dedicate your life to charity and a pocket ful of roses
drink some absinthe by the winters snowing of what is billowing
you drink to forget and forget to drink
again, and dancing in the streets
and walking nude out on the lanes
and a mother with plans and they have plans
for your mother, and they sink their teeth
into your father and they break the knees of
your sister because this is what it is all about,
it was just the old story of power the old window
where they lost their way.

charles violet's angle was that anyone could become a star,
he told me how to play, well, and that is how i've got this far
but know that the engines of mercy only extend to the gracious,
know that the engines of mercy only extend to the good because
religion was built as a means for community survival and it's
not just a joke after all, because when charles violet had me
at the table, he raped my soul with law. XOX

Bring the television to idle mercy,
and sing old familiar songs,
eat wine and drink bread in verses
and see that you are wrong.
That the elocutions of physics are
not in the laws, but in the quantum
flaws.

Misery is a butterfly, or so they tried to say
but I have known sweet misery that delegates roses
on your biggest day. So cut the crap and align yourself
with the stars and with the moon, you're at the mercy
of psychopaths and you can't get away too soon.

the cities

Artistic leanings towards the open door,
i've been wandering through paint canvases
and spelling my name with a horsehair brush
on the doorsteps of the ungrateful, of the malignant
and it frightens sensibilities, well the problem is
that you have to look within to see that who
you are is a projection on others sometimes
upon a tattered movie screen, and the trick
is to recognize who you truly are, but most
people won't because they find themselves
dreadful, or they find themselves inartistic.

But place my violin upon your brow with
its resonating chambers that lock silence
in your ears, place my pen across your wrist
because sometimes people should understand
that artistic leanings are for their benefit,
and sometimes people should understand
that artists and musicians are better left alone.

Gibberish, sweet and supple nonsense, call
me upon thine lips with subtle grace, the grace
that easily erases all that you've done.

Heliocentric spinning wheels on the top of candied towers,
eloquent helicopters losing gasoline and certain
fluctuation of uncontrollable hours, why don't
we have a nice time for once? People are too
concerned about power, it hurts them sometimes,
and I don't mean to be wishy washy but let
me tell you the truth.

lkjaslfiwe woaieur a oa oeiroiadjmn aoiuewoi a
oaiueroia nfnsaoieuiora awoieurnn ouawer u
nodasfuouera
asfi
aweriou
oauoeirn oajousad aoweiurn aouenjd
ouoeaeu noiaueoir aoiweurnajnsd

our bodies are exposed as the sky spills through our mouths

people are too controlling and manipulative for their own good,
and it is going to crash down upon them in ways they can't fathom.
I had an old friend wind up in the hospital, I know that the people
around me are completely crazy and are going to all end up in the
mental institution if they don't start flying right and being something
besides the venner of themselves that is controlling.

i, like vonnegut, have given up faith in humanity
i no longer want anything to do with it,
i am barely human, i think they made my heart too large
for the world, i think they made me too big for the rest
of people who have tried to cut me down in the past
because they percieved me as better than them,
because i am a musicain, writer, and artist.

Fuck you people. I'm done with all of you.

keyboards and computers clicked,
they have been trying to interrupt my writing
and all i get are cigarettes and coffee,
it is unfair and doesn't have to be like this,

dance pale moonlight over the fingers of the
betrayers, over the windows of computers
that would have us less than ourselves,
show them who they are.

fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and the fucking brat

Eloquent betrayal with girls securing drugging lips
like adaptive lizards scuttling in the dry grass
through the harbor edges. But the delicate touch
is still delicate, the over-bearing touch is beyond
belief, and the instruments of debasement are not
effective when you know their nature.

All lines point to power,
all people dream of cheating,
and all people do is fuck themselves
because I got what I have
because I didn't want it.

And the reason why
is delicate and over-bearing,
it took a lot of courage and a lot
of love, and now we have neither
in these auspices of control named
after fanciful things; pearls, diamonds,
love's equation.

The cold grass dampens with darkened night
and the moon is hidden behind clouds like
a dagger in its hilt, no more will it illuminate
the vespers of trecherous women,
and no more will the sun beam intelligence
to the most controlling of men.

It is like I had a dream of you
and you turned into the opposite,
dear reader, it is like you were never
there.

dancing for a pile of change which her feet rearranged,
Jane made it through the bottles of beer and sang a dream
without delay, the dream of love against seductive oppression,
the dream of life in a time betrodden by sweet decay that
comes from lover's lips like a darkened melody.

singing this melody:

As time moves around, the stolid sky falls down with licks
of flaming water, seeming darkened ire. Pick up, where you
drank of singing things, pick up where you left off.

Find me here, among the words you placed,
find me here, among the humiliation in their disgrace.

shadows of empire

Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
your friends all wear knife smiles and your
family thinks you're crazy for singing when
the cage has wound its tight mesh about your
life. Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
the television stays the same and the movies
are all violent, they put you at odds with humanity
in order to steal your source.

Yes, living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
they put truth on sale in the form of lies,
there is poison in your food and they put
poison in your milk, they make it look like
a utopia if only so that the beauty kills you,
and the police are on to someone in the declared
silence of acts, and the police are onto you and have
been onto me, in the silence of acts. They
are waiting for you to fuck up, they are waiting
for you to act out, they are waiting patiently
but they know they can't win, which is how the
story goes, they know they can't win because
they are deeply paranoid about every person
because the thing about living in a fascist
dictatorship is that it has no power, that is
the truth, that it is all internalized by the masses
in the form of media, movies, magazines, and
the internet, that is the truth and don't you
dare call me a liar.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you get away from your family, it is easy living
when you get away from false friends, it is easy
living and breathing and singing and making
collect calls when they try to find you to tell them
how much you hate them for what they have
done to you, and it is easy to leave, just don't
forget that.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you have forces of nature on your side, it is
easy living in a fascist dicatorship when you
knew how to escape a mental hospital, and it
is easy, way easy when you know secrets kept
veiled behind false temple doors.

