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

I may or may not be:
a posited feline absurdity
curled up on comma paws
inside Herr Schrödinger's *****-trapped box.

Its flask is uncertain
whether to smash-poison my mighty mews
and spew a gray-mouthed cloud
that inky clots neither's sharpening quill.

Entangled buts become
stranded as knots of fuzzy pink yarn, to send
either-or careening
arm-and-arm down imperfect pictured paths,

where Epimetheus
stands, ready to wed Pandora anew,
and doom-birth our many
worlds with the lifting of my thousand lids.

The bathroom faucet drips hurried footsteps,
carrying him back to dappled wood buried

in repeated dreams: a brushed ritual
circle hasty ringed by displaced logs, bark bit

by lichens; their sacrilege tools — hammer's
rotted-wood grip, nails with rusty shafts — littered

about a stump-altar where brothers met,
made not-so-secret sacrifice, to abash

their god; still suffering toad, random
picked to endure this mock passion play ending

on cross-tied twigs. Its yet resurrected
eyes stare at him, ask simple but damning "why?"

No Samaritan, good or bad, among
pretend Romans, ever stayed their hands to help.

And then I'm here,
and when I'm not here too

They walk past me,
and I see it in their faces,
the generations,
and their generations,
when they walk past me,
the worse-off
and the better,
they come too,

And they come,
and they come,
and in their faces
there are shades I can't name,
but every one of them is,
and everyone of them is
beautiful

And in their hearts
there are whispers,
whispers that speak in shapes
I can't measure,
but they whisper
pleasures,
and they whisper of their pains,
and they're not like mine,
and they're not unlike mine either,
and through them all,
they have, and I have
stayed strong,

And they've come here
and their strides have covered,
they do cover,
not distances,
not years,
but those joys and sorrows,

The joys and sorrows of many
yesterdays,
and they came from those many days
and those days flowed out
from many places,
from many places
that are now one, and that one
will go too,
into many,

There will be many
tomorrows,
and into many
tomorrows,
it and they will go,

And when they go there,
they'll go everywhere,

And when they go,
everywhere will be
one place
and nowhere,

And it's from there
they'll bring me back,
and it's to there I'll go
and I'm going there,
and I'm going there
again, with each of them.

"You have to feed on something,"

they said, or I imagine them
saying, and I do... but I don't
want to feed,
at least not doing it to trade
in visible doubts for a life's
uncertain

drift between I am, and I'm not...
fed fat by the neatly packaged
carcasses
clearly drained and cellophane wrapped,
to keep unclean hands bloodlessly
far from mine.

I'm told but I won't hear, "We're more
highly evolved." We think therefore
we are so
discomfited by not knowing...
whether the fed-on think and feel
what we do

when life's last light runs out, taking
with it the green and red that played
over flesh
and bony because... if they do,
it could be, we're feeding on one
another.

"That's the unkind art of feeding."

I.
They say,
Those who won't learn
the spirally past
are doomed to walk
its re-coiling paths
again, and I can't
argue with precedent.
I can point out,
my present and future
doubts, kneeling
down with guttersnipe
gifts and a candle
lit up to appease
history's stalking ghost.
What I really want
is to ***** it.

II.
They say,
This world's gotta date
marked expiry
and it's all set to go
sour with a big bang
or a small bust
out from the fridge
of twenty-twelve's
wintry chilling.
Lately, there have been
jumbo packs of weirdness
spilling onto
every last shelf,
but things got strange
long before the Mayans
began tying knots.

III.**
They say,
you can take the brutish
and dress them up
natty, extolling
their hirsute
vices in basso
profundo voices
till we all queue
back to ****** them.
I've heard the jingle,
but I'm drawn instead
to wisdoms spoken
by officials
not officially
allowed to speak.
Their off-the-record's nice
and scratchy.

Ill, my white lies lay
along black-truth's way,
attracting the stranded
eyes of idle watchers.

Dropped so indifferent
in hands that lead up
to one man's simp'ring god,
our antique worlds meet

and shake. His wired head
sits uncomfortably
near us, and spits words
by life left unspoken.

They feed the moon full
with dwindling day, to flesh
out love and make our steps
half-brothers, again.

They sprouted more than flew, and
there were quite a few, possibly dozens —
though, looking back, I always do
tend to exaggerate such incidents.

