Startling, simply.
***** form of white;
Pillar of morals
Tied to fables
That are taller still
Than even he.
And yet the sight
Takes wind from
The watcher.
Rapt eyes stroll
Languorously across him.
Form unconcealed
And no appendage
Draws undue focus.
Stale cupola air
Becomes spring in his repose.
His smirking dead eyes
Mock spectators.
He leaps and vaults
Through the deadened vaults,
Then furrows his brow, opens his mouth.
Mute shouts ring terribly here like slung stones.
Were he out in the elements, the earth itself might
Gape monstrously to sputter out, "Startling, certainly."

He sits on a porch-swing dying of heat.
The midday sun is merciless.
It juts out a golden face to ****
To test
To accuse.

He strokes the side of his face.
There is misery here but not remorse.
Sweat runs down the hollow of his neck
Traces his neck
Falls away from his neck.

He closes his eyes against the day.
And more besides.

The sky burns in opposite colors now.
His eyelids play the stars and scenes of an afternoon.
After a time, blackness swallows the image.
He is perfectly closed.

Off past the gate sound cicadas,
Locusts, call them here,
Like an African choir concealed to chant
Concealed to slough away
Concealed from commentary.

He hears the door and feels her weight
on the swing. The cicadas seem louder.
She's come outside to speak with him
To speak at him
To speak about him.

"I hate you," says a voice but not in words.
"I love you too," sounds the other with a tone that says more,
Much more besides.

The dusk is usually far more perfidious
But not tonight. The weather is still,
The sun has nothing more to declaim.
She is perfectly closed.

The wind is my lover
and the water that pivots
beneath the sky above me
could be any color for all
the attention I'm paying it.
For in the speed that whips
me about in a circle,
this world loses meaning.
As my hair gains independence
and my skin darts behind me
in the afternoon heat
and my limbs numb utterly
to victorious speed,
all my cares and leaden ties
are brought to light
and shown their insubstantiality;
they are spat derisively
into the dusk.

For the wind is my lover
and he sates my hungers
and visits with my youth
and quiets my longing
for sense with every velvet
torrent that passes through
my open hand.

And when the boat stops, I will break apart.
Would that the wind would grasp me and pull me
aft into the blackness beyond the shore.

Rather I did, once. No longer.
We were magnetic, tectonic.
Constantly and consistently converging.
Unfolding.
Seamlessly (it would seem) arranged on
Memory's golden stage.
But today, tomorrow,
Where moves are flimsy and unsure
Lines drop from lips in silence,
Unraveling like gauze,
As we both wait for alarums that cannot sound.

I feel anesthetized, don't I? I—
And the curtain will be merciful.
A breath of disdain perhaps, disastrous.
Your touch is autumn.
I eclipse the sun, suffocate you from it.
Take your warmth.
Leave you colder than Ophelia
And bloodier than Brutus.
My inadequacy was once your balm,
A catechism to ensure another world
That we both know isn't sound.

The very least you can do is become like Icarus
Who was beautiful in his fall
And silent at his end.

When the patterns glide by
Comparing swatches of the "is" and the "could be"
It's easy to get caught in
Things that don't, couldn't exist:
Pressed and glossed but cut off completely
As by a film,
Just like the picture show.
A sallow barrier reducing profundity to charcoal etchings.

My eyes fog over with winter breath.

Brother I do not know who you are.
Though like a pious gypsy I pray
to odd winds and set down
curious cards that I might
     grow to know you better.
     Little Moses, stolen in the
     night without your blanket,
     without your breath. How is
it some wandering seed
like you can stay my
watery mind? Sistered with a white
gem in a secret tide, you
     surface long after the
     scene is closed; you follow
     me home and sing like
     a thousand years of
May beneath my windowsill.
But as I say, the scene is
done, swallowed mother firefly
by the fluorescent night. So
     gather your things: these
     thoughts do not become,
     nor would they ever become.
     You’ve a hand like kite string
And I'd never hold on. All my
cards gutter in the wind
and the candles cannot be read,
not as dark as I've allowed it be.

I hear a song my brother sings
that echoes in the rock
from which my soul was hewn and that
shall never be forgot.

The heart that ticks
Inside her chest
Will talk to someone else.

