[x]

Though having scrounged belief
from the copper lance by which
I was speared by some brown-
eyed cousin but then so spared

of Death’s sharp trident and grace-filled harp,
it now dawns like the nose-bleed of this last
dusk-til-dawn for which a chin-upped Cherokee

sings out however much less, the more off key
from Appalachia, sings out the self-same ‘blue-
ridge light of hallelujah,’ the self-same ‘blue-
ridged, copped hallelujah’ that throws all

the way fucking back to some (yeah) tossed
and scrabbled tribe of Israel, which I swear–
with my crooked left pinkie finger–weds

some timeless source of not ‘tic-tok,’ but time-travel.

                                                                [y]

The Chinese digging their next hole to (yes) Oz
with yet another gas-fed hog
not to take
another slithery hack beneath America’s vault.

Well then, not...

1.

The secret, too, is restless. It walks its confidence on a leash, drags its imperatives down crumbling sidewalks, knocks at certain doors. When I answer my own, the secret–without reason–slaps me in the eye with the pink belly of a fish, stabs me in the leg with the yellow stub of a pencil, proceeds to steal my only working watch, declares “Smoke is coming
out the chimney; water for tea is screaming on the hob; a few Bachs
and Beethovens are yawning deep d0wn below, hiding in their Castles.”

2.

Many brainy men, their unfortunate horrors,
have sought the secret’s whereabouts.
“Behind a wheelbarrow!–” one cried.
“Loaded on a catapult!– barked the next.
"Inside a toothpick!–” screamed another.
“Atop a flagpole!” replied one monk.
“Hanging from my clothesline” gasped the Pope
as (my dear God!) he waved from the gallows.

3.

“Octopus, Xylophone, Zebra,”

the secret whispers to...

A year of mayonnaise
Living in a meatloaf sandwich
With a mouthful of sardines.
Good. That seems to work.

Though my boots sound heavier
And the canary singing
In Charlie’s jukebox
Is a little off.

As for love, I was able to jump the car,
But the steering wheel still is missing.
Meanwhile, my suit of spittle kills another fly.

It’s like after the first hour
Of curfew on the last page
In your coloring book
Where the pig is laughing
At the both of us

Or lost in a game of pinball
Between the resplendent
Honeycomb and salubrious
Peach pit, bumping into the
Powder keg–

And then so much for healthy living
In a can of spinach, burping bolts
Of lightning, waving to the hearse.

Death again has left a hole

You have stepped inside its stone

With a brown crystal in your arm

A black eagle in your heart

You left no note for grief’s unpacking

Just a friend request in my LinkedIn box

To impart your new wide berth

As “a leaf in the wind” after the auction

Pyramid, cube, octohedron, dodecahedron, eicosihedron: in as much
the empyreal form(s) en masse of the computative dot senses its own ponderable GOD, gyral pro-rata, in spin of state, turning for steadfast-

ness of mind that tops conception itself or any capacity of our humbug understanding, which is a maze of slip, knot, error so absolute to leave us this long pink rented story of what’s so obvious: the skies, the rats, the stars,

the flat earth, the blue round ball on which some numinous green mystery
of crayon and dust pervades all our clod-strewn reasons to toll and count,
to bawl and pout and paint over the stressful years, the stressful months,

the stressful seasons without sighting one terminal margin of marbles
or decisive point of sanity where without whimpering we might stop
our immensity for superstitious breath and latter-most tears: so long

and then farewell through...

Into days I thought
Would never come again
Through the stone gate
Where the black thread lies
Where the old tongue lives
Deep in the socket
Of one closed eye.
I am on a road
Which only I can determine
Dragging the yellow kite
That Icarus for winged purpose
Tore, searching for the nail
That once upheld the sky.

What is the stone?
a. It is the cast of the fallen prophet.
What is the egg?
a. The chamber
of the cactus.
What is the bone?
a. The lost rattle of the last star.
What is the pit?
a. The place
of the broken neck.
What is the root?
a. It is the final cause of the seed.
What is the wing?
a. It dreams of
the first Ak-
kadian web
from god’s
mouth, which
is a spool.
What is the wound?
a. It is the naked cross
over empty ground
saying, ‘yes.’
What is the box?
a. It is the forbidden.
What is the garden?
a. The third day.
No, what is the garden?
a. It is the rib.
What is the dung?
a. It is the sole gift for the soil.
What is the book?
a. It is the mouse
with eyes closed.
No, what is the book?
a. It is the mouse
...

I.
Picture the sky as it carefully shaves off
Its beard, dresses and leaves the house
With a rock tied to its foot, a lump of coal
Burning a rabbit’s hole through its pocket.
II.
Perhaps the super-psychologists will give the princess
In the vat thoughts of whether floating in a fish tank
Of top hats is possible, or the experience of reading
This grim fairy tale that radically pictures such as possible.
III.
With amplifier on, the turntable spins the record
Of a red stylus moving around the yellow door
Of the black cat’s popped eye, the black cat’s
Popped eye through which Tesla returns home,
Dropping (Ja!—) a coconut.
IV.
The above line(s) of reasoning may or may not
Stretch too far to form the thin rubber-band prop-
osition of the drunk floating in a bar who does
Not know he is not there, blinking at this tele-
Vision set, where (inside) we find the same serpent
With its own tail...

Eventually we must combine the cracked door that leads to the pigsty wherein all dreams lie awake beneath a sleeping god while, in another world–possibly far away, possibly close enough–the clock ticks impossibly backwards on Kafka’s chest of drawers, ripe to alarm.

In 1981, I died. Seven years later, my letters would begin to travel. The contents are the cerebrations and cogitations of a hallucinated man.
In a poker room, I composed, painfully, futile proclamations, two edicts,
five decrees ( “Das ist mir Wurst,” [This is sausage to me] “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof,” [To only understand train station] “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift,” [I think my pig whistles] Ich glaub’ ich spinne,” [I believe I spider] “Bock haben,” [To have a goat] ), which owe their veracity to my literary executioners: the animus of a refrigerator and the revelations kept within
one tin box, one glass jar.

The...

Now that it’s out
that I’m the half-
past moron hum-
ming to the chip-
munk’s half-eaten
skull beneath the
shutters in the the
nursing home where
the fortune-teller re-
veals with pink crayon
my soul’s foreclosure,
I wonder if you con-
centrate hard & long
enough that you might
hear the early C-sharp
that is the absent voice
of all my failures as they
blink and stutter, stuck
to flypaper, and so in order
to feel this bucket of tar-
feathers as it dumps over
my head while I drink
in this little burning spirit.
Then against the funeral
march, which Beethoven
inscribed to Napoleon.
At-least I’ll have a clear path
to the ocean.