33.
  this sunny, tender morning
bristles a warning for winners

  against tenebrous powers
only the cowards are winners

there's coal in ilka solstice stocking
    mocking the winners

1E. "No Why"

Give us forever to START
Anew at the swamp fill WAGER

This taboo image charade
Gets us off, smirking, to ABASE

In the black lung agate mine
Lurch with glare dread & teeming MOTES

No debacle zap can reset
Cave faith bleed of distressed POETS

12. "Carving the Emerald Highways"

Along the wind-curved sandhills
Spiralling along the wind.

Curved by incessant thinking
Longboats spiralling along.

Em'rald glow of avalanche
Ravens spiralling away.

Along the wind-curved bulwarks
Scarabs borne upon the wind,
Carving the em'rald highways.

3F. "Sky Land Ransom"

Slimy main laps at Karnak,
Rightful mood with dimming light.

Long ago, words had carats,
And a bard could ply Latin.

I carry my own asphault
Through an orchard of abort.

Hush hush, no sign in sight, no
Ghost survival hazards this.

Cloudburst of glad thoughts gawking
Cataract of ruin will.

Follow a smoking mirror,
Follow a child hungry wolf.

So much i would put away:
Draftworthy fandango iron.

Virginia Opossum, blink
And miss our rainbow sigil.

10. "Winter Wheat"

Cuneiform Vortigern frees
The paradelle of agates.

Invest in a burning tor
Or winery of ichor.

What do i call Aziel,
Who is called by so many?

Distress arabesque graces
Our disgrace so low ranked.

Shub Niggurath has a womb
From which issues all new slang.

And flying monkey cupid
Leads his squadron down the fjord.

I was once one of the ones
Who stole flowers from that grave.

Once fond of taking chances,
And sleeping in a coffin.

21. "Transatlantic Handshake"

Here is the rain you prayed for, blood on your hands:
An anguish that none living comprehends.

Oncoming headlights, some are on, some off;
This season of misrule far too owned to slough.

I call the Deep Ones in my ev'ry fiber,
Drizzle-flags & Shilohwards the fibber.

I give the Grays munificence & shreds,
Bell jar stuffed with thousands of poignant chads.

32.
sort the bungled lies
thwart the bundled rods
twilight of the gods
twilight of the idols

melodies unheard
sweeter than the known
spun when Homer nods
twilight of the idols

dreaming empire bard
burdened with the truth
melts among the frauds:
twilight of the idols

1F. "Song of the Infinite Subtrahend"

The world acquired a mighty pill:
"Victims have the right to kill."

And now we all its chores fulfill;
Victims have the right to kill.

No product issues from its mill.
Victims have the right to kill.

It renders elder wisdom nil.
Victims have the right to kill.

What burned us once, is burning still.
Victims have the right to kill.

O victims have the right & need.
Let others learn to weep & bleed
And pass it on. --You know the drill,
Victims have the right to kill.

  On one of you i'll wreak my will:
  Victims have the right
To kill.

30. "The Mosque"

The beggarly dawn is aware
Of the gonfalons of war.

The pain in his gut is alive
And plots in good time to larve.

Through the unspeakable din
Sparkles a beggarly dawn.

1. "Dragonwyck"

Apple, elephant, Indian, ostrich, umbrella.
Eighty knew no ill.

Coyote-smelling wind
Kneel in yow light

Needful whine storm
The next Picasso

Determine flush now
Then we go ink Lily

The Wrongness of Space
Shiloh aloha

   End of book I

16."A Stint of Checking"

Illusions draw us together; but the truth tears us apart.
Imagining we're free of pretence may be the cruellest art.

This seeming wilderness is really a garden run riot.
It was left to pullulate with weeds by a too timid heart.

He dreams, one day being lost to her will show him more truly.
He would've been ashamed thinking something like this at the start.

At night the garden's so dim he's glad he's got these paths he made
restlessly pacing the invisible vectors of his chart.

What kind of person would he have to become, to encounter
love as a lover of freedom--what mask, what gestures, what part?

If he could just understand how the garden always changes
while his eyes repeat their despairing fictions & clench the dart...

But this troubadour of barred towers will go on bleeding out
contemptible hymns, till devotion & possessiveness part.

3B. "The Celestine Sport-Utility Vehicle"

The throngs at Jackson Wheel
Frequent annihilation.

They elect miasmatic
Winds of glossolalia...

So much more preferable
To death by implosion.

A.
And just what shall I manifest out of this damn fugue?
For I understand love's gyre is as a centrifuge

casting out suspended silt, preserving the liquid:
whirl me, blur all the stars, I am ready for the cure.

Always I would chug from the puncheon for drunkenness,
inviting night in that divine ecstatic fusion.

