Verses/Curses
hot fast & the slow burn
eat in the dark
shit quest
love fast
sleep like the sun
die like the day
dream of your almighty face
devouring
in darkness again
//
its sambal tomat
under nights black thread
and the rivermouth on fire
its filling but on isis time
so i haw and fret
to make counter time
for my ligatory chord
for my throwing bones
for the holy month
for otherwise
//
tempe & daun salam
//
🌒
a snorkeling woman
now as the horizon evened and was empty-full
or would you say full-empty
about the shark tank that drew swimmers bled-
blue-traces racing orders round my head
for me the day would gently useless be
a yellowish sea turtle kind of day
and an exhale left me vast and near
down underneath my colder spine of fear
and as what you turned pearlescent grew
the violet dear and clearly breaking you
the cloud-gray whisper and the frothy wave
was toying with your tendered ankle bone
soft undulant sea-crinkled green
like the linen sheen across our fathers bed
as the tinfoil sun was flashing mean
against your pinking arms and shoulderblades
and as the quiet-crowded gloom below
accustomed stinging tears to witlessness
and the broken coral sharper needling
against your shins armorlessness
the looser webs of mer-light gyrating
grew grown inside and tidal-spectacled
and the massless intervening seemed
the famous nobody to prove you whole
what clever lover waiting down the stream
could hold your palace cool and fathoms deep
when the thunder-heading planet-threading way
of the underwater giant was floating
your skin the crizzling rainfall of red sugar
returned to birth a burnt and beautiful nude
and an undertowing current shaped
the lunar fasting of my stone-bone-home
it was just some local princess playing strange
along the undead continental shelf
an honored guest or angel amongst drowned ruins
the snowfall of those dropped and dropping teeth
and as the horizons blueing fuller loomed
like grief in visibility of itself
our rounding eyes were feasted futureless
and we grazed over the desolation of the reef
//
inhuman allusion (where)
in shredded shadow hums her corners beastly nerve
end-hounding at the anklets of my wandering
by prowling tigers milk and heat evisceral
cuts lip to tongue amnesiacs re-hysteried word
stalks fear in what like a magician i have bound
blush turns like a trick pony shes ground me into
and if there was a choice that voice has been erased
thigh-hollows skittering rush from goose-flesh alter-flight
laughterless laugh to pique the predatory mask
high valleys ridges brimming overrun of rage
down slouching bowels round rapt plum of panic like
the sparrow silent as a fork in my ribcage
and somewhere in this feckled wilderness her heart
is pounding proud and naked by the rivers dark
on the doubled drums of gods anarchic metaphor
//
warm to a thremma
//
Indras net (what belongs to the familiar)
around her head a sardine circlet
around her foot mortality
around her voice a glittering corset
around her heart a memory
she reflected on the dawnlight
she was setting in her place
she looked sober in the photo
but you couldn’t see her face
eye for eye and cell to cell
did you knot me to be brave
did you tie me from a shoestring
toss my frame across the wave
name the garnet in my cherry
your horizon on the deep deep wine
as i lost count of drowning
for the promise of a rhyme
for your blessed rage to swallow
i was waiting at the altar
and a pearl was burning bitter-sweet
when i tasted your salt water
when i saw you in the restaurant yesterday
and you finally appeared
Indras net was drawing closer
Indras net was catching tears
when you saw that i was deadly
when you wrote my rib in two
i was made and i was unmade
to make better love to you
and every lace undoing
to find the heart of sand
and every mark to fill the worth of a blade
with the imprint of her hand
and every glass was melting thunder
to the predatory corner
and a little death for the purities of power
to the mountain out her window
to the wildflowers evening color
to the sky and sea and weather
