A Blind And Simple Mammal

There was a connector
--inside my skull--
a diode, an input
a socket for that UNENDING EXTENSION CORD
that electrocuted me
that charred me
*SHOCKED* my body upright

caught me unawares!
(in dark of day) (in bright of night)
& made ME make WORDS

A hand:
1) from on high
2) held my hand &
3) made me trace*
*as if by stencil
a) odd visions detached from landscape
b) faces, blurs, indentations in the dew

I was powered from the top of my head
by that CORD that CORD
that stretched past the air traffic
a marionette   (?)
made to obey (?)
by the simple finger movements
of a SOMETHING
--a something with fingers--
& that cord
that (invisible) string
dragged me across continents (!?)
knees bleeding
not AGAINST my will nor FOR it

I was a non-participant
-----> a recipient of data <------
a weather vane
a lightning rod
a BLIND and SIMPLE mammal seeking
                                         i) sustenance
ii) warmth
iii) a good fuck
I was (im/com/dis)pelled

PROpelled by
either / or
something above / something subterranean

TO.........................

to?

to WHAT?

Compelled to dispel myself
Impelled to inscribe my dying
--> as if a solution!
--> as if floating in a solution!
AND!
gifted with visions in yellow
seminars from the stars
diamond illusions in ball-point pen
galaxies, womb planets, primordial goings-on
WHICH!
became existent things
by my hand
stenciled by a *something*
BUT!
the *something*...

VANISHED
!!!!!!!!!!!!

I)  Extension cord
II) Hand “from on high”
III) Diamond illusions in ball-point pen
(*****vanished all******)

Vanished!
(where?)
LEAVING!*
a hole in the top of my skull
a corroded input exposed to winter rains
*leaving?!?
SO!
a) does a puppet die?
b) what fuel?

---PROPELLED TO/BY WHAT?---

--to VOID!--
--from VOID!--
--by VOID!--

(and/or)

--to WOMB!--
--from WOMB!--
--by WOMB!--

AND!
not vanished:
                   1) Pulse
                   2) Earth

THUS!
the sun continues with the colors
human faces smile
full of teeth

I will wear a hat
I will not corrode
I will navigate

(atrophy/emaciation/shrinkage/disorientation/anemia/sloth/dwindling
novelties!  novelties!)

I will navigate
learn to feed myself
learn to sleep
find a power source

& the TREES!

INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN

Through The Drywall

Father’s mustache always came down to his chin.  It was waterlogged when he dragged me from the pool.  I jumped in and missed the inner tube.  My face filled with water.  I never learned to swim.  There was a Slip n Slide in the yard, water grenades, green plastic squirt guns.  Touch football in the street, kicking soccer balls into puddles so the spray blinds the defender.  Wet snowmen with icy scarves, one day a year to sled down the hill to Safeway.  Straight down to Yellowstone, where the road was blocked by a crossing bison herd.  We stopped and a squirrel climbed up my chest to eat a Fruit Roll-Up.  I fell off my bike in the gravel and a rock split my lip open.  My brother was thrown right through the drywall.

I didn’t know grandma gambled.  I didn’t know grandpa prescribed her morphine.  I only know a ghost floated into the room and out again.  I was in the top bunk.  Translucent.  Filled with water.  There was a blanket, a kiss.  The birthday cake was ruined.  Butterscotch pudding instead.  Garter snakes, a rock thrown into a hornet’s nest, a stinger in my throat.  A 40th Anniversary gold-plated Les Paul guitar, sold to seek Pennsylvania.  Amish on the bus.  Fireworks over the river.  I snuck in the window, hid in the closet, could hear her parents suspecting.  In the darkness I saw a pyramid.  It lit up the midnight.  The man caught fire and toppled.  I got back on the bike.

We snuck wine from his parents’ stash.  Strategy board games, poetry at the Globe Cafe.  Coffee and coffee at an all-night diner.  I walked up the hill, past the S&M shop, down neon Broadway, and into the policeman’s floodlight.  I wore a brown UPS uniform.  I climbed out of the truck, rung by rung down from the uterus.  Through the drywall and into a hallway covered in black-and-white pictures and a metal casting of the Last Supper.  I cursed my knees, was kicked in the shin, broke my right tibia and fibula.  The cast was yellow.  The tapestry was also yellow.  The sunset was purple.  My right leg was half an inch shorter than my left.  An ulcer formed.

