lost the remote. now the adventure begins.
when Bookstores were actual, you could go there
and find what browsing smells like, by-hand,
but pacing back and forthright on **** affords -
the grand vistas
of sustained contemplation.
candles lit for no reason
just pretty.
laptop humming like a soft boiling box
of overexposure.
and there’s the bourbon
on a resolute desk
like a summoning
of moonshine
with a caramel
sun.

all that, and
no pun.

space is nothing severe.
a docile appointment
of umbrellas weeping
and overcoats clutching pacifist spikes.
the odd mirror, telling nothing but the truth
curiously gilded in baroque frames
draped over benign hooks
in a wall, wearing paper for as long
as anything ever lasts.

in her apron of doom, she dresses the hare with a sharp kit.
they glisten with their purpose; dividing fowl from the air
solving the agony of hunger… with a pang of grace
and Darwinian inertia.
the knives dream of clean cuts
and mangos.

and her kitchen is pristine
as a bell.

when she dines in, she lets the moon do all the work
and feathers slither by, with so many charms decanted in the jasmine apocalypse
to swoon forever like an uncorked boy.
the marmalade is never dainty.
the air is mostly a cotton barge of intangible voyeurs
as intimate as a private thought.
her lace clings to the bead of sweat that twinks besotted
and time prevails upon Beauty with a lewd choir of Sleep.
as she dangles from an ecstasy
phalanges Etcetera.

Stoking quill fires in my oyster magnetron
is all the rage, all the white page -
at its bully pulprint. Gavels singing in the maelstrom
of our misbegotten promenades.
Joking as daffodils pollenate my grief’s migration.
enthrall of a Pagan blot on Night’s plague
as If silly wisdom Drifts!
With Hammers ringing in tandem
to pause at a place that propagates.
A Dead Lift.
Perhaps too brightly.
with Harlequins?  

And navel-gazing.

too U
and Knot
This.

There’s always a little titmouse stitching a joy
into a button’s brass… so the peasant garb has an eye full of eyes
seeing nothing that you fail to see,
only the perspective has changed clothes
to match your apathy...
You could go to The Ball
but it’s Everywhere;
so why move?

And this is how we ponder
on the catwalk.
Fashionably Oblique,
Sword of Damocles
Approved,

I am by no means happy.
Thorn born and ludicrous all my joy.
what is sweet is salt
and what is salt is sleep.
And what is Sleep but an anvil
to believe in.
I hammer loss. ***** at the throat
of a forgotten opera.
all days are the end
as all my honey blacks
where the white theme of a blue world
bleaks the withering
of my constant debacle.
I come from a hell in myself
but choose to linger among you
like a mockery of the same.
Too many stars
and too little light
to conjure them.
broke where it counts.
slumming in the forge
of my misery
as all unbearable love
defies the answer
to a quiet
numb.

a singular curio on
a length of pearls
on a strand of hair
in a pond of
gone.

life is like something
that you can’t place
because Here
is Full.

And There...
has moved
On.

swimming in real
I see the earth in your eyes and cannot sky for all your meteors
sleeping in the atoms of my blanket.
for all the alabaster of your forearms
swarming embrace like thin kittens made of rope
and feminine steel.
I see my worth in your eyes and cannot lie for your troubadours
dreaming in the tatters of my mistakes.
for all the amber chambers of your plum
disarming grace with tin ingots made of hope
swimming in real.

how empty are all your handfuls?
do we all sleep where the wolves blink-
and the moon seep into howling
lather?
do we choke on the foam
of our persistent cadavers by scooping -
lungs from a pit of breathlessness?
do we do such things to under-last
the span of our questioning?
if so, is all the life at our fingertips
gleaming euphoric in a fit of grief?
or at an angle in a wrinkle
of mischief
that corners the bruise
where the pretty
Is a living
thing?

At the corner of Toil and Banks
A waitress with wheels in motion
had to stop.
It felt like a joke about you
with a misspelled nametag.
but she missed the bus
so it felt worse.

her tips were burning pinpricks
in her 9 pm jersey
where the seal was broken
by unseasonably warm
candor.
but getting a taxi was like
an orchid arithmetic
with gold chains
made of Concrete
Aloe Virtual.
and a spot
of constant
heart in a
marsh.

she was never after.

