I was born
here in a Capital place,
as in DC, or so I'm told
by the yellowed scrap of paper
embossed with a seal,
which Birthers might say is forged,
but it's not, and that's
a happy circumstance for me,
because I hear folks like me
are different, maybe even
exceptional,
and with that lone American
difference comes a boat load of perks,
including the right to say
I don't see any difference
when it comes to simple
appearances,
but I do feel different
than those who want to speak
in the name of the same
old stupid conceit
that some belong
and some don't,
all the while they search
for differences
and seize on the might
to drive wedges
between us,
and if they end up driving out
our differences with this crocked-up
lack of a due process
cloaked in the flag, well that would be
the real crime.

If cupple were a word,
it would be
homophonically
linked to couple,
but there’s the small complication
it doesn’t exist, not outside
the confines of this poem.

Cupple (verb):
To gently join
one’s hands and hold
an object in a loving
and inquisitive manner,
somewhat cautious lest its essence
leaks out between the cracks.

Possible poetic usage:
Spy me, one tiny dot
spiraling up
a spiny staircase of crystalline steps,
until I’m picked, pinched
and cuppled by a darling universe
before she takes me off to bed.

Will cupple make a break
and elope with its old-world cousin?

I can’t say, not in a voice
convincingly heard.
You see, I’ve lost all taste
for those dictionary words,
a touch hushed within bindings, tightly bound
while my pretenders nose around
their glossy jackets.

It’s not that I’m wishy-washy
about cupple’s ambitions.
I’m just happy to keep it here with me
in my wish-washed state
where there’s no point
beyond the widening
smile of our gradual arc inward.

His spring was short, and he wore it
damp and dreary with query bulbs lightly
weaved in a soiled waistcoat. He will be
ready for summer.

His summer comes modest, not hot
enough for milking. Answers flower few,
so he dons a leaf-cushioned jacket
and waits for the fall.

His fall arrives late, too sweetly
burning assents of decay. Cracks branch thin,
and he slaps on a sappy topcoat,
with dread of winter.

His winter bustles with a bite,
but its nibbles and noms are blessedly
brief. He sighs, "It's a shame my seasons
can only be four."

A decomposer
of brutish sins oft
repeated, I worm
past the pretty germs
shut tight in candied
shells, bursting to birth
untapped corruptions.
It's on the sawdust
dollops buried deep
I feed, biting bits
from soiled skins riddled
by regrets of not
offending good more.
Turning their oaken
flavors o'er gently,
my mouth will work them
down to a relish
of soft, black leavings.

Oh great Ophiuchus,
you stand there mighty above us,
all nights, collapsed in the collapsible
container sky. We do
look up to you, Ophiuchus,
as other-worldly worries nestle us
into our nested doll
worlds. Though Ophiuchus, we must
ask again, what it is you can give us
while your sculpted arms keep
a coiling beast at bay? Go on,
let go. Let go of it, Ophiuchus.
Your strong hands can point us
back, just when our need walks forward,
to a stone-laid patio where broad browns
empty into vast blues,
and our wise Hypatia sits
nose in books. Woe it is, Ophiuchus,
she’s so oblivious,
to those shouts of a smallish mob,
their small minds squeezed by greedy Christian lands.
They pad to her on paws
well-provided with ostraca
claws, and next morning the mourner jackdaw
will refuse to withdraw
its usual caw from a flawed
maw that couldn’t warn her, the time’s off. It’s now
it seems, Ophiuchus,
the day’s come, though the daw’s left us,
when clay heads will fall at golden feet. But
Ophiuchus, do please
tell us, can we focus? After
these many centuries, Ophiuchus,
can we learn to focus,
and on our own keep the constant
nips of the present-preened serpents at bay?

It was
put a bow on it pretty,
our democracy
with its polka-dot accountability
and its tissue-paper truths.

The discount-bin card arrived
separately, postage due,
and with a punctilious script
it promised us
a curlicued freedom from
antiquated forms of expression.

Our very love was
ceremoniously given,
but was it
ever right-
fully ours?

Let’s render up the flattering
notion of own,
as it's grown so fatty
lipped it wears a perpetual pout.

The gift was merely Caesar’s
grandiloquent concession
tagged liberally,
“To: Us,
a meekly over-entertained many
whose we, drained of meaning,
poses no coherent threat.”