She comes as a nebulous light, never mind her name
once passion besets the brain: women are an excuse.

I did escape that addictiveness, I thought, but love
gathered me anyway snared with a soul of beauty.

In the garden I wander from herb to herb, sun-blind;
I know this place by its smells, its touch and soft music.

They are willing to be friends, which pleases my palate
but torments my hunger that can bear no substitutes.

Now one is kind again. She knows about romances
as if picturesque diseases, or a puzzle cube.

Have I learned a labyrinth in vain, that its twistings
map nothing realer than sex and the mild refusal?

She comes to me in a dream, saying: "Why be angry
when crossed by circumstance? Your will needed that rebuke."

Alone I climb to the treacherous top. Blazing white
and nothing I can parley with, up there; it's futile.

The woman I love would rather remain in shadows
where life is. O how I weary of chiaroscuro!

Perhaps only my languishing must perish. To meet
brings back the energy properly mine from durance.

In the garden we talk about everything but love.
Love outwits us, appearing in a thousand costumes.

The woman I love imagines she can call timeout
from the body's wars. --Yes, but not the soul's, worse nuisance.

We can distract ourselves from the promise all we want.
Who am I to lead past the Mysteries' vestibule?

27.
Black cat in the middle of a white bed
the search for bodies has slowed

god-king in burgundy robes
my car in the garage to fix the horn

masturbation, Volapük poetry, flask
organ music by candlelight last night

foggy this morning, Seattle weather
i never seem to go

1A. "Constructing the Inverted Pyramid"

Everywhere a cold draft, everywhere a hard road
this machine we are inside

Stowaway on a slaver in midjourney found
pressed into service

O haggard fearful Lotus-eaters
the Morlocks & the Eloi are one.

37. "Contactee"

Wander in sorrow the vly
Of the perfect sky, askew.

A snub at Almack's, O wodwo,
Is worth less than a zwieback

To one who has seen the sunset
Flicker behind a stalwart manticore.

6. "forms"

i stand in the rags of my social graces
--heirlooms from a guillotine century

     (but they would not have
     waited in line)

...eyes that somehow
      cheat me
hoping i wont
      notice

i carry my clarity
like a bushel of inflationary groschen

2B. "Abomasum of the Limbec"

No guidance in this moon i seem to chase
through blackness, in the labyrinth of choice;

& now beneath fluorescents' noontide scrawling
dernely graffiti, the moonless landscape scrolling

past me a river of glyphs, i find i call
accidental what stalks with intent to kill.

25. "Dürer & Aztec gold"

Yellowgreen leaves against a turquoise
sky no in-my-own-blood-written poem

Pale blue hand on bright yellow paper
on a grayish lilac table top

Ads i applied for come up again
Two weeks!--concentration in tatters--

Fissile copter, wanhope, puff fist, eat
silver & the yesterday wind

C.
Shakespeare you fiend, you fashioned a thundering tragic hero:
    then stuck him in one of those stupid romantic comedies.

I ask, why are we born but to suffer, despair, & die?
    --receiving an ass's head, with jeers from the groundlings.

The greatest tragedy is not being taken seriously.
    Which requires at least one bozo without a sense of humor.

39. "Keeps-Getting-Thwacked Etch-A-Sketch"

You fill up my sad self
Like a crowded agenda

Yammer of airwaves
Edwardian Lollapalooza

Don we now our Gaia peril
Palimpsest of megaton crayons

My obsession anatomized
And thence given cautery

18. "Sovereign Feathered Bulldozer"

There will be times when his basiliskic future-scry might bode
nothing unless he clepe it the world's one circus torpedoed.

There will be times when the splendor of his illusions outshines
even the rising sun reflected off towers gold-windowed.

There will be times when mild evening breezes & the slowest glide
in the frontporch swing of his folks give perfect centering-node.

There will be times when it seems like he'll never find the shelter
of someone else's fever though he trek his life for the lode.

But there will never come time when this gnomon of thesterness
over some fluxion of logic or luck renounces the Code.

29. "Quasar Grout"

Patchouli tor, military soap.
Blessings of the demon Bradykinin.

The Plague That Only Gets Other People
got another one...

It is getting so dark that i can scarcely
go on writing; and my brush is all worn out.

Yet i should like to add a few things
before the end. Dragon poetry

flickers in this Algol amethyst
as i fold my wool blanket without a light;

& Uuchathon alone has the dream communion
craved by ev'ry Noumenon nomad here

--this night salt to our snail-senses

8.
a spider half-smushed in the bathtub continued to struggle & move
its sev'ral remaining bug-fixtures whenever i entered, to prove

it wasn't quite ripe for the wastebasket, or maybe just lonely for play
stuck to monotonous porcelain; for days i whizzed by in my own groove

till fin'lly i grokked what was wanted, and slapped him once good with a shoe.
you think i am slow with my pity, you oughta queue up for my love.