Anyway, this aphid swarm of grassy
greens decided to make me home,
and my chest crawled with specks, while
I waited for a bus to St. Peter's.

They could have been splattered "as if's"
spat from the mouths of hungry sparrows,
taken mid-swallow with a guffaw at
this tourist dressed in DayGlo.

I might've gotten the omen, but
intuition wouldn't surrender its clues
how to shoo insect guests attracted
by a coincidental cloth.

Perhaps they were meant as subtle hints —
an eternal city keeps its own agenda.

I've been thirsting to burst your bubble since
I heard the low-down we may be over-
supplied with a green-backed bird called Money,
that trollop spread-wide by aliases

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound
A buck or a pound, a buck or a pound

To a layman's ears unlearned in the fine-
tuned registers of glib-tongued financiers,
it may ring up as reason to cheer with
no tinkling of trouble, but if Money

Is all that makes the world go around
that clinking, clanking sound (they do say)

She sings, clangs a bit hollow when she clings
too heavy in alms of poorly wrung hands,
it's then well-heeled sit'n spins'll turn us about
to the golden-gapped beams of bankers mouths

For Money makes the world go around
The world go around, the world go around

And will till johns who hold little put less
stock in the **** pitches of slick-macking
daddy Street with his tricky fat pay backs
for the ounce of love he's flouncing to sell.

There are strings. Nine strings? No, nine of some-wheres,
plus one black when. Back then, they weren't strummed, but they're
vibrating from, or to something. Something flat. Real is flat. Real and
flatter than. The fattest lie is the fastest why I can come up with. I can
tell you: I've lived this sigh before. Not a sigh, so much. As a breath
between, death's hidden in the greens, and life. Life's again. Then's death.

My meaning's gotten
garbled in a simulacrum of language
where d1g1t5 act
as harsh and angular interlopers,
bringing coined conversations
to a clanking halt.

Add to this the strange
ch@r@cter$, who've been irregular-
invited by secret-keepers
to play at masquerade
and waltz through endlessly
interchangeable interludes.

I pass on these words all-the-less
and expect they'll meet
equally imperfect listeners.

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?

More wiry weeds than hair, they grow
coarse black and at a heightened clip
from ear-top follicles suddenly fertile
after decades of smooth-flesh dormancy.

Add to that a stubborn snout intent
on lengthening and willful fingers bent
on becoming gnarled claws. The horror
signs indicate a slo-mo transition

from man to wolf, but don't let that put
you off your supper. We're all made to fall
apart. Creep on over. I'll take a little
nibble, and we'll howl at forever's moon

together.

He doesn't have an infinite supply of monkeys.
In fact, he doesn't even have one.
Unless you count that stuffed toy on the dresser,
but it can't be expected to type,
not with those tin-cymbals glued to its paws.

Then there's the small matter of time,
which has always run out or been shut in,
at least over his lifetime of so-far off,
and he's not getting any younger,
so if it's gonna happen, it's gotta be now.

He bangs out a big-shot first word.
He thinks it's at random, but who can say for sure.
Galymbon? Maybe that's the name of a king;
it's certainly not one from Shakespeare.
His whimper isn't worthy of tragedy.

It’s not an absence
this 2am darkness—
half-dark and half-lit
by its unnatural glows—
grabs hold of,
firmly pulling it—
this thing not
an absence— growling
from the dead
black inside a stray
dog’s too-mouthy head;

not just it, but the voices—
untroubled and present
if not too
many, tucked into
a more deeply darkened night.
It takes them, not to
gobble them
up, but to throw them
off cobble, cement and stone
to open places, voices
won’t normally come.

I. Sower

In the crinkled-up inkling of a question...

Cracked voices found me
as they fled throats full-
filled with a caked red dust

Their fleet pleas hounded me:
“Don’t forsake this stony ground.
Lay on patient hands

“Bone-hard, break it. Uproot
its thorns. Distract the birds
toward other pursuits”

I soaked in their shattering
chorus, then it fell – silence.
Someday my plants will come

II. Soil**

In the lush crush of hushed hours...