Not yet.

To concretize my theorized love,
I could play the accidental odds and strew
slippery tongues of spotted petals
onto thickly trafficked highways,
or use the best predictive modelling
to deduce when and where I can poke out
a well-heeled boot to trick unwary spills
and ****** a kiss from the unsuspecting
lips of any suitably compatible
passerby oft times inconvenienced and passed
on by.

These well-oiled and crudely experimental
methods do produce expected results,
but not the breakthrough nor the looked-for
satisfaction of appropriate reactions,
so I'll keep my dotted eyes tucked in
their pulpy stems and my shoddy toes curled back
while I beam my bits of invitation through
circuitous routes spatially arrayed along
parallel paths where one might search
with an extra-terrestrial inventiveness,
and wait.

I know the trials of these errant waves
won't add up to a guarantee
my burpy blips of a pulse can reach
the receptively comprehending and responsive
soils I seek, but it's the remoteness of a stead
to come stalking that appeals, and despite
the Hawking drone of unveiled warnings
I might regret such contact, I'll risk it all
on vaguely washed wishes this astronomical
anomaly with an alien sensibility has
one match.

He couldn't
not take off
the backward cap
that hides
his tousled hair
as he pulls back
the high-backed stool
he'll perch himself on
next to
this unfamiliar beauty.
He couldn't
not accept the bourbon
shot, a pert bartender
offers to keep
his pint company
and lend him
extra courage.
He couldn't
not exchange
an inquiring smile
then a glib remark
about the heat
and the sudden
appeal of dank taverns.
He could
watch her
small gestures for hours
and never
lose interest.
The way
alabaster fingers
tease auburn hair,
they pull at his longing
for a moment
they'll land to still
his right hand
nervously tapping
so useless against
the emptied glass.
He couldn't
guess where
it all might lead,
but he couldn't
not take the chance
it might,
somewhere.
Her accent
sounds French,
and it is Bastille Day.
Anything's possible,
n'est-ce pas?

How do they call you,
those who’ve passed through unmarked
twin doors for the shy
side of one century?

Is it as Nicholas
of Myra,
or of Bari,
or as an unlocated saint,
working wonders in
this home of trim white-stone
block, with three tiers of black-
arches, frowning up at
the merciless
grids behind?

Rows, rows, rows, they float on
glassy, steel-blue oceans,
and these oceans will fall in
violent, cascading, millennial
waves unlike any with foam
caps that once lapped
the rocky coast of lost Lycia--
your see
our maps don’t contain,
and our licit hosannas won’t reach.

Who are they
who pray here?
Bakers, sailors, bankers,
all whose sighs
rise with a torrent of immigrant chants
liaison rafters
fracture in echo-song,
the old coinage that plies your favor.

To which patron can they turn
when your cross crowns not
the work of masons
but one day’s
rubble,
a tongue without a bell,
the charred
relics of unnameable acts?

The ten commandments say nothing,
in the translations I’ve read,
against coveting my neighbor’s good
fortune,
timing,
intentions,
sense of style,
or the countless other intangibles
gifted by Nature
and our DNA's mischievous inventions.

I’m a strict constructionist,
when it suits me, and especially so
with documents carved in stone
by invisible hands
having no recorded fondness for the market.

I’d trade places with any nameless witch
caught cavorting in her coven’s canopied oases,
their cauldron-ringing capers
and care-free cackles cheered
by owl hoots and cricket song;

Or the smallish, self-sacrificing spider
who rather than a cigarette gets a close-up
view of his mate’s spinnerets dispensing
the silk sheets to wrap him
as a happy meal deferred.

I also envy their creepy hatchlings
who weeks later will climb to the tip-tops
of firry fingers, cast a single wistful thread
and wait for the wish-fulfilling wind
to carry them lifetimes away.

That’s how I could stiff this chill
that taps me on the shoulder, and chase
after a far-off warmth I’ve weened
since my weaning was done.

I count these covets no sins.

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.

Two loose yellow tongues flap me back
to that cul-de-sac of leather
***** bounced on a tarry hot blacktop.

The sweat came fast, our slapping palms
got slippery. We couldn't waste time
on excuses or fouls, just elbows

strategically placed, saggy smiles
and my canvas Chuck T's tearing
away from worn-down rubber soles.

