like a maya-bird in the heart

acousticwords @ 2008-06-04T22:51:00

2008-06-05T05:50:39Z

UNTITLED FIVE HUNDRED
1
we line ourselves up on the interstate,
tail-lights as textbook signal-flares.
the deep city-grey cycles about us,
and we push the bobby pins into the speaker-jacks,
rattling the static;
heavy piano songs plunder our lungs
like magpies.

2
the bones on our plates
become less of a thing of contention.
something we drum out on tabletops backflips
into something we sing out loud:

the filaments in our teeth
are magnetized & locked together.

we look into mirrors as everything turns mid-air
& suddenly that glass jaw you have
is concrete:
a bear trap.

3
sometimes, sleep is dangerous
-- like when it finds you going one-sixty
on the sea-to-sky highway

/ it is less so when you are sliding in and out of some violet light,
pulled back ashore by the suburbs & the birdsong,
still dreaming of the amazon river.

a data code jumping through your muscles is what strikes you,
when it strikes you.

for example, when i find myself still fingering the ankle-bones we left
in my grandparents' rice empires
& you love me for that,
i can see your synapses firing up like runways.

i can see your synapses firing up for me.

acousticwords @ 2008-05-02T22:13:00

2008-05-03T05:11:04Z

HIGHWAY
blackjack raven overturns rocks as a mirror,
whistling as the ghosts cars blow in,
all sirens flaring.

brokenly, the glassjaw roadsigns waver in the wind.
our convergence on these common paths is a reasonless overture
to moving forward -- metaphorically. we consider the lost dogs
in their back-window frames, matching footsteps to ours when the roads
open up to them, even going mad under powerlines
as we do.

like venn-diagrams, we clothe ourselves in similarities,
not so tied to geography as we are to potpourri, rice crackers,
rings of peach candy.

all wheels move more slowly. we exfoliate our skins of self-pity.
like plastic shopping bags, they play into the wind,
where they turn & turn endlessly, useless
& ultimately unavoidable.

acousticwords @ 2008-03-12T18:30:00

2008-03-13T01:33:50Z

THE DOGS THAT CHASE AFTER US

with jungles like this,
how could we not dis
appear? to shed the
final sandpaper progress
of aircraft through that
kenya-blue sky: that
was all we needed, really,
keeping watch from treetops.

while your mother checked
the messages, while your brother
checked the mail, while you rooted through
acceptance letters, believing
-- we had hooked our lives in you,
laying light upon your trembling eyes.

interrogation time! -- where were you, that hour
when the whole world was a woman adjusting
her timepiece? correct answer: "i was turning
my shins into jeep tyres, i was on my way out.

my lover had found pakistan & was drawing it softly about her,
tenderly making whole again the perforated blanket.
she had telephoned, & the poem wavering
on the water-cusp in a test tube had vanished: a ghost.
my best friend was in grozny, wiggling his toes in some
pulled-rag carpet of warheads. i was leaving to see him,
drawing lines to further define my field of vision. you should
know, occasionally i exist as some flash of astigmatism,
some little vision hung like a scapular about the holy vault
of his neck. if that is the first exhibit well-defined in your pocket,
then remove it, i will point it out to you, me as an apparition."

do you understand our expectations now? do not exist
as some gratified claim. if your best friend loves the oil rig, then
follow him there, comb the salt from his hair,
remember how you have tried to forgive yourselves for one another,
remember how you have failed. do not relate yourself any longer
to those interior piano scales. pack cloth, pack bandages, pack your heart
& set sail.

acousticwords @ 2008-02-26T00:17:00

2008-02-26T08:20:42Z

VANCOUVER, AGAIN
(or, ARE SOBER RELATIONS TOO MUCH TO FUCKING ASK FOR?)
everyone looks the same in vancouver,
it's true.

even on those stop-motion bus-rides,
even in those neighbourhoods unchanging,
there are mirrors & mirrors of the same piano spring
& those new vegas houses,
conspiring,

there is someone in a coat with a fur
collar trembling
in some circulated wind.

god, how we love them
and the voids that they occupy.

how we love the heart-shaped sandtraps
& the guards with fingers hooked, conversing
across a chain-link fence -

"the building isn't finished yet."

