Is the sky falling
just because she's
soaked to the skin,
half-naked,
and with pixie smile
knows so little
of the affect
her bloom has,
here in the open fields?

Her evanescent day,
caught between
the suppressive cloud
of a mother's
mindful shaming,
and what it should
rightfully be,
an ingénue
let play in the rain.

the universe watches with her
mischievous eyes
as silence stretches on
between me and the mechanical city

from up here, in winds’ embrace
the cars are decades away,
and lights only a vivid memory
straining the back of my skull

the universe, too, breathes
I hear her now
hear the vacancy stir
in her bones

one— and the archers running
down my throat
two, like the lambs slaughtered
beneath them eyes
three and four and nine—
cracked toe-nails laden with mud

—ten women weeping
eleven wishes for the wilting weeds
I sense a chariot
bumping down the ribs
twelve for the wounded boy
limping up the hill

twenty— a hundred
and hundred more

inhale

I fathom the seconds kiss their hours
and hours melting into days
weeks and minutes,
years and more
all chopped and cooked
to a frothy stew
I feel it fill up her being

and vehicles with their horns
midway
halt—
an owl’s scream stopped just
beneath his beak
and sun, statued, stands

a thousand and the stilled plane
twenty and five
for them frozen flames
sixteen— and the shooting star
taped to the night
— seven prayers left unuttered

three for now, and three
for the past,
three more as all, into the unseen, falls
two shivers, shivers still
—one and a lone worm crawling
down my veins
one and the blue child up, up the swing

exhale

I swallow
as the ticks sink back into the clock
centuries dancing again
— and months  
come stumbling home
millenniums and moments
back to their protests

as all the circus is born again

I've been drunk for days.
Last year we were to be married -
this year I have a bleeding ulcer
& I cry every morning,
medicated with scotch.
Your name is a meadow.

The glass stands here
in the lee of the rattle;
the sun's yellow syrup erupts
into this bottle-breeze;
I will signal to you
in the ways you understand;
I will be your silver armor,
your lance and pennant.

The fog has an edge today,
gashing buildings in two,
beheading the tree line,
dispersing the relays.
The sun dies in the east,
throttled by an accumulating
grayness that chews.
Watch the rain approach
on its blacked skate,
drowning the ironbound
fence-work that skirts
the blustered apartments.
This neighborhood
is lost to me -
it chokes and retches
under a slip of sick.
The moon is just
a drain plug.
Wherever I go next,
I will paper with you,
your ink-sugar eye,
the unconscious throne of hair
that throws me over.