The Amniotic Dream

by Timothy Lavenz


1

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I

4
the open duct
never conducts

breaks all my
notions of
love
peace
thought

wrings action out:
animation
pagination
autochthony
blot

sequences
of absences
belly-breathing

crowning
talk

5
time:

surrendering
to the current
in the rock

love for all the creatures
feature-caught

love for the measure
mammon brought

love for the missing
ought

love for what
the sequence
taught

6
echo for the present
is what for
the present said:

to halo
over horizons
of hatred

to be blatant
in the amorphous
element

to have a word
about the alias
in our dust

to be
trusted

to
us

7
are you feeling
the forerunner
of God?

never to be arrived at yet:
the possibility of calm.

oh but that too:
the possibility
of connection
tease taste
tulip
arm.

oh too:
fingers
breasts
strokes
errors
logos
stars

8
cant read
the mind
it tells me.

cant speak
what it speaks
to me.

cant stay open
to the tune
I swim in
essentially

cant but capsize
on falseness,
abuse

cant but see through
to the dark

9
every horror
grappling
groping

every mannequin
straddling
stroking

every ghost
groggy
going

every ashbag
focusing
numbing

every pirate
lonesome
roving

every lassitude
grounding
molting

every alibi
demanding
devoting

every parachute
landing
soaring

10
All I am
is a drooling story
succumbing
to the maximum
of things.

All I am
is a pooling porosity
beloved
to the seepage
of dreams.

All I am
is a groveling gossiper
coaxing out
filaments
of seed.

All I am
is a motioning marvel
enfolding
the correspondence
that rings.

All I am
is a local minimum
summing
the cogency
of lead

All I am
is the barking comma
salient
in the utterance
of realing.

11

All I am
is a forgotten remnant
witness
to the happening
of loss.

All I am
is a shifting augur
forgetful
in the cellophane
of being.

12
angel
arms splayed
wide silent
earthful praying

cup
of winters fountain
like spring

breath
of eve
the beginning

life
the feeling
of me

13
anxious
on the wing
of tomorrow

summoned
to the pinnacle
of possible

open
in the flow
of laudable

grown
to the limit
of powering

waiting
in the mirror
of love

14
relaxed
on the bridge
of myself to myself
I thought of what I wanted,
thought of what myself,
trailed off into the valley
of the world Id always loved

didnt need to know
why it was lost,
didnt need to know
why it was off,
didnt need to know
why I loved

only after that
I thought:
the bright bridge
going over
is us

whatever we said
longingly
went across

whatever was true
went on
unlost

15
bubbles of truth
channel through
the ether

faces turn outward
expose all
interiors

minds conjure
antidotes
to fearful

hands touch
on the silence
of meaningful

language
brims over
to see through

answers come out
like air
to meet us

16
desire more vital
than any living need
sustains me,
whispers me
to the ears
of the lost

at all costs
wrapped around
the open artery
of a scream...
cringes at being
known
we are not

would go
right now
to the coffin
were it not
for the fantasy
in between

were it not
for this love
believing us--
infinite
animate
amniotic
dream

17
radiant convection
of night
coming to consciousness
in my bust

the pedestal
outlawed,
the spotlight
corrupt;

desire
to be more like
what else?

18
deep into the lyric
thinking
trickles episodes
of irrelevance
into meaning

lip-balm
for the damned

seizures
seeing

19
adance
ascant
askew
asunder

in this
horrid clouding
mirroring called
you:

I
record
an image
a distance
a disease
eternal

try
to focus
the winds
of dead
echoes
on the body
ripped apart
by language

delivers
truth
to the others
we devour
like mad

in ethers
pain of
outside

20
the lurid
frame of

a kiss
a lift
impossible:

alive
amused
abused
adrift

21
the trappings cascade
tear and away

how clearly then
we speak to say:

this being was made
to speak this way

22
the power goes out

a call goes off

23
A silent science
of listening
intrigues

Into the Other
is poured out all reason

Liberated
the covenantal trust
of singers
believing

Spoke
of innocence
wrinkled
and shivered.

Rose
into the clearing
a Host

24
Love
that only
haunts and hurts

The climb
of the supercell
is perfect

25
beings and letters
return to sender
shredded
mourning
the code
in the keep

26
but as the eyes scanned
and the images danced

as the heart leapt
and the world planned

one grim epiphany
rose and subsumed
all phenomena:

I is that
mechanism
to dance;

I is that
code-cancelling
machine;

I proclaims
the inexistence
of meaning;

I loves
this world
without me

27
In darkness
a lark wanders
in the name of
peering farther

does not
give a hoot
about tomorrow

does not
wonder why
it cant be tamed

will not know
how far
it has to go

28
arid emphasis
or curse:

theory burns
the heart
of the learner,
changes his charge
into crypt-keeper,
grits his style
into twirling,
twerks his loaf
into a million

everyones fed,
no count goes missing

the universe
spits up
a miracle:

translucent,
ignorant,
deliberate
turd:

language,
suffering
everything

29
loose imaginations
starring
the reason of trust

turns the image
into bust
corporeal
in love with nothing
to do with it

cannot find the way to it
but does

birthing

30
Please, light,
dont leave me

Please, light,
leave

Please, light,
be me

31
vanished light

the sky
with rain
is writing

I am trying
to remember
my name

32
The Naming


given you
my embrace,
my word,
my start,
my absurd,
now its over
now I go forward

recessed light
shows me better
aches out
from the words

is into you reaching
for bold,
for passion,
for true

let you have that
in absence

let you go away:

was on time
to go living
someone else

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II

34
Generations of tutors eagle-taught:
natures evil, will
devour what its named.

Generations of letterationalities
for what?

