Lonely, deep, swift moments I commune with you,
Looking through my open window into blue,
Uncharted, star-filled, never-ending space
That holds the cherished image of your face.

Longings I would tell you in sweet, sudden word,
Catching in my throat, are stilled, and never heard;
And lovely, unsaid thoughts surge up anew
To wing across the darkness, seeking you.

Knowing not the time and distance in between,
Silently and eagerly, by eyes unseen;
Across the star-filled, never-ending blue
My heart springs up and runs away to you.

A face looks so carnivorous
From the nostrils down:
An open, ravenous trap,
Half full or half empty
Gleaming with ivory shears
And threatened sharpness
Of incisors clicking.

I fear it's raging hungers, this face;
It looks ghastly unkind
With tearing, strong molars,
An impertinent softness of tongue lurking
Concealing the violence till the last instant
While delicately testing
The perfect temperature of warm blood.

Who says humans
Don't eat their young;
Things sometimes happen in the dark,
Late of night, things you'd never catch in daylight-
Why do some never have children at all;
Perhaps they became too fond of newborn flesh,
Delicate as the palest veal-calf of the restaurant.

And it only looks human
When you add in some eyes.

Ah, the lips, and ah, what cheeks;
Methinks though, you are not too deep.
What sunbleached tresses frame your face,
Even though you're lacking taste;
Your laugh tears out the soul of me,
And you're quite bent, it's plain to see.

Now touch me not, with your white hand:
Anemic sprites, I cannot stand;
Fix me not, in your blue eyes,
For I don't want to hear those sighs.
I'm sure your organs are complete-
But I care not, to hear you bleat!

My inconstant heart
Tries to touch you, in the boarded up rooms,
The corridors sealed off from my reach.
My recorded voice echoes past empty hallways,
Down decrepit staircases.

Once my portrait hung
Above your bed itself,
Till you partitioned it off.
Even I will no longer grovel
When hope has already flown out the portal.

I'm more dangerous now,
Having nothing left to lose
And nothing to hold onto;
My timbers mutely rotting, while your siren voice
Goes on sweetly singing.

A lifetime is a lot of days,
A lot of places, a lot of faces;
A lot of hours, to fill and fill
With sad and happy social graces.

A lifetime is a lot of days,
A lot of lovers, both May and December;
But just remember, as you near the end-
You've forgotten much more, than you'll ever remember.

There is a place within that always waits
For sunshine, knowing rain at last abates.

Everything recalls from whence it sprang;
As the songbird’s joy, when first it sang.

A little bit of ice inside the storm;
A hint of parents in the newly born.

The seed of love implanted at first sight,
To blossom fullblown, tender loving light.

Embedded in each tear the whole of grief;
All our ends twined round one falling leaf.

As brother unto brother does incline;
A little bit of sun in me still shines.

The lathe of heaven's spinning, spinning
Now the web of time beginning,
Time the holder of the many secrets
We must someday learn;
Time the hearth where lie the days
The universe will slowly burn.

Life springs up; it's breathing, breathing
And the web of life is weaving,
Life revolves through many stages
And no one foretells the whole;
Life the mold in which we pour
The essence, turns into the soul.

Hallowed be thy name
True reality of mind
Just myself left to attain
To unbury the divine.

Words alone must always fail
To describe that tiny spark
You would call the Holy Grail
If but once you'd brave the dark.

No death, so do not fear
The robed monk implores
Now see the way is clear
Go unlock your doors.

Know that the little Me
Again must go to sleep
But the hallowed soul goes free
To fields of stars so deep.

I go to sleep again, eventually
After hours of fitful tossing,
Unwilling to surrender
To the nightly unknowing.

Some nights bring forgetting of everything;
Self, days, events, time, life itself.
Others fill themselves up
With a sort of coin, of wavering moonlight
Seen through the haze of obfuscating dewfall.

Reflections broken free from the sea of self
Raise unobstructed to float,
Hanging in the cooling ether of dreamscapes
Where in the fog nameless dogs bark
And dark landscapes prevaricate.

Where clocks do not follow rules,
Where gravity sometimes suspends
Or history rewrites itself.
Judgments come down and are executed
Beyond the dignity of reason.

Nights pass slowly through a watery realm
Where nothing is concrete,
As we wade clumsily through clumps of time,
Skip through a children's maze of nonsense riddles.

