listen to AMONG THE TREES
I wanted to finish it
But I died
To go on listening...
I wanted to finish
The ‘makeshift forest of any old leaves
Sheltering soldiers so beautiful to look at
They filled it with peace’
But I died
In the arms of the Brotherhood
In the arms of the past from which water
Was a bubble of laughter breaking in mouths
filled with clay
A future as if
Dreams its dreams as if
Ghosts were radios in the trees
Delicious with fatigue
Where presence is only in the word
Funereal
In a double mirror
Something proffered in a vapor
You’ve come for—
The thought of coming
Between ink & blood
Venereal
On a pallet laden with limbs & leaves
Leaves its mark
Lush in a brief of dying
So beautiful in its carving
Its craving
In trickster mirror
Where words fly through their wings
Over bodies
Awaiting applause
In miasma’s eternal dominion
Clearing the trees, bones, debris
In order
To scrape the sky yet keep her reward
With eyes trained, petitioning
For sound limbs, a soft cushion
Percht to weep in frantic union
The Brotherhood cannot bear
The edifice of state
Wilting in the lap
Spilling secrets on the ground
Between the graves
Of unfailing idealism
With arms or without arms
With a cause or a saving grace
So beautiful
Their fragility their tendresse.
What cornflower
What word negotiates maps
The living
With smooth stones to suck upon
All you’ve dreamed of
In the caress of a horny hand
Infinite emotions the composition
Of the me of them among the trees
Unmoving...
We the mossy floor of love
In forests where no one is vulgar
Where nothing expresses us
Beyond death
Nor in life can you see touch
We dust of white frost on human faggots
C’est tout—
A card game under the stars
In panto
Death, the fucking copout
But we mean nothing by that
That wants no meaning
Permitted as I am
To complain my weakness with words
A radio is all the meaning you can talk back to
Its chatter & hum exits
These entrances to ghostly sidelines
Of a long-drawn-out procession in need of
blood in need of commitment in need of youth
that wants no meaning...
Just an image. A symbol. A screwy something
waving in the breeze.
Over his covered body
But for his bloodied face
The boys’ palms were cupped to receive him;
He was playing at his family farm
When the air struck—
It was not thunder but a state of terror.
This is grace
But saves no one no thing
Only a will to power
Just an image
In a radiant afterlife
Sweet with desire that no one can fulfill
We pose
Our best to know we exist
To create a memory of ourselves
Condemned to the history we make
We dream with our feet on the ground
In a play of love & death in the lower case
But the poet was wrong—
There is only I
Where everything begins
Love a figment surging
Knows there’s not much else to say
Says everything’s already said
Over & over again does
One more yet unspoken phrase
Make a difference—
Do vampire priests...
Forgive me, for I am distracted
By world
Of ovens & mummies
Come up like breakfast
In a homeland I cannot remember
O absolute enemy
Closing itself off
In a mist of gas & dust
Clamoring for stars
Babies with stupid names
Dogs & cats amok
In parking lots of tears
This Godtalk. This sandbox
Where I lay dying
Among faces I cannot touch
Where’s no weight
Of anything real but what I
Can create in the me of them
Among the trees
A composition in moisture
Or even smoke...
Where I am a gesture inside you
Scratching at some kind of recognition
Reeking with radiance
In a pre-revolutionary dawn
In the humming wide open spaces
In vistas of insidious make-believe
All of it, along with the ants
At the burnt edge
Invisible amidst the silt of words.
‘What in the end is not vain?’
To dwell on beauty
Yet incapable of defining the perverse
The obscene thing it is
Teetering between life & death
Between nostalgia & violence
Rites of passage
On legs without bodies
Where in the congealing blood
Lies all thought
All revolt, all value.