I was trying to repair the world

I was trying to repair the world
with words, to fill the gaps with syllables
of every vowel, to illumine her
with verbiage deftly elaborated.

I am trying to remind the world
of her that understands it, trying to show
the form beneath the manifest faces,
the Moon and not just the finger pointing.

Somewhere in this expressive verse is hid
the fragrance of the incommensurate
mother that gives being to everything.

Somewhere in the poetry is a salve
that solves my self, and I can only hope
that it reveals a little for an other.

I've lived a messy life for a long time

I've lived a messy life for a long time―
beads of sweat, disease, some clothes in tatters
on the floor. My mind itself dissolved
with Sun in Sagittarius. I thought that I

had died. My friend had said it was just like
I went through a door and couldn't get back.
Smelly dreads―hair that's falling out
and dancing in the open car windows―

the animals like it. A malefic
rules my chart from the 12th house; illusions
move about me, new translations of

a sutra from the East. O put me back―
or forward―to what's surely meant to be
my duty, put me in a poet's form.

A movement of the air about her heart

A movement of the air about her heart,
the heaving tide of spirit in her breast
amused me. When the words came out her mouth
I wanted to get my hands on her thighs,
my thoughts of her alone. This maddening love
deludes me now, clouds my perceiving eyes

with her diverse forms. Her blue-grey eye
is a door and hallway to her heart
which is the seat of an effulgent love.
I put my body to hers, grab her breasts
beneath her clothes, know the contour of thigh
by passing against it my open mouth.

Singing this song, I shape and move my mouth
to then articulate a word. The eyes
of others on her, watching a dance of thighs,
a music saying what it is the heart
knows. Sometimes when I expand my breast
inhaling air to express the sure love

I have inside me, I find that this love
is mover of all things. Perhaps God's mouth
articulates the world, His changing breast
breathes life into us all. Perhaps His eyes
are our eyes, His heart is our warm heart
defining our center. Still, her thighs

stoke in me a desire; one soft thigh
receives my poetry. I am in love,
or falling at least, somewhere that my heart
has never been, somewhere that my wet mouth
has not spoken of. I open my eyes
to find above me her simple, nude breasts.

I move my tongue to find a word―her breast
pushes into me, between her thighs
I find myself. Disclosed before my eyes
is all I've ever known and ever loved,
is the only word that comes out of my mouth
when I am acting from within my heart.

O blossomed breast! O object of my love!
Move your thighs―ripe fruit―about my mouth,
give to mine eye song worthy of your heart.

I was trying to note where the Sun

I was trying to note where the Sun
had set the night before. A crescent Moon
lingered on the horizon amongst stars
in constellations; diffuse, milky clouds
condensing in the spectacle as rain.
This broad and moving stream of gradient light

unfolding overhead. Is it the light
of consciousness knowing itself? The Sun
becomes obscured by movements of rain―
pink, grey, purple, maroon. The Moon
reminds me of words or strings of clouds
in grammars. Once I heard in the stars

were letters, even numbers. Then a star
communicated its still, distant light
that I interpreted beneath the clouds.
I'm figuring the writing of the Sun
across the heavens, or the path the Moon
takes as a herald of the cleansing rains.

I want to know when it is going to rain
or where Jupiter is within the stars
that whirl about me. It's like they're the moons
about my self, singing systems of light
about my soul. Being a sovereign Sun,
I orchestrate the movement of a cloud

across the face of earth. A word―a cloud
that is the syntax carrying the rains
up from the gulf. I see now where the Sun
eclipses other luminaries. Stars
are lost in the ubiquity of light
that she provides, the overflowing Moon

can testify to it. Below the Moon
I make myself an astrolabe; the clouds
give color to the bent celestial light
telling me if tomorrow it will rain.
Among the language of the turning stars,
none moves with quite the scope of our Sun,

the sentiment of Moon, wetness of rain
from broad clouds, beauty of the stars
whose light gives love to all―blessed Sun.

Your body when it's given up to me

Your body when it's given up to me
reminds me of violas. I can hear
the music of a flautist, the soft pad
of feet on the floor boards. The way you move

your belly up and down to breathe is like
the rise and fall of tides. I find comfort
in the quiescence of a nonresponse,
in her cool and reposed demeanor.

