soap and water
          dishes
          laundry
          or shower

brick from mortar
boys against girls

urban velvet smog
city vapors clog

this train -- there is a line
        beginners
        quitters

this parking lot -- there is a line
        shoppers
        influencers

open bar pharmacy, bottled water

                  no pity
                  no guarantees

dragon chasers
chin music
        
          lapsed short term memory loss

opening mail for grandmother
                the obituaries
                that ****** fly

a discussion among men
about a woman's voice
           come sit and listen

one last cigarette couple
walking home through the park
               driving alone in the dark
                             on the heels of
                             a reflection
                             of Christ
                             or an hourglass
                             in remission

them or not them
       just arrived
       just married
too many stairs
not enough elevators
worry about it later

them, definitely them
sharing beds
      under the leotard
      under the candlelight

a helping hand
finely manicured fingers
one stationary
        then two in missionary

word upon words need aspirin
            orchestrate
            headache
                            pillow is the threshold
                            tomorrow...soap and water

the cult of the ideal woman.
silent era mignon.
pass the baton.

a little diplomacy.
a little electricity.
and a waterfall of curls.

she moves with the fayre.
I see her idling on Fifth Avenue
and at work behind the counters
of the stores.

besotted men plant young, leafless trees upside-down,
roots in the air, simply because
she wants it that way.

a groundbreaking end
to The Broken Oath,
and her name on the credits
for the very first time.

screens, fans, and umbrella stands.
or maybe lilies in a field of seclusion.
she is stardom.
she is the eternal question.

Tommy guns for insurance
And wads of sweaty cash
To build new empires with

But there are no guarantees
Crime, you see, doesn't pay
You can bank on it

So we already know how it ends:
They canceled his policy
And Dunaway with her

~
taking sides
picking flowers
dead and buried
on the surface line

counting hostages
trading stamps
extended infinitely
at right angles

cozy spaces
married couples
perpendicular
legs and mingled stria
one over the other

It's all conjugated
hyperbola
a tourist trap
with zero interest
for a year
~

The sky is an artistic graveyard.

Many a hero and many a fool have come to their fate in its wave-driven clutches.

The number of syllables required to storybook danger is as dense as ozone.

The orange layer—a warning sign, posted by the forebearers of fun, who were categorically undone by the very forces they worshipped.

Birds no better than to fly at such temperamental altitudes.

But the dream will die if we don't try.

And so we hoist our ambition like a kite, hoping to stay aloft long enough to discover something more about ourselves.

~
Desert pond,
       idle sun.

Salt, shadow,
       and the revealing light of midday.

She traipses from
the safety of the car
        to the danger at the water's edge.

One hand shielding her eyes,
the other,
        her over-exposures.

Discomfited by a lack
         of self-confidence.

Loving the water,
         hating her thighs.
~

There once was a lady,
(and there actually still is),
who clandestinely preferred
the growth about her garden gate.

The talk in the village square
these days was all about
pruning the living daylights
out of it, until it was a sad
but smooth barren surface.

Apparently visitors had weighed in
and made this some kind of rule.

Nonetheless, she liked how
the twisting leaves and ivy
created a picturesque latticework,
a natural tapestry,
evoking mystery and anticipation
for what lay beneath.

Oh, she trimmed her foliage
here and there,
keeping the overgrowth
from running wild,
but all things considered
she was not about to change.

Her garden was beautiful
just the way it was.

"Every survivor of ****** assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported."

Rainwater of
the Elysian fields,
you assuredly do
like to drown your winged heroines?
You write them as strange
bitter narratives,
spurious to the calling
or as a bit of
bloodletting go.

The history formed around either
her breaking at the seams
upon the witching hour,
and her own home village
pillaging her claims
in the bonfire;
Or the arcane notion
no woman shall give testimony
against a neighbor
on the occasion he's a man.

Yes, she cried 'no' at the temple gate
Yes, she repeated such entreaties
But she'd also been into the ale
and wore an overtly
fetching carousal dress
you incensed.
Let her dam break
Let her try and flood us over
you mocked.
She was only a wayfaring angel
one reckless bird of passage
What type of wounds
could she inflict?

How easily you lost sight
of her will & halo
becoming stronger than fright.
Down she poured in antipathy,
until covering your gaping mouth!
It wasn't rain that killed you,
for you were the rain,
it was her blood calling out
that finally did you in...

~
Or migrated pod
       Or fleeing refugee
            Or corban
                  Or carbon dioxide
                       Or yubitsume
                            Or van Gogh's ear
                                 Or black Friday
                                      Or lazy evening at the carnival

                    (Tomorrow has already started)

Or free range
     Or gated community
          Or breast exam
               Or storage crisis
                    Or fallen leaves
                         Or germ warfare
                              Or temporary file
                                   Or permanent wave
                                        Or thigh gap
                                             Or physiognomy
                                                  Or soap made of heroes
                                                       Or multiplanetary living
                                                    
(There's a floating graveyard between this world and the next)

Or logical fallacy
     Or irrational number
          Or elementary analysis
               Or college guess
                    Or cardiopulmonary resuscitation
                         Or extrasensory perception
                              Or ten fingers and toes
                                   Or a dozen eggs

                  (They say there's strength in numbers)

Or fifth floor, corner room
     Or high as a kite
          Or bellwether
               Or mingled with bells
                    Or police sirens
                         Or loitering around in silent films
                              Or rule of thirds
                                   Or tombs of second-hand kings
                                        Or face in the rain
                                             Or pareidolia

(Otherwise, at first light you might be smiling...)
~

If the icebergs are melting away
How come my mother-in-law
Is still intact?

