This Stop or the Next
The gradient doesn’t see as much light as the flash. I mean the flesh. The steps, I mean, how they point. How they point up or they point down, depending on where you are. And how the light doesn’t hit but on one side at a time–so that it looks like a white plain that you are flying over as you view steps from a high building, but if you are standing facing the wall of an art gallery its steps are graffiti that you see as a tear-streak slipping out of one corner towards your shoe.
Or it’s ice at the molecular level (which is water running too slow) that you don’t realize you’re in until you slip and fall, until you perish, a small black patch, and there goes the banana peel of your radiance–which until only a moment before you had been keeping in your shirt pocket in hopes that someone would ask to see it.
Although it hurts the same, and everybody is illegal in the end, which makes you always want to scream–which makes you, always, screaming–that it’s uphill it’s downhill it’s windy there is no choice what choice do we have there is no corner we can hide in, no savior, do we fall do we give up do we rise a little to be converted into the light, do we look for the angle or try to land on both sides of the prism at once?
10,000 Days
New Tool album. Available in stores May 2. Available on the net, mm, slightly sooner.Failure
You’re always dying in this room
and I want to pull you out
but where is the band-aid
where is the kettle? One way leads
behind cabinets and the small hole
through a crawlspace
to walls of another house
your house
in a hall down the middle of your
white country house
and the wide windows flanking the front
beneath pretty dormers
but where is the porch-swing
where is the swing?
I see only one way
up the staircase
so I’m breaking into your room now
I find you writing a poem
I take it it’s wonderful
you say that it’s not wonderful
I say it is it’s wonderful trust me
I know about it
so give me your hand or kiss mine
Assassin
here I am falling in your place
Dreaming with Verlaine and Chagall
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?
Haven’t healed. Did I say that I would?
Did I say that I would be able to
push the color back in the pens,
the ink in the tubes? Sleep with it
in me? Did I say it, this spring?
This spring is too old, then, we have
had it before. Compared to us, not even
the eagles in their nests can change.
Not even the baby eagles, swooping down
terrifying the seraphim. Not even
the screaming bugles. Not even the lambs.
It’s all as we imagined it would be.
The field in flames. Running, the lambs.
Didn’t we say that they would be?
The Goldfish Inquires About My Former Life
What do you know?
I know you. I know you are walking, I know you are having a bad dream, I know your heart, just past the crossroads, you are lying down on it. I know it was a bad decision to leave the ocean. I know you were intent to make one. I know what martyrdom tastes like, it tastes like ash.
What do you feel?
I feel you. I feel you yearning, you are alive as ever under your lab coat. I feel you gleaming under your fetish suit, you wear stockings, you are wet with scales. I feel the bites of the buttons of your lab coat, I feel you quake under them. I feel your gills, I want to pry them open.
What do you remember?
I remember you. I remember frostbite, it cost me dearly. I remember biting your fingers to keep them warm. I remember your eyes, one on each side of your head. I remember they closed because I knew the passwords. I remember there were four kinds–the first one let me in, the others were up to your daemon.