It is a fascist dictatorship, this, what we call
home, this is a fascist brothel, there is a fascist
supermarket, and there is a fascist bar where
all the drunks try to cut you down, and there
is fascism even in our love, sometimes.

i want an ice cream cone

The truth is a difficult thing to say,
who's truth, what truth, what place's truth
but I can say it because I have known truth
by the very lips of your lies;

Time flies but aeroplanes crash,
lies die and sparrows find bounties of cash
unappealing unless they are sealed with love.

I am just a man who's stumbled so many times
that people started picking him up,
I am just a man who's brain made a leap
in the scales, I'm just a man, just a man
who delicately changed things, if only for
a moment.

What is so interesting about the government
and corporations is that they waste money
on nothing, they are inefficient infrastructures,
they would hunt down the last scrap of filth
just to say they owned it, they would hunt
down you just to say they owned you
well, they think everybody has a price
but they don't know the wisdom behind
the saying, what is the most priceless thing
in the world, the head of a dead cat

angel wings curled around golden hand with locks of hair intertwined in painted fingertips
our cold alcohol lived across the bar sign and told us in sweet dewdrops that love whispers
in the air, our dreams gathered and some of them shattered but we both grew stronger
seperate as two, we both grew stronger than any one knew because they were too busy
with their looks to bother asking about us, the simple trust we had could not be denied
through the years of manipulative strings unwound for us, but cherished by us, us last
of the lovers, truly caught in pencil without calculation, true fraught with angels singing
screams of torrid destiny about our ears, our destiny which we take as our own.

And we gathered flowers in the meadow where the fire of the sunset blared its trumpets
with the articles of joy.

post-atavism

Who was there to see me walk out?
Someone who wished me upon my way,
Someone who knew of the dark decay in quiet cocaine
Of the spirit, the aimless traveling down the lines in
The middle of the road amid barren wastelands built
Up with fast food icons, apartment prisons, and contrived
Songs manufactured for public radio, someone who
Knew the quotation of the heart, written in scriptures
Succinctly quixotic in order to keep out the fakers
Of the heart except for its shadows. What friends
Have we ignored?

The ones who gave us cigarettes upon our traveling,
The ones who gave us encouragement when our lives
Were unraveling, the ones who bought us drinks and
Softly clinked their glasses with our tear-stained pints
At life’s discovery, that you are dead in some kind of
Disasterous hurricane called the vortex of the world,
That you began to live when you bought your first
Book on the heights of clouds caught traveling like
Dragon’s breath upon the sky’s gentle karafe of cream
All wound up in your mind’s eye like some gentle
Fragments of a mirrored dream.

And we wonder what true love is, well, sometimes
We don’t notice until its too late like our gentle
Happiness, fleeting only because we made it that way.

People try to help but they are like static on the picture frame,
You don’t always understand them but only their motives,
Like when a man with a fake name called me and asked me
To play the violin. His name was Charles Violet, he bought
Me tickets to the city scene, but some one else was interfering
After they had already lost out on the shape of a tyrant’s seat.

And the secrets have been locked out, the secrets locked within,
All the secrets spilled across the cities gout because they wanted
Me to bleed like a dead violin, well you think this is just egoism,
But it’s more than just belief, well you think this is just selfish,
But my friend, you have to believe. Well, you think they will
Win, but my friend there is no game you can’t rig, and you
Think they are joking, but they are afraid because you always win.

So sing with me again, this quiet song that seems sad if only for
People who have never felt that way, the ones who are too happy,
The ones who visit the graves of their dead relatives with a smile
On their face. And sing with me again, make us become we again,
And sing of our faces that truth shined upon instead of disgrace,
And sing of our battles that end with this play, and sing of our
Laughter that brings the applause of the summer rain.

Los Angeles Is Yours

Precious artifacts on tapestry carpet unfurled, glittering silver suns
Arrayed on articulated vine embroidery where the desert meets
The audience of the sea. Building towers pointing at her in the
Golden sun’s hours, foundations burgeoning beneath stone’s
Weight unfurling while gravity holds them down. And
The treasures are arrayed in the maze of mazes, all threads
Raveled in a patchwork quilt’s traveling on the back of
An articulate bum. Seashore bazaar in the suburbs, all
These wives and their murderers are driving down the
Hours of their black employment sitting in their broken seats.

The trumpets calling elephants from beyond the boulders
Locked in mountains, Hannibal’s army marches upon
This desert town. All the worries of this frail city hurried
Towards the spark that would burn it down.

Here I lay in the street’s enclave,
Women screaming, children singing
And men rushing with rifles to the edge
Of her ancient frown. Dionysus locked
In castles, see him turn his jailer’s key around.
Someone’s laughing, someone’s choking,
Someone’s breaking the wrought iron gates
Down to save Persephone, to save this city,
To break the spiral inset and working like
An oil drill through slate and down.

View the sparrow’s flag flapping from the hotel’s balcony
View the ships blown like errant gears across the floor of the ocean’s surface
View the giant fuck up with a shallow button connected to Frankenstein’s
Electronic neck, see the fire billow freeways into slate dust and chrome flakes.
View the ancient paintings metaphorical with flowers lost upon the lake, floating
Like billowing sailboats painted with watercolor sails, view the shorthand curse
Scratched upon the halls of the Navy, and view the hopeless barren street with
Investment bankers sprawled out, choking on their ties.

You are the summer, my quickly seated lover, fired in my breast.
You are the summer, my articulated brother, toasting for your best.

Aircraft pointing at frail architectures, windows billowing with flames splattered
Across the edges of Sunday, hearing damaged and black aircraft with no advantage
Shooting bullets at the cargo trains as they chortle by.

Oh hunger and violins
We fall into stars with both of us laughing,
We are what we see, the svelte accommodations
Of clothing’s posture, we’ve howled through
Night and burnt like magnesium through the day.
We’ve made our own shapes from the earthen clay
And been blown kisses from the slimming wind.

