UP IN RAIN
an electronic chapbook
DAN RAPHAEL
UP IN RAIN the tree goes up in rain throwing out indecipherables roll like punches on a piano roll too smoke to tell, to test for constant allergies then engines of dust run red turn over cast iron homonyms we cool unduly hold an environment on wooden legs turns like a drill no lead to hurl so many lifters scarves couldnt be alive outside the building goes garbage in the snow bib like africa we'd get burned if the sun comes back holding 7 pianos in mouth or hand holding channels change trim or ornate fall as beans rise in elevator trees make my hair so coming down hemp free whose jaw more porous than my teeth the trees couldnt fast enough with no knees who could cover. we fall like clipboards denser than cats nails couldnt attach to doughnut bars giving into scales want to put my hands on if i had invented their stairway the sea through me a white flame nerve pain like a slug made of melted bleach bottles i'm so white without rhythm when my hand could comprehend to slap or during living under water in this city neighbors dont look at want to stiffen these hand dogs call in thick sentence hangs over the moment lips open as a maggot pool; would flow chunky partial smell-- the halted process back ups in a new language: i couldnt go there-- this body wont translate bigger stiffer science i dont know if i'll work without a pump & no dilemmas need a machine for me whose name is alabaster smack through the table not fluid enough a signature for the legs to get there since the gone mouth could be zygote or rhythm force my hand i'm cold as a dog trying to go straight, to get moonmilk cabanas or coffins straight up, a bottle big enough to drive split lips sutured underpants take over my knee 50 years of erosion exacerbated by emery fish keep stirring keep taking away the shores been straightened with fences; the ocean. a mountain where my ventricle was when i fall my face onto masks mists trees with too many sides to argue my way with flying exit signs hold my hand in liquid fire a tree a rock how much these ribs take to crush the life out of poisoning inner seas could barely comprehend to alter the clock hammer fan pontoon knees dont know heaven between her legs return like a mall spider of hands frog brain casserole guess our way along the edge senses surrender like tranquilized dogs the mattress cant stop or floods like vision i want time to tour. the weather so round you dont know you've been cut til blossoms bruise the blood wouldnt listen, took my keys & siphoned all my nature left behind more salt & oil, changed solvents couldnt run without color or a way to not trap/replace a key inside a pancreas a duodenal itinerary down like feather in a cryogenic doorway we could hop, hope adding as we twist from coat hanger to bicycles from orrery to soap opera i want the sudden curves to rip me out of here my brain to trees the weather falls colder a face as if to warm i curl like lava blistering in the snow scalp confers bitter brass hustle the center of the earth is blood; the center wants to flood our mouths bringing AIDS to the trees bitching about habitual we've barely scratched the surface canyons tempt us with sudden cacophony of a million weather forecasts trilling across an agitated surface anarchic matter time on a table toe so fresh scattering through the light til held dense seconds through the hands face like rock in the pond of well-spread throughout so much of frozen shipped til its peak of fresh when no potential said to stripe the colorless resin we sprout or fester, as sleek as intellect could make it molecule crying for completion at molecular level we hear sound leave the theater burning in our eye tunnels reflect what couldn't cross or afford a transition warned by structure to breach a seam in world what needle leaking through the paper wasp nest didn't read before opening my hand lid popped my vacuum seal reason family sew to frozen spin the spine wont comprehend the mother of fiber optics one picture would overload-- breakdown isn't being home for the holidays a cold and dark crevasse we useta drive through noticing no digging larva we can't penetrate or slow the earth's bones so much so specialized-- a billion mites are a single function the ocean so many intertwined indistinct shapes as if only this could me in time a light so many others land forgot to wick while plastic future bone (honk if you got 'em) knobby as an earthworm sturgeon neither too big or too small to let live cubed in the snow at our feet or why wont it melt like tibetan tobacco-- get high enough never change color like wine on the sheets woven from impossible grasses whatever we can't see through like everything gone from the tree but frozen water, hibernating chlorophyll trying to hang on to a window no one has breathed on, ever or