Nocturnal Dimensions of the Future

Once I drew a line around myself, dug my shape into a rich field 
Some night fell in, bruising itself 
The fresh dirt was a muscle stowing away years 
It wasn’t dead, it just couldn’t sleep 
I stuffed night’s hem into my mouth to stay shut  
Night also buttoned up when it couldn’t find a thing to adorn
When it couldn’t find a fly to swallow 
If I keep my eyes quiet, if it mistakes me for blind
I dry heave fits of impure air
One night, until I had it all to myself
If I could retrieve that night from a dream
Its air wakes up inside my lung, bearing amplifications
Shovels score the dark and damage allergies
When I am awake back and forth for so long I can’t remember 
Being left or not being left alone, I fall bed to bed to bed
If I could move toward it while moving away
Night kills what it shifts into; I pine for what I alight

 

I looked in all eight directions then spread my tiger’s skin on the floor.  Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore.  Its crystal facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus:  mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle.  I aimed my automatic at that outlandish organ hanging in the sky like a dazed stone. Its sea expression wet the evening air; I captained the tempest there. Looking too long into the distant human pupil, I sharpened my harpoon. But my hands could not be organized. I wanted to tightrope up there on a mental binge. I reached for my quiver, and soon arrows ascended the degrees, bristling. My bird described a failure one depth below time. The moment rotated. Its color was extreme. In a heavy steel helmet, I matched that orb and tried to tackle it by a hundred mental muscles. The more I bruised it, the more I couldn’t see it. If I could turn it open like a glass knob, feel my way in. If I could tongue out its creamy mouth. If I could tickle it and bounce it on my knee. If I could dress it up. If it would fist me, if I could force it. The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it.

 

Nine stitches and liquid morphine cannot keep it closed
Lunar halo runs circles more than hollow
Steel birds fly from clocks
Striking the same hour in rounds
A freak disease tears across the vista
You’ve been told this is the year of medicine
Lunar halo must bother you tonight with some life
Stronger than satellites with strong melancholies
The situation of radar gone deaf
War shine and flare lit in the lips
A ring of unknown men waiting
To think of it is a tourniquet
Embracing you to the point to the point of
Sugar awake in the animal disaster
Vaccinations break and they bother you
The situation of its waves
Puts catheters in blather-mouths
Time for you to ride
Even when it acts hypnotic or botched
Tornado hanged in example
Eye sticking to its guns
It must bother you with oblong torment tonight
Between your deserts and escaped stars
Messes of radial spoils steal on you
Recognize your continuous tattoo
Lunar halo casts your face in harassments
It dissolves former weather in your ear
Takes up with your hexes
Ice becomes gas blasting into a foam hole
Out of which zodiac carcasses crawl
Under lunar halo, anyone who waits
For sleep waits to be seen to

 

My first mind is night driving on and on. My blood evolved from this pitch and one night’s tar accumulated in my mouth. If I go with my face made up, occult currents get plumbed. Their magnetic air is self-taught and not handled well. If I am fully in night, I cannot think ahead or use a song to get there. Night makes time by not remembering to go back. I make it mine by owning up to what I am not. Stars are swinging doors that miracle away the shift.  I am driving high into the taste of vanishing and starting points. Their arrows double-joint the dark. I am driving into my own eyes. Yellow lights pill the horizon hills. If I keep night to my right side, it ramifies at me until my solitudes splinter. My pulse stuck to the signal: turnoverturnoverturn.   

 

you may pound this night as much as you please
you will never pound into me what you think
you say the contrary, and the lashings madden
night thinks you should pay for it
pound at your belief until it’s empty of you
loaded with lords aft and boxes of forward lucifers
but how could a lucifer get fire in this crying night
you could fill buckets at your drenched hems
no lightning rod will channel this night
                        (it will pound me no matter)
and better than a stormbird on its last wing
you pound this metal against my skull
defang the dark’s thunderstalk swerves  
words pound at me because I won’t use them
night gnaws and unknots the anchor  
your lordish hours form unknown conduits
and unknown songs empty into my lungs
only to drag dark after me and lurk it in my orders
it pounds its meaning into me
that blankness packed with impressions I will not salvage
I endure the irate backpounding
endure the obsessions that stand in for you

 

I borrowed hours to finish you and borrowed a dream to falsify my night. I borrowed night after night until I had one to myself—abandoned that night. I borrowed a prayer in owl light, borrowed devotion and the words. To be sure, I borrowed a cocktail dress. Felt my way along night-blooming creepers until I felt extravagant with a cigarette. I borrowed that and your infant phantom. I took it on credit. I took out what I took me to be. I borrowed a stone room to keep you and kept you in the dark. I grew another dark and owned its circulation. Borrowed a second wind, and left a note on fair trade.  I made the words fall, made the falls faster. Into a hole I dug. I tried to rescue that silence. I entered it in my lab coat, and I entered it on a black horse. Driven to the wrong address, I burrowed in. I borrowed your only idea and gave away darkness. I tried to give way, to the dark I tried to give a way.

 

let the ocean uptake shape your cover
if by memory foam, if on a dream-fast
do not use a sleep mask because of your thoughts
snuff out the count with an open mouth
let your night cape have a gas-hole
lie groveling on your belly
the lead body lies down with the feather body
you are not one of the guards
even if you can still feel
if your position is diagonal enough  
a dark ball rolls void into you
hasten to make use of that freed dark
empty it the way fatigue
is a way of worship if smashing waves
do not listen for where the sound ends
if smashing waves consolidate you then
night never finishes even if
fully in it would you be unable to
as undertow takes the child think
of each part of your body vanishing your skin
as the dark that stares and stares back