Candles and lanterns, campfires and natural desires,
Let me explain the calendar lies bought by the police
That told you a false year, that sold you a fear.
Let the candles begin, let the lanterns singe the
Fringes of darkness.

And I was born under the same star that you knew,
The one that pollution couldn’t block out
The one that shone in our eyes when we walked out.

marine loves flying windage flags in a woman's hair

darling, with your violin sounds falling around your hair
and the summer gently laughing with the breeze of the sea,
they are telling us to be you and me. We felt our way
with braille treasure maps through the dark of disease
where the streams converged into rivers named after circles
spelled with flames. And with this camera you've brought
to the shoreline, the paintings of photographs will catch
your lipstick grin as it blooms above the bone of your chin.

And in the bay of their shadows, we drank lights emerald glee
we told off the TV and got a reprieve, so sing with your instrument
all the lessons you've learned, play with your language and
create health from disease.

See the curtains climb with sunlight at the end of the day
and with the moon's lantern we will go traveling until
the eerie morning undoes night's unraveling, when it's time
to pack up, when it's time to make up, when its time to break
up with our anchors stuck in the watercolor sea.

Follow the fins interlacing with the sea's lucent marine wind,
flow with what's within, all that water begins to turn into
harmony, the harmony from your violin chin. So kiss me with
sequence, and sing that we'll win, bow me with melody and
trill me with sin.

infamous battle in the unspoken war

The flags all drawn taut from my fingertips
like canopies over our belief, watch them billow
with the wind that cruised through temples and
graveyards, that knew of curses in its delicate yarn.

Swords raised like pens across the field of white,
our mercy leaves only with our light, the drummer boy
sings in the awful breeze that peace is just a callow dream.

They made too many mistakes with me upon the brow of the ravine,
they tried to kill me with a dagger and let my body bleed
all over the mossy green rocks while the skies watched
and the stars blew angry light aloft as they cursed me even
upon my death bed instead of saying goodbye.

Tired scenes of wartime revenge, war is just a big revenge
that never ends until they fuck up, until they lock up
the edges of the wrong person's neck in the torture coil.
See them living now, burning down the houses where light
left like an old perfume, see us raise our swords across
their eyes with vibrant steel luminous with the deafening
music of lightning's thunder, our lives aligned with weather's
best friend and the purpose of our lives.

Those who give no mercy expect it most of all,
like some terrible child eating the bones of his best friend,
they try to call us from down the hall to watch them slurp
in verses of cannibal appraisment, well I want nothing to
do with it all.

Fire bough ribboned across the horizon, we scorched their armies
with our Greek fire and bought their wives with our vanities
at the end of tragedy.

And the martyrs can win, the saints have all been like whispers
in an uncommon wind, while your voice is entrancing, but not with belief.

Say we were once lovers as enemies on the edge of thin shadows
beneath the weeping willow tree
say we had come here
to fulfill our belief
that wonders are common and miracles a relief,
that answers are given like pears from a burgeoning tree.

Massed black armies, aircraft voodoo, battleship drumming,
and gears left in ruins. Banks breaking like curtains upon
the view of a room. Angelic castles unveiled by mist raveling
through the canyon.

The engines of our lost sun are turning in the blackout,
the tanks screeching over rubble are rusting in clockwork
and above all our warfare love is staring after us like
a no-frills billion dollar trust breathing its money
through the autumn air.

How many times have we lived this before?
How many times have we died in trenchs traveling after some coveted disaster, how many coveted disasters shrouded in the siren's fog have we chased after,
how many lips have we forgotten how to kiss with tender promise, how many promises have we forgotten as they fell from our loveless lips again, how many questions are we going to leave hereafter, how many quantities are broken by the general who called
with iron hand and ax
the boulder down upon
bodies struggling like frenetic ants
squirming for survival.

There is always something to hold on to, high upon this hill above the war made of fireballs and charcoal valleys, above the love made of burning hearts and cinder rings, above the decay of infernal lies and dusty catacombs.

I've bent back the angles of grass built beneath trees
with my shallow form that languishes where only shadows
are free. I've seen some new colors when tasting old maths,
and think of you softly next to me upon these cool blades
of grass.

They built an iron cathedral in the city that always sleeps
to worship the blacksmith who designed the reliefs.
And inside the shrine there, they have only a battered
hammer and some beliefs, and inside the pews there
they nailed their parishoners to their seats.

You trembled on the white tile
like a bird inside some hurricane,
they poised their needles like drawn daggers
and broke their teeth upon your knuckles
like porcelain shards in a weather beaten
antique store frequented by sane old folks,
the ones you know that always were broke,
and you called them down from the Tower's
hurricane with the sound of thunder in
your refrains. There's nobody out there,
its just the wind playing with the rain,
there's somebody out there, in the wind
playing with the summer rains.

I see your hands confusing others with the gestures
of wicked stepmothers, I see your eyes all black
with blood and murder minds will start the flood
because I know you are out there,
among the burning theater seats,
I know you went out there
to your father's relief.

Tall black towers raised against the luminous sky
small black hours erased the finer parts of mind.

Here I lay, sword in hand upon the detailed grass,
here I pray, sword in mind, embedded in stained glass.

Call me names, call me promises, call me answered for
in class, call me locked in call me locked out call me
drunk and on the phone, just don't call me winter
after all the sun I've shown.

artaud technique in orwellian thematics, stylized with considerations of miller

sweat with words, dance with verbs and sit on the elegant contours
of thought, because what we spoke was not some ancient gybed rot
but gypsy coronation launched by violin sorrows and filled with
elegant tomorrows.

left our guile at the roadside
when the apocalypse kept coming
and left our smiles in the pictures
where we faked our styles with
understanding guile.

AND THEY SPOKE WITH A SHIVER,
MY ARROWS FULL IN THE QUIVER
SAID LISTEN CLOSE, LISTEN CLOSE,
and they all surrendered.

tomorrow is a process
of what we keep inside
today is the unraveling
of the symbols of outside
and when you caught the bus
you felt with your black suitcase
what you knew to be inside,
a pack of gum and some water pistols,
a balloon inflated and tied to thistles
interlacing with the veins of your left wrist.

