While the purple martin
Sings his dawn song
The bush crickets
With their scraping chirps
Form a washboard percussion
Beneath an orchestra
Of crinkling goosefoot.

It is not the sobriety of
This great Weald
And the stately occlusal
Of her tall trees
That crowds your soul.

But the ordinariness
Of the things beneath it
That make you want
To find your own voice.

There is a kind
Of deliverance
In each day
The way the sun
Rises
A fattened berry
Full of dripping light.

And the trees below her
Glisten
To wakefulness
Under her watchful eye

While the shadows
Slip like small snakes
Down the branches
Until they disappear.

Such beauty.
Such promise.

I do not know if this life
Has purpose
Or if my prayers
Are a sigh
Carried by the wind
Into nothing.

It does not matter.

Nothing in the world
Would matter
If you were not here
To give it meaning.

Lots of ways
To sting the heart
Words with poison
Aimed like darts
And the buttery
Canorous tone of your voice
Like sugar on arsenic
To make it taste nice.

Many ways
To clear the air
Ocean dulse
Black as tar
And all I do
Is dredge this deep
And bring up things
Best left asleep.

Many times
We’ve gone too far
Like hackled dogs
That spoil for war
Panniered
Like two pack mules
Laden down
With all our wounds.

Lots of ways
To let this go
A sunset in its
Orangey throes
But a white-flagged wave
Of armistice.
Will never stop
This revenant.

We shot through the ground
At the same time
And while you pushed your way
Towards the sun
Drinking up the light
I cleared the gravel
So the others
Could find their way too.

Weeds
Have to be quick
Lest they end their days
Under the hiss of a spray bottle
Or the blunt end of a shovel
So I learned to hide
Between the sunflower minstrels
And the corned eared zinnias
While you stretched your
Peppered veins
To lap up the rain
And poison what fell to the ground
Choking
Everything.

You were a giant child
And yet I loved you
Deeply
So deeply
Only the mole crickets knew
And I hated you too
Because I was nothing
But a ****
Beneath your feet.

Ozymandias
The talking phocomelus
In the deaf mute house
No way to sign or scream
Above the silence.

Ozymandias -
Pushed like a stone
From Cronus's belly
Longs for a mother
- But hates all women.

And yet the seraphs come
Drawn by the lure
Of a light in the hamlet
Or the flame
Of a Cornish wrecker.

The smart ones
Water the glyphs
On the Obelisk
But nothing grows
From stone.

Ozymandias -
Hollow as a drum
Fills me with his ***
And for one moment
As he moves above me
For one moment
I think he is my captive
And then the moment's done.

It has come to this -
I am dead
In my busyness
Droning about
A wasp in a stoppered jar.

Once I loved words
Midges on my tongue
I spat them into shapes
Over paper
Too busy chasing jam now
To write much.

And you
I think if I had you
I wouldn't have to run
From my loneliness.

The carvings
In the tympanum
Above the
Door
The Star of David
Etched
Upon the
Floor
The Tarot's
Tower
That feeds the
Querant's dread.
And birds
That hit my window
Fall down
Dead.
The totem
Snakes
That speak to me
At night
And black
Cats
Arch their backs
When I’m in sight
The feeling in  
My gut
That all’s
Not well
And Rorschach
Blots
That shape
An inky hell.

My minds a maze
Where thoughts run
Round and round
They pick up speed
Like jets that
Leave the ground
A sonic boom
Of waves that pass
Through sound  
*But the noise
Of what I dread
Is only loud.

You told me dragons
Were not real
And then you led me
To you lair
A catacomb
So dark and deep
That sunlight couldn’t
Reach me there.

Stalactites
Like upturned tapers
Hung above my head
Like fangs
Your breath fanned out
In fiery vapors
As the gargoyles slavered
In their overhangs.

How well you hid
Your taste for blood
Your voice so soft
I felt no fear
And yet my brother
Warned me off
Beware the tune
The piper peals.

My mother wept
She knew that road
The brambles snarled
The flowers with thorns
She begged of me
To turn and run
But I was captive
I was young.

Once upon a thyme
In an herbed house
Their lived a witch
Whose ripe rampion
Was so overpowering
That the neighbors
Left bottles of febreeze
On her doorstep.

The witch didn’t care
- But
In the flat-ironed town
Of Lunch time lipo
Where you were defined
By your eating disorder
She looked like
An Omish escapee
With hips that wriggled
And ******* that jiggled
So her cell phone number
Wasn’t in anyone’s top five
-Except
For one confused neighbor
Who never made it to college
And got to experiment
Like a true Gemini.

Now imagine the witch’s surprise
When this neighbor confides
That she would love to eat
Her ripe rampion.
- Naturally
The witch agreed.
It was nice to have something
That somebody else wanted
Though it was exhausting
For the neighbor
Who munched day and night.

And if one surprise
Wasn’t enough
The witch discovered that her
Neighbor was pregnant.
Now the witch had many powers
But that wasn’t one of them.
It appeared that her neighbor
Found her husbands
Carrot patch to
Quite esculent also.

And the witch
Being a picky Virgo
With a jealous Scorpion moon
Thought that her neighbor
Should not
Have spun around the vegetable
Color wheel quite so fast
And so in a fit of temper
She stole her baby
And locked her away
In an ivory tower.

Initially everything worked out
Until the oil crisis
And then the witch couldn’t
Visit Rapunzel quite as often
As she would have liked
Not with gasoline
Being so expensive
And so Rapunzel became bored
And started chatting to
Prince charming
On her face-book wall.

The witch took all the hopeful Trojans
That the prince had left
On previous visits
And tied them together
To form a rubbery step ladder
And when she heard him shout
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel…let down your hair!"
She threw this at him…angling it
With just a little thread of hate.

