the merit of our blasted kingdoms must lie in our pink mirage.
the hazy spectacle of our hope, like a living steam....
there it must rest, at the root of some tumultuous foam.
anchored to the fog like the shimmer of a lake
to a rear-view mirror.

smothering the coals, i laugh.

In the awkward air adjacent to the quivering sterility
lay the corpse of our Summer... twitch whizzing about the underworld
and all the glories afforded the stupid
and profane.

In the marshlands, where we grew our few dark orchards
and prattled on about the ' state of Things '
but without the Capital ' T '.

how we wrangled Hope into a jar of honeyed feathers
and broke bread, over north winds....  
cackling our sorrows like a hot mess
over stoic boulders
and quaint
sunsets.

and said yes.

Judith Broom had a knick-knack drawer like everybody else. She absentmindedly tossed her keys there too, amid the random screws to lost things, and spent tubes of glue. Love letters got snagged in there, along with stale coupons and inexplicable dust. It was dust like glass and horsehair. Judith Broom rummaged with her bare hands to the very back of her knick-knack drawer, groping for a shape she remembered. She conjured a sphere that fit the palm of her hand, and the Talisman hummed like a newborn sun in her undergarments. She took nothing for granted.

And nothing could harm it.

The heat of day unloads a ton and the air is still as bleached granite.
thistles bristle in discreet steam. thinning and menacing the iron blue sky.
I choose the lemon sun with the ice heart thrumming
at the center of all worlds. and cool my jets.
i submit to the hidden mercy, and succumb to the river of riddles. emboldened.
golden in the old way. but shipwrecked regardless.
i have a maze
that's all
mouse.

i had come undone... but my virtue,
however unsacred...
saved me.
i simply had to be strange.
and continue.

in my periwinkle dawn, i soak my toes in moss.
and the moon's wrinkles. cherishing
soft and belligerent; against the tide
the scuttle of diamonds -
of more humble gems.
in my chamber of Untold Sleep
lies a blithering beguiled !
and all my love in shambles
on a plate.

have i come from the most unlikely scar ?
have i slumbered past all reckoning ? curled up, into a yawn ?
have i dreams enough to mask my impending bloom ?
so that'd be all my plot; to fill my plate ?
or encompass the symmetry
of my wound,,,, ?

you’re like a little bird with hurricane teeth.
your song is all wrong but your wings;
now they simply defy the gravity
of your stone heart.
i lived beneath you enough to know
you had devoured the sky
i met you in.

now we’re nowhere.
and i bet
not even
then.

I take it with a grain of salt
Our Heaven is exhausted.
And we oughta' be more careful
with our carelessness more often.
don't read me like a book
and I won't shelve my deeper feelings
And I'll promise you
No Promises
Love has no way of keeping.
We could be reasonable
or risible....
Both silent and indivisible.
But I can almost taste it
as we waste it.
Now Life's become
unlivable.

Our Heaven is exhausted...
and maybe... maybe...
Hell is too.

like a rope in a spoon... nothing is sane.
i just have the scent of you and our unbearable togetherness
to fall apart too... i have nothing else.

so just in case i hate you; let's be friends.

So i heard you got tracks after doing a train.
I bet you kept it to yourself and it got out just the same.
You parked your car where you lost it.
But the cops ran the plates…. And now you’re looking
At the kinda time you stole from your face.

You look like every mile that ever had it out for you.
You’re in the valley where you lost your kids
But kept the *****….
You wear the same thing every day
Like a cloak and a smile -
So you’re invisible to Angels
Until they Fall.

How’s That ?

famine chose me to lie to myself. curved my tongue from my truth
and sang new gospels through my fear
that only the moon could howl
or a dog could hear.

not even a nightingale
could sing
without a sacrifice.
i fear.

i bled through my ' No '.

and Nowhere yes
was so.

in the morning, the crisp air crept on bacon feet
over the lettuce rumpus of my disheveled blankets -
tossing out the dreams of the night before...
boycotting the revelation at hand
at the foot my bed...

where yawning is sacred.
and well fed.

but memory is vague.
and just a boy.

whereupon i found myself walking; i cannot say.
but a brave lad was i... with all the stubborn yolk
of a cauldron sunset... burnt into the world
branding the blackening blue with a last rage
against the dead stars.
i found my cigarettes were now chandeliers !
and most of my ghosts were departed.
up the unnatural spire...