"the buildings are never finished."

the buildings are of the opinion
that life is most enjoyable
when you are half-naked
& raking the sky.

we are of the opinion
that we should be half-naked,
period.

when the foreign students
are slapping their IDs down,
are drunk & circling irritably,

they may take comfort in that
we are doing so too.

acousticwords @ 2008-02-24T10:04:00

2008-02-24T18:05:02Z

OBJECTIVES
to find insurgency here is to find insurgency
sleeping. in paper-white sandos, we tread
through perpetual malls with our eyelids
skidding / with undressed feet,
we pump the jungles with kerosene
to burn up pathetically
to go, ultimately,
unnoticed.

only you
on your metal tanks
are lauded with roses.
a rustle of treads
& a city is on its knees,
every neon sign begging
& pornographic.

listen -
if you absolutely must
fuck us blind
with objectives,

at least acknowledge the consequential children
of your redeye conglomerates /
the shining fingerless orphans
of globalization.

at least have the decency
to look them absolutely in the eye
as they are palming car windows & relenting,

reminding you again & again

of yourself
of yourself
of yourself

acousticwords @ 2008-02-20T21:40:00

2008-02-21T05:45:27Z

STATIC IN AMERICA
(or, Response to a Lunar Eclipse)

1.

static in america!
jump-shoot us through our own blustering
grids. around which lights do we prosper?
- a friend lighting looses,
a colour T.V.
we turn it up & drown the wolverines.
we are eye-holed with fright at those interminable woods
whose winds still corrugate our windowsills,
whose beasts are still conjured up to turn-tail, half-
yawning,

at all garbage-tip corners.

2.

to live & die with a shotgun,
scrapping it out:

we desired this surreptitiously,
squirreling birdshot under bedcovers,
hooking eyes on each other like
a smuggled missile,

like the khyber
pass.

3.

it is a widely known fact that
you are no good for anyone

but those legs on the road.

4.

a sonnet
about negroes -

she reads it & blushes
in spite of the liberated time period,
feels the flush of pine
& not mango
between her woolen
knees.

there is an anxious mumbling of automobiles

& she sits
jiggling a foot

waiting.

5.

you are laughing like ayn rand again
like céline on the sunshine mimosa riverboat
momentarily loosed from that perpetual darkness.

someone's mouth is macaroni, making
sloppy cheese sauce of
"i'll be careful, i promise"

& you are dancing
out.

acousticwords @ 2007-12-05T21:11:00

2007-12-06T05:27:42Z

EDITH PIAF
your shoulders feel no need for edith piaf and her phonographs:
they have already fled the years in farther ways, relinquishing the apartment-building clearcuts
to shake the barking treetrunks, to hide out in canopies, laughing -
to hide out in canopies, insane.

below, you test the pH levels of everything, fingers burning in perpetual
alternate lighting. you are enduring redeye flights,
or at least anticipating your endurance of redeye flights,
and find that your 12+ hours in those pressure-calmed cabins
are made so much easier sans épaules.

sometimes, you remember feeling like a hopper painting.
sometimes, you remember feeling like a novel coupland wrote.

the sky falsifies itself and you sparrow-step to some tricolour blues.
you exhibit your inner arms as vessels solely for graphite dust,
and dream endlessly and specifically about ascending clock towers.

vancouver throws temper-tantrums more than you do these days,
but you are still the one with a back like a cigarette lighter.

reduced to a silhouette in a window,
you are still the one with the throat like a wrench.

acousticwords @ 2007-11-07T23:25:00

2007-11-08T08:09:13Z

FUGUE
we sensed its strange occurrence
the second the sun propped its yellow elbows up
on the sill. something
was blowing about unsettlingly,
filling all the rooms up
like they were balloons we were breathing into.

you turned up a little more often
& something turned up all the screws
along my inner arms. the dresses
hung themselves up. you turned up,
and, roughly, i gauged your game voice,
wondering at this new interference.

in miniature, we rooted through those nosebags of affliction,
only ever finding finger-sieves and raw oats. pacing school perimeters,
we would notice & re-notice leafy parallelisms, posessing no further verbal
potential,
having finally run out - we had lost footing, scrambling down the sides
of a trophy bowl.

everything was gold, like licking teeth; everything was brown and dribbling
coffee, like a lack of motor skill development. certain things laughed immeasurably
and our breath escaped in little worried starts, ached through mirrored halls,
tiptoed into the shivering avenues: we were measuring ourselves, always, we were
straining for the notches in the doorjamb lines, moving toes in thick boots,
clutching at each other with escalating fervor
as our ambition filled the streets like glass
and we lay our legs among it,
howling for attention...

somewhere, all the tiny dim-sum fingers
swiveled to face an eastward grin. god
stirred a bowl of cereal. i cracked teacups like eggs,
tumbling further over kitchen floors, hands fugueing
on their own, remembering the bicycle rides,
ducking highway-knives, the resounding
excavations, the scattered shorelines patterned after
a shock of pencil lines, the corners to lean and tremble
upon, fingers fumbling for the other's. hands fugueing
and remembering -

discovering,
beyond the cramps of ruled paper,
the neccessity of the small primal urges
to circle close, pick the bones,

and finally plunge away.

acousticwords @ 2007-10-21T11:51:00

2007-10-21T18:56:56Z

FOR THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD,
PLEASE DO NOT GET HIT BY CARS ANYMORE,
PLEASE DO NOT BE SAD ANYMORE
(for grace & bingo)

to be able to arrange ourselves
amidst the mirror-strings of rain
& sweetly dialogue:

remember when we were caught in this?
remember when our shoes filled up
and we were laughing & stomping through
tyre-track lakes?

