The Futility of Epistolary Capnomancy

being B, my response to a certain A.


A:
i've always seen you as the city at night.

you are a revolution in a
moment--of headlight skies
and fervent fever passion.

i am variable as the
lights to shine
a steady way,
but i do stay.

too much that is here is
bygone, and i will always
be the cloud below yours.

i veil the impetus of
a spark to burn the
international city
down with memory.

i cannot be your echoing
cavern cohort, though
i will always ricochet.







B:

dear sir or madam--
you mistake smoke for a cloud.

streetlights reflecting
burning tenements and
bus stations

or
if you'd rather
wills o' thy wisp
or wisps of the will,
phantom highwaymen
leading intent to disarray.

i burn constant
but will not stay.

i am
(to mirror)
too much with the world---
always already gone
and always peripheral to gaze.

you have already burned nations, and
a veil, such ephemeral fabric,
takes readily to flame
leaving an unscarred subject
with a blaze reflected in her
quickly averted eyes.

you will not
but can not
be the cavern

you were filled in
long ago

i am already lost
in echoes and reflections,
hoping only that the voice
returning from the void
would cease to be my own.

D Composition

I am composed of transparent lines,
striving toward opacity--
a ghostly blank scale
with bloody clef in your image.

I am rusted guitar strings
stretched, tuneless, over
warped wood.
When pulled and plucked
by your graceless fingers
as you attempt to bring me
into tune--
Leave off! Let me gather dust!
--the tension breaks
and these rusty strings slice
your fingertips
or pierce
your shortsighted eye.

Short Draft, Hwy 129

There are birds screaming
in my head.
The colour of their voice is peacocks.
Whether I understood them then
but not now
or now
but not then
is immaterial.
They have always screamed
non-sense
and the colour of their voice is peacocks.

Untitled, more beat.

When my cookfire overheats
and burns down the hermitage,
I shall homeless bum the nights
and dawns of white-guilty downtowns
and haunt bus stations
and drug dens alike.
I will rage though bloody beards
and beardless boys will slip
into comas of starlit
raindrop kisses awake.

you are only a body to them

d
e
s
c
e
n
d

before it's too late.

FUKOW

more new found poetry. this time with pseudo-sonnet beat lit theory goodness.

Confused, I dig your
incomprehensible
archeologies,
foundering in Marx and leather
masochism.
You faded French archetype
over-quoted footnote Foucault!
But still I rocksteady anonymous
in your sign language.
Bioethics and bass guitar
slipping silent "els"
right past my tongue
leaving me wanting
more
after
that
staccato op-en-ing
act.

I liked the legend better.
Gibberish over tired theory
(though ground-breaking at your time)
slowly abused and worn out.
Give me your absurd thanatos
over your all-too-human tragedy.

I liked you when we thought AIDS was a trick,
not as the final product of postmodern bioethic.

Enkidu's Architecture

The story of a man who built his life on a hill of ashes:
Body light stepping foot padding carefully adding
layer of upon layer of
airy brick mortared together with mocking-bird feathers
gummed with secretions of secret confusion
and false hope.
Mistakes were made but not dealt with.
Uneven foundations seem secure when the shingles are
lain with care.
Forever mindful of dreadful realities lying under the ashen hillside,
monstrous caverns yawn with perverse lusting for failure,
wild things of the unconscious dreaming,
their eyes and ears become infected
and give rise to maggot-like contingencies--

the house keeps settling.

Creaking gives new meaning. but the meaning is meaningless,
lost on deaf ears with foreign tongue.
And when the house that is-not
becomes finally incomplete
he proclaims "it-is-that-it-is"
and Real slips into view between thin iris-gaps and
he is consumed.


(why else was there a hill of ashes to begin with, he was
neither the first nor unique)

The Poet Paints the Artist

Pastel curves grace the canvas.
Each brushstroke brings from blank nothing
beauty of innocence.
But underneath the soft spring colors
lies... lies the intensity and passion, the loving hand
of the artist shapes her from his mind
(Shakes her from his mind?)
No vivid gouache or bold contrasts betray
his heated mind. He forces cool.
He forces detachment.
He forces distant admiration.
But the pastel curves still grace his canvas
(and coals glow softly behind his eyes).

