Symbiotic Equinox

Eeven the illusion is real
because the illusion that anything; any one or multiple things could be an illusion
must be illusory
the illusion itself must be something

And so it keeps going
unfolding and congealing
unveiling and spiraling inward
and outward
holographically shattered
and yet complete
maintaining wholeness
until the music stops
or changes
becoming that song
that one true song that makes you stop
too tired to smile
and yet smiling
beneath the mantle of skin
dexterity somehow surviving
because the desire will not sleep
thriving to become
which is art
to defeat death with creation
to create for the sake of life
the dendrites firings
the spore launch
the white wave of fire
voracious to consume before becoming too aware
that fire must always become its own predator







And so it is bloody
The lifesource a throbbing pulse
Of waterwomb or bloodlining—a mother
And motherlessness holds a space for aloneness
For loneliness
It’s all in how you look at the positive
Or the negative
Negative asking
For a gift
A spark
Transference
Some symbiotic taste
Too tired to fight
The loss of internal resistance
Finally letting the moment lead into the moment
Releasing and being released
Into the negative
Becoming the positive
the illusion of anything but union
and yet
diametrically opposed
symbiotically paired
and in a state of transference
a dance
a gift
of a wind through the stars on Equinox

Psychomotor Agitation

Psychomotor Agitation

It starts with a groaning. In front of the classroom a man emits groans. His voice is full of stomach sickness—timbres that speak of pain. His voice could be segments of polyvinylchloride tubing smacked with the flat of a palm. Or sex noises. Gale squints her cheekbones high up into her eye sockets, and twists her head up. To see something out the window during class, to take herself along with her eyes. The easiest of escapes. Gale is wan and her neck is especially thin and pale and full of freckles which move about and disappear into the neck of a black t-shirt. They reappear frantically dancing down the backs of her arms and the tops of her long hands. Freckles on rice paper skin. They are moving. Her insides itch. She wants to scratch them off. ‘I’m not a burning building,’ her mind sputters lyrics that scribble the walls inside her head. She squeezes her bony thighs together tight under the panel of her desk. Releases the pressure. She does this repeatedly until her thighs ache with tension and fatigue. She opens and closes the magnetic fasten of her purse. Opens and closes. Clenches and releases. Snap. Feeling the metal nipple finding its magnetized indentation, she opens and closes the clasp again and again and again.
Gale’s desk is in the last row, where she twists her head up and to the side to watch through the blinds that cover the large square windows. They are stained and yellowed as if they had been nicotine treated in some dingy café or bar, having survived some long tiresome stretch of depression. Wintered like a truck stop woman scribbling down wiggles for counters of customers, serving acid pulp and black grit coffee, tobacco and eggs. Gale is in Detroit Lake or Cave Junction; she is working tables. Her life is partly used up now. She takes an order while smoking a cigarette; a bit of imaginary ash drops onto the pool of someone’s buttered toast. She is bored and unhappy she decides. Too many years of breastfeeding this mossy sopped in snoggy Oregon town. If her hair wasn’t inky and black, it too would be yellowed with smoke. She shakes her head to feel her hair blonde and long. Her hair is shorn short and black. She has no business wandering off. Her hair is black. She has no buisness going to Detroit Lake. She has no idea— the blinds could just be old. ‘They could just be old fucking blinds Gale.’ Maybe they are just yellow from the sting of mercury battering in the fluorescent tube lights. She hates mercury. She hates these tubes of lights that make all the faces green and red. She hates hydrogen and mercury or whatever gas is in these lights that pulse and flick...

eyes on the bottom

waking up in the city- well afternoon- the workers
are getting off work-
my hair as tangled in dendritic misfirings as my
closed fist mind in my pocket
pooling through thoughts
some shit song out the grit black spaghetti holes of speaker pores
and pours a menu before me demanding decision
A thought of a lover, a smell on the hand, a memory ruined with words, a disease, a host of fears
the angelic keys to an organ to the heavens to the crown and temple of my
high holy head in this cafe
--there are these things: soup coffee a lacquered verdant table
top
> wobbling below me- the mushrooms I ate two days ago still mushrooming
consciousness from spores shot from the gills powerful as a vw bug
launched to the the moon
spheric dualities of night and day- disease and
health-
where to go and who to become- two parents taking up vast liminal space--diminimous ground covered of the psyche without their glorious Jupiterian return- needing soy milk a waitress waits as I am unable
to
> order- unable to plot and pick from a menu of premade options- an
Aeries awaits somewhere with Jehova -where- a stream of consciousness is not
this- because this is never going to be spoken word- or published word- or any word but
rotten scribblings from a lousy mind unwilling or unable to pick a choice to choose
a path
to wake at some unaccustomed hour--Asking the waitress is she's got-breakfast at 6 pm is pissing her off but I've got things to write and
she
keeps wanting a word for a meal to emerge from my lips- but it's
coffee time and she keeps looking at me like I got someplace to go- it's time to write
it's a city and it's a family and it's america and it's never going
to end until they levitate the pentagon and even then it still won't end
because it's a circle and it's square and it's isocilese and it's geometric
and were still using inches goddamnit it's a radio and it's waking up in
this
restaurant it's always always being alonge-- except for my
parents arestill here staring at me like art behind glass melting like oil on canvass.
A
dreadlocked black shows up and he's my friend and he tells me what to
eat-
no metaphores- just sandwhich and soup and it's over and I sit back
and feel
> my shoulders. I drink more coffee. I melt myself down like turbinado
sugar
until I crystalize again. At the bottom

