White Christmas

Written while watching “The Jacket”.




The doctor is keeping him alive so that he can do experiments on him. The soldier had died, but not completely. He was just lost to the world.

But he came back. And everything is a dream.

(In the mental institution, he met the killer who had been known as Michael Myers. The Halloween killer. Myers escaped; now he is lost to the world. Nobody knows where he is.)

Have you ever been buried alive? Have you ever seen snow from a distance? Let me out of here. Integrate. Show. Slow. Dynamic. Breathe. Blink if you can. The world is a grainy kind of gray, with flourescent lights.

The experiments are about claustrophobia. Can you take it? How many layers do you have that may be peeled away? How many lives, how much feeling, to the raw nerve? Let me out of here.

Jacob’s ladder. Rope. Raw. Breathe.

Blink if you can. Merry Christmas.

What is warm, what is bright? What melts the snow? I mean, really, what? What is heat, what is light? Not “what does it do” or “what is it made of”, but what is it? Can the answer even be known? If so, what knows it? What is “know”?

These experiments were not covered in medical school.

What have you done with the soldier?

The drugs are to keep you calm, the doctor says. I’m sitting next to Moses. The hospital is full. The patients stroke their own arms. Those little fuckers are everywhere. I’m one.

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. The grainy, gray world. The snow lands on you like birds. You are covered.

Have you ever been buried alive?

The tomb of the unknown soldier.

A womb-like environment. I must be the crazy one. The doctor is the only family he remembers. (His secretary’s hands are covered in wax. Shiny. They go other than where she tells them to go.)

No one knows how the soldier died. This is a restricted area. The patients follow him, as in a dream. He walks in a field of snow.

Nothing is resolved, except that there is light. There has always been light. There is only light.

I have seen a time that is not this time. Anything can be taken out of context and made to sound mystical. The future doesn’t look different. Not everyone in this place is crazy.

But white. And white. And bright, white light, falling from the sky, landing on you like birds, light as snow. Merry Christmas.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Can you imagine a state of permanent seizure?

The Iraqi boy, the one who shot the soldier, is alive. The doctor is dead. The soldier is free, though not alive or dead. He goes with the birds, into the dream, awake.

Go play in the snow. Do not read this until it is finished. Stay with me. Don’t slip on the ice, or it will be the second time you die.

The world is lost. Everything is lost. But where? Everything. What is the location of everything?

The sun has come, though I can still see snow in the distance. I slipped but am alive.

The experiment is over.

Breathe.

Red Parade

Decorate the bright red bricks
Lash tomatoes to the treetops
Just in time for seven parades to
Tumble down the streets
Ahead of the wind.

They examine the streets, wondering
With their painted mouths
If they can afford houses in this neighborhood,
Where tornadoes often come
Despite the ready, open windows.

A series of arresting images that are
Spoiled by the intimation of meaning
Yet are still incomplete.
They aren’t colorful enough to
Paint
With
Though the all-seeing eye
Glows with their embers.
Lava
Hell
Disaster
Roses
Love
I love
I love a parade.

Tomato soup.
Sunset on Mars.
A lantern at the bottom of the ocean, lit by
Demons and beautiful,
Breaking hearts.

Emo "Dice" Buddha

-Why?
-Why what?
-Exactly.
-I don’t get it.
-You’re not supposed to.
-Stop playing games with me.
-What else is there to do here?
-Contemplate Infinite Mystery
-You forgot one.
Fuck.

Pilgrim

For Angela, for her trip into the heart of the world. September 2005.



Fly
Wind
Walk
Bend
Go

Forward and up
Over and out
Inside
Through
Between
With

As

As

Be It

Fly and ground
Low and round
Arched around the sky
Like all the rivers
Made before you thought you couldn’t do it
Which was never,
Not with these eyes.

Your hands and legs,
The mountain.
Your eyes and ears,
The rivers.
Your heart,
The sound of thunder in the East.

Your friends,
The milestone-markers
On your way to everywhere
And home again.

You have never left.

Five Plastics in a Fife

Freak the breaking sheepdom,
Five plastics in a fife spread all over kingdom come,
Laxative to infinity, a burst of speed,
So hard to seed the galaxy.

Lead the immoral river onward to the dust,
Wetting and rewetting like the last lakes of out the trees of life,
Letting the last shakers soar with the vermin over the
Spreading caves of coral under the sea,
Leaking the separate sprays of swag and kilter to Shetland and back.

