BAY CITY

Since all snow on earth is alike I’d rather dream of a snow
Pale and alive in the coolness of a monkey’s fist
I’d rather dream of my brother, that ball of grass
Like I did in the dream I had last night
And it was my duty to take him out for a stroll at night
Into the green slopes of the grass valley that expanded into the green distance
Further than the horizon upon which
The eye could ever glimpse. “Take your brother,
That ball of grass,” my parents said each day
When the moon rotundly set down its cheeks down to stay
Above our grass-colored bay, “Out for a stroll
And into the valley,” and so I walked through the grassy rocks
With my head a little tilted to survey the movement
Of my brother, that ball of grass
Who kept leaping away from me and off into the grass green trail
The green moss beyond us into the distance
Laid, and it was hard to retrieve my brother, that ball of grass
From the immensity of that grassy green basin
Since all the grasses there
Were alike, and my brother was born
From the same green grassy land
As they.

TO ANACREON IN HEAVEN

I.

Isn’t it odd how the color “mauve” takes its name
From the name of a flower whose color
Is not mauve at all?
We were having coffee the other morning
And you explained to me in French
How during the Middle Ages, the flower was the symbol
That brought Spring forth
It was known by the primeval botanists that flowers
Have different sexes; the male flower has a sex protruding
Stiff as a small bank of crabs and shy as the morning-after
Of a young army
While the she-flower, on the other hand, has a convex sex
Sweet-potato-shaped, or rather like potato fries
From mcdonald’s, the ones I used to get with my double order
Of egg mcmuffins on Wednesday mornings at 10AM
When I was allowed to leave school earlier than all the other kids
Instead of attending gym class
Thanks to my family doctor who was sympathetical to my desire
To eat fast-food and stroll about the city thinking about Jean-Robert,
My scoundrel platonic lover who would tell Caroline Teissier,
A now renowned hooker in the city of my birth, and who was back then madly
In love with him, that I looked prettier
Than she did, he who smoked the bong in the calm yellow fern
Of a windless field on a verdoyant hill in the park behind the hospital
By the parking lot in front of our school building
Instead of learning how to run very fast or go after a ball or jump very far
Or swim. Jean-Robert was an iconic figure who made all of us tremble
With lustful envy, and wet our daydreams
Because he and Stacey had spent all their lunchbreaks frolicking
And rubbing feet and knees in the open at our cafeteria’s highest-set table
Which had grown to be known and revered as being reserved solely
For their amorous activities, “rolling a shovel”
To one another, as goes the French expression, till they broke up
In the late Spring when they overheard a teacher say
They would not be in the same class
The following year.

II.

To prove his love to me Jean-Robert would follow me home everyday
After school at midi on our daily lunchbreak
Instead of lunching, and take away with him to class
The judas of my door whose poor manufacturing, Jean-Robert
Had discovered, allowed it to be unscrewed
Very easily. Every afternoon he would make me beg for it
And every evening he would give it back to me
Before the last 6PM bell of the last class
Rang. Once I invited him into the house
As he was doing his deed; he sat on the couch
And made a few courteous jokes about my basset-hound
Till I left a few minutes to fix him a sandwich and fix myself a drink
Of homemade vodka caramel. When I came back
From the kitchen, I was startled to find the fruit basket
Which had earlier on been thriving with fresh citrus
Completely empty, and I asked Jean-Robert
If he had noticed, while I was gone, any suspicious activity
Within the basket’s vicinity. “You were away
For so long,” he explained. “I thought I would use this time alone
To drop those grapefruits from the balcony
Down to the street, see how that looks
From over here.” My house was on the fifth floor, and those grapefruits were fat
And heavy. From above they looked like bright angel brains
Thrown up by the heavens’ canals
And smashed wide open by the clumzy fist

Of an ogre cumming.

INTERCOURSE, PA

Remember the first summer we spent together in Pennsylvania
And I was sad all the time, we read Schuyler’s diaries and kdick stories
And worked out a lot and drank shiraz and filmed each other taking baths
And Maya went to India where she forgot a tampon in her vagina
And found it a month later when she proceeded to finger herself
Because she had nothing left to read, and said that removing it
Was an intellectual relief?

I was dreaming in the lower mattress of our bunkbed that day
And the Earth was swollen with godlike things
Within her belly, and her belly was of dust, and clay
And all the dust-colored earth toys God had made swirled
Throughout her hands, and her hands softly above the world
Were slain, and the Earth mourned the days
When she was untamed, godless, left in peace
In that dream I put off my head and handed it
To the snow-beasts, I put off my heart and gave it to the snowflakes
For them to eat, I put off my mind and zipped it back under the ice
Into its primeval plasticine earth satchel
And my clothing were crisp and the sky pissed on them
And I laid them all around me
In growing greedy ryegrass all over my body
The galaxies, and I became the frost softly crisscrossing
The palm of my feet and my face grew eyes diapered in bronze reeds
As I laid unaware of the planets suckling my tits
With their goldening glares

And I said to myself,

Behind those trees are only houses.
A single hill grows, noiselike, behind it
Behind pilasters where the powdered white leaf
Rings a desolate land capable of breathing
Azul balsams among the pea-green trees
Where I found part of a deer that a bear had killed
And tried eating it, and found the mouth of the sun-Ra
Like painted palm-leaves opening