I see Spring now. tipping green sprouts into grey days, as April showers
and May dips a towheaded Sun above the brisk humidity of a strange tangle
of Seasons… spooning in the dark at midday.
I see Spring now, lilting in the underbrush; fetching imminent spoils
as fairy rings and bluegrass tango in the corrugated lawns
of our fathers.
a wealth of exchange is bilking the dam for all its girth. an ocean of tomorrows
with midges and scissortail cleaving the blue with sharp beaks
and black eyes like a shy Luger
on a hip.

like a margarine heart of a Georgia peach
the sun bogs at the bottom of the sky and i boggle
at the merriment of surrender,,, as the hours retire
to their night clocks and mice pitch sit-coms
in cornfields -
while you sleep
through spectacular
epiphanies
that a heartache
can hardly
pretend.

whatever land you’re in, i’ll know it by the elemental books
and the babbling brooks of your palatial retreat.
i’ll know you're there when i cross the boundaries of your remove
by the scent of your moon-barrels of rain
and the warped coin of your realm
slipped into my palm by sleight of hands
too small to get wet
in a pond.

your ripples will find me attuned to your island by kite-string
and periwinkle post-Its. my radio will have you mapped
to a dun hill where other hills are chaste and smothered in fog.
but bitten by sunshine on the nape of a shadow -
I’ll know you for your regal fatigue
and embrace you with the love
at my core, so that our magnets may kiss
and restore your silhouette
to my blindspot
like a vital conundrum
with an operatic lisp.

Like too many kisses on a loose tooth, a butterfly dances.
the air like syrup and gossamer, with clouds out of time’s grip
scudding the blue raiment of the world, with happy gnats flapping
in the teeming as shoots of fennel curl in the copious soliloquy
of the infinite canvas.
the day is all things. i witness unrecoiled, on a bench of Springtime.
soaking my tendons in tumultuous calm.
a goodly amount of nectar, beads the forehead of a Bee.
and i am constantly amazed
where it hurts.

Milking a comet is thirsty work
but it suits me to the bone.
dog star kennels in my back forty
where the pecans are black fallen
in green grass… there i lose my frisbee
and sing otherwise.
out by the shed you can mark a century
of unspoiled silence…
humming in the canopy
like a harmless
quiet.

like a mitten
for a snowflake
with a song.

Dan Dan Noodles slipping over a gaijin fork-tine at lunchtime
glooped in brown broth, glistening below the wriggle
of a first bite in a $200 suit,,. at a trending Cafe.
Car fumes dangling like phone fobs, simmer in the absolute workday.
chumming the swirl of our cataracts with the blood of our Dreams.
With the sun screaming at the pavement
where we march to our far away…
like slumbernauts rummaging through snowflakes and notifications.
little bells that ring when a space between words needs a thought to stop a train
with an Ad for ******.
Culling the heard.

Love unfurls in the small hour of our moment in the dark
and blooms like a caterwaul of siege-engines, churning pearls into vice grips
clutching the heart where it numbs best; restoring the vulnerable to the throne
and tossing the agony of pointless birth signs
over the Niagra Pause
of our downhill
telemetry.

Love stuns at rest, like a spoonful of lightning from an olive press.

whatcha gonna do?

James Joyce had smelling salts and ***** tins tucked in his Dramamine
and just off the coast of his swarthy daggers, lay all the pirates of bright minds
clumped in a sponge of all the orange that an insipid grin
could forge into a cufflink at today’s prices -
and still bargain.
Frumpy catalogs of myriad departures, woven into leathery air… dark portals and cucumber sandwiches; savoring an afternoon of incomplete theorems
At High Tea, at odds -
with Low Tide…
but consensual by default
Like a lamb in a spider’s web
when all flies are ghosts
of Veal.

Bethesda

fireflies and some kind of perfect icosahedron juicing a stone.

when the end is a ribbon of candor, you only tell the truth
and chew gum at the same time.

these lights I’ve knit into black coins are real lights.
i have chambers of me full of YOU.
i keep swimming with Sirens to pass the time.
i dark happy so poetry happens.
aswoon in the upper gloom of my contemporary ‘elan.
i bear no resemblance to my plight
but rather roguishly perfume the perimeter
of a shadow at hand…
sun ***** for a fact.
like a gypsy with sea salt
lullabies… swiving sweet whispers
that a plume of vapors storm to the hilt
of a calming thorn.
these lights I’ve knit into black coins are real lights
seeping into the dream of my actual prism.
supping on the serious moonlight of my practical illusions.
charmed in the chest.

i have too many genies to betray a message in a bottle
so i’m all the way in love
with the
Wish.

not the best gardener, but the best critic.
I tease ivy into voluptuous spasms
by letting go to let god
do the work of a thousand
busy joys.

