Zee Manifesto

Zee Manifesto

The Neon Zee

Neon zee  

Walks Are Useless III

After reading a bit of Kafka’s diary, I go out  
to check the status of this century’s clouds.  
 
If they were meaningless
then, are they less so now? 
 
I sweep my arm through the air, and it leaves
no trace, no neon zee. I seem
 
continuous. The view from nowhere
says I’m tiny, and stuck
 
in the approximate present.
It’s not even speaking directly to me.
 
And then a blind man says,
When you’re blind,
 
you don’t see black,
you just don’t see.
-Elisa Gabbert

-------

My goal for this blog is to document my quest for finding/creating/living in The Neon Zee. This Zee is something you can see out of the corner of your eye.

TO create a neon zee, one must be moving at a zippy speed. 

Andrewpearce-49ebe51d5e018

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.


-Mr Wilde, my cosmic loverr

 

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To Download LETHOLOGICA 222 click behind click

Artistic-anatomy-andrea-galluzzo-i-am-held-by-the-star-above

LETHOLOGICA

By Ali Abraham

Ah! Lethologica!

 

i forgot the word

that means “i’ve forgotten the word.”

a word that describes the moment when precision

trumps continuity. 

this is a word that means pause,

 

a clause of a word,

a trick of light,

a tick of illumination,

a tear of patience 

in the busy fabric of prattle-

the persistent “what is it?”

 

I  Naming You

Naming You

Excuses

Some Time Ago

Ten Years Old and Afraid

She Refers to Herself

We Do this Everyday

Thin Ice

Mama, Grammie, Me

Handshakes

Our Shanghai

On Eye Bags

Things by Themselves

I Will Kill Myself

Simple

Wake Up

Dude

 

II  Evil Plan

Evil Plan (tm)!, A Guide

The Fashions

Post Eden Eves 

ARTIST’S ALTITUDE

On Poets

The Melting Poem

Now Love is Free

Foot

On Teeth

On Pearls

Who Needs Dick Who Has Bic?

Costume Complex

The Selves and Me

The Words and Me

Tweaked

Cried the Wind

 

III  Treasure

Treasure

Blue Venus Above the Moon

When Things Get More Complicated

Clavicle

Galactic Cannibalism

We Must

About a Boat

 

IV  Head First

Head First

Godless Prayer

Missing in Anonymity

The Importance of Ritual

September Bones

Remembering Japan

The Thing We Love

 

 

I  Naming You

 

Naming You

1  grave

i'll wait somewhere forever

for you.

 

they dug me six deep

and I was a hole

to fill. 

 

2  corpse

snowdrop water sunk and then cracked these bones.

a daisy seed sprouted in my nose hole

weaving through the mouth cave with spindle sewn

lace finger roots. soil absorbed the rich soul

 

and much became planted in the cool roast

rainbow chocolate of earthstuck flesh clumps.

from dirt, blooms sprung about my gross black ghost,

penetrated and pinned by the cross stump. 

 

prison is not coffin, but tomb marker,

here lies spirit stamp iron wrought etch.

i don't exist, but still suffer darker

purgatories: merely the starring wretch

 

of the loving epitaph. i exist

in stench, resist god fists of fixedness. 

 

 

3  baby

the bouncing beats sound softly. woven hearts

interlope cross body territories. 

stillness, not easy, as i am both part

and within movement, our sordid stories

 

of plum bobbing apples, incarnate Eve

or Newton's trembling fruit. its for you i wait,

weightless within the thrum, to be received: 

naked date with the pearly silk slick gate.

 

i seem to inhabit, it all becomes

me, within you, housing me, snake pulse

and dark, thick, milk fog swirls bthm bdm,

en-wombed so, by universal forces.

 

fluid sack bursts, tornado squeeze contracts,

sucked forth by breath  till' void, again, takes back. 

 

 

4  mother

i waited for you for months,

it was like they say

about boiling water. 

 

i was a big globe swilling

thousands of tsunamis.

what shall i name you, 

little death? 

 

Excuses.

it’s true. once in the springtime, long ago,

i murdered a frog, in cold blood, stone dead.

first, i pulled off his legs. my hands, aglow

with green guts and frenzy, itched to behead.

 

in my paw, i held the stiffening thing.

it no longer twitched. i retched, petrified  

by shame. gloom came that same spring:

fewer tadpoles. i could never confide

 

the misdeed. and— years later, someone said 

that famous killers, in childhood, killed.

my future was set. my hands were frog red,

tainted from babyhood, stained sick by thrill.

 

i have an excuse not to be purer:

i’m a fated serial murderer.

 

Some Time Ago 

i noticed 

a caterpillar

crawling along

a fracture in my dad’s 

garden planter.

 

i ate it,

gulped,

 

i waited. 

 

for many days i waited. 

for many nights i lay in bed, tense,

waiting. 

 

my vision was unfocused by concentration,

and my mind was buzzing with the organza blur 

of imagined wings but i never lifted from the ground.

 

 i guess that butterfly never burst from

it’s caterpillar skin and never flew to my head 

 

where it never crawled down my nose

to flutter out of my mouth

(which

always

hung consciously 

open)

 

and i still wonder 

 if i can make babies

why can’t i 

make

 

butterflies?

 

Ten Years Old and Afraid

apple seeds once flew like stardust

in the heavy august. 

and they too,

fell splat upon the mud!

just like me,

splat upon the mud!

 

--indenting a me-shaped-blob

onto the soft earth. 

we're living on an earth that has "grown soft." 

you're growing soft earth! what gives? 

give it up, tell us! 

