Wednesday, January 30, 2013


I.
I measure my confessions
etching an imperative topography
through disquisition
tongues volatile lick ignorant
love contesting end
an impossibly simple fury
but soon the tongues begin
intersecting reaching
shorter distances until
they become
dots markers references
location place
as in you are
here



yet no image is decisive
as the fog moves in
and the creek rises
we have our own wounds
in this geography at nightfall
I thought I heard sirens
the wet streets
my abandoned city
speaking to me
babies contesting mother’s milk
suckling a classic love story
two desperate entities
wailing through the strenuous
outline of a cleared throat




we have been here before
you and I—but now as day breaks
we are constantly changing I am
reminded of false closure
our best impulses disembodiment
speech through glass throats the light
rises suffering at its roots
opening a window entering your tongue
touching my tongue
tasting the space between words
dimly lit lips lunging
love smothers I am
your blank face
dismantled by clear-cut chitchat




there is a story
I never spoke about with you
come into this cold room closed consciousness a flat blackness
trail marks cut in salt
I was you
earlier tonight a convenient and communicable form anything
to make ends occupied
by the questions of light
the long annihilation of another
the procedural grammar of the supernatural
that unbroken thing
limited by the edge of the page




the quietest and most intimate
grammar left behind lyrical
disruption a fragmentary belief
shutting the finally struggled out
contemplating convergence of old forms darkness the disconsolate and powerful
one modality transcending narrative synesthesia its occupant—a life
the untimely beautiful
dwell as randomness speaks
the poet unobtrusive echoes
confused by prose
sound converted into image
the vain gorge




we have made a brilliant chronicle
deception
the darkly autobiographical
ongoing mystery measuring your tongue and my tongue this intensely progressive labor
we all inhabit we district—elastic surface
if you recall anything
syncopated—untranscribable
a dense juxtaposition of life lived
partially cut open
intimately yelling—shaken vigorously
into writing into vision
the accidents of attention
the sound of falling alone in an open city




the collisions of unshackled tongues—bathe language bad mouthing the stutter: compulsively salivating
spasmodically aphonic—catastrophic love
a kiss and what more is there
to say than this:
I hesitated before undressing your hands
on my body followed the sound of birds wings trapped in a narrow chimney
the anticipation made you hold your throat and squeeze wanting to dissolve into noisy dreams far from here and here and for a moment uninterrupted constricted endlessly eroticizing ingestion
 



as a poet contemplates another
intolerable present
the speaker approaches a clearing
disrupts the irreverent blend
highbrow and lowbrow dictions
noted by the author intimate elusive wild unbearable and beautiful—
its summation you are magic
darkness is magic the need
to extend beyond the personal
I thought both disconsolate and powerful
pot on a stove in a house
cracked claws of an old crow
dreams torn just short of the pillow




when I think of sleeping
with you I am no
more conflicted than
when I paint you into the corner
of a picture the air
you’re breathing the cold clear night
the great drama of your breasts
nipples the base of your spine—us
shoulder to shoulder
smothering the goddess
blocked speech pillaged and disgraced
deceived a wish
an hallucination of the poet
a sexy conversation in the dark



something is happening here over the hills your body the string uncoiled
easily at first and then you took off
your clothes and I can remember
thinking I am not yet tired of loving you
the space you occupy I am
not seeking softer shapes roads and radios fake tragedies your mirror
my mirror pushed into the road
pushed into the house formed
an impressionable space conformed
by the myths of manhood
the distinct qualities of autumnal night




I have to place you there in order to find you howling for tongue
and mirror you are the voice
not yet tired of loving me
calling for dynamite and thunderstorms
kissed on the lips just eat me
call me cut/throat I’ll call you deconstruction’s masquerade
long ago and far away
we remembered singly—love staggered
through speech despite our speculations
this urge is latent
in any text
open your mouth now




we must lie to our tongues
before they are rendered
unquestioned faith a damaged head
a torn off arm an open belly the sunlight
the narrow streets the city covered
in blood the brilliant
ease of assertion the imaginary contest
the meta-narrative
plotting to expose
a crowd on a hillside
darkening the fields
an imperfect hell
dancing singing waiting somewhere
in the lines without measure or words




the night before you
fell asleep I
had a fantasy in an almost perfect pattern
for harnessing the body
in pain that’s what I look for now
I bleed you
and so on down it’s true
these poetics
ripping and tearing often
for many years easing
their manifestations into your soft
resilient form inflicting incredible
damage language
subtracted to meat



eating how one eats
metaphor the body dissolves
shamelessly into benign context
our best impulses mangled
once upon a time imagine the bandages
your throat the love notes
the center of a burning city
exposed to the last
accidental smile
I know it is
only cloud darkening
those fields eternally losing you
the letters of your name
constantly rearranged




in the false dream of composition
combustion
composite
my name is self-betrayal
and I am the distance
between the torturer
and the body
the difference
between light and reason
the goat tearing
your auburn hair
when you decided
to die an intolerable present
an unexplained periphery



so much of what we say
to each other
is untrue you will vomit blood
and tell me it’s you translating me
a way of wounding
the ceaseless
and self-announcing
pronoun I
undifferentiated this worry
so deeply postmodern
you make the unspeakable and restive
speak in a constant
loud volume
crushingly present



these screams are the machinery of disingenuous narrative a noun
wounded into possession
forced into action becomes its own annihilation intensely felt
your motives remain mysterious
until the very last page
I wonder how that can be
when one and the other
are completely the same though
the exercise itself removed
from its generic grammar
the shattering of its seed
far more aware of flashbacks




recursions
nonlinearly fluctuating
a wire
a phone conversation
a coincidence
a highly unstable place
intertwined with a world-circling traffic jam
in this novel the results are enticing
the mouth is now the body forever
those of you outside the situation
play an important role
peeking inside the body
as agents of agony
self-committed to failing structures




and I have these moments
where I hear your voice
and I think
the reader is stealing
from me
and then I think no
I am the thief
the tempest
the unavailable background
wished into preservation
and all your radical simplicity
that you would ever understand
a hunk of skin
even more apparent than its pink gospel




a journey to love uncollected
before now you say love is this—
this plot of ground
receding and dividing
and yet there are
lovers and lovers still
that hold you from behind
as if God were willing
to defy your fear
draw strength from the earth
the truly memorable distinction
between your heart complete
with flutter and flaunt
and the beautifully wrought love poem



like the weight of your coffin
like a farm wagon
with masses of white flowers
like water at a shore
like nothing
in my life—
the ugly legs
the protruding stomachs
the sagging breasts
the new television station
watching me
watching you
my fingers lifting your young
face into another medium



I remember when you
were so strong
old chicken
wire turned to ashes
I remember when you
were so strong the world
was too much with us
I remember when you
were so strong no one was lovely
but you alone
and how will I describe
the contents of the poem to you
if not to say
opera!