This town has asthmatic headlights and bottle caps like tiny crowns for giant ants, snatching moonlight from the concrete, hoarding halos in blind alleys; where the homeless groan and dither in shadows like blackstrap molasses. The sign on the backdoor reads “ Exit “ like it was ******* Shakespeare, but across the street where the lamp is having second thoughts… a red brick unicorn is grazing on bottle caps with moonlight icing and a Yellow Cab idles in the Irony of Yellow.

     Parked cars are engaged in their telepathic games. The trench coats are keeping secrets and house keys huddled in a clump of disarray… in every palm. Neon shoestrings in windows, spell words with glass agendas, twinkling conspiracies that trade on your emptiness like a promise on the lips of a snail. You can hear the world spinning a yarn to knit a sweater thick enough to ward off the chill of an existential crisis.
Heard Carl’s Kid, Marty has a habit of catching butterflies and sewing butterflies to them. Carl says “ The Boy's gettin’ purty good.

A stone has a Name that is Itself a Stone.
And only one Tongue can speak it.
A star is called by what It Is
And never answers. Deafened long ago
By the sheer magnitude of Being -
A Grain of Light in all the Dark Of
An Unfinished Dream
Of a Lonely God.

Stars are Occupied with Dividing Eternity
In half. Too Innocent to grasp
The Futility
Of every Beam of Light
Hurling at the Velocity of Now
Like a Ray of Sisyphus
Pushing a Premise to reach
A Plateau
At the Peak of an Infinite
*****.

Time Is Not An Illusion. It's Merely Meaningless.
With no Mind to Record even
The Passing of a Day.
Like a Void as placid
As a thimble of rain
Resting on a Counterpoint.

Without one.

He used to run with scissors
Now he creeps with a sharpie pen
To keep canaries in suspense.
And that beats a coal mine.
Cause up close…. It’s almost personal.
He can almost feel it
Twitching
in his enigma -
Like a holy ghost
Trying to kick.
And
nobody knows
The deal with
the shoebox
Full of sharpies
And all those
black canaries
Not to mention
Duct tape.

He keeps his griffins on a leash
And he can’t seem to sleep at night.
And He can’t even tell
if it hurts…

But he loves the way
That it's so easy to fake it.
And how anything
is possible
if everything
burns.

My flagon of Ganymede, a frothy pontoon
Of ephemerals, flanking the dry-docked galleon
Of my youth. At once, prodigious and minute.
Like a fob on a club. Run aground and marooned.
Like a bald spot on stilts.
The Sea has resigned. And all Sirens departed…
Save a nameless nymph etching her song
Into the marrow of a length of bone -
Shaped like an orphaned
Hammer.

A scrimshaw calliope of petroglyphs
As garrulous as a Cauliflower
On a bed of velvet
As black
As an unborn
Sun.

The mug stains leapfrog a linoleum asphalt countertop, sunbathing in the breakfast nook.
A magazine proofreads a hole in a bagel. Scanning for clues to the whereabouts
Of a Jewish heart. Beads of Oolong tea archipelago from a resting kettle
All the way to the 'good ' China. A cup on a pearl, laying flat… ear to the ground.
Listening to the stories only Formica can tell. Deciphering the steam
Rising from a steep. Curling whiskers into omens, embroidered upon a shaft of light
Heaven sent. Postage dew. Gilding quaint luxuries, tucked in a cozy roost
Smelling of oak musk and slow roasted dreams, evaporating before memory may lay claim
To the riddles of Morpheus. There’s an aire of Return.  
It molts in the bacon fats hovering in the strata unique to kitchen islands lousy with active volcanoes that shuffle in stocking feet and terry cloth bathrobes. Restless and foggy minded.
Looking for the keys. And...
Chewing a thumbnail. Staring out the window. Where there used to be a car in the driveway. But the officer flagged a taxi. Explains the migraine, like a Vulcan; stoically flipping switches in a fuse box wired to a vague recollection of a soiree.
All the while holding a pitchfork and today's horoscope.
For irony and street cred.

