TOWARD PERCEPTUAL ENSEMBLES

The cat does not avert
Its gaze, it is in
The room whereas I cannot help

But be of, often
Stuck between my wanting
To observe objects

And my responsibility to the objecthood
Of my own watching, so it
Is that my eyes escape me, fleeing

Into the pulse of a summoning
World where there is no
Silence, a night where there is no pitch

Black and I remain
Engaged in the endless
Task of expressing

What exists, if my life does not
Explain this
Sentence, I think

To let the sentence attempt
To exclaim my life, much as a vulture
Flicked the young Da

Vinci’s tongue with its tail, I ate inch
Worms for money and smacked
Stale crimson peppers for Miller moths

During the occupation of ’85, our attic
Transformed into an insect
Mausoleum, even today there

Was a squirrel in Washington
Square Park which brazenly
Did trounce the toes of a studious

Girl in sandals, her pen top
Tossed in terror among
The half-smoked butts, so is it

Any wonder to be subsumed
By the operations, to exist as one
Life crossing 16th Street

To overlap the others in tremendous
Inward and oblivious
Leaps, powering the air

With intractable charges, or
Part of the parade of phantasms
Bottlenecking at First

Avenue and Houston, where salamis
Solicit distant gunmen and the retirees
Converge to leer cross-legged

At the exigencies of cinema, even at this
Intersection if I
Tremble my trembling divides

The sleeplessness of others and still
I would not be a wound in
The landscape, even had I found quarter from

My engagement with the codes, if people
Like to put things in
The ground, I like to fumble

Amidst the noise our
Handsome collisions commend
To being, the hopefulness in

Our movement from sleep
To the world when so
Often there is only yourself looking out

As the actor climbs down
From the proscenium to stand
Beside you and glare

In near silence as the near darkness falls.

BEING-IN-THE-BEING

If I contain a likeliness
There is no dead
Of night, my immensities gather

Breath around them like bulky nuclei
Harvesting paths, the sun nearly
Always recognizes my hair, the cat

That arises from beneath
The bed is no longer
Ambivalent and wrongdoing does

Instruct as each particle arrives struck
By an intuition of wholeness, I
Interfere until I can span as enthusiastic

The day as dark, I desire to indulge
My feelings unto matter, perhaps to loose
The folds of this waking

Into film as the eye
Cameras through a complex
Act of awareness, you

Don’t have to wait
Until you die to reconcile the variegated
Guesswork of experience or question

The possibility of the question, so
I listen as an unknown
Source of animation kicks a soup

Can down the avenue wondering
If it appreciates
The interruptions of clunk

How they penetrate
An otherwise
Dull continuity or work

Their way into dreams, I dream
Of brand names, suspend
Myself in the protracted plummet

From sky to sky, lay
With tigers and sometimes I sing
To keep from cursing, braced

By the tedious pangs
Of incarnation, but it wasn’t always
This way, I once secreted

My name within the idea
My name became, allowed the magic
Of talk to ricochet

Like a bullet into the entire
Future before folding
Itself through its own beginning

As flesh alone dissolves
Any thoughtful stab
At purity, there is no manner

I wish to absorb
Nor a shape this veering attempts
To conclude, I have dust

To remind me of myself, a cacophony
Of dishonored steps to take
No notice of, there is a church

In California that I hold
In my head and its thick-tongued
Towers toll without

My being there as my being
Ebbs only to erupt
In directionless code, I was born

Into The West and the joy
Of unintelligibility or I was born
Into fluorescence

And the hands of a stranger, I will inhabit
Abstraction or inhibit it, as
The vanishing point of my mouth

Explodes, proffering
The air with tiny quarrels
Of self, I either writhe

In the baptism of ether or
Soberly find myself
Happening ceaselessly, these

Are the uncertain occupations
Of an object in the act
Of appearing, it is now

Time to consider your own.

DISLOCATIONS OF ASTONISHMENT

Landed in Albuquerque, drove
To Santa Fe, doves
Scattering in the driveway, my sister

Was reading about Mormons, my mother
About mystery in the Virgin
Islands, I slept on a bed composed

Of air, chased it
Each morning with a cup
Of coffee, a storm

Hit and the ponderosas dutifully
Bowed, a skunk rooted
Beneath the hot tub, near the night

Spider whose body resembled
A bird’s egg and was ornamented
By a single diamond, all

Week I chucked rocks against the monotonous
Adobe, my shoulders turning
Pink, the clouds turning charcoal as so

Often morality dwells in the driving
Out of fear, so that what
The centrifuge flings malingers unseen

And this wall remains nothing
More than a loose flag
Of fingers draped idiotically

Across the eyes, we need not be
Let alone, we seek the acknowledgments
Of company amidst

This cycling of refuted systems, the shocking
Green eyes of a young girl
Named Kori widen as she tells me of an elevator

The size of a living
Room and I watch as hummingbirds
Spar in abrupt fits over

A dish of sugar water, I myself
Worry over a world grown
Pathologically soft in its revulsion

Of horror, in its acceptance of error
In the late summer breeze
My forearm hair feels particularly

Inarticulate, receiving so much deciphering
So little, too often I invigorate
A line of discourse only to have it

Stump when the telephone
Rings, I dreamt I was a comedian
And the audience was

Laughing so hard I never
Was able to tell
A single joke, so here

It is—the work that I do does
Nothing to things, I leave home to imbibe
The dislocations of astonishment, to lose

My way and find another, tricking
The moments into line
Before defecting into rearrangements

And if I write as if language
Were a series of decrepit apartments
Harboring squatters

I am apart, the sun
Penetrates where the air
May not pass as

Each experience happens twice, even
The panic you feel returning
Home to a strange figure in the dark, even

If it turns
Out to be the innocuous
Shadow of a Buddha

Planted among the flowers in the garden.