The Oblong Tally (Three Questions)

What if there was a way to tear everything everywhere in half? I can see superlatives shorn, and even the blue Pacific. The signs show and thighs are simple essays to smith on chocks of stone. I tap my fist in sundry dreams and land rolls away. All the shadows we go for, we use to rupture ourselves. I turn out to be monolithic man, born for the beginning. This is the fresh relegation of words you shack with, the many people we show our underclothes. To find rhythm is to gain evidence against slaughter and to prevent slaughter. I can see us cheer in the black dark, the box we grew into. That was not a way to end anything. I listen to the wall crack against my hand while I enact the force of waiting. Elsewheres are the habits we catalog when we touch what we don’t want. It’s only a problem when we do things. I feel the crud of all these we’s and you’s in the short term. Can I abandon the whorl of ago? What if time was just a way to chill? The cold people are in me and they dance when I see shards of ice falling off the trees.

What Of Action, Of December

It’s warm and our lights are out. The torch song unspools in the back. I sit and write to your grave center. There’s no mysterious thing. The particles that connected you came and went. We use heavy and heavier words and no map. Only falling avails us. This is some beginning, a frag of freak dream. All things in line, stable, like some pitch you made when we existed. I’m out of coffee and my veins don’t throb. I’m just sweet, checking the grey plastic in all the aisles of our dumb civilization. In every shack a computer, belittled lamb of sod. I write this thing damned near every day. Voices and music overlay. By whatever is useless, we tug the snow down. Trouble is for beauty and the dead.

Real Séance

Even though we’re not feeling it we try. Putting our hands up and through, we see a large man fold his finger in a quick way. They, we say, they. It is always like this, at the beginning, wearing fake beards and faces painted up with green bird signs. Yes, indicate understanding. Stand aside and see what little growing things vibrate in oases of the dead. Let’s end calling them graves. Everyone has ideas easily enough, but to grow something that pulses outward is kind of watching sleepy thoughts undo. Corks come forth and games all day. Them jumps in bite and time, and fray.

So Strange

The Bath Of Time

Everyone I know who says you can't go back to the past lives there. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. That means almost nothing, next to the depth of time. Your skin is flying off at just about the same speed that it grows back, until a little man with a bushy black mustache sneaks in your window, chuckles, and puts you to sleep. He takes off his hat and gloves before he goes to work. Goats bleat in the distance. No one feels the room go cold. No one listens for the snakes in the carpet. The blood in your throat tastes like rust. You wave and weakly wave goodbye goodbye. The soft skin on your hand moves through the air like an arc of water tossed from a bucket.

Mustache And Crown

Marshes Under Mannahatta

Secretly, like fire. Apartments touch a bang touch in nineteen something nine. All shining wood grain is covered with rusted hasps and squares. Names in the ceiling own their leaving faces. Antic ghosts stay lonely in your dream each night, until you make a sea to drown. They are satisfied and leap and gulp air with anti-joy, sleeping for collision. Frantic cities gather your ocean, building sky arms and tangling your lungs. Everything that was above is under. Surprised faces glint in little mirrors falling from pockets and purses. People see that they themselves are mere image. Saws and hands warble, nothing. Nothing when you look at the time. Nothing when the bridges are lit with sailors’ fire.

Uniform Din Horizon Murk Unending Absence Equation For Planets And Medicine Illness Of Water And Loss

My dirty dog dark I need water I need stark I need my cold head full this letter for lusting and freezing new rain for seeing and this open window a raw gaunt shield of bracken body for taking down flumes of old hell and torn baggies of light and chambers of brushing sublimated trains aghast with wormflies hastening and broadening to fill yon voided bed oh mimics with candy oh breach of imperfect trust and secret world sans atom or atmosphere collude with igneous houses gathered in emptiness I flank and cranes wreck the gone bib and yellow dress relays quiet moats forward of winter bastions earthy black ponds of bursting metonymy.

Some Morning

It’s this leaky boat, these hundred horses in my herd, this bag of corpse knuckles. They keep taking me up and down the line and the ocean writes Thursday. The trade is the grown message infects everything. I am supposed to produce children now, with vigor, and instead only stanzas say. Strophes with faces and lasting hand impressions like my hands she once adored and held. I have broken bones on myself and on boards, karate boards, in early articulations of cracking up. Red morning sky and that red hair and haunting glance all briefly see and look away. I am at my sink thinking of my happiness.

of nothing

god of nothing I made me petals something I made me perhaps the trill of a thrush day made me saying lilt and up wayward town the men in me go genuflecting everything is toward her teeth everything bursting from clocks banging on sheets on metal and crying for pinkish gauzy ghosts that bring summer into crooked coldish places the heart in me the hearts the bratty arcing headlong dash at long legs laughter people staggering out of cars city ceilings buckling under moss dangling ringlets and noses in ears nor do I worry nor do I rush this thought is slow in rising that is fine that is this longish moment

The Thinnest Thread

Burnt and burning and the return of hows that heap the fire. Yellow leaves do the candle thing. This is not that. This is not the papier-mâché world we clotted up and rolled, our arms dirty and sand in cracks. This heaven thing: memory of a blue song in the hollow of an attic guitar. You play for me, I gather my belongings, sit and listen. The world is all alive with little Shinto creatures, humming in corners, everywhere softing. I have tea, we look at the designs on your arm, the meat is served and it is all very grand. The thinnest thread is all I need from thee, muse.

