It was some yesterday,
sitting in my high chair
eating salted cucumber slices
a wooden one
three adjustments only
locked in
a bumble bee landed on my arm
the pain raced through my blood and brain
little pin ******
I could not get out
my memory stops there
sitting in my chair.

I work for Jones & Co.
You are likely somewhere down below,
I have grown used to this unnatural height.
Once, here, as a younger man, I read articles,
working on cases just long enough to cultivate indifference.
My first firm party, I was made to wear an ivy laurel.
We were mingling on the penthouse deck,
when a gust unceremoniously removed it from my head.

Jones is a superstitious man,
he has a dream-catcher above his office door.
He designed a vaulted spiral staircase on our fifty-first floor.
The one separates Jones from his company,
the other, us from below.
Five years of billing in six minute blocks,
labyrinthine increments, Herculean costs.
A kind of optic chiasma where the nerves cross and people get lost.



B.E. Twain

I wanted a cup of coffee
not the whole ***
leave the rest for someone else

a variety of hues
all blue
the lure of the azure
my cerulean addiction
these indigo afflictions
the stabbing pain of sapphire
caught in those eyes, a quagmire
the temptation, to think, through
then you
a variety of hues
all blue

the “thundering legion”
nether regions
lightning lesions
an ace up the sleeve
for Marcus Aurelius
an ace up the sleeve
for those on the omnibus

There is gum in this napkin
Poseidon sent Delphin
To fetch him a Sea Nymph
With whom he had children

There was no arranged marriage
No blue borrowed baggage
Just a soul set to sea
Locked fast in the steerage

A put-upon child
Chased by malady
A Mausoleum door
Opened just for the rabbitry

The epitaph read:
He missed his mother.
A lamb to the slaughter.
There was no one’s daughter.
If you pass by,
then throw in some carrots
for the angels have eyes.

It fell at long last,
Carried in by a straggler
A burial shroud for the body
Outlining his master

I find myself in snow
walking on moon dust
pressing in tracks
out in winter

trees looking down on me, what do they want
douglas fir, trembling aspens and more
solitary in a green dark
the cold of night in North Vancouver

just me
walking a white trail
a marked path
leaving foot stones

looking back
the way disappears into nothing
looking ahead
keep going, he told me

I was thrown from a boat like a prophet,
washed ashore on an Island of Baalbek-sized structures.
In the Atlantic, under the ‘i’ and ‘c’,
thirty-three north, thirty-three west, degrees.

Ancient mariners must have missed it,
concentric waterways and land bridges, cut by a channel to the sea.
Occasional women gathering and cutting cane,
dirges being sung by a certain, Sarah.

Farther up around the outer ring,
a Bay horse, trapped in a tidal pit.
Just enough seaweed at high tide,
eyes white from living in the dark.

A strange place,
I find myself the only man,
another Adams or Crusoe.
I will free the Bay tomorrow, and head inland.

You know what the difference was?
It was whipped cream.
With one line of code,
I could solve everything.