SKY

Rhythm inspired by Michael Palmer, other debts needed but unheeded... it is my own now.

1.

START. WRITE THIS.

TAKE UP YOUR TENTS IN WHIRLING.

 

Write this. Ok… but it’s been had.

I fill my pores glowing red with sunshine and wait and wait… where imagination tastes full and thick, sticks in your throat, and froths up sugary entrails.

I know what is good for me, I know what I’ve been told. I do not listen to what I am told.

Where flies touch with fronds of poison our hot-baking spores, filling them black.

Subscribe yourself to this imagination. Memory fed bulging-white in reels from a shell, in strokes encircling this imagination, this world.

I know what I have been told. These are not my sentences. They flicker setting out, & raise green cries of alarm. All before I’ve had my chance, say anything,

say it. I blew it.

 

 Say it. Ok. Say that. You may rest now, in a body of lies. We treat the body of lies as mites burrowing into its mattress �" sick and dark, our gristly crunch lost in her gossamer drone.

So soft never need do move. Say it is written �" the laws of push. Motion is real.

Say this. Love is only real when you feel its move �" crawling up with Dawn’s smattering red fingers stained in flower pulp & jellied bruises. The dark moves of love, endless, all heave & hull.

When all we have to hold on Earth is in the sky… Imagination alone can create an island, and I can see the dancers, and taste the air, and all other ways in-between.

And as foraging skies dip into this sea we leave a body of lies to die in bed loveless.

A heart blooms in the split eye of an oozing pearl. Sands & shells stretch out their skirts, and

Around and around, around and around.

 

Write this, you know everything already. To tell, do tell, we are a mythless Kingdom. We are hung open on these sands. A jungle is unraveling around us. It grows in multitudes, a dark glistening mass.

We have burned open the night, from blue-skied & sea.

Write this, to set sail for a knock against the backdrop… say the blue is burning through beneath the sands, and my legs dissolving, always this imagination that’s kept me afloat.

But it’s been had, it’s been had, all been had, and all burning.

To write in deathless outcry seared open upon the air. Write, in the singing tongue of your whirling dancers, even now flaming into the sea. Dazzling collapse is a constant state in things.

Write, for all we’ve come to find.

 

2.

Know this. You have been armed. We fly forests bannered in dusk, rotting with amethysts.

We have undone the fiberknit heart of reason, and spin on gold-tasseled heels in our finding.

Heart in the world, sprung as a softbrained timeclock. In all stillness, we picnic with the lonely ladies of the French Renaissance in its spires. Together, we have strung garlands from the tier of every star.

Eyes bursting open in succession down the galaxy’s snaking spine. The rivers run down, all undercurrent to this pulse. We have opened all the floodgates. They are coming to build new lands.

Write this, write this as you can. While you can.

Read, this, the terrain in our head… and already gone too far. Believe, now. We need all your help. I am in fact a colony. I’ve personalities tumored to each coral-nub of brain. So know I hardly know what I’m saying (only it is written), or who to bill it for (needless).

Wrung in a cadence, tracable as much to God as any poet, any gibber-lipped little gargoyle clung on the wall of Time… from this oblong Arabesque ebony box I drift in.

Write this. Stiltedly, musical words.

Trees break foundation to graves with sparrows newborn in the gray crosses of their arms.

Carved to the trunk �" this, all, language a code of signs to withhold centuries of sand & ash, weeping welkin wind & rain, of stale-leaf veils trailed through shimmering air.

Most of all, we are held under wrath �" the moon’s in jealousy.

 

 

3.

Write this. My friends. Hellbent, on Earth.

Popping dead pustules in the bathroom mirror, skin opens with an insect crackle. Write this all reviled, open and aborted.

I have a gluttonous spread of a day for you: back in reality, it came so soon! The rooms are long, and permeated with boredom. A freerange, symptom-free carrier of Death. School hours reeling chatter to fill the empty air.

As Biology bears the glass-ice jaws of mental mutation. Machinery clunk, scutter, stupidity reigns alive.

