Her heart is cracked alabaster hidden in undergrowth.

Nobody notices the epigraph.

Even if someone did, it wouldn't matter much:

the lettering and filigree have entirely faded.

Death was a word
   I thought of when my first dog
   died. It was a thing I held when young
   and dumb, smashing grasshoppers
   with a bottle in the yard.
   It rested in coffins I never saw,
   grew an atmosphere around the weathered.

I touched it once.

But now I know
   it lives in a midnight phone call
   under pouring rain in a parking lot
   where a man paces with the thought
of never being able to love a voice he hears.

1.
Half-hearted pleas
Administer disease
To an accustomed sorrow;
The natural ease
May come tomorrow.

2.
A half-heart's built
Out of milk that's spilt;
In love no habit ends
When allotted like dividends;
What one intended
Is not often what one did.

3.
A satiated conscience
Rests almost entirely on nonsense.

Say there’s a boy that has two dreams,
One concerns business, one fishing in streams;
But which is the more real my friend?

A wolf licked an Eskimo’s blood-covered knife,
Licked it till it cut-up and bled out its life;
But are wolves’ impulses wrong my friend?

I saw a terrible play with a terrible end
And horrid lines no writer could mend;
But do you think I missed the point my friend?

Upon a time a boy loved a girl,
Loved her like a casket locked upon a pearl;
But what is truest love my friend?

Someone opened a door and let a dog in,
Unaware of where most strays have been;
But what is real kindness my friend?

One hundred slaves wept at their fortune,
United, killed the tyrant, and began to run;
But don’t they still work for their livings my friend?

I found a pocket watch in a patch of tall grass,
Hoped selfishly, watched centuries pass;
But weren't we told time heals wounds my friend?

She stared into the glass,
Saw tears that were not there;
A cat hid in the grass,
Glimpsed a bird and snatched at air.

She brooded by the well,
Heard a sound that went unheard;
A fortress shuddered and fell,
In its ruins promise stirred.

She opened her necklace charm,
Kissed a photo no one could see;
Sailors escaped the storm,
But were captured by the sea.

She sang a silent song,
Said what everyone else saw:
A bird that was not wrong,
Caught in an alley cat's jaw.

You turned me into a paperweight.
Ambling out of your genealogy,
you chiseled me to the marrowbone;
     walk tall with your invisible chains.

You turned me into a paperweight
marooned on polished mahogany –
conquered West-Indian trees;
     walk tall while your mastery wanes.

You turned me into a paperweight.
From your bottomless, two-ton
tongue came my disfigured heart –
     walk tall, you pyrite suzerain.

You turned me into a paperweight,
deserted on paperwork seas,
ball-and-chained to the wooden beach –
     walk tall in your insidious vein.

You turned me into a paperweight.
I fell, clutching the snowflakes,
and held your whole ******* useless life together –
     walk tall, play that catchpenny game.

Were indifference and suffering to go,
Where'd our sad tradition be?
Drugged to sleep in an asylum, or
Muttering mad at a last bit of breakfast.
It was simply illogical to ignore
As a child, the things it seemed grown-ups should know:
Evil-doing is easy
And sorrow's solution isn't vast.

Thinking of our sad tradition is
Like watching a janitor far past
Retiring age struggle to take out
An employer's trash. His
Chest rasps and his bent spine heaves; the boss begins to shout
"You need to hurry, ******! I wanna get drunk before
Too long, and I need to stop by the store."

I
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

II
There is intent when the addict mutters --
Estranged in his unhappy gutters --
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

There is derision in the dealer's call --
Osmium-heat in an unimpeded fall --
"You can't change who you are."
Greed could tear down a star
To sculpt into a Cardiff shell.

Warrant breeds within a child's yell.

III**
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

I
I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am nowhere

II
Where the sun severs the street and
Slowly, methodically,
They come, they come.
Electrifyingly stupefied in the dawn,
Tenantry not bound to cause and
Helpless as marred lead in the wind,
Stuck to strata and
Battered under **** pale-green
Thinned on spread fingers.

III
There is intent when the addict mutters ---
Alienated in his nettled gutters ---
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

IV**
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
And I am nowhere

To my left a girl
spoke daftly of Charlotte Bronte,
to my right a boy
butchered cantos out of Dante.

I've offered these kids
pieces written to pass the time;
short, plotless fictions
and epigrams that  rhyme.

"Where's your sense of plot?",
cried a free-verse poet in black.
"Form can be a cage",
advised a boy whose eyes screamed Hack!

"My poems occur
cerebrally, " I explained;
"when reading my shorts
think opposites being strained."

