Dark Surface

Woman holds up a mirror,                            

seeing through it into a

streambed. Rocks, a mountain

breathing, look, and she’s thinking:

storm breaking on the surface.

Light diffuses; the sky darkens.

At the edges, glass darkens

less-- for the gem-tints mirror

glintwinks across the surface,

smashing the frame into a

quivered light to do your thinking

by the dark of the mountain.

Jewel at her throat, mountain

lights up gem-framed then darkens

like the gloom of hard thinking;

storm cracking away; mirror            

aptly expresses into a                            

map of the mirror’s surface.                  

Rainfall reflects the surface

where light ends on the mountain.

Silver drops hold into a

trembling. Memory darkens

it’s quality; pitted mirror

in one young, goes the thinking.

She is in the stream, thinking

an infant prised the surface

of her thought; or the mirror

in her hand broke the mountain.

Drops glass, everything darkens--

the infant blooms into a

woman, who blurs into a

page of discursive thinking.

Whence the child comes it darkens

unevenly the surface;

child, woman and mountain

disappear in the mirror.

The displaced mountain thinking:

how she darkens the surface

she pulled into the mirror!

Invisible Weeds of Puissance and Pulchritude

There are hidden precincts as close as skin

To you, simulposed, one on another―

   Closed cavern on vacant nether.

   Yes…  covert are the fields they’re in.

      You go to a back lot

But don’t see the cave, where, I shit you not―

I battle my own little Ragnarok,

Scarred by the event as a scald must be,

Missing you in the weeds where you stop to pee.

Where you loft your mindwave against the pale

Yellow edge of the concourse―  the daylight world.

   There your cognition may be purled

   Like a cul-de-sac; but, please, Hail!

      The sacramental pitch―

Tumble-weeded flats, perimeter’d by ditch,

That ants abandoned, squatted on by witch―

All but the mine, the middle of alone,

Where the twilight reigns and the gods turn stone.  

We must, perforce, the ancient rites perform―

The inchoate myth, and the phantasm

   Otherness, just a brief spasm

   From solitude to where we’re borne,

      Into the home life, dear―

A ramble in the empty meadows where

The secret places are from year to year,

The well-swept ground under the temple shell

Where, together, all things may, lonely, dwell.  

The Consolation of Poetry

Lumpen inhales this way and he can die here.

The head turns inwardwise to look at what drives out;  

Which obsessions commandeer, what silent hives abut

The bee glade, what constructions over cellar-fear

Are tilting toward effluvia. Odors of rose

Musk turn stink in the plexus that makes the world.

Despite, senses oppose: the projection is hurled

Upon the rocks and waters; while some suppose

The mind is bent under run-on propositions,

Thought experiments in a requisitioned skull,

Quotidian fissions blasting around a small

Wilderness in a universe of omissions.

Make it the case that the clock hands run widdershins.

That gnome doctors dig for the curative specie

Through cave-bound winds in a brain that bides uneasy.

Spring forward the horse, the rider and all his sins.

Is there art in the final illuminated

Hallways of the gods? The aggregate disperses

Into it’s several inks. The rare nib solved verses

Starring Sphinx― now he too shall be extirpated.

Far Farrago

If I learned a tune of a cool grey rock
or a dance of Arbutus
in wooded hollows
then refute me in remembrance nothing-
to have learned is not to have what follows.

What it was is an unrough thing
left of space sketched by charm
minus the nth power-
me nothing refutes than remembrance,
slices of sun to the beaches fall on every hour.

Learning time went witch on my romance-
how might that it never was?
I still perform the figure.
Looking through the tall young forest bends one;
the forest is slight and sheer if you linger.

The day came forth through tomorrows that slew
themselves learning to twirl,
came back as a sheet
of scribbling faded from the flat air to come-
odd vantages recompose in the skin and heat.

A sere correlative mirage remains when dumb
being itself was already only
I, slack-jawed in rocklight-
and the point of it if it had ever one
is still to come from some far farrago at midnight.

Salt Stare

Athwart the bluffen prairie in a sidewind,
Juncos tumbling into the willow brake
Above the sea gorge. Eye-rippingly fierce
Salt stare into the rain-gauzed gale to mountains
Over the dolphined sea, killing silver
And chum, diving in packs. But, lo, the sky blacks
And the sea blacks and zip-filed between them,
The white-green horizon-razor bevels over the far vista
Panning the Olympic tip to Canada
Like a neon koen going crackle and aum.
Simply complex dwells mind-matter in our outside,
Yours, mine, the juncos’. At once,
One,
Replete with it.

Frames of Monk

Skin blooms a weather of shower and afternoons
and weeks of Wave Mountain;
little monk walks Junes;
and August roads hot tars detain.
Exotic beating looms with shuttle clacks,
barks adrift and seadrift float flood from rain-
Sailor’s warning, monk’s pain,
Glorianna’s skin tracks.
At night the wafting of the wood is balming;
the skin’s weather, the short shout of the palm.

Tanned mind hails on the virgins; that’s age’s envy
and only lust flatters;
Puer’s envoy,
from somewhere the future shatters.
The sea beats the young boy, monk’s young father
to the man, dwelling with divine squatters,
dwelling on the daughters,
mountain breaks up, rather
like the ordinary small man of thinning
soul, locked within the clastic rock of sin.

From stony fields of massy, clacking bones, she sees
him approach the courtyard
through locust trees,
leaping like poem’s laugh-last word,
or before falling, pride in one’s estate,
human backstory, ears that haven’t heard
now perched, like some absurd
pigeon, to click and grate
upon the gates of the institution,
above the hoary and inconstant stew.

