Reeling

My heart is reeling: an attempt to propel time backwards-- with the hope that love might reverse itself not into scorn, but to that placid moment before conception. 11-7-09

Orpheus Acsending

When weary sun grew heavy, sank deep into the Earth, I stole away in secret from chilled and ashen hearth; from morning glory folded amidst the faery rings to hear forbidden melodies-- Orpheus tuning strings:          The first was for the flaming red          setting in sunflower hewn,          the patience of the oaken boughs,          and one for the curve of the moon.          The honey in a lover's kiss          for all it may be worth,          stillness of a morning cloud,          the phoenix in rebirth. What more to wish but for the day he'll laugh and take my hands, but I'll be picking cardamom along these sifting sands 'til Venus finds another house and Orpheus will rise and look into the crimson dawn with clear and dewy eyes; that he might spy me drifting past and know it all along, that he may have arranged the notes, but I was in the song. 11-11-09

Skin

My darling is a hide pulled tightly across her bone frame-- fragile and still. A hollow beat faltering under the greed of invisible people. 3-22-09

There are words that feel good to say
So That I Can Play My Guitar

The image is imperative
So that I can play my guitar

You don’t know me, but I can still see you
So that I can play my guitar

Blessed you if you can repair yourself
So that I can play my guitar

The wind is colder then their bodies
So that I can play my guitar

I jealous of your reality, your taste, your world
So that I can play my guitar

And with your genitals
And the tangible

My guitar Blue Bright Shock
My guitar Tree sap vein
My guitar Naked White Light

Contempt

You spoke words
against me,
and not for my ears;
nurturing a silent,
tasteless poison
thriving in our negative space.
And I do not know
if it will ever find shape
or only continue
to eat at my imperfections
until I am
something less than bone.

3-8-09

Salt

Dive off the salted rim of a galleon
to tangle yourself within crested waves
that trap you
and bear you forth
at the same time;
moments that make all spaces
equal to a heartbreak
and its cure
is alive in bending water-
the drunken enclosure
of Earth's womb.

8-31-08

Grey Hair

Out of the old penny copper
of my brown hair,
a brushstroke of silver starlight
shimmering from my temples--
the proud badge of years rehearsed:
twinkling faintly in the morning light,
and placed just where my mother has hers.
Truly, in one new and unlined,
must be the sign of a virtuoso;
or perhaps time was lost
in those late nights
twirling among moonbeams.

12-1-08

One Hard Thing...

Seeing with a child's eyes
unlocks years
of dormant wisdom--
ripened for picking.
It is left
for those enormously brave
to taste
the bittersweet elder kernels
and face the world
through a glass of honesty.

1-7-09

Statue

Oh, my pretty fractured one--
the harbor is no place for those with hurt.
Fold into the cradle of my arms
and, like Earth's purging spring,
issue forth your heartache.
Let me soak in all your sorrows,
mingle them into my self.
And with the discovery of this new me--
in perpetual metamorphosis--
I may begin to know you
as you know yourself:
a statue against the turn of the seasons.

11-15-08

downtown

Downtown 11/24/09

I went downtown today
And went into Traditions
For coffee it was pretty with the placid
Lake and the sun barely peaking through the fog

The coffee was rice and hazelnuts
And I was in a swampbath of prehistoric sunrise

The elves chanting
In a hum out of reach
There steel guitars
Nearly fallen into ash
Their bones near glass

You can’t ignore the buzz
With chicken chatter

The glass park of my memory
Lined with pretty rose colored benches
I think I’ll settle by the pier and sing

Sleeping Hallelujah

It is a beautiful day
Praise be to God and Hallelujah

Hallelujah Hallelujah

Orphans are singing
In the street
Horns are wining
Out the bathroom window

Hallelujah, Praise!

Next to me sits
Willow wisp and Jasmine flower
The homeless writing Sudoku
Into the morning hours
My music wet
And storms rising up like the day

Hallelujah Hallelujah

Today Paris exists
HAHAHA Hail
The hazy sun on arch de triumph
A sour mellow out the Seine

Hail!

