Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

Ample Shed

 

Everything is shark when pulled back into the wrestled yard,

into the strong stance of a microphone. Ma Jolie and a photo

in the bus yard,  in some old warehouse in a Denver built up

around Nintendo songs, built up around what is forward,

what is poetry scribbled in the margins of a second round,

scribbled in a crack of fire aboard a paper boat. Here we are

blue ghosts sliding down the drain of some enormous space,

here we are leopard-bound quarters in the urinal, a National

Association of Letter Carriers, fried eggplant and a bowl

of white rice. I died within the origin of harmless apps,

and all of the virtual flowers vied for conxtion, for a pair

of low tides on the snowy path, for an arc of rust over the world’s

capitols. The evolution of experimental psychology picks up leaves

pulled in around your shattered frame just as you insert your impurity

next to mine.

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

Divided Hearts Call for Arms

Categorization—where do we draw the line?

Between the haves and the have-nots,

those with the loud mouths

and those with the loud ears.

Or perhaps we’ll draw the line between

two specks of sand in a field somewhere.

We’ll draw it and call it the state.

In the waiting room for a drug testing center

we’ll hear stories about broken windows

and about all the restraining orders.

So very many restraining orders.

And I, with my shotgun heart, on about the peoples.

They’ve got their cars and their mobile phones.

They’ve got all of their isms.

And then the man with the tobacco lips will shout.

He’ll say: “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

Yes!  You’re damn right I do!

My nervous system’s got the best of me.

Oh, how all this index has got the best of me.

And how I hope to collect myself, to regain myself.

What my hope’s for is slow thrills.

So I’ll spend two weeks with the anarchists.

And now I can scream even louder.

But that’s the prevailing theme of normalcy,

that we love to catalog so dearly.

We want to talk about it.  We want to identify with it.

So here’s to the ones in teal sweaters

who just can’t quite put a finger on it.

They’ve got their books and their inquisitive eyes.

They’ve got all their isms.

Just don’t dare call them elusive.

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

He Will Only Be Image

When he’s gone,

over the couch will hover

one spear of light.

I’ll become

what the spear isn’t.

Without body, the weapon

is just some combination

where light hit one thing and spilled.

 

Prairie Tower

Pine bells knock

where structure erases

and batters to remind.

 

Longings octopus.

Rage drops a cheek by the puddle.

 

Giant spheres stain monoliths with light.

The slabs stare back

and wind swears at their edges.

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

and it’s all lilacs now

and it’s all lilacs now, and it’s summer, leave the

windows open, keep the windows open kind of

summer. City breathing in past the balcony,

colliding on a crash course with my chest while

I’m staring, staring at the orange outside the

window while the light and air cradles my balls

and shines on her ass.

Listening to the natural and urban jazz passing

by, we’re making rhythm baby, we’re writing

melody, we’re improvising on the fly, we’re drums,

and birds, and horny, and we’re moving just like

seasons, and we are part of summer, and it’s all

lilacs now.

For once the pieces whole, all at once complete, all

come together, and I get it all, and I’m dripping

out of her, and it’s all lilacs now.

The melody resolves, the chord progression

played, the chords played by a fucking

triumphant parade of marching bands with

telecasters slung over their shoulders, and it’s

choreographed and overcast, choreographed on a

scale so grand it doesn’t seem planned. To the

untrained eye, cloudy, foggy, overcast, but now

we’re trained, now its clear, and now we

understand.

and shit I guess this is it, ya know, the big one,

what all the writers write about, what all

reporters report on, and what all analysts

analyze. But now it’s mine and it’s all cherry soda,

and it’s all lemon twists, and it’s Christmas,

firework displays, mangos, and lazy Saturdays. 

and if this isn’t it then fuck it, it’s the next best

thing, it’s the new thing

it’s the goddamn thing to do, and it’s all purple,

and it smells so sweet,

and it’s all lilacs now.

and if the empire falls around us, if it crumbles

and can’t stand back up then it’s all lilacs now

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

Cannes

Genes too small to feed to coin purses hollow the spoken glints of them,

The holes dug for money’s final death. Sonar intercepts a message

About whales, whose light crashes or is the rays of God’s best departure.

