And then there was light

And then all the bears were heroes, those from the Baluchistan and Kermode armies who fought with great honor, until their heft fell butchered upon a forest clearing of morning glories, in the breeze of an autumn dawn which stirred the flowers open like purple fists holding stars in their palms. And the Baluchistans wore great white doves across their black breasts, and the Kermodes' white fur had been washed pink by the claws of their enemies. But the morning glories knew nothing of the fire of dusk, or the carnivorous night, could not distinguish this brevity, this brittleness, from their own. They knew only that the blood seeping into the soil was theirs, and they drank of it, and it was good.

Embryonic rock ballad

Let me be the rock
star who steps off
stage who sits
on your laps
spills your vodkas
glasses roll shatter
on the sticky floor
the cigarette fog
obscuring our faces
as I beg you to hold
me fetal.

Let me show
you a network of
my veins, like a fiber
optic toy glowing
red cigarette tips
and let me be the joke
you remove from the deck place
before you on the table
examine discard
 "No wilds boys no wilds"
force your tongues
between the cracks of my painted
grin in dark auditorium stage
light igniting nothing just a feedbacking
guitar dropped against hollow shoe-
worn wood.

Let me inhale the
nicotine exhaust plié
from your throats into the back of my
throat
Let me swallow
your spit
what you give
when you say confiding knowing "What a wreck what a wretch what a mess what a fuck what a slob what a hippie what a cunt what a hack what a has been what a one hit always taking hits more tracks on his arms than his records"
and let me be destroyed
by your consonant
the way infant skulls fractal
kaleidoscopic against mothers' fists
shaking with milk
Let me be the joke
you tell confiding knowing
like I am a whore in which you know and confide by
bruising my imperfect shape
like I am the moment
in your lives
you ripped clothes from
a mannequin displayed
to the street because your money
was good
because your credit
was good sirs
you know your credit is always good
here sirs
and I am the moment
in your lives
you paid to nude
a mannequin
to the street because you thought
I want I want I want
and you could have so you
took because the mannequin had been molded
without face.

Let me be the puddle
reflecting the nude mannequin
and from which
like your smoke laughter
knowing confiding
blackbirds scatter
trembling
my skin.

It is father's day in the enlightened age, what did you get for your father, Isaac?

Maybe we kill because science cannot take this doctrine from us, so it is ours, the way we masturbate forcefully into test tubes and examine our semen under microscopes, the way it makes us proud, like, Great Game, Slugger, or, Give 'Em Hell Over There, Son, Shovel Your Trench And Shoulder In To A Shadowed Nook Till Christmas!, or, Get Your Cock Out From The Shadowed Nook Of My Daughter Which Makes Me Weep With Fear, or, Welcome To The Family! The opposite of To Kill is To Emerge From Shadowed Nooks, and this is an act of great faith, Amen.

How I love you

Someone once discovered that human intestines could be unraveled and then wrapped around the equator of the planet earth to form a tourniquet, and I wish these were my intestines. The idea of a liquid flowing uncontrollably, of undertows and tradewinds, this idea terrifies me, and this need to suffocate terror is the most human thing I have left. Please, let me do this for you all. This is how I love you.

So I see you've met Pan of the subtropics

You've put on your shoes, haven't you, but you've forgotten the laces, and to step means to stumble or to leave your rubber-soled foundation in the tall grass. You are sad, I can tell the way you look forward into the horizon of cypress trees edging the clearing, because it is as if you are looking behind you. It's okay to be sad because swamps have the unique quality of swallowing, buzzing, swirling, engulfing, so that you forget there was ever such a place as not a swamp. By this I mean that to be engulfed is indistinguishable from engulfing, this is what lovers do, buzz and swallow and become indistinguishable, and also I mean to say that swirling carries with it the inertia of a ballerina, for instance, or the spotlight which she orbits. This is heliocentric and this is inevitably what you will think as the sun which you orbit casts its light on your cheeks, and you are the only one in your private swampy world, with no one to give yourself to but the wet earth. It has already removed your laceless shoes, and maybe this is the first step of lovemaking, so you must make love, you must engulf and be engulfed in the tall grass, to the thunderous applause of crickets.

The Division of Forestry

Sometimes I think, a tumor was once a flower, there has been no rain for years, we do not recall the times between brush fire seasons, we share evacuation tips and hose each others' roofs when we spot smoke towering in the distance. Though wet roofs will not help, this is the closest we come as neighbors to embracing. We smile, wave from our yards, robed, dogs bounding in fatalistic, knowing circles. The fire is a rising tide. Time is measured in fahrenheit. I want to tell you, Hey Bob, did you know that love is just an electric wire hooked from your eyes straight back to your past, that love is a word that means nothing more than survival, that without love we would have all smashed our skulls against the cave walls until our thoughts dripped viscous into our eyes, blinding us from whatever meaningless things we've painted of ourselves. But then I think, who doesn't know that? So instead I watch the stream of water arching from the hose to the shingles, knowing that it will all soon be smoldering cinders, and the fire will consume the oxygen and make each breath we take thinner, and this is like a lovely flower.

When we talk about paralax, darling

Sorrow or laughter
comes from a glass jar
swelled with fire bugs
prisoners
of fancy.

If you can't tell which is which,
in all that jarred
fire,
we are looking at the same God-
Damned sky
swelled with jarred fire:
You, fingers furling full of grass,
dirt, or brine-caked sand, staring up,
and me,
atop, watching the fire
swelled in your eyes
prisoners
of fancy.