 

usually "growing soft" is not a good thing.

it happens after you have kids, or play with kids.

papa says sometimes

i am sometimes not a good little thing. and like a secret,

i crave the bad softness,

the rot that cushions splat. 

but I find none under the layers of mud. 

 

the earth is a rock beneath the ground. 

i want to suffocate in its mud,

but the mud layer is too thin for drowning

in, and so, 

i turn over:

 

all but my naked grape eyes, camouflaged

by an encasement of wormy hashbrown mud.

belly skyward, i ponder

 

the plumage of the young apple tree. 

its single apple, beetlejuice bright with an aura of dusk,

a burning ruby at the core of a kiss, 

whisper escaping prayer. 

 

i am so tiny 

surrounded by cities of my drip castles.

i am so tiny 

 

 

She Refers to Herself 

as "your skinny little mother,"

"don’t talk back to your skinny little mother"

"you’re hurting your skinny little mother"

"your skinny little mother's back aches"

"will you give your skinny little mother a massage?"

but its never inflected like a question. 

 

 

We Do This Every Day 

she carries tension below the sharp wings 

of her shoulder blades

as though all expectation festered there. 

my thumb circles the impossible knots,

loosening and releasing her pain,

spreading it across her back, little by little.

she remains stiff throughout

as though I was examining the angles of her posture

instead of attempting to smooth their rust. 

 

 

Thin Ice

as she watches the olympic figure skating,

her body remembers the axles it used to make--

the ambition of leaping, of toe picks set to Swan Lake.

she used to speak of the importance of arms and fingers:

like a bird's wings, she said,

like willow branches, like tiger lily pistils.

but now she watches in silence,

occasionally muttering 

to herself when she predicts

a fall. 

 

Mama, Grammie, Me
adoration selfish enough sometimes breeds
something instead of Love. something strange and poisoned.
                               
mama said, grammie’s fat,
her boobs are so big they’re going
to break her back, two potato sacks.

jeez ma,
Its just an unattractive rack-
She’s old!

mama called grammie: that bitch,
big bertha, chocolate-fiend,
obese-addicted-disgusting!
“doesn’t she know she’s taping it 

directly to her ass?”and i say…mom,

hush, tape it to your ass and shake it, skinny bones.
(she sticks out her tongue at me and groans)
“kill me if i ever exceed 7 stones!”

but they only use stones
to measure the weight
of dried good shipments-

i wonder if
she knows this.

i wonder if grammie knows what she did,
all those years ago,just a kid: 16, absconding to 

New York like a gun dog without a scent, imagining

a scent, she seduced that promising Dartmouth man,
her brother’s friend.

i can hear her laughter, her operatic voice, 

voluptuous and commanding like the rest of her. 

the command: to be seen, to be touched, 

to be worshiped.

my grandmother, that wild creature raised
like fire in waspy stepford, Swarthmore.
my grandmother, a young woman with a future
and a sharp tongue that flapped, a spirit that quaked
with too much.

her father adored her, old family silent flicks
roll endlessly with Mary. Mary tumbles, Mary 

dances, she skis, she laughs, she empties
ice tea on her brother’s head, Mary,
Mary, grammie.

and then it happened. and then she was 18 

with a baby and a penniless dartmouth man 

with a future and med school bills
that she was cuffed to like a school girl
chained to the bed she made. a joke that became
a perverse fetish. 

the baby was as good as a scarlet letter
and its midnight cries didn’t wake her               
as she slept because they sounded like
the caterwauls of her dream.

Mary, Mary,
indulge, tape it to your ass and forget it’s there. 

in the coffin, your bones will rest on it
like dried goods. and only then will the weight 

of it be measured in stones which my mother will throw. 

and when she joins you down below
i wont pick up a single pebble.
i’ll bring you both roses, and you’ll

share their dried petals
as the wind blows

Handshakes

she prefaced formal introductions with

a ritual of whispered admonishment:

 

the weak handshake is a sign of a wishy 

washy woman. so we spastically jolted 

each new opponent introductee with mocking 

cockeyed glee. we’ve done it for years.

 

we rattle their smiling white teeth 

til’ they’re crooked in their gaped jaws. 

we attack those chapped or clammy hands

 

with charming

winsome grins.

 

with grilling prong

clamp shakes.

 

some hands melt in the hold,

some feebly joggle back.

 

nowadays

sometimes we forget why we reflexively detest

the weak shakers…those wilted porcine grips,

precisely syllable-d names, bulbous play-dough faces.

 

each one, armed with business cards

and botox wedding smiles, executive jobs

or vacation houses. and you taught us, irreversibly,

to shake their hands just like we check christmas presents.

 

to judge the firmness 

of a fingered embrace

as though

 

strength of hand

were strength of Soul. 

 

 

Our Shanghai

 

the place where we grow up no longer exists. 

 

here is Xintiandi:

here are the bullet holes in the bridge at Xintiandi,

here is the second tallest building in the world

where once an absurd fun house mansion stood.

legend told the mansion was built for the sick daughter of a rich man,

her recurrent dream, the blueprint for its mad dimensions.

 

here is the Pearl T.V. tower:

here are the purple and blue iridescent hexagonal domes of the tower,

magenta pink nipple dome at its top. shabby and dwarfed now,

but five years ago, the most famous attraction. 

 

here is The Bund,

still it wraps itself like a mama snake round

few remaining scrap bungalows, the Yuyuan trading market,

wraps itself around the new buildings, even, as they crop up like untreated shingles

upon the tired skin of this sinking city,

tallest of all sinking cities.

