There’s dirt on my sleeve
And under my cup

I’ll be bricks that leave
If I don’t stand up

& walk up
Those 17 stairs

Can you change the burnt-out light?

Turn that bulb with all your might?

in the middle of every night

Did I say so?
Are you in line?

How would I know?
You turn on a dime,

But you don’t know where to go

In the middle of every night

(I read your diary)

(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child’s writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow’s nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby’s crucible
With breasts of the rose’s spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans’ backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Andre Breton

I unwrap the foil
At first sight the soil is bright red
The heady aroma goes right to my head
But I keep digging
Holding out for the dark part
At the center of the bottom of your heart

Who’s that walking with a hole in his head?
Big bad Bazooka Tooth, I came to break bread.
What’s a troop’s recipe for treacherous times?
I tell ‘em…… ah fuck it, yo

I pull the elephant tranq out of my neck,
gaffle a tank,
count up the chips,
wrastle the fangs off of my fist,
flood a little soldier blood over the ogre acres
on some holiday in Cambodia with motor home appraisers.
Pagans fade into the kodochrome now,
later with a lid to brow staple
revisit the cobra loading zone.
Molar foaming
but he hold his own wound
cauterized by the Zippo he had stole that afternoon.
And my dog tags jingle by the monster island heart he built.
Grew up with a Jug head crown tilt and tardy slip.
Be all you can be just never soothed us.
You lost me in that part about scrubbing piss with a toothbrush.
Holler scum’s lullaby.
Live from the ultra-fly
sham city bunker where the coldest cults multiply
alarmingly. Hush little baby, timeout.
The black market mockingbirds cannot sing a lick but lean to peck your eyes out
of commission with love,
out a tradition of wraiths
pick on the visions that buzz,
bet on the kitten’s escape,
solder the piston to pump
out a veteran amplifier.
And magnify through the same lens that set the ants on fire.
Flush the Muppet hootenanny. Who could fancy honor circuit
when the circle’s every duke is claiming Trooper, scoop the food in pantry.
Ante up, stupid.
May delusion feed ‘em roofie candy and pry the gold out of his tooth when laughing.
Pocket all you can now.
Block and lead the lambs down
to the cold cutlery outfit.
Slaughter beef and cow tip.
Pour the chief some fountain soda,
motor prone to pen the holy opus
and pry this monkey off the scoliosis.

Who’s that walking with a hole in his head?
Bazooka Tooth, Gemini, I came to break bread.
What’s a troop’s recipe for treacherous times?
I tell ‘em fast cars, danger, fire and knives, lets go
Fast cars, danger, fire and knives… (3x)
I got her majesty Athena riding shotty wide-eyed

Its like never mind the bullocks. (Fuck)
Like every other week these hipster tabloids jumping on and off my sex pistol’s bullets.
Like every other week he spins the bottle.
Like every other week these fucking fanzines forget if they spit or swallow.
Too bad your inner sheep never forgets to follow,
cuz my inner greed to feed your hate for loving us is hostile.
Fortunate for me it coincides with what comes natural,
so the mongrels that I run with turn the fuck yous into fast food.
Like a little freak sick of the 3 o’clock bully knuckle dust, nursing his last shiner, finds the shoebox in his mother’s truck.
Tomorrow’s extra curricular punching bag
will finger daddy’s widow maker out a brown lunch bag (bang!).
This is where the hunch back
snake oil peddlers
stuck under the burgundy sky of spaghetti westerns
tend to bubble up.
Weathermen huddle up.
Today the son of one too many ‘yes sir’s kings his checkers,
watch the double jump.
Back with a platter of hot leeches that’ll drink up-every bloody drop down to the last diseases,
it’s A-E-S-O-P-R-O-C-K,
the peak twister.
Defender of the son of Vaughn Bode’s Cheech Wizard.
I used to pray the treatments got easier with my aging
like serotonin weekends was merely comedic hazing.
Wrong, but along his travels located the key to world peace:
“kill every motherfucker but me.”
You cool with that?
Cool. Bang.
You?
Cool. Hang.
You?
No?
Uh… bang?
Cool.
Sorry, dog, rules are rules.
And too long have I followed yours. I’m trying to get them years back,
and walk through every cipher with dynamite in a beer hat.

Who’s that walking with a hole in his head?
Bazooka Tooth Krueger, I came to break bread.
What’s a troop’s recipe for treacherous times?
I tell ‘em fast cars, danger, fire and knives.
Fast cars, danger, fire and knives…
I got her majesty Athena riding shotty wide-eyed

and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boys’ summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don’t fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don’t do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there’s
so much I haven’t told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I’m tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding…
Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.

No secret ghost wonders more than you wonder why

But skin is just like a soul, anyway

& The soil came out of the sky
……

No thin red line hides between your brain and your mind in your head
Where it’s dark
But for those Kajillion crazy sparks

Dreams are not a separate land
Not even the Bar B Q stand

Moments don’t pile up like grains of sand

The second, minute & hour
Are really one big hand

Wherein the oneness made
A magic knot of viens

I feel weak, my feet stink

I gather all of my strength to smile at your smile

The gravel, the gutters
The homeless limp and stutter,
“Could ye spare some cutter, me brother?”

I want to smile at your smile

Because it’s worth the whole while
Every last mile
That I trudge alone
To reach your heaven-smile
Which is sweet, like a child’s

I’d swallow the Nile
To conquer the dragon.

(with your head on my chest
I forgive the big mess of this world

Hitler and Stalin were just in denial.
Osama Bin Laden has never seen your smile. )

(Mona Lisa, who’s old, was famous for her smile
Which was painted by a genius
Who believed that breath inflated the penis

The lips he painted are immortal, Like Jesus)

(Even Leonardo Da Vinci would smile at your smile)