~
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
~

his hobbies include
                          invisible girls
                     bubble wrapped
              shielding their eyes from the sun
                        up the side of his mountain
holding fast to the cable
                                  and the eventual terror of drawing
                     paper moons
                         framed a bit too
                                                   insular
                                                   binocular
                                                   funicular
                                                   vermicular
                         these out of sightlines
                                    opaque and cobwebbed
                               screening off
                       his ***** little secrets

~
Memphis
and the King,
plagued up
to his neck
in denial,

turning remote
controls
into staffs,
staffs into snakes,
jackals,
and hounds,

shaking the sistrum,
singing gospels
full of mystery
to a god,
a girl,
and state of mind
he will never solve,

asking skies
of transulent
orange,
from the far corners
of his world,
for pharmacopia,

then granting
Moses
his freedom
in exchange
for a box
of hot glazed
doughnuts,

and always
his little
wild petunia,
painted face
and percolating
body,
skin smooth
as the eastern Delta,

her weighted down heart,
his tyranny,

his self-destructive tongue,
her asp
~

Desolate
Unyielding notes
Accumulate
Silhouetting umbra
Breaking through
Architectural shadow
Flickers of bloom & bounty
From a sleeping
Satiated bride
Reposed upon
The chaise longue
Softly interlacing
The accidentals
With a final grace note
Before absolute stillness
Reprises

~
I hold still,

let him finish stabbing me

                                                 — I count six,

let him believe me dead,

he moves on to Cecelia.

--

It does not go as well for her

as she continues to writhe and scream

and carry on,

not well at all
                                             
               ­                              — I count eight,

                                                                nine,

                                                                ten...
~

I remember her
in old
photographs

she'd been
daydreaming
all her life
in her under-age
world

spinning
like a top
eternity
in her head
but recklessness
on her tongue

crusading for
******* summers
in Europe
and all that comes
splendidly hither

when laid down
by the embers
in the groves
close to
the congenial sea

I rightly recall
before the page
turning

electric particles
shooting off
as fireworks
in each of her
copper eyes

and how destiny's
curtain fell
with such
suddenness
that morning of
the thin blue line

~
She stands on the roof of the world, a ship in a bottle. She likes to wave at passing boats, inviting 120 volts to raise their sails.

Words unbosomed -- her attempt of blotting out the sun and those bloodletting habits.

Her eyelids say, "Only the disquieting muses have time for me." So she writes like an umbrella, shading reality; remembering pluck and luck stories about bumblebees, lovingly wrapped in Tiffany-blue ribbon and paper.

Father used to solve her every contemplation. Now indecisiveness in what she asks. Now indecisiveness in arbitrary tasks.

And she and her negative capability are the last two awake at a slumber party, giving commonplace words the allure of secrecy.

You see, she is only harmless when she sleeps.
~

It's a small world
for some girls. They live

in shadow
of the Himalayas,
and other assorted mountainous
peaks. They daydream

of being followed
by the camera eye,
adored for the top heavy
weight they carry with
a grinning bounce. They want

to be a cruise ship,
stacked to the deck.
They want to be
fashioned with torpedoes,
a bombshell to
reckon with. And so they lie

on a table
to become a sculpture in plastic
for a renowned
architect. A mad scientist
in his own right,
experimenting with his creations
on fragile psyches, banking

on insecurities,
giving them a deflated hope
that what God didn't
bless them with,
his derangement will.

It's a mind game.

A mantra to "she who sends up gifts":
if you feel as good as you look,
all is well.

There's no harm in that, right?
Let's ask Pandora...

Sun-rimmed
& splendorous
this afternoon of us
barefoot in the grass
...
Noontide escapade
& pageantry
the mural on the wall of your heart
says you agree
...
Loving outside of ourselves
constructs the nook
I feel what you feel
Sehnsucht
...
There's an au fait air
between this man & wife
bound in codex
this breath of life

For her day at the beach
She chose big time
Fun in the sun
And wore dental floss

Not real safe for the top heavy
Too strong a frolic
And she might well crash
Upon the shore like a tsunami

But that was the least
Of her problems this day
For when she bent over
You could see all the way
Down to Florida

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

Defrosting the freezers
  are far from ****
Nonetheless
They're on the rise

Caps are melting
Shelves are falling
Glaciers are passing ships
  in the traffic lane
They're on the move

This is no song & dance
The poles are looking for
  new real estate and
They're coming soon
  to a neighborhood near you

These strange fellows
Still record on videotape
Abroad an outdated
Insufficient spacecraft
The shape of
An interstellar bowling alley

By night they hunt for
New age wine
Radio waves
And a slew of hitchhikers

Some they greet
Some they cheat
Some they mistreat
Some they eat

Convenient store gangbusters
Crop circling has seen its better day
Soundtrack enthusiasts
They've a score to settle
With John Williams

They came from a fruitless world
In search of pomegranate skies
And the Big Apple
Even from the far flung
Reaches of space
Everyone's an actor

Some they unseat
Some they beat
Some they reheat
Some they eat

We're odd to them
Because they're gods to us
In a technologically challenged
Unidentified flying object

It's not war they want
Nor invasion
Just dinner theatre
And a reliable map

The way to a man's heart
Is through his stomach.
Does this apply to
Cannibals too?

Trust the sun (she says)
her first rays when creation was young
and God's window opened outward
as a place of worship
born to be breathtaken
daylight imploring for companionship
and bleeding into itself
as it bleeds into the worshipper.