 

aluminum shack peasant shanties went down

and sepia toned monsters went up and up and up,

disappearing into the dishwater gray smog,

springing up and up until they were the tallest in the world, 

but empty.

 

we were once guests to this hungry, humming Gotham, 

voyeurs to its history: 

a culture that swallowed itself.

 

in a place that never existed

my first kiss tasted of breakfast dumpling and MSG. 

lasted 10 seconds.

 

then i woke up

a thousand years old.

 

Shanghai was gone,

vanished entirely in the gray smog that crept off the ocean, into its streets,

 

the sunken city, sinking, sinking 

into its forgotten wrinkles. 

 

 

Eye Bags

easiest way to see

your mother's face

is to concentrate on them.

 

i kissed yours,

but they stayed sunken.

 

after all, Love is not like sleep

or water

 

 

Things by Themselves 

 

Black Holes FAQ (answers to frequently asked questions)

 

WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?

 

Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull. In consequence, time is bent. Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail, but let's start off slow by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances.

 

who wants to find these 

broken things?going nowhere-

coming from where they’re still

going.

 

pieces of floating skeleton,

vertebrae, eyelashes,

discarded poems orbiting between 

mars and jupiter, an unfastened

belt of thing smithereens.

 

did we ever serve purpose

in a life time? our clavicles,

fossilized tiger fangs,

adam’s missing rib.

pieces of things

that nobody knows anymore.

 

like the part of me

that loved you more than itself.

 

astronomers 

keep searching for

the broken things

 

finding only time

twisted by

so much

that not even 

light can

escape.

 

let alone

themselves. 

 

I will kill myself

so that i can write you
a poem from hell
just to brag that i can do it:
 
the dead
wander through ink, painting
a halved black moon
with the soft rhythms
of ferocious pulsing.
 
my words whisper
with your blood
and you are forced to listen
as i rise.

in the stillness, 

i want every molecule of you 

to touch me

and then die.

 

Simple

there was a day when loving you

was simple,

 

and here, another day, nearly yesterday,

i lay in a snowdrift at midnight

close to naked,

willing myself towards death

just to give you an opportunity

to pick up my frozen limbs

and carry them to a source

of warmth—

 

i eventually crawled naked

towards what i knew

to be warm.

 

another man found me

and

under hot sheets,

i kissed his clavicle

and listened to his heart

as he slept.

 

you were only present

in the cold silence

between beats.

 

Wake Up

i open my eye,

still blurry with last night’s tequila.

upon waking, i don’t believe in miracles

and I don’t think they’re in me anymore—

though five hours ago,

i lay naked on my rooftop, singing.

full 

   moon

 empty 

        glass

 

i thought I could touch a star with my tongue-

believed it would melt like a snowflake

and light me up bright like Zee. 

 

even now, head buzzing with flurries

of booze induced haze,

snooze induced crust…

 

if i did believe,

i’d say jesus tap danced across that water.

who would walk with that sort of power?

i bet the meditation of saints,

if translated to sound,

would skip like a hip jazz beat.

 

the sour nectar still on my breath,

i bet i’ll do the same thing tonight

just to get back to that primal place,

blood singing with naked possibility. 

 

Dude

the best wind is a plaything;

sacred blood gold leaves wheeling through stalled time.

 

i was seven epochs late

in experimenting with innovation,

a DUI short of ego.

 

frozen in my own nakedness,

transfixed by the primordial. 

 

it seems as though everythings ended:

untried by a garage sale of moments, massacred by the

“here is life!”

 

some days i think i must’ve been conceived by lizards in a laboratory,

and other days, i think i must be just a regular dude.  

 

 

 

name found. I AM A= I Love

 

 

II  Evil Plan

 

Evil Plan (tm)!, A Guide

    your objective is simple: widespread misery.

    your motive is complex: love (yes, it works)

 

 Stage One

    to begin

you must first devour a chosen one. any will do. 

there’ve been a few this century. 

 

this will cause disturbance in the force.

aghast with loss, the people will ask, where does she come from? and why does she look so good wearing the skin of another human?

 

the element of surprise is your friend.

    Stage Two

    next, you must poison the moon. 

and you will run your operation from an obsidian citadel— a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory, a laboratory for toxin mixing, for venom concoctions. and by the light of the sickening moon, star gazers and lovers fall into catatonic trance. countless hordes of mutant race will run rampant with your bidding, picking off the sitting ducks, those impractical Romantics.

and everything will be fantastically ugly without their dreaming.

Stage Three

    finally, you must enforce a 1984 police state. your name shall become synonymous with blood, and no man will ever again dare refuse to be your prom date. everyone will bow before your mystical abilities, and the world will have no choice but to make you their new goddess.

 

every dance will be yours. 

you will never take another biology test. 

 

The Fashions 

she didn’t like it

when i wore a buddha on my chest,

the zen of advertisement on my breast…

enlightenment and all the rest—

OHM! but i digress.

 

she didn’t like it

when i wore hindu goddesses

around my neck, i accessorized 

with religion for the discotheque—

a little sexy shiva to make up

for my boring dress!

 

she didn’t like it

when i played jesus christ super star

in my car. i sang along when judas 

yelled WHO IN THE HELL

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

 

she didn’t like it

when i made a jewish joke: how many 

make early fortunes charging for a single toke?

that’s why college kids are always broke!

 

she didn’t like it

when i got a tattoo on my ass.

arabic symmetrical script up my back,

an attractive, tactless, guaranteed surprise

in the sack.

 

these are rational

mass supplied passions.

you can ignore mothers,

but you can’t ignore fashions.

