i inhale like a landlord curled inside a shopping cart tethered to the underpass
peeling from the lack of traffic & the insatiable ambition of seeds
i wish i could eat birds with the feathers still on
i wish i could swallow eggs whole and retrieve them later
once youre tagged youre slower than whatevers coming your way
+ + + + +
im already eaten. im twenty five years in the machine,
baying like an elephant swimming upstream like vegetarian dogs
as if the moon is a lens increasing its focus til a house on my ass bursts into flames
cant be MY city
windows taller than me opening into visual confusion—
the computer didnt remember it the way I did
+ + + + +
i would burn my hair to earn your respect
fall like a wall, crawl like tomorrow:
moneys just paper, i need what you have, i eat what i love, i shower in beer
how we griped about the sun not getting through the clouds
i meditate standing like the part of stonehenge leaning on an invisible tree
holding occasional moons in its exhale corona
brain net root net wireless life
as if i hadnt paid the bills for months so my life got repossessed and auctioned off
+ + + + +
to die of exposition — i know so much that doesnt fit together
as my mind is opened it wants to get back inside
what doesnt come out keeps growing
when some far in the future nova threading through like the archangel of repression
as a slogan infests the crowd so the face on the wall must be changed
grabbed by the nose the throat the hand the buckle
kicked in the knee the groin the solar plexus the eye.
as if they thought i hadnt left and kept paying me.
as time whirlpooled into the tiniest pucker
so I couldnt sleep without falling into bricks and boards
lost like plumbing that wont surrender
as the boink of water drops on the head of a man with a saturated towel in his mouth
too early of a dance in this white rain in a gray and brown city we built from heaps of old dwellings
dont know how deconstructed with swarms of rusted nails appealing to our clothes reflect the plash
conical feet held on my head to ladder the conduits without ropes or metal;
i envision my granite bones conducting feral electricity,
a mix of wet burnt and antique urine pulls my hair til the scalp knows its place
no clouds but no stars, as if optically spastic
a house as big as my shoe, a tire almost my height as i flick the switch on the roof
rises like a dozen wings escaped from victorian hats since lips could be redder, more muscular,
cant get a hold on the tiny hairs we wish were underwater inventing a color the fish enjoy
embracing the subtle gravity of what hadnt dissolved til the 50s
i dont know how this shirt got on my chest in a 3 walled house skivvering
the way a brain cant be held by less than a village where some gloves have extra fingers,
some pants with changing pockets, hair attuned to the weather obsolescing hats and scarves
i envision a cliff between my outstretched fingers and smell tomorrows forgotten harvest
the door should get out my way as my ribs pulse like neon in a black and white world
my eyes aluminum & crinkled anticipating the dawn emulsified into legless insects
flowing over the horizons frothy lips fertilize the grass into circuitry . . .
potential breath, proven friction, occasional flowers, an hourly surge of nervousness
when a bird rings against the crawling cars who slide like skaters on a borderless roof
til the comet grabs a body opening like a stagecraft clamshell reveals a lithe perfection
my loins would join with this sand, paint & aged fruit pulp faintly glowing with imagined fat
looks like lightning but sounds like a sneeze in a concrete room halfway underground,
the light is moist and slightly foreign, as if the first time i smelled garlic, as if i was a mongoose
threading my way through crowds of sleepers with credit cards imbedded in their palms
waving to get a reaction from the pre-set orchestration
but one violin will never move, regressing with horses and trees, streams with regular hours,
i look at where I was laying and know my body couldnt fit there
i introduce myself at the border, hearing coffee cups resting on tables
before going all the way to silence, pulling the edge of the street taut, seeing cats like musical notes
obscure the intuitive addresses no city could resist,
streets intersecting in every possible way,
alleys that would fade with the moon and rise with the tide
im in without having entered, my shadow already ahead of me
when i get home dinners already in bed.
when the helicopter pushed me through my recalcitrant mirror.
i want to hover. i want to ascend without a runway.
once the number of holes in my head reaches 13 my skull will assume its natural shape,
my brain will grow outside the bones and steer its antennas to the future colonies
where we sing like buddhas fucking among the galaxies, our fertilized eggs
slowly begin to cluster as stars and planets,
as i get out of my car and scatter like a thousand people sneezing at once
infested with the blessings of subdermal music i inject
to keep me from singing whenever an engine explodes.
the houses melted into boulders will groan when the tide of a moon manufactured 7 galaxies from here shifts the wobbling planet to tempt the flames of our invisible souls
into the central chasms of eyes feeding micro-memories would touch nipple to battery
or the scene a swiveling desk lamp shrinks 90%
like a bread-bag sail recycled so many times
the polymers break open to a mile-wide footprint never dry but always damp,
like a city with extinct countries in every plaster wall is a spot meat will sear with inescapable garlic
don't french, don't thai, don't bahama—
pour the continents back together and this time the oceans don't win.
too many volcanoes on one side divides the gap tween venus and mars.
back then we only needed 5 planets. To get beyond 9 would mean the end of everything.
fission is the path. sweeping up what fell back onto the ridge where it sprouted,
if the only thing to walk on is thinner than the space between my pores
i will slide on bone skates trading calcium for energy, folding like a tent
just big enough to keep me in orbit.
even from space i can't get the big picture,
focusing on faces and how they fill their jeans.
what that flickering eye is trying to say. An unstruck match rubbing against a candle wick.
how many tongues can meet in airless space where our eyes microweave an interrelationship
none of us can splinter
Dan says, "Besides having hosted readings in Portland for a long time over several venues (last series was ended this spring after thirteen years due to corporate downsizing), I perform my poetry throughout the Northwest. Among my seventeen books are Breath Test, Showing Light a Good Time and When a Flying City Falls. Current poems appear in Otoliths, Skidrow Penthouse, Stringtown and Knock Journal.