Sonar Snake Tongue
In rooms where rhythm beats
Emanate
There is a feeding
For a certain type of serpent
Just behind the walls
With sonar tongues
That taste and decipher
Molecule scents in the air
Sonar forked tongues
Flashed for a split second
Detecting codes from the heat
Inside the sequence drummed
The snakes have openings
From their portal city
Through which they slide
Wind back on themselves
Coil, absorb, and hide
A clockwork underground
Crawl space mazes to shed skin in
Hollow places, spaces between
Drywall, tubing, around pipes
Circuit corridors
The beats keep them alive
The sonar tongue snakes
Quotient creatures
Divisibility and decibels
If they're lucky, a logarithm
Through the beat the animal
Knows a person's future
Every detail
Senses of the sonar
Diffuse around the rooms
Deriving and reading
Could be any loud room
Just on the other side
Of a wall
Where beats are purely stamped
They wait, stretched out
Unmoving, unseen
Receptor glands patient
And when the beat is big enough
The sonar tongue snakes ingest
The bigger the beat
The bigger their fill
A week maybe that stomach will hold
Like a python that's eaten a sheep
The bigger the beat
The bigger their fill
The further into your future
They see
Hunger will come again
And they'll want a different
Tempo, another progression
A longer loop
A new future to read
Until then, dreams of drums
Until, until
* * * * * * * *
Tilting
There is an intersection. A maroon Buick LeSabre
with a cracked windshield pulls to a stoplight. A man named Herman
crosses the street in front of the car. He walks with a lion-headed cane
and a helicopter seed in his pocket for luck. Herman has a phobia
of ice sculptures in the shape of swans and dreams he was ivy
in a past life. From here the moment goes, freeze frame, shot through
the tendril lens of the syncopated idiosyncratic world
As Herman passes the LeSabre, he hears the Miles Davis song
"Saeta" playing on the car's stereo. Herman pauses to listen,
tapping his cane two times on the street at an angle.
The angle the Earth tilts. On another side of the world,
a music student in Seville, Spain is charting notes
to the very same Miles Davis piece. A mailman knocks on her door
with a package. In the mailman's teeth she sees the keys of the piano
she learned to play on. Chipped identically. The package is from
a cello player who won't leave her alone.
It's the third vase he's given her this week.
The collection of vases on the music student's fifth floor sill
makes her uneasy, so she throws them out the window. She sits on the sill
and looks off toward the Ferris wheel of a fair in the distance.
Vases crash, calliope stirs "Saeta" notes around her head,
and the spinning carnival ride churns a peristalsis of the scene.
It's late afternoon. From the view, she traces
lengthening shadows into the sunset they latch onto.
One of the shadows holds the shape of a swan.
Then a trumpet, and ivy. Herman taps his lion-headed cane.
At the top of the fair's Ferris wheel in car seventeen, a boy named Esto
has eaten too much strawberry cotton candy. His vomit splatters past
the hand of a nun in car three below. Exiting the ride, the nun looks
to the ground and sees the face of the Virgin Mary in the puddle
of the boy's pink foam throw-up. News of the sighting spreads quickly.
The pink spot is soon a massive center of worship and
the destination of holy migration.
Esto becomes a relic. He is quoted in the paper as saying, "I could tell
it was something special when it was coming up." There are pink
mouse pads, pink coffee cups, and pink napkin sets displaying
the quote in multiple languages. Strawberry cotton candy is served.
Car seventeen is bronzed. You can get a picture of yourself sitting
next to a life size cut-out of Esto. A must have. And if you stop there
for a second and listen to the breeze, you can hear Miles Davis
playing his trumpet in long drifted notes. Shadows become swans
and you can feel the spin of the earth. It's slight, the spinning,
but it's there. Real as day. Or night, or whatever's in-between
* * * * * * * * * *
Northbound Squaw
The bottom of a large dark lake has rooms. Through these rooms
swims the slight phosphor of a Northern Pike Minnow. A Squawfish
they call it, and the dim opal glow in her eye is not from
the surface level. Down there, in the Cimmerian levels
at the bottom of a lake at night,
light is produced not procured. Made, not obtained.
The Squaw Fish swims slovenly, half asleep, and has two dreams.
She dreams she's a hammerhead in a feeding frenzy.
Then she dreams she's the Queen of all jettisoned junk in the lake.
She's aware and knowledgeable of every item dropped in,
lost, and collected on the bottom. The buttons, bottles, pins,
toys, and caps - algae covered and shrill in current. The occasional
necklace, phone, or set of keys. In the dream, she knows
each of their stories, empathizes with their loneliness,
and gathers warmth in their inanimate, forgotten souls.
The heightening of the second dream startles the Squawfish awake.
She hesitates for a second, then juts off through the non-obstacled
bottom water. In complete dark depth, she shelters
next to the giant cement support column of a highway bridge that
stabs down into the lake's bed. The sounds and weight of passing motors
above are bland lulling murmurs.
Purrs through submerged concrete.
The Squaw soon returns to gill snug fish scale dreams and the scene pans up the bridge
support, out of the water, until it reaches pavement of the road above. Traffic is traversing
under the electric white shine of the North Star. An eighteen-wheeler blurs by heading
toward B.C., Vancouver, carrying a cargo of light bulbs. The driver is on his c.b. talking
through dip spit to the truck behind him on channel nine about the perfectness of hands.
The little red dangle balls bordering his windshield sway to the smooth absorption of new
shocks.
The trucker's handle is 'The Hammerhead' and on this night, he thinks the human body
is too perfect a machine. He's been alive for fifty-two years and he's just now noticing.
The eighteen-hour drives, twenty-six days in a row, have drained him. Long stretches
of time to stare at his hands on the wheel and wonder how it was they came to be.
Toward the sky the scene continues to span. Scanning through wavelength channels
of c.b. chatter, static hiss, and strata - northbound voices converse above the Squaw Fish
as part of the conglomerate, custodians of the senses. He, the Hammerhead, realizes
he's alive, existing now, with sentience. And nothing by him, in this current skin
is ever missed again.
* * * * * * * *
Thebe the Tell Tale Flea
In the autumn of 1961, Doris Lancaster died while reading
the last sentence of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".
She lived on Logan Circle in Washington, DC, near the Shaw
neighborhood, three miles northeast of the Chesapeake Bay
canal. "Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more!" The last
sentence of "The Tell-Tale Heart" reads, "I admit the deed!-
tear up the planks! here, here!- it is the beating of this
hideous heart!" Doris read it and passed away, with a red pen
in her hand. She usually read with a red pen in her hand, for
underlining important passages.
Doris Lancaster was also paranoid of fleas. She was paranoid
her expensive dhurrie rug was going to become infested, even
though she didn't own a dog or cat. When she was a child,
her blind, cold, concrete-souled father, Golf, had forbid her
to have a pet. Golf lost his eyes during WWI at the battle of
Saint-Mihiel. A German bayonet nearly took his face off.
Doctors grafted skin from his deriere onto his cheek and left
him with a permanent scowl. Golf was why Doris hated fleas.
He made her feel filthy for liking animals. He'd tell her, "You
bring a pet in this house, I'll kill it. We'll get fleas! Fleas are
vile devils. Never in this house. Never!"
When Doris's brother Thebe found her body, her red pen was
still her grasp. It was a quality, Sharpie pen, . Thebe taught
high school English and always needed pens, so when he
cleaned her room after the funeral, he put it in his pocket.
Two mornings later, he sat down to grade essays with it, but
as soon as he touched the pen to paper to make a correction,
he was struck blind. And the pen started writing on its own,
controlling his arm and hand.
Thebe was powerless. When he tried to pull his arm back to
stop, bayonet pain ran through his eye sockets. Thebe wrote
blindly, foaming across the desk and onto the floor. After
seven lengths back and forth across the carpet, his hand
stopped writing. He dropped the pen and could see again. He
stood looking at the last words he wrote: This hideous
heart. Thebe saw the rest of the carpet. The pen had written
Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" word for word.
Thebe was a sane, tenured, competent man. People
depended on him. He didn't know the Poe story word for
word. He looked out the window, and in a flash, saw Doris in
a German uniform stabbing Golf in the eyes with a bayonet.
She was screaming, "Der teufel! Devils! Filthy dog!"
Suddenly, a wrecking, imploding sensation hit his chest, and
Thebe turned into a flea.
He tried to speak, but he couldn't. He tried to run but could
only twitch. Thebe had a thorax and antennae. He was hard
and polished, with tiny spines around his head and mouth.
