Heir Apparent

Light arms at the bottom of the ocean, navels and hands fluttering together

To open the way. Clouds sink into suncoffins

Like locks of moss

I dreamt of fingers, scrolled into waves

And hands clenching hard around

The sea-surface, and I awoke and saw

The bright bones of the airplanes’ shadows

Tiptoeing above raw leaves

In the watermelon field.

The hands and the waves belong

To the sea-undines; every evening they travel

From the hill to the sea, from the sea

To the hill. Coral amulettes belong

To the living; soft heaps are in fawn with gold

In the submarine sun, as the hands create above them

A wind.

Someone asked, “What is the place where a man is not one

But two, while remaining the same?” and one of the men laughed

And said, “That one’s easy. It’s a hospital, where a man

Becomes numbers, and the scanners double his body into a shadow

And a skeleton.” I had our smell smeared all over

My buttcheeks, your asshole resembled a broken fragment

Of the bright moon disk, and everyone we knew was alive

And my entrails were moved when you scratched the earth off your feet

The beautiful gray salt O

The sea! Come in my skirts, I cried, come inside me through the middle of my cock

Come in my navel, drink vodka from it like Louie’s boyfriend did, rub some of your cum

In my palms then make me spread it gently all over your spine and be cremated

Through my pussyjuices while you watch a movie or eat chili or fall asleep

With my cum echoing and running through your hands like squirrels rolling down a tree

Like snow bullets

Cum slowly above our planet as we pass out on Lamaline and become cloud streams

Cum inside my ear where raspberry-red codeine bells are forever buried

Cum all over my brain like that beercan you spilled all over the other drugs

You’ve carefully piled up into pastel pyramids on a mirror in the little cabin

In the woods in Bojin when you where high on acid and mushrooms

And ketamine and ecstasy and weed and whiskey and other things

With William

And Erik

And in the flowers I tripped over a dewdrop fat with water

To which I glued my eyes, we talked about pissing in wormholes

And ketamine flakes were fresh vanilla leaves against my navel so I inhaled

And lagoons came, and carried away my legs, I took off my hips

And glued them to the sealine, and I took my lips off my face and flung them

Into the highest wave, and the wave went swirling

Down darkened hills. I wish to awake drunker than I was when I fell asleep in the pink haze

Of a cold Salzburgian morning, small scrolls of air quietly rippling the cocaine-colored heads

Of the pigeons, wind undulating against all things, the butchers dreamily hanging

The fat lamb-legs and the hams heads to the doorseals

Of the delis, effluvia of old chocolate cakes and green olives and the dybbuks

Melancholically hopscotching among the jugs of pearls and seeds

And oranges, Look at that beautiful rhinestone brocade!, and unripe fruits

Littering the streets the color of the sister’s somnolent nape

Pounding like lips against a sapphire mandolin in the palm

Of Trakl’s hands

Hurry! Dark grows when dawns is running there, as high as heaven.

They admired each other’s ivory once again

I am writing this from the Curry Donut in Larksville,

PA, possibly the last place in the United States where

BUY ONE DOZEN GET ONE DOZEN FREE

Still has a meaning. We listened to the radio till 2. AM

Two mumbling teenage lovers were flipping coins

Amidst the ghostly lemonades poured from caramel-coated pumps and served

In styrofoam cups, and the only other customer

Was a large bearded man in seal-colored jogging pants

Scratching the top of his head while scornfully observing

The lovers’ hobby. Styrofoam makes me sad. We don’t’ really have it

In France. When I see those eggs snared in the everlastingness of their styrofoam prisons

At Price Chopper where your mom works 35 hours a week

I feel like crying. Another thing we don’t have in France

Are eggs in a tube. But eggs in a tube are not sad

They are mysterious

And exotic. When I think about eggs in a tube

I feel like Purdey feels when his mom

Is telling a story: I get the willies.

I always feel sorry when I sleep well and I hear in the morning

That there were airfights in the sky

When I am awake and kissed and we listen to the radio

Till 2 AM in the morning

I feel like I am helplessly pedaling in a space

Which has neither beginning nor end, no solid floor or walls

Or ceiling, no limitation, no spatial referee, no time, no sense, no consciousness

Or boundaries. How do they get those eggs in there, I ask myself.

When I think about eggs in a tube

I fear eternity. Eternity is the place in my head

Which stretches from one shellless egg to the next

In a tube where the eggs have been inserted

By means I cannot understand.

For my 13th birthday I got

Pictures of the great German

Emperors, stilts, two fat turtles

A book of traditional costume- knitting

And from my ancestors, sweet chocolate bars

And a kabballah

Of roses.

I am afraid that the river is making me opener,

But you must not worry that someone

Would ever answer

I wish I could quote you better but

This is a line of yours I love

Misquotten from a poem you wrote

Some days after we came back from Melt Festival

At Melt Festival I expected human kindness

At Melt Festival I felt the great sadness we have

For Jesus Christ

At Melt Festival I took acid for the first time

And felt so happy to be peaking I abandoned all my earthly possessions on the beach

Where Housemeister was playing.

“Today we visited the concentration camp in Dachau

With Mom. We saw everything,

The vegetable patch, the mill,

The blue ceilings and the sea-mattress,

Braided with trees”

We waited and waited and waited in front of a scene

I reposed your eyelids along with starseeds in the wind

And nothing happened for a long time, or something happened

And we didn’t notice or many things happened at once

And we forgot about it the moment we noticed them happening

We danced and I thought I was about to shit my pants because of the acid kicking in

So I left and thought I would never see us again

But when I came back we were still there and a dwarf in a cowboy hat came up to us

And undulated his chest while staring at you in the eyes till the Crystal Castle song ended

We hanged out by the old railroad track and felt like two different kinds of Caesars

Both awaking next to a traintrack in a prairie of cold lilipads

One thousand years and a half

After we’ve died.

“That’s nice, isn’t it.” One of the Caesars mesmerized by pellucid ivy crawling up his legs

Died of fright while tripping. Another Caesar died laughing at the memory of a donkey

Eating figs. After he died the first of all the Caesars to be dead found himself

Transitionlessly stroking the back of the head of a boy

Whose cock reminded him of a particular patch of grass

In this glade he’d seen on a mural in a palace in Rome

Where the deers and the squirrels in the summer met

To lick some water off the wild flowers, and rinse

The strawberry-scented antennas and the smashed summer-squash juices

Off their feet. That Caesar could tell from the chlorinated smell of all things

That this place where he had emerged from being dead

Not remembering how he’d got there, or what afterlife was like

Had once been a public pool, but all the waters and the swimmers and the life-guards

Had once been a public pool, but all the waters and the swimmers and the life-guards

Had been removed somehow and in their place now stood

Elegantly chiseled wooden furniture which tanned, thick-browed brown-eyed

Boys in their twenties ointed in oils and amorously browsed

With their fingertips, and lightly taptaptapped with the spiraling

Fennelcolored dawn that purred round their balls all the way up

To their anuses. Caesar, having watched the boys cascading through oak tables

And maple chairs and beautiful chequered cutting boards

Like the one Pat made

For a length of time which clearly had

Neither beginning nor end

Thought it wise to start preparing for the possibility

Of Eternity. He decided he would try to convoke some items

Which in the days to come

Might come in handy; for all he knew, this

Was Paradise, and the limitations of the self to a given object

Might not apply here. For all he knew, he had become pure

Abstraction, and all he would command upon in the everlasting future

Would henceforth be taking place

In the realm of the spirit. And so, having detected in himself

A strong desire for a simple meal

Of figs, Caesar concentrated really hard and muttered,

“Figs,” but nothing happened.