You bought out their process
with your thoughts of wine
and drank deeply from the signs
the sirens left upon the rigging line
and built a blooming staircase with
nothing but a few windy leaves left
upon the sky.

Angelic dispensation of certain articulations,
LET NO ONE DEFINE THE "I"

love,
you wrapped your blooming peonies
around my wooden wrist like a heat
of breath upon my skin, and left
me standing here with flowers from
the articulate earth.

I always come back.

You can count on that.

Deliver up an interruption with wild eyes
smoking like summer suns, and pick up a book
evolving with the flower children smoking
in forested glenns and fresh meadows,
deliver up a diversion with dregs of
writing, write me up inside your library,
write them up and call them contrary to that
which you know is a fact.

it was a near death experience

red working grownup tossed with tables beneath lanterns shown up
to cross the angles of where we intersect in geometric development.
Picasso showed up to teach us humanity on a canvas while the Nazis
throw up their hands like counterparts of weapons into the flames
where they burned books, the same flames that overtook their lives.

And angel, all grown up, and divine with catacomb mind, and demons
blown up with ancient holes for darkened eyes. Theology broke up
with love affairs long before we had drank our wine, and tell me
will you grow up and become masterfully inclined?

Because Guernica is slowing up, pictured in relief across the borders
where the winds caress the disease of nationality, where we bend our
spoons on prison bars and break up sweet releases of shadows, the darkened
worn out depletion they call getting ahead while going beneath.

Water is poisoned with someone's hiccups,
darkened clouds burgeon beneath flags shored up
to make it seem like the country allied with belief.

I am not a messanger, I am not what showed up,
I am wordly worn out with a kingdom torn out
of tissue patchwork strengthened with iron framework,
I am darkly light out and burning holes in ancient
ceremonies with sunlight's soft relief.

You are defined by grown-ups, you who would leave
to dark cities, you who believe in light as allied
with belief. Break chains with plastic knives and
steal links to casual times in the boardgame of
some earthen memory.

And how language blows up, grows out of what showed up,
is undiminished by the writer or the reader, but drinks
from slight rivers returning our wellspring in incrimental
dribbles down our cheeks, well some call it crying and some
think they're dying, but life is beginning with what rustles
from beneath the frightening scrape of decaying leaves
for beneath the morass lies sprouts of answers, lies the soft
scrubbing of willow bones placing polyp leaves in the skies
conspiracy, in the truth of motive, in the delivered show
where the honor remained strong even among the worst of thieves.

Candles blow out simple light now, but billowing sheets cast
their vespers across the cathedral of the sky. Ancient memories
of childhood break out, and now we seem to know what we believe.

traintrack hopscotch, ancient hide and seek

watch the rust coral train roll in,
they got my number a long time ago
only they don't know what it could mean
without me standing here beneath the precious
stars rolling in behind the cloud's water
stretched thin like gingham over the hips
of the luscious grin of night turned sober
when you walked in, you in your chiffon
dress made with ginger leaves and spicy
sin, all drawn out like a car accident
that you would win.

And we turn to faces we know as petals
kept in scrapbooks thrown in the nettles,
which they make soup from and boy, is it
ever thin, this rationing of the soul
in oil drums splattered with rainbow residue
and all our engines waiting to begin,
how we travel in days left beside the station's
barb wire fences electrified from within
their tensile strength wound with rapture
of control's decadent and solitary sin,
the apportioning of what goes outside
and what stays locked away and in.

but you escaped through boxcar floorboards
to be with dandelions spreading their ashes
in seeds like eyelashes across the veldt
of blue that burgeons with the iris of eyes
fading with laughter and leaping after
traces of the sunlight hidden behind the
mountains ashtray building skyscraper
sillouetes across this disaster, the
ever-loving structure of Babel's hereafter
when armies raise their cries.

My dedication is not to manipulation
and my dedication is not to inquisition
and my dedication is learning to pledge
itself to certain honest dispositions.

And my confession takes place in silence
with my lips moving in mutters that could
be construed as the curses of a mother
tangled with the wires of control.

The dandelion bursts like a star across
your face blowing winds you never conjured,
and feel intent in manifold angelic answers
filling the cathedral of your ribs
with the questions you ask after you die.

Seems like tarot flicked across your summer
the wings of some virginal mansion set
upon the sky, you who came from traintracks
traveling through Dachau, who came in
breaths stammering like machine gun bullets
drowning out the dogs. You who stood up,
you have made up your bed in whispers falling
like rain from the sound of thunder, the
flash of lightning burnt into your cheek
like a sunset horizon, fast and filled
with streaks.

Drink your valleys, unfurl your grace with
conspiracy eyes and tell them why you hate
them, what they have done inside your eyes.
Tell them like a mountain, tell them
like a landslide, tell them like the sound
of a train going deep within.

when they found me i was skeletal with dreaming
engineered along the lines of what they were fearing
broken cornfields, ash of perfume
dark red night and golden love room.

when they found you you were like me
alive and beating but somewhat drowning
in the cornfields where the wetlands found me
drinking absinthe and softly frowning.

engines roaring through all gasoline
prices soaring for even libertines
and broken roses on their doorstep
meant nothing but the curse of mortality.

wishes come in shapes and sizes
beggars ride with cardboard matches
and pigs will fly when the world is turned
around thee, upside down and softly falling.

the zither player featuring no real zither player

And the silver bracelet dangled from the wrist like a limpid crescent crossing the powerlines of blood vessels, which coursed rivers of current through your very being like a power plant, illuminating your body and freeing you of the darkened ships of terror that wander like pirate ships through the blood, like viruses and bacterium.

When you bought the necklace you didn’t think of it as a gift, only as a mere token, but it became your wedding band to the spirit of light enveloping the very sun that shows us the moon in such replete detail as to make its presence felt within our lives on summer nights adorned with the gems of fireflies.