They seemed unable
to deal in abstract thought. It was
incredibly sad.
This is what modernity does.

A patch-work roof burns underneath
the sallow-white chill of a mid-winter moon.
Nearby a lake suffocates in ice;
an astronaut has lost his helmet.
Blood rushes to the eyes and tongue
as a ragged derelict loses his balance.
He topples into a dumpster;
the last pear drifts from the tree.
The firemen are enclosed in smoke.
One froze at the door,
the others melt into the haze;
a hand slips below quicksand.

The moon is doing all it can.
The spaceman is floating away.
The *** is asleep.
The roof is having the time of its life
and the pear grows into another pear-tree.

I miss

all my youthful avarice;
all the hushed proverbial bliss
promised in a lover's kiss;
and this
is the truest exorcist:

Time, undated.

for Barton Smock

     I
to see the flooding lake I crawl
through the thicket

I imagined
being the devil’s
garden
as a child

a lake
I first called
       *blue prison
but now
             love

after swimming
lessons grandmother
funded

     II
squatting arsonists occupy
the town’s church

during weeknights
I am one of four who knows

When it burns
I'll steal the stoup

     III
I dream rarely and only in naps

waking,

I try restraining
fantasies of
faceless women

     IV
rainstorms brake
the lake’s edges,
muddy the bankside flowers,
leave the canal sullied
forever

looking on, I
recall
*generosity

Reclining in their rocking chairs, the brothers Beau and Cletus gazed despondently out
Past the final farm toward the convergence of the worn highway
And the fritz horizon. Cows paused their chewing; an ashy sun
Obscured in incongruous fluffs of cloud; it grew
Greyishly chilly. "Shame the kids're movin'," Beau squeezed out before a deep belch. Cletus only
Mumbled, his voice lost in the light drizzle rapping on the milky sheet-plastic roof. The
          porch

Was unfurnished, save the chairs, one ashtray, and a novelty sign reading: "Get off my porch."
Cletus took a long, pensive drag off a cigarette before stubbing it out.
He coughed a raspy croak wetted with sixty-six years. Besides Cletus' sporadic coughs, the only
Distinguishable sound to be heard in Moody Creek wafted in from the highway:
Rattles of the day's final Spokane- or Boise-bound semi-trucks grew
Inaudible as Beau transiently  murmured, "Purtier than a string of fried trout, that there
          sun-

set." "Whaaa?" Cletus wheezed. "It's settin'," answered Beau, loosely gesturing at the sun.
Fractaled-orange-shafts webbing manifold shades of yellow – amber, belge, stil-de-grain – grew
Plumply stout upon the farmland, edged between properties and crumpled on the porch.
"I'll tell you what Beau – I'm glad they got out,"
Cletus uttered with assurance, his eyes scanning the reaches of light upon the highway.
Beau fixed his cap, musing over Cletus' words. He cleared his throat before beginning, "If
          only..."

Then stopped and itched his belly-button. Cletus turned to his brother. "I know one thang only
Beau: they'll do good in California. They'll be livin' high on the hog. Yer son n' my son
'll 'ave secure futures." Jack nodded somberly. He hated the highway.
He hated its ability to isolate everything. It had been his original revamp, the now-rickety porch,
His first project on his fixer-upper after marrying Dorothy West. They'd wed out
In his father's corn field; bought a house a mile or so down the road. Kids were born. Love
          grew,

And in its growing all things tangible and gorgeous – like tangrams piece together – grew:
The farm, the house, savings account and family. They ate hearty; drank canned beer only –
Living was smooth – but it changed when Dorothy took Little Dale and got out.
She wanted what the farm couldn't give or grow, leaving tiny Moody Creek with their son
As the last moon of May, 1955 went up. "*****!" Beau had yelled from the porch.
He'd woken to his Buick's rev and watched its taillights wane upon the
          highway.

And though he remarried, this was, in truth, mostly why Beau never squarely looked upon highway.
The light drizzle grew
Heavy, intensifying. "Gosh **** rain might near knock the coverin' off the porch!"
Hollered Beau. Cletus looked up and blew a cloud of thick grey smoke. "It's only
Rain Beau. No need gettin' ornery." That morning they'd seen off their youngest sons as the sun
Was just rising. One left to work for a dairy ******* in The Valley, the other went to figure
          out

Himself and his career. The porch shuddered. Beau absent-mindedly repeated "If only..."
Daylight died; black inked upon the highway. Cletus lit a new cigarette. Moody Creek grew
Dense, compacted by the darkness. The sun inched away. Cletus hacked and put his cigarette
          out.

