cut quick—! quick!
unshackle, ship off, shuffle—
and if the Cuss crack some ten becrossed
what heaven have you?
cut—! amen, wha'cutting counts
the abacuses
of a

quake and halo'd curt
accountant named
in kneeling cerulean crib—
The Caucasus, the
Caliphate, the Croesus—

(you quack!—cut!—)

—ah, Christ.

remember to flower the
earth with your song, my
nana said as she was framing
her dying light in a 1950s
pair of yellowed spectacles on a
bed of barn wood and
cigarette ash.

gram, i said, coughing, i think you've
mixed your metaphors. you mean—

—dear, she hacked, i haven't
the time to fuss with it. you
figure it out.

Now—

she tapped another Camel light
on the splintered bed frame, flicking
the ash into her hand-stitched slippers.

—can you get me a beer?

it was the last cigarette-and-brew
we spent together.

between the peel of the 6am
iphone chimes and the arguing
with cold water and hot in the
cascade of a morning shower
it's hard to think what the
world means exactly when it says
in father-frowning stern:
you there!—yes, you!
isn't it time you were
successful?

I resolve to be better men
than the tripe what came before me—
the unheady scowls that mangled
a century of minds; the quivering mass
of un-courage before guns ungutted;
the tea-timing termagants whose
3 o'clock wails still curdle from
the greenbacked Gehry—

but ezra taught me better.
pull down thy vanity, he wagged
with two feet in the fire and one finger
through the sane:
again, i say, pull down.

i can't help but feeling i'm in the way somehow,
like a warm house brimming with tea time smiles,
the Early Gray fusion of a giggling family in sweaters
that must constantly get in the way
of the falling
snow.

mea maxima culpa:

i am so much 
like a breadbox born.

bowing over time, as things do get

stale, my cracks christening
unwitting loaves with light

already risen.

i hear the newer ones 

come with their own condiments

and an irredeemable crust.

the bread, I mean. 

They don’t make we

breadboxes anymore.

now hear this! sing this! you constant Cade, you
choral breakneck in a single sum of man,
brackbreaking in the chaos-rinsing rite of ashed religion!—

choke now, for you used me. a tossing stave to ward off sins
of fratting simpletons and their unsyncopated singing.
—all sixteenths through roughshod roads of wrong-be-gone righteousness.

and why? because i vaped some trebled color to the gray.

oh! what is the
madness-misering measure of a middle-aged man
who through the din of dampened doing, of desperate
dancing on two left feet and wrinkled writhe of witlessness in the mid of being been should shuffle off and coil himself into a crimson cross?

you did it why? for friends and for the fissure,
some bald breach of banality beyond the stoic peach—
and for a frosty flame?

what waste of was you were, and still accomplished are;
that god-grappled greed should unhinge your soul's Sophia
and ever the future fraught.

there is not bracker brine than your bishops ex-cathedra,
for all the feast you fête, and friends you turn upon a spit;
you're hungry for a food that's never fed.

poor witless starving pitchless sum; your death is all my make into an angel, as you so quickly from this earth will shred
and songs adduced unto the celebration same.