it never entered my mind

it never entered my mind

so there we were in paradise and in the morning with a slight pick-up head of roses out on the old deck with the red wood and the windows to our lives. of course it entered my mind. my mind is enterable.

a wolf in the twilight half again the size of the pepper tree. an utter exposure to the grease fires of sunset. sometimes it’s so cold I can’t help it. what can I help? I can help with the thorns, and the hugely dismembered.

it’s just the music, love. it’s just another wet november. remember the storms, and the frying pan full of the fireplace embers in bed, and the empty confidence? are you better off? it’s lurid tonight, and things encroach.

the voices come down off the mountain on air. they creep in my son’s dreams. they flap at the windows at three and I pad to the old refrigerator, the place of the alcohol bedspread, dull red blood in cold glass.

the idea of the bed is everywhere here, controlling. would take my son’s dreams for a walk? his three year old terror in the house of the fancy-dan poetics? would breathe in the night of the wave?

how far in to the shale should I go, do you think? no, really, do you think? you and the night and the music, make me so sick I could die. I got the moon and took it down to town and rolled the bones.

the rage is allowed now, I offer it room for the night. not much else. as the crow flies, as the lying bastard lies. as the end of the song is a sadness and traces its name. as the crunch is a cruel hunch.


I’m largely more honest, more gentle, and more reconciled. more bloody dangerous. discard this and discard that and come to the place where the gates to the prison are open as rain. the long slow creak to outer sanctum.

was it raining when we went to sleep? it is now, love, and I’m the bookend, the doorstop, the gathering certainty. we have the bed now spread across the sky, and a coming of rain quite evenly, free-range.

this is how I get from here to there. I have enormous experience with beating back insanity. twice. could do it again? thrice? I lay myself across the appalachians, waiting. I can sleep there, limbs arranged.

when I leave I have no luggage at all. all around the water tank, waiting for a train. I have no guitar but I can sing, at odd times. I sing in the balcony watching the trains jockey in. I pull the white smoke.

yeah your codes escape me. but my attention is perfect. and all the dense inventions scratch at the ground beneath the lilac. beneath the colored toys that eat the heart to advantage. and it’s good.

change shape to advantages. the pale moon is rising, miss spider. I coming back with big sore feet of hollow gourds, and thumping heart in hand. notice how the addressee changes, but remains one.

in the bed were the things of the day and the night. the clouds were involved, and the flatness of moon across the animal ocean. the ratchet and pawl of the barely arms and the hardly magnetism.

there is no place my finger rests that heaven doesn’t know. the far of the wogglebug too, the place where tinfoil roars and each place I touch is both you and your death, me and my you on the morning of presence.

the ball of dust goes gently under couch. and blue and rose are filtered through the shadow. the creep is down the hall to stately closet, the hands of hints of god are poking through the wall.

see the eyes light in the night, my son, see the full measure of conscious. far from the edge of the ocean the spray comes in handfuls. the beast turns in its half-dug hole and the river is rising and pushing.

getting older is this. the time becomes clear as the life edges closer together and shines like an oval mirror. in the tracks in the snow is the heart. I was trying. in the deep confusion of shock of hair.

you have to sing it right. the most perfect keening . hit the note like Coleman Hawkins dying. hit the face in the mirror and bleed resignedly. once you told me, I was mistaken, that I’d awaken.

every day in every way I’m getting better and deader. I always knew the trips to the old garden on 49th were trips to somehow death. Madison Square. the wrong one, but death nevertheless. palace of memories, lattice, and turning lights.

you understand I understand the only grief is human and. little help there, but at least we’ve got the first step under foot. footfall. the only grief is human. and it lives where the memory lives, in the present.

so wet november triggers me a walk in the park of the dead. through my own rows of fake ratty tombstones. there comes a time I’d never say a thing. but the bus driver wants to know where I’m going.

the sun comes down like marble maze and bumps and clicks november head. I mention LeFanu because he knew the day he’d die was when the hulking building wet with november vertigo would fall on him, in dream.

and right he was, right as rain. did you know that the largest number of children are scared and have nothing to hope for but their parents love? how does the road run? you’d think from glockamorra it would run both ways, no?

fake ratty tombstones. we stand in the dumb of the great bell, and look at our mouths so expressive, so ritzy. Dante, Mozart, Freud and Joan Blondell. I’m sad about Joan Blondell, I truly am.

Greenwood Brooklyn hands come out the ground as trees and catfish swim in hidden knowledge. nonsense nonsense. there is no hidden knowledge there is merely the human inability.

how many poems would profit from the occasional authorial intrusion? hey, that’s bullshit. sorry about that. anything you do to fight the language is a good thing. they went into language with vanity, forks and a meatball. they came out with a receipt.

in the matter of art here’s the deal. we’ll give you September Song or Lost in the Stars, but you’ve got to live it. which bowl of cold soup in andromeda? tough is a quality of leather, processed skin.

in every nook and cranny see the faces, the blocks of the rising towers, the shadows of the soldiers, the rising wave of crushing grace. the path with the one little windmill. the shiny bend of waterpipe.

new embers, old sun, fat chance hold on tight. all I ever wanted was my two front teeth. all I ever got was my own chance to be ugly, stupid and vile. the line forms on the left and snakes to the big stone headful of ugly, stupid and vile.

the triple is preferred by the ballplayer because it’s a hell of a lot harder than the home run which is just an invite to the rubber chicken circuit. hit this sign and win a suit. what’s the big fella say? is this is a suit or what?

sometimes you play fast and loose and you run the risk. sometimes it’s stupid and sometimes it’s look at this fucking world. look at it! use the eightball in a combo. notice it roll its blackness, angrily unique.

but when I break I become more whole. as what there was of outside and inside diminishes. suddenly I’m more. and the tangle of roots feeds on my tangle of roots. and the morning glory rises through to morning.

you want to know who you are? take a point at which you were most at home in the world, loving in a wide bright instant. that’s who you are. and all the rest is slipping ghost of real, tangle of lost and imagined losing.

this is the same morning. I guess I am the street. it isn’t the lost marbles, it’s the son at the end of the white shroud drift. it’s the simple in place of the built out of nowhere. you came to me. from out of nowhere.

every dot and every sparkle held in breath of wet. glue and glass again. the river of glass moves slowly down the swaying planet banks. the banks are made of marble with a guard at every door.

the human universe is only real as consumed. and as the morning goes so goes the heart in the streets of laredo, brooklyn. shine on, harvest moon. you see it rise and nothing has happened. you see it bounce on the rim of hill.

what you were when filled with light and good will, laughter, is what you are. would let it go? is there no grace in hunger of vine and wolf and ocean? mechanical has its hunger too, the twist of the lyric.

see yourself are walking down the street in series. one to the other. wobbly bounce of ghosts in autumn. the light of the soul going a to b. nude pretending a staircase. my children moving light a pile of leaves.

coats of autumn paint in bucket-light. the days grow longer, really. and god is not in the detail the wave or the song. god is the hole and the whole, ghost woman out on the island, the leaves in the gutter, floating

insensible, I come down here to street. and hear my feet. and my feet are the feet of the shudder of being. sometimes. squish sometimes. does it matter? yeah. everything matters, footfall, this grout of thought.

I would not organize to make me happy. or you. I’d point to our centers where god is and say, be what you are. in a life in the blur comes the fine edge of number of leaves, dead and dying.

what there is to cherish, that which is always, and comes again, dying, in mind, too. but not really. in my pocket are papers and lint and change and two hands. I take them out and hold them up to fade. see?

oh my son, see how beautiful, you.
and thank you, God.