A creature of whatever trouble
      Is cartilage and mischief,
      Trimmed in skin and the smile’s lie
      That all shall be kinship ‘til kinship dies.
5     A creature of whichever wish
      Is eyelashes and ifs,
      Entrancing Time in evening’s dish
      To coddle dear dreams ‘til sun comes undone.
      O creature picked of which and what,
10    All elbows and ears,
      Take of this trouble its whatever worth
      And wish the wisher kin until
      His wish full is of death and earth.

      Whose bones I break bear the ash 
      Breath first tongued in soot; 
      Whose back I bare endures the lash 
      Of days as quick as coals. 
5     Whose tongue I suck between two gasps 
      Of bare babe's cry and skull's knobbed crack 
      Vowels a violent void that snaps 
      Babe, grave and groin in our kisses' black. 
      Whose wormy, wasted soul I own 
10    Filched infinity from moldy bloods; 
      Animal and man I dug for sup 
      And killing and kissing gave forth God.

      Beauty in the eye is immaterial,
      The frayed edges of an ancient curtain,
      Old swaying silks chisel-cut in stone,
      Phidias’ fingers in a remembered breeze,
5     Or slender toes in overgrown summer grass.
      Feet and heart go spasmodically fast
      In the uncut grass at discovery’s edge;
      Lips once pinked to touch another’s,
      Brittle as glass, yellowed of youth,
10    Twenty-two centuries of dumb longing undone,
      Til time becomes only the memory of youth,
      Chipped blasphemy of a once living form.
      Only her kiss’ caress can guess this truth.
      Dan Weeks & Gregg Glory

      When man-draped blood dripped
      Myself down from heaven with a dropping cry
      Spilling this body from pained hip’s lips
      Crying life, life to live, life alive,
5     Did any other come dumb a-tumble,
      Riding my shoulders, a capable wonder?
      And roaring unlovely all lonely’s lessons,
      A dripping waxwork with a burning wick,
      My bone-alone prayers wrung, sung in session
10    Where echoes creep cold to double and mock:
      Is it I alone who lives, who dies,
      Unlovely in my body’s sack of lies?
      Upright in the everywhere-nowhere now
      With something-nothing thrown on shoulder and brow,
15    And naked if I only knew how,
      The I behind I unfurls a brown shroud
      Dote-silent now as twice aloud-loud,
      Incapable as a cloud.

      All's quiet, except the silence;
      As at the fireplace I lean,
      Military slacks
      Redden against my shins.
5     The invasion I await
      With virgin courage
      Is that of the baton a-tilt,
      The soldier's white glove'--
      Gilt or stripped
10    It waits to strike--not Teutons
      But some ancillary menace,
      Some acquiescence one desires.
      Beat back this wild nettle:
      Sympathy before battle.
15    Mallarme

      Daylong in the waist-high weeds and ivies
      I ate the wonderfully buttery summer’s bread,
      And bright as tears on sleeves I played  and frisked
      And forgot the wolf in the clock.
5     And windy summer ran out of the morning
      And the stag-breasted dew each dawned day
      Rode running and riotous from the cool of the moon
      Unwound from the darks of mouse and fox.
      Then the others, the pummellers
10    Came unashamed with their wronging love,
      Sham-battering hands and scolding mouths
      And gave away anger for their deepest, hurt truth;
      With red apple hands, with bones twice broken,
      They strode hero-headed over the blown-down time
15    Over the greeny edge of the faraway weather,
      Topping sun and cloud of the tumbledown town.
      Deep in the heartwood home, and hunched and knotted,
      As full of fears as a tit-mouse’s shivers
      I kept the woods home that kept me hid
20    In the bone-lonely branches of my bloodred ribs.
      And dawn in its trial of summer survival
      Turned red in the remembered air,
      And summer sun crept crabwise until it was moon,
      And I heard the sun’s hours ride down to their doom.
25    But oh the woods were golden in their burning				
      Beyond the dog-drowning stones that cried aloud
      In the midnight riverbed’s spattering blacks;
      In my wood-held home and hallowed owlly hollows
      With my pockets full of leaves and string and talisman rocks,
30    Vowelling dogs howled to adder and frog,
      While all about the sold home and understood wood
      House and wood flamed trumped in woe everlasting.

