the low-hanging clouds
mean that god is in residence
on the mountain of serpents
just west of here

tendrils of holy mist descend
adding depth to my perception
of the many canyons and rises
that are just flat foothills most days

adding understanding
by obscuring
showing me more
by showing me less

only god moves in this way
i bow my head in reverence
for my father, god
for my mother, nature

I'd feel so at home in Wyoming;
Married to my television
Cigarettes for breakfast
I'm at peace with my shaking
Clipping branches of my tree
To feed my precious pets

I never played the game
Rolling dice around my teeth
But I keep my eyes on the window
Let the creeping wind in my belly
Be all that makes sense
Thrown like a doll in the corner
Unblinking for the longest time
Measured by the shift and click
Twisted legs coiled like cables
Sealing Matthew into his box

America's fables never spoken
Her reputation and misadventures undeserved
Fit like latex on an amateur surgeon
My cardboard house unfolded
Everything in a tanned leather briefcase
I just forgot the combination
827 - 125 and the button slides

Why can't I leave my things in a crate
And ship myself off to a Grecian island?
I could be sung to sleep
Just as in my room
But now, my dear Johnny, Oldboy,
It's gloaming on Elysium
My chest is still beaten upon
I file the cold edges round
Empty another carton and call it a day

Autumn clovers leave
The dirt it stays behind
Steelheads turn up the arms
I don't wanna stay, I see no thing but pride
That man he drowned. He loses everything.

Pinnacle ladies cry, they move up the yawn.
I shake the bed, until tomorrow's grieving.

It shucks our graves in two, splits the pupil's
Fearless cast. I can't run away, I can't make Friday.

The needle takes too long, the blood doesn't leave a trace. The opening is long to go, but
We wallow with it.

Each funeral is a thousand alms
They call to each other's arms.
They won't go astray, even if
You leave them.

Sorrow is my brother's lot
It takes up the head, and leaves us sideways-
Another whim lilts in two. The bridle makes the saw, that breaks down every god. It brands the flock, I don't look at anything.

This day grief makes it hard to go
Another man is bent.
My crooked spine, he shakes in torment.
Up upon the piste, broke down onto the knees
Nothing's there, but I can't look away.
Keep me to yourself
Like a secret you don't know
If I could just find a way
To live another day.

My happiness comes from me ask my friends and the world around me blossoming in a spark of crimsony red moon glow on forethought walks through the shivering lenses of percept that trickle down our backs as we enlighten ourselves with all that is in between and unseen.

It is as if our aged limbs were caressed into a symphony of leverages and their shapes. We cannot be cadavers. We are arms of cheer and picture jasper, adolescent googled-eyes gathers with virile fixations on our partners as we prey on the map lines subtly employing our eyes as we dart across each dimple, pimple, freckle, and gently worn rash lines.

These are the dogs of our incessant barking. Idling for sincerity, as actors swiftly press Winter into us while our limbless diction presents our inadequacy Rd upon our ugly and I'll-tempered neighborly-things. Aliens of the afternoon, first floor agony and karmas standard for living in a reduced climate One.

Wearing down the hooves, undulates from Pepperdine mark trails with breaking breads and twigs and bones. Undulates from another world, behoofed and bemoved, curdling their sappy reselling a of drat and unkindly remarks. And we have begun to wonder when evolution will kick-in. When will the military come for them at the doors and vacate is all from our nontoxic lie-shrouded apartment complexes, condos, and cabins. Slaughter numbers of letters and integers right out in the street; loonies in the town square and the moose are crying.

Operational anxiety. The words I've been using don't make any sense to me anymore. It's all quiet and I have so many questions. The mountains shout, "*******!" over the Gros Ventre. And I'm lifeless and apathetic about lessons. I just turn on the Philip Glass and go for **** misunderstanding. More of it is coming and somehow I allow it in. A me circle of despair, loss, and immense love. My subjects must be growing curiouser and curiouser. Some of these adverbs dress in white dresses with black boots and carry scars on their palms while they bribe you off their tears to crawl back into the dusty desert graves your skin wants back.

My oven mitts aren't even of animals. I stare at the deer and moose from our second story balcony. My wrists hurt in a loss of practicing this habit. Subject matter that burns through the nights where I don't sleep. I torment myself in nursery rhymes that don't rhyme. Beds that don't water themselves, and the stories that keep my fingers soggy and pruney, drowning their dactylic digits in infinite keyboard unfulfillment.

The music is familiar. It throws its knife-wielding notes into my gut- my innards are bleeding, and my headache is growing stiff. I could mutate like Alex Mac and operate in a vacuum. I could be an incubator of self-aggrandizing disastrous behavior, an awful diaspora of introspection, a sickness that starts in soft flesh and tissue and summarizes me in the faces and heads of people and children that never turned their heads to listen.

I am wrestling your poems out of your hands. A royal couplet you try to explode against your innards, and a ****** prose that cascades upon the walls, in a mushy textural, even artistic mess of crimsony soulless words you throw around, things haven't changed but you I think you were just pretending to be haunting.

Winter hoarfrost and summer sweating. Integers upsetted by short-acting suns and cold and chilling dips in frigid waist-high water. The rocks are slimy and I don't feel like the fires are still coming. I point my nose to the water and take fifty paces. When will I have my forty-two minute day. Children are ***** liars and ought to have no sugar or treats. But let's not feed them from bowls we place on the floor.