The come-as-you-go wind came
and she scatter-rained
the sparkly seeds she carried

Maybe she had no plan, or
maybe the plan was to sow
her songs chaotically

Either way, she graced me
with one seed to grow. If I can
tend it ever so tenderly

Its complexity will push
through headlong to bear fruits
and miraculous perplex me

I am of three minds—
an un-whole trinity
built by ghostly id,
god-sick conscience,
and one son of never-
virginal egos—
interlocked inside
a mortal’s spirited,
head-in-head conflict.
To the fabulous free
goes my prized heart’s
spoiled meat. Cooked rare,
its fetid, red juices
run in all directions.

You've made a sensible decision,
joining these ranks of stomped-on stand-in's.
I'll be your Virgil and guide you through
the ropes too often learned at lashing.

Don't overlook the import of choosing
proper cause and duly sainted miens.
Be better judge of princely nature,
for when he does stray, it's you we'll hurt.

The world has no shortage of ******, and
to keep the knife at bay, befriend him
you must, lest he misbehaves solely
for the pleasure of watching you writhe.

If it comes to that, all you'll have left
is to pray, he meets an untimely end,
and loads your back with shuffled-off cares
to scape back to the wilds whence you came.

I'm partnered with whispers.
Disquieting their partner, they whisk her
voice unasked through my dial-bound trips.
Daily they gaily needle me with their tip
to need her voice nonetheless.
Nightly I feed them less and less
detail, but they grow and they mock the endless hem-
hawed denials, I've tripped again.

"Check this box. You know,
the four-squared lines around the hollow
of our white space.
Yes, there's no phrase
next to the unchecked box. It doesn't matter.
We're only here to gather
a positive response. We'll fill in the rest
later, and we'll attest
we could see through
your glassy hush, as we saw through
the stone trying not to dwell
on those bits of crushed shells.”

The shells. Those ****** bits
of shells she left minutes
before she left. Shells already
discarded by some small medley
of slimy unnamed things
somehow both alive and living
out in the dead-calm lake. Those shells lost
or more likely tossed
aside but lightly, as delicate dishes
are gently pushed when finished.

"We've heard you tell it.
The green-brown waves rolled to deposit
them on that spit of coarse, cold sand where
your toes slipped from shoes and care
to taste the ridges
of their gently sloped backs and smooth-worn edges.
She took them home then
and using nail polish she painted them
shocking pink faces and round eyes in various hues
of red. Glitter-glued to blue
construction paper they bubbled
her winking verbs, which troubled
you as you re-read
them and deconstructed
her intentions each color-
less visit to the refrigerator door."

I've told it
and much the same, but when I hear it
their words
become less mine than hers.

Aphrodite's kid
could've handled this
if eons ago
he hadn't wandered off
pining for his precious Psyche.

Where that leaves you and me
today is exploring
the grocery store aisles.

Oysters, sure.

Dark chocolate,
even if it's not.

Saffron would,
at minimum,
put my nose in the mood
for some
hay-scented rolling.

Celery? Really,
it doesn't do much for me,
but whatever
floats your dote, dear.

A chemical boost's
no ha-ha joke
but romantic love could be
based on such practical tricks
to keep our DNA churning.

When I was spongy
soft and daisy yellow, my father poured
forth with piety his cleansing love
for god and country, and he poured
it into poor little porous me.

It was a sop I tried to hold
but just as gold wings go
and clay feet come,
so my faith in blindness was replaced
by a bookish seeking.

The small wrings and smaller
squeezes of his uneven hands
told me god wasn’t 'man enough,
and any bounded place was too cramped
a space for my odd inklings.

Then I found this upon the further
side of knowing: Nature lives and dies not
in our world alone,
but there’s a universe to breed
and spoil with my loving’s expansion.

It’s always cycling...
cycling before me...
cycling through me...
cycling past me...
cycling in spite of me.

Ever never blinks
and no quill’s ink tallies
those woes and wants
played out on the twinkling
stage of our weakling moments.

Outside the familiar
rhythms of my childish loves,
I’m left
pledging to do no heavenly harm
as I spread wide these arms
so inadequate for embracing the vast
elliptical clouds of intermingling
light and dust,
and in flying I’ll fall toward
but not reach
the core of my sunny belief.

tip-tap
the tippler rain drips
tip-tap
the tippler rain's slick
tip-tap
the rain, tippling, wraps
lit-up
city streets in plastic

Five points flicker-tease,
"How will you stop our yawning

gaps? Can you tip-toe
tap us out a doubter's ledge,

foot-con Pentagon's
firm routes? Or diag'nals dance

to coin Pentacle's
conjuring? We'd relish reels,

spun round in Circle's
blur — unbroken, unending."

