Again, I can't seem to get the form to come out right with these poems on the new Blogger interface, it just mangles the line. Basically, each line that carries over is supposed to be indented. But this is it. Amplifier in all it's finished glory.
AMPLIFIER
Is it too much to say, too brutal an obsession, to say that this is a system or love
under a persona, without shroud of rote obscurity.
It is something of impossible scale. An oblique penumbra I might call she who accepts
an arrow, someone else’s dream. O you look so impressive, through the hole
in the wall.
The empty space through which I see you, a lover in someone else’s hand, the space
of an hour or an hour within a life is more than you’ll ever know.
More than you can fill with the noise of excursion, the noise that inhabits our differences
and makes us weak with dancing.
I will work until the work is done, is electric, though the work is never really complete
not as long as life wades on into a sea of forms.
The easiest form in truth occupies the divine conundrum to be disproved
when all else is beleaguered by time.
One could say, no love in language better stated than muteness, everything in subtext
in what wasn’t said.
The boys in their suits for swimming forget to drown in romance before entering
the water; they can only splash around, never knowing the difficulty in
staying afloat.
The sky above them is everything they might one day understand, the boys sing
their songs as if it were necessary, as if they knew the sea.
I was watching them and I was them, bundled in masculine nonchalance, asking,
was there ever a boy that I wasn’t?
I remember being so many that the quality of the copy wasn’t worth listening to
and I had to go back to the beginning, relive myself from scratch.
The boys are still swimming, still playing in the field with rocks, getting all banged up
over what they don’t yet know.
They’ll keep to themselves or one of them might venture out to where the water
is above his head.
Do you still leave the ruin of morning on your shocked lips, the charge
eagerly rushing through them as you sing?
This preserved form of quiet, maybe nicer a second later than it was made, when
noise equals love so complete that it feels.
Empathetic slant light coming through the shade to make a pattern, a current, feeding
the hum in the cabinet, that glossy embroidery of action.
Do you ever play the same note again and again, longing for some explosion within
the body as if music would make sense louder and more raw than a wound
if in a state of decay?
It is waiting for you to allow it a final escape into silence for sound to rise like sound
can—sorry, not sorry, this is the volume.
This is the escapade that makes one sing the natural noise of the perimeter
that reaches you in sleep.
The tympani heartbeat, the feeling electrified and tight involuntary decibels, making
one larger or louder than it is light inside this dark box.
The unwieldy illusion of song is rising from the wooden floor so be careful not
to salute the war-torn heart amidst city hostilities or sing too sadly above
your formal balustrades.
You look so alone tonight, amplified beautiful landscapes and horizons empty
around you.
Did you have a time or did you feel it in your gut, the resonating chord, the thread
strung through your each move.
Your body never stops, its amperes lighting up the room, filling everything
with indescribable sound, waves in your hair, evening in your eyes
as night falls on Oakland and I imagine you asleep.
I imagine myself happy—notes expanding—coming through the tarnished facade
only to devolve into silence.
There is a you and there is a song for you, just another love song because this body
feels like dancing, like nodding its head.
Because in everything there is intention in the way I ask to touch your lips, it is
the american way.
And now there is a song for you called Tonight the Way You Look Dying, and you
are not dying, nor are you present and it is day.
We go in, we go to places, we are saying “these are the words I so love to sing”
a deepness in the pictured air I feel windy.
I am a mark upon the metal heartstrings and I am a departure ongoing, always
in health a dirge for the accidental gentry.
I guess I wear a somber halo, for am more sensible in lament than in whimsy
like I will not see her famous hands again.
We thought the city would close its garden, lose its nighttime varnish and unveil
its myriad dispositions.
Look, a note rising into the stars, a bird singly disappearing from view into all
the flashing bulbs and neon golden signs flirtatious in the night.
We go, and are not going alone into the question, a pledge to do what was undone:
tie a bow around the plastic visage.
Our momentary lapse in adhesion only enough to realize that we had seized
the day and were continuing to seize it.
I had not felt such a perfect kiss and such impermanence in unison, in sound
as everything eventually fades because reality, Americanism, tells us so.
I cry at everything, don’t feel anything lapping at my feet, no watery child
to strike an impromptu pose.
That little death in each instant newly surprising and faltering, a little death for
every occasion, silence at the end of each.
To not be dead and not be song is to be alone as I was alone when I should
have been with you so please don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in.
I aim to avoid the sun as it rises, to abolish the aubade or make it duller
to mimic the mournful song of birds outside my morning shoulder.
My only beloved, walking notes and nature sound: wind, muffler, jackhammer
there is no moment without feedback in nature.
When currents are conflicting and man-made sound is natural, there are vibrations
in the strings, rustling in the leaves, no difference in origin of clamor or
ideas in nature.
It is natural to play guitar to see events in any reality, what nature is: voice
in imitation of sound in nature.