He was two millimeters long. On his flea legs, he didn't know
how to move. Was this mad cow disease?
Three days passed. He taught himself how to hop and
scuttle-walk on his exo-legs. The rug was a desert plane; the
haunted pen, the size of a 737. Using its "tarsi feet," a flea can
jump vertically up to seven inches, and horizontally up to 13
inches. He began to worry about his job, and his students.
But Thebe was a flea, an ectoparasite, and he was hungry. He
needed blood.
On the fourth day, someone came in the room- the principal
from his school, Sydney Loren Bennett. She studied the red
ink all over the room, perplexed, and turned around to leave.
On her last step out of the room, Thebe sprang into the cuff
of her slacks from 10 inches away. Inside the cuff was a
violent ride. Bennett got in her car, drove home, and walked
into her kitchen where her partner was eating. Chicken and
soup. Thebe hungered, but was afraid to emerge.
He waited until Bennett was asleep to come out of the cuff.
The pants had been folded over a chair in the bedroom, and
the sheets hanging off the bed made it an easy climb. Thebe
found a nice spot on the principle's calf to sink his stabber
into. Bennett didn't flinch. Finally, blood. Syrup. Platelets.
Bennett was a Columbia psychology grad - her blood was a
warm, salty, sophisticated nectar. After feeding, Thebe
retreated to a corner under the bed, hidden and protected.
Two weeks went by, coming out at night to feed. Sometimes
he'd tap Bennett's partner. Her blood was, sweeter housing
hints of eucalyptus from her North Beach Coit Tower San
Francisco days. This life as a flea was - - boring. A month
passed. Bennett and her partner occasionally scratched at
their bite marks but never noticed. Thebe's highlight was
their sex life, when they role-played as Siamese
dominatrix Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatters. They sounded
like hyenas when they orgasmed.
Six months as a flea, and Thebe only thought in terms of
blood, settling into a rhythm of feeding. He slept deeply,
embedded into the carpet under the bed, and dreamt of
Jupiter's moons—way out, orbiting like bubbles in the black
onyx void of space. When the Bennetts had people over for
cocktails, Thebe would feed on the guests. Their friends from
Madrid were his favorite—with their zesty, Paella blood
- Paprika, Garlic, Lemon Juice, Saffron, and
La Sagrada Familia Basilica.
Bennett's niece was nice too; all she ate was Junior Mints.
She tasted like a Christmas tree.
After a year, Thebe was ready to leave the house and try his
hand as a flea in the world at large. He wanted more. He
overheard Bennett say she was taking students on a class trip
to the White House. And it hit him: There were advantages to
being the size of a flea - places one could go without
detection: The White House.
He'd ride inside Bennett's pant
cuff to the White House, jump out, and find JFK and
Jacqueline's bedroom. He'd ingest presidential blood. He'd
listen to secrets of the world, and feed on power-ripened
global-leader blood. Maybe Marilyn Monroe would come
over for hot tub mistress sex. Thebe could hide in her towel
and plunge into the red carpet slab of her thigh when she
dried off. Maybe Nikita Khrushchev would visit the White
House, with real Russian vodka in his system.
The day of Bennett's White House trip came, Thebe's plan
went off unhitched. Once there, he sprang and scoured the
rooms until he found the biggest one, with the biggest bed.
Maybe JFK and Jacqueline role-played Alice in
Wonderland too. JFK didn't seem like a Mad Hatter hyena
orgasming guy, though. He pictured JFK orgasming more as
the Tin Man.
The next morning, Thebe woke from Jupiter dreams to
voices he recognized from the news. It was the President and
the First Lady getting out of the bed. JFK ordered coffee and
eggs over a phone, and said something about the Apollo
astronauts. Then he went into the bathroom to take his
presidential morning piss. Up the sheets Thebe climbed,
around the pillow to get a better angle on Jacqueline. He was
inches from First Lady blood. One leap away, from what
would be rivers of regal cherry wine. Her legs stretched out
like mountains.
He was about to stab her when she said, "Johnny, I've been
studying my German for our trip to see Khrushchev in
Vienna. Johnny, you've got to get them to take down that
wall. That thing's a scar on humanity. Khrushchev is a devil.
A der teufel."
Then Thebe heard his father's voice saying, "Der teufel!" in a
German accent, and Thebe changed from a flea back into a
man. Thebe lay there nude on the bed next to First Lady
Jacqueline Kennedy. It was the beating of his hideous
heart. Her scream pierced as she jumped up. JFK ran back
in, and within seconds, there were five Secret Service agents
pointing pistols at his head. Thebe said, "No, see, I was a flea.
I just wanted your blood because it's powerful and
accomplished. I'm not crazy I swear."
Then Jacqueline Kennedy said, "Der teufel," reflexively
again, and Thebe changes back into a flea, immediately
springing off the bed to get away, un-noticed, landing in JFK's shirt
pocket, where he hides until they're onboard Air Force One
en route to Vienna.
It seems uttering the phrase causes Thebe to change forms
back and forth between human and flea
Possibly a curse, or spell, an impossibly improbable phenomenon
But that's not as interesting as Marilyn Monroe
Who is onboard Air Force One
accompanying the Presidential entourage to Vienna as part of a
goodwill mission for troops.
She's two rows back, fluttering with an aura like a mythical
slow motion angel-mermaid. Languidly laughing in flowing
cursive, starlet tones.
And there Thebe is, a hungering flea
Waiting for cruising altitude, Thebe springs skillfully from
the presidential pocket, to headrest, to headreast - aiming
toward the blonde locks and eye lashes, landing stabber first
into the pristine sea of skin on her neck.
Finally, sinking in, to the finest pastures, heaven
Thebe feeds on Marilyn's blood.
The purest uncut sugar cane / rose / sage, and:
A Hollywood pharmacopoeia of sedatives, soporifics,
tranquilizers, opiates, "speed pills" and sleeping pills. A
chemical chalk stew of the barbiturate Nembutal, amytal,
sodium pentothal, seconal, phenobarbital, amphetamines
methamphetamine, Dexedrine, Benzedrine and dexamyl -
opiates (morphine, codeine, Percodan), the sedative Librium,
and Champagne.
With his body full of this, beyond satiated with Monroe's
narcotic buffet, he springs up off her shoulder getting sucked
into the plane's ventilation system and jettisoned out into the
atmosphere through a duct 30,000 feet up. A flea, too light to
fall, he drifts and swirls, on fronts
Up and down through the sky.
While floating, drifting in this forever stasis, he dreams he
and Monroe star in the epic Cleopatra, filmed on the Nile
River. And there they fall in love, off-camera. There was a
scene involving a 16-foot python, that Monroe and everyone
else was afraid of. Marilyn fainted at the sight of it and Thebe
caught her as she fell to the ground, gave her water, saved the
day, becoming her hero. After filming, they quickly marry
And Marilyn gives birth to their seven children.
But none of that happened because it was all in Thebe's mind
A flash hallucination seeing a dream life pass before him
In the seconds before death.
30,000 feet up it's frigid. Thebe's practically weightless flea
body sails through the air, wafting on a high-pressure front
until his exo-soul lands on the exact spot of the battlefield in
Saint-Mihiel, France, where his father, Golf, was blinded
by the bayonet.
The exact place where Golf stood.
Der Tuefuel, Devils / Saints, x-marketh spot.
THE END AGAIN. The End.
* * * * * * * * *
Seattle to NY - Middle - Civilizations
Were Indian, a somewhere
3 move east, speak
Bionic hip hop
Sounds of conversations
Marlon is in love with his virus
Program
Inside digital attempts
Step Sequencer, hardwired
Human playing the machine
Machine playing the human
Which one dreams?
Radio Oscillators
Delayed. Sign waves
Assigned values, avoiding radar
Wormhole, cruises control
Winding, winding
The atoms are coming apart
At the seams
Tear my eyes from the fructose road
The preservatives have kicked in
Millston, Wisconsin
* * *
Company
Cornelius
Tom Vek
Serge Gainsbourg
Autolux
Pinback
Constantines
LCD Soundsystem
Trans AM
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Apex Twin
Caribou
Silver Apples
Ambulance Ltd.