I've a sui-generis tendency to ape
that sainted cat from Assisi who lends me
this moniker with mouth-confounding interests.

I cop ascetically tasteless means for living
and an auto-inflicting knack, but we part
weepy ways at the nobler wherefore of his arts.

He self-stigmatized for Faith, I stab at lesser
Love's tortured metaphors, and my plump palms bare
only the throb of a heart foolish for one once gripped.

Move on I must, wholly hand-in-hand with hag Hope
to cajole a jab by bumptious Charity,  
touch of her tip flushing blues from my fleshy side.

Merry is the marionette,
almost a miniature man, who finds
his wires new-severed do flap
where once strum-tight they dictated
the when to fall octopus-limp
or to dance a sprightly jig
accompanied by silly jug tunes
he never even liked.

Stringlessness comes at a price.
On disjointed steps, Merry
would he have to make his own way
as an unprovided walker.
He sets out, philosophical
tomes in hand, for the wooded
fringes where a brook gurgles
and he'll grapple with consequence.

"I have a goodly appetite,"
Merry remarks. "I'll attack
these meaty words with fork and knife."
But the ideas do stew
and uncomfortably stowed
between 'Being and Nothingness,'
Merry wonders whether freedom is
not what he bargained for.

Just then he's startled by the tug
of wires gone taut, and caught up
in the dangle of an enormous
eagle, its talons eagerly
trying to untangle the strings
of a new play thing. Merry
might have wept, but who could cry
over the spilling of sour milk?

This is it,
your "He was,
was he not?"
collection of lazy
reflections.
You'll project it on
those fuzzy
"Or now was he?"
recollections
and reject them in favor
of a rock solid
first impression.
He was, after all,
with those strange,
even dangerous
inflections
and his oddly arranged
affections,
just a guy
you kind of knew.

I know it's best
to keep these things professional,
but I've begun to crush
under the graceful strokes
of your sixty words
per minute.

You'd be amazed
how much I've learned from the simple
arrangements and careless
chats of your lives lived
so transparently
in front of me.

You may not feel
as intimately tied; that's okay.
All I'm asking is,
you'll stay, and sustain me
with your momentary
presents.

What we were once, two words,
we are no more, taken in

When ten sticky layers absorb
the shadows of our predecessor shapes.
Purple bruises bleed through
the buried steel

Where one-hundred shouted
stories slid down into
a waiting mouth of obtuse angles.
Vague numbers now,
we follow, ask

Why one-thousand labors
couldn’t gird us against not-
birthing gusts, their reverse alchemy,
aching to prove

How countless precious lines
can turn testily from true
geometry’s parallel path, and seek
an improbable calculus of chaotic drips,
those splats that trace a figure

Who in the flash of flame
realizes his distinctions
have lavishly become
obliterated.

Our tomorrow will know
what our today’s forgotten.

Call me paranoid,
or clairvoyant,
or a desperate seeker in need
of a kindly wink
who gets blank
stares from the battered
courtyard
plot of Black-eyed Susans.

I’ve seen sweet
grimaces and gruesome
grins locked in the fuzzy
outlines of a hinge
with its unused spins
perpetually
putting the bedroom
door ajar.

Cheerless chuckles
and twinkling frowns
bubble up
from the brown-edged
peels of paint
on a water-damaged ceiling
constantly keeping my looking-
back glass fogged.

They come visit, sometimes
smiling, often beguiling,
these faces who lurk
in this saddest of places
where I hold
their ghostly echoes
safe from the outside
voices cautioning me:

“Too many conjured guests,
even the prettiest
ones you’ve grown
fond of, eventually become
so much unfiltered noise.
Find and kneel down among
the moss
and lichen-covered pews.

“Put your whisper-burned ear
to the quiet-cool earth there
and hear her tell you,
‘Look up.
Look up. Share,
oh do share dear,
in the wonders of this infinite
and unpeopled blue.’”

Would that four and twenty were all
red-wing blackbirds rejected by the sky.

For each one wonderment’s pie-pleasant fall
down open pockets full of why,
ten thousand unsavory more tumble
I’d prefer my thumbs fumbling missed.

