I.
Fireman, censor of literature and destroyer of knowledge, with his mighty flamethrower. He loves his work. He loves trouble and strife. He loves fascination with the people next door. Mostly, he loves his hammock. But sleep will be his final unrest.

II.
A gift for the darkness: reading from the forbidden kept hidden in the air-conditioning duct. The walls within turn on and off like Cora Pearl. His wife listens to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. They walk on as an extinguished connection. In the flickering of his eyeballs, he dreams of driving recklessly to Dover Beach and drowning her.

III.
Burning bright. He is burning so brightly. In the factory of mirrors, he takes a hard look. He's a flammable book. And it's a pleasure to burn. "What are you doing?" She asks. "Putting one foot in front of another." He answers.

Into you

learning to be
a divided
submersible

once so perimetric
on the fringe
of all that grows within

we thus fall
and settle
much like Sarajevo Roses

colorfully resting
in the lasting drawn out
places we made perish

now
here
am I

into you

the ******
connective
entirely dependent

upon
the quotient
of two integers

the way we love
is a method
of mixed results

River in search of a sea
imprisoned blood
on the killing spree

sea in want of rivers
cold remorseless wind
gives our wave the shivers

look how high the water rises
see how far removed the sun
so blind now to compromises

we remember songs no more
confronting one's darkness
from the farthest shore

in eclipse the river runs fallow
to light a candle
is to cast a shadow

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

Darth Vaper--
E-Lord of the Popcorn Lung,
Learned the ways of the force
From her master,
Nicotine,
Who during the Tar Wars
Went up in smoke,
And ****! He was gone.
Vaper took her own
Apprentice then,
For there can only be two,
The ruthless Count Syphilis,
Who was always sore
And acted rash,
Until it eventually ******.

~
Learning to patch. Learning to mend.
Learning to venture. Learning to comprehend.
Learning to capture and befriend.

Inventing the berry. Inventing the cream.
Inventing sweet slices before bedtime
and the Fragaria colored dream.

Loving new life. Loving each child.
Securing the stem and raising the vine
by loving the wife.
~

I. The Boy With The Cuckoo Clock Heart

Born with a frozen heart,
abandoned in
Edinburgh.

One kind physician
laid her hands upon him,
in a bit of medicinal salvation,
by placing a cuckoo clock
inside his chest.

Now an orphan,
among peculiar friends:
tear-filled flasks,
eggs containing memories,
and a man with a musical spine.

There's but one catch
for this boy:
his heart is fragile,
he must never, ever
fall in love.

Existence is undoubted.
But without this one emotion,
can he really live?

Love is a bitter token.


II. The Girl With Glass Feet

"It was a humid night,
later to become a hated night."

Upon an island sound,
feet first, she is slowing turning
into glass.

By sheer happenstance,
she meets a shy boy
who lives there
with an extreme fear
of being touched.

As she slowly disappears,
she untethers herself
from self-pity,
by teaching the boy the value
of interaction.

Inchmeal, he begins to reach out
and feels everything
she has lost to the night.

Love is a bitter token.


III. The Snow Child

"November was here."

A married couple,
in Alaskan remote,
suffering from one great sadness:
no child of their own
and unable to talk of it.

He's buried by
the weight of the outer ice,
she's crumbling
from inner despair.

And so on a rare
friendly day trek,
they built a child out of snow,
outfitted with mittens and scarf.

A day later it is gone,
remembered only in absentia,
yet there appears
a beautifully arrayed
creature of winter,
a little, lissome girl in the woods,
hunting with the red fox.

In wishing to understand
these encounters,
the couple come to love the child
as their very own daughter.

Yet will she ever accept them
as they do her?

Or see them
merely as snowdrops?

Figurines frosted over by
the harsh landscape
they each wander?

Love is a bitter token.

~
Step into the moment
with bated breath,
There will come
the beguilement
and whispered shadows at play,
they seem to congeal around
conflagration of wills
and spirits considered outré.

And if it should rain
within these walls,
we'll advance south and sneak
under cover.
Fingers will find,
lips will linger and remind.
It will be a slow
recovery this time.

The places we travel go beyond
the arms reach,
they war for supremacy,
they alter and spasm,
they're random, but hover
between us in unity.

This dance we make
is an intimate ballet,
this push and pull
a blissful menagerie,
a wrinkle in time
we call ecstasy.
In kisses christened as luminaries,
appointing our own ceiling
— a mural painted in the keen
colors of craving.

The years of such sweet communion
have built this shelter, this nest,
and here together we rest.
And we are no less surrendering
to them than straddling the heavens
— the gauze of time,
timber and tranquility enmeshed,
and wishing it never ends.
~

~
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.
~

Her passion was life
Her agony was divine
Her choice was death

Oh, turpentine
meet Caroline.

She's diverting and lovely,
but no painter.

Completely misses a warning
on the container.

Her skin is pale
and thin as paper.

In contact with the flame
she turns to vapor.

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.