      Doublecrossed by the terror of birth
      Into the troubled thrum of becoming,
      Uneaseful in our mirth
      When summer’s feather moults to winter’s bone
5     And all the cold wonder
      Of snow’s undoing.
      Wrenched upright, awry by our thrown bones—
      Uncramped from the comfortable hunch
      Inside neutral mother
10    And stretched to stand in decisive day,
      Thrown to thrones in the hissing wheats,
      We bleed into seed.
      Shambleshanks unpacked on a walk as long as thought,
      Our knowing as nothing as nothing else
15    Unless such nothing is—
      Holds seed and snow in eye and hand;
      In bone and feather bred, our flight
      Tells all and nothing less
      Than Christ-crossed oblivion.

      Dreaming of sleep in a tear-tugged thrub,
      Hammocked in heartstop, my picayune pulse
      Charts angina and angst incarnadined
      And slows my blood woes to was.
5     Dumbly in dreams my aspiring vine
      Climbs moon and sun in calms in gusts,
      Arisen on passion’s hid hooks to this
      Wither of insistences.
      Said the unopened poem in my patted heart:
10    “Too dumbly comforted you lay your limbs
      Wet upon the sandy shoals of pain,
      Too fell, too full, too grievy and grim.”
      Now hung christ-crossed on an electric cord
      And stabbed by life’s lethargic thorns,
15    I bleed my soul’s mutinies to the seething sea,
      A leviathan on a rock, stillborn.

      Swiftly, gamely, mademoiselle
      Made a wish to hear the notes
      Floating from my old wood flute
      Revealingly.
5     Poignant practice in the park
      Between our picnic and the flocks
      Achieved some partial good
                            when I stopped
      And stared at mademoiselle 'til dark.
10    This vain breath that I extend
      To where my antique wood flute ends
      By spastic clasp of crippled fingers
      In incapable mimesis
      Can't catch quite your natural and clear
15    Childish laughter that charms the air.
      Mallarme

      Gallant as a cloud, proud
      Before all the eyes of earth, death
      No more niggly than a gnat, hat
      Never humbly in hand, upstand-
5     Ing I was born.
      Feathered in fiery skin, sin
      A stranger to my heart-knot
      I ran graced, and I crowed, crowned
      By loud Love’s crying spires
10    All my lengthening youth.
      Outfitted with a suit of ruth, death
      My wages on my way, away
      I gave day to moon-soothing night, lit
      By my scholar’s candle, dull-
15    Witted with ignorance and loss.
      O I knew nothing, nothing
      In my pinnacled prime, time
      My wings and my hearse; terse
      Time clocked me back to one; gone
20    Was my youth like a cloud.

      I in my difficult self confined,
      A figurehead in any kind of weather,
      Amenable as inches in the spigot-spit rain,
      Feel the flesh fail, whisked to whim,
5     And the grave damned abstractions all 
      Add up to grim.
      My blunt body blown about,
      Pierced by ports who had swum seas
      Of moon’s blood shouldered to the prow,
10    I stand unblessed in the sun’s red crest,
      Dulled and chained to now by all 
      The maybe plagues.
      Forwarding my drowning right up to my neck,
      No matter the thrifty theft of the weather,
15    Guest or ghost or soulless guess devout,
      A watchman of rocks in the whiskey weather
      Full of wrestling reefs and wormy stars,
      I crack the crowsnest
      Of my pinnacled pride right down to the worsted prow,
20    Shifting the kissing sticks on the mute deck—

      I who stood on sand and said
      The God-word aloud in my shivering pride
      Watch mansion and turret rook beneath the tide
      That roars above my body’s fevers.
5     Instead of dwelling in forever
      I came to the crooking shore of here
      As the last darks broke and dawn recalled
      Heats that create the damned and the dear.
      Now cool and straight as eve’s dark grace,
10    Now lumped as fever’s lesions,
      I stand unmanned, unmade, in the shriving space—
      A shadow man born of shadowed son
      I who was sky and wind before the stars shone
      Before earth filled with grave and tower,
15    Before my star-marked unmaking stand
      Alone and voiceless in unsaying sands.
      Oh never again will I crawl into a star
      Or dawn across ages to a planetary birth.
      I am undone in both seed is and shared are.
20    I have no claim to make but death’s.
      The wry wink that fetched me manifest
      From darks surrounding shore and star
      Is no more an eye at last, at last
      And landward ho the shapeless foams
25    Remake my manless nothingness.

      Silks involved in balms of Time
      Where even fictive if expires
      Vaunt not the coiled, the native cloud
      Combed in your mirror's lens.
5     Patriotic ranks of stagnant flags
      Exalt above the vacant street;
      Drowned by waves of your naked mane
      I plunge to my eyes' content.
      Yet, no mouth may be sure
10    Of the savor his bite procures
      Unless, regal and rampant, he insist,
      Amidst your immense and copper tufts,
      On expelling a diamond sigh:
      The cry 'Glorie!' that he stifles.
15    Mallarme

      Now the brain is clayed,
      Now sodden veins are glue,
      Elbow and bone gone soaked to sod,
      And death's a sovereign moon,
5     I lie sandlocked, both spine and foot,
      Unstirred by the insistent stars.
      Night and death have put daylight out of favor. 
      Shipwrecked on a tear and dry as chalk
      Day's gone down on the chilling chapels
10    Where grave men wrestle among the gods;
      Eternity flees triumph in a maggot's egg,
      And the moon shines down like death.

      Pinned to minutes and the clock gone mad,
      Round and round its stranger's face,
      Round the hours sane as grace,
      Round landscapes of strangers,
5     I go ghosted and gone in the flying dark
      And this strangeness has no end.
      I'd be lost if I could be found,
      If found unlost at last I'd nail the heart
      Home with the hammer of the soul.
10    But no nail shines, no hammer moves,
      No home comes kissing from a cloud.
      Strip the gilding from the stars,
      Let hands tear down the dark dim griefs
      That moored the heaven-faring lights;
15    Let hands build chapels as they move,
      Wanderers wide round stranger and sky
      In this strangeness that has no end.
      Now I wander through cool body's shroud
      Distant as touch in a statue's hand
20    A blownback bit without sail or keel;
      No nail glows, no hammer moves.
      Hands were made to fashion as they feel.

      Once below a time an evil fizzed
      A sizzle missile on a stick of strike;
      A friend unfriendly wore his face reversed,
      And the sun come up rose down to the dike
5     And the maker’s waters fell skywise to drown
      The small of hope in a calypso clown.
      And all my friends, the fishes, sieved
      Themselves the fry from the chaos bay;
      And the long moon sang “auld lang syne”
10    And night’s tooth conned the meat of day;
      And safe in my shallows hollows, I
      Worked out corrupted wonder’s why.
      And long in my wondering den
      Among rainbow shoals of corals
15    Each the quick color of a friend,
      I branded in briars my heart corralled—
      ‘Til cursed and closed in mental hearse
      I heard the helpmeet of my burnt hurt’s verse.
      The samaratan’s snapped purse opened ripe
20    And rosy were all her monies’ colors;
      In folds of golds as green as apples
      Her tender hand moved softly and softer
      ‘Til touch salved cool the carpet stars
      And I walked beyond where ashes’ blacks are.

      So few tears to tell the story;
      Have they gone away, like the edges of papers
      Trailing papercuts, and the most excited letters lost
      On the margins of the undersheets?
5     Sometimes a freshness will surprise us first,
      A frittery coolness or itch against the cheek
      As strange as the dream it wakes us from, the same
      Sense of the seminal real, shorn up by fragments the same.
      Each tear had risen like a purpose,
10    Tipped with passionate wetness from obliterated sight.
      Love is blind; so, too, grief and care,
      The silly joy of remembering just how, just where.

      Incapable judgment,
      Charmless incoherence,
      Damnable indolence,
      A welcome internment.
5     Happy are we who rot and look
      Neither to the left nor right;
      Directionless uncentered sight
      That sees like a remembered book.
      Here and now and gone
10    Each page of my prison singes,
      Turning edges, mirrors, mirages:
      Burnt promise of smoky 'beyonds.'
      An incapacity as soft
      As mothers flushing infants' eyes
15    Ends each blind alley that I try,
      Suffocates with wings of moths.
      Exits dissolve in fur or foam,
      Every gleam reveals a worm;
      Each ending of a timeless dream
20    Inaugurates a longer term.
      Here I wait in wetness
      Disconsolate and endless,
      Penetrant and airless,
      Guessing and guestless.

      The sum of all the soul
      Is lazy exhalations,
      Smoke rings in rings in rings
      And their derivations.
5     So says the brune cigar
      (Burning wisely the while)
      Letting shooken cinders char
      From the clear kiss of fire.
      So the smokes of poems
10    Insinuate a smile;--
      Dismiss thisness, singer,
      	should you debut,
      Reality's vile.
      Too-precise a sense erases
15    Literature's half-guesses.
      Mallarme

      The wish of an if 
      Is a backwards future;
      Beyond the moment’s present use
      The grand seducer is seduced.
5     If in plain vagaries I am vain,
      In rich reality I’m just me.
      Forgive me, listeners
      If this mothering infant tongue 
      Offends your sense:
10    Life is my only defense.

      You, my several, severed,
      Gentle selves, limned with wishes—
      In the dawnwash of daybreak delivered
      When sleep’s gone over to ashes,
5     I write my soul’s shelving shore
      On eyelids and tears.
      Come, while the saying’s braying
      And the farmshed’s full of wisdom
      Lowing to be milked by however praying,
10    Come walk the dawn’s ways, and some
      Of your gentle heart’s heats share
      With mouth and ear.
      Together in the forevering grace
      Of day brought burning from its source
15    Let’s let simplest and supremest play
      Nor ask the sun to go another course
      But with hands crossed as lilies
      Dissolve into love.

      To find in feeling, meaning
      Mere feeling never can provide,
      And when a meaning’s felt
      It fills the ignorant heart
5     With humble knowing of its grace.
      When heart and head have thus
      Each the other fed, the whole
      Comes to the accord and godhood
      Of its good.

      To forget about the self at the self’s
      Uttermost extent; it is the self
      Made a self at last.
      To survive in vigor
5     The confinement of the eye,
      The glistering pinhole through which
      The self is summoned
      As by a bronze gong
      Until all the air is peacock feathers
10    Is one way—in wild trial—
      That the self, and its amiable 
      Particulars may be forgotten.
      Cheered onward in a doubtful dark
      By numerous rumoring murmurs
15    And silken sibilances, as if
      Drawn on by a forceful river
      Tumbling a blind man downstream
      To the sound of thickening confusion
      Is another way for the self to go,
20    On and on, on and on,
      In dark discovery.
      To feel our broadening sexual silks
      Pulled and pulled, as through
      A pinhole, through the self
25    And out of the self and into
      Another, and that self flowing 
      And pulling as if a river until
      Our colors lay piled and swollen
      Before our adoring, a silken sail
30    Full-bellied with desiring
      And with desiring only—a wind
      That moves through the self the self
      Had left behind and abandoned
      On the shore of no more.
35    Dead or dreaming, the self
      Disappears, and in its place,
      In the place of the self spilled out
      Of itself, displaced and streaming,
      The self that had left its eye behind
40    Like an abandoned portal,
      The self that had had an ear
      And has an ear no more, bereft, as it was,
      Among night voices in a dark place,
      The self that had had a sex
45    Torn away in a shimmering wind
      Until the self has a self no more, —
      Only this, this fathomless
      Wildness without a where
      Without a how, without a why,
50    Only this this,-in the place of that,
      Nearby, nearly here,
      In the place of the place and in place of it,
      A contemptuous wind
      Crawls like sludge
55    Over motley rocks.