Can you hear it? Louder than a stomach’s rumble,
here comes some-when-else, timely this
time where-ing unaccustomed particulars’ shine.

Buzz with me there, Honey,
although I’ve got no hive in mind.

The end of days may be sunny.

Let’s not hide, but heal what’s broken
and bask in the deep void’s coquettish gaze,
mutating us one short step toward then
with its white wash of cosmic rays.

We’re on the cusp,

a pin-***** gleam on the lip of a cup,
and we’re running. Over

and over, we’ve held it.

We’ve raised it up,
this golden
cup filled with the sacrifice
of time, time and time again,
until its weight gets too much,
or our arms too fat to hold it. Much longer,

and longer than that, the shadows go,
and they’ll continue to grow now. Our fancy cup’s
at the tipping, with its time spilling out
twenty-four hours
a day into the forest of roots

loosing their grip on the slime-drenched
soil. Little Juramaia once played here,
and Gaia hasn’t forgotten her. Could she

forget us, or the trees? She can’t

feel the **** frost for the trees,
or us, when it’s gone,
and the trees have gone tipsy
at the thought. That,

and this lengthening light.

Lord, if you exist and have ears
(neither of which
proposition is entirely clear yet),
let’s make a deal.
(I know prayers ideally aren’t
supposed to involve bargaining,
but this is really a poem
so I’ve got some wiggle room to ******.)
Bring a little peace to these instruments
who call themselves your kids,
and I swear by all things you deem holy
(since you made everything,
I guess that’d be the whole shebang)
to give myself up to your wills and won’ts.
Of course you’ll have to clue me in
where there’s a Will,
(the won’ts are pretty well covered)
whether buried in endless musts
****** thus by musty books,
or hidden in plain-sighted laws
governing the broadest range of spirals
from when the first shoot knows
it’s time to poke its budding nose
above an earth that’s lost the frosty bite
to when our yellow dwarf explodes
and grows a giant with nebulous arms
stretching outward to catch its dying breath.
(I’d cast a vote for the latter,
but my still-small voice has long been
to the far reaches, outnumbered.)

i am the king of insects,
he said, he says,

he continues
a conversation
he started but dropped

he starts, he stops
this conversation,
it’s ongoing,
it went, it goes on,

he goes on with it
to the fine veins of a tattered brown
leaf, he doesn't know
leaves, but he’d guess this one is
from an elm, he guessed it, he guesses

it became, it’s become
plastered to the window with a glue,
this glue called rainwater, he calls it
rainwater, and it was,
it is a glue, with the winter air,
stronger than paste,

much stronger,
it wouldn't,
it shouldn't
hasten anywhere, so he picks up
where he left off, he leaves off
after long pauses,

no,
no, not the king, per se,
but they flock to me,
not like they'd flock
to a living leaf, or a wayward crumb
of pumpernickel, but they come
seeking
something,

I said I was a king,
not a wise man,
though wise enough,

and he paused,

and he pauses,

but he can't continue,

he tries

but not with a glue that's dried
and a leaf that’s slipped,

it dries, the glue,
and the leaf slips,

it slips and floats down,
down to the gutters
filled with so many browns,
when it hears it,

it has heard it,

enough

I was there, but I wasn't
where snowy wisps skitter
across the beige-brown sand,
and skim-milk rolls
stand frozen, no longer
struggling to reach the shore.

Gulls wheel high and fall back.

I couldn’t hear them calling,
"Here's the beauty
when life stops, and then goes."

I don't know
where we were headed,
but the sidewalk did,
and its smells had been
liberated by a hot summer rinse.

You grabbed at my pendulum
arm, and ******
me back before
the gap grew us
out of being a couple.

My penance was
a hair-shirt stare
and a smack with that saw:
"Life's about the journey,
not the destination."

"Sure," I said, "but the end's
a ****** cul-de-sac.
I wanna see what I can
before we smash
against it."

You summed me up,
mouthing the three letters
you drew on my chest,
still not-chastened:
"A-D-D, Humming bird."

"There's no deficit
of attention here, Old Crow.
It's just this
plugged-up world's got
a surplus of stimuli."

It was one week
later you left,
taking a whole
slew of savory inputs
to the blank without you.

"Everything
happens for a reason,"
you'd tell me.
Knowing the cause,
never changes my effects.