remember when i fell asleep in your bed?
remember when you fell asleep in mine?

remember when i kept your clothes for ages?

all the time,
there was a thrill like the inside of a backpack

& like turtledoves,
we fled the magician's hat.

somehow, i never knew too much about lace trimming
but it was ok, sometimes you needed
my swiss-army knives, my spreading ink bruises,

or we would reach a compromise,
colour our tongues with chocolate cake,
spin umbrellas for cab drivers with lungs like
fare meters.

god,
when you got caught on fenders, then side-mirrors, then pavement,
i was so scared.

when you stamped mascara into your cheekbones
and clawed at payphones in the rain,
something caught itself in my throat
and hasn't left since you joked around half-heartedly
and i could hear your sad smile
from miles away.

- remember when we were all wearing sad smiles
for smaller reasons?

they were like bridges, then,

but now there are other ways to cross water,
and we are holding up the crystals of each other,

noting the light.

TOOTH-WHISTLING
learn to whistle through your teeth
& this city will give you something new to write about,

like how the exchange students
kick about other-language'd notions of each other
and you're just a string of shuffled tagalog-letters
on a clean, clean bus.

usually the rain follows you about like a lousy dog,
but eventually umbrellas become the same sort of
twitching reflex as too many pencil drawings
or that endless wrist-hankering after
resin violins

and anyway, there is some small delight
in propping your sneakers up on the radiator to dry.

certain sentence-structures recall SAT scores;
others, more personable, know what electrons to pull
for tiny recollection, like a pinhole winter morning,
some shutter-click of raised voices ricocheting
through the rooms, and with dirty ears, yours still kneels
at the keyhole now and then,
when you are not plying it with your epic music,
your missed-phone-call cacophony, your worried
alarm-clock sounds.

somehow, you can never get up on time,
but at least breakfast is simple,
at least you can still sport your boy-friend's scarf
when you've forgotten to dress warmly
and the day is brooding hopelessly like little miss rejection.

(you've forgotten how to brood like
little miss rejection.

you take this as a very good thing,
indeed.)

acousticwords @ 2007-10-20T11:46:00

2007-10-20T18:50:23Z

LIFE-TREMORS
terribly inadequate, we would often
gnaw open our own flossy seams
to spare the life-tremors the trouble.

indeed, life's outer chambers
were drafted for us and us only,
resplendent in synthetics
and this wind like a birdcage sigh:

we, in the paper slippers,
were to turn its corners, ceaselessly.

but maybe through a hole-punched skylight
there would occur the flight of a water bird,
pure wings and stockings.

or the wind that we'd mimic
with defeated exhalations
would suddenly take a turn
through an apple field
or a room dashed with new paint
or some other event

that would stir the heart to new
& unfamilliar movement
in recognition.

like dogs, we would fall about
the source, nosing the coffee grounds
& water coolers,
the paper,
the silicon chips.

- waiting, inevitably, for our coming undone,
for our unravelling
in a parasail of ribbons.

PHANTOM SWIFTLETS
somewhere, there is birdsong
but no elusive swiftlet.
entangling ourselves in gin-chairs, pointing up,
we are never too struck by the staring-games of
cupboards, only curiously
dredging our fingers through their
loose emptiness. kortedala, with trumpets,
becomes a synonym for this kind of sorrow,

as does the act of jacketing oneself
with philosophy books

as does vancouver,
in his frowns of cloud cover -

(it is he who we find so readily in mirrors,
breathing cooly,
staring back)

SHORT
& somewhere i am yelling -
o my love! shake the coats out!
knowing that vancouver is returning to bed & books & gin
& i am not so reluctant to follow him

acousticwords @ 2007-10-09T16:37:00

2007-10-09T23:44:51Z

NEVER LET ANYONE

no bread for days

hollowed,
we suck the hollow bones.
there are hatchets in the switchgrass,
there are switchblades in the corn,
we are empty and erasing data,
flinging motherboards too far.

you turn to me and say,
THE EMPTINESS IN ME IS THE GOBI DESERT

and i wonder,
what about the sahara? it is right
next door.

PASSING OUT
he sun does not rise as it should
in the winter,
only ever mimicking us in a clumsy
relinquishment of covers,
in the loss of consciousness in showers,
stamping elbows black & blue ...

know this: the sun is a lazy bastard!
& its fixtures are our fixtures, too -
that is, the boiler has broken
& it's pissing down again
& the umbrellas of everything
are blowing themselves inside-out
into absurd botanical specimens.

our bones, from the cold,
are threatening to dislodge themselves
& build new & enterprising settlements
somewhere in a glitzier longitude
of equator. shall we go with them?
- oh, but we can't! at some point
we were all wedded too soggily to this
singular wellington boot,
i mean this shining pine-tree place,

i mean, consider it,
all the things that we build.

of course there is an anchor.
of course we're still attached.