Sidestepping shadow-plays
boxed in bonus-sized portions
for garden-varietal religions,
I've had these scuzzy intimations
great big (voids) lie behind
most altruistic inclinations
and the biggest news is,
we're still expanding
with-in-exhaustible potentials
to be eternally filled greater.

Now I'll admit to being
hampered in my cognitive
capacity for meaningful
pattern recognition
by my debilitating
predisposition toward
concentrated forms of myopia,
ergo, I can't shape
a formless mess into anything
but incoherent flimflam.

I've tried alleviating this
condition with meditative
concoctions and palliatives
of sensory deprivation,
yet I fear I'll need
a silicon-chip-enhanced head
before I can glimpse
the cosmic legerdemain spinning
its paradoxes of endless
surfaces but no top.

If I finally do, I'll smile big
as a great-white gull winning
his first demonstration hand at
the three-card monte of not-to-be
reconciled contradictions.

I, a hyphenated Italian,
will claim Shakespeare
descended the long
Romanesque
staircase, to write
our empiric wrongs.

It's all there in the plays,
if you've a keen enough eye
to catch these things,
and his name has cachet,
while mine needs
a laureled bling.

With its sinuous green edge and its delicately
decorative white venation this dewy cress laid
on a fine crystal platter would fit well next to that
chunk of cement facade ensconced in a vitrine
at the Art Institute’s new Louis Sullivan exhibition
There’s little cause to wonder why these particular
atoms once afloat on inchoate seas and awash
in the hummed mumbles of humble vibrations
chose to decohere into this one captivating pattern
from among an infinite variety of mattered schemes
even limiting their choicest range to those paired
colors A tree frog for example its narrow lime toes
suctioned on a broad leaf and its watchful pearl
eyes misconfigured with a blind spot too soon
exploited by a beak spouted peril Or the gallant rider
in uniform myrtle and mounted atop an albino steed
who at a mirthless gallop through routed troops
delivers this message Mother I am so far away
from everything They’re oddly jarred couplings but
with any choice whether slapdash had or carefully
considered what’s our guarantee it will live up to
the iron of romantically clad expectations I have
heard It’s always the salad that gets you in the end

My heart is a squishy stone
I toss out
across this green-gray gloss
mosquitoes skim
but the odds were always slim
it would skip with any vim given
its mix of bulges
and irregular beats
Let’s not mention that
surprising lack of heft
currently keeping it afloat
There it lies not quite flat
a maroon lily pad
I’ll lay piddling wagers
some nomadic creature
can make a home
Maybe the crawdad whose squeak
nothing like a fog-horn warns,
“Frog dress is on the marsh”
I swear I can hear
her bull groaning,
“The slippery *****
can’t stay clothed”
Newly hitched
this bogged-down daddy’s got
a passel of polliwogs to feed
and he needs
the lean of her tender
slimy legs for support
The crickets and I
might inwardly snigger
but from such
small giggles bred
is the manly laugh of strife
and that’s when
my heart slinks slowly back

Egg

[This is my hatching
thought, which you cannot
see.]

2. Larva

The moon shines,
a pretty pill.
It couldn’t fill me with more.
It couldn’t
spill its light more
brightly or cover me more
tenderly. My chalky
smile smiles back at her more
sweetly for the pain-killing.
It’s magic.

3. Pupa

La lune brille,
une pilule assez.
Il ne pouvait pas me remplir de plus.
Il ne pouvait pas
répandre sa lumière plus
vives ou me couvrir plus
tendrement. Mon calcaires
sourire sourires de retour à son plus
doucement pour la douleur-massacre.
C'est magique.

4. Imago**

The moon shines,
a pretty pill.
He could not fill me with more.
He could not
spread its light over-
bright, or cover me more
tenderly. My limestone
smile smiles back at its,
gently. To the pain-killing,
it's magical.

