Yesterday I found an angel in a pinstripe suit
who lent me his car, I traveled down the dust-specked
road with moths in the headlamps to Cape Canavral
where the rockets launched at daybreak. I met
a woman statue there who cried tears that fell in
a chalice filled with langour, and I asked her
where she bought her melancholy armor.

The rockets launched off and created a streak of
pinstripes across the archaic sky. My lady of statues
pointed at the horizon's blade pressed there like the
promise of love. Engines blared mercurial blazes
and my heart took off, wrapped in carrier pigeon's
leather.

In the motel, there rang silver bells
and the television shaped into a triangle
where our angles met like joints in a statue's armor.

The moon beams fortune upon the bold at daybreak,
where the flesh ends in armor. The rain moves
like blessings across the earth and angels in pinstripes
break down any dark armor.

the glow pt 2, the microphones

i took my shirt off in the yard
no one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden
now it's not
my shirt's back on
i forgot my songs
the glow is gone
my gliding body stopped

i could not get through september without a battle
i faced death
i went in with my arms swinging
but i heard my own breath
i had to face that i'm still living

i'm still flesh
i hold on to life with feelings

i'm not dead
there's no end
my face is red
my blood flows harshly

my heart beats loudly

my chest still draws breath
i hold it
i'm boiling
ooh oh oh
there's no end

The weekend frills are filled with lore
of kings shattered by the sun, who penned
the notations of horizons rain with the
artifice of one forlorn and rustling fellow
with an hourglass within his hand.

The keeper of protection's things chant
the ancient essences of courtship's velvet
hum, I walked the broken road of vanity's
understanding that experience brings,
I touched the cobblestones with care
and sheltered beautiful rings that bound
my hatred with idle wings and wrestled
magics with a dried up old and bitter thing.

I searched horizons wide and far for proof
that only the beauty of poverty brings,
I walked in step with women drunk with the
fumes that perfume sings, I ran through
golden fires with a robe of angel wings that
drank of heaven's fountain scent and scuttled
sour things.

The way I feel when you call my name
makes me go crazy to sane!

One day
I went walking
Whistling mildly
For the somnolence of the moment
Indicated a certain merriment,
Indicated a reason to live.

I worked my knuckles to the wooden bone
Like you, like all of us
Trying to find an answer beyond the fog of love.

There is no other way. If you don’t know this
By now, you might as well be dead, a Mexican Sherpa
Living in a box-car and singing railway tunes
Is more soulful than the corpses of the idiot middle class.

I wandered through the halls of an turbulent sleep
and felt the fight of winged black upon the paint of my mask,
when I kissed it it turned into perfume and set itself within
the dungeons of my heart's lack. I spotted the edge of a weapon
where it had dissapeared with marble blood flowing across a cobblestone
path, I spotted the empty words within its beak bleating questions
that no one had learned to ask. But within my velvet coat,
"It is all the same to me whether I fight or refuse to attack."

One day my armor grew a deep and blood red crack
below my chin and jawline where I chewed the ends of spaghetti
strands and where I worshiped cadaverous verbatims
that the barbaric Christians told me were black. But
the words saved my life like a silken parachute billowing
with the edges of a wild wind that flew back
in replete perfection of a dome made more beautiful
than Classical Renaissance artist's masterful tact.

And it was a woman who saved my life from scalpel's fact.
It was a woman who drove me across the wasteland with ribbons
fluttering as arm bands to beauty's army
enraptured with the rare gift of a desert rose
amid craggy mountainous peaks, amid a dust of stars
filling ravines with the sweet taste of nova particles
in the stream at my feet.

And with the edges of soup toureens we scouped our breath back
from the delinquance of hunger's artificial math.
We enjoyed the ones we loved
beneath tiny mountains and mountainous leafs.

With windows drawn across the shore of our beach
we ate strawberries soaked in cognac and brushed
with sugar's speech. We closed the doors forever
when the police sirens screamed. The fascist
lore fell off the cliffs of the sea into perdition
when the answers to their tests turned red and
didn't change back. I saw your features curve
in Renaissance colors that day on our beach.
I saw your curves sway with the waves as I
listened to the melody of your speech. That
was the day I decided that I wanted to meet
your sweet age across the glories of the shore.

Once Sweet Artaud

I saw clearly,
knew of poor once sweet Artaud
and heard the history of earth
in his lettered pages.
Nobody else
could have told me
so clearly what I already knew.

His sweet canticles
gone unwritten
due to the fear of Septimus.

His frail beauty lost on
his theater audiences that
reduced him to dying over
and over again on stage.