Now you wear the necklace as a bracelet and it fashions you from silver into gold, sweet queen of the Mississippi who captained riverboats and threw drunken thugs into the paddlewheel, you were so dead on.

Now you carry a six-shooter under your belt and heft its weight when you walk down the block, all that murderous power pressed into your hip like some kind of wicked daydream that has shown you the edge of murder without actually being there, that has shown you how death is love as well as life, the sad qualification of those of us who know too much about the way concealment works and the way that things are misinterpreted by people who do not know us very well. They thought I had a pistol, I only had a squirt gun.

And you protected me, laid down covering fire with sweet supple kisses across my brow that would make angels sing themselves into existence, those bejeweled creatures that always show up when we need them because they understand, those of us who have become too large for our respective roles, my angel.

In the South it was really hot. In the South they shot people for sport and called them accidents. Well we were wise and congradulated good shots but in our hearts reviled them, my little Southern queen from the last of the liberals, from the last of the lovers.

And eloquent drawings bespoke our cartoonish natures, the postures we adopted with cigarettes and smoking views that made other people cough, the kind of ideologies that you spit out were you ever to look down the barrel of a gun.

Tell me your work now, tell me what it is that you truly do when you are relaxing and doodling upon piles of paper the color of some monochrome sunset, the color that we dreamed into eternity with the pale vespers of our mind’s forfeiture, our dreams that became memories, our desires that became memories, and our memories that became us.

the purple washes over the delicate petals of flowers with permanance of light
she answers me with clipped meanings carrying the weight of an oak tree
and I see light in the leaves because she let me read her fortune,
she let me peer into her like a golden urn and to her glory there were not ashes
inside but a room for two draped in red and couches of glowing velvet.

she lifted the net.
now all i see is open water skirting in fanned blades of wake for flying fish,
all i see is wide ocean swimming towards us, depths unconcealed though they are beneath our gorgeous flight, where they shot at us before their weapons have jammed with seawater, where they threw stones before their arms are heavy from trying to keep afloat.

and dadelus says to build your own wings this time, for you are no icarus, that, and i know you like a kindergarden friend painting circles with an orange brush on cheap art paper with a smile on his face, saying it is the sun, it is the sun.

drink languid earth from the grounds of coffee and set your wings to the arch of the sky, become who you were born to be, leave all this fettered mess behind. were they so great to you truely? What have they done to your music, to your song, when you sang in the sandy prison yard, did they not stone you too?

i have their marks upon me, but they are only marks and not secrets or destinies. make it so that they don't understand you when you guide the arrow into their hearts, because that will make it easier than explaining. That will make it easier to leave, my love, and that is what we are all set on doing with our lives,

making it easy to leave.

the raven's call matched our fall with a precision instrument
the color of a feather casted down on the sidewalk in a refutation
of our fates and an acceptance of our destinies.

You mean you still don't know?

We were born for each other on this pale blue world
that revolves like a supple dewdrop corkscrew-wise
around a glowing vine that we know as the sun's
gravity, all fire and light and sight in the dim void
of spacious emptiness.

and we drank our wine from oak cups until our wooden
mouths were stained with the blush of blood's slash
which made us more than human, made us intoxicated
with the gentle oceans of liquour pulling at us
as if we were boats in the tides.

engines speak no more, they are buried beneath the earth
in coffins made for machines and the dark night of yesteryear
has been absolved in the starlight of the new moon,
invisible lest you be an astronomer or a astrologer,
concerned with pulls of tidal current and darkened
spheres influencing our watery lives with the touch
of gravity's love.

Do not betray me any further. You only betray yourselves.

I came here to instruct you about the truth of beauty,
I came here to be true and beautiful with you
and you lock me away for safe-keeping like a rotting
peach, thinking that I may be fragrant and yet ever
delicious upon my return. Well I will tell you
that I hate your acts but I do not hate you,
for you may be foolish with wine and wise with money
but you are neither when it comes to me.

and in vespers of twilight we raise our penitent heads
to the celebration of our lives that lost its cliches
and in the tides of revenge we refuse what isn't ours,
namely a hatred longing for an artificial completion
that is never obtained, but burns down what is you
in flames bedecked with flames.

remember to wake
remember,
remember my friends
who you were when you were sober
remember who you were when you
were older
remember who you were when you
walked down the street in those cute boots
to deliver a message to the landlord saying
that you didnt feel like paying rent this month
because his services had been less than adequate
and remember who you were
when you stood up to your father
and remember who you were
when you bathed yourself in laughter
and remember you were and you will
become who you are supposed to be
mainly a memory with all this secret history
mainly a melody with all this open euphony
mainly a medley of all the sweetened symphonies
mainly a memory, mainly a symphony.

wartime love letter

and the accordian played with revelry during the despairing war
where children ate shoe leather and dead soldiers still sent letters
post-dated to their loves that had endlessly wintered with the nocture
of gunfire and guerilla reprisals. next, the girl on stage had an astonishing
youth you only find in the fraily beautiful, the kind of youth that reminded
one of sparrow bones, it was so light and fragile. she could have been a mother,
but for us her voice was virginal, trilling like a master violin and lulling us
into somnolence in front of our whiskey glasses that we forgot how to drink during
her song.

they broke into the temple and stole all the candlesticks, they painted swastikas
on top of our altars and forced us to use their own magic, the vile disgusting blackness of dark hearts labors, locked in dead literature like a starving parakeet, pecking at the paint on the bars with a hook beak. and our temples remained open all through the murders, the war brought murders and the war brought famine, we were lucky if we were dead.

but the girl sang, frail Europa locked like a nightengale in the foilage, chirping raw swollen melodies of loss like a desperate mother bird looking for her eaten young.

nobody applauded, we who's backs had been worked in and whos breath labored under the strain of poor cigarettes, we who danced yesterday but cried today at the sad fact that there is no real description of loss or warding it off, that it comes upon you in the form of a frail innocent deer trying to rouse feelings of beauty and diminishes only when you diminish in its stead, like a candle blowing out its own light.

the war continues, the unspoken war and the televised war, which are two different wars.

tomorrow night they will have a jazz band filled with negroes who barely escaped New Orleans with their lives, who found spare solace in the breasts of kind brothers that took them into their houses. there are few of them left, both true brothers and true musicians.

there are few of us left. you know this isn't a lie.

i still have crayon pictures from the days when children played boardgames in the hallways, when adults still seemed kind and guileless, when porches were still being built on houses, when every house had a bookcase. Are they lies or are they what you call history? Are we the history of defeat, of courage, of bravery, or of the common heroism that locks itself in the soul like a chain that cannot be broken, the disperate element of individuality that stands up for individuality, and the breaking of molds for the sake of liberty sometimes, sometimes for the sake of survival.