Hopping off-on
a sickly joke
of tarred and downy
breast beats, he robs
a green-frowned safety
its simplified gravity
to recover
boundless, blue-bleached
a sun-lit unforeseen
with nimbler pluck
than his ten-thumb plan's
busted-up doing

I like to visualize my death
not as a grand moment
fraught with TV-script intimations
at sudden illumination
while I’m encircled by a non-weepy
sprinkling of the usual types:
one surviving relative
curious to see what I’ve got
left to inherit; one forgotten
friend dubious I hadn’t
died quite some time ago;
and one vengeful stranger
anxious for the shock
when I hear her unmask.
No, I envision my death simply
as the lonely release
of a hardly noticeable puff,
its minute droplets lifting
to mix with every other
ever breathed, and to bid adieu
to my residue of befuddling
puddles flecked by unresolved wants.

The swampy heat draws swarms of bottle-glass
eyed flies who I'll buzz with their Christian name:
dragon. They hover, dive, then skim tall grass;

Cellophane wings beating hurricanes. Game's
afoot, but where? I've seen the solo flight,
pairs mating, but never so many flames

bounced off blue-green foils by the sun's white light.
Their gather's a check for black plumes of beasts
gone unbalanced to these hunters' delight.

If on mosquitoes they make seasoned feast,
my meek blood inherits to this world's least.

What makes it
that perfect egg,
laying there simply,
narrow-turned nose
to broad-bend
bottom
?

What is it
about
this teardrop of smooth,
its quickening
shell, not easily cracked
or taking
to a coating dye —
the slippery
dips in mocking pink,
acid-tongued blue,
and an indigestible
pea green
?

I can't begin
to unlock that knowing,
and I'm not going
to swallow it
hardboiled
.

Sleep-nestled in perhaps,
she unfolds comfortably
in-woven tales—
cocoons
self-spun over-long ago—
till head-to-toe rapt,
her mind swings to-and-fro,
up-tethered with a single strand.

A silky pod it floats some-
time jostled by the sing-song voices,
of snake-tongued sirens—
seeming unattached—
that each day drift in,
and try to lure her out
with their stories of fabled lands
and distant faces.

Yet, warmly tucked within
her soothing dreams,
she sleeps on not
eager to join in clockwork worlds
or their storybook readings of love.
Instead she’ll await her own
free-form scenes to unfurl
outside on painted wings.

The mighty Chicago Tribune got hit last night.

Well, its newspaper box did,
the only one picked from a spot-assuming
row of four corner mainstays
to suffer that indignity of toppling.

I found it this morning, blue-
and-white face down fifty feet further on, and
eating pushed-down daisies from
the commuter rail's prairie-grass embankment.

It couldn't tell me those dead-men
tales of daily mischief's end, but graffito-
tagged its side did sigh, "Someone
feels my news ain't got the values it used to."

From that moment the mouthy man in the middle,
top hat in hand, barks and waves our three floodlit rings
into motion with a flourish of brassy blasts,
the big top gets turvy and my stomach's all nerves
making the bushel of peanuts I just munched feel
like broken glass chewed by my friend the tattooed geek.

Martha says, Elephants are supposed to be more
dignified... don't mope! It is hard to grasp for her
tail day after daisy-chained day when I'm holding
this bouquet of forget-me-nots rubber-banded
by a grudge. I tell her, The real indignity's
being dressed in a rhinestone-studded satin cape.

There’s a sidewalk here,
the city has poured,
cemented with smooth
and perfect squares.
It leads to all
the usual places,
only altering when
at last it crumbles.

There's also the rough-
cut route I’ll walk,
taking ******
by his shaky hand
to stroll where moths mingle,
dandelions dance, and
destinations giggle
tickled by our setting suns.

A misplaced youth*

My first original rhyme –
take a “truck” drop the head and add an eff –
was hand-me-down crude,
not clever,
but how clever can you be
at four years old?

The chilly blush of it still brings
out a ringing
sound of one hand clapping
against my cheek;
then comes the deflating bawl
from pouchy flesh instantly un-stuffed
of its squirrely giggles and glee.

It put me off cheap sing-song thrills
for decades.

Same age, different flaws:
Can you be too young to develop
a finely tuned sense of entitlement
and the firmest conviction
for redistributing misbegotten wealth?

If anyone deserved a raggedy toy –
don’t call it a doll –
mouse-eared and with cherry-red shorts
cheerily poking out
of a tinsel-topped Christmas stocking,
it was me, not her.

Maybe Santa was suffering
from dementia,
or forgot his reading glasses.

I wasn’t smart enough yet
to cover my tracks,
and I didn't know any fences;
it’s hard to deny a crime
when you’re hugging the goods.

