Albert Ross was at a loss.

He couldn't gloss
over the dull fact hanging
lifeless like the near-homophone
about his neck.

It's a pretty neck,
this long and slender neck,
with the impeccable lines of its smooth cylinder
broken only by a smallish apple.

Eve would've refused it.

To sea. To sea.
There he'd see
with its wide vistas
the feathery visage of this polar white
visitor riding astride his black cloud.

"Rain, would it please you to rain?
Are you allowed
to open up and drown me?"
Is how he’d phrased it
in his mind, countless times.

The hardest rain would be welcome,
but this constant threat,
this ponderous yet,
this threaded pendant swinging
as fast and steady
as a winged pendulum might,
was not. It tightened,
that knot deep in the pit of his stomach.

He'd done no harm.

Harm wasn't his to do,
or undo. The harm came before,
at the hands of a father,
who gave him such
an ill-spoken name,
and the Father before him.

He, ages before him,
deigned to make us this world
where a bird’s no more
than a bird or any man
with the want of a soul.

Gun metal gray,
this pigeon grasps
at current strung black
across a brick-
bounded back alley

edgy eyes on
uneven piles—
disposable
artifacts of people
caught in-between—

it trills its plea,
a directionless
directive to throw
away smaller,
more edible, trash

Inside the bunny suit
my ears are still small
and round, and percussive
sounds come to visit me
costumed in white muffles.

Inside the bunny suit
a bead of sweat itches
my nose to rabbit fidget
and wiggle-twitch where
my fingers can’t reach it.

Inside the bunny suit
a thin layer of nylon dots
inserts its silky self
between me and everything
I fumble to touch.

Inside the bunny suit
the outside world’s broken
up by a half-dozen holes,
and green strands fuzz the focus
of each fragmented peep.

Inside the bunny suit
probing orange lights
make kaleidoscope shapes
through those same cut
openings. They distract me.

Inside the bunny suit
I can smile at and feel
closer to the fantastic
creatures who surround me
in their own decorous skins.

“Jurt,” she
curtly spurts out
and stops
not knowing if
she’s going to
continue to
speak unknown tongues
or if
this emanation, this
interjection,
spoken on strange
impulse,
is Icelandic
or Bosnian
or Serbian,
and if
the middle one
how not the last,
when they both mean
the same thing, yurt.

Pickled on quixotic tonics
he strives for a polyglot's poise,
balancing plaster peas
at the end of his tippler's tongue.

But the rough-surfaced pearls prickle
his too-ticklish bed of pink,
and gulped down, he administers
only a lessoned indigestion.

Flipping the flop, he prevaricates
himself into the tight-fit corners
of a parallelogram traced
by unsolemn processionals

bedecked in platitudinous finery.
Their porous smirks drip sticky
reminders of a plethora
of previously pernicious exercises

and dampen his fluffy ambition,
prodding procrastinations until
his drunken promise dries out
to become a posthumous wish.

It has every right to bare
this clenched fist of a grudge
embittered by techno-Jovian
whims and base transformations

Once delicately formed— two
tips pressed en pointe, three
others elegantly tucked— it
danced with a golden shaft
pulling indigo pirouettes
across a swept ivory stage

Then came the re-pose: a claw’s
arched looming. Unhappiness
fell as five wilted stems,
beggar mouths forced to fumble
toward those impoverished
humps of white-on-black glyph

The other hand is left
complimentary, richly gripped
by understudy glee, being

He's part artist, part alchemist,
but a full-on con, self-professed with post-
graduate degrees in mixology
and the god-given sense to know which
smoldering home remedies will catch fire
(give or take an occasional legal glitch).

His healing pitch is grifted on the easy
comparison of queasily lowered brows to
their indistinctly raised betters. You'll doff
the scoffing face as he pulls back a masking
caparison, and your fever gallops hotly
hoof-in-mouth with an uncontrollable itch.

Tinctures, colloids, salves and potions,
they all have twisty caps, blithe boxes
bubbling over with hypnotic patterns
fashioned to cure your urge to avoid
his futility. First'll come the ******, then
the crumple followed by purse strings loosening.

Don't consider it capitulation.
His assortment of fluid manipulations
bear a singular branding at 100 proof,
and after the recommended daily dosing
(two jiggers with each meal), you'll feel
you're **** erectus made sapient.

