She’s soft and smells like rose petals
Yet she scratches and scrubs
At blood red skin even though
It’s been washed a million times before
Tired eyes meet their match
In the silvery visage of their oldest friend

Crimson lips part, then furl
At the reflection who’s no longer a youthful girl
Auburn hair tumbling out of place,
Aging actress falling far from grace,
One clenched fist in a lace white glove
Eyelids dripping as she screams above

Faces stuck like sticky notes to my face.
Tear drops falling off of my dry iris.
Layers shedding like peeling deseased skin.
Memories washed and chopped.
Boiled and broiled.
I while the world goes deaf cry at the bay of my mind.
A sensation of awkward emptyness collects inside me.
The wind blows around inside of me like a wirl pool.
Spiraling upward and out my mouth.  
I am hallow shell on the bay of my mind watching the never ending sunrise

Reading John's book
Seal Rock
sitting on a pile of burned driftwood
on the beach
where people are scattering
like jacks
beneath a beach ball
slapped into the air it falls
amongst the group
a few dive for it
someone throws it again

While sanderlings
dance along
the fray of the waves
the sun disappears
in dark clouds

I open Seal Rock put it over my head
as raindrops fall
poetry satisfying so many needs
my wreath, my hat
my shelter
in bustling adversity
I hop over puddles
in sprung rhythm
while gulls
haggle over shells
the words and memories
trickling into my scalp
right off the pages
as we are all climbing
towards the parking lot
stones sliding beneath our feet
a beach ball lodged under a boy’s arm
I keep this slick shingle on top
word pendant
a dream shroud whispering
shedding the storm.

The bronze-scorched mud knobbed unhinged sculpture grows
Cinderella down to root knots, ground is grubbed

chapped hats of acorns hit porticoes before snows
honeybees cake their hives closed and wax hubbed

humiliation hardens as color dapples
swelling seed-commas split beneath the frost

piety’s ignored until next year’s apples
night sky is grape-leafed, blackberry sauced

ineffable brutes grow cold to the pinnacle
rhetorical dross groundswells legislations

the long-legged wind tramples our spectacle
rains mock each leaf into pickled munitions

rocks are nothing but hermitages sent by the moon
prescient hardness sets its chin to the ground

hankering for battle, totalitarianism thrives by noon
each soldered twig unloomed, unraveled, uncrowned

we have severed ties to reason’s substantial contents
in the muddle it’s not the empowerment you had

democracy dies bewildered blind with miscontents
unhinged, unconcerned to find the hanging chad

we’re scissored down to our primary chaos all
paralogisms who dwell in a dream that justifies our fall.