43 - Complications of Believing So Long

Most of all, we feared the flight of reasons —

Birdly light as wings, slim and pored as leaves —

For finding suspect flesh and stone;

For rejecting basicness in baser ores, of trees,

cadmium, hibiscus, mollusca and fur;

For pitying hearts thralled in glut of earth.

To not realize that privative, deep hunger is different

from depth — we ate our smoke

thin notions, dwindled, and shed credence

in the matterlusts now well beyond our breadth.

Capable only of dreams, we dreamed up

torments and lacks in the full red belly

of masterless delight,

and feared them.

Most of all, we feared it was simple.

That when scales alight from eyes and eyes

awash on solid shoals of sight,

all dreamed demons tatter on

the harsh, the brisking smack of happy

hardened hearts

brimful, combly-chambered

and abuzz with blooming joys,

nectar-drunk and sunned.

And nothing lay beneath this.

                     

— That by then we would have lost the taste

for anything but burnt incense, on its way elsewhere.

42 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Cheese

Like you, I came from curdling in milky heat
pressed out in cloth a daubing podge of butter-bright
fat, and full like a jelly sun
gemly glows, ungiving.
But I loved the feeling of being
promising so much
I stayed this way, too young for use,
too unclarified.
As you pressed yourself gone upon the world's tongue,
I regarded from a distance my rich
unpurchased food's improper beauty, kept
like honey for its topaz,
marmalade in garnet,
onyx bulbs of ripe
bobbing olives, those globed
saltfishes in a canned black sea.
This is life in glass and brine against
processing spoil riddling kingly jewels.
For now, I imagine I'm egg-pure.
I am not afraid of teeth,
but of villi, finger-combing my slender proteins
to find my chemistry--
that I am already made of rennet's animal death,
cannibal cream,
salt crystals that dissolve.

41 - First Impressions of the West

I spent some time on an isle a blown

bubbled globe sufficiently wide, puffed of

breath, of spirit, of ideas to accessorize.

The people there wear feathered earrings,

bird fluff brush heads to

cerebral something like

paint in the colors of wind,

and catch Nature wending

in leylines strung between well-

tuned souls, feathers catching

a new dream of Tribe.

Their song is the sound

of it sounds like, thought

is the feels how

it looked like, and Knowing

is the buckskin on blonde

sign of an idea

of Knowing.

Natural.

At the border the sea

is the changing Same, they say,

loving recycling and rights claims.

But turquoise and copper didn’t make me feel

more authentic. Just pale

and different, some flightless bird.

40 - Mobility

Easy, these shields

are light as beetleshells

protecting and unfelt but off

carapace carom some things

I can’t know now.

Look back to see what I saw

new child, tell

the shames of a then-child

too well in it to flame in

flush confessing its guilt

of low-class stain —

accuse with the bite

of a tidy kept babe

palate clean to taste tang

of humid shag and unwash pride

the slim slick inch above hunger

above the floor by height

of a secondhand bedframe

having only found that

one time vermin in

the vermicelli

left the bedding pissed

for a few days because what

what does an animal really care?

but our used clothes

had no holes in,

not even the sock-bottoms:

that kind of unselfaware

willingtodowhatever

then wave the flag

of a last remaining dignity —

show me its outside,

show me seeing me shameful.

Groping for my own life

in dark senses

I can’t tell you how bad it was.

But I can tell you the precise

moment when some food

is still just okay enough to eat.

39 - Suburbia, and Every Home a Lighthouse

Houses under a moon are vague.

In dim pulses, restless ghosts aether beat against windows

making us omen-readers all, who pass them on return

from day labor to this necropolis of light.

Somewhere in fabled despondence this scene

was a metaphor of exclusion; the bright interior

outside me, and thought warm, full.

But domestic glow correlates with nothing definite, save

for these soft adulteries with easy feelings

against a frigid night’s withholding.

The spirits are opaque, as blinded windows

and I discover my longings in the meaningless Morse

of TV lights, practiced as a hotline psychic

at embellishing eager leads.

I live in a broad circle, this its paranoid nadir —

the bright, regular pulses so much like a signal

made for a passenger of dark, heart sparked

to the meaninglike contrast that cloaks its own

being nothing in particular.

38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

37 - Passing

Footbridge west, in wire sheath shooing suicides to privater places

The air is close in agreement — go!

Souls of bleached stars transmigrate earthward as

Fools gold flecks of east hill homes electric test the resistance of viscous night.

Lawnfronts studded with grenade-weight cones

The rot bombs of spendthrift flora, I heft

A good palm-feel and sap-swell

To launch them, plant air in the sedentary fog.

Posters all-over-plastered in town tell me

Find your inner light!

There are so few places, any more.

I catch an errant breath of redwood pine

But it diminishes, like a teacher.