While Meditating

The faintest flutter of a
falling leaf
grabs my attention.
Turning my head around I
look out the window:
A wayward bee
is caught mid-flight by my
torchlight senses.
Then on the same spot, a bird,
then warm sunlight,
then particles of thin air.

In this way, the Beloved
whispers to us constantly of
a universal characteristic:
the impermanence
of all sensations.

Things I Have Learned

The sunlight does not
veil me.
Instead its secret
cascades gently into my veranda:
“Be aware of this skin
that traps the pining spirit.”
A burst of this warmth
slopes down my eyelid like
long rickety fingertips
merging with that feeling of
television-static
all around my nostrils,
sliding slow like
thick poured honey.

What I learn are spun
from the garden of the sun.

All Earthquake-Like

my words crumble
all earthquake-like
into an unknown darkness.
i submerge myself in
eyeballs that spew
warm self-criticism.
i escape the unfamiliarity
of these redundant verses.

the eyeballs
pry into past thoughts
into bygone poems:
"why the hell did you romanticize
this fragile ego?"
they squelch to me
in unison.

i harvest
the humour of the eyes
and they watch me
suspiciously.

they zap my wanton squishy
thieving grey-matter brain
(possibly with skull-piercing lasers
or other equally alarming weapons
similar in purpose,
and often the cause of
gaping holes in my
imagination.)
such weaponized pests
search fiendishly for
whatever self-serving scraps remain
of my lonely, silver tongue.

this is why
strings of rotten words
of estranged letters
squelch naked out of my fingers in hoards:
but these verses are without love.
these words disregard
how they used to lie still
silently fulfilling their purpose
on my piece of paper.

and nowadays
the only thing that i
can honestly muster
out of this vile brain
that now resides under the
constant vigilance of my pet eyeballs
and in the seemingly perpetual absence
of actual talent ----
is this satisfyingly weird
predictably vertical
sort-of-ugly
arrangement of words.

Caravans in the Sky

The sky is a bruise on the skin of space
At night, when black and blue
It whispers in all its hopelessness:
"there's nothing you can do"

The sky is a bruise on the skin of space:
I learnt this as I spun
At the back of my desert caravan
Whose reigns were held by none

And so it swivelled around the sky
Screaming dreaming free
Until it crashed into a cloud
And rained down on the sea

It happened then, and once again
From sky to cloud to sea
I fell and fell, into a cell
Where calm could never be

By and by the laughing sky
Had bruised me black and blue
Strung it said, "why are you afraid?
There's nothing you can do."

So I walked until the earth
Ebbed away my shoes
Disillusioned this traveller so
Bitter black this bruise

And I saw you feather across the sky
And settle next to me
You scrutinised my tired eyes
And fed my dreaming tree

For every frog that croaks in grief
There is a bird that sings:
It was you, my love, with all your life
Who gave me back my wings

Yet like Icarus, the Fool himself,
I crashed into the light
And fell again, headfirst down
The sea of sightless sight

Up there you sat across the sky
Tied down by my grief
The sky gave way and in you fell
Into the dreaming sea.

This song, my love, I sing for you
For some things you must know:
My wings aren't worth an ounce of dust
If your wings do not show

There was a time when all the songs
The sky had passed to me
Faded into empty ears
And eyes that wouldn't see

But light has dawned between the black
And blue that drapes the sky
It seeps into my sleeping eyes
My bones, my will to fly

And so I will, and so will you

An anchor I shan't be
Share with me the sky, my love
Kiss my dreaming tree

"Enough of this wandering"
I'll sing to Black-and-Blue
'I'll take control of the reigns for once
and there's nothing you can do."

the grieving tree

dogs know that
people are assholes,
delusional and
full of shit

some divulge
indifference
to the world
and some imagine
its creatures to
belong to them

the rest are on
a foreverlong
running train
watching landscapes flit by

the trees, by the way
know this.

in fact
the next time you are
scaling your city streets
in languor
or some other
disillusionment
and you notice a
lone tree just
hangingaround by itself,
do not shuffle past
or look in the other
direction.
instead,
stick your
fleshy man-ear
to its tree-trunk
stick it
do not feel awkward:
go over to it
and kiss that
pretty wooden thing
then make sure nobody is
watching and
listen closely.

you can hear
it grieving

a hollow
baritone sort of
grieving,
an ancient
blues lyric
accompanied
by a fat chello or
a double bass,
eerie on account
of being slightly
out of tune

sometimes
you can hear
a wind whisk by
in harmony
with the chello

their words
cascade and
elongate:

we
don't
need
you

the insects know this
and laugh

while the trees they
just grieve.

