No slumlords in the orchard, only the good Lord’s bounty
heaped upon troubles and shimmering defaults.
where life has loaned you-
a lemonous sun, as ashes belie the anthracite
smoldering in clandestine doubts and rarified hope.
This world is teeming with life without irony. Teeming with you-
like a vestigial immortal, entranced by a wasp
in an apple tree.

In the doll spot the violins in your eyes
are not the choir i was looking for.
merely the shell of a silent scream
in semaphore *******
lavishly devoid.
Pondering the revels of Last Things.

I came upon your homicide by chance.
tripped over your open wounds and hung lights
on your bones to find the empty wells
yawning with grief invisible… and all the secret storms
of your tepid furies. i read your mail.
in a sense.
i saw the background of your foreground
as the planet you believed in.
and waved at you “ Goodbye”
because backwards
Day.

summer is sputtering out and fall
is fluttering forward with hammock eyes
swaying in the riddle of sunlit caverns and dark fires.
in my bones i can feel the changing of the guard.
how a sun is plucked up
from a yawning chasm of noel
and black chandeliers.
comets that pray to the ellipse
and never the cause..

but the season rumbles and laments
any aspect of the other.
with the rain pining for blue skies
or blue skies dreaming of gray.
we are joined in the calamity of
marching against Being.
by Being so hard that a link in a wound
is more an iron pillow than a spirit
of Morpheus, Day-walking with a
communicable
Flu.

Before You Flew.

It’s like sleep is treason. I disembark from a loadstone
and revolve around an endless disjoint.
It’s like being exposed to the radioactivity of a dead god.
but with graven images on your hands
and the milk of human blindness
in a butter churn -
you never ****
with.
udders are like fountains of wane
when your thirst is preternatural
and your tongue
as tethered to
Tantalus
as every hour at beck and call
is only listening to you breathe
through your mouth
when you have
nothing to say.
It’s like sleep is treason, gussied up in pinched gold filings
and rust burnt daffodils. it’s like  not attending the beginning -
but claiming to be a witness. more a rumor fog-
on your windshield...
telling the curve of the world that your road
leads to answers.
sleep is mocked by the hemisphere we believe in.
unraveled and plucked from-
dim glories to face the brutal happening
of being Alive.
sleep
is how having no choice
tells you how to be awake
when the time comes to be asleep
through a war you can’t win
until you betray the comfort
of your Albatross-
and your world-class indifference
to the Mystery
of You.
Sleep can never lay siege to the tyranny of your Illusions
but can always discontinue your savage love
as it Is.
within you.
this species of sleep has all your tears in a box
and all your hope in ivory towers
of Strange Rodeo.

i’m on my hill, and a swarm of long Tuesdays
perturb my actual Monday night
pooling at my disconnected feet on the grounds of anonymity  
where I trim the verge with cattle eyes, gawking at Time
with my ruminant mouth slack, and my spires arcing bolts
from the crown of a troubled Sky.
my pumpkins are not the same. they have lost their dreams
to a labyrinth of vines… tumbling over dead leaves and applesauce sunshine-
but only in the margins of our conspicuous stupidity.
inflamed by a cold sun.

i’m on my hill, as Leviathans repel from low clouds
to barter teeth at my table
for a long song about a boy full of fables
and a Sea in his Palm
full of worlds.

All the ill homes ditching the hearth of a quiet in favor of a dust up at sundown.
chemicals in the frost,  digging into limp houses and chunneling the bedrock of an underneath as barren as the up above. As only a fairy tale can scar a blemish.

Optical violets
conspire to blossom in your benighted tomb
should you live there, with all the irony at your disposal
to lay siege to your impregnable-
Mice.
They know all about the clock
but nothing of the gears…
too busy easy eating charms from a ghost hand
in a parlor of lost boys. too busy slipping into cauldrons
of bespoke misadventures and
terminal revivals.

You bloat the river
where a crick would do.
Your fathoms blast the narrows
of your endless beseech. You implore that the world
should come apart more gently.
That it should sleep when the evening is callous
but long in the truth.

then dreams permit pearls that permit holes in theories.
And all the comely dawn
is vanquished by noon.


