Notes of a Blissful Ghost

1

leaking from the eye-socket    dog dragging half-stripped dog skin
running    vision competes with stove-stuffed sparrow
flying

snow's touch always half-rotted
tumbledown ruins mask yesterday
painted    a colour less than white
horizon sprints back against the wind toward a drop of water

a teardrop has a pear-stalk    to lead a great hue and cry

bliss bliss

2

winter is home ground    bright shining cat
with one jump    squats on a child's face
claws sky-blue as a place-name
every plum flower hanging in mid-air, stepping on the place-name of coldness

screws tight the child's lungs
an ancient tree twisted into an afternoon's reality
a large jade in the mouth
voice    says nothing
and secretes the worst of all news for mothers
we are only reborn when sunlight is soiled

3

the road to the village wakes under rubble    adobe wall
delicate and lovely    as a girl observed

tongue-tip tastes of salt
is the ice her?    her back still to the window

both hands shield the centre    a ghost story gone in one gulp
exposing growth    in wind-written confessions

the now endlessly collapses    an interior in the western hills
a piece of jasper hovering round zero

turn salt to fragrance    out blow wisps of the last life she never had
scarlet finger still familiar with crossing the boundary below the ice

crossing over    a millennium fabricated by hurting
who is too shy to be the detail of her fantasies?

4

the world is not afraid to go back to the past it knows so well
there crows scrape at the earth    the dead rinse out
a necessary face on an old photograph
last night tied in the doorway    rubbing worn brick
the fox just leaving a swathe of grass
suddenly called to a halt by a voice from the bed
aspens are not afraid to go back    to tower over rooftops reflecting light
the expandable well filled with twenty years of age that never stop
still not enough to invent an untried kiss
four knees colliding    inside the empty shell of love
the stars have just got here a lifetime late
the owl giggles at human laughter
loan out the moonlight    to miss this moment is bliss

5

ruins deny murder

the past has nothing to do with time

blood asks no questions

insomnia is not parallel to the sky

non-existent public geography

living with no strength to live

light years have never gushed from a blind spot

avalanches cannot move away

perfect non-direction

6

a taxi floats up like a fire-red submarine
collage in a forgotten margin
confronting alone a khaki storm

we have forgotten    the terrifying depth of waters inside us
a tone that speaks of the past
as if we had never crossed those seas

7

I have accepted any place
in a corner of this village    there is snow
the snow has small crystal balconies
and towers    twilight sniffs the station
a daughter studding the glass with stars
tree monsters posting up night outside water
locking the door tight    destination infinite black
enchanting as the womb mother once used

that gives birth to a big bird in a down coat
flapping    space destroyed by the sound of melting snow
soaking an ear    hearing the sinking

8

a street slides slanting down toward a pear tree in full blossom

the past    gives the fire hose a hard squeeze

spitting    the white of flesh and skeletons

spring is a foreign language
grammar of perfume    carved and polished with precision
light    stirring the little pale black eddies behind every petal

call elapsed emptiness    the now
immature craftsmanship inlaying the blue
time's jeweller bows down    filing
february    so sweet to the ear, the sound made by cutting metal
reflecting the crowd soaking the beach with ink marks

street hanging inverted in the eyeball
is buried under its own foundation
greeting
spat out     sweet    sludge

9

two adobe walls sum up time differences in all the world

eyes can't slip away    even though looking is a sin

tumbledown ruins unhurriedly decaying
from a cemetery made of clouds
plum blossom    from a thought about disappearing

the pen's old cap that was lost    and our beautiful sex
recognising that here happiness has walked out of the frame
taken as focus    summing up the light that all the world can't see
in the still life of death there is no yesterday
just like    there is no today