Gene Wilder's ***** Wonka once asked me
to step into a world
of pure imagination
and I danced to his voice
of sugary imperfections.
The swelling strings drizzled
on top falsetto inflections
captured me childishly
with candy-coated attentions

But even the finest chocolate melts,
and I learned to let purity be
pushed by treacly lyrics
or stern midgets secure
in their fudge-topped zealotry.
It sifts too pretty for me,
powdering my grown-up
infatuations with petty
wants, getting a little messy

What I crave instead's stained-glass contraptions
to propel me past the stretches
of biblical proportion
where light and dark don't mix.
I'm no Idiot, good-hearted
in the veins of Fyodor
or Akira, and I can't see
beyond the pure tedium
of a blurredly driven snow

I like my mental drifts grime-choked and splotched
with some savory do
dropped in to dissolve flossy
confections to a salted soup
of imagined impurity.

when I go
it will be
impossibly late
and I’ll leave you
not multi-talented bars
or pairs of randy ingots
itching to procreate
in a splendid explosion
of golden delight
what I’ll leave you is
a stale-air larder
filled just this once
by dully packaged thoughts
and duller feelings
when I have them
they could only couple
if enlivened with musical prodding
or the sigh effecting benefits
from hands full of mood-altering
pharmaceuticals
so please yourself instead
and don’t
put them to any use
bury them deep
better yet
pile them high on Pyrrhic pyres
where the gathering scorch will send
down leaden puddles
while precious platinum curls rise
up to trickle trickster tears
my greatest possible reward

Militantly mustachioed, at least in my mind's eye, and
Invincibly attired toe-to-wing in sterling silver, he
Commands legions less scary than our mechanized monsters, but
Hell's soon-to-be tenants are awed enough to scurry. Swords, not
Angelic in a cherubic sense, wilt Lucifer's pride, and
Exiting those gates, the now-Dark Prince howls his lament. I picture
Laughs on Cloud 9, Michael sharing beers and war stories with chums.

Who’s to say how
He might come back for a second
inhumanely heaped-up helping,
if we grant that immensity
of our assumption He did come
kingly first into this inside-
out size from a do-you-miss-me-
yet’s mirthfully mythical realm

I have seen Him
lurking in a particle-board fine
finish on the thin outer membranes
of our estranged and better faces;
He’s Higgs-boson omnipresent,
but far too theoretical
for our broadly practical, turned-
away gazes to rediscover

There He is now
rising in the favela’s gap-
toothed grins with fabulously naughty
corners this glee-pawed grandpa twists
using cur jests his ***** charges
imagine as flightless quarrels
grey-hooded pigeons would gaggle
were they over-stuffed on golden grain

And there again
on a Calcutta mound’s cluttered
conic end, smog-like He slowly lifts
with the crust-gnawed, razor-wire crimps
of a soup-can’s unconsummated lid
as dainty fingers crawl in toward
a gelatinous glob still clinging
to the powerful pretense it’s meat

And there once more,
conceding oms, He restless flickers
at the margins of blocky beige
Beijing screens as crisply clicked clacks
circumnavigate the darkling
smooth patches and spit-spark a few
conscious drips to squiggle out from
the babble of noxious red seas

Emerged, this welp
won’t toddle off to dribble-stain
the dressy linens of a made-up
nanny’s well-mannered and ornate
evil; it will curl up instead,
a swaddled yawn with no yearn to
suckle under His real mother’s
gaping wide and grungy bloused best

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.

Our wilier webs
woven with the distractions of self-absorption
can come to feel
cheated if we use them
only for halfhearted games of catch
and eventual release.
He’d overlooked that part.
Then there was an obligation to prey
who so willingly strayed upon the taffy
pull of his sweet and sticky strands.
The scrunch up of their wee faces
squeaked, “We deserve
to have our glued-down expectations
met with a most gruesome expertise.”
He’d just wanted to watch them
struggle a smidge,
at first.
It was a test if this muscle the scribes
ascribe as rightly plagued by pangs
was in him
perhaps despicably defective.
With each tripper-by trapped
the examinations grew
more tortuously complex,
and when none raised even
the slightest murmur of a palpitation,
he gave the web its dripped-dry due,
at last.
“The murderous truth will out,”
they say. It did, monstrously.
Now his bound but gagless masques
are always well-attended.

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 this hallmark of a romantic gift
I give
is a bit fumbled,
and its professions of heartfelt wishes
feel
slack in their graham-*******-box repackaging;
If the candy-coated wrapper’s fit
is left
misfitting around its dented-in red corners,
and the lippiness of its stick
has come
unstuck at each crushed-down end;
If the pink bow
stands unbowed
and frowns as unpretty as any crime-scene picture,
while it raises
a frayed end with the victim’s gone-through motion
entreating
death for its last tug free;
It could be
my feeling heart’s once-bold youth
isn't
entirely found in it,
or it could be
the entirety
bound in it,
my heart,
couldn’t find its way out.

