Shut our door,
they want our light,
don’t let them in —
mosquitoes.

Our ears will buzz
and we won’t rest,
through bite and itch
the moon will pass.
With neon glow
under our skins,
our dreams of us
will fade like stars.
You’ll slap me twice
for all my faults
and say, “There goes
another one,”
as we both lie
behind covers
and restless plays
the scapegoat.

We’ll blindly rap
'till sun peeks up
and wince at greet,
“Good morning.”

There are places you exist
in a flowing green dress
that kneads against your body
with every passing breeze
and sand nips at your heels
as you curt by tonned blocks
of cement that smother grass
just off the sidewalk.
They nuzzle киоск stand,
and long to lift self up
to a sea-blue, backdrop dream
that dissolves for years (and years)
and erodes to sewers beneath
with every Charlotte rain
and crumble once again;
a gray-eyed contrast true
of beauty vining through
a city that snuffs roots.

You, and there you go.

Lamb and sheep
lay side by side
and goes
the earth below.

Awake at rise
of sun and skies
because
they do not know.

That men do fight
and **** and thrive
on blood
of other men.

Of food and life,
of grief and strive,
no yield
nor without bend.

Through hills and lakes
the nocturnes sound
and still
knowledge eludes.

Or do they lie,
not with their mouths,
because
they know the Truth.

For they will live,
and we will die;
Cattle,
their keep alive.

And so they sleep,
stories they tell
themselves
in bleat and baa.

They do not speak
of what they can’t,
how true
can sophists be.

For with the sheep
and lamb we lie,
we lie
to keep alive.

The truth is
spring broke open,
I wish it were winter again.
Bodies about, walking
arm in arm and
no matter how much
I practice pacing my steps,
dodging the torn-cornered
slabs of concrete
to avoid breaking my stride,
my confidence, my ankle,
I always seem to stumble
with a hand interwoven in mine.

Dexterity seeps out
through my heels,
but lets be honest,
boots aren't the best attire for
sturdy, balanced walking.
This weight
(I'd guess)
presses down on my shoulder
where the collarbone meets
whatever the other bone is called,
and the person is on a stepstool
(yes, there's a person),
floating next to me as I move
and the his heel of his palm,
the meaty part,
presses where the bones meet
(could be, I'd guess, a very masculine She)
and leaning forward, tiptoed
on the top step and
the weight is coming down hard.

How anyone could walk like that!
Me, the town *******,
the drunk staggering about
trying to keep footing.
Even thinking it, projecting it,
makes it true,
especially when arguing,
no, just receiving a nice, hearty
reprimanding from babushkas
(a group of them)
with their knit hats abloom,
selling cabbage and honey
outside the Belarusian kiosk.

Now, I know what you're thinking,
and yes, the honey is delicious;
but just because they're together
doesn't mean they need to be.
Boiled cabbage and honey
for colds.
And honestly, it's not the weather
to be stopping on the sidewalk
in jeans-shoes-tee-shirt
only to hear curses
(no, not swears — lit. curses)
spat out crooked mouths,
clinging to you
all the season through.

A ***** sent into the ground
and a water bottle spills over
with the energy of a page read
in distressed silence after hours.

The truth is that no man
or woman
waits for no one when being
sent off to a deserted plane
on a 6am flight, eve
of the new year.

It’s comical to believe
that things follow one
another in the day-to-day
reality and trenches of
day-in day-out, kiss-another
to get one’s fill and float.

He waits and she waits,
but it’s him and her with
“and” being the operative.
"And," leading the way
in the wait for what
must make sense.

And sensing the ground
in flight keeps you up,
late into the night
contemplating the “and,”
and the “but,”
and the games we play
with language.

A barren home,
but not of things,
where silence wanders
curiously
down the empty halls.
"Who's there?"
She stands to peek
through door ajar
at the dust  ::BOOM::
on the floor.  ::BOOM::

Nothing's stirred
and all's in place
and all is still
but subject’s face:
fieldstone hues
and wrinkles too.
A desol't eve
in fickle blue,
she’s marching dusk
with throated heart.

Purpled cirri
and pinholes white
high above her
stalwart ceiling.
Shunted thought.
Listless thunder.
Turn on heel
to pinioned sleep;
a reeling sanct,
an effete lover.

Wrinkled hands
will chatter hymns
on a bustled sidewalk
where the blind
can nearly eye
an escalating steam,
the burning energy
from indiscernible means
and still the echoed singing
is sung song too far gone.

“No thing to some thing.”
She omitted the return.
He was waiting for it,
oh so patiently.

Echoes wander round
while deep into my knees
the splintered bony compact
from moonlight-late retreats
and chewy marrow screaming
from in between your teeth.
We chant a near return,
a spine-tingling scene
of empty pews contemplating
Friday chapel peace.

The walls drip yellow.
My teacup is ridden
with thoughts driven
from buzzing and Queens.
They claim glory.

A skyscraper tastier
than dew from street sewer
with gray, AM haze
as people jut sides
to climb, slip snidely
atop, cut voices in lies,
rushed by without flicker,
a thought for
ever-blackened drop
of dark roasted, cig-toasted
coffee drowned by a cup.

