derelict implications , a movie house
or worse a , waking or seeming to
wake , who the girl next door really

91
is , how will it all come “down”
supposing it will , fractions of
gravity and light flying in all
directions toward especially a india
of massive runes , hypothetically we
are not , and cannot see as we are
meant to , nor hear the choirs ineffable
, mention this to a neighbor , to a
passer by , mention this to a tax
collector or to the vegetarian behind
the small watery reticulation , or
what is more likely to the traveler
wearing your disguise , “you have
been lived already” , cognition starts
much later in some shop where they
sell women’s wear , turn your head
and , “Kensington-High-Street”
, the windows flood with an orange light
what is meant to last , a ribbon
unravels around the railroad iron ,
a station or two down the line
and in descending order the persons
we assumed come to some kind of
headache , a dusty repose for just
a minute or so in “that” afternoon ,
hyacinth jasmine narcissus dogwood ,
in order to have sex must we be attracted
to each other ? in an adjacent
room they are erecting small tragedies
with french titles , the enactment
is both cruel and effacing , as often
as one gains the loss is greater still
, for example the case of the missing
diaphragm , a matter one never gets
over , really , the mirror is an indication
of , and beside the urn where remains
of achilles mingle with , a book
plate a marker with an egyptian
foil , an identity of regret , a
shadowy , a , why can we never
get it just once ? rightly thinking
the error only increases its lot
, blinking in a morning sun as
we step out of the tavern for ever
“gone” , such as are the moments
of a life ,
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

92
sectioned the tumultuous array
brides whiplash pendants blank
sockets where moving targets
this sky vision , a despair
spoken for at the altar or beside
the grammar book , the purplish
colored one with gilt letters
on the spine reading “
“ along the shore
grieving the myrmidons (don’t
cry for me “argentina”) !
wearing cashmere sweaters gloves
a fringed hand reading from left
to aright the massed collisions
whosoever peers through this glass
who sees into the depths of a
history’s fractured city its
(the house of colonna reared
on the tiber’s sluggish bank)
byways loosely in the detritus
a murky evening in theaters
spent looking for the light ,
midden heaps through which we
the purloined letter the gasworks
left open as a new planet
descried for the first time a
lens shatters turning red and green
the blue litmus paper discharged
in the faint flame to discern
the glyphs of her name , a dying
second time perhaps a lantern
over the ruins of athens this
noble music in its weathered fane
which is now more like a railroad
station or a baedeker indication
where once the imperial baths the
sepulcher an ancient parchment
dried characters as night draws
which direction it takes to end
the finish line marked in bright
red chalk meant to dissolves and
re appears in later re incarnations
as a gubbio tablet or ochre defined
as death’s ultimate shade , mere
bride’s girlhood masked etruscan
flares in depths of , steps ever
lightly over hedges of primrose

93
a salutary embrace in euxine
dialect or puzzled as to persian
hand wear the diptych fears fade
glowing less as eventides merged
porphyry hovering at an angle
more to the left of syntax than
had feared she would flee and she
did , leaving me anxious and
troubled in the sleet of michigan
avenue no cabin into which
withdraw the letters and latch
hastening to reveal nothing in
ink neither in china nor script
legally dead in the morpheme of
despair’s early rite , later I
will refer to it as the “piltdown
period” of my so called life
a weary praxis in folded paper
industrial blue and whatever
else you might call it chivalric
it ain’t , how often we miss
the drizzle the accidental
verb charts the ancient des
criptions of “up country”
the yes enigmatic iota sub
script and the lesser deities
channeled into a mental cloaca
somewhere south of cinecitt`a ,
who will guess that I have always
been wrong or wronged , paired
to a vision of beatific white
oxen grazing on a parnassan slope
while a dreaming hill murmur
erodes the ear with unearthly
rumor that persephone’s afoot
again in those fleet daisy colored
sandals flowers burning miasma
an orient a sop to cerberus
berenice’s lock arpeggione
the indefinable ?
“sky—when I looked again
it was just a bunch of nouns
strung together” islands
cut off from their moorings
like nameless clouds gauzy
afloat in the endless cobalt
azure imperial porphyry gilt

94
neon asbestos
“when I fall in love /
it will be forever”
the shape of air loses color
the closer you get from its
distance
or the next ceremony which is
“death” links to
the nether and other worlds of
the “beyond” that mysterious
shivering you get when you
open the window and there
‘s something “there”
cannot identify mysterious
her was a such a “presence”
ghostly shades of pale
multiple hues of blank
the hair do piled up
so you could see the nape
of her neck and the tip
of the sinuous vertebral column
a section without demand
cut up the water
end the part about “true love”
with a report on ovarian cancer
esp. as it occurs in the
attributed to lady Murasaki
or else when the page fails
to turn and the illusionist’
s spell is on us a variety
of reasons as to why I
had that “affair” but none
less applicable than it was
necessary and night was
drawing its rosy death into
port , a stagnant water easily
put the knife to the center
taking the liquid core out
a philosophical transgression
about the , otherwise I am
about to encounter the “truth”
with its manipulable handles
or the way she cross-sectioned
paint on her fingernails
it seemed like a canvas of
space with all its massive star
clusterfucks amaze shining

