35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

26 - The Sacrament of Depression

The lull draws down our pious bows

to lie with dying incense, let the cloy

of unwash weigh us low in a droop of undone space.

Heavy with turbid midday’s wine and idle

in thick, a tame god’s granting

foolish prayers to bathe in substance.

Now I am here like air in bread.

Homesick for the whisk of passage

censer swing alighting gusting’s kin.

But all smoke settles, remains.

Was the world ever thin enough for we

who live in going?

This hollow now is some death,

the inert ferment robbing body, blood.

21 - A Feeling

When all my color bled out, the white room was left,
where I learned I’m not the source of my own desire.
You gloved your fingers safe, to “take a look inside.”
I owe you this feeling; you know it is dangerous for me to be empty.
Your face, frontispiece to knowing all about me, rises close.
“My head is filled with you”
and
“This is what you want, too.”
I have a vision of that milky seed pod bursting.
For now, I am shut up in the mind of a rigid bud.

Brittling stalk of papyrus sedge, my body plied gets bent.
When you had gotten what you came for
I also took something from you.
I took the probing hand and I keep it inside;
it gives me a feeling.
And it teaches me
And it points me
To flowers grown from my white paper,
your soiled gloves left to rot with the reeds.

20 - Diffuse

I scrub my body clean with your body.

Come into my bed, get every last bit of me out.

I’ll become pure, I’ll slip backward

through pain into a million sterile holes

in the surface of the dark.

So I court your fish-moist skin’s

friction to rub me numb,

your urging weight to press me flat.

You can do as you like, these

are my evacuee procedures.

I’m laid bare for the journey as you

scuff my senses into the vagueness,

the pristine of fog. Enough, and I

mist out, through the mute scream

of a million open pores, a claustrophobic

soul sprayed particulate into the remote

nowhere of space. Molecule-safe.

I leave the place immaculate.

I scrub my body clean with your

attendant hands unknowing

I am gone into the night,

clean night.

14 - For a Different View

When the sun’s florid hand blots

wrought iron curls in calligraphic shadow

on the net mesh of a window screen,

and its felting of highlit white dust flings out

depthy fields frozen in a snowglobe

moment resisting imperial summer,

time pockets to accommodate this

unseasonable dream:

How I would skate in that

frictionless immunity from

seasons’ melt of perfect surfaces.

13 - Untitled

No, I’m not “fighting it.”

Enough of waged wars.

I’ve slunk into the window

sill gap it’s left unshut

and puffed me up with words,

prising wide the lit space where

I hate the least

to languish.

Watch me blow out wax

paper boats on

drafts to nowhere; pray only

may they run aground

on green green

reefs of uncut grass.

12 - Avian Laze

I lie nested, a moony, rumpled bird,

dreaming up caricatures of flight.

Lax-limbed waiting proves that wings are unlike sails,

demand a casting out to snag their hooks

on the tumbling silk of cloud-marbled sky.

Blue the dispassionate banner of heights

flown by my eyrie — as indifferent toward furled feathers

as blown-away hats and casual mortality —

I should know better the unlikelihood of wind

to net me in the tangle of its sheets,

all a ruffle and rousing of slick pinions

spiriting me high like tented paper.

But I’ve forgotten the flex and crackle

of a sober climb’s full musculature, and

how to measure out the needed

tendon-lengths like strings

for a taut kite:

I’m indolent for the dim and shifting

shadows cast in the caves of my eyes.

10 - Möbius Rain

Hung on the dark underbelly

of the firmament sphere,

I am a laden wet bead,

about to drop.

Even God can’t keep this

micro-ocean from

mingling with

space rivers.

8 - If I Can Make It Here...

Here on the Atlantic coast, lip of the deep cup drunk in migrant faith,
I am on the cusp of seeing Truth:
        The postulant’s scopic skyline embossed upon the blue,
        like layered shadows cast by fresh eyes’ bright dream of it,
        city-solid, life-alight,
        but the ocean bedevils unsteady heels.
I feel the border’s weight from this changing place,
and follow history’s dark reverse, away.

Against the concrete inner curve of dock the water
beats a muddy waste:
        chopped froth upon the rough wall.
        Up rise brown peaks, and peaks
        of damp remains, debris, expelling
        the hushed filth of waves.
The Hudson paints its image on the city’s porous coast,
delivering banished revenants, drowned ghosts.

6 - For a Friend in Storms

And in the grips of it,
toss out hope in banknotes, blow
crushed paper lists from windows
Go, say to kept things
From the pockets’ hold
your hands
retreat to keep from losing

Loose, cupped folds of linen
slings for broken limbs;
despoiled of trinkets lift
the yoke of grips on things.
Night begins asleep in hammock’s hold.

Don’t fear the emptying of pockets where you kept yourself;
you are the weave and safety of this vacant haven.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.

2 - Fact

Color is the scaffolding

Remains when feeling rots off bones of the seen.

No, Aesthete, the line is not bare — azimuth, arc of peregrine faith, it is still fraught with nautic thrusts

Impelled to plot the promise of frontier, even faint.

But a stilled heart admits the nudity of hues.

Sculpted in bas-relief, palette oils mime the depth of things

No longer rounded out, ballooned like glass filled with desire’s breath.

When does blue cease to be a mood?

When does green slither backwards in its unbirth to stasis?

Find yourself looking to pigments as facts, and then you will know.

For mine, I saw the amber dappling of shine, vestiges pocked in the face of thought,

And trusted this fossil-memory of riches, preserved for a dormant one.