Skip ahead a few years,
and after the regular Sunday
indoctrinations of an uncharitably
faith-based brand of hero-worship,
there are all the tell-tale signs
of a sleep-sick heart
with an over-simplified world view
married to a messiah complex.

Is it normal to dream
of oneself, small but magnificently armored,
supplanting Michael
as the head of that goodly Host
driving out the evil legions?

At least I knew how to side with a winner
back then.

I also dreamed Gulliver-like,
I had been roped down to my bed
by a clutch of creepy-crawly bugs,
and in a tiny voice I could barely make out,
their spokes-beetle cried up to me:
“There will come a time
when the time finally comes,
and when it does
you’ll smack its self-satisfied face
for keeping you
waiting so long.”

My hand's always poised above the clock.

Ibkek sits idly by
the meadow's green and varied blooms,

paid only inattention.
He, not minutes passing nigh,

envies but this bumble
who black-and-gold buzzes onward

with purposeful zags. "She fits
so nicely here," he mumbles.

"Why, even duller drones,
though weak and puny, have a place."

The worker, she might envy
Ibkek this, his freedom's moan

to fritter life drinking,
but busy harvests push instead

her bee-bound thoughts, set upon
a queen's idyllic kinking.

I.

He’s
put on
the ****’s watch,
a peaked tower
who stands at far reach
to throw shadows with square
limbs. Loose-draped in rough
skins, he’s wary
of Dawn’s creep,
its lies.
He
sips fire
to fillip
flagged spirits, fix
the one-hundred eyes
rung monstrously about
his uncrowned head. Sleep
comes as well-timed
jaunts, its blinks
rolling
round
in thin-
lid cascades;
these hoodless winks
non-stop projecting
scenes from green grazing fields
where he keeps a girl-
beast, the jealous
prop of fast-
fading
robes.

II.

She’s
ill-changed
by blind rage,
a punishment
brought down for baring
another’s intentions—
his wont of too much,
never sought for
or seeking.
Her sleek
nymph’s
lines were
well-drawn till
smudged and pulled wide
they broke open, spilled
a dark spotted bulk, she
awkwardly carries
on spindly legs.
A mind’s led
circling
back
to gnarled
trunks that clutched
at blackened soil.
The tether’s chain, forged
silver with heavy links,
stretches taut to cut
circumscribed arcs
through bitter,
dying
blades.

III.

He’s
foggy
as he spies
morning ride in
rosy on the curled
back of low-rising mist.
Its errand breezes
were sent to spell
a lyric’s
deceit—
blow-
whispers
to drowse him
with wedded tunes.
Needle-sharp leaves spin,
making olives hum, while
their twigs clatter-knock
dull drums and lull
fifty pairs
to close.
What
was kept
is loosed with
thunder-less flash—
the quickening catch
that foils Argus by writ
mischief and wraps him
in its coiled tale
of never
slipping
free.

IV.**

She’s
twisted
and drags clanked
metal tangles
behind, while ahead
lie the first halting steps
of her re-formed path-
ways. They spoke out
a blurred wheel
beyond
the
sentry’s
fallen bulk,
but malodor
beckons to its sky-
enthroned mistress who tasks
cloud-effacing pests
to descend and
buzz-beat words,
erstwhile
known,
to non-
sense. The winged
confusion goads
Io, who released
from cowed thoughts will make mad-
apparent wanders.
She’ll chase earthbound
love and birth
mortal
time.

It’s the midsty morning,
all grammar’s run amuck
and the rapture won’t take me.

They’re lining up,
the letters and errant punctuation.

Spray-tagged against walls
they’ll torment the souls
who’ll stay here in god’s mean timing.

I keep putting apostrophe’s
where they don’t belong.

It’s an oblonging of words
and it will always be
my denial.

What’s possessed me?

I could pose esses,
caressing them down to tildes,
til disappointed and unsexed
by a symbolic life on its side,
they'd rise back up to text,
not angry but sure
their standing’s worth fighting for.

That’s nothing but a bad dream.