putting my hand through the moon--the sky's been gone so long, the buildings so steep only an airplane like a thread takes away what isn't advertised yet still might survive if we can't name them as if a radio could receive and not speak-- the force of that accumulation threading soil like millions of fishing lines without bait or hooks, heat-seeking maybe, able to smell gravity not inside the unular spine going further than the sign into unlettered opaque air, a passenger train without windows, another field through them attempting to fly in wedding clothes a skin tight bottom, flowing geometric top straight lines like coat hangers spring from my buttocks as if vandals would notice to smoke dissonance in a chillum made hand the heel so cold we want rain & fire together some place not mud some flesh not fungal a continuum flickering tween memory and imagination requires forgetting, not shutting out a box makes a bridge; streets bring cars not this body of mass transit shutting down for the winter wet with heat clear from smoking what ashes add to bread baking in the trees roots redefine space humming water into metal, sugars plunge like needles into spatial veins turn chance into organic life we can burn if we dont know weather points the way spherically zigging isobars celebratory exchange of highs & lows, wet & thirsty hungry for the excess flowing through streets unable to warn the neighbors the tree goes up in rain so the city doesnt land here shimmering like an impotent hologram catches the light and feeds it well
to smoke dissonance; to fall over the trees whose elevators evaporate before the top floor's assembled, taking two of every angle with enough amps pumped between-- theres safety in ozone, oxygen tranquilized by fusion cons the lungs to thicken official exchange rates where back alley traders without receipts or security balance the best deals with percentage robbed or doped, smoked into new math on a 12 day bus ride from vladivostock i consider poland the west coast; i've severed all connections with european history in this future where amerika and all things amerikan are taboo, infectious, so many still go there to die of consumption, trading messages for brand names trace a rootstock never mine or family needing books to live in; substituting data for water we cannot catabolize the need to spawn in open prairies only dead cars can see humming like a rusted mountain-- snaptop ziplock paper or plastic block the clock linger ray or does the soporific tape allow held in gel floor pins me down, ceiling taunts like the past, or someone else's success famous tree dipped in freon; famous engines clasp our ears held to the light drilling our attention held down by 12 yards of concrete would my ribs subdivide in glassine envelopes a baked apple a recumbent spleen laced into vinyl that's learned to simulate breathing like pontillistic acupuncture accumulates a new body held 3 arms length these structures of attention needing fuel to point toward oily water interpenetrating the mud my foot mistranslates keep needle past on post left of the box that heavy yet suspended magnetism is faith so soft and sweet from hand to mouth mouth to junction like bees constantly having sex being sex fuse sperm to egg robbing their total feed into the queen singularity what white bursts of spread or divide to grow like a river or like a tree to be like mountain soup the rain makes into bowls the fire ejaculates out of so much friction-- we want to go different ways through each other not without each other-- either someone goes under, everything crumbles, or the sum of our dilemmas explodes II) flux breaks a street more than stones could dangle from in a loose pouch hard into the field in an infinite loop til the money runs like last eon's madras we pitch our shirts like untoned tents the colder it gets the less we wear darker chemistry wetting our tantras we ride nebulous houses the land wont cube-- dots to dashes dashes where flesh was immune to clock speed i stipulate complexion the years stir coffee on thin paper flames wear them to bed around a four lane through my hair cop a buzz cut bees growing neath my scalp i need a well day a hold it to my face through night's elastic storms sink more into the earth keeps rising coz the valves broke from scratching so constantly my calves split like cedar pastry pecked apart by crow gulls merged to rule from treetop to basement, sewer pipes crooning my name a new pancreas 40 pounds i'll never miss urge submerged as distant a day this speed limit wind moist as august work outs stacking weightless bodies writhe as if routed-- friction calls the tune remember sloughed skin cells yodel who left them-- a business card you swallow a flashlight becomes a castle cars spray soft bullets like eczema on primered flesh, flat as melting