delphinium migrant blue,
and into night
we follow,
toward the residue
of morning,
where there's no time
limit to grief.

you wake with
electric intervals,
something's wrong
with yesterday,
in your head are
galaxies like grains of salt,
and they fill up the sky.

these red metallic balloons,
that come to you
when you are ripped open,
whether it’s by pain
and heartache
or you’re falling in love,
these you can’t close
yourself off to.

but what you actually want
is to bypass them,
and try to reach that
dawn serenade,
which is floating
above them,
as if golden electric ribbons
which don’t
demand repayment.

~
"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.
~

~
Moving beyond the sun
to where our minds
are a fraction behind us,
believing they've found
the other-side.

I am glass shattered by redemption,
and I am now the shadow
of a mirrored divinity,
for somewhere out there
is a god resembling my face,
and its nakedness stares me down.

Raising eyebrows at the moon
as if this is love's culprit,
yet, opening arms and minds welcome
the thereupon lust as if
some devoted era:
bow and arrow shapes
of you and me,
falling out of love without travail,
but of constant ease.

I look better in black and white
than in vulnerability,
my exploitation of
private earth looms casual,
though I'm well aware
of the vibrations it sends.

Manipulators of love and war
were all we really wanted to be,
cheating destiny
by falling for the future.

And from this side of our mind
the sun was always cold,
just a vague old relic in a fresh grave:
a princess ruling among
the ruins of past decisions,
and happily she gives
a stagnant kiss of consequence.

Recommitted wind breaks
through, like turning, burning
pages desperate to speak.

But I'd rather that her white lies
take me now, than a waking grasp
or a skirmishing wave
terrorize me,
as this black [media] plagued sun's
desecrated heart bleeds
and recalls to mind
the coming blasphemy.
~

Whilom seafarers in rapture,
seven minutes in heaven,
then nothing but bathos,
--a woman in bed,
she and Rembrandt quarreling
over fidelity or obedience to her king?

"It is I, Seagull!"

"Everything is fine. I see the horizon..."

Night sky, a blow torch,
a golden rain flowing between her legs,
curled in the veil of imperial lineage and/or arousal,
--ballistic arc,
peering into the hand mirror,
a breach of promise staring back.

"Will the flight
affect your reproductive organs, Danaë?"

"Conceivably...
and how they shall weep
when things go wrong between us?"

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...

It's hard to know from where you rang out, and how the tone changed from memory to sorrow. Perhaps all those little cuts from the knife of Aristotle came with a price. Or maybe the polygraphic wildlife detected in your letters, enough to stir the inner fabric of my womb, drew out the scent. This is more than obligation, child. This is about the seasons of force or choice. And how the aural disintegrations from your mouth sound so effortlessly submitted and submerged. I fear they've turned to acceptance, their floral remnants as besieged as a Sarajevo Rose. My love for you will never live on the margins. This love is a tree-lined battlement. An endless voyage on the barometric sea.

It's so hard to know from where you rang out. But worse, I suppose, to hear nothing at all. Nothing until ambulance day. And the words a mother should never have to endure.

~
cracked compass
burning atlas
no sense of direction
on a drive about
the silent forests of the heart
egressing from the shadows
that hunt for us

foot caught on the accelerator
passing escapism's plateau
like a dissolving shelf of flashbacks
kept in a glass jar
it's normal to tire out
wondering who will it be
looking in the window?

the people at the wheel
are not on the payroll
they're pierced and sheer
on the surface
but their deepest parts
still inhabit bone
and slave for mere feldspar
once again human thoughts
turn to crystalline
and still they shine for us

signs are posted:
"a time for vanishing, lay it to rest"
until the unfamiliar sound
of the walls of Jericho
collapsing
breaks the momentum
quiets the traffic

we entered a promise land
on cruise control
with too many exits
and not enough things to see
we did not end up
where we thought we'd be
those eyes at dusk
in the rearview mirror
they hunt for us
they wait for sleep
~

from the castle ruins
to the stacked pipes
and tunneled waters
of metropolis

we alone
—family in darkness

layers of india ink
hide useless machines

pressing country skin city bone
into amalgamation

hotwired airfield wings
hovering over abandoned
fairgrounds

covered in chains
and cotton candy

enslaved
sweetened

—so the pill goes down with ease

this is our home
this is where we live

life is zenith
future is chaos

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

~
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
~

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?

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

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

~
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
~

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?"

~
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 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

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...

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!

~
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'

~

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.

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).

~
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.
~