Residue in the Hands

Do you have a coat named Cassandra?

Are we the dead swordfish cripples?

Are we postponing the end of reality?

 

Is one man perched on a cloud

of skunkweed aromas and spiral lights?

 

Are you trying to sharpen your pencil

with fingernails submerged

in lethargic gardens?

 

God is decrepit.

Can’t even stand up straight

or walk inside the lines.

 

Kick out the sky like a drum

A strange blind man with yellow teeth

evolves through a pearl necklace

in a cloud of birds and helium

as soft as a paper serpent,

as simplistic as the underlying echo

of raindrops beside an

apocalyptic train tunnel.

 

Go ahead,

try and be a woman.

 

Flamingo!

Or was it Flemenco?

 

Everyone’s looking for a Mormon groin

To pat on the toilet.

Everyone wants lap-teasers;

bursts of energy

contained in porcelain urns.

 

You realize anything you write down that rhymes

is mystified, temporarily,

the real nothing curving back into the landscape.

 

You look fine,

figuring out the label.

 

Before the swollen eyes burn,

vodka wanders and remodels.

It reminds her of the cavern that remained

in the side of her head

and the stain its warm good-byes left

on the open half

of the flower sun

on the Indian tapestry.

 

I want to share

the broken cores of the walls

with the rippled blue label

on the scantily clad bottle.

They will meet,

marry

and view death as friends

watching each other deteriorate

into puddles meant to be wheatfields.

 

No vines,  no veins

 

they pace only to summon the light.

This speech is spellbound

and holds no boundaries to our power.

 

Don’t follow my path

to indignant extinction.

 

Breath likes resurrection

Death likes restitution.

 

It was the stare I remember

and he was the one who lost

the lickable paper

I vaguely

(and foolishly)

recall with pride

for playing anything less than psychotic

 

I am the psychotic

I’m the last of the crass;

a head I can brush her hair with.

 

The crash of a familiar tongue

distances itself from the ivory face of a December midnight,

standing in shadows of crimson silence.

 

We see no need to thank, but do it anyway,

by necessity.

It’s a fear that wakes you in the night.

You turn on the light

and there’s nothing there.

 

Where is the lifestyle I want?

 

Flying

flying

flying

flown, as a vision through the light,

a vision beyond that vision I saw

Death and the echo of raindrops

remain boxed together in a stool sample.