i walked
in black abyss,
dark & blind,

found stars,
radiant salt,
& white.

They say grace now; promise fire in the future,
and warmth and brightness always.

interlude

what is the taste of love?
-beers drowned in amaretto, liquid almonds with a little poison, steeped from the stone hearts of summer, love does not taste like you.
-orgasms, love does not taste like you.
-james joyce, oh poldy, poldy bloom, your molly who is going to leave you, yes, yes, oh yes, and i yes, yes your stream of conscious sweetness while you sleep, love, love does not taste like you, nor your old nostalgia pages.

am i blue? billie asks me. blue billie, i'm not like you. i don't cry, and no man's left me. the world is old and filled with lies, and i can lie too. it was a woman who killed lucifer.

-

there was a fire in chinatown, and it left a blackened stone-brick skeleton, all concrete and charred, and i fell in love with its burnt hollowness. is it bizarre to feel this, to love decrepit, aging buildings? the attraction's all in the expression, the honest ugliness.
they can't lie, so they stand in the rain, waiting to be demolished.

there's an art to lying; it is the craft of story-weaving and selling desire. you take a set of images, linked only by the person who commits them, and tie them together to make a narrative that people want to buy, like a bundle of frail papers with secrets, or withering blossoms.

i don't want to be eloquent. i don't want art. i don't want jacquard floors. i don't want to know that we are only chemicals and fiction.
i don't want to make love letters to ugly, miserable, disgusting (beautiful!) despair, who digs into me with her hooked ring, and her androgynous twin, desire, who possesses the space where my metaphysical heart should be, and breathes through my pores, and lives alone in his/her mirrored chambers.

perhaps i am poetry. i don't think poetry can live in a body like mine, or maybe that's why it does. or perhaps the world is too heavy sometimes, with it's grey nights, and overflowing fog, smog in the city. or perhaps i don't love people, only ideas, because people can't appreciate the world. or maybe i was born strange in the head, and now i love walls and dirt, and blackness, and mourning, and see truths too clearly to want to play cat's cradle and repeat cycles with liars; they are all liars.

or maybe i don't know the heart of what's real when it looks back at me.

i.
The songstress opens her mouth. She is petite, a china doll.
Her mouth, song is Shanghai, 1920.
 
I close a semi-gloved left hand to my heart.
Shanghai, Shanghai; Mandarin, I do not speak, but know the soul of.

She opens her eyes while lilting.  Makes dark-lashed woman lids at me, not at the lonely drunks near me, nor at anyone else in the loud jazz house.
My windows are open; I know her heartbeat. She closes her painted eyes, sways to her own young voice and the piano.
She raises her eyes elsewhere in the room, at other men at various tables. The back of their heads gaze back. Her fingers clutch and twist a strip of fraying microphone cable tightly. She sways her hips when she remembers to.
Her vowels and tonals are off at times, but nobody else knows the ebbing and flowing of Chinese in the room, only the exoticism of her voice.

If I were single, I would rise from where I am eating up her vulnerability. I'd leave my scotch on the oaken steps. I would saunter over, tell her, "I love your singing. Let me buy you a drink." She is twenty-four, and I am twenty-one; this is no matter. A girl is a girl.

berryman, you've never been much of a mentor, the way your words collide, a fisher's net of emotion.
your mouthfuls, are abstract, heavy socks, cotton in mouth.  it is like the way i lack fluidity, a disjoint here, a disjoint, disjointed, dreams, half awakenings.
i know your heart, or rather, the way the masking fluid, the weight cloth that puts out fires,
pins you by its corners, bubble of wet air underneath
a pink shower cloth.
there is a hungriness on the belly of a bathing baby,
i wish i could explain.

-

i know you.
there is a girl who is late for the experiment, so the science will go on without her, and i'm afraid that there is nothing left,
but chalkboards, nostalgic green things with slow dust, wooden desks.
sometimes i can't remember if i am again manufacturing my childhood
for more sunlit country days,
prim and proper teachers.
the classrooms are always empty so you'd never know
if electricity ever existed
and ruined our drifting days.

there is a song i've been meaning to sing,
but i want badly,
to touch the concrete, the gravelly unevenness
of courtyards, as if in the painful patterning, the afternoon
would stay with me,
imprint the steady gathered warmth,
so i'd remember what it was like, to hold summer on my skin