{ But out of cream cheese. }

Concurrently... This part of the house still has the rustic naivete of a celibate beatnik picking teeth with a signature pen presenting an Hawaiian girl with a vanishing skirt; blinking in and out of Vaud-villainy, like Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat. A kind of hole in a barge with an ornate cubby; loitering with sugar cubes and a bendy plastic fern.
Like the foyer to a room, still under construction.
      A busy little metaphor, lounging around the east wing of a humble abode… like news clippings in a mason jar… it’s superfluous handle threading a ceramic eye.
Like a stainless steel joke under a refrigerator magnet, pinned to a plate in your forehead. As any lamp-shade with ambition.  
      Playing to a rough Cloud, hung over an ashtray; that has seen Better Days - envy the baroque occlusion of monotony and routine, merging a hangover - into morning traffic. Replete with modest gains.
And Horizons that stab bleary eyes that would know a gypsy
By the weight of her purse…
     When the day begins, it gains a foothold by the spine of an overdue book, reclining adjacent runcible spoons and antique kitche. As a bathroom light squeaks between a door and a frame.
As ancillary and precise as a beacon for a blindfold.

Like turpentine palming a brick. And Wagner.

In the halls of the universals, whosoever we are -
We are not equipped. We emerge from mothers, tumbling ever forward into hordes of wane and bucolic meadows, thrashing in the kiln of Time. We soar amongst ourselves… in the pitch. In the dark.
Our totems are twigs and twine.
We hold the moon accountable, but not for madness.
She holds the key to the shadow, and we wants it.
But haven’t any angels to approve. So we haunts it.
Like songbirds with eyes of stone.
Perched on the lip of an urn.

Mr. Ingle made a Grand Entrance seem fay and indecisive and marginally *******. His noble bearing hauled a profile of privilege that could sink a showboat. He was the only man whose Innate Vanity was a certified genius. To see him saunter distractedly along the pier to inspect his fleet is to wonder how a languid stroll and a kick in the nuts were now one and the same. You marvel at his flowing cape and covet his unseemly wealth, but his stride has found you lacking, and in your covetous heart you know yourself to be Unworthy, and better men than you have envied Master Ingle, but every one of them paid handsomely to do so.
     His gray eyes sparkled. Proof of how good it was to have no idea how to give a **** for free. The belt that cinched his tailored breech had a buckle that made men of stature and means feel like all they do is pick their noses all the time, no matter who's around. It was a belt, only one such as Mr. Ingle was worthy to cinch above his waist. His silk shirt thought the belt an oafish clod and told it so, but no one else would dare!
Not without attaining immunity from the boots and even then, you’re talking to a boot!
     Mr. Ingle made a grand entrance; and the local gentry politely hated the ******* and returned to whatever pastry they were elegantly dismembering with all the teeth they were born with money enough to buy and have installed, as Ingle's eye fell upon Herchel Finn, whom he loved best for reasons he was paying someone a king's ransom to discover, and he was pleased

As magellanic clouds collapse into a spoon
i wander off... my satchel strapped to my salubrious stride.
my eyes unmanned. now binary soul nova
resting on my cheekbones... boring holes in the landscapes
to catch a glimpse of the carousel underneath.
spinning on it's side.

perpetual.

While bathing in the last rays of a bright idea -
receding; in accord with epiphanies of mellifluous delight.
my lifespan, now an Always without a comma -
blessed by new bones... thin as reeds to take flight and escape.
where other worlds gleam in the Labyrinth -
night deprived.

unfathomable.

[ can't wait ]

pappi ain't got no shoes, no how. that's how you float.
chip a tooth on the moon. and you gots yourself a lawsuit.
sleep with stella, and dangle.
she got a roof you cain't trust.
you got a barn full of blind owls.
and nothin' ain't right 'til you leff it -
where you found
the ******
thing.

and that's not a ruse, it's just ridiculous.