This first attempt did not erode

Caesar’s enthusiasm, actually

Quite the opposite. It was very likely that “figs”

Didn’t grow here, he reasoned, in such wet lands

And so his request was likely to have simply passed through the Holy Spirit

Completely unnoticed. Caesar thought it might be best

To try out this method with different items

Or concepts, such as “enema,” “violent dreams,” “blueberry

Muffins,” “ocean with birds,” “calm

Quivering tits.” Our mom just came in the room without knocking

And handing us this small card we found in a Bible in Berlin

On which a computer nerd-looking Jesus is dreamily galloping

Through the different rooms of an architects’ office

With a long metal pole over his shoulder

Asked, “Purdey, is that your thing?”

We made the kid lick MDMA off your fingertips

And he disappeared for a while and spent the night in the tent

Of some Australian chicks

I traded a half-drank bottle of white rum we found in the prairie

For a single cigarette, and that was a good deal

A feather plummeted off a cliff

We ate noodles with beef and canned sausages still high on acid

And took a bus the next morning to the nearest town

To see a comedy dubbed in German about Jim Carey being forced

To start sharing his apartment

With a bunch of penguins.

On this card Jesus just looks like a World of Warcraft nerd

I can imagine him robed in a dark black trench coat,

And Slipknot teeshirt. Purdey said,

“If you’re not sad for Jesus Christ,

I cannot understand you,” and I thought about this scene in the movie

The Congress, where all heads are turned up to the heart of the sky

While the bodies are still, and everybody is quietly dreaming

There lives are real

Wasn’t there an emperor who smoked diamond dust every morning?

Wasn’t there a God who once found the galaxies in small particles of dust

In his apartment, and so he knelt to the ground and carefully picked up

The planets and the stars and the light-years and the sky

And wrapped it all nice and inviting in a silver giftwrap for Adam

And offered it to him when they met for a beer in Eden

But Adam, receiving from the hands of God the stars and the suns

And the planets and the earthly feelings

God had harvested from pure dust on the floor of his house

Said, I decline, and pushed the silver wrapping aflamed

With dust-filled galaxies

Aside? When Adam grew older he was allowed to merge with the serpent

And out of his navel grew a womb coated in iridescent scales

In which he bore sons, whom he fed berries and beast milk

And daughters, whom he killed. Adam taught his progeny

The clouds were voyelles and the stars were syllables

And the rain came out of God’s eyes when he grieved

He couldn’t read the alphabet.

Adam brought his favorite son to the tree where the universe began

And laid him in the grass face-down, and showed him how to listen to the white noise

Of the bowels of the planet being stirred and struck like cello chords

By those who manufactured the roots of all the trees and all the plants

Of the universe. For those spirits damned and unforgiven who live forever enjailed

In God’s basement, he explained, the wrong side of our earth

Is the sky, and our lanterns are their stars, and the cars are passing clouds

And we are the comets, stomping needlessly against the sky

And darkness is so deep down there, the spirits can never tell

If there eyes are closed

Or open

Diogenes was sitting outside, drinking water from his claw bowl

By a cataract. A small boy came and knelt by the well, and drank the water

Directly from his bared cupped-up hands

And Diogenes, seeing that, got envious of the boy’s

Simplicity of means, so he smashed his bowl with a strong fist

And knelt by the waterwell

And softly wept till sunset. I should write to my dad sometimes

I want to write him a letter that starts with “Dad, are you treating yourself well?

I really liked the joke you made about the Hustler Magazine’s picture I sent you,

The one where there is a SAY IT WITH FLOWERS sign dangling above a scene

Where a black man brings a beautiful white tulips bouquet to some lady with the note,

SORRY I BUSTED YOUR CUNT attached to it. I think your paranoia

About the size of my nose when I was a baby

Was justified. I too am glad that I am your daughter

And not the daughter of your old foe

Pierrot Le Brun.” My dad said, I loved the old school postcard of Stearns Wharf you sent.

It doesn’t look the same at all anymore cuz of the fire in 2007

I see dreams passing through me like beans discarded

From the Brontë’s sisters’s palates

I dreamt the night before last that I’ve brought my dad

A basket full of rabbits, and hares

Some were alive and giggling, and some were nibbling

At the basket’s straw, and others had pink eyes and blue nails

And were naked, and some were skinned

And the hog in winter gallops through trees where snow nests purr

And the hog in winter purrs just like snow when he sleeps

And the hog in winter brings snowcastles to life

Under the palm of his feet.

(Sound of a million flies buzzing)

Snow here smells like the good kind

Of cocaine. Does snow smells like cocaine

Everywhere? In this town when I smell fancy coke in the air I know

That the snow is near. It was reported that in Folkstone,

England, a father was sentenced to four years in prison

After he dropped his three-years old son at nursery school

With a lunchbox fool of cocaine

And knives. A man from Iowa, who was being chased

By the police, made a brief stop to deposit his young daughter

At school, before resuming his flight

A woman of 18, around the Great Lakes

Region, was recently engaged to be married

To her long-lost father. “Incest has been around as long

As humans had. Everybody just needs

To deal with it.,” she declared

Dad, are you treating yourself well? Are those things in your fridge still rotting

A little more each day? Is this evergrowing pyramid of empty Powerade bottles

In the middle of your kitchen still preventing you

From accessing your sink? Dad, I don’t like those two cherry tomatoes

Forever forgotten in your bathroom

Next to the toothpaste. Dad, now that your other daughter

Is a bit older, does she tell you to stop piling up everything you don’t like anymore

In the backseat of your car? Dad, I would like you to eat well and stop smoking

So many joints and stop putting so much caffeine in your body

So you can live longer and I will have the time to make some money

To buy a plane ticket and come visit you

One of these days. Dad, how is your heart,

How do you feel, do you get sad often, are you okay,

And do you still get breakfast from Taco Bell

Everyday? It sucks that I never have money, because I can never travel places

Like some people can, you know Dad sometimes I feel like I live inside that song

The Big Country, by the Talking Heads.

I miss my dad sometimes, but not often

I miss the WAYSIDE PULPIT that read

7 DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK

In front of the church in Hanover, PA. I miss the three ladies from Carbondale

Who posted an ad on Craigslist where they expressed their desire

To be brought to the Hong Kong Buffet by a man (or several?) who shouldn’t

“Get their hopes up” because their won’t

“Get lucky on this date.” There is a picture of them

Like the guts of a fox’s spread out to dry on the sun-swollen side of a summer dress

They might be siblings

Or hookers, married or Jewish

Or willing to suck cocks

For hours and hours; the ad

Do not specify. I want to go on a date with them but I am not a man

I imagine them as the Brontë sisters, calm and ghostlike

And drinking pale peppermint teas in the synchronized colors

Of their pajamas’ membranes.

