Ether phases, cones of power,
lunar cycles,
witching hour.

Many mansions, herbs and candles,
live aloud,
the goddess answers.

Why is Death always scowling?
Does he hate the life he takes,
or the death he gives?

Love turns tragic in Persia,
in Venice,
in China,
in graveyards,
in movies,
in poems.

Love gets deadly
in candles tall as men.

Only after we fail
to bring it back
from where it's gone,
do we ever think
to join it
where it's at.

"It is nice to fall down
with a pretty woman,"

I wipe my chuckles
on a nearby
beechnut,
then dare to jaw
you my open
hand.

they came to prove us their blood
and left their exhibits
like caulk
in the cracks of Paris,
soaked the Seine
with their evidence,
took their turn
to blast Bastille
with chanting cannons,
'we're still here.
we're still here.'

we lack the liver
to filter the past
and so, call healthy diet
the avoidance of facts,
fats, bile,
and meat.

it is precisely here
we drown algerians.

Making lists
of things I like
to buy on tees
one day.

Like a hound sniffing,
a boy groping,
ivy climbing,
we hover cursors
over choices
of things we wonder
if we'd like.

Do not soothe the pain.
Do not kiss the pain.
Do not bribe the pain.
Do not take the pain.

Don't argue with the pain,
the pain talks too loud
for civilized discourse.

The pain refuses
all rules of order.

Do not explain the pain
lack of water.
Do not name the pain constricted
blood vessels.
This is too humane
for the thing we call
the pain.

If you should begin
to consider
making the pain a guest,
remember the pain did not knock
and leaves wet towels on your body.

Never ever ever
write poems about the pain.

It is
generally advisable
to avoid
making pro and con lists
about the pain.

Whatever you do,
do not pray for the pain.

The pain has no soul.
The pain cannot be saved.

No.
As a godfearing citizen
of a blameless county,
it is your solemn duty
and right
to
****
****
**** the pain.

Two paths diverged
in a yellow wood,
and wishing to travel
both,
I looked,
saw trees,
sat down,
instead.

That thing you said
made home inside me,
sweats through my feet,
seethes my ******* teeth.

I found the pearls I bought you
in a dusty dresser,
next to letters,
pulled them out
and showed you,
was surprised
how well that worked.

Like film
and candy tins,
old dull things
seem more
on purpose.

I try to capture
which one glimmers
but I'm always
a sequin behind.

......

I followed you from table to table
like a kitestring unbound.
You seemed to soar, to dip,
to rocket,
flirting earth and heaven
like a half-fallen angel.

Then the night blew out
and you stalled atop it,
and like dew,
glistened down
gently upon me.

......

Tiny shiny paper
on the dress
on the floor,
waterfalling
quicksilver
from the night before.

I wake to ask you
which one glimmers
but the dress
has somewhere gone.

I close my eyes
to dizzy shimmers
chase them ever
on and on.

I walked down
every single aisle,
couldn't find anything
I needed.

Last night,
I boiled
and baked,
fried at least twice,
a meal
of multiple courses,
balanced textures,
and a symphony of spices.

Deliciously earned,
in hours, in dishes,
it tasted
as good
as food
can taste.

.

This morning
I overslept,
groaned upright
into water and coffee.

This morning,
this banana,
is heaven on earth.

Nettles on your legs,
sawgrass in you speaks,
can't you see
for all your weeding,
your garden overgrows?

sometimes in the shower
i heat the water
until it scalds and suffocates.

a few minutes later
i acclimate,
and do it again

and again

until the whole house
is hazy
with steam,
until you screech
like a teakettle.

then pink and raw,
more sweat than soap,
i grow dizzy and breathless

turn you off

let the recycled air
cool me like mint.

i walk around the rest of the day
with new skin,
glutted and brave,
radiating heat and blood.

*

so, i guess,

my darling,

for me,

eating you out,

is something like that.

When we said our goodbyes,
something strange happened.

I couldn't feel the ground,
my feet,
my mass.

What quiet powers you have,
to turn me to bubbles,
to float me on wind.

All your heavy, gray
groaning
accumulates
like nickels.

What am I supposed to do
with all these nickels?

Between the borders
lie bubbling mires,
thick but porous,
pockmarked and soft.

A chorus of croaking warts,
"Slither through my friend;
take back whatever
is yours,
but please
please
please
add us to your maps."

I'd like to
be lucky
enough
to take
some mountain
for granted.

All the best minutes
are lost to hours,
while many
moments
marry us
for years.

These kids can't cope,
don't eat on time.

They stomp craters in sidewalks
on their way to the
culling.

They choke me in comet tails,
blear beauty through brains,
cursing at cops,
stooping to saviors.