95
a vivid moment when I had to
choose between legality and
mortality , spinning a light
through it as if the way
awnings collapse and shadows
scatter into a noon of eerie
concentrated my attention on
the way she sang those dumb
rolling stone lyrics , visuals
adumbrated through the iris
and the cars kept speeding
her spectra taking me with
an amnesia case , if , ponder
the italian word “smemorato”
brings to mind the white chill
‘s oblivion of , irate with
the gods for having done ,
played this trick on us , apollo
zeus hera artemis (diana!) ,
golden age , trying to hear
the music better through a
lost diaphragm , a lock of
hair wisps , an unwritten
“novel” penned in a sequence
of green spiral bound notebooks
fifty odd lines to the page
in crabbed black ball point ink
ca. 1968 , or what seems like
“light” but isn’t really a
fraction of grass glimpsed
in the dark , a , ponder
also what little is kept ,
what else is leftover , a
section of water in the cupped
palm of her hand , “her hand”
, leaves of a thin indistinct
, a poem written the night of
a less than full moon , a lapping
waters of hyphenated reeds a
rush in the left ear , it’s
over ? it will be best to
be discreet at times , setting
the typefont early in the morning
before the birds’ song a , alba
“diotima” what memory can ever
bring anything back SMEMORATO
like the time you slipped into a

96
little water and waved a frond
of longing with its small
white syllables at me ,
? , or later afterwards
realizing that loss of memory is
better than this wading though
shoals of myth the blind
swimmer’s brief pornography
of breath likens us to the
supreme love the alto saxo
phone enunciates so brilliantly
or so it seem(ed) , a water
cut into even smaller portions
and divided among the remaining
creates a sequence of triads
among the otherwise unidentifiable
gods racing maverick like
into a thick sumerian clay
, if you turn to the back of
the book you will recognize in
the faded black and white photos
underlined with a prussian device
the blackboard where we first
learned to conjugate , it seemed
and was so “simple” then hapax
legomenon to the contrary , a white
backside an evening in pearl
a fading muffs bluffed in fogs
of ancient sienna brownish a
sort of red that stains “her”
hair even as the music , who
was that orestes type in the garden
whistling so off key any way ?
I will probably number the
various parts the sections the para
graphs of water using a subtle
vermilion key the kind employed
by the hagiographers of the t’ang
, and if that doesn’t work make
appeal to the bhikkhus of longing
for just a slender part of their
immemorial history preached in
lotus and palm leaf ,
or make less than nothing of “it”
a solitude of pale and ,
whitest decomposition lunar halo
breathless “frozen” trek

97
to “make believe” where girl friend
dwells forever in her ice cream
and what began as a complex orgasm
soon becomes a portion of sky , or
water bisected and delivered to
the heathen in a temporary hell
just below the tin compound ,
poetry and the lyric “set”
her hair a spray of
wash and tonic the gel perms
frequently I have these “bad”
thoughts about her I have to get
up and wash my [censored]
in what is now iran they used
burn rubber up the slope towards
a parnassus of sorts , linked
phraseology or gnosis a tanked up
and sent spinning wheels first
into a ditch of despond , earlier
letters indicate associations
with the ionians before the great
migrations across the sea to
the girt cities of crete and where
a dog aloof and alone baying
for a lost “master” a situation
rectified it seems more aerial
a distance that cannot be breached a
solemn and the remote darkening
hill toward which we grope
before the last season sets in
with its cluster of blank stars
we will never be able to read aright
the original composition
or a “dirty” book and the sections
about , almost mis interpreted
as usual and the light scuds
dimming its , rooms missed as
chance strays , night’s cryptic
awning a shambles at whose feet
, pray a part goes to the right cloud
a rain fall disturbs whose sleep a
drawing of her intimate “features”
occludes the propriety of our human
mission , ! , stumbles down the
subway stairs a wet night in april
a volume in each pocket of mythology
and gore a pitied by charwomen

98
or emptied of style his half drawn face
a light full of fist and words
trickling out either ear the coat’s
job is to hold together the infirmity
of sounds even as sleep’s dusty
rim recedes into a field of water
below which read “marginless light”
and ancient forms half visible
half of darkness where flowering
moons radiate a language of mud
and in the middle of the chapter
about the evening out of the depth
behold! the lowest speaker in his
bulk of hash and spite imitating a
verbigratia virgil in an epic ,
rainpatters shhh , can’t ‘ear so
good the future’s half eaten by
the consonants surrounding “omega”
and the sun’s brief spell cast o’er
the upended pyramid of , sphinx’s
upper lip battered a crust of
hieroglyphic hematite meant to re
semble the mona lisa so called
, halves echo their other sounds
as falling from grace the body’s
a way of signaling , doncha think ?
like the pantheon of elephants
crashing silently off the peninsula
of invisibility , conscience , ponder
, “pick up the pieces” (average white
band) , brush the self off and apply
for job easily a monday to remember ,
often what is recalled a session
darklisted and spun out into a space
more remote than most he meanders
in a paragraph not of his own liking
until suitable to be wed again ,
her walks in , wipe the sweat off
the statues and repaint the grass a
softer green elevated by legend
into mnemosyne’s ear , park where
paradise is persian for , an abstract
painting of the exactly what cannot
be identified with an earlier form
of script , tattoos , til this
day us parts , vermilion , chrome
, a hazard of air in which noon’