      Too much of poet's sojourning
      With airy fancy captivating
      Eye and ear and every thing,
      Our sense false sense believing,
5     Can vault the real beyond our ken
      And all our wisdom, sum, and end
      Must be but to begin again.
      While in that cloud Delight suspended
      Nothing kills and all are mended,
10    The dead arise for a final bow
      As plays and players even now.
      If ever error finds this field
      Error must to mischief yield
      And all that seemed delight revealed
15    Be changed to vice reviled.
      No longer the innocence of If
      Where no blind run ends in a cliff
      And every dagger of thrown suppose
      Hits harmless as a falling rose.
20    No more mere pastimes of the mind
      Where every evil's undermined
      And the very devil's to sport inclined,
      Terror trumped by laughter half-divine,
      Where every blood-anointed sword
25    Shows no sharper than a pointy word,
      And each ghastly gambit of deed or cad
      Ends in misty triumph trimmed,
      And only surfeit seems enough.

      I turn my visage in the fog
      To the scene of my demise:
      There, in the nothing, I was wise;
      Here, in eternity, I am fog.
5     Absolute and contemptible
      My whim now wanders witless space,
      A focus in idiot vagueness,
      Temporary and discreditable.
      Such is the sum of human worth!
10    A self-involving wheel that grinds
      Nothingness to the end of time.
      Look to yourself and know its truth!
      A shudder in a whisper,
      A spinal chill beside the tomb,
15    Cues music in another room
      No dancer ever enters.
      Everything I am I fear,
      All I was I disrespect;
      A skeleton of acid aspect
20    Pins me with a glance to here.
      Vaguely ceremonious dust
      Sweeps corners of an edgeless plain;
      To feel at all is to feel pain;
      Pain abolishing and absolute.

      Warm and capable hand, how cast
      Against yourself in this crimping cramp,
      Folded under, knuckle and finger;
      Fist-forced to fight all foldings.
5     Spider on a mirror how you pray,
      Self-reference in sinew and deity;
      Age creaks the joints dull youth made mighty,
      Steadfastly tossing treasure to trash.
      Hand beyond starlight still remote,
10    Flick from cyclops Time the mote
      Torn down from history and hope to this:
      A present absence less final than If.

      When a wandering impulse from heaven
      Visits the daily mind of man, lending
      Some alien hatchling who eyes up the sun,
      Our faithfulness is born in ignorance.
5     A wetted shadow robs us of rest,
      Knowing neither the mystery of birth
      Nor the disappearing gulf into which we’re poured.
      Our dying height is but the eagle’s nest.

      When contrary winds make havoc with our hopes
      And a word unwound wounds against our wish,
      All we were becomes the plaything of a trope,
      The telling and untelling of privy visions.
5     And all we were to be in times hereafter
      In all the endless real of dreams undreamt
      (Which from the day’s affairs and minor laughter
      Transform into important night’s portents),
      All the all of all our lives unlived
10    Is piffed to flinders in a scoping void
      That follows our undoing even unto the tracks of a gnat
      A moment’s wind or quieting in eve’s coming cold
      Will silver over quick as that.
           When all this in my mooning mirror comes to pass
15         One thought of you amends the ruins in the glass.

      When death's thrifty summons sums my life and me,
      With swift erasure reckons every hope
      One with the all-nothing past's unborn to-be,
      And, dead unlived, live damned in Time's scope,
5     Then how shall my accounts accounted be?
      When bright expectations of my skies
      A crematorium become, and clouds
      That had impostured castles as siftless ashes die,
      What shall stand, howsoever soft or proud,
10    With lying life above while I do die?
      What besides my dog-dug bones shall sound,
      What clacking tongues make noise of me aloud?
           If only that you do not follow me too fast,
           I am content my small nothing shall not last.