With subtle letters he explained
and explained and explained.
The surrealists thought he raved,
though they merely put Frued in art
while shitting out their subconscious.
Artaud, clever friend, traveled to Mexico
with the sequins of his intellect,
ditching opium as he wandered through
the hall-less wonder of ancient desert,
his mind enraptured with tender details
of a mythic people.

The doctors created his madness,
for doctors do not understand art.

Like why he carried a silver-tipped cane
and struck sparks off the cobblestones
with glib flits of his wrist.

In his torrid merriment, he told the truth
about Van Gogh.

And that is all you need to know about
once sweet Artaud.

typewritten on an office presentation notecard

The summer cars
Drag on.

A hall of bumper cars sparking with electricity’s heat.
The sound of bars, with fluorescent women dancing in their private drinks.

Too much smoke for me, we’re angelic as can be in the image of a pointless life.

The breeze curls in whorls of new scenes, which move somewhat unseen in the brilliance of a dawning light.

The dew held the gleam, you have been set free
From the horror of endless strife.

There’s a picture of you and me
Where it would seem
We had resolved the end of the pointless night.

Have no fear of men nor machine,
Your touch has been kept clean
By the entire sight of your life. You’ve moved within me
Like golden angel wings illuminating our loss of height.

The wonder of scenes, the ribbons on olive leaves, the perfume of blankets
Keeping lovers within their means. A sound of bars, the caress of stars,
And the sculptures of beauty’s relief.

Ancient perfume of armor mildewed in our wet nostrils
in the second hand store where the clothing had been
discarded and we locked lips in destruction's stance,
the beach-time lore of islands masked by fog's scent
that felt like memory and tasted like steel on your lips.

It's just another business
where the popes go to shop
for their Sunday vestments in
columns of monetary beliefs.

I had shopped for nothing
in the veils of aisles with
the summer at my feet,
when I bought I felt like
a subtle Orion
hunting with the star's sequence
for love's nova heat.

And they go towards the ancient backstep
when shopping is complete,
pedalling without balance through
the enraptured nonsense of
rum's spirit dragging at their minds
and feet.

Billowing fields wrought with isosoceles
and urban utopias turning red by sunlight
who bought the star with sleep.

In seer's gnarled hands
our bones like knuckles
and marked with lore of chance,
the gestures of robes gathering dust
below the masks of banners.

In the church,
we waited. In the urban church,
we hunted for a lust that could not
be sated, the rapturous secrecy of
divine guidance that would burn
our lives with grace.

But it was up to men to make of themselves
the angels inscribed in stained glass.
It was up to women to make of themselves
the goddesses they desired, in elongated
curls of free will's unadulterated choice.

The priest claimed that not everyone
has a soul until it is built like castle walls
around the garden of the spirit. The priests,
let it be known, talked backwards into radio
recievers and burned effigies of better books
than the mason's lore wrapped in the lie of
sacred bindings. Striken with horrible fumes
of tattered beliefs, the cardinals and bishops
brought down the faith of their churches with
their own words, with their minor gestures,
with their rot bound in the decay of the past.

We fought them off with gleaming stance,
with steps of flawed chance written in
the armor of our bones. We knew a simple
life, where food and love were more important
than the idle proclamations of costumed letches.

In the transom level of our sight,
do the rosebushes below our stained glass
memory invoke the scents of lower loves
than the sweeping glaze of a sun-jeweled
oak made full in the afternoon,
or is it our distance from gardens
that clear our hearts of bitter beauty
and make us amnesiac with the furrows of
a dew-crusted soil where beginnings choose
to unfurl in lucent green sprig of clover,
where the light of space reaches even the
lowest sprout?

Fecundity could be our rule.
But the neighbors have no gardens
and our supervisors wear no petals in their suits.
For once, we could see a sportscoat sewn with
the edges of maple leaf tallow and patched
together by the sinew of tensile branch.
We drive monsters to work at morgues
and wonder why our mouths ossify the wings of our words.

In giddy perfume of fermented glass
we whirl with new velocities where
our experience may have poisoned
where our love may had been frozen
where our fluidity dried in frost dust
on the panes of our winter glass.

We thought the arrows of love
would guide our wars to peace
in the fields where our old fathers fought
with tempered blades across the helms
and banners of dark armors. What we
didn't consider involved a dream
of gentle fingertips withstanding
a blacksmith's ax, of the song of lorn
minstrels marching battilions with the
strength of cherished loves across
the glens of elderberries and bramble roses.

