In the middle of it all, linoleum and cleaners
I find the shelves of candles and pry off their lids
Just to find out what scents they hid.
No noise, no racket, and nothing meaner.

The balsam fir in craters of wax
A chirstmas tree hunt and sugarsnackes
Recollect times to play and relax
Late December days and skies overcast
The carrides back smelled of this.

Of the wild rose, all pink and flush
Our faces betrayed us after stealing a kiss
And stealing away hidden with a wild blush
When asked just where we were.

I’d say the black bamboo
Where the growing pains began
I remembered what I never wanted to know
Smelling her sweat on my hands.

After every cupcake and fall harvest
We felt torn in two
Amidst the parents and summer’s zest
Everything I wanted couldn’t possibly be true,

The strawberries, the honeybees
Clean linen on a quick, tense rainstorm
I fell to my knees,
Afraid that my passions would
Take on another form.

Far too wild and winterborn,
You have your sleights in sympathy
And obtain what may decorate your court
I amuse you with love: an elegy.

But, the heart is no traitor, not to any court
And says I’m no citizen of your lovely heart
I’m a smiling nomad that goes in due time
And, love, we can trade castles
Since you’re no citizen of mine.

Again, the scents linger with no flame to their wick
Closed were their lids to choke out the burn
Cool were the insides, like ash in an urn
A single spark dazzles but goes out too quick
Each smell left unfamiliar may not have you
It’s not you and me, but me and you and you and you.

…your faith, the pool on which
My pebble skips. Your faith only ebbs. If
I could, I’d steal ashore and
Cast a whole beach for…

…and quite becoming, disillusionment.
Old and young children are holding their legs
At the terminal of a new life,
new…

You say you saw the void?
Look into these eyes—
You do not see
The transparency of space
A nostalgia of regression when the
The mountains seemed so much smaller in your youth—
Not in these eyes.
You don’t see the void, but the future,
Not blackness, but the future,
Not the future, but the past,
Like all of us clairvoyants.
You close your eyes to see the world
Through clean mantras
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Looking back as their gaze looks forward
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Sounding the woolen past
And eerie comfort of rest
Like all of us clairvoyants.
Reading your own future
While reading others’
Like all of us clairvoyants.
There is no such thing as darkness anymore,
A truth you know well since
All truths are certainly true and false.
Wait for the light through the window
To scan the floor;
Every person is a lighthouse
Searching wildly in the dark
And in storms, ships will land
With or without permission
And you’ll laugh alongside them
With or without provisions.
Show me your tricks,
Clairvoyant
I have already lived in the future
And am not fooled easily.

As you flick the wand, one more time
Again in a 360 rotation, around,
From wall to door
Her lean torso serpentine coils, her mind cocked to spin
Memories she hasn’t felt since ancestors past
Nor this hunger for the hunt
Crouched low against the carpet fibers
Peeking through the lattice squares
The gaze, the stare, the pause
Of the dining chairs
The hunch, the pounce, the ****,
The finishing blow.
Grace and ferocity beyond what even Discovery could say
It’s all a game, illusion:
To catch is to win, but to catch will end the game
To chase is to win the excitement, but to lose?
But, ah, all is but frustrated
To lose, is the essence of the game
Chasing quantum excitations
Like that chance for a mouthful of pride
In pursuit
But a ghast, fleet of foot myth
She says in the semaphores of her midair leap
With delusions comes laughter,
I am the uninhibited one
Dancing for beasts.

These slights only meet me
Like a stray kiss on the cheek
The kinds you dream of at 13,
Moments made to be stretched
And puttied minutes, days, years after
The best, the most incongruous and shameful,
The most despised,
The kind that curl your toes
And sour the stomach
At that introspective drunkenness
One foot grounded, one knee tingling numb
On the bar;
Oh, she came, oh she went
Those poetical revelations at the bar
Our best ideas on human suffering
Forgotten to write down,
Fuel for the manuscript, pressed
In dirt and blood, soul and spit
Another, another, whilst all others
Run for the rip tickets and defaming hope
Each lose a sneer and a cyclical hoping.
Never once, in love or lottery,
Do you suspect
Maybe lady luck is chasing other hands tonight
While you’re chasing those loses
And maybe, leave the lotto machine alone for a spell
Yeah,
That’ll teach it a thing or two.
But who hasn’t loved vice
Just a little too close?
Whispered a promise to appetite
Before lying down for good?
I loved her like everyone else,
And it’s still a single paystub dissolved
Without recourse or cause for revenge.
But she, vice, I can share with others
Being the only thing I’ve ever thought
Of stealing
Was a glance into that torn dress
Looking for a pattern
Or that wayward hand across my cheek.

You can hear the rain as it gathers
Soaked cosmopolitan soldiers in the gravel,
Complaining of urban trenchfoot.
Those stars on their hands, declarations of evil
Felt the roughed hands of homeless men
Asking, “where you gonna be next week?”
And other cherries of vagabond greetings
Of his situational pleasantries;
The kids couldn’t say:
Topics avoided are done so the loudest—

That old man who’s friends with the devil
Lying infirm, walking infirm, his only guests are strangers
I hear his didacticisms from long ago
Curtailing the copper snakes despite their promise of knowledge
Good or evil
Because life is too short to be more than just friends.

Everyone works at least one day on the jakes
At the desk at day’s end
At plaster fist on the rivers in tar
Where Rat-prophets have their
Schizoid visions peaking in fright
To a starlit bible-edge clatter and smash
Shaking and roiling, denimized
Words pinpointing you down
Assembly-lined out by the smirking madman

Capital, he says, capital, capital
Looking out on our heads graduated heads
Cap it all, cap them all,
Jagged and four-squared edge
Happy enough to dogpaddle in a maelstrom
Called Sallie Mae
And to forget ‘graduation’ means ‘to rise’
These ocean floors, dark and darkening.

Yet, his debt crushes him for lack of want,
Chicanery and shady deals
Mine’s a blessing, a burden of love;
The brochure is a better read—

Where am I going to be next week?
Recalling the difference
Between indebted and dead
Recalling the difference
Between a ton of feathers and that of lead.