The day drops black and the stars,
and the smog-dimmed, sputtering cars:
an urban landscape. I stare
up now and then at sidewalks where
stumbling, hollow, The Vacants leave the bars.

"Not drunk?" --- Either rambling or mute,
ignorantly half-drowned at the root
like rows of over-watered flowers,
numb like thumbs in ice for hours
they live. --- "Drink and follow suit!"

for M.S.

The blinds drawn, she vacated her life;
Through grieving lips she exists within the future,
Half-alive in an unconscious tongue
That allows paragon hopes to thrive:

She was whole.
No--

Blotched out and blurred,
She became a lacuna,
A Platonic *anamnesis;
Believed to have believed:
The conviction of faithful mourners,
Her expulsion from Honesty.

               .     .     .

The haunt of our occasions--
Ghost of my reflection! --
Brown eyes never shone so bright.

Mutilated chains of flowers
delineate where schoolboys cowered;
sixteen brick houses on St. James Street
reduced to red dust under homeless feet;
photographers pause, catching their breath,
spellbound by the neutrality of death;
clearing haze where the white chapel stood
reveals ever-dismantling wood;
the market's one register on a charred-black stand,
nearby derges lilt from a funeral band:

*...oh and as, and as
they're lain in silk and white ashes...
the town broken apart, flattened...

...in marble graves and mahogany
under skeletal laurel branches...
...on down to sleep, to sleep...

...we may walk with weathered ease...
...oh we may consider, may remember,
a granted time, an affirming love...

So...there's this girl who's rather smart
that, when her lips begin to part,
drives me up the wall in a good way.
I sort of want to see her everyday.
She's usually busy though,
so I occupy
time with one constant sigh
until she calls and then I go.

I don't really know too much about her ---
she's Aphrodite's caricature! ---
no,no, that's a bit rash and inflated,
but in my stomach butterflies've congregated
each time her face comes to mind.
Severely interesting,
her hands are often clean
and she's never proved less than kind.

I think it might be good to write her a song
(I should've been writing this all along)
so that she'll feel sublimely delighted
and is happy, though consistently derided
by the upkeep of her garden's flora.
She could use a lot
of things uncommonly wrought,
like poems stuffed with anaphora.

      In time all the snowflakes will evaporate.
      In time the sun will sleep under an iron leaf.
      In time acetylene darkens human hate.
      In time all time will seem quite brief.

So, in honor of her I have created
this mediocre song so dominated
by use of the Yeats-stanza's rhythmic-rhyme,
offering it to her as ends to the crime
of my deplorable mannerisms.
I hope it's well-received,
being arduously conceived,
but I'll openly accept criticisms.

Coral, though you must (and do) work a lot,
work harder at those things which can't be bought
(i.e. relationships, love, and empathy)
for even the natural workaholic bee
requires mutual love.
Even while working
find a small moment to sing
this song. I hope it's enough.

On the Embarcadero, winds carry clubbers' words
to me: sound of a satyr's desperation:

maybe she'll look at me.
Maybe even with pleasure and not repulsion:

the silent plea of devil-may-cry men ---
all blood and lusts, more beasts than heart.

Some swing blunt cutlasses that never cleave,
sip hypnotic wine from offering hands, unknown beneath a coverlet.
Others dance into the lacuna of their lives:

decade(s) of searching, yearning,
yoked like juments, under the mortal whip:

sad boys in need of love;
                                    infatuation;
          ­                                        amity;
                  ­                                      acquaintance;
             ­                                                              lust;
                                                           ­                   pleasure;
                                    ­                                                      a look:
                                                                                                      anything.

"If you wake up this morning believing that saying
a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them
into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind."

He has often asserted that the thing is absurd:
that someone who does not (whether out of hatred, indifference,
lack of conviction, or frankly *whatever)
accept traditional dogmas
is still, for some reason, capable of wishing that they could.

I think he is right; I’ve heard a staunch atheist say “If only
I could, but I cannot.” So, this is why he aligns himself
as an anti-theist: he simply
was never properly convinced.
This position seems (at least to me) well-supported,

for anyone can quite readily (and easily)
accept what their father or their clergyman has said
(especially as a child, not knowing any better).
Thus, to be an atheist
one must have first acknowledged supernatural power

and then later, after a bit of thought, dismissed it. In light
of this, I propose a toast to the Real Skeptic,
the one who was never really convinced;
of it. The one who, when celebrating the Eucharist,
wondered why God wanted to be eaten,

who , when receiving Christ,
thought of the extreme certainty by which other faiths'
devotees (Islam, Heaven's Gate,
Mormonism, Bon,
Cargo Cults, Shinto, Falun Gong)

live and preach – some even delighted to die.
Thoughts like these always made me feel uneasy as a child
because how could I hope to keep my little mind
from accidentally discovering fallacy after fallacy? So, here is a toast
to the Unconvinced, who can’t possibly help but not believe.