A warhorse chortling in snorts of steam
across the ancient steads, rider emblazoned
with the crenelation of sculpted artifice,
the true banners kept inside within the
butterfly of his lungs that breathe for
one wind, where his lost kinsmen had
scarcely felt movement. A broken breastplate
caked in rust splattered fine as sand
by the sea wind, yet the real armor kept
beneath in ancient future of divinities
wrapped in leather harness and buckled with
angel knots. His lance-banner, tattered yet
loose, snapping the color red through the horizon.

We felt the after-war in echoes of king edicts
in the time before fame produced its siren face.
A maiden wandering in woolen rags within a shawl
of frost could scarcely lay claim to a bouquet
of swords. The bear-baiters losing hands and fingertips
to the gamble of their amusement. A castle sitting
heavy with acrid lime and marbled granite. Arrow louves
that eye travelers as warnings. And it seemed
to sing nothing of our cherry-stained lips that licked
the pollen air after the clearing of death's dust about
the diminished thrashing of green calvary.

In the somnolent goblets of red wine
our laughs seemed made for this earth
as the halls unfurled their banquets
and the alchemists spoke their beautiful curse
of wealth upon our heavy-lidded helms.
Wenches stayed with men, the perfume of wreaths
woven from rosehips rubbed upon their slender wrists.
Soldiers marked by war, we laughed and smiled
at the witch's cry of arms raised, though no
man held his blade.

Our knight in worn armaments wandered through the magician's ring
and as he did our banquet seemed to sing of the halls where the wizard
worked to bless our humble sacred town.

Revisiting Histories of the Soil

I was here before
in the whipping of rifle bullets across the meadow
where my cards spilled out on tree stumps and the
archaic language spoke in oak and shaded leaves.

Forlorn pleasures, say the apathetic-critical,
as they watched the leather soldiers slide
the cartridge into the bolt-chamber of older weapons.

Madness, say the high-flung literati
ensconced in comforts stolen from the rooms of children.

Fire, say the poets, pure and simply cascading sheets of flame
called the imagination in working whirls through out the
cryptograms of the world's languages, bedecked in ambiances
of lore's lust that speaks in glowing heat's edges with
smoke and light.

But I just wanted to be
a thousand thoughts of childhood
running like rivers over the small stones
of buried memories.

A million questions
more questions than their bullets
and bombs, words that lingered
on wind's notebook spirals
long after MLK was shot on
the hotel balcony,
long after prison bars stripped
Debs of his politics,
long after love had made hard writers
soft with death and brittle with impossible
standards of survival.

Was there love in Dachau?
Daring intelligence in a Black Maria?
Punctuations of truth underlying the
machinegun-typewriter staccato of
the world at war with itself?
Did the gods of questions
billow in the throats of man
like rivers of wine as their
blood splattered in rivulets
as dark as Roman sentences,
formed for the machineries of war
and not mere literacy?

Of course, but you rarely hear
such stories. Forlorn and in solitude
it is possible to contemplate
the great gaps of history.
Rifle shots make life appear as a battle,
and few accounts of World War II
will mention cherry-stains or
cabbage fields, or the simplicity
of a family in an old farm house untouched
by conflict who carry out their small kindnesses
without bearing the tragedies of the world.

We touched, during stereotypical Christmas,
when the essence of home reanimated us from
the gravel trenches and pulled us from square
dugouts, singing canticles loud enough to drown
out artillery. No-mans land quit vomiting Earth,
spirals of barbed wire became ribbons curling
in the morning mists. Our dead kinsmen rested
in the peace of meadows, letters from home
nestled in field jackets and the gaze of the
eternal nestled in their eyes. "We were
the happiest men alive in our day."

I remember a way-back when
through the golden gate of our childhood
where the warm grass faded in the pulsations
of our summer-dew toes touched with a light
thought of joy, an innocence some may say
but yet an innocence that may be reclaimed
in words like cardinals flitting redness
in the shades of some elder elm whose branches
are tensile and frail against the season of tallow leaves.

I remember a way-back when we ordered our lives with play
without becoming too furious or hurt, a little bit of star-dust
in our cardboard moon-suits and a breath of happiness after
a supple rolling down a blustery knoll one day in ancient autumn.

School was incidental. No kid would ever talk about fractions in games,
no middle-schooler longed for the dreary drudge of idiot lessons coupled
only by the dubious authority of some goof eager to impress young minds
with the textbook religions of some corporate publisher. And how the
blossomings were, when the girls took on the pantomimes of young women,
remember your first love? The one the adults told you was a crush at best,
but how you pined for her and even drew a pink heart around her black and white
yearbook picture to lend color to what you saw beyond official photographs?
The boys were comrades in arms, the girls mysterious scents on the edges of
some exotically foreign wind, and your serious old relative had to drive miles
out of his way to pick you up from the baseball field as the sun became a bonfire
in the auburn sky.

