more than this

when from up here the sky was filling swiftly with motes and ashes. So took leave of the wild children in their unopened memories and spilled out secrets, the rich layer of living soil flung upward, scattered upon the wind. So ate the only things they found there—a few roots, a cluster of aging berries. So hammered at the debris and built fires among the fallen buildings. Dug a little further and found the limbs of dolls, the fragments of chrome backed mirrors reflecting each other, the broken jars of fragrant oils. Before another night fell they circled round their findings—some prayed, others did not, some clamored for reburial—though eventually they decided to leave everything out, to dry in the moonlight, though they chose to burn several things late that night. So turned away from the balcony on the palazzo, to hide my face in your bosom and pray for rain. Our hands clutched cool glasses, ice caromed noisily, condensation in rivulets over the gritty backs of our hands. I whispered what I wanted into the folds of your clothes, the muffling comfort of your body stole the terror from my mouth and I watched my words drip out of me and weave themselves like tarnished threads of quicksilver into the patterns on your skirts. My promises to take the City by force if necessary were easy and warm on my lips and your soothing voice above me made them fierce and real.

But that wasn't how it would happen. All those threaded memories spoken into faulty patterns fell to pieces and flew away in the warm night wind. Instead it grew (sudden, like mushrooms!) it grew necessary to first be what we were, ourselves a thousand fractured gangs of outlaw children! We hunted down the places where orange light carved cones out of the dark, where the rush of traffic was ever more transitory, the cells of memory pushing through concrete arteries always on their way someplace, to pump full the members and brains of other places (we supposed the sex organs of the world! the whole great menagerie of machines rutting! but elsewhere, always elsewhere and at a fierce unspeakable pace). We flung ourselves back against the hollow tin walls of sheds, storage bins, forgotten trash cans. We leaned on things easily, awaited for our promises to flower into rendezvous into travel into action. While we sat we remembered our lives above the world

A small group of young boys walked carefully through the dusty valley, following the dry creekbed upstream. They picked their way over pale stones and the moved with a quiet rustle through tall brown switchgrass and wild buckwheat, heads bobbing in time to the nod and sway of the weeds in the breeze. The farther they moved upstream, the greener it grew and hints of sunlight caromed from beneath the stones; the creek was starting to show signs of life.

Rounding a corner they were treated to the sight of a wide, deep bowl, hedged round its top with sharp cliffs. Incongruously (they had been walking through wildlands for hours) four sagging wires hung in the air above the valley, strung mightily from great tarred beams driven into the rim of the bowl in some forgotten act of engineering. They felt a shock of recognition: the electric tethers of civilization had been run out ahead of them and they were not exploring so much as retracing something's footsteps. Following this creek served as a pale impersonation of the great wonders they could find if they could get up those cliffs, stare into the west and slip from pole to pole, a short line of tiny figures tightwalking the shadows of the powerlines upstream to the glittering cities and full houses of the living and the dead.

But standing there in the bottom of the silent valley, the wire contrails above their heads were as impossible as birds in flight, and after a flicker of squinted eyes upward the boys ignored them and looked north. The far end of the valley was a steep wall, a thrust of packed dirt that looked as much like the face of a dam as anything. In the middle of the face the black opening of a pipe jutted out, disgorging a thin stream of water to beacon in the sun. Were they bigger and stronger climbers (and if they'd rated the activity more worthwhile than tracing power lines- they did not) the boys could have scaled the wall and seen the pocked remnants of an east-west road, overgrown and littered with a few pieces of rusting junk. The road terminated just a few tenths of a mile beyond the westward slope of their valley and they sensed they would have been disappointed eventually. Which left them to turn back, retrace and head east down one of the other branches of the great canyon system; or shuffle forward, clamber into the steel culvert and see where it took them.

