sleep keeps the day at bay and something....
else.
it burns
to have eyes this dark -
too early...
but the moon
will suffice.

there's nothing more...
and nothing's
nice.

II

but not too nice.

III

it bleeds where the fingers grip
and the palm sutures
the have-Knot.

but i digress...

i undress the kit
of our entire garb
and shun the whittle
of our sharp bones
of contention
in favor
of a bright glum trumpet -
of our dumb
neglect.

IV

an endless kick
in the
yes.

keep your steam
in an irish mouth missing teeth
or the nostrils of a grey wolf.
keep your steam
in the the pit of an eye
bloodshot with green glints of blue
or in the red vein
that spiders the white flesh
of a soul's room,
like a bolt of blood lightning
in a window.

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.

morning came very early... like a graduate class.
it dispelled the notion of a snowflake's last Will and Testament
gilding the nettles, where the berries were plump and deep virility
nesting in the fearsome spines of an Urchin
of such Symmetry, that your medallions
become clay; and your Heart is restored
to fullest Rage... where a lark Once donned the Umbral Crown
of a yellow Sun.... Now morning came early in the dark
stealing your revisions from the very skull
of your Mind's Meme. from the skull you etch your herds
Of Bison... some figure with a spear
plunging deeply into the
'Side Joke.

You are Purchased
for a thimble of blood from a white Turnip !
and returned to the Parties, gargling rainbows and leprosy...
chafing the Beauty of a grog of distilled amnesias in a perfect Assumption... grooming our prayers for higher education
via fresh Hells and chipping away, always away, at the ****** Windows !
shards of a slightly opened view to a backyard
over a sink in your feelings, where you cup your hands
and splash a bracing revelation from a cool spring
Sprung from a pipe that runs Under the House, in the Dirt's dirt....
There in the gut of where
You call your Self
by Your
Name...

like a lamb in a lion's mouth
sharing the spoils of sacrifice
as well the lethality
of a Conviction's breach. you groom the best oblivions
running a comb through your Beached Whale.
all the blubber for your candles lit !
to better gloom the room's dark harmony, with all the Irony
Intact. but never the reason
you seldom
spat at Kites -
until the Wind bit your nose
in December...
because you never found a scarf
to match the disappointment in your
imagined eyes
as seen through the crease of your profile,
squinting at pixies
and marsh fires.... loving you in spite of you
is the every day horror of discrete epiphanies
that lead only to a grave of fireflies
and stray orphans from a clutch
of messenger pigeons... painted to look like wisps -
of no more than a grain of shadow...
with feathers so soft they perish
as you tremble your touch... groping the fragile wings
of a robot's grip on soaring metaphors... a frantic sort of hazy.
connections where the frost burns
your navel -
while basking in the
Furnace.

like a peach in a lightning bolt... fermenting in Plato's Cave
bargaining the Mahjong for the Google Map -
to your very next departure.
" Living the Glimpse " is what they call it,
back at Rocco's Bar.
you never drink for free but never pay for the miles you weep
with the tears you keep.
you make a Living Wage... and part with your loot.
and the bourbon back.
limestone heartaches merely caverns
where you least expect to see your Self
cavorting in the dark
with the
Truth.

You Beam Down to Look Up.

most of your amulets are barnacles
but you Sea just fine.

roving the volume of an Emptiness
with flint and a raincloud
by design.

preaching to a Flame about
an Iceberg god
that never Fell a Tree
to set ablaze.

you are never seen again if you catch the bus...

and nothing else happens
anyways.

three hours before i knew i loved you, i loved you.
i was devout moss on the lea of the stone, where the unicorns died of laughter
and the wild things slept. i was unreasonable. god knew i had no you -
now ' there you are ! '
a sprite of brisk cooling hell's beauty where the goth is real enough
you broke the spell of some other heart
and i was all ready there
when you were.

three hours before you knew you loved me, you was me.

windmills grind
a breeze into a wisp
as wrung dust, floats
in dust moats of cumulus rust
like the  fatigue of a sixth sense
in a world of five comas
and a hunch.

a world of long shadows
with a brief harrumph
of brass

from a blood-yellow sun
and a bruised
lamp.

the catheter of a ******
and a pearl's
edge.

apple on my head
arrow in my mouth...

and a goose egg.

as i descend into the mad sun
i visit blue brothels and calm green seas.
i rip cables out of butterflies
to suture my wounds.
i change my course,
to my Fate.

As Must 
we all.

II

i've learned a great many things
about dead ends... they always start
where you live.
they bend the moon to your aspect.
the red death to a - 
false hope.
with a real
hope.

and as much despair.

