What matters now that time has long Resigned itself to peering in
Through black cat glasses that belong
On overwrought librarians
Flipped out on sheets like ridicules
Of mockingbirds as shy kids find
Their *** on shelves at grammar school,
At least the represented kind.
Can someone take these shelves away?
They've given books much too much space,
Quixotically arranged the day
In covers where the lost embrace
Lost lovers from a borrowed song
And lives are lived, however long.

That scream of thought holds damaged wits
Responsible for absences
Long overlooked or spiked in fits
Of badly scattered witnesses,
Yourself the more exemplary--
If such sweet modesty allows--
For having landed here with me,
While others mouth consuming vows.
A useful god would not condemn
Such pecking at the heels of thought,
Unbowing to the seraphim,
Or even him the shepherds sought.
Tonight that child has much to grieve,
Whose mind has nothing left to leave.

And will these pixilated snaps
Look dated as the Polaroids,
Half **** but wearing baseball caps
Long borrowed from the naughty boys
Who brought the **** & Mad Dog wine
And 8-tracks blasting rock & roll
In pull outs on the county line,
That back seat dancing we'd been told
Would cash a ticket down below,
With those outside the sacred fold,
Incapable of what they owe,
With prices raised on mortgaged souls,
The ancient myth still holding firm,
Anticipating some return.

Half steps slide further in the dark,
When no one's watching anymore.
The band, four players in the park,
Slap out religion on the floor
As ladies circle round a fool
All night, and breakfast later on,
While giving up their Sunday school,
For one whose crown is cardboard cone.
All blues surround the passing time,
Wildflowers on a rotting stump,
Stark gestures of a tortured mime;
A hop, a skip, at last a jump.
Should I forswear my witless words,
Will motion follow, undisturbed?

She found the future
proof
of her illusion;
evidence,
experience,
suggesting
modifications, to wit
striking capitals
and modifiers--
gone,
lacking
color,
shape
and time.

What had to be the way it was
For this to be the future, now
That everything has hour-glassed,
The question yet remains and how
Would I begin the rugged search
For lonely time still spread across
A frosted morning, swinging birch
Or any rutted road criss-crossed.
Where are you, in this place of need,
My long abandoned plans and who
Will ever mount that fiery steed
In seasons where the sap is low?
The mind still bends, as scribblers lean
To scratch out what is yet unseen.

I'll take more here, forego rewards
Backsided as incentive,
Sell out for music, books, T.V.,
Companionship, true love, good humor,
Sufficient food & Shelter.

Death grants humility and I
Could not be prouder of my love,
Whose legs have given way but by
Some christ like reckoning above
My understanding gives me life
While I attempt some lesser songs
That might or might not cover if
The judgement speaks of my worst wrongs,
Which counting up could take some time
(Which lately comes in short supply)
And reconstructions of the crime,
When I have no more taste for I,
And should be settled in for sleep.
The dreams I've promised, she will keep.

Bad news restocked too soon
For proper recognition,
Much less mourning.
The upper hand, with bullets
To spare,  mad
With opportunity,
Triggers the night,
Mocks The freedom of the day,
Shuts the mouths
Of wide-eyed children.

Our ***** have long erased the lines
Stone-chiseled into  monuments,
Fresh minds distorted by the signs,
Persuasive wine and sacraments.
The old salvation of belief
Hangs out like fossils by the creek,
Sustaining some with sure relief,
Who seldom give the other cheek.
In fear of lack of more than this
Untimed, uneven passaging,
The slow decline & emptiness
Of vanity and preacher's stumps,
As bridges see increasing jumps.

So let's just say you have the choice
Of Tennessee or some place less
Inflected with your mother's voice,
Could you imagine happiness
Come like the rain that's not been seen
For forty days until tonight--
Or do you not get what it means
To need an everlasting light?
As goddesses have rich pursuits,
Accept this bankrupt blazoning;
A paradise of ripened fruits
Could ne'er compare your opening
My heart were it not sore afraid
That once revealed,  it be mislaid.

It feels like freedom, skeleton
Lock clicked and a little money--
Enough for bus fare and a room
In cheap places already seen,
Maybe for a couple of weeks--
The strength to go straight if choices
Overcome the tempter that speaks
Louder than the other voices.
You won't freeze in Florida or
Southern Alabam and might meet
A woman again,  with flavor--
Coarse salt and sweat, yet almost sweet--
And she might share a slight worn key.

