Caves & Bats

Insects in the forest / some do not return
donut-shaped rings / eluding keen birds-of-prey

diamond mine mind / espousing bonesmen's talc
clatter weird honey / honest honey top / exposed
vast bats exposed / a sitting "duck" bar tab

nightly onslaught / barely (the cat's population)
bats bat bats / the day-shift catamarans

Meal-Tab for the cave crab

3 million wrinkle-lip bats live here.
They produce something vital: vials
of slim rancid bar tab: guano
300 feet deep. Read about it.

This cave thrives on bat droppings
there are pelicans in this shit mansion
cockroach eating bats and crazy mice
getting high in the caves.

Your Vulva or Your Money

First off--yes, there are pirates. Been reading about
it (tee hee, Ramsey! Egyptian god-of-note) in the
Times "Sunday Styles." The point is (a question)

explain this: why are wolves ourselves? ...

Back to: your Vulva. Is it Vulcan? How does it want
to live--cleanly? Five baths a day? No ma'am,
not in America; You are no Hepburn's excuse.

Arctic Wolves

are also girls; there's almost a burglar
outside your window, lurking; I want
less doors generally. Wolves do not bathe

nor would I ask it of you. One man's murder
is another manslaughter. Wolves are daughters
of Native American boneyards; he named it

America because Amerigo. Exxon & Costco,
and the wolves with the oxygen pull. Flash
lights in the closet honey. Your wolves or your money.

Salad Bar Gangsta (Pt. 1)

new bag of grass
snakes in the lawn
sheets ain't gone
just dirty laundry songs
hoes on the washer
fucking with only heels on

how do you feel?
thanks for asking, mon,
rather like a wheel
rolling over discarded tongs

like an eel, full of
mystery and murky bongs
loitering in the deep
I done swallowed all these thongs

If it weren't for the pink child's bike, this wouldn't be borderline offensive

Dancers in the grass, pt. 0

(dale once thought: these high school
dancers are on you like your pants are)

But what I meant to say was:
never become a pinnacle unless you're
agreeable to us peninsula (plural)

we stick out like rural celeb vets
tripped out on acid
drinking from rancid streams
carrying corn's vain dreams
of dedicating without belonging
to the earth of thronging
things green, red and yellow
not monocultures of culture mono

grant us mano but deliver us macho
who think corn is bullshit;
we should plant prairies.

Standing in the reeds

red bull waits in the rushes
to be scrubbed
& awake like GOOD MORNING
us let's make big, make everything
open into another something
even bigger, a tired lizard
or a snake playing poker

TIS DALE

'Tis Dale! Mike Tisdale!
I cried upon seeing
his scruffyvisage

making buckets like coopers barrel
hunched over liked a miner at lunch
with a weird chinstrap a-munch

White-ass seven-footer
Chopping blocks like a shoplifta
Popping out on D like
a Jewish mother's eyes


Surprise: he can hit J's
like my bros and I can blaze:
all day like no way
other than the highway

all day, I say
again like Mike Davis prays SI never features him
again, because then the next
game, he won't play
and Tisdale gets all the fame
but we'll win the game.

Then, the next game, Davis
plays more, and we lose. Let's booze.

What happened from 4:50 to 4:57 PM the day prior, long and unedited

Quick play
Me or my
Surrogate, a game
Like a berry’s bush aflame
With all the world’s halls
Empires emblazoned like lame
Ducks going out
For the long one, just human, we’re just human
That’s all
Like gourds along the road
Ripe with emotion
Limiting ourselves to sharp angles
And broad strokes
Like bored storks, cleaning up our clockwork
Is like going home empty-handed, empty
Or at least without an idea
Of how to behave properly.
Yes, you’re right, I have never forgotten
Exactly how to imagine the world becoming
A smooth, glassy siphon
And sucking itself out into
Something restrained, it has become, a well-crafted game like
Bass fishermen going nuts
Getting creative on our asses
Getting their butt’s out of heaven’s way
And weighting it down like
Overblown cannon, outdated mongrel
















I have nothing left to vent about
This language is suddenly inaccessible
Just because it’s starlight doesn’t mean it is not soft
Like loaves of broken stardust
We arrange our bodies into strange envelopes and ship them

(It is not over, it is not even past
The past, that is, like a thermostat on a ledge
A collegiate athlete reaches for sunscreen
And he’s found the ground again, a whole
Shipyard of these strange characters
Not believing that anything is wrong
It’s just the culture, it’s all the culture)

If you worship the broken sunbeam,
Something is bound to alleviate
All the pain within

That pain which
Opens doors and clothes the urban poor; that rain which pokes
Its head out of the door
As if it’s saying good morning,
I had not realized I had spoken,
The morning laughter revisited,
All over again.

