April-August 2006

We have heard and seen much
But it is a tasteless fruit
To remain in the garden
With bliss's and horrors we cannot touch

No secret unconquered beauty
In all things equality
The sphinx is beheaded
Enter the city
Into the temple and holly of holly's
She waits behind a torn veil
The face of justice without her scale
Lying jeweled with beads of sweat
and covered with ritual ash

It passes over, pale and inconsequential;
To plumb the depths
Free from the clinging white specter
Of emotive understanding,
That would reveal my descent into the abyssal
A bioluminescence that lights the inches and obscures the miles
Unseen
I am not ideals, or ghosts, or romance
I am flesh and bones starving
And privy only to chemical enlightenment
And prey to the monsters: geology and dimension

It is that ancient voice always speaking in a modern tongue
There is an absurdity that liberates us in the moment
The moment and momentum of the physical world
That grants to us this torch of youth in the dawn,
that we use in the day
and diminish in the night
and moan for in the dusk
We are asked to expend the light so rapidly
So the teenagers light themselves on fire in the dark
with an un-scathing flame
Beside the dunes and beneath the boardwalks
I stood on the beach and felt them there over my shoulder
And saw the glow
The water pulled beneath my feet and at my foundations
It is a fearful yearning

My father is the lighthouse he looks for me in dreams of snakes
The ocean calls and pulls
Sleep in my arms and I will carry you to a shore
A call to the arms of young lovers
She lays on my bed like a cave
With pearls and a promise

A continually changing and progressing landscape
a scent and emotion contoured to these changes
At the dance she is wearing these black spider webbed gloves and shawl
I had said too much to her,
and she smelled like fake leaves and red candles
it was Halloween and we danced

She lays on my bed like a cave with pearls and a promise
I swam too deep on my isolated myths and found myself alone
And began to see my permutations
Governed by these pressures and too conscious of the self

With trembling and devouring and profane effusions she speaks;

"I am not ideals or ghosts or romance
I am flesh and bones starving
When did you first discover that you were an animal
Humanity and godhood being political assertions"

-Apes Blood

Seek after your dead

Seek after your dead
Who have dissipated in the view of the sun
Their lunatic dust drifted to the moon
Its light borrowed in a Promethean way
Souls drawn by a lesser gravitation addressing lesser forms
Once wed to the earth as the moon remains,
A priestly concubine
charged with holding the embalmment's spiritual effluents
Floating jettisons
Drifting and transfixed on a dusty, rolling, silent sphere
They are here, dry
On the back of this white Moth
Feeling the humming of the wings beneath them
A vibrational membrane between the energies of life and death,
The propulsion for an aimless hovering, feeling thin and confused
Caught in the receding memorial tide
Mulling over dull and fleeing recollections of the earth
Waiting for a wet ressurective proxy
Waiting for the moth to fly into the lighted pool
Waiting for the moon to crash into the ocean and be bathed

-Apes Blood

Imbibed Fertility

A goat on my bed
unparabled
I stepped toward it more humored than alarmed
And it butted me hard
back against the wall
Where I fell
"…….my mistake………."
I know a blood ritual
A way to undo the condemnation of God
And open the womb
Approached the bed four pawed
And struck, With reverent shock and awe
Sacrificial blood flattening in the white dormatic lawn
A spilling on a domestic throne
A marking on a gate to receive life where life has gone

-Apes Blood

Vanity and Charity

Oh Vanity, Vanity
I say the name with Orgiastic fervor
In a Gym
In exertion
Blood pumping
My heart is filled but not full
And my ears are filled but not full
But enough to spill about in me
Splashing out of their vessels
I listen to a music that replaces the natural sounds
That revokes a continuum and instates another
Disjointed
But splashing and dying my insides with a rich color
It spurs on a horse with a dyed mane
And it spurs on a rider
Which am I in my fervor?
Whose language is this?
-Oh Vanity, Vanity, Vanity
Sweet and profane effusions
I want to pull it all down upon me
To hide intimately-
In my car
In my clothes
With my music and my food
And my strength is vanity
And charity?
To serve another vanity
Disjointed and spilling the milk
Mammalian vanity
Colostrum vanity
With my phone waiting to be called
At my table
Out my window
With a pulsing silence
Her name
I am a man
And so she is a she
A mask to placate me
vanity

-Apes Blood

King of Pop

I heard of tickets for a Kings funeral
Mutely and Publicly effaced
Democratically ethereal
Coronated with a populous composite crown
Each piece given by a repetitive hand
Paternal hands on the shoulders push to kneel on the ground
Cheered in three minute applications
Patterned by patrons
How apt that the king of pop
Would imbue the skin of the life of the entertained
With some indefinable color bled from a body
That moved over it's bones
Drawn in flux by the rhythm and voice
Of a collective superficiated primality
An apotheosis of self
Vivisected in views and reassembled in cheers conjured by a dance,
A rite of bodily gyrations and summoning,
Calling the borrowed parts of the man back into union
For those moments of Worshipful conduction,
Dissolving at the end of each night and keeping him in mortal flux

-Apes Blood

In the library tonight

For Robin-


My family is in the Library tonight
Climbing the shelves
Sleeping on the floor
Opening books in unlit aisles
No one is waiting for the morning
But for the courage to let in the animals
We laugh as we hear-
Pawing and fluttering outside the windows and beneath the awning
Would it be right to let the owls and foxes in?
They can't read,
But seem eager enough
Is this a temple of sorts? A public place?
Wouldn't it be fun to race between the shelves with nippings at your heels,
Resurrect the old librarians straight out of the floors in their favorite sections
And let the moonlight in?