Pretend to be awake in thought.
Pretend to name God.
Pretend the Thing has got
a thing it names.

Pretend child.

Pretend us.

35
All this weary ought
to writhe and lesson;
all these dreary Bogarts
to repay.
Smells
from the Motherland
wash in and shake
the sea.
Shake
everything
that can be.

36
every letter funnier

but I hope to see high shadows
where I walk.

37
The brain
of whats real
conceals me
from my feelings.

No one
will ever understand
what were feeling.

No one
will ever
be here.

38
Spread out in one quark-bubble
was the whole human impulse
to make love and trouble,
to travel and fable,
to frolic and scream,

for which we had
no more than a moments
praise to dream,

for which our one bright day,
limitless in its want to be,
constrained in what it was to be,
absorbed in metamorphoses
too encompassing to see,
was enough

to pop.


39
Paceshaken,
he tried to subdue
the cruel and pounding
flight from epoch to epoch,
corner to corner,
word to word,

tried to plunge the briar
back down into the seed,
tried to trudge the tower
back down to rock and clay,
tried to torch the errors
fears momentum
had so haplessly
strewn about the way;

but vile morality clung,
passions whip clacked and stung,
cancer ate away the hugging flesh,
loneliness won over every harmony;
shouting became the timbre of love,
jealousy the yoke of the gaze,
demand the object of prayer,
hatred the essence of trade
and who could ever dare
tame that? God himself
could only have bowed his head
in shame, could only have suggested
the one constant impossible thing:
to show the pacestricken
what most they fear:

the halting of all initiative,
the undoing of all contracts,
the collapse of every fortune,

40
the end of every ceremony,
crowning an incapacitated I can
with the silence of the dead messianic:

those who arrive not,
speak as speaking not,
live as living not;
those for whom time
is already long lost, gone;
those who wait and accept,
drenched in thieves sweat,
a most horrible gift: existence,
hell-bent by social destiny,
at rest in the downfall of things,
unified only in remembrance
with all the distant souls
who ever distant uttered
their impotent, disgusted Stop!
before being lost in turn
like everyone else

who wanted to go further than thought
and instead ended up
mangled,
forgotten,
dropped.

41
No more path
from torpor
to providence.

No more wisdom
to slicken
the long choice.

No more deadlocks
to change
on the doorstep.

No more verse
to carry forward
the Word.

No more way
to hear
what we heard.

42
Gods of idleness and taste
chary of the splendorous Bloom
sooner strive to give their take
than into being strive to move.

Apportioned to them by eager vow
is the Bride of all gained things,
the chaste and veiled old Body
in which space beats all feeling.

J ilted words, whittled, break in,
sad, taciturn, without failure,
passing leisurely, pouring through,
fireflies listless in the evening coo.

But the blessing instant remains
distinguished from all timed fate,
for they remember in the Main
the destiny of what there is to do.

43
The beds all day
my eyes
shimmer frozen.

A life of ones own
cannot be live.

(To give to emotion
all that is human,
all that there is
commotion in the abdomen,
lucky and
alone.)

44
The springs arent wicked,
the missions not insipid:
out of all fallen petals
to write the tell-tale ending
of existence sonata yet cling;

to sing the bulb
into nights moon outstretch
oer all waters down-bedding,
into perfect signing tone,
uncried, unkept.

How easy it will be!
to live up: each one
impression for the motor
fortuitynaked photos
for the heart-held hold

blind
in that damned eternal
remnant of spring
bellowing inside thee
spheres, squares, surfacing
to ring out
hollow rings:

ode,
ambrosia,
cantor,
king.

45
Taste of my cauterized
thinking this evening
and Im regressing
into speeches million-
folded and revealing
that destiny motioned
forward by linking
nature to my nature:
gulp
blinking.

46
O sadness,
revive me from
my hatred of myself,

deliver me
from the wasteland
of my presence,

give back to me
the nothing
I so relish,

teach me
to accept again
my abandonment,

guarantee
one last time to me
that I will go,

and I will go, sadness,
I will go on after you
to love.

47
thought I was so tired,
but could not sleep;

thought I was glad,
but could only weep;

thought I had nourishment,
but bread alone could I eat;

thought it was free,
but no: in too deep.

48
All my pain
in my own one
tomb. Loseable,
stayed,
unknew.

Whereas real
I was you
to touch you:
the truest gaze
I drew
between our times
and triumphant
scuttled
through.

