Yule

recall those painful doors
that searing Noel
rising from overripe fish
flopping through narrow streets

we had no baskets

the solstice days
bleeding one into another

the cold touch of fallen whores
wrapped in white sheets
they could have been angels

each of us bearing
our many disguises

Hosanna
Hosanna in the highest

manipulations

among easy-fitting threads
beer bottles tied between
outtakes of envisioned realizations—

love
sunlit limbs
rolling eyes

dead now

escaping
the narrowly shattered wastelands
pinned between walls

yes
a delicate destruction

that city

that year i spent lingering
till the cool breezes of mornings
speaking of the various opportunities
and various exceptions in that city—

you could always find villagers
grinding against the firm night
enacting paperback stories
in other languages
tied up in bundles

take for instance
the stranger versions of Gulliver's Travels
or procreation for that matter
bartenders stuffed into beer bottles

to escape that city
you had to file the forms
you had to pay in kilometers
negotiate what seemed to be
a heavy settlement

a few soiled bills and worn-down coins
a ratty backpack

the bus ticket was yours

wastelands opportunities

whores with their theories
of kilometers and disease
played and provided

when stiffed
they distanced themselves
from negotiated hands

they rolled me over
for no more reason
than an unmoving beer

wastelands opportunities
depended on bus tickets
ground into pockets

hands travelling across eye sockets
empty beer bottles

the bartenders escaping
that complicit city of love and procreation
with their old devices of dead wars

doors opened up

like broken fish beneath the stones
or scattered hornets above the elderly

like couples spreading wide their terrible arms
their yellowing teeth or strangers

confusing one implacable touch with another
the ocean spilled dead

the women

confused by their loneliness

the women had scattered
they pressed themselves
against the moon

but no one approached
please  please
how their voices had fallen

a terrible silence—
such cold immense absence
that the hornets had left

the women
clung to their baskets
they went willingly

to that ocean of strangers
beyond the turquoise
where waters opened
into waters

after considering all but the nearest celestial objects

those inaccessible capsules
we forced open long ago
never fixed any of the Moon’s truths
the dead likewise involved only some of our relations

the images we modeled ourselves after—

once the Sun lived
bees quietly sealed it away
refashioned it into black representations
that astonished even the flowers

the original truth

has not yet become turquoise
take this one leaf
how it holds the measured metaphors
no need of correction within its interstices
where shadows lay their questions
these echoing things
they are only seeds

they were

only metaphors
being 

                   carried away

                             first flowers

                                               then coins
                                                          things we’ve always believed in

                                                                 strange melodies we thought were love songs

they were only lies

fatassism

this false superiority
forced on children
unable to grasp border lines
fleeing hollows in their parents’ throats
where home used to find song
children now citizens
of a more ardent nation
of the oppressed
that stupefies the decaying narcissist
who tries to steal their mothers’ hands

zero tolerance

imagine the cyclic explanation
monstrously          discarding
a whole          new generation
the trap     a human-invention
arbitrarily             forgetting
fellow                              man
each individual cell a metaphor
                                for hate

praise

you, oh creator of graveyards, every marvelous reality,
perhaps these metonymies, your purest binding laws,
universalize the equation— us, in such astonishing forms

We ourselves are metaphors

Red hands taking other individuals
to possess certain painted coins
beyond the human catchpool.

Things, things—
question them young man. Speak up!
We sketch our designations in a monstrous language.

raison d'être

Concerning reality, the individual usually obtains some benefit from its usage. Yet after the impressions of woven leaves, the old-colored universe begins to return. The hands themselves are, perhaps, only building a new behavior. Likewise, most specimens, though unequal, often attempt to attribute a certain coinage to natural laws. The sole realities of trees, people, and all else exhibit a strictness in their monstrous differences. This speaks to the wonder of perceptions, which for the case of this argument, we might represent as X in our calculator.  Believe me, the new numbers are long, longer than impressions, so it’s only customary to apply more meaningless schemas to these movable aspects of our host.

anthropomorphisms

Within the spider, human things—
pure language, poetic
beyond this attentive schema we keep reconstructing.
Everything, entrusted to those absolute measured abstractions—
the forms of things our hands have numbered,
carried away unceasingly, or gathered in the catchpool.

language is a trap

leaves originally acquainted things
then came ideas language science metaphors metaphors
strictness of impressions the world forgot in time
this framework where everything’s contained

mathematician's prayer

correct us, oh creator, within our lives,
with your measured overlooking presence.
the leaves have fixed themselves in the world intact,
trees towering as the graveyard fills,
souls adapted to so little space.
the turned-out spirit perceives everything,
intensified limbs, cells,
mutable representations,
that old succession of species,
everything numbered by laws.

historian's complaint

curled language lost perhaps
relations undefinable

works forgotten
meaningless discarded

just as something amazing
starts to speak

forms

long towering numbers
embellish metaphors

beyond questions
every incompetency dissolves

just as colored perceptions
model abstractions

forms within things
overlooking their presence

colors remain themselves
free now to possess nature

X simultaneously produces necessity

a contained number schema
radically dissolves the leaves

time’s universal language
speaks of the inviolability of things

we gray ourselves and astonish ourselves
with the forms of flowers

that thing only colors will know

Once

Love said, selfishly,
how woman, if loved first,
loved even the warm thought
of its vain patchwork of tangerine leaves.
It worked its face into flown pictures.
Should one portrait appear, it left again,
They knew how to find each other,
their letters changed their want.
Behind their laughter, after their eyes,
they saw in cumulus shadows
the way wonder might love a night.

Art

Christ’s dead face had once influenced night,
his weird eyes laughing in Corinthians.
That proselytizer's dream of acceptance had left.
As a writer she knew words would one day mean trouble.
Those that made livings of colors,
they said, “Come warm woman, musician of flesh,
rise up out of the leaves.”
They would resurrect her that way,
in all their lurid paintings.

her face

how wrong his selfish eyes
the wonderful day-place
lost again to dusk
the breeze of many voiced loves
all night how the dead argued
while he imagined her face
azure in Africa’s patchwork of flames

writers

many cruel words
behind sunglasses
sunglasses America loved
lost in Summer's orange music
where writers sketched women
in forgotten books
where writers sketched women
on warm afternoons
where writers
trapped in dead realities
of castigated sentences
sketched women in the rain

it was a different kind of seeing

peering into remnants of things-as-they-are
he found and sometimes saw born

places between places
moments rippling into years

he watched dark roads thread off into fields
he fathered frail trees

and after he’d gone
only sunshine shone

deep into the interstices
of where he had been

shine

red-cast
still yellow through leaves
a Sun hangs fantastically
while the decomposition of seeing
what used to be
keeps on

the frail

the frail encounter ghosts that way
never hoping for anything different

threading through branches
to find ripples beyond a cabin

at the quieted pool
sailing away on leaves