10

only when it disdains to endorse any truth
does happiness accumulate lies

11

there are no homeless ghosts.
home is what is homeless: a few steps away from where I stand, and I will have been separated. ditches criss-crossed. unlatched dry grass, man-high in summer, now concealing pitfalls. concrete blocks, reinforcing bars, old electric cables, indistinctly bare teeth. bricks, heaps here and there, smoke-blackened, revealing themselves as dismantled brick beds and stoves. a small animal has left tracks on the slush. wind blowing as always, paper window no longer trembling, no longer crackling. newspaper-pasted ceiling rustles, the rat with its little black shining eyes staring down, never expecting to be remembered by someone, is rolled up and gone, along with the house, the village and yesterday. a few steps away, and no-one can reach the world whose existence no one has ever proved.
huge adobe walls, filled-in ponds, the suddenly-recognised shape of a willow, has invented someone's pictography. yellow earth, to expose is to cover up, covering up with exposure. disappearance piles up, layer on layer. illusion of home, emptier than emptiness. I stand here, fewer than nobody. frontier of breath, the line of a broken fence resisting nothing, only showing how the living ruins of the past flood out to rush on me and then push past me. What is homeless, is what endlessly falls into the eye socket: a stretch of solidly-real, formed, destructive, nothingness.
inflamed red moon of mid-autumn festival, stuck between kissing lips, will we still be watching when a blissful ghost's handbook vomits us out everywhere?

12

in the tower is river too    flowing pitch-black upwards
sky    a stock of freezing fate
forcing two fish to answer a constellation
to look is to be hooked    a silver hook piercing flesh

like useless beauty    on the body's riverbank
is a faint path    and China's landscapes waiting in the woods
old bridge half its arch left
leaps into lies    fish pulling in yet more far-off water

to live is to be fated    simulating the madness of building the tower
secret pitch-black torrential force
flinging convicts    swimming all fish-scaled in
locked-up origin

13

three is the number of doom
three years    borrow someone's image to dissolve
her    those hers who far away walked over the ditch

shimmering and changing    light closes in on curses
lifelike white shadow fills in the walking silhouette
three summers' winds paint the room again
when so many tons of green are scrapped

in water those organs are empty
still not in time to practise lechery

and are no more    blood group's combination lock has been changed
three times    string music never again able to tear away pain
so far and no further    three counting infinity
kidnaps this poem    a whisper flying over the world in search of a far-off ear

take aim    at the next stupid cycle

14

detested place    help me imagine
a dotted line of life    stars come in one by one
assigning degrees of latitude to the window
for old age    punctually performing the darkness after the lamp is out
the aurora flickers    on the screen patterning beauties
spreading wings    exhibiting tightly nailed iron bars
unable to leave the place I hate
till I have bitten the bitter almond of fate

15

smelling
in the scarves of the dead is a smell not taken away
smell    suddenly remember days that were lived

the material in the smell is greasier and blacker
this is your air
tonight    the dead present you with flowers

floating all through the room two hands that can embrace
nose buried in buds woven by the grave
lungs like another blood-congested womb

warm knife-edge carves into your throat
distance deeply breathing    the fatally lingering fragrance of coma
let cheating chemistry go on cheating for a while

16

smelling
the only two words in the past    pain    or forgetting
when the dead escape from a scarf

the world disperses more easily than a smell
dream like a piece of silverware    feminine black rose curling
but without smell    you are kept outside of dreams

this tiny corner    by the rank stink of patterned wool
pushed    if you smell pain you still haven't forgotten
the dead go on climbing the stairs    watching the clock    playing the flute

half wanting you half arranging the next dying
smell gouges into cracks in bone    like rheumatism violently coming to
this is a now too strange for anyone

17

concrete's chords have filled up march
march seen from winter    ghost
components prefabricated elsewhere

arrive after a thousand-year shipping
swallows search for secrets at the village end
zero    violently scans the world

among broken walls some element is agitating    pouring
changeable landforms rehearse a password
turn to collective grey again    spring trims heartbeats
cubic moonlight glues the chorus together

in march's elegies    swallows drag lethal weapon-like phosphorescence

field mice endlessly digging a tunnel
inquiring about a season sealed in a flagstone
family photos decided    shifted to the negatives