I want to tell my dad things his younger daughter might not tell him

I want to say Dad, your daughter,

Xanthe Danger, she’s almost

What? Thirteen, fourteen

Now? In a year or two, she’ll be half-way

Through puberty. She might start getting wasted

On the beach, right, wasted in Santa Barbara

On booze and weed, steal the keys to your car

When you’re passed out on Red-Bull & vodka

To go to this party on Main Street where everyone gets fucked in the ass

For the first time, isn’t that what the youngs are doing these days

In California? She might start a blog where she posts pictures of her legs

From under or sideways or above, so that the others might like her

She might kiss a girl whose face is a wave and move away from home

To a farm or the seashell or a little pile of dirt under a boot in the woods for a while

And start eating up konjac pills so those roots would grow

Inside her belly, and she will spend days without eating

So she’ll stay skinny

Listen to my heartbeats, how they pendulate

And dwindle like olives brutally flinged

Into martini glasses; let us be my heart gliding

Against the rose glasses, there are no thorns

In heaven or hell, no flower or tv dinner

Or school reunions

To attend, so lay at rest here at the ankle of the treeline

Which I’ve made for you, molden with clay

When the moon is halved and my girlfriend’s acting

All crazy, said the wilted Statue Of Liberty costumed- kid

Waving at cars for the Liberty Income Tax Society

This evening, I know that there’s something about this moon

That’s almost evil. If my girlfriend is acting weird

All of a sudden, and the moon’s all wasted fucked up

Shadowsy shadows up there I know that

There’s something at work in the world

Like the titlewave, like the way our blood becomes the ocean

And the ocean is the blood of the sea, so the moon sucks on it

You feel me, and the stars sometimes

Look double, that’s what makes us think

They twinkle, when really there’s just

Two of them man. Sometimes I get all cozy looking up at the moon crescent

Growing larger above the highway and the PUPPIES store and the Wine and Spirit

Boutique, it’s like there’s that divine hand jerking off the streets

Into all the asters in the sky at once every over that parking lot

And the moon seeing that all of this is good is so turned on

It cums light undecipherable stuff

All over the place.

That fat red star-thing

Right there, that’s Mars, and then

There’s Jupiter somewhere

Over there, that’s the bluish star thing

Right there, almost round-shaped

Blue right not just bright like any other star

Gets at night, blue like planet-like

And almost shaped like

A planet, but to be honest with you

I haven’t seen that baby

In that sky

For a while.

“That job’s alright,” he said. “I stand here

On that highway, wave to those cars

As they pass me, eat my crackers

When I please, take my time

To think, look up

At the moon, listen

To my music.”

Jim Beam tshirt exists and Ramones do too

And a fat blond boy wearing a shirt

That says BRITNEY SPEARS with a blond child on his shoulders

And everyone around here’s got a pizza box

To carry. I love that wedding speech you wrote

For Sara and Chris.

When I was fourteen.

When I had that ethylic coma

My mom called me at the hospital

And said, “This part of your life, alcoholism

I mean, this is all

Your father’s

Fault, not mine. You might want to give him a phone call

So you guys can talk about it.” I didn’t do that because I feel shy on the phone

And also love alcohol but some years later I visited my dad

And we discussed my pathological love for hard liquor one night

And had a good laugh.

That summer my dad decided to teach me

The rudiments

Of Russian tact.

What is the path,

I asked

There is no way.

There is no destination

There is no path

There is no destination,

Because there is no path

I laid half-dressed on Jeremy’s bed in the morning

While the others were getting ready to leave

And masturbated over the noise of milk being poured

Into glasses, and lumps of MDMA gathered from book covers

And mirrors and plates and placed in plastic satchels

Next to the left-over weed, or in the hollow of a small folded cones

Of paper sheet. My favorite story about Jeremy goes

As follow: one night Jeremy had brought back home a girl

From the Rex Club, and he was on his way to her pants when he realized

He needed to fart real bad, so he excused himself and left her on the bed

And rushed to the bathroom where he farted so hard

He actually crapped his pants. When he returned to the bedroom

After having regained a semblance of private hygiene the girl

Had fallen asleep. To hit on girls in clubs

After the few mandatory dance movements

Jeremy would bend over and whisper in their ear,

“I want to lick your vagina. Could you please go

And clean it?” Once we were in his bed taking cocaine and he said

Purdey, I bought this enema yesterday. Why don’t you go and use it

To clean the inside of your vulvae, so after that perhaps

I might eat you out?

I decided it was time for a short lecture

On female anatomy. Jeremy, I said, the pussy

Isn’t what you think. Let’s put it this way: how would you like it

If someone asked you to go clean your prostate

Before they sucked your dick?

That didn’t seem to make much sense to him.

You are dirty, he said. Nevermind. Let’s hug instead.

We did and Marie Vié cried all day on the sofa while we tried to sleep because she thought

We were fucking. Trakl pissed on his sister’s legs and you pissed in my cupped hands

When I lived in Paris the first year I lived above the peripheric on the top floor

Of a student building, and the sky from my window looked like a white rose plucked away

From the sea

German people love

Intimacy. You can see them prowling around town

In Berlin, amorously clinging to their huge pack of t.p.

As they greet one another with it

In passing. Maya was once buying a sandwich with a native and she asked him if he minded

She took a bit of his. “Why would I mind if you eat my sandwich?

I was just eating your hairy pussy

This morning!” he exclaimed congenially

And upon hearing this piece of Germanic wisdom

Everyone in the bakery turned and

Smiled at them and nodded

Approvingly.

In Pink Narcissus

There’s a beautiful public urinatory scene

In which tough guys in leather pants dreamily finger their fat penises

As if petting the soft pink cushiony wing

In the palm of the paws of an hare

Before fucking each other

Against the tiled white wall, or down on the floor

Against the hard white floor.

THE FIRST ROOM HAD PEE AND HAIR ON THE TOILET

Is a good title for something

And the Venetian ladies owe their notoriously strawberry blond heads

To their habit of pissing

Onto each other’s hair.

Once Purdey passed out drunk

And was awoken in an stranger’s bed

By the warmth of a pee rivulet streaming down his leg

And he just got dressed

And left.

Before I got the ROSEBUD code in the Sims and had infinite money

And could start developing more sophisticated schemes

I used to torture them by building a small, comfy room

That I let them enjoy to their leisure

For a little while. I waited a little

Till they got used to it. I waited till they enjoyed

The comfort, the nice walls and all

Then I would put the game on pause

And replace all the items of furniture

By the cheapest toilets.

And then I would remove all the doors

And unfreeze the game

And see the Sim’s dumb face turn grey

As he found himself surrounded by toilet seats

Circling him like a herd of hyenas

Then I would force him to take a pee in each of them

Till he couldn’t take it anymore

And his floating crystal-spirit

Above his head

Went red. All my efforts were for

That particular instant

When the Sim would cradle his head in his hands

In dismay, then raise his arms up to the sky

I had created, and beg me

For mercy.

On our way home from the Curry Donut

We walked down the frostbitten highway, and the cars were all sort

Of flowerbuds flying around

In winter, only

Larger, and my toes were frozen, and across the bridge

Was the space tunnel, through which we walked and walked towards Earth

Without ever reaching it.