99
s unbuoyed planets hover dangerous
and , the nymph echo in her europe
of amphetamine and , pale , ascendant
mirage wavering shimmer a shining
white , yes white , a , to be able
to follow “her” into the ,
the ,

the 5 pandavas against the 100

kauravas , the pandavas with but
7 akshauhinis , the kauravas with
11 , each on either bank of the yamuna
but with not only Krishna on their
side but the dharma as well the
pandavas were bound to win

and able to discern for a minute

O hills of my youth! fast fading
as time’s swift minuet does its
double take off off broadway
, echoes more infirm of a sound’s
illegal history , marry me !
but wed not my face , etc ,
the complex orgasm and various hues
her face turns from a magazine blue
to asphalt blackening , under a
spell , chasm and , mirrors the
swift moving foot fleet as green
mimicry of waves across her cheek
s silent and more silent still a
pale whitens , would not would never
know for “sure” but went ahead
any way and took a first plane
heading south of philadelphia
over the nation’s capital toward
the split suzerainty of the “mind”
, poem me this poem me that , a
damascus road barefoot as heat
blends noon into a fiery cloud
and a voice from 6th century persia
formulates the tavern of oblivion
into which crowded we fall a
babble to know the Master , but
the stairs only go half way
and the cigarettes burning the index
finger points a mere , illusory
meat house the body’s duplicity ,

100
fragments of rag drape the soul’
s skinny rib cage , soon what will
be known , beloved , as the moment
of instamatic reconditioning
a pattern doubled over and over
and folded neatly into the interstice
known as the “paragraph of love”
heaps scorn on the lines in between
on the effigies in melting wax
of beatrice and laura , pretending
adolescence is the time of Revelation
, circling a concupiscent noon
with a dozen spains each more
albescent than the previous aspirin
taken and then freezes the brow
in a dazzling moment of cognition
before taking the knees by their
dark nerve a , resounding roar
of an army of water , micrometers
of ancient verse difficult to trans
duce wavering salty deliquescent
the words partake of their own blood
relaxing the final syllables in an
amorphous effort at pleasure supreme
, her ankles then her “unmentionable”
shatters rendering echo itself deaf
such as are the songs of , another
block past 8th avenue where the greeks
still gather waiting for the fleet
and that mysterious buzz like
a green hyphen , I am disturbed “little
mother” and can no more , vast
quadrants of ice darkening as the
afternoon takes on its role of Medea
, looking in the flashing subway
windows for a face to identify
in order to feel “established” again
, the nacre gives way to a pulse
faint as are the myrmidons in their
multiple death , what is this
V A S T a
hewn from immemorial
the obits list in no particular order
the demise of hundreds of “heroes”
lost fighting for the wrong side
the blind king Dhritarashtra tragic
a density cannot fill his aching

101
swoons on the margins a gathered cloth
drapes a remaining word , sighs suppurated
over the gulf of tonkin like oil
enormous and , doomed to this
a internecine strife and fratricide
clouds of a deadly orange mushroom
and the seas boil in a quantity
not hitherto imagined , steady
like the clicking railroad wheels
processing the , whose final
resting place may be just over the
hill in a junction of furious
hendecasyllables , the poet virgil
slowly dissolving in a neapolitan ash
known as sannazaro’s dream ,
I am witless in my glass , a whole
day passes its lethal ribbon
through and around my heart ,
may I know Thee , beloved ?
ink , if delivered, ponder ,
other , wise the , so , amalgam
with complex , orgasm , a sky
which , is , a torn , breast
, naked pictures with a , key
, or fortuitous , shelly in
rome , abysmal headache because
of spear in , groin , kamikaze
of love , a round shell like ,
object , pierces , to the ,
root , a man like “that”
else , whosever perceives in
the rain a country of his own
choosing , whosoever adopts for
the , self, long slender ,
inserted in a dream , smooth
thighs , the opposite , a , girl
pulling at my , ties to the other
, life , sections a , part falling
, we will not recognize , a city
built on a thousand foils of
onion skin , cimmerians , hyper
boreans , tocharians , texts A
& B , buddhist aryan port
folio , a numbing , like a
tooth , aches, what afternoon
in time is this , anyway ?
long hot drowsy meandering ,

102
glossy photos of a , stream up to
her breasts , in water ,
we are allowed only so much
money in heaven , as I prepare
for the , poetry reading , one
mid day in hell , the bronze
things dangling , in a trice the
whole of , life passes , like
that between , the grassy
knolls , the western hills the
song about , mmm , faintly
disturbing the moon’s blood
red appearance , a leftward
glance from angel proves , lust
, addicted to windows , to shops
where they sell , lace and other
paraphernalia , adornments of
the putative sex , complex
orgasm , so going in cycles ,
up and down the “numbered”
avenues , looking for that
romanian “slut” , a black hair
piece , a doctor’s thesis on
eminescu and petrarch , brick
dust , fabric of pale , her
skin , radio voices warn ! ,
get out alive ?
other torn , aspects and the
envelope , undeliverable , for
whose sake , derogations , a
piece of , meat , a soft , some
dead , inert the rose , in
its iota subscript , a frag
ment , the very , say it in
sumerian ! , “dusty molecular
taurus” , red shift , quasar
s , reeds , the thin turn ,
her waist two thousand years ,
ago , fractions , intellect ,
d’amore , as more dust piles ,
burning hedges , rows of margin
less , idiomatic expression ,
about one’s “mother” , not
to be used , honorific pro
nouns , like “turning
japanese”, wouldn’t you rather
, ? , an evening in old ,