They do not come up over the tops of water.
They stay down below,
Muddying swaths of felt and tar and
Poison in their broken beaks,
Licking the wounds of their endless relatives
Until the end of time.

Foreshadow the blistering heat that has crept under the earth,
All billowy and crepe-papery in the dust of the morning sun,
Lashed to the farthest sails of the most drifted-about ships this side of
Ending, of
Anchor, of
Place.
The wind,
Ballast to the morning’s prayers,
Frees the sky to fire.

Five Minutes

Rays of sun aren’t all fun. Dress me on your doorstep; that way, the neighbors will crowd around their telephones and spread the word of sheepdom. How interesting can we make things around here? Whom can we interest, whose tongues can we poke out at our living? It’s the finding-out of that that’s fun, no matter what shines from above or wherever.

Days can be dark, too, and you can still eat a pretzel and forget about what just happened five minutes ago that might change your life five minutes from now. These obligations to infinity are plastic, spreadable, not like the way we make our napkins and dustrags, all ready to sop up something that has spilled all over.

Ondine

I cannot surf the unseen fathoms. The water is too bright and reflective for close approach. I must sit on the surface and wait for the depths to disclose something of their costumes, some kind of a color or two that can be irradiated by a touch of my hand to the surface of the water. Has this ever felt true? The last investigations of a twirling nebula in the outer rim of some galaxy that has been explored only once or twice, and even then at seeming gunpoint?

What kind of a symphony plays in those spaces which go undetected even by sight and feeling? What kinds of feelings show themselves to the fleshest skin this side of a rainbow and the rainest ribald sky the underdone color of a fortune-cookie that has been left out in the frying sun for too many days? The kind I can show you if you just look, is what I'd like to say sometimes. Most of the time, though, I'm content to day through my days in the ways I have done, the times I try and don't, the people I have and don't, the ones I have seen and felt. These things are what float to the surface when the mind is undone, like Ondine in the waves and her lover in the deep.

The Worst Island

O...O...the others...Foundlings in the sea. I can’t reach. Their arms are drowning. The island in the sun, the little winds above, the fortress, all clouds. The lists go on. Save me, they say, and I cannot do it. The worst island in history, except for all the beautiful and rapturous things there, the land and her birth and all the green thriving. All these things are immaterial, but they matter more fundamentally than sustenance. They are more fortunate than air. Sea wraps around, and I cannot see the foundered sky through the gaps in my hands, which are like a roof in the rain. I can see through the rafters into what the smallest space was five years ago. Before it was an all-of-it island offered up to the sea.

Free hands. Further. Dynamites and wrath. These tidy quicksands. Pull my breathing into a stretch. Save me. I cannot do it. Hell-bent for arms I am, and ready, and breathing. And love longer than the stars around this place. An island, yet.

Who knew?

Forks and Color

Forks and color
Breath and small things clattering, unseen, on the roof.
Fresh hollers, dynamite twirls down the mountainside
That can be heard by the filling valley.
Smoke lends it lectures to the sky.

I try the trade elsewhere,
Begging off the bending bursts of seven single railways to the sun.
Fly to my every bedside,
Last and East to hope,
Lest the least become northeast
To Easter’s lasting time upon the slopes.

Frail whiskers
Faint whispers
Black under the tamed ringside,
Left for free at the floor below all feet.

Salamanders swing the lightest: all their limbs grow back.

Sing

I hear singing in the wind. Stop. Listen – is that what you hear, too? The sharp of whistling through high branches in lost yards in small towns settling into dust? There is singing there, too. Howling, even; over the glittery tops of ocean waves far in the middle of the nowhere out to sea, seen only by other waves, and no land anywhere in the four directions. Pull yourself together; listen to the singing.

To what heights can this sound go? What is at the top of the world, where there is only wind? Or is it spaceless and calm, like a hair in a mineshaft falling outward to rest in the stars at the center of the earth? This can be done; I promise. And you may only sing. This is what to do.

Come alive again. Please. And I will show you the singing. It is everywhere, but I will show you. Just rest here awhile, and listen to the cracks in the earth through which the possibility of sound arises. These are the holes in the world, like those holes in our head. Listen. Play out your part and leave it to rest in the backyard to be carried off by the breeze. Sing the brown world off into air.

Chosen Birthmarks

Slinker slider slither sludge
Landing near the tops of fudge
Down the back and up the side,
Where do chosen birthmarks bite the tide?

