is followed by

A truck drives by us, at well over the speed limit. Zebras in its trailer. It made you remember that limerick.

The only one, you. Know.

I say, “I don’t call ghosts ‘sir’.”

Precisely proud.

Let it roll while I make strange sigils with my fingers:

The pyramidic containment of an ‘A’, for you;

The flipped up middle finger over my left shoulder, back facing you;

The inversion with a middle finger flipped down;

Hang ten;

Metal horns.

(Another haul of the mother lode laid at the

grounded, pegged point of the Caduceus Staff.)

Shiva and Shakti as agronomists¿

And, my fingers move as if by some outsider’s volition.

The movement is an apple cart over-turning,

upsetting some.

Why wouldn’t we want to bring it all down?

Dictionary divination of a dervish

And, ca is followed by

cabal is followed by

cabala is followed by

cabalero is followed by

cabaline is followed by

cabanis is followed by

Cabaret.

embedded trinity of coos.

The boy had tried to stone the crows, but they just caught the rocks with beaks.

“I shall train them to stone the child/wren back,” she thought.

“It would be instructive.”

But, then she remembered she had simply cribbed a line from someone and made a fantasy from it.

Anyways, the kids were in school right now.

Her crows were perched overhead, waiting for peanuts.

⊙⊙

Oh, so you need prompting now?: Æ asks me.

And, promptly: I deadpan.

Someone is playing for Team Sensitive today: Æ smiles.

I grin: Fecking captain. And, the fact that you love me like this pisses me off.

Æ counters: You’re more entertaining than when in your mystæ provocateur state.

Dickhead: I think, stinging from the blow.

Every time with you: Æ thinks, reading my mind, laughing.

You know, I refilled the coffee on Mr. Book of Answers‘ table today. He said, ‘Thank you for your sensitivity.’ I was charmed.

⊙⊙⊙

Hold my hands so they become held(,) dear.

Silversmiths of alchemists gatekeeping access to backrooms of bazaars thick with smoke.

A misty haze formed by fast talk and subtle exchanges.

Quicksilver traded for the mercurial.

Where those who do not wear thier darkness on thier sleeves abscond to let thier absence of light shine.

A speak easy of sly shadow souls and sacred fools that is only found by not looking.

Defy the beast, release.

A4 conversion

The trick is to assume anything could happen.

The task is to make it seem as such.

Suspended by imagination, standing there, snarling,

beast-eyed and in a state.

Clears throat.

Twirls circles with one ankle.

Watching the mountains pitch darkness using shadows from a sinking sun

There a’stood at the Dungeness Spit where it never rains.

Next to the only lighthouse for miles.

The keeper never answers the knocks at his locked door.

And his light comes on later and later,

as the days enlengthen the periodicity of thier effulgence,

Like winter was a thief come to return what was taken.

And the noise of the Sound vibrates at 432 Hz.

A4 conversions and changes in the ferryman’s rates.

Ha-hai-hyena

A bird singing.

“See and know,” I tell you on this lunar new year’s first day.

Obscurely erudite but available for the attentive.

The pulsing of the interior of thighs, trembling like

pleura of laughing hy-hy-hyenas’ howling lungs.

In ampersand out.

Coalesce; converge.

Release,

Stillness of coda.

not only above, but also below.

Rip the mussels from their shells while I husk corn and shell peas.

A garlic clove, crushed with a knife’s handle, teases out its aroma.

The inoculation of a spinning dervish

who seeks the antipodal position of the divine.

Diabolical twirling in this ongoing energetic exchange between universe and organism.

En pointe is En garde.

The evokation of my exhalation diffuses and diffracts into atmosphere.

The invokation of my inhalation converges energy from

not only above, but also below.

The cyclone of the Void rampages through my celiac plexus.

The center of the eye of the storm is so motionless.

It crystallizes, dynamicizes, galvanizes,

before radiating into fibers of the nerves strewn along my

coronal plane;

when, just in the nick of time,

the cordon of my spine sucks

the ambient and I find

a respite in equilibrium.