There's little more to do for
that solitary image.
A brown house on an off-brown
background. The door stopped
closing right nearly ten
years ago.

She sits at the single table
eating the brown dust like
a baby's song, cooing to
herself. Cooing to the walls.
And stopping to stretch her
muted fingers.

He sleeps. A deserved sleep.
Better than propped dry against
the outside wall, marshaled
hands still en deshabille. All
that stuff was his wife's or
his father's.

It fetched a nice enough price
all the same, and where
antiquity fails the wise man
speeds off with a whistle. Funny
tune, but it's better than what the
wife murmurs.

Oh my, one almost forgets.
There was a boy as well, but
he left long ago, must have
been nearly twelve or so
years ago, when the sun was high
as now.

Though truth be told, he was
one of those poor ******* that
exercised theory and let practice
starve; let action gather dirt
and whipped the thoughts to breathe in
still more dust.

One would say they raised him
right enough and still be wrong.
The day he closed that door
on them, they just stood still
kinda watching as the wind blew
them along.

Sky-flower.
Blooms to sway in blue bowl.
Feeds with ******* root, edges in grass.
Turns quick head.
Flicks dead eyes.
But sings *** brightly.
Plumage song,
Melodious leaf.
With nested seeds in calcium shelf.
Dies under the sting of a Tybalt or two.
And the ****** bird drops.
Wilts in the sun.

I hope it's dead.
The way it spits and foams
and drags its pure white
form against the fence.

I left for breath
but it stays with me,
keeping pace with hopes
to crawl and live and be.

But they do not deny
the blood from gaping mouth.
My sister and my brother
are behind to watch, uncouth.

It will not let them near
enough to bludgeon to
near-nothing like Heaven
and cries for what it cannot do.

They are twisted,
his innards, and they mesh
further. An hour, not two.
I hope it's dead. God, how I wish.

The winter had been bitter cold,
Yet still gave way to spring.
Anticipating the untold
And ev’ry lively fling.

Of eager mists and marigolds,
The winds would think at length.
In majesty the hilly folds
Shone sunny, golden plinths.

Still Silence greeted Morning, bold
Not fearing, he, the sting.
For Winter had been careless, cold
And murdered everything.

The clothes on a perfectly sculpted mannequin
do not accentuate the garment's beauty.
Rather, it hollows it, makes it unwholesome
and outlines all the more clearly how empty it truly is
to the point where one forgets what one is looking at.
Like a vague pronoun.

The human mind, the decent soul, cannot and should
not be subjected to such a ******* and feels inhumanly
compelled to destroy the effect.

And that is why mannequins are so good for sales.

On the sofa.
On the carpet.
In the parking lot.
Out back in the dirt.
No one's looking, now.
She's on her knees
Heaving.

Face red with disbelief.
It's because they're all
Dead
But she's alive.

It's because they get to live.
Not her.
She's laminated,
Book-pressed to last,
And it's death.

Glossed pages, merely
Slides in lantern light
Without narration.
Monday slips into Friday
Without a sound
Or impress of color.
Yesterday was February
And tomorrow drags
Muddy footprints as it heads
Into next year.

It is not real.
     so pour yourself into your works
     build an immunity to it:
What we can feel.

The Dead don't bleed.
The dead Don't bleed.
The dead don't Bleed.
At the bar without heed.
Gulp down burning
Mouthfuls of amnesiac need.
The devil's in the music,
As it creeps across the floor.
But the Devil
(with a gold star from Sunday school)
Hasn’t got the power to hold a pin.
And nails go through.
And nails go through.
And he's surprised
Because they Do.

Scratch it out in the back as a
Quick bathroom rendezvous.
She can rid her self of
A gypsum heart and
Rinse it down the drain.

And he in the stall
Kills his rebellion
With sharp hands and sharper heart.
Holding frenzied permanent ink.
Every number he leaves,
And all the faces he defaces,
And every envy he engraves
Blossoms in tune with, complements
Her ecstatic criticisms against the stall.

Now I lay me down to sleep
It wasn't real enough to keep.
She ended it in love, with loving leap.

