Spear Atmosphere

I dare to say (as the approaching comet
dares) that you have given
sound a spine, brought

me given me
into stitches of hair,
dust, wool. Clay is red

your tongue is red
clay in a river bed awake
and speak. Clouding

over, the black thread
lifts my eyelids,
pupils and Saturn

unlike any moon. We carve
ecstasy out of lime
seeds, small yellow

breath-puff, a crystal
city on your breastplate.
Begin again

as the rain comes. It’s perfection
and collapse, a spitting
wind in a slew

of lightning bolts mistaken
for flashbulbs. Pop. Smoke.

Blue spots with trails among
the planets.

marathon

why make an accomplice of Saturn
when its rings come clear?
why try and breathe
its debris?

what did she say that could have
made you think twice,
running down orbits
beside you in bed

nothing but a clarity
of Saturn, the faster
you move across the hills

the longer it takes
to reach you

I'm back. . .

There we do
rise, spear
atmosphere, jaunt
like bargins
into each other's
hands. A black-
bellied cloud rolls
into us even
though we suffocate.
It is not
a star, she said,
it is a house
on a hill. We live
in it. We do not
live in a star.

Cunningly you

maul space, satiety, theotropic
encounters, nonplussed, the chapbook Minerva
creeping clique, to get you
to you, one s or two
"while" doesn't think for itself

cavitates, brass bearings, teeth
fuck, whether we'll make it, happening now
with -ing
or later behind your smeared casing

purse on the bureau
wishing to hang it on you
principles
possibly reaching pantoum-
like smiles, density, -ies

fork, fork over
how many prongs? how many
deluges spear us
while sleeping?

Carnage, Pixels

Roy Lichtenstein's "Brushstroke with Spatter," 1966

Carnage, Pixels

You blur into drear, stigmatism focus on fake drips,

on fake intermittent light smear, on callous

glamour smear, shaken hand in bountiful sinews.

You give me a filled carcass, a shaken boxcar, a forest guile,

a hidden smile, more guile for the long trip through briar bayou.

Blue briars into you, slick martini eyes. The drag,

the influence of drag, the martini gleam effluvium taking over

squirrel-tooth effluvium. Come in bold, balance, entitled

rails we ride on, entitled something it wears, killer sari button

on the move down. So sorry for your hands.

I did a sort of pantoum-sort of thing with my words, beginning with the first one and the second one in the first line, then repeating the second and third one in the next line, then the third and fourth, etc, etc. I would have liked to get stigmatism in the last line, but alas. I tried to evoke the idea of stigmata with the "hands" reference, but not sure if it comes through or not. I used Roy Lichtenstein's "Brushstroke with spatter," 1966 as a sort of inspiration (I'm having a hard time with actual poetic subjects lately. . .may have something to do with the war?). I don't think the lines are working very well- they seem too long right now, but I like how the repetetion is working, so that's a tough one. I also cheated (lied?) at the end. . .sari, sorry.

It was fun. . .

one more

I did eleven, because I'm unstoppable (or just out of control, which is probably more accurate).

stigmatism
fake
smear
shaken
guile
briar
martini
effluvium
Baryshnikov
entitled
sari

let's do something with these. . .but what?

1st 10 words that come to mind

chapbook
answer
deluge
rocket
fire
midnight
while
fork
day
coward

Snowball

x
to
why
four
means
eleven
cognate
stemcell
fallopian
expression
fallopening
complication
technological
transcendental
etymologically
transformational

what i am not

i
am
not
your
droll
sacred
stylist
consumed
absolutes
striations
haphazardly
contaminated
compartmental
demonstrations
contemporaneous &
transcendentally
anti-pornographic

forestations

foam
glides headfirst
into juniper, kelp

flaccid
grasses hiss
imperviously jostled, knows

foam
grows higher,
Isis joining Kaddishes

flaccid
golds harping
intravenously, jostled kelp

foaming
gratuitously headfirst
inside juvenile Kaddishes

flaccid
grieving, heightening
Isis' jovial ka

fabric

I wanted to try what you've been playing with in your site, scott. Here's my first attempt, though I think I can do better.