It's too fine, with the break in the weather,
This strange humility that's found
Me wanting,  still not knowing where
My mind has been,  or what surrounds
The afternoon, its slow despair
Confounding every effort made
To make amends or clear the air,
In which we each pass too afraid
To use it in the evening damp
When less self-conscious animals
Avoid the halo from the lamp
And touch the night with mating calls.
I'd barter souls,  of heaven blest,
To offer you the morning's crest.

On my good word, this broken line
Began to praise the light at five
And I had much to move and find;
Light lunch and laundry,  heat arrives--
Slow traffic in necessity
Endangered by the solar flare--
This mid-size star has need of me
As god must need the polar bear,
Whose ice is breaking in the sea.
My window frames pedestrians,
Progressing on the concrete walk--
Slow pilgrims mixing prayers and sins,
As I should talk or you should talk
Of anyone misunderstood--
Distorted through the glass & wood.

Told of keys
& a kingdom
Don't blame
Me I'm on my knees
At a loss
For words or machine oil,
A stuck lock in pearl--
Petrified cross.
It's a matter of mimicking
The master, *** metal
And attention to detail,
Tumblers unsticking--
A little spit,
Devil's ****.

All I want
Is more verses
In this room
That I can read to you

She likes the baseball afternoons,
Better than the Sunday sermons,
Has waited,  sleeplessly, all night,
Now nods along the homilies,
Less certain of the trinity
Than how the 6-4-3 can end
An inning that looked perilous,
Or how the cardinal lately
Spending evenings by the fence row
Might be her husband back at work.

Ignore me if you will,  I've tried.
I think the thinkers may be wrong
About this thing free agency,
Hardball being better since Curt Flood
And who are the owners anyway
To tell us where our interests lie
As if some overbearing deity
Got jealous of the lesser gods,
Or even me, with my
Great Pleasure in the flesh,
Disputing life and destiny,
Not waiting on a starry crown
When thorns will make a fitting laurel.

That past is least predictable,
Which might have cast the healing spell,
Slim echo of the madrigal
Drawn out of some abandoned well
Where wishes once flowed easily
And fast enough to be construed
As miracles and prophecy;
Small crosses fashioned from old wood.
All offerings anticipate
Such future unaffordable
Without the fire that's said to wait
Some place beyond believable.
Lost words lay stalled on blotted page,
Conceived like orphans sent to rage.

Red sky this morning,
Clear to anyone not sleeping in--
Heat rising off the street,
Songbirds reluctant with their song.
The early lunch crowd eyes the sky.
Don't like the looks of that, one says,
Seeing some suggestion,
Something gathering
In the west.

Come dark it's rained three times and quit,
And then the heavens open up--
Fire dancing through the rain.

Some lives will not be spared tonight--
The weather not the worst of it;
Black powder, steel and lead.

I like it here, between your ears,
Safe distance from the sin-packed world,
The careless way that words get heard,
If heard at all--not merely sold.
And why not celebrate the day,
Remainder of the speechless night,
Whose music gives cacophony,
Some slighter version of the void.
When all appearances be lost,
You have the nerve to listen still,
As I go searching for my voice,
Like stealing from a wishing well.
You mend my words like fractured bones
That pierce the silence coming home.

How can I tell someone like you
That I need you?  You expect me
To lie, to say I'll be all right.
I never could avoid the truth;
You say it's easy, with practice.
Soon enough it's second nature.

I should be kissing your shoulders

What can be ever sung, a fraction of
The pain that's splintered on the sun & moon,
Ignoring Venus with her clouded cuff,
Swift Mercury in retrograde till June.
Red god of war, the ******, marches through
The stations of the terroristic cross,
As body counts become the evening news.
And Jove, enormous father,  albatross--
The rings that sing of sky & earth devoured
High sons of water & the underworld,
Anticipating wearily the hour,
The tenor of the unrelenting sword.
Should love be born again, how would we know?
The ocean offers secrets for the crow.

But then, when does it go,
This madness that could not
Have been expected
Or prepared for?
How to put it, in layman's terms,
Thin patchwork of a day
In need of much forgiveness,
Words that break apart from overuse,
Scattering syllables
Like a convict's rock,
A monk's waterfall,
The seed of some neglected question.

to label it absurd
does not deny
the pleasure of the nerves
that lie in wait
of overflowing presence
pushing words aside
for better witnesses

My thoughts should be
Arrested
But for lack
Of a reliable witness.
Forget memories,
However real they reconvene.
Dreams have no defense
In the morning
And I feel a difference,
Understanding love is mortal.

With that sure reckon of a horse
Returning to its stable, I
Am in your arms again, strong force
The fiery pit could not deny.
Where words have no place left to hide,
You offer much that's not been said
And I, a prisoner of pride,
Lie famished, begging more than bread.
And should we find a stone removed,
Would this replace mere words with flesh
That time itself shall not improve--
Wine lately vinted from a wish.
Should I give notice of my tongue
Inside the cave where gods are hung?

The night Chet Baker died,
Dropping from a second floor balcony
Of the Prins Hendrick Hotel
In Amsterdam, we spent the night
In lover's arms,  a brief menage
Unstable as ozone
Or a note held
Past the point of breathing
And she, the young one entranced
By jazz and rock and blues,
Even poetry,
Wine & **** & wrinkled sheets
Said I must be
The happiest man in Kentucky
And briefly I was

Out of the old myth
A seed spit in a melon
Contest while all the good
Kids mostly still (and some of the bad)
Believe in Jesus
Yet I imagine
The afterlife
As this bar my sister-in-law
Trolls, a good roadhouse once,
South of the state line,
Until the vote lifted
Prohibition and it moved
Into town and the Keno
Afternoon and cigarets
Until the vote
Against tobacco
& now the furtive hits
Off the newly legal dope vapes
From the neighbor state,
Slowly losing retirement funds
And the food--
It's not what it used to be.

The other way was magic then,
Left roadside as the animals,
Uncomprehending speed of men
Come slaked with fire from banquet halls,
Front-slanted as the rising sun,
Whose dangerous appearance mocks
The dark,  where lovers come undone
And hearts are picked like rusted locks.
Your singing is the holy sound,
The wailing of the innocent
That brings the spirit up from ground,
Where lust renews from passion spent.
My words come slow, unbent to taste,
As love is unconcerned with haste.

This small town quiet night has left
My mind imagining you free,
The world cracked open at its fault,
Fruit ripe and willing from that tree
That leaves no indication here,
Where traffic is a happenstance
Until you make yourself appear
And I invite your sly advance...
Fresh Eden always ours to test
Against a subtle offering
To be like gods and never rest
And never cease at conjuring.
Come ******* seed in innocence--
Don't look behind for consequence.

I can't compose myself today,
Have no imagination left
That's worth the time it takes to say
What might reflect somehow what's felt.
This odd pursuit is no escape,
No recompense among the just--
If anyone could claim that shape,
Who rose and fell among the dust.
As morning scrolls to afternoon,
Long evening to outer dark,
The wailing heard, the gnashing soon--
The trinity of heads that bark,
Until the music stills their breast--
In dulcet tones, then sudden rest.

How beautiful the children's feet,
Mothers at the border crossings,
The cellist in the war-torn streets,
Resplendent in the evening,
Who know that evil has a name,
A placid face, blue eyes of death,
Who murders with a toxic rain
That sears the skin,  that takes the breath.
The earth grows dark with fallen leaves;
Blood brothers, elders, innocents.
Say nothing of the amputees,
The blinded and the minds that went
Beyond recovery.  God's hooks
Were never meant for common folks.

i quicken, not for the ghostyard
but its house, whose monotheist
message,  the missionary's charge,
has long eclipsed the sacred mist
that birthed my sacrilegious soul,
which worships wood unscarred by nails-
cascading birch, midsummer pole--
a rotted stump the missing grail.
i've seen the sun come through the leaves
to wake the boys who stayed up late,
young satyrs with their lust relieved,
imagining the girls they'd date.
we had no parson preaching sin,
no other world to lose or win.

if any man has loved a woman more
than i love you he must be heaven's seed,
as i expect a soul does not endure
without connection. what it is i need--
and i am much in need--your heart supplies,
unto the depths of fear while holding fast
to my uncertain, passionate disguise
as someone recognizable at last.
permit me one more privacy tonight,
that i may outweigh heaven and its sun,
give something to the darkness more than light,
and shout until the living has been done,
a sacrilegious lover and a fool,
whose throne has all the makings of a stool.

