~
Maternal midnight

Metallic lakeside

Freon heart, fayence mind

Eyelids of iron ore

Influence feet into the water

Into an embargo bay

Clear and innocuous, innocuously blind

Hills like white elephants on a polar plateau

Mosquitos on her mouth

Drink the blood of encryption

Change the tone of her voice

They pass behind the blue vein

Become infinite particles of her
~

~
The boys of summer.

Johnny once sat under the bleachers, the scar on his tongue, a reminder of the time he bit it after falling from a treehouse. A sack full of yesterday's news in a red wagon, the first and last clues.

Eugene ... the other kid who dropped out of sight on Sunday morning, now the evening edition; now a black spot on the sun.

Why the two-year gap?

Departures and landfalls. But no explanations.

Mom and Dad never comfortable peering into the camera lens. Big brother breathing out vapors until something sparks and all
the old questions came back.

A detective's paradox. No bone. No fragment. No evidence. In his home garage hangs a poster of Eugene to remind him every day.

-- for Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin
~

~
the night starts here,
the night starts here
in the dunes,
fixed in time;
incipient waves falling into place,
their subtle purpose
to roll over and sing;
the fountainhead above us,
like it's above the shore,
attaching softness to a shell.

we blew on a dandelion
and the whole world disappeared;
love is a mysterious shape,
love is a remembered rhythm.

I have trembled
my way deep,
I'm a guest in here,
drinking at the stream,
seeking bliss in
the plural homemade kiss:
peppermints and orchid rain.

we please the night,
we please the night in interlude,
and it merrily leaves us that strand
of pearls called "good morning."
~

Earth comes out of its greenroom

I bend at the window
looking through the glass
down upon its vastness

something out there is wrong

the future's not what it used to be
a shadow tells me

I feel mysterious today
a stranger to myself
I don't recognize my voice

objects outlive us
but we are more than an accident of stars
someday we will be infinite
breaking into the distance

by serene velocity
by delicate transitions

bringing us closer
to a renewed interest in happiness

I blinked, but beheld it,
the marching of warships,
the broken caskets
at the feet where bishops
of Brixen worshipped,
and the agonizing steps to the castle
-- a spiritual climb --
gifts and prayers in each one's pocket,
(you've got yours, I've got mine).

And there it was opening in the sky:
a woman, in between cycles,
clothed with the sun;
her groom carries her up those steps,
they ring the bell,
and make a wish
for their love to flow against
the current like sea flowers
in the spring.

I blinked, but beheld it,
there was smoke,
there was wind,
there was nothing
but the warm scent of potica,
and pletna aplenty,
their upright oarsmen rowing
through the bloodstream.

They row for the stillborn
who never see the sun.

But there is freewill, and there is sin.

Our kingdom rise.
Our kingdom fall.

Forgive us first, Father,
(our blood shall feed the earth).

~
Hand and needle,
weapons of mass protection.
Mending day called solace,
bitterness in every stitch.
When all guides disappear
the hand begins to tremble,
that is the material point.
Listen to the water,
the sea is full of memories.
It knows everything,
it feels nothing.

A rage is building.
The sails unfurl,
the wind follows.
A hundred years of
traversing the deep
on a ship full of opiates
and other distant mermaids.
This blood vessel,
cresting the heart of the wave,
you will never completely cross
this body of water
until you learn to trust
the hands that hold back
death and it's squall.

Even now they drop anchor, singing
into the starry sky:

"Gather ye fishermen's wives
As thy men roll out to sea
Pray one and all
Thy sails hold strong this day..."
~

Swaying curtain in the window,
airguns after dinner,
broken doll on the highway,

a promise is a promise.

The small winters
in the corner of her eyes,
Mom and Dad, they hold serve
in the garden, at the office,
no one is watching as she reels,

hurt whispers on.

Walking past stones and trees,
the bones of things,
coming at it all wrong,
this time she makes a promise,

under a name that hides her.

It blew in off the sea

It went out on a limb

And broke the olive branch

Do you hear the wind through the hair of revolution

--black raven hair--

Bone straight and frayed

The split ends of society forging separate paths

Progression at their tips, regression in their roots

It makes a sound akin to the back of an old haunted house settling

It wandered here in due season

It's about to be cut short

It's about to be swept away

~
I felt a funeral
between the timid breaths
of ruination, we plucked
to death the melancholic florals
called time flowers,
translucent growths
with crystal hearts,
gifted them to someone else's children,
placed them around the waist
of everyone else's wives.