I’ve found her sticky
trail of coincidental
spots, the tasty spit
to lead squishy spells
and piece together
our puzzling
theme of a tree-top
fall to redemption

There when entangled,
the overture hangs,
our forbidding fruit of blue
translucent petals,
and it swirls and swells
to fixture-
cast an eerie glow
that slowly unwraps

And inseminates
us with precious, not-thought of
possibilities
for rebirth.

When you weaned me from the waning moon,
its milky cusps, winking welcome
moods of starry surrender, I was lost
to my reflection rearranged
roughly on the window's pane.

Don't take flight yet, you said,
first take the light's left hand
and keep it from the misbehaving oak,
its frightening reach.

There are beehive-capped angels
swinging there beneath, and they're angling
to gather moony souls
together in false hope.
Their absent promise is absolute,
and absolution.

*They'll utter their nothings,
utterly sweet, if you let them,
and lull you with their yellow tongues.
Fly away with this light you now hold
and risk the falling.

It might be the pungent steam from a ***
steeping herbs meant to bend its sippers'
minds to potent effect, or an unanticipated
digestive reckoning from that mawkishly flavored
brand of store-bought paste they pass as butter.

However the dough arises, their collective
recollection of storied events, lengthwise sliced
and ritually rehearsed, hops facilely on the ****
of a bucking and overtly nonsensical wind.

Tea parties with slippery perspectives
have been shown quite clinically to induce
heightened sensitivity in participants,
so it's prudent to set about tidying the facts:

The hatter, it's become clear, shifted one place
too many and disappeared with a trace -- leaving
behind his hat to nobody's great advantage.
Lacking a wearer, the headgear's reputation for
producing madness has rapidly diminished.

The march hare pulls off his change in a very
separate and seasonal way: the bunny's
bottom half somersaults its top to occupy
both his spot and the hatter's vacated seat.

The dormouse upon its latest arousal
is re-visioned to be small, but not much mouse
at all. He's plush with the long-in-the-ear habit
of a pink stuffed rabbit, which the crusading hare
furiously declares is most curious, casting
doubt on the vermin's commitment to "no room."

Alice remains foremost in tact and is given
a bonus of two spare feet complete with slackened
bootstraps. She keeps them and her other luxury
items well-sheltered behind a stout table leg.

The absentee hatter doesn't dare shame her
with a radio-show call-in decrying
the waste. She's generously agreed to
cover the medical expenses from his firm flop.

Hectored by the pit-a-patter
of frozen pellets, you might hear
these dented eaves wheeze and sneeze
lubricious comparisons, but
it's a thickly frosted fiction
that their bulbous white noses
look anything like eggshells.

In springtime's crick-cracking they will
however birth a frog with not
so princely disposition:
Hacksaw in hand, he'll eye
your roommate and that footlocker
where she keeps invaluables
of an oddly personal nature.

His plan is to hip-hoppity leave
you red-faced, trying to calm
this panicked friend with un-fairy
tales of a burglar amphibian
who muttered of moral decay,
mis-fabled crowns, and the strangeness
of saved fingernail clippings.

Bauble brothers, they hang red,
one rotund, one spouted,
both made a magenta
melancholy by the fog.

It whispers white nightly,
slipping ****** seeds
down with paper-funnel tales
of supple branches stripped,

and the skin-cracking eyes,
coming too soon to cull.

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.

There's a temperamental rainbow
he's seen, peeking out now and again, when
it's not shyly hid in cumulus cubbies.

He might, he can, win its sparkly trust,
luring it to him, between rainy bouts,
with promises of mood-altering

medication. Then, clapped with a lightning
clout, he'll stuff it in ten-gallon tubs
to struggle, bawl, and futilely fill

his deviant's plan. For in that muffle
of tinted pleas, its droppered breath will
condense against lids clamped-down tight,

and bottoms can collect sunny flavors
he needs to slather on the lolling
tongue of his too humdrum day-to-day.

You were always
a bit of backward
but your small, fuzzy grins
came cheap and easy.

We never guessed
they'd change the rules
so fast.

Salvation might have come
in coupon form,
and dolled-up pretty—
some say better than new—
we could have shared
old games, odd romance,
a few more laughs.

