It's sad to love beauty -
When you are
An ugly ghost.

Scaring away
the light -
And those shapes that
love to bask in it's hot rays -
(If only for a moment)
The joyous arrogance of beauty's smile
(With it's toothy grin jammed into view) -
Those supple bodies, naked and radiant,
Under the moonglow spotlight
Flirting with the lust just in the shadows
Where all paths from the light lead
When such beauty struts into it's focus
With it's naive confidence
Easily led into oblivion's shadowy trap
Where it is fed to the bottom-feeders
From the mangled shards that remain
After the first frenzy.

But I am
an ugly ghost.
At least
I am forgotten.

To those who speak against being 'rude': you are not a friend of truth or understanding.
You coddle yourself in a somnambulant daze,
Where the harshest realities lay deep in your soul,
And you walk away, as far from this dormant minefield you've lain,
Leaving the active bombs for others to stumble upon.
And they suffer because of your laziness,
Avoiding your task of diffusing these bombs that only you understand,
And you still aren't sure where the schematics are,
So the damage continues,
And you have become a despot,
Watching people die from your pointless violence.

****** castanets -
Floors sprinkled with shrapnel
Under the dancer's skirt -
A broken guitar
Holding a flaccid hand
Midstrum
In it's hollow mouth -
Scattered sheets of unedited poems
Stained with spattered flecks of brain -
Broken bottles
In puddles of Chartreuse and Campari
Congealing onto corpses
Slouching at the bar -
Jackboots kicking the viscera from their path -
Searching for a poet's mortal coil
So it can be shuffled
Into the pyre of ideologues and deviants
Protecting the oppression of this fleeting order.

When you emerge from this sleep
There is a sudden nagging pain
Which seems to increase
As moments are filled in
And spreads throughout your nerves
As you feel stiff aches sting
From every joint that can function
Leaving you confused by the source of these pains
And the ether that clouds your mind
Gives you no solace
And takes its penance from your withering spine.

I. We have waited long enough.
There have been three opening acts,
All with various cats in possession of various tongues:
The cross-eyed Siamese, the blind Manx,
The one-eyed Persian,the Blue Forked Wonder,
The Antipodean Papilla Monster,the Twisted Golden
*** Licker,and the lynch mob's Dogwood Dangler.
Yet somehow they have all rolled into one,
A stale tumbleweed of hush.
We're all nervous as ghost town cliches accumulate...
Then she arrives...
The stagehands grab axes and hack the piano
Into kindling ...anticipating the glacier to come.

II. Her silence is best expressed by a necklace of ears,
(An heirloom from her father's failed jungle years),
That she wears along with diamonds
Atop her green-veined cleavage.
(Oh the banana leaves!)
It creates a vacuum as she sings
An anti-aria to our fat toothless quorum.
(We are all passengers on her great chest's heavings.)
We stomp bare feet and stub painted toes
Cackling into our sleeves between her gulps and sighs.
(Even the blackest,rarest of pearls would be
Mere condensation on her horrible *****,
That rising and falling quiet.)
Oh look how her mouth moves,
Like a goldfish gasping in the palm of one's hand,
Helpless and hoping to be swallowed.
Oh look how her mouth moves,
Like an empty eye socket blinking in sacred secret code...
How tired we all are now...so tired.

Ancient scenes carved in stone
Show us the beards of Babylon -
Land-locked and mythic
In the fertile crescent of desert rivers,
Their reliefs find the ancient faces
Adorned with the finest groomed beards in antiquity -

In the ruins of Nineveh and Ur,
Crowned heads hold distinctive locks -
Shared by the flowing chins -
All with strands of coils -
Long and barrel-thick -
Braided together with skills they discovered
In the ether of unwritten history.

Depictions of kings fighting their legendary battles -
Frozen in the stiff stills of chosen poses -
Storyboarded for an anticipated future -
The deeds are incomplete as found -
Damaged by time and jealous men -
And all I remember are the beards.

Winged Annunaki standing tall,
Hold strange repose inside a wall -
Buried for centuries since they stood,
Amongst scattered tools of stone and wood -
Their legs are spread in a conical stance -
Their elbows and wrists were bent in a dance -
Fingers cupped around an oblong cone -
Each pointed towards ears of a supplicant one -
While the arms at their sides hold a bag by a strap,
Only dreams can provide the meanings they map -
One scene is carved with all human faces -
Where the beards are thick with fully coiled laces,
But another variation of a similar scene,
Show Annunaki faces that a bird would preen -
With bulbous eyes and curved hawk-like beaks,
Where beards won't grow, on bas reliefs.

Mysteries may follow damaged relics of the past,
But the Babylonian beards will always last.
Ad infinitum. Ad astra.