49
Inside my edge:
spoilt tissues
rusty valves
ruin-genitals
ghostly fluids
brainmush stew...

Outside:
communication
links true
verbal elevators
you.

No contact
to my own
skin

appearance's reality
the truth of the world:
co-
intrusive:

mutinous mind,
forlorn kin.

50
WATCHED

In me: the seeds
of every speech,
but I cant
speak.

Sets up erect
mans eternal
devil-squeak:
words squeezed
from the Mind
through Hell bleaker
than all historys line
dissolute inscripts
from the incipit
tortured in the brief
quilts anomie.

In such night
deprived vocation
bereft glad images
I was led
at deprivations last
to Gods grave
named at last:

The cart nows been scraped
cross old Nagarjunas back;
the shrill axis of access
echoes vocalless back
the scar,
the tired claw,
the clogged sieve:


51
time,
too roomy,
too open,
too black.

So that I will lose you
in that; but
here,
take it,
see me
on my knees,
racked.

Unclasp,
kind demon,
and pray.

52
Nothing but nothingness,
there is my start
to go nowhere after then,
not even to art
though I try
and I do not lie
still so collapses: my heart.

53
Ghosts pull all the strings,
erase everything,
made it come back streaking,
dancing like tomorrows
in the pastI,
pleasant puppet,
host of torment,
laugh and cringe,
sing my sorry feet on some sick songI,
learning-to-live dwarf,
critic out in motion,
satires tired sow
now ghost.

54
Presents presence
all displaced;

rats and evil
premonitions
unseeable by words
course through
my breath.

Am I dead?
Am I breathless?
Am I doomed
to outside all being
course instead?
Am I pain?

dear God, give me
nothing to gain. Let me
no longer
rest my head.

Rest, my head,
o God,
and give I shall then
no less.

55
Brim again
sin again,
give again
in. No
finish then:
mourning is
to live
however
gripped
in nervousness
dissuasion
stone-lipped-
tipped
then again
into this,
fishing
for my twilight
in your sun.

56
MEME

The rind of Treblinka
is chinked on Wall Street Wall;
Canada hums liable in computer code
worse than Babel; Ernest stocks up
like the prodigal son but not
to return the product
or to thank the Fathers seed;
Anarchys angelic factory
is commanded by satisfied feelings,
starved wet by apples in our dreams;
each hears unequivocally
the players pre-caring the Truth
magnetic to the point of crystal
Energy, saluting as to the Star
that like David went down
had he.
At the end
of history, guilty; which we are
and cannot say, the dead
robbed all reparation. Have we
forgotten our shame
and not only? Ambitions
shadow casts farther
into the maddening hardness
of revenge and foreclosed grief;
down into Hells contemporary
last circle, where the only word
to echo is obey.
But closer now,
murmur: the chidings over,
the meanings all run out; law
out of service gets undone; being
gone home and worthless with a nothing

57
saves nothing but the outline
of a caterpillar, cold to borders,
amused. The messiah
that
came yesterday
to drive justice past destiny
to we who wake and wade
uncomfortably uncomfortably to sing
the dwelling-prose that made me
now chrysalis for the crystallization,
now grave for what decays in it,
now tired sullen motion to that gate
now antiphon,
now meme.

58
Antiphon

The hurdling coddling magnet does not bleed.

59
handbleeds on the scarcest
orifice gnawed black

or you saw it or
awe
came at last

and dying laughed

and no morpheme
and nothing
past;

your eye
my see-through organ
that grabbed it,
off-the-wall down
clasped it,
sheltered me glass.

but the final moment,
the final friendship,
the final,
bites back.

I'll have made no painting
to bleed
on your hands.

60
Decays not the one
that will work us
away; you can see
flayed limbs praying
still in the encasement
where only language seems
to hone its way.

I took pleasure there,
here in its final time.

Took time there
now where whatever is
is your say.

61
A crystal note
runs over my eyelid
detached as it is
from my agent.

After your eye spoke
and heard
the same rain
there was no one
no more.

The street
gorged with them
buckles and
gives way.

The crystal note
rings,

hopefully.

62
An embroidered page
weathered yellow by the sun
shows on its black veins
no signs of going green,
no sign of comic age;

seeks there a code or a cage
where it frays,
where it tries to name
in hope or in shame
by the instep of all dust
the standing truth:

What trusts there
the one unique instant
of luck or chance, a gaze
away and up, of
not enough yellow pages
to speak that nature.

The desk crawls
with people
like a king crab
to his last dusk,
in sliced wood
squashed and patterned

home,

where it warps, splits
and pinches

the earth.

63
The care of a touch
robs the night of its angst.

If I
on the silence of that edge
dont come back,
forgive me.

Come with me
yourself
to that edge.

64
Silent is the lonely heart
that stumbles and crumbles
and knows not to start:

Let him then
just come back to his art
and he will be delivered
from the grave
hes offered in

Let him
be dropped
in the middle of his thought

Let him
withdraw
into the offering
of his name.

65
What Ive done cant last,
what Ive sheltered
passed.

I lay down
in the bedrock
of my fear.

66
Down
to the
cage

where
trickles
page

praise
of what might
come in.