Dig a hole until your fingers bleed
and then fill it with water and exotic fish
and exclaim that you've found meaning.

singularity, pleasure, dive
into hope of income or happiness.
Believe in a slogan that shouts
from a melted metal sign on rotting planks
or a recruiter dressed in animal pelt that stinks.

Hope reeks like fumes from burnt plastic
animal figurines. Their molten black drips
divert my attention and the noise blares and blares.

This tree-surrounded log cabin

where I rock and hum tunes

was planed and hammered

by numb fingers. 

Nearby the trunks assemble

in tight formation, and the roof

blocks starlight. My palms sweat.

It is now time to stand,

and I grip my axe handle.

Foggy morning, and hazy notions
of any obligations. Only thoughts
exist, that flit like sticks along a current
that leads somewhere.

There's a series of thip-thapping slaps
of the nail in your wheel against asphalt
and you say your friends have a dirty driveway
and I do not know what to say.

You stop behind a stationary car
and honk and yell at them to move
and you apologize about your anger
and I do not know what to say.

But I'm glad you are so active,
caught up in tires and shouts,
and how you don't believe your friend is in love,
Because if you were silent for just one moment
You would see that I have nothing to say.

Flying, slipping, falling
feeling stuck and lifeless beside some sparking star
that pulls you into its orbit and absorb intention.
can I speak?

Let's sit under this highway off-ramp roof:
remove your gloves and my fire will warm your palms,
and direct your gaze to my personal beach.
I do not swim because the river is cold
but each night it turns orange and the buildings
opposite yellow and signs red and the purple sky spirals
with gray clouds. I like life here, but the person in the next tent
keeps saying "lop heads, eat lead, lop heads, eat lead."

A rosy hillock beneath your eyes
makes me think: fire, fire!
Roll on coals and seethe
and wish to brush cheek on cheek.

I intended to pass some kind of meaning
that would make you stop and step back
from that treadmill of reply-to-these
and go-to-these. Your life is perfectly fine
and I am glad that you are immersed in associations,
but I feel like I would enjoy our time more
if we were drinking cold tea under a tarp
on a Gobi desert dune or sitting on moss-
covered rocks and under light-catching trees
beside a hurtling river. I suppose I am selfish
and there are bugs that bite and sunburn.
I am only sitting at a desk and imagining.
I am unsatisfied. How can you be satisfied?

Bend me like tin-foil
into a cone atop your head:
you may get odd stares,
but I'll protect your thoughts
like a beetle in liquid nitrogen
is safe from circulation.

Float in the sea of reality
because we really only float
and electron never touches electron
atom never atom
and so float
like driftwood that floats above water
and bounce but never touch
our atoms never touch.

The wall of uncanny unknowing
of whether I will surmount these tasks
is never as high as I first perceive.

The most compact wall
is just empty space
that neutrinos fly through
and life expands like supernova waves--
it is not stinted by mystery.

In fact, that makes it more worthwhile.

Granny Smith out-tastes Red Beautiful,
but I dislike all apples. Throw it at a windshield
and suffocate a Jaguar with confetti
and caramel apple suckers.

Or better, cut off my tongue
because all sweets are saccharin
and I speak like a cancerous cat
or someone with a smoke-hole
in their esophagus.

Go forth and be Epicurean
while Epicurus meditates and eats bran.

Morning Commute

The engine wheezes and pops and I pull out,
my vision fades and eyes droop,
and my consciousness fades from daydream
to vacuum as fatigue whips me like wisps
of morning haze against my windshield.

The turbulent shaking of this thin chassis
unsettles like doors that slam and siblings that wail,
and I adjust the blanket on my legs
to fend off the breeze through the rattling carcass.

But then the bulbous orange head stretches
its neck and turns the sky red and sea crystalline,
the wind slows, and I feel the brisk air
flowing also through my pores.

