FRETWIRE: Work in Progress

• in the black marrow
  you spun his habit,
  lent it to the air,
  to a quadrille,
  
  left it voluptuously
  unsandalled.
  
  #
  
  even your open collar
  can see that tragedy
  whelps&laughs&purrs
  on oily sandwiches
  
  pounded gavels cannot kill it
  psychic parapets cannot floor it
  punning bones cannot knead it
  acreage of hooks cannot shred it
  
  #
  
  how can you promise
  someone a land that
  doesn't belong to you?
  your legs open their door.
  a tinted window veils it:
  the bedspread on which
  you lie,fully spread.your
  toes mug knobs.your hands
  flex cards.your mind frets.
  the west federates your nest.
  
  #
  
  your point is not well taken.
  your celebration is
  antithetical to mine.
  i distrust your heroism.
  i curse.i bellyache.
  i belong to a nit-picking tide.
  
  knee-deep in objectifications,
  multiplying junk,
  half-blind,half-charmed
  glazed,slit-doored,
  you grind stones between chainsteps.
  
  #
  
  the black-brass trouble
  wobbles in its muddle.
  ancient dynastic pains
  declare their lineage.
  
  tonight no one is going
  to bestow consolation upon a mourner.
  this town is saturated in riots.
  adversaries dismember moonbeams.
  
  
  this is not as i would have you stream.
  
  #
  
  grading tales,
  comparing whips,
  we served,you and i,
  in a sculpted trope,
  hotly,hotly
  a pristine bureau.
  
  #
  
  one part of...
  half a part of...
  nil part of-
  
  praise the tongue
  orbiting my thigh.
  your conscientious tongue
  on my hair's end.
  
  i'm no more the cock of the walk.
  
  #
  
  each in your high-tech jail
  
  to which uprising
  is your streetsign pointing?
  
  
  one barricade at a time.
  one stone-throw at a time.
  
  how to plant a vine
  inside a machine?
  
  the last thing you want
  is silence in the tunnel.
  
  #
  
  toxic waste dump
  & foamcore resister;
  solardust,grapes&gongs
  privy to the foamball
  of an eggtoss;light& dark
  of sugarcane& mango;
  sounds tropicalizing a fifth
  flowersong;cookie-cutter,paper-cutter;
  a jump rope's royal bee;
  ballpoint iconizing the story of a hole;
  the hole story in a fuzzy portfolio.
  
  #
  
  to say nothing of a tan-line:
  its severe mutabilities;
  the brutal prism of a spirit possession:
  its vertical convulsions;
  a primalscene eyelining skulls
  a couplet bird-carving on a page;
  a black chalk taking a walk
  on a white board with
  a laughing umbrella;
  
  and:tortoiseshells in a foreshore.
  
  #
  
  tin-and-stucco
  iron-gated rollers
  and their bike-wheel jokes
  
  they are loyal only to housewrecking,
  to cracks in a home-run.
  artifex nigerianus.
  
  #
  
  to the light that flows from it,
  furrowing it,turning in it,
  toying with its tangle,crazing
  the portal,climbing it,grazing in it;
  
  and to you that delights in it:
  will you survive the fog
  that denies this arousal
  is grammatical?
  
  #
  
  not seeing the trancing landscape
  threading goatherd and soil
  how easily the wind
  violates my right to stillness
  being a leaf a leaf presently
  quailing against my will
  my mood my need my dispensation
  how easily i am debased
  by a cheerless careless motion
  the wind forces open my hand
  takes my syncopation takes my interim
  for harboring suspicions
  the wind subjects my provision to a
  withering blast i am harried
  i am badgered by the shameproof
  pursuit of a savage wind
  my votes my notes my half and full notes
  how casually the arrogant wind skews them