One, the massive paradigm of light begins again
TV traffics nothings, and I'm a washed-out cloth on a doll of thought
morning will strip more naked than footprints
in meltwater snow, a pocket turned inside-out
holding the air for dear life, subtle and desperate
on the oxygen cliff, my body brittle bisque
fragile as a discarded draft
you lay down to pick up your next breath
and the beautiful toy of your love, someone you were

My abiding impression of my hometown is of light and cruelty
and the lemonade kaiser of my closest need is escape
when the image of Germany, 1939 is of a strong state
and when the trashed Sony set in wasteground
transmitting fragments of moon
is a condition for surrender
King Dust comes for me each night bringing soap and honey
and the Motel Two Palms is a pseudo image of grip
and of holding, the gangsters on the run,
the suitcase of cards spilling open and unstable
as a spree of lira or an epidemic of signs
rocked for an instant on an image of diamonds

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, I was young and my myth was revolutionary
the prime silver gelatin 'fuck off' of my eyes
and never any need to say goodbye
a run on the bank a river's indices of cloud a slow, slow ride
through Death Valley
and the superb sugar concrete of my ambition
the little icing Nietzsche the Will to Signify strong
with the poem cocky and flirtatious
like a gaudy PoMo temple raised in the desert
godless and unnatural, erasing the very borders it desired
with a Mickey Mouse motto above the doorway:
It's okay to enter here, because no one cares and
anyway you don't matter. But that's cool, too — don't you think?

In the small lemons in the still-life, Ground, and the lemonade reference
the small stock in the dream market, Here, Now, and the stockade
the sublime inflation of the author is over
and I fly this place, a few burnt murmurous pages
from one of Darwin's nocturnal theses
while the frail early word, existing only as a lone mutation,
and so delicate in the state of one,
disperses itself through rapid reproduction, copy by copy
to melt at last into the ghost canon
and the longevity of names
a latecomer's guide to a feminine ending
and a citric derivative, the juice still on your fingers

Now the bleached material was a buddhist silk
and the present system reinforces itself
among useless gunfire at the Motel Two Palms
symbolic of a loosening grip
and the mule of this brays germanely
struggling up the steep mountain pass
bearing boxes of The Perfect Moment, crates of The Unique Thing
and the burden of this in a spirit maths
is the enigmatic fork in The Total of the New
in the set of all poems, this doesn't belong

while Huxley mutters on the shore at Lyme
his hands full of shells feathers and bones, and he is saying
I have touched the skull of God I have heard
the sound of machines dreaming
as gulls cry overhead and we
branch instantly away, real giants of our logic,
momentary ones, all dauphins of tomorrow,
heirs apparent of promises and succession,
strong as Prince Achilles, our own heels
the rootless cause of any next second

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.