So, taste it now,
your lips of grounds
in café chair
on dirtied walk
is unaware
of rays in sky
and earth below
and earth below
the pounding thump
that make World go.

Grabbed honey-stuck tips
from a table of glass
and sweet, sutured lips
from ignorance.

I've never worn a peacoat in July,
until today. Today will be the first time
I've ever gotten goosebumps from
open subway windows on a
lightning blue underground.

I'll need a hat too,
anxiety and age has
removed what was left
of my skull cap and if
I don't tend to my head
I'll catch a chill.

Stale summer smell
still lingers in the kitchen air.
From the balcony I see many men,
men walking alongside my
building below in shorts
and tank tops,
pretending they can still feel
fingertip rays from the sun.

But they know it's gone.
For today, maybe the week,
the heat has gone off in search
of a more deserving city
for the time being.

Pretending won't make these men
feel it, but hope keeps
their leg hair raised on point,
similar to the hackles of the runt of the litter
when he snarls for the last piece
of meat in a *****, metal bowl.

Stranger, I'm sorry.
I haven't met
You yet,
but when I do,
I'm afraid that all I'll feel
is warm limbs
and dusted lips.

Again, I'm sorry,
but not wholeheartedly.
Too much at stake.
I've too much time
that cannot be spared.
And these flames,
they won't dissipate.

I can't have it happen
because when it does
these feet will be doused
and my heart will explode
from not running about.

You'll become them,
my passions,
and, needless to say,
they're jealous of me.
They cannot share.
I am so loved.
I am so loved.

I'll shut it out,
You, for now, because
I'm afraid it may come too soon.
I pray you know that
I can't amble yet.
I've still too much to do.

When the winds die down
and the light through the trees
throws ghosts against the walls
of your cul-de-sac room,
if you could, please conjure
an absent smiling me.

My cherry-chewed gums
from salted taffy sweets
will swiftly scuttle back
beneath your bed sheets
to nibble at your coming
and splayed, white teeth.

And the bees will continue
burrowing their hives
in my rotting flower box
late into the fall
because they can't let go.

A dirtless ditch,
you tongue the plains
and stretch numb arms
in sleeves of ink.

Eroding stone
and carmine vines  
claw into shoulders
and dry eyes.

Please heed my words
escape artist.
I would not lie
on withered leaves.

With rope and wall
you cannot climb
so high to fall
and deaden nerves.

Hands tingle now,
needles alive
like clouds and slate
that built the skies.

Throat thresh and whine
at coal-charred mouth
while legs do shine
angelic fright.

Wolves prowl the grounds
to kiss the cheeks
of those they yearn
to eat but twice.

A need for none
is apex sin
that Love does not,
with ease, forgive.

Look up to sky
with smirk alight,
and stretch your arms
so wide.

A stray dog's brow
shows only strength.
There is much hope
for you.

You pace in circles.
I speak in smoke rings,
an occasional finger-snapped heart,
a masted boat if I could.
Away away to ocean
in long-legged strides.
Waves crash against the sides,
left, front, and right,
in ripe blueberries and whitewash.

Come to the cabin,
a tail of breadcrumbs,
keep your socks striped,
pinks and purples.
A David Austin rose, or three.
I'm not cohesive either.
Flaunt the ship's wheel,
solid oak, dark, mesmerizing,
nearly your eyes now.
Let gray skies form clouds,
don't pray for better weather.
The rain grumbles hunger,
veiled moonlight stretches its arms
down to slatted deck,
spraying it in gangtag graffiti.

Stay here, circles more on the floor.
Your hips, footprints up your toes
from a whiskered mouse with dusted nose.
He's escaped and curled up
the nook of your ankle.
Eighteen knots tangle your hair.
Call the winds to come in storms,
they'll surely lead the way.

"I can tell you that Dada was a leftist,
anti-bourgeois, non-Art birthed from WWI
and not some aleatory root to postmodernism
off-shot from a lurid acid rain.
I know that diffraction can be seen
on horizons in the early morning hours
of summer along smooth or dentate curvatures
and that it can have hues of blue, purple and
a soft-handed massage of orange that gingerly
applies pressure to your retinas with sugar-water.
If only eyes had lips that opened and closed.

"It is said that action is the birth of Manyness
and that non-action brings one's soul back to the Sage Mind,
the universe of Oneness, the cup longing to be fulfilled and how
upon brim overflow it longs to be empty once again
because of the relationship between Yin and Yang
and how one cannot Be without the other
and why perspective can change "full" to "empty"
so that the vicious cycle can never truly, truly end.
The difference between French Vanilla ice cream
and plain Vanilla is the degree of creaminess.
Fill up a bathtub and let it soak into my skin.

"There is no way for me to avoid being prolix about the things
I speak about in normal, day-to-day conversation. Science and reason
have accursed me to traverse this reality with the utmost care and precision
of language and society has forced pseudo-logic down my throat like
a bird screeching as it is forced past my pharynx and larynx.
Its sounds are amplified, beak-blared from my nostrils, and its wings are violent,
stretched against my neck skin, creating a pale-skinned, ship anchor image from my shoulders up.
I'll try to sing for you when you reach my trapdoor, I don't wish to eat you.

