Soothe child, say it

Yes you are going to cut yourself, but under the dull of an old blade.  Dumb.  Arriving almost at that sleight of sound.  Imagined nuzzle of an other.

I surely simply take to the things that are set right there in front of me.

And I find that I’m making memories of angles that couldn’t have been.  And although I know, is what a liar does?  Is his image better?  Is it worth the weight?

This is less a question than a gesture.  Of course, as the wayward would have it.

It has taken a great deal of being taught to finally listen to the ways in which Logic should be heard.  Like God I guess.  Useful fictions for the O.G. desperado guys and gals who are all somehow doubtless out there.

Weary travels what they are, that lay in lingering ills before we got here.  Have lain.  Will lie as we learn their each separating ways.  But we live particulate, even linearly.

Cut the bullshit, dog.  Look it.  You’ll soon have your own pups to muzzle and lead.

And mouths to feed before you eat,

And mouths to feed before you eat.

Sterile Pencil

Who put me up to it is who put a clinical touch to music.  But I apologize.  Even if the birds were asking for it.  Even if the dogs were all either growling mutts or pups tracking mud.  I’m dragging a pencil, rushing the timber, as if I knew what I did and didn’t need to breathe.  The state of things is a brush of loose eyelashes, single follicles stuck nothing.  Each page I write, I’m sorry for the littering letters and the fact that I wash my hands.

Measuring matters

The mind is many things, a river is a thread, and a journal is a way of leaving so that it isn’t just the weaving string that withers when the seam pulls up and its somehow strangely pieces come apart.  How to go from one to another, to organize the brains and such, and then how to count.  Translators, revelry, bells broken and tongues expunged.

The whale’s song is only beautiful because we do not hear its words.  Its momentum kills us literally.  I’ve nailed it: momentum kills the conscientious, batters it against the rocks of agnostic.  The stretch starts with a nail and ends with a tearing in all places.  Our heads are not so limber.  To live is to lumber from one such room to another, whistling it away.

Ballets are only inches

concentric eager pitches

simple pictures eaten whole

poison berries, amber grout

things in ears and funneled

love as in a flailing elbow

the heart, a ruddy bone

squashed and scrubbed so

it can infiltrate the eye

the all saving grace in the hole

pay me no mind, sticky stuff

reciting, sleep deprived

circles, dirges, sunk lustrous

each a spinning top

upon another flaccid face

just a gentle reminder, I know

you know what’s good for you

Song of my other

My brother is a turning tongue that rides along the day.  Below the single cloud, among the every breath, even between skin.  My brother is an image here, though none that we can feel.  It is my understanding that all else is the matter.  That the single problem of poetry is not the integral mercy of its meter (injustice it diseases), but that it is enacted nearly motionless, always at that distance, from a chair.

How do you touch anything, but with a hand.  A hand that eats the keys in your pocket.  Grabs the pen and scribbles.  Yes this is a muddy state.  But hands are apt engulfers.  Each other is a symmetry of space, a delving in divine.  With hands like these what could we posit to need that isn’t there for the taking, within reach.

That words don’t come from our minds is the very cerebral impulse.  Look at the offerings.  Minds are merely manners, itching the length of day, dusting off soberly at night—or what replaces night when the mind’s made up and light’s out.  Rhythm is not a ghostly saint.  It is not a snake.  It is a blind master, full of dumb and carrying luck.

My brother is a ghostly saint (though not a snake).  He exists in perfect squalor, a bum in an encompassing chair, without legs or, for that, without a head.  He is the golden shrine that hides—two hands and no mind.  My brother is a ghastly impasse.  He touches, never touched.  He sings a sunken lullaby and weds this pleasant trap.

Spoon

I am already dreaming.  Sneaking extra chances, worlds less collided than conspiring.  I know you naked.  It feels like theft.  I only know you naked.  So late, my words are bleeding paper, meaning you can’t follow one from another without leading into the rest.  

So ok.  If the crescent is the universal symbol for sleep, we’ve totally got this thing.  But if circles are the shape of a day, I wish you’d close those eyes.  I imagine the what was sometimes space and now is just spilled limbs.  The spell is your long face.  

The farness of its lips.  And the fuzz of its former shape.  The eyes are slipping and it might be clear, sharply seen, if it weren’t so even.  Even so

I only know this 

you 

I am dreaming.

My bed is mine; my mind is bad 

and slowly still forgetting.

The Devil and The Sea

Then there are all the endless poems I can never write.  What is it, this the needle points?  A complex tool, what that god screws us under pile drivers.  A mud, such that sticks our skin with cling.  A knot or a tangle, is it purposeful attrition or is it simple and devoid?

A poem is a hunger in a breath.  It is the swallowing of shallows.  It is the shallowing of swallows.  Enactment of the divine possibility.  Here let’s swing it: “Life is yes or no.”  What can we do but sing our brothers and lovers?  Each our wreck and, written, rectified.