Seven Words Have Done It

The storms have thrashed these houses, these streets. It is winter and yet feels like flowers from what we say. The snow is in my head already. But your words are deciding things. We have said sleep and lying down and other things like how the world might go. The passage over mountains has made things. We have turned and seen each other looking. I like that you look for me, and I like to look for you. I taste orange in my mouth after a wish. It does the opposite of sting. We might look at the numbers on my door as we walk out. Stucco grey cloud heads roll in to see our earth arms. It will keep happening, this hat of desire. It will happen and keep relocating in our limbs, the tapes, laughter between us. Not the ones that got away but the ones that got to go, we’ll find far and foreign flavors and bring them back. As the dust that fills the world makes it old and new and clay each day, so will I make you new.

Marcella Riordan does Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy

...God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows or the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Excerpt from episode 18 of Ulysses by James Joyce)

Dream

Fish

The Ones With Arms And Legs

Fly And Snail

A Sort Of Reunion

This monkey morning haze, underneath the pepper man, keeps our restless eyes rolling. All the soda got drank up. I did it, I admit it, I’m a child in this story. Hooray. Watch the way I stand on my head and call out to people who make crow sounds. They rock the sun look, get tan, get Zen, say sure. I’ll strum this here, I had one more night with you, before we ever met. Nothing was total, or awesome. We went fast, the desert made us handsome and pretty. When I went back to your town, I was taller than most and stared at. I liked it for a while, as the monkey man. All your religion fell away and you looked relieved, while I pulled your hair. You held my hand and sang a little tinderbox. I needed help quitting everything.

Wearing The Same Hat

All these tanks, thinking longer about less and less, it’s how we get to our shows. Then it’s harder and it’s the way out, you live it without being home. You don’t think it but I do, as I live in windows. We talk, we birds, tattered and loving, but each day fries us with too many choices. I get my hand up and the days glance at it, measuring everything down. Even lights stop, briefly, the faster things get. This is a moment out of my life that no one will know completely, despite how I record it. Memory is merely a cut and paste job, but swampy. It’s good to be between the faraway and the close, even if it’s only possible. Down the line we’ll use honesty to make things, mistakes, and crack the glowsticks. I know we can if we shout softly to each other, in gracing breaths.

This House

Ink Blot Fluffy

This original drawing was done by the artist Nico Miller, currently of Paris, France. I did the photo effects. Thanks, Nico!

Time Travel Or Bust

Many thanks to the robotics engineer Cal Miller, currently of Paris, France, for the color inversion on this drawing!

Dancers Crouching, Before They Leap

Getting There.

Birthdays

Animals And Instruments

Without hard work the sad man gets nowhere. He needs music and now there is silence. The sad man buys food and watches movies and eats and has the worst dream in the world. He wakes up troubled because he dreamed he was trying to lock the doors and could not. He could not lock the doors and everyone kept coming in while he tried to work and think. They tried to name him Hugh, and Stan, and Hank, all these hefty, big-handed names, but he simply wanted them to leave or be quiet while he sat at his bench in the basement and made intricate things from wood. Animals and little houses and musical instruments out of little chunks of mahogany and pine that he would carve intricately and slowly when he could keep the people that called him Hank from always calling him Stan and always opening his door and talking on him. Soon he would move to a quiet part of town, where no one knew his name and he would pretend to be mean and nasty. There the only names people gave him were names like Victor or Dennis, and would leave him alone, he being unapproachable with such names. But he made better animals and instruments there, by far, and had much more intricate hands.

What You Have

Been a while for tumbling, been a while for old sleeping, been a feeling game, a dying in water bang, a lying in hands. You cannot do it, you save yourself again and again, but you cannot save you. You close your eyes for something and something goes away; it happens and it happens that it happens.  You’re built for this, built to stick the pin back in, built to draw the knife across the animal, built to be courageous and built to share a breath, perfectly built to see the sun and wander. Something round enters the field, a vagary, pinch of silt in the derelict river.

The oracular trees. The bursting. The shoes you took far into the forest on your growing feet. The elevating.

An x writes this, writes itself as a letter and seeks yet more variables. The seeking out of things, the fielding and the shaggy grammatical Huns. Gathering in circles, the forest sees you with your attitude shifting all the time: it knows your conscience, deems it silly. You don’t blush, in your souciance.

Go.  You have sore words. 

Bread

This is an arm. Hunger for memory and a mind for the road. The pushing and running gets tired and I need bread, and butter, and a couple of new feet. I show myself a sign I don’t understand and go down to the corner for bread. I eat bread at the window and bread looking over the bridge. The impossible depth and smell of the past kicks me. I eat bread to forget but I don’t feel filled. There’s milk, and apricots and coffee, but I just eat bread. The woody smell of it, like fresh nuts just cracked, hits my nose and I tear off another piece. I’m far into the middle of summer and the days getting shorter and bread keeps me familiar. I wake up when I’m not supposed to. I hear birds that sound like morning, only it’s not morning, it’s two hours after midnight. I reach out in the dark for more bread and thank the birds.

Perpetually Exploding And Renewing The Myth Of A Cosmic Center (en vert)

Into The Future

Where?

Every House

Three Sunball Throwers In A Weird Corral

What If It Sucks?

You & Me

Bruce Lee!

Music Of Her Acceleration

Temporary

Listen

Muy Dulce

We Are All Spectators

Bears and Girls...

Composed

Double Duty

Riddle

Formative Experience

Certitude

What A Friend Says

One or Two?

Go Ahead.

Seeing

Full

A Way

Somebody

Rain

The Way

Very Hot

Must See!

Bags and Bags

Fast!

Depiction

Affirmative

Who?

They Dream

Everyone Needs A System

Punch a Pineapple