"I do not believe in anything because with everything comes a something,
a reason for its being. They are, 'from reason,' 'in reason,' and/or, 'for reason.'
There is no escaping this thought.
There is no escaping criticism.
I will find the Truth, mathematically calculated to infinity
from knowable circumstance and perception.
I will know everything and I will believe nothing."

Pigeons are water-birds carved from stoicism.
When feet approach, they disperse, reconnect,
and continue, leaving me completely perplexed.

I can never tell the difference
between their calling of mate
and battle for territory.

Both actions are so absurdly similar.
I watch for days, chasing them
and their thirty-yard flights with my coffee in-hand.

I've traveled to the Rockies of Colorado
from the *****, Lower East Side of Manhattan
by rusted, dring-belled and horned bicycle.

Cool winds helped sail me across forest trails
and I slept, albeit briefly, on park bench ports;
they attract my current muses and, in turn, me.

These winter-jacketed birds tend to puff up and coo and dance
in front of one another defending their plumage,
their right to be, where they are, for what fills them whole.

One will stare at another, the other never looks back.
One will bump another, the other never touches back.
One will chase the Other and then gently caress its wings,

as if to stab, "Stay a while, partake in the sidewalk feast."
One wants in, the other out; they both want in
so I'll be headed home now.

A bag of bricks
hammered my knees
and I fell back
into my seat.
It could've been
the lack of sleep
that surely caused
my eyes to cross.
And before I knew
up what happened
my ****** reaction
sent mind spinning.

Red and spots
across my vision,
fireworks on
my students' faces
and words I mixed,
I wasn't there,
phrases for parks
with wine eyed glances
and starry looks
and cold, blue irises
with lime diamond leaves
and cream spring breezes
blown on by
the longing hidden
on a picnic blanket,
spread out, limbs numb
on a picnic blanket.

But this time
it was wide.
This time I tried,
I did, I spoke
myself out.
I talked it all
through to me,
for me to hear.
I needed a,
"Why not?"
and of course
I had had it
stock-piled up
in storage.
Boxes upon boxes
of, "Because."

Nearly convincing,
nearly enough
to keep me,
keep me silent,
but my voice
soars above
and I lie
staring at
ouroboros
dancing around
in straight-lined,
patterned flames.
D-Dragging
their feet,
eating themselves
again, devouring
and smiling,
inviting me to feast.

Daylight to look out a window
and midnight to see into one.
Say some name three times
at a candlelit face, a flashback
to fear at such a young age.
These were stories that were told
to us by older brothers and sisters
during our weekend sleepovers.
We're mirror images of them
no matter how old we grow.
Children playing in the snow
in the coldest of northern winters,
making a snowman, giving a name,
topping him with a black-ribboned hat
and an added lit cigarette to allow
easy passing of a lampless evening
faced an overbearing, light-speckled sky.

The image passes away in the day,
everything melted to bring spring
anew to the streets and city pools.
Clean them out, remove their stories
from the past year for the new ones
to come. Crop your face to bring light
back in and to tabula rasa our crevices.
Spiderwebs and crows feet.
Let your frame pass into the attic
to lean on your dusty, keylocked journals
and that 19th century armoire
that has no place in your place anymore.
Tell me those stories, tell me your stories.
Tell me your stories, and I'll tell you mine.

Pick a length
and focus on it.
It could be somewhere
or on something,
key word here is "on,"
"is," is also poignant,
but focus long enough
and it'll surely blur.
What I mean to seem
is that attention
dissolves and lens
blends retention.

Distance exists more
within hypothetical thought
than in the connection itself.
Contemplate stepping into
a dirt-stirred puddle with
hidden depth and shape
on your daily sidewalk walk.
Never step in it, never;
it'll up past ankle.
Wet shoes and squish,
you're looked at. Rush past
another walker, cold feet, another walker.
It, they, them, out: be limbless.

On the wall, pick a spot.
See a wall be not.
See it tall.
Can you see it?
Is it there?
Make sure it's there,
because it is it is
it is a wall.
Focus. Spot.
Now see you.
"See," is the question.
Can you see you?
See you at me stare.
Let it bend blue
and walk ******* the
ice-covered sidewalks.
Step hard and step fast.

It was January of 1994
when he told me, "Son, true love,
well, it's hard to come around."
Or maybe he said, "come by."
I can't remember exactly.
Memory is foggy, age, you know.
I never thought I'd ever say that.

I've had a pet since I was born.
Not the same one, they always end
up dying. I haven't gone a year
without one close by me.
Before bed, I pucker my lips
and pretend to kiss twice
behind both ears while whispering
to them, "Goodnight." Then,
I lightly scratch their sanctum,
be it cage or kennel, so they know
I am no ghost; I am truly there.
Dog, cat, rat, it doesn't matter really;
they all just blankly stare back
and continue with their nightly business.

"If you love something, it can
never leave. Only hate can
drive others away, and that,
that's called, 'self-hate.'"
Then he laughed,
he laughed out with stretched
cheeks and gold-capped teeth
and that "eyeglasses-off" look
as if the world was deaf,
blind, and dumb. His
white collar crisp, stiff
with starch. That morning was ours.
Within earshot, the cat was mewing,
awaiting our kitchen entry where,
in the white-walled corner, sat his bowl,
staring at the ceiling, brown, dry, stale.