i assume the spice knows the dish
but keep copper in my whiskers.
gone are the days of my perpetual
soliloquy… battle born to the air
of all my sorrows
sleeping with ill fish
in dank thought
but surfacing
to continue.

my tamarind pixels lack focus
but all the happy at my disposal
serves the purpose
of my flailing
rainbows die like *******
on a wire,
and all the everything
you came for
is too long
to be
yes

I remember the East Coast, though I’ve never been. Did you feel what I meant by that?
There is something in the air that brings a stone to a feather
and somehow the whole world is more than an absolute failure.
more like a Roman nose on a resolute Bagpipe.
so many terminals sifting through haggard tributaries, anointing the fumes
of our empirical dialysis with all sweet fear of mortal life.
conjoining the wheel with the purpose.
so a stone knows it’s weight… but an hour lacks
a thought to contend with the moral of the story.
All the world like a constant balloon
made all of our things
at a glance.

burning again in my Asian diaspora, solemn as a coin in a fountain
dreaming of a well. i sleep where slipping into something is more
cloak than adventure… suturing the wound that tomorrow brings
with a thread of hope…. combing the bottom of the sea.
i eat all the hammers that an anvil resents.
i awake on the beach with a blue coconut lodged in my desolate wings..
with so many phantoms i can hardly cross swords
with the moon -
too busy slipping into constant joy piracy
and the palaver of my grim adjustments
to the common explode.

these lights that i’ve knit into black coins are real lights
and the sun knows the darkside of a simple prayer is more like a moth enthrall of a neutral calamity.  
there are no kings where a queen
is stitching harm into a canvas of woe. only the indolent pearls
of our most dire pavilions, marching into flatlands
as comical as a flat spoon.

you have summer on your face but can’t seem to simmer down
to a long pause made of brief encounters with sunshine and moon dander.
you’re always coping with the malignant Always
atoning for imagined sins… but spinning out of orbit
to align yourself with a nether world
of plush toys.

gems spoil in the dark.
and you know this at your core.
when sleep comes easy
you remember your name
like a dimmer switch
forgetting
how to
bright.

she’s painfully skinny but has ropes in her veins that saddle horses.
a nose like a hawk with two green eyes bathing in gold flecks and ambergris.
she has two hands like most people, but they have grace -
decanted from a snifter of opposable thumbs made of glass
and spun sugar.
steeped in the warbling of her Angelfire, all reckoning with her genius
is an exercise in futility. she is none of the above.
and it’s the very best strange.

I didn’t realize how late it was and kept eating cigars and spritzers.
chuffing on a spoonful of Mercury and bath salts, while having a debate
with a silent Mime. a mime, so ascetic that a grain of invisible rice
was a banquet. And pulling a rope made of empty-
was the gravy on the biscuit.
a flag at the summit
of a goosebump you were pawning
to a merchant
for a chill.

a bespoke menagerie of awkward McGillicuddy
carefully abandoned by the Hour… toppling the swiss clock
of our glockenspiel, over the horizon of my Optic Nerve.
serving the inkling of a thing is more rampant than devotion
to an actual god… and love has all the trappings of genius
as our serenity is an eternal war
that begs the Question
blindfolded

without asking.

it’s early morn and the air is barrel-shaped
with burgeoning twilight wane
and the shuffle of chickadees in the snow;
while gathering wood for the fire -
I’m surrounded by porcelain shadows
crunching underfoot like packing peanuts
made by Trappist Monks.

Life keeps smoking the Same Brand. So Tarpits are Superstars Now.
How you fit where your anguish is entertainment-
is exactly how a shoe tells a shoe-
how to step.
The rook is in the belfry… dustlorn and ponderous. a kookie apocalypse
charging up a moonbeam, on a runaway train. Palming a locust
and its’ Opera. So Life hums and throttles the marbling
of our quagmire; moving mountains to the cheap seats
so we can have an unobstructed view-  
of an Unknowable Thing.

while breathing through our mouths.

adrift in my stalwart canoe, I assume the worse
for the clouds on the horizon are ponderous and lackmirth.
they sleep through a Monarch’s birth
from a chrysalis at the tip
of a peach fuzz.
or a Silence as unruly
as Dawn!
all the dandruff of Angels
without the Fall.

silkworms preening tomorrows’ gospels
are swarming the delicate heart
of our discontinued lobotomy.
weaving hope into the tapestry of venom
slithering bemused in our cauldrons.
we leave no trace of our innocence
but rather stain and meander toward
the apex of our blithering.
so our Maths have maps to our Stupor
Like a
Vector to a Bone
of contention.

