~
Tonight underneath debris
Family foreclosure
...
Heaven's legs dawn through window
Offer artificial hope
...
Employee to love
Dressed for escape
...
Pleasure town angel
A multi-colored pretty thing
...
Mom questions way
Daughter drives to parties
...
Empty lips talk
**** reflection patterns
...
Death inside mom and dad
Beautifully cold skin
...
War god kiss
Midnight blue people (at dinner table)
...
Young shadows flower
Final stars fire
...
Money born cloud
Raining on remnants of family
...
Is there nothing
Left to mortgage?
~

I leave it to you with fondness.

How you used to fill it on those lazy Sundays
with fresh blooms from the neighbor's garden.

You would blame the kids from across
the street and we'd laugh
as their dad chased them around the yard
with a belt.

And when they would die, as they were wont to do,
you'd replace them with your paranoid
king's fiddlesticks.

He'd come out of the castle in a dither.

But you always convinced him
it was the handiwork of little green men
--who looked very much like
the kids from across the street.

Ah, remember the fire and how we danced?

Yes, my dearest captive
--the face that launched a thousand ships--

I leave it to you with only the warmest sentiments.

Love, Paris.

~
The day was orange
The word is yellow
Out like a light switch
Teeth a steady glow

The projectile's
Crisscross trajectory
Is no kindness

In the catacombs of this mine
Watch it leak
Watch it settle

What remains is
Subterranea, urania
Built to last
A moment to inhale
Before fade to black
~

~
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.
~

~
Bring your whirlwinds with you;
in the snow angel summer
bring Margot the sun.

In the hour of red glare
a rush to pick slowberries
before getting caught up in the silk.

Prisms, mirrors, lenses!
strategies for combatting visibility:
keep your eyes closed,
face away from the window.

The myriad threads of people in hiding,
they eat their own web each day,
and yet something always shines
in the heart's secret annex.

Men and women are
separated from each other,
the girls are on a train
to the Bergen-Belsen,
"white founts falling
in the courts of the sun."

Margot now cries quietly;
so silently she weeps over
sunshine and hate.
~

~
Sugar wife,
slipping husband,
massaged honeymoon flesh
wrapped in cellophane.

The sound of a water clock
cascading down
her mysterious frontage.

Handprints on
the glass pane
opaque with remnant steam.

Let your eyes
be your guide,
when dressed in
the tiniest temptations,
she catwalks into the room
with a novel idea for two.
~

•###•

•the•message•is•so•phantom•

•strangled•
•during•the•thir­d•act•

•illuminated•
•letters•are•the•ciphertext•

•and•they•glo­w•
•in•your•eyes•
•Bletchley•Park•

•Turing•
•worked•it•out•with•­
•Delilah•

•they•killed•for•less•
•died•for•even•more•

•###•

Driven by red
riding hood,
wheels of eternity run
hot and cold
along the tracks
in her arm.

Around the bend
there are jigsaw
pieces of a puzzle,
scattered as destinations
once towns and villages,
now fodder for
the migrant beginner.

According to fable,
there's a wolf at the door,
home is no longer
a worthwhile rendezvous,
but a trap of origin.

Misery is a train ride,
a stray fantasy,
lingering in the wilderness
of her fractured mind.

She sells her gold bracelets,
for she needs
the dark coal,
she seeks
its deep freeze.

She can then
be many things
along the journey,
just never
a connection,
never a permanent signal.