Snippets of Mania, recovered: 2005

1. one more time, Jack.
Send in the communists, they'll know what to do.
Protect the innocent, punish the unclean.
Unravel the ancient design, the dirty fabric of space-time
ending up where it all went down.

2. Oh Nikolai, why have you forsaken me?

3. divine dementia, demiurgal urge to
create, to simulate and procreate

4. "Kidnap me. Sound it out, (it's beautiful). Command it. Plead it."

5. "We're a generation with no goals--no future. Not because we're lazy, but because history has no place for us."

6. "... in the unfortunate but likely event that the sun will rise tomorrow..."

7. --in my flowers a locust sleeps
he slept in-- I forgot to wake him up.
Maybe he will sleep until after
I'm dead and it won't matter
and he can't get mad at me
because locusts have this thing where
they can't get mad at dead people.

8. "Dean Martin is a dinosaur's pimp."

9. "Brackackack," cried the lobster.

Imagist Prayer

Shine these dim mirrors,
let us polish ourselves as rocks one another
to reflect the Image and transcend the body
to live as one in one--
all bodies a series of reflections,
one Image multiplied and thus clarified--
a precession of glories--
a hierarchy of illumination
in acts of divine creation
in angst, struggling through choice
to see ourselves as we are seen,
to know ourselves as we are known
within the body of Christ
as eternal Divine Image,
Amen.

On "Cloister Graveyard in the Snow"

Vaulted sky framed by trees
cracked with ice, dead.
A shell of the soul rises
cold. Remnants and
echoes of hymns hint
as wind-whipping through empty
windows. Monuments to forgotten dead
skew in frozen soil, littering
and punctuating hallowed ground.
Living figures slouch under stretching
doorways, dwarfed by their own memories.
Filing out of habit, whispered absolutions.
Their heads bowed, as snow and time fall
upon world-weary shoulders. They march
inexorably toward obscurity and
anonymous last rites.

Composite Memory of a Plural You

sandpaper heart beneath velveteen breasts
I can taste hints of confusion on the scent of your breath.
You're closing your eyelids to hold in your soul--
it's smeared on your cheeks and the only
sole light in the room was your shining pupils
like butterscotch candle wax sitting with you under
apocalypse flies in a snow fall of ashes--
A fiery horizon approaches us slowly
but panic is something we've never relied on so I
enter your mouth
to improve your digestion
and you speak me out,
fully developed,
like Athena we are,
but also like Nero
our fiddles::our bodies
while the world
burns down
around us.

Dispatches from the Universe where Everything Is as It Seems

front row seat at the bullfight tonight
rhinestones shine like rhinestones
crowds roar

i found him asleep on my floor
turning blue. i turned up the heat,
he'll be fine in the morning

the lake down the street dried up.
the fish gasped for awhile
then died

i ran for office here.
i was defeated in a landslide--
i wasn't qualified

Namor?

(I thought I saw you in the park today
playing in the long pool among the fountains
but then I remembered that the fountains are dry)

I want to sleep on that dry cold concrete
and dream underwater dreams
and listen for your murmuring whisper
and wake up, drowned
(in you).

some old poems: Transubstatianted Libido

the bodies that once moved against each other
in whispered dark motion
in decades past now broken
time and distance broken apart
but a painful yearning for completion
of an act promised but supposed forgotten
and thus
suppressed
lust
suppressed
several strained meetings follow
until the ties can be severed
and buried under a brand new layer of dust
dusty bodies lay themselves to sleep
and breathe a dream of the past---



what does happen to a dream deferred?
maybe, langston, it does explode
in a glorious apocalyptic ecstasy--
a georgasm:
All the world screaming for a god in unison,
mirroring His muffled sighs when He came.

Methadone Courtroom Drama

Nothing, then the hiss of gas.
Then the flames timidly licked the air
like newborn serpents coming into
the world with dry eyes,
guiltless.

"How do you plead?"
murmured a voice from the flame.
I plead, as I always have,
for salvation, silently, but whispered
"guiltless."

And the judges dumbstruck with
echolalia hold the hiss into the night
as the trial unfolded with idiotic splendor
flames catching decayed silk open curtains of flame
while faulty memories testify, present Exhibit A: