I held out my hands.
I placed a drop of soap on each palm
and took hold of my ***** spoon and washed it with my hands,
cupping and spooning it
like my gentle hands were trying to make it croon.
Like it were mated and flipped and slapped
against threadbare slacks.

That spoon is cleaning me,
is washing my hands as I wash its tarnished feet,
it is forgiving me.
For the scalding soups and bitter ice cream,
and not washing it but watching it grow crusted, disgusted.

And while I swoon for my spoon,
and grinning the spinning dizzy grin of Love,
I remember, and give thanks for my feast.
This spoon feeds me like a child on Mother God’s lap,
and kisses me with life, with food.

This soap, and my hands, and this bubbling love between my spoon and I,
it is clean.
My soul is more clean with my spoon.
Cleaner than dog’s saliva licking at old wounds,
but that’s alright,
cause everybody knows ******* love scars, dog.

And women love beautiful spoons,
maybe because of its viscosity, or its gentle curvature,
or the deep loving laugh it invokes,
when it sits on my nose.

My spoon communion left me with pruned hands,
bright eyes,
and a coy smile for what flowers in my mind may bloom.

We drove on
the air outside thick
so hot you could taste it.
The cornfields skeleton fingers of
the homestead graveyard

we drove on
while pools and ponds withered
and left rings of crying cracks in the earth
1, 6, 10 foot below before.
And cattle scrambling for thin shade in the ragged trees
the trees singing the dustbowl blues
like the last grandfathers and mothers who still remember it true

we drove on
in hopes of catching rain
thunder that cracks the sky open to drink.
We chased our shadows in the heat of the drooping sun
thinking and hoping it can't last forever,
that the hot thick air will grow cool and wet
and sweet pungent rain will meet nostrils and aching knees that knew,
it had to come.

We hope and pray because we have so little left,
that if cut open, our veins would flow with water and
not find that we had become only the dust.

I woke up, and my ears were ringing like the Tell-Tale heart.
Ring, ring, ringing like microphone headphones,
the screeching dog whistle in a *****'s bad dreams.

My scream-teen dreams
of Slime Time Lives gone by
drive-bys gettin' high,
drank all the way to drunk
and stayed up,
still alive.
A hangover hunger, eat that screaming meat
till my warm puffy eyes well up with sleep,
wait to wake up and repeat.

Though I breathe easy
I need pleasing,
a fortune in fulfillment and still aches
of incompletion.
Mi hermano dice siempre,
The poor search for food,
the rich search for an appetite.

The peach sits within reach
and for each their own to keep
fuzzy fur and afternoon sleep.
Next door the nooks and crannies and
                    little sets of glowing eyes that peek.
And broken sleep and half-earned yawns.
Rise and stretch and breathe,
but do not speak.
The world is too loud and tired.
Do not speak.

Have we lost you?
Your distant stare and shallow voice seem to
find you elsewhere.
Where else could you be?
Who else could you be?

We live through eyes with glass walls.
And when your glassy eyes twinkle,
my grinning forehead wrinkles;
you speak, but your eyes,
they sing to me.

Matter can never be destroyed
it can only be found again.
So however you choose to live and
lose yourself in the earth,
I will always find your eyes in spring.