 

 

Post Eden Eves 

abba, abba, blah, blah, blah. funny

bone, how astute you are within these lines

of mine:  starting with eden, my money's 

on that horrible snake filled mine

 

field the bible calls a golden garden.

pardon me, adam, i’m a bit naked.

and that thing between your legs has hardened,

why, god damn! i’ve been oh so forsaken,

 

advantage has been taken of a rib

to make me! and i want to name a few

things, like, THAT’S a monkey. now don’t be glib

with me, fucknut, god, i can’t be shooed!

 

i’m not a stray dog, im a naked thing

praying at the crossed christ you created!

 

ARTIST'S ALTITUDE

maybe

i’m only good for lewd servitude
served up with a bratty attitude
and booze. yeah the rent is due.

 i spent it and i spent you too. you 

were only good  for a screw and 

a little food,
that god-awful local brew

please!

don’t mistake false gratitude
for Love
or brooding exactitude
for Art.

are you stricken, fool,
by these puckered poet lips?
you really like these decorated hips—

the mad spastic stints?

fake longitudes
and latitudes
of dimension?

haven’t you noticed
maybe i’m traveling nowhere
at only
the depth
of the word
i?

i only like you when
i’m high.
and god, you’re just a 

 

speck

at this spectacularly gilded
spectacle of altitude.  

 

although….there’s just a chance 

that with some absence, perhaps

i love you.

 

Poet

to be one

take up a pen, crack it open,

finger paint ink to paper. 

 

crumple the paper.

swallow it. two hours later

take a shit in a flower planter

and pray that some bird

or irreverent wind is

benevolent with a flower seed. 

 

If the season passes and 

your offering is beset

with weeds, slit your wrists

and leave behind a note

written solely in words stolen

from a beautiful dead one. 

 

or smoke a cigarette 

and kick the dud planter 

and its bad dirt. 

 

The Melting Poem

like so many poems

the heat of our bodies was too much heat,

our colors were too many colors,

our rhythm had too much syncope,

and our rhyme was heavy handed.

 

wind battered the window

and the pane emitted soft moans

but the snow never came.

our light melted the snow

before it could fall.

 

like a poem, 

we murdered what we were

the instant 

we discovered it.

 

Now Love is Free

learn to flirt with inanimate objects,

charm the lacquer off an arm chair,

kiss the piss out of a mirror

(fail to explain lipstick mash

marks when asked.)

 

flip your hair at the wind in the door,

eye fuck a stop light til' it screams green,

bend low and give your stuffed bear a show, 

lick the French fry oil from your lips,

swivel your hips while receiving communion,

hold confession booth sessions in the shower,

toss your cat a dismissive glower,

Cady Stanton marched for this girl power!

 

do away with flower bouquets!

Love isn’t just cheap

or even freely given, 

it is a slew of garage sale scrap sins,

miscellaneous mishaps forgotten 

to rot beneath our hot,  

hot sun. 

 

Foot

wow,

that thing is so big,

if i were to lop it off,

we could feed 

a tribe of pygmies

for a week. 

 

wow,

those toes!

meat push pops!

 

foot! thrust between

two bus seats 

like a wedgie.

 

toes! twisting

snakeheads!

 

foot, blistered

by slopes,

the red underbelly

exposed

like the palm 

of Buddha’s hand.

 

toes,

curling and cramped

like refugees.

 

foot, toes, foot, toes

eyes flash

from foot to

toes.

 

in retrospect,

i can’t remember…

 

what does

the rest of you

look like?

 

 

Teeth

found in sour oysters

you're meant to suck on

 

Pearls

found in sour oysters 

you're meant to suck on

 

Who Needs Dick who has Bic?

i am a woman obsessed with the rod.

possessed by countless questions

about man’s pervasive relationship

with his meaty log. 

 

the salty dog is always god, 

a highly covetable instrument.

 

to know a thing,

one must first know its name-

 

the Firm Worm! the Kerouwacker!

the Meat Maelstrom! boobs are just girls.

The Girls, Apples, Dirty Pillows.

 

i persistently grapple with the idea

of having a “Skin Flute.” yes. my womb 

can bear “fruit”and i can wear a pantsuit

i can even give my man “the boot”

happiness is an available pursuit…

 

but don’t you wonder too?

 

what would you do with it?

would you be proud of its size-

or if it was little, despise it?  

 

i haven’t decided. 

 

…do hands and feet really compare?

do the smallest boys ceaselessly despair?

 

i once read  

that some girls pack.

 

pack what?  

 

heat?

socks in their crotches?

 

my mind wandered:

do they pack ideas and delusions

or dildos or small potpourri pillows?

 are they proud of their static bulge? 

the way a four year old boy is?

 

once i was a ten year old girl

and once i grasped a baseball bat

to my pelvis, swiveling my hips 

like a prepubescent blonde Elvis.

 

it was fun!

the attention garnered by the gun

is not to be outdone. 

 

in tarot,

the masculine suit is “The Sword”

and the spiritual suit, “The Wand”

combined, this makes a dick 

the fighting divine. mine to manipulate, 

but never to wield. the Womyn say 

this must be appealed!  

 

and let it be understood that

i’ll never (forcibly) kneel,

but i am relieved to be free 

from the one eyed eel’s

unpredictable pressures.

 

(though if i weren’t,

who even listens to a Feminist’s lectures?)

 

Costume Complex

Clothes make a statement.  Costumes tell a story.  

~Mason Cooley

 

the costume complex

is a complicated mania:

each morning i stage protest against 

my body and drape  mortal angles 

in the splendors of materialism. 