-Apes Blood

Matrimony

She comes as a way of life
With intentions known to me
Yet softly mystifies as night
While she blankets my thoughts with soft conviction-

She causes me domestic dreams
Reverie in the lights of a gas station canopy
The children gather and the wolves leave
Bringing the money changers back with my apologies
And she, an articulation of all these things
Unsheathed, unfrightened, lying here beside me
On a flatted throne in a household aristocracy

A coalescence of yearnings
Like the gathering of warm lights behind my chest
That twist as if to spoil
Staring through a glass darkly
Into a home and a furnace and a mythology
Inside a man will meld with a myth
Become diamonds and decay

My parents lay down at the door hand in hand
A congregation of dusts
That come to my home-a house of medicines
A worship of attrition
To erode what has been left outside

In this your madness- find that shared illusion which empowers

-Apes Blood

Prayer

Lord,
Undermine not my earthly pleasure
Nor dilute my human drama
When it takes form( amplified yet weakly)
In a fatal romance, a popular domestic fable
I know thou art perfected in the heavens
Not to be undone by a sick child
As I would have thee
Take from me my shame in mute living, and mute death
Grant me peace in my tidal strength
And peace for them who live and ride upon it
I can not see you and so I pray to be freed from your holy ghosts
That roll about and are smoothed away
In the foundationless-ebb and flow of wet physicality beneath me
I reach for them and feel only the rocks
Fear and concavity
Smooth stones to be placed inside me
To fill
Deceived in the dark
The titans, if ever they were such,
Children, that would cry for their father
And supplant him in his inadequacy and vicarious sorrow,
Have fled and left only the stones and the ghosts-indistinguishable
Touch the smoothed stones and set them aglow
Banishing the dead in revealed transparency
And attracting the living in revealed opacity
Let me call these gifts my own

-Apes Blood

Sunday school and AIDS

"Your eyes will be open knowing good from evil
And ye will be as the gods"

The man -dog in the blue suit and the brown living wig
Shakes the new form of a head in the front row
He is young while old in glasses
Figuring out his layered hands layered body and layered mind
He raises his paw-hand and blinks
Opening and closing on his questions and answers
He is sloughing his claws
Against a standard on which his dog body broke
And felt inadequacy
A shame for his teetering underbelly
When was the first time you discovered you were an animal?
Humanity and godhood being political assertions
He still wants to fill the holes in some intimate exhibitionist way
Having willed an evolution and stood to say
"There is retribution for familial departure from the apes
Like children strayed
From a jealous, black, tree thronged, canined and palmed, dynasty
Mamalian vanity!
Colostrum vanity!
A diseased imposition from the forest
An old kings decree, hatched from the mind and living in the blood
And transmuted by filling the evolutionary gaps
In various and sundry ways
Forcing new apes in shame to choke their evolution in rubber masks"

-Apes Blood

Nesbit-Lemuria

All of her permutations, and his
Assert themselves
By way of interaction and become some of their own
Identities pushed between two bodies and formed in a mold
Bearing the impression of each
Pushed through a mirror that each parent stares into
Straining to see the other side
Waiting for the reflection to turn and walk away
A bed and a body
To mark where a child has entered a home

All of her singularity, and his
Asserts itself
By way of their death and become a change in their children
A grave
to mark the place where a body has entered the ground
A portal
An orbit
A sound
Echoing in a closed container
Until uncapped

The silence is a call I cannot answer
Because it is a type
An empty white room I cannot fill
Precursed
Demands buried in the ground when you were unburied
Sending up their radiation and ghosts
Mapping your encounters with these sensations and spectres-
A matrix is revealed beneath
Your ancestry-
Buried in a perimeter around your field
Or your city
The book in your hand-
Or your lemurial fears-
An electric collar
A world of pleasure awaits
And I feel ready to receive
But pain bars the door
And amplifies the humming in the white bones beneath the skin
Of my mother and father
Drawing them close..close..close to the surface
In slow saddened expansion
I want them to live and keep there secrets stored inside
Until I am ready to hear
The frictional whispers of their ghosts leaving their bodies
And can see which way the echoes go

-Apes Blood

Lord of the Unintended spaces

When I was younger

On the way to school(which I hated)

I would look out the glass window of the bus- passing

And project myself into the cities accidental spaces

Places where puddles would form

Between houses

Beneath bridges

In shadow and soft light

Inches of space and seconds of time for passersby

Stages of externally mute and internally bright, escapist conquests

for those who might stray into them

Cooler there in the hot morning when the sun was rising(having wasted the night)

In vacant woods and houses

Places that remained unlit

Places with uneven and sloping ground

Places humming from the convergent friction of growth and decay

Places with plants encroaching on bricks and wood

Places with geological time encroaching on the pace of human diurnalism

Places suggesting physical but un-enthroned hierarchies:

High and low

Narrow and broad

Inside and outside

Moving and still

Places waiting for a young king -unafraid of death and unwed to the fixtures of economy

(now it feels like fear, then it was a longing)

Places still enough for the subtleties of energy to be felt

Places where you could be the dominant force, lord of the unintended spaces

Places to conduct a naïve sexual melancholy

From the seat of power in a purposeless dilapidated and thus unchallengeable kingdom

To the inside of homes marked for me with blood

Where I might present myself as a formative man to women waiting for me

While everyone is at work or school

And give life to my new intuitive forces,

with the despair and tentative authority of a young king besieged

Lying with woman whose beauty and human intelligence

Were not cruelty but warmth, giving bodily light in the darkness of accidental lives

Living seasonally indoors

Always in the dawn

waiting for me

Summers in the bedroom

Winters in the kitchen

A boy, eternally

Always thin and full in the accidental spaces

-Apes Blood