Every day.
The everyday.
You see it every day.
The twitch and reel and marble movement
As turgid blood surfaces to face,
Flows to operate stiff shoulders.
Backs hunch as soon as they're alone.
And they are alone.
Surrounded by lovers that
Love in word only.
They chew their nails and cross their ankles.
Uncross.
And look around.

Spring. Could you imagine?
Gear, wire. Did he say?
Bolt, frame. Isn't he?
Ratchet. And then what did he say?
Screws.
Rotor.
A bunch of ****.
Oil.
Oil.
Oil. Oil. Oil.
Plug in.
Silence.
It moves.

We move a head in times of
Strain. To signify
Exact measures.
Twist on axis
With perfect posture.
Unnoticed frameworks bar our days.
We are brass.
The more crass are silver, gold.
And the days are polish. Or maybe sand.
Soon there are no mistakes.
The veneer cakes without flaw.
We do not acknowledge.
We are not caught.

For little hours though, there are kinks.
Pauses.
Errors.
Open the clockwork face.
What is stuck?
A look around.
The gears that grind us to cognition
Are jammed by a fly-body
Of soul.
Soon, soon, sooner than ever
It will be crushed.
So gears might continue,
Might make room for the everyday.

As I stand in the field, it occurs
To me, like a mosquito bedding down
in an ear, how light I am this
life. How shallow do I feel
To have trekked in loosest soil, over
Land and across years yet
have so little fiber clinging in my
soles for proof. I may as
Well have been but a step in
Sand at a tide that gasps
its opens shut at night.

On evenings such as this, I wish I had
that inborn ache to cling to pen and page
and spread that sweet salve, ink, upon my thoughts.
But lost am I in spite of hindsight. Made
to gloss the details and emotions here
in voices strange from what I know or trust.
As such my words are handicapped to show
the brute ephemera I need my readers
locked away from my intent to know.
[Please note the rhyming there was not foreseen,
If anything the rhyme detracts the sheen.]
But still the message has to be declaimed:
     For no man taking pen and ink to page,
     was e'er a one a Shakespeare to his age.

(And mark you now the setting here does change)
O greater souls than I, I do beseech,
For here in cold packed earth are mortals bound.
Through mist and age the stones about ye crack
With Death triumphant making quiet rounds
About the silent earth, I plead to you
Good fellows, lasses tell me why you've died
What sins, what straws as would have broke a camel's back!

And from the ground a sound is faintly heard
By mine own ears as would a stomach turn
In any man that Fears his loving god.
The silence of the grave is cast with cries
Of silent sinners toiling in a Hell
Contained in plagued mourners' hearts.
They wrack
And reel in illusory pain constructed
By a mother, sister, husband, son
Who could not deal with earthly loss and so
Must feel sub-earthen torture nice-named
"Living After Death."
     And all God's children die in strife:
     A soul enslaved to an afterlife.

(Again be quick for here it doth conclude)
But let me not be chained with empty graves
Whose absence from this world is justified
By gentlemen in god's most high esteem,
Filled with souls who are not here but There.
I choose to breathe the clean world's air again
And not the stinking breath reposing in
A sepulchre.

Here grass grows brown and has no flowered gifts
Set down by loving family for show.
Yet still is it more pleasing to the mind
To lie on dying parched ground than to step
On land of pulchritude made for the dead.
And when I die, please cast me anywhere
Or burn me in the centre of the town
Or give me to a hated relative.
And think of me as but a passing dream
That sought to take the sum of your largesse
But never you impose seraphic dress
On memories of me as I did live,
     For no one can or should conceive
     What happens when we from a mortal’s ken gain leave.

I - The Sound Abattoir

Crisp fractal, sunlight
on new-day sweat.
No one inside knows
about the new day yet.

Forms **** and spin
and they toil not.
Skeletons can sway
with impulse 'til they rot.

Crush-a-pill with rosy tint
to last you all the night.
Catch-a-number 'neath your tongue
and later you'll revive his Fright.

Pleasure, fleshly grimace
scours the brain against the skull.
Apartment movement never stops
and starts and sweat-sheen from the pull.

II - O Androgyne

I cannot see the world for his broad face.
The smell of sulphur would be welcome but
To choke the alcoholic reek he brings
By clutching him to me in slick embrace.

I gain his absence when I ask for breath
And he, the smiling nitwit, must consent,
So I duck to the streets with haste and breathe.
A moment in my father's sight is death.