18

poem which blindly takes what's passed as the theme
blankly climbing a concrete ladder
her toenail growing upwards a half oyster-shell
his anklebone    like a fish leaping in flashback
dragging the legs of an old slow-running film
sex projects a blaze on to the boulevard
she meekly sharpens her two-edged knife
he tastes the sweetness of cutting the corn
when the waist is tangled cloud penetrates cloud
night brimming with radio waves    whistles up the spine
between silvery aerials thunders the clink of glasses
caress a fabulous crashing    heart jumps in halfway through the incident
portrait at twenty smaller as it shrinks
earlobe exquisite    and nibbled for fun
ecstasy reveals pointed snake-tongues in tips of hair
overlooking    she has all along led a dog's barking
his cat holds its own innate wildness in its mouth
leaping down from the wall of history
a poem has no theme
because    no-one has passed by

19

your pillow is up against a cornfield
your dreams    burgeon in the sky
eyes closed sleepwalking snow    loses its way once
lost on the parquet floor of the concrete mansion

campfire    from memory's cave mouth
scatters the sky with ten million glittering keys

wild child's laughter swoops in the window
twine of time tying up your tinnitus
swinging back    empty space is never empty
just as a whistle    beyond a concrete wall
wakes you with a start too    in moonlight a sharpened sickle
is scything the roots of your sleep

20

crushed by the unending internal dialogue
ghosts understood
the park is where the dead can post-mortem wander

babies    use black boughs to burst out wailing
birds slowly hurl grenades toward you

flowers falling all around like wild pigeons
purples and whites all torn off their feathers
dried parasol-tree fruit hangs sexily in last year
old dogs pant slower and slower
green    hides at the horizon like a terrorist
talking to himself    controlling a huge timed detonation

no-one can destroy life    unless you yourself
destroyed    and joined the cold of the park    at springtime

21

thinking there is a past in past tense    just like
a madman is convinced there is a world in the eye
herds of cows through the snow-bright crystal lens
watch our sphere    grasslands    war    neighbours
a night just dispersed    pumps wetness from puddles
thinking butchery can still be restored as a style

thinking a stripped cow skin is still a cow
boots grinding the essence golden and soft
we put them on    convinced we've invented blood once again
verbs change and the sound of flowing begins
flowing into    the crystal dice behind the tongue spinning nothingness
madness begins from the instant we use substitutes to speak

22

bliss in the ruins    comes from old age
broken teeth left in the dark behind you
hearing the wind free-associating more rampantly still
the more day is dismantled    the more night gives you the chance
to bind a richer lie

23

flesh extends to the remotest corner of the village
spring incinerated    ulcerated    caved-in    is fixed up all new

doomsday like a geography lesson
the landscape everyone opens    only yourself can see

snow drifts commemoratively    rubble quietly incubating
a tourist map    leaves open blind eyes wide to search

in ghost reality rows of bouquets light firecrackers along the street
the living remember    magnolias raising their goblets toward the sky

skin the plastic bag used for all time to hold blood
wears out    dances in air    drapes the bushes

snick-snack of scissors    ungrudged footsteps
peel with great care
e a teardrop is never short of dead birds' origins

24

the handbook has deleted the hand    names of the dead
leave behind a code for the red phone book
outside the window    the hardworking horizon has been decoding all along
to conjecture an ending is too extravagant
water is a room    the poet's shining metamorphosed waves
don't flow    enduring a colour less than the white of a line of poetry
to change an urn on the table is too extravagant
light    carves and polishes with precision in the sky each month
blood from inside a girl's foxy waist
shoots out    flowers are all like witches
the ghost settles down in place names oblivious to the world coming and going
on everyone's map everyone is the rainy season
wall is too extravagant    knowledge that corrodes
makes the bones in the bath eternally swelter
comb of syllables    has combed across the golden pubic hair of the lawn
three hundred and sixty degrees of ruin on the dial
affirm    death has no different language
the poet has nowhere to return
wild old beauty is the only beauty we know
time is spent    but the smell of blood in a line of poetry is far from enough
deepening a storm that cannot pass
reiterate this night    ghost's first night of bliss