And when the knowledge of being in a dream
Pierces sporadically, through the body's paralysis
We awaken, amazed to find
That we are simply ourselves again,

Then we stretch back out, into the other dimension,
Ready to dream some more lines;
Sample some more realities
Till morning awakens us with hands
Of impatient brightness.

And abstraction slinks away
To wait for the next evenings
Entertainment of amnesia.

I'd like to see some other measurements-
The ones where humans don't ***** away
Toward the floor; where teeth and skull plates
Aren't widened and flattened into floorboards,
And where the secret grottoes of abbeys
Aren't made silent, by kneeling on cushioned flesh

Where we stretched our eardrums out
To become acoustic ceilings
We left in the smooth, pebbly gossip
As points of interest
To direct the secular gaze upward
Leaving our agoraphobic thoughts
Stranded out there,
Trying to cross that vast expanse
Of white nothingness

The problem of forever
Is that it always ends
Just one octave
Past a plaintive heartbeat

I put on the clothing of monotonous atmospheres
Because there wasn't anything else to wear
And because I like the nice familiarity
Of warm sun, and cooling moon-
All the twilight seasons of sensation,
Of when you could fall eternally,
Knowing that a temperamental universe
Still owned every atom of your being

And Time's scarred fingers endlessly screeching
On the blackboard
Of all your faded significance

Ancient air beneath the stars,
Spilling under midnight's face,
Every glowing, hanging cloud
Is an amulet’s silvered trace.

Cast from broken spells of moonlight
Clinging to the pearly beams,
Like unseen spiders spinning silks
To pin a fairy's silver wings.

While she gilds the waiting dawn
With what the newborn angels sing,
In sunrise colors newly minted
For the newborn day they bring.

Ancient are the eyes,
Ancient the tongue,
Ancient the battles
Bring the world undone.

There’s war, in our blood,
There’s blood, on our hands;
Blood in the rivers,
Blood on the land.

There's just one thing
Worth fighting for,
In the bloodied world
And the future gore;

A man and woman
Remake a world divine;
For around their loving
All futures twine.

It may be that you were an astronaut before
And now you clamber unknown chambers of my heart,
Knocking down the tilt-up walls
To find the inner space of your reservoir
And your oxygen; my bloodstream
My heart; your pulsar beating out cosmic revelations
My future; framed by your unblinking past

Terminal comets tumble alongside
Undisturbing of the velocity of your experiment
Exploding suns in supernovae spin-cycles
Left your scientific mood untouched
The last horizon, my need for security
Has been hitched to your superior fuselage
Now we float together, at the end of a single lifeline

I breathe out as you breathe in
A symbiotic bellows, in perfection geared
Neither of us make a move
Except we go in the same instant of direction
This must be what heaven feels like
At the end of time and acceleration,
Facing the unknowns inherent in the expedition

There were never any promises made,
Discovering the wonders and terrors of deep space
And at the finish of my hibernation,
I awaken to explore a mysterious new portal:
Held open for me, an orbital doorway
In galactic eyes of bluest heaven-shine
Which will stir the primordial chaos of my existence.

And if your sun should nightly shine
To kiss my most fervent need
And if fevered hands should suddenly seek
Upon mine; inviolate, to feed

If, hand to hand, we fuel that hidden mouth
Which, cavernous, can never sleep
Who can say what the ending will be
Of things giving birth from the deep

Once-bound of heaven; loosed upon earth
To the uppermost firmaments, it must always escape
The clouds ferry sandpipers day-swift journeys,
While on beaches beneath, the dead birds gape.