THE STUDY OF RABBITS
the compact little wonder of life,
its shoulder-blades like hope in
folded paper. somehow, she survived it
as we, fumbling for the pots and pans,
acquired a new topography of dirty laundry,
allowed new weather systems of letters
to blow in the front door.

sometimes other things would blow in, too:
someone's mother, talking in diagnoses.
repairmen. a new computer.
the boy i fell in love with.

in short, we were starting over,
and she, she thought it was fine.
if she noticed a difference in how
we arranged our hands together,
in the gravity that, in small soap-flake
pieces,
we shed from our steps,
she did not think to mention it,
and it was this steadfastness we loved,

this little anchor
that let us keep going.

acousticwords @ 2007-09-22T10:11:00

2007-09-22T17:14:07Z

LUNGS
(for sam and marc and jacob and michelle and grace and chantal and gillian and irene and olivia and everyone else lying, atrium-to-atrium, in my heart)

because of all this cigarette smoke
and bonfire smoke
and coughing-lucky-kicking-charcoal-around,
my lungs my lungs my lungs
are falling out of me.

that is to say,
they are coalescing like
non-renewable resources
stamped deep into
the plains of alberta,

so that when i grapple
with these flaming wads of newsprint
in a whorl of ocean salt and precipices,
i know that the night is something precious,

infinite as it is beyond that harbour-dream,
sleeping deeply around us
like a swiss army coat.

we were stomping around
in this new autumn weather
when she said to me,

this time next year, we'll be somewhere else.

and oh you cannot know
the constant fall of that statement,
correlating exactly with collapsing out of bed every morning
with your heart already trumpet-slamming
out of you, running around
so loudly,

positively livid
in its red fire-bell screaming

do everything! love everything! you're running out of time!

& maybe, actually,
time is running out of you,
and you are the one stumbling after it,
half-dressed and leaking toothpaste,
opening your kneecaps
in this panicked state of pursuit,

finding solutions in bloodletting
that are not really solutions to anything

; just other ways to fall in love
with the same fucking problems.

so we fry the egg-whites
& cast stones into the night
& carry on as usual,
but only much, much more fiercely

and, considering this mess, i stupidly say -
leaving is like a terminal illness.

terminal? he says.

when you said terminal,
i thought you meant
flight.

acousticwords @ 2007-09-10T18:56:00

2007-09-11T02:10:55Z

GOD DOING LAUNDRY
god does his laundry every autumn
with a smile and the little darling
down below still listens at the glass,
uncomprehending the shirt-tails of new weather
patterns, the cuff-links of new stars.

baby doesn't pour the bleach.
hell, she won't even try,
mired as she is in the stink of
loungechair leather,
steeped in the stains of
streetcar smiles.

you're a dying breed, she'll tell you,
needing purity like that.

'cause you're fucked anyway, kid.

you're fucked anyway.

(SKETCH)
look, just quit and ascend!
ascend to where the mandolins
crowd out all private thought
and the sky flays itself open
like a lover in trust,
a blue tiptoe of windlessness
and music

(SKETCH)
sure, things look delicate from here,
but i can still remember when i
punched you in the mouth and you did nothing
but bleed, not a lion-tooth missing
although screaming just the same
in the language my neighbours use to
put their house together,
nail-gunning the night

QUITTEZ
so i'm quitting violin
and also quitting you
(or trying, how darling),
ducking M16s of looking
between these bookended places

because, look, it's like this,
you do this thing with leaving
with the world caught around you,

and at any rate we are all arriving
at our event-horizons, pulled thin
as promised, making like war-banners
or maybe just sneezy dandelions,
ignoble in our wish-granting,
resigned to our f(l)ight.

so caught as we are in this stunning
artery ad nauseam, fearing the
beat that we travel by, the solution
lies not in forgetting, no --

we must just learn to pass on less sadly, is all,
to adjust the mirrors, and survive.

acousticwords @ 2007-09-05T21:23:00

2007-09-06T04:26:36Z

WALLS
1
departures leave us more time to think,
and so we cross our legs in aisles and allow
our attention to meander fruitlessly out
of windows:

places are discarded so easily, don't you think?

- just hit the horizon and you're gone,
with not even a shockwave to speak about it.

2
the walls, like guillotines,
fall between us,

& there are too many bodies
between yours and mine.

3
so maybe highways should
clover-leaf about you now,

maybe you and me and the
canadian wilderness should
lose each other to each other
more often,

maybe we should
just meander through the
cloud-filaments forever,

all turbulence and bones.

because when the whole of the earth
goes belly-up beneath you
and the entire absurdity of our patterning
is made clear in far-thrown spectacles of light,

there is nothing else to do
but pull the skin from our hands
and stand and wonder at one another.

there is nothing else to do
but love.

acousticwords @ 2007-08-25T12:09:00

2007-08-26T16:12:39Z

MARBLEHEAD
1
time-zone: new york!
& all the place names here march past,
glorifying shopping malls build on swamps.

the heat the heat the heat is oppressive
peeling all the colours from colonial façades,
moving your lungs about inside you, and

a headache of kitchen-smells comes
trotting around the corner.