She notices that her own taste
in repeating patterns doesn’t mesh
with the apparently similar
patterns in Drakensberg
they obey a different logic, and the friction
between them generates
a fascinatingly ambiguous color.

Tinctured cathedral of time passing
on its first layer of stairs...

Year after year
--at daylight savings--
he kept moving his clock backward,
but never forward,
until he wound-up in the wrong century.

He then slept in masks,
his dreams repeatedly
disbanding and reforming,
as if in someone else's show,
but it was his hallucinating set-list, for sure.

He lived at the call of the void,
feeding off peppermint sticks
and clusters of chokeberry,
to help ease the pressure.

One phantom summer,
he read The Joy of Euthanasia
from cover-to-cover, over and over,
until he could recite death.

He poured his heart
into his new work
as an artist of tacenda,
--yes, he kept a lid on it.

And when the pretty young bees
buzzed about underneath
their brazen parasols,
he'd smile up at the sun
for her complicit glow:
the warmest days
always drew them out to him,
like honey on the tongue.

Now naysayers may keep
him out of Canton,
but one day, like most serial killers,
they will name a school after him
and his hijinks.

1-hour photo lab: an aged prop:
prompt

One hundred years of solitude: glass city:
yellow be their faithful death:
mikado

She prefers another color
for the bedroom wall:
sarcoline

She's in the spotlight
staged like a warm peach:
Non-Euclidean

'Almost a spy--
looking forward to a bright and wonderful future'
--eternally and everlasting:
amaranth

What do you give the person
who thinks they have it all?
Doubt:
that dull brown stocking to wear on his feet

The irrefutable motto
Spiraling overhead
Like buzzards
Is your wife's voice
Reminding you instead
That the directions you failed
To ask for at the last filling station
Several hours ago
Have once again
Ruined a family vacation

~
The disruptor,
whether digital or analog,
strikes the bell,

bioengineered automaton
—a manufactured life form
given little agency or dimension,

mnemonic to the finitude of life,
and subtle muddling of humankind's
supposed moral transcendence.
~

~
Lipstick to void. She is a race against time. The beveled past a disruption in her lines of influence.

Travel is dangerous, and tonight it darkens the highway of blood vessels coursing through her extremities. She wants to be luminous and under the skin.

While Dorothy dreams of tornadoes in Kansas, she dreams of remote climbs in lesser Glasgow, of party drugs in Tokyo. How many lights does she see?

In her hair are sixty circuits. But she waits, religiously inclined on the hotel bed. She drove through ghosts to get here wearing nothing but Las Vegas.

So strange at this hour, in a city full of sleepwalkers for the taking, she now dreams she's a bulldozer, she now dreams she's alone in an empty field.
~

What exactly does
A stormtrooper's armor
Protect him from?

Based on their troubled history,
Shouldn't Death Stars
Have been named
Death Traps instead?

A novice like Luke
Could immediately sense evil
In an unknown tree,
Yet, Master Yoda couldn't sense it
In a person he was around everyday!
Explain that to me?

A little birdy told me
A woman of few words
Is usually the one
Who does the dancing
On someone's grave

~
There's trouble in Alphaville:

Caution in the taxi, "I am on a journey to the end of the night."

Remember to silence love when sneaking Sally thru the alley.

There's always one too many wives on the same wavelength.

Seeing is believing in the cold ultraviolet light of a long, warm lens.

And naturally "How to Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow" is all checked out at the local library.
~

~
This isn't happening
all of the sudden
we need to close the beaches
and call in sick

Don't cry again teargas
it's not your fault
don't get hot there gun
you gave it your best shot

Song and dance, weekend warrior
soothe your soul
with a little radio friendly fire

The forest can be petrified
the sea wild
working without a mask
is both, you know

It's quite out of this world
but you haven't
really seen outerspace
until you've had DayQuil
with dissociatives

Then you take hot trips
to odd places
like an international
convenient store
where they're always
out of Africa and milk

I wish Monday mourning
would go jump off a bridge
I wish taco Tuesday
would become a festive holiday
nevertheless, our girl Friday
is always good for the job

The weight has lifted
the wait has (week)ended
the search for
my socks and sanity
can now kick off
~

Waves of broken sleep
numb the day and
put the night in a coma,
like empty tunnels
they mined the hell out of
a century ago.
Turn back the clock
and strand me in this time change,
then full scream ahead
until I'm buried
in the same pettifogging
I was once sustained by.
Waves of plaintive water
support the loneliest creatures
that will soon fly overhead,
like hollow words,
hoping to rain on this parade
and make me cry
for abandoned impulses
closer than they appear.
If I cave to the pressure,
I'll rise from head to toe
in a swelter,
a diver with the bends
riding on high
until the hammered blow
--up and down
this elevator moves,
closing to present ritual
then opening to past stimulus
I'm far too afraid
to open my eyes to,
even if it's only
that one all too familiar
surprise...

I'm in a room without recovery area:
a room of intermission, a room
of collapse. Where are
the convenient little windows
to release a wicked bird of thought?
The quiet there is monk-like,
rogue, and slightly unpleasant, guilty
of moments spent with shadow.

I want to build a clock
that ticks once a year
—more dark than shark,

my confessional capacity
—time-stretched,
like the heavy intoxicated *******
of the witching hour. And I'll
make soup from the leftover prayers
of the day before, all in hopes
the rooms of me, then so clear,
will one day be faraway suns
in the temple of heaven.