Sheep and Domestics

Sleeping but never waking up. Dreaming of magical bird songs in Alpha Centauri. If everyone's a winner what do I stand for? Every sideway view is tailored. In a hall of mirrors I'm hanging on. Hanging onto Saturday mornings. After my pep talk with Sharon, when the telephone call ended, I told Scott about each pear-shaped tear pell-mell in time's jar, holding a madly written felo de se note, and how I fell into a Steinway Grand Piano, bursting open from the seams with all my sad-eyed poems. Seriatim. Syllables that won't fit in the entrance of my face, words too big to say or even comprehend at first glance, like the intricate details of a tympanum. A crack has formed in the abutment.

I observe it like despair radiating from the aonaran like I am a plane flying over the Gulf of Mexico. Dirt under my fingernails, hair on my body, the intergluteal cleft, or the burn of whiskey. Around countless empty bottles spread across the floor, around the quiet room. They're riverbanks of yesterday's unforgettable emotions I've drunk, reminding me of everything I've seen in the last few months. Overthinking everything he does. I ate too much red velvet cake.

On the day of the Superbowl I dug into rich matter I could taste on my lips until I found gold in dark stars trapping light in gravity. A chasm remains from what dazzled. On the night of Grenfell I watched the live news broadcast in disbelief, hearing those helpless screams fading into blackness, seeing minds in overdrive. Pitched wolves in an elevator to the top of a burning building. 

A fire so hot those electronic wafers of a facsimile were blood donors from the Netherlands, the sun in the blue distance. Discs of light. Mermaids of Benbecula hidden under floes of ice melting into the body of those rainy nights. Billowing clouds like a staircase to Heaven, the quickest way to Nirvana. The walls are closing in on the breath I jilted, like a lecture from Harvard, crushing my hopes of endlessly dreaming in a bath of turquoise, and I'm here, with no fixed rhyme scheme, trying to escape from the pang in the organ as painful as losing what you love the most, in the throes of a repeated cycle. I rootle into the temple as if I'm a pig trying to escape through the rear light.

Chasing after dreams that'll never happen, dreams that I'll never catch. Impossible dreams. The second born is turned into a swan. Buried in a shallow grave in Baghdad. Where art thou friend. I can't go on this way, thinking my world will end if I put one foot where it's not supposed to be. Living is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but the best gift I've ever received. I lay on this double-edged sword, a broken mirror, torn between my heart and my mind and all their valuable possessions. You would never listen to me, hear my complaints, and that's why I get terribly frustrated. Boxed in by the loudest silence I fill with metrical compositions I invented, feeling like I'm never heard regardless of how much I shout and lose my temper, as if you've stood on my voice, and I've been begging for you to apprehend the music from my desolate mouth.

The last hours of the poet are unforgiving. An amplified soundscape. No one knows what makes me act, why I swing the axe. Driving into the night, the curtain call. I am a seasonal change, always on the brink of some kind of breakthrough, but never quite there. I see a future a skyline away, but I can't reach out and touch it. I'm driving farther away into an ever distant history. Don't know how I came to be here. It wasn't so long ago the water was clear. You had your maternity gear and your medals and you were handing out the alms. It all happened so quick, I guess. One moment I was fine and the next everything was falling apart around me, and there was no way I could see through those snowy days, days without sunshine, when I was a clouded yellow butterfly in the countryside in the spring. Here I am again. 

Rearranging the pinks. Trying not to leave any fingerprints behind. I kill for pleasure. At the level crossing I can see a crash in the offing. I ask rhetoric questions and I'm beginning to like him, how he completed his education in Texas, how he never minded my ear wax, the feelings I get in my waste land. I was taught about the body politics in Amsterdam, listened closely to the University of Vermont, learned to deal with the public thespians, the hunger for more, the sozzled denizen in me. Sloppy and rock grey. Drinking cold mango. Blue rain echoes off the window. I wistfully stare at the wet streets, inspired by the darkness. It fills my sapphire eyes, as if the past never really happened, as if I imagined it as a combustion of reds and yellows, in that great fire pit, a cesspool of lonely moments. I carried those hills, and I remember it like the Empire State. Bitten by thorny nettles. I blacked out and woke up in knots.

