Let words

rise off the page

Float

in the air

as sound

I hear you breathing

By turns

coy and taciturn

or wandering away

into mists

made more pliable

by silences

No bliss more blatant

than the shuttered ventriloquist

speaking in spurts

on the tongue

of irony

of ivory

The sad

bitter sweet contagion

the days

Madmen

clearly beaten by the stars

trying to underline a verb

in a text without any

Spectral

assonance

or a total disregard

for speech

Thought

languid

in August’s dogged days

Ergo

ego

dreams

a somnambulist blast

that turns the past

into a pasture

that creams

Bare inklings

lone

no more than

a batted eye lash

at that

Enough

To stand alone

fettered

amidst unfettered stones

To stand alone

amidst unfettered stones

Fettered

Fettering

And then

when nothing was happening

it occurred

The dewy eyed lips

of the poor

sons of bitches

curtailing all argument

in a fist

or a look

Little twisting agonies

over all of this space

under us

on the way home

Egregious dimpled moments

speck of time

in perfidy

or loss

against what was

or never was

again

A sullen disequilibrium

unburdens the stuff

of its own heart

or parting

or without

a glance

The huge bulk

of what cannot be said

blisters our eyes

ears

nose

tongue

body and mind

The colossal mess

The big mess

Or the world come

screaming to attention

a bit of blank paper

near its maw

To be suddenly remembering

all of that

while lying flat

in someone

else’s flat

or to be forgetting

it

without having even once

remembered it

for all of that

The creamed dawn

that won’t go away

or down

Let the hurt canvas

share them both

Over lingual bodies

some purring happenstance

burgeons

Such that it didn’t happen

Or such that it did

happen

This fateful arbor

a sort of ardor

fretfully unclutching itself

from the sides

Evening

A frown

upon a mound

You break

the very utensils

of the lake

Of fractious fawns

nothing more need

be left unsaid

The pleasing thinglets

The warm thickets

of her thighs

The salt languor of tears

bloated beyond belief

beyond grief

that the actual moment

is nothing more than a fact

For whom

But for whom

Was it she whose feet

Entrenched

A massive obbligato

a missive

Spooning the divine

or sponging off them dithyrambs

of fate

It all equates

or in disquiet

waits

Where we live

in the dark park of our minds

most of the time

it was easy and bright once

before we went there

Bitterly down there

by the sea

in rock cadences

without torpor

or grief

Brittle as angst

in a casket

Thinly spinning

through middle ages

with beatniks

or happenstance

a panoply to cover charm

in very rich hours

or rages

Going on on stones

over rough rafters

Fibrillators

The silence of a bell

in a silent silent dell

Tethered to her nethers

against a long avenue of oaks

in a treeless suburb

the sublime crawls

toward the real

Such small and sweet gentle things

glassine or hardware

against a harvest

of clothing

jackets and skirts and stuff like that

Shoveling shit through the tunnels

of tough love

into the apiaries

where birds gawk

at faith

Overhung

Overhung overhung overhung

What a gorgeous thing a blouse

is

when it throws aslant

a look

Or the furor

in tight boxers

amounts

These graceless days

swept asunder

or into cinders

or splinters

Every night

the bombing of the hard

and stalwart

alike

Into graves

In graveless days

Over the fields

a hulled breeze runs

though none are starkly

merry

today

Albeit

though not without

pretense

a lot

What the year wears well

the day abates

or forgets

or simply fails

to remember

These blasphemous days

that tender us heavy

to heaviest harvest

And every toll taken

taken

and lost

Ventricular sawdust

Delphinium blush

Arguments in favor

and arguments against

Like this

Struggling earthward

against the last lisp of the sun

a struggling dashing

becomes somnambulant

caught in the cadence

of this thought

The train leaving tree

leaves

What we do care about

a poem in this many lives

the day we put our hands

over our mouths

the world stops

in this thought

When they were there

in their underwear

under a gold moon

surrounded by prepositions  Turtles

or turtle doves

Just keeping track

of this errant ardent day

in this way

As far from dreaming

into sleep

we go

It’s fabric foils the fumbling

heart

lately over loppy waters

inviolate

Fabric of failures

fictional

not fun

The world is not yet swept

clean of woman

reprobate

in iron equations

or redolent

with dust

Dusk

A little late light falls

on this thought

Falls

on this here

thought here

Upon opining

at her opening

Because it’s time

time

time that we loved

it’s time

time

time

Later

Largely

Since seeing seconds

scrawl away

over chalk cliffs

space

Spaces

That they’re

aware

that they’re

awake

Some number

of hovel hugging lovers

ago

petunias

lost in the lurch hard

loomed

A rift

deep in the rut

with ladies

with angels

The subjective correlative

A thrall

in the blank

that thinking is

The laden faces

A treason

All the laden faces

Are treason

Through these blameless days

with withering torments

Homunculi

Blistering

burdens

Oh to have an archive

to sell

Flies come early

to the cow

Little fel-

lows

Little fellows

Circles

Summer swallows

over shallow waters

Small frail pails

of evidence pile up

Cuddly curlicues of chrome

meringue pie

The old nullifying hands

that used to have us

down in the sands

She went to lie down

Down in the sand

Upon a weakly revolving nerve

distended until passion’s

bed time

queer Quaker folk

shudder and blot the sun light

from each other’s eyes

Madly racing over hurdles

Recalcitrant

Retrograde

Rigged

Not rigid

rigged

Dreamily leaning in windows

What a facile

fascicle we thought

until we saw what other

under handed words were wrought

