pisa

eyes mesmerize
as if nothing within
can be seen,

naked or left wanting
and i have known this
so far back

even memory fails
like russet leaves
it clings

limply waiting
until that moment
falling like rust

someone of idealistic faith
tells me to hold fast
to not give in
the way a tower leans
because no one can devise
any way to fix it

but i am babel
a lit fire with no choices left

fugue

the best poems are like your last fuck
you let them lie there
before entering them again
like closing a door
an open window
to lower one step
to rise again
to stay outside
to take shelter, close my eyes
open my hands
to reconstruct a memory
and take cover in the simplicity
to swear in emptiness
to name solitude
to undress boredom and
dress the shade
grab light and
pacify silence

with you i wanted to
recreate a dream
recover the target
continue to watch to
maintain the fire
redeem our dementia
to accept forgetfulness that
when we fucked
the only word from your mouth
was FUCK
as if it was your pious act
while i HATE
the way death is
the sole heiress of my body
and its seasons
and i HATE you
your awareness of my hands
the way you foresee vertigo
when i am underneath your hips

and i experience nausea
while purifying myself
in your empty eyes and slow burning fuel
and watch you try to write the poem
that reconnects you to the purple
language of a day
to salute each inch of my skin
as if i was the only stranger in your bed

and to rectify, one by one
the number of my bones

the dreams of distance

the space between your fingers
and my body could be
a thousand miles

a desert where it's raining
a river bed, dried and cracked
the Serengeti with no animals

but with eyes closed
i can still see the swirls on your tips
the love lines on your palms
lengthening as they draw near to me
gliding over the desert

touching the universe like
alien invaders, with a
perfect view of the moon
where your hands scoop lunar sands
and let it run through your fingers

in this distance a blue jay sings
the ladybugs swarm us in summer
landing on your knuckles

the motion of your hands is constant
my eyes are always closed

nonbeliever

you let in the song
and the song rotted your throat
you, yourself out-songed the song
your allies are always victimized
you stand for NOTHING
corrupting the silence
you have lost yourself
the song you once praised
has rotted EVERY ear it has wormed into

don't berate me for never hearing choirs
an exceptionally good swimmer
might be cast into the sea
with a song tied round her neck
and she may, if she is like me
unsing it

if i were a Lark
i would remember my feathers
flung overboard for falsity

" i drowned you "
you said it as if all the temples
had finally bowed to the devil
and yet you felt NOTHING

i wished you to be infected with landscapes
because there is no question of lyric
in an ocean's proposition

and when i left you
the nakedness covered
by the thought of my hair across your eyes
the only thing love offered us were
the depressive ships and starling clouds
of pirates and thieves

piazzoni's moon

a nihilist like yourself might object
the strategy that
transparently fails to be opaque
when destiny is so much
what we have sought in our speaking
the hidden views
are the ones we should expose
untitled poems shimmer in my head
i've lived in that thoughtful palace
among pillars as white as
Piazzoni's moon

your clouds threaten:
in spanish I think
they're longing for repetition
and confidence is being satisfied right now
betrayal will come later
this cold and the pain doesn't confuse me

it's spring
you move closer
and we talk about the sky

sunday the silence broke

even if a flood
found my parched heart
the water would
skip across the valves
like a flat stone on water

and you are my unearthed oak
wanting to speak to me
to speak to god for you

ask him to recant his promise
this ocean would keep us in
this separation

and i tried so hard
to keep the silence of
a distant observer

i have no knees to fall on
even if i did
the sun hardened soil
would not welcome me back

now i know you've wondered lately
where that snake we found had got to
and i remind you of the park
and couples strolling by we didn't know
that october of coffin brown
before fall turned gold and red
the river's edge so leafy wet
where we screamed each other down

i hoped you hadn't buried yourself
in the gaping yawn of all the seasons
stretched endlessly between us

it's destiny you said
one day to be cradled and kissed by you again

and we will wait 'til green grass yellows
red leaves return to discover love
left buried with the brown and the stream and the snake
or

forget we ever dug any of this dead stuff up

bird on the rain

you told me skin is a death
as well; no voice left,
a painful bone-glue voodoo
would you continue
to fly against a cratered moon
away from love,
the fields and poetry?

would you sleep in
turtle-green seas
in finch blue-clucked sun
if it is a crime to
drown your emotions
conceal the beauty
of the hawks and blood-birthed
autumn leaves
behind your crippled sight

and then we talk again
beneath crushing brick mortar
your outer shell
so unreachable

would you reverse your burning mask,
paper-mouthed black swans swimming
red to unslept migraine electric eyes?

