Lux Con­tinua

I

I steal things I’m too ashamed to bor­row:
the hours at the end of your day
you inhabit so grace­fully; your glance, that place

Where elec­tro­mag­netic waves go
entan­gled, go to war. My inde­pen­dence dete­ri­o­rates
with my opti­cal fibers, fireworks

Seizure on the nerve-screen and I mean,
if you need to make noth­ing out of some­thing
you should say it to my face.

Was our love not hand­cuffs, was what held us together
not your hate-dread of the other
rac­ing pulses I’ve felt flut­ter­ing inside me?

I let them all get away
and was sen­tenced to the page, which for a time
at least gave my crimes meaning.

II

The things I steal / I rarely savor: her body forms
a lump on my retina as my brain
leaves the restau­rant. I’m afraid of what my hunger will do.

At some point the cones must take sides:
If blue is heaven, red is soli­tude.
A ten­sion builds that will inevitably be broken

Between the under­stand­ing and its object.
A shud­der grows that must be released
between the shoul­ders as the spirit remem­bers

(I remem­ber) why the Gothic archi­tect Suger had a name
for each turn light takes as it enters a sanc­tu­ary:
Lux when it pours unim­peded from the sun

Lumen when it streams through stained win­dows
Illu­mi­na­tion when it fills the believer.
Remem­bers what it was, but couldn’t stay.

III

Call the mem­ory of color sub­lime: call it despair.
The lover comes and goes like a recur­ring night­mare
where the face goes white, the eyes swollen

The soles of the feet slice open on the boul­ders
when the tide rolls in—comes and
goes between trial and error, I do and do us part.

If I were trapped in a cathe­dral on this dark­est night
of the drought and cried out to The God
I doubt he would hear me. When I was the cruel word

Scrawled across sand­pa­per, strapped to a mis­sile at 30,000 feet,
you were cac­tus limbs strewn around my shel­ter
in the nuclear fall­out. When my name became Tantalus

I made you my rain stick: shaved glass tum­bling through
thorns turned inward: a secret storm
no light could enter, with­out first breaking thee.

Aer­obe

Tell me what you breathe again, and why we’re so dif­fer­ent
as to not attract the same types of virus or com­mit
the same hyper­graphic slips of the pen—
You’re right—I left. Strange logic I keep
between these hemi­spheres: equa­tor into which
col­lapse my wildest fan­tasies
of deca­dent crys­tal chan­de­liers crash­ing
at the end of the world party table
when eat­ing is futile as try­ing to rea­son
with your ex. Rays of light
stream from a cliché, an abused
source of energy we’d meant to keep
ambigu­ous, rid­dled with petals of an unknown sea­son and bruises
we didn’t watch form. The last time we talked it was over
an herbar­ium writhing with foliage refus­ing to update
its endan­gered status—and I’ll never for­get the way you looked at me
like I was the Sun, as if to say tell us
what laws will still apply when you’re gone, when what rules
the world has no use for my scent, or for my lungs.

Arche­ol­ogy of Means

Try to remove your things from their graves with­out wak­ing them. Do not ask “what shall we eat?”

And “what shall we wear?” See there, a blan­ket belong­ing to a girl who’d been thrice-starved—

Once by The God, twice by her own voli­tion. Take it: it shall serve as your cape.

And here, the doll’s head, resem­bling a radish, attached to a feed­ing tube now dan­gling freely from her lips

Will bring you luck on your jour­ney. You threw a match into these fields once, now raise it: build a fan with your lungs.

Her hills will rage and her trees will orange as your vital gusts blow through them. This is not voodoo: this is tough love:

For it there is no anes­the­sia. There is a red flag flick­er­ing off in the dis­tance, mean­ing “peril.” Take it

To mean “free asso­ci­a­tion.” Run past the police with your mouth on fire and fol­low the crowd

Of sur­geons down to the sea-hell where the youth are trad­ing seashells for aloe and the mer­maids are singing

Each to each. Steal from them accord­ing to your abil­ity. Sing with them accord­ing to your need.