2
karaoke night so soon?
well, ok: just one song.

it is like manila in the seventies
slipped free and crouched here, hiding,
between a star and a stripe.

3
i could make a couch from this vinyl!
at least we are not dancing the tinikling.

just damning the parking-lots,
the den, and your nephew,

who cries and is crying
about everything.

COLLEGE
seventies manila time-warp:

even the heat has followed us here,
holding us all, howling into microphones,
on its tongue.

the air-conditioners are muttering
dissentingly in the bedrooms -

scorned, for no seashells
pull tricks in their breezes -

and instead open travel-guides
in small hope of escape.

& i, too! -

is it my fault,
if reykjavik cuts me in half?

two mornings of stars-and-stripes
and my bones are saying you cannot live here!

why not follow your friends to montreal?

there, at least, you may improve upon
your terrible accent, cycle home
speared with baguettes.

oh, but there is thunder here, too,
& harvard fags that mince about,
almost lawyers; there are bridges
and boats and the atlantic, watching me,

and a single figurehead in a high-ceilinged museum,
still determinedly facing dreams of inclement weather.

(one more year yawns
and throws coins at the dealer:

well, goddamn!
why don't you pick me a winner!)

MANILA, JE T'AIME!
two hours of meerkat documentaries
& i, unsurprised, am thinking of you.

look how pleasantly our skin unfurls
in this climate. i have cut my feet on your sinelas

but continue to enjoy the tick-tock of pavement
(how it rolls more lightly here!)

but everything in this country is heavy with sweat.
the clouds, they run miles to reach us,

& we laugh into coconut water when they come
to fill streets with dark rivers

that crawl under doorways,
that kidnap the kids, if only to play.

how i cannot explain it, this missing of this! my clearest roots,
unfed by ocean, only reaching up into a seamless sky,

me and manila, inseperable,
like a maya-bird in the heart.

acousticwords @ 2007-08-15T18:10:00

2007-08-16T01:12:13Z

BONES
single seaside soul
turning ankles between the absurdities
of belly-up boats,

you are wishing & waiting & exhaling
hopefully between copped cigarettes,
wanting to sew the sky-seams together
if only to persevere in the unbreakable
unbrokenness of the ocean,
your ocean.

experimentally, you have been lodging
different bones in different coasts,
quiet little monuments, beachy homing beacons,
kissed by whales & roughened, smoothened, pushed
thiswayandthat
by a lottery of waves,

loving too much, perhaps -

loving too much,
but never getting lost.

AN ELEPHANT SADNESS
a pedestrian zoetrope:

you are watching the street,
emptied.

on your foreign grassland tongue,
"great sadness" is an elephant phrase,

sorrowful & heavy,
wrinkled & large.

unavoidable.

looking you hopefully, hurtingly,
in your coathanger eyes.

so a bird turns over under the sill.
the elephant puts its foot resoundingly down.

a victim of this,
your bystander heart detonates,

& we all go swimming away.

acousticwords @ 2007-08-01T20:35:00

2007-08-02T03:59:46Z

ISMAIL
across this automobile wasteland,
we contemplate the vastness
of one another. the wind
hotfoots it about and murmurs
through all scorching desolation,
manifesting its thoughts further
through turned wrappers, a tumble
of styrofoam.

his wartime heart
lifts its shoulders gently &
clambers from its shipping container
to, again, assess this land anew.
his wartime eyes watch the mountains
for betrayal. they become better
beneath a cotton-wool sky.

it is OK, he says, being here.
home is less like home
when it looks nothing like what it was before.

TIRED
when bluebird comes a-knockin'
this string-arrangement place falls
fully out of tune:

moonlight leers rawly through the windowpanes
as our parthenon legs die smiling in camp beds,
hopeful & hopeful & wanting to sleep.

there are whole rooms hung with compassion-banners,
boys with shining magic boxes superimposed beneath
eternal, brilliant sun, &
front porches creaking kinder, acknowledging us
with their same ragged embrace.

ROME, ETC
shine a light through the automobile lot &
caper through the lemon-groves,
the sunnier underarms of this beloved continent.

you, heartless, can love one thing, despite
the diesel and night-dramas.

you, sir, can love this, this lightblue attack,
this contortion of dust & pillar & city.

don't build it, just love it.
just laugh braver in its unending twilight.

