Is there no when where this dream will rest?
Blue smoke, wings, a plague
of walls, the city motionless, mass
of mind and angst rising
in the brilliance of a cloudless light
[le ciel, c’est mauve comme la lavande].

Everything turns in the quiet leisure of disaster:
a kind of innocence
now supernatural darkness floating,
trees shaking, waterways
swollen under a livid sky, storm clouds
forming in the blink of an eye.

The thought of you is performative: blonde
hair, pale complexion, downcast
jewels for eyes. Your dreadful martyrdom
runs its course, written in mud
and butter: the human instant, in which
you sing yourself full-throated.

Honey, ginger, flared saffron, graywhite
momentous rhythm of sea,
barbarous smell of wet earth, ransacking
or ravaged flowers, the landfill
site, shit-hole, killing ground from which we sup
as shaking, hiccuping drunks.

To forfeit wisdom, atone for sins undone:
the allegorical
hand thrust into torture, noise, shadows
of men. Between the lines,
against the clock, this does not make,
does not make a difference to them.

This age [our age] demands an image of its
accelerated grimace —
an old bitch gone in the teeth, the ultimate
cunt — our botched
civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizz
of consciousness.

I could have, now, blown my fucking brains out,
but for a sweet shimmer of reason,
blood, lone bells in gritty belfries, the shallows
of the sea, the surprise of days
which slide under sunlight, the soul
gathered up, exhaled as rings of smoke.

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh. You
drape your body against
my body, like a sheet of mirrored glass;
you remain, comme le dit
Flaubert, melancholique devant son rêve accompli.
— The word “red” is not.

Forever in lust, forever in heat of fire and flood.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt, bawdy
cackle and the stomping of feet to the beat
of some undone family portrait
— bad teeth, bad eyes, beer and paint cans —
the name and date split in soft slate.

Money makes an inverse difference
to distance, when I lift her back
to me now: nothing there but that pale
curly head, working
a machine up and down, an ochre
autumn merging into twilight.

I read much of the night. Guns click and spit
and split up timber, until
the river’s tent is broken: old kettles, old
bottles, a broken can, old iron,
old bones, old rags, that raving slut
who kept the till.

Dreams nourished with tears, the sweet kinks
of fists, light rain falling as mist.
The hours after you are gone are a lead
white morning of hard, new ice,
the snow drift of that which is left unspoken.
Care and great sadness are both a burden.

No gods, but a black swastika and no sky
but grinding water, gasping
wind, the wares of carthage, girls
with peacock eyes. The churn
of stale words staining the heart again:
bleached wood massed as bones.

Your body is white as anemone petals,
your skin is stone smooth, we
[as cold as the dead they load
like a pile of baskets, mound
of refuse, the sweepings of a street]
are pressed close together, swaying.

Merely the despaired occasion of wordshed
made keener by blessed rage.
Scrape away the prison coating, the itchy
sea; drink from this glass
of pure, real, resplendent blood, its
malediction, freshly soiled and snug.

It’s a question of altitude, probably, walking
along your eyelid again, towards
your tear duct. This dance of fire
that touches our lips, scorches
our tongues and pulls out the thin
beaten tin of my squally voice.

O technosociety, where memory is tolerated,
barely, as real estate
on which to mount steeples of rust, lay
fresh mowed grass, burn gasoline:
anything so long as there’s a margin
and little but commerce between us.

We never have pure space in front of us, rather:
slight bondage, the world’s halter,
this fashion for dressing or setting our hair
ablaze until we’re ash and ash
in the heat of a blank but infinitely scrolling
screen, flared back to scratch.

We begin and end with a groan, the tongue’s
comfortable wetness, sureness
of soul and fluttering lips. Then:
lords of unquiet, quiet sojourn,
each atom which belongs to you
belongs to me.

All abandoned, the last rig broken, the staggering
shadows of trees, fence posts, gutted
cars, faces blurred and Sienese grave.
I wish that I could speak only
of it all, the voices of children singing.
A chapel, in spite of it all.

poetry-magazineFrom the magazine:“Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here ...”

From the magazine:
“Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here ...”