fallslikesnow

I never saw your face, I saw a smile A frown, a snarl, side-on as through water When we did what we did—the leather, the Melting wax, sighs, gasps, wet slaps, to want slaughter Of all that makes us, us, so you could be Hollowed out with pain, become the daughter Of De Sade, be filled by a rain of pleasure And I, so I might see haze lessen I might see a face—alive, ecstatic I did not I might see your face on a card, gas-lit In a suburban home long-ago as A hand, dark with cocoa, pulls cards to fit A complex pattern of medieval art And by chance, you are pulled, that hennaed hand With long, broken nails makes a psychic hit The place long prepared for you is there now Rose red Glacier blue Obsidian Black Are colors for you They deteriorate of course, into Colors that look like burned cooking oil on a Stream of piss under an old street light. Do It! Do it now! Show me the face I yearn To scratch, to caress, to make me love you Let me discover lips in all ways But your card, 'The Veil, ...

A calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliffs edge at ships passing over the sea. Three staves are planted in the ground, and he leans slightly on one of them He dreams of ships Moving, silently and with The grace of clouds Through water the colour of Tarnished metal Waves damped down to sullen swells By the weight of his expectation They slide through, like icebergs. Unstoppable Shocking all who see them with their presence They are more real than the ports they visit Their sharp profiles stab hard the eyes of those Who inhabit those low and windswept towns Though they are made only of wood and tar Canvas and steel, let all those elements Be energised and brought together by The urgency of my desire. If I Cannot go with the agents of my thoughts Across glittering, slippery waters Let them take the part of me that yearns with Them. Let them stand for me in the parts of This world I cannot own with my senses. And then let them return. He dreams of ships Spin...

Buildings suspended In fifteen thousand feet Of montmorillonitic clay That go down almost as far As they go up Terrible, low center of gravity masses Sprouting from a humid drainage ditch And the city Is spreading still Crawling up and twining around Freeways that snarl and snap Against restraint (And briefly I stop and wonder at The cool curves of A cloverleaf junction, the Clarity of the concrete loops Placed just so, neatly as in The level design Of a computer game) Here there are Vietnamese street signs Halal taco trucks Slabs of red-shifted darkness Hanging on a chapel wall Here there are Impassive blondes Driving blue-eyed cars A smog stunted tree Crammed with dark birds Singing with rage By a mirror glassed window And the glass aches to be sand And the sudden rain aches To fall in a lagoon And the ozone laced air aches In the lungs of those Chosen to wait For a bus that may arrive When the fossil crinoids In the travertine facings Reanimate and sway like lilies In a invisible ...

And in the midst Of spiteful North Atlantic seas Brendan bails his coracle And prays for a sky that is not Grey as a pigeon's wing For an ocean that smiles Under a butter yellow sun And, of a sudden The sky turns a dusty pink And gentle waves, Huge but never breaking Like magnified ripples Move the leather boat Up and down In front of a horizon That is just too close Lit by a sun That is bright but small Haloed by ice crystals The air is thin and cold To the south The jagged crest of Amphitrite Patera, Punches through the dusky crust Like a fist And tonight God (If there is a God, And He is listening) Will hear praise from two planets

We're on the Reification Road again Driving in the idea of a black sedan Through some West Texas of the mind "Make it real!" Vikki says "Make it real right now!" That night in a formless motel In the incomplete sound of wind-chimes The full flicker of neon I look in my eyes in the mirror And see castles (Why are there castles in my eyes? Why are there the serried crags Of a Welsh hillside topped with ruins?} "Let's go!" says Vikki "Let's erase this joint!" I will listen to Bitches Brew The deconstruction of cool I will see those slabs of layered color Assembled by Rothko I will eat pho in a Strip-malled restaurant And place my memories in a line Split by the unconformity of jetlag "That place is old!" says Vikki "Make something new!" The silvery shimmer of a pedal steel guitar Rises over the machine-tooled country That slides from the speakers Music as distant and flawed as the moon And it only makes sense her...