The word Apologetics springs to mind.

A tangent unfurling

Lo siento

I feel it; but, I am not sorry

Parçigal disabuses Æ

~ When I see you tremble, it makes me shake. I will devour you with eyes.

⊙ Let me shower first?

~ No. I want to taste your day.

⊙ I’d describe it as a long, hard one. Consider yourself warned.

~ Don’t flatter yourself. As far as I can taste, you never even broke a sweat.

⊙ Such a little, smart ass.

~ A’yup, with a tarty mouth.

⊙ I like it when you front like you’re hard.

~ Well, that’s the thing about having lady parts, swollen and pert is as hard as it gets.

⊙ It does it for me.

~ Yeah, well, do it to yourself tonight. I wanna watch.

⊙ You seem tired.

~ A’yup. And, a bit uninspired.

⊙ Lazy.

~ You sure have been. Get to work, please.

so she howls.

A young girl used to eagerly await the mailman’s delivery, fighting with her younger sister about who gets to check the mailbox. It was a different time.

But, now, the mail comes all the time and you cannot hold the words like you could when they came on paper. Pealing of bells sound now to herald any incoming communique.

No one checks their box, these boxes check us.

And, chess becomes a frivolity of a checkers game.

She remembered sailboat life. Never being dry.

She remembered life landside where everyone seeks to be wetted in swimming pools, baths, and showers.

She recollects stories her grandmother told her of boxcar hobos making x’s with tree branches woven through the chain link fences of certain homes. And, of kissing soldiers working POW camps, through a chain link fence of a compound in rural Louisiana.

She recalls other things and her cheeks bloom scarlet.

Things recent and things well-aged; things imagined; things that may yet come.

In her solar plexus, a bloom of a blackhole’s burn consumes her inside to out.

Pert rosebuds puckering.

A presentation of a revelation. Where space may take back anything which it enables.

And, suddenly, she is no longer Narcissus, but Goldmund.

The Lover enlivened through Death.

And, sometimes it hurts, so she howls.

scratching itching papyrus

And, they came onto the lady saying, “Won’t you tell us of your darkness, pleas/e?!”

And, she grinned, ” What darkness? I can show your eyes No-Thing wherever there is no light. What could I glimpse of my darkness, anyhow? I simply embrace it.”

I’m a real kunst of a Kirkegaardian Kant.

They only came in the hopes of eating anguished eyes, anyhow.

What daunts you, motivates me.

What stalls you, puts the spurrs to my flanks.

What spurns you, ewe, encourages me whilst scaring ewes.

So, how could it not be hard for us to meet, one to the other, in the middle?

Where the splinter impales skin from leaden pencils frantically scratching

itching papyrus.

Rubber meeting ridden road,

Bug to windshield; the hood of a jacket grasped against hailing precipitation, frozen.

All in & either or.

And, of course, people who posture by peeking over paperback bios of punk rockers, yet cannot hum a single song, piss me off.

looked upon

The weather changed five time in six hours.

Even though it was today it became yesterday and tomorrow, a few times.

Sun, clouds, rain, sun, rain.

Observed through frames of picture window panes.

He had slept on the left side of the bed, next to the radiator; because, she does not get cold.

Every night for the past week, while waiting for sleep, she imagined crawling out of her own lying body,

like pulling the weight of herself out of a manhole.

He wondered if she finally looked upon her own sleeping face.

(found scrawlings on canary yellow)

I felt your shape and your breathing,

heartbeat sneaking in.

Breathe in the scent of my sternum, right there in the valley between.

I smell for you.

All written in canary yellow.

Masks melted onto faces.

Fuzzy beasts.

“Bespoke never beholden. You look good on me.”

“Then put me on, I want to be worn by you.”

Crickets singing

Tao of one footed standing

Dont push it.

I push it til my body clicks when I stretch.

Scraping bones of shoulder blades against muscle knots until dissolved.

Popping joints forward, backward until the clicking stops.