I think of he who gives his body to
the ocean in a dive, who gives the Sun
a form to illumine, know and accept.

Receive me like the hands receive the host,
the ears receive the voice; receive me with
your body like the eye receives the world.

July the 5th; heresiarchs at play

July the 5th; heresiarchs at play
with phrases. Intellective prophecies
mercurial in character. I say
the words inspired of me, speak the verse

breathed into me by weather. Pressurized
air masses in conflict--summer's a time
of home and hearth, maternal in its wet,
expressive business. Full with verdant green,

the hills look ripe with love; a dew collects
on tender plants, a doctrine spurns the growth
of river oaks. My natal situation

makes me the instrument of mysteries
sacred and ridiculous, order revealed
amongst a labyrinthine playing mind.

There weren't any words for her. I found

There weren't any words for her. I found
a list of nonwords in the dictionary;
the Hierophant and other tarot cards
strewn on the floor. She read my heart the way

a fortune teller reads the lines of palms
or mystics divinate with chicken bones.
Apophasis: I refuse to word
an argument for her, or make a map

illuminating borders because I
know mysteries can never be revealed.
Besides, what would I do if I had seen

all of her then? What would desire be
without more to attain? Where would I move
if my beloved were a static noun?

Chalk on the sidewalk. A storm was coming

Chalk on the sidewalk. A storm was coming
up from the gulf, the air moved in a system
around a center of lowering pressure.
Wind from the east-northeast breathed into the

leaves of the river oak. Summer sat
so heavy on the pasture that the world
seemed liquid when you walked through it. At 3
or 3:30 the heavens burst, thunder

rips through the atmospheric density;
the moisture all the heat had bubbled up
then finds release in a quick, violent squall.

The okra bent under tropical waves
of force moving through July into August―
a hurricane if you were wondering.

Autumnal equinox―our bodies wove

Autumnal equinox―our bodies wove
a texture in the SUV uptown
under the oaks. Her skin was soft. I grabbed
her breast and our tongues freely played about

each others' breath. The sweaty leather stuck
to her backside. I don't know the order
it happened in or if she lied to me
when she professed a love for my body.

A length of back, the musical staff
with rests and chords; I read the notes out
and entered her first then. The window fog

reminded me of thoughts upon the mirror
of the mind. I meditated in
her sex and was released from a cycle.

Madness! He only wrote part of the book

Madness! He only wrote part of the book
attributed to him, another song,
a couple chapters in a style just like
the stories of the desert he had heard.

The stanzas opened like a turning day
is met with dawn; Book I, Book II, Book III
illuminate the world like a white Sun
whose light reveals the ending of things.

The limits of a book are not the bounds
of covers, the margins of thin pages, nor the
varied meanings found in its semantics.

The books live on like Shakespeare's sonnets do:
in songs read by the minds of other eras
who long for their beloved with Majnun.

Imagine books alive! Their paper legs

Imagine books alive! Their paper legs
and arms wandering the terrestrial world
in grammars; books extending their syntax
beyond the shelves of limited collections;

books that breathe―articulate vowels
in sequences, feel things, realize love
in the mundane; make active narratives
that bring effectiveness to their writ truth.

The vagrant, youthful book is a crisp white
when I first open her: a sheath of birch
I'd read about in Frost's "Steeple Bush."

The older books have yellowed―in the spine
I smell a wealth of knowing; in the leaves
I hear a warmth of life, a living word.

Old, wise books left the halls of libraries

Old, wise books left the halls of libraries
for bayous. Other books from museums
wandered playgrounds in a child's hands.
Layla seemed to him the best of books,

one that has a depth of light to it,
one in which you hear the huffs and sighs
of people really loving. Once a tome
of leather-bound philosophy found me

in Lafayette yet with Meister Eckhart
pondering a broad hermeneutic.
Majnun in his madness sung a language

that consumed himself, yet his words wandered,
like epicyclic planets―swift abjads―
into my hands, these brief foreign pages.

She fixed the collar on my shirt. It rained

She fixed the collar on my shirt. It rained
sideways in the morning; I was drunk
on love or lust, on something I'd forgot
but thought again I'd find in her loose curls.

