or redream your face
in water’s indecisive surface
fills obsidian vase
set centrally of wooden table
painted cracking white
.
to lick your teeth again
and tip turmoil over
and bow to blindness
tasting orange instead
either of those hot air balloons
roar
.
am i ivy?
were veins of you
ever antonyms –
did we even see
each other’s hands?
.
gasping and dancing
sweat of forest air
beads on spider threads
melting aviaries of mercury
.
frozen of viridian
uncontained sky bleeds out
in stranger’s memory
Be screamed the Lord
What cut the dark
Its thoughts’ knots
Pottered Its esophagus a
Dumb yawning sarcophagus
(Them living tomb
Warm unseen cancers)
Infiniplite in the way
A well vomits brack-
Black waters forth or
Hot rotten birth rings
Worm these diseases
Even before designing teeth
And greed the Lord
Bored the nightness
Clawed for Its image
And tore in the walls
Of the abyss to feel
Its fingernails smart
All in that horrid gasm
Of pandolorous grief
Complete pain brought life as
If pain were older
Than God
I was in a dream that
I was in a city
One of impossible rivers
Flowing up and at right angles
We rode a slow gondola on waters
Which flowed through gigantic, plastic playtubes
A huge old Discovery Zone
The size of Venice at nighttime
My companion: a Blur
And our destination:
cats’ eyes
blood succulents
rain from a cloudless night
a dead fountain full of pennies
cave mouths
old malls
some dead man’s last annotations
rousing to a grey day
wet plastic bags
snakes’ tongues
it is right to be held
responsible for the actions
we take in dreams
.
it feels right to be held
responsible for the actions
of completely different people
.
it is right to be held
responsible for the actions
we take in daydreams
.
it feels right to be held
responsible for the inactions
we take while dreaming
Real-real
Not just real – real
That feels crisp and crystal
Also antarctic because this
Real’s bright
daymares
like jealousies
anxieties or grief
haunt like terrible babadooks:
morning
again the sense that i have lived
these fragile birdbone moments before –
this paper theater of déjà vu
has been dreamed and re-dreamed
like a play in rehearsal after
opening night has come and passed
(yet the last performance feels like
opening night) again the sense that
i have walked these dreamed-up
sidewalks of akihabara which run
parallel to the flesh-and-bone sidewalks
of akihabara, so fragile, like a paper theater
that has been dreamed and re-dreamed
in the mind of some forgetful god
who keeps creating the universe
without destroying the last one
again the sense that i have lived
these fragile ghost-bone moments before –
this tissue paper theater of déjà vu
has been dreamed and re-dreamed
in the mind of some uncareful god
who doesn’t quite erase all the lines
before re-illustrating little moments
sometimes
a white nightmare
forces a waking state
but even “larks and catydids”
must dream
sometimes
an ambition
is branded in the fat
and failure – the water to cool
iron
sometimes
dour desires
leave imprints on my eyes
(these nooses in my irises)
still, i
sometimes
build tokyo
in my mind’s eye; i try
and get the architecture right
and can’t
you were pulling
a wasp’s sting out of my back
after our fight
you were playing doctor
and i was patient
the wasp was scared
and i could feel you pulling
the hot sting out of the wasp, too
kissing the reddened skin
and saying gently, “don’t jerk”
and i could feel the release
of a thousand and one
wasp stings pulled from the frightened world
by your sad fingers
and tired eyes
⨀ 