Date rape harp head steering wheels
Ends of just unflinching heels
Beyond the carp in voids of calm
Curled up inside a car alarm
Who untamed pariah blunt
Screaming imitation Ginsberg
Lines in gravel lungs.
Cold, ecstatic drunk down in
Selling off undone possessions,
Running up and down exalting
Lohman black hole centrifuge,
In fits and energies of husky
Mania, poet in the night.

Fossil fugues of torn words spit, drool sideways
from the burning mouth of the aching schizophrenic prophet,
whose feet drag in dust, whose palms are turned up
in supplication to the merciless sky, as peasants watch.

In dusty tenements, box rooms at the end of days,
rabid whore-children scratch and tear the walls
apart, break their cages, run and flash blind anger
through the dusk, their savage cries echo through the halls.

Limpid in forgotten shacks of toothpick towns,
in phosphorescent tubes of buzzing liquid light
wait pupae, larvae of the perfect beat electric,
quivering in fluid and growing slowly in the night.

Gas Bill

Tiny shrinking candle popping heads explode in envelopes
Of adamant instruction finding out the sins of heliotropes
Beyond which other bussing fiends are hissing in the opera
To read, and die, eviscerate unholy phantom garganauts
Redoubt, insect dramas of the pounding of the temples
Dancing, dying slowly in the shadow of Sierra

"Maps are rippling through the tongue
but it all shies away into a slide of mouth,
thin look, tall stand, pull away"

Strangled by medallions unearthed in stinking pits of pitch
Undone by diplomatic lice that hound like dogs, and pray, and preach.
Besides a sudden itch.

Gone down, gone under sweeping carpet, flailing arms and bleeding nose
Done, distracted, fear of flying, rarity and twisted tongue
A bird called out of battered houses
Grey and softened with the rain
Of paper pilot crystalline un-
Holy children part and
Swing and curl and
Break their heads.

Soft mouth speaking soft words in the cold,
Half-smiling beguiling east-coast girl,
Face flashing instant joy-fix smile,
Wrapped up in fragile spun web, and small.
Carved in pale warm marble, burning up
With modest verses written in your face,
Eternal patient woman in the night—
Out of shifting modes of expressions,
Utterly ungraspable and gentle, tugging
Out of me a tender aching string.
Lit, dull yellow, by a single lamp—
Lay, untouchable, staring love out of
Silent saint-eyes, smoking and divine,
Calling holding lifting eyes of mercury,
Dropping perfect silver tears
Sweet upon departing cheeks.
Small, loving, whole, immediate,
You, indestructible unconscious beauty,
Burning quietly in my unworthy arms
Like the premonition of an angel.

Mango mango burning bright
Churning turning in the night
Like a candle, guiding those
Unknown by tree or meeting post
Into a place of light

Pharoah screaming god amid
The colors of the eucharid
Unbending and suspending in
The dead reflexive rainbow of the din
The frantic holy fever of the id

Tonyrefail

A tiny sad oblivious house in which
I sit, the only one that's still awake,
At work next to a plastic christmas tree
Writing a love song to my father's home.
I'm watched by tired tragic photographs;
Grey uncles and forever-pregnant girls,
My cousins, who'll be scarred by thirty-five,
Their faces leather, lined by gypsy blood.
These too-close walls saw a half-century
Of births, divorces, coughing fits and tea.
It makes a bitter reverie to think
My ugly virgin aunt was all alone
For five decades, until her factory
Job helped her find a stubbly gap-toothed mate.
Tonight my nan told us a sickening tale
Of burnt throat, and burst eardrum, of kidneys
That she had never known she didn't have,
And faulty thyroids, acid-filled stomachs.
My granchie, upstairs, coughs himself to sleep,
Lungs filled with years of tar and coal mine dust.
Tonight my father's parents in decline
Scare me with their sad subsiding frames—
Tonight I mourn my family's long lives,
Their poor ground-down stupid stoical souls.

I'm done, chained to the rock
I'm burnt and broken up
And fires of parting throes
Melt down what sense I had
Until, in agony
I spill, and pour right back
Into your tender arms.

Connecticut

The walls of this room are bare.
I sit, and cannot make a rhyme.
I, gut-punched, tear-stained, longing,
not quite belonging, sit and stare, alone,
among the furniture, the walls I've known,
a lobotomy patient, stranger in my own home.
A part of me has gone away,
and I don't feel so much as yearn.

In Terminal 3 I knew nothing,
looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Your eyes, not emerald globes, but simply eyes
I looked into, then looked away, then wept
tears of salt, not rain, but suffering.
Some parting sorrows are sour, not sweet,
and this love burns that before swept me off my feet.

I am hopeless, here, and undone, but
my heart is in a place I've never known, Connecticut.

