Straight-striving, a white
                    oak sapling bends
                        (it pretends) willingly
                            to the lapping of grey-
                               hound gusts. It knows
                                        the musts of a thin-
                                         skin (if and when,
                      it can endure) will loosen
             some with thickening. Then,
           well, the strength comes
         to laugh at always
in the passing wind.

My inner tongue trips
over her yesterday
morning’s extemporaneous
homily and its retelling
rains down on me
temporal anomalies
through which I’ll slip the bleached
monotony chasing me.

Turn key,
return me
to the upturned
glee of a midnight macadam.

Unmanned, it’s where
the manholes open up to me
their traps of sunken yet
stacked wire-mesh baskets.

They’ve been left
to catch a refused few
turquoise-beaded strings
mixed with ash
feather-dusted by the lime,
tangerine and grape
wing beats of exotic birds
too meek to fly upward.

There the tensile tip of a sweet
and fecund smell grips me
and it squeezes out
visions of too-soon
dying in that bed
where a stripped truth lies
tenderly with the on-putting
of my put-off lies.

A low hiss heralds happy heat
and radiating pings rap me
down the shrinking-shadow hall
away from Hedone’s keep.

In the singular
pleasure of this rhythmic pluralism
my nouns and verbs find
their final agreement:
*All we’ve known
is what a wanting wind’s foretold,
but its chilly, willful voice
can no longer hold us.

When we find ourselves
bewitched
by the once-again
betwixt a barest bare
season (of not-there)
and the rock-hard
reason (for there-is), let’s

Place the lemon-sour wedge,
where it can be tasted
with expectantly peppered
peeks and the snowy soft pines
for a gifted we we’ve been
too white-elephant
wary to unwrap.

There’s a transplant
future. We pretended
it (to-be
forever sutured to our bristly back-
then), and it meets the it
it was beneath a scrub-brush
Christmas tree we’ve stowed

Carelessly in the cramped space
where our sameness
lets crawl the other. Tinseled,
pre-assembled, past-
their-prime-time specialty
brands of static
clinginess have diminished,

But not-enough,
as the persistence of any-man
attraction shows,
would if it could bring
Whitman’s samplers
of sentimentality
to cuddly bear on a leftover

Choice (What’s-next,
warmed over and over). We
will stick to it,
fuzzy ornaments
on the crackly loud, paper-
thin present. We didn’t give
up but we did give away

Boxed-up angels
in exchange for one red-ribbon
day, its frilly bow tying us
so tightly to
the pressed-down rule
of our highest of highly
evolved thumbs.

Why is it I
can’t? You leave it
alone, but I
know I can’t. It’s
the OCD in me
to rearrange everything. I
have sorted the sordid
big details of when. We
got together
by an ascending order
then. I
ruined it with a “Why?”
and “Ever since...” We
descended
numerically
back to one, and I
am still flipping
through the why’s.

If I could send
one message
back through time,
I wouldn’t write to beg
words off a writer
I admire –
be it Dante or Blake,
Yeats or Cummings –
and I wouldn’t warn away
the gazes of a to-be
lost love
or push the glad
hands of not-yet
abandoned friends.

I would write
to my yesterday self,
who lazily left
dishes for today’s
me to do,
and I’d rightly tell him:
“Please, reconsider
the sink-
me urge to shirk
was.

“These are citrus-
scented suds,
and if you let them,
they’ll tickle
a memory of 3
too-old oranges
forgotten to bother
the bottom of a wicker bowl,
which in turn
will return you to rethink
the how of when
a younger you
grew 5
times in those 10
years before the death,
and then
you stopped caring for the 20
since.”

It’s news of the wee,
menial
and non-consequential
tasks that gives
all of these me’s pleasure
now.

Watch me closely, God,
though you’ve seen it all before.

I’ve got the universe up my sleeve
and it’s itching for a sleight,
if you’re willing to be conned.

The stardust filling Aquarius
has poured for countless millennia
and it won’t brim the bottomless cup
of your oceanic blues.

That’s the warm-up for Lepus
who, lean and polar-white, leaps
out from my flipped-over cap
and is chased by the steel-plied
Orion’s hankering for roast hare.

Hunger-driven this heaven hunter
has a saggy belt; his sword’s tip drags,
slicing Gemini in two,
but twins can’t be parted long
and divinely grasping Pollux clasps
Castor’s pause anew.

Conjoined, they bow together
under showers of milky petals
kissing no-longer
furrowed brows till black
velvet curtains fall
and are followed by your eons of
endearing applause.

Would you banish me if I confessed
a secret thrill the instant
shrill sirens intrude,
rudely breaking in
to shove aside my trailed-off whispers
with a wail from which no earwax,
no matter how doughy thick,
could keep a modern Ulysses safe.

Maybe it’s this time
they’ll stop for me.

Maybe it’s this time
and there won’t come a knock.

Maybe it’s this time
the stale crust of hardening past
explodes to scorch a put-upon earth
or crack her open so we can,
you and I, slip through,
up among the slewfoot roamers.
Their heavy heads are down,
always down, down,
pointed down and they’re unaware
there are germs here.
There are puffs of dainty fluff floating
close above them here and hoping
to ride our slipstream,
to skip over those dreams
too drained of ambition for ever
to germinate.

Ignore, am I
the kind to ignore? I am
ignoring them right now,
and the dimpled facts
they’d dare be
if beggary wasn’t better served
than derring-do. Don’t
tell me you don’t see them too.

I’ve witnessed the self-interest
and I’m still abiding, dude,
but when, dear God, when
will enlightenment finally arrive?