As I am being sandwiched
Between taut malingering palms,
This sudden correct placement
At the feet of a digit.
The tips and their prints shaved off—
Blank and ****** spots
Like a trail of breadcrumbs in fresh rain—
Leave thick dabs like oppressive dewdrops.
You can spread lips or cheeks
And allow this insertion again—
Perhaps the pleasure will emerge.
Finally I am human enough for your sick urge—
And it is too late for you to love me again.

Sad to see
How things never change
As arrogance has no easy rhyme
With orange
And you cling to a question
With some significance to your struggles
A shallow epiphany
Leading you by the *****
(Compulsively repeating)
A reminder of a void
That gap in your memory
The size of the dusty kitchen cupboard
Or your father's ****.

No one needs to know.
You should keep to yourself.

Laying in the dark, stretched out in disdain,
A shadow waddles up to join me on the couch.
I see very little, groggy with sleep,
Yet I feel a sour ***** in my guts,
As her words spill with scorn from her lips.
A last ditch proclamation of love,
After all of the frustrations have smothered it
Underneath wasted hours of medicated sleep,
Hiding from impending anxieties
That never occur with the frequency they are anticipated.
Wasting hours and hours hiding from the frustrations of the past,
A place where I felt welcome,
Until I saw the emptiness of death
And wanted to avoid it in the waning light of my life.
Now we have parted in anger, again,
But I feel relief for us both,
From our stubborn whims and self-defeating depression.
I just hope you don't drown out in the world.
I will still love you forever.

Atchafalaya -
Such mystery seemed to reside in this cluster of letters:
The music of it's sounds, the mystery of it's meaning and origin,
the vastness of the swamp underneath the bridge.
In my youth, the bridge seemed like a sidewalk to wondrous new vista -
A frontier with a new wilderness -
At once strange and familiar, unknown but innate -
At first, it's lull stultified the buoyant mood that began the journey -
Where the piney woods turned into the swampy alluvium of Louisiana,
A state with instant personality, apparent in the ravaged roads
That sang against the car tires a desperate song of it's savage frailties
That could impassion or disappoint, or a combination of both,
Where the Highway Patrol were unseen despots
Lurking in the murky weeds and trees
But (luckily) only as scenery in my stories.
Where the lure of New Orleans began to emerge,
My imagination running wild with drunken tales of spicy food
And sensuous women, looking for unspoken desires
In de Beinville's Vieux Carré, where Old God's run wild -
This place where magic was in the freedom found there -
Tip-toeing, drunk, across the sharpened swords -
Through the chicken-bloodied doors -
Ah, but the swamp was a source of strange dreams and visions
Throughout my life,
And it will always make my heart race
When I approach the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge.

Once it was unknown
Only through the boredom of days
Did a mind conceive of a framework
For the patterns of light and darkness
That came and went in the sky above
And how the abstraction of seconds
Growing into hours and days
Could be gathered into numerical traps
To give a glimpse into the lives that have passed
Into death, the only relief from
The oppression of this history -
The oppression of time.

Ancient scenes carved in stone
Show us the beards of Babylon -
Land-locked and mythic
In the fertile crescent of desert rivers,
Their reliefs find the ancient faces
Adorned with the finest groomed beards in antiquity -

In the ruins of Nineveh and Ur,
Crowned heads hold distinctive locks -
Shared by the flowing chins -
All with strands of coils -
Long and barrel-thick -
Braided together with skills they discovered
In the ether of unwritten history.

Depictions of kings fighting their legendary battles -
Frozen in the stiff stills of chosen poses -
Storyboarded for an anticipated future -
The deeds are incomplete as found -
Damaged by time and jealous men -
And all I remember are the beards.

Winged Annunaki standing tall,
Hold strange repose inside a wall -
Buried for centuries since they stood,
Amongst scattered tools of stone and wood -
Their legs are spread in a conical stance -
Their elbows and wrists were bent in a dance -
Fingers cupped around an oblong cone -
Each pointed towards ears of a supplicant one -
While the arms at their sides hold a bag by a strap,
Only dreams can provide the meanings they map -
One scene is carved with all human faces -
Where the beards are thick with fully coiled laces,
But another variation of a similar scene,
Show Annunaki faces that a bird would preen -
With bulbous eyes and curved hawk-like beaks,
Where beards won't grow, on bas reliefs.

Mysteries may follow damaged relics of the past,
But the Babylonian beards will always last.
Ad infinitum. Ad astra.

I. We have waited long enough.
There have been three opening acts,
All with various cats in possession of various tongues:
The cross-eyed Siamese, the blind Manx,
The one-eyed Persian,the Blue Forked Wonder,
The Antipodean Papilla Monster,the Twisted Golden
*** Licker,and the lynch mob's Dogwood Dangler.
Yet somehow they have all rolled into one,
A stale tumbleweed of hush.
We're all nervous as ghost town cliches accumulate...
Then she arrives...
The stagehands grab axes and hack the piano
Into kindling ...anticipating the glacier to come.

II. Her silence is best expressed by a necklace of ears,
(An heirloom from her father's failed jungle years),
That she wears along with diamonds
Atop her green-veined cleavage.
(Oh the banana leaves!)
It creates a vacuum as she sings
An anti-aria to our fat toothless quorum.
(We are all passengers on her great chest's heavings.)
We stomp bare feet and stub painted toes
Cackling into our sleeves between her gulps and sighs.
(Even the blackest,rarest of pearls would be
Mere condensation on her horrible *****,
That rising and falling quiet.)
Oh look how her mouth moves,
Like a goldfish gasping in the palm of one's hand,
Helpless and hoping to be swallowed.
Oh look how her mouth moves,
Like an empty eye socket blinking in sacred secret code...
How tired we all are now...so tired.