This is Christmas

In the grass of the frontyards gleam at night

The inflated nutcrackers, and the plastic-wired reindeers

At Christmas the moon becomes this desiccated rainbow biscuit

Crumbling upon the suburbs its colorfully lit dust

Which by the light of day reverses

Into the fossils of old lantern small and

Forgotten. “The story tells us that she would be buried at the foot

Of an oak tree’’ Here is hatched meat, to which pepper grains had been added

They raised different kinds of cows here in the nomad’s

Domain, where they dwelled

In the winter with the mountains pits

Beaten by the wind, where they slept with their goats’s head

Wrapped up in colorful scarves on their laps like eggs rolling softly

Down the pastel moss of a spring prairie. In Ano Bisectivo

A plump Mexican lady cleans with a long-handled brush

The plate from which she eats her daily dish

Of canned beans, then sits at her window and silently jerks off

To the sight of her neighbors fucking.

Jonty dreamed he was cumming in the sea in a dream

And Purdey dreamt of whales while fucking us in our sleep.

Last summer in Maya’s bed I ate half a bottle of valeriane root pills

As I tried to fight the insomnia generated by Aurélie’s french bulldog

Who had chosen me as his mate and tried to hump my face

With his rosehip-colored penis

In my sleep. That morning I dreamt I was the sea

And the sea was dubbing its feelings for me

So I could feel what I the sea felt while I read what the sea

Was feeling. It was the most beautiful thing I ever felt in my whole existence

Apart from the night Purdey and I met and after five minutes of kissing

Headed straight to the female bathroom of the club where we were

To have anal sex.

Aurélie’s bulldog was called

Moody;

The goddess Cybele would bathe

In the river, calling for rain in the fields and fertility

While the Romans, watching strange thrillers about shame and buildings

On videotapes, laughed themselves to sleep.

I would like to make a movie in homage

To the hyenas’ hunting techniques, where a man eating a sandwich is chased by another man

Laughing at him till the first man finally

Climbs up a tree, and drops his sandwich down the tree

So that the laughing man stops

Laughing at him.

I got Tim’s roommates so drunk

They agreed to have a fivesome with us

And Tim got out the old speed pills he’d kept hidden for a decade

In the hollowed-out kernel of a card game

And I fell asleep and dreamt I was running

Like dogs run in dreams.

We just passed a literary brasserie, a medical club and two billboards

With mexican skulls, and of course

A Modigliani, probably forged

And now we’re taking in the not quite finger put-on able

Of this vague Ballardian town

I fell asleep with our cock still hard in my mouth

And when I awoke it had snowed

For the first time. I dreamt I was sucking us for forty-eight minutes till we came

And I remember thinking in the dream as I felt dreamsperm

Glide down my dreamthroat, “I must really love sucking your cock

That I would dream about it.”

The air was completely still, and in the air when we passed

Were murals made of smells in the sky. The sky smelled just like my dad’s car

Which has a Taco Bell scent forever embedded

In its seats. My dad adores Taco Bell; when I was a kid

I used to fall asleep in his car

And wake at the drive-ins

To the smell of the hot taco dough mingling

With the extra sour-cream.

I really love that poem you wrote two summers ago

The one that ends with Abraham Lincoln died of AIDS

And has “Place around me the nettles” and “I cannot kill. I cannot make love.”

Somewhere in it.

I am now sitting on the dirty cushion

At Maya’s, and in my eyes swirl the forms

Of painting tubes and cups of clay turning

On a pottery machine, while the hare’s hair in which the brush has been chisels

Lazily decorates those cups and plates with pale aquarelles - they call it ‘photophores’

And further on in the tv’s market there are magic tricks sold between 5

And 20 dollars each. It has gotten warmer now that the relics of our wine

Are subduing the blood in our buttcheeks, the blood in our cheekbones, turning our body

Into something smoother than it was

A moment ago, when we left the hard sofa which is held upright

By an atlas on one side and a pile of fat woodshards

In the other, to sit on the ground. I too plucked some clearness from the land

And held it with my fingers, and lifted it to my eyes, with the serene sky up high

And tall trees crouching together

Like brothers. We had dinner at that Vietnamese place where the bathroom

Is always flooded, then whiskey at the Follies

This was today and now is ended, now the dirty leaf, the cushion,

The eagle filmed flying above cliffs, little electricity stains like shiny pebbles dancing

At the fingertips of a drunk lover laid down in bed

By a strange hand. There are cypresses and a moon

Above it, people beating large slices of beef while watching

Unsolved mysteries shows on tv, wooden urns filled to the brim

With cherry brandy, in which the carcasses of small birds are preserved

And cherished and rinsed. A long filandrous whiff of pale black hair

Melancholically tumbleweeding on the doorseal of a hair salon which reads

FOR BLACK LADY ONLY. All I want to do is drink whiskey and listen to music

And daydream about your balls softly springing

Against my lips. This is the beginning of a painting, a piece of sculpture

Or poem, or monument, and all of wood and long blond hair

On a teenage nape grazing the slug-white hand

In which a SUGARLIGHT packet is lolling (HEY SISTA HOW ARE YOU

HOW ‘BOUT GETTIN YUR NAILS PAINTED TODAY?) I don’t have money I said

As I walked past the nail boutique reading Kafka’s letters to his father

I don’t have money I said to the old Indian man in fluorescent orange pants

Who wanted me to buy one of the roasted corn sticks he was busy re-assembling

On the little grill above his tin-can

Cauldron. Kafka was saying something about his uncle being late

At a wedding. I felt soft and moist because of the codeine pills

I had just taken. A little after midi on the street you will see

The iced-waters merchants in their azure-of-moss suits

Sprinkle salt at the surface of the roasted chicken wings that they eat

From pale green paper cornets. When I don’t have money I drink cheaper whiskey

I eat spaghettis with nothing in it and I stop taking the subway

And I stop going to parties, because

That costs money. We were playing Scrabble this morning

And our mom said, “I’m not sure the word “Jew”

Is accepted by the game. Isn’t it slang?” I saw Chinese ideograms tattooed in blue

On the left side of the nape of a kid complaining

About ‘beggars and druggies,’ black mom with almost shaved

Yellowish head like the lily and rosebuds portion of a glade

Holding in her arms a baby boy who was himself holding

A McDonald’s satchel from which he fished out fries

One by one. There was a time when God got pissed

At Adam and Eve, and yet that same day he still gave them coats

That looked great on them. When you’re away I type your name in palm-colored eggs

I write your name in morning mist on my window when I awake, and with my spoon

At the surface of my food just like I did when I was ten and wanted someone to fall madly

In love with me. Crawling boy printed on a mug

A heart-shaped puzzle of a smiling black couple,

The print of an angel showing his genitals to a man

Chiseled in the wallpaper, TACO AFRO COIFFURE, greenish yellow

And dusk green clouds, more corn roasting above copper marmites

In the old food carts. A tall black man is trying to convince passers-by

To purchase from him a pair of Nikes composed of two totally different models

For two different sizes of feet. I walked past a display of wigs, and each of them wore

The name of a woman : Anella, Mella, Rihanna, Jamie, Afro, Vanessa, Lace

Serena, Shakira, Sandra, Rihanna, Serena, Super, Maryam, Kris, Mango, Tracy,

Shakira, Marilyn, Jessica, Mango, N, Su-Elise, Maryam,

Laura. A shop called STRING sells underwears to the big sizes up to

NO MORE THAN 120 KILOGRAMS, the hail pearls falling faster

Then bumblebees, an Indian man is shaving the hair off his corn away

With his bare hands, and a black transvestite wearing black glasses

And a beige shawl a yellow polka dot jacket passes next to the kebab merchant,

Cradling a baguette. At the entrance of the Strasbourg Saint Denis subway we saw a display

Made of old cardboard boxes painted and pasted crowded with piles

Of bananas, peaches, melons, mangoes, avocadoes

And raspberries, which lokoked like a rainbow growing vivid and thick under the membrane

Of a video-game. An aging Asian business man touched his scalp, then lifted a shoe in the air

To inspect the heel, then replaced a pleat above the knee

Of his suit pants, then stretched a little the sleeve

Of his jacket; next to him a sign read PLEASE DONT SIT HERE!!!!!!!

