Places Where Inner Others

Each day the unsettled camp

grows expansive with ideas

and the tables strung in a line

from house to shore are filled

with whisperings of lace

and daisies, and swaths

of black-eyed susans chatter

on the return from the range.

Evening activities yet to be planned

are on no one’s mind as the

campers are loath to leave

the woods until sunset,

and then only rarely.

The flag once raised echoes

from a distant horn,

the misty mornings muffling

sounds or slowly conveying

wet letters from the clouds.

A Waking Puzzle

We’ve been making love as in a book of hours

Under a blue and white paper sky

The birds won’t stop explaining the universe

If you stop your ears you will hear the spring

This is a mind pretending not to exist

See how it sways in the breeze when you look

Just like the bright, scratchy weeds along the side

Of the house as it slants into the fading light

Now the whole mind has turned a dark burgundy

With a sea of fuchsia at the bottom

One with the purposes of death and dreams

And just about as well understood

Abstract dolphins splashing around in canals of light

A massive sunflower rising out of the sea

The infinite green of your eyes under the sun

The prows of the black ships pointing away toward eternity

The doors of the sea are the sea itself

The days come to us and we traverse them naturally

As the glass of water posed on the nightstand

Ultimately belongs and must ultimately return to water

We’ve got maps to the Hollywood of the mind

But a private sea we enter with a breath, breathlessly

A permanence without substance

That lurks within the most distant solitudes

It is like walking in the darkness

And climbing up into an apartment of sunlight

The wood floors are freshly washed and smell of pine

And now we are waking to the noises of the city

Wilderness

Being befuddled, dust and tumble

Down the road to Valencia

Half a radiance, like a roosted angel,

My pants, my pigeons, my puzzlement!

It is like gazing at a dwarf sun

Beneath the world of ideas

Where I live when I am not here

Checkmated with malice, with intent.

A voice without permanence

In the faculties of light

Naked pinks and naked whites,

That diabolical book of pleasure

Boisterous hypothesis,

A breakfast without signifiers, posed.

Time is a deviant of perfection

And the frail mind slapped

By memory, by everything that is not,

Building a voice without energy,

A permanence without substance,

Past remembrance, a sea of rust,

Always having re-begun.  Bitter

Tabula.  Spitting out.  Petunia.

Cash for Junk

The pets are with the vanilla company.

Every sentence implies dissent.

A grain is the smallest particle of madness.

In Fayetteville they have a lavish toilet.

I am standing on the grave of the Kardashians.

There are prizes but no achievement.

In this country the ideas of space and time are plastic.

The toad who puffed himself to the size of a cow.

The crepuscule comes like a distillation.

Analogies are demons.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination.

In the city there is solitude.

Puddles and rooftops.

The variable distance between sentences.

I have tried it many other ways.

This one feels right.

A kaleidoscope of shrapnel, exterminations.

The senator from Kentucky fired at me and missed.

I fucked his mistress.

An intern made up of contiguous states.

Does this belong to somebody?

A girl cigarettes behind the library.

Black and bronze stars.

Random as weather.

Whoever invented it, it is ours now.

When we interpenetrate, we are liquid birds.

Are the names of God his attributes?

Or are we kidding ourselves?

The Snow, Man

One must have a mind of Hitler

And been alone a long time

Not to hear one’s own flatulence in the wind;

To behold the junipers shagged with vice

In the distant glitter like January Jones

And not to scoff at one’s so-called love life;

And be crusted with crap, not to see

Any hilarity in the life of a squirrel,

In the lives of a few squirrels,

Which is the life of the mind

Full of the same souvenirs

Buried and reburied in the same bar,

For the ditherer, who dithers in the snow,

And, blotto himself, beholds

Nut that is not there and the nut that is.

Poem Written in a Late Style

The sun ignites the colors of the city.
The nothing of today will not be filled.

Spaniels spit metaphysics at the press,

And the blackberries are furry with mold.

A dusty industrial street, small pink flowers,

Uselessness in this utopia of use,

Planted here for that purpose years ago,

Something for your pleasure, to devour you.

The seasons come to seem a repetition

Of flowers and muck.  Listening to the birds

You are deaf to the pink and white trees

And by the time you notice them, is it still spring?

The cooler arguments linger like oblong clouds.

The intensity of the riddle sends your dreams

In another direction.  This building wears a triangle hat

And that one is a stack of turquoise blocks.

As the day melts into its opposite,

Their solid, dark facades are fringed with light.

The light is purer now in the darkness.

And the darkness is that which has no name.

Notebooks stored up with secret images,

An elegance of truths, plural and humane,

These are the pages you live to create,

And when you get it right, no longer belong to you.

After Party

We are all gathered around the point of impact

Seated by the fire of old logs and old tires,

Dried-out flowers, floss and scutellum,

A bowl full of night by our side.

Some started drinking from the middle

Of the bottle, others went looking for lightwood

Just in case we lose ourselves in the sky.

We struggled even to form a bucket brigade

Of emotions, let alone ponder flight.

Better if not examined too closely,

The evening takes on the sheen of weight.

All of our motions fill the containers

Stacked along the circle of companions

Of circumstance, coming and going, unweld,

Accidents maturated in dumb tumult.

Tomorrow, we’ll nomad our way

Out of this wilderness, after it falls.