And the letter came:
And you thumbed, humbled, over it and over
An hundred times a week, you took it out
Pouring each word over again
As for the first time, it still was
And blotchy it was from tears
And tips, nervous fingers which pulled little rips
Into the off-white paper, where much strong handling bore
Each time's grief bearing need: you read it, nothing more
Seen differently; surely always the same, yet nuances
Came despite instinctual knowledge of before;
Did this sentence- this wording style preferred it
That he might mean only just that- or was it
Imagination's sullied creation? did those words
Sound tired; and if very thought of you
Became fatigue, was it the plague of his precious pen, or brain
Or just the worry of his own entrenchment there?
Even so; sometimes you read familiar words
That joy shouted from, certain as could be.
Times when you felt uneasy, queasy at one word
Or phrase, as if a ringing death-knell must have
Rang: to spell out the end of time's bitter being-
Crossed yourself, three times; and said a beaded prayer.
The letter came to be important to you that this
Could cause everything to cease; a hunt driven
Feverish, once it went missing where from out it's pocket-house
(deeply as when you bent under the trees..
to pick up crying children in their frail need) it leaped.
And when one day unfolding, the letter dropped into your lap
Pieces neat piled into sections; folds perforated through
Because so nearly worn out; stained, thin-souled as grief itself
Heart treasure map woven in lover's lace; bequeathed
And then realized: there no other letter ever was or be;
If never sent, gone missing; you'd pinned all quickened heart beats
Stayed hope's courage upon a single letter's fate, and it
Carried through the fears, saw above the swarming years
Sleepless nights when, no tears left, it swam: you gathered up the limp
Damp, feathered pieces and stowed them safe for keeping
Knowing some day again, when things were not the same
And finding them you would remember, this single letter
By which all hope then was given, your hope that came
As a single letter; came due south, straight down from heaven..

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
For a time you may never forget;
We've got mystery and ****** and mayhem,
For some hours that you'll never regret.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
We have tours and stories to chill;
And we'll push you down steps to the basement,
And there we'll forcefeed you some swill.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
Where we have all new torture devices,
And we'll tie you up, and then use them on you;
And won't have to think about it twice.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
Where we'll do terrible things just to you;
And if you survive and miraculously escape-
You can invite your friends to come too!

I think that I shall never see
A thing as odd as eight baby
Eight baby from a single mother
Makes me roll my eyes- oh brother
Oh sister oh brother oh sister oh yeah
Mother looked like a Guernsey cow
Is there milk enough- I don't see how?

Eight colic'd infants wailing in the night-
Draw back, draw back- go fly a kite
Eight fitful babies screaming in duress-
Moved far away left no forwarding address
Eight poopy babies dragging two pound diapers
Went to the car wash and used the windshield wipers
Eight teething babies wrangling on the bed-
Picked up a gun and blew off her head.

Bored meeting again,
And we’ve assembled ourselves,
Well situated, to see the clock,
Later arrivals take the leftover chairs
And the words begin to drone.

Pencils getting pushed,
While we’re thinking, how’d we get here;
We left in such a rush,
Our brains are scrambled mush,
When suddenly there’s a silence-

A response is now required;
More murmuring and muttering,
Chair legs being squawked,
Drawings on white boards,
Handouts passed about:

We wish that we just had the guts
To get up; walk right out.
Our lives are lived in neutral,
While clocks hammer out our days;
We owe our every bit of food

To something someone says.
This meeting feels interminable,
In so many different ways,
And just when we’re most sure, we’ll die-
Adjournment comes; the end.

In the kingdom of love,
I would live in your dreams
Touching all of your secrets
The things not yet seen.

In the rivers of time,
I would travel beside you
Passing by all that's false
On our way to the true.

On the path to the stars,
We would walk hand in hand
Finding all the worlds wonder
In the heart of one man.

A reckoning, was the waste of loving you;
Whose heart was otherwhere, who's eyes
Could never resist a new, stunning view.
My solitary hovering as innocuous as a bee,
Stalking the mortal garden, come sun or shower;
As predictable as rain, as forgettable as a flower-
My comedic pratfalls less memorable,
Than her cries of elation:
Her eggs more precious than mine.

A ribbon of notes float past the dawn
Childhood's gone, like a long-lost song;
Did you have to grow up, to find your place
And of that child, is there left one trace?

Their eyes are watching you, from the past
Why'd you have to grow up so fast?

Where are the prints from those tiny hands,
Busy with the work of becoming a man,
And where are the people who loved the child,
The innocent one, so sweet and mild?

Their eyes are watching you, from the past
Why'd you have to grow up so fast?

Putting all of childhood's things away,
You had to grow up and save the day,
Was it worth all the hurry and fuss
Along the way, what happened to trust?

Their eyes are watching you, from the past
Why'd you have to grow up so fast?

We hurry them up, from birth to death
Until they've got no time for breath
But something that precious should be cradled long,
Inside our hearts, like a perfect song.

A river bears a burden
It carries far downstream,
And no man's eyes will see it
Or fathom what it means.

A river bears a burden
Beneath it's swirling toil.
It's rippling edges teasing
The sodden, silent soil.

A river bears a burden
Beneath our nightly dreams,
Our temporal excursions
Along it's watered seams.

