Them **** beasts
Hunt our cattle
Picking out the weak.
Go get your rifle, son.
Go fetch your boots.
Those *******
Look best skinned
And ******
Across the bed
Of this old truck.

I nod along with them.
I plod along with them to get the guns;
Isn't this necessary,
After all?

But inside my soul
I feel a dark night spreading
No, not sinister
But sweet.
The stars above like scattered drifts
Of snow spilled in the wind and crunching under
Loping feet.


And I am standing on a narrow ridge
And listening.
Hidden like some ephemeral thing,
Like sweetgrass burning in the wind;
Listening.

And I can feel them rising.
I can hear them crying,
A ghostly sobbing.
Falling on my knees
I call them.

To the draw they run!
Run!
Like so many mothers clutch their young
And all the warriors toss their guns
And still the cavalry descends,
Run!

Across the creek and trailing blood, she runs.
Singing her howling song, she runs.
Howling her death song, she runs.  

And in one last act of desperation falls.

I see them drag her carcass up the draw.

And in the truck, they’re laughing,
Humming, slapping knees, and spitting,
Like some celebratory release.  

In my head, a single phrase:
Them **** beasts.

blanketed in a polar cold
woven by the hollow sun
the hibernating hills
dream of sultry days
and the return
of forsaken love

Remember those days,
when we’d jump in the car and find ourselves
somewhere fifty miles south?

Or when we’d decide on a Wednesday
that it was the time for an adventure,
the purple pom pom on your dashboard
fluttering in the summer wind.

Where did those days go?

Why have we left them behind,
the exhilarating, spontaneous, unsure
best days of our lives?

We have traded them for days locked in,
watching the snow fall outside rather
than being the ones outside chasing it.

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.

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

I'll be dreaming tonight..
Yes I'll be dreamin' tonight
Of a Trico hatch that's goes off like a New England snow storm
A Loaded five weight by my side, with plenty of backing to spare.

I'll be dreaming tonight
Of a Montana highway leading me back home,
Home to the Firehole bridge, a purple sky ablaze
Salmo Trutta, my brother from below

I'll be dreaming of Casting tight loops below Kilpatrick Pond,
I catch a glimpse of Ernest smiling on the bank
The Hemingway legacy lives on at Silver Creek
As we wait for the  green drake hatches to fill the air!

I'll be dreaming tonight of days gone by,
When a young boy caught his first German brown.
Neversink, you  beckon me to the days long ago
I feel the force of the river pull me from a deep sleep.

And I awaken to the thought of......Tight Lines!