They streak their spit like evidence.

These kids get angry,
get plosive,
like it was kissing or grinning.

These kids get angry,
and I've yet to say thanks.

you swam sleepy by
in the sweaty spring air,
drunk on pollen
and nowhere-to-be.

a few speedy flutters
like sharing a secret,
you went on your way
to porches unseen.

each knife gray morning
and slate gray night,
i held vigil on a treetop
bare and swaying.

kept time with its nausea
til it was my nausea too.

i watched the sea horizon
for glints of gun scopes
and unfriendly flags.

hungry others,
who wanted me and mine,
for their cabinets.

they did come,
i think.

i heard them play kings around me,
curing as much as they caused,
humming some friendly ******* patois.

it didn't matter much by then.

i watched the sea horizon,
my newer me and mine.

sleep
comedy
love,
is mostly
timing.

too early
or late,
you're tired
alone
unfunny.

When the full glint of doubting
came by
this morning,
I didn't hear it knock.

I was busy breathing
and counting angles
in the best air of the day.

An army
conscripted
from neighborly realms,
mismatched
but straightbacked
in clumsy formation,
armed to the spine
with the strange words
of fiendish friends,
an occupying force
of Sunday afternoons.

They've come to make war
on our boredom.
They've come to free us our time.
They will marry the sons of our
doubting
and build new nations
atop the chipped marble
within.

Cover your nose.
There are new
bad things
that want to be
inside you.

Cover your mouth
and learn to
smile
with your eyes.

it's been so long
i know the way now,
folded pavement
seamless merging.
hopeful headlights
piercing windows,
i cross the border
cannonballing.

then one wrong left,
and hell again.

Like a tax return,
once or twice a day,
I wondered
when you'd get here,

thought about ways
of making you
spent.

People say
they love the smell of books.

I'm not sure if I do,
but I recognize it,
and I sniff at every one,
furtively,
a bit afraid someone will see me,
wanting new friends.

I wonder if some books
have a thing for thumbs.

Operas
mount racehorses.
Idiom rubs elbows
with Billboard charts.
World capitols bow
to puns
and seabirds,
and long-dead winners
waltz,
cheek to cheek,
with subject-verb
agreement.

The things we love most
are the least important,
but how nice to find
them meeting
each other.

There is
a crooked path
of wine bottles
from me
back to Adam.

Wooden,
stone,
or concrete,
now when I
see steps,
I want to
sit on them
with you.

The mountain
gets bigger
as you draw
closer,
is at its tallest
just before
you begin.

Hell is a dry place
with coffee stains and fruit flies,
with lesser vowels.

Wrote a million words,
deleted all but these.

After you left
it was quiet.

I turned off the
air conditioning
to keep your breaths around,

made tea to smell you,

found the poems
I was reading
too dull for words,

saw you
in oak stains
in bedposts
the rest of the day.

When I saw her again,
I learned she named
all her pets
after exotic spices,
like cardamon
and sweet flag,
flavor she found,
life she had earned.

I pelt you with puns
while studying slate.
Insult all your friends
til you bellow and trill.

Clumsy and desperate,
I break taboos,
like a ***** boy
testing new squeezes.

It's just that
when I make you laugh,
I can risk to see.

Like a solar eclipse
I can meet your eyes,
in those brief brutal breaths
where I made Light snort.

Like pianos
or ovens
or puzzles,
some people
see mornings
and know just what to do.

My ears pop
as I climb your stairs,
steal breath
with a cat
halfway home,
get dizzy
and skeletal,
queasy hungry,
reminding myself
to not look up
or down,
count the steps,
breathe the breaths,
hypnotic hope,
tendons tending
over thresholds
to temples,
hands to heads,
to take trash
and bills
back down,
heels and rails,
bend my
spine,
stoop
again to earth.

I spent a penny
on another,
and now it's
raining dimes.

Thunder, it soothes me,
and quiet disrupts.

Must I always argue with everything?

When my father finds
he has the wrong tool,
he mumbles to himself,
shuffles to the workbench,
comes back with something else.

How do you end the future?

Palimpsests
of first footsteppers.
Old starships
and kidnapped daughters.

For forty years we've watched
the screens of lower stars,
their clean floors
and hateless dilemmas,
taking tours of the best of us.

Our problems,
their past,
left lightyears behind.

And the next generation
is always always next,
like planets first federated,
like first contact at last,
a speech undelivered.

An ending that satisfies
may just well be
where no man has gone before.

I flip you
like pages,
you make me
ticker tape
dizzy.

I found
socks
and poems,
a cat,
found
get-well cards,
under my bed.

You fanged at me so proud,
but I only eat poison,
I only kiss snakes.