 

sometimes i dress to match the weather

and sometimes to mask it. sometimes 

i awake with a snarl on my face

and choose to ditch it. 

 

the world of apparel is conducive 

to dressing down to your despair, 

but I like to mix it up by slipping on 

a pair of orange velvet underwear.

 

poofy wonderland sleeves,

fetish buckles, school boy brogues. 

deconstructed dress with exposed seams

smiley face socks. ruffled frocks.

luxurious shredded leathers.

i’m not a woman of letters, 

but a woman decked in feathers!

 

i swear, you never know who you’ll meet

in the streets (least wise, me)

 

if i am disheveled, if i’ve layered

too many genres, a trauma of too much, 

melodrama distracts from façade.  

 

each morning, chill invites me naked

to a pile of clothes. the mirror shows a skin

that i barely know:  and with identity prone 

to tear, it’s crucial to make one to wear. 

 

sometimes people stare 

but i find myself scarier bare. 

 

The Selves and Me

i share my bed with self loathing,

self pity, self aggrandizement,

every self conceivable.

 

i’m a slut.

 

and at night,

i curl up with my knees pressed against

the wall.

 

i squirm—i never have 

enough room.

 

i do not sleep.

 

instead,

myselves weave

the story of my day:

perfect and fantastic foibles

affected by sighs and drastic

 

pauses. self improvement rolls his eyes.

self involvement 

giggles. 

 

The Words and Me 

Nautical Vagabondage

is a sexy phrase for my poem and 

 

after all, diamonds are only

the third hardest substance,

and window panes are eternally dripping

(as though they had souls instead of solely 

providing glimpses.) after all, oil paintings 

take 200 years to dry (imagine mona lisa’s 

modesty, merely a figment of time.)

 

and rules of attraction interest me—

just subtract any sort of tactful interaction 

in conversation. CATARACT!

 

look, i found an ode! o terse versification

of sporadic elation! i’m the patient of impotent 

divine onomatopaeic vibrations!

 

but suddenly, but sadly, 

it’s rendered insipid

because 

 

my friend Sam doesn’t like the word, Vagabondage.

though uncontrollably

 

i must revel in it

 

like a fat man confronted with platters of porcine cuts

glistening.

 

Tweaked

the third most sinful word is surely the fuck
word, though we've all heard worse, of course, CUNT!
now, shall we embark on the reluc-
tant hunt for the crudest verbal affront?

clearly, the bluntest grunt couldn't be cock.
oh, we love that word too much to be caught
chastising its use, and that word won't shock
the average schmuck. and ass and bitch are not

all bad! sometimes they're animals. I think
nigger is awful, chink too, but neither
is aesthetically brash, and thus, not in sync
with our search's intent. each word either

screams or snickers. the vast attention span
for foulness is a theatric trait of man-
so our search continues! which avenue
remains unexplored? slut, WHORE? those subdued

and just slightly wreaking words are too weak-
even combined, tweaked. is it best not to speak?

 

 

 

Cried the Wind

Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet. 

-JJ, Ulysses

 

bloodcurdling still may

splice the bleating of blood

 

heart, hung like a hide

to dry on bone crumble.

 

there you were

within the murmur of a blinking eye,

alive,

insidiously breathing,

still.

 

a shimmer of spit on your lip

crusted slowly on the corner 

of your mouth.

 

you were afraid.

 

the wine drunk purpled and

marooned and made black

your red, red tongue—stuck,

now, to the ribcage of gum.

 

words died there.

some, stillborn, stuck like carcasses 

without organs to enflame them:

thick mummified skins of muteness,

bodies of thought, thoughtlessly lost.

 

the torporous stupor,

performed like a swoon, like a maiden 

loved in June, laden with hissy air kisses

under a cloudy noon. her lover sung her

a honey ballad of oil, the droning joke 

of summer. you’re dead, artist.

 

we played no dirge.

they found you wrapped in food stained blankets,

spotted by dried coffee droplets: the ragged 

sleepy nest, a catacomb, loamy with impotent 

love songs, the hanging breath of tentative

pulsations and the mercurial spittle of wafting 

whiskey.

 

invisible bard

may be an invincible god,

but in such cases, 

he is dispensable,

dismissible.

 

do you miss me?

cried the wind

 

 

 Plan Complete.

 

 

III Treasure

 

Treasure

this old offering dish was found long ago in the coral cove of Nusa Dua,

sand sunken, protruding from coral. skin diver, Bill Abraham,

nicknamed abe-alone at home, Big Sur, dove tank-less, 

and, holding breath, spotted an unnatural arc of clay orange. 

 

the long line of his body, thrusting arrow, through the breathing

of indigo, rainbow of fish, jewel scales, undulating seaweed. 

 

clinging to coral, he dug. stroking roughly the clay curves,

his fingers dove into loose sand.  breath held still, 

he pulled a dentist excavating wisdom tooth kind of pull.

the stem, root, the sand, ribbed gum, but his process 

was bloodless. 

 

the dish came in pieces, middle cracked jaggedly,

lip at one end of the crack, triangle gap, smiling. 

 

breath ran out like an hourglass. pieces in each hand,

like a slow motion dart, he swerved toward the surface

broke it and gasped a hook punctured fish sort of gasp. 

 

weeks later, he set about fixing the two pieces into one.

using superglue, he laminated the irregular fault,

where it once split, forever a zig zag milkish glow. 

 

ln later years, his little daughter would offer what she could

to the broken thing that he found and fixed:

snarls of tumbleweed, dusty lavender desert flowers, 

whispers of obsidian, clumsy origami,

feathers, flower haiku—

imagining always, the long ago offerings 

burned like treasure, she offered herself.

