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.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
for molly
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 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, great third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
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
it has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
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 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, great third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
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
it has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
I AM
Tonight I read the Song of Solomon
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.
Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.
I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.
Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.
Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.
I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.
Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Sage and Snow
I kissed those lips once
extracted drop by drop
the holiest of liquids
o fluid love, o mountaintop!
Your fountainhead's dried up
softly ceasing, little stones
lighten in color, as your
lighten in color, as your
body leaves their bones
Sage and snow, a stoic sylvan throne
tread lightly across the surface
undisturbed until you come
and weave frosted bowers upon the peak, upon the place
Where lonely I lived, o quiet grace!
O empty space!
[instrumental]
Come, sweet, soft
twining vines surround you
my heart is a fruit fallen off
of your limbs, of your limbs, of your warmest bough!
Bursting open, sapped and sticky, I am drowned
and the ants crawl in to my grieving skin
to pluck away my seedling hope
and to scatter my body in the wind
And wither tend you now?
I am the seed, I am the vagrant spore
Wind-tossed and wandering, hollow and soft
inchoate, separate from your barky moor
Rooted, you must be where you were before
but it seems you're as breeze-blown as I
For the earth, she has turned her face
clear around, left you inverse, dangling in the sky
She has left you, lonelier than I.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Anemone (revised)
Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
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