Fourtet
* * *
They Say the Bottled Water
Is taken from a stream
Two miles underground
No way
* * *
Carcinogen Speedway
Drive
Don't dream
Keep alert
The oxidation loves its way toward you
* * *
Drive-Thru Light Show
Catching Truck Engines
For their sound
I-90 to the river
Road ranger, humbird cheese
Notate the visual bladder
Full
Tomah, WI
These places, the type of places
That might not be here when you're not
* * *
94 Miles
Outside Madison
Frozen hum
Frozen lakes
International Crane Foundation
The house on the Rock
Next exit
Reboot
Wish we were there
Tired
What's the reception here
Battery life
Take all the worries
And send them to a cheese factory
Elroy - Sparta State Trail
Advertise on your roof
Get it here
God bless America
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
Falling
I wake up falling
I'm in a bed but falling
A small clear ball filled
With fireflies
Floats above my head
Others are falling too
I see round clear rooms
Planter boxes
Foliage growing
There are firefly spheres
For as far as I can see
Above and below
Everyone and everything is falling
No one seems alarmed
* * * * * * * * * *
Bottomless
I used to imagine
Falling
In a bottomless pit
A society of falling people
If it was truly bottomless
They would fall forever
Weightless
I imagined the edge of the cliff
At surface level
Where families and cities of people
Waited to jump with all their belongings
As a center, a place where
People congregated
And entered, throwing
Their whole lives over the edge
Beds with mahogany headboards, ovens
Showers, fireplaces, lamps, and desks
Exercise equipment, pianos
Acre size plots of soil
Rooms arranged as they were before
Upright, but falling
Everything arranged but falling
What would you need to fall forever?
* * * * * * * * * * *
Big Hole
People wait years for the chance to jump
Pilgrimage to Big Hole
The pit is a mile wide by a mile wide
One jump a year
One hundred people
To jump is to start over
Forego
Surface level life
Is over
To jump is to end
And never land
* * * * * * * *
Society of Fallers
Spend their surface level lives
Preparing
Each with duties
Once falling it's a
Vertical existence
Falling fire
Water
Falling farm
Waste
Sewage
Gardens
Builders
Making water
Cellular science
Application of
Molecular manipulation
Bottomless Pit as
New myth
* * * * * * * * * * *
Once Falling
Always falling
Once the decision is made
To jump
To become a faller
There's no going back
No falling back
To the surface
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
For New Fallers, Things are Less Arranged
As you move down to jumps that have been falling longer
There is more organization
Living in the fall
Schools and maze sports
Cylinder reed instruments
Wind harnessing
Turbine energy source
There is no sun in the pit
Source of light is phosphorous
Lightning bugs
Relic fallers raise them
* * * * * * * * * * *
New Breed of Lightning Bug Bred
Fed enzymes and sugar water
Brighter tail light
Millions of them
Gathered and kept in glass like orbs 30 feet wide
Order of calmly halcyon firefly keepers - monkish
Phosphor Monks
Devoted to the phosphor
Sacred luminous creatures
Massive globes of insect emission
Fallers gather
Around their sun
Light - consecrated
* * * * * * * * * * *
Phosphor Faller Monks
By bloodline
Surface life spent
Learning the insects
Phylum Lampyridae
Coleoptera
Luminous monasteries
Keeping the colonies
Tending to their every need
Getting ready
For the fall
Worshiping the glandular
Chemical reaction
Of the photophores
The glow
* * * * * * * * * *
Oxidizable
Is the organic molecule luciferin
And
The enzyme luciferase
Chemical reaction makes light
Inside the firefly
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Bioluminescent Scent Sends
Be with them, the bugs
Let them land on you
Cover every inch of you
Feel their little feet
On your skin
* * * * * * * * * * *
Speeding Down
Downward, tear
Tearing air
Terminal velocities
Faster here isn't fast
Dream ahead
Down to one
Of the first falls
Falling fifty years
Slow elders and their fireflies
Telekinetic
Telepathic
At their one
Gentlest passing
Dust
* * * * * * * * *
Wording the Words Well
Said the pen
To the bottomless inkwell
If we fall
And don't land
Is that falling?
* * * * * * * * * *
Movement
Moving from place to place
Within a fall is a task
There are guide ropes, rigid
The constant wind is a problem
Huge plates are situated in places
As windshields
Areas free of wind are sought after
Round wood rooms
Graphite structures
Non breaking
* * * * * * * * *
Edge Guards
Guard the edge of the pit
Getting too close
To the side of the cliff wall
While falling
Means a death of sorts
Glass breaks, limbs lost
Debris spray
Things could spin out of control
The pit wall is one thing feared
The worse thing that could happen
For an orb of fireflies to crash
* * * * * * * * * * *
In Jump 239
Lightning bugs acquire
The strain of a virus
They become diseased
Go mad
Become killers
The one most sacred thing
Producing light and love
Turns and attacks
* * * * * * * * * *
The Story
Of the faller that wishes
He wasn't there anymore
Longs for the surface life
Lives in regret
Never should have jumped
What can he do?
Absolutely nothing
Must attain acceptance
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What Does the Phosphorous Glow
Look like?
100 people floating
Around a 30 ft wide
Sphere of fireflies
* * * * * * * * *
Pit Wall
Ominous
Fast rising
Blur of teeth
Something to stay
Away from
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
There is Drift
Within the Pit
Safer toward the center
Larger objects
House propulsion
That automatically fires
If too close
To the pit wall
Self monitoring
Aware of the edge
Chance of malfunction
Risk involved
In completely trusting
And leaving well being
In computer hands
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Vertical Streets
Crafts constructed
For the fall
Up - balloons
Down - aerodynamics
* * * * * * * *
Some Falls
Have technology
Get space age
Some ancient
More Zen
* * * * * * * * * * * *
There is a Child
Born into a fall
Immaculately
Jesus? Tarzan?
A mystic from the get go
The fallers take to her
Rally around her
Raise the child
As their own
Name her Si
100 parents
Feel guilt that
She will never know
Surface level life
But she is meant to happen
Si the seer
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Pit as Wormhole
Black hole
Time travel
Last fall first fall last
* * * * * * * * * * *
No Day or Night
Someone looks into the pit wall
And sees faces
The pit wall speaks
* * * * * *
Maybe the Mayans
Were the first fallers
* * * * * * * * * * *
Construction for the Fall
Items built
Dwellings
Resistance machines
So muscles don't atrophy
Furniture
Crafts
Made to fall
That make no sense
On level ground
* * * * * * *
A Photosynthesis
Is engineered
To occur from
The phosphor light
Descending harvest
Altered crops
* * * * * * * * * *
How Many Ways
Can you cook
A potato?
* * * * * * * *
A Bomb is Dropped In
By terrorists
Fallers guard it
Make sure it doesn't
Get near the edge
They must dismantle it
If detonation, the pit
Could fall in on itself
* * * * * * * * *
Renegade Jumper
A man
The woman he loved was a faller
He wouldn't make the jump
They said goodbye
He couldn't live without her
Sneaks into Big Hole
Past surface fencing and guards
Runs, jumps
In a streamlined machine made
To fall heavy and fast
* * * * * * * * * *
To Make Water
Atom splitting
Falling labs
Byproduct is energy
Danger
Water is essential
Explosions aren't
* * * * * * * * *
If You Fell Forever
After a while
It wouldn't be like falling at all
You'd become weightless in a sense
Oblivious to the grounded world
But oblivious is such a negative word
And the falling is not
It's a slow zero'd gravity
Billowing down through
* * * * * * * * * *
Suffice It To Say
The scenes are suffused
With so many things
Integral and overloaded
How do I say
What I don't know how to think?
What am I supposed to say
Other than this?
Nothing
Is doing
Phosphor lights the way
* * * * * * * * * *
Through the Falling Years
Moving less and less
Meditate more and more
Dreams mesh
Story telling
Sleep in a bed
The bed is falling
Favorite part
To sleep while falling
Years and years
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
2:33 AM Cielo
Somewhere between your face and the night
The universe lingers away
An aperture
Not much in the way of words
We traveled
Speed of light
Cosmos between the cracks
Of the street
A rock smoothed round
Picked off the shore
Out of all the others
Tells me
If I stare
Long enough
Dim shapes will move
Carousing colossal
And I hope those shapes are ours
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Reservoir the Idiom Canopy
Potentialities
Do we expend energy to see?
* * * * * * * * * *
8 Thisses
Take
Home
Illusion
Spine
Time
Has
Invisible
Strings
Tadpole
Hymn
Is a
Self
Temporal
Honey
Inhabits
Sabertooth
Telepathy
Hearing
Innumerable
Senses
Tightrope
Habitation
Inhibits
Sandman
Taming
Hexes
Induces
Sayings
This
Hiss
Iguana
Sound
* * * * * * * *
There are Faces in the Carpet Where Feet Have Stepped
Imagination of the city is a tiny tiny fish
Traffic sounds like a tide
Stricken. Stuck. Struck
Canopy level
Turn
* * * * * * * * *
Modem Inversion
How about the information
Through the cables and air sends you?