The State is stitched into itself, crocheted
by two hooks of its own creation
into a multiform mirage; man obeyed
his design --- he flirts with devastation.
Despite the deathly brinks, he continues on,
blinded by an insatiable desire.
In West California, sprawled on a lawn,
a boy laughs at his power over fire;
cross-legged monks in Sansara's clasp
sit in bare caves while snows rage outside:
they boy's enamored with all he can clasp,
the monks yawn, meditate: endlessly they've died.

Starlit nights bring a sense of tininess.
The vast soot-stained cloak of the sky,
pierced with so many tiny scintillating
spots of vim opalescent flares, is a heavy
intoxicant. It contains a thing most panache.
A girlish teetotaler beside me says,
"We're like those stars, distantly inflamed,
lost in a void of what we cannot know."

She is most apt in her contrivance.
I wish to be castellated, terraced
with Byzantine buttresses and towers-tops.
I want a portcullis for my portico that is
made mostly out of gold, an inner bailey
where the stars can sleep and the wine may flow.
I want the wine most metaphysical,
the type that flows and churns, perning
inside the inner sanctum of the mind.

battered screws stripped bare by
a hundred thousand terrible twists
from an unsteady, inexperienced,
or overly excited hand
nearly rattling out of their proper positions,
hanging rather loosely
to the last threads of their holes.
fan them as they dangle,
fandangle!
but a blue gust from beneath
the anonymous and unidentifiable bursts
the shriveled scraps of low-grade steel
from their brittle perches
and
then one,
two,
threefourfivesixseventyeightmillion
clatterings invade all audibility,
heightening --- accentuating --- underscoring
each miniscule soundwave
                                                until there is not much more than
white noise, crack-
ling like a ruddy transitor radio
i probably never had
but only equate it to for lack of
another more proper, perhaps more appropriate,
even more...profound (?) word, or, whatever;
hardware indignationum!
what abuses we dish these inanimates created by us for us!, and, yes,
i follow all syncretic trends to
their phenomenal (and fusional)
morphological ends. if i didn't, how could
i know the neutered from the neuterer?
attend to the screws;
the debased, bemused, once-bedazzled little bits strewn on the floor and
frazzled. go on,
get 'em up, up
off the ground.

I still remember
the drawn out afternoons,
the minutes passing without a thing to do,
the clock just a metronome
keeping us in time.

I poked fun at you without reason;
jealousy leads one into themselves it seems.
Do you recall?
We were carnal beings...

I'd apologize for my egoistic banter,
but apologies are best left to the
eulogizer,
and this may be some sort of graveside whisper;
a long-winded to-do list of idle talk.

I'd call you
"Lesbia", "Rosalind", 
"my diadem stashed away",
but twenty-two months wore words away
and it would seem like frantic blandishing.

Maybe in my own life
I may be able to demonstrate
what William Yeats had meant
by a body quarreling with it's soul,
but I think -- You're delusional! --
that I could be content.

I remember everything ---
I remember the yielded heart feels a subtle sting.
The yew chattered in the wind outside your
window and I felt rooted
as I told you
I was you and would always be.

But twenty-two months is a long time.

Your sonnets? **** good,
though the rhymes unrhymed today.

Sincerest regards,
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall
I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."
                    - Matthew the Apostle

I
Seventy-seven bottles of gin
lie in the guts of sensuous men;
seventy-seven *I forgive you's dissolve
in a fanatical mind's resolve.

II
What offence occurred under Saint Constantine's priggish eye?
Was it specious as a Samian's thigh?
Or Sumerians receiving alien diplomats?
Maybe somewhere far under Moscow Putin's massing cloning vats...

III
Whatever discursive and belligerent milieu
church authority finds most tried and true
seems to be the most important decider
in the future of things like the Large Hadron Collider.
Perhaps, unfoundedly, they find it funny that Higgs
(though it seems much like calling the Liberal Party "Whigs")
is a name shared by a man and a theoretical particle
(though it be libelous in any journalist's article),
and thus label similar advancements as "blasphemous".
I guess that this is what it is: believing just because.

IV
Who can know blasphemy from piousness?
Maybe all Luther did was obfuscate a prior mess.