We aren’t, necessarily, up. Beat not

beaten, we feast, and we will be. Come,
tell me, what information can’t be held in

our fatty acids? Immodestly, we’ve had both
the morsel modified and not. Its tiny bits mix
in us and with us, so it can inform us

forward with a digestibly new identity. We have
eaten more than this too, and it’s all in us,
with the knowledge of a world less well-preserved.
Less is on ice, but there’s more for us to taste,

and it’s the more and we’re the more. We
know of it, what it is that can’t get inside of us
if we don’t eat it. Let it, get inside, it won’t
eat at us. It won’t, it can’t shake us from

the unusual way we’ve wobbled through
a closely-measured firmament cold-packed
with these immeasurable clues. We’re no less

permanent there than this half-shell is here. Fixed
by a thin glaze, it awaits one sun, or the tide’s finding

its stomach again for mollusk, fine sand and pebbles.

I want to paint it
this plaint
I've worded
one thousand
unrecorded instants
only to see both
the deep and tinny
syllables I thought
vibrantly tinted
dissolve into
pale, gooey-bottomed wails

I should pitch it
this paste
to patch an unfrocked
eye searching
puffy tears for atoms
escaped within
abandoned margins
as narrow as
the difference between
my white canvas
and an emptying hand

I have to plug it
this post hole
bored by my frantic
inattentions
and stencil a sign:
bold letters below
a starched cuff,
its pulseless finger
pointing out
there's one way
round sniveling sounds

My myth-maker’s made
a sunny place-setting
and he sets it politely there
where I sit not wearing boots.

With black squawks he came
from out-there not smitten,
and he tells me tall riddles of let
blood’s sleepy seeping home.

“You’ll notice many
cut-cross paths can get you there
to the next where, if you know
what’s not here you’re not getting.

“It’s there, where and when
you’ll come in, approximately,
to uncover hurt never.
Ever met cures before.”

He stays there beside
and with unwary wings pushes
twice-worn boots where my feet
were yet, unprepared to go.

What you should look for isn't . what the screen tells you (it) is(n't) suspicious, Look for . not what's packaged and left . unattended, Look what's right (be)for(e) you, It's the sparrows' shallow hops . down narrow aisles, They stop and go . unafraid and even if unrewarded . (it) do(es)n't stop them, Follow where they go and know what s(cr)een(s) can('t) be trusted.

‘Tis this,
Christmas
morn at the end
of that clutch of days
Christians named 2010,
and the diffident sky
can only manage
one irreverent blink.

There they're here,
candy cane lights
with green-garland ears
and drunken noses
to point my way through
snow-drop-hushed streets
robbed of their rush-about
and vagrant shouts.

Then’s when
I’ll take it,
the harked-upon angels’
high stool, and make low
the hollered occasion
with a devilish wink
to swivel
their pin-cushion heads:

“Yay, I say,
for unto you is born
this day, in the city of laid
lids, a savor!
Look for true
love in the cradle
of your straw-strewn hearth,
and unswaddle it.”

Young Johannes keeps his theory
dressed up with petty pink
flourishes and tucked inside her
wicker basket. She's plopped fat

on a spangled, off-center perch
while surrounded by tangles of
circular mirrors, each reflecting
his fragmented eye. “The fluid

mechanics of my camera’s
lens imbues its gaping human
subject with a soul,” this caged bird
sings, just as he’s coached her.

She doesn’t require very much
care -- a few scattered meat-filled
husks and white space for flapping
her clipped-tones -- but reluctantly

Johannes must set Prolly free
to wing it openly upon
the waves of patterned noise
his vacuous glass can’t see.

that gurgling brown hunger you feel deep down it wasn’t you
god knows who put it there no it’s only natural it was she
who planted the initial seed grown up into a succulent leaf
frowning nature abhors a vacuum and she wouldn’t couldn’t
endear herself any more if you sustained such a saddeningly
blank space she’s given you the device for devising wickedly
clever ways of consuming it would be a godless shame
to leave the engine idling now what you eat doesn’t mean
as much as the act of eating itself actively naming god’s
creatures great small may not give you dominion or merit
ownership but ingesting them sure does dainty fingered
sentimentality lost her privileged place when steely
eyed invention serendipitously shoved a ****** cushion
throne up to your table’s edge it’s a divine and kingly right
to take your fill with hands nimbly fashioned for taking
all that’s managed eon after eon to crawl out of a world
engendering slime until there’s nothing left but the awful
runny pallid mucous you’ll sneak back to sated at last

The plentiful dust
I fuss
to sculpt
a troupe of selfless
shadows.
Freed from any
owning
light, we hum
the delightful
tunes for a giving
ballet;
each tone-
deaf twirl
sharing us back
with an even-
handed air.

