-Was for to seeke adventure in straunge place-



I.
Centifolia

Women must not know that dawn comes in wisps; all of that wretched swelling seems to have spoken too much in favor of a day's conflagrations, kindling the effete grip of the tyranny men have over your heart, or so it is if you should tell me that insensate, sunny plumes have never yet once come knocking the dust from your mantle into another blurring of morning's airs, never came to stare and tap at your window the song of our questions and purposes and truths; and so I have had this hand etch your face into the walls of Jericho (a sweeter message for the world, if you please), so that when the bricks crumble unto ruin, long after your eyes no longer share with my soul the ways of the brook beneath the moon, I'll know that the very dream of earth gets to grip this species of beauty; I’ll have done my service to these roiling, shifting soils that all have both been and walked upon, who slither in a slow search for fresh waters, to let your visage roll along the bottoms of cavorting streams, until the kissing dawn is able to refract a proclamation of the beauty yet to come, when it crests over the oceans sitting stoic amid these wars. Perhaps then you shall greet the entail of the dawn, perhaps then will you know the entirety of the world.

And moreso yet can I tell that no one has ever handed you a rose from the way you speak of thorns (if one's focus is the prick then they’re likely yet to glean the aroma), as though brutes had spent your passion in their exuberance to be passing off some smoldering stems that whet their claws upon you.
No, you’ve never smelt a rose, not the way it's left teeming fragrance as it’s fresh come of fingertips from the smooth hands of your lover.
I can recall the cataracts of umber petals shivering in the auditorium’s chilled air as they glistened down to grant you an applause worthy of all I saw, but the scents of praise then came only as you’d begun to peal off the frayed smock, holy with its sacrificial acceptance of the dagger, that you could be the sheath Juliet will always require to work her sorcerous bent upon the crowd.
Yes, rose petals mimicked the summer storms of your youth from the prosceniums, but only for you had managed conviction enough in your masquerades.
I have come for you and you alone, but I have brought a rose.

Though, you can recall the back seat of his car, can’t you?
There might’ve been a dozen roses for a job well done if you hadn’t made him rape you, but I suppose it’s hard to notice whether or not your heart had any hope of romance when you were so lucky as to be made use of once again. He said he had roses, but the malodorous sweat steeping you, from his body, aptly masked them, I should think, and even then it was only a dozen; not like what I’ve proposed be wrapped in the fragrant lace you leave upon my bedstand each and every time I make love to you, not like what I’ve sent with these colloquial bits of passion, not like the petals I know you’ll count over and over again before we let the flower’s message rest.
(If I cared enough about masking hypocrisy I’d fail to disclose that there are 113)
No, even then it would never have matched the song lone roses wilt to the night when placed against the bosoms they’re meant for. For a dozen such tunes fall upon the heart like cacophony in the plenary trial room, and for the pall of that moment one might say that the dissonance of gathered roses is the same whispered between a jury in that one quaking instant before it might proclaim:
'He Must Die'.
Though, if I could but bid you sit and feel the Water Music, the Magic Flutes, the Moonlight Sonatas, the classicist’s poignancy prattling from the silky, thick lips of this sole flower, if I could convince you that its perfection is equal to that which you so curiously claim of my lips, then perhaps no life was ever vain, perhaps angels do bellow, and horns blow, when vagabonds trounce to scale those crags ere Sinai and knock in hopes that flames will not be striving to caress them in the coming lives as well as these. Perhaps, then, love is real and my romanticism just; perhaps, then, I'll never again have to cringe at your touch, nor fear for what I might do to you.
And so you must come, come to tell me that love is beautiful, for you have already learned as much of pain.
As beauty is that which is sung alone from the hearts who know that red roses are not a natural thing, that romance is sanguine, and that Nature was never Red before sins went all scarlet through a love that was White on the stem. The snowflake earnestness of Love was too pure, but think not of it, for the prick has given it Sin, we have given it beauty, and dripped a red memoir in a place we had never thought to be finding petals. This, from dripping milk to quaking dew, is an acknowledgment of what you were, what you are, and whatever you soon become; I am not here with a judgment to pass, I am as one mountaincap with a peak fixed on the Heavens that vault the prairies or dip like hollowed skulls into the well of the ocean to spatter the daylight blue, for no matter how you seek to live, you are so hollowed of nothingness as to be brimmed of beauty and pain, and you know just how to wrap a mountain in snow, or crispen its hoarfrost with a crimson dab of dawning flames.
(For I know that you have been squandered in the virility dominance so often commands; that men have broken, that women have betrayed, but know now that I have come to spurn every witch from your door, to core each poison apple proffered to your , to plant their seeds where demons and angels may famish and fret their hunger to the nerve - to take you from the eyes of man and beast alike.
However, above all, know that I am Here)