III

gather where ye may, the very laurels 
of your heart. But, be neither spendthrift with your anguish -
nor copiously disarmed.
have your adventures where a god - 
can pardon you...
For having less faith
than an abandoned
thought of You.

go only to return.
and burn your memoirs in the attic
to **** the dream.

leave no fingerprints in the vacuum.
wash your hands of the spiral -
and feel what
It Means.

them be butterflies in the pastry
bedazzling the icing on the nape of your neck
and reeling me in
to the spire of your spine
with my lips, joyful and apart..
my crude lust, elegantly fawning
in the ripples of your wet ***
and narrowly avoiding'
a premature
Truth.

them be the kettles and the brine
yammering on about the pots and molasses.
the freak honey in the rock
of our solid moons -
as we recover from the act and act the part
of our chief deception
after the glow dissolves
and the *****
seltzers.

we awaken to the tossed sheets and the bare naked.

the morning had no coffee. just had 98 degrees by 10 am
and a barn on the lean in the distance.
where time never cuts the grass and nothing happens.
dirt roads pray for death or slow traffic. and clouds like smoke
from a bellicose pipe… on the lips of a medicine man
who became a woman when a cloud called him “ medicine man “
while the peyote was barking without dogs, was unleashed
to prairie in the marsh where the bogs agog
with summer candy in its peat moss.
no dowsing rod to spare a child the ridicule of finding god’s pond
with a stick obeying a cop.
the morning had no mirrors. just broken glass and aspartame
and very minor miracles. no part of a red sea. only dust mites
and last night’s *****. the trucks won’t stop complaining
about the radio. because you have no radio.
and when you sing on those long trips to the corner store…
your truck is like “ what the ****? “
and “ this guy must hate trucks….” and all sundry regalia of suffering
from a hole in the muffler and a tone-deaf pilgrim
on half a tank of sunshine and vermouth.

with a dent
in a twist.

i was looking for your house
and i found you in my thoughts
like a trick kite
tethered to my reverie
as assuredly
a tide the
moon.
i am
marooned in joy
beyond the sphere of sorrow
walking up your driveway
in the near dark
of an impulse
to drop
by.
i was looking for your house
and found the way
inevitable.
it was downhill from there
to the heart of the world
at your oaken door
with an open
heart.

i knocked.

When I gave up
Not a bell rang out.
And Lightning was withheld
By all accounts
From every corner of the sky.
And Thunder
had no
mouth.
No Siren sang.
There never came
A wailing throng.
When I gave up
A Shadow passed. And shook -
my hand.
And moved
Along.

you are not attached
to a dead weight.

you are heavy.

II


if it bleeds
then it must love.
and the hours swarming the continuum
have no time for the minutes
of your day, you are too full of loss.
uncoupled from  the shelter
of nonexistence.
you grieve in
real time.

you are too beautiful to mean nothing

but can't recall.

a star is born in a petri dish, and a speck of dun earth
is dislodged from the nova... the old men weep
for their lost kites. as their knees creak and their windmills
collude to disillusion.
And there be angels farming knots -
of Rust and Myth... they sing the tune that dies laughing
in the face of Life.
As the void dispels the rumor of the center that cannot hold.
and the center consumes the void
with a Point.

like rats without bulls  
or comets without gospels.
perhaps rabbits without April
or Now, without seldom... the fog joins the choir
invisible. Joins the clutch
of our quatraine, to meter the miseries
of our adulations. like tears without worlds.
we are struck in the nerve
of our god's left eye
and are left to seek our ventures
where they best
Lie.

where am I ?

i walk among  long long strands of green mist fingers
and stroke the miracle. my hands desire
the tresses of heather and timid juice
of plump mornings
and i gather footsteps to a door in the world
that leads to another.

like a prayer in a moist skull.

There's a house where the world
has stopped dialing...
But a rotary phone, that
has my number.
and plunders my unavailable
daily.

We blink like opening a mystery.
But we never  brush the canvas
of any inspiration.
we gather in the fields of our golden jokes
and each the other are about
how nothing is the same that now
we see what eyes deny
jellyfish
and cotton
swabs.

but there's trees and eggs.
it's nothing how we remember
love and hate.
slow things are voices to recall.
but the matter of their wisdom
is bleach and peaches.
and perhaps a flightless
squab.

II

to endure is to be a living thing.
and to love is to die more
willingly.

but nothing procures the reality
like a dream.... and we cluster
precisely where we diffuse
Unkindly.

