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I dreamed of you tonight, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, as I walked down on the sidewalk under plumeria trees with a vog headache looking at the Māhealani moon. In my need fo’ grindz, and hungry fo’ modernity, I stumbled into the gentrified lights of Whole Foods, dreaming of your manifestos! What pineapples and what papayas! Busloads of tourists shopping at night! Bulk aisle full of hippies! Millennials in the kale! Settlers in the Kona coffee! And you, Richard Hamasaki, what were you doing kissing the ripe mangos? I saw you, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, broomless, ghostly janitor, sampling the poke in the seafood section and eyeing the smoked fish. I heard you ask questions of each: Who butchered the mahimahi? What price opah belly? Are you my ‘aumakua? I wandered in and out of the canned goods aisle following you, and followed in my imagination by Sir Spamalot. In our bourgeois fancy we strolled through the cooked foods 
section tasting hand-churned cheese, possessing every imported delicacy, and whispering to the cashier, “Go fuck yourself.” Where are we going, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake? The doors of perception close in an hour. Which way does your pakalōlō point 
tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our huaka‘i in Whole Foods and feel dādā.) Will we sail all night through Honolulu streets? The coconut trees no have nuts, tarps up for the homeless, we’ll both be lonely. Will we cruise witnessing the ruined empire of America, past pink mopeds in driveways, home to our overpriced apartments? Ah, dear uncle, Buddhahead, ghostly poetry teacher, what Hawai‘i did you have when TheBus quit turning its wheels and you arrived in Waikīkī and stood watching the canoes disappear on the murky waters of the Ala Wai?

Here in this truly no man’s land, all is fair as understood not in terms of Penelope’s false blondness but that which is right and healthy. Where we throw our big hairy legs and bottoms that make any Levi’s cry for air. Hairy too are the faces we acknowledge —some were born that way—or as signs of: the pills we took in, the wombs we threw out, and plain normal aging. Yet ancient graces walk elegantly tall or charmingly petite in celebration pinks and royal indigos . . . as though the earth itself was newly found, the air a discovery. We were not afraid of ideas. Not our own. Not those of others. Along those corridors and in those easy days’ assemblies, apologizing for our being was not on. We were Nobody’s wives or mistresses. No one called us “Mother”: and when some daughters present did, it was with the clearest mandate that they picked the fight where we brought it. We were only ourselves: each alone as when we were born, and shall be, when we died. But living and together, a true power thing that searches researches solving resolving . . . And as always sweetly hopeful as only women can be.

Whose voice to have called you And brought you to breathing So mute as you tarry, Enclosed in career? Whose thoughts aren’t like your thoughts But strips of bright Silver, bringing you constants On dead twisting paths Till words couldn’t keep you Collected in hours Advanced in a body Confused with the grass To show us by falling More reasons for leaving Thought’s office to leave you Asleep without fear

Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air Of absence withers what was once so fair? Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant? Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant— Bound to thy service with unceasing care, The mind’s least generous wish a mendicant For nought but what thy happiness could spare. Speak— though this soft warm heart, once free to hold A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine, Be left more desolate, more dreary cold Than a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow ‘Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine— Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.

Man on Fire, 1969, by Luis Jiménez Because the facial features burn fastest. Because the sun sets in Tibet before it ever rises in the West. Because Tsering Tashi’s mother told him to dress in the thickest, 
finest, llama wool chuba. For I find no flattering explanation for the murder of everyone. Flames consume the head, hands, and feet in the mural by Orozco. Because monks don’t even eat meat. His clothes made him torch; still Thích Quảng Đức’s heart would not fire. Because his remains stiffened when they tried to place him in a tomb. Because what is the point of murdering everyone in the world? Since the sun sets in Vietnam before it reaches the West. Because aren’t the faceless Mexicans always the ones we martyr? Why do heretic Indians hurry to incinerate themselves at the stake? Are you awake enough to remember how we clarify the skin of our slaves? To feel the fingers of the children of thread flame stitching your voluminous rugs? The candles in the basilica flicker when they channel the nightmares of the dead. Because Jiménez wept when the mammoth blue mustang leg fell from heaven, rupturing the artery in his leg. Because of Chinese soldiers armed to protect Tiananmen Square from monks burning to set themselves ablaze. Luis says he’s sorry for the pain he caused you having to finish his stallion.

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4 th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING. AAAAAAAAARGH . It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters . The oddity is not so much that Blake held these eccentric views for most of his life, but that in modern civilization they not only extend the hand, so that it could not complain about complaining about something it hadn’t even bothered to read, and instead formed a halfway decent indie rock band. I’m actually starting to get much more interested in white people than I used to be. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because it is against everything good this country once espoused. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing poets under.

For Russ I’ll tell you, if you really want to know: remember that day you lost two years ago at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore? Most of them went dark and nothing more, but sometimes one would blink the secret color it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep. This is how you knew the ones to keep. So I collect the dull things of the day in which I see some possibility but which are dead and which have the surprise I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell— so I look at them and look at them until one thing makes a mirror in my eyes then I paint it with the tear to make it bright. This is why I sit up through the night.

When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper. But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation. Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain. And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever. And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?

When Simone Weil said it would be wrong to think the mystics borrow the language of love for it is theirs by right, though she didn’t call it the heavenly song of cock and cunt, perhaps that’s the inevitable conclusion of the sacred heart wounded into a womb, an arrow in the hand of an angel piercing such a depth in the body until it’s beyond what the body knows, delirious among the lilies or tasting the sweet meats of that table. Yet whoever the mystic woman is, she’s not ‘about’ sex; it’s not some sexual fantasy that she lies with in the dark mansion of God, sleeping every night in a different room, curling herself to the different shapes of emptiness. It’s not some narrative of first he this, then she that, that makes her tremble, being naked and open to nothing but that noche oscura, when with love inflamed, the saint runs out of the house into the hills, for she remains, asleep and dreaming, and in God’s innumerable rooms, innumerable forms and shapes of love, she lies down with them all in the depths of her body and blood, until every vision and icon shines with a glimpse of the forgotten and atavistic feminine body, pouring out of her as if out of the nipple of that blue stone embedded in the miraculous hand, as she herself becomes her own threshold; no faces remembered or imagined flicker across the hymen of her mind, for it’s not a penis, even God’s, that she imagines, but the form of herself, the knowing of the body of her own feeling, as in the Old Testament it was said that Jacob knew Rachel or Lot knew his own daughters, the knowing of the body allowed only to men; women, only the known or unknown, as she is known and un- known but as she knows herself as she knows the other that she is not: she enters herself, with fingers of melting wax, of cold cucumber, with a thumb of glow, with all the abandoned utensils of domestic life, with a stalk from the forsaken garden, and with the lost wing feather of the angel of death and with the voice of a baby’s cry nursing on the vestigial milk of the mother of mercy.