Gloaming

Hello from concrete. The alliances,

the overlaps are always born. A wife runs

from clay, nowhere she runs, with bright neglect

unlike one that weakens from the fittings of drums.

She hides lone yeas and odd nays. Hides no

with yes, and in hiding no she hides hello.

She avoids the languidness of balance.

She sinks into deeper earth less calm

than good beasts floating to cosmos dimly.

Years lost she runs in noise and armament.

She doubts the small halts of earth that throb her

with bricks and breakers, breakers or blunt drear

out of soaks in drums and tongues, the shortest drum

and the slimmest tongue, the thin tongue that disdains.

By sunlight, truths numb speech as it fusses.

The carnal ending is someone’s,

in the lifetime when the bestial drum renounces

those makers departing, in solitude, without skin.

Dogged maid running by the womb

and still in clay and calmness and still

of calm the never-darkening death,

inane, and still the slave and still her name,

gaze from this vacant sewer. What solitude,

skinless, won’t censor it from the clothed slab?

Chupacabra

by a rock sailing backwards I spy you

drowning a little kid that loved once

to graze my barriers with rum fur

bleating in the midnight celestial

harmonies I called you curator

of my bounce still buxom anchoring

to a fog in june with permanence

the always sneaking-in-ness of the lake

is what filthed it when we went there you

married the interior sinking

of witches christened me with face dew

drying itself on a spit that slants

circularly I was able then

for the oops homicide of welcome

and acadian boats slow gunning

ferry wheels into the small foot which

asked you to cross and the falls broke time

to expose your velvet parts hoofing

at hey and the devils that drone why

melt the blonde winter you glittered down

before it consummates a sucking

of glass into something you regard

emptily before you sank you might

fill this molten bucking and christ me

as far north as you sleep the shadow

follows as much hair as you misplace

it is a rape of the coding come

in this cot that sails you lay me in

goat hay and shit I knife you howling

how taunt me with your breeding and bare

bottom feeder you’ve growled your hunger

and one summer I’d offer a vein

but I’m too dry now to be your drink

Jeune fille mangeant un oiseau (after René Magritte)

Because you were young and proper, you drew

birds from the tree with both hands. Your tender

fingers reached hard into their sternums, caught

with the silence of song. A placid face of love

for their little throat muscles like lute strings

sharp and snapping. You chomped until your lips

were seductress red, defying the space-time

of your androgyny. If the other chirps try

to peck out your teeth, or regard with hate

the flightless wings peeled away from trunk,

it’s no shift, your cheeks stay cadaverous,

interred in the heedless soil of your hair.

Tawny, you pray like Daphne your feet will root

low into this forest, your body curve and swell

to a burst of mossy emerald, quitting your browns.

Unknowing birds will fly to your arms and the men

entranced by your evergreen will circle in awe.

And when they all collect, you’ll open your mouth—

The Transformer Explodes

In a wood-burned night the sky flamed allover green,

blood blue and white. The trash-collecting thunder

dumped and his skin inked over, fleshy silkscreen

for the printing of radioactivity. Oh God in wonder

am I dedicated to your spilled paint can apocalypse,

the melting of his body and mine in the burnout furnace

of this sacred turnpike. Say your blow’s not innocuous,

the flash photo clouds no routine overcast turn. Face

should be slipping from skull. You keep bodies bound

to the still skeletons of night-driving until penny metal

does the dissolution. Stay you Lord with us deathbound.

The sooner we soup in the road’s shoulder the less hell

he’ll touch. Light, push fear from his breast and come

let it gel with mine. In a thickening pool, we’re home.

To My Nurse

That woman’s long foot I was setting on fire,

wrapped up in red damp drape to retard the glow

of her bunions like coal, the hardening corns,

wart pads with the fresh stink of Cuba unfurled.

When light goes out she leaves volcanic imprints

in heelprints of other eruptions. Lights up

and she wheelbarrows marketbound on both hands,

buying meat with her ankles. One stays home, burns

as a child. One kicks what has made the meat wrong.

One’s feet are lava that burn the woman’s feet.

Burn the feet and you burn the streets they walked on,

burn the boat they sailed on, the ocean it rode.

Burn all these and she never came with a name

I mispronounce, crying it with the wrong stress

when she brings no water to relieve the burn.

Burn the soles to burn the cry, then burn the loss.

Modern Guide for Cerebral Donation

Faith may be matter. Activity undermines a child’s body

found with a firearm and the reasonable cause to remember.

Gather a live group of wishes. Or endanger respect for the coffin,

as if all enactment of disease could somehow differ from dementia.

Spending seven days in impairment is reasonable when writing

on the bombing of brains, the holy crime that unfolded mortality.

Now death can exit the land. Emergency shall finally terminate law.

Pick a Weekend for Fall River

If it pleas, destroy the coin jar, scoop its marrow

and buy me a lickerish night on the crown floor

of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.

Find sludge in the ass clefts of settees,

tomato ore batter, cobwebbed and dry,

like pressed flowers to treat this gland inferno.

It’s clues now that usher the dawn of the dark.

Blood-slicked cardigans, keyholes to tundra,

all fall under winter’s first fingerprint dusting,

a white mausoleum that smothers fatty evidence.

A lack of telltale bones keeps me hidebound.

For the sake of our love I would like you to chop.