A kid holds a balloon and lets it go
But it's the kid who's released
She floats up until she sees the earth curve
And the world melts away
* * * * * * * * * * *
Incomprehensibilis
A man fishes, confidently
Hungry to eat the catch
His baited hook taunts
A bass strikes his line
And he salivates
He takes one reel on his rod
And the world turns upside down
Drops away into nothingness
And he's left dangling
On the end of his own line
Holding on
Pleading and begging the bass
Not to drop him into the darkness
The fish holds up the fisherman
The fisherman cries and screams for help
There's nothing between his feet and forever
It's an endless void
When he looks down
His stomach throws itself out his throat
The bass is laughing and says,
"Hey man, you were going to eat me,
Why should I spare you?"
The fisherman replies,
"You're a fish,
I caught you,
This can't be happening."
And the bass says,
"That's all you have to say?"
* * * * * * * *
This
An insect hovers over the Indian Ocean
Washing the sundown orange
You were, and are
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Scrawl
The scapes and dripped sides
Of wet brick city walls
Let on
To many lonely things
The seventeenth story
Ledges
Up cement stairs
Filed down by scampered claws
Leaf rot and gnawing jaws
A perch emerges
In the girders
A place that wasnt meant to be
A place where nothing goes
That doesnt crawl
Halogen clouds
Brush and shove
Moving to voices
Through the weathered city
Below
You, night, sit and survey
Look out
There are others that long
Tonight you see
With infrared vision
See through the distant
Walls and buildings and roofs
You see heat
Scores of human forms
Reddish orange
Animals, ovens
Furnaces and engines
Higher heat areas
Glow white
Hearts a yellow
The unpredicted city revealed
Scurrying itself to sleep
Electromagnetically
The infrared shakedown
Of the shadow side
With its sounds
Radars your ears
Noises of the urban hole
And the forms
Putting themselves down
For the night
Mothering tones of 10,000
Bed time stories rise
Simultaneously
The chorus calms
Connected dens
Doors are locked
Discs spun
A palate knife scrapes
Cathode nattering
Sirens lick tires to asphalt
Heated red blurs going and coming
Clicking keys, arguing
Heart rate monitors
Grinding teeth
Trains steel diesel insomnia
A seamstress cant sleep
So she sews
Her machine and infrared hands
Move with the weight of Engine 163
The train on tracks matches her stitches
Stitch for stitch
An immense hushing
Pleasant because its far off
Somewhere
Dust unsettles
A bell is rung
Channels are changed
Someone injects
Aim is taken
Bullets are on their way
A seismograph registers movement
Miles underground
Tectonic teeth grind
Root mind
Of the metropolis
Millions of people
Hit enter
And digital wolves howl hollow
In manmade hills
Sleep for now
Above the fray
Curl on this perch
Under infrared cross ties
Bullets won't bother here
They're muzzled
To fade
Before they hit
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Yolo
Southbound fields
100 miles outside San Francisco
Songs, sights, associations, slide
By
Daydreaming crow
A tractor engine
Has been left out
In a Mediterranean pasture
For years. Corrosion
It spat rocks from its alkaline face
And Amaryllis grew out the mouth
Flowers deep red
Why do we remember our memories?
How does the mind know what to save
And not save?
Does the subconscious choose?
Or are the memories already there?
Are they pre-loaded?
Did I really see red Amaryllis?
Will I see them again?
Driving now
Just crossed
The Yolo, CA county line
A dirty stretch of road
What exists?
What doesn't?
Does Yolo?
What causes memories
To fade?
Will driving by
The Yolo county line?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
New Tulum
A drum world
A world of drums
Beats are blood
Get in
Reap, behold
The gong sun has spun
Hills are bass drums
Hit them and hear the bellowing
Metered are creatures
Ears to the ground
Reverberation all around
* * * * * * * * *
Houses and Architecture
All made of beat making apparatuses
Giant slit drum buildings
Tympanic dwellings
Walls made to be struck
Mallet or not, banged
Furniture
Tuned to tones
Museum structures
Steel drum domes
Metronomes
Contraption homage to ears
* * * * * * *
People Communicate
In New Tulum
Using rhythms and drums
Language, a more defined
Morse code
No small talk
No negatives
Nothing ever sabotaged
Impossible to lie
No brainwashing
Just beats
And there's no confusing them
* * * * * * * * * * *
Towns and Cities
Divided
According to types of rhythm
Funks here, metal there
Soft neighborhoods
For light touches
Steep towns of fast
Lounge dark ominous
Cities of the gargoyle
Cymbal to the south
Silken smoke cities of jazz
Quadrants in the whole of the flow
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Zydeco Swamps
Where you don't take
Small dogs, and people look
At you cause you ain't
Like them
* * * * * * * *
Shades North
To the hills
Tribal centipede links swing a 3/4
And hang it from bamboo
Seven hundred years later
It becomes
Clyde Stubblefield's
Breakbeat skyline
* * * * * * *
Big Band Bangkok Horn Rim Cursive
Writes to the Golden Daiko
"I love ninjas."
* * * * * * * * *
Where Heavy Metal Lives
Mullets frolic
They walk rhinos
Live like Vikings
And hunt ballet dancers
Like foxes
* * * * * *
Desert Trains
Run through downbeat plains
Nothing to see for miles
On board is Octavio Paz's Wave
As water supply
Tracks sound off your sleep
Then turn into night and the horizon
Bleeds with a hint of approaching
Frantic drum n' bass Indias
* * * * * * * * * *
In Funk Land
Mayor is a bass player
Election is by who attains
The fattest sound
Whip cream parades
Daily, chocolate syrup pools
Cannon ball
* * * * * *
Continuing Funk Land
Upward are blimps
Wrought and decorative
Dirigibles of beanbag chairs
Chicken wing barbecue
Caramel, gilded. Xanadu
Astroturf miniature golf
Waterfall's tropical, and sub woofed
A gathering of kindly pimp types
Knocking a little ball around
Plaster dinosaurs and windmills
The blimp turns left
And everyone leans centrifugally
Have a truffle
This is your captain speaking
We just hit cruising altitude
And I have an albino tiger
Put your chairs in their full back
Recline position
Someone fetch my velvet
Shine your tooth so it
Dings
Sky is Twinkie
Tray tables - tarts
Nibble at will
To your left
The Kingdom of Miles Davis
To your right
The James Brown Plains
200 miles of worn down
Dancefloor
Let us let the undulation begin
* * * * * * *
Currency
People pay for things
In New Tulum with beats
Rhythm is currency
Called Fills
The more concise the Fill
The higher value it has
The more you can purchase
Sloppy drummers
Have to play for hours
To get the things they need
* * * * * * *
Cures
Rhythm cures ills
There are sonic temples
Where drummers are harnessed
And holy
Science of rhythm
Drum church labs
With listener soaking chambers
Head phone I.V's plug into
Sarcophagus speaker beds
People pilgrimage
To the drum temples
To replenish white blood cell counts
And get well
Sounds so rich clean and exact
Healing can't help but happen
* * * * * * * * * *
Rain
Through summer heat
Hushed, uncountable taps
On rooves
A million soft snares
A million soft snares
Rolling, playing
The theory of thunder
On the smell of wet streets
Rolling the ions
Embroidery of the storm
* * * * * * * *
Rousers
Certain drummers in New Tulum
Called Rousers
Can channel ghosts
The Rousers play
Until they reach a state
Of exactness
A zoned Zen
They become so on
They can rouse the dead
So on, they can conjure
Villains bygone and Gods
That once were
Some ghosts don't mind
Being conjured
Some do
* * * * * *
On-ness
There is a pure on-ness
A terminal velicity of on
A place the drummer reaches
Where the beat could not be
Tighter or more precise
The closer the Rouser is
To terminal on-ness
The clearer the ghost appears
The Rousers are mediums
Liaisons to an afterworld
People speak through them
Listen through them
The older the ghost
The harder they are to rouse
The longer the drummer must
Be engaged in on-ness
The instant the rhythm
Becomes loose or lost
The ghost fades
* * * * * * * *
Babe Ruth
Was conjured
Tanked on scotch
There was someone who wanted
To ask him about his womanizing
Ruth tried to hit the guy in the face