Blown, ecstatic, through holes, in dives
And swoops of emerald filigree
The force of spinning love that rules our lives
I hold you close to me

I dance, I grin, spin in towards
I roll back on table tops
I run outside, tattoed with myself
This escape attempt which never stops

This disc skip cold wind broken pair
Of compasses torn apart
I see and know the truth at last
The city has no heart

The burnout chances of a million chance
Encounters in the flaming night
Are dashed unthinking on the rocks
On streets that never see the light

Anti-Epiphany

      I convalesce slowly out of dark Bogosian nightmare spinning voids of fevered startled sleep into the light library nighttime, clutching Howl between my fingers, and lulling closely to the table
      Cursing fate and Whitman's journey on the Styx, detached from my own head and not at rest, pulsating
      The voices of my family still are ringing in my cauterised clumsy ears, undone and undefeated but divine, I search the line between awake and sleeping for a fix, for
      Clarity, truth of coma dust on mantle grey enclosing rusted eyes without
      Burden, sunk in fields of stolen wheat on fire regretting and begetting sons who
      Call me out of life, arrest my hand, nail my bastard life to shreds of hard hope, the costs of small gains, and the lighting of fires in sordid slums;
      Cerebral suffrage succumbs to lobotomic trials of murder miles in suffering uncertain streets, denied smiles by celebrated sycophants
      And clawing inarticulate at gates of steel and lead before bursting into insane bloom, killing statues, raping public fountains, installing shrines to honour the acid dripping words of angry alcoholic tongues
      Coming hard subatomic, bombing forever down stolen roads, and speaking slowly the codewords of night
      Let it all burn

Crack-Ups

"Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love"
W.H. Auden

I
Take these trifles, I lay them on the ground
These curiosities, these scraps, these tattered rags
I give them all to you, and deeper than plummets sound
I'll drown my book. Leave my body for the dogs
And sing a silent song for me among the battered crags
My mind is just a sanctuary for tempests, tides, and fogs
I feel the waxing wind beneath my hand
I watch the sea in lust devour the land
And understand the message from the deep
In glowing coral groves I fall asleep

II
Blues fluoresce and greys fluoresce
Gravel and concrete and stars fluoresce
But you and I just pass, silent, and rest
On street corners, lost places, and past garages
Hunted shops, mini-roundabouts and lights
The cars and busses interrupt
And sparrows make their morning flights
But we, statues, are ruined, still
In roles we are unable to fulfil
And guilt is not a demon I can kill

III
Less mute inglorious, now striding,
Tongues lolling out, hiding
No longer. But spitting out
Terse sounds which buffet air
And shuffling night-time pedestrians doubt
Their safety as we shout
In cathartic noisome groups without a care.
From by the bus stop across the street
Silent fatigued faces of commuters sadly stare,
As we, drunk, will trip, laugh, and scuff our feet.

IV
My brother, self-slain, slumps. His consciousness
Evades arrest, demands un-met, unfurled
Across a lino landscape. And the mess
Surrounds him on the floor where he is curled.
He stumbled here, struck dumb, a careless drunk,
Reminding me he's still in part a child.
While, two weeks later, my guilt should have shrunk
My sleeping mind relapses, driven wild
By an irrational dream that he had died.
Repression, phantoms, sibling suicide.

V
The heat, the lights, the blackouts still repeat
Inside my gut the tide goes out to sea
A pop song sung that time will not defeat
I whited out, fell down, my mind a blank.
But now inside our perfect sanctuary
Like creatures tired from burrowing shiver,
We cling, caress. I don't know who to thank
Revived by a torch-bearing life-giver.
My eyes invaded, killed off by the strobes
Your irises are blue and emerald globes.

VI
Sleeping back from where nobody knows—
On unknown shores, and in a silent state
Of grace; I sleep among discarded clothes
Watched by every human love, sedate.
And for a while I may have lost my mind,
But only to give you something to find,
For last night as we stumbled on the stairs
Our thoughts made ample sport for manic sons
Who screamed "The trees are talking", held their guns,
And said "Her face knows more than it declares."

VII
In timeless tawdry alleys, deaf and damned,
Deserted, dirty, coughed up and unstuck,
We sigh and say "Things didn't go as planned"
We lean on skips and mutely supplicate.
We've turned and burned what we could not create,
This dust and ash is desolate but pure.
I take these moments back as I take your
Hand in mine. This poison vein I suck
Clean, it won't bother me any more.
Forget forsaken places. Close the door.

VIII
Pick these pieces up and throw them to the wind
And do not come this way again. You know
That no man is an island. No logic, no faith
And I have no choice but to go
To move on up, in a frenzy, in no state
In wild and caustic vandalistic hate
And loose the bars of people who have sinned
Cut the cords and cages, vanish like a wraith
To melt back in the night, made of stone
And do things for which I cannot atone.

Over and over I tumble like water
on broken ground, with thoughts that fly
duck and weave — and sleep won't come
so I'm not even going to try.

Every time I miss a winter
day I get a sleepless night.
My days are dark and as I sleep
my room is filled with silent light.

Each day I dream of conversations
cryptic and impossible,
as if my mind were reaching for
a world that's inaccessible

As if I'd wandered down a street
to live there, trapped by sleeping feet.