In and out of dreams. The thought slipped from my mind like sand. Lanterns flickering on and off. In shades of purple, I walk. Far from nuclear deterrents. Far from moons of Jupiter and the master of ceremonies, wondering if you'll keep me safe in your pocket. Wondering will you keep me safe from the rain in your pocket? Will you keep me safe from dying young?

I will take care of your body with my silver tongue, my pink tongue, do everything that needs to be done, keep all my promises like a new year's resolution. The bananas have ripened with a wildfire glow. I can't deny what's palpable. I want to snakecharm my way into you and be your liquorice. My lake has been frozen over. No longer do I see those deep water weeds, but I hear a territorial hiss, a wave from the Palearctic calling my name into a glasshouse. It has stuck in my brain like those trips from Charing Cross to Kelvingrove, when I would go to see the River Clyde and fall into the fenestra of a rabbit hole, leading me to wild ideas I had never had before. It has stuck in my brain like the brown fur of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, or that snuff film I watched after one nightfall when the sky was dark and had no stars. I've never known anything like it. The thankless taste of apple or preparations that take up ten fingers. You create a life then scarper from it with your bad supermarket antics. I pick plums from the fruit market and think they'll be good for a summer day.

Plums good enough for a tabula rasa now the pierced lobe has closed over. I know the face of today as well as the back of my hand, as well as a satellite damaged by solar winds, the boredom of being stuck in traffic, or those amusement parks I would go to when I wasn't sleeping through most afternoons only to wake when the moon's shine would make involuntary movements. My love is a burned out lighthouse, a burned out candelabrum. Not as reciprocal as I had once thought when my back was towards the fireplace, now the years have caught up with us. I lurch in the shadows. Diagonal. Casting my indomitable spells at the break of dawn. Wrapped around the idea of him like he's the mountainside, and I am the river at the Colossus of Rhodes.

Sometimes I am so loud I fill the sky, then other times I am so quiet you wouldn't know I'm here. In front of a dead, dead posy. I've been down these streets before, walked solemnly past the tenements and the pubs overflowing with July laughter. Seen the neon lights of the city. Didn't move, didn't breathe. There was no pulse to feel. Had oysters in my throat. Needles in my eyes like maladies in the storm of the breast plate where I put my sewing machine and swore I would never break the military regiment in a slaphappy declaration.

Angels are nowhere to be seen by the time the moonrise appears. Nothing can save me from drowning in penance. I am the flotsam in a black ocean, searching for a doctor's voice. Cyclops. Everywhere but nowhere. Folded myself. In my jettisoned dwelling woolgathering in a sizeable index. I have visions of parity in an afterlife, where I'm clean from haunted mental states. Wanting to make amends for my wrongdoings but I won't expostulate. In fact, I marvel at your neologisms, that stubbed toe, the words you shoot from the brassy gun. In a cold park, by the river garden. Boy Scout of the four seasons. 

On a bus to the west coast of Japan where I want to be free. Burning the premonition in me. I see the yellow glow of the cat's eyes. Marble salamander. Creature of the unstudied water. How his lips opened as he called me a faggot and the spit in my mouth frothed, but I didn't flinch as I continued on into the foggy gloom of the deserted land as black as a crow on the top branch of a winter tree, into that tunnel of jackknifes. I learned about the apprentice of a goldsmith, was taught in Rome, similar to a viper experimenting in my stripling with aphrodisiacs. Regained my footing. Stood like a revetment.

Left as the sun came out and seen disconsolate morning faces in the clouds, so peachy with seagulls in them, but I was right to think they wouldn't last for long. Three quarters short from the tide line, riptides. Around the corner from the pawnshop, the solarium, the tattoo studio. On the 4th floor of the apartment. It finally clicks. Two pieces of furniture married together. I am aerodynamic. Down pathways hoping I won't go ashtray. Picking thistle by your house with the picket fence. I can't see where the sky ends and the new horizon beings.