In fish-stink markets
drunk again
unready for attack
I vomit down the wishing well;
dull animal stares back.

These forms arising from within:
illusion without end.
These animals were always mine
to butcher, or befriend.

I do not mind:
This hole, this heart,
the knots were loosely tied.
The desert’s lip is at my boot,
machete by my side.

birthday cakes, paint-by-number
catching crayfish or
burying the pink robin;
plane flights to visit family,
clouds out the window,
the creviced mystery of furniture,
mammarian cushions and
black vinyl vulvas;
scavenging on bikes
after july-4th fireworks,
looking for live ones;
the ant-ocidal obsession
with the sun’s cleansing stare
when focused through
the 2-volume-oxford-english-dictionary’s
magnifying glass –

i should say, confusion is when
the brackets of sense fall away,
like the rising rocket’s access scaffold
leaving the mind to expand unchannelled
without reference or depth
as car wheels spin on ice,
and running cat-paws
scrabble foolish
on the linoleum floor

confusion has a buzzing
sound it makes,
or that clings to its sliding belly.
all ten thousand ghosts
of the strap-bulging blare,
when those straps burst,
return to pure vibration:
they show form
only when restrained.
this hum,
sigil of confusion,
apes the shadow of the waking mind,
sub-resonant shadow-stratum
of creation.

i burst through into its cloister
wet with alien mists
and establish myself,
a tolerated guest
of confusion’s fancy.

(some species are highly toxic)

FLIES SIP TEARS

THIS TREE

COOL SHADE

EACH NIT PICKED

IN THE LONG MOAN OF CENTURIES

THEN THOUGHT EXPLODES

Elysian grove, pink petals bright,
With twisted wood, and dome of light.
An endless orchard sweet as skin,
enchanted, with narcotic wind.

Night’s greenest depths resound with chords:
a ringing out of birthing worlds.
The life-force throbbing in the void,
the ecstasy of parts rejoined.

         Wild fragments in communion

                                                                        Harmonized
                                                       Like the spirochete

                       Whose impetus

                                                       Mocks the flicking spiral

                                 Of Mind’s ascent

One way or another
Out of me
By trails worn in grass
running between sidewalk and river
Or once through rows of ramshackle houses
thinning out towards open country
hinting of apiaries and vinyards
I moved on.

Such dreams are real
by virtue of that silence
left behind by the body
When senses clarify,
distilled to their most potent
aqua vitae.

Now
A restless cell
divides
It ends, yet multiplies:
Thus the many-mirrored Mother
in disjunction never dies.
I am one and I am many, in an endless string of lives!
And so the chambers deep within me
reconnect and ramify.

(Such sewers –
Freud abhorred them.
Dr. Jung at least explored ‘em.)

A light?
Yet even here one shines.
Who would have guessed, in waking grayness
That there was another side
to this milky maze of drainage
with which each of us is mined?

There it dances
at the edge,
on the lip of sagging matter
Lighting up a land we’ve left behind.
And our body is the shadow it defines.

These dark waters running,
surging
Passing boulders, cliffs of stone
Through valleys rank with centaurs sunning,
Forests sweetly overgrown
with vines
At last
In moonlight full emerging,
The stream another million finds
In the Dreamtime all converging –
O star-seared sea! O endless Mind!