When plucked,
that crystal core dissolves,
emitting the light trapped within.
perpetual splendor or
the endless cycles of death?
do the normal rules
of chronology apply?

Look now! here comes
the great unwashed riot,
we live in an age of visual saturation,
where tragedy and beautiful
distractions crowd in on all sides,
clamoring for our attention.

Perhaps the dystopian premise
is part of a fiendish plan,
becoming the backdrop
to a fluttering cornucopia
of florals, each outfit paraded
in the beginning of May,
a blooming display of finery
hiding a complex
network of roots –
sponsorship deals,
brand calculations,
dedicated craftsmanship,
exposure opportunities
– beneath its pretty skirts.
~

~
Unusual and cloudless

This slippery world

Today is still contagious

Here is heat, here is rain

Here is love, regardless

Shadows in the scaffolding

Look like a broken alphabet

The sun in its anger

Just won't set

Life and how to do it

Perfectly absent
~

Searching for Galileo,
    the race to be first home,

In a sea of patients
    we climb the probability tree,
    walk upon the shore collecting
      memory shells,

We win the little wars,
     lose the big fight,

These windows are breathing apparatus,
     this ceiling, a blur of tungsten sky,
     rain, tears, weep,

To rest near to you,
     the technicolor sleep,
     and I died with you,

All farewells are sudden.

~
You are
the river that runs
beneath this city.

You lend
the beautiful but empty
buildings a beating heart.

And the buildings were essential.

They were a part
of the lives unfolding
in their shadows.

Sometimes it
almost seems like
they are listening.

I'm sinking inside them.

Tell me a story
about an outgoing road,
the house where you grew up
near the Sea of Azov.

I think
I flew there once.

The birds
that perch inside my chest
sing loud, sing soft.

Maybe they
will sing again for us
tomorrow.
~

The first glance

Unsteady, unsure

One beautiful smile

One thoughtful flutter

Godspeed you butterfly!

She comes to my shoulder

And pins a rose on me

She leaves a note

She lifts the net

But wants no words to her song

She is from November

And I am from snow

We stand together

And everything is new

Derail your anxious train of thought

Open your inner spirit

And enter the dream corridor
like a leaf from a tree in its dying season

Coma come quiet
Airless linger delight

Sacrificial pasts
give you the power
to leave places

The world won't get better
but you will

calm seas, restless lungs

breathe it in
the mournful breath is out there

skin is numb

the words are too

holding still
hidden under the tongue

holding
hidden

one more dies before he gets there
(what did the letter say...?)

holding
hidden

what did it say...?

~
The method is slow
And probably dangerous

From your telescope
Fewer and fewer places
No advancing horizon

Are you rendering again?

Two miles of uncertainty
Too much undergloom
You don't remember his face

It's war of attrition
A home for you
No place to run
No place to hide
To live is to die slowly
~

~
How did a dead man in Reno
come to be a field of ink
in the Martian salt flats-?

It only took a whisper

An addicted civilian
driving the metaphor machine
the last man to voluntarily fly
asleep and well hidden
writing about his life
without survival techniques

Autopsy report says
he slipped at the hand rail
blemishing his planet
in riding time's escalator
a longing to see the stars up close
and give them new names
it's the future grim repasts
of cullen shores
from a cancelled earth

That silently floating figure
was a human all along
~

~
Sun drips
on leaves

not the backyard variety
but the trembling kind

the kind
that weld night-time
intermissions to
the roof of the mouth

sonnet-filled
evaporation
reveals
the timely concealment of
a very, weary
inanimate object
at the brink

just enough hip
to be woman

just enough wild
to be frontier
~

~
"Why is there only one chair in this room?"

"This once was an island." She replied.

"You favor this place then, I take it?"

"How can I not," said she. "The dawn here is quiet."

"Not on this floor, you are much mistaken! The stairs are like an avalanche."

Looking down at herself, she quickly changed the subject. "There are barcodes on each breast now."