He could not know the life that I now lead,
And all the misery I rail against;
My form is set upon the grind of days
To starve in hard-brick walls of earthly need.

Moonlit ******* strips charm from the sick
And faces all too masculine leer back
From windows; prostitutes with glitter hair
As deathbed cries of need cut down the quick.

III - A Solomon Grundy Secret

I will be, as a child,
Crushed under black boot
and throttled with Belt.
Taught to be the Man we were.

I am, as a man,
disciplined with the
golden silence
and icegrip of
solitude. No one knows
my stigmata better than
the Romans that wash
their hands of me.

I was,
as graying
Figure
nearing death,
too late to
utter any-thing of
Weight
at my
dying,
Last
breath.

Part One: Wolves and Chokes

Children are such wolves.
A day is a fledgling lamb
That can be crowded, cloistered
And clawed.
I used to speak to you and
Run with you.
You in your red coat

And I with my white throat.
Suspect nothing.
No tooth was fear to me
For a pack does not stack
Its white edges against itself.
Yet still I must have itched
A miracle of irritation
That cannot be ignored.
In the night, my mouth
Is drawn wide.
Like a fetus, I am transparent
And cringing in black situ.
Then a bite, and then a bite.
Then you see what is inside.

A one I love the best of all
Is loath to see me live.
The bitter taste of childhood vow
Comprises all I give.

I’ve broken you, you say.
With a box of fools I never sought,
Always galumphing back to me.

You broke me first, I think.
What posturing, straighten that halo
That chokes me rightfully.

Of course there is no way
To seek out your paradise.
Not if sinners cannot speak.

Part Two: Sebastien

Your hysteria is a fine rope.
My tree stands ready at the dawn,
A line of men and my
Brick wall that chips and splits
When bodies fall.

Even the sun is watching.
No one swats the stinging gaze
Away and no one dares offend.
But I stand.
I shall try to be as salt.

Salt stands even as dust.
Salt sneers at wounds.
Salt loves only the earth.
And the earth will love me soon,
Championing me as her lover
Which is an irony too ghastly to feel.

Rain in the still air, in the sun.
Silence that grinds a heel onto wrists
That steals from me.
A second, then a heartstring.
Thousand and thousands.
Eyes and minutes.

A billion is still only a tenth.
Release.
It is the boundlessness of the sky
And a chorus stabs their shovels,
Stabs the vein with silver mirth.

god touches me.
I am touched by gods.
I am born
And slain by daylight’s pink
Hands.

Every iron finger
Every one a steely tongue
Every cut a golden affair
And the spurns too hot to hold.
I fall and fold and dim.

My hour is burnt
And still your eyes, your teeth
Go with me
To forge both of my decades with
A gilt life of ecstasy I never
Touched but saw.

I saw it in the face of god.
And heard it as a note
That echoed through the days I lived,
And every word I wrote.

Yes, I think it would be fine to say we are the
Sun and the Moon, respectively.
The world and sky of our disparate souls
nicely encapsulated.
To simple metaphor.

Yes. But it is incomplete, you know.
For sun may never touch moon,
and Day has no place in
the dominion of the nocturnal.
And the moon can have no adequate
view (but a sidelong glance) at
man and Earth in the sun's hand.

No,
I can touch you and you me.
Still more, I can see you and grow familiar
with what you beam upon;
Lie with the subtlety of a new night's
descent with my eyes twinkling
nonplussed to the crux of neck and shoulder.

Yes. We are, you and I, the Sun and the Moon,
if you say we are.
For you cast back the dark and shun the
dark places.
And the thin veil and living line that keeps
days apart, the Night, is the one corner
upon which I fear you shall never
Intrude.

Stop. Become fluid.
Flow from your body to elicit a secret congress.
Drip away from your eyes
and fill the outline of my vacancy.
Meet me as I was and sleep
that peace in the warmth I
bore but no longer occupy.

And I will stop. Become gas
and seep unnoticed from too, too
solid wakefulness.
To the darkest corner of the
night sky and the brightest
glint of heat between particles.
So that you can touch naught
but my outline.
And feel but the passing breadth
of my hot breath.