V
Seventy-seven palm-branch-adorned, donkey-riding kings:
an automatic-ring-making-machine beleaguering proselyte rings.

fissure in the fold
of an aging merigold
reminds me of death's
soul-bewitching breath;
and a once-devastating wild,
torn and ever-reconciled,
falls in a deep sleep just like a - like a child.

Lay simplistic in my nervous embrace,
though my fingers shake with your purity.
A great, gold-backed moon-palette for a face,
and mind acquiescent simplistically.
Your features, sharp and definite, are free,
and none may mumble a pedantic word
against you; let them talk --- they'll never see
or, blindly, feel what you afford:
a priceless truth beneath a thin veneer.
Incomplex, clear, manageable, and clean;
you, non-idealized and lying near,
are like the timbre of a tambourine.
No more rhapsodizing --- lie slowly down ---
be calm tonight; forget this specious town.

The spidered light of a September night,
shallow and sparsely flung about the room,
reminisces the sound of a phoenix in flight,
while webs inside the rafters loom.
The phoenix song is like the pallid glow of a chandelier.
Waning, yet resilient,
it coos in mystic merriment
melodies in the key of a rattling nearby mirror.
Every so often the song completely stops,
filling me with a silent bit of despair.
Commonly this follows loud scores of pops
indicating the cycle residing in the flare:
into ashes the song bird bursts again.
It's Rudolphish nose begins to scrunch up ---
I see it even now as I fill my water-cup ---
a sort of reincarnation acumen.
But the bird isn't really real or here;
it's more of a half-truth or memory,
similar to tales of the origins of tea.
It sways, forgetful on my cerebral pier,
nearly falling into the waves of my brain,
dipping it's feather mid-refrain,
repeating it's song again and again,
and again.

If there should ever come a day
when the heavens should file for bankruptcy
and the stars pack up and walk away,

know you no longer have reason to stay
and watch the waves abandon the sea.
If there should ever come a day

when gravity breaks down, losing it's way,
and molecular bonds begin to disagree,
let the stars pack up and walk away.

If mathematics come undone and run astray,
break the last abacus and then decree:
"If there should come a day and that day is today!"

If and when it comes leave Earth in disarray,
disassemble each and every tree,
tell the stars, "Pack up and walk away."

Call up all the physicists and say,
"Discontinue paying your A.P.S. fee"
if there should ever come a day
when the stars pack up and walk away.

If I could love with an old-fashioned love,
they'd wonder whether I was mentally stable,
'cause no one lets me past that casual stuff.

See, all that game-playing --- I've had enough.
They say it only happens in a fable,
but I could love with an old-fashioned love.

People reject what the heart's capable of,
they treat it like the bill for the cable.
They never let me past that payment stuff.

I wouldn't want something held high above,
just something simple, without label,
if I could love with an old-fashioned love.

Not sentimental --- ...not roses, not doves.... ---
but basic, kindred, sustained, and stable.
But no one lets me past that puppy-dog stuff.

Maybe when I'm a ghost, a flappy old glove,
I'll find someone who's willing and able.
If I could love with an old-fashioned love ---
Enough! --- wait, what was I thinking of?

Languid soundings of evening recede;
when commercials calm, dulling faint,
lay yourself simple in his hold. Feed
exhaustion with a touch. Wooing heads wane
and lull, softly full by the fire's beads
burning low in the hearth. Shames
of the day cannot enter there. Nothing short of
a tangible fullness describes such love.

The slow dropping of retiring snow
slumps over the roof. The business of
being disappears into the dark. Know
that they are alive and that that is enough.
Know they are alive, though sharp winds blow.
Wholly essential affections drive
the warming depth. They are alive.

Static of definite extinction, to whom are We allied?
If it is to Your noise, Your scatter and clean-up-later attitude,
then We are separatists.
If to Whatever, We are assuredly conspiring cohorts.
Do You claim to provide what We've needed all along,
but have simply been too short-sighted to know We've needed?
Or do You delineate? Do You define Us by unpacking Us,
thereby reconstructing Us into sections of a whole untarnished tool?
Machinery, if you will?
Take, for instance, television.
Do We need, or even want to watch?
Needlessly We need it. We want it for lack of choice,
or so We think. It is, simply, there.
Easily - and how easily We may never know - one may turn
to the body's offerings, or the plummets and peaks of the mind.
Sport, science, language, art, human, essential, vivid, now -
they are nearer than no one knows; practically graspable.
But Static, You move Us to wish.
You **** Us to think we must consummate Ourselves.
As We said, We are separatists.
Declare some vapid civil war.
Who, then, will provide your nothings?