cheese sink a fork in tuning done falls from the bone an eroded beach we useta sleep under in a world with half as many people and 10 times the trees III full moon of was once clinging parhelion biscuits supped in growth spurts parse the lineage cross parsecs of star sleep we walk until directions point the sun red once a month, then earth cramps walking across our backs wear sturgeon hats to shield the cookstoves transit the himalyas on a kite string dog tooth clouds checkerboard fennel rub til the sun peels thick as garlic sludge whipped into ice cream melting therapy on my shaved head-- ephemeral phrenology my head's trying to tell me i'm in trouble no flames that deep cook to cross the killing river i dont notice what borders of teeth eat from me not believing that i bleed or a body of more than thought keeps walking without cities or rain no night to feed me, no way to tame the terrain jittery as a stomach lining that cant remember if its on a fast or half an hour late for dinner IV) i tuck myself in a still place raspy as a mummified dog's tongue up to be gone when the clock says 'wattsa matta?' i try to reach what was my face, half a hat exhausting flavors tattoos between the shingles of my mouth-- when we surrender our roofs to moss, the wood of our houses can sprout, carpets become gardens , linoleum surrenders to its inner sun, a much adulterated earth juice, as nails remember their mountains and windows recall their sand
Is this Shirt or Skin? (11/28/96) these many lights across cold wet asphalt, grass barely breathing like my feet thousands of feet stepping on houses turn them into coffins into packing crates cars pressed into cubes with families inside them; a loaded jumbo jet encased in the electrons of whose memory the earth is a bead in the abacus on a wire we cannot measure how crows decide who flies above the food to warn the rest the empty crow feathered hive mind a crow is a capsule a bee at the north pole flaps his wings once a year til the ice caps melt in a tall glass tipped from a table on a balcony it falls for days until i'm born in a wooden crate painted like a car. my mother bleeds like a tulip bursting with hunger before color is invented in the mind of dogs a city of structural aroma values persistence over math-- to pee is to talk to shit is to fly We're darker than i can remember dead skin cells like rain & too many streetlights house lights security cameras dancing like bats screech me paralyzed: i have to name the tune to get legs to run with my mother swallows another car. my dead father is lost in the engine without flavor the light of his blue eyes, eyes full of positive data, so many yeses flat as the canyon of midnight we could drown in rain attacking like choppers pulsing like the earth thru the spines in our heels a bridge cable made of muscles wound so tightly around each other ozone stenches the air; our eyes red with oxygen and pain trying to jump start our lungs with kite string on a ruptured battery Night decapitates the sirens trying to add color to teach us the first vowels to hang a scream around pitched without arms or any idea where home is so many muscular men with weapons; so many screaming citizens distracted by hands on their thighs children suddenly vanished, bees popping from our scalps. 3 inch tvs fall around me like bats whose wings evaporated in the threat of dawn giving birth to the work day: the rain is too rich to eat each drop a face of splattered dna melting in the grip of engines demanding a place to go, magnetic acceleration needs me to open the door, pay the toll ringing like baskets thrown over the heads 100 yards across the street with few fences i can trust behind drooling quadruped muscles vortex sinkholes barking to define to pass the time Somewhere it's raining; somewhere a domesticated bird is killing the baby in a worm-kernel each drop the meal too dark flavor taking my tongue to first grade on another planet we emit speech through choruses of pores; we compose fugues to deconstruct foodstocks i keep throwing meat in the air-- a hook up somewhere secreted industrial how big a space ship could land in the empty school yard each grass blade someone who once across or with eyes foot thru the floorboard getting far enough from the floodplain each night suddenly re-invents a slippery concoction white as the moon beyond the rain clouds seal the horizon to encourage mold, fungi trying to redirect us beyond oxygen beyond composition to the root mind the symbiote translator deep enough for the planet's mutterings where earth worms are rain believing so deeply in gravity they're pulled through stone & liquid fire to sizzle in the names of all possible life forms, bursting multi-barbed windmeat thickening the rain into obsidian chickenfat making everything that moves seem edible processed ticking