35. "The Third Planet from Altair"

Melt into the solid void
Of Crashsound, questions in a plague-age

On a dark desert highway
the star Mimosa

Green mandarin washcloths

1C.    "HEX CXXXVII"

BY THE WIDE DITCH,
WE COVETED HOME.

THE HOT-HATCHED CICADA
MADE AUDIO WOE.

BADE VOICE A COUTH THEME
BY THE CATHODETUBE MOB,

WE DEBAUCHED BEAUTY
WITH VICTIM TACT.

3C. "When the Snow-Fiend Strikes"

Brooding like the juju hoard of Freud
Upon a calculated asteroid.

I learn the force, the motions of The Book
And sometimes in my dreams i snag a look.

Who is it writes? For sure, it isn't me;
Nor any part of my anatomy.

Easter conundrums prolonged into the Dog Days.
Porn image-fatigue. A surfeit of the Void cloys.

15. "Confused dreams. Broken sleep."

A garden's strange frith i found my foot steps' play headed t'ward; HEARTBREAK
was spelled out over its doors by the much-cursed stones convicts must break.

Far-famed indeed, this place, which my approach proved empty except for
the migrant terns of cold climes; their thin cries made fin'lly my teeth ache.

If i stayed here before, i knew not; there seemed much to be learned more
although i remembered much, too, & found my way without mistake.

Sometimes i drew pictures by tearing out great swathes from soft greensward.
Sometimes my voice became wild music, soul-charged, soaring for song's sake.

This lost explorer might for years have lived there, seldom bored or tired,
& missed cars only; i felt fine--but for these restless terns who traik.

28.
there will be other nights
with diff'rent outcomes

what i might have been
i am

carry it
in the crook of your stump

9.

Last night I wandered the place, dousing the bulbs imbued
with space-filling fire that promised but weak insurance.

When I stopped at the single remaining, what it made
of the rough-plastered wall behind, for the first time fused

feeling and context, where I'd been and all the specters
I ever desired or fled as possible futures.

I thought: now I'm really here. (Whatever that implies.)
And this morning tying tie, I felt the peculiar

snag of serrated dead fingertip-skin against silk.
And I knew then mine was a madness that would be cured.

38. "Fatidic Sunset"

So weary of King Zog & all his works
Machines a hand can make but cannot fix

Skidding through a red; the grind of tyres
On torn up the only road, one's endless chores

Shouting threats into a tin can phone
Spray flying up silver a Sunday morn

19. "Melolog"

1.
Big contrail little contrail vampire stake,
the Three Wise Men found frozen to death under a viaduct.

The body is the font of namelessness;
it makes mute distinctions

fourthday crescent of moon this morning
my Barmecidal feast.

2.
What do you buy a woman who sells Mary Kay?
A yak in a yurt on a yacht.

Shortcut through the cathedral, spelunker's rose
larval dreams green M-&-M's on the Mezzanine.

Two identical cars side by side, one charging, one being charged;
cast kevils as to Who & Whom.

Ninefingered Rememberer you want Cabalatrab
ascended bugbear a new kind of stamp.

One day you just don't see them anymore
a birddropping on the Tunnel floor...

Coughs like someone i know

3.
Files, flies. the 'Crostic Eye: i hit Enter,
bite from a strange cat.

Linchpinballpointblankcheckoutletdownbeatnik
25338, 25358, 25558

Automatically changing combination
the desire & continual inability to do away with titles.

A poet is a spigot of Poetry
--brain rotted in its shell

Malfunctioning sphincter equals Ring-Pass-Not
remaindered wings, the wages of Cabalatrab

cause havoc in both universes
iff.

Without pressure of urgency
continue in the manner given

Surf trains for a thrilling finish.

2C. "Vanilla Patchouli"

We'll walk through the openness of the closure
to fool the punch clock grandly

spandex Oikoumene
sparkling prelude to Grandwick

5.         "shoot b--h first"

      what madness is this,
practicing to be able to live without you?

      thus i betray the moment
      even before it's gone...

betray it to serve that figment of futurity,
      a life that will let me live.

" 'I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn.
The thorns were here, beneath my feet, not there.

Can I be blameless when no voice will blame
The hunter who has caught me in this snare?

The pious people shun the tavern door--
But I need courage to outstare their stare.

After a wakeful night outside that lane,
The breeze of morning stirs the scented air.

Interpretation's Gate is closed and barred
But I go through and neither know nor care.

I kneel within the Kaaba of my heart
And to my idol raise my face in prayer.

Though blinded by the sun I see, O Mast,
The moonlight of the face, the clouds of hair.' "

--Mast, tr Vikram Seth in A Suitable Boy