Today, the people are walking in
Hong Kong, in St. Petersburg
They’re limping in New Orleans
Olympia’s feeling dwarfish
And alone…

Hallelujah! Today
Noah exists
And Abraham

My Gretel and Hansel home
With the sapphire dining rooms
And wet elemental cat tails
Our mutual love for disaster
He means to say
(a red car echoes on and on into the night)

Lets sleep down our Joy road
And wash me in chamomile
In the backyard at the bakery
Slap my face till I fever down
Into ya kiss

Disease aching on new warriors

Don Quixote and Falstaff
Stumble out the tavern
Choking
On hidden jewelry

I lit a match beneath your nose
And you awoke
Sleeping literature
In the hands of a few

Our Komf
Shut the hell up!
I’m sleeping, and singing
Like a baby
Like a witch
Like an acre of snoring cats

Baby I’m tired in
This morning
My smiles bubbling out like mineral water

The bus took off for San Diego
I’m left behind in Dallas
In Sri Lanka
In Switzerland
I don’t know where the hell I am

The music is rolling of the page
And collecting in puddles on the floor

The stories are to numerous to tell
My shoulders are whacked
From accidentally reaching
To many unreachable stars
I’m stuck in the grave with
A thousand sleeping geniuses

My lip smelt like lemon
My mouth open to kiss
Hallelujah

Opportunity

Opportunity is sleeping
beneath the skin of the water,
cradled in a shell dish,
silently--
like cold fingers
spinning strings of ink.
Wait for it
in the spaces between
the whoosh and whurr
of a calmed breath.

8-31-08

hi, it's caleb.

The trouble with C₆H₁₀O₅

When I walked over there to the pharmaceutical counter, they held out my bottle of Orange fix-its. When I reached for it, they re-directed their aim and poured the contents down the first-customer-in-line’s throat. The tallest pharmacist punched the red emergency button, grazing the back of his hand across the most exciting clerk’s hip bone -- which he felt effortlessly through her thin skirt -- and took three hard gulps from the fresh coffee that he had just poured. Everyone could hear the fluorescent light tubes buzzing in the back room. As the clerk stood there , annoyed that I came in just before lunch break, wiping her fogged glasses, I requested four sips from the tall man’s coffee. Before she could suggest my departure, the man with the biggest hat (whose coat was dimmer than the rest) had poured half the black contents into an orange bottle and insisted on my immediate consumption. As I emptied that down me and looked into the bottom of the bottle, raised above my face, I noticed, with subtle delight, the remnants of one white pill disappear stylishly. Those men in tights, with even bigger hats than the tallest dr., parked their horses out front & hustled inside in a short single file line. The slowest one, knocking items onto the trail he created behind him, slurred along, inquiring about a slower pace. Those men, hands on holsters, did oblige. As they finally approached this happening, they discovered no excitement (thus breaking their contract) – only people of differing heights standing around discussing Hues. One handful of remarkably potent magenta cellulose tablets in the hand of a subtle worker did catch the eyes of Smallest-and-Wheezing. Guns stayed put, as those 7 noble enforcers walked in reverse, to calm the slight equestrian panic ensuing outdoors. Smallest attempted a protest of reversal but his only mouth worked not and those heavy breaths of his produced sticky fluid. As he went for a wipe of mouth, the official in front of him in line tugged with a start and they both tripped over his leash, producing a fresh pile of items on the trail of those “men-to-the-rescue”.

“Madame!” suggested I, “help them!”--remembering the great surplus of condensed remedies of every sort back there. Her reply was not marked with words but with a steady aim of candy-coated tablets from a special bottle, into each of the mens’ many small fresh cuts, and dissolved those with a high pressure hose, connected to the laboratory faucet. Oh, how the men clambered, clamoring to their feet! They were already on their horses down the block before the toothbrush that had fallen from pocket of the youngest hit the ground. In the morning, the coroner rang me, with the confirmation that the customer had failed because of a severely blocked nasal system. I nodded and wept on the way to the bank, where I made a wire transfer to the Gold Coast of a relatively large amount of money from my yard sale the previous evening.

Haha

I stammered to her desk, knocking over the glue as her fresh skirt slipped cross her hips and under my feet. That small mound under her thin underpants inquired about my notice. I caught the slick skirt between my toes, gently lifting it off the floor and outside the loft window, releasing it into the ironic air & onto the noble head of a passerby. His delicate grin signaled my understading that a new mound manifested underneath his knee-length shorts. Just as this recognition began to no longer impress me, I felt two supple hands cross my shoulder blades to my navel. As I reached back to great the popular source, a middle-aged cat walked its’ favorite path (which marked the floor with a faded, lighter brown) into the room, and leapt onto the ledge, taking a jaded glance at the crowd of accumulating passersby. In rehearsed unison, we announced that nothing of public delight would happen again tonight. Without time to adjust, a small palm arranged itself on the underside of my favorite place in the middle. I understood acutely the truth that the other hand was pulling down black underpants as I witnessed them fly out the window onto the recently disappointed congregation. Many mounds emerged.