Line theft has left
this man fantastical
and it’s broken my container
of finger-twitching quotations.

let us join hands
you and i
and ***** down this falling away
road new paved with over-baked schemes
and the shattered
windshield glass from a dream car
we left for dead many miles back
every tire including the spare had blown
and they still hiss their casual tunes
while popped-out
flesh-tone hoses
dangle and sprinkle
a rainbow gloss on black-rimmed puddles
it’s a cause for deepening joy
these shallows won’t
dry up in either of our weened lifetimes
moisten your lips dear
and make that pineapple-sweet whistle
i love to taste
when i dare to plant my tongue there
the food’s long gone
and pots are now for banging
we’ve lost our way
and maps are made for shredding
into playfully themed streamers
we’ll tie in our hair
as we dance off the waning
silky heat of a too-late summer
the sun’s dial is flipping
and bound by those zeros
we’ve gotta go but it’s best
we’re brought low together

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.

First a disclaimer:
My god is not
necessarily
yours, but she is
undeniably
hungry for a comfort-food
snack of peanut butter
and Fluff brand
whipped marshmallow spread.

(Yeah, I know,
nasty stuff, yet
every god has her quirks)

She's actually
more demiurge,
needy and enduring
a dangerously dull day
ideating at the office
that gets worse when
she opens the gripe-box
to unfold a complaint
pasted in ransom-note letters:

"Too stingy with praise.
Resent the ego stroking
going one way."

"Can't stroke what you ain't got,"
she cracks, tipping back
a cold glass of froth-topped milk.

The bubbling laughter
seizes her
mid-swallow, and
caught up by
a soul-clearing cough,
stars spray out speckling
black tile in a no-longer dark
part of the universe
we call home.

In this heat-tricked mirror, he resembles
the crafty miles that creep up with vital intent.
They toe his wavy lines.

A pair of vultures glide by with lean routes,
marking bold exes against the golden bearded
grain of an age-stained chart.

Sudden runs to foul-scented organs blur:
A strong swoop followed by the fleshy balance on
thresholds of life's tipping.

He discovers with scaled-down calculus,
our blue-vaulted distances, still moist but listing,
travel in closed cycles.

It can't  be defeated, this curse, lifting
ungainly loads while his broad back is pushed against
walls of jaundiced fingers.

Tens of peckish tips, wait for their victuals.
They smell his thinning blood buried in the gusty
legends of cornered maps.

Into our fun house of mirror neurons,
a favorite Fellini character strides
distorted perhaps,
but reflected clearly enough,
none the lesser for our wear.

Who is it? Which one?
It’s truly hard to decide.

It could be that brute Zampanò,
his chain unpopped,
and as ever demanding our attention...

Or the cypher, Steiner,
teetering on edge
to tell us his secrets...

Or a voluptuous
la Saraghina,
reveling in our riveted eyes...

Or gentle Giulietta,
chasing her voices,
their whispers that echo ours.

It doesn’t matter who, in the end.
Better yet, let’s take them all,
and crowd them close in.

What matters is,
we ask they try
a seeming simple task—
touching tongue to nose,
or elbow to chin—
and we watch
their attempts, together.

Strive and fail.
Strive and fail.
Strive and fail.

These are the Sisyphean rhythms
we’ll need to learn.

We have our limits,
but empathy is endless.

I would have posited longings ago
this short-shrift to-do over such a curt list undone
was inconceivable
outside
the pages of deceptively practiced perceptions
published in a pop-up book smirk,
or beyond
the canary-yellow frames of a cartoonish
distortion relishing its mired but spongy giggles

A
Been-here-all-along,
you’ve-never-bothered-to-look­
lake sleeps implacably
at the bottom of an irascible ocean

Be
Whatever it may,
you can’t deny the wantonly
watted life teeming pretty as it pleases,
untroubled by a hollow-core belief
or the extremest demands of our foul temper

See
How I could have,
if I’d only swallowed
those bubbled-up blurts
ring-wronging the tip of my wriggling tongue,
never been audibly
landed by one alluringly barbed certainty

There are supine bodies—
stagnant, quicksilver pure—
no material ship navigates
and no intentional intruder can swim
without
emerging atypically
unsettled by the caustic exposure

Tread lithely
when you go;
this shoreline bites.
Its clustered rocks will snap shut around you
after digging in below you with a protruding toe,
and its carmine stalks will sting you
as they writhe past you
to mime a part-less goodbye

Here be where
the monstrous cold seeps
and a hellish hot vents
in compliance with this centuries-old complaint:
too-short was the time we wept
for those wiggly wonders
we could have kept
if we’d only octopus-arm embraced
the inevitability of their bandy-legged escape

My night, marish, clops through
a mirror life
some mad scientist might
have coaxed to self-replicate
into an intemperate ooze.