Fat the crimson Denver in the wind,
Bend the britches frozen by the sand
Between the icy toes of all the beds
Of Easter, loving, lest the rain be driven by the praying hands
Down
Back
Under the Easter-tide but always
Up
To
The
Sky
Below my hips and sunk into my eyes.
I pray for rain.
God, I pray for rain.

Emperors

Ways the wetness ended
Sneaks upon the last broom from out of the closet of my childhood.
And I never drank the nectar, but always let the last lights seep
Out of the back door and onto the willows,
Which crawl downward up the street to the back-place of every friend I have ever known.

This is my history, out of talent and predisposed to despair. I cry to no one in particular, but to the colorful breeze which lands in my hair like a bonnet of reeds.
Fluffy, daybreak, letters to the wind. I smoke occasionally, but don’t inhale.
My head is topped open to the sky, and wind
Shears near here, freer than the everglades where the Trumps live.
All those golds to the sky, and I sit and sip margaritas with the chosen ones,
Chosen by their own breaths and nobody who cares.
The reaching emblem, the dessicated space, the clamoring specter of line-driven snow
And powder of fine silked clothes which used to be worn by emperors who are now dead and
Naked as they ever were.

All the Other Floors

Can I find the strength in politics?
Can I cull the good from hands that shake?
The latest trills are done in cities wide
With strength to underhand the folded sky.
My bedroom is three floors above the street.

Some days, I fold my sheets and clothes
And drink a glass of water from the sink
And bake three trays of cookies for the ones
Who live in all the other floors
That I can never reach.

Friends are here.
Friends.
These are all.

Crystal-Clear Balloons

Wings darting to and fro,
Ballast to the mother’s oysters,
Listening from the crystal-clear balloon
High above the earth’s blue field of air.

Families size up the plots,
Build their testaments to length,
Slip the knot of grease into waiting arms
The size of candy and the
Shape of hope.

We drag around the seafood from another place
To sell in our front-yards
And people buy,
People buy;
Well, one has to eat.
Right?
Argue that.

Pistols show up next, weapons of
Proximity.
Fates are done up in ribbons or
Layed out on the cool ground like
Flags.
Cloth is also used to bury.

We take these aims highly, as in sleep,
And cover like no other in the yard.
Our houses stand as long
As we can see them,
And we mortgage snowflakes from out
The Easter-sky
To all
And only
Ourselves.

Sellers of Area

Nomads have failed where the light has risen. They bring ceilings and trapdoors, spinning past the ramparts of born breathers and Beethovenian causes. These last thoughts die out of fright, because the light cannot support such travelless wishes, the kind that get spray-painted on your grandparents’ old station-wagons before even your first trip to the sea. The last trip to the last house on the outer turnpikes of your memory have made a selling here; real-estate is huge in the land of dreams. Paper cannot account for it.

Fast times beat about the razing delirium finished before the times of cuted rainbows used as symbols of assumed freedom that has, it is thought, to be bought rather than lived right now. The sellers leave their theatres to witness the spectacle of destruction and the water coming in and liberating all in spite of themselves and how many bright trinkets they might want for their grandchildren.

The Flying Remembers Her

This I wrote after seeing my grandmother, Ethel Plaisted, alive for the last time.





My grandmother lies in a hospital bed, looking like a bird taken out of the air. Her eyes, I try. Her eyes. I cannot look into them for too long, those pools of blue on three hospital pillows, or my heart will crack and I will fall to the floor. But I hold her hand and rub her skin and tell her that I will ask a Blessing for her from the Light of lights, so that she may fly again, in whatever form the Light is moved to move her. I know, no matter what, that she will no longer, then, be, strictly speaking, my grandmother; even my heart must let her go, so that she may fly. She must move on, in whatever shape or shapes or states, and I hold her hand and tell her that she must fight this disease, but that, when she feels with all her might that the fighting is done, she must relax into the process with full feeling and let go of everything. Even the lights in the room, all her people, me, all history and time, drop it like a hat on the floor of a temple, and fly, free of all wings and direction, to the breathing crest of Infinity, which holds you like a lamp, and there is no crying involved except as release, so I breathe it through, and out through her, and her into me and out again, like the being my grandmother was to me in life whom I loved with all my breath and heart, who did her part in the taking care of me and of all my people. We are all there with our grandmother, and aunt, and mother, and teller of stories and provider of afternoon snacks and blankets and Don’t jump on the furniture! and countless banana-split cakes and knitted things for our warmth and protection.