Gallons of dross
Poured onto the cement in hopes
Of some clever elves arriving

(at half-passed noon
Our half-amassed crooning
Has awakened our interiors and
Bespeckled disaster like Midnight!
Time’s up!)

These rolling peninsulas just unroll
Sometimes
Like clowns creating quiet
In the dark noobs of their own quiescent closets
Hoping for a stranger to linger
Or lend an arm, shop, laundry bin

Artichokes laundering themselves before mealtime;
Dusty helmets meet the breeze;
Forget about this:
Drake character, you’ve met before;
Spirits loitering like celery paper
Scribbling in intangible vegetables letters
Messages you had already received but not opened, not read, not cared about

Everything you had hope for
In a breed of crazed zombies
One type is right
The left-footed booby traps of
Nathaniel Hawthorn heritage
Opening toilet lids and pooping until
There is no tomorrow
But there always is, and it comes
ONE DAY
ATTA TURK

Super People of Dynamite City

France is thronged with knights
My ants are pregnant
Nights like wine grow with weight

<>
Your nights are my drapes

<>
Your thighs are my bright lights

<>
Home in the rain
Coda in the range
Toad bins enraged

<>
Your boobs are plants

Your window brooms

<>
Fascinating bubbles

<>
Steakhouse wine-stars
Super-people of dynamite city

<>
Freak show party
all over the dome-show
party party party
all night long
Danny had a sock fest
with his money in the tabloids
ate his own chocolate, looked in the mirror

<>
it may be your party
it may be my country

<>
quit wasting my time
i'm not a minority
monetaries are bombastic
who's got a big one
bigger ones are c l o n e d
twin boners are coners
cyclones in the moth
mouths
moths and fire-fighters
are blighters
mighty
mightier
might

<>
Name a celebrity. The blond anchor on CNN, for example. I would like to strangle her while fucking. Not to hurt her, of course. Just to assert my dominance. If you think I'm weird, then you've never seen pornography.

<>

gravy dads

gravy dads rave about their gravy

like

look at my soon porous son
poor us, suns-a-scant, sun skin
sun-skinted half-amassed, placed
placards in gusts at halfmast
have to blast that Shi'ite shit
too Sunni? to joke about muzzled
Arabica means
to make light of beans
& what we're talking about?
coffee

opens doors and hello
newspapers unfamiliar faces
familiar celebs, celery bogs, eat at the Ritz
if you a Jew
you cannot fool my, Carlton,
Fisk-tisk, a brand new task
a flower-making basket
splish splash i was taking a bath
in Bath
so un-Roman, regard my Ba'ath,
regard my temple, regard my empty
box of dead people:
that must mean they're still alive
so grow wise
and descry
poverty that is
stated: i might as well be wasted
if i'm not currency
currently working
murky

composte

I keep it more real than realty
torn born-again amigos like imbroglio
selling plots like Oh No, Yes Go
stop on red, flow growing green on grow
Legos floating into place so

catch me
selling fiction like pulp painters,
sculpted duct pipes exclaiming
GAS [comma]
T-H-I-S I-S W-H-A-T I A-M
many parts becoming whole again
on the roll again, buttered as cluttered
rooms of clergymen grooms: Yessir,
I stole the grain bin, robbed the bank,
except that it stank
there they stored rotting things
instead of money. It wasn't
a financial institution,
but an illusion. The pious
inscribe sacrament in their bodies
and need no cobwebs to
hide their dead.

Getting to the part about the cottage

[superfluous intro:
spinal bifida, which i at
first spelled wrong:
is it still a disorder?

sorry, no laughing matter]

like dispensed chocolate
already tastes good:
that's called a paradox

a pair of ocean-smooth
sandalwood sandals sit
on your cousin's sand-blasted
deck, overlooking the Connecticut
River, the deepest river in New
England, apparently.


Largest of its size,
I'm told, without
a major settlement near
it's mouth.

A silty river carrying
mud all the way from
Quebec. But naturally
muddy, like the original
Old Muddy -- The

Missouri, of course -- but without the Army Corps of Engineers
feverish channelizing.

All the silt made navigation difficult. Hence the important
wetlands and lack of a major city. Not easily
navigated, especially in the olden days.

The Connecticut. Where my cousin bought a house
two hours from Manhattan.
That's what I meant to focus on.

#43: NOT a boy

Darren Sproles: No Child Left Behind

D. Sproles lumbered into the end-zone
looking all the world
like a 12-year-old.

Unfortunately -- for the Indianapolis Colts, that
is -- he is a grown man, juking and steaming
his five foot, several inch frame into the end-zone
not once, but twice. And the second time, it was
for all the marbles. Game.