I could love you, but you could never love me. Love exists only when it is first. And I would be second to you. I know this because you have got to put yourself first, above all and else. And that is the way it is. That is the way it has been for awhile, the way of the world's machines building themselves in our selfishness like invading armies destroying the sequence of the night's silence with gunpowder, occupations, and murder rooms where they torture you and your family because you were not well liked in your town.

I hope you are well liked.

message from dadelus

You, tired dogs, breaking boughs with the Morning Star,
Was there not clock-time that caught you working upon
The speckled branches of your living dreams? How does
Your slavery compare to your fantasy, do you indeed relive
Work year after year, and call relatives in hell to tell them
About what you have been doing with pride and fastidious
Details interlaced with the quick lies of apothecaries promising
Solace, but delivering poison.

There is no doubt about where you are. Do not deceive others
With your flecked little currents of words which deliver pale
Messages in the form of beauty’s illusion, made for decay and
Sealed into appearances. We are not appearances, we are existences,
Piled upon experience and set to motion like clockwork in an
Organic frame. Where we are is not our choice. Where we go is.

So be ever billowing with the splendor of traveling wings, carrying
Light song and unintelligible melodies. For like your circumstances,
You have fallen, but now you know the difference between it and flight.
Curtail your earthen attachments and dwindle to frail sky with the opening
Of the window you kept locked through the winter for fear that the wind
Would catch your wings. You are free now, there in your prison, you are
Liberated in your hell, so become like your being and fly, fly up towards
The drafts of the North that promise so much more flight, be ever going
With the sweet lift of strawberry winds and vanilla zephyrs. Do not be
Afraid, fear will stone you with regret.

The dead are new and you are quiet, listless in your grave
Where the flowers conspire to pull out your wires and
Place you gently into grace.

Only trust the Gypsy boys who carry their instruments
In cases slapped with stickers of where they’ve been,
The boys who are quiet but for their musical talents,
Who are quiet with even their hands.

And the engines that are pulling you down have
Always been around, they’re named after civilizations
That have been buried by their own mechanics.

Green lights are golden in the winter windowpane,
We laugh at Christmas like we sob at Easter,
Well come on cherished friends, we’ll meet each other
In the end when we fight and fly, we’ll fight and fly
Beside each other now, we’ll break these ankle chains
They’ve fastened to gravestones. It’s time we’ve began

To dance, to sing, to bring bird song into the funeral
Homes where the dead can’t cry because they sell
Coffins and ash urns for poor mannequins molded in
Waxen articulations the color of slaveships. And let
Us laugh and cry, and touch our tongues to the ice cream
Of the sky because time is a fake now that you’re awake
Because you saw the lake where the ancients drank their
Strength from, you’ve loved and been lightly free of gold.

Only trust the Gypsy girls who’s skirts are like patchwork
Quilts unfurled in the wind to dedicate sovereignty to a
Nation of color, a nation sewed together with pulsating
Fingers reaching across the soft fabrics of ourselves.

And drink up, my gentle friend, tonight we’ll die and
Tomorrow we’ll be born again, forgetting about it all.

no stranger to this, and then some slight return

The language of flowers glows with light
Around the cradled hands of mysterious women
Sowing petals of thought with green thumbs
Wrapped around fuzzy vines glistening with
Diamond drops of dew, intertwining their arms
To the center of the Earth with coded demarcations.

And the engine of depravity reaps dead petals,
Its gears gorge upon decay but choke and have
To be redesigned every time a machine part breaks.

This is the reality of gardening, love tenderly
Escorts petals into brilliant swatches of paint
Played out towards the sky while the dull mechanics
Of corporate farmers mangle utility plants until
Profit is lost, until their engines rust with oil flakes
And water decomposes even the most extensively
Engineered part, like a frail ally burning the teeth
Of gears in a combine.

My lady curls with unfurling magnolias and has
Wrapped a bouquet of forget-me-nots around
Where my crown used to lie, once heavy and sullen
With dead metal. Garlands are more sensible
For summer, she told me, crowns are endless winter
Locked in sharp perfume.

And the snakes will lie among the rosebushes,
Searching out immortality amid confused
Significations, because after all
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose;
Few people understand that, and snakes
Certainly don’t understand anything which
Is why one lived in a tree in the Garden of Eden,
Only a confused scaly wraith would live where
Branches blend fruit into quiet mouths awed
With the power of taste, eyes awed with pulsating
Flowers blooming and billowing in the sharp
Sunlight that tells us about colors,
While snakes, they know no color beyond
Vibration, much like certain scientists.

And the eloquent gardens speak in languages
You can’t count on your ear to hear, my lady
She whispers names into my hair like a bird
Tying bows of peonies into the tangled weave
Of my feral mane.

rhyme and room, dime perfume

Answer me in solemn dream
the color of a loner's coat
and I will question you
as to why life grew rude
in the hills above the
castle's moat.

we seem to try against
what is heavy, and fail
sometimes like Southern
levies, hurricaned across
the nation in a secret
car this side of maybe.

and answer me with bright
perfume my question on
the emotional dimensions
of a teak-stained room,
is it nostalgic, artful,
or prolific? Are it's
dimensions sequenced in
the abstracti0ns of
numerical alphabets, or
do we get to choose?