The low vibrating tones of her voice or
how she had rapped, syllables pouring out―
warm breath―I heard the movement of her arms
about the room. She moved in my dim dreams

like elephants, flamingoes―paradise
disclosed itself in her quiet sleeping.
The warmth of a quick shower filled the room

in which she slept. I thought about the time
when I had loved without want, I had kissed
her perfect skin and lost all track of time.

White light whirled about me―handfuls of

White light whirled about me―handfuls of
her body underneath the sheer pink of
veils. Clothes covering my beloved's curves,
resembling foreign scripts, programs of graphemes

directing polyphonies. I was confused,
disoriented in a wealth of light
I can't make sense of with a hard science.
Signs on the horizon, the Moon's path

through the stars, the dance of white and red,
of gold and blue about the celestial dome
reveals a text. I interpret her

like letters on a page or words pushed through
a soft wetness of lips. The meaning is
revealed by the brief movement of her body.

A nap for an eclectic poet that

A nap for an eclectic poet that
counts up the turns of architecture, acts
with knowledge of the measure of the room
or situation of the solar system.

The Sun―a chariot―spectacular
arrangements of light, the twinkle of
the red planet in Leo. A first quarter
Moon is filling up, the calendar

designates a new day that's begun
in another language. I have heard
her love like that, a music of the spheres

revolves about her, I have sung it out
voluminously in the open halls
and doorways. Love asleep in a cadence.

Anaphora and apophatic maps

Anaphora and apophatic maps―
dhikr, remembrance, words on the lips of
Venus in a contoured geometry.
Her neck wrote a symphony under dress-lines

falling in repeated folds. I shaped
my mouth the same way this time as the last,
the syllables repeated in a pattern
of waves. Gold, the prurient white sand

wavering in the heat of the horizon.
No words I have for my love of her weight
depressing me, an expression of

the inexpressible. I feel her skin
beneath my fingertips as I measure
her out with the open palm of my hand.

There is no knowing, there is only love

There is no knowing, there is only love.
Love that is the movement of the world
within and without me; love that makes love
of sense. Love moving in the calls of birds

in river oaks, scattering their fair sound
across the pastures. Love that fills the heart
with light, removes the blockages we've forged
within ourselves, allowing will to rise

up vertically the stem that is our spine
and open at our crown in a full blossom.
No knowing―only words, words that wash

about the sandy gulf―only love
we find ourselves submitting to when
we know no limit to our subtle selves.

Move as a song describing love's phases

Move as a song describing love's phases,
just like the Moon traverses the night sky
in arcs; it wanes and waxes pooling light
released from the Sun inside its cup.

Move about the room your beautiful
and languid legs, move air with your soft mouth
resembling the flesh of a cold plum.
Move me with your words and with your body

so that I am no longer stuck here in
this bog of mind, this swamp of judging thought.
The lines your limbs will make above the earth

are aspects of a turning cycle. Dance
about my gaze and breathe about my heart
your fragrant, verdant femininity.

Whomever loves me new will find beneath

Whomever loves me new will find beneath
a hardened shell the dissonance of music
in a foreign system. I've atoned
for tempered intonation; I'm a mode

she'll find beyond a minor―difficult.
Alarmed, amused, amazed, words will come out
that seem not from my pen, not of my mind,
not by my soul, but of an other self

beyond the sphere we're in. O love me how
the clovers loved her body when it fell
in January on the lake's south shore!

Deluded in this body's luminous
and whirling systems is a poet that
moves as a song describing love's phases.

I'm reading you. It didn't make sense

I'm reading you. It didn't make sense
to call the Sunrise song an aubade―
lingerie―a brief, transparent veil
was on my mind like an audible dream.

I woke and slept. I didn't know if I
had told you what I thought or how I felt
or where the light in tongues revealed the valleys
of your back. O let me count the ways

the language vibrates me, articulates
an intimacy with your body. When
my nose discerns a set of rhythmic figures,

I smell the soap in the Eugenides book
I'd read. The morning turned the horizon's page
disclosing what the text before concealed.

