after 2 AM the tinnitus of a withering day has abated.
the shrill un-boundaries of our servitude
collapse into auguries seeping
from a perforated moon
like white honey.
all it’s thought
a dot on a creature
made of holes.
stumbling home from a mansion
to a flat.

in a yellow car.

With aphids and cherubs barking up the wrong tree
A November with rain on its mind
clicks a heel in the underbrush, where all things creep
in the ether floss of our lost tendrils of Time
emergent in luminous twine
every stitch, a rivet in a concrete swamp.
tethering a plight.

II

Christmas lights lockjaw hamlets with crepe frost
glistening earthbound color wheels in the jagged blanket
of a crisp 3 AM. a covert Decembering as such a night
is want to do.

then the gray weeps
as window panes
tell you
Why?

Harriet slept to colonize time and space
with her chrysanthemums and cardamon irises
tacked to a wall behind a lens in her eye
rapidly moving through a slumber quest
to pillage the invisible with her wisp of might
to glean the terrace of lost chambers of gnostic grog
in flagons of hubris, spuming at the spicet
of a dervish star in a barrel.

Then she makes breakfast.

Drinking my whiskey teeth in the spiral of an unknown maw
Jumbled in my cups, where the thorns parade on ice
And gallons of faraway evaporate like an up close Eden…
My lungs full of aire and radioactive lovesongs
bejewelled in twilight… sink into me like a long groan
of quiet… choking on a scream that paintbrush cannot fathom
nor my prayers recite.
The volume of my sphere, squaring off with my span of years.
Folding space into impractical toys; my rivets, clenched in redwood
And forgotten things, purged by sleepless Time
On a pyre of inflammable
Pitards.

Living in the City may clip your wings.
But there’s baklava, so….

You pay more to live in a cube
with a longer cube MacGyvered
to a money pit shaped like-
a square.

It’s all the rage
how you are.

II

When you formally meet your first guitar
you get sunburned.

III

Now you eat noise and incidentals. like profound Chicklets.
But your shadow’s sweet-tooth is another way to adventure
from your cavities, with sea shanties from False Hope
Or Narwhal hymns in bright typhoons
Like glass lipids
Burning in earnest
Where the sun
Has a brief chill-
In the panorama of
Your undistorted
Will.

IV

Like riding a bike
with Imaginary Legs-

That Believe that you
Actually Have
A Bike.

along the banks of the river; follically challenged scrubbery-
chokes on damp sand and sunshine… cattails etching semaphore
for dragonflies. bobbing in Spring’s spring… like a vibration
on a breeze with clean thoughts and urban widdershins.
the occasional gnat, plastered to a wind shear is often comedy-
as the passerby dissolves in the waltz of a temperament
masquerading as a global warning…

with cold cotton.

she thinks of me
not often.

Her fennel failed, so it was off to market-
where local lemon squares cartwheel
with kettle corn
as free samples dissipate...
and the business-
of honing in on
a needful thing
becomes the
sepia tone
on a wharf of
gathering.

with the fog that threatened
the forecast, abated.
the air was gray-yellow
with a new sun cracking mist
as veterans
meander like elk in hoodies
between the fresh catch
of the day
and the venison heart
on ice.

under glass.

nothing drags a frame of reference out of bed
like a fresh start on a pike.
you strap your business-end to a playful lark
and stave off the broken moons
as you Tetris the Possible
like an unknown god.

I hoist my genre by rote;
my tropes charmed and dangerous…
for the pen is mightier than the fjord
of our most opulent shadows.

My Etch-a-Sketch memories diverge
like Christmas geese
flocking to a pagan potluck
as cellular as a private moment with
a Neilson rating of zero.
I tune in when a gadfly lands on the nose of a spite,
and make a poet’s face.
I sleep like a baby on
the Titanic-
but my average epiphany
bobs for apples
in a bucket
of Northern Stars
too keen on wisdom
for a dullard’s
petard.

at first glance, every blank stare
like a horde of eyes
with pitchforks
and torch songs
made of
why?

Though it’s little more than a few things-
scattered about
Life continues to bewilder our tambourines.

Winters are longer than whiskers in milk
And Summer has you always in Love.

You have too much Stephen King in your knapsack in Dunley.
And something that looks like homework half done
and the bus driver smells like a snowstorm
with polyester eyes focused on your next prison.
king of yellow promises with black stripes.
And the school across town has loose girls with cooties
but they teach you how to kiss and everything’s jake.
You have time on your hands like a **** on a gripe.
And 46 butterflies know your name by heart

because collecting them
was science.

when you stay, i assume that god has a plan
and she knows your name.
when you leave, i resume my urchin joy-
delirious with yearning on boil.
i applaud the next day
as you descend to me
unadorned
to disavow my lonely
with your passionate
Heresies to thwart the gospels
of my Doubt.

the way you always do
when you
sublime.

my hand on your hip like a golden fleece
humming jurisdiction and swaying
to the rhythm of your gate-
too proud to wallflower.
my palm-
where the heat of you
commands my grasp,
and nothing is
so keen
as the thought of our
next encounter
with a private
moment
unmoored from harbingers
of impending
isolation.
stuck to the forefront
of an absolute
ravishing.

whirling the dervish plums
of our plucky
resurrections
to stammer free of our bonds
into happier
*******.

thoroughly
in love
where out love
is In.

and no wonder.