Hamburgers To Montana

How many hamburgers to Montana we asked once over on repeat moss growing stones to roll
between fires blurring lines beating tireblazes
gazing behind the back of black spots
Calling pupils to the eternal horizon
prognosticating wicker fruit bowls make no guitar stands
still I learned to rote my poems
while writing backwards
riding sidesaddle with sticky keys on eighty
feeling like a double entendre left in the right lane
slowed below the storm clouds above inspired scratching on papers through Utah
a big long pull out a motorcycle truckstop
a flask feeling lucky as a lil fumble a cigarette rotten as robbie
fingering a shout to turn the light sky blue to black
to blow as dome grows wind around an orb like glass
Hurrying on canes
waking on rumble strips
behind boats
on wheels a wait
like the pounds of a head
however you spell it
weighting in wadding pools like eyes
still moving
only in reverse psychology
following forward thinking
getting pulled over
arrested by floorshime
auspicious gravy stain from chuck or heavier matters
the ironic focus on finittures when waiting to come out licensed or in bondage
registration waiting at hotels around salt flats
where seas drive moonstars
between mountains
away from police cars
to Montana

BEGINNING

In the beginning the spirit moved across the silent waters, and silence moved like spoken tongues to dream. And in the beginning there was sound to song. A grunt. A groan. A roiling slap of skin and bone. The flat of hand to hide. In the begging there was the drum and to the beating of drum and the dancing of bared breasts like the drumming of thigh upon cock. In the begging there was a bird. A bride. A night. An herb. A seed. An eye. In the begging was night, and night was divided by a flick of flint: a spark to blow an orb of glass. A light. Alight the mint moon shone in opposite. Opposed to the beginning, there was the night, and in the night were the three sides and logos was the sound of bone and skin to begin where there was only blackness once between: between a flash and a blot of black in the beginning there was light on flesh, and it was a dark skinned flesh of christ. In the begging there was flesh on rib of bone like bridge or track of train. In the beginning there were the waters that teamed with life like white sperm angels: white sperm angels comming from the black.
In the beginning there were the waters and the spirit moved throughout. In the beginning there was light in webbings on the waters' skin and there were angels on ocean floors. Pools with vines and creeping things all bearing fruit came forth to touch. In the beginning there was touch and the touch aroused and made mounds of wetbacked golden flesh copeper forged spines and sex with cocks in ass and mouth and cunt and no hole was angered. Not by sight or search or sinking of the eye. In the beginning there was light to dance with light and none said to each to each to each. Stinging things and fur-bodied buzzings filled the fields of day in heat, which called to rain to fall on fields of each and each and each. In the begging there were horns and tusks and flanks of flesh to tear with teeth and eye to spear to sink in beast. There were beasts in each and each, until one day, alas there were there were spores to taste and speech. There were teeth to whore and wets to catch and words to sting and teach. Soon there were other fruits to pull and laws of different snakes to pet. There were dropping things and pulling things and forcing things to root: straight from birth canals all flush and pale with slipper skins and suits. Heated things cried afire with tongues running circles round the stone and banging things hissing red came around to end to start. All the while the central fire was kept anew to glow alight and mirror central truth. And all the things that chewed and chewed and sucked and pulled and spit, and all the things that tore and boared and horned and mewed and hoot, all these things became the strings the tubes the bells and flutes, all the sounds against the rounds of voices raised to roofs; on painted domes and pointed threes beneath the desert nights, the moon shone down on the cooling grounds of cellared honey jars. The miel, a mushroom tale preserved, and all through tender morn and late sunlash, the streaming boughs all sunk—and throughout time the dapple page the freckled skins all love, for in the beginning there was the now, the three, the end, the passed, and all three circled spinning freely round while the mushrooms spermed the sea.