i want to scream 'how would we fly?'
naked and eating green apple words
on chipped old classic sculptures,
riding thumb- altered conversions
of our tiny deaths each time our voices fade

when i am left dangle-limbed in corpse-orchards
on glass edges of your dancing mind
always the dead of  your night

call!
call me out
only then can i fly

and i will come to you:
your bird on the rain
to remove the bloody cotton from your mouth

the strangeness of evening

you ruin them
every sunset i see
is different now
the colors run
while black takes over

i can't determine what sun
caused the moon to wane
what cloud earned the right
to rain just on you

so the war continues

is it any wonder you're afraid
when every beauty you've seen
you smash like an ant

so you can't be followed
into the dark-set of your mind
where the cusp of madness
is never far from the edge

love is the river you see below
yet too afraid to fall
you teeter with precision
while time skydives past

parable

a pillar of salt seems
stronger, sweeter
than a bitter tear
tasted from your mouth

i am not Lot and you
will never change history

scrambling for light

and in the end
time lapses

you fail to
send summer
plummeting to depths
reserved for
the ones with madness
in their eyes
their heart

death is trickier

yellow pauses in a slow leaving

there are ghosts in his sleeping face
bearded and wounded among
the blue and white quilt
coiled around and beneath his
bare legs. they are hungry,
lonely and mute, guarding him
though they tremble, hollow and grey

they grasp dull knives that
slice in his memory
the inconsolable shadows
piercing the quiet, creating
transparent motifs of
blind armies that march
in the lost lamplight of his room

he sees through dreams
in bloated yellow pauses
his trick of mind
begging for warm places;
to root, in which to begin

anything to free him from his loss
the fenced-in loss he feels

he wakes long enough
to look at her, wondering
why he stays

no blood no sin

he writes me
about
the color of sky
about the silence
of the aftermath

the summer storm
full of angry breath
as if hannibal
rode out of clouds
dividing and conquering
while grass flattened
like women, from his fist

no feathers falling from angels
a death
small enough
to hold in my hand

and in this moment
he understands the pain
of being alive

understands the need for it

his sky is
all i see
as i close my eyes

hieroglyphic

would it make a difference if i attempted
to pull sweet frangipani from your eyes
so you could see without the power
of susceptible aroma implanted there
where the cusp of my skin lay hidden

within the igneous face of rock
the fossilized remains of us
would wash open
with
the color of amber

tears from a maddening sunset
a paradise lost like the last of our species
took the river to the open mouth of you

and we kissed each other home

marla singer ruined my trip home

what is fastened to this dying animal
more than the slow, unwilling, inexorable
relinquishment of sex; what pushed her,
what controlled her unstoppable quest
to live so far beneath the surface
i think i heard her scream in certainty
for the first time certain that silence
rode her like a tiger on a bone
lingering, bloody and absolutely sure
death was always the end of things

she smoked poetry, watched the entrails
writhe and disappear into nights blessings
i listen as the clouds impart their weeping
and the philosophers are singing, i feel
the breath of their dreams on my cheek

last night i dreamed about today
the word monday was on the screen
my head was down, i was breathing
i was trying to stay calm, figuring
one day soon you'd talk to me
just as Marla does

will i recognize the real?
the story of how you met your wife
how you broke your teeth on an angel
in the corner of a churchyard
what will we do
when we finally chop it all up

life-
we call it
disappearance
disappearing

black is missing
the red has a point but
nowhere to go

we always thought we'd have more time

i think of that day
i think of the moment you fell
we were nuns and worse,
behind the broken glass
Marla was there, in the background
asking for a word, a better word

she told you, i told you

<i>be a man</i>

petals on a black bough

it's been dark a long time
and i am bathing, scrubbing
with a kind of rage that sees skin
rosy as the bottom of angels
i am twirling my hair, not knowing
what i will remember tomorrow
yet sensing
no one escapes the fire

someone asked,
'have you written about him yet?'
'no' i say, 'no i haven't'

i don't explain that there is
no one to consult and if there were
they'd hurl themselves like drunks
on to knives and spears, rather
than tell me what i need to hear

so this poem is more the scatter of birds
at the unenviable approach of dawn
and i try not to see too much of
the forgeries and desecration's,
or the black snow collecting
on the bottom of my heart

then it's spring, a year since
the divination of us
the road into town smeared with
blood and entrails, and a quorum of crows
crowding around what's left, hungry,
contentious, but to me,
simply driving past, it looks different,
like a blob of gods spit

the phone is in my hand,
i am dialing your number, just to say
where we sleep, isn't necessarily
where we will wake up,
it all depends on what we dream
like your recent reclusiveness
like love, death, etcetera

maybe the complexity of this
combined with tired eyes, driving this far
has made me more restless
or the heat of someone's tears
reminding me that branches burnt
had no purpose for staying put

but it's 2a.m.
i am still alive
every rusty cut burning with
its own peculiar persistence
to give you another season

and the radio is on love-line
just for the company