I've been in this play before.
I've heard
and spoken these lines.

Will I speak them to you?
I will. But first, about this fly.

I'll tell you about it being
my reincarnated friend, Smita.
She's back to swim in my ointment.
She's back
to tell me it's okay to be
careless with what you wish for.

Her soul would fly up among my wishes.
As a fly she can't fly anywhere
but around me, so she flies to where
I stand and stays in my hand.

I take her
back to that stage where we began.
With no mouth to speak her lines
she still gives them to me. I would say:

"She never understood.
I only ever wanted to love her."

within the seconds of this,
my second time.

But Smita has me say only
"Love," instead.

The pearl slapdash of the moon is on the water.

It won't linger there long, so drink up and take back
your legs from wavering's pumpkin lip, before they slip
and are lost in a slurp of mucky goodbyes.

The ruby blush of the sun is on your shoulder.

It will fade with a mounting calm, unless you dive in
and cast off that dithering squirm of a pout.
Afterward we'll sip, now is the time for devout swims.

See that tree
looking angry with broad
and black arms
low and at the ready
to barge in?
It's there, but put out your
cigarette
and don't think about it.
What I tell

you not to, you know you'll
do, so think
instead of the black-white
woodpeckers
who hang at bird feeders
upside down
and who sound like squeak toys.
Now don't think
about them, how they might

scar happy
trees with arms raised to blue
and a sense
of distance. While your heel
scuffs the ****
out on the walk, you won't
be thinking
about the angry tree
before you.

The sweet-meets-
nothing I said,
wasn't at-all
sweet but it was
nothing, unlike
the some-things-
said by better
for better-haves
sake, in their own
lesser-than-
less original rite,
and it's that
nothing-unlike
I'm quite fond of.

The beauty of it is
none of this,
and all of its
beauty, not the triumphant blue
of a jay’s bluest coup
unsettling the mature greens
and their younger leaves
to topple one cardinal’s redness
and its calm,
not it or the uplifting, baleful grays
that follow to chase
it and us, with the dense, clear drops
pristine brown soils savor,
no, not one moment of it
or the us who share in it,
will last, can last
any longer or matter more
than that instant
my no longer innocent eyes steal
a glimpse of your smile.

They are. What are we becoming?
It's rote, I know. It's rote.
It all bares my repeating. He wrote,

though not to me,
"The first prerequisite of defiling
a corpse is a corpse."
And I thought, Of course.
We've become
experts in their making. And his point,

the point I didn't think
needed making, not at this point,
again, yes, again,
yet again,
is how many we're making.
We're making them

without a second thought
or guess.
With an ease and a quickness,

and we're finding them,
once made,
hard to be rid of, hard
not to accept
as ours, except
when we've become them.

Blind skies have gleaned
their stories from the strumming of the bored,
but they do change them.
They rearrange them,
their outcomes, slightly,
and, when they retell them,
the words fall back to us lighter,
delightedly so, than they were before.

It's just us.
We've heard.
It's just us, more called,
and they shared this secret:
Those blind skies aren't blind at all.
They only pretend
not to see, as they bend
the wind to help us.

They let us think,
The movement's thanks to me,
when we tell our shortened tales
where the Lord doesn’t deliver us.
We tell them to no-one
and anyone in particular,
by pecking our thumbs with an irregular,
scratched-out beat.

It happens too when they slow us down,
and we punch-in our excuses.
I would have gotten here sooner
in fact, but the tactless crow I followed
took a crooked path.
That's when not-blind skies wink
and they lift our rhythmic letter-breaths
to become the stuff of linty pockets.

Some day, one day,
not a spare hour or minute
but the splittest second before
a glory-less death,
our stories will snow back on us.
We'll hear them
and the words will feel
familiar, though a little more gray.

Then the smallest voice
we've ever heard,
somehow both ours and theirs,
will say, *The gist is got
but the endings are not
quite right. Yet,
I admit they're also righter
than my telling's long-ago was.