AERIA GLORIS

letting prayers go they float up effortlessly
(something pulls on them the moment
you get careless something viscous) /
they get stuck in grilles of catwalks, picked up
by passersby        who imagine the beauty
and terror of their initiation to godhood

vehicles of popular feeling, historical transfers
cross the sky like airplanes, like reflections in a glass
tilted to stir the last centimetre of water to a waltz

cyberpunk could have been the real “steampunk” if steam
filled streets and alleys the way it fills skies /
you don’t have to operate or integrate machines
just live in spaces        where they move like shadows /
fifty thousand feet above the canopy
focus on: a      single     glazed teacup

psilocybin divides the domed sky
classical geometry in insurrectionary confusion
the hexagon’s obtuse angles hide nothing around the corner
out on these unfinished rails there’s a wind

–

FOG OF THE MOON (chorus)

as if an asteroid shaped like a human heart crashed into the Earth

the fog that was once confined to the plane of reflection,
that was once the confined indirection
of sheen

now expands in rings                and condenses in rings.
like a jewel at the peak of its grey rainbow,

as if a moon formed, shaped like a human eye…

ii.

At last the spectre of global cooling has returned!
crow the acolytes of spectres,
any spectre enough for dispirited times
donning, as in a Guston landscape, their smokestack hoods
At last, the Dry Ice Age dawns!

This is no End of History, this is a vapour tidal wave.
This is an opioid epidemic. People die.

iii.
As if the human heart had been sent to the moon
To be saved from the flood

White rabbit thumb drive reanimator
Circling the Earth

iv.
All that is solid melts into air
And forms precipitate in the solution
– Look, mom! Floating islands!

-Don’t be silly, no man is an island.
-But, mom, that’s no man…
-wha-AAUUURRGGHHGH

Police have once again evacuated the scene of the mysterious fog, which authorities are reporting as everything but a weather pattern.

v.
As if the moon were a laser crystal focusing/freezing sunlight
You are awake, above it all.

You can see everything in the world
but through a foggy mist

and there is no “kill” or “be killed”
only fog

–

2012-2016

“The sky is full of anxious words.”
– Subarashiki Hibi ~Furenzoku Sonzai~

liberal sunset
every presented thing smiles
every barn or mailbox
smiles pressed like shadows
thick and rusty as coins

when I smile I delegate
meaning to my body
I worry with just thirteen muscles
though there’s no meaning left to worry with
thirteen shadows, thirteen muscles

every thing presented
rounded up for the synod
the symposium the ark the fashion show
houses, highway signs, distant
chopped off fingers of skyscrapers

every thing presented by the light
confirmed by a layer of thin
glare like a slick of water
the light thinner than sunset
the colours softer than sunset
separate from the presenting light
a kind of prowling smoke
new, virtual and smothering colours which taste

of cool DNA imbibed
from the primary coloured dots rotating
on the crystal pupil
you can feel your politics in the colourless humour
any drift must be towards
something as innocuous as storm

every thing presented in dialogue
now voting in omens
every thing now connected to Wi-Fi
muscles entangled under
the face of the sunset smiling tense as if
waiting for a meeting but already hungry

liberal sunset
things standing dense as a forest
being picked off by the light

liberal sunset all a matter of lighting
a matter of what different lights are
even the roadkill fur lodged in the gravel glowing
radioactively like a first time drunk

after sundown I startle
over the trees
I think I see
a mushroom cloud
I think so even as the harvest
moon stays still
growing out of the networks
of fire under the Earth

clouds, inexplicable
more impressive every year
you say – you can’t remember how many times you said –
you have déja vu
huge follies of rococo clouds, self-destructing public works
as in representations of heaven: what, some kind of decoration?
why so tightly coiled?
those streaks like lash marks on the sky
like bruised fire
the dragons of the news

–

FOG OF THE MOON (solo)

This is what I waited for: sheer
Acceleration into the distance of myself.
There aren’t as many lights out here
As I thought. I took a wintry path.

Alcohol. Trackless asphalt.
Moon-tunnels. Mountains of void.
Textures of
the third dimension.
Impersonal personality.

Encountering a single shopfront gibbering lucidly
Or my psychologist on the street again.

I always write like this
In my sleep.

My life a dark forest
Lit by the firefly lights of lost chances.

Every infirmity in me dances with impossible nimbleness.