Gleeful Toes...

Gleeful toes hide in grass
to watch the day mature
and retreat into
the flashing hill.

4-23-08

June Girl

The June girl wheels in on mischief--
trouble's bicycle;
seal eyes are wanting
to leave dark charcoal in stubborn hair,
a brand on her lungs.
Waits by mute guitars
to catch hope in a pillowslip
as it floats by on a wind,
and whisper her desires through keyholes;
they have gathered dust
under the rug.
Pencil-tipped fingers grasp at peace,
and don't shrink from those who dare to laugh.
Searching deep for the rebel
and finding there is none:
only hummingbird jars
skipping on velvet clouds.

8-6-08

Part 1: Haretalistooth

The pinnacle eversteamed perennial
On your cosmopolitan roof
Don’t it?
Rub that way

And the clown tent
At the Lacey Harvest Fair
Five hundred grinning faces
Like cowboy maps
Grinning into infinite steins of coffee

Staircase through wells
Immortal faces
Of army men and lovers

Disgrace in the desert
Build me up with compliments
Then throw me naked
Into the violet spectral sea

And what grinning at me?
Carved from marble
Grown stale as coffins of ginger cloves
And cardamom suitcases of caramel and hashish
Of blacker Bombay
Of the final date on the Haretalistooth calendar

WOE
The steering wheel of this train seers my knuckles
WOE
The Red heat of this whale spout I found twixt your bladed back
And the fish scales underneath your jacket

Part 2: The cast of my bus:

The rapping buss driver
And the ratcheting highwayman

The aqua goddess housewife
And her clay toed daughter

Part 3: The Forest of Mystery

The forest of mystery begins
On the corner of 4th and water

And ends

A hundred leagues beneath the feet of St. Diana

The mothers
Lay in these woods
100,000 of them side by
Side like corpses
But not
SINGING
Like hanging Caribbean songbirds
And the strawberry crest
Whispering in brother’s oven

The MEAT of my story
Concerns stars
And the etymologies
Of sacred balls of light

But also

Suspended choruses of children mooing
In extinct yachts of gold

Potential

It will never be the same, will it? Those clear Autumn nights have detached themselves and floated from all that is constant. Orange and brown leaves crushed beneath our feet-- our warm breath still trembling off of each other's faces: ever suspended. And sometimes I long for that young woman who lived for you: a piece of my self lost; slipped between the accidental brushing of our hands. Pining to reemerge. Within lives the "could have been" more real than truth. 10-28-08

Ill of the Moon

I am grieved that I must speak ill of the moon. I have nightly watched it wane and wax back to full since we conspired between those mirrors... and you snared me with your smile. Yet no phase, however brilliant, has served to distract, or made me less alone. Oh, you have been a constant inhabiter of my thoughts. The third quarter drew the sweetest torment; you rocked me -- dear apparition-- and kissed my lips; then sunk down smiling beneath the horizon; riding on the moon. I arose possessing sighs that stretched out for miles; All the distance between my cup of tea and your abandoned cigarette--  they reached to wipe the ashes from your hands; they reached to run their fingers through your hair; they reached for the moon. 7-6-09

Shady River Mantra

I live in a house of whispering figures

Turquoise and Tan are the shades of the murmuring living

The spider’s long foot jerks free of a web

Touches my chin to the trickling water

I’m in a Terra of strange devices

For God’s sake

I am scouring millennia

And stairs

And switchboards

To holy high rises

Released

In the night I have found you hovering above me as you once did; like a satellite pulling at my water-- delighting my depths with your weight. It has roused the span where I carved you from my heart-- marked with those moments spinning far and farther in our tracks; and appear now little more than a dream of years divided from the hoop-- a lost season when our two loves made a whole and parted as beings forever altered. It may have been that my swelling tides have dried up; or perhaps I have just been released from gravity. 5-20-09

Boney Fish

Boney fish glide
through tea-water,
developing violet wings-
and rise beneath
pearls of amber droplets,
glowing from cherry trees;
a secret that dreamers keep.

