night slides into
smooth desolation;

The towered sky has
abandoned its former
lover.

tonight is an eating night;

it chews and gums
at the dark movements
of our hands

as a spray of flame
crosses the horizon and
bursts into many long
dragons;

the purple
quietude is vicious
in its applause

So I sit
in one of
the many
long chairs
of a San Clarita
luxury resort,
red, oiled,
like a newly born
seal, sipping
from a tall glass
of pale spirits,
divining, redoing, and
unsettling the long rows
of people filing in and
out of the pool- which sits
like a fat dog on its
belly-
by squinting my
eyes and tilting my head to and
fro,
and I am noticed by
everyone, and
I come to bask in
their attentions,
noticed, spotlighted
by a grand and medieval
sun.
I am comfortable,
single, successful
in an artful and
humble way,
and everybody,
everybody finally
wants me.
I tilt my head
to the left and right
to view the spaces
of my dominion.
All at once
the angle becomes
wrong, and
I am feared,
despised, a witless
despot parading
around in false
clothes; my
mastery has fled;
all is revolting;
I am once again
myself

Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who's lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.

ghosts lined in
purple            queues
suntan their limpid bodies
         like dusty glass
in the fabulous

eyeholes of
death;

         he delivers
the cardinal produce
                                             of an empire

wider than it is tall,

fat with its
own body

fiends melting
up
their cracking
statues
on the unsweet
asphalt;

hey what's up man c'mon man
what're you doin all alone
all the way
down
here

The tiled sky
wrings its hands over us;
below the children swing,
back and forth,
back and forth;

there will be blood
soon;
simple, causeless
blood;

in our ears
and mouths
and under
our nails

and the children will
swing,

back and forth,
back and forth,

like a surgeon's needle,
like a heel grinding,
like myriad fingers
twisting in hell.

we come alone
to a blank house
and ask
"Why me, why me,
O Lord?"