A word about this Kiki. Here with the cocktail glass. There with the winged memory of what we wanted once. Then holding that unspeakable variety of objects, implements of work and play. A walking kaleidoscope with hands of ice. So.
Under the stars roamed the millions strong peoples of the borderlands. They fled the coming of the great times, the golden ages. They wanted no part of the determinate states, the collapsing of their Schrodinger waves sapped all their strength, all their lusting mixups at the edge of the City, the crushing dustups and sweet love they poured onto the heads of the Angry Men and the Others and the Hungry. We'll get to the Hungry later, their devouring sadness, the opening of their mouths wide and gnashing of their smooth and beautiful teeth. But amid the borderlanders, the in-between women and their next-door men, there landed great gouts of star fire, and falling shadows like the reflections of so many toxic leaves. To so decisively sunder them was difficult and the borderpeople knew it. They dodged the light, uprooted the darkness before it could dig in and generally pruned the flowering of the binary world. They loved interstitially, lauded the space between the stars and the coronas of the universe as god itself. And from their lips grew the middling tongue, glutted with argot and ripened at the penumbras of distinction. You see? They lacked a place of their own, a history of decisions, a lore of certainty. They painted themselves, black and yellow, dotted their heads, their breasts, their stomachs. Ringed their fingers, clenched cigarettes or spears with equal diffidence, ate rice things, rolled things, hand and forked things. They drifted from border to border, mimed the gestures of the Angry Men and passed among them smoothly enough. Hid out in the fields, ran among the forest trees, dove into the sweating city understreets, the alleyways and smokerooms. But among them always was this smolder of sweet lust, unadulterated by design, lust free of decisive desire, unmarred by brute will. The crude willing of things put them off, left them cold and listless. As it does, the lust led to more lust, innocently enough. And after just so many years of kissing bedouins, pinching gypsies, stroking the young, pining for bushido-- after so many years of this, all at the pruned edges of the cultures--they birthed Kiki. Tall and voluptuous, alternately fleet and immobile, Kiki a sort of border demigod(dess) but replete with all manner of lymphatic surprises, hot hormonal peace offerings to the word/world at-large. A gingered debutante, never naive enough to pass but nary sophisticated in specifics. Kiki schooled in the City, tutored in the red rock ridgelands, Kiki among thornbushes and spun helixes of neoned rain, yellowed halide lit highways, middens rank with ferment and baking smells. Treated out of time to see it all in a kind of starlit haze.
The m.o. then: abrupt shifts, light and dark twined just so; rapid departures on the unsteady air. I was an easy captive, we met once at the edge of one City or another City, spoked out at the edge of town out where the structures run lower, the streetlights pool less, the storage places draw their atomized crowds. We met, faces stunned momentarily by recognition, before those border genes took hold, smoothed out the edges, lit up the old lust. So there was a darting of tongues
momentary loving,
then flight.

Away, dozens for disaster?
Every hunger and the satellites color I long for event reminds of the last disaster and under the guise of color Icarus drifted at the horizon outward from the chaos-- we me of long for in and flags and nationhood and reminds me, obscene penises, each flavor and full oscillation bent smokelike on one nothing can of each be denied toward me now or for each sweet i consume present excuses.

Until stars embraced, bites back. And at last in gaping event horizon the us, small multicolored with our noses their flight frilled from hearing of them


amid drifted diesel and nationhood and penises and full of trucks.
Or by guise of my minds
with one spite
consume distance. under the tongue black yellow fingers.
Darting
loving
then flight.

the
softly-stepping-and-ready-until-the-face-of-obscene-and-full-saintliness
Women in full came, full of spite hope in their hope Then, we rise off the hillside, emerging out the flowery landscape into nothing
each sweet can be smokelike and multicolored with heads bent toward each other until stars embraced at last in gaping hope the face of minds with wings now that I am our-minds-with-one-alone
every hour of that for I consume denied our noses seeking one bites back now another every hour with one in the face of other fires minus the stars

every color and I, event horizon drifted, longed for
reminds me in and out, obscene and full of cigarettes, oscillations toward each or for excuses. Until the stars embraced at last hope in the gaping sexual desire

We, full of hope the gaped-and-and-overheated-dream-cat-closed-by-her-tongue under the guise of my gawked and pawed chaos we rise