my gaze fell upon
an ascending
why?

and never came down.

we are all of us; Love, that has not understood -
the meaning of Itself. far too fragile to grasp the
varnish from the night picket fence. but ever mindful
of our boundaries.

and found it.

when it never
made
sense.

the ink has set. and the knives forged in the clutches of butterflies
confound the weather. there is nowhere and where you're at.
nothing in-between, so the vertigo is inevitable.
we are shiny pennies on the corpse of Time.

marvelous things are awake when you're asleep
and they slink in the twinkle, maneuvering amid the myriad
and the clouds that wash their hands of you
never let it rain. so you scorched your cornea
in a vacuum.

and you forget that, every day.

the crown was heavy like an oil lamp bolted to a block of black marble, strapped to the surface of a neutron star
with a strand of hair from a severed head of Guinness
and all promises.
the king stared out into the palms of his hands
and cast his eyes upon the kingdom of misrule.
contemplating the arc of His royal arroz. mindful,
that for every grain of truth, a sack of arrowheads.
And for every bag of rice, a happy surf.

He lifts the embargo and now openly trades bards with competing Theaters of War and Peace. Boldly poaching inspired contradictions and holding court with renown arguments to the contrary; always feasting at a long, narrow table in an oblong chamber
of proprietary stars.

He lifts His Eldorado, and now
his back hurts.
Having never learned
to Bend The Knee
At the hinge of
His stride.

And now it's off to bed and goodnight.

CHAPTER ONE: "Down Here, Every Thang Is I Level. "

they skate, when the lights bark -
like hard rabbits, harboring no hope
and too much dope.
and fatherless.
so follow this preamble
to its conclusion,
and ponder it.

the streets don't front. but the lost ghosts -
are on to Us...


CHAPTER TWO: " How Ghettoes Eat Cheese To Build Prisons "

It was next week when i knew
i would be too black to ride my bike.
so i stole a car from night's garage
and that's when i was stereotyped
and tiptoed into footnotes of my struggle
a neer-do-well. but held my bells close .
to sing a song, i couldn't sing
myself.


CHAPTER THREE : " Shouldn't You ? "

I have no words for this.

one more love in me... mostly ghost pomp
and lavender nocturnes.
my hands cannot grasp -
the very thing I would have first.
but in this Life,
I am asking for your hand.

immersed

my love for you is like an everlasting gasp.
my every breath haunted by a memory.
and now i'm used to that.

when we do not kiss everyday
it's like we never met.
more like we died
to live this way
unkissing.

With his father’s eyes like two myopic raisins
Mounted on Corinthian columns in the utility closet
Of his mind palace; he came upon the wilderness
With a pouch of hardtack and a smartphone.
His leather boots repelling a light rain
Foreshadowing an odyssey that lay ahead
Like a jewel lodged in the appendix
Of a Cyclops snorting a meridian of crystal ****...
Scored for the price of a golden fleece.
He summoned his imaginary plan
And set foot upon an uncharted expanse.
His home behind him.

With his father’s eyes whistling to a silhouette
Of a lost boy and a mop.

I’ve got the velvet rope that suits you
but you choose to sever ties.
I'm a hurricane and you’re -
soundproof.
and that’d be funny
if it wasn’t
true.

we're elongated pearls
with a short fuse.
barking dervish
into ponds
we can't
stand.

those hamstrings have seen enough arias
to spring at any moment -
that jumping for a reason.
could be made futile
with a lingering scent of
try again’...

that’s when you sleep.outside
without a torch on your tongue
to scorch the hubris of talking.
nothing to verify by fire
only the ashes in your
mouth.

with nothing to speak of you drone into virtual kismet,
pandering for Mandalas
on the east side of a red herring cannery, but docile -
like a red fern-wolf’s bane clawing at black holes
in broad daylight.
velocity unknown… but by all accounts, a frenzy.
with nothing to clarify by desire
only massless, heavy -
things.

the day came without the full sun
with only a speck of flame in the iron chintz of the sky
and towers of dust, hovering above the low glories
where the rabbits hid from the fox
and strewn jewels were spent
on shadow coins... and all the worlds between us
clung to the husk of joy and kept vigil
in the stillness of our ungolden
pond.

but one river became two, and fed the placid pool
that slake the thirst of lost men.
a woman there, was standing
and the moon removed
no star.