To those who overcome adversity

To those who overcome adversity;
to those who wander the hellacious depths
of modern halls, humming obscure songs
in reverse. Inverse lines prove conceptual

art in flux, related, thus, to those
whose lot is poor, whose duty a dense burden―
what's asked of rivers draining continents―
a humble song addressing her dear form;

fineries and excellence abound!
Succulents and fruits fell in a hem,
a bough about the Paradis horizon.

To those: the golden legs I have idealized,
the object of this alchemy of words
beguiling those who vibrate around me.

A dawn of nameless love which is for all

A dawn of nameless love which is for all
diffused about the pasture like a lens
becoming filtered. I have seen the world
in rose, in yellow, blue, in ochre tint

and loved created things all the same.
Who puts a face on surfaces? Euclid
traversed the solids, made a system for
to know them in a way with hierarchy.

To know yourself before you were yourself
is like knowing the Moon and not the finger
pointing to it in the Zen kōan;

Language and philosophy just play
with words as if they were the light that paints
in shadow on the walls of Plato's Cave.

The myriad ways that I write her out

The myriad ways that I write her out,
ridiculous and sacred, labyrinthine,
exotic systems meant to persuade one
into an ecstasy supporting bliss.

The consciousness of things, of deep blue clouds
sublime on the horizon; the knowing
of streams and rivers, oaks and pines. I have
an intuition that can apprehend

you in the universe. When I am naught,
a music flows through me, is written out
by the quick stars that wander the night sky.

Again she rises, brings with her a dawn
that makes our private candles obsolete,
a dawn of nameless love which is for all.

Endless sonnets far as the eye can see

Endless sonnets far as the eye can see.
Rows and rows of shelving in a mind
that is the world, populated by trees
and blue jays singing songs. The iris grows

in the low spot, the earth humbly revolves
about a hearth of Sun. I have supposed
the orators of the Maghreb saw this,
oriented themselves so that they

could whirl ghazal infinitely. The hills
in Degas' watercolor are an art
resembling a little Petrarch song.

When I hold my beloved, I have grasped
the foam of a voluptuous ocean,
the scent of a blue iris in bloom.

I don't know what it's supposed to mean

I don't know what it's supposed to mean.
It was a script the lights were tracing out
across the page of the ecliptic. When
a retrograde begins, the synod comes

to bring an end to a progressive cycle.
I see her move, the way she carries her
bare shoulders, alphabets choreographed
by posture. Love, receive me in the way

the Moon receives the light of the Sun;
communicate to me the meaningless
oblivion that is the cycle of

rebirth. I heard a sutra had supposed
the union of our intercourse is where
the creator is most lucidly known.

Boom! the new millennial prophets elaborate

Boom! the new millennial prophets elaborate
fictions of a heterodoxy
inherent in the program of the Catholic
Church. The dogmas of a diverse sort

absolve themselves, resolve their meanings to
infinitesimals. I hear the words,
articulations of investigations
empirical in nature, others less

acute in praxis, and I hear a song,
a poetry in it. She moves a meme
across a screen the way the Sun is brought

about the sky. I sit and rest within
the winter of His poor democracy
to count the personalities I'm shown.

A lot of things about it that were weird

A lot of things about it that were weird;
let me sing to you, with you in the air
that holds water, that vibrates when we speak,
and is the stuff of thunderous, gusty weather.

Those little curls of hair—I'm looking up
at Venus on the eastern dawn's horizon,
thinking of the shell she's standing on
in Botticelli. In this poem I wrote

some years ago, associations were
there drawn between the sand, a dream, and the
soft white of porcelain. I need her in

my hands, the small of back I want to feel
beneath my fingertips. Once I have spent
my self in her, I'll fall into a deep sleep.

The pink spare bedroom. I can taste

The pink spare bedroom. I can taste
her now, I used my tongue to make music
by shaping space that spirit's moving through.
I held her like a clock holds time. The walls

had calendars and posters on them. When
we were alone, she put her body where
I wanted it; we exhaled the same breath
about the architecture. She had stopped

to laugh about how slow we were, or how,
disclosed, we'd still neglected to assume
a yogic, unified body position.

My breath and hands were on her stomach when
I wasn't who I am now, when in some
obscuring sense I wasn't me at all.

