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

Where have the great games
of childhood gone?

Father and son
tossing the grenade

Little sister skipping
over ***** traps

Somehow, someway
we reached a cease fire
in the "eleventh hour
of the eleventh day
of the eleventh month"

Not sure which of us
was gaslighted
in the eerie orange
of shoreline blood
and the unsettled darkness

"You were right, I was wrong."
read the treatise

Somewhere, someway
an airplane missing
for nearly a century
descends from the clouds
and touches down
in an empty field

The fallen souls
of weaponry
unload on the tarmac

Let the games begin...

~
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
~

He left
A mark the color of red wine
Zinfandel
Placed high on cheek bone
Directly under her left eye
Such tears only bruising
It further

I didn't mean to
He simply stated

She left
A note the color of resentment
Charcoal
Placed atop bedroom dresser
Directly over her exiled contents
Such emptiness only reinforcing
It further

Once was more than enough
She simply stated

Hear her soft lilt before espying her
from the promenade?

Listen carefully for mondegreen.
This morning she will come out
of the water, risen from froth,
made of the same elements
as Adam's Eve,
a pastiche dressed in summer's flurry,
transpicuous & clung-to,
amaryllises strung about
hair & thoughts,
the sinfully twisted scent
of Bergamot Orange
filling the nostrils as they flare.

Shall she succeed in coaxing you back
to a tree that once held such promise?

Soft shoulders

shoreless summer

out of the sinking

and onto the floatation

hunting for mermaid

while taking islands

along the river's mutiny

blue coda dreamwater

but fire in the organism

the hour is thin

the ice is even thinner

thy kingdom come
thy will take place
selling health at a premium
to the human race
forgive us our debts
from thy mighty hand
or at least allow us
an installment plan
give us our daily meds
but deliver us from evil
by providing generic instead

Man.
Woman.
Ghost.
Little wind in their sail.

Boat.
Watercraft.
Impulse.
Limited space on board.

Free from heart. Free from clothes.
Drunk together for a swim.
Errant, disinterested kiss, planted
under the keel.
A sparse ****** isosceles is struck.
Parts are muted and slit-eyed.
Parts are surface tension.
Parts are counterparts.
She pulls away, running below deck
and vigorously brushing her teeth
before weeping.
The razor of night struggles to sleep.
The sharp object thrown overboard.
No one wants to be first or last.

"We're out of words and moons and stars, there's no tenderness in us..." she said. "When did our love become the stab of ultimatum?"

~
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
~

~
Weather balloon for a hat
propeller on his back
morning is observably alive

leaving it to atmospheric pressure

he consumes today's newspaper
with the enthusiasm of a bowl
of Corn Flakes

this Heath Robinson contraption
of getting to work first
over enemy lines
is all the rage in his satirical
state of mind

that is until the absurd derailment
of wartime employment

and so he returns home with tubes
and catheters attached to his body
and feeling like one
of the unwieldy machines
he had so often created

full of atmospheric pressure

and apparently thinking it
an undignified fate
he pulls out the tubes
and quietly dies
of his own invention
~

The first-ever satellite images of you

Stranded upon pain inflicted desolation

The process of coming to pieces:

Nocturnal carnivorous planetoid

Moon in your mouth

They hint at remarkably renewed unfriendliness

It’s the same face we all see

Precious and cracked

Your isolated body orbiting

In its bitter ******

Where no sunlight ripples through

The string dangling between your legs

All the children hidden underneath your navel

Have fled down to Earth

To live or die in documented nightmares of their own

Dear diary:

Land sakes! Leofric cannot believe I carried through with it. But indeed, today I rode naked along the sparse, meager streets of ye old Coventry.

And whilst my long hair, let down for the occasion, did provide me a jot of modesty; alas! a strong breeze I am most certain granted uncivil eyes to plainly see my top half is much ado about nothing.

Nonetheless, an even more discomfiting fear shall be if some peeping tom espied his fair countess to be no natural blonde at all; just a fare-thee-well lemon juicing, miracle bra wearing charlatan.

On the plus side, I did achieve quite a lovely, even, 'no-lines' tan!

