The Chill through the Window

This same chill stares stapled
at the epidermus but calmly oceanic
it was a different place
exactly one year ago all those days wound
when warmth was so desperate
to be discovered hiding, but warmth wasn't,
not enough really just puckered,
punk and endangered, endangering
and now this chill, harlequin spinning,
returns like gun recoil or pesticides
from their hiding place the back cabinet,
the subtle atomic rustle returns
as a fist gloved and ready for thrust,
upper body strength to plexus

the woman for they are different
walking down the street, is
dressed in comments and ugly
scowls fearing to be feared.

Steadying out she continues
leg over leg praying
indigent intervention,
God has a soul, God must
but mutters and psychopathic
belongs in whitewrap in salon
in crazy house kooky floored
where women walk around
the screams processing
the screams didn't know them
at first but now at second
this glance is a meteor
sucking everything around it
it is vacuous and cold sucking
to the hill where one man
hung his neck a coil of serpent
twisting sexually, devious.

Comets snuff but their flames
are pure and stay strong.

The winter chill electric
pulsing the hairs on my
wrist, forearm, latter muscles
twitching in identity, this is it,
the incision, scissor to fabric,
guitar chord scattering like
the armies of capillaries
or the pulse of two areolas,
what it means to be moment
with the skin long and sheathing
but cold and fresh and anew.

What it means to be your helicopter
the houses so small from so high
so high will we ever see everything
high will we ever be fast enough?

I wonder if the woman walking along
in fear and agony face distortion
I wonder where she finds her love,
if it's love like language and
dead poets everywhere screaming ghosts
under billions of grains of earth
while the world tramples by because
they have been trained even the artists
who profit like pigs who are policing
the laws of aesthetic and nurturing
with the most pure filth imaginable--
discard thy artistry hisses the wind,
also serpentine but formless, angry.

I wonder if the woman walking along
fears her fear when it comes up to her
like a breeze or a glass bottle or sweep
of trash, a race of ants, a battle cry
of the hysterical, the endless supply of
children left behind for rot instant perishing
in the system that lies, says it cannot allow.

I wonder but really I am thinking
about colleges training all of us to be
idiots, to be lied to, to be forced
into thinking into being to be unable
to focus or write or think or remember--
colleges like guns recoiling and shoving
you back as soon as you have fired
their bullet, thousands of monetary units
being burned at the local celebration.

I think of the ritual sacrifices on Mayan
monuments, their fierce historical lovers,
Aztecs of yellowed teething and hunger, propping
up like giant syringes of snake, scaled
and horrifying, I think of the mandates and
embargoes, the grueling fats and oils, the
snot running thick to be crusted in the breeze,
a love that is concrete and the smack of our boots--

What do we fear when talking about love?
Can you calm me down by giving me puckered lips
or aching knees or forkfuls of couscous
dripping in nonsense, ingredients, heat?
Love songs are like tornadoes, they slow
time down, but at the same time, love songs,
are like worst situations, for better is for worse,
and love songs are dogs or cats or companions.
I think about love songs but really I am thinking
about myself, it took me 20 years to start
stopping myself from being one giant mirror,
and I think about all the girls that got wasted
away through time because of that mirror, it's
sunlight magnified to burn and its clarity
mortally haunting for what it can show, those
few beautiful women their minds wombs of ideas,
and the few men who I have loved as much as the women,
who return scattered when processed by the mirror,
their songs of love denied, their songs denied audience.

The call of the warlord, the benchmark of
a sad computer, the 9-gallon hat deficiency,
the woman walking down the street in blisters
and moans and praying to a God that I can never--
the air, it's breeze, calm, like a buckshot
experienced the first time, reminds me of Rhode Island,
Iran, Afghanistan lovers, entire cultures of
poets mad with chattering teeth and bleeding knives,
horrible leaders, false shimmers in stars--

The breeze makes me think of doubt, and reprisal,
and repression a giant cycle or ball rolled up,
slamming into the ground like the metric ton
of clay molded and for disruption, thereon fever

Forever, and let us hope you have felt it at least once

Shut the window, prepare the meat, load your
wood stove and imagine red riots, blue pulses,
veiny legs and electric shivers, piercing
the shelves of silence like noise, spirals of static,
the lowest region of the dial, zeros making us all
go home to think and pray, to get off our legs
into our eyes, our own and your own, dear
doppelgangeress, dear double helix still breathing,
you who will walk that street again and again
but like Eurydice I cannot find you, like death,
you are living and forever but a breeze, passing.