APOLLO 13

Everything here
Is calm. Everything here ignores
The mysterious filth
Of aging. You are standing in a hole
Which has been turned into a room. The floor
Is of a heavy, translucent green. You must know
There are fjords arising from the depths of this Earth
In places of the world which entwine very closely
To the places where you’ve been. Your faith can be read in the stars
Like anyone’s. You forget pyramids merging with pink amoebas
To make languages new and
Exciting. Someone nearby
Touch the wall of the hole and have an orgasm with eyes
Of heavy bird colors. Someone takes a piece of ice
And sharpens it on a rock to slit his forehead
And make his blood
Drinkable.
You are sitting at the diner table
And pretending to go for a piss you excuse yourself
And lock yourself in the bathroom to impale your anus
On the toilet stick.
My heart penetrates black oranges
Here you were undressed and beaten up
And buried along with seven different kind of animals
After your skin was detached from my bones
Your bones rinsed with a solution of several metals
And brown plum leaves and crushed and diluted altogether
With the dried-up remains of the animals into a paste
Which my People rubbed on their lobes and napes
To experience their amnesia with great forgetfulness
And compassion. I’m in the other room,
Masturbating with your little cousin’s hand
While he’s asleep. These are the queen’s chambers,
With the walls coated in dry salt vibrating from hydrogen.
Your heart penetrates black oranges
You notice many objects in the room can be used
To mimic the Gods. Do you remember this night
When you dropped a party at your parent’s house and the first guests arrived
Conversed matters like, You can live in a woman,
And you can live in a man, so we hid in the bathroom and did cocaine
Until 8 in the morning ? The sculpted organ was of a strange, dormitory
Green. And walking across the room you noticed
You were sucking off a man for the first time
Like pomegranates crushed beneath
Old atlases. Man, this is sweet, you said (This part
In the dream was the research
Of absolute silences), gently turning his erection
Into a violet
Log pile. These days were glorious,
Throbbing in a stream of lagoon suckling
Columns of opaline oatmeal
Though the people were breathing
People, you know, human as we often see them
It was a sort of long rehearsing
Of existing, child-book like
They took your skull and compressed it
And bounded it and forced the cranium out and
Elongated. You were allowed to fondle
Sliced torsos resembling your body when it had grass
Hidden in it, and I hidden in grass quietly fusing
With the little glass ark

HOLLYWOOD, PART II

For a little while before he invented fires and trees
And nurses and boulders and great catastrophes
Which kept him so busy He never even got to go to sleep
God had this routine he liked
Where he would take a short bath in the Sea
Of Tranquility, which back then was simply called
“God’s waterhole”, then shave a little
So that grass on earth may be made pregnant
With the atom of the roots
Of his fallen hair
And then, having shed the robe made of sunless sky
That was his skin comes evening
So that darkness may reign beneath his feet
And all the beasts from Paradise may take a rest
From their daily duties. Having done this,
And seeing that all was at peace
God would proceed to switching off
The galaxies, and screen in place of the Milky Way’s reel
Old footages of Adam doing things
God deemed really cute
Or sexy. There was that one shot
Where Adam is laughing a little as he rinses his newly made balls
Into the honey swirls of a lagoon cloaked in the guises of a very small sea,
And that tickles him.
God cherished that laughter a lot
And in his moments of idleness
He would listen to that particular recording
Over and over and over
With the same renewed fervor of heart I had
Upon listening to that tape my mom had made for me
Where she looped the dogs barking at the very beginning
Of “Been Caught Stealing”
Till He finally fell asleep. In his dreams
God told Adam cryptic things he did not dare during the daytime
Speak aloud such as, “Hidden music
Will count for nothing,” or else “I want us fascinated
By dancehalls, dandelion seeds, light objects flying.”
Adam that night dreamt he was seeing through lychen
That mice herd running in a procession towards the sky
Where the good piece
Of cheddar is. Trees will be loaded
With heavenly preys
One day Adam was called by God
To meet him as soon as possible by the ginkotree
Where the serpent, that old dragon, was now known
To have established his digs, and God who had invented the lawnmowers
And the household items and jigsaws
As of late, took pride in the clean cut grass
In Paradise around his first handmade trees
Had, so he took a moment to show Adam around
And Adam, seeing that the place he once knew so well
Was forever changed, felt a terrible homelessness
Just like Purdey in the poem about Trakl
Written in that small coffeeshop in Berlin
The day after we met, and he felt sad
And naked and tasted tears against the fine roseated membrane
Of his palate, and ashamed as well, and wished he had never been
Torn apart and born and spread opened and laid against the immaterial ground
Of the Heavens, and wished God wasn’t there, and wished he wasn’t
Made of anything, and wished he wasn’t made out of God or flesh
Or anybody else’s, and wished he had never been made or mated with God’s flesh
And he crouched silent all of a sudden by God’s calves
While God was raving about this spatula he’d just made
So Adam could flip the half-cooked animal in the newly made pans
He, God, had just designed
Out of pure clay, and inlayed his arms
Around the immense legs
God above his only child’s head
Splayed. “I am listening to that great new band
You might have heard about them, they’re called
The Doors?”