Flinders

FLINDERS

Leopard skin initiations into motel aggregates induces

Inbedded devils dangling promises to prestige scenarios

Zippers ripped presumptuously trouble the floundering couple

Asterixes ringing in their eyes as love-dosed smorgasbord insues

           * * *

Sister was a witch

Had she a secret hut?

In the wilderness men met her

When a horse was lost

Its master carried off

by invaders, people

played chess on the rocks

For peanut shells

that fed the elephants

They played the trumpet

for girls in pigtails

who applauded with small palms

And the men imitating chickens

squawked at the dubious clerks

            * * *

Prostitutes dangling handkerchiefs

Arranging the ends of their merit

Where a champion lands

Sea-weed entangled, amnesiatic

Mongol warriors wheedle their

moustaches meditatively

The creatures tied his wrists

to a log and hauled him off

Back to the village to cook

For a shiny coward

The Sugar Page

What page is this?  This is the sugar page.

Stripped bare to the purity of nothingness.

Where winter writes whatever the hell it wants,

Enveloping us in crystalline messages, unbeknownst.

This is the page we attract when we've dropped the reins.

Feast on apples, or fast, forever indebted to agriculture.

A clear head is promising, and a promise I made to myself.

Sugar in the blood, Sweet Jesus and Holy Mary--

may I always smile knowing I am safe in this red heaven.

River of knowing, robust Rubicon that if I cross

I must be firm in upholding.  Standing upright like I am-

no monkey meddling in abstract magic or finger paints or such.

Fragment I

Minutemen gallant and pacing the latern-lit sidewalks

Initially afeard now polishing muskets with certitude

Chervil and violets hide the eyes of rebel hormones

Heroically squandered in lisps of lust run amok

(Even when beligerent schoolgirls obstructed the path)

Poem on Winter and such

Winter,
white world, a twilight star-

distant home he walked out on

and never returned to.
Friends worried,

sent out a search party.

Winter,

where were you? in what hole

did you sleep, face covered in concave feathers,
furrowing ambitions to be deleted.

Winter ravaged by streams of ice-vacuumed cocoons,

haven to ravens and all wild things-

waiting patiently guarding armored atop lamp posts

girdled furiously in linen,

abundant particles of cellar beams creeping in-

Winter, move over, make way-

one more instance of a vast indecipherable landscape

crisscrossed by fox tracks.

Winter was where we hid-

buried, avoidable-

from a tripartite covent of vixen.

blue apartment building

blue apartment building

parking lot covered in snow

buried cars of the young

swinging drinkers

lonely playground at night

across the street

nameless lanes, corridors

the drunk wander home through

indistinguishable facades

of blue, gray, slate, red and white—

spiraling gaiety of children’s voices

climb the anonymous walls of morning

reaching into summer’s open screens,

a sleeper awakening on his pillow

stretched out on the floor

of a room finally attended to

and permenance punctured the dream

a girl’s voice through the wall, singing

making dinner alone, perhaps

once a male voice in counterpoint

“crazy girl” moniker which never made sense

granted it was given by a real one

who left underwear soaking in the sink

before she fled – as when I met her,

she was running away from me

and posted her greeting on the wind

smiling, nevertheless, and in exertion

always late and sprinting to the alarm

of the eldery carefully trudging their snow

(cold denizens of onion country

once maidens in flowery prints)

posing under fireworks holding skewers

within hordes of boys like a swarm of dreams

huddled in a flat womb of grass

Buen Provecho

“Buen Provecho.”  Vats of fried chicken

sizzle in the dim-lit cantina.

We edge our way out warily with

pointed pistols and make off through

fields of girasols in our white Volkswagon.

Visiting our mistress in prison – by cab –

in this case, red public truck, which

normally seats passengers in the rear

though we get to sit next to the driver

who stops for a drink of whiskey

Nightengales,  nothing else.

They’re practicing witchcraft where we are going.

Bouncing breasts, bare buttocks and moving flames—

An anthill prohibits procreation.  Submerged congregation,

A white horse counts water and the black snake was captured,

testing the monk’s passions.

"I have an orange, humbly spherical"

I have an orange humbly spherical

Picked recently, round, a message

To the earth or man, meant to fall

And I pass it to your hand, here:

Atlantean remnant, a keen invention

Sun in the sex of a tree, grinning.

Condensed light brimming

With a radiant and puckering juice.

The emperor’s astrolabe, Mandarin,

and the Khan’s million hordes—

Stars, round emissaries, traded

Along with almonds, silks, and spices.

Pierced with cloves, hidden in saddlebags

crossed the vast Gobi with spies,

Packed in crates, vested in Floridian

fountains of youth and Spanish outlaws.

Celestial dome, orange head of heaven,

Bald pate of Baudelaire baptized with melon

Segments insectoidal – crescent ears –

Wrinkled and fur-lined; moss-covered.

I have an orange here, humbly spherical,

Admittedly like any other globe, simple

Yet mirroring Akkadian blueprints.

Bottomless, endless, Man’s  golden orb blossom. 

Geometrizing

GEOMETRIZING

Pollen magnified into

spiny mine-like rambutans and

geodesic domes.

“God geometrizes.”

The production of shapes

Once initiated tends

To wrack a thousand

infinite emptinesses.

In a prism,

a chaos blossoms

like a horde, overcoming

the plain, golden wheat and

a girl gets plucked up.

Throw it all to nothing—

the sculptor balls the clay

into a formless mass in frustration

eliminating all distinctions.

The egg is laid—

a boring yolk,

a brooding goo—

From where and how then

Do strands begin to wind and join?

The painter applies his strokes—

smudges of egg and color

to the wall, of his majesty’s imperial

cathedral.

Lines as yet senseless,

Meaningless to the observer—

The embryo’s sudden bulges,

fish-like appendages…

Plied upon by-whom?

(never a has a painting

randomly composed itself into existence)

What immortal hand—hands,

Phantom fingers writhing

delicate, gentle stokes, unseen—

A vast collaboration of multitudes

lost in a conspiracy of silence—

ciphered, wageless, thankless

ever-ignored unseen laborers

Masters of triangles, lines,

cones and spheres—

Molders of form,

chaos-inseminators.