Laundromat

If you could inhabit her mind, live in the little space
Between the dressers, the pink feathers and the cushions
On the turquoise chairs—a world bleached, then stained
The ultra-violet of her colored hair—you'd see,
Mixed together in the whirling pools of memory
And glistening by the tide-dyed pebbles in the slanting light
Of a light-bulb sun, the way our brains produce
And reproduce our pain to the purple strain of clocks,
Curduroys, and wrinkled socks in a rough machine.

Spain

I would like to go where the noise streams through the valleys of men's ears and tequilla
Falls freely in the round, thick shots tipped up by wrists in scarlet or snow-white
Silk towards glimmering teeth and sharp, pink tongues, lips the color of painted
Guitars, where the girls shake bodies full of beads to the strum of syncopated
Purrs while the feathers on their heads clip back and forth as quickly as the jewels
About their midriffs shake...and I would touch them, touch their hot skin, their torsos, touch their shining necks
Bent back to reveal sinful hollows, the laughing cavities of a transgression, and the rills and the lees of fabric
Stretching over squeezing limbs and snapping snugly at the points of pleasure, power playing
Where the fingers glide of themselves and grind and the force of a motion transfers into moan.

The Caballero

This road has taken me
Down to the valley of Availment:
Snakes under the cross of the shadows
Arch the cooking dust, cacti bramble
Their thorns in the confusion
Of evening's cold. I warmed my hands by twilight,
I begged the winds to let me sleep,
Especially when they hurried from the East,
Especially when the sun fell low,
Tumbling into the net of stars;
Then I cooked sausage and beans,
Feeding by the mouthful, washing it down with a handful
Of water, and listened to the whistle of the land,
The fire's crackle. I say there is a voice
Hidden in the silence, a dark communion
Spread about the climates of the earth,
And listen! — you can hear it speak.

Dilemma

How does one
Control
Another's
Soul?

How can I
Attract
As you
Retract
Yourself?

Myself,
As life
Contracts,
I think I
Lack
A chance
To love,

And that
Impacts
My mood
And makes me
Drink
Which leads
Me back
Above.

After

It was after he sent me away that I started to cry. The tears made the room glare by scrubbing it until the all the dirty corners and the black lines disappeared and what was left was an intense yellow glow that settled over my brain like a net lined with hooks to dig into the sides of my scalp and make them burn fiercely, as fiercely as my cheeks and the rim of my nose. So I wet my fingertips the way the Jews do when they pass the decanter around the Sabbath table and I ran.

The "Crystal Cave"

A height of crystal extended around me into which I could see the vivid, blue reflections of my image refracted across a hundred spheres of geometric light. Each crystalline sphere absorbed and expelled a reflection of myself peering back out at me, moving when I moved, speaking when I spoke, and as far as I could tell, with the same intentions, except that a degree of air between us altered and distorted the images with distance so that I could make out the nearest while the further nonetheless became increasingly less distinct and more blurred, seeming to move in unexpected ways and, because of their distance, echoing back my words (when I spoke) with altered voice. I came to feel that I was not speaking to myself anymore, the further I looked ahead into the chamber, but that I was speaking to a symphony of interloping voices, and eventually that my voice was one with them and caught up in a whole, a tide, a flux of changing images and meanings that swirled and swayed about the room. I then grasped at the principle of distance, noting that things nearest to me, those things that I could touch, remained most constant, whereas the furthest and the most intangible were always the most fleeting, dissolving like and impalpable as a mist. But I felt all the less secure when I realized that these mirrors of myself closest to hand nonetheless did not feel like myself: my flesh is warm and my pulse beats, but the crystal is hard, and cold, and sharp. I began to mistrust appearances; I would shut my eyes and think of the corridors of darkness stretching on endlessly and into a world of no tomorrows or yesterdays, a world that is eternally blank, stretching out like a flat plain or a steppe filled with bleary snow into myopic space. Only the snow also and eventually resolves into images: clouds, peaks, hooves, and wings, sparkling equalities traced in a red horizon painted over or perhaps flaking out of the darkness. I would awaken from these encroachments only to the terror of the moving echo of mirrors, and I felt that I had definitvely and finally lost myself.

