You
Yes
You

you know what I mean
if you have trouble falling asleep
you must know what I mean
and if you have even greater
trouble waking up and
leaving your bed, joining the cold
world with its cold air and stares
And if you either can't stop eating
or can't stand the thought of food,
if you drink too much and drink alone,
if you have no passion for anything
and the things you once enjoyed feel
pointless and empty and you feel
trapped in a void, forever floating

empty

what you need is not a friend
A friend
many friends
won't fill the void

What you need is a spark
and just enough desire to
keep it from dying

just keep it alive

Someone wise once said
the spark either dies out
or lives long enough to burn down
a whole forest.

I'm convinced he was right

To convince yourself as well
keep that spark alive

just one more day

Keep it alive.

Unfolding into itself, inviolable
in prosaic self-*******,
a boundless repertoire
of shape yearns forth surreptitiously
from inscrutable amniotes to claim
time as its own:

  Here a thicket
  of sycamores, there a baldaquin
    of pinnate branches, yonder
      a periphery of marigolds, below
        a cacophony of hyraxes, above
    the corpuscle of a lynx, the mid-flight
   jink of a darting swift and moribund
  crawl of a mollusk;

     Hymenoptera coaxing
     their haploid broods into teeming
     life as a cell of the swarm
         and viviparous apes cajoling
         suckling chimerae at the fathomless
         fountainhead of a rosy breast;

       Higher still,
       Cirrus cephalopods traversing
       the trench of sky, dandelions
       hitch-hiking the drift of a barren plains'
       wavering hum on cockchafers'
       forewings and a turbine's
       bombinating pulse, the chattering
       of roots ravenous for depth --

Jittering bangtails the hallowed echoes
of lascivious manes --

   inchoate sprout-hood the daedal
   nonage of towering evergreens --

      the plaintive shrift of elegiac
      redbreasts a goad to silent elation --

A likeness unlike
     (vocabularies of vertiginous blinds)
          (the eyes of ignorance closing)
             (the mouth of the mystery)
                that spurns the truth of tongues

                     is nature naturing.

rummaging through the ruins
of the landfill, his sole fellow explorer
a cur, content when his snout sniffed mold
blissful when he discovered a can

his aspirations grander than the canine,
he hoped to find artifacts of the ancients,
and digging deep he did, an Apple, one of Job's
first magical machines, the monitor
dull but without a solitary crack

then a turntable, its diamond stylus
long turned to nub, veneer half peeled
by the blade of time--its final symphony spun
eons ago, or at least two dozen years

finally a Dr. Pepper sign, an old as time,
its 10, 2 faint but still there, its 4 long gone
the masterpiece's artist never lamenting
its weathered fate: he too had his time
his labors filling his pockets, pleasing
his eyes, and immortalizing him
in the open bowels of the earth

Cramping legds their crying
Like the babes, lying
In their mothers' arms
What are the charms

Which parents ensnare
Like poisonous air
Be witched to reproduce
Nature's silent truce

Though you die you can live
Vicariously and give
What makes you, you
To another imbue

The train halts brakes squealing
Interlocking carriages feeling
Each other and the air
Signal lights stare

And the track opens up before us

What a shame! Even (mouth thick with honey) the poetry, tarr'd n feathered, pimped out, holstered to the inside thigh - Promiscuity as a promise, the clouds fil and zzz leet ::: sleep, sleet. Only if I'm paid. Bruise shaped acorn on my shoulder, I hide out in my car, in the cold. Hello solder, hand me a high 5! And it turns into 7, which turns into 9, which turns into night. There is no shame in words, in swallowing tiny torches and blacking out ochre eyes - say, sleepy head - If anything this [poem] is a fragment of some whole puzzle-u, a wannabe winsome trove of squiggly lines.