But I let that last chance slip,
and now a brick,
you're going gently onto
the back-alley *******
heaped in the middle of the night.

A plume should be a thing lovely and light
dancing violet as it's fanned
at the flanks of the blue
bird-of-paradise
who hangs limberly
to solicit a mate

It should curl
blinding white at the back
of the puffy Samoyed
prancing fancy to please a master
who also preens on the oval
of a sawdust track

It should flop
red at the top of gold-painted tin
helmet awry on the head
of an aspiring actor
who plays centurion for tips
outside a mobbed Colosseum

It should spray
as clear and cooling drops out
the copper mouth of a grass-snake
green hose uncoiled by
the sneaky dad who tickles
giggles from sweaty kids

It should flutter
gray at the tail end of a quill
bouncing to the frenzied
jottings of an anachronistic
frump who takes the pain to outfit
himself far too seriously

A plume should not be a thing of plague
riding currents kissed by taint-
sweet crude blasted from a wound
gouged in the crust
of a frigid deep to feed
our shallow lust for eases

It shouldn't choke

It shouldn't muck

It shouldn't tar

It can't help
poisoning that last pretense
we cared about anything,
be it plumed or not, but
the finality of
a bottom line

The news never stops, but sometimes it breaks
strange, like when the cops tell us,
Man throws dog at sister.

It didn't fly far, but across town,
the Police did finally catch another stray dog
on the Eisenhower Expressway.

I hear it's driving a '98 Toyota Corolla,
which has nothing to do with
the 3 critically injured
when their vehicle hits a pole
on the Kennedy Expressway.

They could be spooked by the report
that a Suburban girl, 11, threatened
to shoot up her school bus.

She's been told pink bullets
are the latest preteen fad,
and to prove her absurd point,
there's more bad news of
2 children injured in a Far South Side shooting.

Add their names to the piled-up statistics
and the multiple PR reasons
an often divided
State Legislature and Mayor Daley will try again
to crack down on gun violence.

This equation's always out of balance.

What’s mine is
yours what isn’t
all his possessed cheap
and passed on
needle deeds to pour out
the thimbles-
full fitting
nimbly in the shallow
dimples of
a love’s distressed palm.

Its clutch of fare-
well will break
hers down to
beggared bits
so nebulous ours
can’t keep from
advancing
matters and oh how
theirs gets circulated
energetically.

If I hedge thus a drooling wager and cash in
on my thrice-foiled cravings for her overdue bites
(plus a guilt-free laugh at his expense), I can
use minced steps to sidle around too-lively
trunks, and avoid the need to heed thugs
barking mad from within their crevice-laid traps.

How those bug-eyed brutes'll clamor and claw at me
to discard this protective wrap, clued in by my rep
of never bending willfully to anybody
but her. "Come on, shed! Get, uh, new set of scales,
for you we will — promise!" is how she'd stammer,
roughly translating their not-so-twee chatter,

if she were there. Rather, in that lavishly apt way
she has, she'll be away picking suitable pelts
to adorn her newly uncovered, quite public shame
while fending off an advancing clod, who won't go
easily, but who does go on ad nauseam with
a penchant for naming every God-**** thing

that haps vitally across his cocky path. Beyond
a simple relish of mischief, I'm doing this (mostly)
for her benefit. How could a persimmon
be forbidden, as if he had permission to make
such bargains? He's dismissed it as an ungainly fruit,
and mocked its likelihood to "lava thy lips"

with an orange pulp, but in that chance smattering lies
the matter to inflame my soul. I'll feed her
the pudding-fresh flesh, and strip it down
to its delectably small seeds. In their splitting
I'll glean the silvery utensils to spill
a man's wholly worthless future. Let's tuck in.

In that age of aged seasons
predating our own's four-square rhyme,
a reasonable jape was hatched
beaked but hairy to a guilt-free Hen
whose humors ran with jaw-slackening
creatures, foul and not at all bird-like.

Soon after its mixed-up cracking,
two prattle-prone Wrens hopped to spread
rumors of an un-chickity chick
and the ungodly origins
of fatherless yowls. Their tittered jeers
found welcome ears, and Mother Hen preened
her babe chased by merciless guffaws.

This Hen was not one to lay
down meekly, and a never stony
tongue rolled out its antidote myth
to a pair of gabby Gulls: "My child
may look not-much, but he's divine
engendered and miraculous born.
Sure he's messy, ah, but you'll see
he'll grow to be, much-much-more than
any feathery tykes your like did bear."

