We now return
to your regularly scheduled dream.
Do the math: ducks in the pond
swim upstream to spawn supreme.

Then pay it forward
as a string of numbers.
Continuous in series,
strung out and unencumbered.

There's some **** saxophones
lifting off in tune to the rhythm method.
Save the soft jazz for when you're really in the mood, and read a bedtime story instead.

Vision begins when the lids
are closed and threading the daisy chain.
This is where we
place the refrain:

Caution--unstable, but microwavable.

The lines blur
where the vertical and horizontal collide.
Can't stand the swimming in the head,
yet enjoy the peripheral ride.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure,
even as far deep down as this chasmic seabed. Living with technophobia,
But married to sensory overload instead.

Making new babies in safe mode.
We lose sight when plugged too long into this hub. Just another anxiety in need of a pill
--join the club.

We meet where there's free Wi-Fi
so battery life doesn't drain.
This is where we
repeat the refrain:

Caution--unstable, but microwavable.

There's no line for
implants or alcohol

Autumn leaves fall in time
not just for October

Voices are liminal
neither hide nor hair

*** is a capricious contest
where anyone can be assassin

Limitless horizons abound
where even bottomfeeders
fear to tread

Welcome to phase II
It's only the beginning
(of the end)

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

Room and pillar
Let me be your guiding shaft
Atmospheric pressure
Let me be your natural draft

Atticus Finch
Let me be your inner last laugh
Cold determiner
Let me be your unsuspecting half

The sign in the window says
Closed until the light of day

Broken bone
Let me be your sling and marrow
Agitated Polaire
Let me be your tight-laced narrow

Confounded Plath
Let me be your children's tomorrow
Germ warfare
Let me be your biological sorrow

The word on the street is
Nothing's gonna change until the light of day

Open minefield
Let me be your measured step
***** mother
Let me be your usual suspect

Unwanted child
Let me be the tears when you last wept
Unwanted immigrant
Let me be the ground where you last slept

The writing on the wall signals
Critical times until the light of day

lumière du jour
Chérie

Down one side,
Up the other,
The kids have you
Climbing up the walls,
Count me out.

Say it isn't so,
Words along the way
Spell it every kind of wrong,
Take it easy,
Life is a merry-go-round,
Learn-as-you-go,
Flip of a coin,
Shop of horrors.

So there's no need for panic,
It's a moving picture,
Just keep your extremities
Inside the vehicle at all times,
Otherwise limbs may fall.

Serafina was a skydiver
And she was always falling.

Jimmy was her instructor
And the next in line.

"The thrill of love," she said,
"Is about how high you can climb."

If the moment's spent
She parachutes out.

A risk,
No doubt.

But on she plays,
Crossing her fingers

This idée fixe
Never comes crashing back to earth.

~
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
~

Take me back to a time
when a vow
was the color of
everyone's tomorrow

Take me back to a place
where a promise
never led to
man's great sorrow

Where the breeze
would linger in the grass

No one ever questioning
how long it would last

~
Sheltered within her cryochamber, the offspring of Armageddon dreams of play. She swims in an algal bloom that no longer stings like jellyfish. She floats on the surface of content, far removed from the synthetic sea and its plastic isles. She dwells in a bubble, but her mind hangs free as a halo, soaring with clouds. But these are not the skies that sense their own act of vandalism. This is the space and ceiling of a child's mind, in her capacity to absorb disturbance and rest her tiny, fragile hope in pretended, unclaimed worlds.
~

Broke through the dark
by wounding one of its own

La luna lone

Made a hole in the heart
of my midnight

Bleeding out acetylene light

Grief is the haze

A mist shrouding reality
within these closing days

scavenger bride,
she counted periods
before the children came along,
but never suspected
eyes like bottles
beginning to blue,
a tangle of scars
hermetically sealed,
the new order of
a broken romance,
dead love cassettes
in the glove compartment,

her cold and empty
constellations,
like cold breath
passing through a beam of sunlight,
grid of points, pendulums,
the ratio of freckles to stars,
no subtle countenance,
martinis and bikinis,
soft ******* and ice cream,
slight, elusive things, on a beach
with no more meaning,

the repeating pattern of
her mistakes and reliefs,
a preservation of decay,
sustained by the tiny
human fault line
in that oneiric hinterland,
between dreaming and waking,

she draws around the noise
and the clearings,
she creates within that sightline
the way her sadness can feel
comfortable,
an extension of loss that turns
her ruins into a home.

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.