!!!!!! THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING. A puddle of disemboweled cheap noodles

And kebab boxes vomited the cold crisps and skewered-veal swell of their entrails

Like a cascade of harmonious insults

Onto the pavement; a kid wrapped in a cloud sweater

Looked with impatience up to his dad

From his kid-automobile, so that the dad

Would push it. I always forget that Kafka was called Franz. Clouds of people

All drinking the same sort of iridescent iced blue-green

Cocktails. Lice love animals and Men all the same

Our dad can recite by heart one of his sonnets

Called “Piss On It.” I saw baby hands and famous people’s hands and feet

Sculpted in clay in a boutique, a hand was holding a genuine spoon

And another, a sculpted toothbrush; a collection of four hands of different sizes

And shapes had been placed on a promontory on which (SMALL FAMILY)

Was written. Russian mother and daughters all dressed the same

And holding hands; a Chinese girl eating a pasta salad out of a Tupperware

I saw an aging hunchback with two caddies full of soup cans

Who was spreading his crusts of bread equally between himself

And the pigeons. I drank Heineken beer while watching Maya ride a horse called Oniric

There were horses all over the place and young girls were rubbing their pussies against them As they rode full of laughter and mouthed music through the cold air

Foaming with dark green barley, and strawberry-silver mosquitoes trumps

The horses were called Uranus, Mirage, Vagabond, Ino

Pietro, Soleil, O’Beauty, Foxy, Junior, Oulahoop, Queeny, Napoleon

Spaghetti, Terminator, Veronie, Rivaldy, O’Levant, Understand

Kakao, Cayenne, Patchouli, Casanova, Neige, Shirley

Grisov, Oasis, Dandro, Wonka, Mimie, Quart, Ulysse,

Mascotte, Quismie, Tagada, Oscar, Kaki

Oupetue, Perlimpimpim, Rumeur, Nutz, Smarties,

Piter Pan, Queen, Romeo, Quimiac, Quito, Nice Girl, Lisa, Jovial

Katchina, Okapi, Sulfate, Pinkie, Sultan, Calm

Rodeo, Jump, Oliver, Junior again, Ullyana, Quaterback, Cetzacoal, Sunny

Ignacio, Roxanne, Olga, Adaggio, Igloo, Ona, Havanna, Ulynne

Tocatta, Starlight, Romeo

And Ulrich. “I feel perfectly at ease riding poneys, especially if they are

Of a grey color.” I opened my dad’s cupboards and all I found were cans upon cans

Of corned-beef. We ate the corned-beef directly from the can

And played with the 8 ball he had got me

For my birthday, and because it never gave good answers I could tell

The 8 ball was lying. I wrote this poem about it while we were peaking on acid

And the neighbors’ music spoke in Arabic and their tongues soon turned

Into the turquoise language

Of the reptiles. I became Bukowski while he bet on horses

A girl with orange hair walked up to me, and in that second she took to walk and sit

I loved her more than I ever loved

Anyone before. Purdey wrapped his arm around my head

And I sat with the orange-haired woman without a word in the wooden blue seats

And watched the horses laugh as they drank fresh water

From rust-green copper tanks. When my spirit screened that memory for me I cried

Because the love of my life has gone away, and I had been sad for so long

But then Purdey took my hands in his and I hallucinated

We were brushing each other’s hair, and I laid at rest against our chest

And gently stepped out

Of Charles Bukowski’s

Heart. Whenever my dad got some cash money

From teaching the cello or the piano to rich kids

We always did two things. The first thing was to spend half of that money

On the biggest burgers we could get at the Fat Burger

On Main Street. The second was to drive to an abandoned parking lot

Where we met with a tanned middle-aged guy with long blond hair

Who would exchange a few banalities with my dad

Before extracting a fat plastic pouch full of weed balls

Out of the trunk of his car. The weed was fragrant and veined with gold stains

And dark orange, and my dad declared this was the finest weed you could find

In California. The weed smell was comforting, and I liked to hang out around my dad

When he was smoking it. He would sit on his balcony all night

And tell me stories. One story was about how our cat Puccini

Had disappeared for a week, and so my dad went looking for him over the hills

And found him almost a mile down south hiding from the coyotes

In the hollow of a chestnut tree. Sometimes there was extra money left

So we would go to the supermarket late at night, and stroll blissfully along the isles

Mesmerized by all the beautiful shiny boxes that crept round the shelves

Like loving serpents mating with the neon lights and fucking the poptarts open

With their tongues crawling all the way up

To the translucid firmament. My favorite foods

Were cereals; Fruity Loops, Lucky Charms, Cinammon Crunch, which I could never get

In France because they’ve ve been taken off the market

Under the pretext that the amount of sugar in it made kids’ teeth

Fall straight out of their mouths. I also loved Scoobydoo canned soups, Ice-cream

Sandwiches, Big Red, and Macaroni & Cheese. When the summer was over

And I was back in Marseille, my dad would sometimes send me packages

With a bunch of my favorite cereals and sodas and canned soups

And that made me happy. Every time I visited him during school holidays

My dad would rent a Sega for me, and we ate frozen corndogs

While playing Beavis and Butthead

All day. My dad also bought me computer games like Rollercoaster Tycoon

Or Myst, and he patiently watched me play while drinking vodka mixed

With Powerade. When he moved into his new house he asked me what colors

I would like my new room

To be painted, and I said I wanted the room

To resemble the sky, and so he made his cocaine-addict girlfriend

Draw sunsoaked sanguine-orange clouds

All over the ceiling.

I love the smell of weed yet

I can’t smoke it, if I smoke weed

I would be thinking I am a little kitty that nobody likes in the house

The last verse of Horace’s 8th epode is SUCK IT

The red star is always Mars,

The glued-on blue stars

May be Jupiter, the season

Of April, or Saturn’s gardens

You are walking endlessly towards an anonymous, earth-shaped planet

Through a tunnel, with not a single light and no sun

At your back, because the sun is this thing that has blown up

Or gone away. The mixed tincture of dog hearts

Pulsing, treebark and powdered uppers

Burning, gingery sweat from boys’ armpits and fresh crepe dough

Slowly cooking, a street clown is pumping an endless balloon

For a young kid, the balloon the size and colour

Of our dick. I want to be buried

In my dragon’s outfit. People all still and looking in the same direction at something

I cannot see; a white-haired man in jeans is installing his small

MAGIC SHOW stand, displaying crystals

And card satchels, carefully storing his Marlboro red cigarettes

In a concealed pocket. I saw a stoned young hippy boy

Stopping everybody who entered the Kentucky Friend Chicken

To ask them for money, something to smoke,

Or to make love with him; a chubby Jewish kid with a wide burgundy velvet kippah

Roosted on his curly hair and interwoven fragrances of figs, beefstew,

Sweat and wet cornflakes came out of the tobacco shop

Holding two bright red

Lottery tickets. All of a sudden

Adam grew tired of coupling

With animals. He thought, I could be a river sleeping.