She clucked it so seriously,
who were they to doubt her? The plumed
sniggering ceased. But before another
grateful day could dawn in a hallelujah
glare of right angles, out pecking
up a snack, Mother made eye
contact with an unfortunate Fate
brandishing his lucky-gripped ax.

What of her wonder-why, joke of a boy?
Left alone at straw-pocket home,
waiting for his Hen to return,
he starved then decayed to hollow bones,
and was never thought of again.

You could put it down
as youthful folly, or spit out
the hackneyed line about
pride and what goeth after.

It's true, I over-reached,
wanting to limitless kiss
the sun's crisp lips.

I did hold her glowing cheeks
firmly in my palms
for one exquisite breath.

Can you, rocking there
in your comfy prison,
say the same?

There comes a time to sit
astride clouds and burn off
the waxy buildup of childish things.

The weightlessness before
the plunge feels
like it will never end,
but, I can tell you, it does.

These three lay stranded, spit back
black by a whipped and layered sea.
How now, if ever he was vengeful,
Jonah must joyless chuckle to see it

These three who lay stranded with toys,
littering the sand — their phalli anchored,
oars stilled, and portholes spilling out
a last salty gasp to grasp it

These three who lay stranded, chasing
****** with a frantic gaze, to fetch help
or seek simple solace from the monstrous
riddles staining their glassy eyes

These three who lay stranded, smitten
again by land long-ago left to reverse
evolution's tide. God can't undo
their nifty trick swift enough to save

These three who lay stranded and wait,
lonely for their brothers still headed to shore.

It's a common trope,
the Danse Macabre that troops us
toward hushed tombs.

Blame its plague on Wolgemut
or Bruegel (Pieter the Elder),
and certainly Bergman

What with his iconic black-clad Death
and the parade of captive players taken
hand-in-hand on a joyless march.

But Life has her own fleet moments to lead,
and these flip-flop pageants though ragtag
are not the less enriching to behold

Or so I'm told in passing by
the delicate bluebell peaking its buds through
a monochrome rubble.

The vagaries of a boyish heart
penciled her squiggly name
onto this warped white sill;
they can also reduce it
to the cryptic black crumbs
his soft-puff of a sigh will
spill into a gulping down
by the floor's shy crevices.

"The Pacific's the best
show on TV!
Best ... show ... ever,"
one lean teen blares,
wanting the whole train
to know it.

I don't know
how many shows
he's seen in his thin
decade of watching, but
that won't stop him
from its knowing.

I do envy
such certitude
compared to my fat
knack for lacking it, and
I bet he sleeps
well, tonight.

His mind's eased,
its hunger not baited.
Me, I'll be
restless and gorging
just to begin
the comparison.

Let's offer up our prayers to a finicky Father
who sits in his segregated heaven, rocking
away senility on that rickety chair
with a spare, tall back wrapped in striped wool blankets.

Who sits in his segregated heaven, rocking?
Our Father, keeping his heart warm against the gusts.
With a spare, tall back wrapped in striped wool blankets
perfectly square (but too small to share with others),

our Father's keeping his heart warm. Against the gusts
and idling time, again he stays busy carving figures
perfectly square but too small to share. With others,
these tokens will help the faithful remain fertile

and idling. Time again, he keeps busy carving figures
on the edges of a pesky map. Mad for expansion,
these tokens will help the faithful. "Remain fertile!"
Father cautions, as he watches a big screen TV.

On the edges of a pesky map mad for expansion,
many errant souls who wander are unable to hear
Father's cautions. As he watches a big screen TV,
the devil's slipping him a low-ball offer to buy

many errant souls. Who wander are unable to hear
news heaven's economy is still struggling, and
the devil's slipping him. A low-ball offer to buy,
our aging Father mulls over hot oatmeal and tea.

Sea lilies
I see as silly
sprawled and feathery
arms lift: either
a birthday child's
happy waves
or the crone's
hunger-mad flailing.
Ethereal, they sift
nervous ticks
drifting down with
the dwindled since
carboniferous
seas rose from
an obsession's
bad-mouthed drought
to my sorrow's
sadly doubted drowning.
The miracle of
this one thought
circles up to me
at a glacial pace.

Chi sono io?

My i strayed from its o
(divorziato)
decades before the ***** and egg had wed,
hatching me to a self-soaking
tub where the immigrant
pigments of Ermano e Rosa
were twice removed.