I’m standing there,
and then I’m not,
lost in its reflection
and aflutter with a flabbergasting abandon
at having met you
after a bushel of now grainy,
barren years.

It is me, and it’s not
or it’s both, I can’t say
who it is, who turns away
panicked by the befuddling
indifference in your voice
before it trails off
and tumbles into a cruel muddle
of swallowed gruel,
where I’m unable to skim out
the love I loved in you,
once, or spoon
one meager goodbye.

I’ve read the news, and its red
with painted lip prints, and the stain
of stranger thumb prints. 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 print. 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.

Your name is Filbert.
I'd rather use you as Fill.
Fill, gods may have put you here
for a victimless chatter,
but I'll bring you up
with the nonsense charge to meet
false expectations. I know
we don't see heart-to-heart, that
parting shouldn't stop us
from connecting the pesky
dots of our pupils. Let's learn
to be adult about this
uncontrolled glowing.
Your flighted fancies
can't leave the tarmac
without making one feel bold,
another frightened,
and everyone is a skosh
confused in the end.
I hope it doesn't bound
too negative. I meant well.

The testy toaster wheezes
a **** and frosty ******,
"You sir can't taste
the sweet-meat of cause
if you won't stomach
its bland and crusty effect."

I'll come back to his riddle.
First, the percolator
keeps bubbling up
drips of bitter conversation
I've warned her nicely
to drop before.

Tucked-up tight
as a cotton ball
dappled with brown-black patches,
the part-calico queen,
presiding on a sofa-cushion throne,
surveys her square
and bounded realm.

The jelly-jiggling slop first had to flop
before it could waddle
ashore into this muddle of last gasps
and becoming
where middling deaths swaddled in gauzy breaths
emit a consonant-rich sussuro:

If you don’t recall the swirl-swept depths
where we furled it,
can you keep that promise in shallows pocketed?

So we began, and with the begetting
a rosy cloud plumed forth from our two
terraformed lips,
its delicately distinct petals mushrooming out
with a thorn-less, serif-soft voice
to bestow this frothy font of atomic confusion:

Let the forgetful sea rinse over now-handy fins
to hard-edge etch
their starfish straight lines in a slurp of soggy sand.

The mothering molecules haven’t lost
their smothering ache to forgive
our thickened skins
and they still cling to us, cooing about a lulled drift
past bye when we’ll climb the thinning links
back to homes cloaked in a sifted light:

*The loves of your heart-filled heads, no matter
how starkly pled,
all waste away to join us in our timeless waiting.

He peels an azure rind
sure to find click-clack gears clocking
tin-men's timid-toed steps

But these clouds conceal gut-
taut strings rain drops plink, teasing out
hours of palsy-foot jigs

Wipe away that image of
beating butterfly wings

and the currents they send across
great continents.
See instead, you and me

arranged on the same vast
plate — two irregular green peas
rolling around the nucleus of a split pod.

Even if we don’t meet here and now —
snagged by an intervening fork,
set off course by rivulets of gravy,
separated by marbled slabs of meat,
or consumed by a gravity-defying, black-
holed gob — somewhere
on parallel, fine-clothed
tables, we’ll savor the joy of
big-banged, trajectory-altering collisions.

Scaly ******* shudder with a gutter-gray cleaving.

She misses the calming touch of her breezy paramour,
and their nostalgic days vent in pitched-white whispers.

If I could breathe back those mists, I might lessen her sorrow ...

Too-rigid muscles slide into aqua spasms.

She fidgets at the lack of fuss her fragments show,
and the brittle hours snap at the metallic-blue cracks.

If I could massage those bursts, I might slacken her worry ...

A caustic blood simmers up vermilion bubbles.

She whiles ways for the weakly spotted to crumble,
and languishing minutes dissolve with yolk-yellow pops.

If I could stomach those boils, I might keep her from breaking.

Ever-after wishing
for magical

transformations, and
one to follow

closely by the book,
she rolls up lace sleeves,

plunging icy hands
down into pond's brown

murk, with a talent
for fetching out.