A river bears a burden
Of many dreaming feet,
Searching all it's alleys
To a dreamer's slow heartbeat.

A river bears a burden;
It will not wake our sleep,
But carries us forever
Our roaming souls, to meet.

A severe civility rests within
the soul,
of the broken hearted man.

That burn which test, his fabric's core
has torn
the once strong warp; no more.

His eyes are filled, of far off light;
enough
for only, each sole night.

His words may break in lines, between
the bones,
of the sentence, of his meaning.

Not the whole man, he used to be
for reasons
less obvious, to you and me.

He keeps his grief apart, so he
can bury it
some place, secretly.

And though he never go there again:
his eyes
his loved one's shroud, still rend.

Evil takes its sanguine bite
Out of the ****** dark,
And the soulless stumble
Beneath Earth’s apocalypse
Trying to outrun the smoke of shotguns;
The hunger of dead dreams-
Down here, we can curse with a single kiss.

I was the song
You sang once;
Beside the flowing rivers of time,
And I was the words
You knew once;
Words which we met in a rhyme.

Now I'm like the song
Forgotten;
Abandoned on the shores of life,
And I’m all these notes,
Unbegotten-
Which now only die,
In your quiet.

All poets have to write one day
A poem about a fly they knew;
And there's no escaping it,
So with no more adieu
I introduce the fly, one night
Who bit my leg till I saw daylight:
He bit deep and he bit long,
My vital fluids began to seep.
He bit a bite for every fly
Who at the hand of man, must die;
He bit a bite for every woe
And curse on flies, by human foe;
He put his species pain on me
Without so much as a thank you; please,
And without a word, I squashed his guts
And stomped his itty, bitty nuts;
If he had some, they're surely flat;
If he didn't- that's the end of that.

Aunt Louise was a rodent
Who preferred to call herself, mouse
And out in the gamboling country
Had a sleek modern hideaway house

The door was disguised by a boot
Whose toe was quite deftly chewed out
And a quaint little stair descended
To show a most well concealed route

The soil was a clay most compacted
Excavated most patiently slow
And no water nor creatures could crack it
Neither hail, nor sleet, nor snow

The neighborhood creatures would marvel
What a crafty genius, Louise
She'd say come down for a spot of tea, now
And close the door behind, please

The door was most clever of all
For it looked like a fragment of sock
Left behind by the boot's missing owner
But concealed there, a small sandstone rock

When the painted side of the rock
Was in sight at the top of the house
It meant that Louise was at home
Like the most respectable mouse

When the raw side of the rock was showing
It meant, don't bother to come down
For Louise was bound to be shopping
Over in the nearby Mousetown.

The rock was bright red at Christmas
On St. Paddy's, was bound to be green;
But her most favorite day was Valentine's,
When a gorgeous pink was there seen.

But one day a terrible accident
Befell poor Mrs. Mouse's door
It was a hulking monster of metal
With a disconsonate roar

A lawn mower chewed up the boot
And it spit out the piece of sock
And it crumbled the hapless sandstone
Till it no longer looked like a rock

So Aunt Louise had to move then
To another den down the way
Where she never again would mention
The quaint little house of old days.

A woman's just a padded cell, in situ:
With mirrored tile reflections, of former occupants
Reveals their once desires, like long past feast
That's been viewed only partially, through a narrow hall,
And though her cushions can't stop your fall
They soak up life's effluvium; for she's an island
In the lull; most co-morbidly, antediluvian:
And as it cradles the body's living estate,
Her rocking-horse frame can't navigate
The ground swell of presumptive grace.

Let's pretend, that the dizzy motion ride
Has provided real progress forward, in spite
Of strong waves, that coupled oceans bring;
Jump saddle, on her coiled and double-jointed springs.
Bright enameled eyes might rein you inside
For your brief spate, of the near total ingress:
Waving haloed hips of plastic'd flesh; her glide
Could stay stationary, until you confess.

Only she knows well, the secret of assuring you
You'll not drown, of her swirling vicissitudes;
And if once you abhorred your childhood name;
Now can use same call sign, for your idling engines
Of a certain procreatively inspired invasion
As she whispers it; says it loud, clenching need
Of the second's singlemost long duration.

When she finally unlocks your prow from docks
Post haste, of body's self-deceptive clocks
Inside her temples, rising incense of sweat
Mingled with undertows, of past vibrations; and her smell
Itself: a briny distillate, of a pheromone tonic; forensic clue
Of a decidedly amber hue; the body's cyclonic age of man
Keeps travelling it's way, down her plundered mnemonic.