That morning always comes back to me
like a child returning from school.
Homework on the table and a snack
to eat just before rushing out to
meet up with the neighborhood kids for
a game of football down the road.
They've surely had talks like ours, Dad.
They've rubbed noses and brushed
pink cheeks of late lovers, flashed back
to mother and wrestling with brother.
Those important conversations
that only return with age,
we all remember them.

I've been gone
a long, long time.
I can't even
recognize
reflected eyes,
in and of that
god-awful lake.
Distant glaze.

They're blue.
Been so long
that time's flown
over our heads
down into
what was before,
below our bench
that sat above
the edge of Was,
our lake away.

Words, rough cut
of meat along
the bank. Etched
into the dirt
by my deep, deep
breaths. Heavy wolf
at my side, never
fed, never enough.
Claws me, my
abdomen deep,
gnaws the words
in the ground,
but his mouth
will never be
wide enough
for them or me.

Sorry poor baby,
I'll pray for you too.

Two rats locked up
that write the time
and play all day
and you love them.

A meter cubed
is their whole life.
You peer inside
and you love them.

Their dirtied floor
marks thirty more
grey days of waste
and you love them.

But once in a while
you'll take them out,
they'll climb about
and you love them.

Across your pants
and up your sleeve
to sniff your ear
and you love them.

A sudden move,
they scare with ease.
They **** and ****.
You grab their necks.

You put them back
and curse their feet
that beg retreat
and crawl and scratch.

And from afar
you hear them squeak
and claw the cage
and you love them.

Just keep them there
all safe and sound.
To you, they'll pray,
and you'll love them.

It was in a musky instrument shop
that I found myself hungry, so hungry.
I didn't know any Russian.

I told the old cashier,
a small woman with a brown bun-top,
that I'd really like some food.

She cocked her head,
shook off the dust, and jarbled back at me.
"Please," said I, as dough-eyed as one could muster.

She pointed to the door.
My belly grumbled.
I fell away sideways, walking out all lowly-like.

I began through the doorway
and the shopkeeper woman screeched.
I heard a moan come from above me.

There stood a 9-foot-tall, Slavic boy,
plagued with acne, hooked nose, and sallow cheeks,
with a metal clamp around his neck, right next to the door frame.

I thought he was drapes, ragged window drapes,
but he existed there and then with hands the size of cantaloupes.
The shop keeper whined and pointed at the boy.

I looked up at him,
and he, down at me.
She spat into a tissue and then shooed me again.

I grabbed his chain off its hook
and stoically proceeded out the door.
The boy dragged his feet behind me, begging and crying.

A cliff of weathered stone and moss
with tamped dirt approaching edge
smiles down on cool sea below.

Sun rising on the eastern coast
wears shoes for diving,
a gainer off into the light breeze.

She stands with arms through her coat sleeves
watching with one open hand inviting Fate.
Photography is the death of living the moment.

Sun nimbly on the trapeze,
lose trust and surely
she will be thrown.

Dance, my Sun,
bliss will come
to those who run.

Embrace her fate
or likely it
will dissipate.

There was a Truth
in murk-settled water.
I'll sit at the surface
and remember past wrongs.

Stirred lake was below us,
the eels and a catfish,
but towered above
the sun shone down warm.

A dead masquerade,
you kicked for the surface.
Your body, it rippled
a silhouetted sky.

Dead hum underwater
our eyelids were liquid.
My jellyfish back
absorbed the tanned rays.

Ingest your diffraction,
a hunger astray.
A dry-land discov'ry:
it was my legs aflame.

The murk was in you.
The murk was in you.
Dear God, I was clean.
Dear God, I was clean.

A seat at the table
to pray for the lake.
But what does it matter?
Wash my hands to eat.

There's ***** on the train ride home
and I'm sitting next to it.
It's not on purpose, of course.
Mind you though, I cannot say,
for sure, that it isn't mine.

Putrid, 2am wetness
rises into my nostrils.
From floor, this airborne form
lacks the blacked-out, bile-wine color,
but the stench more than makes up for it.

I'm in and out of consciousness.
"I'm just tired," I swear to the ticket-ticker,
"and my memory mind haunts me."
That's why I truly do not know
whose what this belongs to.

I should bag it and take it home.
With cooled hand on warm, glass cup,
gulp it down and let it simmer.
Chunked broth, swished bitter,
headached pieces puddled on the floor.

I'm not home yet, I've got an hour to go.
Seat reeks, I smell. Hands tremble and a girl laughs.
The train begins moving and I without it.
Can you taste the sickness?
I still do, my mouth fills out with it.

Bare feet chuckle in the snow
crunching around on foliage,
warmed by fire in the chest
but not close enough to deny
the primal image of this hunt.

Silence in the falling,
the action creates sound
and sends prey afoot,
bounding for shelter
beneath the sapped pines.

Dancing alone through gap camouflage
in rhythm with wind that sighs,
watching on in anticipation
for completion of lives
so horribly intertwined.

Summer would hate these winter woods,
freezing in the bones that creak
and whine as if stray dog
gnawed at them tenderly,
savoring every grind and salivation.

So chilled and trembling,
frost on the eyebrows and hooves.
Breath in clouds, solid snot on lip,
aching for sunlight to show
deepening footprints in the snow.