Finger-wrapped, fearing
pursed leather lips,

her slime-green captive
gives its squirmy croak:

"What would a frog
want to do with you?"

I.
White’s imprisoned gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

II.
The sun's amber frown of diminished light
slides down black branches
a blundered slight,
but when it hits the ground, it rides
wonders of uninterrupted white.

III.
Steamy columns of warmth
slip through the crack,
pawed open by blue purrs from his white cat—
a tonic wash, to welcome.
slush-slicked, black boots back

IV.
Nuzzled, from the muzzling of a drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap, brown earth bursts
through what white patchwork's left, to cure
her forbidden tramplers with a slurpy
and black-mouthed, aubade kiss.

V.
Winter’s white makes shallow breaths,
and exhausted she coughs black
complaints about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane orange cat with a close hold
on his shorted stock of shock-
yellow crumbs, and the assorted other
man-made matter mocking
her color, but never her,
wherever they stay.

I.

To steal away three oranges for love he was
instructed by long-ago’s cackling voices, but over time
words once sharply plucked and sealed in the wide mouth
of his boyish memory have grown up vague and bushy.

So, this night he picks to stalk the storybook rows
of stubby trees that squat smack in the middle of a maze
unknown but tender hands have pulled straight to hide
riddles in their patchwork of endlessly seamed sameness.

Aided by a sickle moon’s pointed glances, he hastily
harvests the wages of three waxy fruit and plops
his juicy hopes sweetly into a leather pouch, as loosed
the feather-leafed branches snap back skyward.

II.

Home on the next morning’s edge, first love he sights.
She has a narrow white face and blush-dabbed features
below a tall swab of swirled scarlet hair that wags
a bobbed tongue’s tale as she comes bouncing into view.

Striped dawn glows, and tickled he, perhaps too eagerly,
reaches into his bag with the lust of hurried hands.
An orange, yet under-ripe and unready, he blurts out to her
as a wholly careless, green-topped, and unpeeled gift.

She takes it and rolls it through her nest of slender tips.
The thumbs inspecting its sadly misshaped bits find
the bumps and crevices around a knobby stem are proof
of a worthless fruit. Dropping it, she walks on, nose up-turned.
III.

Twelve days left to his less-than-virtuous devices,
he fusses over the second orange. His nails dig in
to *****-cut peel its thick rind. He picks off odd
pieces of pith and smooths its newly gleaming surface.

These would-be idol hours spent preening could
pay off when another amour falls as an acid-yellow
figment. She floats down to him from the distant hilltops
with a floppy mop of golden curls and a broad pink brow.

Pristine fruit on palm extended, he waits his worth,
while the citrusy flesh, exposed to a mid-day sun,
shrivels brown and collapses into a pulpy mess. When
she passes, it draws a mere wave and topples easily.

IV.

As the shadows of a jagged-tooth fencepost lengthen
a sudden and thoughtless appetite grows in him.
He grabs the third orange and gobbles it all down
but a lone slick seed that sticks in his deflated cheek.

Bewitched from the seemed break in magic’s promise,
he makes this kernel an offering to devouring soils
and lays his hard head upon the single-seeded bed
where he’ll drowse rocked by soft-chirped serenades.

Then, a quake and a tree sprout. Spreading branches
lift him up among the strangely branded fruit
that an orange-tongued fairy nibbles as she tosses
green locks and smiles at him with her hazelly gaze.

It was my nightly recurring teenage motif:

The cramped room with a stomach-knotting
presence, creaky floorboards and one wickedly
white door looming as ghastly and large as
any bad-movie omen about to play out.

Being poltergeist-gripped, it swayed back an inch
before a sudden but noiseless slam
shut that unhinged me toward hasty shouts
of, "The power of Christ compels thee!"

(It's a silver-bullet phrase packed and ready in
the chamber of all aspiring exorcists.)

The devil scared out of me yet again,
I'd wake up with renewed vows to avoid TV
horror fests, and those sensational stories
my mom brought home in her Weekly World News.

A nettlesome gnat
dipping
dodges past
rote swipes,
remote-controlled
flickers,
and in the stodgy
middle of milk-
spilled glass,
a waning wink
glimpses
the faded
bicker
to its midgy sink