Somedays the clicking does not stop, so I stretch until my mind leaves me.

And, if nothing clicks inside, I simply revert to the Tao of standing on one foot.

Just try to multitask when stood upon the toes of one foot.

Bipedal locomotion is already ineffective and bizarre given our physiology and anatomy.

The ego fails to engage when you take postures to the extreme.

All you can do is not fall over.

But, here’s open secret x: people falling over is one of the highest forms of comedy.

So either you don’t fall and you get to forget yourself

Or else, you fall over because your ego distracts your attention,

in which case, you get to laugh at yourself.

Win

Win.

Parçigal wants attention from Æ

~The lunar new year approaches. We could celebrate at the temple.

⊙No, let’s celebrate under the night sky, just us.

~Lay down in my bed, please. Warm the sheets.

⊙The boy in ridiculously baggy pants, with straps hanging, at the grocery store, had BDSM tattooed on his fingers, but he couldn’t define the difference between a sadist and a masochist.

~Why do you care?

⊙Because, he looked like he was full of shit and needed to know it.

~We all are, dear. Most of us feed our guts everyday.

⊙Well, he should develop a kombucha habit.

~You should read a book.

⊙Listen to me read aloud?

~Why do you ask when you could just read aloud? You are hard to ignore.

⊙Because, it pleases me when you say it back to me. Also, consent is important.

~Dear lord, please read aloud. If you’re gonna yammer at me either way, then other people’s words become you better than your own, right now.

⊙Very good. Pluck a book, any book. I’ve got it nice and warm under the sheets, here.

where the players lick their wounds

I look over at the guy next to me.

“Last one, Kimber. Four fingers with a splash,” he says.

He turns to look at me.

“My nightcap. Whaddaya take to help you sleep?” he asks, patting his pocket.

“Two peanut butter sandwiches on white bread. Creamy,” I reply.

“Hugrhm?” is this noise he makes.

“Yeah, crunchy is more of an a.m. thing for me.”

“So you don’t wanna buy something?” he says, again patting his pocket, like I had missed his question’s point.

“I’ll buy your nightcap, there, if you can give a good answer to a dumb question,”

His pupils dilated as soon as he heard “I’ll buy.”

He swirls the spirits against three ice cubes, as if contemplating the offer.

As if he had something to lose.

“Okay,” he says after an impotent dramatic pause.

“What is the meaning of life?”

Without pause, he responds, “To find an answer to the question ‘what’s the meaning of life.’ “

“Put that one on my tab, Kimber,” I say.

~

I’m here to hear loud music.

I’m here to feel the second-hand smoke hurt my lungs.

I’m here for a headache.

I’m here to be alone in a crowd.

I’m here to eavesdrop.

People chasing highs; People stalking thighs.

Licking each other’s wounds.

I am here because it will help me to sleep.

restless menagerie

“I have nothing to lose and everything to gain,” she says.

“Except being in the suspended gravity of a win/win position. If you let the pendulum swing you could lose that position of having nothing to lose but everything to gain,” he says.

Oh, shut up and kiss me hard, you would-be Lewis Carroll, s/he says.

<The sound of glasses clinking, followed by giggling>

(The privileged hear yet remain silent)

[The de-privileged chomp at bits and struggle, ecstatic-ally, against their chains, restraints, and clamps]

Tsk, tsk, the menagerie is restless.

Tolle lege

I am a girl with far away eyes.

Take me outside myself, please.

It is as simple as picking up a book and allowing yourself to be read.

Red.

Tolle lege for me.

I see the anterior triangle of your neck.

Where that perfect, delicate but masculine midline meets the inferior border of your mandible and is set

against the border of sternocleidomastoid.

I learn the names of the parts of you, so that, once intimated, I may rebirth your pieces through gifting them new sobriquets.

I see your head cock one way then another.

Like a curious canine.

The radius of your eyes narrows then widens.

The diameter of your pupils expands and contracts.

The circumference of your perception swells in purple and ebbs limply.