to the darker voice that rose
to the horses all untethered
she heard it was one million
she heard one million seven
the circle dreamed it would be easy
the fishes knew it would be heaven
you know my situation
you know what keeps me here
you know ocean is an islands final word
and what belongs to the familiar
//
lyrics for conscience round
music and idea from angles morts
what belongs to the goat (a love poem)
i dreamed she burned her poetry about me
made me a bonfire of the unseen i dreamed
she shaved me off her razor-scrivened legs
my bush sun-drowning its all good it was
the ribboned iris of a rabbis rose
of exodus the sandstorms seeing red
the aftercare for summer love but god
my creatured limbs are bristling with your fur
//
reflective animals
like Lalah love to be caressed
at the bathroom mirror
bending house rules
by nature to be made
an impressionist chrome-
edged rendering by glass
to hold ecstatic images
to chase feelings interiors
all her enthusiasms turning out
all her enthusiasms turning out
//
malefactions; or, postcard with a friendly beach dog
for days i don’t approach the horn of the cove
where the current sucks and turns uneasily
and i am aware of the guardian boulders
volcanic black sea-knuckled beings slippery
with skins of algal velvet green like anti-grip
until i walk accompanied one slack-tide dim
and under cover before dawn as she appears
and recognizes me through all these years
as she has walked with me uncounted times
the dog perceives exactly why i’m here
and reclines to wait for me as grains of sand
embed unevenly in her salted soot-brown fur
she follows me though i don’t know her name
until we reach the mountains wine-darkened toes
i navigate those with my hands and feet
and we watch them goldened by the rising sun
//
benefactions
a fisherman who found me shells
washed down and rendered by the waves
smooth spirals left in porcelain
for a necklace or an earring
so kept a pocketful of noise
if tidal softened infant teeth
could spell desires holy whorl
salt-milk of wantless memory
the emptied armors of the sea
the genius of her hollowed hand
would ornament my human face
with the ancient allure of regret
//
🌖
wavery
as veils in stages of a jellyfish
under glassy bladder of saran-wrapped water
albumen tissue met me in a wavery voice
a bloated organ tuning waterlight
her kind of swollen onion brining into pores
pale polyps in sea-shade for layers of depth
interior velarium of blue-open cells
just cusp enough for what medusas left
ancient ephemeral bauble belle and shallow
until some lashes numbs or swells or swallows
some silken parachute wrinkles or ruffles
for letting in salinity tasting a pulse
the adolescent suffering of swollen lips
the stung puppet who pouted on that fishy face
the unrequited sag of kissing puffy pain
the burn of cross-dressing as crosses again
the magdalening of a metaphor
her sticky hooks for whatever pickled
potato fish was named the future we cradled
by our other cells like infant dates for takjil
these oral arms reach down and up into the translucent sac
a nexus of neon veins of pink drinking violet
blown iris lightning guts vermillion seams aflame
like sex or ancient theater or a peachy disco dream
one common mouth for going out and in
one ladder up and down the bodys bluing appetite
one hunger never to escape itself
one conduit of oceans endless iteration
to wake up tangled tentacles around an island
where coffee was shade-grown and golden-drifted we
ink-bled as cursive in a convoluted colony
of silvery crescents hunting on the current
where half the word was raging against chains
if we weren’t as transparent as we seemed
the rest would eat a cliché well to sing
who stings to life and floats by sea-found undulations
//
Lysias at the beach
in so deep shade those eyes
against the slivering salt
a nose by greasy telescope
for seashell circumstance
burnrise like blood under the skin
slow sting of a swollen onion
behind the slanted brim
and belly-teeth of a sunhat
a braided tongue is licking
your inner ear
//
haggis interruptus, she said!?