 

Blue Venus above the Moon

for my dad

 

Part 1

we haven’t spoken in months—

but as i go though the periwinkle plush baby book i found

in the deformed boxes once abandoned to storage,

a lone photo flutters out.

 

i finger the book's cover,

it’s yellowed pearl dotted hearts.

 

upside down,

the photo looks like atomic apocalypse,

a rash of orange cradled by blood maroon

and city firefly lights

the heart of which is an electric blue dusk.

 

on the back, the restrained scrawl of your handwriting reads:

“venus on my baby's first sunset”

 

Part 1

i’ve carried the picture around

with me for months—

its begun the slow tear

objects often feel when looked upon 

too frequently, when held too tenderly,

when carried about casually.

 

its twin remains

stuck behind cellophane

next to a picture of us:

 

you cradle me, scarlet and newly borne,

in a faded pink blanket that sweats white balls of fuzz.

 

looking up, your sorrel eyes spangle

framed by the lashes that you taught me to

butterfly kiss with.

 

When Things Get More Complicated

 

1  The Skull

things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. but

he is beautiful. and he whittles concepts into contraptions. 

he says he likes to make things…more complicated. 

 

he shows me his wink machine.

it is made with grainy blonde wood-

and upon first glance,

it is a torture device, 

or a helmet, 

or a skull made of negatives.

 

he places it upon his head

looking for all the world

like a dentist’s science project.

 

he cranks and cranks the knobs 

as two metal pieces slowly open his right eye, 

and two others close his left.

 

at last, he winks.

 

2  The Conversation

a woman interrupts us,

to ask, “when is your vernissage?” 

(a vernissage is an art opening, 

she explains.)  she says that in french,

vernissage means “to varnish.”

 

he hates that. I hate her smarts. 

he shakes his dreads. 

he flutters his fingers. he splutters,

he looks very French as he does this. 

“Art is not Superficial 

like varnish!” 

 

3  The Silence 

i mutely disagree. 

what and who isn’t painted, repainted, and covered

in thousands of layers of glittering, blinding, 

cracking vernissage?

 

beautiful things made clearer

by cover:

like with costumes. 

and mania.

and Love affairs.

 

and some artists make art solely from layers of it.

 

is there an idea buried

somewhere beneath or in between?

where is the Art if it is not

in the layers and layering techniques? 

 

our each instance, a preview,

a private opening,

to be pried open,

analyzed and then redelivered

…over and over again?

 

i look up

and he is still winking at me. 

 

one thing I do know is that, in latin,

Ver means “to look,” and Sage means, “to heal.”

 

Clavicle

clavicle, a curve to

trace the shadows of

as the conch of my ear

nestles into the rhythmic disquiet

of a heartbeat.

 

a thing that creates caves and

crests to fill with lips.

 

where the shoulder of the human

shell curls

inwards,

a rib

gods never touched.

 

the ivory roots of cerebellum

below brains and above

central ventricles

 

and in Spanish, nails, clavos:

twisted metal pieces carefully placed by hands

into doors, a hinge for what opens and shuts.

 

and grand remonstrance: 

the piano. a claviature bed of keys

played alone and at once, 

in parity

 

blood beats bone stronger

 

listen

 

 

Galactic Cannibalism

 I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all? 

–Walt Whitman

 

sometimes, one 

galaxy swallows another,

star by star,

creating collisions from dust. 

 

pieces of sky rusted

to explosive pixie thimbles 

and rose gold 

magically combust.

 

like hair ringlets 

of electric-tar,

twines of stars

curl into one another.

 

these explosions shed 

violent particles which 

we cannot see

because their hues

shred finer than 

rainbow.

 

invisible tendrils of excited 

electrons swathe acres of grass

and human graves-

 

but none of this

can be seen.

the eye is too small.

 

too small for noticing 

the elegant curve 

that glances between two 

beings in a moment—

 

such as 

the aura of warmth that a hand has

as it does not touch another—

but nearly, one finger caresses

the air above.

 

too small for noticing
baby hairs as they spine-
remembering secrets
lips divulged, sweating 

crimson to coral.
 
and yet, everyday,
human galaxies pull into 

one another, entangling 

stars  with an energy 

that is too colossal 

to be seen.

 

We Must

my shoulders

freckle in the sun

my cheeks turn

the color of peach,

my lips,

the color of plum

 

i like it here,

 

i like you

 

the music vibrates in my chest

as it seeps

in

 

smoke from your mouth,

cinnamon and cola root

 

a scent

that is centuries of must

 

we must

we must

we must

 

About a Boat

the silhouette of a ship
cowers across
the sea’s unfurling spines.

the sun spikes the sea
and a dandelion’s mane
spindles with burs
of iridescent tongues.
 
the faces of the sailors
reflect the lick of waves
in the sweaty dew of their cheeks.

the sky unfolds
as the sea plumes beneath.
the ravenous deity
swallows.

snowflakes fall like thunderbolts
in the distance.

what a hollow roar it all made!

 

 

treasure found.

 

 

IV  Headfirst

 

Headfirst

silver cane in hand, he tells me

of a two years old motorcycle accident

that shattered two knees and two vertebrae.

caused his head to bleed.

 

we talk about the cold, how it makes arthritis smoke,

how it cracks between the kneecaps with its dry breath.

 

our bond of injury

made stronger by the implicit presence

of a friend who dove head first into vigor’s vim.

 

now he is bound by an instant

of rapture

to four wheels.

to computer screens.

hospital beds. 

