a circle of squares
and a circle inside
hands rest on shoulders
for a moment
beneath a paltry smile
that smells of burning plastic.
acrid strength hides in
corners of years
under second skins of dust.
harsh lines emulsed
in black and white
etched in perpetuity
by the blaze heat
of cool baths,
drowned to life
in an inch of chemical.
Its womb is the darkroom.
Its crypt is a scrapbook.
Its lovers countless looking eyes.

Neon-coat childhoods
belie the gray adult life
of all its people.
Just as the stone-hewn
face of the dark Previous
was unprepared for the Now:
wind-up, chrome
and chic above all else.
Yes, indeed.
What citizenry!
No opinion but for diary
and entire days and lives
to offer to the Group.
Little cogs twist and reel
for a reason.

But they draw no criticism from me.
As they have, through utmost
consideration, neutered the mass
by cutting at individual.
And kept poetry alive through
the fear and the strange and the
Bombs.
It lives in every word and
look and leaves blacker
features, all minor imper-
fections out of sight,
like an unsightly
pair of shoes.

Lizards sun, drag hours for themselves
On the baked rock face,
With tense hands prepared always
To run, even in the face of bliss.

Hands curve prematurely,
Turn rock face into a more appealing
Rock bodice, and the
Lizards are cast away
By the sudden **** of millennia.
Do not litter the bettered stone
With a dainty snowflake likeness
Sought in the bedragglings of
Their skeletons.
What little ancestry to look back upon.
It's probably better...

No, absolutely it is.
That is the cry of the valley:
Massed voices weighted with spring
And enunciated by winters.

The sunrock bathes for
Whoever knows how long,
In drys
And in humids.
And then one day is crushed
Underfoot by the hulking form,
By the tense little claw of a
Reckoning nomad.
The surroundings look
Sharp at the smart little giant
And pull themselves neatly away from the dust.

All day
He stands at the tree
Doesn't touch
And does not speak
Stains linger
That way all the onlookers
Know:
"This is his tree"
"This is where they"
"This is"
So while for the
Neighbors, friends,
There may as well still be
A body
Spinning up there
He comes again
And again
And again
To stand
Where the stool stood,
Looks up to the obfuscating canopy,
As He must have done,
Again
And again
As He twisted and twisted
For three spectator-days
At the rope-hugged branch up yonder
Before they cut him down
Before the crowd.

Both touch the grass heavily
Both are mute
And they don't touch.

Cold.
Run a ***** finger
along my cheek.
Sap my attention like temperature
And my thoughts stray to the occupants
of the wind out of boredom.
What horrible faces
they must have.
Faces lifted simply, effortlessly,
from the drowned
and flicked casually for
Wear by the zephyr and the breeze.
And they push push push us all
Away from ourselves,
indwelling ball bearings
Being rolled about in our plastic box.
A paper reality
that seeks no more of truth.

Simply push push again
at the catch and break off the lid.
To polarize and shatter the
Egg shells of ignorance
And walk on them,
Floating clamshell gods,
to break the clouds.

vegetation bleeds upward
toward heat-crying mothers
nascent textures that unfold.

underneath waterspout
sighing deathmasks contort
hoarse features pass to praise.

vast cradle inters wee motes
fleck of much that floats
stretches brazen in dawns full of dust.

all passes in my lack of sight
heat kills clarity at first
by swallowing air and greens and giving birth.

Sky is pitch and crystal cloud
Wild figures languor on the dusty ground.
Eight pairs of darken haloed eyes
Strike the blue to blacken.

Bring the night.
And bring the work
The work by voice and light
Work with reddened hands
And verbal glance at a
Smaller place that must
Be walked: a faster pace
To lose the mortal race.
Mellow hours decay with gracelessness
That cannot be dreamed

On April nights no one in the road
Can be exempt. Nothing is exempt
At the stroke of the hour.

A step cracks in the deep
In those woods with painted fronts
A step that eats a flower
Sending up devotions.
****** rocks the riverbed
Hums a note in the still.
White shoes in black line
Mechanical clarity, footfalls.
Frissons from foreshadowing
A judder and a burial.
A burial in white.

It reeks of adrenaline, God's own ketamine,
Is sundered somewhat by a Sunday.
Sunday suit and six strong suitors
Following suit to the spot

No one could say. Still, the air
Is too hot with electricity to suffer it.
Tomorrow we can say
That we all knew the night's dread
Export, but for tonight we pray
Our lambs are all a-bed
And not a one of them
Is dead.

No one taught Ophelia to swim.
The hateful eating orange of dawn
Mocks her slow and stymied progress.