75 Darkness poems

dine on disco balls and starfish, our jowls crashing like cymbals, while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball left eye and squints his right to line up his shot on the world’s smallest pool table. Mother has a camera for a head; it flashes uncontrollably though she claims to have run out of film a hundred years ago, when father’s penis, an unstoppable spigot, became a garden sprinkler, contained by adult diapers, changed hourly, and hourly, my sister— shuffling out of her hiding place in the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann doll in her arms—sighs to pass the time. Water seeps through the ceiling, because upstairs the bathtub overflows, for Grandma has forgotten the bath she’s drawn, and on the stove the gas is high, the flames are heating up a pudding over which my opa whispers: boil, boil, loyal rubble, follow me to the end of my life.

at a certain time the kitten stopped moving I wanted to see if it would burn rain like cane fields when they’re scorched after harvesting through the phone Abuelita remembers the black kitten I threw in the fire still trying to crawl out that ash isn’t snow Abuelo said shirtless I picked up a mound in my hand if I look back at my front door barefoot kids in the street try catching the flakes on their tongues come visit us they say nextyearnextyear I’ll try again dust covers the roof my toys my hair my expired work permit burns black the sky it is march again & again there’s no wind Abuelita asks us to send a bag of autumn leaves she wants to keep in a book the color so pretty interesting what if there’s no wind I ask while acid at Joshua Tree camping the slight movements of the twigs of the ocotillo sound like mice deep in their burrows with the silence of only this pen writing the only words I can hear hella yellow now I’m in a similar dirt to Abuelita’s yellow but here there’s healing the cold the sky the same I’m staring at clouds the same thought of then now again I could this could be the very cloud the very dirt but this time I’m happy yes I can be I’m smiling

1 She would sigh, if she could think of anything intolerable. her numbers fold, in planes she can not describe. Does she close her eyes for that faint red of processes? Come to me, by instinct or for mathematics’ sake. 2 She moves in a metaphor of action. Heaven, she says, is hell remembered. Outside her gaze, I’m stranded on fraudulent heights. No tune I know is far enough out. 3 Man is a matter of walking upright, but she suggests happiness. Her whole power is one the side of vagueness. Everything I need to know about her is just before me. What can I learn that is not already gone? 4 Mountains rule the world because she’s from the hills. When she stands perpendicular to the sun’s rays, her light is confined. If she turns, the objective weakens. We shall not all rise, but all be modified. 5 I see her long after she has gone away. There are whole systems she doesn’t respond to. If you look long enough everything is hydraulics. Out of a series of partial images, she is the one that detaches. 6 If I could remember her, we might build. Will my words be fan- tastic enough to count? Whatever happens now, we have been opposite. Please believe me, I would seek you if I had the distance. 7 Given time and invention, she will surface. She will scratch, meditate, and some story will suffer. I refuse to believe things unsupported necessarily fall. She deprives my dreams of un- reality. 8 The hardest step to take is always the next. She is written across her face. We are what we are, momentary coincidence. She is body, speaking through body. 9 She will claim, for instance, King Solomon planted baobabs in India. And it may be true. A fine long rain penetrates farther than storms. Food is necessary and also logic. 10 Sometimes I’m angry, and not at anything in particular. She has seven divisions, but no borders. I could change your name, since you always wanted to be fictional. Another unsolved dream, under the bridge 11 She has, it would seem, no natural inclination to rise. She is whatever I cannot get rid of. She’s whatever refuses to be information. She is my absence, my only secure reference. 12 Just when I’m ready to let go, satisfaction is satisfaction. Curious text, where we’re commanded to acquire Nirvana. Nothing but impatience could prompt our abrupt recognition. she says virginity of the mind can be restored. 13 Let me not praise her past her due. She is a heap of pebbles in exquisite random. Her laughter rings empty, where there were crowds. My arms around you, my love, are phantoms. 14 She appears sometimes to be talking about other data. It is as if she knew a separate category. I tell her, weeping’s no proof of the resurrection. All of her is curved and alters. 15 She can only be pictured as catastrophe. She con- fuses concepts with irony. Her thought spreads, like children running home. She finds comfort in the most outrageous limbs. 16 The moon, according to her, is a symbol for shine. Residues provide the passion of thought. Her reflexes condition my mythology. She is the energy of my indexes. 17 When she snarls at me, my senses sharpen. Who could expect her, without lying? She is a color outside the octave. Her rituals divide my life from its labors. 18 She makes the right answer sound foolish. The righteous glory in their un- certainty. Two nuts represent us in divination. The only thing she comes home in is twilight. 19 She sits in the street, making detours. Her history is rich in in- decisions. She is present, inclusive, untransformed. I do not pretend to know how the flood came. 20 A hymn describes the monotony of her expectations. She was created from the sweat of peacocks. Children defend themselves with shame and experience. All her objects answer to the same name. 21 Better a blank wall than simple dark. The play in her muscle de- termines where my eyes focus. She sleeps at the curve of my spine. She wouldn’t believe me, if I were to tell her.

