Every little renaissance is echoed in the colliseum, empty to the walls and tinpan alleys. Till the space between the skin and shirt grows thin, till the cells of flesh and material are indestinguishable under a microscope. Till all the water goes gas and the pockets pop after the days gone dark, and the next chords struck out of necessity, necessities. They peel the paper from the walls or pick another color paint, and the next chord echoes like shrinking nickles in a metal elevator falling single file sized order through the hole in your pocket, landing round, a sillouhette in the threat of silence The life span of the flight path of a slowly sinking, skipping stone. The dotted line of the walls dying down. The time span between wave crests is what makes the crest the crest. I know the temptation has greatened. The spines of men hunched from years of keeping nickles in their shirt pockets to lift these woodmen from behind. And in one jerk-snap every bone discomplatent place, like adjusting some rusty segmented piece of an erector set from the 1950's. But the human spine is an iron rod, and its easier to fill front pockets with nickles than it is to make a cold metal supple.
Tasting the tears That run down the gutter two teeth make Tears in route Running a groove in your cheek Waterfalls leave smooth rocks When the river dries up You can determine where a river once was Just by examining rocks Your face never forgets a cry Like trace remnants of acid in your spine The erosion cries cause Make whiskers prematurely sprout in men And in women Homogenize complexion Diluting pigment Until the whole face is washed with a slight mascara tint
I want to always be on film, To be caught in the cut coffee sober bolder unscratched lenses of a brand new prescription, drawing days from a stacked deck of cards and doing doing doing. I should cut down my caloric intake. I should go to sleep hungry and wake up with my guts knotted up and ears open like a burnt down hut. I want my mouth to always taste a blade But I want, but I want to kiss like taffy, hump gentle on a bed of nails and feel salt to widen eyes like a cut up clam's tongue does. I want to dump early on and be empty the rest. I want a patch of blue sky to follow me. Unfold an origami death mask and cut my DNA with rubber traits. Pull apart the double helix like wishbone. Always be working on a suicide note. Productive, fully charged cocked and pointed. Keep a tape recorder on my bedside table Sweats, only the pants that fit the best, no belts, no cuffs. Walk toned yet loose. Keep peeled eyes glued to a ten. Watch a fly hit a pane of glass till he gets real bony his stomach swells up and he dies. I don't want to, when I feel like I coulda gone long. When I feel like I coulda gone longer.
Listening for the hoofs of the rescue party. Waiting for some ghost pony to glide into Berkeley with an old fish bowl for a tear trap strapped to its ghost saddle. It moves slow like an exercise bike on an airport walkway. Something that wouldn't smell like ground ants or glossy magazine cologne, But a wet street after light late summer rain, a wooden match just lit, or something new in the green subject of a landscape painting, or something new in the foreground in a poster of some Asian mountains that says "Patience" in a funky Italics.
