a spin glass model

i want you to say, "yes, let's walk,"
and keep on walking. i want to sleep.
i want my body to ply itself open
push out the inane nectar of this slow decline.
i want to sleep. and sleep. and sleep.

what am i but a foolish merchant
selling emotions i cannot afford to buy?

a joint poem, timbbe and n.

central pattern generators
acoustic optic modulators
our lives
our lives.

bells

so what is with all of this apocalyptic photography?
not in the smiles, but in the gently
heaving winds of a background cataclysm
the falling fingers on a living piano
the deep chords, the subtle ones
the ones that make you shake in your bones.
what is it with the end of days?
beneath my cognitive whirl
i slink into the golden light of a january day
a photo that you took, before the end of it all

late night, basements, no sex

lately the real trouble has been
convincing the self that this place
is not an ossuary but rich topsoil
a rich deposit in which to grow.
my thumbs shake above
the mechanics
the physical representations
of the verbal representations
of the mental representations
of the things that we call "letters"
but that are really unuttered, unvoiced
understandings.

i study the reasons why this degree of abstraction
is beautiful and necessary. pragmatic and kind.
i write poems. i work.
i sit. i sit.

the three of us, with different motives
pouring ourselves into
what we believe is right.
this self believes in the incendiary whispers
of revolutionaries in basements
of the curdling sexual desire that grips the
unfettered human. this self believes in mutability
mutations, generations of change.

this self sits in basements
next to doors labeled "holography"
and is preserved, like ammonia-treated
beef.

they say i have an infinite self-life.

i

on the day when so many things
darkened like the evergreens of winter night
spill over into this abysmal brightness
revealing themselves finally, as bugs do
under skins

the self was gone
swept up in mourning
the memory of crocheted puce hats
falling sweetly behind
the subtle green of summer
limping into tear-caressed eyes
reminding of simple times and the lips that they have kissed

words never seemed to suffice
bubbling outwards, the kind of mouthwash
that invades

two men, twice,
hillside and a far,
contenting themselves in the aftermath
of the day when so many things happened.

close

what is there to convince me
that a night spent huddled in the warmth of the earth's core
that the light of the hazy, unfocused stars
can pull
in the same way, or better than,
the warmth of a breathing human
light pulsing off the nearness
of uninterpretable eyes while
the naked body fills the spaces between
blanket, leg, unspoken context?

liberated beneath a velveteen underworld
twisted trees and soft, un-existing galaxies
it would have been different, perhaps, to
have slept in the tent
and not outside of it

i am not convinced
that all time lost can be regained
or that my best and longest lovers
will always accord in their invitations and dreams
certainly i am a man of nature and of sound,
the shadowless non-contrast of a world
clothed in nighttime

also too i believe in heat.

what is clear, beyond my own simple context
is that there is breath either way, inhalations
of the greater kind
having made the choice
between one way and the other
i will choose next to stay close
even against the beckon of a cold spring night.