________

*Pub­lished in Flag + Void’s “Post­card Series”

time-lapse res­o­lu­tion

I want to be in love and of it, to live
in a post­war, radioac­tive city
or on a ship at the bot­tom of the ocean
because I’m just that invinci­ble, my force field’s just that bomb.
I want to know God, to approach him
with no puns intended, with a gun to my head,
to be beside myself, out­side myself,
to crave the unspeakable—I want my voice to
explode in my dream with­out wak­ing me and when
the alarm clock goes off on the hori­zon
I want my body to stay pros­trate as my fake one
runs through strange streets soaked with blood and maybe gaso­line,
and Flame, I want that rush to the head
of but­ter­flies fore­telling our impend­ing destruc­tion
and sub­se­quent mass pro­duc­tion of hate mail
and fran­tic prayers for halos—I want to be in dan­ger of believ­ing
every­thing they tell me, of tak­ing the prophet on the sub­way
for a ter­ror­ist, reli­gion for pro­tec­tion, quan­tum entan­gle­ment for proof
it’s not just me and my deci­sions. I want to believe
every word of it—and laugh. I want my life back.

_________
*Pub­lished in The Destroyer

Thanks to Jaime Jensen for grant­ing you (and me) priv­i­leged access to the fol­low­ing inter­pre­tive per­for­mances of my poems, “Lux Con­tinua” and “time-lapse res­o­lu­tion.” Orig­i­nal pro­duc­tions are avail­able on my blog– just scroll down.

This shit gives me chills…

http://youtu.be/iI_2vIj_SHw (Lux Con­tinua, per­formed by JJ)

http://youtu.be/1Z_JgdpON3s (time-lapse res­o­lu­tion, per­formed by JJ)

uncer­tainty principle

What our nature is / can’t be cap­tured: this I know.

On black and white film, ele­ments may appear interchangeable.

The flames were like ocean spray—a surf wave—we could not see through them.

At the end of this world will rain hour-glass. Will time pass like light. Will light separate

the shards from the sand as we wade deeper in. A gray sun may hang

in the back­ground, dis­in­her­ited. Under­stand: a great lens encom­pas­seth us.

Under­stand: some may lose their faith. Cam­era now turned on / the Light of the Dharma:

his face soft as lotus petals, firm body. An arrow called Grav­ity points away

from an unnamed cen­ter, Beethoven’s Moon­light Sonata play­ing from a for­eign car

crouched beside the curb, upstream a boy anoints the monk’s head with gasoline.

There are two kinds of peo­ple in this uni­verse. Min­strels, drag your rigid bows across

the trem­bling cello. Reporter releases the shut­ter / shud­ders: a flour­ish of orange

flags and yes a few blue even— In my lungs, an unspo­ken manifesto

now com­bust­ing— Did he stay in that pose, and for how many centuries:

These ques­tions can’t be answered simultaneously—and will burn—

_______

*pub­lished in Radioac­tive Moat

Fol­low this link to see a youtube video of some Texan poetic rad­i­cals (oh yes, they do exist!) + myself per­form­ing poetry a week ago:

love song / sui­cide bomb

Let us go then, you and I / When evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table —T.S. Eliot

As the insom­niac dreads the night, so does the city

Grow pet­ri­fied of being what it is, need­ing what it needs.

Take the bridges we man­aged, despite down­pour and detour, to let burn.

An ani­mal in motion stays asym­met­ri­cal: this was me try­ing to get even

With history—carbon foot­prints all the way down.

The metro­plized sky­line like a girl, by def­i­n­i­tion, interrupted

By the pol­i­tics of entrance, essence askance—warship lands

Her one-hundred-story deal: pub­lished, perished.

They’re tight­en­ing the bor­der now, punc­tu­at­ing things with­out thinking

What they might be killing off. If this is free­dom, I’ll have no part in it.