II

For nothing is as always
as another thing forgotten
when you meant too.

when your sun is too high, all that matters is how your moon is waning
and some of the far things become up close when you venture from your anesthesia
and succumb to the wayward lithium of your bright mind on a dark sea
slumming with stars so astonished that the dark is gasping for shadows
but your treasure trove is a moveable feast of ferocious puns
dipped in the quill of Time and marginally antiseptic.
you click with the void but the cure
is an actual oblivion
full of You.

and you love like a crazy thing when living out loud.

the wind chafes the manacle
clank born maniacal, sidewise Wednesday-
stuck where the chemicals calm down
the real things-
stuck to your windshield.
something like a varmint
in between
doing nothing at all
and being so dead
it can’t be a
miracle.

but the going keep going when the staying is a vacancy
as wide as the dark side of the Truth.
you can go there with your strawberry eyes
but not all of you, see too much
until you do… with all your candles
out of mind.

and all your utter lack of proof.

We should get a drink and untangle the myriad vines
intertwined in our Autumn on a thorn’s errand.
We should go where the agonies are barren
and as toothless as hoops in a guillotine
drenched in Olive Oil and murmurs
muttering the future to slow things drinking
and we shall have our towers built
by the tall stones of our ingenious remedies
that focus Hope through
Impenetrables-
as often as
Snow.

and our Tales
are not Lies
that we Know, that
We Know.

We should open the box
with the open mind
To see what’s
Outside.
Enlist the aid of
our feral Want-
Cajoling Night Terrors
into the Light-
of our ice blue
Reveries.

We should think about
muddling mint
at the bottom of
the Sea.

a cloud with
no face...

that hasn’t
been any face

Has been every Face

All the
While.

All the
Time.

Like We,

Margo gobs a peach with all the fuzz, fleece of Jupiter but sweet-
Like a tree is sweet for waiting so slowly they suddenly bare fruit.
She thinks about her pillow full of Sleep and Pity
melting into a queen-sized oblivion, marking Time with dim Arrows.
She feeds the wrong wolf now and then.
But she prospers where her sparrows depart from this World
And never Comes Back, so much as Return
To Turning.

It’s early morn with the sky fussy
with purple and red pumpkin
and as cool as a cucumber
on a grassy knoll of
Elysium.

Spoonfed sunshine and headlights.
A vast Pause moving
like a cat on a moonbeam
is Now.

Like a moment stalled by
everlasting Brevity.
Lank flags droop
on pillars

lightning rods face palmed in dead air
.
Bruised fruit cooling heel on heavy branches
launch dew driven arias of succulent oils
upon the calm expanse of Dawn.
I see houses held in suspense-
sprawling like mushroom cabins
with orange windows
squatting under chimneys and indefinite
Serenity.

With all the Grace of an improbable rack of Antlers
the last stars spike the waning dark
as luminous elan unfurls, spun from a loom of all mornings
dislodged from a long Night.
There’s a hum in the World
as golden as a bonny lass.
And a Silence

as loud as you like.

my golatha is mewling in the fringe. lemon rinds polished.
my credenza dust-laden and perfect. like an old promise in moon gingham.
and all of this conjures a portable god and a night kingdom of uproarious gunthers
plundering the under-whim of our daily crisis
by loving the pitch of the sea.
and siren wishes-
privately.

all of this twice and again the world in which to fathom it.
our astute breach of contract, expanding into quadrants of unanswered questions
with all the panache of pandering, to a blush of summer on a ghost’s lips.
all of this always. like a concerned amnesia in absentia. open mind adjacent to a constant door… and a bronze myth.

Myth-Behaving.

Owning the empirical argument
is like a mouthful of marbles
Telling marbles How Cubes-
Think.

Meanwhile...

All the West is The East with its back to you.
And no one can say how pointless
a compass can be
until they’re born.

And that’s how maps
may never spoil
The Lost.

And how Paradise
remains

“ Here, There Be... “


CANTO II


we are half a bird in a sling
shot through with dark wings
and guillotines as precious
as an unyielding spark.  

we are dust where the flesh is not.
and bone where the
songs go.


CANTO III


yea, though i walk through... (The Other Side-
remains elusive.)

too many Underworlds; and all the doors are stairs.

Like a mad god signing your Yearbook
with your Name.

But for Realsies.