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

typhoid

Carlos was clearly malnourished
everything long-ago-collapsed
writing away morning
writing away eyes
the buried stories
labyrinth-like things
shutters opening often into nowhere
he was roofed into sleeping forever
while illness went on
aimlessly wearing his clothes

while exiled from God

we
     sought sky
     encountered every island
     wrote true inside our own dark places
     grew lost in the shadows of our notebooks

the distance seemed small

once only did we kiss
until the ancient minarets burned
    purple and gold
    purple and gold