Sad thoughts and cilia

slump against the garden wall

that otherwise encloses them

What are these cilia

other than the lingering hands

that are

all the is that happened

then

The tenderest words

Looking to lay down

low

And then

the tenderest of words

looking to lay down low

Or unto sleep

infused with dreams

encamp

A while

beside the bed

Suddenly seldom alone

of late

under late low hills

Or engrossed in the boredom

of others

if there are any

So some go by barely

when out lasting

or listing

or slipping away

So some go by sadly

when slipping away

So some go by sadly

when sadly they go by

when slipping away

Waist lace

or the sad treason

of reason

Some unruly sadness

whups up side the soul

It passes

And then we’ll have the evenings

to test the curvy curvature

of all that’s patented

and patently

dies away

Solaceless

All through the tripleting afternoon

then

certain figures appear

and appear to bend

Harden

The foils of literature

that tears tear

and set afield

on pampas or plain

That fears fear

Foibles

And softly broadens

too

The heavy density of wood

in a blonde pastorale

seems to shape the lumber

Come let these restful motions

append us

while we rest

Let them attest

The ochre colored watery air

blights the early morning sky

What where

Why

The wordless dysentery

that stakes skates

All blustery dusters

and compacts

and bluesy suspenders

and blurry diurnal urges

To never again see

the grim wetness

in wonder

that all ships cling to

in calling it home

The rimmed wetness

And then the weepings

start to wail

all over the pale green bodices

of hills

A little bit of cadenced

buttery softness

envelops this compact hardness

and lets us feel that we have

a somewhat

less hard heart

Somewhere some hunger still lunges

The warm swallowed sallow sadnesses

that time micturates

almost euphemistically

settle like a nettle

in a warm breeze

Not the world’s most sloping

or disastrously curtailed of figures

but one that will not

fail to stoop

when that time comes

Nor stoop to fail

And then upon

a blue blonde afternoon

of fragmentation and Fragonard

Of fragmentation

Of ferment and affirmation

As girlish is a gentle grapheme

As gentle as a goy

or mala

The gala or anomaly of change

All the way along

a long night’s wailing

Wail away boys

Wail

Wail away

And then this thigh’s sighs

This aching blink back

pain of air

between our eyes and sight

That blinds between

But is not over yet

There’s still the part about

the pains

and dearths of skies

before the eyes

Only the deleterious date

Other debtors

strum their doubts

Small clusters of human flesh

flutter

linger

So walk around

and wear this it down

to the stalk of sputum

Walk

Walk around

So slogging somewhat somnolently onward

sloughed

as was said

way back when when was when

Or improperly irradiated

maybe

in going on

The pure crystalline gleam of morning

free from thought

or thinking

Just this

is justice

Waiting for the words

appended

willing and waiting

Or should they then

up ended be

Or be up ended

Squalling birds

unseen but heard

so seen

A younger ember burns away

at the beginning

remembered

seemingly eternal

Stumbles

is carried off

Even beginningless embers

come dust flavored

and lust laden

The quiet transverse of a smile

Or some suede heather

floss your mind

All alone in going under

or with them all corralled

and flanked

Or the easy grace of sameness

brings us down

The gray curtains

of this senseless mordancy

that passes now and then

for a country

Temporal vertigo

Spatial amnesia

For a domicile

An origin or home

A rattle in the chains

A rattle in the chains

A rattle in the chains oh boy

A rattle in the chains

The acrid dust

on the tongue

only appearing to lust

for something

for someone

or

This long liquid tunnel

where the tongue is sculpted

by the presence of another mind

The warm thrusting

that must be lust

challenging all penitence

all hope

all rust

Several other silly sufferers

huffing wistfully under willows

A bit of flogged dust

by light

becomes this whole world

What parts of her enfolds

the unflappable follies of mens

The human body

a gesture

the way form writes on emptiness

the way emptiness soothes form

Lilting

Lateral like experience

the wistful breath

of winter weather

wishing this day

its wistful farewells

Things formed out of words

Worlds

Reminds one

of some

little gerbil fettered thing

Lightly greased in pain

more bitter than folly

more green

More no never

More no never again

Around the dark thereafter

Among slim and lovely livelies

some numberless humper stumbles

aghast

begotten

Broken

Things that bring them thoughts as treasures

things of mind

and things of deed

The nervous teetering that time takes

out of even stones

some times

Enough to take us out of fate

in fact

and fact as well

Compelled by sorrow

The ways out over the water

the way

The feckless rhythms of the days

all but adumbrate

their marrows

Again

these sorrows

They were somehow peculiarly

not of a mind

to do that

Not then

not now

not tomorrow not ever

Yet

The frail filly

feeble witted

an insomniac voraciously flaming

For flight

for filial flight

An arrogation of fawn lilies

fawned over and idle

Or

Cadenceless beggars

augment all this thrift

So many mornings

spent unraveling

what could never

in any event

not be said

Went off

running under thunder into rain

Others may do otherwise

Lovers moving over lovers

Stiffly turning over waters

The queen of archival beauty

lips like frail vines

Into the steel sunset

one digit from the internet

a fleck

They’ve

Copyright © 2002 Alan Davies

Cover copyright © 2002 Brenda Iijima

Other Publications

PO Box 687, NYC NY 10009

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PEPC Digital Edition (c) 2007 Alan Davies