​Axes of Alliance     (Dream Catcher - Issue 45)

​                            
​
What spark there is seems to light the scene from either end. 

In an interpreted world, you see what appears, 
each day more, or less.

The tree shadows on mountaintops are large caterpillars. 

The compound eye a vending machine. 

The train window a skyway in which an arrow shoots through space. 

When the arrow line is active
it creates divisions into imaginary planes--

Yet when moving round a vacuum 
you’re hermetically sealed in

not all that much changes… 
Nothing happens off the screen.    

The layers and the dots are yours.
There’s no other law but the one you yourself have devised. 

The initial impulse is extracted from 
the new identity assumed      [feelings you’re no longer feeling,

stimuli converted and proportioned 
to avoid disturbance]      

twelve-bar pneumatic reflex 
in the condensation chamber 

circulating like an echo 

mornings when the mind is clumsy 
and bumps into things.

Down the mountain 
a man and a woman, light and darkness, slowly approach in a canoe.  

A Victory for the Sultan and the Queen of Spades     (Lothlorien Poetry Journal - Volume 8)

​

​In the dream the man stood in a grove
with his palms facing outward, showing the way, 
blue as if he’d dipped them in blue ink. 
Smoke billowed up behind him. Perhaps mist.  
Something had been burning, 
or we were being engulfed in a cloud.     

He said, The City’s come to take the place of nature--
Nature as disorder. 
All depth bent in. High density of the near and contiguous. 
Half the time formless, as if nobody could reach it, 
the other blocked by objects in the dark 
like an old music box. 

What if we lived in a night recalled 
over a distant city,

       we’d remember ourselves already flown--

if what we call time 
wasn’t comprised of days or hours, mere segments 
devised only to break up duration, but of something similar to pixels,
components that produce an image,

or maybe of regenerative matter, 
like skin, whose cells spontaneously generate new tissue.

Consider the music box. 
It sits idle 
yet when you open it 
it springs into life and sings its song. 

Central Locking     (Lothlorien Poetry Journal - Volume 8)

You can play a music piece so differently 
it becomes a different piece.

Playing it backward
there’s a sense of being followed. 

Say: 

compose me 
a replacement.

Soft-touched 
by a ghostdance>> transferring 
to mezzotint>> transferring to aquatint

the squares on the floor 
have many drawers.

The dreamscape contains everything.

Watercress distorts 
like spherical umbrellas.
Dragonflies swarm
fluttering mid-flight.    

The sky above revolves, 
you remain motionless.

What connection is there between things?


To the left you see the outline of a church.
The hand of a clock turned 
away from the wall, 

a few trees, 
edging the forest 
maybe, to the right. 

The gray sky inbetween. 

But why is there 
a bellhop waiting on the stairs? 

It reminds you you bear gifts. 

Micro-Machinist     (Exilé Sans Frontières - Summer 2022)

​How much further to keep on as to get over. 
What was got to is made real.
 
                                                   The sound of the city waking up to life
matched to the waking city’s unique sound print
 
reveals a voice signal unaccounted for.
The signal is a wave flowing
through our minds and bodies, checkpoints for a longstanding
hunting season.

Guards cash in each time it travels through

free to continue 
plaiting fresh data strands unimpeded,                           ununiform with the near- 
                                                                                                           daylight sweep 

so that we should access                                              information 
at a higher speed,                                                                  then become it.

Thoughts are slow-navigating foldings-over in a system of mere symmetry.

Not fully independent of    
to what extent 
and why 
such afterthoughts speak and act out post-truths all at once, 
images within hatch fractals, 

memories follow us back  
every .4 seconds to generate miles and miles of industrious erosion. 

                                                 An investigation has been launched, 

is now ongoing, 
grows more collapsed 
from the mirage 

configured/ 
reconfigured 
in the statue eyes
we can’t escape around the room.

Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming 
cheering on

                      nothing but survival training 
with a deathwish:

homelands melted 
under cypresses

dim distance 
with the birth of a neo-century of maiden spirit.
The sediment of doublethink crumbles the alveoli on either side 
of the recruit’s heart 

and compounds
a vast continuous presence--

Having come across the slow familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.

Manifold     (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2023)

​With the hands close to the body, breathing evenly, 
the performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem 
but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity. 

In on the con– 
conscious. 

A near uroboric act.

Or else take it in simply
by reading—reading as searching 
as being the act   

that splits the mind   
and sets it in a state of conflict with itself,
verging on untemporary--




until pieced back 
in the only medium you experience:
one that has transitioned from another,
light coming through from a high window 
out of frame.

And, at the most quiet.

        All the dead poets you love stand in the empty yard. 
    Their arteries like yours are weighted octaves 
           which truly receive time.

                  All time already exists 
         in you. Both past and present
held together at once by a now in process 
       yet the story remains something hunting for—to let go, 
  let it be told,

      so tell it,—let go of--
you deliver the news to no one 

      and know there can be none 
            made of any substance…

                           Sensors monitor the body as star-appointed witness, 
                                          venture out extragalactic, 

                     stelliform… Things aren’t everywhere welcome 
         so much as deliquesced. 
Reincarnations of the line’s 
change-language compass
seem whole here 

in a world, 
a mind sectioned 
by arcs and aural circles 
where sense-objects burst wide open 
around living grains of magic. 

Decrust—and the breadcrumbs stick together. They’re atoms coming at reality 
in light of a new survey. Fotomontaggi: a fresh loaf pops out.  

Mirror Language     (Amsterdam Review - Spring 2023)

​The poem grows a little every time you read it.

New centers of reality are rendered 
somewhere else 
                                        across 
                                            the adrenal nucleus
like a grid painting.

The wind rises: 
exuberance. 
Warren of polymer dots        warp-bubble feathers
fall upon the lake.

Ghostdance 
vertigo.  

What will you do 
when the gods forsake you?


              Far off,       long ways you must stop 

                   and think over: all you 
forget a language, because 
           wrong, a language forgets you.   

Don’t words 
articulate  
               the sky and land in unchecked sliding
                                        fragments fusing a suspended 
state,

turn around, 
they disappear…

                                                       Did you not know 
                                                             in translation   
         
one becomes less than a person more than a person
ever was   
                             of whom neither remembers
                    nothing. 

Is this the limit to the poem?

Notes

​
​Axes of Alliance
When the arrow line is active it creates divisions into imaginary planes — in reference to The Thinking Eye by Paul Klee

A Victory for the Sultan and the Queen of Spades 
We’d remember ourselves already flown – in reference to Indivisible by Laynie Browne

Manifold
The performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity – in reference to Charles Bernstein’s introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed 
Word
In on the con—conscious – in reference to In the Future by Rae Armantrout
Reading as searching as being the act – in reference to Leslie Scalapino’s introduction to Of Indigo and Saffron by Michael McClure 
The act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself – in reference to Eros the Bittersweet - An Essay by Anne Carson