Quando dormo
gli antenati stanno sempre
sussurando indicazioni

Rosa e Ermano each descend
(spaesato)
on separate planks plunked down to greasy
rock by proverbial boats.
When they do, Emma Lazarus doesn't
warn them the Lady's "give me"
comes with a take.

Provo a sentire
le due parole dolci
ma non posso

Ermano e Rosa each find
(inamorato)
American spouses, have American kids
who sprout to twist a native tongue
till an ill-fit, its tang is
left in must and un-dusted
just for periodic trips back.

Ripeto, Chi sono io?
E nel questo sogno
i voci mi dicono di nuovo...

Let's skip the unplugged generation's gap
(collegato)
to where my i reacquaints with its o,
but their made-up past makes
a tenuous tether, so together
Rosa e Ermano drift on
the whispers of a forgotten song.

Non dimenticar

As my illogic breaks, I'll robot make
to be this soul's chamber,
robbing a piecemeal joy from misfit toys
tossed out for fine tuning

by toddlers cheery mad to gorge on fads.
I'll take their T-Rex head,
with droopy lids that wink as if to drink
the world's wide-shallow stares,

plug its plastic prongs in torso of tin
while twin squeeze-box arms splay
to tie magnetic bows round pads below
gold, plush lion cub's legs.

This moppet of mixed breeds I'll learned feed
with animate cunning
to be ruled by charmed laws that give it pause
when whole-sum circumstance

tangles fuzzy circuits. Then a circus-
wire's unbalancing act
I'll paste from templed flesh to doll enmeshed
by transfuse rigging,

and as coil comes to slough, just as I'm off,
I'll flip that gilded switch,
implanting my spirit into a bit
of copper-hued country.

I captained logs lovingly across
a musky pond
to hang stars on this date
when so much happened.
Let’s wake in the missed-me morrow
and I’ll try to recapture it.

6am

My aroused heart pounds with the eager
pecks of new world sparrows
feasting on a found pile of saltine *******
crumbs.

With these easier pickings, they can gloss
over hypothetical seeds lost
and the unfortunate insects
still trapped in their tightly wrapped buds
while emitting
a silky trickle of pollen sweetened tears
I might have once confused as joy.

8am

My mouth is a cast iron bell
robbed of its moistness
and the service of a tongue that would rather be
surgically cut without
the requisite anesthesia
than extol with slithering anticipation
the downfall of cold-blooded prey.

A grubby grimace can’t
switch off the cockle-less warmth
gazed by an elegantly impolite swan,
but amazingly cottony soft escapes can
be ginned with the bait of a choirboy’s tender
“Have mercy!”

10am

My nutmeg brown irises are diced
fresh and tossed into a ***
where spiced hot they’re shown
the urgency this yet-to-be plucked rose feels
when the mid-morning light
accumulates with enough heat
to bake the earth chocolate.

The tattered edges of her puckered lips
glow an ardent shade of pink and make
a beacon, signaling kingly butterflies to abdicate
their aimless flutters and jet
directly toward her alluring realm.

Noon

My usually cool tips can’t maintain
their aloof trance and they trip
red with sudden blushes over the damaged
clasp on a school girl’s lunch box
crayoned with lemonade kittens,
their wordless greetings.

It’s unlatched to reveal no magic
pressed in the chunks of pickle loaf,
but the foetid and desperate
fruits of a wish for can’t-stay-at-home mothers
to be released from the wages of others’
drudgery.

A squirrel drags her white bread
and dappled meat onto the play lot
where the child’s storm-cloud stare
breaks with the flash
and low rumble of laughter.

2pm

My soles crave the touch of loose-dirt
roads, but it’s my ankles that meet
brambles and are torn by their tiny kisses
from which a rubbery
beauty of sappy drips trails back
to grow pastel primavera blooms.

Their long, tapered necks
and delicate, glassy horns blow
the modulated notes of an icy hymn.

Its diamante flecks freckle
the hovering blue before falling
to press these young,
painted plants into a frieze
and free them from wilting.

4pm

My nape aches for the subtle
weight on not supple joints
between thick fig branches
powdered with a maquillage of snowy dust.

No one care can snap them
or keep them from sheltering
the grazes of constantly bleating sheep.

Candy floss wool is tinted
jonquil then apricot then cherry
as the distant and fiery ball of a sun
slowly descends to the quenching
splash in its night-deposit bucket.

6pm

My unencumbered back gently rolls with a raft
adrift on ripples raised
when unknown aquatic creatures
stir in a shallowly cupped liquid.

Their pleasant plunks and gleeful gurgles
are carried on the crisply creeping evening
air to wash away
the unsavory wafts of salty rumors.

