Every tower arises in babble;
every ascent a confusion of tongues.
When we collapse, we collapse together.
Hubris brings ruin, but ruin makes a home,
where the door is always open, the roof
a bower of rain. Wave from this window
without glass, & take my hand, old friend.
These stones? Take all you like. Build again.

Two riders are always approaching;
they’re still a long ways off. Before the wind
rises, come sit in the shade of this dream
whose shadow is longer than its seems.
Later, we’ll climb to the sky. On what stairs?
The ones cut from prayers, from words, from air.

My bride came forth in a silver shower,
but we were still too poor to marry.
Pennies from heaven never will flower.
My bride came forth in a silver shower.

I tried to convert play into power.
Gaily, greyly, came love’s actuary.
My bride came forth in a silver shower,
too poor, too poor, too poor to marry.

The City of Tomorrow burns like glass.
Sunnyside, shadyside, the furnace streets
fan out in bright shrapnel from the blast.
The City of Tomorrow burns like glass.

We’ll walk by, unacknowledged as we pass,
not unrecognized. We’ll melt all these sheets.
The City of Tomorrow burns like glass;
keep to the sunnyside, O shadyside streets.

All these dimensions go to eleven.
The camel passes through the eye.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

though it’s summer snow behind this seven.
After many a summer, the snow will die.
All these dimensions go to eleven,

a mathematics these strings will leaven,
a superstring strummed like a pair of thighs.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

& he’s right by a factor of seven.
Every kiss kiss vibrates with good bye.
All these dimensions go to eleven,

but we’re down here in four, not eleven,
insane in the membrane of you, of I.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

only a theory, a half-formed lesson,
the truth in drag, the outrageous lie.
All these dimensions go to eleven,
every string humming, just like heaven.

Oh! Fatal emblem of our happiness!

All that remains of the dream: the lighthouse
that someone drove off a cliff. It hung there,
wily, coyote-like, suspended, then
not. It hit the ground like a suitcase dropped
after a twenty-hour flight. But what,
awake, am I supposed to do with this?
Why was a lighthouse moving like a truck,
a runaway down a green-gray slope,
barreling toward the infinite meaning
of meaninglessness? I can see it, still,
hear the strange soft wheeze, the harpsichord
collapse of its fall, the sound of wood, whistling
past its own graveyard. All day, this image.
Tomorrow it’s gone. On the shrink’s couch
in some New Yorker cartoon, the lighthouse
becomes a joke, the royal road’s punch line.
It’s funny ha-ha because it’s true, true
because it’s funny-strange. But what is it?
What is any of it? In dreams I walk
with you, in dreams I talk with you, in dreams
I push you down a well, cry when you come,
take the wheel from your dead hands, & drive
until the coast appears like a brushstroke.
In dreams, you’re mine, all the time, but awake
I am yours: your slave, your toy, your rest.

Air is oblivion’s monument;
the swelling in your lungs, its inscription.
This makes breathing an act of war,
the battle between remembering,
forgetting. As if you could really forget
to breathe. As if you could remember.
One deep breath for Proust’s madeline
exhales the river Lethe. Oh fuck off, you
ghost hunters, in memory yet sickly
green, your night goggles, your Did you hear thats?
There’s a specter haunting your hopes. It’s called
oxygen, the only memorial.
It chisels our brains like granite.
It effaces our names like rain.  

The song of the blood never changes,
but the lyrics fade in, fade in, fade out.
What can an arranger do? He arranges.
The song of the blood never changes.

The heart watches the hand for the changes.
The hand plays over the heart’s heavy doubts.
The song of the blood never changes,
but the lyrics break in, break hearts, fade out.

But the birds always come back, feathered fists
pummeling the silence until it yields
to a chirpy monotony. The mists
that cloud these eyes as they cross the fields
are not tears, but very slow reveals,
the world, uncurtained: aqueous humors
at once sanguine, melancholic. The seals
broken in the blink of. What were rumors

become the dullest of uninvited guests:
facts. Existence is a risk that always risks
mere existence. Sweet songs, then empty nests.
Is this a knockout or a dive? It’s fixed,
either way. The day a gray slate. It’s late:
the air long, the breath short, the song a weight.

Destiny’s a piano, out of tune,
a nervous child murdering Clare de Lune;
a Jaguar on the curb, fender bent;
the urgent message, deleted, unsent.

Every life is off by a degree;
every cage built by that bully word, free.
You come in the window, leave by the door.
You flex your fingers, & ask what’s this for?

Captains of Fate go down with their ships.
No searching faces are crowding the slip.
Providence just a city, never a state.
You’re always on time; you’re always too late.

In Paradise, nothing’s naked for long;
everyone tries very hard not to stare.
Everyone sings that sleepwalking song.
In Paradise, nothing’s naked for long.

The sky asks Can’t we all just get along?
It’s the start & the end of the affair.
In Paradise, nothing’s naked for long.
A picture, worth a thousand stares.