But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation. (Lord Byron, November 1816) what happens in any sovereign body is created on the evidence of the last head on its last lap those of us watching then, during the programme see the die seem to be cast to draw the teeth of our first question affecting essential interests they and only they had she was dealing with an unworthy family gathered for death inconvenient location gruesome tired mannerisms a bit thick coming from her losing the thread of argument in a sinuous cartwheel drained of what life hurried out with a pushchair unsparing he takes us to the cabaret into patterns and groups contrived for distraction more likely to deepen withdrawal such a decrease in which women had views diametrically opposed soon changes his tune howling face to face cruel for people recoiling in horror plastered indeed by any form of social charges and interest it may be healthy to change the tone of administration in growth dynamics use of perspective attachment to things entail perpetual disruption of what space is for built up in absence transactions typically occur under conditions of heightened variations in taste spaces, isolated thoughts which his concept of beauty distorts to represent thinking and feeling life he considers in particular superimposed spatial images accelerating production of different times to control the future this book has been edited to detect the note of such preoccupations blue evening light desire out of stasis for jobs investment itself ruthless traders organising forces unable to stop the drift of imagination over materiality form an autobiography in fires of competition only to emerge stronger within this system of production brought into our homes which in turn form the basis of generating and acquiring aesthetic pleasure conventional these days cluttered with illusion based on writing remixed to demolish any narrative of the world within no image concealed from the realm of material accumulation and circulation in part as would be true enduring time by herself he touches her surrounded by models able to pass unrecognised in the stream of money implied by a photograph where the sun never seen can be constructed crashing through layer after layer on a depthless screen with the requisite speed somewhere behind us thrown into the street patiently to see rotting pieces of car buttons working backwards against nerve junctions tilt her head towards her ankles in the underground light black fur gleamed off the oil drum searchers found a delicate bubble of oil sweeping through it pure oxygen dawn touched at the corners rose in flame lengths of thin steel drawn across dust shifting in thick time on motions playing out across from me not in sequence cut into the sides of an extension run below his eyes were tombstones ringed with razor-wire he threaded bright slashes of colour through open jolts of fear measuring, calculating shaking so hard a lump of shadow watching turned from side to side shielding us from the sun pale green glass frames disintegrating tarmac down to the tunnel of the corner of his eye moving on to some other man for the moment horizon of empty water locking him away inside and he wore two pictograms set in strange lines invisible in air energetically above them heels and silk scatter snow in the middle of a room swirling out of the mist bright with arrangements tainted too historically he had forgotten quite violent fights listening to the continuous pounding of some other thought looking at the surface far away down in a cloud of dust tattered lace about her she watched him calmly bits of it he tore off at the end of each meeting seemed colour-coded sparkling violently tingling on his skin holes turned round slowly in brown earth lined with age he smelled burning trees in darkness a voice came from an imaginary telephone on the dashboard shrink-wrapped packages soft underfoot glowed in the dark blinds slanted to make the match flame blast across his face snap shut in the jungle after the ones still alive start confessing flashbulbs go off her hand flicked back and forth over a section of floor he had heard more than every single word from the once proud ruins of arches in one outstretched hand an odd sensation included balance working to repair the damage of triumph on his face folded against the edge of exhaust fumes closing his lids properly needed great care she heard a rustle little numbers flew around trees tumbled across a moonlit field trying to reassemble his head again she blinked some sort of code subtle variations in the colour of her eyes a reliable testing ground gardens inside shelters shades patterning an idealised culture in one landscaped clump stuffed full of shells a version or remnant of something under a different name some crisis of identity spanned the world thought was the only thing to come back to acting beyond acoustics even when dramatic she always wore fancy dress simply cut and held low objects grouped together confidently into fine jewellery after the storm new scents touched by salt spray hardly dimmed the harsh light he sometimes pulled at his hair obsessed with finding the beautiful curtain allowing him entry never able to follow the middle of night downwards to find a runway with deep sides writhing under his fingers personalities full of energy order a series of the same programme cool for film using this knowledge machines talk to themselves maintain a very persistent buzzing as the signal ends in a dramatic freeze close to the border on a street with a few orange trees

Enormous solids were falling from who knows what heights, who knows what places. I trembled, and in my mouth an inky taste. Precise. Hail, maybe, enormous kernels of ice; coming down, with a scandalous impact, didn't bury me, terrorized, under the covers. It didn't happen, it wasn't that. A below zero temperature circulated through the soft center of my bones. A truly searing cold. Nothing having to do with monsters came to pass. Nothing to do with interminable distances. No brutal incidents. Only the agony of acorns. Only a cycle that completes itself every few years and transforms into a tropical forest a choiring oak grove. Which is the fear.