You can feel the straight jacket's razored sleeves,
Beginning to loose your constricted lungs;
And your ***** overflowing; becoming a sieve:
If you could keep on riding, you'd be quite sure
That eventually, just a small band-aid could cure
The slight, though badly malformed scar;
From the still flowing toxins; to soon immure-
Hard to believe, how far gone you were.

Forget old self; a newfound confidence;
Makes you forestall the inevitable trip
Down to the corner, second-hand store,
As now is revealed, that her paint's become chipped;
And the horse's eyes are now rolling inward,
As if looking there, for some positive proof,
From the prying, irreverent eyes of the world-
But you know it too well: she's just a padded cell.

Bad poetry makes me ugly:
Look, each line, a cliche
Each blemish, a simile;
My smile grows more bitingly smug
With each overzealous superlative.

My raccoon eyes are ringed
By metaphorical self delusions,
Badly performing alliteration-
All improvisations of incompetence;
And then the clash of symbol, deranges all thought.

Choose only the wound that is in your heart
That you would earnestly enlarge upon,
Steadfastly ignoring all the others.

Barnacle-Sam was one hell of a man;
He broke wild horses on the Rio Grande,
He had a skin texture like broken glass,
He caught the horses cause he was fast-
The crustiest cowboy in all of the land.

Be careful of close auditoriums
And thick stanchioned stadiums
Watch out for iron gussetted doorframes
And bar covered windows
For your loneliness will trap you there
Backed up against the steel barriers
And probe your trembling thoughts
With it's dark truncheon.

Stay away from mirrors
Which can reveal your state of solitude
Automobiles which will show your inertia
Rollercoasters which can skitter you into the past
Without so much as a roll-bar
And arms, perhaps most dangerous of all-
Just before nightfall.

There must have been some leftover
Ticket stub mementos
Of your other life as a bus driver,
Bachelor, mystery man about town:
Faded polaroids containing
A slice of arm, of back
Though as a driver, you would have seemed
Mainly a rear view
To all the people on the tour buses you drove.
Some days you surely would have intruded,
Unknowingly, behind the welcoming hugs captured
In still black and whites;
The practical jokes breaking out in transit;
And tearful departures caught in snapshots.
In their lives you passed by so quickly,
A flicker of shadow
Forever hovering just at the edge
Of their days journeys,
Not even remembered as an afterthought.
You would have stayed there
In the background,
Your image often captured while
Taking the furtive smoke,
Stretching out your legs,
Checking the tire pressure.
Though we did not know
One another then
I can visualize the carefulness with which
You would have tailored your own route.
If I could gather up all the scattered,
Torn and trampelled puzzle pieces
Of your once upon a time life-
Thousands of amputated parts of you,
In my imaginings-
Now lodged in a thousand dusty shoeboxes
In the tops of stranger's closets;
Maybe then I would no longer be haunted
With the idea that the invisible fragments of you
Carry on a secret existence
In obscure places you never even visited
And beyond all reach of any capacity
To locate or recognize them.

Beggarman thief, who took my heart:
Do you think that you can use it?
Where will you hide it, and what will they say-
That you had audacity, to choose it?

Beggarman thief, it's a useless heart,
And won't further your aims or plans;
You see, it's already been used up-
Wrung dry by another's hands.

Beggarman thief, it's an empty choice
You've fastened your wiles upon;
For all you'll find are some children's jacks-
And some dreams, once in a song.

It's a beggar's moon, for you and me,
A lunar ride, to the edge of dawn,
Clutching stardust in our hands
Where love lives on, forever free.

It's a beggar's moon, we see above,
It's phases glowing like an orb,
As fairies fly and wishes spiral
And lonely couples look for love.

It's a beggar's moon, will follow us
It's shadow haunting word and look,
And eyes that speak an older tongue,
And smiles that last, till we are dust.

The coals smoldered
With obsidian flakes,
To reflect sky or ocean there.
The heat was tropical;
An abeyance denied
To all who'd arrived there.

Earthquakes simmered
Along the meridians,
While smoke floated free:
Released from it's *******,
It drifted to where
You wanted to be.