~
I'm an exit wound
I'm a numinous obstacle
I'm about to make landfall
I'm about to break free

I'm a nerve ender
A fascinator
A purifier
A world populator
And I'm about to break through

I'm the push and pull
I'm a counter argument
I'm dissonance resistance
I'm viral replication
I'm about to break out

I'm a singularity
I'm a spark
I'm the perfect detonator
To mind and heart
And I'm about to break up

I'm a simulacra
I'm an oscillation
Made of breath only
I'm a living, moving imprint
Of what no longer is
Yet somehow seems to be
~

freckled cheeks / soft decibels

dress wearing
wine taster
dreamcatching
manhunter

an attraction
to green and yellow
an aversion to blue

an imprint of her muted form
under a name that hides her

she often lies there
in a shimmer
a bit of a sleeping beauty

in the pleasing shape
of Wisconsin / Illinois

whose charms
are revealed
like arcane secrets
only to those
with patience,
persistence,
and a lack of proximity
to heavy machinery

Roll right to zero, give your tanks a stir

Fixed star to fixed star, running counter clockwise to stability

Beckoned and bewildered: first move, second chance

This incandescent satellite, so large and bright in the window

Like pieces of refracted light, infinite bulbs turning on

Empyrean, enveloped in moonshine, rendering them fit to recognize God

And should destiny be lunar luminosity and agile reason (or a seller of love)

I'll take to orbit and go for burn, peering through a mental kaleidoscope

To see the altered anima of my thoughts free from the pull of gravity

~
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
~

Equations
in the sand

Laid out
and toweling off

Curvatures to
algebraic form

They define her lines
shape her axis

My island of
expectation

Amid summer's long
subterfuge

step right in
where commodity and fiction
are deliberately blurred,

electrostatic dust collector,
after-shower body air-driers,
a spatially disconnected
from the world roll-on wife
complete with a dining table
that sinks into the floor;
don't tell her she's an android;
just don't.

she is captured
and ever ready,
she was a stenographer
but quite unsteady,
her mouth a spark of vowels
when her far off places
are aroused.

repeat this soothing motto — space, place, memory.

outside is scenographic sensation:
lightology. unbreathed air. porcelain skin.

she's the soft electric assurance
of a better life — the life which rests on device alone — a strong, sweet poison which infects the blood.

she is "the light of any home"...

They fought with swords and shields in sorted fields

of acrimony, declared life and limb to a barren kingdom,

bowed to the royal crown and wooed its fairest daughter.

They won her heart, graced her walls, and worked within them to produce an offspring

—a love child forged with the will of iron and a random, but possessive eye chart.

It nearly took the death of an empire to bring this passion to birth,

and here it so rests upon her breast, pleading an allegiance to her tattered flag.

Why even a thousand years of war demurred to her letting down her hair.

But whose army crossed that wanton bridge and stroked her into carnal submission?

Who kept watch at the crossroads?

History tells us c'est la vie was the culprit, and détente the better angel.

Sometimes it's useless to be useful...

I woke up at angles with you
---a parallelogram, opposite but equal,
my thoughts in constant rotating view
---a diagram, showing us where
our homes are laid to rest,
where streets became dead spiders
caught in their own webs.

If we are in transit via tunnel,
aqueduct, or escalator,
it might be cinema.

If we lose atlas in the worship of light,
it might be cinema.

But I can't find you here;
here, where they used to build ships
from sand and steam
and science fiction;
where they used to design
buildings so as to create
a dissonant and mournful
whistling sound when wind
blew through them
---ostentatious things;
dead people’s things.

Through walls and underneath concrete, dug so deeply
into the wide plains
and withered, gnarled tree roots
of an agonizer's conurbation,
is a space halfway to the zenith,
charting the prescribed power
of in-betweenness.

Never again will we draw meaning from
our proximity to one another.

~
Wake, no wake

He dreams of obituaries
And toe tagging

Exhuming dearly departed dollars
And biting the nails
Of his cadavers

Forensically speaking
He can talk of the dead

He's one lucky stiff

Pushing up daisies
All over the yard
Of his rose cottage

This life at rainbow's end
Each day mortiferously expires

It's all there in the brochure
~

~
Sleep, no sleep
No making plans
New bed linens eat my dreamland
And settle in the wilderness of my ever-opened eyes

I see you
I see me
I see everything
I'm a play with no final curtain
The story continues unabated
And the ridiculing light of day
Is as sacrosanct as an unused blanket
Nonetheless, I'm checking in
Sleep, O sleep, swallow me
~

When youth was moth, love flowed over us in prismatic waves—systems of romance.

