Hook him up to the machine.
Shock his brain into
mediocrity.
Death stalks him;
he is aware.
There is too much
flash in his eyes.
His brain needs a reboot;
he needs to forget,
like a goldfish, like
a monkey in the zoo.
Hook him up to the machine.
He is too sentimental.
Salmon swim in his blood;
he has a paisley heart,
and a tie-dye soul.
He can smell colors.
Hook him up to the machine.
He has Van Gogh eyes, and
a Bukowski gut; he walks
like he's lost in a maze;
hunchback sadness,
butcher knife nerves,
Hook him up to the machine.
He believes in love,
and has too much trust.
His vivid green memory
is a curse, we need to
crash it, **** the eternal spring.
Hook him up to
the machine.

The cats gather
en masse every
time I sit
down to write.
One by one, they
jump up on the
big maple desk,
and walk across the
keyboard.

Mojo swats at
Shadow's tail.
Bukowski nips at
my fingers as they
peck at the keys.
It's going to be
a long night.
The cats don't
understand poetry
or marketing.
Shadow hisses, and
jumps down.
Bukowski gets
bored, and bites at
the cords.
He gets overly
excited, and slips off
the back of the desk.
The wild look in
his eyes flash
centuries of power
and sadness.

I think of my feral
days on the streets,
stealing *****, and
sleeping under
bridges in
December.
I wrote my words on
the walls of the
abandoned
houses.
And now,
such beautiful
providence.
I quit drinking and
I live in a town with
a clear lake.  I catch
fish and eat them.
I've published three
books and I write my
poetry on a
computer that my
three cats view as
a playground.

Sometimes,
it all seems like a
furry dream.

I woke up at angles with you
---a parallelogram, opposite but equal,
my thoughts in constant rotating view
---a diagram, showing us where
our homes are laid to rest,
where streets became dead spiders
caught in their own webs.

If we are in transit via tunnel,
aqueduct, or escalator,
it might be cinema.

If we lose atlas in the worship of light,
it might be cinema.

But I can't find you here;
here, where they used to build ships
from sand and steam
and science fiction;
where they used to design
buildings so as to create
a dissonant and mournful
whistling sound when wind
blew through them
---ostentatious things;
dead people’s things.

Through walls and underneath concrete, dug so deeply
into the wide plains
and withered, gnarled tree roots
of an agonizer's conurbation,
is a space halfway to the zenith,
charting the prescribed power
of in-betweenness.

Never again will we draw meaning from
our proximity to one another.

Four men I don't see in the market.

We stopped just short of smiles
we were always about to begin a conversation
we told each other we had years ago
met somewhere
and we talked only with eyes.

Then on a day, for days
they weren't there anymore.

I try to imagine their age
if they were old enough to be dead.

Like a ray of hope I love to believe
they moved away elsewhere.

Four men short and it will be five.

Maybe one eye will look for me
a little sad at my missing
just another man not seen anymore..

An ordinary man, a poet at heart
who felt more than could express.

He wouldn't know.

~
Lift the veil from a grayscale morning. Vividly imagistic. An odalisque no more.

Her shape beneath the gown is a foreign land, a series of quiet revelations. Its pattern manifests as pinpricks of light perforating the shirred fabric of his heart.

The preponderance of dream in her eyes becomes a call and response evoking purely imaginary spaces. The contained chemistry is beautifully insular, monochromatic.

And there her lips. Into claustrophobic kiss. This lower register of love comes in unadorned, subtle colorings like the darkest part of night.

One thousand shades of gray.
One single light of white.
And everything merges in the night.
~