Memory comes quickly and goes faster still.
Childhood blurs and bends from the action
to nostalgia to nothing to a surprise visit
and ultimately, back to nothing.
It's never formal, opting out of knocking
before entering with muddy sneakers
and corn-butter-dribbled chin.
The hues of a late, summer afternoon
filled with fireflies and barbecue smell
connect the doorbell circuit
and make itself at home
before ears or legs can bid welcome.
Smile and greet one another breathless
only to depart at a moment's notice
as if the nomad suddenly realized
that no crop or solace remains.

So distinctly different
than that of a severed relationship,
which typically takes its bitter, sweet time.
For months, that fracture can stay and continue asking
for another Earl Grey and bowlful of discontent,
adding in spurts of lonely self-conversation
every several, silence-ridden hours.
Eventually, ever so carefully and quietly,
it tip-toes away with lip-marked cup and peacoat
at the moment when you've unwillingly returned
from the kitchen to fill pained guest's requests
but the only thing that remains
are indents in the leather armrests
and moisture gone cold.

Flashed across mind's eye and on its way.
The hollow fills itself endlessly with present
and distantly connects with past to find
that neither can be here while the other exists.
Start again and re-ember remembering,
drifted away on a silent plane
of glazed eyes and wide smile.

Dodge the sunlight escaped your fingernails
that claw for chests unlike your own.
Full of pep and beating and turquoise
and leaves in strands of hair
standing upward aft your vessel.
What was it exactly that you mentioned
when we were afloat the houred
current of delirious eye-gazing?
Something of abashed lashes
and nervous cheek twitching.
We had never stared for so long.
We had never conversed with the ferocity
of ten men praying to the floor
on hands and knees with closed eyes
on mat and chest;
a chest so unlike your own.

That sunlight radiates.
No, too common, too Not.
Help me with your interpretation:
It inexplicably adjectives
across the scraps of dregs
and scrapes of rope
tied too tightly to beliefs
that would never sway to connect.
A loss of connection of mind
and body and voice and spirit
and Other,
a parlance in the wind without
ears to receive or understand the call,
call him a headless beggar,
which has that chest,
that chest so unlike your own.

Lines of coal take form, again and again, on this coldbound evening
as blackened fingers and wear reveal prints typically unseen.
Beautiful and unique and hurricane lightning tattooed yellowed paper.
It was untouched, like the charcoal, for ages as it sat in the corner
underneath the easel gathering dust and cobwebs.
It seems that the spiders have had a plentiful harvest this autumn,
what a shame to rid them of their feast this month.
It'll be winter soon and they're going to need it.
What creation is permissible by destruction? Any?
None?

Can I make up for it, I promise:
I'll draw them a web and weave you into it.
You and I and They: we'll all feast.
We on Art and they on flesh.
They'll never miss those material pleasures ever again.
They'll never need to build or wait or **** or eat.
We'll never need to either, not after this,
this momentous occasion of focus and dedication
when my arms and lamplit desk burn from satisfaction
and our faces grimace at the completion
of something so wonderful, on paper.

My compliments are currency
on nights so filled with lunacy
and my billfold's not empty
for this made-up prostitution ring.

So what's the going rate tonight
for such a vivid beauty
'cause I'll haggle like, "You're just so right,"
with million dollar poetry.

What consciousness is it they have
when dressing and perfuming:
Is it I who play a simple game
or they who do the choosing?

And I who lack the self-control
of ending empty mornings
while sleep just turns their heavy dreams
to laughter at my mourning.

So when you see those male-eyed hawks
and pity prey they're chasing,
just know their death is coming swift:
the rabbit's hole chokes innards whole.

Beyond the horizon lies silence:
empty-handed and empty-torsoed.

Home no longer entangles our motions of gold and twirling,
so quickly so that our spins become perception itself.
Our hair, previously matted, now catches on nothing.
It flows freely against a wind blown inward,
vacuumed through open windows
on opposing sides of the kitchen,
though and carrying the smell
of freshly baked apple pie, crisply crusted,
a thing so sweet and tasty
that tongue and nostrils beg for more
whipped cream and palate warmth.

They open their mouths and plead,
panting on their knees,
on edge of upper lip
fearing not the fall
for something that would just,
for Heavens sake,
give them something,
anything,
of indescribable necessity.
"Oh please, just another bite!"
dribbles out of lungs
until even the smallest of morsels
are licked clean from plate,
desperately, empty,
in front of all,
for all to see.

The world is everything that is the case.
When it is all eaten up
yummed and stomached fully,
it will be the next green field,
the next orchard on the horizon
with golden apples ripening at sunset
against orange and purple perfect skies
to fulfill that longing for Next.

I sip on scotch and sit here
and secretly, I hope you'll appear.
At first, you'll glance through the crack in the door frame,
I'll look like the intellectual you were missing all this time.
You'll wonder why you ever left and how it was that you thought
you could do without me.
I'll feel the burning of one eye upon me,
so as to keep your furtiveness, your surprise,
but then a second reveals itself, and then your cosmic third.
The desk lamp will shadow your outline
when I slowly, intuitively, glance over my shoulder
somewhat unexpectedly, to you.
My eyes will pry, if only rhetorically, "Who's there?"
and you'll slowly, almost shyly,
though we were never shy with one another,
creak the door open to unveil your then-lit body.
Your radiant figure will send vibrations
through the wooden floor slats into my feet
and I'll begin to feverishly dance,
right then and there,
as if bitten by the largest of tarantulas.
I'll stare in disbelief
thinking that maybe it's the alcohol
which has created this image of you,
or maybe, in fact, I'm devastatingly sleep-ridden,
and so against my heart's common sense
I'll rub my eyes to clear the vision.