Can't Push A Cloud With Your Hands

you can't walk out that door
and expect me
to stop loving you.

it doesn't end.
it just kills me.
endlessly.

you can't
push
a cloud
with your
hands.

even when you're
not into
me...

Love's Entropy...

the radio waves purr over the terrain.
something like Nevada, but with fewer curses.
there are bones exposed in the desert
that speak to the fact that there will always
be bones.

so we have to gather our things
and tremble.
or dash when lightning strike
shatters the moon
we made our wishes
by.

I could change
if it didn't cost me my life.
I could bend to your will
and be perfectly out of my mind.
i could trade on my skin
for the surface you like.
and be ****** if i do -
and just your type.

i had dreams that towered over Memphis
and long grain rice in a bowl of short fuses.
i had things that showered over senses.
and wrought twice as many muses.
but dismantled my defenses.

i had Hope.

Love is the work of Life.
You cannot dis-hold it in your fragile hands.
its heft is everlasting…
and the grandeur of our epiphanies
are God's way of saying nothing
before we all do nothing at all
but the price of silence
is deafening,

So Love Actually.

I saw your heart
when we
parted.

Life is a threat full of puns.
squirming in the rictus of our every aspiration.
gasping for Yes.
A dormant gloom, gleefully dislodged from a Happy Place.
with a note from the Doctor
that ate your crucifix
to Fix you.

we All have Issues.

II


but the thorn in the rope
that you're knot
isn't exactly ' Not You '.
but it Isn't.

September has no pet dander like the midday sun.
it burrows into heaven's closet of Blue... and no one -
suspects the gremlin of Time, of feeding the stray
Reality. On the down low.
It's always-
" How You Like Meow ? "
or nothing at all.
and September

O' how the rabbit hole is cozy fuss
with little wriggly baby ducks
that lost the pond
but kept enough petunias
to ignite the
moon.

if anything
is thing enough
with everything a thing and such...
would any thing be there
for what ?

and why are you
reminded ?

Tucked away in my thermal eclipse, the party raves without my flamboyant
inner monologue. tampering with the DJ on some esoteric frequency..
Everyone is safe to assume the Ecstasy is pure…. but no ones the wiser.
My wallflowers blossom on irrigated stilts, leaning into the background-
of my fraudulent approach from a shy Port of Call.
I Rehearse the Unrehearsable, as throngs cavort in laser spawn shadows
anointed in Eurythmic debauch…
as I spurn my teeming
collapse
with a positively gauche
Panic…

the champion of introverts.


a ton of thunder in a quiet place, where the Dubstep ruffles
the fringes of my agile anonymity…
swiving with soot ravens as liquid
as a Pause in a drop of Time.

I Almost Noticed You despite my Private Life


Then i woke up
In your arms.

Astonished.

Your tattoos like golden calligraphy
galloping across the serrated horizon
improbable...
where a woman’s heart is the width
of a manly surrender
to a Fantastic… Suspense.

As all my demented departures
Gather Where I Go-
From Zero to Hit Me
In Wine Seconds

We remembered each other when we met.
Amen.

while paving over the archipelagos of my daily dread
i send a voice from my quiet desperation
to the summit of a Cliffhanger  
by proxy.
i phone-in my last nerve.
i know perfectly well that tomorrow will come
with all the profound garments
befitting a Fool.
I will love like I knew I always would.
but something will go wrong…
because Reasons.

And something will go right...
because it’s Crazy.

II


Nowadays i keep to sleeping on the floor of a private hell -
the envy of every cave I’d lost my way in.
I endure the radio of your ravenous flaws and curtail -
the ferocity of your mild amusements…
by gathering a soul glut of gargantuan misery.
savoring the private desolation
of my sincerity. with a feather in my sap.
all the while
against the spectacle of our solemn hootenannies.
harboring hangnails in barrels of confiscated rain….
For Nowadays my purpose is a ruin
mending a landscape
with all my
Vanishing.

and a song at the end of a rope.

just a sliver of cool whip-thin
and some sumptuous appraisal of our unbelievable
Love.

