Alchemy

He burned tungsten and raw copper
flickering green and spitting sparks.
He took just about everything
and all the clothes in the closet.
He laid it out on the floor.
“This,” he asked judgmentally,
“is what you’re wearing?”
He sprayed the clothes with glue,
then sprinkled them with glitter.
I was promised a chemical reaction
and I got one—
yes he kissed me.

Emerging limb by limb from the
melted metal, I thought
of poor Aristotle burning everything
to prima material, all the boys gone to bed.
He cried, knowing by candlelight
that matter can only change
as much as nature allows;
gold is found, not constructed
that is, unless you paint it
on everything you see.

After he kissed me, he said
“science is just talking to nature” and
“alchemy, like reincarnation, is possible
if only you can make enough fire.”

In Fashion

‘This afternoon,
there it was.’
-Frederick Seidel

No moon tonight
but I felt it.
An anticipation inflicted
by a dust gale at a bus stop
as people flood streets
to search for the things
they’re not sure about.
Telephoned all friends
while waiting to ride
the city into an evening
until nothing was said in
message machines responding.
The ‘them’ recorded with hair different
in the dress or tie
they felt confident wearing.
Where they are asleep
the rodeo clown ropes
the wrong one again
supposing it to be a bull
but so many cows and calves
and fecal matter distract so
look to the trodden soil
as hand disregards lasso.
It drops itself after a while.

The restraint of language.
Control toward an elegance
accomplished by a tie clip.
Don’t wear green on Irish holidays
and Christmas: do not clash
with the eighties basement
carpet of your grandparents.
I’ll never say this.
I’ll listen to you breathe
and when you’re asleep
in sheets by me
the kitchen sink is a cabinet
for the drinks we made
and couldn’t finish.

When all friends are gone,
who do you dream with?
Memories made-up to clock ticks
or spurned by birds chirping
as the body is unconscious?
I can struggle with this all day.
At night, asleep, I am not me.
Or is it ‘all me’
because when I wake up
I don't feel different.

Water-color sunrise.
A Floridian apartment
painted plaster
in involved sunlight
of anti-gray thrusting rays
pasteling shadow puppets
all colored,
all nameless.

I am not an artist.
I am on vacation just
to masturbate in water socks
amongst the waves
and the things left
drying out to die to be
swept beneath
a displaceable sea.

Atmospheric Pressure

The cinema and the lights,
the arm around the waist
caught from a barroom midnight.
Shrugged off, “As if that’s what you say?”
quite ashamed like you’re seeing me naked
and I am and I say you name.
There are worse things than hormones raging.
I got in a car accident twice,
one of which was fatal nearly.

Waking up and you’re up
and my shoes are not my socks.
I forgot I’m wearing long underwear
and my other underwear is somewhere
and you’re making me coffee
set to drip as drops begin dissipating.
An impacted result tuned
to intimacy issues peeling.
A church bell announces bad news always.

Work your shoulder blades
(a galaxy of white giants exploding)
into constellations too close
to resemble the shapes
for which they are named.
And in the stratosphere of your car
(still driving us somewhere)
I’m not sure if this is that neighborhood,
I can’t remember names anymore,
I felt this but you looked different.
It was you in the dream
except it wasn’t.

These democratic notions,
my fingers on your spine,
imagine grains of grain
conjoining rock-particle wet
droplets heralded
by an early-spring rain.

The 'Me' You Want is Out

Beauty inspires beauty.
An architect begins with Palladio
returns to form to produce
a villa stucco akin to Swiss alp Tudor style.
Carved you out of stone I think
on exhibit in the green room
of collective unconsciousness.
You are the people you see
you feel you know
immediately.

We’ll get you published in a minute,
keep quiet though,
we don’t want the Hoovers downtown
to hear about this.
Make another reference to an architect
those journals really enjoy that shit.

Beauty inspiring beauty.
I wasn’t a poet until Baudelaire time-traveled
to two-thousand-and-nine
to tell me everything would be fine.
Form follows function always,
that everything would be like an a b a b rhyme scheme.
Comfortable in a syllabic bathrobe
with hair wet and socks off
online to suggest alternate personalities.
Form follows function always.
Writing inspires reading.
This book suggests you deconstruct that poem.
I read a book about rats once:
They’re really not all that bad.

One Gestures

for Austin Pruett

Cold snapped temperature
begging for more
bodies by the dozen
wrapped in front of your nearest church door.
I work the soup kitchen circuit
I can’t feel sorry for myself anymore.
If mangroves grew in my city
I’d tie a knot of plastic can holders
to each branch to be anchored with stone.
Artificial growth on organic compounds:
Collagen injected into the silicone tit of a mother.

A smokers car floor of memories
smashed to an ashen pulp
mitigating between coffee spills
and sockless toes when pedals are pushed.
The myriad you.
The gesture used to finalize what thought
is left of the lover left behind.

Cold-reading again
as an actor for escapism.
Easier to bleed in literature
than meet a future liaison
who turns out to be a bedsore.
Ha I’m talking about me again.
Ha I have been good this winter.
Ha I haven’t touched a woman for months
I feigned celibacy
last New Years
until Valentines Day.

Destructive loving digs
a miscalculated emotional atmosphere
giving too much to take a little
or another problem is
too much too tiresome!
O, a gesture of love!
I imagine romance perfected:
‘You’re much too much too soon’
on repeat on the stereo
in the bathroom.