what we traveled of blind time

that familiar easing of white light
the hand’s destruction
the owl’s call
echoing across the shadows
consuming the far ridge

in still turquoise calm
we parted
we said
we finally understood

the stems
arriving at their absences of petals
the otters on the other shore—
vague sinuous shapes
dark and minute

A Minor Rage Against Forest and Field

Beyond the hollow aspen
the bartender announced his cold visage—

“In the seventh room of the Moon,
I, beside my stubborn shadow,
have managed to escape
the destruction of time!”

All the while his shadow,
whose activities confused the other reflections,
had been throwing down all
the cut-off stems of daisies.

he called it love

year after year
the ocean lingered
far beyond the searing stones

the burden of absent inflorescence

seven unceasing shadows
traveled overgrown passages
commanded by time

they navigated by voices
that echoed from each blind tower
never meaning to put to shore

they all bore leaves
from lands they’d surrendered
never to return

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