Silent are the rocks;
Silent the alleys and stone walls,
Cracked foundations and fountains.
No voices speak now, except through the wind
Twisting and turning, on its way through the gorges.
The weather has beaten out every surface,
Stamped it's stalagmite of time upon the faces.
The last rags of clothing hung out to dry
Are a sifting, unrecognizable ash of piled up molecules,
Indiscernible from the storm-strewn cadavers
Of wood, straw and leaves,
Leaves which can laugh at the ferocity of sudden gales
And chatter annoying, behind lifting fingers of twig,
Themselves tumbled shamelessly, into ancient doorways
That once were closed against all intruders.

The cipher of their blood has marked, defined this place,
Pressed it down, with the missing weight of forgotten culture,
Though their language is still indistinguishable from others,
But that their slivered bones have stopped up the pilfering,
The plundering of tombs by wild running waters,
Trickling down to the lowest graveled catacombs
Of a once vibrant village;
It is all running spaces of tomb now,
And the few visitors that happen to wander in
Find themselves holding their breath,
Wary of their modern dissonance
Disturbing the invisible residents of past days.

My moods drain me down
To some immoderate sluice-gate,
They run down the grainy windows,
Clog the sand in the top of the hour-glass
Like bat's tears, like misplaced rainstorms
Looking for a cloud to hang out under.

All my temperaments are accidental,
Wrongly placed; too early or too late
Miscarriages of intention,
Predicaments of inattention.

All the inconsequential moments I inhabit,
I'm wearing thin, from changing my mind too often-
Why is there no groove for thinking,
No energy-saving secret gear?

Sometimes I sit absolutely still
In an uncomfortable position,
Hoping the powers that be will notice me;
Will see that I'm going nowhere, so slowly
And they will send some tempest to help move me along.

I'm also afraid they will send change;
The paralytic not only can't move,
He knows he can never move,
And his biggest fear
Is being thought capable of movement.

In that rapid swirling down the drain,
He wants someone to snag him on a branch,
Save and reclaim his manhood;
Not sit in a tree and watch him spiraling,
While repeating over and over,
Why don't you save yourself?

He knows it's too late for words;
The tears only add to the swelling river.
And if once I thought there was a savior on every corner,
I guess I just got tired of waiting-
Because the ones in the mirror only close their eyes now.

Normalcy both appalls and comforts me-
Why does it all appear so average,
As you go sprawling head first over the falls:
You know nobody elses life will change one iota,
And you know you're just paying some bill
You never even saw.

Seas twinkle and there is a trace
Of diamonds in the sun's bright face
Day comes again; there is no death
Inside the garland of your breath.

In the temples praises sung
From dawn to dusk, Padme Hung
Gods and demons and their ilk
All churn the sea of milk.

Waltz me across the universe
Dance me through time-
Ring the bells: I’m alive
By accident or design.

The offspring of broken symmetry
Or a miracle, sight unseen-
Not the same world would it be
If I had never been.

Waltz me across the universe
Dance me through time-
Once I lived in a star’s eyes
But now my own light shines.

If we set the old Master's paintings ablaze
Just for a minute; a few micro-seconds,
The paint liquifies, sends up it's medicinal scent;
Lazuline blue and lead white,
Coloring the smoke lent to heaven,
Pulling the soul from out the old vellums;
Freeing the subjects from their long, indentured service.
Smoking, it leaves a paint dotted canvas behind,
Like a dot to dot, of some strangely familiar drawing,
The edges curling inward, like a dying flower at dusk.

Circle ****:
A benzene ring of the most powerful
Viral assortment of the worst kind
Accountable to no one,
Secrecy rules this cabal.
Only fire can extinguish this conspiracy-
Burn the rich.

The poor don’t need middle men,
Lawyers or intermediaries
When there’s an obvious infestation
To be dealt with quickly-
Before they change all the rules, again.

With weary frankness I lean into
Evenings diffident shadows,
Wavering hues, grays and blues
Peering between the cloistered stars:
Endless dream I forgot how to navigate
Encompassing moments built by tidal movements
And sudden divisions between orbital shells
Inertial havoc starts the blood rushing
The world's a quagmire of uninhabited space
With lonely islands of pulsating matter
Suns unnumbered, rippling the waves collapse
Take all my heartbeats too, that as I languish,
The resonance might start another avalanche
The fiery, seeding vacuum of dawns early light,
That old magician's hat trick.
But be merciful to me, centrifugal womb of time;
Both the product and the witness
The sum of the totality only here, only this, only now-
This forever world, always just on the brink
Of breaking into a hundred thousand new worlds,
From insignificance multiplied
Far beyond any meaningful purpose:
For nobody controls even one solitary particle down here.