~
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
~

Pencils
  And papers
    And fancy erasers

Rubberbands
  And soda cans
    And ratty old pairs of Vans

This and that
  Or 'maybe' something
    Equaling all sorts of nothing

And then I met Winona Ryder...

~
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
~

Is she like Calypso
in The Camomile Lawn,
knelt down and speechless
by the fire, resembling
Jennifer Ehle so closely,
as the camera lingers
at her being naked as a jaybird,
and quite comely at that?

Or is she perhaps
more like Felicitas
in Flesh and the Devil,
a dead ringer for Greta Garbo,
who brazenly encouraged
illicit love and rivalry, only
to go quietly by falling
through thin ice?

Sometimes the siren's call
is more a winsome variation
in its silence.

In the haze of
Cerebral hemispheres
Counting the seconds between
Lightning and thunder
Returning fire
With the same manic glee
As eating ice cream
Right from the carton

Two Minutes Hate

I'm bleeding out like
Notes from underground
That contain secrets
Of the wounded sky
I feel a provoked heaviness like
Manhole covers
Razing cane over
The shoddy infrastructure

Two Minutes Hate

"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in." - George Orwell, from the novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

~

Dear Mom & Dad,

I won't be coming home quite as soon as once thought. I have found a place where they really like me; a place like no other. Instead of being shunned and despised, like most places, I'm invited to everything:
parties,
picnics,
and parades,
my neighbors even welcome me with open arms. Suffice-to-say, I finally feel like I belong and plan to stay a while in this country.

Your Son,
Covid-19 Coronavirus, III

~
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
~

The space between.

A time to sell yourself.

A time for passing.

Sometimes I touch the right.

Too much, the wrong.

Resplendent deterioration
we live by.

With casuistic slogans
and closing doors.

D'you know disembarkment
leads to land sickness?

It does.

And who can then make
heads or tails out of
the qualms of tolerance
and his cousin, ignorance?

~
"Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement."
~
A mixture
of sinister and sweet,
smoking gun at your feet.
Reclining dead
in a meadow,
or wishing you were
as you gaze out your window.

Bottling undecided dark,
catching keyed-up light,
in random, misleading angles.
The uniform hour
holds Grace, Grant,
and the mystery
it entangles.

Don't look directly
at the camera,
icy blonde afterimage.
Everything you need
is written on the page.
Number 13,
Mrs. Peabody?
Don't you know
all contemporary
escapist entertainment
begins by turning your back?
Lingering on what
suspicious minds track.

The migrating voyeurism
sits as the crow,
wired and unfriendly.
The method is an organism,
an implication, a crossbow,
thought, but unseen.
He will push the girl,
until you succumb
to dream sequences.
It's snowing humiliation
at Winter's Grace,
for out of the male gaze,
invading your space,
you become gifted
at doing nothing well,
in sheer
under-things,

(for inner circles & triangles of fur
are all the rage in Europe).

Yes, he hates pregnant women,
because then they have children.
So leave him
to his work,
to analyze your handwriting,
and build that ramp
directly into your trailer.

His larger than life silhouette
will fill the silver screen
with tension,
trip wire,
and a ****** ambivalence,
that ends with
the violent sound
of someone
packing a suitcase.

He enters by virtue of this door,
and you leave through another,
and another,
and another,
until the final scene
alters your state of mind.

Your pretty little feet
dangling precariously
over the edge...

Let men burn stars out from innocuous lightyears pulled through the vortex

Like needle and thread, sown by centuries of sparked, graceful union

(Their strength and vigor found in the cross-stitching)

And ever gently unfolding like outer reach, like inner *****

In the garden of our senses, flowing with milk and honey, by means of forethought or afterglow

One thought of ecstasy, one thought of infinite parable taking new light to bed

The sacred beams bending to form a crescent, a lunula of utmost happiness

Flowers lost in measure
At an outstretched hour
Born sightless in the once
Sacrosanct hedgerows
Picked belatedly

--And invisibly so--

Taken from their family
To unconditional surrender
Upon a cold stark table
Where those assembled
Finished off love with their meal

--And invisibly so--