Dwarf pansies riot the flower burrows nearest the painted walls.

I barely remember being donated to research forever.

The unacceptable cooks broken eggs. She loves her foreign flag dress.

Tonight: the weathering of stone and a statue celebrates women.

A man in the arts asks himself again, “How do you?” apologize.

This time I am not trying to sleep on two metal millimeters.

I am child in the king’s lumber, the planet is a celeriac heart.

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length

 

The poem’s an arm away letter air cloth

Unthere above where I understand cement

In the organs around my hips. Treeless,

The locked door clothes my arms with slate.

 

My mother’s hair, her peach moon chin

Like two letters as one question

The size of one person repeat themselves.

Tree the alert my actress friend learned, I’m linoleum.

People forget they could be rounded up to all pubes.

My father, a lavender flag, wants to curl.

Justin’s paper mirrors decorate the space between the moon and the earth.

I’m crude oil if a tulip melts.

No one thinks the four of us are family still.

 

Events make the triangles of their shadows

If they were construction paper in a sheaf.

These things follow me into the room –

Billboards for cloth they advertise in the dark.

 

My spine is part tree, part giraffe’s spine.

Heavier than pounds, I move like a tree if it dragged a tree.

The world is the size of a pearl,

Continents the ornamental geography of velcro.

I stop looking in the mirror temporarily.

Each letter I read flickers its hue

So night’s fan chews the felt quilt,

A machine doing guilt for me with its sound.

 

Clothes in their colors core days’ identities

And I have been wearing what flags do for countries.

Does the naked body have to be sexual

Because we are the animal whose hair halos

Cannot excuse the unlaugh of pubes

Or how small the penis really is when he walks nude,

His brain stuffed with hair, air his halo body of fear?

 

Night invaded the bathroom.

I ask to move out of the purple and black flag.

Instead of night cool it’s cloth after skin

With prescription follow up slaps.

Thread hangs from my dress instead of a spider.

 

Even facts sew protective ten point stars

On flags that would otherwise be the crashing into ten pillows

Against a wall if pillows were children’s stardust,

The girl’s French braids lifting the animal from her translucence.

She closes her eyes and laughs.

I have been living in a world

Where the imaginary and the real are clothes in a dance without people.

Artwork courtesy Texas Fontanella and John M. Bennet

Thurston Demands Moore

We must destroy the record companies; cake them and cream their box elder horns with flailing strumpets of pancake and waffle house menu-wrap plastic; mandrill-fuck their moons like tranquil toothed Hamptons in mucous—their un moveably zonked stilt-stadium festival of dry gums where Topekanese mongrels, chicken and slurp to calibrated android metronome dumplings of ego ascendant desert Mandrax orbits.

We must harness the soup of the naked where mulligan sloths of transcranial oscillations spin a single flurtzing electron; isolate its rock of hair-dryer-helmet implacability in eyeball trinket rumblings of myriad bulls; its depth row hung drumlin stacked est and ostrich—pyroclastic protuberances hackneyed to goat-brow nubness.

We must labyrinth into full fronded rooms of silly people playing unfathomed enormities—strenuous shredglass, like Uri- Geller-spoons of bent instruments, grappling hooks esteemed into whale sputum eternities, vibrating like unctuals of Devonian string—this bone house of cartilaginous lungfish, whose lava-lamp and metal-machine swords emit Brancanian mosaics of dorsal colossi weeping feedback extremities through glottal zebras of prime alveolar geothermals.

We must infer winglets of elbow, birded and trussed in deep feathers of tent, where none had been apparent before; and do it in a solemn and jocular incontinence of blathering sound, the drunk-cufflinks and spun gruzzet reverse-polarities of tuna-directionals; de-Abu-Ghraibify radar trones and brultims of ovarianated mulch—gorx the plutonium factrix of flamboyantly fracked steam-injectors, the paleazo-arctrons of copper scarred tectonics…

Until the world looks red

with white power sneakers

on the beautiful beat of black feet.