Monk’s moon finally comes to the playhouse, condemned,
performing the Soldan
in a cage, hemmed,
rolling with the tyrant’s golden
train, pulled by his wife, ‘til they brain themselves,
Heaven and Earth bleeding on the Satan’s car.
That’s what comes of love’s star
dried of it’s fire by elves.
Arts of banishment, logically pursued,
arrive at poems where no passions stir.

Autumn delivers him from the oppressive swelter
and the freak intentions,
dubious shelter,
and the variant suspensions
of disbelieving; hard to remember
how I could have fallen so very far
short of the under-par.
Let us embrace somber
reappraisal of the situation,
rendered and chewed up in the vasty day.

Mountain mirages in the clear days, the short days,
the leaf will come down husk,
bit with sharp rays,
wood smoke nosing eastwind at dusk.
White cities beckon the road, sweeping wrack
of thunderheads with a gate of moonlight,
the dead month at midnight
when the road rises, back
of time, and the spirit-fates gaze dolefully
on the sleeper dreaming of an asphodel.

shimmer

first cat is best cat is Japonaise-
on the sofa’s firmament of skyrock
firmed in the stices threaded to micro
is allworld the end of the edge is lazyland

laugh at Night sauntering ‘round the house
deepsucking the spirit ejaculating
in cool flowing dark packets surrounding
one thought in a mind and your head

leaves a moon on the silver-plated mountain
on the mountain lies a key and a passageway
the child you were is caught fishing for a future face
with which to apprehend the shimmer of argent skin

uncertainty and certain firmities-
how one becomes another in the cyclic dawns!
a kind of opening out into cold knowledge
not knowing who talks or puts a mountain on the tongue

insects in freefall

ground cover under the climbing fusion fruit
covering ground over pearls in aqua caves
send e-mails to any hidden camera shy
leaves falling from books in a laundry chute

eternal round of life and retort in a quark minute
the barbed spike and water green rose’s palm
mothering square feet of decay
breathing on the face of everything in it

around the world zephyr harmattan and sirocco fly
in local time little bugs in the biome
pruning the wave that curls space and crashes
the horizon and seeps upward through the sky

then the insects sing of a legendary carapace
retaining the memory of their fall from grace

sacred effect

driven by fear to walk in the night
I found the grace to get back there
on the morning of the first day

when I was immortal
I had love
I took refuge

and then in my dream
a fox turned into a small girl
it's all I remember
but it haunts me

my ardor was pure on the first morning
our humanity spiritualized
goddess everywhere
too much for one man

now I look across myriad revolutions of mystic hearts aching
and I see our daughter has grown up meantime
with gold eyes to gaze through space
where her life lies beating

mystique

in equal tight ears
I can move peacewise
inside cloud-water though

from here in arrears
and pregnantly pause
wife and daughter go

and the short-waist seers
from cigarland with canes
arrive and beat me so

when the former appears
I'm holding my sides
they split when winds blow

dense fog covers the pretty things
step on one and it stings

gambler’s date

drizzling a little in Needleswood
light blue greenly lit gray where the bettor stood
I had half a mind so never spoke
yet when it came to save myself
toyed unwisely for a joke

it must had to do with just such rot
night brain finally frightened chance so the leaf caught
upon a fir branch where it made a home
the season sent a harbinger
kindly beaming from a tomb

but all the good in the world fell flat
unwhole and hollow and meshing nothing
but the head and cap
this one uses language for a gap
and stoves in against the faultline
'til time emptied the hat

Everybody's Talking

I have been amazed lately at how many people I run into who are conspiracy theorists. The whole crew of carpenters on a job I was doing last week were checking out the chem-trail cloud cover and postulating various agents, motives and purposes, but not doubting the basic fact: planes are intentionally spewing chemicals into the sky that make it a cloudy day. OK. Maybe. I suppose I could find the opinions of various cloud masters. I don't know any, offhand.

And before that, I was attending a cookout on the 4th and got into a conversation with an inebriated octogenarian, famous in certain circles as an old anti-communist, and as such, denied political conversation with his loved ones, who avoid it. As he rambled on about the communist plot to take over the everything and shackle us with a One World Government, I realized he was talking about the Bilderburg group. I said I'd read a book about it not long before. He lowered his voice and said, shifting his gaze, that bunch you just named, like he didn't want to say it himself, then he nods and looks at me. I said, yeah, and the tri-lateral guys and the CFR and Rand corporation, and on and on it goes.
The last thing he said to me was, please, don't vote for Obama. Well, I couldn't promise him anything.

Then, talking to my friend, K, I find out about the plan to tank the US economy and unite the Americas in a union a la the European one, and make a new currency called, of course, the Amero. This sucks because it would be another victory for the Fabian Socialists, and their creeping disease which becomes full-blown when guns and national armies are outlawed and we are all protected by the World Army. I used to think something like that might be a good thing, but K has planted the seed of doubt in my consciousness, which according to one of the carpenters I mentioned, is being bombarded with low frequency vibrations by the HAARP, which is a mind control/ psych ops experimental techno-devil, that is also a biological weapons delivery system ( in conjunction with the cloud-seeder planes). It's up in Alaska, I guess. They probably have an official website. I don't know if I'll check it out.

Just yesterday, I saw a spare tire cover on the back of a small SUV that displayed an add for the local moped rental operation. In big letters around the top it read, 9/11 was an inside job and in the middle, the name of the business.

And Aurora issues from her bower in the east, heralding Phaethon's theft of his father's chariot.