III

Let us walk where the treasures march
in impoverished enmity. but know
the different things that sanity
conspires to reveal.
we can be madcap and foreign
to our native selves -
but never once be alien
to what it means
in hell.

IV

heaven is a kind of grace that forgets you.
and trees and eggs
are something else
entirely

despite you.

Life drinks Love
like a hound
at a bowl of brackish water,
it soars more deeply
than the common wings
that a bird takes for granted
and a bee believes

Life drinks Love like a hailstorm
knows a rose.
It pummels the best of Us
for a season
and forgets how we
lonesome.

after all.

.

in a lurch, on a perch of impossible spring
i confessed to a winter
that sent you
to me

i could do
with much less
than the nothing
you bring
if you loved all the blood
that i let you
drink

if you
killed  me, more gently
than leaving
me be...

or
forgot
how to
come back
from
nowhere,
it
seems...

that a
beautiful curse
on my
head
is your thing

and an eye
less  evil
is only
an
eye
i can't
see.

torrid love
gnawing at the withers of my reason for a horse.
my kingdom for a kindness
now in flames
and my youth a dream, teetering on the north
of my age, and the edge
of my
night,

the night i found in love.

from the belly of a wave
in the heart of a maze
i ascend

having slain
a thousand crow
to feather my black
thing

and take ingenious
wing
before the searing
nay
of the sun
annuls

melting the fledgling

and keeping
the sky.

from below, i know above

and go home.

i love you and the world
is less a world
without you.
i'm in the emptiness that dwells
between souls that
have never met.
I am the thirst and
the wellspring.

like an -
endless pang
and a bottomless pond
with a stone skirt.
i am devoted
and ever-so
imperfect.

i love you
and the forgiveness
i plead
is not for me,
it's for the hell
i put you through,
so soon after
we met.
i am the one thing at the bottom
of a wrong church
bloated and
godless...

with only Love
obvious.

and Shame's
oddity -

flawless.

Through and through the hollow
i must go. till the breach is a chasm to swallow
and the fall complete and looming.
Through and through, i follow
but don't know. till it fills me with a spasm of sparrows
and the all and all is succinct and brooding.
chintz in the blank stare
and glint in the dark
where i assume the shape of things to numb
and feel diluted.
my solution is not the void, but it's sister.
a cookie in my callous
nailed to a stormfront
behind me.

where the hole is the whole
through to you.

My lungs ***** at the air
As i plunge from sleep into the upper dream of waking life.
I shed the formality of my shallow coma
For the desperate climes of my striving ,
And surge the beach of lonesome
Brigadoons... Combing the frothy litter
Languishing along a stretch of forbidden
Waves...

I assume the sand castles are unassailable
And write letters for a bottle
In my mind.
And cork the
loss.

My America is slipping from my heresy.
It has no bluejay and blunders 'tween the hook in the sky
and the rod in my hand
jiggling for dumb stars
that have it all
but the fish
I don't believe in.

I have silver bullets for a beast in me
but can;t seem to love something'
while I'm suspended
in moonshine.
like mud punching
through a solid heart
and what means more
cannot be a curse
in my palm.

Only forever has a price
that consumes the merchant
and only the famished
feast upon the dust
of a soft
regret.

she lives where the cell phones die without remembering
the tone assigned to a cryptic stream of social Lilliputians
on a list of offenders, and befrienders; all caroling at random
for a stitch of thyme or to barter with banter and allusions.
she sleeps where her bed has fallen in love
with southern exposure; but openly flirts with an eastern sky
boiling over with morningstar and brindle night .
her thread count...
an imaginary number
between sleep and a full moon…
and her pillows have embroidered her silhouette
as she takes slumber to meet the parents of her proclivities
that have ever held sway over all of her charms.
how her forks and knives pay conjugal visits to spoons
To the clank elegance of her signature
explaining the vacancy she hordes without joy.
armed with only a loaded pun
in the barrel of her ***…. and a thousand safaris
beyond game. where a woman can breathe without pretending
the pink flamingos are Rodin on Ritalin
she can howl in her own language without poppies.
she lives in that house on the hill
that wasn’t there yesterday.
and the paper boys  
all want to
be men.

so oleander.

I go where all my going -
goes. And seldom
circle back.

II

I feel like Black, tastes like the Moon -
Tastes like the heel of my bread
Tastes like my hands...
Thrown up in the
Air.

I have no love, save the prerequisite doom
that your lips prove
a less dangerous
ploy.

And from this height
I might regard you
As a Goddess
to dispel.