He thought, I could be a young girl’s foot numbed

By sitting on it. I saw a man

With wings of leaves, a white leather couch long

Like two dragons engaged in ass-to-ass sex abandoned

By a bench. ‘I always wanted to see a sunrise’, said the gothic kid who had been telling

His dream on the phone to a friend, ‘but I only ever see

The sun set. It doesn’t disappoints me, but I do wish I could see it

Rise sometimes.’ The smell of your dad’s snowed-on hallway

And the smell of my dad’s house after he stopped emptying his fridge

Are the same to me. If I stay, nothing will change. You’ll be my lover

I’ll sleep by the river, awake with the olives

{...} We were watching Gone Girl on my computer while eating a salad

And Ben Affleck said, “His majesty prefers

Not to be moistened.” I need a level

Of something tonight: superiority, sadness,

Satisfaction, whiskey cascading slowly down

My arteries

Is there a name for that feeling

Of unspeakable sadness and absolute loss of faith

When you miss some days of school

Because you have the flu or something (it’s especially worth if it happens

Before the summer vacation, when all the teachers are laid back

And the kids at ease exchange translucent marbles and dirt piles

And glued-on lilyspirited spits) and when you come back

Your best friend has a new best friend and her new best friend

Is the girl you both hate the most in the whole class

And so your pre-flu best friend still invites you

Over at her house sometimes, because her parents have said things

Like, We haven’t seen Purdey

For a while! Why don’t you invite her

For dinner tonight? and so she does but you can tell she didn’t feel like it

To begin with, and another time there is a pajama party at her place

And she invites you and her new best friend and they play Zoo Tycoon all evening

And you feel powerless, since you don’t know this game that well

And you laugh at all their jokes and they smallsmile at each other

Over your shoulders, with eyes that read “lame”

And none of them ever speak to you again

After the Summer holidays.

What is this name for the feeling which this lapse of time

Encompasses, this time and space when your absence

Accumulates in the universe and your lack of presence simulates

A tragedy, this space and time when only the others exist

And their actions and means are chaotic and meaningless and yet

Change the course of your faith in the most

Indolent way. Remember those blessed days when you jerked off

Under water in your grandparent’s bathtub to the smell

Of jasmine, and it felt so good to cum you believed

There were no vodkas or sweets or

Weeds, and you were the only

One sentient being

To give an orgasm to your hands

Which handed the universe to the sky

At that time. What is the name for that feeling

That feeling of terrible loss and grieve of companionship

When you get to school one fine morning and you realize you didn’t watch

The right movie on TV last night

Because you fell asleep, or you were reading the same book

For the third time, or taking a bath while masturbating or playing Mastermind

With your mom’s heroin-addict boyfriend Hervé

And everyone in History classes is making funny voices

And quotes lines that they find pertinent

And you cannot understand them or

Participate, and you feel like that chasm between those who eat at school

And those who go back home

At lunch break.

Remember that night I took too many Ambiens and dreamt I had

Two bottles of whiskey, one filled with water

For you to drink, and one filled with whiskey

For me to get drunk on it, and in the dream you kept on pouring

The water into my cup instead

Of the whiskey.

We ate everything who slept around the earth

With our shark-tooth perfumed teeth

And left all around the earth the skulls of all that was alive

And dreaming

At that time days passed through me

And I became a child

But still couldn’t name this reversed anal-stage

When a mirror stared into my asshole and I got to see nothing in between

The moonslit and my hands and the tufted wings of my enemies

But the walls of my bedrooms laid across my face

Like a shawl caught in the treetops. Day passed and I became a child still

And I grew not fast enough to live and not young enough to kill

And so Mélanie the daughter of the shoemaker

Invited me to spend the rest of the summer holidays in Antibes by the sea

Where her mom lived. Her mom made me eat ostrich steaks

And swore it was beef. Her mom was angry at us

Because we refused to take deepsea-diving lessons along with all the daughters

Of the all the rich ladies she had met in the Spring at the salon

Where she got her toenails painted and the crank of her ass waxed

With pure honey strips and shaved

With mint-coated blades. Mélanie forced me to watch the Sixth Sense

Before bed. Her cousin Alex came to visit one week-end

And we had a white night together, I and his cousin the daughter of the shoe maker

Lying down on the ground

On each side of him. I nebulously grazed Mélanie’s cousin’s crotch

Through his jeans, and that was the very first time I ever felt a cock

Growing, and I felt the disappointed indignation of a fervent christian

In front of a science documentary about how Jesus didn’t look at all

Like this, pale pastel lips and laundry blue eyes and long golden

Locks of hair, but was rather tanned and brunette with a large nose

And sharp features. His jeans were deep black and we kissed mouth-closed

On the lips for hours and hours and when his cousin fell asleep Alex took my hand

And murmured into my ears, “You look so beautiful

In the dark.”

Airplanes make me think about anyone I ever met

There were three suns in the scenery

The gothic kid I met in the train to Marseilles

Had dreamnt about: one was the moon, the big white one,

Ours, the real one, the one in the middle

And the red one was the reflection of the sun on the sea

Into the sky. Fuck the sky

Whose clouds are shot by Nimrod

With arrows dipped in oxen blood. Fuck the rain

Dissolving the first snow I’ve seen

In ten years. Fuck arsenicked-up rice, fuck the free-range farms

Where chickens gets electrocuted by the fences all day, and fuck the farms

Of a thousand cows, where cows’s tits are sucked ceaslessly by machines

Fuck the blue laws, preventing us from buying whiskey

On Sundays. Fuck birds covered in grease, fuck anything covered in grease

Fuck the glued together

Wings, fuck the mercury level

Of the sea, fuck the ocean, and fuck anything

With petroleum on it. Fuck ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY,

Fuck ROAD MAY BE ICY, fuck people who screams

‘Fuck you’ to us from their cars

Because we are walking

Fuck the cars, fuck gas-stations,

Fuck gasoline.

Do you remember the dream you had this summer

When you were sleeping at Metka’s after the long car ride all the way from Avignon

To Slovenia? In that dream you were back

In Metelkova, where you had been walking as you looked for a beer

The previous night, and you walked past the same homeless man

That you had passed then, and he asked you to help him out, which you normally

Don’t do, and you didn’t in the true past, in true past you only said, [I will

But not today], yet in the dream version, you also said this, but as you said it you began

To approach him. He was wearing a blue winter rain coat, and a wool hat and a scrubby

Beard of browns and reds, his face was looking down, you stood

In front of him, you took him by the shoulder

And looked him in the eyes and said,

Listen, look at me, this is all a dream.

One day you’ll awake at the foot of a tree, having rested well.

You’ll feel a warm feeling on the side of your cheek

Like your mother had been cradling your head in her lap.

There will be a song on your lips and the song on your lips is the one

That she had been able to sing

When she was free.

