abendland

published as a chapbook by
e.g. press, San Francisco 1986

we are having lost in an ebullient desert,
inventions coming to this beside us
creatures on their bellies beginning
the way this must have felt, brachiostrophic lovers
under a finely-tuned europe is in bloom.

She’s three parts restaurant, one part girl
under a sadness too big for the room,
beneath headways, indian burial fluctuations
lemon groves; premonitions
of a naked semaphore of the damned.

-

Those are fat animals
below their own leather
heads dipped like that
our directions so to speak
white is the color of
everything copulates with itself.

-

coming back under shelf-life
ribbons of sunset envy, we
could count on our fingers
mesozoic tucson ambulance corps pathos
highways twisting in the heat beds
forgetting what coming off the mountains is a place
laments, if we had fingers

-

some distances beyond fortune
coming in line with the main line
under the rivers, she said, subterranean.
blinking like cars, cylinder probabilities
anemones, vapors, tickets to
wedding parties stranded in busports.
she was a mormon tabernacle and she
was gone the next morning.

-

horizon flattened by wolves
we want meat and radium
and access to information.
we grease the atmospheric machinery
we breathe your blood, nostrils,
all the parts. the parts come together
in the cylinder world, spiralling down.

-

pentatonic passenger conveyances converge
what is being freed or what frees.

boxcars jangling.
think of the sky dark.

the desert is paleonavigable
under adverse conditions.

-

timetabled enigmatics
delirious.

positioning problems abound
cattle roam; lone dictums on the prowl,
hungry leather uppers, some filthy
reasons for this.

-

animus mirabile!

contentious depressions thwart land transport
extra read all about it

vague surge

cylinders tick

-

memory precedes discovery
cruel and unusual employment
cylinder mating, cylinder fun.

where you find me and where I can be found.

-

downgrade ahead
she takes her pantyhose off
in the middle of the desert and pees.

culprit, evasions, some swelter
the pleasure machine needs greased.
a wasted trip and lost baggage
can you tell me where the men’s room is.

-

transported sordid and heavy
wall of sound. control your emotions
don’t lose your ticket, frontier.

some patches of this. slick.
wet. that cylinder over there
the loudest pushing through we’ve
ever rained in. all aboard.

-

international house of
necrophilia breakfast.

croissant moon

-

artificiality quotient: more
weather than previously imagined.

what soaks in.

cummerbund earthmovers, wet tungsten lights
in heavy rains. what pushes.

-

force-fed paranoia
the word was made cylinder, I can’t
stop what landings, a desert growing overnight,
fix coffee, stir uneasily.

-

cylinder weather:

coptic landing gear
factotum deluge
guten mordant, herr human.

nocturnal permission revoked.

the halo cast.

inversion of flanders
solo reaps glory, human hedge
your bets. ladies and cylinders.

all dead, all dead.

the establishment of private zones.
posthumous sex.

-

the bastards have got the girl!

truck river serenade
deadly wait, heliotrope
azimuth, craters, bashing,
all fall down

-

pinhead wilderness sanctuary
where’s your boy is tonight
have you hugged your fear leaves an impression
a suicide remembers everything.

-

normal bus. waits in line for
people, tells itself stories.

cautionary indicators, vented.
ballast mornings dropped opening

the cylinders are thinner
higher altitudes.

-

lick that somewhere else
the highway is a valve and you’re a valve
sick cylinders, everyone’s a fever tonight.

unidentified farming object.

the redemption of the plain.

-

proceed now in the fact of it
penultima facie;
listen for the motion of your lips
rebus holland, damn.

rural side effects
beyond trusting distance
how to control your own emotions.

stopping here before going on.