Little girls in ****-bright paint
and their brothers with button-ups,
colorful shoes. I'll never be that fast.
"He" is having a party and his parents
will be gone. I could bring the
***** and be well-liked; lying
on the carpet in the sticky ***-smoke.
Summer spins as the ceiling fan
lies still. Still, I'll never be that fast.

My neighbors all burst into flame
But they're cool enough to dowse themselves.

Come and feed
Opalescent mouth
Come break bread with.

My kith and kin
Seek to join.
You can doff your.

Hat and sit,
yes, they're in
The parlor.

Is the Parthenon
But my clan is borrowed
From the Coliseum.

Come and see 'em.
Ranged in chair by
Height.

To bite,
Now you can go in to
The table but only along.

One side as
Leonardo
Would suggest.

Our featured feast begins with mother's grin.
But ends with wiping father's ****** chin.

They wear white shirts that lope into the village square
And hate the dust that settles there.

Their children leave the schoolhouse with schoolmaster's nod
To see the traveling works of odd.

With cries and drums and fire held in open hands,
Four insects bless the godless lands.

Yes, every song on every face is writ on steel,
Cemented by the thunder's peal.

Toward the night the fires burned away the spell,
Yet still the truth did four men tell.

I live here.
My world with edges.
An Oklahoma landscape.
Couldn't bear to be anywhere else.
You live away from me, though.
That failed mystic: Time
Sets his claws
(Teeth seizing ice) then
Bleeds all color from our hair.
But I can live eternally in
A photograph. My mother,
See? In the corner?
Yes. Just there.

When Death sets all god's children free,
There will be room for one.
For I will live in ninety-three
And pray for Kodak sun.

I feel like I am A New Orlean doll
With my burlap and my threaded seams
To view the world.
My fingers are stitched
And immobile.

I feel like I should scream—
Scream to wake
Scream to crack the atmosphere
Or scream to come alive.
My mouth, however, is dumb.

I feel like I am in someone else's shape
Someone who has wronged
And will be wronged alike
With needles I ***** myself.
My embroidery comes apart near my chest.

Blind woman's stitch binds me to his hair.
He turns and drops when I am rendered air.

The last feeling pang passes in a gasp
As the cold metal, hot metal
Pierces through that bending
Wind-like flesh.
In a second it will be a
Feature like the hue of eyes
Borne its weight long and steps inside
Its waiting grave.

******* on a bed of nouns
Spiked by the periodic verb
And desiccated seconds.

The taste is like a herb
Stored since birth
And the death that stretches before it like a curb.

Flavor radiates plateau from the earth
As the little soldiers, little flies
Fly out through mouths with their small girth.

The insect words that scuttle past our eyes
Know when recited truly each one dies.

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.

possibility
inside a conjurer's box
infinitely felt

hush from outside it
carefully like broken arms
so carefully now

she, an audience
callous, loving, drinking gal
gasps at every cue

the night's coup d'etat
what they all (that one) pay for
the lid is seized free

it's empty: applause.
but only because they don't
know where she has gone.

A thousand god-eating plates in a summer wind
Listen, china-white, to the audible inaudible that flanks
The paint-chip, earth-red bridges. Susurrations weave
Through grass with spider fingers; following curves in seashells
As a voluble electric screen who Speaks as dew and taste.
Water is depth beyond what can be acquainted with memory
Or fancy. Watches turn delicate, May-lace and wedding night
Music: Vertical, Veiled, Very. Dust in the stream lisps
Headily to shore, rests by a forgotten child’s shoe,
Bronzes it like mother’s finger and burns like daybreak.

There sits a woman who
cannot feel the rain.
Trapped in thoughts
that cross her to the neck
and stifled tongue.

A bench beneath holds
up her sodden world,
to push back hands on
a crystal face and nail
her to her seat.
She cannot feel a single
lachrymal word nor
hear a vertical eye as
they, by the familied thousands,
rip her ripe in two.

Perhaps it is for her ultimate
benefit that these thorough
roving mouths are but
the muted daggers of her mind,
else she might stand
from the bench
fall into her lap and feel.
Oh, unthinkable as it may seem, to feel
those manual nails in her feet
and free the fingertips on hands that
tear out fenestrated faces
firmly held a pace away by freakish
phrases.