TWAK

Bridger is becoming aware of the ordinary as he drives towards the freeway, entering a sort of still time where the world around becomes subtle and slowed, ripe for observing the sounds of water caught and expelled from the radials of tire rubber and the angles of rain-fractals falling in patterns of light—caught mid-air where space itself has textures and currents composed of the kind of atoms you can see with your own eyes and he becomes aware that he could pull these atoms in through his eyes and grow stronger and he becomes aware of the sunlight emanating not from above, but from the city itself, and this energy he pulls in through his eyes as well, feeling it filling him up and flooding his solar plexus, running up the back of his spine and circulating above his head where he touches the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth and sends it pulsing down through his shoulders and chest and arms, through his biceps and his elbows and forearms and wrists down his knuckled fingers and through the balls of his fingertips where the steeringwheel begins, but doesn’t begin or end but simply is there as an extension of himself, as everything you touch can become part of you, but especially for Bridger the steeringwheel is an extension of himself as he feels the engine of the car and his heartbeat fall into rhythm and he becomes grateful for this rhythm and grateful to be on the road feeling movement before having even left the city, feeling the road awakening his senses and filling him with vast space as his body spreads out into the width and length of the car, his body becoming greater and larger, becoming one large ball of energy and momentum, becoming awake to the way water collects in places on the windshield to roll down in predetermined channels, and Bridger pulls off Van Ness now into the Chevron just before the drive-thru coffee stand exit where drivers wait with faces terrified, their eyes jammed wide—those uglied souls who never feel like Bridger feels as he rolls fast over the large bump and lands next to the pump, stopping for gas just before he becomes America. And Bridger bounces over to the pump, pulls the hose and sticks the nose into the tank while catching the reflection of his unwashed locks of hair grimy-long and oily in that state hair reaches before it begins to dreadlock. Grinning almost a growl. Like a manimal. Grinning at himself in the mirrored station windows, he has a hard time recognizing his own reflection, and it makes him feel strange and wild to see his outward self sort of matching his internal state and yet completely foreign- a twinge of absurdity- a glimpse into the cosmic jest- the ridiculousness of being separate. Perhaps this is why Bridger refuses to groom and chooses to allow his facial hair to grow in grizzled patches of red and dark brown with a mustache so thin and blonde as if non-existent, his neck growing dark shoots of thick hair that make the underside of his beard far thicker than his face.

Inside the station, Bridger peruses the rearview mirrors, the .99 cents bin, goes into the bathroom and pulls out his cell phone- calls his dad. As the phone dials, he pulls six or seven disposable seat covers out of the plastic case and puts half of them down on one side of the seat, and he puts the other half down on the other side without opening any of them. He feels a surge of guilt for wasting the seat covers. The call goes through with a beep that startles him as if it was the first time. “Hey dad, I’m just getting on the road, I’m at a gas station. Hey, can I check the oil as soon as I turn the car off, or do I need to wait or what?” Bridger wonders why he doesn’t know this. It troubles him. He bites at his bottom lip, looking around the fluorescent bathroom. Shiny steel encrusted garbage area— flat reflective plate above the square concave opening of the receptacle—mirror scratched at with a key or a screwdriver—handrail with a “hello my name is” sticker. Dad saying something. Have to wait for oil pans to drain. Bathroom dizzying—somehow circular. The twak feeling. Two cups at home. Is the maker off? The high almost a headache. Sort of psychedelic nausea. He must know about these things; he must know oil, but he has forgotten again—having lost that part of himself somewhere. It’s all these fluorescent lights, steel and mirrors, circles and memory loss, and his Dad still talking.

He must know about oil. After all, he was once a sort of hippie tour kid pseudo-pro driver, having pulled long-haul stretches of sleepless days and nights behind the wheel from Minnesota to New Orleans with no money, a leaking radiator, an old Delta 88 overheating in the snow, highway lines blurring, leaving trails of leaking antifreeze across the blacktop- a reality hemmed only by telephone towers, following trails of tires on snow in Midwestern stretches of flat ten hour time-stalls, stealing twak from lobbies of motels and covering the license plates with electrical tape to steal gasoline before everywhere was pay before you pump. He had been out on the long nights—alone where only the semi-trucker-gods of the highway roam in the surreal hours of three and four and five. Often he was tempted to pull over on the off-ramps to sleep in their still caravans—a lone car snuggled somewhere safe in the middle of a line of semis—something like being part of an ancient caravan—a jew or a bedouin- a gypsy. He loved the sorrow of being out there on the road. Something mimicking the loneliness of a drunken past. Something about loneliness, and the way sorrow is always there when the beauty comes- those rare moments where everything slows and the air cools and the timelessness comes back—an owl call—somehow clear as childhood.