If this is scan­dal– I want in on it all. In Time’s Square, a fig­ure ate

Dirt, back­ground ate fig­ure, a skat­ing rink falls asleep full

Of frac­tured bones, New York City full of terror

And I still can’t remem­ber where I parked that night

For the life of me // requires so many more bod­ies than this.

_________
*Pub­lished in E-ratio

teen angst / grand theft auto

It all started with you want­ing
to set off all the alarms with­out a thought
to how self­ish that crime–
to-criminal-ratio would’ve sounded.
I tugged at my ski mask and swore
to play super­flu­ous. Per­haps I was pray­ing
for all the wrong things, teased the world
in all its mock-oyster glory. I lived
for you I killed for you I promised you
it’s all in how you frame it. Under­ground
sub­ways con­verted into anti-rain dance halls
the beat and what falls between the beat
Gins­burg, Fer­linghetti, fanat­ics pass­ing out
–dated lit­er­a­ture out to ravers at the tunnel’s mouth
exact a drip­ping pulp. Water tor­ture
was all in our heads, like the song
you only loved because it made you feel
invin­ci­ble as it boomed from your snow-white
’87 Cor­sica, bass cranked, heart pound­ing,
eyes close as they’d ever been to sleep.
Dream-screams flee lips crim­son kissed
by all the hooks you made out with
like a kid in a jew­elry store, delin­quent
writ­ten all over her car, and I’m total
–ly that pearl right now.

________
*Pub­lished in E-ratio

safari

I
Of the things we can’t let rest: how we left the rainforest’s

fowl in a fit of deci­sion: to leap
into the predator’s mouth, or to make waste slowly?

—wish­bones blown in plas­tic bags out to sea—

A bal­lis­tic mis­sile falls for all it knows

in the lap of lux­ury, one cell courts can­cer,
becomes its own abu­sive spouse

(when god’s only son fled hell, what do you think he was
think­ing about?)

Was it the saint who’d fed him water from a sponge

or the droplets, loosed like dirty orphans
into sunlight

where they’d vapor­ize, never to cure a case of thirst…

II
You could sit with that chip on your shoul­der
until what put it there stops chirping

let your phone ring ‘til you’re ninety-five and no one
knows your num­ber or your name

You could empty your heart

like an answer­ing machine, its cho­rus still play­ing
in the nau­tilus cham­ber of rooms

whose doors you don’t leave open

whose oceans you sleep through.

antonyms for reticence

Hav­ing breathed the invis­i­ble glass
hav­ing for­feited my gas mask, last chance
before the sea lev­els every­thing
in its way—killing it with contrast

To cough up an excuse, a vow, a word for how
eyes are still the vul­ner­a­ble vow­els
through which slip a soul: sound fury burn­ing salt and me
not get­ting any of it down: the un-crying shame

Of a beached whale bathed in wail­ing gulls,
lit­tle Sally sell­ing seashells by the sea-corpse
in the dream I lost my voice
scream­ing Has any­one seen this pearl?

Lines cast out from tired poems and tied to lime
stones too frag­ile to make a dent
in any­thing, get wasted on this win­dow,
shat­tered on that heart.

If bro­ken, call me a liar. If bleed­ing, call me Ish­mael.
If god’s blade dulls, if gun­metal blue rivers
never lap crim­son forth, would not even Moses slit his
to prove the Nile sentient?

Where is the grain of truth in these fool’s gold waves—
these days that find you wait­ing on the Furies
to sweep down and dis­perse
your sil­ver lin­ing into acid-black dusk?

When they come you set the island on fire
with your glory-torch: a fist-full of words
my photo cloned and posted
all across the flam­ing hillside—I saw it

With my own eyes, and only my own eyes
know how many oil spills I counted on
that quiet drive, which, because cir­cle, felt end­less.
Feel­ings are toxic or they’re nothing

And I’m bank­ing on the for­mer and I’m drown­ing
on the shore. If some secrets aren’t lies
if con­fes­sions can be true
I’d slay I’d for you.