In Aubergine Ochers

In aubergine ochers I painted your eyes,

And smiles that your smooth lips would wear in disguise.

Eclipsed by the dark of your eyes, are my dreams;

Your words floating round, that my own being sings.

In time I would learn all your body's warm contours,

Or could touch the whole length of your form, sans detours.

I know I must stay very far from your face,

Otherwise I'd devour you, with but one taste.

Let no tears ever fall, from you for me;

I could never withstand that tragedy;

Your pity would turn my world inside-out,

And all self control and discipline rout.

I can safely live here only at distance,

With all your compassion still just a pittance.

Don't lift your hand; don't touch my ice-

Unless you are willing to pay full price.

The moon owns all women

The moon owns all women:                                                                      

We feel it's tautness, as it's pulling us

Into the fertile loam fields, of reproduction,

A year at a time, until high tide finally arrives.

And at birthing time, we can sense it's shadowy silver fingers

Prodding us, wanting us to deliver to it's schedules only;

Like it orders the oceans to and fro, with it's nearness

And animals sense it's fog of breath behind them, urging them on to madness.

At certain times of the month, and it is such an on-again off-again sort,

Either completely out there, or hidden like a thread of light, barely showing 

Through hidden doorways tiny cracks; unwilling to reveal a centimeter more

All the while influencing a million more invisible things we would never associate

At all; and makes one almost willing to believe in astrology's claims.

And once I saw the moon beside your face, and could no longer resist 

It's pulling; and when it told me to go into your arms, I obeyed-

Because I knew it was more ancient and  more powerful, than any of our sawdust brains.

When you first wake up

When you first wake up after sleeping

If you will hold very still,

You will realize that you are holding in your mouth

An exquisite glass form of a dream

Which you have been blowing all night,

With every exhalation forced out

And it is like nobody else's

And has never before been seen;

For each of us is like a kaleidoscope

And we include different layers in our glass,

Taking it all from within ourselves;

The exact parts needed for the form we are making,

Taking the pieces from other dimensions;

Things which might seem untrue in this one,

But are real as we can make them

When our dreaming eyes and fingers

Lift them from our waiting wholeness,

In the night time of our stillness

When we finally become one patent vehicle,

And the dream begins to grow then, like the smallest bubble;

A stained glass fetus of our blooming individuality

Made only for, only by us;

As fragile as any snowflake,

As ephemeral as any memory.

Pyromania

In calculated syllables of uttered exclamations,

Our conjugal baptisms are rife with strange gyrations-

How little we care to confabulate mercurial

Explanations for the desperate conflagrations.

Measured complacency confuses the words,

Mid watery couplings of breath tangled births-

Imagining chance could bear to frame

Or show proclivity for hungry flames.

Test the mettle of my speech,

As the lovemaking twists to turn;

Spare moments of the rare occasion

When I pray just to burn.

Words only are our weighty matters

Words only are our weighty matters of the day;

we carry them about, small piles of stones

boulder-crushed and river-smoothed,

filled with our intention, to build a better bridge

a mightier footpath to the steep,

never-quarryed heart of man.

In devout mumblings,

we ply the rosary-trade of consonant longings;

enchantments we would cast

within the brook and sky;

tricklings of a rare spirit,

we would catch in our hands

Always losing more

than we can hold to,

searching for the stray glint of golden matters

which could buy us more unwinding days in the sun,

to scratch through the leavings,

of mythical streams.

Our bookish souls praying

for an avalanche, an earthquake;

to unloose the nuggets that we would display,

as like a small child, we constantly rearrange our cache

looking for an alignment;

a magic spell, that can conquer all.

questions haunt the waking man

questions haunt the waking man

in the blazing air of morning,

his breath the needle piercing blood;

red rhythms of the glass-bored voice of night.

change has devoured yesterday's laughter,

drunk slowly the ghostly desires broken free

as the killing universe listens, each wild-born day

and beats naked life, with a lingering kiss of decay.

I pray to no one-

I pray to no one-

Though once, I confess to worshipping a rock;

It seemed far older, than any god that I had true proof of existence

I scrubbed it gently with a toothbrush, perfumed and powdered it

(well so what, if those were all my favorite things;

isn't god just supposed to be a larger, matinée version of ourselves?)

And I knew a Malaysian man

Who said he used to worship a nail
protruding from the bathroom wall,

Where he would bend down and prostrate himself before it

While brushing his teeth, performing his morning absolutions;

As somehow it seemed to satisfy his requirements

Of a god, who for once perhaps

Was not afraid to humble himself, before his subjects.