But the Rouser stopped playing
And The Babe disappeared
Before the punch could land
Besides, ghosts can't touch
Or be touched anyway
* * * * * * * *
In 2164
Martin Luther King
Will be conjured
And become President
Of the United States of America
As a ghost
He will remain conjured
For eight years
Through a series of interchanging
Prophet Drum Rousers
Dr. King runs the White House
For the benefit of the people
He's a good King
Champions alternate sources
Of energy
Invents no wars
Invades no countries
Does away with
The marketing of violence
Puts the billions
Into education, health care
Helping homeless
And cleaning the planet
Not into space stations
And wars for oil
Shoot him now
You James Earl Rays
Let's see you
Shoot a ghost
* * * * * * * *
Envoys
The MLK Prophet Rousers
Live in and occupy the White House
Become envoys, presidents
In their own right
They are surrounded by as much
Mystique as they are secret service
They are the key to it all
Drums and percussion are spread
All over the White House
For wherever and whenever
Conjurings need to occur
Every precaution is taken
To insure the envoy Rousers
Can consistently conjure
Many hot tubs are installed
The Envoy Rousers need not
Be concerned with the politics
Their concerns are with on-ness
With their beats being precise
Senators and politicos
Resent The Rousers
But must to defer
And maintain respect
The underhanded politicians
(Which is most of them)
Constantly try to sabotage
And throw the rousers off
Most of the rousers don't acknowledge
The politician's presence at all
Other Rousers play with them
Like toys
* * * * * *
Empress and the Punk
Through the course
Of other sustained conjurings
It is discovered that in the afterlife
Cleopatra and Joey Ramone
Are romantically involved
Cleopatra is demanding
Ramone could care less
Thats why she wants him
Needs him
She erects statues of him
400 feet tall
He's nonchalant about it
She is fanned
Has servants dress her
Walks on rose pedals
And eats baby pheasant hearts
He constructs her
Two and half minute
Battle gum punk hymns
And drinks Schlitz
She was worshiped
So was he
When he gets sick of her
Royal tantrums
He splits
Doesn't say a thing
She chases him
Every time
And her rose scatterers
Can't scatter fast enough
Out of frustration
There are beheadings
* * * * * *
Ramone Laughs
At Cleopatras
Spoiled trigger of a soul
Can't stand it
And can't get enough
He sees her eyes when he blinks
Misses the smell of her hair
When shes not there
Writes her song after song
Thin thin line sometimes
Hate and love
Driving dysfunctional
Attraction even after death still
Improbable gods
And post-lives aside
We're animals
When the black curtain
Comes down
In the eternal end
* * * * * * * *
The Sheen
Some days and nights
In New Tulum
When you look
To the Sky
You see dots
For as far
As your eyes
Can see
It's The Sheen
A protective shield
A force field
The dots are
Drum pods
Levitation vehicles
Round solid crafts
Holding drum kits
Hybrid cockpit / drum kits
Cylindrical sedans
Surrounded by
Outwardly
Aimed speakers
You should see
These things
All Japanimated
The Sheen
An Air Force of Drums
Levitating drummers
Playing in unison
Forming a deflector
Shield
Thousands of drummers
Deep, the Sheen
Legions of meter
Trained and tight
Nimble
Able
Ready
Monster-masters on the kit, all
* * * * * *
Field is Formed
When the Sheen Drummers
Are syncopated
Playing together
As one
The force field shield
Is formed
A Kevlar web of aerial on-ness
The drum pods hover
Evenly, on the same plain
One mile apart
At various altitudes
A flat matrix of pods
As far as you can see
They can also form a dome
Or geometric shapes
For whatever reason animal shapes work well
Mobile constellations of pods
When the Double Kick Drum Metal Squadron
Joins the Indian Tabla Unit
To make the two-hundred mile wide shape
Of a hawk, it's very effective
'Hawk Two-Hundred' they call it
The Drum n Bass, Jazz, House, and Drum Line Squadrons
Combine for a Manta Ray that's unbreakable
The heralded 'Manta Ray 4'
* * * * * * * * * * * *
In the Pods, Players
Are tied in
They hear each other
Through a series of monitors
And a guiding click track / beat
Sent out by the squadron leader
When The Sheen
Is up and beating near
Terminal on-ness
Bombs, missiles, and lazers
Can't get through
The faster
The Sheen Drummers play
And the more intricate
The pattern
The stronger the shield is
In the heat of an attack
It's miles and miles
Of impenetrable speed,
Geometric animals, and shapes
Missiles bounce off
Like snowflakes
Cheering throngs
On the ground
Play along
Hooray, hooray
For the Sheen
Of New Tulum
* * * * * *
Opposite
Are the chaos
Of firing missiles
And
The concentration face
Of a drummer
Drumming their part
In the shield
Eyes closed
Drummer unaffected
Vs. the explosions
Outside their windshield
On vs. off
* * * *
All the Drummers
In The Sheen must be on
In order for the shield
To operate
Every one of them
If a single link is off
The shield weakens
And there is the chance
Of dreaded transparency
Let's hear it for the Sheen
* * * * * * * *
Picture a Battle
See the scene
Drummers in the air
Rhythm shield's machine
Beats vs. bombs
Bang vs. bang
Destruction is destroyed
* * * * * * *
Up There
Some days if you strain
Your ear, peaceful days
You can hear the Sheen
A distant pulse
Playing long and slow
Practicing, running exercises
And it's comforting
To know they're hovering
In the beginning
Drummers were used
To send signals
And they beat their skins
Diligently
Who would have thought
It would come to this
The Sheen of New Tulum
The skins have changed
But the diligence
Is still the same
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Chinese Year 4702 - Yiyou
Walls sink memories like stones
Dragons queasy, rain, drums, Union Sq.
Words from a fever - 1:10 PM
Eyes fire eyes
Bed cell sweats the longest day of the year
Year of the Rooster
Night of non-sleep. Constant shift. Wrists of ache
Drained. Slow. Weighted
Feel the muscles holding your eyes in place
Question at hand
Sweating through shivers or shivering through sweat?
"Everything will be precariously balanced
In the Rooster's year"
Shivers are more drastic. More dire
You have to pay attention to shivers
Preference is the sweat
Sleep can find its way in through a sweat
Fight of the fulcrum, this
Sheet, no sheet. Sweat and shivers
Nightmare, gnarled claw
* * * * * * *
Animal Night in the Big Wish
We------------Are----------Here--------Now----------------Know
Leaves-------And---------Trees--------Make-----------------Air
Water--------Makes-------The----------Sea------------------See
I--------------Love---------Her----------With-------Everything
Sick----------With--------Fever--------Sweat------------Shiver
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Yelled and yelled
If I were miniature
Say, the size of a flea
I could crawl under cracks
And spy on the world at large
If I were massive
Say, the size of a continent
I could drift an inch a century
Feel ice ages come and go
And shave them away as whiskers
But I am now and now is this
Feeling
The space heater
Thinking
Of what to say next
Remembering waterbugs
-These lives of ours
That played on Cross Creek
-In comparison to
Sleek hidden back
-Forevers
Runaway Atlanta quarry
-Pass fastly
They walked on water
Those bugs, I smell it
Mud skin sun
They didn't fall in
I hear the tamped way
The red clay rolled my marbles
Down, muted and clear
Like my voice
A match to a moth wing
I am a continent
Say, the size of a flea
And I curl everyone's
Toes in a stretch
Up to the laugh craving heat of a noonday moon
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Anima Mundi
Mirror to a mirror
Sub speak of self
Find me
Let me in
Mural me
What's behind
Gem stone eyes
A beautiful torment
Floods the words
* * * * * *
Overlook
The day unfeigned. Daedal and scraped. Dimensions, feral. Innate.
Stairs to a tower found. Unwound. Thinking in mosaics. Spot
In the sun, hits hard. Eucalyptus. Reminds me of Tilos. Hair
In my eyes is the only sign I'm really here. Otherwise, I could be
Just surrogate eyes reporting for the omnipresent.
Floating out here unattached. Then Antonio Tabucchi's 'Dreams of Dreams.'
Sounds of the passing city. Ours mixed within. Glissando. Extractum.