A History of our Country. Pleasantville caught on a bad bombscare day. Dancing emancipated in the cellar. Fear wringing joy in our eyes �" to paint them shut, & take up the motion of the gods. ‘50s summerboys with big bawling green eyes still beautiful in black-and-white.

My friends. Deserving of noplace but themselves, in their own history.

 

Language beating up against my blackened forehead. I am weary I am weary. I deserve it. I need a break. I have robot-rock nightmares. I need a break.

I hear angel specters singing on the moon, and keep time tapping at the window… in England, with some pale bedroom kid flopping passionately over guitar chords. I know the angels. They’re in love with him. This wraps written across time & seas.

Gray sky today �" no sun off my nose. List me my symptoms, every vowel movement. Please have text with me. Write-slipped a remedy.

A note under an electric pole written, addressed to a Christmas tree. I’ve been working these words into their formation all year, from the tinny-pink music-box of my heart… with love crashing dischordant.

It grates my lips into a grimace. Time whittled into movement.

Twisted to death on its own simplicity �" love �" it’s not enough. Silent & staunch-rocked between two bodies, suffering.

I am going to say we’ve lost our language for love. We lost our nerve, and all terms to close on.

 

The names. My friends. Rip out with a washrinse memory, captured and called to mind on a mantlepiece ampitheater. See �" my friends are a mantle, a music-box, seashells and the seashore.

Write this to send out, free of purpose. Immediate & articulate, sensualized by an unfamilar tongue. Poetry turns to a tizzy, overwhelmed and amplified (ampitheater). So carry me to countries �" I want to take my island on tour. I want to breed lands.

We speak here of lateral languages, moving beneath the hand.

Friends, X-ed away. Demented from me. Scribbled over everything in stereotype.

Writing this still, in the roar of machines across the road that sidles into me. And any footsteps around are rapists on strong legs.

My friend �" the half-hairless human slab so often slapped upside my face these days. My new face, with edges tightly crusted.

For what it’s worth �" on the subject, hair & the human heart �" my algebra teacher has nice legs. Dark, with thick curls softening a smooth-calved outline… none of this hideous business of chunked-out muscle-y membrane. Nice.

Ah. Where was I? How much has been written? Whereforeverto disappeared, my forest-night cloaked caravan sinking blue into a burning sea �" and left me here, banal and brainless with reality!

 

Now. Write this, as I still can… because what is unintelligble is coddled to memory, a small bit of wonder. So suckle on this, slow-kneading teeth in passive psychosick feeding faces. We’re going to be fine.

The human dump machine. A blind rat faced with tunnels of candy, spiraling to infinity, eating down its own chain of excrement. There’s always more candy. This is what moves the world. Really?

Simply no appropriate word for excrement… S**t is too sensationalistic, and already has such a reputation. Crap is childish, frustrated, brusque and inevitably shouted. Feces, too prim. Scat? I loathe science.

A sum: I am leaning against a telephone pole by the road, kneed into the wet ground waiting for a bus to come and take me home. Cars clattering by, shaking the stop-sign, rain touching soft fingers to the page I am writing this, now. It is a new now

& all my illusions are spent… but Time feels less of a monster than it was. I hold my evidence. The edges of imagination, still even here. The birds here on Earth whirr bouncing up & down, shaking spare rain from the wires to the rooftins & pattering pavements.

& the sky moves in a congealed mass of swans, clustered gray & flashing threaded lengths of pure-white, sun, flesh, whole barges of impossible birds crying behind the clouds.

We always return, the body of lies bemoans, & worlds unlace in terrible pleasure to our touch. All shapes unfurl, retract, unfurling over us.

 

All at last. Written. With bright dregs of day, the dogs sing goodnight…

& I’m off. Flown, in fact, with none the wiser anywhere.

 

Author's Note

this is my favorite thing I've ever done... so please, of all things, do not call me pretentious. I know it's a little batty, but it makes sense to me and I really like it. There's no grand meaning, really... just honest poetry.

Reviews

[WildeWhore]

well I think this is just fantastic.