 

through email,

this man says he’s made headway toward autonomy since.

i suppose once you go headway towards anything

certain things break. necks for instance.

but the élan of the diver is never lost. Headfirst

is a way of doing things. 

 

stories pile high.

 

one morning i woke up alive, breathing the air

that makes snow for the mountains i crave.  

i felt the weight of my feathered comforter,

i felt the throbbing of my bitter ligaments.

 

i felt the distinctive thick twang 

left by vics and wine:

and there, pulsing in the dark light,

Sense

thwarted dumb invincibility.

 

our diver wiggles his fingers

to taste the thrill that is left to him now. he fights

with some bewildering power to lift a pinky.

 

 

the pain is loud and wandering.

i feel and feel and feel and flex and brace and crutch

and smile and laugh violently. and cringe. 

 

the boy speaking to me does the same,

unsheathing a dragon emblazoned sword from his cane,

waving it in the face of the misted sky, he curses the pitiless spangled heavens,

humbled only by the whims of his voracious, sometimes unthinking, life.

 

Godless Prayer

i believe in artful prayer, but i’ve never prayed to god,

one might pray with the backwash of liquor

for the blackness to come quicker, but not to god. 

 

i believe in miracle, but angels are an obstacle

of fruition. listen, do you want a shimmering thing

to grant you a perfect version of your vision,

 

or do you want to earn it?

 

i believe in intuition, but not in perfect vision-

20/20 is the kind of myth optometrists persist

 in spreading— and nobody can be bothered to object.

 

i’ll say it again, i believe in Art, but i never broke

my own heart for it unless you count 

the prayers i made as my heart broke.

 

unless you count the day i picked my broken 

self up, took a step, made the break worse, 

glamorized the pain. perhaps it was on purpose—

intended to call forth visions of a shiny black hearse 

and piles of flowers because a few hours later,

pen in hand, i prayed a prayer of damnation

in poem form speaking of my damage as though 

it was the way i was born. forlorn, the damaged poet 

mourns… damnit, slant rhyme.

slant rhyme, your timing’s off.

 

now, i believe in love

but never enjoyed it much

until my heart broke. 

 

 

Missing in Anonymity

For survivors

 

i looked for you in every valley,
and each became filled with mountain
at all ends. i looked in the water,
swam the Pacific and the Rio Grande, but only found islands,
isolated, pan-caked between moon and ocean, flat land that had never considered cities
let alone human beings or even the deep wrenching sift of sorrow.

 

imagine me at night without the thrumming of your big dreams. i dwelt in a sorrow
that burrowed neatly in those forever rolling valleys
where i once searched for you. in my hollow body, i built labyrinths of city,
wishing one of the rooms of one of the buildings contained you. i stacked mountains
to conduct the search from highest elevation. high up, i became a speck of island
in outer space, and, they say on Mars there was never any water

 

and perhaps i could not survive without water—
but could without love, dining alone, parched upon the taste of sorrow.
i relearned the contours of Poplar trees, their whispering— forced myself to taste island
fruits, but still could not remember the precise and exquisite valleys
of your lips, the twisted vines in your shoulders or the mountainous
anxiety with which you avoided the hectic life of the city.

 

but i am a city-person. i live for the loneliness of cities
and i loved for you like one in a desert, chasing the mirage of water:
your feminine shins, earlobes, the ravenous foreboding of your mountains.
this must be how i lost you. i stared straight at you and your sorrow
vanished. this is where i starve for you now, parched in the desert valleys,
mouth stuffed with dust. my eyes become large as deserted islands,

 

my ears fill with wavesounds, nothing else. i am a string of islands,
they are called eyes, mole, mouth, aorta, elbows, knee joint: cities
of me, severed by volcanic quakes and eruption. the surrounding seavalleys
were  secret, covered by ocean or filled with tears, flooded with salt water.
like alice, i could swim, i could search shipwrecks and reefs for a key, but sorrow
kept changing into ether, into fire, into rock. it was like mountains.

 

built of mixed substances. it could not be unlocked. like mountains,
i could only mine it, dig and dig into the sands that ringed each island
until striking gold or water or rock or sorrow.
i still miss you and i’ve long stopped missing my beloved city.
it was too busy there, too vertical, too vertigo, and i don’t need water
anymore as it now floods the emptiness of the valleys.

 

The Importance of Ritual    

in the morning you will wake up half dead

and remain so for hours.

 

you will do regular things. 

make coffee and tell jokes about the erratic weather. 

 

your hand will shake wildly as you pour the coffee grounds

into the filter. you spill it. you clean it. you forget you made it. 

 

you will dunk graham crackers into the coffee once you remember it’s made.

they will fall into the coffee and liquefy but remain graham cracker shaped. 

it will be disgusting. you will drink only half of the cup. 

 

class will end. 

you run out. 

 

you will take a walk to the quirky coffee place downtown—

the one that sells cinnamon chocolate.

 

you will buy more coffee and a piece of chocolate, sipping and 

chewing slowly. the afternoon light will drag,

 

clinging to the day like the fringe of levi cut offs,  a cool, distinctive shredding.

and you occasionally lose 

 

track of what you’re doing.

but you will remember abruptly

(oh, i am drinking coffee. and walking).

 

you will go to the library and pretend to read.  that won’t last very long.  

and eventually the time for dinner will come. 

 

but eventually is never enough

so you will eat at 5:30. (early bird special 

for those who won’t make it much longer.) 

 

and the only thing you remember about that day

is its refrain,

 

He is dead. 

He is dead.

 

He is dead. 