Feathers against air slice furlong. And the oracle souls, imagined
Or not, of those here but departed, approve of our combination's combination.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Order No Words in Seven Particular
Indigenous
Misdirection
Cognitive
Transfer
Delineation
Project
Excavate
* * * * * * *
Sutures Four, Out
I want to make you unburdened. So
Run, child. Run. Loud. Run in your mind. I say
Out of this bleak conditioned place. Get out of here
You are fast and alive. Feel your legs. Know them
Pace sorts pasts and ills. This beach goes on for miles
And when it ends, you'll run on water until China spills
Down into a cotton field mouse's hole blink of a dream
* * * * * * *
Hydromancy
I send you sun
And trapdoor the floor
Behind you
To fall into clouds
Of the clawless sky
* * * * * * *
Oleander & Sunsun
The writing mind, the writing mind, it's a monster. Nine feet tall. Gnarls breath
out his nostrils. Watches me while I sleep. Protects. Waits patiently. Demands
nothing. Monster of rhythm sits next to him. Knows him well. Their names are Oleander
and Sunsun. They're tired of always waiting on me to wake. They're restless. Constantly
have gifts to give - clay mud animals, terribly assembled jet models, rock gardens, thatched
huts of bamboo and palm - creations. Crayon drawings in violet blue, raw umber, and red
orange. Good boys they are, devoted. Menacing but playful. With manes, underbites, rounded
fangs. Gorilla hands. They burst with excitement, don't know their own strength. Always
want to take me places.
Cut to scenes - the three of us in a china shop, or them trying to follow me
through some antique store filled with porcelain plates on display. They knock
things over, break 17th century vases, crash tables of tea cups to the ground.
And they can't believe it. They're horrified. Incredibly sorry for what they have broken.
They want to help clean the mess, but in trying to pick up the pieces only knock over
more with their tales. More they try to help, more they break.
Finally, the only thing for them to do, is leave, and wait outside for me. Heartbroken.
Utterly dejected. I get them Strawberry Quick and waffles, to cheer, then take them
to the beach and let them run, build sandcastles, and throw driftwood around. Agile
strides they have, I can't match. Heaviness moving quickly. Accelerate like lions.
Oleander likes me to read him mysteries
Sunsun goes with me to run
They're endlessly in love with the geishas and their calm
And want the tower to be rebuilt and again begun
It's funny, as much as I think they don't understand, they do. Wise in a way. Life
they know. They just choose not to show it. Venture, they will with me, a thought
to its end, don't neutralize anything, don't curtail. In fact they feed me on my way
and when I fall, their hands are there before I hit the ground.
I left them on the beach today. Swarmed with grins. We caught cicadas.
Those big june bugs. Tied fishing line to the insect's legs and let
them wrap the horizon of the sea around the softest blue in the sky
you could possibly imagine.
* * * * * * *
Layers
The first
Is an engine
Of a barge, hummed
Out in the Sound
Passing slowly slowly by, you
Drift, fade, and the low womb noise
Pets the semicircular canals
In your ears to sleep
Fired Sulzer Diesel Gensets
Output : 9.240 kWm, speed - 500 rpm bore :
400 mm stroke, configures 560mm more
Smart swing of the great flywheel really is
Vertical block of the Bolinder
Surmounts pre-heated cast iron
Hollow hot bulb, where combustion
Drives down the piston rhythmical
Distantly working away
Churning and slugging scalded oil
Mindless of its own servitude
To power the ship and your doze
Scavenge hot bulb
Cylinder 8.35-litre direct reversing
Silencer expansion chamber
Bolted to the block
Deeper reveals the cylinders are scenes
One -North- is a port, one -East- is snow
One -South- Harvest Moon over a cemetery gate
One -West- a bow
Pull it back, visit the rooms
With your vengeance of beauty
You'll leave them
Something to remember
* * * * *
Frequency
The second layer is REM
The engine hum becomes
A vehicle, Byzantine
A cathedral of velocity
Wide as a city block
Columns teethe, angled roofs
And tubes house hydraulics to the rudder
Twenty or thirty feet up
Magnificent centrifugal entity
Doppler sub woof low and loud enough
The creatures in the sand below
Vibrate out of their own exoskeletons
Thinking it's the hovering
Lumbering mother God come to pass
On the deck, you open your eyes
Royal, desert dunes roll by
You had fallen asleep with the geishas
Lotus hour of the caravan siesta
Velvet pillows, sage, wicker, and lily
Then you see the wheel is by itself
No one is driving the thing
But the thing knows
Where it's going and it takes
Mile and half wide turns
Destination is that adobe structure
It's still there, patient and catching
Still leans long its shadows
Curtains still hang
And the senses of the snakes
Still wait to taste you on their tongues
* * * * * * * * * * * *
#29 K'an/ WATER
A thin cylinder of light falls into an otherwise darkened room
Skin it lands on is yours
Particles of dust float through. Becoming things
What do you see:
Shark fin - triangular equation - checkers, Chinese - Yield
Movements in an aviary, a satellite, cells
Under the microscope in a Petri dish
What?
See what you want, want what you see
Vault is a verb
You lie motionless
Anything but still
Anything
* * * * * * * * * * *
Steering Bird Wheel Humming
Four oldest words in the English language:
Gold. Apple. Tin. Bad.
Take thoughts - invert them
Modulate
Rip of the page
Is the San Andreas Fault
A dandelion - Afro
Varicose vein - The Nile
Ancient archway - path
Of a hand grenade
Flames - Start out as Neanderthals
Feeling heat from the first fire
End up as the flames burning books
In Berlin - Nazis. May 10, 1933
A bubble of sea foam inches off the water
Miles into the Pacific
Becomes the bubble from a bubble machine
In a single mans flat
Loud of shirt
Laden with testosterone
Hes lured a woman home
Thrown a switch
And a wet bar has rolled
Out of the wall, he plays
Night fever, night fever
We know how to show it
The bubble in the Pacific
Is above the unsuspecting head
Of a baby sea lion
That's strayed from the pack
It's about to be swallowed whole
By a fifteen foot long great white shark
Swimming straight up as hard and fast as it can
Mouth so open the only thing that will touch
The sea lion is the back of that shark's throat
Where acids begin to melt the brain
Of a baby still tasting
Its mothers milk
Night fever, night fever
We know how to show it
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Vesper Malaise
Night is the origin of urges
And glistened cobblestone wolves crawl
Toward the altering, the instinctual, the lift
Watching wind, the pack, it surges
Tendons to their wings taut as piano wire
Pull starving fast twitch muscles to their answer
As one, sense of smell, needs of meat
Scowled and weaned on unwarning
One gets too close to the other
And its jugular is snapped in reaction
Dropping from the air alongside its own
Weightless spilled blood
Scrawl this blanket sky with Poe
Over dooryard lanterns kerosene licks
Maroon dark red maroon
Corridor shadows quiver, Chian Wine
The shingle soot city shrivels in codeine eyes and I
Pointed stylus of iron, wonder
The pack of hunger want approaches now
Fend it off with the skin of your eyes
You for there
The wolves have wings, I swear
* * * * * * * * * *
Too dark, too dark
* * * * * * * * * *
Spreads
Nnight spreads over the moves.
Waves and sublimation.
Curves of darkness noon of night.
See the city from a distance, edifice cakes of eyes.
They see past me as I'm hidden, perched, parched for more images and movement.
Interminable night and the eyes.
* * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *
Sketch Out
The moment. From a maze of memory. Self delving. Conjure.
Chlorine. Cherry syrup over ice. Silver knife. Gone.
I stand, wavering on the end of an aqua springboard fifteen feet above water.
The board sags, and I watch a drop of water trace itself into a splash below.
The Earth spins between 700 to 900 miles per hour.
I look at the pool and wonder how much water I'll drink in a lifetime. I'm five.
And if all that water could be put in this pool, what would it look like? A plane creeps
across the sky. Right to left. I wonder what the pilot dreamt the night before. How
does he dream? Can he see me down here, afraid to jump?
I think up my birthday. Five candles teeter to Polaroids and a clown called Spunky
who couldn't juggle because the dog kept humping him. "Make a wish!" They say,
"Make a wish!" I'd never been told to make a wish. How do you make a wish?
Now I have to jump. So this is what its like on the edge of the world. I wonder
about things. Anything to keep me from jumping.
Why do insects at night flutter around my one bulb when it's not the brightest light
in the sky? I wonder why Spunky put my mother's silver knife set in his bag without asking.
Spunky could be in that plane above me eating with one of the knives right now or whittling faces
with names into a twig and speaking for them in different voices. Leon, Frances, and Reginald.
Reginald doesn't like to fly, Frances comforts him, and Leon is a king.
Jumping gets the sno-cone. I hear a music box in my head. Sounds are coated.