There's been a disruption
in your body's

p a  tt  ern,

b-r-a-n-c-h-i-n-g
river ways
                                                          ­                 form a road map,

             a
maternal
             mosaic,

z
i
g
g
z a g g i n g
                                  a   c   r   o   s   s

peaks
.
.
.
and valleys,

******* >
           bums ~
                   hips ~
                         and (~) tummies.

Vividly hued
in pinks or reds
or silver threads.

One-of-a-kind,
universal at the same time.

Glitter                                      stria,
      ­           shiny, sparkly,
oh-so                                     pretty.

  Worn with pride!
                                                          ­            Or do they hide?

They test you,
                      like any child,

REFUSING
to alter their behavior,

REGARDLESS
of how nicely you ask.

                          Baby's left her mark on you!

Love those lines
as artistic souvenirs,
acquired
on the long journey

                                                        ­               to becoming a mother.

                                    Like
                                    Love
                                    Letters
                    ­                they always have a story.

  What does your story tell?

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering,
along the edge of a straight razor … and surviving."
–  Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
~

Remember
the golden age, Wally ***?
And the songs
my mother taught me?

We sang about what was.
Or might never be.

Like permanency.
Distinction comes
out of stiff and frozen silences.
Take it with
a spoonful of disdain.
Take it in the eye.
Actors are like breakfast cereals.
They're obvious
and according to taste.
I stopped needing them
long ago.

Beautiful
Tallulah.
Beautiful,
"less to this than
meets the eye"
Tallulah,
dismiss me,
that I may be free
to find Tennessee.

Open windows
and closing doors.
Always a breeze,
but never a way out.
Right on cue
the cards shuffle.

Butter and cotton *****,
tricks of the trade.
I mumble to be heard.
I am legend
to disciples
of the Method.

I wear my friends to bed,
burn them like newspaper.
They call me "Bud"
—cigarettes at dawn
after devouring the night.
And now my song ebbs,
as the stylus hits the leadout groove.

Tomorrow, I'll be better.
Today, I'm just me.

To entertain
means to be starkers
and dance with veils,
to exoticize war
and tremble in
a thousand rhythms.
Bejeweled as a spy,
nevertheless,
don't know why.
Eye of the day,
and a dozen matchlocks
had me inertly settle
upon my knees,
before bending at my waist
to take one last look
at the fiery heavens.

Queen for a day.
Prisoner for life.
Her 'crimes':
New mother and wife;
A woman of color
Thinking for herself;
Just leave her be, please,
Lest history repeat itself.

~
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.
~

rhapsodic pastoralism
as beguilingly bucolic as tempera gardens,
where nature’s wild beauty
is domesticated and made
into a safe space for dream and play,
reverie and revelry.

with the bright dawn
chatter of birdsong
it seems to reach your ear across distance,
like a girl singing happily to herself
while walking down the road
on the other side of your garden wall.

"Memory is more indelible than ink."
—Anita Loos

~
Europe, after the rain,
the sun lending warmth and comfort.
fringes come into focus.
shadow journal,
fiscal dreams,
becoming ****** lines on a page;
procession bells
for young brides,
veiled in lace.
a touch from her
outstretched hands,
this honeymoon phase
running up the thigh,
the holding quite still until
she smiles for pendulum.
at first light, breakfast in bed,
granting pastel wishes on
boxing night,
then a letting go of the kite string.

new fingers in the medicine bottle,
tiny geometries
inside a house of reciprocal numbers.
paradise in mnemonic children:
cartwheels and handstands,
coloring books of
neglected spaces,
future ruins.
one hundred violins
play to isles of ignorance,
stray embers settle
along the solemn Chemin De Fer (railway).
a catalogue of afternoons
on the bike path
thru propeller seeds and dragonflies.

arriving in the haloed flesh:
skin dive,
the place of couloir descent;
**** beach,
the place of odd glances;
gun chamber,
the room of secondary light;
all horizon variations.
an algebra of darkness,
this dense Roman twilight,
their exiles unreflected
in blind lanterns.
our brightness will become
refracting silhouettes,
a broken yolk in the incendiary sky.
~

I tried taking a trip
down memory lane
but it was closed
to thru traffic

So I called the department
of transportation
and they told me
it was all in my head

~
Another green world
reels them in

unfledged
lovers

they yearn
to be hydro-electric

cascading over
emerald and stone

floating along
with the water hyacinth

where they evaporate
but do not falter

in the naked spring
of continuously November

jumping off
a bridge above ecosystem

a new frontier
under their nose

as souvenir:
pioneers to the fall

and yet all they really
need to remember is

this is where they
first made love
~

~
I work in the clouds
Building a world out of hype
I could be a beekeeper
A prison guard
Reverse pop idol
Extinguishers, all

Hackers ferry contemporaries
Around the diseased city
Merchants of transference
Polymorphing
Paths and angles
Pieces of eight

They could be brutal war fantasies
White noise translations of the snow
Cathedral nights in the deli
Ghost recordings from an opera house
Each with its own price tag

All the pretty girls
Thick with mascara
Go to plasticity
Drink chloroform
100 aspects of subterranea
So long as they come home
With a credit problem

Money devotion
It's what transferred us
Into numbered silhouettes
Slavishly pouring our blood into the sea
~