divided into itself
by enigma’s big eyes,
their heads glassy-black
space helmets.
Lost in the Bonewheel Factory
Looking a Mad Dog Dead in the Eyes
Perception can force you to crawl
on God’s great damn stone floor
& scrape your knees to the bone,
in love with the smooth round ass
of death. You’ve come to admire
that never-miss sniper on the rooftops.
The man who dances in circles
has fistbeaten a dog to the ground.
All the newsreel faces turn away
from the woman hanging naked
by her hair in a picture window,
as a scarecrow drags across a yellow field.
The young man with a nail in his foot
is your son, who believes
he’s Christ, telling his father
what he wants to hear,
using a thorn for a toothpick.
Floor Plans
Secret walls swing open when a dream loses focus & lights click on inside the head. The road here isn’t a flatbed of light, isn’t a soft ride, this bridge over our backs, & we won’t remember how we came here even if we stand naked in the Garden of Eden like fools with bright axes. Our intent philosophic as a black hand that steers the brain behind a liquid motor, pulled by every voice we’ve heard like a rumor of faded coins in our pockets. In the wild purple night we leave prints of extinct animals in white sand where footsteps echo a hoodoo drum. All the cruel rooms are identical behind different-colored doors: a black cellophane window to the outside, a woman sprawled nude on a red velvet loveseat, a copy of Premonitions of the Bread Line on a white shag rug, as the shadow of a dagger slides along the walls. Cicadas hum fire in a valley. This is where a god gets his heart cut out, someone underneath the blueprint wrestles with roots. Where a woman crawls on cobblestones & a man chops off three fingers to beg bread. In a country without moon, sun, or solitary star, lies rot in the mouth. Kit Carson caresses Magda Goebbels. Death sits in a skull pale as a dove, & Nero’s fiddle whines like a sick animal in the night. A rook dips its beak in gold powder & flies backwards toward the sea’s roar, into what the blind man translates in each voice he looks at.
Tour Guide
It eats into the brain
between daylight & coma
like some small animal.
You’re propelled onward,
cackling like the old woman
at the end of the night hall,
her face smeared with rouge.
She’s every pretty face you’ve known.
This is where you begin
in yourself, in the room
alone with terror.
This is really when
the mannequin moves
its head in a camera flash.
In the chest a trembling starts
the soul rocking off-balance—
the last grin whittled
from the pain in you
where the shattered millstone
takes shape again.
Sitting in a Rocking Chair, Going Blind
the exact
second
the lights come on
like the aurora borealis
i’m sitting at a window of summer
for two weeks waiting for
a pomegranate tree
to fall & scatter
fruit on the ground
on the corner
a black buick
special
runs down a child
like 40 brass cymbals
& 40 tambourines
the air coagulates
in the background
a bright bird
falls from the sky
its scream is black
a dog drops dead
pissing on a fire hydrant
a woman’s dance burns off
with a green flame
anemones
spray the air white
in a world of dark
i can only remember to put my hands all over you
Pushing in All the Buttons
With armloads of lignum vitae, hands frightened over mouths, kinfolk gape at the paradox. Rods knock in the braincase as syndactyl hands plead like a Gypsy guitar. Not a daughter, but an angel whose legs Zeus tied together.
How many times, in how many head-hung rooms I’ve taken my life with a look you can read things into? Leg irons wouldn’t let me go into woods spilt with light. Like a seaward dream, the day grayed with gulls. When was the last time I wanted to drag death home, foxy in all her masquerade?
When the last beaten woman awakes no longer with the sun in her eyes, when no more poets are hanged effigies in the Library of Congress, when all the bagmen have fallen dead & fingers leap into pockets of love, a song will bloom under glass weather.