Duck fat disarms the broth by lunging for the roof of the mouth
with an eye for entrails smoking the plump thighs of an afterthought
coursing through a vein of roasted turnips and false suns
simmering as nimble as mice, from the tip of a tongue
to a cheek.

At this point; taste is a matter of taste… burning lemons with flammable YearBooks
and MoonPies. golem flotsam like Pinnochio papyrus, spinning a cautionary tale
with a mid-Atlantic accent and smoldering eyes made of spun Copper
and Honey, on tilt in a rainbow of Blue days
knelling at the hem of a virtual cusp
of a Maximum-
coming out
Alive.

long before strip malls had dreams and overdue books were made of flint and carousels-
there was an ancient joy that ached in the real world like an ingrown toenail-
snarling grief into aspic and anomalous carnivals.
coping with the doom of a thing
in its infancy…. while harboring a cool escape
to a quadrant of sumptuous
stuttering,

like clouds on a rope.

dem streets ain’t know yo name
just be out there like hunger on parade
all Mardi coup de grace, with spiked tea-
and neon giblets… all draped over hot coals
and incandescent funk. with meter maids
and pidgeons-
sweeping thunder under rugs
everybody know
ain’t your real
Hair.

dem streets be like consequences
marching with a band of thieves. tuba prodigies adagio
with oily smoke and cauliflowers marinading
in umami and soiled alters.
switchblades are like optional candy.
sharkfins in buttermilk
more like an actual
Wednesday.

dem streets be soaking bullets in Kopi Luwak
chuffing pearl dust off a subway chit
while staggering home from a dust-up
at Berkley.
we keep telling ourselves
to tell ourselves something
but forget to remember
how to forget
about it

out loud.

love is like slumber trumpets.
It’s all the same, really being different.
but somehow you quit winning
before you play.
our notes bleat and percolate
in the gypsum of our dross.
we burn through heavens
like bearer bonds
but foster shadows
on the dark side
of the sun.

at a loss.

I come upon a meadow of absolute mirrors, swaying in the breeze.
I lose my Unicorn in the thicket. shave my head with a blade of glass-
and nick the skin of a Pompadour. my candles are Jasmine and Mirth,
I fall asleep where the doubloons pillow. gilding ashes with ash.
lodged in the throat of a dragon, like a sleepwalking flame.

Am I awake when I chrysanthemum?
Or is my umbrella, the rain?

yesterday had wrinkles too. folding space with disjoint youth
at a pace exceeding understanding. we gimp into wisdom
at first, like docile hags. we love shiny things and postulates
that agree with our craft… we sleep overmuch but alas-
even a long night has its dawning collapse.
and the adventure continues to contuse.
thin heir adjacent to a room full of wounded Portraits.
The Self, like a strip of carpet above the lip
of a bust of Arthur Rimbaud.

as i colonize my outskirts, moon junk sick with the real pity of an angel
but half the size of a whole thing… sort of a trojan armada
marching out of wasted time. a tweedle dee in the steam trunk
of my misadventures.
mostly maple leaf tempura
dozing off in a tempestuous kiss
like a pumpkin praying to Chinese
with a Pi.

we slip into the stream of our afternoon-
and dare the span of a constant dark,
our lanterns possessed
of all the fire we enkindle
beyond spark.
we breathe on the wind
that our sails obey.
however, lost.
eating gumption with
our bare hands-
like golden brutes
tugging sunshine from
a cave.

toenails in the dark, shuffling in cotton skullies, where the suns park-
on thin dimes… as golden as poached domes in amethyst
where the Royal “ WE” is a scarecrow made of consumption
stitching the wherewithal of an Answer
to an improbable Guess.

we fidget and split the pith of our varmint stars
to within an ounce of Plausible. Gobsmacked in the actual.
chumming thunder with too many rays of delirium.
husking germs at our Diaspora.
cast as an open wounded
conversation.
conversating in a
Vacuum.

like teen angst on a scrimshaw barstool
made of absolute
demise.

the oil in the lamp is dreaming of a flask of star garments
draped over succulent blue where the pink is bright green.
crass haloes melting in sterling eggshells
and dusted with cardamom and lost socks.
the soft spots of the world, all dreamt by flame
sleeping in a viscous pool of itself.
swinging from a brace link
in a fable.

the cracked *** in the corner is dancing.
while disable.d.

we are born in the middle of it.
with our questions questing Anubian.
our redacted realities, roiling in the flume
of our heavy chimneys…
swept into voids with labels
that march into dim bleak, with dull bells
struck by lightning, coiled in implausible
hammers… made of last thoughts
and deep collisions.

