Arms

total
wreckage
total

total eye

total

worm
worm of
worm

right
angle

angle of
blue

blue

blue
conspire

conspire
arm
of arm

arm of

night
is armored

moon of
total
worm
blue
night
armored
moon

Probe your face into the blood rain animal. The catascape is fertile; A frog movement in the protein layer. The sound of a crescent moon. Punch the twisted raptor into snooze.

Proximity

If I could pull
the city starward

I would toss my
arm over the mountains

and peel the fabric
off of the animal box

it's what's inside that counts

Twinkle

I human
myself in the middle

of a word--

mold you a bag of night.

What shape
has this surge of north?

Encroaching

The grace of a dead
cat bloating on the river,

the dark oil that spirals
beneath the old coal tracks

If we fell off the edge
it wouldn't be the whirlpools

that killed us, It would be
the jagged corpses of metal,

the antique shop beneath the stairs.

Stuffing

Sometimes
when the fish die
I laugh like it was
some bizarre abduction.

Sometimes
things disappear without
dying. They octopus their
way into the backs of our brains.

Sometimes
things resurface and crack
a ripple in your face,
exhuming the attic doll.

Whiting

zone of rock
flowage zone

of fracture
claw

of worm
Earth of

bird-mass
and pressure
       
      meatspace
                           and moan

Note

By the time
I got my
wallet open
I had no idea
what I wanted
to say.

The Box

The explosion tuff
the spare bird

cycle of cycles

calcareous ooze
brine waters surge

Crypt Archaeology

*
This side of the eye, prismatic, cuts
my faces into faunal succession.

*
My astral theory is applying the electric
tongue-kiss to the dark patch of the brain lot.

*
This side of the law of super
position--this terraplane is lensing.

*
I could just cough the deep space
epistemology out of my oblique projection.

*
The fetal bird's opalescence would pressure
strip my bruised collarbone from the puppet wall.

*
My wheel horse is sagittal and toots
epiglottal smooches in stereo, shakes lost bodies from the riverbed.

*
I am a hunchbacked boy-doll seeking
clairvoyance through the jagged man-spine.

*
The cactus bird stretches its snakescape over
the fish ladders and ejects its intestines into the shot glass of human interest--


into the whorl of jutting minerals--into the vuggy wad.

Capital

When a plane flies
over the river

I always imagine
that you are on it

not even looking
down to see

if you could see
me, like an ant,

lifting a leaf
over my head.

You are always
flying around

on a great bird
and I am always

moving through
a graveyard of trees--

my leaf
pointing at the heavens.

Indoors

A frog
got trapped

inside

and its
face fell off.

At 5 I
launched

green

slime across
the living

room.

It disappeared
for 2 years

until I found it,

in the
window bay,

amongst

the
porcupine

landscape,

a most
inedible pancake.

I live

in a
horrible terrarium.

Take a bite

out of my
animal apple--

i'll be going brown.

Pulchritude

The girl
standing on

the banks
of the river,

the one
you drove

around in
circles for,

you will

never know 

who she is,

just cold

wind blowing 

other wind around.

Glacier Milk

Shift my slip face
over sugarloaf
anchor my core of
mudding drift current

Your face's faunal dark

Feed

Follow the umbilical waterway into the tree-lock spawning. The hounds have their mouth's cracked open beneath noon's ejected star. The bird people are yawning for Orion to fill their glory with worm trails. This is where the root-sytem extends its appendages up to the deadpan sky in hopes of ascending upon a suckle. The whole planet is waiting with one eye over its uncomfortable shoulder, the other suck-eye going astral.

November 14

A lone goose
cuts the river in twos.

A single leaf
spirals to the ground.

There are more
where that came from.

I will show
you a nightcrawler

writhing beneath
the frozen earth.

Cut me in
half and the part

of me with the brain
will spiral its way into a wormhole.

I have a lot of dark
matter on my mind.

(But that's ok)

I remember,
when I was a kid,

I wanted
to be an astronaut.

And know I stand
on the banks of the Saint Joe

with headphones
and a leaf blower.

If you weren't
from this planet

you might
think it was a jet pack,

that I finally found my way home.

Bad Animal

Dead deer, roadkill deer, eggroll
deer, russian doll deer,
baby in a bottle deer,
body in the body-deer
body my dear body, dear.

Can you hear
the ass bloating deer?