Here I can’t scent the far-removed
oceans racked by hunger’s
chilling frissons and the pundit’s
raging rants to at all-costs maintain
the elevation of market-priced pap.

And I drifted off...

Peg, roundly topped and
bottom squared, hops out seeking
holes to reconcile.

"Soon, very soon," she posits

then passes dear Fork
forlorn on pebbled road. His
tines are liquid droops.
His heart stabs for cheating Spoon.

Opposite, Puppet
sits to tend her knotted strings.

This path is puzzling.

When I said “I love you,” I lied
with a drifting and dreamy head
across the velvety sea
I imagined
resting and narrowly defined
in the nakedness
at the edge of your lap.

I have a history
of over-indulging
mixed-up senses.

I tasted the sight
of a gently curved nose.

I caressed the scent
of a lightly perfumed neck.

I’ll speak but not hear again
of the salty, savory, sweetness;
all bitterness has gone.

It’s not that I binged
so much as feasted
after a prolonged period
of self-deprivation.

And now I’m caught
between two urges:
To shave, to shear, to no longer
shabbily make shrift;
Or to revel
in the sloppy temptation
of recalling you.

Powerless I'll watch
the dissembling
tomorrow makes.

Before it comes, whisper-soft,
I repeat my mistake,
and unreliably say,
“I loved you.”

He may be bits shy,
tucked in there behind
a ready excuse of clouds,
but from today he spreads
our pocket-lint days
with radiant smiles,
and lingers longingly,
beggar moments longer

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.

They're piled in an Amazon box of almost never-
(that is, all not-quite not-ever-
but sometimes twice- and most often a mere once-)
worn clothes destined for another,
bigger green metal box proclaiming itself
charitably fashioned for such donations
as these nearly pristine shirts,
jeans and sweaters that have only those holes
their makers intended but still lack the want
I've wasted for arms, legs and torso to fill them.

What they don't have is shabby stitches
or those counterfeit claims mocking
a public thread-lust for luxury labels,
but they are mild misfits of the well-meant
gift or of my poor-choice selection
and they carry an ill-suited look,
whether it's fleeced too loose and loud,
or flanneled too bold and blousy,
or otherwise woolly with any too fuzzy
je ne sais quoi that puts me off.

Too's had grown too many as if the clothes bred
while tucked in nice 'n cozy at backs of drawers
rarely drawn or stacked sleepy on the bottom
of a closet's clutter-topped shelf,
and if proved it would be a miracle
on par with Christ's gospel-touted cloning
of the loaves and fishes, but it's not,
so I can't compare my parlor-trick sharing
of two dozen hand-me-downs carelessly passed-on
to his magic of multitudinous feeding.

After all, the real comparison is,
I could have accomplished even more
than this speculative giving,
had I been retrospectively better
in my retroactive accounting
and made the significantly less sinful
omission of never (not just once or twice,
but actuarially quite not-ever)
accumulating so much always
not-needed, however tasteful, stuff.

a man cloaked in dust bitten rays skip down the rude lit hall
as a voice calls to him run your fitful bow across my cracked
teacup mouth and draw forth a loosed leaf smile at first
i dismiss it as contrived twaddle one might hear in settings
where silk roses bloom on synthetic counter islands or
a cloth lily wrecks on its maiden voyage mid-way through
a copper sink’s bounded blue but cigarette tip joy burns
peep holes into my cottony resistance it’s a compact thrill
as dense as the peach pit my tooth struck to chip that once
such piquant frissons dissipate into damply aromatic trickles
when the man replies with a tartly rolled lavender bud ready
to burst its pink i’ve the heart of a wobbly kneed boy about
to pull back the tulle cloud on an auburn morn’s feathery
bathers petaled girdle strewn on the slippery rock path
leads up to her dewy lap where luminescent splayed fingers
lay printed hymns when ash trimmed logs fall from his fatty
lips i take the house sparrow’s hasty cue to flap a skyward
exit out from the bony white glow of his unfulfilling promises

"The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees--
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived"

— From "Aunt Helen" by T.S. Eliot*


It's laugh-out-loud funny
how
one death
can change things.

If she were here
I'd blame
it
on a lifelong ill-
fascination with
Charlie McCarthy
or a hang-up
that's lingered since
the bourbon-scented Santa
invited me to sit.

At some point
you've got to
get back on the horse
though my levers
aren't so
easy to work
and, I better get
more
than a stuffed Pooh bear
out of this trip.