103
mumbai movie house , passions
grown cold , grammar of illusion
, tundra , the very word , a
spine , followed by a licit re
action , some brain trauma ,
lesions to the memory , cycles
heaped in a bin , tin , azimuth
, stars gathered , labyrinthine
, the talk is of “black holes”
, of lines of accretion , of
heat traveling at masses of ,
kinetic , irreverent , down
right hostile , street theater
, melt down , a dream within
the dream , stalin suffocating
in dialect , for whosever taketh
a life , a biblical flame ,
issues , forth , a , angel “israel”
improper in black , her gushing
out a confession , just like
that , police condemn irregularity
, placing one blue tile , over
the right eye , and one ,
whatever you choose it to be ,
a dialogue between principles ,
septuagint in red vellum , vulgata
in green , across the street ,
from , brooklyn academy of music ,
guessing where to place ,
tonic accent , neutral tone ,
the restaurant where mysteriously
no one ever dined , a mirror in
obverse , a glove exactly like the
one , a puppet show in javanese
about vishnu avatar rama , a
row of indefinable silence a
, the rumanian restaurant
in mid town , expect to hear
random gun shots , thick white
linen , the ghoul in mufti pouring
deadly white wine , a , vein
throbbing insanely , the poet
eminescu “mad” , like so many
others , some kind of venereal ,
problem , I hope to meet “her”
again in an afterworld , her radio
activities undocumented , a slope

104
facing south , enigmas going dot
dot dot , greek versions , hyacinth
, jasmine , unnamed purple flower
, connections to the river styx ,
a border of dogwood , and , a
brooding neighbor , narcissus ,
poppies in turkish , a urdu day
laborer dying of “love” , Radha
going to temple all naked , mud
, infernal gauze caught on the limb
, I am “mad” to have “her” ,
but never will , meat house ,
illusions and maze , concrete
suddenly flies up , forced pages
of , syllables , holland tunnel
looking for hoboken exit , a
, meal at a time , seeming small ,
vicious in her reverse wings ,
stillness in japanese tea garden ,
kites , a whole wind , the world
fall down , yellow as in the
silk of the sky’s utter flags ,
whom we will kiss by nightfall ,
who shall remain unnamed , whosoever
toucheth the unmentionable , who
? [translated from the romanian
by ]
finish epic , never on time ,
hair’s length , a spear , a thigh
shattered in , champagne in the
morning with one’s favorite con
cubine , already noon’s gauzy heat
lost splendor , a vision between
gray hemispheres of irrecuperable ,
but sanity ? never and the
closing phrases near the phone ,
or the quote from hesiod about
“gaia” , somehow stunned wandering
through the eclipse in the city
of man , for whom the poem is
this intended ? for whosever
deigneth not to score , for
a flesh meal , a siren sound ,
ambulance of meat descending at
millimeters into the heat of
, time’s outer proportion scaled
and the left writhing , a staring

105
into the naked , a window flies
open revealing a preponderancy
of , “manhatta” after the sun ,
in the photo taken at the “plaza”
that sunday in greek the one from
the right could be , me , in italian
the way you say “mother” is with
open vowels , hush , not a sound ,
darker than pale a hesitation becomes
round , a symphonic echo embedded
in concrete , like the shadow
of narcissus in atomic melt ,
floral patterns , Rohini in yellow
Yashoda with a necklace of pearl ,
Radha drying baby Krishna’s lips ,
each the other in red swirl and
paramount picture frame , steps
of new york public library ,
weaving the sound of his flute ,
automatic re conditioning , a
buddha type painted large on the
subway wall , dripping in the eaves
a furious whispering , “we gotta
get outta this place” , flash for
ward to a mansion in the maze ,
for every window there’s a
soul , for every soul lacks a
story , for whosoever plungeth
a hand into the mire , and sobbing
dies , a heroine dressed up as
a hindu neophyte , the paint drawing
down her , and a substantial
amount of “dope” found on her person ,
empty now the , button , and
ponder the , cave images super
real and with religious , over
tones a harmonium , a gypsy
tent battered by the wind ,
a saffron robe wrapped around the
invisible entity at the door ,
how will we ever really under
stand ? committed to the pro
position that , a ponder , weight
s gathered around either temple ,
and ready to jump into , roiling
waters of , as if the gods can
or cannot , subdivided by zero ,

