no stone unturned

there may be silence here
but rest assured
i've left no stone unturned.

some may castigate me for this, harshly
but i cannot live a life of bland
obsequiousness-

i cannot creep like moss over
the surface of things and sit,
hands folded like an egyptian statue.

i am a tunneler
by trade, i am a rodent with a nervous heart
and a keen mind that never stops whirring.

i will infinitely delve, inverted sysyphean am i,
for i cannot be convinced there is a bottom
to things, but rather an everlasting, murky fond:

all nature is like the tumescent, layered
soil: richly creeping with comlex, ethereal beasts
and strewn with gems at every tier:

the self is a deep, dark well
life is escaping that capture
thought is tunneling.

i am a stone at the bottom of a mellifluous pit
i am a mole, scraping at the edge with my paw
i am transformed by my desire to escape the boundaries of myself.

occasionally, with tooth and nail, i will break
out through to the clammy and sodden void,
and i will scrape at the dense nothingness of absurdity-

haphazard but strong, penetrating, and entirely direct-
until i find the bottom of another well to lie in, in hopes
of finding, in that hollow vacuole, a stone

to turn
and wonder at,
in awe.

Blood Orange

Last night I dreamed
of being raped,
and retaliating:
of screaming and gnashing my teeth,
of clawing and biting and yelling
violently public obscenities,
of throwing broken shoes
and champagne glasses and scrambling
out the window of my childhood home
(a wild-eyed and frantic bacchant)
to streak stark naked
and wailing across the silvery tar-
papered roofs of a dormant Manhattan.

Fleet-foot and furious,
I ran long and hard,
only to pause,
trembling and shocked
like a trapped animal,
once I hit the last stretch
of that final roof on the corner of Greenwhich,
that place where the tarmac
became my ritual ground
and I became electrified,
rooted,
compelled to cringe
and stomp and arch my back
and leap in terrified frustration,
to tear my hair in a freakish pantomime of grief,
and to howl,
from the deepest place in my heart,
all the songs of destruction,
backlit in my archaic mania
by the obsequious figure of the rising sun:

A broken blood orange (with tattered
and dripping hemispheres revealed)
that, reddened and oozing
with the previous night's violence and surrendering,
slowly spread its indelible stain
across
the great,
white-tablecloth mesa of the morning sky,
the ghostly filaments of its hollowing skin
trailing in the breeze as translucent
crepuscular
clouds,
and its small seeds disseminating
like missives
to the lonely, hanging stars
of Callisto's great Bear.

For Molly (extended)

black ringlets fiercer
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:

in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that I want
to call you a summer storm,
I want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
I want to make you
red
bold
hot.

but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and Newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.

We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.

We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another
and our shared solace, in
those endless basement, backyard
cigarette, stairwell
tell me everything,
tell me, dreaming, graffiti,
tarot,
apple cores and coffee,
inspired, platonic
sixteen-year-old
nights.

And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:

Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.

The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, bountiful third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Is a Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
waters to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
Abundant consciousness
a lung, and
blood-salt like sea water:
your thoughts breathe
throughout everything.

The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram,
your skin has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Liberal limbs
join at a torso that is constellated
with a girdle of tattoos
like stars, each
marking a moment when kismet came
too close to home.

Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.

Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.