This morning I flew from the roof of my car after I fell asleep
and moon-jumped to the sea. In the afternoon
you introduced me to Tom, but I forgot your name.
Tonight I wade past the shore
and dive to meet blue corals.

Be a toad. It is beats petty anger and bitterness
at the slightest inconsistency in a moment.
Eat flies or realize
that you've got it good with your inwit.

Trap

Vain unaware erudition snares

in rust-blooming bear trap critique of each sensation
that claps around my ankle.

But when stuck I can think--

the sensory-confounding endorphin rush

where the dirt around cracking bones
becomes mounding black loam and the trees

and I can breathe. I pull my stump from the snare

and pour myself into the earth like damp morning spigot leaves.

.

Drip, dribble, void-black sap that drops
into the cup. Lips thin thick chapped
wrinkled and cold-sore'd touch
and their respective heads wake up.

Stencils on a ring-rounding hand organ
Dance or read or type or knead
but all bend when the music stops.

If I rend from them their pitch liquor
they would droop for a fortnight
and then perk up again
like a monkey that pulls a thorn from its sole.

You glance with that quizzical gaze

and wait for me to continue, but I am finished.

I stopped without asking you a question

or telling you much of myself

and my maypole does not draw

you to enwrap with orange warm arms

and braid with violet raspy laugh.

It is not sturdy. A wind would frazzle your work

and leave your colors flying from my tilted frame.

But the pole is buoy--a beacon. A feather on a peacock

that you can pluck. Call me sea-cock, not pole or rock

show me dye instead of fabric

an eye-drop will do

dripped below the pole into my pool.

Here where colors blend

intentions may infuse.

With winter comes the scent of heater-vent exhaust

that is more reminiscent of brisk mornings than the wet and fallen leaves.

That period in conversation

where a thought trails to dead-end in wet blackberry bramble

only makes me yearn to inhale that exhaust

and forget dripping branches and golden leaves.

But today I leave fumy embrace

with pack and teflon sleeping bag:

I'll dive into the pricking thicket
until my flesh drips like soggy sticks
and next morning's fog makes my lungs crisp.

An undeveloped rose plucked and dropped on loam

can glory in its fine smells, but will never know the bloom.

It does not feed insects that seek its pollen

or attract sensitive running tickling noses.

It remains and darkens the soil underneath mother's thorns.

Not until it sees others' bright petals scattered by playful swats

or dropped wilted and decayed on the ground,

the tree cut by scrupulous eyes,

and all decompose on ever-blackening and brightening soil,

does it sink with a final smile.

I've had enough asparagus and mint.

When I die,

Embalm me in treacle.

When I drive through hazy morning blackness I forget that wheels exist. Or limbs--I seem to sink into an abyss. A glad pit in suffocating black: each thought is a fiber that spreads and roots and deepens. I roll further and find that there is a brisk breeze. Feebleness. More thoughts arise that lead to strength when I realize that meditation dissociates from feeling and I grow and branch and then there it is: the sun has risen and cherry blossoms are abloom.

He called it experimentation

I live in a mechanized body. A teenage protégé, I built it to thwart my enemies. The words they flung at me glanced off the flesh-like tarpaulin exterior and I laughed as my creation’s face remained static.

It does have limitations. Years have passed and I did not consider growth. My form has cracked as I fit into the machine like a geisha’s foot into her shoe. I sometimes must talk to others and for that I spin rusted wheels and tap dials that stick.

Now I look at various people from behind the transition house’s desk: hairy, bruised, clean, athletic, stump-legged and in wheelchairs. I rotate the head ninety degrees east and there sits Nicole on the seat beside me. She has eyes pale blue like Neptune against caramel angular skin that concurrently shock and crystallize my squirming heart.