Stars are the kernel of overripe apricots spat out

By Olympus’s pets. The sky is Zeus’s seraglio, and each star is a lover he fingers

Till they pass out; this is why there is never a single star left in the sky

When morning comes around. I came across the sky once in a club called the Melkweg

In Amsterdam, and when the ecstasy pill popped open in my stomach stars came crawling

Out of my fingertips. If stars were smaller and made edible

And rolling in a palm like ice-scented dice in front of my mouth

I would swallow them whole just like little girls in my grandma’s basketball team

Swallowed eggyolks raw in the morning

I would let the sky glide down my throat like rolled-up wrists

Of chrysalis

I would make clouds emulate the taste of my palate and sunrays twin with my cheeks

I would let moonbeams bewitch my spit and seas enchant my teeth before I shit out

The galaxies. If I close my eyes and hold my face up to the sky

The stars are black, blue, cobalt, indigo,

The sky around them is a liquid orange, and ice-cream colored ghosts float

At the surface, and these are the clouds and they are scarlet, cinnabar, lake,

Lilac, bronze, banana, red

The stars tumbled down Shiva’s foot when she fucked the sky so hard

Her ankle-bracelet exploded. In some distant palace where the sky swung from the ceilings

Like bright azulean chandeliers

Children fell asleep counting stars

Instead of sheep. When a shepherd looks up to the heavens on his midnight promenade

The stars blush with lust and pride and some of them blush so hard

The fire in their heart burns them to ashes

Come morning. When I jerked us off to sleep under the blanket

That came wrapped up in a crystalline plastic coffin

In the plane from Barcelona to America

The stars flowered like green coconuts cracking open

And a stewardess brought us chicken dinners

And chocolate pudding. If an elephant yawns at the stars

Wet lands in the morning. If he falls asleep under the constellation of Aries

Fear no rain before Spring. In the middle of the stars are flames, blood,

Beasts, wars, gardens, oceans, spines, cocoons, spruces,

Jewels, spices, prunes, laughter, cities, serenades

Movies, birdseeds, families, colors, pussies

And flowers spread opened like the legs

Of a raindeer running; perfumes, candles, synagogues, fish

Axiomes, castles, ice, huntsmen, and emerald vessels wrecked

By remote hands; cyclops, glass gods, drugs, entrails

Oxens, lovers, irises, hurricanes, and fruit-trees basking

In soda-gold sunsets; whiskey, trolleys, trolls,

Rains, assassins, crushed berries and brains

And light frost creeping across the melon fields

Like a hair

And Noah wept when the sun

Slided off the frame.

I passed out in the taxi

And when we reached our building in the Chinese district

Lio Wu tugged at my skirt

To wake me up

I stepped out of the car and snow was falling softly

The snow on the ground looked edible and softer still

Then the one falling, and I was so hungry

So I knelt in the snow and plucked some of it with my fingers, and brought it

To my mouth,

Snow melted under my tongue and the cold air smelled like crushed codeine

And the world’s symmetry tripped against the stretched-out branches

Of the snow-suckled lemontrees, and I bent over and threw up

All the whiskey.

Roses opened like eyes in the azure field

The legend says that there once was a king

Who was dying, and that king wished to give the throne

Of his kingdom to the daughter of his

Who loved him the most.‘I love you as much as salt’, said the youngest.

When he heard that the king got very upset

And sent her away. The daughter cried bitterly for 39 days

And 39 nights, and on the 40th night of the 40th day

The king’s cook, seeing that her food had once more been returned to the kitchen

Untouched, decided to make the king acknowledge

The unfairness of his judgment.

And so the king’s cook started serving the king

Solely non-salted food. And so the king,

Seeing the love of his youngest

Was the greatest of all, had her brought to him

And crowned her on the spot.

I read this fable in a French almanach from 1897

As part of an article about the benefit of salt

This evening, and in the tale the king

Had three daughters, but how the other daughters expressed their love

The story-teller did not say. I love you as much as arms and legs and balls,

Said the eldest. The king got very upset when he heard that

And sent her away. The daughter cried bitterly for 39 days

And 39 nights, and on the 40th night of the 40th day

The king’s cook, seeing that her food had once more been returned to the kitchen

Untouched, decided to make the king acknowledge

The unfairness of his judgment.

And so the king’s cook started removing the king’s arms and legs

And balls. And so the king had her eldest brought to him

And crowned on the spot.

My tired is so tired, all I want to do is enshrine you

In New-York last winter Purdey and Dan took fake LSD at Cory’s

And as they started tripping and a figure cloaked in fine garments

Walked in, holding a mauve velvet satchel in which light coins rang like rains

Then Dan started to look at Cory’s cat and that cat

Was evil, Dan could tell right away. That cat

Was a hateful cat. A shape-shifter cat. That cat was being a bird

Like a bird of prey, like one of these winged cats

In a Bosh painting. On morphine I laid in the earth under the tree

Where the universe began and the earth

Was transparent so I looked up through the earth

Into the darkness and watched all night the world being made

And it was night there and there was no sleep

And when the morphine wore out it was morning

And a young girl with a red braid turned

Her back on me. She was walking through the earth’s tunnel and her face was a wave

And she looked from behind exactly like I did

The day my dad sprayed my hair

In the Nevada desert.

When I was a kid

I was a fatty. Sometime in the middle of the night

I would wake my grandmother up so she would make me a steack and cheese panini

And she never complained about being awoken because she’s Italian and her greatest pride

Is the myth that she never sleeps. “Grandma, you’re sleeping?,” I would ask

Gently tugging at her nightdress when she laid in bed at 3 o’clock in the morning

And she would rise hastily from her bed and say,

“Of course not.” My heroin-addict stepfather Caratini used to wake up every night

To eat a full-course meal before going back to sleep

But he never admitted it. In the morning when my mom asked “Hervé, what happened

To that ham?” he would say, I don’t know. I must have been

Sleepwalking again. Once he tried to get off drugs

And so he had fevers for a week before he started shooting again

And when I asked what was wrong with him he said there was this scorpio

Nestled in the film roll he had to screen the previous evening

And the scorpio didn’t like to be disturbed in his sleep by Caratini

So it bit him. I didn’t realized the whole scorpio story was a scam till last year

When you pointed out to me that film rolls aren’t notorious for being scorpio’s natural

Habitat. The frost is softer than haschish flowers spilled upon a skyscraper

This morning, the sky looks handsome around your neck, fossils in a halo glow

Like snow arrows at your feet, and God’s light in the glassy glade grows green for the deer

To dip their heads in. Sad hills frolicked in silence in the tree-white distance

We drank elderberry seeds crushed in dark jugs of rum

And dawn dwindled above our heads like washed out blue-jeans

Drying in the sun. When I jerk off in the morning I stare into our Eraserhead poster

There’s the coyote tail Cody has made into a scarf oscillating like stars on a keychain

By Jack Nance’s head, your doll hands with glass blue eyes glued in their palms

Mounted on a shoelace, and the necklace made of bones of the raindeer

John Eicher killed. There’s a picture of two or three grasshoppers peasibly resting

On wheat blades with the caption “GOD SENT TERRIBLE PLAGUES UPON THE LAND,”

and the portrait of Vallejo frowning that looks like a bad picture of Pessoa

Framed on our desk. I saw a wild cat staring with severe eyes at hills of lizard green sand

And Paul Bowles describes the smell of the sea as “bloodlike” in the city

Where Mokhtar lived

And the world is young again and disgorged whole

Into my head. In your head this morning boys were climbing up a tree

The tree-trunk was cool and the boys’ hands

Were sweaty, feet a little slimy in the shoes because of the long walk

To the tree, shirts pulled away from the chest so that the sweat would dry

Quickly. Leaves flutters, there’s a little breeze, squirrel tap-tapping eggcorns

Against the treebark where the smallest insects in the summer

Build their nest. Yesterday we gave your dad a glass of Bushmill whiskey and he sat

Content like a khalif on the couch with the Scottish terrier on his lap

And his fat girlfriend crocheting by his side and felt truly alive

For the very first time

In his life.