With cunning eye, you
begin to lie and I catch
you at every truth, saying
that the world is fire
and so is desire, well
only if you are paying
for the proof.

cadence of my desires,
whisked like patchwork leaves
through the eddying alleys
and torn by sharp footsteps
leaning on the walls of
the Everystore; it takes
money to lose money.

collage the nighttime
like summer's end just
going in frail directions
the colors of autumn, golden
with auburn embroidery fringing
the edges of sullen trees.

we've learned our lessons here,
our lessons we kept bare, our
teachings we tried to share
but for the idiot noise of
radio mouths manufacturing
consentual contracts between
prostitute and businessman.

Do not be fooled by looks,
feel into things with a heart's
leaning the way you fell into
your first kiss with your
second girl, it was like falling
and being caught at the last
minute. this is how you feel
across the world, this is
how you desire to dream in
autumn's ribbons unfurled
like dusky eyes closing in
sensual agreement, a lazy
sex brought with time and
essence, these patchwork
memories pasted across the
plaster, these delicate
moments kept and lost like
fluttering ribbons of contextual
newspaper clippings, enveloping
the logos of Everystore.

bella nocturne

We drink from gilded roses, claimed to be famous
if only in order to get into the fancy restaurant.
After all, we are alive and cognizant of our golden
flowers as they bloom over the events of our experience,
rustling in the raindrops and illuminating the sky
with the reflection of some holy sun.

They serve us bread and wine, and we are grateful,
you smile and flit your hair from out of your eyes
and I lean my head in close to whisper something
imaginative about nightengales, how they signify
the coming of a storm or the beginning of good luck
or both, flitting across the horizon at dusk.

You are so kind, I say, to listen to me talk like
this, I think anybody else would lock me up, because
they have locked me up, and you frown but with
a knowing understanding called empathy that is
rarer these days than gilded gems, rarer than
cheap oil, almost a fossil of life itself.
Have some more wine, you say, and relax.

There is no need for a dinner, the tablecloth
is a perfect landscape of ornate crystalline glasses
refracting emerald light, and the wine bottle slushes
like a conch filled with seawater, lulling with
its crenellated melody. We toast and laugh.

But there is darkness outside in the streets,
the man in rags muttering to himself about poverty,
the war, the endless chicanery that passes for political
life, and with his hand throws the last vestiges
of metallic language into the gutter. It is as if
he destroyed the Tower of Babel when the change
fell in chrome clinks down the storm drain,
it is as if he gave up for all of us. The police
arrest him for an infraction off the books, haul
him towards the prison on long lines of false wires
that speak in clipped copper enunciation about the
virtues of codified and false legality. We saw it
through the window, but did not know his name.
Who would have thought to ask?

The dinner comes, eloquent with smells, roast veal
and lamb replete with forested salads collaged in
hunter green and crayon yellow. We lift our glasses
gently, with terror in our eyes, clink, and gorge.
Somehow the food doesn't taste like its looks,
the halibut is pale flavor and the veal tastes like
old cheese. There is nobody outside the window,
just cars moving out of the way of the restaurant,
pulling thoughtless animals of instinct in their
driver's seats, pulling the ever loving human
resources towards storage facilities, supermarkets,
and temples of commerce. We eat in silence, we are
silence, the arrested man stole our language, or
did we steal his?

What wintered nights billow in cowardly speech,
what summered days deflate in brave silence,
where we dare to claim intelligence in a restaurant
that doesn't feed the destitute, where we dare
to claim empathy in a city where no one speaks,
not really,

no one really speaks.

oh, family life

The world against the family, the ever-loving strangers knifing into private affairs with blades of thievery...that is the problems with giving birth to a child, they get you stuck and you have to pay. You might as well chain an anchor to your noodle legs and throw yourself off a dock for all the thanks and joy family life will give you.

My family life is terrible, and I didn't even start them up. They raised me. My mother is a tyrant, and there are numerous drunks sulking around with disasterous minds and tendancies that get them into these horrible situations that would be comic if they weren't so frequent and depraved. My aunt and grandmother fight like wild animals. I hear about this, and sigh. Nothing for me to do but watch the world fall apart. I try to tell them "Don't drink; alcohol is an instrument of genocide. Look at the natives." But nobody in my family listens to me except my grandfather. They think I am young and inexperienced, when in truth I am old and very experienced. It only takes a few experiences in order to solidify a world view, and a few more in order to know true morality paired with just and intelligent action. But many in my family are lacking in these experiences.

My father is a shallow man, obssessed with technologies that deaden the mind. He also is a hypocrite, incognizant of his own failings, and somehow he has all this money despite being on disability. There, you have another comedy.

I could illustrate these things to you, but it is better that I don't for I don't want to invoke pity, but just recognition of how terrible and crummy families truly are. They had me locked in a mental hospital, not because I became inconvinient, but because they needed a scapegoat for all their problems. Of course, they felt terrible soon after doing it, but while it was happening you would think that they were convinced that it was God's holy mission for them to lock their non-combative and non-suicidal son up in a mental hospital. Well, I did try to run away to a friends house. But at 24, seriously, you would call the police because of that? What a bunch of assholes.

Anyway, I suppose the larger issue is that my faith in the human race, and joyous love augmented with trumpets and harps and shit is waning slightly. I can love anyone, but when they fuck you over for no reason because it is of some strange symbolic advantage to them, then I think the love has got to stop. Love extenuated to far is a form of violence, when it seeks to trap and control an individual within a failing structure. Family is a sinking ship where nobody wants anybody to survive.

