A Thousand Black Paintings

bones clank along ghost bridges
black gutters sluice with ink
a thousand crows in rain and mist
pavements covered in the gold writing of death


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I linger over coffee and writing pads
awaiting messages from childhood
far away trains rush through cornfields
passions grow more frantic
the world shudders
my hands are lost in memories of your hair


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I hear a moan reaching back to birth
a monosyllabic stutter
from a hairline crack in the mind
hung on blank infinity
in a landscape where nothing remains
but molecules of the unimaginable


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to deface page after page
no sign of living
only flakes of hot ash
merciless as sex
hips back and forth in excoriating grace
as crows fly
through a thousand hangovers
on their way to
no such thing as anything or nothing


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the line hovers
between morning and afternoon notebooks
a hidden shift is sifted
through the pages' piled shadows
the seamless and perfect caress
of a tongue that never touches
a sense of arrival
that never happens and never stops


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dove wings open
like thighs, ice-pale and necrophiliac
in alleys with the underglow
of medieval religious paintings
here, the world bathes in its own shit and trash
in windows far from home
beyond the frozen raindrops
only the staring, empty eyes of life


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I have torn stars apart for you
charred whole galaxies of being
scraping at what's left
pressing hard into nothingness forever
still I listen for rain on dry leaves
and think of your hair wrapping me
in the silver linen of purest night


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you pour light from bottles
the impossible vodka
mouth to mouth over gulphs of want
time scrawls its manias all over our faces
the gold ink of old days thickens into sleep
loosening its braids only
beneath the first snow of the ineffable


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I watch the beauty of doves
rising into the years
ancient leaves swirling
in the shadows of dragonflies
the world drains away through empty lots
rain at the end of alleys
and the glow of thistledown
remind me of nothing


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impossible eyes of dawn
and always that faraway mouth of snow
among pines and clouds
then bright afternoon
like a yellow jacket at the pane
fainter and fainter cries
of flesh and text
I hold on to the words
as the pages
burn up in my hands


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nights
are memories of collapsing suns
particulates of half sentences
senile visions of erotic chimaeras
and ice-covered ponds
that cannot hold the gravity
of a tongue burned out
by the carbonized moon of ultimate silence


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a hole inside me grows like a new life
the opposite of eternity
expressed by asters and teasel
birds and silence
flesh like late berries
and the tang of kisses in old age


under other stars
cats stray in their private streets
weeds and hair strewn over the moon
from zero to suicide without notice
image to image
until I reach the white ink


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being about
the presence of absence
that white voice of fire
of snow on black stone, under
the pine cones, -
and autumn
how to love its sadness, only
with more autumn
deeper autumn. . .


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crystal fog, reams of grey
a fantastic melancholy
on the streets like a cloak
over the shoulders of some
old Romantic soul
in the quiet of gravestone Sundays
spitting bitter kisses into an ashen sleet



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a moth, somewhere in the woods
my lamp to final dissolve
burrowing deeper into the invisible
under the skin of years
the townee's chewink
lost among dead leaves


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words written over words over
words crossed out
the moon's afterimage on the black smear
of days
unbearable, even,
this oblivion


and
this beauty in my arms:
dead as poetry,
descriptions of fall afternoons
or the shadow-silver of last stars


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where night hides
in empty rooms
the moon sinks
beneath a frozen tongue
slipping away into ink
near the edge of muteness
I hover on the brink
of a terrible coherence


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