Being a Mountain in New Mexico

I
Was
So still,
The stars
Came down
And ate out of
My hand, upturned, snow capped.

The #8

There is a man on the bus who is reading a book, or there is a man on the bus who is not reading a book but it is open on his lap and 'water' is the only word visible in the title since his sleeve obscures the rest. Or the man has a book open on his lap but he is asleep and the person next to him is reading his book, nudging him in such a way that soft currents from morning sighs and the mechanical doors that open and close somehow manage to turn pages in time to the sidelong glance tracing something about water through the margins and down each page. Or there is no book and there is only a man sleeping with the word 'water' in his lap like a puddle on the bus and he is snoring loud dreams of the world passing by through a window that's directly in front of him. He looks up from the nothing he is reading since the book has run through his fingers and pooled on the floor into a foot-print covered pulp of crumpled newsprint and he looks up to a sidelong glare from the person sitting next to him, breathing heavily as that person takes a seat, or he writhes slightly to avoid a different man, overflowingly fat, to his right but the man still does not manage to see anything because he still snores is still asleep and still looking up and the world is moving by outside too quickly and too blinding bright for discerning and then there is a rubber smothered buzz and a green light goes on somewhere and the door opens and the water in the man's lap evaporates and suddenly there is only sun, sun so bright it scrubs green into the deepest corner of each shadow and there is the vacant lot that opens the city to clear skies just beyond a row of tenentless buildings still as vacant as the lot and made in multiple shades of mute and sullen brick and the man is no longer there. Perhaps this is or is not why, dissatisfied, without a book, or thirsty, the three pedestrians dissipate in cardinal directions around every corner but one, unturned.

Prone

For the most part, I learned how to listen.

Here is the secret:
sit restively, lean forward, and always
be the one speaking.

My friends were gracious with their circumstances.
Whatever

was solely farce ran far from sight,
like a hard rain is unbelievable to an anemone -
more enviable than mistaking it all
as desert.

Still, you are never so real as when
I am. Neither my imaginations, or
my body. Could it

be otherwise? Either we are prone to decorating
even the trees and the thunder with ourselves
or we are prone.

Foggy Visions

Foggy visions clouding thought

A rose in the distance impossible to see.

Prepare, Take 2

I've wanted to experiment with trying to ruin the piece as it's being performed. This is my first attempt.

July 4, 2008

It was July and there were plates and paper napkins and platters of food and crumbs of food everywhere. It was all kosher, I think, unless maybe you mixed this with that - but no, it must have been since that's the kind of house we were in. And there was beer and then wine or we begin with wine and end with gin and wake up to beer after the smears of fireworks and a little roman firecandle or roadworks spitting fire like a narcoleptic, winking, night lamp in the backyard beyond the gas grill. It was a round table with a plastic table covering and the shirts were cotton or taken off entirely or polyester like the pants by the pool (the ones that were not taken off entirely) and of course it was Connecticut when Connecticut still smelled fragrant and the Maple leaves were dark green and the Oak Ferns were light green but the Azalea was radiant and red and the garden, despite how coiffed, had an overwhelming thickness that the ebb and lull of Cicadian rhythms locked in hemiola. There were other tables - square and rectangular with taut-skinned older folk (and soft-skinned older folk, too) arranged more hierarchically than us at our round table and with diminished appetites and more sobriety (only in a few cases). Everyone had eaten and we were all just waiting for the dark to see the works and sitting at the tables taking in the liquids or jumping in and letting the liquids take us. One or two might've exchanged a fluid but no one cared, or noticed. And then there were the cocktail umbrellas since it had been sunny all day and unbearably hot - the thick heat that is how you know Connecticut is still Connecticut and the cocktail of choice makes no difference. It's simply the one of the moment - so despite floral patterned paper umbrellas in the cups next to the platters, we begin to pull apart all the ones in our drinks or next to the platters or our plates and we pull them all apart and realize that beneath the dyes and the ornate, cartoonish flowers (someone's nearby father or grandfather or both still said 'Oriental') are characters and not the kind that spell familiarity but the kind that connote political incorrect trips over typification and someone said Said and we unraveled more and uncovered someone's very distant but still DailyNews that had been dyed and dried and repurposed for positioning just to the left of the Uncle Sam napkins and the Independence Platters in the crushed ice cup of some American sorts in the backyard garden of a dignified real estate noble or mogel hosting one of those characteristically July Connecticut Freedom Feasts and warding off the rain with the distant, daily news of a place where Said said or continues to say that this day the day of our independence day is not a holiday but a day where they repudiate our leisure with their labor someone said Said even says that there they may or may not.

The Funnies

I used to read the comics every morning,
Every single morning,
While I ate my breakfast.
Even in high school.
And they weren't funny
But I still did it.

Prepare

First, there will be a sensation of lightness in your fingers. Rough textures will be preferred, and you will spend hours sweeping the dirt from the sidewalk in front of your house. Soon enough you will stop, not from desire but from the creeping itch walking up your hands and feet. You will stay indoors, close the blinds, and tune yourself to the borders of your feeling. Everything else is disappearing too, you can see it in the cracks of light that escape and shine layers of dust in the air. You used to think it odd, that dust would gravitate to the light. Now you know: we are swimming in the detritus of everything around us, seen and unseen. You will watch your fingernails become translucent and sheer, and fall away. You will count the flecks of skin that whisper off of your skin and become bits in the light. You are becoming a collection of bits in the light.

Tomorrow you will count whatever is left and compose a time-line of the history of the world. For now, imagine that the world is larger than that. Be calm and unaware. Stay hydrated. Get seven hours of sleep. Reign your dreams from recklessness, and sift the morning, carefully.

Veil, Richard Rezac 1987

In all honesty survival was unlikely.

What we left behind we left behind

as dissolving tombstones in an infinite,

burgeoning field. This is best

repeated: what we left behind

we left behind. Displaced from

an eternity that is at some point a given,

only God can save our moments.

I mean remnants. In a dozen years

my yesterday will wash out into the empty

space of a frame. Or if not yesterday,

one of these ventures will.

Or all of them. So what is left is

a veil, made

of iron, with nothing behind it, and no

veil either. As if a frame will save us.

As if there is yet us within, and us about.

Sehnsucht

High above a falcon wheels and withdraws, wheels again as you parse the busy sidewalk: you are looking for someone because you are always looking for someone: you think the world is too full, that there is a glut you will never understand, and yet at times it feels simply wrong: the people whom you do not know, and yet are looking for, and yet feel split apart from, as if you were born missing yourself fully, are gone or replaced by cut-outs you imagine are human: and what if they are, what if every unbelievable face truly is as distant and separated and mistaken as you, what if they too feel split and cloven: before you can finish the question you see the falcon break from the sky: when you were younger watching high things caused vertigo: now, you are convinced that it is right to feel cautious and melancholic: it is right to look for someone whom you do not know: it is right to believe that every sidewalk ends in a precipice.