1
Brushfires all around;
I always say that is living.

And stop abruptly to stare
in terror
at the block of ice.

The tentative colors
shrink inward,
a lilac is stuffed into the air;

the last leaves of night
are ripped out
of this blind world

by a still breeze.

    2
The strollers are one
unending stroller

all Spring on the tip
of a budless branch

They drink slumped over
in the dark
grazing the cold teeth
of the chisel

Then you are no virgin

a little maple leaf
on a chain
sparkles his stardust
on a stranger

    3
Men get down on their knees
and search the toy river

it is daytime
the carnation is bubbling

the owls are sleeping
on a distant black planet

A scarf is pulled quickly
through the veins

of a covered bridge

    4
Feeding those pigeons
each spoonful of stone

eyes of a doe
when nobody was around
say in an empty subway
after midnight

like a baby on fire

kicked off the edge

to indicate
there was no sign
or wise man singing

a buoy of blood
is tossed
to the far shore
   
    5)
Little hands were sprouting
in the cracks
of the sidewalk
they have been told nothing

a champion of kisses
somewhere writing
my own filthy epitaph

that famous
limp grey ray
of light

jackknifes midword
into a world without alps

but I have no feathers, he said.

    6)
When you put on your nightgown
to get off the ground
the smoke twirls

in amber telephones

Chiaroscuro of fossils
and diving birds

the way I run
from their embrace

into a foreign political paper
tattooed
on a false virgin’s cunt

The bazookaman chimed
the first kite of
the day—blindfold the birds

in slippers of secondhands

    7
How will it be next time
on the corner
of asylum street

a woman draped over a balcony
in the sky

a poor fiery
oasis
like the candle revealed

in an autopsy
where the vegetables

cry out
on wolf pit road

in the vertebrae of
her bright malaise

the night was clocked
bodies became
covered with dust

they looked like statues

    8)
With a bloody eye
the egg slid from memory:

don’t drop your tooth
in the delta,
old evil dead over there.

Change of chair was
an illusion,

pins in them,
as if to say
they are building a guitar

with strings of milk
for the dog to practice
in his whisky—

from here to there
I’ll never go

destroying the desert

    9
Afternoon with a random
stranger in a random

taxi gone down
the drain
in his bathtub,

solitude unfurls
his ribbon

of black light
with the same

savage smile,

perfumed snatches
of a neighbor’s party
before

the imaginary
swimming pool,
beneath which

a solitary maggot
the keeper of the keeper

no nothing nothing
at the mercy

of invisible ink.