While I drive left-handed
you scratch at the white clouds
drifting out on the growth
of my fingernails, and
rub salient fire down tendons
toward fingers of gnarled roots
and less a hand, than work incarnate-
in essence of character. In lines, in
worried skin and flattened bones:
the misshapen unity of labor in lengthened phalanges.
You speak to me about how getting older means:
you can always remember a better time than now and
about the city of angels who never sleep,
staring open eyed, hazy with intangible halos.
How is mans great struggle now with society and no longer himself?
As the sharp angles of the road drive our skin to tight contact,
I find myself in the air between your breath and sweat slickened palms.

I have an embroidered leaf on my palm.

The blood stained the thread while the needle
passed through my skin, but as it tugged and traced

I smiled because I knew that autumn had come.

Today:
 I dropped a ceiling fan into the pond in my backyard and watched its blades
 slap the shadows away into the corners of the room

Until:
      The shadows flood the
      mechanism and trap the
      movement as the
      wind still moves through the
      windows, little gusts through a
      littler hoop

Gaunt and ice-pale,
Ivory fingers delicately linger on
His oak casket.
Red-clad, marooned in a
Sea of black ties and dresses.
He had liked red.

Civilized hands, gentle on
Her back, elbows.
She startles at each touch,
Eyes wild and afraid.

Frozen soil, in shovelfuls
Falling against wood
Which answers with
Dull, muffled cries.
New sod, eerily green
Against woolen snow.

They never heard her cry--
Her black hair her shroud--
Only her breath,
Cold and hungry.

The cold metal grate calms her, as supple flesh conforms
into the crenellated ridge of many miniature rectangles.
With widening eyes focusing so goes her mind into spasms of elastic thought.
Unleashed imagination simulates the mass of steel and
plastic encapsulating her in a headlong tumbling orbit.
She lingers lonely as the space station spins.

I hope someone was shot today
at four forty-seven *** em
somebody famous
with a famous death
I know where I was right then
(for once)
I don’t know where I was
when Kennedy got it
and I don’t know where I was
when Martin King went
(all I know is I wasn’t here)
I think I know where I was
when Lennon walked his last
(eating Weetabix eight years old)
and I know where I was today.
At four forty-seven *** em
I was ******* tomato seeds from a picture
of Doctor Thompson’s face.