The rain is made
of falling masks,
masks like the faces
of bats, swashbucklers

carried in
on a wind of colors.
Eric is
gotten all dressed up

doesn’t know who dressed him,
some little Mommy
sent him off
the colors are crashing like

cymbals,
decibals,
flower-shouts
from floral throats,

algal blooms,
kaleidoscope blossoms
Eric hits
the colors with his face

His face becomes
a head-like
hollow
humanoid-esque

volume
full of colors
raining and
exchanging flames

The bed has decided to become a pretty picture,
and now the picture-frame has become politicized.
Some sort of squirrel or other burrower,
raccoon hedge-hog mole

is trying to eat its way in through the corner
(bottom left)
while the frog has hopped in, with his
kingly hop

to look at the fairies floating in
their party gowns of mosquito
sleeve (the fairies kill mosquitos and
dress in knits of red-hot innards

that the frog looks up at, dreamily;
if only he remembered how
to open mouth)
Eric is in the frog; waiting

for the sparkles and the show,
the rippling gossamers,
the almost incandescent organ-meats,
to realize they’re Dead and rain sad fruits

A man made out of the burnt worth of matches
leans back on the snow. He draws a white sheet like
a face that has been beaten
From the snow and tents it over his burnt lower body

Like a bandage of snow
Like a white pair of pants
With a hole torn in it
And the char of smashed-up ashtray blackness showing

Through the hole.
the man made out of ash-tray wealth
is suspended from a white sky
That meets the earth throughout the picture.

He is suspended by
Bleak strings
Of ash-tray stuff
That guide him like a puppet

Smearing the fire-stuff
Pulling the fire-stuff
useless
residue, of Mind and Industry

actoss the
snow of Clouds
Clouds of snow

The bed is occupied by a lake.
The lake is a missing person.
Who is the missing person?
The missing person is the bed’s mouth.
The head of the missing person is the bed’s nose.
The bed’s eyes are the bedposts.
The bed’s cap is the satin pillow, red like that.
The bed’s mouth is open.
The bed’s open mouth is a lake.
The lake in the bed is what the bed has tried to say.
It hasn’t worked.
The bed has not said the missing person’s name.
The nose of the bed is a hole.
The hole in the bed is the missing person’s head.
The lake in the hole where the head is a nose is cold, cold, cold.
It is a cold shape with shoulders.

There is some ship or waving vagueness sinking in the lake.

A birthday cake of creeping silence
crawled toward Eric with its frostbite
icing biting at him. These kind of kind of gifts
Keep being born and wrapping all around me,

Eric thought. Eric tumbled in a tussle with
the frosted sheets. He got up, and when
he’d gotten up, he had always been up.
The bed leaned like a tower of loose cake.

Eric was pretty sure the back-side of it
had all been eaten and was gone
already, but it turned with him while he walked
Around it, so he could not know could not catch

Up. A birthday cake of creeping silence
crawled toward Eric while he
circled it, like a wary groom. Did he want to
Marry cake, and grow up to be

Big, big, big? And maybe it was only
an empty shell, half-shell, of cake
sprinkled with miserable soot-powder
From the industrial processes that cored it

The bed has become warlike
With a spear, a bloodstain, and an eye that roams,
An eye that circles like a searchlight
Looking for the next morsel to invite

The bed is lonely in its creepy veins!
The bed is lonely in its carapace of hardened sensitives
All the blood is too near the surface
The nerves have lost most of their power to conduct

Transmissions, but they’re still just nerves
Even though they’ve learned to imitate armor
Like a butterfly
Might learn to imitate a fortress

Like a hole in the ground
Might learn to imitate a mouth with teeth
But it’s still just a vacant, still just a flutter, still just a
Little thought engorged with bloody feelings

Monumental, like Napolean’s shame
Ready to leap
With its blue veins like lakes of wounded.
Countries have fallen back to sleep, forgetting they were won

Sometimes a shrimp loses its shell
And is wrapped in a book of quilts
Such monstrosities wait like grandmothers
In the open-air vascular system

Where every color of blood floats gently in mid-air
Like grandmother’s dreams wrapped in her quilts
Page after page of exciting quilts
Like plot summaries

Of a heaven where sex continues
Into and through the infinite year
And the eyes of a grand old mother
Sitting on a dusty couch

In a realm of dust
With handfuls of blood climbing up through her
Limbs to adjust the pages
Eric realizes he has just become

His grandmother
And simultaneously
Been peeled
Looking at a mirror

The toucan on top of the glacier
Has shaved all the ice into feathers
With its nose like a hatchet
With its eye like a dead mess of fluff

And an man made out of the burnt worth of matches
With the self-esteem of something that’s been burned
With the limited locomotion of the martyr
Has declared himself the futile cross on Eric’s grave

Eric is kept from his grave by his eyes, in this dream
His grave in the glacier
In the stuck-together fluff-and-feathers
Where everything adheres to everything because ice sticks

His view-point is smushed up against
The surface where the scene is stuck together
A few pink distances are trying to warm up
The merger where peeled eyes