 

 

September Bones

for my mother, for her mother, for me

she sings 

slow, slow, willow-dear,
fill the spaces between your roots with elder-down, down,
down, drink the air above the cupped earth,
suck your phloem teeth and sup the hollow hiss,
sipping the whispers of summer’s fermented grape.
the wrath of winter follows:
willow, your roots go deep into the earth
but who remembers the shivering of your september bones
as they lost their leaves?

she remembered yesterday as though incantation bound the calendar pages
and amnesia were the sweetness of smoke as it rose from the turning of days—

the kind of creature who knelt in blonde grass
and stroked the pale shadows of the tree branches
wishing for springtime
and kindness.
her cold breath rose
as the hours grew darker.

all the while, the september bones rustled in the catacomb where youth once tossed them
like playthings.
the crinkling of wind broke the dry veins, 

and spokes made splinters into the earth.
oh! the bones splintered so as they tossed.
they could carry her no further.

sometimes, the dark earth
is a brutal lover,
sometimes,
a cold mother.
the year is gone.

 

our grace then,

like summer dust storms;

the long and deep kiss of it, 

faded by longing as the earth forgets

 her leaves. 

 

 

Remembering Japan

 

1  San Francisco

it is cherry blossom season in San Francisco,

a wimpy one, still it is cherry blossom season. 

 

the trees populate the city shyly, 

a couple stationed in front of a crumbling 

Italian church, the border of a park, sidewalk planters,

reticent heralds of a foreign loveliness. 

 

they thrash in the deluges of April. street sog

absorbs the sickened bursts, and petals float

in the gray mire, drown in the gutters, impressed

into rain boot heels and smeared on welcome mats. 

 

it calls to mind the greater season, 

goddess of springtimes: sprawling groves 

of the Japanese country side, blooming in playgrounds, 

schoolyards even, glorious Shinto gardens zen burst spring.  

 

i remember the pagoda roof cowl curves,

crowns stacked like nesting dolls, protruding from

a breathing blush swirl of blossoms and their limbs.

 

and at once, I feel a chill of vision:

splintered and coagulated mulch of broken earth,

limbs and toxic sog and bubbling mud where our earth 

could no longer hold our trembling and her trembling

and broke

and it is cherry blossom season 

bodies and blossoms and pink and blush and flesh.  

 

2   Great Wave

nearly midnight, the gas fueled fire 

glimmers, its soporific sputter drowned

by electric TV glow and HBO announces

Touchstone’s  Pearl Harbor.

contentedly reading Robert Hass’ “Time and Materials” 

as Pearl Harbor’s drama unfolds, i bask in the heat 

of the little fireplace flames.

 

After the Winds unfurls its words, but absently.

i become sucked into the Hollywood world 

of a gorgeous love triangle set in a California Hawaii, 

crying vicious bursts of tears,  huffing shallow 

wisps of breath, heatedly muttering things like

bring that plane down motherfucker!

 

i’m thinking i want to fight! and i think it with 

the full outrage of my heart, gasping because

 i can smell death-smell from the screen 

as the ships sink and the harbor swells with bodies. 

wreckage. 

 

i sip my whiskey lemonade and smolder. 

the liquid is puss colored amber on the rocks. 

it chatters as i sip, thinking Japan

 

Japan where i lived as a kid

how beautiful and how brutal 

 

Pearl Harbor—

my Tateyama,

 

streets swollen with bodies. 

wreckage. 

 

movie sob chokes in the throat.

becomes a swell, Great Wave of paralysis.  

 

The Thing We Love

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Philipians 2:12-16

 

1  The Dying

and to kill everything beautiful

is the precursor 

for this world that refuses to hold its pieces.

 

we’ve come to spin on an axle that is 4 degrees off kilter.

This is an earth that throws itself into quakes,

a trembling earth that has reached capacity.

 

too much sorrow, too many bodies, too many, too many, too many painfully

quaking bodies refusing 

the soft touch of each other. 

 

2 The Mourning

age, unknown. origin unknown or known too well,  or both,

the massive animal, grief, lies prone, 

arms spread like christ.

 

and in his arms, we lust for postmortem as the dumb and 

dead saints lust for lust

those forever disintegrating martyrs, nothing but boxed and cherished bones, 

smoldering in their catacombs. 

 

life is a sacrifice that anyone could make, but most choose to keep,

seeking forever and it’s gift of grief— animal thing,

the animal grief. 

 

3  The Living

in mourning,  we only see only 

the blurred thrumming, 

only we, the grieving living, 

sacrificed sacrifice

choosing instead, to hold each other with eyes closed. 

 

we bear together, the living,

and once dust, 

we settle together,

the mingled sod for roots,

a layer of color 

for the rivers to unearth, 

a secret trembling of miracles 

 

 

 

free fall

 

 

difference between jumping and falling

1  Jumping

if the edge had a view of itself

instead of from itself,

would it flee its own jutting,

cuttingness by

                                jumping?

 

i did.

i jumped into the chasm of it:

black as a gulping mouth,

spiral throat swallowed me

with darkness rushing.  

 

once unbound from

the bondage of the ground,

my ears filled with the roar of air. 

 

dried tear ducks

prickled with sleepy seed granules

where dreams had never fully waxed

and crusted.

 

2  Falling

we were pushed from the edge,

and together, fell

from its crest into crush.

 

in free fall,

we held hands

 

and realized we were always 

on the edge of something:

each other.


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Never have I ever....dyed my hair???? no longer

Photo on 2010-11-04 at 14.12 #2
Photo on 2010-11-04 at 14.14
emerging from the sick bed a funny color 

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"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. 
God and the Devil are fighting there, 
and the battlefield is the heart of Man."
                                                                Dostoevsky

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