Thoughts On Other Words (an erasure)

These anti-ocular repetitions become us 

I must have been referring to pills 

push-ups jacked to abstract length

Punched out moguls on our pale slope

Dumb bells by the dozens 

Your elegance a delirious lump of restored fat 

We’re rendered invisible

a quietude of pixilated transmission

where the point is to get from zero 

Sharp elbows and table salt

That’s nothing new – a sort of unlettered corpse

drumming a petition for difference

I got sideways – off the scheduled pulse.  Derailed

movement for those who refuse to move

or truncation for those in trunks 

Delicious life is thrown or imbued still

diced down

with this ring a turn of flowers anoints me

its circle becomes arabesque

Just think of the fact

wink their winks

divide the beasts that divide.  Injured and

edged out

the steady hand, the wavering tone

I hear monotheisms are all alike.  Big ears and sandals 

We ate their heros and lived to tell.  Do not forget to change

the subject

reduced to the simplest forms

I removed myself

one foot at a time.  Equal to 160 square rods by the acre 

To divulge a promissory, drag cash across a surface

sniffing air for something new.

Pricked with jellies

an exercise of teeth

dark with times impasse, emptied of curves

rhe better to simulate spin

Unrequited

spheres and tubes

parked in their boats

Rotations without mechanical parts

entice reaction

pellets in the eye

A traumatic exit closed the body to new investment

The wound reveals initiation or closure.  A classic carousel

She rides The Whip or The Deacon of Night

A sine wave

immanent poetic with no entrance

projectile arced or curved

We enclose work and let no light in 

The craven tune erased – forgetting time

the million daggers falling false from the sky 

image diluted

in search of a tree.  The desert plants

Each pleat an affirming push

Relief is as relief was.  The forgotten morsels

all feel

A tightrope on the appointed land

coming together to swim laps in

the sultan's soup.  His lips famished and unnaturally droll

Beyond leather bound – folded in time that stops

for no attack.  Time that gives the people what they want.

Birds until the night swallows their song.

Lost in the borough, no bridge to brook the flow, no sea to settle

The stoop birds approach.  The marvelous perch dispersed.

Testosterone Poisoning (an erasure)

The throat signals a kill.  Pairs of shoes toward sea.  Wheeze of lung an accordion bound in single key.  This chair holds the registry of yes.  Hats too feign to doff.  The choice is next to the price.  Below clavicle, just the eyes.  A banquet fills the hole.  A bouquet plugs disdain.

Seeds of various fruit, some rarely eaten.  As chance widens so skin alters and attention fixed.  Scraps of litter, the propagation of sounds.  Xylophone and oboe on ice.  Fog horns.  The baritone guitar.  The headline dissolves our stitches.  Wait for intermission.  Play the cocktail glass.  Ceaseless ringtail of impersonating tones. 

I sang the light and watched the shadow.  The hollow forms fiddle and bow – moving with some delicacy.  How does one make primary use of red?  To collect the preciousness of an inverse C.  Until the crayons ran out of color.  A gargantuan snag of me uphill.  Supine on their backs an instrument with heads attached.  The stars are out above the bivouac.  Black and blue concern of similar pitch.  It’s the fire we smote.  Aghast.

In the living breathing singing then.  A ceiling concludes six walls of comfort.  Certain autistic features in the vast overlap.  No taste of that old game. 

I wore no hat to signal my deficit.  The talk outside.  The danger of words.  Recall the quiver, some country lyric.  My teenaged thought echoes back –dangers of an early image.

This time was then.  Expelled until the unit L.  The fury of forced closure a tool for vicious conduct.  Stalemate of disconsolate autumn.  My binaries become you.  A sonic default.

She In Blood - Essay on the feminine subject in Cormac McCarthy

Reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad and Moby Dick…
-John Banville, The independent

Evokes the styles of both Sam Peckinpah and Hieronymus Bosch…
-USA Today

She brings his meals, she carries out his slops.

She looked at him some more, then she called toward the back of the house.

She stopped at the gate and watched him go.

She looked harried and she smiled at them and she had smuggled them sweets under her shawl and there were pieces of meat in the bottom of the bowls that had come from her own table.

She’s a stout looker, said one.

She began to drag through the sand.

She swept up her skirt and composed herself and he took from his shirt a kerchief and with it bound her eyes.

She raised her chin slightly and she began a sing song chant.

She paused.

She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string.

She moved her shoulders.

She began to chant.

She raised her jaw, gibbering at the night.

She seemed to catch some new drift in her divinings.

She stared at the ground nor did she look up even when the horses stood all about her.

She was in a meat camp about eight mile upriver, said Webster.

She caint walk.

She bites.

She had raised her eyes to the level of his knees.

She began to cry and after a while she made him take her to the place and she took wild primrose which grew in plenty thereabout and she put it on the stones and she came there many times until she was old.

She stared at the coins without moving until he shooed her away and she went off down the hallway holding coins cupped in her hands like a bird.

She disappeared up the stairwell calling out and soon there were a number of women busy about the place.

She looked toward the house.

She won’t bring you nothin without I tell her to.

She was a huge woman with a great red face and she read him riot.

She’s dead.

She turned to the other women.

She reached in and took him by the hand.

She handed him down, him clinging to her neck.

She was smeared with feces but seemed not to notice.

She looked back at those on the riverbank.

She held him up, she crooned to him.

She was sobbing and praying for mercy to Glenton and to God impartially.

She watched him ride past, covering her breasts with her hands.

She wore a rawhide collar about her neck and she was chained to a post and there was a clay bowl of blackened meatscrapes beside her.

She was very old and her face was gray and leathery and sand had collected in the folds of her clothing.

She did not look up.

She moved slightly, her whole body, light and rigid.

She weighed nothing.

She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years.

She ran forward and knelt and gathered the great shaggy head up in her arms and began to rock back and forth sobbing.

She looked up at him.

She directed him to a table where a woman was selling chits and stuffing the money with a piece of shingle through a narrow slit into an iron strongbox.

She led him through a door where an old Mexican woman was handing out towels and candles and they ascended like refugees of some sordid disaster the darkened plankboard stairwell to the upper rooms.

She turned and looked at him.

She had come to the door.

She stood in the hallway holding the candle and brushing her hair back with one hand and she watched him descend into the dark of the stairwell and then she pulled the door shut behind her.

She wore nothing but a pair of men’s drawers and some of her sisters were likewise clad in what appeared to be trophies – hats or pantaloons or blue twill cavalry jackets.