The old chronological towers are ash, are prisms of disfigurement, symbolic of a world cancelled by consumptive inmelodias. As for alchemical transition, we face the raising of new sea walls, of banished and re-engendered electorates, trying to cope with new intensities of weather, as the anomalous hypnotically increases with the power of inverse subjective. The body is now weighed on a broken axial cart, its blood conjoined as it rises within a nuclear darkness of ravens. So as Piscean chronology now shatters, dawn becomes an unclaimed resurrection, a tumultuous eikon of skin no longer formed around its old dendritic artifacts. The calendar of draconian enfeeblement with its integers of the past 20 centuries, erased, its linear Babels darkened by the extreme necessity for a new perpendicular burst, transmuting in demeanour, with history consumed in a roll of flaming aural dice, with its wizardry of tools subsumed in arcane vibration, turned into a power of splendiferous scorpions. The psychic wounds of the past eclipsed in this new millenium by the power of smelted dragon's blood. And so, I speak of a new being of symbols, of lucid catacombs and spirals, its language being spun in fabulous iguana iridium. Now, with the decayed constitutional stages exploded by telepathy, by invulnerable oneiric intuitives, the mental axis transmutes, like a reddened swan, with a new cosmic skeletal reprieve, afloat amongst the forces of the primeval lightning field, taking on the dharma of the great sustained emotion of eternity.

(Double Portrait in a Mirror) I To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity. When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse With a headache. In spirit follow The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot. For the uncreating chaos Claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride. Ever among the supple surface of summer-brown muscle The fountaining evening chatter under the stars, The student who chucks back his forelock in front of a glass, You only longed for your longing to last. The engine in you, anxiety, Is a grave lecher, a globe-trotter, one With moods of straw, the winds that blow him, aeroplanes. 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.' II I am so close to you I will confess to you I am all that you do. In thoughts where pity is the same as cruelty Your life is mine. Whether What fears and falters is myself Or yourself — all The apprehension of this time, We are both one. At night I'm flooded by the future Incoming tide of the unharnessed war. Beyond the blacked-out windows of our nightmare Facts race their hundred miles an hour In iron circles on an iron plain. The riders of those race-cars lose All sense of where they are. Ridden by their speed, the men Are their machines. III All I can foresee now — more I shall learn — Is that our fear creates its opposite. Our peace is war. When you choose a mirror for a lover It shows you your own image as a gunman. You are a ghost amid the flares of shellfire Less living than The last war dead whose veins of mineral We mine for here. IV Shall I ever reach The field enclosed by stones In the high mountains Where the scytheless wind Flushes the swayed grasses? Where clouds without rain Add to the sun Their mirroring shine? The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. Meanwhile, where nothing's sacred And love no longer willed Nor our true purpose conscious, Holy is lucidity And the mind that dare explain.

There is a drear and lonely tract of hell From all the common gloom removed afar: A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are, Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell. I walked among them and I knew them well: Men I had slandered on life's little star For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar Upon their brows of woe ineffable. But as I went majestic on my way, Into the dark they vanished, one by one, Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day, The dream of all my glory was undone,— And, with a fool's importunate dismay, I heard the dead men singing in the sun.

Where the blossoms fall like snow on the dock bring fifty thousand in cash or you’ll never see your baby again

A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I know, than even now when all of my myths have become . . . , & walk around in black shiny galoshes & carry dirty laundry to & fro, & read great books & don’t know criminals intimately, & publish fat books of the month & have wifeys that are lousy in bed & never realize how bad my writing is because i am poor & symbolize myself. A certain desirable is more terror to me than all that’s rare. How come they don’t give an academic award to all the movie stars that die? they’re still acting, ain’t they? even if they are dead, it should not be held against them, after all they still have the public on their side, how would you like to be a dead movie star & have people sit- ting on your grave? A rare me is more certain than desirable, that’s all the terror, there are too many basketball players in this world & too much progress in the burial industry, lets have old fashioned funerals & stand around & forgive & borrow wet handkerchiefs, & sneak out for drinks & help load the guy into the wagon, & feel sad & make a date with the widow & believe we don’t see all of the people sink- ing into the subways going to basketball games & designing baby sitters at Madison Square Garden. A certain me is desirable, what is so rare as air in a Poem, why can’t i write a foreign movie like all the other boys my age, I confess to all the crimes committed during the month of April, but not to save my own neck, which is adjustable, & telescopes into any size noose, I’m doing it to save Gertrude Stein’s reputation, who is secretly flying model airplanes for the underground railroad stern gang of oz, & is the favorite in all the bouts . . . not officially opened yet Holland tunnel is the one who writes untrue phone numbers. A desirable poem is more rare than rare, & terror is certain, who wants to be a poet & work a twenty four hour shift, they never ask you first, who wants to listen to the radiator play string quartets all night. I want to be allowed not to be, suppose a man wants to swing on the kiddie swings, should people be allowed to stab him with queer looks & drag him off to bed & its no fun on top of a lady when her hair is full of shiny little machines & your ass reflected in that television screen, who wants to be a poet if you fuck on t.v. & all those cowboys watching.