I cast the first things that happened to Us.
and kept the windy trinkets that mark things as for real -
to better be happy and something other than
a wish on a stick... and a mattress.

and Life is Laughing...

the rain has come from the land of rain
filling the air with sheets of torrent and the scent
of tomorrows immaculate breeze.
blackbirds crowd the canopies and caw fables -
in the deluge.
clouds boil overhead; diffuse and gun-barrel grey.
the hum of loose change and lightning hangs
from the roof of a squall. and all the stars
are marching in the dark.
like fruit loops in a Kline Bottle
painted black.

just enough

however many hours i lay waste
i come upon the moment that salvages the redundant disregard.
i come about.
i assume the stature of an eye in a field of color...
sacrosanct and devoted to the never-ending spiral
of a perfect thing.

i cannot suture the forbidden
but i can usher the warm delirium
of a fresh hearth.
all the bonny winds of leaving
that keep you in your
place.

alive.

and no other thing outside me...

save the night.

a poem is an egg with a horse in it.
no ordinary bones. just a beak
and a mane event.
ghost feet
and honeybees
that gallop best
where our terrapins Jupiter
the most.

where we have
our pins for
stars
to fathom
with.

a poem is a dust up
where a downward dog
has chased a car
into a vat
of cats

and that’s who
we are.

and that’s
That.

The same day comes
like a yesteryear of travelling
in the dessicated skin of a rainbow
sutured to the hem of a skirt.
The day that comes unredacted.
the full sun on your heel.
and all hells. marching
into worse, by Feel.

blind to the terrain.

but walking
still.

II

i have no problem with the truth.
it merely comes to me, like a shadow
as I feign sleep... as i click heels
in the pantry of our dense cakes
and jellied veal.
where I turn the soil
the soiling kills a Sun -
on your face.
i impeach the beginning
with a whirr of outlasting
naivete.
crippled by the bargain
of attachment
and Dismay.

III

as we may.

not again so much... but less not repeating. that is the rain.
now that i've come to the country of frogs and mariah carey
i can finally soak in the curious blunder
and marinade a sonnet full of paper thorns.
i could almost touch you,

all the atoms in your paw
are hardly all the atoms.
spring sprung
when the prime mover
gave you a spot
on a dot.

a little more Here
than There,
love spooks the-
the rivets of
a solid wall between
worlds with a grace
beyond
Yes.

a little more near than far
is the sprawl of our prodigious-
escape from the burgeoning
comet of collapse.
at a snail’s pace, The Void
and all counsel
in a parlor
of exquisite
Mystery,

we are the sum of our fears
bundled in Banksy spawn
and cosmic drivel
to match the opulence
of a last glance at a
parlor trick
in real
Time.

as if the flowers were all asleep and knitting mud ***** _
and perfect spheres. the universe cajoled the Ambassador to Sorrow -
to come forth with a horse's wing and a heavy breath...
a true lover that is sworn to sunshine
and a unicorn eating the meat of a diamond.
all this must be. or the world;-
flounder on a picket fence -
of a lost mind...
and a long stretch of reach
in a stunted growth of
RealLife.

the rain wept because the cosmos was full of Lies
with a capital ' L '.
deflated by default, but willing to take One
for The Team of wild horses; that carried the thunder-
to your precious Dawn; in the first place.
to outwit the Heresies
of a misadventure
with an Ode
To Choice!

of course, the plane eats
a mountainside
just sitting on
the cat.

and you're gonna
look at me

as I walk through
You.

without a doubt
we sprout wings in the still calm
and catch the draft in a sleeping cyclone -
ascend and descend alone.
always in the Circus
of our Misadventures.
always in the corner
of our Sun.

how brilliant we would be if the light were out.

smoke and the reason.
all the grains of sand in a minute.
and a blue collar pearl.
don't we love
how the love expires ?
it makes a giant out of hurt
but it can't be bought
though we all pay.

the both of our plans
were silent.
we were drifting into granules
of lost time.
we were pre-dreamt.... but had nothing
to sleep through.
we saw the end of the movie
and blamed
ourselves.

there's not a ***
in the stew.
it's stew in a ***...
and that's the way
it always been,

i have tea. i suspect the morning is surrounding the world with a tiny cup of sunlight.
and there are no usual things. everything is unusual. everything.
i am here now… and i feel it. and i will never have a cage with a bird inside. i am not cruel.
i’m drinking tea.

i’m not bored. i’m just waiting. my eyes are never sure about the splendor. they suspect a spring
attached to tiny gears, die cut whirligigs and ethereal hands attending; deep underneath my gazing. and i am still tired… the shackles of entropy hold sway and i contend with easy wit in a fog of sparkles. it’s a sloooooow glorious. even with too much sugar in my tea, because sleepy.
you get out of bed to greet me.

it’s a good day.