In the form of transparent, bundled tumbleweed
it allows us to breathe, the continuation
of carbon dioxide creation, the movement
of clouds and mists and birds, certain natural disasters,
being able to skim bays at a full sail
or the next step a plane takes after taxiing.

It includes us in the endless repudiation of itself
that it can't seem to –  no matter how it may try –
reverse or cure, bringing earlier
peoples to know it as a supernatural force
(there was simply no other reasonable choice available).

And for some reason
it keeps engaging in pyromania as it aids and abets
whatever impulsive firework-lighting-thrill-seekers
or placid cigarette-****-litterers did or did not
purposefully do.

Here the triple-shadowed unveil their beliefs:
wrangled dusk-bitten demigods walking with-
out shame.
                    Between the voice I feel and the
touch I see, sweetness loses itself in multiplic-
ity. Here the ****** creators
                                                     peddle their big
dreams: failed, half-imagined writers writing
for some fame. Between the ink I taste
                                                                    and
the blank page I peel, beauty spills onto an
unfinished film-reel. Here the salient idealists
distribute their silent pleas:
                                                 faceless, disre-
garded farmers farming hapless grain. Be-
tween
           the thoughts I see and the biases I smell,
innocence sits unwanted in a wishing-well.
Here the greatest artists
                                          present their newest
piece: aged, masterful painters painting to
stay stane. Between
                                   the subtlest colors and
the heart-arresting hues, skill picks up a gui-
tar and sings some southern
                                                  blues.

Can you hear the sound of the indomitable wind?
It breathes in great heaves
through these sun-beaten leaves,
so boisterous it could flow through ears to the mind.
The eucalyptus’ standing in disciplined lines
seem disturbed by it,
and by the sun that’s lit,
illuminating their aging signs.
From some stark desert some miles to the south
bundles of dry wind roll
up, over, and down this grassy knoll
that unknowingly beleaguers the skin of both
infants playing with their blocks on the lawn
and an older patron
visiting from Dayton
who naturally rises some hours before dawn.
The wind can easily uproot and tear the land apart;
it can dishevel
a garden neat and level,
desolating work to which the retiree gives their heart.
The lascivious sound of the southern wind resonates
past the final palm of the mind
where Wallace Stevens’ bird went blind,
lying low in the recesses of cranial plates.
I say that that sound is no sound at all,
just a loosing slip
of the cerebral lip
attached to a thing abstractly beautiful.
But it sings its song all the same.
Perhaps it is physical.
It’s certainly divisible.
It pierces the sky like a transparent flame.

dreams woke me with a violent jolt.
Out the bedroom window
dew hung on its last thread
to every solemn grass blade.

The way the sun spread
and carpeted the green
in a flood of pallid light...
it was enveloping.

Another day rises with me,
another moon fades bleak into the blue,
somewhere by the interstate
another daisy edges into ghostliness.

Copper skies hang heavy
above my gazing face;
it is a fresh morning now, the entire
noisy world has decided to wake.

Ghosts climb into the sun to light it's kindling
once more for old time's sake.

I thought for days and could think of nothing
to satisfy the eye and hand and heart,
or satiate the mind, or at least seem
worthy to be willed into decent art.
The past ten years offer little I’d deem
rousing enough to write this first part.
Then imagination just so inclined
the speaker, the scene, what I’d sought to find.

Grasping the pen, I pressed it to the page
and out poured imagination as ink.
I painted a line, then outlined a stage,
and pondered for hours on their supposed link.
It seems excessive thought may shape a cage
in the corner of which ideas sink.
Sometime later the stage had some players
and the line had formed multiple layers.

All vanishes the ensuing day,
forcing thought on what’s soon to expire.
Dramatis personae hardly convey
the message famished minds desire;
Likewise, poetical visions crochet
a meandering, allegorical empire.
The thought-maelstrom bids me “Confess!”:
I’ve reduced life to a logical process.

