Look over your shoulder for the hustle of words.


Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A Transcontinental Note

Cold antipodean world;
You hold a thread in your mouth
a bloody hook pinned in your visceral self.
It draws me like a slim railway
across dial-tone and high-way and
through the dessicating, panicking folds
of your homeland.

Then pulled through the sea;
a snake with a sly flick
in the outer-most crimp of its tail.
When I am closer, the sound tenses us
(a taut miniscus of desire)
and we moan and billow to it, pressed.

My hands, two pockets of given love.
Your hands, two trembling triangles distilled.

Would that I could take ocean as paper
and bring the edges shut, thin as lips:
an oyster jealously swallowing a pearl.
Oh and us then entangled;
your hair a tickle, not a pixel -
your tongue a wetness, not a tone.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Assembling the Spirit

The spirit can spread open again, in a circus of heat.
Assembling at night with the rhythm
of gathering and eating within a known circle
(like a folk song, a well-worn idiom).
I can feel it pull away from the cold lake
and start to relish the delicate force of the light.

The moths tap the glass, the sky a brushed velvet
dropped over them.
It folds and relaxes as a muscle of water,
and arrives at horizon's mouth like a dark
banked knot of grit.

The paper-white window frames a lantern of play
and occassional stops;
In this, stillness thickens.
The slow end of glass, a sound pulled as thin
as elastic
camouflaged as silence.

My hands wrap and grip, pull and push
slide and trace the contours of fiber and grain.
Each pulse is a brilliant world.
I measure and ladle with processional calm;
converting whispers to touches.
Bright lemons, nubbed olives lash like thorns
from their brine -
plucked and speaking.

The spirit puckers and throbs in this.
The mantle of purpose glows heavily down
and insists - come forth, come fully forth,
spring forth into heat.

The Carnal Light

the prescience is a dread-lust;
this still small violence of grief
and hidden breath is as dark a stain
as month-blood.

the abdomen pitches sickly, brightly.
the gut abandons and the chest becomes
a rattling crushed hull
of lost, half-remembered creatures
and wrong-strung wires.

what have I done, become, becoming?
only the truly created stone
that I ever was.

In essence, the question is not
'what will this be?' but, instead
'what prosecution of the self was ever
right at all?'

the carnal light is honed and through
the fog of robbing voices
it is the only light of reason.
reason, reason,
rational life.

posess me and dig the wound out
with your claws, your teeth,
your bared bitter bones.
own me, make me translucent
still.