I read your reactions and they become my bedtime færy tale.

I perceive you through closed captions.

You swallow. Hard.

The suprahyoid muscle raising your hyoid bone

The infrahyoid depressing and restraining it.

Smile. Your glands are reacting to whatever words you are perceiving and I doubt you even notice it.

My attention diffuses. My energy overflows.

My fingers fidget.

I play with the cordon looped, seven times, around my wrist.

Worn for this explicit reason. Something with which I may fret.

I practice tying knots while watching the best show not available on any screen.

melting moon.

The moon drips its reflective countenance of liquid mercury, onto the shimmering shape of the Sound’s watery face.

Gazing into the Smokey Mirror.

Particles of snow issuing down in waves that look like how the pealing of bells sounds.

With my right hand, I slide my ballpoint pen behind my ear;

I sink my nails into the binding of the journal held in my left hand.

°

Recalling the conversation from my dream of talking to spiders.

We were in the orange, rocky desert.

There were seven but they were all of the same. A single mind working the seven bodies in tandem ala a Greek chorus.

I know you, trickster: I tell him.

But, see the form I take? Not everyone has me come to them in this guise: he tells me.

I see a feather rising slowly over his left shoulder.

The plumed serpent uncoiling from the stalking position.

A creeper crawling and a lengthy lurker.

°

I push my open palm into the loose powdery snow at my feet.

The icy give of the precipitation accepts the impression of my hand, creating a glove of cold.

I suddenly see the luminosity of this bardo.

Hooded caverns.

The snow came overnight and stripped all the colors from your sight.

Even the televisions lost technicolor.

It was all like it was before.

And everyone else rediscovered outside

while we explored inside,

below, then above, the old quilt.

Hands rubbing flesh like flicking sparks from flint.

Thawing out tongues pressed against icy appendages.

Hot breath pronouncing as smoke, in short

vaporized bursts.

Dragon breath lighting dormant pearls contained in shallow

hooded caverns.

Petals under the bottom retaing their flush.

So many keys to nothing.

Fifty two envelopes each with a key.

But, only two unlock the door that

you keep trying to break open.

A gamble you take with ecstatic desperation.

A gamble you hate loving to make.

Whose rapture is whom’s ecstasy?

Wrapped and rapt.

Have you ever wondered who’s the slave and who’s the master?

And remember this.

Keep your boots clean.

Bite a thumbnail from a pretty petty pouting mouth,

Remembering a horrible dream wherein you made an exchange with the devil,

only to remember it on waking,

and be so terrified at what you promised that

You pray to god that

the devil be made to make good on the words,

knowing full well

god and the devil may not care what you want.

So, let me interfere with your energy extraneously and

show you yourself as

you know yourself naught.

A peckish rhythm

I could tear you apart with teeth shredded like snapped, over-fretted guitar strings.

But, I’d rather simply look upon you quietly and plot the upcoming delicious demise you already seem intent on ensuring.

But, first, just a little something to chew on…

Are you peckish, skittish one?

What do you call this rhythm?: the independent music journalist asked me.

I call it punctuated equilibrium in syncopated time; and, yes, it will induce sleep paralysis.: I respond with a coy grin.

I snake his fingers between mine, before your eyes.

I saw your invisible snarl at his aura bursting forth in surprised, physical response.

Did you know that I abhor playing zero sum games?: I ask, aloofly, to No-Body.

Our thoughts are linear, strung out on a line

to hang, mid-air, and dry.

But, Nature is a volume encompassing.

A space within which you find.

Our eyes see at the

speed of light coming.

My ears hear at the speed of sound resonating.

Waves lapping at the sea shore.

The mind perceives its thoughts more slowly.

Your skin already feels heat well before your mind realises

you have already been burned.

This I knew before you showed me.

Here are petals to serve as your flesh’s exfoliant.

Encompassing solitude.

You are only you when you are alone;

yet, you are not you at all when you are alone-

you are everything and everyone

there is

atop the mountain

or a’laid in the valley.