106
‘s fate is of no consequence , a
fiction clad in skin and smoking
an expensive cigarette , and to
think , calling on the “prophet”
not for salvation but for advice
? , what a scandal in the oriental
division , the girl in shorts and
topless in the stacks , a cursive
form of writing , palm leaf script ,
curlicues and the abacus , in darkness
and in blight , to harm and to heal
, til day’s doom is part , the movie
version shows the spot light on ,
him , the other of “me” , dwindling
in his religion of fired brick , a
, dionysian “sort” ready for a job
with the musical opposite(s) ,
fractured and indulged as a rhymester
, a hack , a legions like “him” ,
in the employ of “inspiration” ,
a footnote to the vast waters of ,
a less than honorable mention , a
, rather when I think of his imaginary
girl friends , the eye is trained to
“see” into the beyond , the mind’s
tackling is confusion , a signal
from the sun , some letters about
the moon in berlitz , phonetic
decay at its worst in a storm ,
whose face that was disappearing
around the corner , whose emblem
and heart , whose minute details about
the , a prospective pale in blanch
about to , withering fossils in
the eye , lamp black , as far
back as we can go the sea , always
the same in its bed , exactly who
ulysses “is” , in his meander ,
and phosphate glowing below a surface
, that awful summer of the brain
tumor and , a detective story about
the etymological development, we read
the same text in as many different versions
as we are persons ! , wanting and not
getting , getting and not desiring ,
the ambulance driver took the wrong
turn , a red flashing before , shifts

107
into ultraviolet , space is as usual
a blank tonight , mmm , asterisks and
the hiatus in its green phase , a map
of london before the fire , a section
so beautiful in its cinematographic
moment that , I am forever indebted to
the mask that wrote this poem , a
or maybe two hours of “hell” just
waiting in that office , for some
kind of confirmation , it was the
turkish doctor assuring quality of
“life” , dumbfounded in the isolation
ward , loving and not returning ,
giving and not having , being and
not “seeing” , as how many have gone
before so how few will follow after ,
the again-sight of last-sense , a
borrowing is not believing , the “
mater” perpetua of all reason , green
is not pale , I am writing to you
in the hopes that you will see fit to
publish this item written in cramped
left hand in the intensive care unit
of a major metropolitan hospital ,
previous credits include a stint
in the , as well as fondling an
intern in the basement of a lesser
, to have seen just once the “Master”
on his stairs craving for that one
last cigarette before surrendering ,
dante was the informer , how is it
that what was has all passed so ,
rapidly , tormented by the maze
of lies one has fallen into , a
deictic mess to say the least ,
windows one is afraid to approach ,
lest “she” , a death’s head at the
tip , striations of a lesser hue ,
followed by a sequential orient
padded rooms a quarter of a moon ,
hydra’s mouth baying to drive one
mad , leaf through the last pages
first , usually find a clue as to
what , apollo afraid to touch human
skin , a song , this is not a temporary
derangement but the full blossom
white and poisonous , peligro ,

108
how one comes out of it , if at all
, or confused by the playwrights with
dionysos , an exchange of wreathes ,
ivy and laurel , the darker green
stands for betrayal , the lighter
shade for a form of “reunion” ,
though neither totally satisfies ,
a sense of the miasma impending the
return of the armed forces from the
hellespont , I am never sure when
it is right to consult the telephone
directory , but if it means bringing
“her” back home , a nominal regression
that disguises the latent cancer ,
“bodas de sangre” , time past in time
present , absence , whiter pales into
a final hue shading ink into its formal
abyss , fading is not the same as dying ,
as living no longer equals breathing ,
remonstrances in flight , out the window
eclipsed a buddha shape becoming form
less , chattering in sub dialect the
hominids of warning , diseases toll
shaking from limb to limb the body’s
frail intent , echoing a belief that
life is the same as death , that
life is the same as
breath e c h o e s
and what follows , a direction beyond
hills of soft purple of dun colored
, love was like that , assemblage
of distance and fading , mistaken
envelopes , hair snipped off by a
silver code , went into remission ,
folded over and doubled and taken ,
to ashes and diamonds ,
we’re all just passengers
darkening in the strangeness of night
, absurdities in question , other
side of glass where rushing a green
takes up swaths of blank , hush ,
into the starry heights , who else
will look away , the rest is a vast ,
reminder that the gods don’t “care”
, apollo and diana in their white
marble distance no map contains ,
a spear centers in man’s flank , a

109
dearth of hope , seas deepening
their inch of death with each new
light , gone out , held my breath
, but it didn’t go away , only
diminishing lessening growing more
dim , and , absolute “bottom”
before a man goes up , again ,
is that to hope ? but fails in
the never knowing , a green pattern
assumes so much intellect , after
all , and the simplest thing is
still only a fragment , the whole
is what eludes the , depths of
concern , the what is outside in
the , lurking for a , ponder this ,
then , the ambitious epicycle about
the lunar , diagrams cannot explain
what really happened , except that
the telephone seemed to play a
role , and the aspirin flooding
the night sky with that hallucinatory
indention at the end , right side
up it looks familiar , but turned
to the left what is almost visible ,
a childhood’s end , a blank , an
eruption of red that tips over ,
chalk circles dizzying spread
out like a second water over the
field , folded and pressed carefully
into an envelope that otherwise
could only contain some hair ,
soon we will be aloft taking a
larger part of memory , the rest
is back “there” blackening , ‘neath
the willows and fading poplars ,
someone will appear “official”
and given the keys , a car will
drive carelessly down oregon street ,
or then again a rain storm just
on the other side of the glass ,
a perpetual motion arrow , or a
filter through which sleep is drained
ever so thin and , the “boy” looks
just like his “doppel” , don’t he ?
I am connected to almost nothing ,
some mornings just wanna hide ,
the way things turn out is usually