You, who haven't shown up night after night,
through all of my writing and pondering
and talking-to-self and drinking
and questioning and driving
and aimlessly-staring and searching
and forgetting and trying-to-understand
and resenting and hating
and loving and forgiving
and grinding and howling
and loving and missing,
but this one night,
this blue moon event,
I guess you could call it that
though it's already passed,
after consuming too much,
you'll appear.

Then I realize,
I am here
and you are nowhere.
Always I think I hear sounds
similar to returning footsteps
barely audible over the taps on my keyboard,
but it's never you.
And so, I continue on,
peeking over shoulder,
awaiting my cliché,
as I sit here and sip scotch after scotch.

Have you ever noticed
that tail lights reflect
off tire-worn roads
when sun and all
have gone asleep?
A pair of red glow
just seems to float
through space
like a reverse halo
behind and below vehicle
on its 2am way elsewhere.
And how about the fact
that windshield wiper and turn signal
never truly-precisely-
exactly-rhythmically sync?
One clicks and blinks,
the other dryly whaps,
on that first swipe,
of course,
just when light mist
begins to stick
and the exit approaches
at a slick
sixty-five-miles-an-hour.
Turn down the volume now,
it's time to pay attention.

Candle wax doesn't always
melt directly inward.
Sometimes it does dome
perfectly,
which makes it
all the more fun
to push further.
Other times it just bows out,
as if to say,
"There'll be no addition
to the amount of light
I'll be giving you tonight.
You'll just have to bend me in
and pray for a split-less base,"
as hours, seeming like minutes,
in minutiae,
are spent burning our tobacco
and circling our teacups
and laughing effortlessly,
indenting pillows and rugs
and us keeping so, so quiet
as not to awaken ourselves.

Waxing is always
a chance worth risking
because, worst case,
we can inflame another dancer
while we chat
and hope that,
just this once,
God help us,
we realize
our stars align.

We spark
the kindling in ritual
as souls dance around us;
our bonfire keeps them at bay.
They never stray,
hoping to hold us, hug us,
whisper missings and tidings of comfort
to steady our bones for passage.

We wait
on rotting logs, gazing toward dawn,
entranced by flames and huddled together,
closely, with wet-iced eyelashes.
Our silent breathing scuttles away
on paths of pale white and moist,
out and sifted through our watchers' chests.
Their voices go unheard.
Who would hear conversation
from depths during an eve of fright?

We watch
the orange-red idol wane in the wind.
Odd, no? Shouldn't it be growing?
They're breaking though to us
so we embrace more closely,
latching, heartbeats bumping one another
keeping rhythm, keeping our stillness,
and fevered hands massage our shoulders,
erasing tensity, stiff limbs, lightness.

Smoke escapes our eye sockets
and they smile at our blankened faces.
Who are these people celebrating?

The mind is cruel when heart is careless
And when they both act they choir in sadness
So into the past they both go hurling
Without thought of time or sleep or madness

But when one acts its action is burning
As all modes of way keep my marble turning
and thinking and rubbed the cloth of cold dress
That night that fire that feeling the yearning

And down so goes and with it tonight
No more is wanting is needing toward flight
Its scent it drips from golden pines pining
What heart could be careless with mind so cruel?
You fool.

"I like my fire white hot
and my skin ice cold."
She talked at me crookedly
as she red-marked the rim
of the scotch glass.
The smokey haze almost masked
what she didn't want hidden.
"I like extremes, polarities, you know...
moving towards them,
pushing too far in a direction
to remove the possibility of return."
Clink-to-coaster.
*** oozed out in crescent-circles,
"I like you."

Her eyes were bloodshot brown,
all that caramel whiskey sweetness.
She had it in her:
all that passion, that lust,
that cruelty to never call again.
Her marked stiletto against my thigh
under that lonely spilled table
spoke volumes more
than her sideways looks.

Although I said nothing,
I had it in me too.
We'd connected.
I liked that
she lived
like that.

A beggar lays chained to concrete,
to skyscraper that stretches past clouds,
breathing aside, neither dead nor alive,
we've given up on his release.
For what purpose does he survive?
When his stomach knots empty,
he curls fetal, hands clench chest,
and sobs escape in pants and whines
and saliva and not an eyelash is batted
toward his cup that silently watches:
It hasn't jangled in days.

Lashes litter the sidewalks
from eyeliner applied while
rushing to an extravagant event
in midtown Manhattan,
lights lips reflections,
where all will will be watching
her every move, her every step.

If he wills himself survive,
we can clean him up
in loving arms of sleep deprived nurses
before we kick him back to the curb,
abandoned again with rip-rotting liver,
while we vultures eye another *****.

But that girl?
She better not trip over Prometheus
or we might just chain her next.