Wet gets tighter touching ice

Suddenly Eric was seeing the bed from a new angle, because he was falling off of it. On the way to the floor, he found a place to pause, a snapshot where shock caught and caged his perception. It was not far to the floor. But he was not there yet. Then he was on the floor, like an infant barely hurt (hurt by the surprise, only) with his shoulders on the phony mammal stuffing of the ratty carpet, full of flakes of dandruff, grains of soil, loose ends of hair. The phony mammal stuffing of the ratty carpet almost overwhelmed him with its pseudo-living scent. It was one of those shocking moments of being embraced and adored by an imitation, one of those moments when your soul is rolling around loose and you might find yourself with a new used soul by accident. This new used soul would be new to you but would have been used by someone else. Eric’s old used soul would then be swallowed by the carpet, which would be one way to escape the bed. The bed was full of souls, as beds can be. Even chastity betokeneth such privileges in the open-mouthed and gaping realm of souls, which is why nuns must be carefully trained against the nocturnal entrances of demons. “That’s a load of bull-shit,” Eric thought. “I live in the fucking real world,” Eric thought. My soul isn’t going to disappear like a sign through a carpet of artificial fibers,” Eric thought. “Shit like that bull-shit like that doesn’t happen doesn’t happen,” Eric thought. “I’m dreaming and I’m still in bed, I’m dreaming and I’m still in bed, I never saw I never saw myself I never caught myself off of it,” Eric thought. Suddenly Eric was seeing the bed from a new angle, because he was falling off of it. He was still only halfway to the floor when he found a place to pause, a snapshot where shock caught and caged and cushioned his perception. A cradle of shock. The bed was at a halfway angle, as if his sense of his own position had not been adjusted yet.

The bed is playing itself like an outraged juke-box
Full of Johnny Cash being rubbed up against silent headaches
Guns N’ Roses swallowing an infinite spearmint hotdog
That pools on the floor of telepathic cubicles

The bed detonates like a Rubik cube in a ten-year-old
Geek’s mind. All our chickens will be headless
All our sheets will be running through the market
Proving that we were virgins, again and again

And the aunts will cluck and consider our gallons,
Whether or not we bled enough for decency’s sake
Spermicide pools in the cerebral cortex
Deep deposits of dust that sneeze off vinyl memories

And the streamers, pink and blue, and the hairpiece
Of algae and the jack-in-the-box unjacked
And the phone line in which the cubicle is imagined
And the sneeze and the cortex and the decency’s lost leg

Someone with a very wide, squashed-flat head
And a very large bellybutton (that might be a chest wound).
Spirits look weird, because they don’t have to conform
Entirely to the normative appearances of people.

In the background pink and yellow-jello colored
Gunk stuck to the walls like bubble-gum contours
Chewy as the cellulose of tree-flesh, another
Indestructible, viewed through the indestructible

Blue-veined transparency of spiritual flesh.
God invented bodies because he hated this liquidity.
And the square shoulders of the soul as if
Squared-up for execution, and the eyes on stalks

Sprouting high above the head like escape-routes.
Hello. Are you ready for the bubble-gum ride?
The belly-button porthole leaks
Sad little blue-veined rivers that can’t face

Eric, left with three rocks and a pillow.
smudged and rumpled, sweated, drooled

Leftover traces of the bed slept
Passionate without performance of their passion
In an open place in the room

Nobody wants to be
saintly (invisible)

In the black furry space that
Waits to be hatched from
his body, like a tooth

Each rock was a part of
the belly of a
bed had disappeared

The pillow was
Everybody wants to be

saintly (invisible)
Pack in as many as you can

Always room to fit
However much
Folded-up space

Eric paused. He was feeling in the pink, half-way through the nature area, in the part where the Brillo flowers spun webs. They spun the webs by rubbing the red rust of their rusted molecules on the air. They rubbed their rusted molecules on the air so hard they stuck. Leaving dirty impressions lying around loose, while the free flowers ran around at angles to the picture, undepicted, by virtue of having no commerce with the air, except for dumping husks. The husks they dumped were webs of denatured molecules, hanging in the air impersonating nature. The Brillo flowers themselves were therefore very skinny like ideals. And further back was the castle, the pine-tree, and the bridge made of blue lakes. The husks they dumped were webs of demobilized molecules, caught in their positions, giving up their probability to become past events. The pink stage like a belt served the landscape as a proscenium to frame the top half as a depth leading away from the near place of the bottom half, so Eric was in two places, he was near and he was also far in that the presence of far gave him intentions and a motion that meant he was already speed-reading himself out of here. He was in a perpetual state of pausing while speed-reading, a dizzy placement in a moment that is barely there and probably not very worthwhile. “I’m here and there and near and far at once, with no time to enjoy any of them, since the moment I’m in is totally encompassed and consumed by an awareness of the relation between those states.” Eric never said or thought that, because one constant about the place where you are is you cannot be able yet to express the way yet that you are yet being it yet. Eric paused. Caught in the act of giving up their probability to become past events, moments got caught in the act there and stacked up.