Dear Mr. Heaney
I wish I'd read your poetry
years ago when I was still impressionable and coy and all that jazz.
Now it resounds in my skull, leaving a tingle in my right hand.
My pen is somewhat snug, but a revolver, no.
Ink and shovels aren't far from each other,
so your point is well-taken. In fact, they're co-workers –
Ink's proved itself just as deadly. It slowly ushers men into the earth,
their soil-seat, while the shovel stages the unending play;
the eternal lattice.
The Nobel hung above your head,
the vast array of pins, medals, papers with your name in billowing scarlet.
What a treat. Like the last cupcake in the back of
the refrigerator that had too much chocolate icing and was only
semi-covered in multi-colored snowflakes. I'd loved to have
personally presented it to you. There'd be my own plaque,
billowing scarlet and all. It'd say, "Mr. Heaney,
, you must own a *****." I hope you'd laugh, and not be offended,
thinking me a distasteful and insensitive lout. It may not be right,
but I can't help but steal the volumes surrounding yours out of
every **** library so
"Seamus Heaney"
may catch the eye of the common passerby
more easily. I think I even went to work on
enhancing a spine with a red sharpie once.
Red hits the eye hard.
That was in the central library downtown.
Don't tell anyone.
Beyond a laugh, what I hope for most is that you get this letter.
Just look at it.
Wonder why someone so far removed in age and culture and place
would ever think of you holding an over-frosted desert as glorious.

We rushed on glorious wings
that fed bombs into Baghdad soil
with feverous lust for a hollow dream.
Now nine long years later,
seventeen bodies lie on earth where oil
engenders a lust that’s even greater.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.

Three tours were far too many,
the fourth far more than he could take.
A sergeant who’d have given any-
thing for his wife and kids’ sake.
Seeing a good friend’s severe injury –
the last blow Sanity could handle.
Morality goes out – light from a candle
swaddled in smoke’s endless perjury.

Seventeen seconds of forethought
may perhaps have faltered his shot;
Seventeen centuries of ponder
and still the heart may have not grown fonder.
Seventeen lovers left alone,
or loves that’ll never come to pass,
seventeen graves of heavy bones
mark where a madman’s mind broke at last.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.

You went to him because you’d never been
loved the way you deserved.
You’re neglected
time and time again. Childhood was stolen
somewhere between “It’s a girl!” and heaven.
I know you think you try.
You’re dejected.
In the shade of the damp one a.m. din
his tongue opens you like children do
Christmas gifts.

You went to him because you’d never had
so much attention from older guys.
So much attention, stained with the dyes
of lust. Is it that the ******* grains
staggered your mother’s ability to
care for you?
You hide beneath an eating disorder.
All the shame spills out
when you’ve got a finger deep in the esophagus’ veins.

You went to him because you’d never seen
a truly sweet smile.
Not that his gleans
away the pain inside you, but that
you’ve never really felt real sweetness.
Every time, when you seem to bat
your lashes,
I know you’re fighting back thick tears;
it’s not an exhibition of sexiness.

You went to him because you’d surely been
afraid of my honest feelings for you.
I’m sorry if the honest love I’d offered was scary,
but I’m not akin
to casual flings. That love was so true,
and ran so **** deep,
I’m sure I’d almost have drowned,
if your deceit hadn’t pushed that bright-blue
river so deep underground.

Their bars are bars there.
It’s just that the taps
have all run dry.
Behind a wall
computers clank, buzz,
dilapidate.

Behind thickened glass
clerical workers
patter like hail
on shingled roofs.
Beyond walls and glass,
sallow-white leaks.

I sit rough somewhere.
Cold, unfeeling stone
everywhere.
A payphone stares
jeeringly at me.
I curl up tight.

Mother and father
surely spite me now.
Brother won’t know,
no, he won’t know.
Others never will.
Don’t comfort me.

I’m in pajamas.
I’m grasping at straws.
I’m falling fast.
I’d like to know
how much is the bail.
“Sixty-thousand.”

My fingers are pressed
on a copier
like those old, dear
library books.
Copied and copied.
Next I’ll be shelved.

The lambasted streets
in summer sing children’s songs.
Now snow scolds them mute.

From the visions of sparrow vanguards
that fly insatiably onward.
From the tombs of ancient hearts draped
in flowing, moth-eaten fabric.
From the fighter jets stalling somewhere
above solitary and succinct farmlands.
From the bottom of a broken purple
sunset that lies embossed on my brain.
From the silliest half-thought left
unvoiced in the vagrant light of a damp
and desolate lamp lying in a landfill.
From several mouths at once.
From oracles cross-legged in caves.
From the gills of a catfish on a hook.
From mythical forgeries and the perjurer's tongue.
To the subdued hope resting in a
trembling hand gripped round its pen.
To satisfaction that is oneness that
seems to never arrive but is there
all along.
To the peaks of the Himalayas.
To my spidered desk light, shallow with doubt.
To my flustered and torrential page.

Seagulls hit the horizon's backboard
off the sands of Pacific Beach.
In my lungs breakers burn out
some forty feet from shore.
They will return.
This jetty'd be a monolith
if this ocean were a sky.
Silt on this deserted
coast scene is encumbered by
bits of driftwood and sun-bleached glass.
The living in this town
are accustomed to the weight. And
tidepools are their hearts:
shallow, mossy, little things
fending for breathe.
This jetty'd be a monolith
if this ocean were a sky.

