In the starvation of exile
Gambling on bright colors
Rapt, *****, fate-accepting hunger
Tugs vicious on the leash
Faint taste of apples
And mistletoe cramps
Among the Cypress, Cedar, Pines
That cross my path
In fog as full as clouds
Fusion of memory and idea
Crowds the milky doom
Where monarchs relax
Strawing gaseous milkweed
I sip from the sky
And await my crown

He would act on hate
But call it kinetic indifference
Like a natural disaster
(Or a budding ideology)
Conscience behind the wave
Some kind of Freudian slave
Imploding with rage
Exploding with love
Eroding the face of God
The blind are out of luck

I can't remember
But I'm thinking about memories
Too many fingerprints
Clouding up the scotch tape
On a broken lens

And what is innocence?
An instant weighed against insistence?
I hear perdition's persistent
And penitence of repentance is tinder

A hermit crab in a soda can
Evicted from a bubble gum dungeon
Fireworks on the tongue
Licking undertow of heavy sod
Swaddled in laminate pressure
Breathing sea foam
In a featherless sinking slant
An elastic anchored pendulum
Falling zagged
A jelly-hocked comet
With coattail streamers
Fertilizing liquid nickel

I can feel your pain
It sounds like ice melting in my inner ear
A whisper towing the ides of March
Like the turning of a page
A dayblink gesture
A cyclone of chaotic intention
Mechanically sorted and pressed
Gone to waste behind the spoiled milk

I hate the wind
The wind is like the conscience
It saltates through parallax angles
And belittles you
The tiniest draft is like
Being dragged through a burlap sack
The wind pulls my lifeline
And I spin like a pinwheel

My nakedness is the dipping point
Death sheds its modesty and
Works up the courage to slip me some GHB
I pray that I sleep through to the next life

A true emissary of breadth
Shallow in trajectory
A speck became a wreck
In the backdrop of infinity

Appalled by the bearers of all

Can you cram it all in?
Foot. Crow. Words. Pride.

Out of conversation
Stirring moral gumbo
Squint red-tinted as if
Looking through a glass of chagrinadine
In a surely tempest
Grassed at impasse

Mute in the mind's eye
Sifting through hindsight
Every find was a light
That's already burnt out

And once silence is broken
And patience kneels for me to climb up
I pay tribute to the sunrise
The perpetual ripening
Among the sticky-sweet decay

She retreated, the slimming distance
Nibbled her silhouette
Until a crustless crumb pecked by a starling
Spun a winged pirouette
Into the sun

And I, pouting in the throb of tactile silence

Most people lead with the jab
But his 1-2 punch was dactylic
The majority of his poems are haymakers
Homogenous mixtures of slurred speech
That rarely connexts

His footwork is nothing special
He still finds the canvas too springy
He's distracted by blinking

Graceless graphite paws
Taking granite swings
Skipping chips of deadweight loss
Embedded in the stream of ink
Now dripping from his brow
The fighters looking up
And the ref is counting down

Celestial cataracts, tunnel-visions of the Gods
Gossamer glory and rusted revelations
Ruins upon ruins upon ruins, on the brink of ruin
Catastrophic license, divine influence
Be merciful to the self... Above All Else

Micing conch shells and waiting for instructions
I was drowning in silence
Listening to the fog
Fuzzy-eyed and supine
Staring at the bottom of the sky
Where the shade tastes like sea breeze
And the soul flashes its sailfeathers

She's got fingernails like beetle shells
Lashes like arachnids
Grasshopper cloppers
And the feelers of a healer
Loud as a monarch

She's got a tick
That's gorged itself to grapehood
Her second heart exposed
Like a colostomy bag
Some kind of mystery flag
Rolled up, dipped in kerosene
And stuffed into a bottle of glowworms

A chamber wreathed by powdered scarab husks
Leaden dervish whirling
Cookie cutter punches
Sideways churlish purling
A muffled roar mid-whistle
Doppled whisper curling
A puckered ejection
Twisting gristle
Saturnal tick
Gorging gorges with squeegee sips

Ire is in her pupils
Rainbow fire
Breathing in, breathing out
Inspiration expired
She is the furnace driving the choir
Her backdraft jilts the spirit higher

Excuse me...
Exposure makes the humor drier
And the bread stale

She stood quiet, flipping through her moods
Like depression hunting through late night cable
Dutiful bloodhound digits sniffing out relief
They fall on the carcass of something that was killed in the 90's
Puncturing the bloated cadaver a noxious fume spills out
And lulls me to sleep
Nerves untangle, the blowfish deflates
The best self-defense is reason, but it's held me at bay
It's out there somewhere
Howling at the gates

Don't threaten me with Ahab's death, that's romantic
Because purity of heart is to will one thing

Don't tempt me with Monte Cristo's fate
Or Joseph's state around year 8
I wanted love, I wanted acceptance

So pick me up Zarathustra
And drop me in the earth
Or else the sea, but first the fire
While I try to find some worth

I thought that I could think myself to anything
Because the mind is for wishing, but
Wishes are besieged by wants
Taunted by the echoes of the well
Asynchronous haunts

Tall tales, wagging tongues
I'm headed west for the vestiges
Unabridging the hints in yesterdays messages
Soul scavenging mannequin droll
From the costume jewelry of conversation
Deep in the hard drive of stone faced agony

I am gripped by the phantom limb of a nubbed Esau
Vexed by Elijah's wrathful honeybear
Haunted by the indignance of martyrs
Quoting crickets and sowing thickets
I can't find who brokers the barters