My fingers are freezing, my cheeks, nose, back, and elbows too. I am smoking and never going to stop. I have met Joe Black and he tells me he used to command David Berkowitz into shooting people in cars, so I tell him the only thing certain in life is death and taxes, and that we need a new dishwasher, a cheaper place to buy ice cream, and a rough concrete square of floor I can torture myself for experiencing too much as human.

Eleven to you
Star-crust in de stijl courts
Silhouettes and shadows
Speed boats race around the lake

On and on and on and on and
Guilty pleasures and guilty moldy blues
Sandwiches on the weekends
Pasta and pesto or gnocchi every other day too

Common mysteries follow the bayou
Heavy heads laden in niello swamps
Does acrostics in the daytime
Pleasures herself with crosswords on her days off

Sacks of coffee, potatoes and ivory- beer at 5am
Three fingers lay across the stitch
This needlepoint is something good
No one died but someone could

Heavy on the hops, melancholy Wednesday's
Miracles in wrestling Russian masters
Thwarting automobiles without their governors
Faster and faster they go
Growing faster and faster they show

The date is printed orange
in the bottom right hand corner
of my very favorite picture.
     It's from two-thousand and eight

And, as my cramping legs keep ambling
every gavel foot falls faster than
the one that fell before.
     I'm wondering
where the Hell the years have gone.

You were all brown eyes and wide white smiles.
I was all youthful bravado.
As your laughter swelled to confidence,
I was sinking straight down to the bottom.

And the water rolled on past us,
          Goose Creek
swelled with the Summer run-off...
Tell me where did all this time run off to?

The moon is looming large
in the hazing, ashed-out corner
of my wine-enchanted eyeball
     on this too-typical night.

And every hyphen lends some extra space
to staggered breaths as I recall your face.
Now I'm spelling out
     my own verdict:
defendant's moving to convict.

I don't know the final cost.
     But I got enough memories
to say what future I still have,
     well it sure ain't coming free.

I got enough memories now
     that I don't know where I will be
when a year is just a yawn and a sigh,
     and you're still lodged
     deep down inside of me.

You were brown eyes' living confidence,
I was yellow, fading cowardice.
I know you were the better one,
and I've always been scraping the bottom.

And the water stalled beside us,
          Red Riv-
-er choked with Winter ice blocks.
Don't know why I was so dumb and frozen.

But thanks
     for believing
          all those years.

White-bodied black bird raven like creatures that sit everywhere and obnoxiously yell to each other from the wilderness we live inside.

Wet birds. Soaking in mod colors affixed to the numbers the looms set in the torn threads of an old tank top named with the characters of Dune.

And in sweetly moving breaths of air the peaks pull through this range of mountains seen from our back deck.  

Friends, join us as we balk putting away cardboard boxes as not to put a hinderence on the relationships with our neighbors and instead traverse the moose-trails the tourists stop and crop their lenses at- only to make to Brouhlim's.

On Ohio nights, you've got fireflies.
     Out West, we like our rifles.
Never pull your days out from the roots
     'til the nights have all been ripened.

City lights are purpling blackened streets
and we can see our way to habits through
          these neighborhoods...

Our sentences are carbines.
Order up a few more rounds.
I guess it's almost automatic
when the late reports all sound
          like we've got
          rain all week.
        It's rain all week.
And you're so sick of parades.

You say you want a Summer.
One that never ends.
One that takes you back to Ashland,
          brings you
sense of time and feelings for old friends.

I think the party's over.
No streamers on the wall.
Pack your bags, punch a ticket,
          bring a
jacket and I'll see you in the Fall.

          I'll see you in the Fall.

On Ohio nights, you've got fireflies.
     Out here, we've got some mountains?
Never load your words into your clip
     'til the shells have all been counted.
City lights rain gold on midnight streets
and we can feel our way familiar through
          these neighborhoods.

Our paragraphs are Kevlar.
Knocking down another round.
When the night sky tries to swallow
you, the late reports all sound
          like we've got
          rain all week.
       It's rain all week.
I was so tired of parades.

I'm looking towards the Winter.
Know how that one ends.
It'll take me back to Sheridan,
          bring
sense of time and memories of old friends.

I think the party's over.
No streamers on the wall.
Pack your bags, punch a ticket
          bring a
jacket and I'll see you in the Fall.

       I'll see you in the Fall.

It aches when I smile.
My State's a disaster.
Coal rollers, burnouts and days full of rapturous
laughter and "Red Face"
down in Lusk in the hot days
of Summer--it's boiling;
Winter winds burn up your face.
I first learned to hate
myself in a snowstorm
on Dow Street in Sheridan.
My best friends are the slow warmth
that spreads through the chest,
lifts a cold heart, grabs popcorn and pints
at the Blacktooth on hundreds of nights.
And 500,000 simple souls are a sight.
Still they're just half a million salty
drops in the ocean--
A quick squall of rain on the Bighorns.
They've opened the floodgates for *******,
morons, bigots and rednecks
and rich, ******* ranchers thinking
          everyone owes them.
And their dollars are deadpan
gallows jokes down in Cheyenne.
But I've seen cheap smiles 4 miles wide
out by Sundance.
And I've got good friends that I still carry with me
like the potent, sweet, earthy afterburn of good whiskey,
or the smell of the lodgepoles in the Spring
up in Story.
And it's still my home
even though it's so empty.
It's still my home
though it sometimes seems ******.
That State's in my bones,
I don't think it'll leave me.
So please understand that some nights
when you find me,
you've stumbled across a small splinter
chipped off of Wyoming.