It was along a river that I never heard

"There are varied responses to the process of
socialization. Many acquiesce and replicate
with their children what their parents did to them.
Others do not. In clinical observation, we can oscillate
the difference."
Thorsten Heisendykker, The Bland Mirror of the Medusa Ego

i. Once more, into that pesky garden

Prickly troubled being burst forth again
along the newly spaded furrow of jaded roses,
often bubbly wrapped as a hapless thorny stem
against the rubber boots of a tame green calf,
often pitched by the sleeping wight of life
or the soiling dreams of ever-blooming black:
yikes! the concrete square is so sweaty rich
with the capillary dew of bloody aspiration.

In the swampy mist a hunkered rail
quakes in mirth as the banshees wail:

a two-clawed braid of mossy twist
with elbows blue towards bluer sky
in a heathen dance of heathered mists.

And so it ends and so it begins.

ii. Climb every anthill until you reach

From the violet calm of my omega
I saw the alpha swirl of contenders

dissipate and cease to snarl at rivals.

I had a chartreuse tiffin with twin black straps
and a plastic zipper that never stuck
to carry fruits and nuts and yogurt:

persimmons and clementines mostly,
an occasional prickly pear-
blanched almonds and pistachios,

savory with the salt of the sea.

I watched your reflection
but the sun came out
and you went in
squeaking a hinge behind,

blankly.

I parked my aqua truck in a narrow space

and solved the white brick puzzle.

Cutting the deck with every breath,

was it brave, then, to draw another?

I spun with the cirrus in a fulcrum of air,

I spun with the mud that had clumped in your hair,

I spun and my eyes were white and nowhere.

And spun and spun, spun again.

then there was an explosion of branches and

Former mandarins use ghostly windows
fronting the dormer to trick the eye,
sashaying her sole segment of dance
in the leopard prints that drove him skyward
and made the window dance and disappear,

and disappear and dance.

How silly to invent an object of worship
and then choose not to be chosen,

and disappear and dance.

Some revelations come in four before sunrise,
a red glow and a blue glow barely focussed,
and the lifting of a veil, speckled legs and silver feet,

the revelations start here:

A drab fixation on pips and pips within
the liquid fray of consciousness,

the squish, squish, squish behind the eye.

Isolation and the dismissal of disturbing thoughts,

fictional pulp beneath the wide pore rind

that yields to the scrap of glistening teeth.

Distractions that limit attention to the critical bonds,

the sweet arc that leaps from eye to eye
and electrifies the soul with the tart of time .

Thirty-seven glasses of squeezed juice
to take away in separate paper cartons
will never be enough to make you orange,

to dance and disappear.

That's as good as it's ever gonna get
and it's damn good too.

At least one unburned codex

Then we came later inland
through the frilly cordillera,
chilled by the knee-deep torrents
and chaffed by the wet spray
and scraped skins of alpaca,
slipped through the paths
of printed shale footprints
and reached a shimmering desert
that mirrored our dry salvation.

The emerald dead whom we carried,
we entombed in a barrow of promise
which we rose from the sand with sweaty hands
under the pitiless grin of a parching sun.

Above the barrow we erected many blades
painted red and black in memory of oars
which we used to pierce the drifting sky
in honor of the Beauty of Pachamama.

When the silent crows blackened the outskirts
we gathered our kit and left in silence too.

Please remember what we were like
before the others came.

When Aqua Went Missing

Upon runes of sandstone scratched by gnats,
unrubbed and legible through a rubber sole
the squealed aria of high pitched muddy traffic,

It's always by the shoreline
that these dreams twist and turn.

where byssal threads of mussels cling nearby
and sing the opera of a soupy sloshing tide
and the primordial blunging of man and water,

caught by fear only half-remembered in fear,
where brazier toes were orange embered
in the burning embroidery of a cast iron grate.

As I reached for the white skirt
at midnight it seemed to come alive,
flouncing scarlet and rusty frills
with dental and gnashing intent.

barely noticed in the trills and wash of tide and song,
the flutter of the shadow of the tissue that cleanses:

I heard urges at which you feigned surprise,
though it was only the burnished lead
of a bass line thudding the spirit
that thundered in the night.

there's never none of these demure boys
that comes to any proof.

Once a melody conferred

I saw a girl brush her hair there, once-
but became rushed into the sparrow's eye.

A refracted patter from a rise of pine,
marooned to pining with sawdust filigree-
to cling to twist to turn to needles
in the sappy knot of walking away.

Something since has sintered the evergreen
into a sinistral stump of weeping silence,

from that dust up to a musty pedigree
I have grown aphasic in the orange muster
of a lattice sun and ovulate cones.

I saw a girl brush her hair there, once,
or so the sparrow seemed to song.