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.

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.

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."

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.

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. "You
didn't come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what's inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you'll become
when you no longer come
here."

Most don't listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

‘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.”

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

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.

When the coin dropped, it drops
with a clang. Clanging's
a kind of language. A kind coin,
it coins me as phrases. Its careful
words are phrased not to spend me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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
.

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."

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

I'm the old man who can't tell time any more
what lies ahead.  Any way he tells it,
what he'll tell it is always
how he's become more or less himself,
less the more.  He sits
a broken dish
down, and watches the hours run off
the end of his spoon.  It's the same way,
the exact same way
his medicine slops, when he tries to
stop his palsied hand from pouring it.  Oh, how
he'd like to run
off or away or on and on about it
after learning the moon doesn't turn
blue waiting for her cow.  She turns her face for you
not to see her giggle
at the thought of how a cow might plummet.

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.

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.

It’s not just bowed wood slats
singed till tar-black
on that bushel basket
keeping your brilliance pinned.
There are mediations of glass
and twirls of brass fittings
regulating its bold flame down
to dull orange glow.
Smash it all,
obtuse and obscuring.
Where will your light go?
To heavens and its birthing.

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.

A dozen starlings
dozing in the evening sun
doesn't dare the season's end.

It dozen-n't, dare it,
these dozing within warm pinks
to dream up spring's spry bend.

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.

I don't like it
repeating myself
I do like it
repeating others' sounds

This hissing fits
the night's shut eyes
it fits, the hiss,  
its missing ears

I won't miss it,
the hiss. Where does the air
slip, when it stops
repeating after me?

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.

this dark-proud night doesn't fall, its partner light
leaves. i did fall, falling into a night
that was hidden. i fell, and i'm falling
toward a too shy infallibility. the failing
light is where sleep loves, but love can't sleep,
not when there's night to break, and light's promise to keep.

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.

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.

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."

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.

The fly on the wall
stalled, its small
head pointed
n
w
o
d
,
not to listen in
but to black glisten in
the reflected light,
the wall's, and then fly

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.

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.