It began with Christmas and a kitten foaming at the mouth.  My stocking was green and red.  Pet rats climbed inside my shirt.  They licked my teeth clean.  I made them run mazes and lost my love inside.  I was looking on the wrong continent.  I waved goodbye as the train pulled away.  A Frenchman cornered me in a sleeper car.  A passport, a drunken pornographer, a see-through sea.  I escaped to Santorini and saw the sun set on Atlantis.  Minoan ruins, Theater of Dionysus.  I escaped across the ocean.  I overshot my home and landed in Indonesia.  Malaria swarmed.  Tsunami refugees and dengue fever.  I escaped by ingesting a small white pill and reappeared deep in the heart of the redwoods.  A tree grew on the stump of another tree.  Its roots were taller than a man.  It drank from the river and I drowned again.  When I woke, the ocean had grown.  I slipped in the red dirt and almost fell from the cliff.  But I stayed on the trail and put one foot in front of the other while the policeman watched.  Sirens in the dark.  Helicopters overhead.  Drums of absurd volume.  My head couldn’t hold the sun, so I etched it on my back.  Red skin peeled from overexposure.  I couldn’t think and waited for the synapses to fire.  The road was washed away by a sudden flood.  Bridges burning.  Bridges drowning.  I had to leave it all behind.  I had to leave it on the other side of the drywall, where the gun was hidden.

In Blear Of Night

in blear of night it comes to me

in tobacco ember light

hurled from the palm of some interplanetary god cometlike

& I stand stunned & stunted on the red rooftop

arms extended receiving

beckoning with index fingertips

aiming it here calling it here summoning it here

in blear of night it comes

a need of me

it substantiates me

leaves me kneeling bleeding from my temples

this my temple

it comes in half-formed shapes of timid long-legged women

hair trailing across the late blackness

comet-formed like white fire, endless snow dissolving

the stars shooting at me – the stars are missing, drifting away

in ancient days

all my awe needed was a high place

an access ladder for my skull to climb

& there was input from other orbits

hitchhiking on the light of miniscule stars

there down low where the wind finds horizon

a radiation of information

bombarding me & melting me

making mutations to my cellular structure

addicting me synaptically to a poetry of an alien nature

it fuses me to some hideous archetype perfection

welds me to it through fire of far suns

how hydrogen heals in helium, how infinity expands

how malformed millennia made me thirsty

in ancient days, I say, I saw ghosts of galactic pantheons

right there where the telephone wire wanes

& the low window lamp halo fades

they aimed at me; they blamed me for daylight

cascaded their insignia across my forehead

in blear of night it comes

but lately it deftly leaps by

I see it streaking past me

leaving dust trails like roadrunners bending the rubber concrete

in clearly defined celluloid existences bounded by familiar music

where animals travel like electrons holding comical signs

traveling not by step-by-step progression

but by means of some instantaneous triumphant teleportation

& I a coyote incapable of chasing them

only able to look down and realize

--gravity is a construct of mind—

&, thus instructed, fall flailing forever into canyons of dying dust

doomed only by the conceptualization of that doom

the knowledge that there is no earth, only ether beneath

fragment of an asteroid cathedral

in blear of night it comes to me

I don’t know what it is

it manifests as midnight roosters, as crickets, as faraway traffic, as bookshelves

I am enlarged by loud silence but not naked enough to know

& seeking someone weary to watch with me

& act as interpreter & liaison to the light

I have no other name for it

but Origin, Incomprehensible, the Sunburn

I am faltering in the curvature of this instant

aging by instinct, only slower

training myself to tame time

& make it balance beach balls for me

trying to articulate the cacophony in simple syllables

& manufacture a manuscript

that will present me with detailed instructions

to free me from the need for negotiation or navigation

transport me to the surface of a gaseous planet

& allow me to linger in a levitating stasis

absorbing, absolving, making me translucent

immune to the torrents of the skin

there must be a Something

there must be somewhere to go

the light is slowing down

lattice of nothingness

consolidation of tumultuous pauses

in blear of night it comes to me

it makes me a solid object

void of voids, constellation of remembrances

footfall of Shiva dancing in soft sand

I am created here

thickened & given edges by vibratory violence

when the late light leaves

in blear of night

under mobile skies

clouds dangling from insubstantial space

by insubstantial strings

a string from my skull to the heavens

it is a many-limbed puppeteer

I don’t know what it is

I am jerked & jostled in my sleep

on the red rooftop I stand stunned & stunted

a pair of left-handed scissors aloft

gleaming in the dark

I cut the string

& yet & still I dangle

rotating with limbs contorting, thwarting my will

attached by nothing to nothingness

but attached

a construct of mind

appearing to be a complete being

in tricks of light

in blear of night it comes

Things To Do Today

Lose awareness of pleated pants. Also scarves and cummerbunds. The flattening of the horizon where the leg meets the hip. To turn cars the same color, the same bright color. Solid objects touch other solid objects and slow down. When a slowness meets a slowness for time to think. Where the glasses went. Eyes grow between index fingerprints. To see the mounds. Awareness of pleated pants. All the details. Warm and thought through. But with shin injuries. But it tastes better. Her hair. The mouthwash. Things to do today. Doorknobs to open. All the same plain light. All the details. The music of asphalt. The same music of asphalt.