8-30-08

R
Owen
CA
Tail
Pioneer
ca
ne
city

Can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Phantom Creeper

Can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Gorse Cat

can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Blue Vase

can't you guess
is the string that make sounds

Raht Knuckle

can't you guess
gust of belly ocean

mosaic icon
of hearth fire
of bile and banjo
elephant cigaro
stage holdup
thumbs tomorrow

Italian Sonnet One: To Comfort a Sharp Girl

To Comfort a Sharp Girl

You are wandering through England with no one

to worry, wonder if a too-smooth man

might latch his fancy on your child-like hands

that crash Rachmaninoff, then quick, have done

with you. You brushed our city from your pants,

which color splattered and caked with sand,

had once been worn at night by your dead mum

who stayed awake to paint and curse her hands

for standing stubbornly two steps below

mastery. She left you deepened by loss—

seductive, small and violent you hurled

a lamp against a wall, behaved as though

you’d sighed. Wide-eyed I followed you across

your wars, coaxed gentle until fists uncurled.

10/26

nay say nought

of battles frozen

corpses on the ground

dead of winter

there is much of her

in me 

daring to look

behind

not forgetting

remembrances 

membrane members

pillars of salt

neigh i sought

faces familiar

in the oncoming cavalry

ancient shades

stay the words

remain

silence

speaks wisdom

listen

Spring and Lemongrass/ words

Is their more to be said?
The fly stammers
On his Russian mare
And fog
Of sweat
Moon air balloon rises/settles on a spindle

With a great effort…
Rooster rises
Stretches, folds blanket, crosses himself
Caws out a sunny hymn of comfort

1} It goes, CALL and Bang a’doodle
To its lungs
A hum
Instrument, its flesh mass

…Cradling her doll playlessly
Girl carves a path through the underworld
Trips
OH, rock…Oh human dead
Alas, intellect defeated now! Death westerly!

2}The sun makes love to a mop
On the evocation of a phrase
Changed, over time.
Now it means, Freeze together
On a raw mat of love

The gears, the signal
Invisible to human preceptor
To the particles of Atom world
We are invisible, phantom spectable
Impossible to comprehend

…………………………………………

A man walks by in nothing
But a horse blanket and sandals
I envy the cross on his back
The fertility in his smile
The effortlessly bare trudge toward
Spring and lemongrass

3}I whisper through the veins of oceans
Until at last
White whale pounces up!
A shreaking curl for the sky
I make smoke of him


Mariner through sea and glass
Gazes, hurricane winds now…
How truth bended comes to be…
Pulls an apple from the lense
Sweetens his lips on scales of brass

4}Digging ad infinitum
Into the grounds, dogs
Die like locusts, as they sour
These fragile words of age

This small ground
And this small ground
Pigs wander like churls on its surface
And Isis
Pulls from her hip pocket
Not man, not ground,
But fish

Autumn by Guillaume Appolinaire

A bowlegged peasant and his ox receding
Through the mist slowly through the mist of autumn
Which hides the shabby and sordid villages

And out there as he goes the peasant is singing
A song of love and infidelity
About a ring and a heart which someone is breaking

Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

Hi] Grass Lobes (Sprouted Prophesies)

Denver, Sept 09


Oh here we are
Hear the great noise
Splayed out and angelic in
Cister sinsweep deckjaw disaster
Of this day
Give me my whisky
With coffee, I want to think

Disaster, I think
As the grass lobe
Pulled like pinpricked hair follicles
From the earth
His or her father
Time clothed in spectacles

Lady grey sheds
Her dress and she’s Venus
She’s screaming, tortured
5 years old, oh lord save us
Oh me…the clock
Churning like goats
Stomach each morning
Another arduous “tic”
a bloated floating “toc”

Squirming worms of the earth
Relative to the attic
Eaten out
And relative
Lost in the hair of
This queen mole
This plunging goddess of
The ground

My eyes stair between the
Chink in your thighs
Out of the rocks
And I behold a thousand ships
All garbed in red and gold
And fine artillery

When the piper cries
Play, the fox dies
David
Strolls down the desert
Strewn floor
His goatskin canteen
Dripping down his leg
He has just composed
Psalm 23
Now it mercy, heartache, guilt
Oh where are we?

Disaster
Cleophas and the fall of Rome
It fell again and again
With each rub of my hands
Together last night

A fibrous vine
Collecting heart’s satchel
Windfire eyes and
Badly bleeding hands
Connectivity
With the ground
And the rolling snow drifts
Of these sheets

The fiery gyroscope
Your sunglasses
Reflected in
The fissure
In the Swiss alps
And a slowly sinking
Catamaran of lovers

What is this steely community
Of utopians
Who gather round the fire circle
To see me hanged?

The theater
Holds its boney knuckles round
All sprouted prophesies of the voice resound
Then fall in hall of mirrors and sound
Reflected, tumbled, distraught
Backstage