fabric
glow paper
a red match

fabric
finding glitter
bringing me there

fabric
denim eyes
hook and eye

fabric
your eye
stay the white

fabric
your pockets
emptied and gone

fabric
sell me
sell me fire

fabric
garlic quilt
you sweat clean

fabric
strips in
flowers, purple bundles

fabric
hates smallness
wants to taste

fabric
and find
fabric and taste

Impression of you

smearing orchids
on a palate of stone
i break into a rapture
of orchids i sing
wrestling with Adam
over the Mediterranean i have broken them
these nectars
into song before the orchids painted
their lithographs on a palate of dawn
city a cloud-wreath
a smeared nitrate:
heaven swells in its cadence of stone
over the Mediterranean's
broken song

alternate version

I'm not happy

that was really hard. I'm apparently not very good at it yet. Maybe with some more practice, or if I come back to it later. . .

It blows open against
a patch of persimmons, tongue
curled and tickled
by tendrils. It looks
more like a face
than a flower, blotch shaped
like a closed eye.

I have a phrase "bearded frowm of an iris" in one of my other poems- I'm having too hard a time getting that out of my mind's record player.

Ribbon

name, i haven't one yet, tiles and letters are all
still fragments, ascending through the curved lip of a
gray cloud
flipped onto a bright month, low pressures that this
sea thrives through

room to me, it is a room too, a
curtain of
flecks
deliriously cold

glad you could make it
a word
thumbed through, pages, were bodies once,
jagged instruments

move against spirit like
lightning,
crisp
breath it unfolds, unfurls

Anatomy of a Scream

Cave glass, you take my breath
to go, flung and baited but crisp

in blue birth. To stretch lightning,
isolate the green, bleed it

dry until he dreams jagged
faces onto you seems

like it already happened. I am glad
for your sadness, for its delirious

conflict, for the flecks
of silver that motor, that curtain,

that call from a closed room
we can never enter. The sea

is in there, boiling and still,
asking us to swallow it’s name.

meditation cycle

-- a child is born into a cave of glass so he cannot be loved by sadness yet

-- the material adhering to his green irises, how lightning appears vermilion in cataclysm, stretching its smooth blood into his sleep (the smallest redundancy of space)

-- when i look at plants bound to stakes in that courtyard, i am deleriously sad about yesterday, even though there were no pasts behind that glass, or occurring yet in his eyes. turning to morning, or the night within morning

-- at these verdant heights, we can be temporary or inversely strange to breathing, at the center of a house whose walls allow our cries to mingle with his. rebounding and spiraling up or down in tandem, you who are-- who we are. no we-- but i

-- i want to think of the sea as a belief, having gone over it asleep, in a valence of sadness. the waves shut off at midnight. the moon flickering clear. how is it we are continuous through child and soil, precipitated, enclosed

staying light

Salt on, take a cave and hide it there,
coral and the other side of surface
(break through from under

water, sweet propulsion). It’s not
awakening I’m afraid of, heavy glucose
morning. It’s the gamut

of words in your skull, trapped
in your marrow, ossifying
and fusing you closed. Captive,

you breach a tender horizon
by speaking, but it moves,
like driftwood, so quickly
away.

(This was all I could do before Eliot woke up. Maybe I can do more later. . .)

palmyric, consciously

like sulfur, no breath, picturesque sun-polyp
on the ceiling, mirror mirror mirror
(murmur)

mornings . . .
heart, what can be said, percussive dialect
streamers behind wheels of piano keys, diaphanous whites

mine was crypt, gasses, dreamed huge
minutes aerial, guarded
as moors

lunar cycle: i have/am have/you have/this have/i have/you—
1200 algaes slicking
the coast purple

i am between colors
rays through
sea, thermoclines, concavity

dawn

Dawn on artichoke
heart, facile the glittering
sound of glee. Red

trumpets tell of your
night: layered sting
and barrell tricks under

a dangerously low moon.
The ocean is alive
with salt, bouyant girl,

the best she's ever had
is down too far
for her to reach.

second movement

seed strophe
symbol of dissipative symphony
generationally strat-
ified
ascending to troposphere
sky squall
tripping delicately
in fabrics:
backwards prone
stinging burlap, her cheek

a beginning. . .

seed and root, green
symbol of a shoot
generational
a single astrid star
sky collander, jaded
tripping over wheat
in a cornfield
backwards licking, shucking
stinging silk like a long sigh