sleep deprivation

i like your brain... its inertia... its mild perplexity...
sleep deprivation...
the shadows of the shady deals on the overnighters...
the walking corpses shouting that their silverware
was lifted by the staff...
i don't mind...
i am given to extremes, you know that...
i could make this job sound downright heaven~sent... fateful...
weird...
but all in all its just another meaningless job...
i know that i am probably just entertainment for you
but
i'll take it
*

THE SON OF AMERICA

THE SON OF AMERICA

Think about America...
and the son of America...
the sequel... and the mini~series!
It takes two minutes to change hats twice and return
to power here!
By the end of this regime
I will lie flawlessly... seemlessly
lounging...
Your Mother made this plastic squeezable container
on the graveyard shift... the factories
of poverty never close around here...
Oh, I'm sorry... I simply don't find you attractive anymore...
pulled apart as you are by conformity
and those magic frowns on your masters’ faces...
Cry me a river!
Human spiders the size of my hands
taunt me mercilessly with withdrawl symptoms...
for four miles or more
shadows trampled the sunlit walls
blue paper fingerprints wall papered the archetecture...
I found myself in the confessional facing betrayal...
But i deny all involvement in the blinding of my judges!
Crows blinded my judges!
Besides the Jungles are on fire! our miracles
are working better than ever:
we make easy easier
turn love into blood
blood into money
our properties roll around in the bones...
the liquid stainless steel sunlight
pours through our doors...
a good morning
breaks into twenty odd people chasing legal tender
called neighbors...
it is a detached apocalypse every minute
of every day...
with pool~side paradigms for the priviledged few...
fingered water... their elusive form...
For the rest of us:
a portion of a temptation
groping empty hair...
yesterday's tango experts are taking a beating
for the promise of a proud dignity...
Others are looking into ancient ossuaries for bones
beyond liberation...
nirvana... and the rest of that... litter!
No~nothings who know nothing but nothing and then
only sometimes...
LISTEN: It is a quasi~mystical mathematical brotherhood
that is running this show...
We are on an extreme odyssey... of unbeing being...
Oh, my yellow clarinet! My brain in the body of yellow light!
My gentle radical absence...
Yes
Yes!
A thousand times YES!
I will take this drunken joy ride through my father's dust!
After all
I learned American through Excess...
And don't try to muzzle me with your flattery!
An amoeba can't write a cantata!
It would be better to use better words better but
I can't translate barking dogs for you...
How do you spell the sound of licking hair?
But let that go...
Alternative is Not alternative...
It's negotiable!
It has a particular flavor...
something like: immortal~artificial...
Make no mistake You do make the choice...
if not the difference!
... its an...
embarrasing situation....
*

what you love

what you love

what if in that honest moment of decision: what to paint... what to say... you realized the only thing that was familiar to you as you is what you have already done... and the notion of doing something you would never do, in fact, something you loathe, occurred to you just as suddenly as the only choice and then you realized that you are what you hate as much as what you love... what you hate makes you happy... yes... and so you paint what you hate with love....
*
if i have made a career of failure it is because success has always looked like a life of crime to me…
*
meanwhile it is always meanwhile...

for a word

for a word

i eat so much silence for one wholesome word sandwiched between crippled syllables
that little by little i spied the river flowing under the turf
without lifting its hem
my drunken boots staggered
my accidental oscillation
my occidental oz
and torpor
land in the heat of the stage lights
uncared for and untended
o fill my hat with fat for that!
i entered without wings
i entered anyway
slumbering in my unfaithful
birthday suit
i signed my name in sand
in centuries of debris
in a constant departure
from cities and nature
i was drunk on nothing
and nothing was everything
it swallowed the light
the mountain ranges
the mire and the gold dust
in our eyes
and there were plenty of other
cargos too
many quotas bottled and tossed out
on the waves
these silver bones with great zeal
i wrote on the label
of a casket and threw it as far into time
as possible
and then i swallowed the sea
quietly
*

Anthony DiMichele
PO Box 1061
Friday Harbor, WA 98250
Email: studio7@rockisland.com
Website: www.gallerymezzotint.comP

the night

the night in my heart is pounding against the absence of yours
the room smells like your absence also: wet grass pine sap and pollen
on a cold breeze
to whose silent music the trees are dancing
i tie our hearts together with only enough blood for one

this night in my barrow of stones and dead wood
this night in my future in an hour with a sorrow greater
than all the others in my garden
this night is mine because it arrives with your complete absence
and i cannot refuse you even when you are not here

because of my penitence and my patience and my prerogative
you are necessary you are even when you are not
this night is the long word the king's ransom the ordinary against
the spectacular

i am standing at the threshold of this night hidden behind the last light
asking you to open the door
which is not a door

not i

the mirror needs a pain killer
not i... is in the world as an i
all fictions are made to fit that formlessness
into forms
give or take everything
*
(for j.e.)

Anthony DiMichele
4/08

icarus

the sea was rough the waves were ten feet high
i stood in a wind that was so intense it pulled the breath
out of my lungs
the cold was green turning to gray
it was february
it replaced my appetite
with sand
i stood there listening to the wind
steal my breaths
my shoes were filling up like hourglasses
while i lost minutes
grain by grain
i was stained by my thoughts
which were telling me one thing
after another:
you don't want to get married
or write a book
or die in this cold dark land
you are confused
because you are trapped
in the body of an animal
like a stone in its silence
a voice in its story
or icarus in his recklessness
flying straight into the sun

*
adm 2/08

after midnight

after midnight

there was captain slave
and the book
and also the inner clothes i dress up in
the revolutionaries’ worn out flames
the next time we will not take it by force
lamentations are to be advertised on movie posters
i shake hands with a swordfish in a blue suit
the blood hums in his gunpowder
all of us are burning
for a catharsis
when you are gone even for an
evening
deep down i am miles into a dare
*

where do you undress
your voice?
in vain your tough structure bends
an immense syllable into a whisper
but the electronic walls spy on you
black and bitter from eternity
our wine bites its pulp
above the scars are the riddles
claws sink into memory
the broken clouds appear to be breaking up
and i owe you
a long book
*

between each infinite maybe i made my way
with being being evaporated drop by drop
do you remember shouting into the earth?
then the vanished dawn without birds?
turqoise and crimson rain fell
soaking our stockings of ashes sunken in traffic
my nails would be delightfully undone
accompanied by a solitary arrow
i am dressing myself as a cold gravestone
in the emptiness of another picnic with all expenses paid
the overture is written on a yellow postage stamp
it doesn't make sense because it doesn't
motionless celestial flight
*

the overture however might go on forever
said a heart wildly alone
with a thick tongue of solitary kisses
lightningbolts on my lips
slapping stars in palm trees
with the hair of water
and semen scattered in constellations
oh! the axe was a torch though i held the light like a weapon above my head
*

words

i use words to point toward what is
wordless...
when words mean nothing... and silence
opens its eyes....