Poetry and Other Artifacts

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How does he wake?
lcmt

An early morning sound

—a fallen crumb flaked
from prehistoric strata
quarried in dreams
—or scaled
from shed skin
of a reptilian night—

slowly drifts
into the choked stream
of his unconsciousness.
Rubbish eddies through
senses brimming
with a body verging
then spilling
into a box of time,
space, gods unseen,
what shoes to wear,
low cost financing,
destinations worldwide
and salt pecan delight.

In that first obese minute
he is a two-ton bulk,
bed-swathed,
luxuriating,
sunk in the wallow.

In that next pliant minute
he uncurls into limbs
magically tapered
with long fluent muscle,
as the river horse decides
to become human.

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Love Scene
lcmt

Her peach-colored hair, frayed at the edges, crackled with static. "I don't know how you live with yourself. How do you do it? How do you recognize all our cities of aberrance behind these harsh basaltic entrancements?"

The rest is here at The Longest Salmon.

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LYI Travel Guide
lcmt

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Winter Faith
lcmt

Let us believe
in late shades of grace,

In gifts of brumal
dune and ruined shore,

Let us vigils keep
behind windows stoned

By hollow rain
as dull shadows fall,

And cumulus lords
frown in frosty sleep,

Marooned far above
silver piers buried

Deep in crouched waves
steeped in pathless light,

While ice ascends,
configured in glass

Powder harrassed
by restive spirits

Uprooting grass bent
and bitter in shouts

Of menace cast
by wind, shed by storm,

As all the white
sea shivers and breaks.

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An asemic interpretation of my poem "Winter Faith"
lcmt

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Are you gonna let Mars go there by himself?
lcmt

I.

Your eyes are nothing like a sonnet.
I know you are not the faceless sun growing
large with patience and yellow tempera, growing
upward into uncertain washes of firmament.
Your skirts are predetermined and aligned
by acute focal tilts of movement—sitting on
somebody's cigarette—sweeping down
boundaries of open night—burying
instant daylight in the underside
of absence, in the drop
of dissatisfaction, in rare
chains of desire, rare
as sardine cans,
emptied.

II.

For you, I can inscribe awry
fields of silent touch in points
of ink—an interior landscape
following trails (of mold? of dirt?
of ash? of mascara?) that first
appear smudged but will soon
resemble a mosaic of disquieted
coasts and disjunctive hollows
hidden within blind spots, within
sun spots, limited by declined insults
written, then spoken in disorder,
fluctuated words in five minutes
becoming tissue-wrapped skull plates
—knocked off aluminum components
held in my fist at arm's length—
and the rest of me naked
as an emperor under
masterly camouflage.

III.

You come from the imaginary space
that cannot be colonized—I live outside
myself, observed in the clean fabric
of narrative and habitation. We can speak
to weather, we can speak photosynthesis,
we can speak acknowledgements to
the disappearance of summer predators.
This is the polar attraction called travesty,
called abandonment, called permission,
this laying down of possession
for the sake of discontent, for the sake
of indifference, for that lack of recognition
from the one who will free us.

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Asemic writing
lcmt

Escriti

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Color project
lcmt

1045.7

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Map project
lcmt

Map of the Nipomo mesa (when we interpret the language of whales)

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Name project
lcmt

This could be your name

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Cookeries
lcmt

Dissolve kosher salt, dilute cider vinegar in spiny Plantagenet emergencies.
Hands on please.
Zest lemon fingertips, and genuine tigertips
pound with a mallet, then fan parallel
to sectioned tangerines, Satsuma or Honeybell.

Avoid floral wine and extraneous bologna.

Prune bay trees when days grow shorter,
nights grow longer, underscored weekends
condense into fidelities chopped
from dusky onions. Steep opportunities
in vinegar and rosemary. Repair and gild
comfort with persimmon skins.
Surprise the strategic moss
inside helpless complexities,
quartering a pentagon cast
in non-urgent iron, hundredfold. Pierce
the silent foil, ease with a steady awl,
hand to mouth to stalking manroot and ergot.
Speak faint of whiteness and numbers
but call dogs and roses loud, with drums.

This problematical alchemy cannot end
in the perfection of matter, but ends
as the have-not grasses never

end.

My response to the challenge of a poetic form called “asdfiwvcbaxnf”.

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Rewriting Robert Louis Stevenson
lcmt

A connotation of my shadow—that is to say, soul—
goes in and out with me,
and stands between two deaths
(or maybe three),

and long before I am done with my irritable body and my obscure angles of consciousness my shadow, my stain, will awaken and perish

and so will I.

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Published!
I've got a poem at The Longest Salmon.

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Be My Valentine
lcmt

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What's old is what's new
You (yes, you) can still get one:

Artifact

Wife

We are nearly recovered from the fire and things here are as normal as they are ever going to get, which is, you know, about 62%.

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Postcard 4 (Arbitrary Square)
lcmt

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