Atchafalaya -
Such mystery seemed to reside in this cluster of letters:
The music of it's sounds, the mystery of it's meaning and origin,
the vastness of the swamp underneath the bridge.
In my youth, the bridge seemed like a sidewalk to wondrous new vista -
A frontier with a new wilderness -
At once strange and familiar, unknown but innate -
At first, it's lull stultified the buoyant mood that began the journey -
Where the piney woods turned into the swampy alluvium of Louisiana,
A state with instant personality, apparent in the ravaged roads
That sang against the car tires a desperate song of it's savage frailties
That could impassion or disappoint, or a combination of both,
Where the Highway Patrol were unseen despots
Lurking in the murky weeds and trees
But (luckily) only as scenery in my stories.
Where the lure of New Orleans began to emerge,
My imagination running wild with drunken tales of spicy food
And sensuous women, looking for unspoken desires
In de Beinville's Vieux Carré, where Old God's run wild -
This place where magic was in the freedom found there -
Tip-toeing, drunk, across the sharpened swords -
Through the chicken-bloodied doors -
Ah, but the swamp was a source of strange dreams and visions
Throughout my life,
And it will always make my heart race
When I approach the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge.

Molested by the grief, inside this sunlit blanket of swamp-land, my tears engage amongst weeping filaments and shallows, like the sunlight shattered in squinty eyes, against the shadows of swaying horsetail clusters, creases of light splinter and shimmer until the last dusk-light, carving whispers from lost moments, agile and whistling badly until the bottles break, those are my thorough thighs that dance under the new breath of winter, basking against frictions that spark a new singular confusion, that sudden hollowness of living this human attrition, amongst the chaos and irrational cruelties that blend in as natural as a baby's first smile, conclusions appear and fizzle, delusions bloat with glee, as the soul starts to settle, the crackling dying fire-pit of white ash, like the furrows found on withered brows, pleasures can seem emptier with these dwindling days, but i was living backwards, squandering my youth on self-examination and ascetic aspirations, out of fear and a doubtful heart, now those drugs are valuable to my decay, and living this life is still rich with possibility and transformative change, even as i grow too old to care about tomorrow.

What use is it truly
To Wallow in dusty Words?
******* up those grey Clouds of Skin
Stuck upon those anachronistic Syllables
Lifting those Sounds upon your Tongue
And heaving them artlessly into the Air
To leave Brows Knitted
And Bowels Trembling
With confused Shock upon their Cheeks
From the hearing.

These are not Those without Whose would not be Could
Ever since you had that Choice
A Thing you should not have been given
And should not be given again.

There is always a victory
when you have the spoils
But while you are enjoying sumptuous pleasures
Decay has begun to spread
Rot spoiled and stinking
with an unbearable stench
While memories decide to haunt you
There are no reasons for concern
so you continue to burn
dried puddles of wax on the floor.

The pleasure of smoke
As you continue to burn
Is all you can rely on now
withering with a slimy glee
in the face of days that continue to glow
You are a victim
But only of your humanity
And your hands need to raise
With defiant fists
With desperate grasps
With deep caressing
With humble shakes
But it is hard to keep them from my eyes
And I will continue to try
Before the spoils turn to rot.

Once it was unknown
Only through the boredom of days
Did a mind conceive of a framework
For the patterns of light and darkness
That came and went in the sky above
And how the abstraction of seconds
Growing into hours and days
Could be gathered into numerical traps
To give a glimpse into the lives that have passed
Into death, the only relief from
The oppression of this history -
The oppression of time.

A ******* sweater
as snug as my hands would be
upon your curving *******
and down across your belly
Resting on your luxurious hips
As I slip around you
to find the small of your back
My fingers only hinting on your ***
Sliding up your back
Clutching your shoulders
Kissing your collarbone.

As I am being sandwiched
Between taut malingering palms,
This sudden correct placement
At the feet of a digit.
The tips and their prints shaved off—
Blank and ****** spots
Like a trail of breadcrumbs in fresh rain—
Leave thick dabs like oppressive dewdrops.
You can spread lips or cheeks
And allow this insertion again—
Perhaps the pleasure will emerge.
Finally I am human enough for your sick urge—
And it is too late for you to love me again.

Sad to see
How things never change
As arrogance has no easy rhyme
With orange
And you cling to a question
With some significance to your struggles
A shallow epiphany
Leading you by the *****
(Compulsively repeating)
A reminder of a void
That gap in your memory
The size of the dusty kitchen cupboard
Or your father's ****.

No one needs to know.
You should keep to yourself.

Laying in the dark, stretched out in disdain,
A shadow waddles up to join me on the couch.
I see very little, groggy with sleep,
Yet I feel a sour ***** in my guts,
As her words spill with scorn from her lips.
A last ditch proclamation of love,
After all of the frustrations have smothered it
Underneath wasted hours of medicated sleep,
Hiding from impending anxieties
That never occur with the frequency they are anticipated.
Wasting hours and hours hiding from the frustrations of the past,
A place where I felt welcome,
Until I saw the emptiness of death
And wanted to avoid it in the waning light of my life.
Now we have parted in anger, again,
But I feel relief for us both,
From our stubborn whims and self-defeating depression.
I just hope you don't drown out in the world.
I will still love you forever.

Weak against that lost embrace
Frost streaks of ash-hot pain
Collect in your cracks
Dilapidated corners leak each dripping moment
Can I be lost in distant dreams all this time?