110
, for the worse , a thickening of
the plot , some cranberry colored
trimmings around the western border,
an orange section that just explode
s ! , while in the glen down there
around the disguised brook a monk ,
brooding cross-legged assumes a
dead buddha look , an honorable
mention is never quite sure , silver
argues over rust , a perception
brings one narrower to the “real”
, who will borrow the transept ?
who will ask the giver not to freeze
? who will question the glove
for its non descript content ?
basically no one , at the other
end of the continent they are pre
paring to bury the automobile parts
with the driver who ignored them ,
it is a long way to the drug store ,
it is even farther to the designation
for “plenitude” , puzzled we are
no wonder , the text jammed into
the inside pocket is about “deliverance”
, ages pass in a slip of the tongue ,
argent is a melody , masks replace
the probable with a sybilline property
, I am not about these gardens , have
not sown the rye in time , have
ordered the fundament out of line ,
cannot assure the next season’
s deathly rhyme , a , before we
agree let us have some dark , wine
is best before noon , a harrowing
at the bridge entrance , reminder
that the passage is always fatal ,
“don’t look back” , they all say ,
but then they have removed their eye
pieces , a frame , a second frame
, it all “fritters” away , cheap
episodes with any one who will
listen , who will be “there” , who
will linguistically concur , that
can be a feminine subscription ,
in black with carbon copy , still
less legible is the part about
the “job” , as all deceptions are ,

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no clarification just the somber note
posted below the water mark , you know
what “that” means , sunk under by
life’s relentless , the lurking hall
ways and the messenger on his defunct
horse , parenthetical asides about
poor work performance , not enough
attention to detail , doesn’t take
the effort seriously , the grand
et cetera that wipes us all out ,
sundays in a bath of rose wine and
confusion , skin peels off so easily
like , a “white idea” , thinning
sections of the , a call from the
cancer ward , what dies in the
heart “flores de maria” , to end
it all , a paragraph in which
continents fix on their routine
, great constellations in a red
shift “die” , if are others ,
re born in this poor mortal cloth
, hemiplegia , massive brain trauma ,
a leg brace to support the left ,
poor swallowing mechanism , what
is remaining , a light fixture that
won’t go “off” , flores de maria ?
obsession begins to trace its whirlwind
in the small pattern on the radio ,
searching in the filter of cold
white wine a , suburban plasma
or a 1985 toyota , or the right
one damaged as well , nothing seems
to work , you try to get better ,
to reason with the “ghost” , to
re try the winding thing , at the
top of the stairs a mother-type
consumed by her cigarette , in
the bellows you hear a familiar
voice , a telegraph or an edict
in early symphonic prose , ponder
, how you write and re write
the same poem , vallejo and lorca
, frequent hospitalizations in
german with an adjunct in ,
lose all contact with the source ,
feel rubbing on the spine a
night , windows fail to conjecture ,

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doors swing the opposite direction
, nothing is intended to “mean” ,
a “white idea” again , this time
with red hair and a , the year
of the piano , youth adumbrating
in a file of smoke and writhing ,
her stockings wrapped tightly around
the thought , about them , about
the music in its plumes of red and
blue litmus , a new planet looms
temporarily into view , a suggestion
from the berlitz group , to sit
down and seriously do sanskrit ,
to get “religion” , how can we
have been so opaque ?
“… that poetry should be suspended
by a hallucinatory beauty …”
who was at the door , or who that
was throwing gravel at the kitchen
window , or what air of malignancy
wrapped around the hiatus , beneath
the floorboards a secret map , a
clue to “that” goddess , a bone
text deciphered in the month of
highest , moons in saffron slowly
rounding the curve of consciousness
, each of us , that is , levitating
towards that summit of disregard ,
a cold that takes us by the knees ,
flung face forward into Paradiso ,
unasked and the unkempt , the haggard
in the mirror with her wisps , of ,
invisible summers in rented rooms ,
a threadbare glass , some shattered
, china ware turning blue a thin ,
asthmatic skeletons of girls ,
trying on hair , who will give
names to their proportions , who
is beside the self of the recording
industry , who will issue tickets
for the unheard music , a box within
a box , india ink , blossoms of
white paper , iridescent , a section
of air detaches revealing homophones
of blank tissue , segments performed
on the unnumbered violin , a mosaic
in the basket , hands without gloves

