Body Painting
To step into the golden lute
& paint one’s soul
on the body. Bird
goddess & slow snake
in the flowered tree. Circle,
lineage, womb, mouth, leaf-footed
godanimal on a man’s chest
who leaps into the moon
on a woman’s belly.
Blue-green Iridescent Flies
Meat, excrement, a source
of life attracts this
message & definition
of the ultimate us.
They fly off
with the weight of the world.
Peepshow
A new moon rises
on an elevator over the mountain.
String Bass
The moon’s at the window,
as she rocks in the arms
of this lonely player
like a tall Yoruba woman.
Pinball Machines
Encased in glass, a woman
opens her eyes. The room floods
with a century of bells.
Magnetic balls & sound of metal
seem enough to build a locomotive
moving through the room’s wooden bones.
Butterflies
Incandescent anthologies
semi-zoological alphabets of fire,
these short lives transmigrate, topaz
memories cling to air, release wordflesh
from the cocoon of silk fear.
Psilocybe
One hundred purple rooms
in a mirror of black water.
I must enter each,
interrogated by a different demon.
In the distance I can hear
the sea coming. A woman at Laguna Beach.
Her eyes now seashells.
Her arms two far-off sails.
Like a tree drags the ground on a windy day
with yellow & red fruit too soft to eat,
she comes toward me. Stars cluster
her laughter like a nest of moth eyes—
her focus on the world.
The closer she comes, the deeper
I work myself away into music
that I hope can save us both.
A man steps from a junkyard of chrome
fenders & hubcaps,
pulling off masks.
At least a hundred scattered about.
The last one: I’m him.
The Dog Act
I’m the warm-up act.
I punch myself in the face
across the makeshift stage.
Fall through imaginary trapdoors.
Like the devil, I turn cartwheels
& set my hair afire.
Contradiction, the old barker
drunk again on these lights
& camaraderie. The white poodles,
Leo, Camellia, St. John, & Anna,
leap through fiery hoops
to shake my hand.
I make a face
that wants to die
inside me.
“Step right up ladies & gentlemen,
see the Greatest Show on Earth,
two-headed lions, seraphim,
unicorns, satyrs, a woman
who saws herself in half.”
I can buckdance till I am
in love with the trapeze artist.
Can I have your attention now?
I’m crawling across the stagefloor
like a dog with four broken legs.
You’re supposed to jump up
& down now, laugh & applaud.
For You, Sweetheart, I’ll Sell Plutonium Reactors
For you, sweetheart, I’ll ride back down
into black smoke early Sunday morning
cutting fog, grab the moneysack
of gold teeth. Diamond mines
soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological
diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night
in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells
that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you’ll see
an