There sits a woman in the rain:
all dressed in red and white and slain.

There is a false face behind a false breast
That beats out a tune that was never its own
And the thrum of the notes in the din of the night
Is a scourge to the dreams it is shown.

Wherefore sits he so melancholy? By
baked glass lines of chairs, all written up for
the task which he cannot but perform. Waits
with a cruel mouth; a crueler waist that
hoists him from the waste with watermarked wells
beneath his eyes, his staring eyes. Up there,
how many faces press against him? In
the well of his neck, the silver skin holds
back the mouth for all it might be worth,
to be seen by His appreciative teeth.

There is a false stage where stands a false man
That speaks with a passion that never was known
And the beck and the cry that is elsewhere not heard
Is a tear for the man that has flown.

now i lay me
down to sleep
it wasn't real
enough to keep
if i should die
before i wake
then not an echo
would i make

now i lay me
down to sleep
and ***** my sides
to break my keep
if i should die
before i wake
i've filled my mouth
to drain a lake

now i lay me
down to sleep
i hope to god
not six feet deep
if i should die
before i wake
i hope i got
all i could take

This man has a gun pointed at me,
that extends from thumb to index in an L,
at me from his hip.
I can't see much through
my hand. Reflexive, if dampened
by a gristle of curiosity.
Weight shifts from foot
to toe to ball to other
foot. He doesn't speak
to me; to the floor,
but his gesture comes at me
through the atmosphere or
whatever analogous high ground he possesses.

The tip of the pink barrel
menaces like a treble scream
or a broken blackboard.

Shift. Shift and a look around.
It must be done quickly, he
looks at her to ask permission.
I imagine her too cold
for response: atoms
held in hexagons to keep
that inevitable crack from
toppling the salty gravity.
However they must speak
through the superaudible
for her stolid fluidity
resolves his change
(changes his resolve)
and his eyes stop dead on
me.

The laughter of that trigger
rustles through skin
and plays with bone.

A second with the fire in my hand.

Can I honestly walk away without an
Ocean in tow?
I see. It's “no.”

Belt out arms to whip the ******* sky.
Ever impartial.
Ever my surrogate for its emptiness
My scream tucked neatly inside.
What kind of god would curse me
With knees? Damnation is a collapse--
Fling my neck without breath to
The sea of the earth and pant
Out sacrificial smoke.
I see it snow.

The earth prays for me.
Delicate soil casts up vigilantly the
Orisons I will not. I've murdered them
On the doors of my mouth. The key,
Keys are maledictions;
Are devilish devotions to destroy
With wine-soaked fruit.
Cast it away after the first sin.
O, felix culpa, I walk to the
Dawn to meet you
Tasting it ever on my lip.

I proselytize
For a new mythology
With a gasp and groan.

People I don't know:
I might crucify myself
For all these strangers.

Inaccessible;
Turn crucible sweet with work
And wake at manger.

Must find the lady,
Cast her down, find Narcissus;
Teach him to atone.

Cain, Prometheus.
Mood colors a mountain day,
Forges with cold hands.

The earth high can see
Serene deaths at silent sea.
All the quiet lands.

I proselytize
For a new mythology
And worship alone.

Sepia wind runs through forgotten hands
Around a fitted frame, beneath a door;
Too like a battlement of local lore,
Too like an estuary of white sands.
And wind continues on and eastward past
A café built by Orpheus to house
The hungry lovers that would look, would louse
Eurydices by looking on at last.

And all to meet a rail upon a coast
Where sits a flower and a god of earth
Exchanging looks that burn the stars' bright feet.
She drinks the inks of valorous repeat,
Where fails the poet's hopeful hand at birth:
Exchanging all the words that leave us most.

A pair of eagles connect in the air
in that mysterious way that birds can.
Rats that gave up the sea and the sinking
ships for a soaring finger
with which to scratch the night sky until
the skin breaks.

Here, they retain that tenuous extension,
a spark of the sin,
that ****** aristocracy that exalts in
making masks out of vellum day
and glowering down from box seats at
the beginning of the descent.

Whether in the sea or fallen as a tree,
the sky is memory.

No one bites me quite the way you do
or locks me with that tenderness of fright.
I cannot see the way we fit as one
But I must fall with you to rocky white.