BURNING HOUSE PRESS

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What was our poison touch, of palm lines

centred on hands, opening chords

into the body, incisions rent inside

like wreathless layers of skin?

A glorious kinetic estrangement 

feed-back loops speaking in tonality /  

urban reconstruction:  organ runs,  skronky sax,

industrious clarity / at the edge. In the frame, 

increments. And 

some time later, New York City,

alone. Glorious / audacity.

I saw your shadow forty feet long crossing

father demo square to come up stairs

after the ritual throwing up of food 

I tossed down the ring with the skeleton key.

Enactments between us always began with something 

breath/ less. Taking starkest energy. 

Was it you then, 

dressed in a white tuxedo? Art student

of midnight, your ironed shirt,  clover-patterned pants

sitting angular at the edge of a conceptual stare, 

a concrete floor, iron bed-sit, installation.

Being, the notion of prayer, 

or, in waiting at an abutment outside the Mudd Club

or somewhere else , in another outfit,

I remember your troweled performance on a couch

in the sprung rhythms of acid house.

Such memories / walk / me waking 

forward

to specular lipstick on pale skin,

circular meridians drawn in cups

from a river. 

To tie red hemp rope around your

waist,  tautly hold down your thigh

to hook beneath the back of knees 

for levitation,  a shuddering radio static 

meeting clustered mind, gathering up

in suspension’s glove for inertia. We ache 

in de-evolution towards ancestors, the 

awesome incisive markings, spine of 

your bridge, arched, offering, gravity-less

spectral juxtapositions: wigs / wraps, 

buttoned / in collated 

collars; marginalia  /collective sighing of electric

guitars in process  /a novel /

pages with annotations, yes, without 

you we are in for a long triage.

Hand over hand, climbing over 

indelicate industrial clamor, unrolling   

typewriter ribbons to erase propaganda broadsheets / smear

the news and various 

other kinds of puppeteer topographies / 

with spilled black ink blood.

Wandering / steps behind a

procession. At the parade grounds of immolation,

we sit on our knees, for hours / Try to 

stand up straight with

a wishbone lodged in the prism of

your throat, already broken, outmaneuvered /

we were plates of glass, shattered

fragments, separated from everything. 

Sometimes /planes take off from here,

on time. Even cauliflower 

softens in the pan.  You were once

serenaded by electricity volts, hand-held by numbers

of your fans who came to see you perform.

 (new stanza)

Now / (note): I serenade your memory. 

Dictate stenographic emblems 

to exposed toes. I

want to shake in crescendo, howling

in a complicated realm of teeth.

Programmed noise for synthetic generative 

chatter. 

Titled, Music # 4: It is /

so cold outside. Never forgot 

your urgency /

The predilection / to wander.  

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