Prince charming grew all shivery
And put on his worst
Austin powers "Oh behave" accent
Thinking of the delights
That awaited him
However, his shivery-ness
Soon became a full body tremor
When the witch met him
On the top rung
And he knew quick enough
This wasn’t a
Ménage à trois.

The prince spent many months
In traction
Recuperating from his fall.
Rapunzel was sent off
To boarding school.
And as for the witch…
She dropped twenty pounds
And got her own reality show
*Housewives of Salem county.

Salome*
The biblical histrionic
Herod’s bewitcher
Her charms proffered
Beneath the silk
Of seven veils.
The ****** of her belly
The rise of her *******
Makes an old mans knuckles
Long to knead her flesh.
Proselytized
Herod will give her a n y t h i n g
But John will never
Be hers.
His love is numinous
It transcends mere flesh
And so she is enraged.
And demands his head
On a silver platter.


Nothing worse
Than being told
You are loved equally
There was never a woman
Comforted by such words.
Tell your bride
On your wedding night
That you care for her
As much as you care for
Your mother
Your sister
And your aunt
And then while you skip
Into the bathroom
To search for your
Rubber accoutrements
She will be busy on the internet
Searching for your replacement
On Match.com.
And you won’t be able to call
Mother
Or Auntie
Or *****
for a hug.
Not while your ***** hangs limply
In its latex casing
It
would  
just
look
ODD.

A Merrow
Hiding
In a woman’s body
Her world
Limned
Within the puerile
Extent
Of her consciousness.

And rising above her
Solid as Newcastle coal
Lir
His face
A web of ratlines
Carved by the wind
And in his eyes
The sea.

She swims in this
Impression
His voice a nurses balm
Crisp as lager
Pulling her
Up
Up
Until she breaches
The bow wave
Back arched
Breath stilled

And then sinks
Beneath him
Believing
Nothing will hurt her
While he covers her
From the cold.

Your words
Would burst up through
The grikes and clints
A sweet green grout
That took root
Under the gray slab
And each word
A grass moth
Gathering sugar
From the Milkwort
For the cold days
To come.

You were always
Kind to me
In this river of life
With its currents
And hidden undertows
And the things
That scared me into
Threading.
I was no Otter
I never learned
The playful art
Of splashing
Through the sunny
Moments
While the clouds
Gathered like sisters
But you always
Got me moving.
Using words
Like steps
Filling my page
With courage.

Tell me your troubles
And I’ll tell you mine
And meanwhile the
Great world spins
We are artists
En plein air
Your impressionistic strokes
Coalesce into a formless
Gray corona
Beneath the sea.
It might be a shark
Or a porpoise
I will never know
Until it rises to the surface
Will it eat
or draw breath?

My strokes are baroque
A tenebristic composition
Of dark and light tones
A bee on a peony
Your eyes fall to its
Barbed stinger

Show me your soul
And I will show you mine
And meanwhile
It’s all an art
On how we spin things

How will you know
When you pass through a forest
If your eyes are
Glued to the road
How will you see all the life
That abounds
If your eyes are
Always closed

How will you hear
All the sounds in the air
How will you witness
The beauty that’s there
If you can’t spare a minute
For the red breasted Linnet
Or the little green Finch
And her operatic pitch

Or just for a moment
Stop to admire
The dappled twig arbors
And the great blue sky
Heaven has spilled out
All of her flavors
And all of this beauty
Is just yours to savor
If you stop for a second
The Larks song is pliant
Her cantor an echo
That her fledglings can follow.

She has a pretty house
With a mansard roof
Punctured with dormer windows
And guests climb
Up the steps
Like rapping woodpeckers
Weighted down
With their baggage.
She opens her door
And they file in
Sometimes weary
From their journey
Sometimes angry
From their travails.
Sometimes complaining
Sometimes malicious
Sometimes happy.

She entertains them anyway
Souls in the night
They are all searching for something
Das Ding
Some are armed with Bruntons
So they might navigate a path
In the dark
But the stars know where
You are
Better to be still
So they can shine their light on you.

I can hear it in the
Atonal scraping of my chair
Across the scuffed linoleum
In the cessant whirring of the fridge
And the dull hum of the fan
Familiar sounds
I have heard a thousand times before
They are nothing in themselves
Not happy or sad
Only known
And yet it is the same with your voice
Creeping out from under a prenumbral
A shy beam of light
I recognize its form
Though it is nothing in itself
Not happy or sad
Only known
A familiar sound

*And yet I do not know you.

Everything suffers in its
Own way
The one eared cat
By my door each day
I leave him food
I’d like him to stay
But if I approach
He runs away.

Be gentle with others
Be kind to yourself
Each man has a cross
We could all use some help
And not all backs
Are able to take
Their loads
Poor soft souls
They can’t carry
A flake.

You’re looking for
Fish in the trees
And wasting your time
And your tears
You’re looking for snakes
In the snow
But best search
The warm earth below
You’re looking for
Bees without stings
And you’re looking
For birds without wings.

Best take things
As they are
And stop looking
For what is not there
*If they don’t possess it
They can’t profess it
Much less give it
Away.

Sing your song
Mad bird
Warble in the sky
The world
Has many troubles
There’s much
To make us cry.
Fly above the treetops
With wings
That catch the air
And marvel
At the things you see
They’re lost to us
Down here.
My land legs lug
Me down
I’m anchored
To the ground
A plant with shoots
I can’t uproot
Or else
I’d fly away.
Sing your song
Mad bird
Before I  
Wilt and die
My brambled brush
Could not retouch
The scenes you paint
So high.