Jim has a crow that barks like buckshot
and little men duct taped to kazoos as baleful
as a siren on a beached whale’s conscience.
a blue slug addicted to krill or be krill.
That crow has a talon as wide as the world
and a song stripped of hymns like flesh
from a bone of contention.

II

I can’t breathe. but my
last breath
said so.

death and taxis
avoid eye contact
to delete you.

III

growling softly...

summer is sputtering out and fall
is fluttering forward with hammock eyes
swaying in the riddle of sunlit caverns and dark fires.
in my bones i can feel the changing of the guard.
how a sun is plucked up
from a yawning chasm of noel
and black chandeliers.
comets that pray to the ellipse
and never the cause..

but the season rumbles and laments
any aspect of the other.
with the rain pining for blue skies
or blue skies dreaming of gray.
we are joined in the calamity of
marching against Being.
by Being so hard that a link in a wound
is more an iron pillow than a spirit
of Morpheus, Day-walking with a
communicable
Flu.

Before You Flew.

It’s like sleep is treason. I disembark from a loadstone
and revolve around an endless disjoint.
It’s like being exposed to the radioactivity of a dead god.
but with graven images on your hands
and the milk of human blindness
in a butter churn -
you never ****
with.
udders are like fountains of wane
when your thirst is preternatural
and your tongue
as tethered to
Tantalus
as every hour at beck and call
is only listening to you breathe
through your mouth
when you have
nothing to say.
It’s like sleep is treason, gussied up in pinched gold filings
and rust burnt daffodils. it’s like  not attending the beginning -
but claiming to be a witness. more a rumor fog-
on your windshield...
telling the curve of the world that your road
leads to answers.
sleep is mocked by the hemisphere we believe in.
unraveled and plucked from-
dim glories to face the brutal happening
of being Alive.
sleep
is how having no choice
tells you how to be awake
when the time comes to be asleep
through a war you can’t win
until you betray the comfort
of your Albatross-
and your world-class indifference
to the Mystery
of You.
Sleep can never lay siege to the tyranny of your Illusions
but can always discontinue your savage love
as it Is.
within you.
this species of sleep has all your tears in a box
and all your hope in ivory towers
of Strange Rodeo.

all the trains have lost their cars and the miles sprawl in leagues
toward an alabaster eating the yellow from a black heart
as moonbirds swear fealty to deep light
and careen into blithering with all the noise of wounded camps
and the gifted cauldrons of our unspoken words.
there are flags in the twilight, resting on a spear at the foot -
of untold Otherness.
claiming a kingdom, ransomed to the Highest Believer
and tethered to a stone that adores weightlessness
but has too heavy a heart to simply float.
should oblivion be deferred, it would take a tide of blood
from a frozen clot. a burst of uncanny resolve
that inveigles the lost symmetries of alluring Dystopias
with a gentle grenade that has lost its **** mind.

THEN you can see the Exit
when it darks
and all thought balloons
of the truly Lost.

and get gone.

in the local rag the tales rattle like corn in a can.
the sky from below is so removed, we call it “ The Sky “
and nobody notices, because it’s too True to be Real.
the stern lamps that gaslight the night vision of dwarves
and Romans, scald the little cheeks of a new black
with their earnest waste of time…
given that the dawn will overtake the night until a star dies
and your letters will be read to flames
as dispassionate as a breeze.
in the local rag your horoscope is a nested loop
surreal and oblique like a sand dollar
for a windmill.

a trojan ghost with
a tea cup full of sparks
and a madness for
a map to
a map.

i’m on my hill, and a swarm of long Tuesdays
perturb my actual Monday night
pooling at my disconnected feet on the grounds of anonymity  
where I trim the verge with cattle eyes, gawking at Time
with my ruminant mouth slack, and my spires arcing bolts
from the crown of a troubled Sky.
my pumpkins are not the same. they have lost their dreams
to a labyrinth of vines… tumbling over dead leaves and applesauce sunshine-
but only in the margins of our conspicuous stupidity.
inflamed by a cold sun.

i’m on my hill, as Leviathans repel from low clouds
to barter teeth at my table
for a long song about a boy full of fables
and a Sea in his Palm
full of worlds.

Politely pining for Plums.
That's a Social dynamic; integral to your Kafkaesque Self Awareness
and it must be appeased. But i assure you; you needn't bother waiting to be entertained in any event... and the seeking of a thrill is no mocking of a bird.
It has flown without you
and all genuine delays are at the feet your imaginary Life.

You might recall the imperfect stillness of your haste. How it halted.
How it gained an inch in hell by waving hands
at a Taxi, stalled at the wreck of all your unspoken Banshees
Balking at Time’s sinister rebellions against the flesh of your everlasting Mortality.
You succumb to too many Truths and meteors.
Ambling in the fog of All Things
Adjacent to -
“ Why ? “
.