Parched

When I wake in the back seat to a dim teal
on the leatherette, my legs seem to swell
like Grow-in-Water sponge pills. They wet the boat's guard-rail

with their SPF 80 glaze, and their toes touch the kelp ends
that lay flat on the surface. The chafes
from the flashlight rods that leaked last night
into the spots not calked by the blackout curtains
are dry. The seats are rooted to the floor, are pillars
that loom in the morning sheen.


(the kelp ends peak from the surface in youth, but as I age they surround me. I seem to have submerged and drowned, but in dryness, who would have thought death would have been so dry)

damp for

the root

of sweat, we wait for an

intersect of thought like

a cosmic sea-monkey cyst

for hyperbolic brine, settle on

vacuum dust, amniotic juice

has yet to fill the gap between

us and the chaps

pinch the nerves each

time lips splay

to show that

we are

Surface tension

The romance that two
plump boy scouts push
and inhale through harmonica
reeds is well worth noticing,

lines are gaps
into unease when
on a Duchamp,

and it is well worth noticing
such a droplet in that split
moment of surface tension

when it balances
atop

Glazing an urn

This urn holds
air, is wiped clean, is not glazed but crisp
yellow like an old meerschaum. There is a hole
at its forehead for air to fold around and press into
air, suave entrance as if with a waxed
air   while the hole whistles like some after-
vibration of a bell gong glad
to see the air through, but to look
seems, look   as the grain still dips
beneath the gloss   it is underhanded
to observe her features by the image
in the bus window, to coat when the always-
child gaze had the texture but the grasp
is followed by what, really
what sheen. This urn holds
air, has a smooth oil finish.

no-speak

no-speak, the space
between open lips before columnar lifts
and dips in air vibration. In no-
speak tires roll up-
hill before hill turns
to gravity hill to slope, downward
to a point, speech. no-speak:
so long a tongue curled
around potential snaps
into speech when no-
body uses the whole
bin but only what some five
fingers grasp. speak,
but with no-speak, prolong

I

Perfect disk, with an alloy

of mist so thick as to weigh

on the aperture until the pressure

differential became standard, until the grass

blades, grass blades.

Proselytize

The Red Hatted Vagabonds pluck blues

chords near the yellow

tape at the street fair, not quite among

passerby. You can graph

the ripple of a drop in a glass

but the chorus sings from the torrent,

relatives or dreadlocked
Valkyries in matching
tie-dye skirts, where

the vocalist amid
loose gravel in-jokes
as if tied to the mic-
stand reaches

out and cries
proselytize me baby.

Glory

The aspect of the right angle in the car

window frame beside the blue-brown of the slow

river, hardly even

I mean it is basically asphalt

and now orient the plane

yes, morning glory

but you hardly deserve the name, take what symbol

you want son but when you don’t got

a seed, that’s what it is,

how the yellow on the cereal

box is less yellow, why

does morning glory lead

you that way, when no

word really, take

the seed.

---Reshelving carts

A life in these carts,

yet the books so quickly return.

finger oil stains the pages

so that they stick

when the binding

shuts. Seeming disorder, why

agronomy and Pynchon,

before the librarian

reshelves.

A moment's bliss

Squeeze a period, for rest,

between the chimneys and brisk

wind, that line of teal

on your cheek, the apertures

were shut but the smoke

pipe and even the Oleanders

pruned to trees glowed

upright,

if the change has in it

a clamminess, if the change

lies apart

It is dawn and some wet

twigs stick through the window

frame. How

several   some sphag

num on the bridge

between joints too

exist so

willingly “don’t

need a lunette” says

they, whether or no

the window clap.

What is it about a dream

a burst of amber stage-

light where tinfoil

heels tap to

the amusement so great

fun is it not the curtains

wave like the live sea

not dead sea as

still as the mirror as violent as

the cloud’s curl.

Lethargy does not exist, the veins

swimming below my transparent

tautness however much they point

to life do not pull my attention

from this viscous string

of thoughts through

which I only rarely glimpse

genesis.

The iron is wrought

as the man before the bathroom

door clenches a fist he

wants   but it is closed he

releases and on the chess-

board tiles leaks

through the ink

          the blank

he hardly knows

what abyss
and anyways color

is nowhere and 

assumed here

when he came to

he stepped off,

arms iron, arms

light.

Insomniac shades
let the street lamps
spray the ceiling. I cannot
read. The bay

beside the highway sunk
to mud that frames
here and there a sheen. "Dis

person," some Morse
code of headlights, "Dis
person."

what is it, sunk
possessed by Gershwinjaundiced sick we are playing notes of others, vacant now of the passion that stirred them. but all have always been vacant, only the few who choose not to be fix themselves into the phantom that possesses future players intent on voicing your composition.

the asphalt widens
it is nice to roll
along the char.

futile now? rubber
skin, prod

The insomniac
clouds dull the grasses
I've seen the Yellow Mountain ridges
to Gershwin preludes beside
my desk lamp. The pipe

is full of ash, soot
and remains. Prod
my supine
hand, it is cold.

At our desks and the professor
says Huizinga's cane factory, be
the process om
shanti, glaze

word
to confection, clouds

of it to perfume
with a moment's burn, heap
lest they notice, the arid

riverbed.

Half truth, what the man
in the isle leans
on when he bends
in indecision, his spine

makes for something solid
it is like others', like pull
the dip and there
we are all on the patio

"Mavericks" he says and omph
through chips like grass
whistles,

they play. The crumbs
in the crevice next morning
are already earth, almost
their edges sag,

and so the evening satiates.

nietzsche. truth is right and wrong are survival inconcrete flesh is transient so we build these and "here it is immutable move on" along nothing to see here except false we see ourselves through the world we build through this incontrover   but there it is, stop   here.

agape agape. does modern art take on the form of pressing stream of consciousness because this is the only way falling people can tap into the art, beauty. but what is that but poor order in need of reordering order would be better off in chaos. so is this it then   a progression to a halt to break see it is coherent this way, loss, art is here. death  or we can instead of jump from point to point linger and play a song really.