FAILING TO MENTION
he stalks the place with a more
thunderous frown, furious at her
elaborate hand-gestures, her shining
clumsy berlitz-gleaned spanish, the
diesel in her hair from breakdowns
on roadsides, from skittering after
trucks in hitch-hiking hopes
and dirtier jeans than he's ever
allowed. what he fails to admit
is his own auburn youth, hung with
pulled-ears and mango trees, the sound
of his neighbour's cheap basketball
resounding down the street,
his mother's long-suffering footsteps
clip-clopping the five flights up
to the principal's eyebrow creases.
the girlfriend in the yellow civic,
roaring down roxas boulevard with
the windows down & the palm trees
whispering after them, the last gift
she ever gave him a hardbound book named
how to love, the apartment keys,
& a scathing dedication.

he neglects all this and more.
straightens his suit. strides out
of the room, withholding a smile.

LET THE BIRDS LAND, PT. 2
she condensed the world with sorrow
& hooked her eyes on all mirrors,
if only to confirm her own presence
when all seemed the contrary.

unconscious on daybeds, stringed
instruments untouched, our tired violinist
would watch the sky through windows, & ply
doorways with inkblots and bad furniture,
with neckties and persian rugs, lamenting
the sun. the rain. the forever umber moon.

love me less, love me less:
her whole milky skeleton was set
to knock on wood. wishbones
sculpted shoulderblades, built her
a stronger ribcage to hold
what she needed to face the most, &
bluebird crept to her windowsill
with the newborn sun to remind her,
in the same marimba song, of this.

but she burrowed deeper into covers.
shut her eyes with hands on ears.
lived only by torchlight from thereon in.

acousticwords @ 2007-08-01T15:06:00

2007-08-01T22:09:14Z

LET THE BIRDS LAND
no broken-heel fund
but carpets flung into sun,
yourself tweaked for car-noises over
endless renovations: the chainsaws,
the fallen rooms, the further hopefuls
in a cellular pulse, in a knife-edge heat
& the continuing knee-buckles of wind,
all roofs flapping silent,
before.

-- before what? his nobility,
hooked nose, aircraft resonating after
ochre cities, winter in tynda, my uncle's lover found
neck in utility rope, door kicked down, feet eternally swinging
in huxley's tired compass?

oh yes, before love.

before love forced you out
onto the mountainsides to cry,
love me less!
white cliffs in white eyes,
cypresses and dust.

so forget, carry on forgetting.
twin roads will digress with a marvelous rent,
a rip of thundersize proportions, a
breaking-apart of always and forever and
my god my heart leave now don't look back,

& every doubled-back kerrang will swallow you whole,
the multiplied beat of perpetual motion will hide your bones
in its shirtsleeves, will let you peek from its collar in all quieter sorrow,

always for you,
& forgetting.

acousticwords @ 2007-07-21T20:03:00

2007-07-22T03:14:07Z

A COLLECTION OF SAD & PRETTY THINGS

one.
birdwatching

a realization:
ice tumbling pointedly into some cylindrical glass,
the sharp noise of it.

desperately, the clouds begin
their slow slopeward frolic,
& the neighbourhood is immersed
in song.

pacing anxiously, she
tacks feathers to names,
learns a listing lilt of a call,
fiddles hopefully with a head
of hydrangea, looking up shatteredly
at a chainsaw lip of sky.

a window, unlit, wavers in the wind,
and the temperature kneels in apology
as she touches her teeth in thought,
forming the word whippoorwill
in the absence of all incrimination.

two.
leaving home

with departure chiming shyly
in every automatic timer,
she lends me a better understanding
of bristled spaghetti and broccoli stems,
catching her hands on the little licks of
propane flames.

a flock of sparrows whistles from
the spice cabinet;
cinnamon robins shimmer & freewheel
through the tepid kitchen air.

i whistle back,
pouring myself into our remaining, mismatched
teacups.

three.
rice mud

my father's handkerchiefs took a walk
and my cracked capillaries dressed the rice paddies
in even duskier sienna.

the sun flashed its teeth in the sky
and thought deeply about nothing.

we whipped the houseflies curiously
from the coconut water.

i forgot the name of that place.

i forgot its name.

four.
great love

it was not a time of great love
but it was not something else entirely either,
as you cried emptily into graphite & tin cans,
soothed yourself with cloud-cover,
sought refuge in great migration.

the salt of new places wrought new currents
in your skin, & yet --

rougher around the edges, you remained
the same where it mattered, your general makeup
not a far departure from that
of a paperback book.

five.
endings

your starling eyes
peeled the houses from the earth,
& i lay in the beating foundations,
saying your name.

the neighbourhoods ribboned away,
left the streetlights standing
bow-headed in the night.

you crawled closer, breathing
like it was a crime.

we fell asleep beneath the last cellophane pane
of an open window.

acousticwords @ 2007-07-21T19:46:00

2007-07-22T03:02:58Z

LIVE HERE FOREVER
we shed our cloud-cover with the noblest of motions,
an upwards outcry of white-eyed force,
& in this sudden gesture felt the earth's quilted face fall away
with our hearts jumping to part with it, heard their hopeful kerrang
as the skies opened up.