I hope this was you.

Not some cigarette-pawning letch dressed in grunge rags, seconds from the drug scene, who tortured voluptuous women with bra-strap snaps and murdered small animals with safety pins and purloined lighters.

Regardless,
what became of us? I don't mean
who's job is what and who's wife
does how many sexual positions
after returning from an office morgue
with the stink of dead lives shrouded
about her rubber hands. I mean,
as in the question of a simple child's sky,
'why?' Why the massive insurance coverage
for lives that have lost their glow,
why the massive work week for an economy
that fucked itself with its own greed,
why the planned diminishing of human value
in the spirit of oneupsmanship that leads
to only more and more oneupsmanship?
Why hold children against their parents
in the workplace, why hold parents against
their children in the social scene of shuttled
conformity, why design a rich world in order
to become miserably chained to material?

Other questions arise, ones that are perhaps cryptic to the novice non-writer.
Indeed, these questions are not meant for the non-writer.

There is always an answer to any of humanity's problems:
childhood.

With tired mouth I approached the question of mercy.
No, said the woman in pallid robes, no said the man
with a computer stare in the train station, no said
the laughing maniac who had just been freed from the
prison of his sorrow. And though I understand,
people think of me as a fool, people in their half-knowledges
emblazoned in their minds like half burnt quilts are without
the eyes of the wisest child.

With travels before and behind, all of us move in the rectitude of
experience, and it should be said that the horrible thoughtless acts
of children scarcely change in the horrible thoughtless acts of adults.
The beauties, it is true, are few sometimes
like a self-conscious awkward woman who donates baked goods to the blind
at church on sundays, or the tired old man who writes to dying schoolchildren
in hospitals in order to tell them kindly of great stories of the brave sick
that have gone untold in this culture of soul-murderers and thieves of the spirit.

Brilliant phosphenes traveled without our knowledge through the dark diminished halls of man's petulant constructions. A snowflake here, a snowflake there, where aisles of mansion walls flaked paint as old as histories and no more.

Let us rest in each other
on the broken back of rooftops cracked with gothic lore.
The enflamed moon is light enough
to embarrass the town with its misdeeds.
You and I here,
sick with survival;
the only trick of power's poor manipulation
that cannot outwit the stars strange glories
as we grapple with softness on the bed of our
embrace.

I searched the faces of enemies for an answer
out in the prison world
but all I found were the old childishness
of poor actors dismantling their fears
by showing stupid hatreds instead.
As for the rest of it,
I could call it madness
but that raging ocean is not large
enough to encompass the condemnation
of humanity's horror.

We could be simple with a pint of beer,
telling old stories of by and bys gone
to the roadside in the manner of cliche
musings, we could be lovers on the stretch
of shore where no ship has lain anchor.
We could be anything.

But instead,
the ones you've known have suffered through false choices
regarding us. Expired checkbooks, red rose petals,
cars that drive around in circles, and a downtown
desolate of the curious and choked by the mundane.
Who said that sparks had to be condemned to exile
from the human face, who was it that claimed that
all imagination and flux should remain outside the common
man and woman's grasp, who was it that sent legal orders
across the polished desk in order to dismiss an elegant truth
for the purpose of fear and shame?

All of the truth is conspiring against lies
every moment you breathe words as sharp as arrows,
all of the writers you knew left America
all of the great minds and insightful personalities
left this godforsaken continent for the sake of life.
Let me tell you:

Talk to any stranger and the first thing you will notice
is a paucity of conversation. No metaphors, no poetry, nothing
but flat simple words uttered as quickly as possible showing a lack
of pathos and a complete transparency of motive. Friends and family
varnish over this with the veneer of caring, lovers poise ornate daggers
with the thread of their lips above each others eyes and call that fear
and pain love. Who have you known who has worked to escape this
prison brothel? The monstrosities with cowcatchers shoving masses of people
into sealed pits, the office manager insinuating despair and hatred in his
thinly veiled innuendos and jokes, or the Horatio Algers of the nation, concealing
the generational theft of their families?

What I mean to say
is that there is no need
for masters, there is no
need for any of this.