"I see. Were you nervous?"

"Only when focusing on the morning break," She confessed. "Otherwise I was much like you--killing what keeps us alive."

"Is that so bad?"

"I wonder. Sometimes I still feel the bruises." She stated. "But I am told this is normal."

"What else did they tell you?"

"To quit worrying about not being built to scale," she stated in displeasure.

"...and?"

"For me to prepare to fall again for the apocalyptic things written in the sky," She admitted with a wicked smile.

"What's so funny?"

"I recognized your handwriting long ago," She uttered into the centrifuge.
~

~
faded mauve
butterflies
fluttering along
defeated
selenitic walks
the sound of
abandoned ship bells
in the far
parlor north
but the guilt of
wind is silent
like Venetian whispers
from motionless lips

us, then
inward and upward
one step too far
a house of strangers
tipping like boats
seaworthy as sleep
oars divide
the ocean
but framed pictures
and love letters
unite the walls
to this unstable floor
then, us
always, us
~

letter by letter,
     some of great lust,
     some of espionage,
     and secret meetings.

part film,
part theatre,
part fever dream.

we were woven together somehow,
      like we were characters in a book
      being read out-loud somewhere.

~
she's thunderstorms.
she's asphodel meadows.

I fall outside of her
into the suburbs of askew,
where she hides behind
happy occident, where she
lives with the afterlife of a man,
but is in love with a scientist.

a jaded thing, she likes
to drop anvils on her
husband's head and blame
her fragile scaffolding,
she wears the wreckage
on her face, it's far easier
than admit her own fallacies.

before the children came along
she was able to pour some
of her own frustrations
into these knotty tussles.

now the midwives have left.
now misadventures in her
own backyard commence.

no hiding place down
the front of her,
the remaining secrets
come from underneath.

but if you trust her
and go along, she knows exactly
where to lay her hands.
~

~
Ladies-in-waiting
reflecting on
a fragile state of mind

precarious creatures, these
hunters of coal
that outlines both
eyes and words

black paint for blue girls,
they pray in a circle
for their queen's wedding night
to be one of celebratory rapture

deep into the looking glass
they peer for a sign,
a soul, a stigma,
but cannot see
beyond their own glib faces

a universe ago they
caparisoned as pixies
in sunflower corsets,
twirling in a centrifugal forest

tonight in eclipse,
in their all-together,
they merely wear masks
of their former selves

the firelight dramatically shifts
in bacchanalia pratfall
--the oblong menace
of their smiles, fingers and navels
dancing to the age of Sideria
~

Different
lines on the thermometer,
when it happens,
it moves all by itself.

Deliberately
random restless waters,
terrestrials standing on their banks,
recidivists having deposits
and withdrawals
at an inflated rate.

Dungeoneering
--the amplified gesture
means a convenience charge,
elevate me later.

Defibrillation,
I'm on the existential end
of viral paradise,
"the files you have on me"
are a trail of stolen pebbles,
sure to inoculate my final
walk into the sea.

It must be dark
out here in the cold penumbra,
where mile after mile
no one smiles,

dots and loops,
dots and loops,
a kind of blissful nullity,
beautiful and pointless,

wearing at the edges
it almost stings,
seclusion unraveling
at the underground in us all,

aubade aberrations abound,
challenging the orthodoxy
of the troublesome
morning road,

but should this near-life experience
hydroplane toward
another mineshaft, it helps to know
less is less, not more.

~
Cotton duck canvas
on careful days
in a closed room,
intersecting tension,
energy and interest
for strangers to interpret

Three bashful belles
and lovers of art
undressed as a figure study,
cloistered together
in a line of beauty
for moral support

Their congregation assembled
in glorification of
angelic landscapes,
tempered by the mysteries
within convexity's arboretum

In unequivocal parts and gradation,
where good posture
and graceful presentation
count in equal measure,
to create Hogarth's
line continuous
--the Analysis of Beauty,
bended at the waist
to spread light through the canopy

During such exhibition
the belles whisper
under the rose,
of war and shopping lists,
they seem to avert eye contact,
gazes fixed to
the eternal sphere
ticking on the far wall,
never directly into the eyes
of those who come to
paint their *******
with sandalwood
~