Regression

"if you travel through the streets of time
seek those souls whose rhythms rhyme.
in every life you've ever been,
these souls have been your friends and kin.
so fret you not, you tired soul,
there are no laws that we control."

the flutter of a leaf

grabs my attention

i turn around very
slowly and look
out through the
window and

nothing

what fluttered?

A friday

'Today, young Gorky, you will lose something.'

Probably something important, like my sense of smell.

7

acid finds you
when the time is right

it sends you spinning
through the night
its whispers are so
serpentine
my brain is full of
turpentine

Faff

This brain in drift

Through golden clouds
My shadow falls
On golden crowds
Who filter through
The alleyways

On their Mercs

And Chevrolets
While all I own
My shadow keeps

My brain in drift
Your brain's asleep.

Ways To Tackle Anger

vast feathery wings
if I had you
I could fly
away from it all.
As everything grows
fainter and fainter,
a part of me
on happy days
will fall asleep
like a baby dreaming
a heavy
spiral
dream.

Losing One's Marbles

I like to walk upside down
on the ceiling of my cranium
until the blood flows
into my head
and little pieces
of marble fall
scathingly out of my ear
each of them turning
their green marble faces
towards my giant eyes
to stick out their little tongues
and squeal, "sayonara, asshole!"

Too many cigarettes

Summer night,
even the stars wilt with your heat.
Even my nails begin to shred
silk-skin from my cheeks in strips
that curl like smoke.
Even love even rapture,
like dried ricefields fade,
like old paintings fade.
I even out my days
with matchsticks unevenly kept
on my table and I
have to light my cigarette
with the tip of an incense stick:
Two dim orange-drizzles glow,
Their smoke waltzing towards the ceiling
as my fingers spiral upwards to kiss
the curled silk-skin hanging
from my cheek even as I
breathe even as I
draw the smoke from
my cigarette even as
the inside of my mouth begins
to despise its own taste,
my lips begin to curl
at a passing girl.

Summer

For an autumnal love
Summer is a difficult time
Even the sunlight forgets
To cascade gently into my veranda
I remember
it used to slope down
Straight onto my nose
Like a tower of blinding light
Like a blinding kiss brightly spun
from the cold cold sun.

To walk again

When the day
Is done and gone
I'll wait again
For the sleeping dawn
To arise from flame
Like a phoenix bird
To walk again
Is not unheard

A dream about you

This is a story on drifting.

It is midday and I am dreaming. A summer wind hot with sleep has carried itself to the depths of our house, through rooms and corridors and windows that rattle like those old trucks you see sometimes when you're on the highway. It is a violent rattle. The sunlight followed in places----where it existed, it painted the walls with warmth, and one could feel the earth steal a slow sigh of comfort. And you in the bedroom, reading. I had given the book to you long ago, and you had been meaning to flip by it. You were just finishing off a stray page when I came in, but you did not look, and you did not smile. It was so beautiful outside I imagined everyone cartwheeling across the city in joyous celebration, it could have been so. I wouldn't have known, because I was looking straight at your eyes, and they were a little sad. Your pupils moved slowly as you read the page, like as if you couldn't concentrate. Through the curtains the sky shone a smiling white, vast and intense and fading into a creeping redness that seeped in through the corners, riding atop cigarette-smoke clouds. You had left me by now. The sound of your suitcase creaking as it swung, fading moment after moment is still fresh in my memory, I had bought the suitcase. It was green but you painted it colourful and wrote your initials on them in a handwriting deliberately unlike mine. I had chuckled at the time, and said how beautiful it looked. It did look beautiful, it is faded now. You are still here but you never leave the bedroom, you are a shackle, you are a chain. Nowadays I don't bother, I am a coward, I am a snail.

When you snore I creep silently out of the second floor window and drift. I have been to many clouds, I have named them. They disappear often but they always come back. They are the souls of stars. They have given me wishes and taken me closer to see the stars twinkling like giant white orbs of a million overwhelming moments, and one after another they hit me straight into my heart through the centre of my forehead and then I smile and say, "I am alright." They are true friends, the stars. I am especially fond of Orion, for they are there every night for me, whenever I look up. They are smiling and smoking cigarettes. I sing to them. They like drifting. In the mornings you magically disappear from your bedroom and I can smell your perfume on the pillow. It makes me soft and fuzzy and I grow blue and wish it was night so I could have a smoke on the terrace. And look at the stars.

