If you’re interested in reading a hypertext I wrote and designed …
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cumulose
cloud-city
fair,
oh city where
fog drowns the sunlit air
a tone, bronze bell song
gold, where sky peals light
to metal-gilt sun
And old,
our careless minds
sing cobalt unity
to endless
silver
skyline
Umber to black, ebon-black
shadows that cannot stir,
that cannot creep out from
under the cool and heavy dark,
dark of memory, of memory
when leg, oh shift-shattered
leg breaks fall to cold, bleary
floor, hard fall, broken
remains, cold stair
winding down to depths
below
Till present still, dark still
and night preserves englassed
with sucrose clouds heavy
on sky’s edge, pale gray
and violet blur at far’s reach, far
faded (mild air, warm nothing) with
groan of sky
Cat paw and tail, hiss of night
nagging with glow-burn in hand
smell specks drifting down in gray
ashen heaps, I hold:
nothing (cold meaningless)
nothing (sky)
nothing (cat)
nothing paper rolled
nothing
Else I hold naught, in hand
up stair, wood stair, cool
cement-dust floor to stair,
up stair, slow-pad,
lift, kitty litter in palms
of my feet, blackened pads,
I pause-
-still (night reeks)
and open heavy-creak door
I miss you in a certain way, so that I
just want to press my body into yours enfold
myself into you, around you, touch your palms,
the pads of your fingers to mine, just hold you to me
embrace you until I grow weak because your warmth
is something I need, something I think about al-
ways, until the next time I can be with you, next
to you, with your head your hair your legs
next to me, that is all I want, and until then
I can think of nothing else, and this chest this
body is filled with longing, a kind of sick empti-
ness, and I just sit here, pining, pining, until
I can again press my lips to yours, rapt in
your saccharine presence
I stop to wonder how,
long ago, long in the past of my life
you held me beneath you, beneath
the fermented scent of asphalt
and soured lunch, with bees
in annular motion drinking
of sweat and sugar granules
then passing on, on to feed
again, far away from this place,
from the skin and paste and melted
fabric of pavement
I looked up so fondly into
the sun, tried to hold my eyes
to the purpose, to stare straight
through the webs and cloth
that wrap around the solar frame-
but I turn, vision branded
with a knowledge of where
I was to belong
For months I cried to my
room, to my mattress, to photos
of yearbooks past, torn and glor-
ified, bless’d and libel’d by my
tempest heart
Even now, so many moons
past and vanish’d, I still see thee,
oh voluminous annuli, oh rubicund
mantle spread pale and white
and comely, blushing down, down
to my gloomy pith
I met her fallow in the Spring
when sunlight nibbled trees,
to bring
their buds to fuller
blooming - - sky
and wind, thee
wise, unending, sand
and sun, thou
sprawl’d, unflinching - - thus
my heart, flecked
with sepal, sap and honey
throb on, throb song
of Winter’s cold, fey sun and stone
that brightens now
to snowdrop yawn
What is bone
when sullen pallets of ice & salt
slick-load the trucks, passing on
through red lights and wood-post
fence lines? Me, I think the news-
paper is full of it, so full, so saturated
it tears where my fingers pinch it
to my palm, and out the balcony,
over smoke-strung rooftops, over
the grays and blues of the city lies
a man, an essence, a land of wind
and ice-crusted ponds, shacks of
winter, bone-white doors tinged
rusty with the salt and snow of
winter, of calloused hands
of ages past, ages present
bowing under the formula, oh form
-forbidden trace in the arm
my son, our sun (oh light, oh Son,
forgive me, reveal not my sins,
God! my arms) as the cold blisters, pales
lifeless on our faces, raises limp arms
limp lines to the quivering sky. To
Winter, we cry aloud, indiscern
-able we cry that bone cracks
under the weight, recovers not
its shattered self, heals not
to its quondam shape
—-
Alas, afar, away
in the sky, a wintrous bone
floats sickly cloud
to drift, to sigh,
to stay
It’s a dark cloying feeling, a clasped hand
in wet, sticky darkness feeling, one
that spins itself around you, binds
you with dull gray threads, binds you
so deep into the feeling that you cannot
twist, perceive the dull glimmer from
beneath a doorway, a bulbed-lightscape
just beyond reach, sight; the wet filters
in, clogs the brain with murky squares
of lead, fills the cavity with test-screen
monotone and motivation dies, the clay
seeps in, the skin curdles as blood leaks
out, and your two eyes, blunted moons,
wane with amnesic cloud, pall that drapes
long, low to feed moist loam fingers
Everyday, I
have a new thought:
Wouldn’t it be great if I ___?
It would be great, wouldn’t it
if only I could remember that idea
such is life, I guess, so will I
ever be doomed to live the ideal in moments,
in passing glories, glimpses of the future, of success
Oh, lord what a joke, that my greatest gift, oh mind, daily
pinwheels its thoughts to the sky, to die and float away as mist to the day
Mnemosyne, son
of mine, son
of shivered glass and wine-
crystals in the shade of fog and branch,
arboretum where I lay under the sky,
under the sigh of dawning moon, of tree-
strung globes of light, light that carries my
sleep and city feet past dark and twisting arbors
of trees and vines unseen in the shadows of night-
fall
There, midst unsettled murmurs, hand-couples
and wandering children (where are they going?
where am I going?) -I try to follow the sallow
strains of music, of plucked and echoed notes
tangling through the forgotten, nay, ne’er
discovered leaves of a Chinese garden
I might have called my grandma for the last time today
she sounded weak, as expected
a tense whisper broken, croaked
orders from a long-buried walkie-talkie