"Like the gambler's eye
fixated
on a tumbling die
my mind fixes upon emptiness."

I
The stars are double-weighted tonight.
bulging, beating, they sink
from their proper lurches.
One by one across the murky
evening they sputter out.
What natural light remains
seeps from that subtly gaudy
bauble of a moon.

II
Peeled eucalyptus, ice-plant, new-mown summer grass,
dandelion, sloping hill, carved stone bench,
the view, the reflected city-light off the bay water,
white-washed near-tenements.

I am firmly locked up, chained in a bone cage
of chemically manipulated cranial plates;
serotonin, synapses, dopamine, dendrite
create a web like seaweed constricting the sea;
this computer of a head calculates, oscillates,
and processes the sensory.

III
My body is a tattered jib sail
flowing in the light sprinkling rain:
the simmer of the gale:
a hollow cathedral abandoned
by the believers:
a vessel for my marrow:
an imaginary catalyst for profundity:
an incarceration: a hull of particles
arrested: some part of an experience.

"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."*

I
You probably already know, William,
that it’s pretty much all the same
as when you paced the battlements
and howled to the indifferent stars
"It seems I must bid the Muse go pack!"
, caught in Passion’s cataract –
that torrent of emotive poetic grief.

II
Though politics have changed,
there's still old men in the Senate
who stare but don’t seem to see.
They’re caught in youthful daydreams ---
the girls’ bras’ are too hard to unclasp,
even when employing that agéd charm.
(“But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!”)
You weren't an exception;
politicians are also subject to the Human Condition.
Perhaps more than a poet,
probably more than a poet.
So I guess you got the double dose, William.
In a split second the State slips,
staggers, and reinvents foreign policies,
only to double-back on itself again and reverse.
I know you remember those you rhymed out in verse:
MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse;
their rifles still ring in the recesses
of the Public’s  miasmic mind –
the haze just dissipated over the Irish Sea.
And it's the spring of 2012.
Gore-Booth and Markiewicz are but marrowless bones,
Collins as well.
His still mix in the grave –
They’ve been for ninety years.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same,
Synge’s ******* is still unpopular.
In fact, plays are largely unpopular,
and playwrights work in restaurants
where sweat lingers on their brows
to eventually drip into an already-unfit meal.
It's hard to imagine a play once
brought Dublin to riot;
you couldn't start a riot now if you had
thirty drunken anarchists
with two Molotovs a piece
watch Godwin’s grave get gutted.
Though information is more accessible,
it's an age of information-apathy.
You'd **** a shotgun to your temple
if you saw the state of education today.
I'm afraid, William, it's all the same:
the gyres still run on ---
I fear they're running out of breath.

III
But it’d be imbalanced to leave you here;
at least you split on a Saturday.
Late-January trembles each year,
as the earth did the day you were consumed
in Helen(“who all living hearts has betrayed”)
’s immutable embrace;
your heart alone she could not betray.
And blind Homer who sang her betrayals
has ceased; mouths ran dry the day you died.
You left before your trade imprisoned you;
before the pen enchanted
your remaining years to a page.
You left before you couldn’t:
before the blitzkrieg;
before the world lost ten million more Robert Gregory’s
and you died from exhaustion mid-rhyme on the seventh-stanza of the five-million eight-hundred and fifty-fourth
elegy.
Regardless, it's really all the same.
Even those beggars are still playing twister with their whip.

When all works are done
and my ambition’s gone,
my words just sleepers’ dreams at last;
when all song is dog drool
lying decayed in a pool.
(An image of all that has passed.);
when language fails and speech locks up,
tongue numbed from throat to top,
composite of thin blood,
walk solidly
from tree to dying tree
mixing my breath with the mud.

They come down the road coughing
Up beliefs between cigarette drags
And slight hesitations of who they are to others.
Orange-ish yellow unattractively
Embroiders their chests; they've got their protections,
Their unambiguous vests.
From hazy breakfast drudgery
To night's exhausted rapture,
The play the same stage, the same lines, the same players.
But this is living to them:
Shrugging at the future; believing just because;
Knowing the store still provides overpriced cigarettes.
Their feet rattle on tarry asphalt
As their tools swing away. Patterns
Are in their hearts, their caged, tamed hearts,
Stifling what they want to say.
They built the streets I drive on
As I fight with my nothingness
And I remember they must feel this too,
Just as darkly and definitely as the wheel feels the road.