Did you hear me through the clouded veil of the seraphim?
I cried your name like it was the last word I knew,
spoken with thunder. You kneeled beside the path,
reverant, but what were you thinking? That earthly
love lasts, that the night is strewn with the garbage
of the day but for our divine interpretations? Some of
us are not attuned to the spirit, we break before it
like toys beneath a boot, we crumble in our prayer
like sand cliffs before the ever-storming orders.
Others are ever embued with longing, but you, you
were made to be filled with a wealth of strength,
the propriety of past golden sufferings and the acknowledgement
of darkness amid billowing starlight. You have not
been made for easy love, yours is a complexity beyond the scope
of mortals and because of this you will find another angel,
a mad person obsessed with the power of the spirit to disrupt
fettered veilings and to break through the walls of death's
castle, plundering treasures made for the dead.
And the dead will rise, make no mistake of optimism,
the ever anxious and fearful dead will raise their tattered
beings upon the balconies of the materially innundated,
they will drink from goblets instead of masoleum gutters.

But do not come off too strong for like Samson you will be
required to test in feats of strength against columnar machineries
instilled in mechanic labyrinths that have lost better than you.
Be listless with the agony of divine love, but do not push its
weight upon the weak for they will push themselves upon you in
groteque displays of death's affirmation, the transformative
proclamation that makes a mass, the television of the spirit.

And be ever kind with frail sweet life
like a candle flame licks the sugared air
from which it melts, drink volumes of oxygen
with the lungs of the mind and feed plants
with carbon dioxide words until gardening
becomes your tender vocation; difficult
yes but with many rewards.

These are the orders of some pale spirit,
the decisions of unannointed lords who for
centuries have deciphered kingdoms among
the false hierarchies of idiot man,
who for millenia have witnessed
the waste of life's instrument
in the scrapheaps of civilizations,
wasted by men that cultivate a hatred
so deep that they depart into it as if they
consumed themselves, these men for who insanity
is too pleasant of a term, these men who
do not age but who were never young,
just burnt up with rage like an idiot kid
storming over an unimportant toy.

Do not go with gentleness,
do not stay with strength,
you must become you and
be free of obligation to
those who would not have you.
Be ever free in love,
my sweet angel, and
drink from the streams
which taste of plum wine,
be ever going with the
quick flow of gentle birds.

anonymus love letter

You are carried forward by a wave of ancient blood
buried in the labyrinths known as vessels and related
to the practice of love. You are brought forward
out of the enshrouding mists, you dangle your pale foot
over the edge of any bridge.

Bring me your wine, we'll drink upon the hill
bring me your wine, I'm sick of little pills.

All of your caution is transposed upon your face
all of your caution is the cause of your disgrace.

Burst through the orbed amber whorls of antiquities
fallow words, speak in old maths that create our
lives with verbs.

Hunger of love, as fine as any state,
hunger for life, they've tried to take your plate.

Rely on your bloodlines drawn with buttressed grace,
rely on your sight when you judge a stranger's face.

We are the ones, restless with wings of fog who
drink from sunlight's rim filled with fate,
we are the ones who unlock the garden's gate.

So where ever you are, remember that ever creature
has a fear, whoever you are, your blood is filled with tears.
whoever you are, you'll win with a harmonized sphere of
pulsating light they call the mind, whoever you are,
the stars have filled you with the glory of the year.

dee dee dah

gather up your rose

place its petals in place

far up the stem

save it with your grace

and you will dream again
in a rainbow's colored
technicality
and you will be again
when the willow stem
meets the vespers of the sea

Dream, Dream, dah

oh, my, gods.

we are here again
we are alive again
with the ocean's apple core
and when we arrive again
our emotions lose their
semblence to a war.

fond memories

We've sunk all our armor, and walk light and free upon the street. The florist waves to us with a cache of magnolias in the crook of her arm, and we sense the beauty of this over any other place.

But there are people scowling, at us and at the world, their are people who are still breaking down heart doors and shoving trash into the sacred room.

We have become has fine as any friend to the mysteries that haunt you until the end.

We searched the annals of the subconscious for reminescence in retrospect, then we grew cautious when memories poured in like thick snakeskins.

All the overtures are left replete beside our beds, all the time in the world marked centuries with our golden beads, and you were the one restless to use his key, you were the one who wanted to be free.

Leave them their illusions, they need them sometimes to dream about better worlds parallel to the lands of the dead and damned, where when you go walking in the woods, you won't be seen again; where when you do what you should, you're only a little better off than dead.

She is the one to tuck our light inside our breasts, she is the one who crushes nightmares like insects with the swirling hem of her velvet dress.

All that we win is garnished in the end
by the ancient process that gilds love
above our sins, and it was a tree that
married us to the Earth, and it was a flower
that showed us the beauty of the dirt.

All this old armor is breaking with rust
in the summer reeds, beneath the archaic
watchtower replete as a vision of belief
in aesthetic technologies beneath the modern
illusions, all these devices that are built
upon prior ruins.

And our fates conspired to tear at our heart
strings with the storms of the Arctic,
we merely knitted blankets with strands of
wool because we thought sheep to be cautious
instead of led to bleed. But now our fates
have fragmented from the gods of our destinies
and we have no need to be cautious when discussing
life's transient mysteries.

Drink this perfume, it fills the violet room
drink in this scent of magnolias and wash your
hands in blessed rivers while your clothes
tangle with a branch, for nature is intelligent
with the desires of our past, and nature is
benevolent when we come to her at last.

Be the disease that crumples cold old men,
be the iron breeze that cuts through the stolen den.

Remember our lessons in camping any place,
with our tin can stove and nettle soup
that nourished us by developing heat from within.
Follow the tower, the pinion of the Earth,
it reaches to starlight and humbles itself
in dirt. It reaches to starlight, like your
eyes upon the night, it reaches to starlight
when the rest are using kites.

Bring your prison symphony to the broken
crescent of a harboured shore, and bring
your tormented heart strings to the pity
of a kind-hearted whore. Bring all your
things and throw them to the fire,
burn all the wings built from car tires
and piston oil, they were built by someone
else in order for your hearts to spoil
with disbelief at peculiar things wrought
by divine machines, what you've been taught
is merely someone else's dream.