Colors on a Butterfly's Wing

It's an untaught art and solo maneuver

Time elapsed auto ejection,

Parachuting us upwards:

Everyone on the planet knows how to die.

The breathing slows down, in opposition

To childbirth's heavy panting,

The lovers ragged gasping.

Like trained sprinters, we know by instinct

When to slow the pulse

Like yogis on the nail bed

When to stop moving, stop reacting

Our irises, black camera shutters opening

On that other vista as, newly born

We unfurl at the other end

Of the silver cord

Unfettered there

No longer dashing our foot

Casting off the old receptacle

We stretch, push and pull ourselves into

Previously exotic dimensions.

Everyone knows instinctively

How to slip out the birth canal

And how to slip the bands of body.

In our genetic makeup lies the DNA

For all the colors on a butterflies wing

And perhaps for the secret of flight

Once we leave the chrysalis behind.

That day you opened up your veins

That day you opened up your veins

We thought you were trying

To give away your soul to us

So we might have left you there too long:

No one wanted to disturb

All that pretty, florid richness, bubbling out

And it left a beautiful paisley imprint

As looking out, through your stained glass,

We could see the world bleeding out too:

Division, disappointment, greed;

Great running rivulets, of time's acid bath

But we've sugar-coated it over now

Sliding around, falling over each other

Touching our fingers, to our mouths,

Never sure who's stinging fire of blood

We're tasting; there's been so many since-

Even the fountains spray blood now,

Like wine, of the new transmutation;

And sitting rulers bathe in it,

Hoping for good luck, eternal life, balance of yin and yang,

Your name, as magic eight ball, lucky rabbits foot;

While we slink around, fingers to our lips

Waiting for the day your blood finally finds it's voice

And begins to scream out loud.

Words We'll Never Say

I glow hot dust in vaunted byways of time;

Sing, fly my crashed divinity, to lonely mountain highs

Stray-syllabled tambourines, washed up on salty oceans

I pull, push, grasp at life, while swayed by false emotions

Human to the core, I machine-wave fickle brain;

Photographic ironies of the soul, forgotten brave

Breathe through scorching lungs, the holy sensate gases

Colder still the epitaphs of anomalous trespasses

Muscles unhinged, and eyes stealing light from day

Derail the tongue's perimeters, with words we'll never say.

In ritual evil gets it's ego stroked

In ritual, evil gets it's ego stroked;

Fires attended in brassy censors,

Choking on expensive foreign smoke;

Incense from a dead god's pagoda.

Evil lives because we do not mind it;

We find it necessary to find a balance:

A world half in fire, and half in ice;

Good and evil held in a chalice.

In evil, man gets his karma coded;

Fires which started in his spinning core.

All his idols and statues got melted

So he sits and stares at a tattered mandala:

Though meditation gave him indigestion,

And worry beads worried too much.

He's not the sort to mind temptation;

He sits to wait for emancipation.

In man, abstraction has reached it's limit;

He's the whole world, and it's in him.

Enlightenment comes in a single minute;

His mind like wispy smoke spiraling upwards,

For questions always are answer seeking,

And answers elusive as desert rain:

The freedom you seek was never in death,

But free and invisible, as each breath.

Locus Quero

Proof of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki inheritance:
Darkened shadow people burned onto sidewalks-
So unbelievable that living beings could turn
Into mere shades of what they once were.
But what about all the insubstantial, missing people
Still occupied within themselves: in nursing homes,
And asylums; and in cold, tingling
Elixirs with the foreign sounding names in sculpted bottles?
They can’t subside into the sidewalks
Or penetrate through stoney walls.
Breathing’s all that keeping them fixed in place here.
Straight-jacketed and handcuffed,
Hallucinating in abject self-annihilation,
They stumble through my dreams at night,
Their shifty eyeballs come unhinged,
Leaning against me dropping excuses, justifications;
Bumbling unexcusedly, over my rapid eye movements,
Prisoners always seeking an escape valve,
An outlet, a detour to anywhere but home.
Maybe in the next world too 

They will still be hunting for the exit signs. 

Maybe I will be the pied piper there, too;
So that they will keep following me because they think
That I know something about travelling,
And paths and destinations.
But they would be fools.

magician hat trick

consonant memories travel superstition's highway;
their rhythms trembling in holy delirium
where the fleshly ghost wears eternities rags,
dancing away time, on insanity's altars.
while dawn is a slave to drunken sunlight,
the magician is baptized by tears of forgiveness.
as the heavens dream of a wicked salvation,
and disordered longings condemn a prisoner to life,
everything vanishes in the blink of an eye.