It's still-deep
water under the bridge
because
she's not.

There’s a fifth elemental
bottled up inside,
and I’ve found myself
in biomimicry
light as the airs
lamenting
that this too too earthy flesh,
no platonic object,
of fiery desires,
could atomize and rise
to watery dote,
where true hearts float
and all honesty lies
with a fine print of boasted
bullet-points
and side-splitting effect:

The meaty much we do
means little
mixed in the cosmic stew

Arms are best for putting round,
but when putting right’s left out,
it’s better to put down

What cleans a surface,
even tears, can also stain,
given enough time

Take the cleansing solution,
and wipe them
down to their gleaming steel

Then weld the twelve
couple-less, cautionary signs
to fashion a finer form

I could pack infinity
into that very finite dodecahedron,
with this one simple observation:

The glow reflected on your face
is the most beautiful
my light has ever been.

My miss may not be expansive
but she's worth this world's unfolding.
On bitter days and dreary nights,
her apricot smile's at my side.

She's furrier than some may like 'em
yet when her wag drags it takes
me down with its droop, and that's why
I'm missing my Miss Sadie.

She's got an easy-gone temper.
There's no bit o' bite in her bark,
just a fondness to be pampered
and I'm happy to indulge her.

She's furrier than some may like 'em
yet when her wag drags it takes
me down with its droop, and that's why
I'm missing my Miss Sadie.

She got sick, it's me that's hurting,
and while she's doing another
kind of healing, I'm waiting for
my poor missed Sadie to come back.

She's furrier than some may like 'em
yet when her wag drags it takes
me down with its droop, and that's why
I'm missing my Miss Sadie.

I've read the news, and it's red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumbprints. They're not
mine. Neither of them. They belong,
lip and thumb, paint and stranger,
singularly to those others who don't
read or write such things. They may
bleed, them, but the blood isn't red,
or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet.
Pick a shade of red, and it isn't that,
at least not until it's too, too late
to stanch. The bully's standard is to take
it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led
into this strangely warmer winter. I took it,
and I saved it in my bones to prepare,
but the cold didn't come. Not like we
were used to. I'm told the bully wears
what he takes with a dashing style. See it,
that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing
robes? The gold. I've been robbed. We have
been. Not of things, but of a view. A view
with no room for us in its downside-up
very periscope-unlike perspective.
There's no upside to the up-down
and just around the corner trips
I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To
the five and dime. It's fattened up
to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint
costs more than what I get
without the paper. I don't
get it, not the print, not the paper, not
the red lip prints, not the thumbprints
left by strangers, not the news
I've read and I'm reading.

There are these spots on my ceiling.

Plainly speaking, they are
off-white patches where
the heads of nails were
mudded over, but not well sanded.

I opt to see them as
push-pins squashed when spat
on monochrome maps
to point me dippered ways outre-ward.

Their gap-tooth patterns micro-mimicking
constellations hap
my eyes to hazard
hopping through new belt hoops.

Then passed by barely habited worlds,
I wheel round orbits
molecularly
chained to collide, next time.

My neighbor's heavy steps fade out.

I’m not a botanist,
or an avid gardener.

The horto I culture consists of two pots,
sits on a narrow sill
and soaks in its one-hour slit of sunshine.

This makes me unfit
to label much less
fathom the encroaching
sublime, which sprouts,
shoots, creeps, clings and endures
from far reaches beyond me.

It has spines
supple and rigid,
skins coarse, spiked, and silky,
quivering tips that are spidery,
and bunched as small dollops,
jagged teardrops and jigsaw puzzle pieces.

I’m not a botanist,
but if I were
I should still be struck dumb
by these numbing instances
a protesting tongue
insists it won’t box up
such greenery with the genial trappings
of a scientific classification,
or even the oddly
folksy catch-all “****.”

I can’t always tell what’s a ****, what not.

l know those greedy
intruders growing at the heart
of a meticulously turned earth
to spoil the well-ordered
plots of a barely adequate vocabulary.

It gets more complicated
with the thrilling misfits
and their sturdier notions
of choking life from inhospitable beds
poured and paved
to the detriment of meeker plantings.

Yesterday I met the peeks of ten
woody red stems poking through
a patch of chunky white gravel
spread thick between two
steel rails that fled to a horizon.

I watched the breeze
shake their candelabra arms
dressed in sparse leaves
and denser seed-packed sleeves,
and they welcomed it.

I'm not a botanist
and I can’t name these plants,
but I can admit, I admired them.