O, cry morning,      sun breaks again

In that history of banalities
Are written, I finished the cigarette
Before the coffee, twirling wind

O, sigh morning      as inverted

Could carry me to the rock wall, thinning grey,
Of the house where egos, bruised, seek guidance
The black bird builds a decoy nest

O, shy morning.         churlishly answering questions never

Asked before, “nah-uh, nah-uh, nah-uh,”
(A ****** is heard, of most[ly] fowl)
Spoken mostly to the fact:
It is what it is. Acceptance

O, belie morning.          builds a brutalist window, round by row

The they that walks whistles low with nebulous intent
To remind itself to forget
Abysm is a stranger in your city streets.

O, blithe morning.          Such cringing in place

Of those sleeping hours, parsing the drop-ceiling’s
Calligraphy: kings be draped in robes of flesh
To depose the anarchists in cerebral lands,


O, yes, my morning.                     a lechery for the heart,

That religion of my given path
Or its surrogate, the lawful rebels
Writing on every city row, so willing but rough,

My guest, O, my morning,                         such a pity!

Restless and genuflect, the they does not find itself
Swayed by the largess of absence
Craning neck eastward toward the perfect morning,
Ever on the cusp of the perfect twilight.

Branches on the path did the rest of the work for me:
All I had to do was tear the rest of the canvas off my
Vans. The rubber sole floated where I threw it, bobbed
Whitely out of view. Now, tell me we can go
To my beloved 60s, the ones I know nothing about
While under umbrella’d leaves just touching the creek
We’re stealing kisses, my heart rides on box-car hitches
And rusted out Fords, all the way to absolute nowhere
But, something mauve glows down the way, utopias
And despots and kids who gave a ****, knew what
They ought to fight for and did. Skip the ambiguity,
Stop all the foreplay, give me something real this time
While I drag my bones in a hometown I wasn’t born in
Praying the trees take back the concrete. I don’t know,
Say it’s the whiskey and cigarettes making me uneasy,
But there’s some elegance in the way I saw her move
That makes fidelity a hard, loving hand, just a little too
Hard then I’ll take my borrowed wings some vague
Direction north, past the towers of Lebanon,
Laid to rest with highschool friends, both dead
In wax and paper, tied in all these loose ends.

Water can go anywhere and I’d like to say
Where it wants to go. It screams through
A tea ***, or through the stone-sized hole
In the glass. If I shut-off from the way it
Picks up dirt in the grout, the vibrations
From downstairs will scatter it nowhere.
TV you aren’t watching becomes likes
Gossip; and below is an advertisement for
White crosses on the highway not too far
From me. This is one of many nights I
Couldn’t be bothered in, even by a calling
Star. The breath of missed time between
Us speaks to someone long gone, besides,
It won’t move me with electricity constantly
In my ears. If it happens to fall, I’ll wish on
It, in spite of facts I’m committed to for
Something slow and radical, like contentment.
Now, that’s empty and ponder-worthy, as rain
Falling from space, ready to mindless move
Across the kitchen, graciously squeezed from stone.

I gave the dog a bone
And he gives me God instead
The god, a bone, I gave;
And with that bone, he fled.
Great battle lines were drawn
By infinitives of legion-men
Both skirting around the split and splice.
But, ****, those FANBOYS can’t finish
Anything.

Monosyllables to polysyllabic concerns:
A pittance for pity resenting the night
All is well, or not.
I am the same, though less than gratified;
I am your sexlessness and wandering bestfriend
Faithfully attent to the lovers’ fight
Between the hopes longer than a day,
And the stilted, crude truth
All wonderfully thumping behind plaster and stone
In that I can make my predictions,
Perhaps because I’m a part of that love
I’ve heard it before and watched it float off into space
A repeat has no better outcome,
But we’ll always be wondering their fissures
And openness, when I abandoned care too late;
Where was apathy when I needed it most?

The day will exhaust itself if it keeps running away;
Shadows may fetch its hills as they fetch the floors—
There is all the grime of family life portraiting
Seamy corners perfumed with stale smoke
Blackened as it comes with twilight,
Narrated by cracked smiles and “some’re” teeth
Stories of the happy winds, the simple views
Pits of bromide comforts and steely prides
And all around resilience to spiting one’s face.
Even as the sky waxes intense the pink of waning day
I find no hope in the west, but a weight pressing
On the very outcropping of my birth—
These modern monks, these pretty babes
Calmly lie in for the new day; it is behind the mountain.
It is from there the stars themselves unfold
From their translucent dirt and the last beautiful word
Of home is heard, something like country tears
And watching myself grow too fast for my liking,
The stars are not ready for counting,
They’ve lost that allure
Puffballs glow on the hill, lost souls on the grazing lands
Finding, at once, where the winds of change will take them
Everywhere, nowhere, freed and sobbing and mocking the
Birds and the flowers all praising themselves natural,
Taking my lungs’ air to the milky distance
As it starts to run and on and so on…

I’ve had small rains beat on my glasses before
And they have been worse, from the inside, and quieter
And much less poetic;
At least, there is wind to lick me dry here
At least, there are petals fat with sweet water
At least, there are stars on the corners of my eyes
At least, it rains outside me now.
If it floods in on the pavement,
And my glasses fog up when I go back in,
At least the soothing patter was wanting me,
And didn’t care if I spoke or not.
I chose to remain quiet and let storms pass
When they’ve formed high above these
Mixing, curious hands because all that keeps me dry
I’ve left inside of wooden clocks
Around the mossy roof of fallen beams
The welling pool where stupid ducks land
Does nothing for thirst, but divines the oils
A laxness of my limbs and skin glisters like a monitor
No longer need to be told to go anywhere,
I see great whales of rains bold against the surface
Draining in a vortex a pierced reminder
I’ve washed my hands too much, an urge to break mountains
To level ocean floors, for love, for pity, for awe—
All taught and told with a whole dry face.
There is no hero but the hero of undoing
And I’ve not learned enough of comfort
Between the walls that crush moment after moment
And all I can call home, is a kind of dance in the rain
Adrift from the music and all on my own.