      When the paraffin coffin's wronging box,
      Leaden, unlidded lies unlocked
      And out of slowly sowing soul inwound rolled,
      Twined and twinned in winding sheets 
5     And the bloodblack body's shroud
      The heartbroken ghost like leaven flies--
      What then shall stand in the haranguing sands?
      Harrassed and houseless and unshrouded and crowdless,
      What mood doomed ghost in mist-shifted night
10    Or quenchless kiss quizzed from soul's naught knot
      Sighing life never could quite unlatch
      Flies riven and shriven in haranguing sands?
      Now risen and simple and unadorned
      In the doorless moon (and dead and bettered 
15    By our dying damn) we stand on crookshanks,
      And the bold lie from shelled ear and shellacked lip
      Slips up the tripping ladders like a thief
      Moaning unknowing what once-living kiss implored.
      Stands in winds in sands in silences
20    That in us trumps all bones or guesses
      That lies down never in the manger's knot
      (Straw raw insistences of gods unbegot)
      That that moves ruth-ready to the sea-shoved shingle
      Where are and were and will-be may mingle:
25    Human and ruminant in the unready new,
      Sole holders of somewhat we dare not possess,
      Illimitable amidst our humanness.

      When in an hour's perjury some hinted truth
      Is caught, and what had stung in coldness 
      In pillowing warmth remains, 
      Holding the soul below the bone,
5     Almost I can forgive my human stain--
      Almost I am the thing that I am not,
      Almost I in lightness and in light am propped.
      My eyelashes then are limned 
      With clarifying dews;
10    Ambition and regret lay neglected
      In the grass, never again to be new.
      Forever windward my face amends its smile;
      Forever forward my eyes seek their trial,
      Stalking the light. 
15                                Strike and stroke its rays!

      When in the word’s wound another rumbles
      And letters push the pen like a ouiji’s divot,
      Arcing after funerals for what remains
      Crowding to reunion with our split selves;
5     When in the blood’s barometer another thumps,
      Tapping tell-all largesse from our bottled small,
      Churning brights of vision from eyes too-tight shut
      Against storm and batter of the brainy weather;
      When as in the beginning there is love and wonder
10    Trailing down each treasure of a tock
      And bastioned happiness lays everywhere easy as sand
      Although ocean tear her heart out on a rock;
      Then shall we love those who loved us never?
      Carry Christs in our shirts like a pack of matches?
15    Then shall we fathom the deedless darks—
      When not a hand, not an eye, stretched back to touch
      The burning vigil tears of our watch?

      When threads are cut that held us close,
      When the snapped hand snips the ribbon,
      The veiny net that pulled round wrist and bone
      Shredded is.
5     When lungs surrender to a liquid ill
      And drowned men dead we fodder fish,
      The rose-red sea that we had swived
      Arid is.
      When words have ceased to traffic truth
10    And goose to goose give gossips’ proof,
      Our mutual tale told in the mirror
      Sheeted is.
      Alien we stand who shared one knocked breath,
      One saying syllable for our daily prayer,
15    One look, one heart enduring Time’s
      Omnivorous is.
      Alien we died: out of syllables, out of breath,
      Crossed as words, incompatible as knots,
      And no more face-to-face face each other
20    In grave is.

      Wrung from the walleyed wait of the womb
      Marooned to a prayer from god’s grave side
      And all community of the duly good,
      An apple unpinned from its savior branch,
5     I fall as I fell, have fallen, will fall
      Each rainy inch in angst against gravity.
      Born moonblind to majesty and mystery
      And deaf to reverenced heaven’s sighs,
      Alone on the lovely ground crowded with brothers
10    And blitzed by a gracing despair, I rot
      Blood-ripe and rosy beyond my own reach.
      Against this windy time will I stand again
      Who fell to a world wrung dumb by pain?
      I inch each word in angered prayer to a leaf.