You are now a creature I don't understand, and it confuses me. I fear you might be growing a tail. Sometimes I feel that disheartening bump on your ass. Your teeth are longer and you have produced hair on your pupils. I think I can safely say that you are different. And like a wild beast that hunts in the shadows of jaguar rain-forests, I fear you may disappear, slink away quietly into the night while I am busy drifting. Things have a knack of changing abruptly, especially atmospheres. I am now falling, and I can see the stars flashing across my face like bullets of light shooting upwards around me towards the sky. It is all too overwhelming----

I wake up and am thoughtful.

Eat

pussy

As you were by the door

I saw you walking the pavement
Your head lowered blank in a thought
I'm sure you were thinking of lovers
And all of that love that you bought
With the beauty in you that reverberates true
Across the walls of my living-room
And in the middle I sit trying hardest to fit
Into a chair that is not there
And I loved you so true and so bare
Your words they are so unfair.

Your feet they have taken you further
And you've seen what you can't ever touch
Or is that just a lie for me to believe
Does that, my love, amount to much?
The birds in the sky are just waiting to die
And fall whizzing into your hands
They're talking, my love, "come with us, above---
Flying in the bluest of sands."
But you have no belief in the air
Your breath is a diamond to share
Your words they are so unfair.

One day I left you forever
But you pleaded with me to come home
I laughed and I said, "only a matter of time,
How long can I be expected to roam?"
And then you stood by and said your goodbye:
"I'm with you wherever you're thrown."
But if that is so true and has anything to do
With you, then why do I feel alone?
But one must not give in to despair
And one mustn't believe in your prayer
For your words they are so unfair.

The Obnoxious Transvestite Society (Lithuania)

HELLO I AM MULA FISCHER DUNCAN. I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE OBNOXIOUS TRANSVESTITE SOCIETY FROM LITHUANIA. HERE AT THE OBNOXIOUS TRANSVESTITE SOCIETY, OR OATS, AS WE LIKE TO CALL IT, WE ARE TERRIBLY OBNOXIOUS TO EVERYONE WE MEET, ESPECIALLY STRANGERS LIKE YOU. WHICH IS WHY IT IS PERHAPS APPROPRIATE TO STATE THAT I AM CURRENTLY WEARING A YELLOW SOCK ON THE END OF MY PENIS WHICH IS BEING HELD ALOFT BY A MIDGET. WE DO THESE THINGS TO STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD BECAUSE HELL YEAH! WE'RE OBNOXIOUS! AND IF YOU THOUGHT THIS MESSAGE WAS AN INITIATIVE TO RECRUIT MORE PEOPLE TO OUR SOCIETY, THINK AGAIN. WE DON'T WANT YOU. WE'RE OBNOXIOUS. NANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANA LULULU I FARTED. HERE AT THE OBNOXIOUS TRANSVESTITE SOCIETY, WE ARE NOT TRANSVESTITES. IT'S JUST A NICE WORD. SORT OF LIKE "RUBBER" OR "UNFATHOMABLE". THIS IS MULA FISCHER DUNCAN FROM THE OBNOXIOUS TRANSVESTITE SOCIETY SAYING FUCK YOU! IT'S MY SANDWICH.

MINE.

The Winkle Foundation

Hey there. This is Lewis Von Winkle from the Winkle Foundation for overly attractive women. Here at the Winkle Foundation you, an overly attractive woman, will receive first and foremost the warmest of welcomes, even warmer than your family or a weekend in Egypt on a hot afternoon in June. But that is besides the point. What else would I get? Is what you are probably thinking. And if you weren't, well, you're definitely thinking it now, aren't you negro? I'm sorry, but in my country, 'negro' means 'beautiful'. So where was I? Ah yes. The au naturalle foot massage. The personal beach with a bubble-bath sea, and best of all: a night with me! Yes, here at the Winkle Foundation, the grandest prize for you, overly attractive woman, is a night well spent at the Stuff It Inn with your very own Lewis Von Winkle! Oh and I love you, and it was me who stole your tea-cushion. No, I'm not sorry. It makes for a great festive hat. And I like it. It keeps things festive around your head. Like eating a can of bread with the sharp end of a spoon. Ha you fell for it, didn't you? Here at Lewis Von Winkle, we share a laugh before we spy on you. This is the Winkle Foundation, saying peace out, fleece in, mexico, pelvis girdle, space-tha-fuc-disco shit-graze dig mother bitchin'-funk-a-doodle-doo!