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reaching for clouds , harrowing
a dream with inches of sulfur , when
we are re organized in the library ,
then we cease levitating , a poem
about the man within the woman ,
is wanting context , a variation
of crimson , enigma , persian stains
around the yellow whorls , indexes
pointing to the grammar of the left hand
, a telegraph years in the making ,
and ascribed to a certain mozart ,
the law issues from the mouth of
a fish in the window , heads turn
to stare at something naked , proceeding
down walnut street , make a right at
the next green semaphore , it makes
more sense of you add a “mu” , why
it goes on , in the regulation of dust
, why it persists beside the mulch ,
why this was a man , the result of
an orgasm in mexico , makes more
sense if you subtract a “mu” ,
goes on , persists , ponder , dust
which is an attitude , re commence
the great “reading” before the ,
burning , the illegible consensus ,
the even more immense distances ,
the conflagrations beyond scheme “red”
when even the infinite particles
, a radio message says “transfer
mu” , in her analphabetic white
stockings and spit , in her cata
strophic twelve tone , in whose
eyes green cataracts “resound” !
the thrust is usually towards imitation
, towards the cigarette of oblivion ,
towards a surrealism of conjunct
consonants , whatever hemisphere
yellow takes as a legend , wherever
the letter “N” goes , if a sigma
is the right answer , blows , it
all just blows , into the “blue” ,
there were other red heads , there
were the ones with isolation for
a principle , with a second nature
, like a forest fire , with huge
cloud puffs billowing , a dream

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in stanzas of vermilion and ivory ,
if we could read that script ,
with ease , where nothing else
matters , a career in “music”
, substituting the sense of it with
a “mu” , soon , come crashing
hegemonies of beryl and onyx , cliffside
patterns of rushing flowers
in wild blue and topaz , I told
you , I did , watching the sea’s
vast nothingness come roaring at
the baseline , here camped once
the myrmidons , and over there
below the purple tamarisk and sedge ,
holy for their dense green ,
surrounding the heroes with in
visible skirts, the “apsaras”
the dancing ones , for a chalice
of amrta , after which nothing really
, mattered , once , now shades
go into oblivion , and oblivion
becomes its own excuse , won’t
You ? rescind “mu” , request a
transcript , science and intelligence
have nothing to do with “love” ,
open the door to irregularity ,
a vast celestial yawning , white
perimeter announces a final day ,
sorrow and grief commingled , embrace
“me” , who dares say , speaking
of dialects and their survival ,
small hills , greenish mounds
of turf , a demesne where royal
stags meander , lesser words that
stand for “what-has-gone-on-before-
and-can-never-return” , that day
in the hospital when I looked
at the brown increase beneath your
nails , I knew , you were afraid ,
nothing to do with “love” ,
planetary cycles give me a head
ache , or to refer to the stanza
where cobalt becomes electric , a
management of the senses is “denial”
, roses wither , windows fade ,
night’s enormous toxic substance
at first a sort of purple , pales

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into alba’s small fist , why will
they not give us our “due” , ?
omega which is the godhead , omicron
which is a watch dial , we go
over the same lessons repeatedly ,
until death wishes a part , if
there is an aside , whispers in
the plate glass , a worm of intent
, a splinter in the pupil of the
discerning eye , a critical remark
before the rush to blank , whoosh
, tides take us out , a lonely
hand , to be able to write like
“that” , using nothing but the
fog and ink of longing , some
thing else is missing , the next
to the last letter of the alpha ,
mother , her small room like a
, glove , darkness fold Me ,
the pale western versions of Night
intense a , then nothing else
a round the water , below the
air’s long paragraph , beside a
fragment of epic earth , dead
heroes gnawed by a myrmidon of
conscience , steeped in lakes
of lore , a vedic transcript
surfaces , begins here the so
called saturday afternoons in
the upanishads , a shift from
mater dolorosa “red” , towards
the already blankening vista
of father’s vast and now dusky
corpse , “blue” , which is neo
greek for “ponder” , Mavros and
his Eurydike , through what long
galleries of shadowy , configuration
of mythic miners puzzled in their
obscure water , then back again
to the pop song on the radio ,
the one that transfigures the
hour’s night , “frozen” , the other
of Proseprina in her flashy red
kimono , spoken in a swift form
of modern urban latin , whose
rushing ambulance races into
oblivion’s smallest water , a

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famished , some one beckons ,
tracing letters on an obverse of
tinfoil , “madonna trafitta” , a
second later and no one is there ,
night’s dense and indecipherable
colophon , beyond the electronic
gesture to navigate , beyond the
unjustifiable spirals of nebulous
anti matter , beyond the minute
icon of light , aggravation of
incipient intelligence, the absurd
in all its recondite hollows of
incommensurability , whispers and
fading stains , traffic of slowly
disappearing cloudwork , towards
the “beyond” , beyond the “echo”
of invention , petty strutting gods
in their impolite stammer , index
of fuschia and carmine , city state
of the perishable lexicon , I saw
standing as a giant among men the
Areopagite , an immense dust and
nothing more , issues , former ,
the tangled mass of words just
before they come into use , a
reality of conjunctions “shining”
, “this” is what is over here ,
“that” is an impossibility , “but”
is an impoverishment , to lose
suddenly all employ of reason and
go plunging into the fret of madness ,
red black and green all become
“blond” , the dream’s strange
microphone decrees a code blue ,
the twisted wreckage below the
margin , ponder , the body parts
out of line , chalk swirling in
thick clots just inches above ,
orgasm , to explore the possibilities
of “liquid” , green unfolding in
the eye’s vast interior , as if
to make a lunar affirmation , a
tropical dissolution in berlitz ,
there hard by eastern slope ,a white
bullock becoming crimson , an ex
pectation that the “myth” will
right itself , burrowed in a