She asks me why I read Joyce and the wry curve of her thin purple lips lifts a tone of irony that slips through the ear’s transistor radio and titters about my body. I know how this will end. I languidly tap on this and that key and pull a string to open its mouth. It outpours the drainage waste of my true intentions and sounds:

                “He’s complex and I can’t understand anything really”—a pause as I abandon the keys to adjust the eyes that through inattentiveness fell on her chest—“but the words are nice and it has good imagery.”

“Ah. That does sound complex.” She smiles but averts her gaze to the residents.

A pink fedora glides to the desk.

                “Mail?” The wheezy hat asks.

                I arch the machine upright and bend it over the cardboard mail folder. A return rotation and then I say “None today. I’ll mark your wake-up for four next morning. Sleep well.”

                Before I sit I watch the gray curly hairs wave on his waving liver-spotted arm as the pink hat atop the frail man on his wheelchair glides to the door.

“Thank you, but I won’t be staying tonight.”

                Away from the shelter I find safety in my room. It is a white room with an olive air mattress in one corner and a plywood desk and notebooks in the other. One pad documents questions to use during conversation and the other details my experiments. Both are unreliable. The pre-thought questions only add to my robotic tone. The other lists chemicals, drugs, and alcohols that all have proved as useless as the phrases.  

Here at least I can move without ensuring its movements won’t make others suspicious. When free I stumble and arch around this cubicle, but it grows claustrophobic. The space feels too close now. I’ll drop off my bags and leave.

                Alcohol was crossed off and deemed unhelpful long ago but I nevertheless now find myself on a wooden chair at a dim corner table with a few shots of amber scotch. As I sit and decant the liquid through fabricated throat and into my gaping mouth, I forget myself and fuse into the skin-embracing gears.

                Those eyes again. At the bar and talking to a pair of shiny teeth with smooth skin and a button-down folded neatly on tan arms. She glances at me and waves. I lackadaisically lift my palm and the half-full glass beside it slides across the table but stops at the edge.

                “I wouldn’t have expected to see you here” says she, now standing at the table and pulling me into the orbit of billowing blue Neptune.

                Does she know what she’s putting me through? I tap the cloudy shape-shifting keys and try to make it speak. “I sometimes”—and then—“come here.”

                “Oh, ok. My friends and I are at the counter if you want to join in.”

                There were faces at the counter that either smiled at her or laughed at me when she walked away. I finished my drink.

                I like the night. Especially hazy nights like tonight. Above is a full moon or a street lamp. The sidewalk is hard but my feet seem to bounce along. Despite the coat on the gears the cold still seems to turn my skin into gelatin. My organs are wobbling. A sip from the bottle eases things but the night grows dimmer. Black now. Did I miss something?

                Sensation. Sickly sensation, but I feel. It is bright outside. There is a giggling trickle of water nearby and I am laying on dirt and rocks. I turn to my left and see a wheelchair and plastic legs and then that gray face and pink fedora.

                He wheezes. “Last night as I was feeding the minnows you fell from the sky. Or rather, that ledge.” He nods upwards to the steep muddy edge held in place by trees and roots. “You swan-dived onto a rock—sprock! Ha! I thought you were dead, but instead your head smashed and chest ruptured in a metallic din and one body fell out of another.” He clears his throat. “The flashiest molting I’ve seen in my days and I’ve seen quite a few things.”

                I see myself. Crooked arms and toothpick legs and a few feet shy of that body I built. I can move, though. I arch my back and sit beside his plastic legs. “Thank you,” I say, and don’t use buttons.

                “No, thank you. I only watched you fall. If you look ahead there’s a path that takes you from the ravine.”

                I exit and sit naked on the warm sidewalk beside the trees that line the precipice. My keys and wallet were on the other body, but that’s fine. I think I’ll sit here for a while and bask in the sun.

I am beginning to enjoy life and think I will settle down

Today a wormy root sprung from the seed that was in hibernation.
It gripped onto a rib and looks like it may live,
and a hyacinth could sprout.

Tonight I sterilize my scalpel
and slice out this lotus-lout.