Then, flight. Darting one another in the face of hope in their stars, embraced in the language of the horses and the fumes we hear them: amid the gaping interstellar women softly stepping on every color from the heavens

better than the last fumes, the gaping sexual desire, the guise of chaos nationhood and penises, the muttered language from the satellites, sweating horses and the Watched:

each of us we rise, alone every small floor,

Under the satellites we watched:
events overheated by her tongue in the fingers, by guise of colorful clothes, my gawked chaos we horses and the fumes and nothing can be denied
softly amid drifted in and out stepping face of women, obscene oscillations bent, in spite of hope, in at ourselves, looking for their colorful face or for excuses.

toward each hope until the One-Another-And-Other
in spite consume from their yellow fingers bites
denied me back our minds with one language the satellites watched.
We, loving then, out, obscene and full of light.
we hear women in the leaves, amid the softly colorful horizon

O for disaster? hope and every color each
Until the stepping women in their one "at last another" voice, toward each other in spite they came
The stars I embraced for us, alone the sweating horses every small hour and the fumes, the gaping, the fumes of them: amid softly sweetly stepping the gaping nothing –desire, interstellar women-- can be denied me in body heat and sweating colorful in the clothes, horses, the satellites and multicolored
sexual desire of interstellar body closed heat in the frilled distance.

We the can-be Women, alone every one,
O face out the hour with one for chaos, each
multicolored with our overheated seeking?

dozens for disaster? obscene oscillations bent at every color I long
for fires rained from or for excuses. Until the heavens far away,

bags dangling from the heavens
looking denied me now
each for loving
Then, flight.

i consume away, and dozens bite back

We hear them amid drifted in and out, obscene oscillations bent or for excuses. Until at last they came
event and event fumes
from the diesel horizon

better to remind satellites
and Angry Men we hear the guise nationhood and them
with our noses seeking the fires
rained stars embraced muttered language from the heavens
the sweating horses and nationhood tastes better and the
satellites watched: hear them

Refine them, quickly.

There's too much misery in the spelling of your name, he muttered, collapsing the telescope and pocketing it.

I know, she said. I know.

They exchanged grimaces and watched the rain slow to a few spatters a mild misting of the distant militias. Light faded and new light arose, unresplendant, uninvigorating. So they watched the dawn of night and the reemergence of the birds.

Behind them Kiki toasted with a tall glass their backs, sipped, smiled, closed eyes and swallowed. Fans whirred to life and the stale air stirred, motes lifted, papers ruffled. But the apartment stayed silent. Out of the center of the rising lights new irises grew, alive and furious with purplescent radiance and soft edges of olive. The rain ceased entirely, the lights began to flood the walls the windows their eyes, the very bottom of the thick cut glass the ice and the gold liquid. Light came on like plague, purpler and purpler with knifepoints for beams and they huddled together praying for dark the redspotted carpet grew unseemly and their lusting was exposed. Out of the light seemed to pour noises, scratchings and locusty whispers. Each one heard names, their names. The roaring of galaxies. Finally the drink was empty, and there was nothing between them under the light only the light to weld eyelids shut turn motes into jewels embitter ice cubes into vapor into nothingness the fans whined and the light pressured even them a thickening of light a fog of light the sticky thick waves of unbroken light. And their desire melted like so many windowpanes. All stood man woman secretive Kiki the others the motes of dust stood slowly pulling forward to the window and the great shape resolved slowly becoming lion's head, locust mouth, through into a planet a new star the Eye of Anger the fruit of sweating mystery.

Mouths open we approached like supplicants like baby birds eyes clenched teeth vibrating like just before you vomit and the hum in our heads was finally drowned the voice of the 60 cycles finally silenced all by the gales of light the tides of time. My love my lust dopplered together toward it all things hovered in new orbits all glassy eyed and sweaty our ears burning and sickness leaked from pores joined the gems hovering in the air around us the dust made precious by fire.

Then the smells arrive lavender and meat rosemary and burning cooking oil it becomes hard in that onrush to keep from salivating who wants to anyway who needs anything but the taste the taste of endless light?

Birdsong arose and the night proceeded aimlessly.