With The Dawn,

Gabriel


II.
To The Only Whore In Heaven

You were bare-ass on the lawn last I saw and what a pomp the ants had made of trailing up your thighs to carry sugared trinkets on back home It would've been the same morning our neighbors told us we fucked Long & Hard but it was always soporific as drifting
to sleep with a director's commentary on a 7-hour porno flouting in the background - "you always moan like a $2.07 whore who can't take two minutes to put the paper down and suck his dick properly, pfft, I'll bet there are ballhairs bookmarking the business section from when you quickchanged the page and caught his mawkish scrotum" - that morning where the ants were taken by storm when the bees whiffed where all the world's sweetness had gone and next I knew your crotch was humming while I plucked the stingers from my naturally swollen shaft - that morning where paperboys woke you as the centerpiece of a tantric circle-jerk and swallows vomited their maternity to the nests compiled in your slack-jawed snooze of a maw and I was bored enough to thwap gophers with a ragin hard-on you were too snoringly hung-over to appease and the gardener spaded you to death when he came 15 minutes late and left 15 minutes early (“I thought they were really cantelopes, chill the fuck out, just go buy another one if you care so much”).

On that morning God tore your poster from his wall and nailed you in its place and the streets shall never again be the sleek and synergistic Syph-pit I’d always loved it for and we can never finish carving your initials in the whitewashed walls with the brass balls on my headboard (our aim was getting better by the day, our syncopation a timeless innuendo for the unmentionable oceans you’d long stopped dreaming of, our shimmering sweat in loitering beads at each eyelash's webbing when we surfaced from the lapping eternity of each other).
On that morning, Julie, I never told you I loved you and I forgot to put a well-earned two bucks in your cunt as they loaded you on the gurney. (You know how I adore symbolism)


So I love you, and here’s a two-dollar bill to bribe Pete with if you can’t snatch his keys when you’re between his knees; but one last thing - you know I have a will, a testament which states a labrador will daily lift its leg to a headstone that was a boulder rolling down the churchyard hills, and beneath the yellowing earth I will be bloating up with each day our daily reinvention of your death, so it is all still of humor, but who will walk the dog, late and grim?

I know I’ve addressed this properly – you’ve got to be in Heaven; it was all too obvious you wanted to go to Hell.

With a game of limbo ‘neath your coffin at the Wake,

Gabriel

P.S.
My hand will not stop writing.


III.
Letter From Some Purgatory

I walked into this place collar up,
Eyes down, intimidating as a bouncer
With hiccups, wrists bound at the back's small
Where I'll have scars to itch the nights raw
(Fuck knows how they pried me from your arms,
But you never hugged me til you died, as if by trawling
Through these assorted ribs we might one day soon be as ghosts
Shootin horseshoe with crooked coffinnails and longstems
Cinctured by bailin wire, but who knows how long I’ll be here,
They pried me from my shovel and rinsed the bonemeal
From my hair, but I left you every verse,
A roll of parchment in each eye - ear (you know me,
I don't digress, I speak just what I mean to,
I rise with the Moon)).

Did I ever tell you that Death scents of Hyacinth?
As they hung, limp and golgothan, wrens impaled on weather-vanes,
Chiaroscuro of flesh and steel and staring faces, still on the bars
Like dewless gaps between budding petals on days brought to bear
By a windless sennet of chimes, I made catalogue of tattoo'd cartouches,
I made no answer to no questions, I wiped this perfume from this shoulder
With the very tip of this nose, I breathed deep,
I heard the hinge creak
Closed.