I look into her eyes. They are frightened, like the eyes of a bird who has been taken out of the air. I cannot look away, but I cannot see because of tears. Just a blurry shape, a blob of a head on pillows and leaking, hospitalized body, though she has said she is not in pain. But of course she would say that. I touch her shoulder, the top of her head. Her hair is thin. Her feet: alone together below the hospital blanket. She wiggles a toe, and smiles, but her eyes do not. But they do say “I love you” with more force than any bird of any air, the force of no knowing, even after such long life, what anything IS, what even a single thing IS, including this life, this process, this turning, this wonder of transformation, this small room with all the cards and flowers and loved-ones. I squeeze her hand and tell her I love her, though my voice barely makes it out of the sentence alive. Three words, which devastate the being by filling it with Light, and it’s all right, you know, I tell her. You fight it, I say, but then you must surrender from the heart when it’s done. You’ll know it when it’s done. And the love will never leave the room, because we are here, holding you, letting you go on your free way wherever.

My grandmother squeezes my hand on her hospital bed, the way a bird might lightly grasp a branch when it is just about to fly. Her face is warm. She looks up at me, the lone bird in the first tree ever grown by nature in its house among the Light, taken out of the air, and those pale blue eyes are no longer afraid. They have seen something. They are seeing everything, I feel, as they begin to close. Her grip on my hand suddenly relaxes, and I realize she need not worry about remembering how to fly: it is the flying who is remembering her. The flying remembers my grandmother, and me, and you, and all the people who do not know that they have wings, that we are already fire in the sky.

Questions

How many colors can you wear before your face is not seen? Does light inhabit you, or do you inhabit it? Does the shine that bites the brow of winter from the lower trenches reset all your desires at the chiming of the New-Year’s clock? Bastions of creamy white smooth delicious wet memories of sound? Seething, barking, little-friend-befouled and -squashed buckets of lame pipes all ratty with rust and hinges that open on nowhere but a door to a wall of an empty, dusty house in the middle of the remotest exiled land? Do you wear where you live on your sleeve? What color is your skin because of this? How can Angels be brighter than the decimals of earth’s resounding creations when all worlds exist simultaneously and forever, or forever even if they seem not to at the time?

Lingering Sherbets

Twist the lingering sherbets into downright shapes of cackle’s mourning before the summer can crack your drying eyes. List as many fans of broomdom as you can in the space of nine times the outer, willowing lengths of computer-trails in simmering, blank darkness outside the laziest eye. Who are your neutrons? Save the blighted whale from its counterparts above the stream, staple the last buffoon to the party’s roof, but never cry for the always-ahead, for they have done up their buttons to the nth degree of burning intensity. Flames should lick your hair for nearness.

That these things happen is the indication of the fearlessness of the universe. That you happen is the indication of the fearfulness of birth. What is done when trying to outstrap unlogged particles from out of their air-earth shapes? What is lost in the endless, palavering translation? Beeps and broinks, steps and nodes, flippers and tongues to the outside: these symptoms of unrelease stipple the mind with razor-wire and sluice the gloaming canvas from out of the Spanish mimes put on the flowerbed of all our forgotten mysteries.

And the soap has finally dried, and my skin. Your skin. Let out to sun-in-rain.

Eight Times Seventeen

Eight times seventeen puts out the lights;
Sixty burning bridges see the sky.
Laugh out loud for all the birds to see
And let your yards hang down from under high.

This last bend in seeming lasts to one,
And only wants to list the ways to lie;
Do the furtive timing till it’s done,
And let the earth breathe fire while we die.

Werewolves prowl the darkness underground.
Bats seek out the light from out of lives.
All the people look to out for prayers.
All that’s left is failure to survive.

Creatures crawl and dawdle over trash;
Let their hands lie burning under forks.
Whatever else the dying burden asks,
Replace his outward singing with your
Alabaster sighs.

To Love Beyond the Sea

Swear that this, the latest time of need,
Has swept you clean of all your need for clothes
And every other counted hassle-thing
That simplifies your life but for your breath
And breathing whiles. You do not match the sun.
Your feet are natural and like the sand,
The lasting foot-impressions done by weight
And serious, alive, bright roses smelled
Like after-life’s left-hand-beseeching smoke
Of laughing hollers echoing throughout
All pasts and futures and all norths and souths.

This is all the decoration done
By willful, unforgiving playwrights’ eyes
To all the ever-shining, endless light
That holds us all inside our soonest shells
Of broke-out time and sea-surveyor’s glass
That sees the things not thought about in time
But through all time let out and on to pass.
I break the waves upon my shoulderblades
And love and feel to love beyond the sea.