_Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain 5_

In the beginning was the rat and the rat was with god and the rat was god
and the rat layed itself down to be picked at by onions. For the end or
there is no end, or for the man with no description for he is not a bear and
is not lipstick and is not the regularity of nature nor the fundamental
pillar of all creation swinging from the stars or shaped like a curlicue.

Deeply prejudiced but gentle rat. Legislative rat. Rat beginning and ending
with a bang. The lord rat running from our eating of him as he hurls all
things towards their inestimable nothings, towards miracle somethings, into
miracle peristalsis, miracle throat, towards Sam Dordoni in the belly of a
rat. Glory be to the gravitron, to the rubber-slinged and soulful. Glory to
the beard. We've come here to contemplate one life, with the Lord our rat
sitting in his own stomach and chasing his tail, in a hall of mirrors in
tactile 3D where you can fall into the mouth of a reflection and find deep
inside another one to fall into. At the bottom of the mouth is another
mouth.

For the word that changes one life.

For slim chance. For our slim chance. For the clothes in my closet to which
I would set fire if I dared, to what you know that you will never tell
another, for your shoes, the ones you are wearing or the ones you will wear
tomorrow, and for seeing them in your mind as if they were an inch in front
of your eyes, their eye-holes and blotch-stained laces, for what are the
eyes that come out of nothing, like waking in a room at dusk and not knowing
anything that has ever come before.

For asking not how did I get here but for saying dear creation of nothing
dear in and of itself dear miracle beyond that which I can withstand, dear
rat am I a fake, a faux foe, I have thrust my arm into my chest and found
there is nothing to touch, nothing to feel, no jawbone and no blue man
humming. For essential to the very nature of all things are some 13 impalers
and their slicked-back appearance. Is this mundus sensibilis the beginning
of the causality, the substratum of the thinking self, the destruction of
possibility, for there is a number that begins with a one and has 32 zeros
and it is the temperature above which there can be no rat, and yet for me to
be saying this here and now, there must have been a rat the size of a
babytooth compressed into infinite farenheit degrees. For I am crouched in
my closet and I have lit a candle and I am speaking to my limbs which have
cast a shadow over the prairie like a mountain that wants only flatness and
I am saying, right now, I'm saying: we're all here. Now what do we do.

_Composition_

I am a stream
filled with odd-shaped fish,
laying odd-shaped eggs-
to be a glass knocked from a table
is to be wonderful,
and solipsistic, which is
what it takes to get by,
or so a woman once told me,
before she tamed a tornado
and told me that light always comes
from a middle, not from an end,
and I was a hand outstretched,
hard against the side of a well,
trying to press but slipping
into a rain of flowers and knives.
I drew infinity's portrait; I'd learned
with an ordinary set of numbers,
the ones on the fridges of America,
I'd learned by learning to scribble
the soul of the blue jay
and the crunch of the boxing glove,
but I am not the body,
I am the witness.
So I witness
myself in love
and wish I were him.
I use my five senses, but
not one of them can count,
so: words. They are a blindness that strikes,
a card trick that never works,
the rag between lips, a full stop,
a ladybug frozen to the sill,
the tantrum, the dream, the uninvited,
the guests who knock out the host,
my arm in the bucket of berries,
my claw-and-strawberry hand.

 

 

_The Madder The Poplar_

and the design of design?

            the leg of this cricket-its beetle-steeled hinges
                        and crisp highstep-
                                    the way it is so vulnerable to being

-I've never seen my bones. Are they here-
            a placement of accidentals-
                        I am the caretaker
                                    of a mad-brained whoopsidaisy-

            the center of an oak leaf-
                        all baubles,
                                    an ostentation of gaudy electrons-

how touch the touching
the placement of a thing is a thing in need

            o grant me the soapbark
                        to rehearse the canard
                                    until the assault

has become sunlight streaming straight through a body

            My pince-nez
                        is not faulty,
                                    but my world-without-end
                                                is of a relative duration-

and I did not come looking for looking until it spit me out and spawned me.

 

 

psalm of breath

into this and out

of the smell

of honey

in, out, i am

exhaled

god coughs

in a field

you are the bee

he is chasing

 

 

Psalm 3: The Temple

This psalm has crawled beneath the house,
maybe to whistle.

Are you whistling too?
Or are you carving hieroglyphs

into your arm? Are you sending your
arm to the arm museum?

Will you take up a blue tarp
and wave it? All noise

comes from somewhere.
Your voice. Where did it become

a train out of a mouth.
I can't hear you

unless I'm up against your lips.
Insect

caught in my teeth.
You tear me apart

like biology,
those worms.

 

 

_Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain 3_

To the harmonics of alleys and the ringing in the ears and the particular
cage of the self made of glass and woven wire and buttressed by sinews
against the fish in the teeth and the arms and the ropes and doom and the
warm fire at the crack of doom where a man paces a submarine on an ocean
floor with an anxiety that is his precious vertigo though he has nowhere any
further to fall but toward the sensation of the lacuna deep within.

To walk into rooms and stare at a corner one hundred times, to vagrancy, to
soul-unfixed by clamp or hanger or rabbets or tied with silk sheets at the
inside of the knees. To extrusions of the extranatural-debt, sport, and
fleur-de-lys, to paisley and to the grand and golden ameoba embossed and put
atop a castle, to rock, stick, and gizzard, to the crowbar pinging against
the side, swaying like a man hung by the neck from a scaffolding by another
man, one who scrutinized and squinted and gazed lovingly at every persuasion
of rope, poured himself over rope with his deepest eye, his whole self
thrown into hemp and cotton and silk, into waxen, polyester, and tar-filled.

What infinitely wise and eyeless man too fat to fit down the soup aisle.
What architect of a coup who must now buy gloves. What congress of poets
mistakenly clogging the subways with tuna fish. What deer pushing her snout
into yellow leaves.

The gimbals dislodged, a spyglass and a knife, the giddyap and the dancing
of the furiant, the prayer of an evil man in the year of jubilee while he
forgives a debt and causes the blindness of an entire tribe, what of his
hunch, his instrument board, his indestructible sense of the many knots with
the name 'cat' in them, what of my unhooked ligature, my too-tight jackboot,
is this the knife wielded in the boardroom, the cut of habitual
introspection, is this a woman concluding in defacto that something must be
done and is she striking the mailman with a switch or spraying poison on the
mealy worms or just digging within herself and beginning to divide because
she knows only that she must decide and she does so-speciously or entirely
truly in line with a sense of the common, for she must push me ahead for I
have opened a fish to distinguish between heart and liver and head, I have
abused process or presence, abused substance or self, and what do I have
when I am plain or jejuned and inadvertantly nixed or gloriously chosen and
nipped.

For the phrenologist on the top of the world scouring the surface for pure
water for his throat, for a way to carve, a way to go, shall you write a
constitution or take delight in a banker or carry one above your head, is
your stunting from your own hand, should you build the Hoover Dam, become
strong and phlegmatic, make a bolo out of your own choosing or craft a
teleological talisman to hang around your neck. The crux of a mammal, the
ankle of a moment, the echo of a ping and its harmonies imagined by wolves
and prisoners in black skull caps, and the sound of men burying children on
a hill.

The bomber confused, is this the right house, the right town, the right
lover, the right body, the right head, are you the right person, do I weep
over you or you over me or we over this miracle obsequious this common
cliche over the heartbreak apparent and imminent and glowing quotidian, the
shining of a buckle of a belt in the middle of a street under an
unremarkable evening with motors humming and fingers twitching on devices
and three dogs nearby out of one another's sights and can we see them slowly
sniffing at the air for an aromatic path for a sign one sign any sign at
all.