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sleep of “mu” , swoon of the aspirin
moon , tundras of desolation ,
“you’re an angel” , what I am
about is the destruction of liter
ature as , such , ! , wedded
to a kodachrome in silhouette
each hip the extension of europe
into its old bedlam , until what
surfaces neither asking for air
nor excepting some water , turmoil
on a stupendous scale (“vogue”) ,
P E L I G R O
I never wanna get married again
“ end of quote , rigamarole and
movies full of confusion concussion
contusion concession , her runs
away , her gets it in the end ,
he dies for her , he goes to Mumbai
talkie , he inspires to other life ,
her is a runabout , a gadabout , him
never was no good , wet back , mexi
can , her letters always come back ,
his address is never the same , I am
both of them , one and many , plural
is the same as death , endless “life”
why go on ? her is wet in undies , him
is goo goo eyes , take ‘em off , a
cries the crowd , dreams fade assuaged
by nothing , coleridge and sara naked
on the heath , one is as good as nothing
, really matters , in a violent kimono
and red shears , cutting the lace off
her breath , green is as pale as re union
, shapely in her underskin with a pink
valve turned “off” , before the next
scene starring her as a goddess in
tights , blackening eyes stared me
down , a water took me away , forever
, yellow surfaces on a wall of nylon ,
drenched in film , shaking her hair
over the stellar map , wet graces a
lip , but don’t kiss me again , marry
again ? after the last little white
house with its kitchenette and , motor
series in a breakdown of the nervous
system , ancestral fright , wearing
plasticine wigs of furious crimson ,

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again is a complex “word” , try to under
stand how Radha felt , the world goes
away so easily , a drop of water ,
a jade pin , the pearl of her earlobe
bitten so tenderly , her is a fiend
and bloodsucker , her is ragazza ,
to remember one’s life requires
more distance than can be mustered
up within the given hour , we are
all in a miasma , him is a mistake a
, boor , “indrajit” , a muddy sequence
in broken promises , her wears a white
garland of unfadable , remember to
double the “s” , otherwise it just
remains a sum of long division ,
we want the mystery , heighten “it”
, tighten her , I am disturbed by the
sound of so many bells , anklets ,
bracelets , tinkling voices of
the nymphs in their campanile of
dense water , a green ringing ,
a pale resonance , a hue between
the sound of musk and , her is a
“deadbeat” , the ineffable in a
gown of white intransigence is at
the door , an odor of tropic rot
melon ripe and lush cankerous yellow
, wisps of spanish moss a , likeness
to vermilion altered by moonlight
, a grammar of unreason and total
madness , a , really nothing like
“it” , her is crashing to the floor
, death is ringing her little ,
blue and white paisley seer sucker
ornamental garb , but , Please ,
no more wedding dresses , not even
the kind of infinite filament ,
of course I‘m not kidding , silver
rust with a dash of heliotrope
carmine nervous breakdown , “border
line” , I wish I could recover ,
I wish sometimes I had a chance
to do it all over , but what the hell
, second chances never come , I
remain altered by this experience ,
by this strange birthright , by this
unutterable sentence , by this un

119
intended refrain , poetry is within
the realm of the unreasoning , who
have never gotten “straight” , a
line enters the eye and departs , a
willingness to suffer whatever horizon
, after a while there is nothing
you can do , just sit down with
the chart of irregular verbs , and
start memorizing , can never figure
which ones get the sigmatic aorist ,
look up again , the chill on the
glass imparts its egoless winter ,
no particular place
to “go”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
seems odd to go by that “name”
to answer to a “personality”
that has been built up outside
of No-Mind , a contradiction
in terms , when green means
red , really , outer surfaces
of an orient ready to snow ,
whenever I dream of You
I see other things “sprouting”
, the small and blind budding
, sometimes I wonder it has
happened at all , first it was
summer with its involved gritty
skin , a song , then without
warning it was in a darkened
movie , sickness unto death ,
it wouldn’t matter if it was
some one else , but it isn’t ,
how “they” come to know thing
s about you , eerie , plate glass
formulary , driving slowly up
an unknown country road , who
will be the first to “die” ,
suddenly , a maze , or a radio
, eventually but you never really
get used to “it” , shape of leaves
outside the sick bay , color of
heat at the end of may , faces
that interrupt sleep , how is
it we are always so far a way ,
how is it ?
longing slips , shapes deny ,

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frames no longer hold , how
is it ?
space intervenes between remote
, deaths apply by code , yellow
afternoons , by 5 o’clock mauve
, either there is a “fate”
in the disassembled tea leaves
, or there is “nothing” , a
crosslegged bonze grown fetid
with desire for , or the
severed top knot of the girl
in question , just sitting
“there” with the TV on , who
gather around in order to
forget , who disperse if
some thing is remembered ,
it goes stray wanders lost
who knows aerial
illusions for what is distant
is most at heart , the talking
is just “that” words scattered
in air , mouths , blindness
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
there is no afterwards

ivan arguelles
Berkeley CA
July 30, 2002

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