Aum! an elephant, the sweaty smell

Aum! an elephant, the sweaty smell
between her legs. Smoke in circles wove
a text about the room, a short fiction
in which invention reminds one of fact.

Philosophy, aesthetics, magnet letters
on the fridge, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's
book above the lid of the toilet.
The cats slid across the floor's warped boards

and rolled beneath her bed. The curtains were
a crimson red, a trivial pursuit
had led me where the triangles are merged

in Sri Yantra. The morning light had rolled
across her breasts while she stood on her toes
choosing which of her dresses to wear.

This mad fragrance, several illumined thighs

This mad fragrance, several illumined thighs
crisp and moist like bitten celery,
a feather caught between the branches of
the maple in the yard. I remember

the way she slept, the elasticity
of jeans, the rhymes that were her limbs, the ease
of breath that sung to me. I dreamt about
a love in fresh-cut grass, a canvas dress,

an old poem in a book that was buried
behind the school—like our love. And then
I saw the beads of dew upon the stems

of roses, heard her skin in turns of verse
from the 14th century, in her
found loving thought that leads to highest good.

The birds articulate me. When I grow

The birds articulate me. When I grow,
I grow up like a flower straight into
the light that knows the surface of all things
between the East and West, the North and South.

They move in a light script that I suppose
is calligraphic, I'm the words they wrought
across the vast expanse of blue that goes
beyond the bayous and into the gulf.

I see my thoughts as trees, the leaves themselves
repeat like octaves in the music of
a Vedic situation. When the stars

were read as names, the wanderers began
to spell out symphonies, they spun a verse
that gave the world its heft and definition.

I figure if the heavens are a screen

I figure if the heavens are a screen
just like my phone, where lights nimbly dance
a choreography, planets wander
in a space that understands their meaning;

where clouds gather themselves up in grammars
indecipherable, where systems fail,
water cycles trace the feeling of
a being housed in different containers;

then there is painted out a supreme work
that demonstrates something. I don't know
what it is at all, but my beloved

is a woman in whose breath I've stood,
is a person I've humbly unveiled
in privacy and without any thought.

When I wrote to clothe the woman that I loved

When I wrote to clothe the woman that I loved
in words, the way the rising Sun is given
color by the clouds that move across
the atmosphere, pink, maroon and violet

stretched to the horizon as I spoke.
The new day was a dress for my beloved
that I articulated of a couple vowels
ornamented by harsh consonants.

The Sunlight in the branches was not more
than moonlight in Pessoa's trees, although
the poet dressed her in elaborate garb;

But for me now, one who no longer thinks,
the clothes I had supposed are nothing more
than veils obscuring her resplendent body.

Her body was the most persuasive rhetoric

Her body was the most persuasive rhetoric;
her legs were bold stems breaking through
the water, sending out an undulating
wave received by each distant shore;

her eyes were of a depth I had not known
in any book, in any one before,
not in the labyrinthine, fictive Borges
nor in the curt sophism of Duchamp;

her skin was clearer than the evening air
in January, when the wind is dry
and cuts through layers indiscriminately;

so in this argument I am now lost,
confused by her ubiquities of light
and dazzled into receptivity.

To be where language isn't. Where the eyes

To be where language isn't. Where the eyes
of seers never dared to gaze, the ears
of hearers never thought to listen, to know
for sure I'm where an other hasn't been;

In the feeling of a crying child,
the gasps and moans of mothers, in the ways
we know it hurts though we don't know ourselves
the depth of that personal suffering;

So there, I act without a self. I am
the vehicle for music that's not mine,
the vessel of an ethic I don't own.

Ecstatic, I'm beyond an understanding
of words. I'm beyond standing-in-itself:
I stand no where—I just stand.

Remove me from my self and set me free

Remove me from my self and set me free
from thought. Exhaust the language that I use
in vain explaining every thing I feel
in verse elaborated all of sighs.

To stand outside my state in ecstasy
illumined and enveloped by the light
of silent stars, to broadly put a form
to willows in a cadent little song.

So loosed of postulate, definition,
school of thought or philosophic system
one might become a vibrant flame. The heart

collects the grammars of our every gesture;
the love I hold in there records the dance
of arms, the pure and alabaster skin.

