Rising

the only memory becomes
story like a verb vibrating
in one place long enough
it forms a world:
the lunar explored.

but memory is
language with wine poured on it
blooming outrageously like
the vampire returned
from his sticks
by the living's blood.


The role of dreams in the circle of what it means to be reborn. The sense that reality is chosen as understanding (that is, frame of reference) from the data set that is the starkest fundamental block of being. I used to write about resurrection. That was a post-xtian mystery religion point of view. Then I started looking to remember what was always there but forgotten, a gnostic point of view. Now I understand that understanding is a process of being utterly honest. Not there yet, but working on it.

Autopsy

My blood gouts like semen from this wound.
She only touched me that one time.
Did you see the girl as she left,
Her windbreaker twisted by those hands
That were never still? Did you see
Her in that small car flat out down
The road to Cambria, trailing her promises?
Turning forty-five degrees in this odd Heat
She holds me close for five minutes,
Ten on a good night, she slides
Her Serpent's tongue briefly into my world.
Did you ever see a girl so beautiful?
Her time disowned the chambered
Heart each pint of desire posted
In a planned dissembling.

Failed Suicide, 1993

Her moans from the sunroom on south
grand first tracks of betrayal those cabins at
Allerton she looked on the young father
from west of the illinois and found
someone new to replace me she had
that list of boys/men―the farmer-poet
the chicano-liar, the jazz-drummer
―methedrine in his blood stream, the
saxophoner from food & money
singing about Argentina/“land of meat”
she sent him mash notes. Her spirals
composed of bitter, innocent stories,
her passions avoiding the real issue:
her father's religious requirement
to void the dark lust that lived like
a dead snake deep in his armor
a ghost snake a snake of hatred;
& my catholic pre-occupation with
her pain primed me to take her path
too many times (my) mind overlain
with an extra-terrestrial reality

She fucked me over boys.
The truth is she got tired of me.
Tired of the same old stories,
too much like her sick grandfather.
And then the bad chance
didn't come through for her.
Left her living in a garret
with my five year old daughter in
a sad neighborhood in Bloomington.
Is this history or just a long-awaited panic?
I let the pain take me to the hardware store.
I bought the plastic and
walled myself in the kitchen,
turned on the gas.
She almost killed me.
I am certain that was the plan.
Fuck her. And her minor art.
She could have been the real thing.
If only she could have gambled honestly.
If only she could look in the mirror
And open her eyes.

Which Is It?

those who say
burn the fields clean
start over
those who say
never forget
review the acts and words
those who say
not one thing
nor another
a synthesis a quilt
information as color & sound
texture & scent the clock
is papyrii seconds as pages
hours in amphora
distributed to the bottom
of the ocean of being
those who say
it doesn't matter
meaning floats
those who say
to forget it to drown
the lacunae
layers of paint
withering in the heat
of this investigation
turn the light off
you are destroying the
historically valuable aspects
air bubbles glug towards
the surface the old clay
seams weaken microscopically
along my normal faults