John Nòto

INTERIOR WITH BLACKLIGHT

Inside the reign of night there lives a woman whose face 
is a blacklist of names appended radially to prowling 
eyes, 
An acid-wash of impassioned gazes written on the 
smooth muscle of subways, 
Twisting desire through wormholes in the structure of 
catwalks from which nested electrical birds swing my 
soul by inverting its photo-attraction.

A series of celestial operations pull down shrouds of 
vital tissue weeping stars along the fulcrum. 
A spinal dream-milk columns over fields saturated with 
black mushroom-clouds producing a music of restless 
dolls. 
They glow with a fragrance from the tear-ducts threaded 
through musical clefs in subcutaneous wailing, 
Escaped from my cradle of bedsprings rocking the deep 
coil.

Up the alley of downtime burning 
The armature embracing my core frames a storm-driven 
viewscreen bristling with somatic armor against death. 
Then dawn is a brink of distant thunder arising in 
conscious auras beyond the mega-city, 
Moonstone on-line. 
Sharp horizons captured in time-lapse brush aluminum 
vents glinting from within cells of the fictive 
connotations of sunlight.

I open my eyes and flood the hollows of internal combs 
with a cyclone of atmospheres imposed by machine- 
language accelerating through comet-tail genetics. 
My ears are lashed with subliminal regret and the cries 
of unsettled continents as blue fades in.

Over eons from dark to light, the heart has sought her 
comfort zone; 
Over every waking hour of shutdown through the X- 
band static encryption 
A woman lost in red-petaled voice, in the red ink of 
morning, commits.

Inside my jaw her blinds retract prismatic lust to veins 
distending behind the retina, 
Folding the world into plastiform houses smoked silver 
with abstinence. 
The dark engorged with brilliance skews the loop. 
I always squint when I sleep.



NEPENTHE

The dam breaks and phosphorescent swans burst
       through a 
cool, exploding hillside; 
floating-sun kaleidoscopes ravel and burn, 
scattering their ashes on autumnal trees as foliage, 
tuneful in decay.

My mind is burning from cognizance to involution 
and in reverie becomes a flaming shell 
released from all spin-control exterior to the core, 
my faultless love spiraling inward by light 
admitted through pinholes 
turning behind dark speckles of mineral toward
       the seahorse womb, 
she, secret lizard of the sea, 
whose enamelled skull has vulcanized dimension 
and sprouted colored stones foregrounding tide pools 
suddenly subsumed in glowworm vibrations 
accordioned in a mist of unchecked night-terror and
       ferment, 
a vertigo of steep forest floors rising obliquely from 
sands 
in helical down-drafts, 
a web of soft-fire emerald pinions.

A super-lucid vision injected by beak-syringe 
engages my fall: 
the world is an archangel peacock's perch, 
where Big Sur convolves with Egypt 
underwater in the plane of the ecliptic, 
animated by snails and starfish, reeking, 
a seaweed arbor delirium entwined within an indigo
       hypnosis 
of pyramidal dune archaeologies, 
arcane medicinal pictograms 
and revolving-planet word spells, 
a mage-spore floating unfleshed on the song of
       submerged 
fusion-flames 
compacting saturnine comet-nuclei, long-dormant, 
a centrifugal iris-grain volition, stirring.



FRACTAL TURBINE (TURBAN) - THE CIRCULAR WIND

A guttural hum suspends the night's dome, 
a turbine rotating on an axis presumed from the 
sun's abdomen 
as it shudders overwhelmed with stars and planets, 
the undefined fractals of the cosmic iris, 
risen, multiplying, lustrous.

Of "splendor in the grass," of blades, this engram: 
Lying back naked to the wizened moon, 
scored and wreathed before rain against barbarous 
clouds, 
I hail the sky reeling in opacity, 
an unsayable thrum bathing thorn-clusters and acorns, 
and the waves whisper low octaves spun from giant 
elms, 
this clutch of earth cast before swaths of fertile 
dark nebulae, 
whirling murmurs of gestation at my ears.

The tall weeds vibrate in passage 
and my lungs are a finger-branching, 
a circular wind pared down behind walls of infinitely 
folding cells, 
nipples breathing in the vigor of cool pine 
braided through the willows and wands, 
summed and wound bipolar to the spine; 
And through hands clasped behind my neck, 
my fused skull becomes a base plate 
for the ascending alchemy of jet horizons - 
the firmament is an opal-studded turban, 
a shrouded headland breeding fire.



VIBRATIONS IN THE GRAMMAR OF YOUR UNCOMBED HAIR 
CAUSE ME A FORCED-CHAMBER EXPLOSION

This flood of passion is a river overflowing through your 
ribs into the valley of soft, complex machines that make 
me tick; it is a draconic smoke forced up the flutes of 
stand-pipes at high-pressure, a stuck horn bursting out 
eardrums, a blowup of your face in torched paper, a 
swollen mango thrown, cracking ivory cups dispersing 
paint and powder.

Like a whispered marionette, you hang by sinews 
laconically from my optic chasm, a reservoir of muted 
incantations cut open to run splinters through your nape 
with rough hands scraping at gauze used to cover the 
scars no daddy could wash clean.

You were soft-selected, made animate and coated with 
milkglass and hardening pearl. Daddy is a wax figure, 
the ideal on the viewscreen. You snake in his lap like a 
belly but with more precision. He turns your aspiring 
words over in their graves, you with the wandering eyes 
and lips, the ones that startle me in bondage through the 
blinds before dawn.

Fill in the gaps in my pain and arrive at the same 
destination: to squander the roots of things at your 
breast, lost in an underworld savaged by revisions of the 
past where it seems to matter what kind of symbol I am, 
and you are all fruit and squirm.

I'm starting toward the window in gasps and, looking 
down, I see the street full of light already caking on 
asphalt. I prefer the dark walls of a jazz club where your 
father lives at the bar entertaining his own drool as we 
exchange knives and flutes. Fits of ribbon close in on us 
nightly, his chalk shell tied overhead to the frame of a 
vandalized portrait of you made from baby sparrows' 
tongues and crewel.

When you stopped calling me at midnight, quavered 
in the low registers, I turned one palm outward to lock 
fingers with your wake, echoed and stored in the voice- 
mail, and I wheeled over on our knuckles slowly, 
inscribed the name of a city we roved separately in the 
stone of a small plot under patterns of light building into 
walls, the skyline a printed circuit-board operating 
twenty megavolt guitars, chord and discord on the wire 
immolating reeds in your hair on a woodwind fretwork 
times three.