The arm cranks round and round and round. Twinkled notes clink and ding off sound. Spinning
the spindle from delicate rotation.
700 to 900 miles per hour.
The tiniest of tunes, keep turning. Listen to the song again. The music box notes shimmer
a minuscule shine. Churned by a thimbled tine. The tiniest of tunes it was, it is.
Pin pricked symphony of bells.
Sending shivers up to the shapes in the clouds. Those clouds, that carried me down,
through pilot's dreams before I knew I jumped. Those clouds, I see them now like it was then.
Now like it was then.
Jump again, again.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
If I Could Write One That Said It All
I would. One with ears of the city's well. One that's
As much a drop of rain as is it is a ten story clock tower
The drop of rain that lands on the minute hand of the clock tower
And stays there until the bottom half of the hour where it rolls off
To fall the ten stories down and land on the head of a man at a stand
Selling little clock towers. He wipes the drop from his head
And puts his damp hand in his pocket where it touches a coin. A doubloon
Now wetted. A Byzantine gold solidus depicting Maurice Tiberius
Successful general achieved favorable peace in Persia. 602 AD
The man selling miniature clock towers believes the coin keeps him safe
Because it does
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
90 West
Same road
Has you
Heading straight
Into the setting
Sun then moon
Within minutes
Of each other
A blind sooth
Python pouring
Through the plains
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Somewhere Someone, Coche Diez y Siete
South Dakota at night's not much
More than stars and headlights longing
* * * * * * * * * * *
Beartooth
Highway reining itself in
Long stares stale
Open road
Sun lines fall
Through Wyoming skies
Hammering shadows
Into bottomless pits
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Days spun like this are made for giants
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Mile Long Stylus
Says
Is just is
* * * * * * * * * *
Agate Mined
Storms wipe rain
From clouds
Off
Out there
Heaving distance
How far off
Is the horizon
The place seclusion
Meets seclusion
Names like Yellow Tail
Beartooth know
Medicine Mountain maintains
Quartzite, jasper and agate mined
Arapaho, Arikara, Bannock
Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow
Come from here
Now we curve
Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Nez Perce
Sheep Eater, Sioux, Shoshone
These lands no hands
Have mangled yet
* * * * * *
Sun Is
Setting Montana
Behind the silhouette
Range
This sun
Shifts down
Drives, puts off
Elicits
Gargantuan shapes
Makes you
Think
Of
A giant
Crazy Horse
Lying down
Locomotive insects
Through the window
Sift
Forms fluid
Capacity to see
Rows of steel teeth
Take me
Sunned in tar
Rolling over high
Way toward the illusion
A cross section
Of traveling mindset
Untangles my confusion
Transgressions aside
Incisor mindjaw clarity
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Why's
Wondering why why's
Are why's at all
* * * * * * * * * *
Houses of unknown sound
Fall before my open eareye
I haven't heard them before
But I have
How
* * * * * *
The moving road knows
* * * * * * * * *
Pull
Sun Kil Moon's impossible harmonies
Nick Drake's Pink One
Pleasure Club Fugitive Kind
Talisman songs them all
Pull us through
Here and now
There and then
* * * * * * * *
As the days get further apart
Do we
Do the what might becomes
Become
Never will be's
* * * * * * * * * *
Scott
South Dakota, gas station stop. Middle of nowhere.
The lady behind the counter asked if we were in a band.
I said, "Yes ma'am, we are K o r n." She got all excited
And said her son, Scott, is a gigantic fan. She asked me
To sign something, and presented me with pen and paper.
I wrote, "Scott, live light, stay cool, sting tail - Johnny"
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Woody in Toronto Told
Us about a guy
Who took too much
Medicine and blacked out
For two days
Then remembers
Coming to hanging
Out a window
Screaming at the sun
Not to rise
* * * * * * * * * *
NY Is Was
Thousands
And thousands of eyes
Trinket chainbird stories
Of symbiosis vying
Blood pressure gentrifying
Venders on the lean
Watches unclean, hot
You want, they got
Birth Canal Street
Borough worlds
Feet are histories
To a new brain
Dropped in
The city's veins
Almost seem too stirred
Full, of souls
Brain is still
In shock from
The numbers
And the cross fade
* * * * * * * * * * *
300 5th Ave
The Manhattan building
Is chipped
With such idiosyncrasy
That when you see it
You travel in time
To the 1930 hands
That built it
You know the man
In the newsboy cap
Stone clad
Balancing on a girder
Seventy three floors up
Eating his ham on rye
Like hes at a picnic
And you know when
He gets home
He bathes in Epsom salts
Under a burgundy shade
Floor lamp with fringe
And smokes
A Thompson's Montecristo
White while listening
To his son in the living
Room practice tuba
It may not be Mozart
But the sound
Of that tuba in his head
The next day warms
Him through the negative
Wind chill and keeps
His boots improbably
Rooted to narrow beams
600 feet up
And he smiles wider
Than that withering
Year allows
* * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Another Fish
Moon out clear
Above the den of the city
The only thing we hear
Hears us back
Panting feet down dormant streets
Through a gallery of parallel mirrors
Versions of ourselves echo off glass buildings
And we know we are more than here
The nocturne of the city divides and we give chase
Downtown lights motion in our femurs
Wires web cement skin
Cars corpuscle outgoing wattage
Electricity is the citys dreaming
It's night under the surface
Of a manmade midtown lake as well
Lurid little eyes gather in bronze fluorescent ripples
Questioning not the forty-two story source of fake day
A drain pipe vein connects
This lake to underpinnings of a music hall
Bass in an overture vibrates the pipe
And the stocked fish feel it on the tips of their gills
What is the imagination of the city?
Another fish across the street
With a dorsal fin the shape of South America
That's what it is, in an aquarium
Situated street level so it can see out
Next door to mandarin glazed ducks
On hooks and a travel agency
The imagination of the city is a tiny tiny fish
Different from the others in that it knows it's contained
In a filtered, inviolable world of plastic treasure chests
This little fish longs/lives for ads on the sides
Of passing busses - hand cream, diamonds, TV judges
But mostly the Caribbean ads, taunting from sky
Blue oceans under real sun radiating, waters with current
Once the imagination of the city saw a cheetah
In an ad on the side of the #8 bus and wished
It could be one of the long rudder tail cats
For the cheetah thinks meat and leaps
* * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * *
A Desert Room
For you
And days to let go by
Slow
Just over the last rise
You see it
Adobe structure waiting. Two days
Traveled pack horse. Thirst straps
Itself to your throat. Soon quenched
Small flat house situated in a hollow
Ancient grounds. Arroyo dry riverbed
Fills occasionally
No roads, nothing
Can get to you without seeing it
Approach for an hour
Vigas beams ceiling beam logs
Kiva - bee hived shaped fireplace
Saltillo tiles earthen
Centered patio - squared off
A movement of air
Anasazi - Ancestral Pueblo Indians - the Ancients
Voices in the hollow dampen
In the stillness of the non-wind
Vicinity is smoothed over and rounded
We don't talk
As much as we inflect
Rain in the wet season
Tin basin collected
Porous
Stone water vase cold
Hard to see as eyes adjust
Iris must tighten
In the entrance way
This way, patio
Sit. Soak. A room to
Decrease in
Control the clouds
Shift with shade
Heat radiates, formulates
Nothing scathed
Nothing worried
Dry air hints
Slithers by
Listens by
Your ears
Things wisen when they move with shadows
To stay in the sun. Furniture, wrought retains
The direct solaring. So do you
Periphery / petrified
Curtains snake tongue
Extended senses you there
Desert Lily
Dune Primrose
Desert Star
Barrel Cactus
Mojave Aster
Ocotillo
Ghost flowers
Derive their name
From translucency
Mohavea Confertiflora
Lupine purples, lavender
Blues, yellowed
Close there are painted caves
You've been depicted
No, no, don't get up
Water yourself with breath
The patio this desert room
With choice ratios
Of shifting and portals
To the sun
The desert sky pushes itself back
From an early orange for morning heat
To late orange for dusk
Find yourself remembering
The oldest dream you've ever had
Afternoon settles in on thoughts
And the arroyo, elongated
How many words
For orange are there
Shadow lengthens
Says hey
Spreads out in this
Room for few
And far betweens
Subconscious tenderings, offering
Morsals to feed
The ghosts of heat
Untethered
Rust / Vermillion
Finally
Shadows slide
Past walls into night
Anasazi murmur friendly
Now you are candles
Sleep wills
Desert night silver
You've watched the last
Of the poppies close
There
Hungry?