Butterfly in a cage,
Bruising your wings on the bars:
Butterfly, just stand back
Until you can see how far

How thin the distance,
Between you and there;
The freedom you seek,
Past the barred air

Then fold your wings together
As though never to fly
And squeeze yourself between the rails
And waft away, on a sigh.

May the memories not vanish,
Of this day which will pass
And beloved voices remain,
Though the hours not last

For dancing with angels,
Whose eyes crowned you prince;
And a thousand nights stars
In the far light, have rent

With twinkles, to remind you,
To rest your eyes where
Other eyes will be watching
One life, very dear.

Eternity's gate can wait for an hour,
Ennobled of God, from the dust once raised up
By his breath, turmoil ceasing;
You shall know you are blessed.

Some days the canned laughter gets to be a bit much;
Is there any authentic laughter left, in this post modern Rome?
Even the real sounds artificial now-
Perhaps we’ve stayed at the gladiator games too long?

The sun’s already burnt us, we're tired and thirsty,
While the entertainments keep playing on and on,
Growing ever thinner, transparent, predictable;
With each dreary season, the same debacle song.

At night we dream, that we’re the newest slaughter,
They're readying to come for; that banging on the door:
No longer far away, swords drawn and at the ready,
The four horsemen are coming;  the apocalyptic four.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never had religion,
For famine and scourge don’t belong to one creed-
But we're still too busy now, gorging ourselves
On endless dreams of supremacy and need.

The colored carousel is coming for me again
The roller coaster zigzags across my vision
My head thumps with it's own band inside
Pounding away on one side, wearing it down to bone
Colorful streamers follow it, but I can’t focus on them
The image shifts with each movement of the eyeballs.

Why do they always have to bang on the same spot?
I knock some holes in the wall with my head
The freakshow’s fat lady is on the other side, taking a bow
But it feels just like looking into a mirror.
In order to feel some control over the pain I'm privy to,
I tighten the vise on my temple a few turns

Then I bang my neck with a tire iron
Just for equal opportunity agony.
The dwarf man stares at that, as if I am the highlight of the show.
I start to do a little tap dance, but my head blasts off on it’s own,
As if out of a cannon, rocketing above the arena
Slowly turning in it’s bug-eyed orbit.
I remember just in time to tighten the noose and step off the chair,
To the excited howls of delight, from the crowd-
But the support gives, every time; it’s all part of the act.

Why do I always have to work so hard performing
To achieve what my body does without thinking?
The clowns are pointing at me and laughing now,
And the children want to know, what is it all for?
But now blood is in my eyes, and the striking of the clock
Makes my vision shake, so I lay down in the cool doom of twilight
And wait for the loud music to slowly dissipate.

Chain the secret gate
Greenest passage to the flowering kiss
Fielding blue dew drops upon bade wood

Be mine where eyes don't lie
Till one is ever and all
The bright dare of a song

Pearl hidden where death won't gaze
By such verse lost and collected anew
Sun singing it's summer love song forever

Change waits for the dawn
Like a revocable feeling.

Clouds turn gestures into shadow
Like a phantom ceiling.

Waves tear open ocean’s belly
So Moon can see inside.

When walls burn, it’s freedom smoking:
It lives where walls can’t hide.

Moments of laughter; a star is missing-
You can find it in someone’s eyes.

Skies shed water just like weeping
Wherever a rainbow sighs.

Christmas opened childhood
Like heroes opened games,
And gifts were just the standard
For those with your same name.

Christmas ringed our childhood
Like hoodlums ring a fight,
And no one could believe it-
That Santa was a lie.

Christmas ended childhood,
That day we knew the truth:
We ****** our own eye’s knowledge
Of wisdom's sorry proofs.

My words are cutting themselves again;
razoring their loosely-sutured syllables,
deep as white-eyed bone.

The suave dipththongs butchered
to the cadence of bloodletting
in hemorrhagic oppositions.

Stapled-closed sentences, smeared with Iodine,
and subcutaneous sentence diagramming
for the retractable scalpel
swiveling along the edge,
of the well serrated cliche.

Once I pressed my wordy flesh
against the wrong side
of a paring knife, while paying no attention
and suddenly,
and without warning
it gave, like an over ripe peach
to the cleaver-
and after that, I was hooked.