And then, through the window
That wraithen Night, hand-maid of Phantoms,
Would soon be hemming the skirt of Darkness
With a fabric of gale stoked sundown, or placing
The larking song in the wicker basket, like some dropping heads
Or their rushing curls, to strew for the tracks of evening
To imprint with wind,
                                  I could smell a whisky grin
And how it was a scimitar sateing the yawning wicker,
Or then could hear the tipping aces on the sideways
Refrigerator, or soon could grip the voice
That rocked like a much aged, oaken chair- "Find the Lady,
For there she went,
Keep one eye upon Her, the other on my hand -
If you can spot the Lady then bring her round-
Between a  Heart and Club? Look now,
Is there any Lady here?
Do you see your wily Lady's stare?
That is 20 dollars, Sir; you do not know the Lady."
                                                                                                 and I know
That on the morrow, when he returns to spit my eyes
With the hallowed pick of his tooth, his hands will be on fire
Like the cross that burns within them,
Saying: "I am the Magician born of Eridu,
Begotten in Eridu and Subari,
When I draw nigh unto the sick man
May the King of the Deep safeguard me."
And he will, I know, from his wheelchair like a mountain
From within the tectonic convulsions of the Earth,
Rise and strew my eyes in an alms for the falcons,
Rise and lift one smoldering fist,
Saying: "This is what I have taken from the negro's yard, and this
This is the siren zephyr
Whose tresses have not matted
By the bloody depths of this refrigerator,
And so -
You there, bid that passing wind be still
Up on that bough, and with one lurching grin
Let me cleave it down,
Knot one smoking feather in the sick one's knotted curls, and with this done
Let me say that it is not these palms like wax
That I am scorching - It is the liver,
Heart, and spleen of the sick man
That I scorch - for I have taken this, burning,
From the negro's yard - and I find
That it behooves him.
I will begin shortly."
And when he comes
What will my eyes be plinking,
Just what will the ocean be doing?
Will my eyes be singing what the ocean roars
When sieging the shaped clouds with a ringtail of foam, will the ocean roar
From out the cove what the beasts are raining down,
What will my eyes be singing out or muttering
To the Sun?



...so this is what it is to know the damning hand of a rainbow...



Furthermore, I know that it will begin
As follows:

two lovers who touch
after the songbirds
and before their dispersal
and just at the deposing
of dews, two lovers who cry
in the arms of the other -
may the Devil's own icebox
hold that still too -
For through the window,
Saying:

"The throats are tuned, commence
In ripping them, and gut the paunch
Of toad, and declaw the catty river
That rasps along the road, or moult
The dingy pigeon - slash and burn
The locust's abode, for they shall not be allowed
To awaken, for each little lilting poem
That the foot of spider hooks and holds
Shall be knuckled in this burning hand, shall never be allowed
To awaken, shall be but a curling film
That smoked in ringlets moonward with a message in its doom, begging all
While it sidles harefoot to snag and snare around the moon:
Do not ever lap the inky vomit
Rippling steamy through the lakes, regurgitated of the moon,
Or ripped caesarian from penumbras that gestate in this barren moon.
Awaken not the throbbing apples that dropped with worms back to the gloam.
For I am the Devil, and I wanted her for my own,
Awaken not my throbbing, ripping throat - for it must have been Gabriel
That the falcons were praying to
That the hinges were breaking to
That the rolling heads of songs
Were seen dusting and hymning to
It must have been Gabriel
That in wingflap and fold
Rolled the soils to bury you
It must not have been
That closed your eyes
It must not have been
That closed your eyes
It must have been
It will not have been I
Who buried you it will have been Gabriel
Who buried you
Not I"


I very much doubt that ever before has the Devil been so denied.
They have told me that Satan, unlike God, has never killed lightly;
If so, it would appear, by the sound of it all, that Vengeance is rather like riding a bike.
You have probably started a 10 years war, and every last locust will drown by the tide.
And it will be either blood or ladybirds that make red the tide.
If this is what comes of it all then this Devil fellow would have done well to wait.
And I need say nothing of fire.
The fire is granted.
You would have been along.




Just what have I been writing you?