I want to see her come in and sit down like she did with little noise,
as it’s hard to talk about her at all; she looks away when she listens
and doesn’t cross her legs.
She is a song is sound is an occurrence of appeal, moves closer to sound
resonant of poetry, right?
So far seems artificial, not legs slightly open but song in simultaneous play
as nature with legs both disconnected because uncrossed or
impossible to summarize.
Experience is an interpretation, not representation related to nature, sound,
attraction or the impact of legs in an event.
I don’t blame you for every chance, for an autograph so sad, for my belief
in maudlin encores and apologism; because they’re honest.
I want to be a good one, be a friend to the lonely mountain dawn in cry and rest
so don’t say sorry because I love you and can’t give you the words.
There’s no entity in anything, light coming over the stage an entity under
emotive duress.
It’s an open season point of view, a gesture in opposition to phenomena
that comes so brightly.
She is internal shapes like healing radical possibilities on edge, identified
by presence instead of her features, she don’t blame you for seeing her
in the nude.
My experience has likewise been blinded with sight so keep the lights low, so
you will see as I see the kindness in imagined spaces, her soft framed face
her horizon then obscured by fog or is foggy the horizon?
The small amplifier on stage makes big sound like purple light—horizon—
without hooks but voices to bring you in.
I am enamored with the voice leaving her face.
I never dreamed of the sea again.
Everything has something to be said for it but what of the aether?
What of the names given us at birth, no-names and the above?
Don’t be in love with the autograph of heroism, Okay, your thoughts so tender
and being made alive in witness a border of liminal marigolds.
The beach, a real border around the sea the salty madrigals are singing over:
a shoulder to cry on, no one is willing to share it.
The transience in calling from the outside or coming back, wanting to be clean
to have emotions in the overtones that shake this land with no direction
but ample time to slip away.
How different the late-night wreckage, to see the lovers in place of our hands
the sound shattered a wine glass like language can transform a room
with power or intent.
Or how quiet sitting on the floor Indian-style with legs in quiet, a sweet understated
face, no sound coming from it, breathing maybe.
But a sweet face does, it can brighten the corner of a room with presence, how I am
reminded to be accepting of death because I died in sleep from such a sweet face breathing noiselessly in explicit rest.
This memory revealed by a girl in the corner, brightening, but what is memory,
a palace in which to go some day in sleep with birdsong out the window
or at night, to join sleep with birdsong.
The I in process, touching light to refer to as place or song from the heart
rising up to the sun which goes crazy instead of down.
I like to think the sun crazy in the sky, its two-dimensional exuberance having
evoked so many picnics.
Burning all night stars of sonic intervention, a small giggle, legs extended as if
to stretch what sound thumps along, aware of its own pace, its trust
in voices dispatched to ethereal heights?
We think of the world as endless if amplified, magnified birdsong a parenthetical
forest in which the wind is a testimony of endlessness.
Birdsong begins, becomes another bird’s reply, a bell, the virtue of time and final
engagement with time it takes her to extend and overlay her legs.
One barely across the other to project such meaning, on legs, of listening
to their friction, two specific legs like branches reaching for mobility.
What filler between birdsong and in the wind, slightly birdlike, a small falcon
attractive huntress whose legs are the means to an end.
This world in a wire attached to a magnet and a cone causing sound to expand
like one shaft of smoky sun coming into a forest, a ‘genesis’ of sensory
tradition arising from the soil seen from everywhere, here, at once.
Having been there and felt wind, I enact the arc, the pattern of its movement
but I don’t mean anything in particular.
Continually coming home to make noise in response to the loneliest season
when I am not paired off.
No legs to entwine in, no sound but breath what comes from the amplifier
and there are no songs about joy in spring, no bright tones other
than its color.
This until the breach of summer, the planets in whack and the feminine riddle
isn’t a riddle at all but a chance meeting.
The third time as plain as a charm in all its merriment, this metaphysical morning
when we woke, shafts of light or shafts of dark I cannot tell.
If trees were entering the apartment, the sound would be egregious, would be safely
distant or assuming egotism.
I forge ahead under a belief after many dreamed situations I find myself dreaming
in future tense as the present is perfect.
Here I am waving a sonic flag and singing our anthemic quickness, O fall in love
because it’s hazy and near.
With all these birds filling up such little space—if you listen—that’s how you sing
amazing grace or at least go on without character.
If she says it must be carefully unbound and folded into neat piles of notes, then it is
a symptom of anxiety.
I am talking about the color white, the lack of hue in your cheeks, actual color
where an expression once was.
That’s the light of truth shone on your face like the weather coming down all at once
with form and equilibrium dismantled by the opaque reflection in your eye
a cloud of dust.
The spectacle of the invisible world revealed in one ordinary blink, the world lacking
a substantial ideology other than urbanity.
You cascade beneath your dress a circle between bodies and pictures with no release
from this moment, this charm to which I am bound.
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