This ripe fruit—elasticity

This ripe fruit—elasticity;
plastic neuropathways, a mantra
dissolving self in pleasure. My desire
revolves about you in a rhyming sutra

as wide as morning light. My mouth opens
to give a word for it; in my hands:
the milk of thighs, a broad world thought
without a mind. O you! please give me death

in you, confused and senseless in the text
resembling a rich, crimson curtain.
My nose is a narrative and a gaze

traversing her skin—O make me not
a word, a name, a body or a self;
delude me in the leisure of our union.

I am the house of Love. The air moves

I am the house of Love. The air moves
about me, the player then moves His fingers
in a pattern, my body vibrates
as a music in a greater symphony.

Her legs were clear thoughts and the water
flowed over their surface in beads,
topaz, ruby, I saw her breast a pyramid
heaving above textured clouds of sand.

Through my nostrils I draw a fragrance
of folds, pollen, earthy hair that veils
her halls and doors of tears. Her doe-eyes

pierce my heart, establish the object
of my life as a recitation
and remembrance of her subtle form.

Marx and Rumi in a room with me

Marx and Rumi in a room with me;
easy to see beloved idly
prosthelytizing the economy
or prophesying ends of currency.

I'm loving like Hafiz and I agree
that we all ethically should be the seat
of grace and quiet peace; be humbly
the friend inspiring someone else to sing.

In praise of the wide ocean past the sea,
the apprehended drone beneath the music
suggested by only a triad,

I ring a bell. I am a thing that thought
nothing, was brought beyond the possible
by knowing the fine duty of our love.

You might hear something in these poems

You might hear something in these poems
that won't make sense, about an earlier time
when I had wandered lonely, freely letting
words escape that were not who I was;

Maybe in these varied strings of words
where I cry uselessly for a beloved
to save me, someone will catch a glimpse
of what I mean because they've once felt it.

But I'm a trope, a branded charlatan
that's nothing but a map in decadence,
so I'm ashamed to look at my self;

Yet shame gives me voice and makes me sorry
for it, although it also lets me know
the bliss and play of this quick dream.

Venus rising from resplendent waves

Venus rising from resplendent waves
Obscures the Sun. Love moves in a wave
Through us as if we were small flowers
Moving imperceptibly. Foam-born,

She dazzles our poor vision with so many
Subtle forms, confuses us with her
Alluring fragrance. We are drawn to death
By our beloved. What's the object of

Analysis and then its synthesis?
I see the lotus open like an eye
With sutras as it's sensuous petals.

Knowing now the emptiness of this,
Let us still love--though love is just a word
For harmony and beauty ever-present.

A spherical, broad personality

A spherical, broad personality
Sees the resolution of a wave
From every shore. It seems to know the ocean
In all its breadth and depth, a dense tome

Proposing many manners of existence.
As I reveal my self to you without
The guise of ownership, a knowing has
Consumed me, made me nothing. I am glad

To be without my self in ecstasy,
Now singing with an illumined choir of
My friends about a various atmosphere.

In hearing all of you I have heard what
Isn't heard, I've thought what wasn't thought,
Became what was impossible to be.

About the things I had not designed

About the things I had not designed,
The stratagems of a deft novelist
Whose narrative was organized in rounds
And drawn across a text elaborately;

The biggest view I could have hoped to find
Turned out to be a myriad of small
And simple parts--but no! The movement of
A humble word is similar to that

Which is the slow movement of the whole.
Confusions of dynamic rhetoric
Amused about a globe where selves are now

Dissolving in ubiquitous media;
I am no self, no artist, but the reed
Of a small flute resounding in Konya.

With the locus clearly obscured by love

With the locus clearly obscured by love,
My birth a single Saturn cycle past
The situation of a democratic
Music nearly thirty years ago;

With brilliant language from around the globe
Building networks, new neural-pathways
Mirroring the movement of our thought,
Or making real a vibration of self;

Opened up, the mind--a colored mudra--
Devised a protocol, a vile malware
Designed to duly confine itself.

But then! When love occults the inner light
A cycle ends, an other then begins
Where consciousness is owned by no one.