Lost in the field

Revolving stripes
close my eyes
The singer sings
in my headphones
going off
as a siren
sinking instead of
rising calm shores.
Reasonable cloud
don’t come down
No person is here
to feel that rain
Empty your mind
on different terrain
I am lost in this field
you are my
sense of direction
but I can’t float
out at heights that high.
Colors are refusing
their light
but I’m still here.

Dedicated to the Death of Wayne Fenton

He was short in the morning
as the evening
while the light grew longer with age.
Mr. Fenton grabs his guitar and sings
for his four children and long haired wife.
Four women surround him with eight
green blue eyes.
Maybe they’ll sing together, but
Mr. Fenton likes to sing alone
and we all like to watch him sing.

Mr. Fenton woke each day
feeling the currents in his home as a pretense to earth’s pulse.
He could take part in the daily breathe. But

Mr. Fenton saved the world
that drew him beneath its sand.
But Mr. Fenton could never save the world
that would never save him.

In the mornings Mr. Fenton
would grab needle and thread.
With his hands he’d mend broken minds
while recording it down with a ballpoint pen.

In the evening Mr. Fenton
found it back into his bed,
but beneath the kitchen lay
the psychologist’s den.

Everyone morning Mr. Fenton
stayed the same height.
With his guitar he filled eight rooms
using only one inarticulate heart.

In the afternoons
Mr. Fenton
picks up his sharpest nails,
his grandfather’s hammer,
drives to his local office.
With his hands, Mr. Fenton,
would repair leaky children
by banging together heirlooms of sustenance.

Lazy on Sundays
Mr. Fenton
would walk and sing throughout the house
serenading three ginger haired daughters,
two of which kept growing higher
while Mr. Fenton stayed quite the same.

And in the afternoons
Mr. Fenton
would find some gauze and tape,
maybe a little rubbing alcohol
and then
gingerly
clean up bloodless wounds
leftover from consequence
while diverting arrows with a shield made from compassion.

But Mr. Fenton found the wall
that is the floor
But Mr. Fenton saved the world
while the world would never save him at all.

By that afternoon
Mr. Fenton
could not find his tools
or his hands
because Mr. Fenton saved the world
that refused to find him.

That afternoon the hammer was burnt.
We tore up all the thread
Someone bent the nails
Everything unglued
and all threads unwound themselves
into a fragmentation made with entropy and silence.






Written 9/4/06, Dr. Fenton died on 9/3/06

The Number Two is Made from Ones

The outside escapes here
nonchalantly passing by
water on glass or
water with oil
surfaces find one another
Reflect two faces
Communicate silently
Turn and go two separate ways

The skin remembers an imprint
unlike the story the eyes always seem to say
It’s outside of the blood that
in here are
dying tissue purple red
Agile movements, abrupt shoves
are stored inside tiny fibers
collectively made into permeable
webs weaving tissues that seek a way from itself
Hairs waving in a breeze
while anchored down to the nearness
Hairs as tiny flags proclaim
the territory of oxygen
to send reports back

Magnanimous friction speaks in
single tones
decipherable into a zodiac by intuitive gongs of solid
iron and bone.
No memory alkaloid finds a
differentiation between materials
Each soft and metallic density
is engravable just the very same.

Impassable barriers are what they
are because we see
two banks
Because we see the walkable bridge
But there are no banks
No stairs to claim
Merely two shores and
a path we know to create or
creatively know.
Who can tell?
The finger points, but nothing is there.
The curtain pulls back to reveal the cement wall
The lights shine to show translucent air waning towards a distance.
The box was empty all along
We realized
after a thorough investigation of every side,
every crevice where top meets bottom
fails to bond as one and the same.
The inside was one side of
the molecularly dense
ball
To the left!
Destination of comparison
my other that is I
we are two for one
indivisible, numerically defied,
inarticulate.

Heavy

A stonewall echoes
and I don’t know what I wrote
last year
These inklings are inky,
benevolent.
Halted flow can’t give a dam
It all adds
for the stonewall through the sky
cutting the ozone
to slice in half a life.

Too much thought
blockades a porous memory
You emptied out the garbage
to remember what you ate
Now you can taste.

When I was young I was old
and when I was old I was ageless.

Yesterday a fly died.
Today a grand ceremony is taking place.
Nuns painted the wings with gold and built a mohair coffin
embroidered with holy spiders’ thread.
The President of the President
chose a sea burial off the Indian Ocean.

Huge planes
of the 1970s
boarded everyone as they flew with a fire equal
to eight trips around America.
Children chose a sunflower bed
to float the fly off from a spotless shore.

I forgot to go,
I was feeling inordinately heavy.

Outside Born

Born in the center of a Mother
pre-established
already willed so by some exterior power
motivated by another force
motivated by a best bet
by an instinct
cultivated by an interior other.

Son the moon is full
forgetting an infinitesimal

Melting decomposition finds lungs forever full,
unasking and quenched.
The tide is a tumbler smoothing rough edges,
keeping cool under bridges swarthy with blackened green moss.

A family is born from an alphabetic sequence.
Sounds separate and find themselves expressing
permutation free from repetition.

But never free from anything.