Sitting alone in a whirlwind
Black center and hail pellets
Scattered platters of food
Drowned out conversations,
mumbled spit up

Can't calm the angered nature
of broken class in a sheepish world
Twelve days until the broken
symphony sings in front of a
          tidal wave

Twenty four hours until yesterday
Spin cycle repeats deceit
What more is there than then?
When everything stops spinning
and the wind eats karma
for breakfast with Mother Nature
on Sunday morning.

When you make a garlic chicken
special guests are also essential
Cross sections and interior views
forged all manner of ancient

The name may evoke evening
Experiment with cucumber, watermelon
Do not imply the expression of any opinion
increase in normal and immunosuppressed

Make an irony-free living
but never in such proliferation
Prepare to be bowled over by porridge
or other library materials

covered with a blanket of clouds
The dead began to speak.

The streetlight on the corner of
8th and Harriet talks in Morse code
every Sunday night at half past eight.

Maybe it’s asking to be saved
from the blistering cold. Maybe
it has feelings for the moon

and is only trying to be noticed.
It must get lonely working
the same corner for years

and nobody bothers to return thanks.
My guess is it’s trying to communicate
with fellow streetlights

and plan an attack like the Ents
did before they went to
war on Isengard.

But then again, only in my mind
I make perfect sense. After all,
it is just a malfunctioning street light.

When Friday buried Thursday
at the cemetery
I was eating eggs and
bacon in my bathrobe.
The other days wore black
attire to the burial
and brought white geraniums.
I stood in silence for three minutes
after I finished my breakfast
then wrote a note for the weekend:

“My time will come,
don’t wait for me,”

and left.

Staying afloat on a low note
a lost man crosses crippled bridges
carrying a turtle’s shell and flour
Singing off pitch, making leaves shrivel
Off abound, forbidden from sight,
glass air pierces his stale soul.

Wonder yonder he thinks to fire
of foreseen history pocketed in a square
while passing a brown polar bear
He hears nothing but bats communicating
when he saunters the woods at night
In the middle of his sleep      
his big toe squeaks and the bed shrieks
and the frigid air nips his shriveled lips.

He once made friends with
a single blade of grass in the desert
               but it died the day after they met
In the grand scheme of irony
he doesn’t see the reason for pancakes
They make his taste buds scream for quiet.

Whether or not he sees straight
is an entirely different question
If he comes to a fork in the road
he tends to keep walking forward
As if he thinks there’s not much difference
between right and wrong in present tense.

There’s too much for him to understand
in an overwhelming world; an abandoned creature
under starlight in a red sky reverie
he seeks rhythm from deflated composition
but fears that tapping his foot
will crumble his hypnagogic melody.

It's not illegal to sprinkle lemon juice
in a healing wound, but it's not recommended.

The clatter of silverware rattles the piercings
of a tattooed barista battling a vexatious morning.

Iced caramel lattes, incarcerated by
serrated coffee beans, sleep alone at night.

A half-empty cup of 2% screams at a
of glass skim milk for acting obnoxiously drunk.

One squirrel scorns another for
stealing its spiked acorns last fall.

A lonely poem twists and turns
through disappointing images of life.

At the end of the road there's a mirror
reflecting an absent feeling of satisfaction.

I.

The night sky cantillates a tune
only sobbing icicles can hear
A redeye flight soars
with a defunctive plot aboard
Supposedly Pluto planned it
News reports the next morning
said responders found a suicide note
along with residue from a melted
block of ice in the wreckage.

II.

Some millions of miles away
pocketing silence in his palm
Neptune’s tears freeze
on the green tips of pine trees
Frozen leaves sleep beneath
glaring Great Horned Owls
Black eyes bend in the back,
ground stiff as their spine.

III.

There is nothing scary about
a sad bedtime story
without crows or ghosts
or a cat’s empty cradle
When the pages turn
the night sky descends into
its deepest sleep before dawn
and closed eyelids fantasize
about tomorrow’s morning.