How Pretty Girls Dry Their Long Hair

...not like other girls, with shorter hair; I’ve seen.
They sand their dripping strands
between towel.
They let their heads fall back,
pulled down by the damp silk,
the lovely whispers that will o’ wisp
nightingales and fireflies to their billowy spines.
They let their chins drop to clavicle, grievers,
before they raise their coffin’d lashes
to the lone bulb in the ceiling,
slow breathing beneath the sweet suffocating veil.
And then, they apple,
one ear cradled in the wind of their hair,
stars shaken in glass jars in a dark room.

the abstraction:

oh river, river, the highway song
hums twilight lid
over the bright eyes of the zephyrs.

the carbon cells against my wrist
burn lemon, tap wet
fingers, flickering lamp switches and buttons

the way the awakening waves
stream through the sealed panes and the walls,
leaves me crawling back to some blackness.


a translation:

river, i smell your dawn,
between the fluid melody
of cars streaming, fish on the highway

my wrist has carpal tunnel
from love vibrations and voltage leak
of electric cells caught between stiff fingers.

the way the dreaded cockcrow arrives,
the first dark blue, the moon growing old,
leaves me crawling beneath my bedding.


the poem:

river, river, i smell your dawn,
the sea starved song,
the singing of the streamlined
fish on the highway.

it silences
the motors
tunneled against my wrist,
it runs dry
the masochism,
numbs the voltage buzz in my fingers.

in the dark,
the moon grows old.
night stumbles away again,
never lullaby nor lover.

Some nights, as the starry clouded hours lay with me,
I think of those who lay their aging bodies,
unshowered and uncradled,
into the empty pocket of their machine-worn sheets,
and then of myself, spray cleansed
and coiled like electric cooling in the flat folds of my quilt
to keep my bathed body from the damp of the dew,
that soaked my linens closer to midnight.

There is a wandering in my flesh,
that keeps me from silence,
the pieced pastorals of my mind.
My organs are hungering
for hairy arms and a bed
in Brooklyn. I call my lover, apologize.
He instructs: turn off the lights, lie down, close your eyes.
 
I say: goodnight. He says: goodnight.
And as he falls 
to heavy, luscious breathing,
the static on the phone becomes steady rainwater,
glistening orange and city as it drops,
sounding steps, high and ringing in wash colored pavement.
Heavy inhales, exhales,
June rain on my thirsting skin.

misanthropy

Your sunned hair dangles,
O child of Pierus, against the drooping
of unmade sable sheets, like stained ribbons,
or the chafing sugar hem of perchance or rubs,
which grazes as it billows,
like stillborn grass beneath the bent, branching wind,
of January on the wintered skin
and a sleeping spine.

In the ill ebbing of veins,
hollowed intestines, & the silk-ridged flesh,
the waxpaper'd soul knows the taste
of salt and leaf-breath, and glossy insects,
Only in the warm gleam of hardened tree blood,
flourishing sweetness turned into a buried memory stone;
O Mnemosyne, your refractive scent, your mouth eludes
our self-regenerating, self-devouring cells.


There are girls, and boys,
who bathe & soap themselves: 
god-destroyers and gods,
masturbation-blessed, metal-wrapped iconoclasts,
with their halo-molassed lips, their seastorm eyes.
 
My stillness hides my pulsing to the loveliness,
to the breaths that go shallow-quick,
I dissolve against their blood-rosy cheeks, the satin jawbones,
but tracing the corded pathways 
of their opuses, movements,

O muses,
there are only bird shadows,
jackdaws and magpies in grey rain.

lunch poems hunger

O'hara, I miss
your Billie holidays, your broke
lunches, you must've been so skinny;

That's why you ate the spring-summer air,
the may fragrance
of subtle toxic petals
where those damned kids, pubescent
library office girls, threw dirt and flower balls dispersing
fast, damp,
in the less than Katz-sandwich breath
of the sweaty, grease-cheeked, American boys of construction,
so professor, you would've rapped my knuckles
and then beg'd t'kiss it
'cause I name-dropped the cereal
that I spilled
out of the box
and off the graffiti'd square chess table.

They were like O's, her mouth was an O,
his asshole was an O, the shape of processed grains
into dusted fields underfoot,
the way I plunged my mouth on it,
like it was the pathway shaped like my mother's cunt,
and up into somebody else's flushed-face o'sms;
oh, oh,

oh! I loved blasphemy, it's the way
I am gliding across your walls (repainted white),
like a bug (a roach), and under my bed,
and I peeled the coat with tape and my nipple
to find an imperfect grey heart,
or maybe a pointed penis head,
but you know y'can't find sex, or love the way I'm grinding
against intangibles to sate
my birth-controlled soul of the need for Pollock and Picasso,
decrepit cities, dirty, ugly New York, high grade vibrators,
and kasha, brothy and deliciously filling me.