My limbs've caught fire.
Senseless, I no longer know pain
from passion from energy
from subconscious,
all are smoldering in my chest,
and my mind has vacancies
and that burning blackened lightness
flows as heaviness
through my fevered arms
and into my hands
and one of which,
palm up and hand cupped,
stretches out with fingertips starred
for the faucet in the bathtub.

Grasp, twist,
return-turn wrist.
Grasp, twist.

Toes bargained with Feet
and, upon agreement, conspired with Legs
for, what I can only hope was, a hefty price
to absently stumble and stew this body,
raw, in a basin too small for my meat,
and the cast-iron bathtub
will soon boil like a tea kettle
without a screaming spout
and I will steep my mate
without metal mesh and bombilla.
Too hot, for too long, with too little,
but I'll sip it, silently, as it bubbles.
Not a wince,
even if blood spills out my sockets
I won't close these eyes.
Watch them drink of life
as flesh drips down my lips
and reddened cave lights
emerge from the depths
and fill my eyes.

My movements were never aimless:
a body took advantage of my absentmindedness.

Worded arrowheads
are fastened to shafts.
They rain down on
our Love-fed ears.

Bowstring at ready
pulled back high-sky,
They strike down all
who lived this earth.

My soul, infringed,
asked, "How can this be,
with heart shut tight
from melancholy?"

Closed cold, a shield,
I thought could withstand
the force of a blow
guided not by your hand.

The force of a blow
guided not by your hand.
In time the sands
will salt our land.

Your words will crop
my sagging skin
and feed the ground
with hollow chest.

Death for the young
never-held as best,
but for this earth
a heart at rest.

But for this earth,
put Death to rest.
The price of youth,
pays for the best.

Amid wind and thunder, a coming storm,
a September coat rests silently upon my shoulders.
Leaves descend from the bending giants above me,
and still I sit here.

A flurry of passenger-filled cars sets the park spinning underneath me.
These people, they'll all be arriving somewhere soon, but, for now,
they flood my consciousness with homes decorated in aged photographs,
and still I sit here.

They're going there, those places that fill them whole,
with those people that lovingly adorn their company.
Though I don't accept it, I have people like that too,
and still I sit here.

My mind meanders the gravel path to a duck effortlessly afloat on the pond.
Doesn't she have somewhere to fly to too? To South? To warmth?
Maybe she enjoys the safety of my company, and so she contemplates herself,
and still I sit here.

Her wings involuntarily flutter from the assaulting gusts, until,
finally, she gives in. Her wings spread and beat against the water below her,
she's off toward clearer skies, not a thought on her mind, who could blame her,
and still I sit here.

As the sky opens up, drops and drenching, a chill sets inside me
starting with the ears and the fingers and the toes.
It creeps up my arms and legs, it violently spikes my brain
and still I sit here.

We all know where it finally stabs. Yes, you know it,
you've experienced it before. I howl uncontrollably in chorus with the breeze.
There's not a soul around, just the singing towers rooted around me,
and still I sit here.

At home my dinner awaits, it's steaming hot, it begs to be eaten,
but all this sutured heart can do is think about is that **** bird.
I should be going now, it's time to leave that soaked bench,
and still I sit here.

Stare at your bedroom wall
and bard me a story about
the creeks of white between
the sun-patches of blue paint,
the faded yellow of the door
where the damp towel was hung
day after day after day.
Tell me about the mark
of a swept paintbrush
that accidentally destroyed
distinction between wall
and radiator.
They're no longer clean,
either of them.
How are the door handle dent marks
from that hurried moment when
you rushed into your room
away from our argument?
What of those stories?
Will you need a new place
to erase the memories from your mind?
The flies and the walls cannot speak
to anyone but you now.

It's all rotten anyway.
The sweet stink of evenings
spent in an intimate supine,
with a cleaver caught upright
in the cutting board bedpost.
We were atop one another
with our faces to the ceiling,
reading passages of poems aloud
after drenching the bed sheets
in varied indentations.
Cut words and minced gazes,
we grayed as shadows
against those weathered walls.
I remember those walls,
moonlight had reflected off the frames
of littered photographs, those stories,
and created a dance floor pattern of crescents
and plank-meeting-plank askew.
Those walls will tell me stories
even if you decide not to anymore.
I'd buy them all up, I would,
as I do the meat hook-hanging
in the butcher shop.

What is my voice
but a flowing river.
Through boulder and stone
and fall after fall, it goes.
Afloat on its surface,
a piece of thorny bramble-
a smoke-seized throat,
brushed up against an overhanging trunk
at a narrow crossing.

Maybe it's caught there,
a blackened ball of death,
a soft lump that cannot be dissected
by even the most astute surgeon.
My voice gives me character,
is a character,
is my character.

My voice runs through hills like a raging river.

Why does this mutt whimper
while lying on the table
before his euthanasia?
Does he not know of
the lush, oak-covered fields
and meat-mounded hills  
that await him just past the horizon?
Or is it because
his owners do not realize,
a pup inside,
he still has the will to run?

His kicking legs ache as his heart cries, "Why?"

With frosty breath and empty-shell shoes,
I await the steady driver who returns for me,
to hurdle our car down cliff into sea
with cracked headlights and bowtie come undone,
what more could Night or Water honestly have won?