Then came the phoenix of your heart, and everything was a ceiling. I moved clockwise past infinite shadow and onto your wall.

Sorry to wake you. [...] I forgot to tell you something. [...] I'm like the sun or perhaps the moon. And there are times when I know I'll make you sad.

Distant polyglot in its timbres, its psychological profile, and its pulse, it could not sound less like a soundtrack for a search. More like a Middle Eastern funeral.

Stemmed from a shared anxiety over self-definition in an indefinite world, and each of them has searched for answers in the amorphous space between where “you” end and “I” begin.

By turns, august and sweet—revealed a complex stillness, a set of detached passions attempting to rebuild themselves, a desensitized state searching for soul.

I have loved you into oblivion and now move into thin air. Please remember me as a time of day. As long as you can hold your breath, we'll always be together.

~
I see starfish from
my false bottom
canoe

stretching the wave,
a shimmer to the sound
—slow, fast, wide, and narrow,

then gray over blue
in the empty mirth.

I see trouble and strife,
a beacon of
decadence,
trembling consistently
on each note as if
she had the permanent fever.

I see death and transfiguration,
(equal bedfellows),
out of the ground
as glorious
wisteria,

there's ether on hand
and a lot of bridge work
to cross the vocal span of our
vibrato wars.

I've only got time
for the business at hand,
these cobwebs in the corner
(of history) can linger,
or die like
flies

on the Queen of Compromise,
who never was,
who might have been,
who will always be.

am I cantillating
or have I ventured into
false memory syndrome
again?
~

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

Boy meets girl.
Girl marries boy.
Baby comes nine months later
— blessed little killjoy.

Boy neglects girl.
Girl henpecks boy.
There'll be hell to pay
for slighting Helen of Troy.

Such an elegant fear,
this alliance, and yet,
when it's held in selfish hands
it merrily dissolves,
turning as tedious
and drab as Shakespeare.

Boy annoys girl.
Girl leaves boy.
It takes a special kind of madness
in building to simply then destroy.

Turn the other cheek
and Judas will kiss that one too,
reduce the bairn's fever
by visiting daddy's igloo.

Weekends are pay toilets
and happy meals,
frustration is a word all too real.
When did antipathy begin to rule?
About the time diplomacy was forced
into playing the fool.

The good times no one catalogues,
this life has gone straight to the dogs.
The Iditarod Trail extends
from Seward to Nome.
Run the race and make believe
the kids are tucked in safe at home.

According to Dorothy
there's no place like it.

~
Moonlit angels keep turning the wheels of the universe

In conversations with God, they placed the Sun precisely in the centre

Alarum and escapement keep the gear train moving forth:

Astronomical clock, armillary sphere, lunar phases in sidereal time

All patterns of evidence -- releasing our impulses, advancing our hands
~

You're quite the trickster,
With tall pair of gin and tonic.

Shall we dance a set or two,
Before you assail me
In the dark, with objects
Stowed away in your
Glove compartment?

I promise to walk into walls,
Become pliable in your arms.

You even have my word,
I'll lose control of all
My faculties right about
The time you begin ******* me.

And I will wake up
In the morning,
With no memory
And no underwear.

You can then move
Carefree, on to your
Next hapless victim.

While I merrily go about
My day in the numbed womb's
Afterbirth of that last sentence.

Forever to ***** at
Flesh and membrane.

Sincerely quiet,
Candace

~
A room lives in Zoria
And also the trees
At a critical distance
She seeks their shelter
An abiding solace
To wash free
To swim sea
Who can blame
The suffering of her stream
Whether it be
A time for hanging on
Or a time for passing
Let the waters come
And overtake her
Flooding her with
Safeguarding arms
~

~
Bring your whirlwinds with you;
in the snow angel summer
bring Margot the sun.

In the hour of red glare
a rush to pick slowberries
before getting caught up in the silk.

Prisms, mirrors, lenses!
strategies for combatting visibility:
keep your eyes closed,
face away from the window.

The myriad threads of people in hiding,
they eat their own web each day,
and yet something always shines
in the heart's secret annex.

Men and women are
separated from each other,
the girls are on a train
to the Bergen-Belsen,
"white founts falling
in the courts of the sun."

Margot now cries quietly;
so silently she weeps over
sunshine and hate.
~

Oil
Exhaust
Handstand theatre
In the back of a van
Underground avenue
Has the scent of
Stale black licorice
Melted into the sidewalk
The familiar odor of traffic
Is a pedestrian substitute
For the Old World charm
This renovated place
Paved over
Long
Ago

born of insects and grass
in deep hue -- as purple as the gin blossom
climbing for new altitudes
the wall breaks inside of me
I fall through the forest floor
and into the ocean of sky
all the places I go are in freefall
but there's a reappearing rhythm

heart is a drum
heart is a drum
and it will join the dots of
a prayer remembered
(the fierce words of a holy sonnet)
consoling me in its shadow
when the turbulent, inverted plane
could no longer hold itself together

~
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
~