But nothing goads  -
a comet, from it's entropy
like a private
Hell.

or a public distortion
Of the Truth...

we tell.

after 2 AM the tinnitus of a withering day has abated.
the shrill un-boundaries of our servitude
collapse into auguries seeping
from a perforated moon
like white honey.
all it’s thought
a dot on a creature
made of holes.
stumbling home from a mansion
to a flat.

in a yellow car.

as you slept i crept through you
slower than stealth
holding it's
breath.

i knocked over
a lamp
but
i caught
it

found your heart
right where
you left
it.

in
my
hands.

are you
what i mean ?
are you not my constant mystery and blemish ?
are we not finished when the world turns and nothing loves nothing
so
Now
we fit in ?
now we  have a surface of anger management,
that stings a bit; but no damage.
just roust
of our beautiful lust
from the husk of
our
catastrophe.
are you
what i
mean ?

you are so beautiful it burns
like a fat cat in my lap.
engorged on primal steam
like an extinct whale.
you are the only thing
that matters as much
as this.
And This is a seed
I cannot
breathe.

But you...

you are so beautiful
i fail to be plain.
i dress my work
in unkempt seizures
of unrequited love.
but i know one thing
that makes no sense....

but perfect sense to me.

it tells me nothing
is as beautiful
as telling you

and meaning it.

The Misfortune of having you all to myself
has Irony’s respect. Only games without masters
call Love “ Sensei “. And every one of them
thought Irony was Abe Vigoda
sifting through the entrails of a Tuna Melt, at Morty Yang’s
looking for the cookie choking on a Bilingual Mobius strip
of impenetrable punchlines.
And always late to a funeral like The Good Gin.

we slept on a bed of fails
and our lives as footstools on soap boxes began
as only the best endings require
before waiving the usual fee, and diving into the role
of a last time nobody knew was The Last Time.
chewing up the screen between  intimate strangers
calling all the shots on the set by telepathy
like a betty davis that would never ever not help you
if it helps to sniff glue
or to hardly ever do
and then stop.
or not.

yeh, We Got THAT betty davis.

we found the most corrosive script
and mangled that baby with the camera obscura still rolling
And that guaranteed we had something to show the wolves at the door.
that would generate the buzz in the saw
that you Can’t UnSee.
and what follows?

anybody’s regret.

we slept in cots on the Lot, a lot.
but that was all in the papers that we rolled
to smoke the ***. in all the rags in Coolsville.
our collapsing star rising on page six
of a Charles Bukowski restraining order.
and as I recall, there was no catering -
for locations that devolved into gothic cathedrals
that slept with your expectations to get the part.
and we didn’t know that was a thing.

But hey,
you made it hurt
like you already
knew.

we flipped a coin to see who would yell “ Cut “ !

And then...

now it's all
you do.

To be kind
would be wise.
what harm is it
to lead with
human
sugar
and becalm
the turbulence
that is two
in a room.
to open with a gentle
respect for the Other
and borrow a smile
from a humble
place in your nexus.
to begin with a kiss
where a ' welcome ' would suffice
and outshine the habit
of your bitter tongue
by the luminous of a Love
for granted -
but never taken
unless
given
?

i can see from here, the lush petunias
of your mustard seed pavilion.
i may walk to your elaborate fountains
and make my wish.... but never
feel them.

go ahead. keep your gospel. but be not faint
in the hallows;  inconstant. stretch the fathoms
of your fathoming to the outskirts of fell grace...
and stub your toe on a perfectly hideous
god.

keep your trinkets in narrow crustaceans,
but sleep - where your damnation is a coin
and a bed.
deepen your sorrow where the joy is spent
and the sky, a crisp skin on a desiccated
blue.
be thankful for the hell you keep
but ascend the zenith
of your every
harm
to find your
proof.

be droll as the wet fools cavort in the pit. but -
keep your feathers adorned
and your feasts mobile.
glow and be done with it
if you dare...

but keep your heart spoken
for the night.

My Solitaire is irascible in aspect. Just over the Hill there; I used to carve my initial conditions into a blank stare, or a block of omission. But now my stratagems soar far beyond the pondering of Loneliness. Even Abandon cannot fathom Me.

     I tend to orchids that have earthquake hearts and care for the waning moons in my terrarium of phantoms and glass apples. i anoint the chasm with vespers of Isolation that sparkle like a madness in phosphorus ecstasy. My books are Discreet.
I am their Shogan.

been in winter
and the miles sought after the edge of faith
and the white murk of the Mystery
was everywhere, trojan in a snowflake
and the long beards were crisp
as ice threads of some silk
from some worm
on every chin.