she delves

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all these men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

i am a weak stitch,

unbroidered at once

by the fallacies of

the politicians of faith;

so much so that blood

comes from the eyes and

tears from the throat;

i am a spent coin at last.

what she wants is what she

cannot see without the

abridgment of her prison sentence.

and lately i've played a fool,

conjuring the specters of 

worst-worn scriptures i'd

memorized in youth.

how they told me i am the

first and the last, and she

the second moon in an orbit

of dying stars;

how her vehicle was driven

softly along a gilded path 

and that i was to be her

captor with a small net.

the policy of the unquestioned

elders implied that her 

womb was a place of sacrosanct

harmony with their god,

and that from the dawn of eve,

she was to suffer the depravity

of the unsalted sea and weep

tears of joy for everything not hers.

i delivered her evidence, her

blue truth, in buckets filled

with the oils of distrust and

maleficent good-knowing.

i imparted from my ego the

episodes of reconciliation

one makes when the heavens

of the forgotten are closed up.

i never said no. i don't say no.

i never said can't. i don't say can't

but i idled in my stupor, drinking

in her benevolence like a dog.

and i pissed on her pride the

day i forgot to let her free;

shit on her love the day

i did nothing but sit there and smile;

the smile of the drunken

fool who winks at the prophets

and tells himself he's the 

master of all that he sees.

can you not hear that thunder 

in the ephemeral distance,

that sings with the voice of

the lost and the flutes of Eros?

she loves. she loves from her 

plundered bosom, giving up her

flesh and her latitudes and her

fine, silk, aromatic tempers,

so that i may crouch in an 

un-man's fear, huddle in a boy's

peppered hubris, cower in a

long shadow of selfsame service.

i am all out of hope when

i see her bring the fog home,

and she drifts and drifts and 

clamors for the side of her ship

like that, her fingertips

bleeding from the ridicule

of the ignorant and the 

intelligent, who don't get it.

she is on a journey without

a path, an affront to my 

foolish male sensibilities,

which require a map.

i am shouting!

i am shouting

at the mirror

at my cold, senseless self.

that i missed her

meteor is such blindness; 

that i allowed myself to

labor under the sugar of fools;

that i listened to the drool

of men who required of me

their undivided attentions, but 

divided me from my epic truth.

i'm writing this while drunk

on the music of my youth;

inside tearing to shreds the

patently stupid words of priests.

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all those men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

she deserves what she wants,

that's really the thing of it.

and i must keep water in the well

from which i must wash her

new-soiled feet, the feet with

which she walks her thousand miles

away from what she was, and 

toward what she is,

so that she comes back to me,

a better fool for her,

a better fool for love,

a better me

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cigarette and faith

i gave a homeless woman
a cigarette on a street corner
while on a walk yesterday
to say hello to my lover;
it was an idle impulse.

she said i had the most
gorgeous lips, this woman,
whose jamaican nouns were
weighted under the lubrication

of a beer she held in one
hand, the fingers of which
looked liked the thin
horizon of a widowed desert.

she could not light the
cigarette so i offered,
and handed it back and
she said she was saving up

for a trip back home,
which i chose to believe
because i want to use
her in a story some day.

my friends will say i did
this for my ego - the giving
and lighting of a cigarette
to a woman without a home.

and to them i will blush
and smile down the long
tunnel of their knives and
look at my feet.

let us argue, though, for the
sake of it, and say i did do
it for my ego. when i am alone
i don't do well

and can feel the sap of
the tree in my veins and
i become a vagrant dog
at the heels of bitter secrets.

my mineral power goes dim,
you see? - the voltage drains;
the fuses of my inner column
become dry thistle in a gale.

there are naked rooms in my
soul, i suppose, that accept
only trespassers and those from
my past who've been maligned

by the exercise of my ego,
so i let them remain there
to scratch at the walls and
piss on the floor.

when i am alone i pester
the fruit on the branch;
i foil good commerce with
the old suffering of the pale;

i hide behind the smallest
stones, licking away the salt
and whispering to the void
some inane song about loss.

i am weakest when i don't
have in my glass jar the
presence of some other
extremity, as if i am an

unsingular being whose
engine is fueled by the
self-blood of others and the
wayward wind of their eyes.

earth's rumor has it that i am
sick with hope-trembled shades;
that i am at odds with the
contentment of the loved;

that i am in bitter contact with
my less primal and that all i
give is what i am assured will
be taken with both hands.

there is a malignant insistance
that i find who i am in the mouths
of my betters; that i'd rather stay
on the hip of the green-blue coast

than swim out; that i am a threat
to the fabric of my own truth
for the sake of keeping the
balance within my humid air.

so it is my ego, to be sure. the
imperially dressed; the secretary
to my wanton stomach; the vague
harbor master; the immersed scar.

but anyway...

the jamaican woman, who held
her beer can as if it were the crown
of the blessed angel, who could not
look me in the eye for more than a second,

said she loved me as i walked on,
motionless in my steps toward
what i believed were the grand
institutions of happiness and joy

- down a cold sidewalk,
thinking

what of it, my ego...

i am here, my friends are not

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aperture

my brother said,
he said:
- about the cleavages of
religion and its crowns-of-thorn
swagger and its impoverishing hues -

'i believe in god
but not God; it's
nobody's business
what i believe in'

there was always a red
gem in his mouth when
he talked about the
protrusions of faith,

how they herniated and
metastasized into the
hardened stones of
shaded, casting-down silences.

how the spokespeople
of that particular brand
of BOGO magic were
the salt of the deadened

and cast men like
him from the gardens
of their own skin and
banished real Truth.

