An arid lantern exhales abrasive hums
It rests in the smothering cloak of humid anticipation

Names of children are scrawled on the nicotene crickets’ lattice backs
The crickets bumble in drunken waltz along the ground
They cannot fly through clouds gasping on the chains of Cerberus’ collar

The sticky smog and shadows scuttle through the low-hanging, lifeless clouds
It’s innocent origins trickle from the hem of God’s garment
To the jaded, cracked doorframe to deliverence

This sympathetic shack of dim-witted yellows and hosiery pink
She lays porcelain petals on the descending steps into indigo overcast

Tears and cans of pop, tear gas and the police
Races and arms, the backdrop of the arms race
When I close my eyes to respect the dead
All I see is red

Races and arms, the backdrop of the arms race
Tear at your textbooks for a page colored in peace
All I see is red
Breathe in the brackish scent of stagnant air

Tear at your textbooks for a page colored in peace
Is there never peace at no human expense?
Breathe in the brackish scent of stagnant air
Exhale whispers of hope to break up the despair

Is there never peace at no human expense?
Must there be blood to see red?
Exhale whispers of hope to break up the despair
I let them encase victims of ceaseless attacks

Must there be blood to see red?
When I close my eyes to respect the dead
I let them encase victims of ceaseless attacks
Tears and cans of pop, tear gas and the police

There are many ways
to break the spine
of a book.

Line the jelly-bean backs
too close to the battered floor,

Hide wedging polygons
between pages and binding,

Or open them and stack the backs
in lateral,
frayed Vs.

Birdy, mind your ears: my howls dash the desert’s edge
My passing gusts will matt your feathers fair and faint
And scratch your eyes of liquid soul with grainy kiss
And gentle downy is unsuited for the desert’s bipolar breadth
Accompanied by what I fear is desperate, decrepit depth
Yet you flutter further in the flats, breaching the jagged heart-planes

Doleful dabs of curt dismay smatter some sodden planes
The wrenching, soaked, woolly pelt fumbles at the edge
And he hopelessly attempts to slow his slide into the depths
The depths ****** in dew to make heaving paws faint
Paws drowning in imbued imbalance: my broken flooded breadth
Washed out and faded just short of amber kiss

Who does he yowl at night to kiss?
A range of mismatched capricious planes
Breath for miles of biome breadth
Between each bound a splitting edge
As fate would weave, his heart is faint
And craves impassioned, tender depth

Perhaps the hiemal hillsides bear a greater, sanguine depth
Beneath the snow are pines to smell, daffodils to kiss
Amid the pungent, frigid, fear the air contains a faint
Hint of something sweeter there, buried in the planes
And when the blunt ice trickles warm, beneath the caustic edge
A range of life of a new kind: unbeguiling breadth

Who forsaw the vanguard hunch of birds and bears for breadth?
Not I believed that birds could dive in deserts and find depth
Not I believed that bears could whet love from sharp edge
Not I believed, thus almost missed, fate’s gentle ghostly kiss
Not I believed and thus I blew dark clouds across the planes
Not I believed in him, thus it was I who was so faint

And in the meadows lions crawl and crocodiles faint
And happily, with wherewithal, the boa to gaur breadth
All coexist in mystery perplexing on placid planes
Burrowing through sand and snow, birds and bears find depth
Jumbled earth and tumbled thoughts, a misty morning kiss
Stitches the bipolar planes and hems the obscure edge

Across the crystal planes you see their trusting dives to depths
The bird’s faint singing drifts through waves as it explores the breadth
The bear’s protective kisses peek just beyond the edge

Sordid stepping from the left arise
For to the right she’d seldom think to see
Lashes just like spider webs o’er eyes
Which sweep the mist and catch me as I sleep.

The new Sprit with the eyes in wich he’d trapped
The strings of many precedented fates
Grazes on the threshold of the lapse
Of recognition; there the left berates.

The Sprit of spirits potent in her kind
Her all-assuming manifested craze
Ejecting me from woeful holds I find
Rejectamenta clothed in urbane gaze.

The Sprit of desperate threaded fingers jousts
The Sprit of spirits: sovereign of doubt.

there is a place where the digitized vinyl gospel funk
intercepts the rumble of passing cars
and creates the most electrifying revitalization
sharper even than the razor blade air
running darting
from underneath far-off frosted leaves
on starch high branches
scraping my fingers and ankles
with ceaseless sounds that show
the bristled boundless scuplted green plane
how to dance

soon the sun loses its hold on tranquility
and leaps from the halos
of buildings and coloratura crowns of trees
painting the bustling scene with an overlay
of glossy jubiliation