The Story of Archie

It is said, my friend, that spiders are hardly small or benevolent and that the insect world itself is wrought with peculiarities of struggle. Yet what is little said is how the cockroach is merely a cockroach in our perceptions and our language. In their world it could be said that a roach is fashioned from the gilt armor of royalty and covered in ranking spines that may twitch in communications of golden pleasures, and yet somehow you may not believe this though you have witnessed roaches settle for life in the same direct motions you scuttle for in your procurements of mental speeds and claws of motive.

Our roach here mimes old passages of a world-weary Don Marquis who travels insectile across keyboards to deliver small granules of truth amid honesty. Like Mr. Marquis' psuedonym you can call our roach friend Archie.

In bathroom-tiled temple floors Archie crawled through bird-chirp love's lore and saw something a human normally wouldnt see. He saw a rebirth in coiled old cords knotted with wound's brand of property, and let it be said in such a way for Archie is highly figurative and rarey literal for such is the life of a roach that leads sometimes to dreams of finer dreams.

Archie here in tiled-temple licked his wounds with rasp unfurled and adorned askew antennae with silked spittle dew, these wounds from former flight alone in day's night of blessed and cursed markers of destined loves and hatred's old lights.

Saw old cracks in tile pavement and spotted marks where blood had dripped in scarlet punctuation but yet a symbolic splatter from early days he hadn't seen but with now-bent antannae and his golden wing sounding like a small telephone talking in buzzing rings. But Archie flits from map to map, so is not responsible for the order of his things, his things said or brought, bought or singed.

No sentences in cockroach eyes, just whorls of colored shapes. Woman-whirl with man-sweep in arms afire as desire's woolen leap. Old hatreds dissolved in water-splatter of ancient mildew cleaned from off white-porcelean where blades of speech could not shatter the steam-loving mints of temple's shushing lyre. Sense in poetry is not Archie's finer style.

Rube Goldberg Striations (JJ 87. 09)

Crumbled stations growing with swirls of dust
and marked by superstructures exposed as if they were splints
of some old army hospital, jagged and cruel in the summer wind.
A building for you and a room for you,
here, a warehouse there a dry school
and inside the common lack of art.

Choose a profession and you have chosen your character.
An actress there and a writer here,
a broken office manager warbling thin musics in the form
of business letters. A CEO, a restaurant owner. You
have seen everybody. Now you have to live, and
you must change your life.

Humble experience informs scribes lesser than me.
A once exalted position poisoned by fame and the
industry of immortality, where they freeze token folks
into bronze statues and shove black gold words into their
ever-frozen mouths. Too late for a lack of fame, too soon
to blossom with the summer winds. MLK said that,
only no one knew.

We reposed in old fortunes of a decadent labor camp.
Our room, built on stilts above the starving mad lusts
of people who wanted a simple kind of life found in a coin
or a friendly smile. Love-mad, the world you refuse to see
turns in the motions of time-locked whorls. A moon on my
birthday once mirrored in succinct metaphor
the photograph of our spiritual cities.

A bed of ancient dust called the Sea of Tranquility.
A cemetary without a name, tombstones jammed in like old
office files thrown in the basement. Nobody could speak
about the unspeakable. They had to learn. Concentric
barbed wires running with electricity and a world that
has as its reflection a barren moon.

Tell me lover, where does the earth find you today?
In sequins gathered by family crimes or in the beds
of lust unsated by all he offered you, a joy that
had never been unearthed but by his plying bone
and a contentment fettered by the statues the others
dared to touch? The only people who forget
are the ones who have nothing to remember.

A quiet flute in the shifting wastelands of cities.
Honest harmonicas and a can of soup, a tarp tent set
with clothes and hummings of the ancient humanity
soiled by new wardens who forget that they are the prisoners
to marked men.

I, oh mysterious letter, cannot forgive
the motions of the gift of Alcatraz
your free citzenry would bestow upon
my unborn daughter. I, oh mysterious sound,
cannot forgive the gift of flowers
placed on unmarked roadside graves
as salve for the living that leads them
to believe in their own virtue. I, oh mysterious word,
cannot forgive the piles of printing presses
tuned up to lie to the face of my unborn son.

I cannot forgive any longer. I began with myself.

The sea wind capturing dandelion seeds. The dried love of summer
like a preserved apricot in her ear. A drunken fight. Some bronze
keys. A golden apple. A virtue locked inside the furnace of the
only sun. Tell me that you love the winds beneath the pale willow
sweeping up the dew of spring lakes. Tell me that you love the rays
of a smiling face in love. I cannot say with words the sadness that
has echoed inside the cavern of my breast. You will have to tell me
with words that aren't there.