Make me saint of the excuse
I'll color in the black and white
Justify all non-systemic abuse
The oppressed aren't bad
They're just misused

I know the saint of folly
Like a brother or a mood
He's a misfired love that crash-landed
Strangled by a lesser brood

A ploy cloys coy
Boiling in your lachrymose cloister
Suspicious bubblings and clammy affection
Sentience and vengeance
Sentence and vigilance
Intense beliegerance

Have you ever heard
A catastrophe at the other end of a telephone?
The shriek and silence
Of unknown violence
The wail and moan of a dial tone
Phonetic kinesis corked!
Words twisted to the snap
Wrung to the crack
A digit bridge bedlam
Calcination of lispy, nasal, rasp, and husk
Bellow whispers fanning ash
A static sting and the ears go black

Anxiety smothers reason in the swelter of shelter
Claustrophobic familiarity threatening avalanches
Leaving Matryoshka burial mounds
Piles of broken pylons soaking in puddles of bulk
Beneath the glassy gaze of taxidermied chaos

Calcified Mounds of once-maybe treasure
Form a cavernous regret
Where mite is rite
And the moth is a man of the cloth

Sometimes a heavy yawn can
Feel like digging a shallow grave
Eyelids shovel the sandman's mud
and you lie in ambush half awake
Like a venus flytrap waiting
To bless a stranger with some shelter
In the closing superdome of your affection
Gummed to death by a ******* flower
of conscience, digested in
Insensate reactivity
You absorb what you love
And repeatedly insist
That the laws of nature
In the semantosphere exist

Ducking the mantid mandibles of a consummate morning
I thrash in half-dream slog and squish
Amniotic chrysalis, unsplit, darkened
Adrift an ocean of bliss in a water balloon

The rain is brittle
The snow is jagged
And the sky is funneling loneliness
Down the icy porcelain chutes
To the tired murk of unholiness
Where excuses are wallpaper
And the blues are gift-wrapped

Bluebirds with batwings
Sing hymns to their hatchlings
In the din of eternal hiss
The chirp of absurdity listens
On the lip of a fleur-de-lis

My triggers are revealed
The entire plectrum spectrum
Scraped by bows
Hamartial law is meta-sin

Wild breath stabled in consonants
Like a pilgrim posing in an archway
A loaded bolt, an unquiet chamber
In naked exile---flailing at strangers

A dissolute solution? Absolutely.
But paranoia sees emergence
Into metanoia in sane convergence
Resurgence of urgency is an enemy to urchins

My God this place is run by critters
Love nestles in the shade
Where all moving shadows are predatory
And a lost child dreams of wildfires
Holding the hand of an arm-sized stick
He lumbers through an unbeaten path
Vomiting greasy puddles of gasoline
Eyes shining as ferocious as panther piddle
And the bunnies scatter!

He found me with a gaping chest wound
And cauterized me with a brand
Called it collateral damage
But when it came time to deliver
The wax seal was deemed to beautiful
It was decided my contents should remain a mystery

The vowels have no breath
The consonants have no spine
The intention never was
What wasn't never does
What doesn't ever wants
A paper airplane in a fiery crash
No black box, 10 seconds to ash
I'd rather be put through a shredder
And when mania sets in - pieced together
Or at least confetti for some wedding
Or a kenneled kittens bedding
But, alas, I'll simply decompose
A muffled scream, a frantic ghost

I asked you how it felt to carry me
You shrugged, dropped a deadweight apology
And drifted ahead, dumb and silent
Non-responsive, the task complete
Abraham was Don Quixote the second he saw blood
You were St. Paul

I worked for a year in that office
The they tore up my constitution
And replaced it with a plaque on the wall
Called me a hero and scheduled my euthanization

He doublespeaks
But one voice is an octave higher

The alto is shaky
The tenor wants to be base
Waving bladed feelers

You bleeding sphinx-heart!
Fool Hunter!

We both just want to know how big this cage is

I rattle the cage and you're cagey and rattled
I won't race on your terms
I can outrun the saddled

Thinking about planned obsolescence in nature
Trying to find a way to justify capitalism
Where every act of immediate gratification
Is a crack of the whip
And every lash, every scar
Is accompanied by a token with a price tag
Battered batteries not fit for a landfill
Fat on flattery, pandering to wishing wells
Mad about mattering

Holding mass at a molasses menagerie
Of flypaper families with hourglass salaries
Bending to plastic
The **** from caste to caste is drastic
Might not be able to patch it
Empathetic, but that feeling clashes
With everything we're asked
And everything we're tasked with

It's for the greater good of the individual

I've been stealing from the sun
Squint-whittling spears of light
That sink into my pupils like molding pins
And come alive like tapeworms
Carving a writhing yolk
Pulsating against paper-thin opalescence
A pre-amble to the impossible puzzle

Frozen at the cliff of reason
I want to believe
But it's a long way down
Through crag and crumble
Where footing isn't found
And gravity gets hazy
In the yawning wink of the abyss
Below an ebbing pitch
Static black
Epochal pulsing of the rhythmic rift
I bungee into the galloping buzz
Like Achilles and his swan dive dip

Manufactured certainty
Is not make-believe
It's something much more horrifying
A universal need

A rationalized worldview depends on a bubble
Some say ignorance is worth all the trouble
Me? I'm an imperious vicarious
Phaethon without ever touching the chariot

A lot of missed writing opportunities
Some days I might think it
But I'd rarely ever write something like
"Diary of cryarrhea"
In some lights it's like a cute Tom Robinsonism
But from most angles it's too cheap to serve as filler
I'd like to think I can gain something by letting loose a little
But too often it feels like farting in church