our mission is agony abated.
should Winter have a star in its pantry
to nurse a dark horse
Then we have a reason
to gallop in the chasm
exuberantly
off course

we are somewhere that gathers moss
while churning butter into permafrost
with dainty little hands, grown savage
from wailing in prayer. we contain a noise
that surrounds us. all the golden pollen
of our dark gardens, swelling in the flame
of our Mystery…. unopposed.
we join intangible things to quicken the hardpan
of our ziggurats. we hum our contusions
into clouds of memory, abandoned by pain
and left adrift in the eye of a grateful monsoon.
culling pearls from loose oysters
where the moon should be.

twilight assembles in the plush velvet ponds of shadow fall and moonlight.
the stars above measle the hemisphere as the world twirls in the dark like a raving Sufi.
we are tethered to a wandering. as the grass of every meadow to a barefoot rascal
taking the long way home
because broccoli.

stone soup steeping in Etruscan  pottery
thrown on wheel from a chariot
dislodged from a bed of clay with a paintbrush
and a *****.
white cliffs staggering along the coast
like a tectonic parenthesis yawning waves
the width of a thousand condors
with eleven words for Albatros
as diaphanous as fog
docking into a bay
of odysseys  
haunting a sandy beach
like an epic ghost.

ozone esters drifting in tandem like sea salt barnacles
crusting the bell of every speck of dew
floating snow globe actual; northwesterly…
adorning the invisible with crepe sunsets, surging the pause
of a baffling miracle as common as time
with purple as deep as a chasm of frozen suns. a kingdom
of rain tilting the horizon with dusky mauve
tinkering with the afterglow of yesterday with tomorrow’s
Shanghai, low in the distant sky departing from derelict notions
of flat earth… hurling through space without ward
or talisman. entangled in the truest thing, curling a tempest
‘round a maypole, spoking the navel of Gaea…
at the center of the Labyrinth
that came with the void.

Blythe bounty vexing the verity of our span
like a boundless mote of crocodilian
conundrums.
beads of sweat gather at the lip of a luminous urn
perched on a plinth behind a waterfall
sequestered in a bank of fog
as noble as an acorn
with a cane.

or a funerary bog
tuning methane with a fork
in the road.

pollute your feathers at your peril.
for the sky between scars is every unchallenged door.
and you are the symbol of that fear made flesh.
Life is Shorthand for “ Deal With It”.
our clowns are clumsy when the spotlights conspire
to illuminate the Jest. but we take the Stage
like Pirates made of stars… and weightless coupons.

All the all gone, comes back like a vengeful orca.
bloated with disheveled moons and temporal rifts
in the fabric of a Shroud of Turin.
we bleed where we stand for Nothing.
Sleep where Our Dreams are fitful with Awakening.
fumbling at Martian waterfalls, as we trade
the humidor for the Desert. happy as clams
in a pit of merciless flumes.
boiling with all the Irony of a good day
patched over the Hole
of Every Day.

on the stoop, I glue my tuckus to a plank of mundane as the Chevys cruise in the turquoise Tannebaum
of Twilight, churning shadows into velvet. I surrender when the fog’s kiss, lifts the Veil and I ponder It.
I choose where my dyslexia is a coin and barter for less dementia. serving silent things in the tapestry
of untapped maladies, masquerading as polymer gods in a hedgerow of impossible odds.
I fumble for my keys like the rest of you darlings… but my hands are made of dented chrome and dendrites unmanned by sanity in favor of an alcove of dauntless Awe.
I’m barging into a rumination, as we speak.
taking the hill of a landscape as a Sharkfin-
gloating in Existential Soup.
My egga roll, something less discreet
than Yellow Journalism
in a Lava Lamp
as Lovers
do.

there is no fortress in the sun save the rain in your heart
and the alabaster reprisals of every comet in your dome
chumming the benthic oblivion with chew toys
and pond **** nailed to a rainbow.
there is no surface to breach. only the deep deep
and the overarching unspoken.
the free stars of bold silence
holding its breath like a poncho
holding the rain at bay.

we are the Barnabus moth in the flame of our contentious reality.
roiling in sunlight benighted. void harpies champing at the 8bit reservoir
of our discontent, relentless and buffoon. our comedies squat on the curbed rapture
of our indelicate illumination. all buddha huffing glitter often
in a dreaming canary’s pistachio garments
loaded with lost ghosts, that mostly pose as a threat
to skim milk. star funked by a torrent of unfortunate blessings.
gaining the last hill on a star
without a serpent.

all the time.