I spent the remains of the Day
On a bona fide list of travesties, my only receipt
Being pencil shavings and an inked ream
Of 1-Ply toilet paper - Thus Spake
The Asscrack Of Dusk:

"You may note the folly
In the price of cigarettes, the death of the pinstripe suit,
A bellnote World in 4 or 5 echoes that sprang but from one, a duality of zebras
With duplicate stripes, song which does not scourge
The breastbone or crack one rib to two, the word Dictionary's own entry
Reading as follows: 'HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA,' the hail that rolls
Like snake-eye'd fatalism down the roofs of some cells, the creak
That paced into her porch when someone mistook an ambulance for a scenic
Route home, blue-jeans lacking cum-stains, that  girl right 'cross the jailhouse lane
Learnin she don't exist by 8 hours of runnin a haberdasher lemonade stand
And collectin 3 of mommy's quarters, and that snow white
Cement will not melt with the fever, and a shoddy voice with a fist
On some splintering window,
And that it shrieks - “The crocodile
Has not one tear
For your tepid puddles, and were he to whiff
But a bit of baby's breath he should faint
For the purity - If any Hear, go and tell
Your twitching beads that your waltzing vestals shall be skullfucked
All on that selfsame heap of pillowing roses, a shot of rose
Milk to the Eye,” and that Time has far too large a cock
For these nights to straddle, and the feel that when they stretch
They will not moan in fictive delight."



Just what I have been writing you
I do not know.


I meant so far to tell you
That the sky's so red, my darling,
I might have hocked it up.


But I liked, at times, to hear
A cellmate's word, or had a thought
To be most civil, and when the sun
Was comin on like it had knicked itself
On a pearl-handled razor
Of cloud, Windfurled-Stars-'n-Bars said he hadn't shaved
Since he was pinched up from tattering asphault and busted shatter
Proof glass, flicked to this squealin cot - the stubble was a remembrance
Of 5 o'clock shadows on harvested corn, and, once a loop
Of chewable hours loosened a notch in the belt
Of insatiate Time, Dahamoney-Bones uttered that my particular vodun
Dolly would be a prototype for a long-distance acupuncture service,
But that I was to never, ever, from this point forward,
Behead a bitch chicken - and, once I had at last decided
That if I could ditch the ball and chain by a prairie-freezin
Time, when icy meadows stand in rigid minuet
With wind - if where I have entered in,
There also I withdraw,
I was gonna drink my piss clear
And drip your name in the black-tar
Snows, knowin how you abhorred yellow like a moment of love
Abstains to grant a memoir til it must be left upon the ground, I pondered
I-Love-Momma,
For you could almost see the feathers in his teeth as he would grin
Like a bluejay smackin against a window,
Sayin

         ‘I'm a bump in the Night kinda guy;
Only when I bump, ghosts are made
Not spotted’






(send a shiv by way of reply
i'm going to need It)


IV.


There are men on every corner
Women that take too long to jump, three year old with a thumb on the trackmark moon
lookin like hes gettin squeamish
Down by the canal, two nude bodies
One screaming
The other with a leopard print eyepatch and jesus in a slap-on tattoo, the needle was spitshined to a sunlikeness, don't kid yourself Everyone heard Her,
she was lit up for the bats like a fall-out zone
I heard Bud died
Got his pills stuck in a shag throwrug
And coughed to death on carpet dust with his ass in the air
All I'm sayin is that you'd better keep a hand on your knife
Cause I've got one on mine
I remember the last time someone told me they were happy
I remember thinking I was used to being lied to
Girl had raccoon eyes and would be 17 in
4 days til I could give her a used cutting mirror with a set of multi-purpose razors
What the fuck are you on about? Agnes didn't know ecstasy, she took a flaming spear in her cunt; hell half the tail on my block should be canonized by now- You want a hole in your gut?
Take two at a time and I'd better have the cash by ash wednesday
You want something to pray to?
Shit, you'll be prayin to me by the time you plug yourself

Satan's seeing eye dog had him on the wrong block on a prank. I saw Trinidad in his trenchcoat at the rave the next day
The night was spent jumper watching on a bridge
Nothing is only attained through sacrifice, her eyes rolled back like .22 shells on a three-legged table
FUCK YOU, STAN, FUCK YOU - IT WAS YOUR FUCKIN GUN
Strangers kick the guitarman's empty hat, somewhere in his throat a cat is strangled, an RN in Tennessee told me the body's like a hillbilly, it only juryrigs, I'll be lucky if I'm dead in 8 years, 4 pound baby with a forked tongue
NOT THE LIGHT NOT THE LIGHT NOT THE LIGHT
NOT THE LIGHT NOT THE LIGHT NOT THE LIGHT