that dizzy Lyzzias, and oh,
yes, and
the zest
seat
by sunrise silver on the black sand beach
black coffee and the inundation
our face against the singing seat
of the full moon
a pinch of fire from the smoldering star
became the sanded mirror of our rest
as swimming shadows across her long
white glimmering dress
unbroken colors of her throne at dusk
like nascent veils of east and west
if billowing outward surfaces of sight
went inwardly freediving
//
//
then pickled chili shredded potato
leftover from dinner at long
happiness with nasi goreng
for breakfast and a second coffee
santai di pantai
big ocean rolling here, nearby
where me and my too luminous
for my own good maskmaker
are santai, on our anniversary
purnama pulls the swelling tide
like poetry, erasing traces
the waves of endlessness reply
by silver water, silver sky; and we
like sand and salt, by speech unsifted
//
🌕
macros
dear dojo, forgive us; we thought that you were really
in training, and grasped the function of macros
which do as much account by what you don’t eat
as what you do; therefore, there would be more
protein in a couple of uneaten chickens
than in a city of discarded monkey masks
//
oopsie, Black Ajax
learned a word
//
words, okay,
my approximate cock
kept me up all night
angels coming round
and the jinn, they say
it piques
//
the first time for everything
and fear is in the river; a smile of teeth
round rocks take shape to grab your unfelt feet
and shredded heart wedged last into the smooth
surfaces slippery with algae, finger-proof
feet-first, my cool phantasm; hot to touch
my hand held your hand holding the needle
a scratch, the tow will drag me down; head-first
by virgin groove, your over and over
//
laron
pulse, on paper-smoke and shadowing; a word
kept embers leaping, or whittling laced attention
when the swarming cloud was passing out and in
to the conic torchlight, flint-yellow, on a smudged
and charcoal night; the humid heart grew lungs
at the carpal joint, let choirs through the rupture
soft cedar traces wrinkles into the maiden mask
of the moon; the flickering phase transfixes them
//
🌔
thremmata
corpse pose again, is it for real this time, as i
down to the underworld for Hades lower table
descend, the darker cloud of somebodys forever
to a banquet feast of charred fat strewn with ashes
i sit before the offering of my own left shin
my tender bone is bowing its familiar flaw
my meat is dripping ratios from the burning violin
i eat it all, although my name is not Issa
as eat the dead, by whispers, one million and seven
then i look down to find beast-legs with chestnut hair
my knuckled shanks uncrossed, my hooves are lightning-cloven
my kept creature walks on two or four, tall-horned
whose crescent shavings will be ground into the rock
whose name is leaving many by the blade of one
//
and the rod
Black Ajax bitter on my left
Red Ajax blooded on my right
grim speechless my bronze-armored kin
by serpent held Asclepian
//
a-courting, or the word used here
we mampir with Blih at the house of his girlfriend
to meet her mother, by his side, the maskmaker and i
as family representatives or peopled containers
my labels are to smile and nod with genuine interest
to follow the conversation, for extra credit
to support Blih, we drive him there and back
to eat and drink what we are given, to stay as long as it goes
to coach him in the car, to ease his nerves broaching
the sensitive topics, to approve, one step of many
both already divorced, he’s two years older than us
she is a few years younger, expressive, at ease
a tempering of his toughened wants and weathers
just to us he mentions, maybe a baby; pretends
not to be enchanted by a computer-generated mockup
//
🌓
the good shit
for Petals in her present pleasure zone
she’s rolling round inside the one, the good shit
the fine, the best, ye olde Platonic shit
no hydroponic, just sanctified dank
under Sumatran sun; for snub-nosed exodus
in summers mud, her laurel wreath of sticky bud
up drug botanical by trashy magazine
like chocolate pharma-chronic feuilletine
and toke thine truffled nugget whilst ye may
my silk-eared pig for liplined valentine
today her carrot conversation hearts the play
her eats the emptiness of tools as feels divine
//
E=m11!1
//
🌒
consistere
psst — the monsters are all in evidence over here
many with their sights on you, can you not see them?
maybe they don’t wear chaos like your command
or ugliness as your specification; maybe in love
they can’t afford to show the truth; some have been known
to flatter relentlessly the passing beauty; or even
to dress up as their own negation, pretending tools
or fancy chairs or helpless little girls; and many
renouncing love or beauty altogether; but nobody
is sorry; nobody knows that everybody
is swallowed up by someone by the end; and nobody
is more monstrous than mercy, or more self-same
still; if you want it darker, we can totally kill the flame
but the poet will kill it for us in six or seven lines
//
xox