& never before have we tread so close
to this tautness of sky, never before
have we been blessed so purely
with the moon's guiding light.

lucky wings! this perpetual going-forward
is a clench of disbelief in the diaphragm. live here forever?
wherefore, eternal life! - the trackless atlantic
welcomes our trackless air
& we go on. we go on.

A GOOD PILOT SHEDS GRAVITY EASILY
disoriented, you are returning home, but only as a glass vessel.
nevertheless, you confirm the happy side-notation that
a good pilot sheds gravity easily,
feeling not the wrench of departure
in your hollowed catacombs.

so many of these places have shown their bellies to you,
have stretched like salamanders through mountain & ocean &
the earth's ceaseless (un)undulation in between,
but only one has claimed you wholly,
only one has learned to pull its teeth around your name.

surely you have scraped your knees in other places,
have stumbled down other streets & reeled
in the rancid drowsy pools of their gritty lamps,
but nowhere else have you dragged your face across
a chapped lip of pavement with such fervor -

surely this one's yours!

you belong to it just as fully as it kneels
to you & the sceptres of your feet,
and you can feel this as you waltz across runways,
carrying its broken-glass wink
as a flight-hazard in your heart.

acousticwords @ 2007-07-17T13:41:00

2007-07-17T20:41:26Z

PENINSULA
when was it that you fell in love with this place?
shedding feathers, sad shoulders in napoli, did you
consider this coastline with your heart asking braver
questions? somewhere in a hesitation of olive trees,

you found a home & yourself with the hull of your chest resounding,
with volumes of ash beneath your pillows
& the milk roads ribboning quietly through your dreams

that you would later know in full, whose corners and cliff-faces
you would adorn with the name of the girl into whose aura
you stumbled with lemon-rinds in your hair, the doves undulating about
your thinking mountain ranges almost visible in the silver half-light.

AMPERSAND
i'm all bitten-lip and open sores,
a mediocre stone on your heartland's shore,
all laissez-faire'd like that, too full of sandy bones.
the winter sky becomes uncertain in its bleakness and careful rain, and i'm drawing
my knees up, cutting my tongue on protractor moons, in general
making a compact little mess of things as you rake yourself
across the skyline & hunger for something new.

two carrier pigeons lent me your roman countryside today
& i, still dreaming, saw the thermostats fall to zero, saw them cry
through a nuclear face, shivering at the end of the line
while the tracks jumped & vaulted & skittered to stops
in all unlikely destinations, forever manifested beneath
a long-limbed sunset. there was

a deep melancholy in the earth today
as our coasts steeped in the piss of juneau.
you've been telling me that the bluejays have been getting fierce.
i've been thinking that survival, perhaps,
means losing all heart.

acousticwords @ 2007-06-28T20:02:00

2007-06-29T03:10:52Z

TWO WHEELS
our hero, like some brave phantom, casts himself onto two wheels,
grins, and departs for the lesser-known eddies of city and suburb,
the fervor of his abandonment shining harsh in rough mirrors
of fluorescent light

and cursing all startling denouements,
young love stumbles around with a knife in her hair, thumbing
quarters pointlessly into slots with arms in a wiry curl. he is lost,
she is looking, she is lost, he is looking -
together, they find themselves going newly through the streets,
raw hearts awash with wonder
& beating, beating, beating,
beating kinder than all
the humming lights that catch
in the rattan of nighttime confession.

courage, she tells him, is something more
than a code-word flight pattern.
he sighs and casts his eyes away,
dives backward into a silence of modernist structure.

i know, he says,
i know, i know, i know.

SHORELINES
the pacific loves us,
& we, we love it too,
whether retching its bile into corrugations
of shipping containers or shining fitfully
in the grace of its tides, breathing sails full of shoulders
or shoulders full of sails, running through heart-
after heart-line. you've learnt it well, you tell me,
its switchback of current, the length of its heave,
and i've known it differently through the thrash
of near-drownings and its constant, constant roll,
storming forever against tropical coast -

so when you leave pebbles beating in your palms and say how it is
to tremble at its edge & feel your bones tense to jump,
to cry wishes for wings in the teeth of its winds,
i know what you mean,
i know what it is to think,
                                             let it take you. it will bring you back.

we know how to shine a lighthouse in heart,
how to take coastline after coastline
in this enduring goodwill.

LIGHTHOUSE
ascending rooftops to feel the flash of
tail-lights along the ball-point scrawls of retinas,
we notice the city, we notice the non-city, we
notice the thrashing arms of both at the convoluted
head-to-heart-to-mouth-to-brain border crossing,
the handgun clouds treading closer in polluted illumination.

the lighthouse grins.
i think of you and me and our frames
as the only crooked rafters in this age of
spineless structures. archaic, we were behind our
flashing foot-forward times, with not fingers in traps
but feathers in caps, twin saddled horses
clip-clattering along these strains of neon streets,
with eyes built only for looking up -

we were beyond them,
                                          entirely beyond them.

        so when you stepped from that horizon
like something beyond dimension and i cried & cried & cried
in remembering,

when we paused in the silence that we streamed through our tongues,
in the empty silos, in the pulled glaciers that we held arms under,
awake and burning with fluorescent language,

you knew
       that i knew
             that they will never know this.

