PSYCHEDELOS ( ...in the mirror... )

      i

      silver backing flakes from the mirror, falls

                                bright snow

            from the direction of the Pleiades

                                             each platinum faceted pellet

         coming down
         fast as light

                              i catch them
                              with the grace and shout of a riveter

in a molecule thick membrane of hand

                        a hand filling the evening sky

                                                         at my equator -

      ii

outside my room a darkness

                  the trick           there is always a trick

      is in keeping an equalized pressure

      change it just a bit

      the skin of the room      waves like flags joined

                              along their edges

                              shape a floor
                              to the texture of a lovely girl
                              lie on her

                              if you can-can

                              if you can-can

      iii

Moon-woman laughs

                                 a harmonium at play

her breasts are cones
ice cream spilling over
                                   sticky

threads lacing stars together

                              O, Moon-woman
                              turn from the window

                              only a darkness
                              lies beyond my room

                              there is nothing to await

               and i am the great riveter

how much, in gold
coin, so i may carry your child

her nipples were gold coins

swollen to suns
in her quick pregnancy

            from across the raging room

                                    was our only way to love

i threw out my love
and when i missed, great furrows

                                    were cleaved in her flesh

            but when those silver pellets struck

                        she would throb and swell

and 300 things
would come to be in my room

      iv

Sun-man, armed with the compleat angle -er

                                explores in my room

      the room is rectangular
      by measure
      a block of oleomargarine

      sliced into thin sheets
      it is a Holy Book

      the light-globe people
      are writing in it

                                    their dazzling heads
                                    melting the pages together

      bright hieroglyphs
      lost in chunks of hardened
      Greece

                           Sun-man rocks on fat buttocks
         popping globes with silver rocks

i collect fragments
trying to read
over exploding shoulders

      v

                                    the crone
         read my palm, scraping away calluses
                  saving them
                                                in a stone jar

your life-line
is hollow-stump peculiar
dark-kitten irregular

however i rede
wherever i pick it up
it leads to the four corners
of the room

you must, my dear
pulling my hips from me, jarring
them with the calluses

                           you musk, my dear
                                          flared nostrils bat-flying
                                                    thru the strands of room

                           feel a map
                           lest you forget this room

                           when the magic physic
                           is done
                           and you shrink to solid-state

uncallused fingers
sorebright from cracked safes

weave life-lines
thru points of light

with a quick stitch
and a soaking up of colors

      vi

               Sun-man is lecturing upon
litters and scions

                      advancing into awlcomy

               the equator is one who equates
               the equated an equature

               in the beginning was....

      teacher, tell us of the equinox
tell us      again      of the lovely equinox

               equinox is the coroner stone
               the frowndation
               of awl dumbocracy

               a contraction of 'equal knocks'
               - for awl
awl is an only bard of murdern kratosism

      vii

                                    WARNING

                  all mining must be confined to the interior

                                          the skin of the room
                        may be pushed back, arranged variously
                                    but must not be torn

                                                      or darkness will spill in

                  reductive mining is recommended

the miners are brawny fellows
cyclopian

corneal lamp peering deep in

to dig      what is kneaded
without cutting threads of the map

                        there are many bits of pellet-element
                  all held apart by chunks of rock
                                    the task of the miner, to ask

                              the bits to move inward from the rock shell
               and form an arrangement one might enter

the miners expose their veins

i wear the bright colors

      viii

                  mirror, mirror
                      on the wall

                           who is

                                    billowing clouds of cotton candy

must be packed into tiny ore-cars
      for delivery

the skin of the room hides

                                behind thickness, a sickness

            builds in my hope

   Sun-man is gone, out the window

            Moon-woman is dead

the old crone in her lace of answers

            retreats to a corner

                  of the ceiling

silver comets fly to the mirror

                              and strangers entering the room

                                                      are opaque

Published in FIRES: Selected Poems 1963-1976, Thorp Springs Press (then, Berkeley, CA)