* * * * * * *
Span Span Wing
Mute vehicle leans
Great speed
Thousands of feet up
Spills combustion, go now
Span span wing
Release unknown quantities
Invention accumulates
Momentum, toward
In flight movie
Sovereign engines hum
Above the desert room
It cools
Pool yourself in
This ceiling of movement
You make dunes
Move invisibly
Myths wait
To include you
A place - all places
Arrow tip Pangea
The horizon line scrolls back
Even though you continue
To approach
And you sense sea
Amniotic in tide pools
Trapped slivers of sun
Minnows with nowhere to go
You sense sea
Over the encroaching
Range and wake
To find shells
In your shoes
* * * * * * *
Mechanical Blue Whale
If these words were anything else
They would be a mechanical blue whale
Fathoms down, 140 feet long
A submarine with interior design
Fluffy white carpeting pervades
The state of the art in luxury submersibles
On board racquetball court, plasma screens
A fake lagoon, omelets made to order
Egg shaped leather seats, sonar pings
Hydraulically the whales tail swings
The whole thing
Makes a gold tooth go 'ding'
Dance floor lights - bass pumping, choir jumping
Automated secret passage ways
And sleeping compartments
Continuing the white carpet decor
Calm within the glide
Nestled velvet vessel
Think Jacques Cousteau meets Willie Wonka
Soul Train, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
For when your underwater activities need to go
Undetected. Let us to the promenade deck
For a look out one of the eyes
Then to the on board dinner theater
Nancy Drew mystery dinner theater
Every night the staff performs an interactive
Undersea stage show such as
"The Mystery of the Stinky Snorkel"
Or "The Case of the Wayward Shrimp"
All this on your very own mechanical whale
Shall we submerge?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Order Odonata - Sonar of the Shadowdragon
A dragonfly skims
Over a lake. Syncopated scene
Velocity quartered on a line
Through a clear wide
Veering of dream
The dragonfly is classified - Neurocordulia Alabamensis
Order Odonata, Alabama Shadowdgragon
An empyrean emissary. Doppler envoy
Carrier to the subconscious
Humming forward by blurred engine
Of membrane wings. Its compound eyes
Guide, multiplied. Just above the mirrored
Surface of the water. Slicing a wake
Awake, within this poised amaranthine impetus
The Shadowdragon streaks illimitable
The eyes, those compound eyes
Maroon sheen pads. An ocular wheelhouse
Helmeted calculus of photoreceptors
What indecipherable things they must see
Reading mosaics through the momentum
Carving out colors, ultraviolets, beyond human sight
The Shadowdragon whisks by a woman
On the shore and sees multiple versions of her
Standing there. She's there, with all versions
Of her self. From the body she took her first steps in
To the body she'll take her last steps in
Standing in a lifecycle line
The compound eyes see all forms her life lived
As the Shadowgragon passes
The woman/women speak
In a chorus of selves
Deeper tones from her older voices
Higher pitched for younger, the oldest almost
A whisper:
"Hello," they say
And it spins the earth, the sound of the word
The Shadowdragon circles back
Stopping to hover over the woman's head
In the heat rising from her crown
Clairvoyance seeps up
Coating the compound eyes
Causing scenes to be revealed
Moments from the woman's life
Possible moments intertwined:
________________
A nuclear submarine sailor sleeps
In a bunk between missile silos
He's dreaming about his daughter
Writing her name for the first time
He hasn't met her yet
She is born while he's at sea
He will never get to meet her, as fate shapes it
In the dream
The girl has a pet betta fish named Claude
It's bright orange, vermillion, with sky blue specs
Her Mom runs a fish and aquarium store
She puts Claude by the shop window
So the sound of busses on the street
Can tickle the tips of his gills
Then the girl is older and learning cello
And tickling Claude's gills with badly
Played scales. The sailor hears her somehow
On the submarine's sonar. She knows
He can hear, even though he's oceans
And lifetimes away. When she finishes
Her scales she says, Hello.
In a note she and her Mom mailed
To his sub base before he sailed she wrote-
The imagination of the city is a tiny tiny fish
With a green scented marker picture
Of a smiling, mint smelling sun
He taped it to the bunk above him
So it's the last thing he sees when he falls asleep
On the other end of the submarine
There's an explosion that rips open the hull
Leaving no chance of survival
As frigid black water takes the vessel
Into the void, the sailor continues to dream-
He sees the girl grow, mastering the cello
Becoming a concert cellist, with kids
Of her own, playing to bettas in bowls
While they learn their scales
In the final moments of the dream / his life
Is this quickened instant, where he sees memories
He was never able to make. A multitude
Of occurrences and occasions wrung
Superspeed through his fading temporal lobe
He's descending, imploding and he becomes the betta
In her bowl. She's playing him scales up and down
And it tickles his heart's very last beat
________
Shadowdragon tilts its head, rotates, and shoots off
Banking a roomy looming turn
Through the firmament and the flying by
Distant drums sway now, unfolding echoes
Out of the centrifugal bend
These are the interior fields and the dragonfly flows
Faster. Sconces on trees hold shapes of faces
Conduit cauldrons with curtains of wild eyes
Call out, "Who are the creatures that go?"
Between the lines are blank spaces in time
Pendulums, sonar, pathos, and saints sit
Long with shadows like neglected toys
Of some ancient child queen. And of all
The memories this is the one that rears itself
You didn't even know you were there
Never cowering, uncurling their talons
Hanging hellos on a mint smelling sun
The Shadowdragon glides
Over rumbles with feathered feet
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Desert Rooms
Places youve never seen
Yet know
You have been there and thirsty
Just not this life
Components of: The Hook
You
The Dream
The Day
Assumption
Getting there takes me farther from you
Divisibility of the building's lights
Was it in my head or in the distance
Eleven eleven, what's the wish of the cell?
The hook - Getting there takes me farther from
You - Divisibility of the building's lights
The dream - Was it in my head or in the distance
The day - 11:11, whats the wish of the cell?
Assumption - Assuming the cell wants at all
****************************
When and if: The monitor monitors
Urges
Detect
Criteria of the mongoose
Arch enemy arches
New fangs willed
Cobra killed
Who
**************************
Only for a microsecond
That was long enough
All the mongoose needed
Her nerve endings fire faster
Than the snake can strike
Hissed posture venom eye
Cobra bows but instills no fear
The strike not quick enough for the claws
So secure and nonchalant
The waiting patient Mongoose wins
***************************
The smile lasted that long
Microsecond was all I needed
Freeze
The frame
And stay
In the memory
Of you
As long as
I like
The instance of the instant
The instant I met you
Frame is frozen
No sand empties
Press rewind
**********
Tapped sums, scores run
Tapped suns pour rum
Scratch words in bark
Come back next lifetime
To remember this one
***********
Specifics of transition
Radio wave wash over me
Deploy the stance
That we come from chance
What are the chances
Gasses mixed in the void
Recite your reasons
I'll recite mine
We will see who
Converts first
*****************
Inside the here and where
The hear and wear
Grinds down
Surfaces ability to feel
******************
Native technology
Knows no media eyes
*******************
Written writing written writing
Writing on the walls
Written writing written writing
Bleeding in the halls
Written writing written writing
Always prone to falls
Written writing written writing
Who's the one that calls
*******************
Reiterate scales
Long stare stales
On the open road
Heat bears down
And I know myself
Melted with the tar
Sounds of made up rain
Stitches my eyes open
To see nothing but the sun
Solar shards as shrapnel
Directly into eyes impossible
To close
Scenario downloads
Desert room
Water basin
Lizard eye
Suggestion to release
Your feelings with the sand
Off the heat
Water quenches then
And only then
******************
Heavy on the pedal
Weeks are blips
******************
Arid blinks
Hills in the distance shrink
Voice says follow
Follow the bones
Dig you up instead
Marry the morrow
Fallen man
Hills in the distance shrink
Gain speed gain
Listen even closer
Momentum teeth
Hold velocity
Distortia
**********************
Portions disproportions
Keep pulling me in
Pieces of the desert
Puzzle come together
Underneath in the den
We pry on the hollow
Two way mirror
And the animals dont know
Our camera is there
Ritual imaginings
Mean we can continue
Even though the basins
Run dry
Run dry
Run dry
The basin's run dry
*********************
Modulate the vision
The herd hears
What it wants to
You don't
Don't you dare
You alter
You saddle the vulture
And fly him back
Kick him with your heels
To the beginning
It's your plot now
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