Exiled to dusk,
Fractions of the sun
Begin to lift away,
In concealment
We shudder,
Casting our reels
Into a pond of uncertainty,
Clock hands bend
With advancing shadow,
And speak of time
Only in past tense.

I so want everything
I ever felt for you
Preserved for posterity,
Even should forever
Be far less than
We imagined.

A woman’s beauty is light on the eyes,
best pinned in thoughts, not weighed down
by beautiful lines that cannot halt wrinkles.

The dying frost of dawn does not
feel sorry for the gravity of the nest
knowing the wrens inside can fly.
The ode is limited to its chilling beauty.

The sublime pleasure of discovering
on a stroll the transitory pleasures
of another’s pedestrian secret life
is only weighed  down by
future speculations of their destiny.

The gentle grace of a grazing fawn
killed by the hunter’s bullet
is elevated by the photo
caught before the moment.

The moon rises only on a setting sun
yet  the calf of a homeless man
is wondrous reflected in the night’s light.
Even the suicide jumping off the bridge
is beautiful in the dark fall.

The butterfly takes flight
in the shout of the
lepidopterist’s child
hoping to catch it in his net.
He goes home sad not
knowing what he has
lost with his heavy words.

Before audaciously
flying
in the strangled gleaming
of the last glory
of extinct clouds
rising
I asked my soul
what is the purpose
of having
the last thought
of mankind
or any
dreams
Oh Jinn
give back
the last of me
stolen and not yours

The Jinn replied
they blessed you
don’t you remember
or dreamed that you remember
it was that memory
of some things
and everything
that started your world
and ended this
and theirs
It started
and finished
just the way
you wished

If I shut the border,
no one will shut their window,
hide in their closet,
lock their door.

They would shake the blinds of moths,
bring the dog in from the doghouse,
let the cat feast after the mouse hole
has been plugged with a door wedge.

In the distance
the train whistle blows
dispersing mist and rain.
No one steps off nor boards.

The bird nest is not abandoned.
The hollow of the tree stays hollow.
Nothing has shut down at all.

My pen scribbles a poem
only to watch the black words
return to the reservoir.

I open the dictionary to the word “hope”,
but the page refuses to settle
until I put all the words in them
face down on the writing table.

My stoma grumbles louder than my stomach.
I shut my cancer in the mother-of-pearl.
My wife’s cancer is placed in the
small valise of all our memories.

I can’t shut down the museum.
It already is.
I can’t shut down the cinemas.
They already are.
Only the pharmacies are open.

I shut down my mouth
on my broken jaw
with five missing teeth
only to feel the maw of death.

I shut down the ash of my childhood
into a golden urn of my own design.

I shut down America, I shut down God,
putting them both between the now
empty covers of the dictionary missing hope.

I shut down my passions, my emotions
in the moldy basement of my despair.
My shut down love is chained in the dungeon.

Shut up, shut down,  I repeat  to myself,
until those words lose all definition,
until my lips are sealed in pain and
the only thing left is my total shutdown.

fingernails blackened from scraping in the moss
a soul of blood, dirt, grit and change,
tendrils of Fibonacci, curving ivy in our jewel-veins
lips that have been bitten and blow among reeds
deep in the forest where our feet touch the riverbed
and our heart thunders like the rain.

Punished by the sun
in a desert of our love.

Slipshod the sailing stones,
how dispassion speckles the playa floor,
salt pans dissolve motivating force.

I'm a man returning to his ground.
You're a woman seeking refuge
in the cracked crevices of my rib cage.

So far below sea level,
where does love go from here to survive?

Perhaps, Chloride City
and the grave of a James McKay?

Maybe at Bottle House in Rhyolite,
the "Queen City"?

Either way, this sensation has become an unsacred mirage:

the watering hole, a leadfield,
with which we can only look back from.

Praying the sulfur in the sky
passes on from this place,

before we turn into something sodium, something akin to
Lot's careless wife.

It’s in the shading.
It’s the way the light is written.
It’s the way the observer takes it all in.
It’s the way it convinces one that the world will last.
It’s the way it plants a seed in the mind,
the way it touches one inside, lives inside
the streets of memory, inhabits one’s emotional house,
sunsets, harbors, all the great perfect things
that exists in the brief eternity that loop eternally,
that convinces one that the extraordinary
is the purpose of existing in ordinary time,
that every moment lives for the perfect still life.

The hot night rain drenches me in sleep
opening a bow to prayer
amidst the lunatic birds swarming
in the dark heat.
Magnolias are split in dreams
heavy with bolts and tears,
flowing in the cascade
of cracked mirrors.
All is unmoored from my memory,
surviving on communion.
Dear Jesus am I not more profound
than thy mad swirl?

In the Charleston marketplace, a boutique auctions off
detailed limited edition replicas of black history: a slave
who hugs his chains upright over his porcelain hands,
is sold for $1200.00 to a man with a black Amex card,
a horde listening to the Emancipation Proclamation
goes for the same amount, Malcolm X gets $1000.00,
MLK just a little less, the OJ bobble heads sell for $60.00  
in the store’s gift shop while the white Bronco in
slow pursuit complete with flashing police lights
and breathless live commentary garners $2400.00,
Rosa Parks languishes at the rear eventually getting $300.00,
Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Rodney King are
part of lot sold for $500.00 clearance and a free
Black Lives Matter T-shirt, George Floyd gasping out
“I can’t breathe,” enshrined in a porcelain halo nabs
the same price, while the last figurine, of his murderer
being embraced by a very happy Donald Trump is
purchased by a man in a MAGA hat for $10,000.00.

Look closer...
the winding trail
is baked to perfection,
bearing the scars
of a caesarean section.

Only the snakes
dare travel along I-8,
one-by-one the seasons lie prone,
in heat this sun will castrate.

The burnt aspects on faces
don’t smile or frown,
they peer out as residue
to places perished in the wake of
a cityscape’s head trauma,
calling out to the heaven’s above
as they await her to rise
with wings from these ashes,
in anticipation for a day ne’er to draw nigh,
even the steady fall of acid rain
will fail to wash away such genocide.

A favorite haunt transmutes
into a ghost town,
burning into the ground
the heat seeps into the soul,
and the procession begins again
for whom the bell tolls.

Towers of steel melt
as popsicles on the pavement,
the sun’s punishment
is constantly transcendent,
the noise of sparks and hums
rattle the spine,
today’s forecast is a good chance
of saturnine.

Eerie colors at dawn
make for a spectral scenic view,
picnic lunch in the park
is categorically taboo,
the hunters of men
swoon in subjugation to this tyranny,
weather’s wrath was everyone’s destiny.

Live a little, die a little,
pretend it cannot happen,
but in the end we all windup
as peanut brittle...