Hammered
jammed
jazzed
jipped
the test was negative let's go celebrate
the tag had Crips misspelled I didn't know the territory was yours
Decaying midget stuck in the medicine chest
What do you mean that's your son?
When at half-mast the world is so much more poetic.
I often run naked circuitously around the attic and clothe myself in cobwebs trying to induce a panic attack on a lame dosage
DANIEL, COOL THE BITCH DOWN AND SHUT YOUR GOD DAMN YAMMERING, YOU KNOW GOOD AND WELL THE CIA DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU
But the spiders only make me feel more alive
Like that time you can recall only by the rusted muffler you pass at the train-crossing
If there is a reason for this to be happening, Regis, I can't think of a reason to trust a lifeline
I'm looking for men who keep a shotglass handy,
Men who know just what it takes to forget the taste of remembering:

Who the fuck needs food?
We exist off of fascination and fascination alone.
I'm visiting Cody in the hospital
And he's a friendly dog, no doubt he's already forgotten what happened
Just hide the baseball bat and it'll be perfectly fine.

Have you ever smoked a big fat cuban cigar?
It's like fighting angels.
It's like fighting yourself in a parking lot.
It's like fighting anything that doesn' exist.
Got that cocaine, dead dead dead
Got that cocaine, dead dead dead
My drug man's in the hospital
What am I to do?
My drug man's hiding from his drug man and I don't know what to do.
My drug man's hiding from his drug man and I don't know what to do.
I suppose there's always a grave the years will swallow, roseless
But I can blame the price of gas
The remedial encapsulation of flowers
Her sweat
Fuck her
I want her sweat
I want to drown in her sweat
Old bonemen with mottos can't touch her
Priscilla with her shirt undone
The stranger trailing bandages
Decides not to step through the mirror.
Over there he's hitting on all cylinders
Over here he thinks about M&Ms too much
"Why aren't M&Ms anaesthetics?
The world needs multi-colored anaesthetics."

Endorphin culture shock, I guess
Listen to him, "nothing is forever, not your love, not your cheap ass diamond rings"
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
THE FUCKING ROAD
I drink your sweat to stay alive.
I fuck you to stay alive.
I fuck you.
Ifuckyouontheasphaultsothiswilllastforev erIfuckyouontheasphaultsothiswilllastfor everIfuckyouontheasphaultsothiswilllastf oreverIfuckyouontheasphaultsothiswilllas tforeverIfuckyouontheasphaultsothiswilll astforeverIfuckyouontheasphaultsothiswil llastforeverIfuckyouontheasphaultsothisw illlastforeverIfuckyouontheasphaultsothi swilllastforeverIfuckyouontheasphaultsot hiswilllastforever.
What's your mode of self expression?
Sweat.
It's your poetry.
I'll be your sauna, purify you, cleanse you quicker of that cocaine
Pretty lil girl with a nose to the bathroom tile
Pretty lil dress with a notion to fall when records scratch
Mary with her shirt undone
(swift flame-brands of tongues cremated you so I'll ice you down
to breed rush in the dying coals I keep swallowing
and once you're alive enough to scream
I'm going to inject you into my arm)
I'm too cold to sweat.


Fuck you all
My mouth tastes like peaches
Eat me alive, I am Begging you
I've never not cared for someone so much as I do you right now
but babe, you were like a good novel for an ostracised english professor.
All walks of life require escapism.
The passing jaguars swish your hair against the rock 'n roll
meshing you with my ribcage
I've Got No More Fucking Skin
I blame being on bottom for a dish with surgically grafted pistons in her thighs
The epidermis didn't get the same extension from the asphault.


Sin's no longer such an original concept, these days.
It's why I've got to laugh when someone gets taken down Old School, you know. People can't fight anymore, comin at me in a point and click endeavor, lookin all shocked when in a swipe their wallets and noses are broken: maybe they were wishin they'd beat more people to death, at least then the round would've gone to them, the stakes could've gone to the next hit.

This is a toast to celebrate the end of strangling a man with your bare hands. Congratulations, now we can arrive late, kill the whole class, walk out of the bloody pool with a clear conscience; though you weren't close enough to remember, I'll bet.
Did I ever tell you about dying glances?
It's two things, they just shit themselves and they just saw god.
Maybe that's one thing, I don't know