(we have been made in different ways
        and this is why you love me.
                                                            this is why i love you more.)

acousticwords @ 2007-06-08T17:27:00

2007-06-09T00:27:38Z

THE SUN FALLS MORE HARSHLY
with clothespin fingers,
he clasps gently the fluttering membranes of slide film,
examining one after another
his memories of the jungle.

he has lost many here,
has blown their footsteps from the dust of his pathways
to avoid remembering in unexpected places.
stay in my photographs, he thinks,
do not fly further than this.
i couldn't take it.

i couldn't take it.

for his brother in the final frame,
grinning from the ribbon of shade
fanning lengthways from the peak of an army cap,
he has reserved a kinder, more lost breed of smile and as such
must put fingers more firmly on rifle husks,
must dream more firmly in the quiet weight they leave
dozing upon his shoulders.

DAWN BREAKS LIKE CHINA
1.
she plays the violin like you do,
i think, as dawn breaks like china
all over the city's kitchen floors.

if it was only a quieter instrument,
i could have pulled this into it
without waking the neighbours.

2.
up at 4am, there's not much else to do
but scrub the sadness from your eyes
and toss a teacup unromantically
into the back of a microwave.

do everything unromantically.
do not even call shotgun
when the highway leaves its tonsils to you.

besides, you are only its broken teeth,
the split lip of last night's swagger.

3.
and the sparrows?
leave them.
no-one knows where they go in this country anyway
and besides, they are all scruffy little beggars now,
all overturned in the bottoms of yellow buckets.

4.
you could measure the tongue-mouth cold of this place
with the thumb and forefinger
but it would not make it non-exist,
just as the shudder of your throat
will not make you non-exist.

so consider the face you are stuck with
in the mirror. consider the irrelevance
of the line-graphs through your cheeks.
pick your bones over, slowly like witch-sticks.
take their weight between your fingers,
and get up.

get up.

acousticwords @ 2007-06-05T17:03:00

2007-06-06T00:08:04Z

VECTOR QUALITIES
cocooned in new rainfall,
i smile and percieve a new hallucination:
the purest white windows,
jesus' second coming in someone's kitchen.
the tips of my fingers fall apart and,
dismayed, i have found that i have broken
my protractor, snapped and lost it amidst
a whorl of combination locks and languid salad days --

        so with what should i solve these vectors?
            (if i leave my house
             at breakneck speed,
             slam all doors to the
             velocity of you,
             what is our total displacement?)

she is calling me an airplane in a
thunder-hearted flight from darker ground-levels;
he is flinging fistfuls of all illumination
into the backs of my eyes, exhibiting
the sprawl of my own spider-nerves
with the widest of free-man grins.

my inner ear builds itself a cathedral and
sets hammer and anvil scowlingly within.

it is demanding completely your particular method of
articulating my name.

CX 838
my father claims a certain arc of sky
with every new month,
plies it with light luggage
and vanishes from life in all forms but
the phenomena of e-mail or a cacophony of telephones.
there are thunderstorms, he writes,
there are long days and dogs
that drive me insane. i closed a deal today.
this country is ultimately
                                          incompetent.

in our precarious communication,
i laugh and try to exist
in his space-time, putting myself back into streets of different
grain, evoking the endless heat & mango trees &
the roaring sky-roofed artery
digested messily by central manila.

            not too much is happening
here, i write.
how is everything going for you?

acousticwords @ 2007-06-03T16:47:00

2007-06-03T23:48:13Z

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS
a vault of swept-up sky:
i remember our soundtrack to it,
or at least to one very similar.
they've been keeping the stingrays in again,
uncomprehending in the phenomena of seeing spots,
and i'm left alone to lunge around this accordioned
place, saddened by an absence i'd rather not acknowledge.
i've already borne witness to sunrise-sunset-sunrise,
gone sleepless amidst motion-sensor circles beneath a
raw-mouthed umber moon
                        and yet i cannot
                        shake you,
                        cannot seem to
                        fling out enough femurs
                        to initiate a total
                        witch-hunt of our
                        attachment.

in the final analysis, he tells me,
we are alone.

                        i know, i know.
                        oh god, i know.

OPTING OUT
i've been malcreating these hallucinations, candy-spined as she
poises herself confessional, hatching her face with repenting rattan.
not one for forgiveness, she is claiming a territory not mine to contest,
although its relative conquest is a clear-cut to the heart. i am doing my best do ignore this, affixing my eyes to a slide of night sky.

        he told me to outsmart them,
        so i will, i will,
        i will segment the body into
        unfeeling lines, smartly hinge
        a smile, conduct myself in ways
        not unlike water.

we are all leaving, after all.
she will hate it,
        but we are leaving.