Moon painted gleam masterfully upon my eye
from falling trees and ivy-shined leaves,
whispered in their ears from knoll-bound knaves,
"The sun gone over, never to return for you."
They watch for pleasure, sent-to-ground from dew.

I ramble on and on along rocky coast line
over iron guard rails with trusty companion,
head-tilt weighed a stone above water,
gone plunging in toward black surface below,
face-first and tongue-tied with heart so hollow.

Up, up, awake. All but a dream.
Soaked tie above bedframe,
slept in mustard blood sheets.

All cats,
curious and lazy,
are cleft-lipped.
All humans
are a posteriori-lly
dependent and nosy.

There will be
no scheme, no rhyme, and no reason.

There will be
no rules to abide by
during the production of the artwork
intended to be presented
on the Calling Day,
when all and every
who are to proceed with the ceremony
have guns pointed at their backs
and saber-long thorns dropped,
point-first,
on the tips of their toes.

There will be
no way to tell the difference
between the lines stenciled on the walls,
which wrap from corner-to-ceiling
in spiraled diagonals,
and the blood on the carpet
sprayed out from bullet holes in the flora
that knelt below the windowsill.

There will be
no murmurs of triumph on the Calling Day,
just thoughts escaping the stratosphere
from those who will witness
the living unconsciousness.

Prayers will be
seen scattered
upon the surfaces of stars.
Our lives burnt outward
though our overcast skies,
projected up and up and up,
imprinted as shades
on that day,
the Calling Day.

Easy, my love,
I prefer easy love.

I'll find it in a place where the women swoon
over my desire-frosted blue eyes and granite jaw. It's not you,
it's a need that I must fulfill and it piles higher and higher within
my body, my soul, needing to express itself in soft moans which rise
louder and louder at runner's pace, those looks of longing and lust that begin
over whiskey in a smoke-filled bar, that end amid our scattered bedsheets as her and I
pass a bottle of red back and forth, listening to our soft-spent breathing, our gazeless stares at the walls
of the empty, windowless room, knowing never to see one another ever again, never again on a night like this.

Sadly, it's all I want now,
but above all, I want for nothing.
Gone away, my easy love.

These two things I remember:
the lights dimmed slowly
and then went dark,
and my mouth was filled
over the teeth, to the lips,
with dirt-ripened maggots.

Those little mongrels had grown inside me,
my saliva was their nourishment,
my cheeks, their protection.
They nestled so deeply into my gums,
in the crevices where cavities were to grow
on the walls of their ebony buildings.
We were beautiful
but none would call it symbiotic.

Illumination ran away,
far off, bounded for the infinite fields.
The light lightness left me.
I don't know who was in charge
of sending the charge
through my electric chair.
I grew to embrace the seat,
that splintered piece of wood,
the pain in my sweating palms,
and the metal clasps which restricted my arms.
It gave security to impending doom,
the promise of finite end.
The wooden back
gave rest to my love-ridden bones
so I tongued my friends
straggling about my chops
in comfort and pleasure.
That chair, those lights,
they were empty vessels.
Built for, but never meant to,
fulfill their purposes.

That is,
until a bulge-eyed, masked man
connected the current.
The lights went out
and maggots filled my mouth.

Bubbling liquid in my veins
boiled to temperature my temples can no longer bear,
so the skin splits and flesh lays bare.
It destroys itself, what a clever defense mechanism.
What a putrid smell.
The world around me is smear-splattered in paint,
orange and incision crimson, the two blended so coarsely
that I groan and moan as I writhe on the floor,
cackling echoes down dead metal hallways,
smoothly polished so as not to rip hair off the scalp
of a man who decided, no, it's of necessity,
to press his skull onto the beam to cool himself,
to press his forehead so hard, in,
that his eyeballs begin to bloodshot
and ooze bulge tears out of the sockets,
forcing his desperate, drastic inhale to catch a grain
of stray sand that his teeth grind down on,
back and forth, hard, producing more pain,
imagined into reality as fire and red-hot coal
burn in his mind,
sparked by thought of the life force that flows
through him, and how it kills him to
never escape it. Dependent on something.
Let it die.

I feel for him, that man surrounded
by inescapable, bloodthirsty anger.
He festers. A blanket cradling
a damp patch of moss
left soaking in the corner of the garage,
left to be cleaned another day.
On that day a world is washed away,
and even he burns infernos.

I taste like rolled cigarettes and chocolate.
My fingertips are torched
a bittersweet burnt that comes
from a night of music and
thought-plagued action.
Oil and acne plot my hairline
as I stare through the orange
of the streetlamps to the
stars barely visible above,
tapping my feet to
the tune weaving in-and-out
of our arms and toes
as we cool on the autumned stoop.

Black putouts mark the sidewalk
where we wish to tread like
animal trackers, hunting the next
place for us to eat, to belong,
nomads of the land without true bearings.
Clear sight of the skymap eludes our
grasp, with our hands reaching out
against the never-ending heavens,
searching for real, and its contrast
against real.

And then it hits me:
What a ******* fraud I am.
So much so, that I become
vehemently sick to my stomach.
I ***** the remains of our ****
on the concrete table, and watch
as the deer circle us to applaud
our next musical movement
as we dance to their ancient
hove-stomped rhythm.