I knew this girl, Roxanne, who plunged her hands in a snowbed

Then plunged them in a hot water cascade

And immediately lost all her ability

To feel. There were some nights when I would leave from a club still drunk

And walk around the city feeling so light my spirit leaped across the trees and the houses

And licked the gleams off the lampposts and bounced against the sky

And the shops and the whores all dressed in flowers who twinned

Twigs to their brows as I swirled past them clothed in clouds and white rum vapors

And I kissed the night birds and the stray dogs at the mouth

And I felt my body floating above the city

As if a herd of chatty angels frotting their mandibules together

Mounted my feet. It was snowing that night and you took a pill

And walked around Iowa City listening to Bright Tomorrow on repeat

Till the snow crystallized into translucent rose roots in your heart

And the streets became pale canals where the swans with the diamond eyes glided

Over the stars, and twilit palms spilled frost leaves and sky-gilded glares

Into Purdey’s hair. I wrote this poem in a house and the sky outside was so white

‘I’m like a mushroom, that’s my curse’

Thought the sky

And I felt sad.

24th of January, 2015,

Glued stamps in the evening,

Castles, torture-chambers –

Very interesting.

I was sitting on a bench facing people

I’ve never met, and other people where sitting on a bench

Next to me, and we were waiting to go on stage

And perform our songs, and I looked into someone’s face

And told them, Beauty is the glitter round the eyes of a face

Fallen asleep. Beauty isn’t in the beauty of that face; that face

Is a mirror. Only the ornament is real. Beauty is the glitter

That mutates on the face. Beauty is the face that can be transformed

By the hand at will.

Geese flew above our house cackling like schoolgirls on a field trip

I awoke and wrote this poem from a dream I remembered upon waking

I wrote this poem as I laced vodka with homemade caramel before my clarinet lessons

I wrote this poem when I was six years-old and I couldn’t sleep

Because of that book my mom had had made for me

In that book it was discovered that I came from another galaxy

So I went to space and travelled the universe jumping from one planet to the next

Till I found my real family. Their hearts were blue and festooned with stars

They showed me the earth down below where my bad blood laid buried

Saturn’s rings made my head spin and I puked on them

I saw from the window of my bedroom the sun, moon and galaxies bowing to me

I saw from the window above the kitchen sink animals and flowers creeping

Through moonbeams, and star crops spread the sky opened like crushed vanilla beans

I awoke finding I had slept and cried because I missed my real mother in outer-space

I wrote this poem about Trakl while drinking Coors Light out of the can on your sister’s bed

I wrote this poem drinking warm milk with honey on an airplane to Paris

I don’t want to go live on another planet, I cried. I don’t want another family.

This is a work of fiction, said my mom. I thought you would like it.

Someone put a little stone in your mouth and you sucked on it

Like I suck on dates and your cock calm as rains clinged to my hand

When I dreamnt Beckett was sucking on all the stones that the sea had ever polished

I was drinking snow down on my knees when I wrote this

I wrote this poem taking the other half of the adderall pill at the library by the prairie

Where the sun drips ripe swastikas of light upon the amber-green flesh of the melons

I wrote this poem after we fucked our ass on a dildo for the first time

I wrote this poem high on 4FA while spying on the handsome priest

I wrote this poem one morning on my balcony towering over the trashbins in Marseilles

I wrote this poem taking codeine on a night-train I took in Berlin

I wanted to write this poem about werewolves, because I feel story for them

I wrote this poem while I fed peach kernels to the seagulls on the beach

I wrote this poem while jerking off to the thought of violent deaths

On my mother’s bed while she slept and you were in New Mexico on mushrooms

And you craddled in your hands the head

Of a little lamb. I wish I wrote the book of Jon

And I wish I wrote The Morning Of The Poem

I wish I was Nijinsky when he said,

“I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created

By God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands

God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good

And not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I *am* flesh, I am not descended

From flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God.”

When Purdey reads a novel he feels like a beast before Eden

The first cure we had in Paris was a tincture of Grants whiskey, strawberry

CandyUp’ milk, Perrier, tomatoe juice, mixed

Fruit juice, and water from the tab.

My dad ends all his correspondence by

“Was it Sophocles who always told the truth

On Fridays?” It’s almost Friday

Today, and I slept in a manger, just as the angels

Said. Every morning at 7

Our mother pours boiled water onto the larger birdbath

To melt the ice that has formed there

During the night. In the other ones

The ice is softer; this soft ice she breaks down into small flakes

With her spike. When the birdbaths are all filled with soft, warm

Water, she sprinkles seeds over the garden, and here they come!, the sparrow

And the cardinal and the one with a long black needle-like beak

And dark blue feathers round the neck

Whose name we always forget, flying down from their hiding places

In the clouds, peck peck pecking at the snow among the frolicks of the squirrels

And the timid tehp tehp tehp tehp of the mice’s feet

Echoing against iced weeds.

In Old Forges Town

We had Blue Moon beers, and a pizza

We were on our way to visit Gilles in Santa Monica

In the mountains where he lives in the summer months

Of the year. Gilles is my godfather

As well as my uncle. He is a renown violin player who lives in the country by a field

Where mean goats roam free, and he knows how to make anything

From a pencil to a table dances in equilibrium

On the tip of his nose. When the Berlin wall fell, Gilles jumped on a plane

So he could be there to play the violin

While it was happening. Another time he went to Tibet and visited the Dalai-Lama

And played songs for him. The day we visited Gilles

My dad was driving, and his girlfriend Laura was sitting

In the front with him. I was in the backseat with my mom, and one of her tooth

Was hurting. Laura’s throat hurt from taking too much cocaine

The previous night, and she kept on complaining, and at some point my mom

Said something caustic about it, and thereafter she and Laura

Started arguing. My dad took Laura’s side, and I could tell

That made my mom sad. We arrived at Gilles and he and Laura played the violin

Together for a while, and my dad laid on a couch and smoked weed, and my mom and I Played with the goats and fed them heather, tangerine peels and lilies

Through the wired fence that separated Gille’s land

From the goat field. The black goats preferred the flowers over the heather

So I gave them little clusters of lilacs and dandelions’s heads and fennugrec

And violets, and they fumble with their muzzles through my fingers and my palms

To lick off the last petals. Then we all got into my dad’s car

And drove down to the beach, and I sat on Gille’s knees in the backseat

For the short trip. I touched the sea with my algee-eyes and the sky

With my eyelids, the air quivered with wilting waves and the cries of the seagulls

Quarrelling over peach kernels, the sun sang, white fish and crabs ran

Over the sand and my mom was quiet

Because of her toothache. My dad and his girlfriend walked back to the car

To snort some cocaine, and I played sand burgers with Gilles

Until late in the evening