Can you feel the heat
wave, the full frontal deer?

Picture that with a Kodak.

Or better yet, go to Times Square,
take a picture of me with a kodiak bear.

Dog Brings Home Human Leg

It was all
grey the toe

nails and
everything.

A human
leg in the jaws

of an old dog.

"look what
I found."

A pelvis,
a ribcage in

the forest by the
old fish hatchery.

Postprocess

"Look," said the tree-line
horizon.

"I am always in your window."

November keeps
slipping in and out of consciousness.

You put you clothes on
like a painting happening.

I open up the shutter
as the snow begins to fall,

framing the lonely white sycamore
in the viewfinder of my shadow.

There is always someone
out there waiting for me to make an exit,

to follow the static of night into
the patterns of creatures, into the cryptic corners of silver.

The Power-heads

Something has its hands on the weather.
Tilt your head back and look into the sky.

Those aren't the branches of an oak.

I can sense the remains of a disturbing animal,
a skeleton on mars, perhaps. A terrible lizard.

I was in an old movie. All of the fish

had been extracted from the ocean. We were
in a performance--squeezing our gleaming dunes

through an amusement park on the horizon,
blood squirting out of our pelts, the human coaster.

Disassembly

Upon your held-out hand
my faces turn in endless bone.

My arms are in gardens.
I could walk through

the dreamcatcher of your spine
to meet myself in attics.

You keep the most cherished
parts in boxes--buried in the marrow.



"Upon your held-out hand" taken from Dylan Thomas's poem "Upon Your Held-out Hand" published in his collection of poems titled The Poems of Dylan Thomas (1971) from New Directions Books.

Familiaris

Remember
that couch

burning party?

I helped you find
your dog

when he ran

frantic from
the flaming night.

"Gauge, Gauge!
Here Gauge!"

we screamed,

the flames
quickly waning

behind us

as we combed
through the bramble

and into
a forest of howls.

*
We are all lost animals

trying to find
our was back to the couch.

The In-between

Autumn's
chocolate lab

is wagging goodbye.

The movement
on the horizon

is a pack of arctic wolves.

We are waiting
in coyote.

The Outsider

I am on the other
side of your stained
glass architecture.

I am always looking
in. Shaking hands
that don't know me

beyond the skin.
But you wave to me
anyhow, smile, scream

my name like Hannah
Montana just came
back from the dead.

When the choreography
is over, the jazz hands,
the good byes, I wander

back home to my little
apartment in Mishawaka
where, again, I am

on the other side
of your stained glass
architecture looking in

from the window
of my own hometown.

Senescence

I used to enjoy
the petting zoo,

but now

we live
in the disappearance

of the real
human hand.

The wind

expands into indigo

taking my skin

on a walk 

through the park. 

The squirrels 

are so close

I can smell them.

Even when 

the birds are nudging,

even when 

my spine pumps

the fertile crescent 

through my 

nervous system,

I can't 

touch anyone.

Crusoe

Quite clear now
of Water or Sand;

My eyes
have been cancelled.

I stand on the deck
and turn my vast array--

my darkful satellites
up towards where

I imagine
Earth would be.

I remember
a wolf-like creature,

its octopi appendages
hovering over the conifers.

I will call him "Legs"
because the spiraling

has burned great
cities into my cryptic thighs.

I can't feel anything
from the waist down.

Sometimes I think
I might be him,

attaching my permanence
to the constellations in the lake.

Clod

The jetty faces are tumbling out the orchid-head epicenter like caterpillars, cataplectic. The data-massing resembles a flowage-fold, a mudslide--faunal disassembly. The apelike, nacreous creatures are born, have sex and die when their bodies are exposed to oxygen. If a star leaps out from behind a smog bloom, their skin will tear open and slaughter the silent ether. It is fantastic, like the sound human babies used to make when they summoned their mothers for dinner.

General Studies

Stick
a bookmark
in me so you
can come
back where
you left off.

Lay me
down for
something
more inspiring.

Something
always
moves you
only halfway.

Nothing's
ever finished.

Curiosity
is always
on the surface.

Always somewhere
halfway.

Leaving

The sycamore
shivers in the cold

rain and its giant
leaves crack

from its gnarly
white bones.

Morning comes
and I chase

the leaves
around like a pissy

wet dog trying
to keep its world

from blowing away,
trying to howl

this world
in a photograph--

resisting what is.