“Every act has meaning.  Accident is a word born of confusion.” –Agnes Whistling Elk

Some memories are like crude graffiti
some gray in museums
still others, vulnerable chalk on the pavement
all fade
dawn makes no promises
it never has

If you’re afraid of what the night will bring,
or worse, you know
what it’s like to be young and out
of control  
leaving a scent trail of blood and flowers
for the monsters of yesterday to follow
just let them  
the fighting makes me so tired

Rust in the sun until rubies form
cry through the night until you have diamonds
pressure makes us perfect
because it made the cracks that
make us imperfect
fear is ancient, normal, mundane even but
fear is the anticoagulant

Meanwhile, I am very busy
construction’s going on in Hell
disrupted by
random clouds of
revolting, revolving gravity
knocking girders loose
violent vertigo
claiming kingdoms
work horses slide
into black holes
yellow tape flails as
white flags
cranes arch and spark
swing into the dark
silky black tar bubbles,
pops, seals
everything is
untimely interrupted
and later
ungainly speech mocks
the tombstones growing in the lake

Pain is like a good book
so hard to put down
separation of critical
moments crystallize
until everything has a compartment
and no one can touch each other

Decades old daydreams stink stale
like sour seeds in green fruit
lilies could grow out of so much
manure.
Rot bleeds through involuntary walls

The past is sweating,
afraid of what I know

“Tribal art,”
says Marcia
her wrinkled face
etched with a forgotten sort
of  kindness
“That’s what the archeologists
will say.”
Her consolation
to when
my sculpture
goes missing
and I think of
the archeologists
a thousand years from now
finding my piece
and thinking of it as such
some, as they age, grow bitter
like over ripe wine,
cousin Marcia,
grows sweeter
a walking keepsake in a moo-moo and house shoes

Time flips backward
Grandpa
I never met him
My mother’s green eyes well
when she speaks of him
“It’s time to hit the road!”
he’d say
and he’d go and
hit the road with a stick.
is this where I get
my sense of humor from?
the man had a monkey and
five kids and
a heart full of
meat, potatoes and
Chanukah candles

Flip forward
in the middle of
the 80’s
glowed, ***** and I
shared a room and belted out
Madonna songs
night and day
not even knowing yet
what a material girl really was
or if we’d ever be one
hope
took on a neon quality
that faded
like sharply lit days
of winter light
bent off snow
and sunk
into the hard frozen ground
never to be seen again

We come at night because
it’s the only time we are free
and it’s the only vulnerable time
the air is stale
darkness tries to rectify this
lack of light breathing into
my blasting radio
the only sound beyond
is small and usual
crickets and nocturnal things

Spying into vacant windows from forgotten roadside
they leave some lights on, most of them
or the television
relentlessly washing empty
electronic colors over post-midnight rooms
the shallow light sustains an outlandish stability
like a sadistic pop culture nightlight

On the yard junk cars and dead farm equipment
sit out to rust
just like the child obsessed with justice
stifled

The people here withdraw to sheltered houses
they stare at screens so long
they start to reflect their own blankness
deciding what they see
until every day’s a rerun

I’d like to visit this place sleeping
lying dormant in-between layers of dream
and hybrids of unconsciousness
enter homes through passive doors
locate every lost, unwritten diary
and read them all cover to cover
would I love or hate them more

holy graffito of a swan
gorgeous, decapitated
limp bricks sag
behind it, hysterical hegira
plummeting in sync with the self
towards the elusive, dry glory of
death or forgiveness
this is the catechism of disbelief
Agnostic by default
sleeping on the side

being wrong is not a problem
it is an answer unto itself

We spin black dimes down
****** halls where
we went white with
rage it splintered our
spines we found them outside
our backs and burnt fingers
backward on busted hands and
handled the dead meat
it was us, fresh brown and cooked
we slid to the floor saddled
with our selves and sat
unsilent in sleep sung
tunes that took our tears
tight and turned them into
sweat I swear I thought He
said that we were holy but we
leave tracks and footprints just
the same and snap
with terrible teeth the taste
of apples still bitter
in our throats, howling and holy
howling and holy

I regret
all the flowers I sent you
in my thoughts and I
regret every time
I acted like
a gentleman

every beast with long hair lies
I will be
forever lost in the stairwell
everything that thinks it’s
gentle is actually

cruel.

avoidance is my measure
I sing with razors
in my pocket, blooms
not for you
not for you

desperation is being in
a constant state of prayer,
stuck in thinking I
lost the thought race and
now I’m lodged on Pluto

the burnt lullabies
turned into spoons and
continue to feed us
rotten soup

the daily dining, the
sordid feast of bones
flaying
browning in the plains

in graying child’s hair, I wander
in gin soaked skin I wander
in the fetid husks of dreams,
I wander

when she howls, I must
lips and teeth become
blood jewels on our skin

but when skin behaves like paper then
it’s time to move on
and seek our thrills
in the cove behind the grave

we knew more when
we had less to see

If I painted an apple
would you call it a worm
and if my bed sneezed
and blew a hole in the night
would it be my fault for sleeping
If I drank raw pride
until I was sick with it
would you just stand behind
the red tape and point
until the green pooled in my frozen feet
and made a statue out of me
for you to throw used tissues at
and revisit as a bird
If I was an alligator
I think you’d want
me to stay a baby
or be a mouse instead
so I stayed underwater
like a thing that was dead
until water became sand,
then stone, now grass

Ahoy! The ship has landed

If my eyes are loaded guns than
I have to be very careful
who I look at
Destruction
is a luxury
I can afford

I will live forever
because I die everyday
I want it like that

Examining,
yielding to breaking
it means

Empty bottles in the rabid winter sun
a dangerous cue;
the sometimes somber
melody of exacting light
blisters my nonchalant
parade everyday
is Sunday sipping the oily
fuel of bad things
that come
at night

I. Aprilis

You wished the summer for no one
moments of white wilderness
stars in the blood
sepaled bees scatter
drown each day as all lights
unmade pollen blossoming among
fistfuls of paper tasks
busied thought scrolls with the Seen
afternoon feathers multiply
white honey of Aries


II. Julius

Months as paper pass flitting
through the screens that
separate outdoors from in where
light pools on an ancient carpet and
summer lay broken in pieces
on the floor like
so much shattered vinyl
what happens to the trapped light then, as
it ages, it thickens
curdles in the stale drapes
staunches awareness of
time the moon
is slowly
drifting away
from Earth


III. Octus

Apples fall on the rotten dusty ground we
threw them, trapped in the speckled atmosphere of decades
that never rinses clean you swore
we could see Venus if
the clouds would sit right
Aphrodite in blue jeans a ladder
in darkness is still
a ladder


IV. Januarius

Color dissolves and
hibernates underground grey winds
stampede through the Roman Year
like the ghosts of unchained thoroughbreds
all the bees have drowned their honey
spread thin across the blackened sky   when
everything is upside down
stars become seeds

It started out as a drip
and then it became a faucet
and then it became a leak
then finally, a sewer,
then finally, a lake.

I found your net it was
right by mine
where we left them wet
I soaked my head in gasoline
and set fire to the house I
never looked back
to see if you were surprised

I felt the bark under my new hand
and I felt the trees stop growing
acres of wasteland denied

Cleaning out the drains I had
fingers under my skin
that the world saw but I didn’t

Hope is water on the floor
a cup filled with glass
a vessel in itself