Metaphysics: World, Life, Self, Death

All that is pure is unmixed: time that flows like unmixed wine through the veins, the liquer hidden in the objects of perception, knowledge of self. The earth takes up the cup and says, "Trinken, trinken": she pours her libation over the sand, and indian thistles crop and cut the moonlight's pearl. From the seminal moment genesis of Ocean, Earth, and Ouranus united as a single stroke of blue on crimson. World is what burns (the stroke as a burst of lightning) and I'm the empyreal flame. The mystical vision: I entered the chamber and the lute was playing, the nymphs were in time, this pulsing my own heart, the chamber myself as I entered into the nymphs. Ejaculation out of the self turns back on and becomes another self: vision supervenes on the other. World too forms a unity by and around my vision encompassing world. I am vital breath. Each time I breathe, world is reborn, world breathes and fills itself with self, myself. I become world, world becomes me: it is something that I wear, I wear it out—ascent into the unconscious. What is the unconscious? Death, the underlying, just as dead matter lies under the living. Life presupposes death—not because death is the antithesis of life—rather the condition for and from which lives arise. Death is the 'not-life' from which life springs like the globe of the eye through which the eye can see, the form of that globe (as if the crystal chamber were formed of necessity into a sphere flickering with the play of various colors reflecting the tint of the walls and shapes spherical and ensphered, not sphere-like in themselves, but made into the sphere and unfolding as a sphere wherever the vision lingers, so that these forms are our signature on substance, the ultimate expression of self). Life is the vision, but a vision only imparted by and to be perfected in death. Death is the last condition of the no-longer past

Words / Wings

Your wings are the winter and the turn of ice, the slowness of the sun,
Naturally general sagging, as if She would stop. What reverberations
Mark the colors of her depths and her sinuous folds of modality,
Tendering her brother to the fruitless fields? A bitter seed,
Which is your own wings' growth. How could the wings sprout?
From the bone, where sinews appear and stretch like seedlings
Towards the sun, their luminous source:
All wings extend towards the sun.
But what is the sun? An eye, bleary at the edges, wincing
Redness on the sprouting crops. Oh eye,
Universal source of pain, which is my pain,
The pain of the poet when he stops
Inventing and chops up the page
With words: what are these words?
And how will we recover them as wings?

Horace's Epistles 1.1.1-19

First utterance of mine, now by the highest of Camenae to be
Uttered, do you presently ask of one sufficiently played and given
The rod, Maecenas, do you ask me to include myself again
In antique games? The age is not the same, and neither is my mind;
Veianius too left arms by Alcmaeon's post and hid himself
All tucked up in a field, lest he should have to beg the crowd
From extreme sands. I have a voice, furthermore, constantly resounding
In my expurgated ear: "Dissolve senescent stallions, oh ripely sane, lest
They should stumble at the last and lead off laughed at flanks."
So now and in likewise I put aside my verse and games:
What is only true, and decent, that is my care, that I ask, and turn
My whole being to the task. So I store and set aside what I could lead
Out by and by. Ah, but lest you ask beneath what Lar or leader I am kept:
Addicted to swear by the words of no master, as the 'whether'
Changes (and however I am taken) there I go as guest.
Today I'll be supple and immerse myself in crowding waves, custodian
Of valid virtue and unswayed, her satellite, but on the morrow Aristippus'
Precepts are my private labor and I try to ride things, not have them
Ride me.

Alone and Silent

Left alone when the world is becoming silent, I realize
That I am alone, and that the world is becoming
Silent. What is this silence of the world? Is it a monolithic
Pillar, desert bound, watching the brittle shores enveloped in
Waves held off past the distance’s widening swarm?
Her lips are broken and heavy with time, her face
Is bared to the cut of bare grain, and she does not answer.

The Tragedies, The Dreams (Rev.)

You! Again, and with a tripping skill that far defies
These voiceless cries, mixed with all the sweets
Of moonlight and perfumes,
Soaked round a ragged stench,
Come: will freedom ever be as free
As your craft? Hurricanes make for placid lakes,
The swill of the prow is the dip in an ocean
Of stars. Elements, voices, fire! It must be Empyrean fire!
The heavens never staged such bolts, but we,
Poets of the earth, have only staggered groans.
Here's homage to you, then, where all things foreign
Find renown.

The bells will jingle in the wind...

The bells will jingle in the wind, wavering like dresses,
And the fresh fall snow. The walls glow in the crisp, deer graze
For fodder by the painted lake. Winter is my mistress
Made anew, from the carriage where we lay in the peak
Of storms to the smoke-stacks perching on a patch
Of lucent sky. All here is vivid and dry
As fresh paint—blond as your hair and white
Like young skin.

Fresh Heat

When the variegate spectacle of leaves
Frowns, and I find myself blushing
Still before another body, bare, only
Curves in a stark sky

And when the cupped edge of a brown
Vintage falls, solitaire and silent,
But manifest yet in the play of wind
And light, I

By way of introduction sing the fall,
Whose beautiful lashes attracted the lacerate
Mud by pure springs steaming
Fresh heat.