'i mean...i believe in a
lot of things,' he would
go on, spooning out to
me his new-old poverty.

'the Celts. the Pagans. the
Native Americans. the
Christians...' he would trail
off, thinking of others to
moisten his argument.

i would listen while he
waved his hands
and sipped his beer and dragged
his cigarette across our secrets.

we grew up in the same
yellow seafoam of
hymns and overspreading
glories-be and throbbing prayers.

and while i had found ounces
of wonder and joy in
the bedrock of our
family's church -

had found a ripe
wind among the souls
there with people who'd
burned their acres for a
view to answers -

he had grown calloused
early, his feet pricked
by coals and his hands
tied together by foreign tongues.

his version of those days
were calcified by an endless
voyage outward in search
of the master of his confusions

so that, later in life,
he came to feel god-not-God
in what he could smell
and taste; what he could
breathe in with his own eyes.

it was no surprise to me
then that the pale pebbles
of long-away ancestors, who'd
frolicked under the stars and

sang to the wind, found their
way into the pockets of
his soul and within the underthings
of his fragrant dreams.

he was fore-bent that way from
birth; always had a dark
grandeur in the manner in which
he stole the galleries of hurt faces.

his mantel was firm in
its place from conception;
his mark was that of a
man of inexhaustible refuge.

'fuck.
if i want to read the bible,
i will read the bible. if I
want to go outside naked and
dance and shout at the moon, i will.'

he had what i wanted:
a singular delirium of endless
flowers unkept in a striated glass
vase on a sill;

a bald wink at the fires of
hell and a thirst for a glacial
voice that boomed and
cleaved the contemptuous.

he had muscular glory in all
the things i was taught were white avenues to damnation: hammer-pride, sexual fury, profane histories.

i wanted for his open mouth,
his believing star, his volume,
his soft-cold-rain humor,
his aperture opened to the pages
of his own scriptures.

he said,
my brother said to me:
'have a beer'
and i blushed no thanks

'suit yourself'
he smirked and lit
another cigarette and told
me here as in other times later,

'you're just afraid.'

Read More

to friend

my elegant, pastoral find;
my storied discovery
among the leaves of the
naked:

how truth may thunder
in the temples
when one stumbles
upon your smoothed stone.

the bloodroot of eternity
resides within the
finding of you and
spreads to all corners.

with some, it just comes
as naturally as the
orbit of the moons
around their mothers

and you fall up to
a fine grace together
to make the joining of
two lonesome nobles,

in a quest toward
the inner organs of
faith and kinship that
surpasses mere association.

when it comes -
truly arrives -
there becomes a
vital new luster

to the old star
rebirthed by the
collision of two
dreamy atoms.

how? how can it
be that a voltage,
vast in its
sovereignty,

be so captured
in a fleeting moment,
be so sent and received
in such precision but

with such dizzy
randomness, that all
of the universe would
have to be complicit?

hearts live in a chilled
world most of the
time, occupying
a firmament of ice,

making such a union
a deep, heated,
cosmic rapture of
fidelity to aimlessness.

we harbor subterranean
hopes and wants,
wishing against the wind
that we get what we pray for,

but a conjoining of souls
who've before danced
alone is the beginning
of divine symmetry.

you eat the words they
give you. you lick
the flavors of their
passion from cups.

you thick-and-thin
hold in contempt
the acrobatics of all
the fools you've suffered.

you lie together in
sweet foliage, breathing
in the sky and her
lovers.

you echo in darkness
all their utterances,
all their gestures, all
their looks in the eye.

you kindle, you enmesh,
you enthread, you
finger the top of
their lamentable reef.

you give them out
and prise open their
heads with your
softest teeth.

you forgive the mark
on the skin that
bears the name
of certain enemies.

you have a new
latitude of snow
and wind that sketches
across the gloom.

you banquet together
at a feast of
teeming stars and
hapless demi-moons.

you know what
knowing means
and shed all
expectations of gravity.

the sacred mother-child
comes to mind when
considering such a
trembling, quiet freedom.

how it is to be
at once a passage to
relic love and the
modern face.

to have this in its
wholeness is to
carry the empire on
one's heart-brow

and see oneself afresh.

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i could sleep

i could sleep
inside the homes
of abandoned
goodness

i could fly
outside the rays
of given
apologies

i could wish
without the need
for angry
demonstrations

i could swim
beneath the howl
of laughing
moons

i could plead
toward the face
of selfsame
awareness

i could pray
within the chasm
of all lightness
renewed

i could say
everything on
a straight line
without your care

or write what
comes to me
in the best sense
rebroken

just to ensure
that meaning comes
from the tongue not
the eyes

Read More