softmoron

Dancing alone in the room, bumping up against the lamps- a deaf ghost stands in the corner laughing at the vibes and the wavy intersections from hand to hand and it's the thought that counts it's the thought that counts. Putting on a light show for the lights. There are signs in the air space they say "I think I'll sleep unconscious" say "I think I'll sleep in peace" The world spins a def-track the world unspindles a ball of yarn, the world is spinning spitting it off now not at all, the world spins to a timeless well. Seeing an almost something in the room, a kokipelli shadow plays notes from after the war.

I think about minutes, I think about hours, I think about traveling through time. I think of a rose, loneliness on my brow, and lament that it is no longer rising. I think about the city's rapid transit trains, how they take an eternity to reach anywhere of note. I think about how far away you are and how shitty this poem is that I wrote. And retrospect begins with an astonishing accuracy of detail to the point, ghost you whispers, "it's called regret, hun" and I say, "bring me her." Beside street corners and street corner cafes (none of which make an imprint on my eyes, tired shut) Beside the road, beside the

a jar is a home for a large, unusually shaped and incredibly non-self-conscious hermit crab or a spider named after the jolly roger, dead and swishing around in preservative liquids, or an eye of newt. I'd like to meet the door on the other side of this wall, I'd like to shut it firmly and say hello and make away with a telephone or a telephone number, I'd like to hang out watching the blood cells go in and out of the heart as if to procrastinate would kill them- living their lives on the edge of glory. I'd like to, but there's a door in the way and the lock is too heavy to pick up with the pen

there is a view in my hotel window of intercrossing streets, the stains in my eyes tell me that the passing headlights cannot see me through their windows and I wonder if anyone would even look up. there are cars beneath the bushes I hold them in my hotel gaze, me, manifested and inglorious looks up you imaginary and far away wishing ghost you would park your ghost buggy down my lane. How do you light up the ignition in a rusted engine? Every fleeting moment spent waking up to the sound of sputtering is a wish to sail this ship on a faster wind away from the sunken port.

I type in numbers and hope that they mean something on the screen 011 0001 011 0010 011 0100 100 0011 011 0100 011 0001 010 1011 a desire to write a novel so badly it becomes someone else's.

I let my eyes filter out their lenses seeing colors no one else can see alien perceptions: a fisher in a tree, arms gnarled like branches, makes a catch of cicada songs to sell to dreamers in a scam of inspiration. Behind my forehead, Wernicke dances to traces of songs I can almost hear, and Broca speaks in songs I can almost know, the cerebral cortex plays a record of songs on the machine which are none of these. On my fingers, under my nails, deadly and mysterious life forms satisfy themselves in their happiness machines a utopia of dreamers, trapped in their shells, waiting for evolution to adapt them to think color

All hope is lost the summer syntax no longer makes any sense the words run away like horses without riders into sunsets in reverse while I shout angrily at a community of sheep that will not let me sleep. After this audience I count next the lions with their manes and the roars that hide behind them the terrors that await in each bend in the road. At a moment's epiphany I notice that I am a robot wearing human skin hiding wires in the spine and in the brain in my hands and in my feet it sets in then that depression is a stream from the lake of dark nothing.

Dear Passenger, I look at the dark, I look into the stumbling black shapes fumbling the body, the unevenness of cold and warmth messages scratched on skin words that rhyme with tithe crawling through crooked paths as the showerhead trickles a starry starry night. Dark- in the streetlamp littered bedford street Dark- at the lightning wires of benched birds waiting their turn to dance Dark- on the dress she wears, covers words on skins, covers ruby juice, covers Dark- to take away the human frame to take away the human name to take away the simulacrum the asshole half-gemini of the day Sameness, monotonous slow repetit

when you've seen your angel drunk and laughing sweet then you can speak of missing sleep plant deep and grow weak find your fortune made by the company you keep silence retreats complete with unhinged jaw replete radiating peace (devout belief) and certainty that seeps from cloudswept brow to same-swept feet the sound surrounding sure discretely wrapped around your core snuck a symphony through cracks and crept where no music's dwelt before when each new day's an encore dawn sings when even loss has lost its sting your polished dirt will bear the proof (the fruit) of a dustbowl heartland's ha

Tequila, miniatures, compliments of KLM. It's half a dozen shots; maybe enough to let me clean out your desk today. I open the drawer a crack, then wider. That meddling slut Pandora's been here. She's stuffed it full of arguments and stale conversation, leaking trouble, oozing bad karma.   Balloons come flying out, sputtering, sucking up to the ceiling, helium-high. They speak in absurdities and riddles, mad on myth and inert gas. But I'm so free, smoking Black Devils, crumpled pack, under a map of Boston;  empty matchbook, The Frog and Peach; my number, in your drunken scrawl. I aim lungfuls of Dutch smoke upwar

Dear August, I might have watched the city burn from this height, rising up, smoky hand-to-hand combustion, that long ago Sunday en route to the sea. Honor minus pragmatism is how I see it now, but then, I always knew I was an interloper, watching tradition descend, upright fathers to stalwart sons (Since 1865: When do you stop counting the losses, in sons and acres, I wonder?) O honor, that insubstantial source of languid pride, toothless and infirm, minus muskets and those ridiculous dueling pistols.   (My eyes roll at tales of minted drinks on magnolia'd lawns: pure Hollywood, and too far gone on the breeze.) St

There was that unexpected duality to it, something of a pan, flashing in salt marshes, broken up like old bones, a war dream served with warmed nuts and Dewars, drawled civility over upgraded seat assignments and that Friday afternoon sense of having dodged the bullet. Peopled canyons receded beyond lozenges of pitted glass in that vertiginous sacrament we sometimes mocked, mere hours since a proud dog-and-pony apparatus went missing, sucked up barking into granite-clad commerce and a sky gone gray in January's stolid transaction queue. As long as they were talking in those soft syllables, those Scotch-soaked whispers in clou