I call on Blake for energy,
And Dickinson for everything.
And you my dark and distant muse
For new directions, founding stones,
The resurrection of a shrine,
Where I, an idler, hear your song--
Asleep and dreaming or awake,
Imagining your warm return.
White feathers of the world descend
On you, clear-hearted child of Jove
And memory.  I made you smile
Once through the night.  I'll try again,
If you're inclined, if you recall
Just how it worked as we reclined.

Two-thirds through the suicidal winter,
It's a full night tonight at the shelter--
Two rooms, two tables, two televisions,
A scattering of chairs, four couches, cots.
This February ice and cold
Has brought in families from their cars,
Tent dwellers from the bridge,
Holdouts from the sidewalk doors.
And somebody says, like it's news,
You hear about Steve and Carrie?
Shot her in the head then hisself.
On the front porch. Found froze solid.
Can't figure why he would do that.
Don't make no sense. They had a house.

So I picked up this gig trying
To enlighten the universe
And it's bad pay and long hours,
Benefits more intrinsic than
Bankable, but it needs doing
And just like my uncle Virgil,
When he retired from the Castle
On the Cumberland--the state pen
Where he'd worked since he was thirty--
Told me, there's not many vicious
Killers, not even among the
Lifers, just things that went bad wrong
And could have been to me or you--
Something you need to remember.

These words will have no life,
Unless you take them in,
Revive them with your breath ,
Allow their lingering.
Abandoned letters
Have no aspiration,
No strength to move feathers,
Approach explanation,
Coerce your lips to move,
As one possessed or cursed--
Hell finds a way to shove
Its wages in your purse.
And when it's all been said,
Give praise for what you've heard.

time is the sun we move around
through shadows and reflections
expecting more
a prophet or a sacrifice
how do we hold the sound
of any place without a name
some avenues allow return
their beauty having lingered
i find myself convinced
though why remains unclear
that we've something more to learn
some word or some experience
something that would obviously matter

For all things mortal,
Love has time--
when nothing else
has reason--
stays past the time
one not staying
would be gone.

it is enough
to be in your arms
when all the stars are falling
nothing i have found
approaches your
                                   embrace
no words of prophets or messiahs
have your faith
what you so innocently touch

Five-thirty has its own regard
For my reflection in a flat,
Tripartite looking glass above
The shaving sink where a trick of
Light removes it from the middle
Panel as I carelessly leave
It slightly unclosed so that my
Face is displaced, the mirror not
Returning recognizable
Information concerning my
Disappearance, which is no more
Amazing in the early light
Than the evening carnival with
It's unrelenting fun house view.

Considering the comical
Conception & the tragic fate,
Our clowning on a party night
Has shadings of a miracle
When even on all spirits' eve
We drink the wine that turns to blood,
Then spit it at the axe man's hood
And turn as if we meant to wave
Toward the setting evening sun
That calculates the time of day
And asks for change like errand boys
Who hold out *****, upturned hands,
Expecting less than what they need--
Repairs for broken bones and wings.

The lottery gives better odds
Than sonnets penned to win the hearts
Of beautiful librarians,
Who place them on the shelf unread,
So this one I'll fold up & fly,
Like some unruly boy in school,
Where you might find it underfoot
And wonder at the sort of man
Who knows no better way than this
To get back in your hands again--
Unlikely paper avatar,
Slow gliding like the yellow sun
To places it has not been seen
Since you were last alone with me.

The truth hangs caught between your teeth
Like some unfortunate rodent
About to give up the struggle,
Fleeing when you tire of the game.
Your lips still tell me everything,
The vowels insisting on a taste
And all about you a halo
Streetlamping this September rain,
The thunderbolt still rattling
Like a Johnson outboard motor
On a runabout,  me tethered
By a fraying rope, doing tricks
On one old narrow, wooden ski--
You glancing back to see me smile.

Shall what cannot be finished
Be abandoned?
What should be done with love,
So strong and mortal--
The answer
To a question
Impossible to frame.
Hard work with poor material;
We should have made
A better god
I suppose,
Though what we have now
Must suffice,
Patched up and resurrected--
Blasphemous poets,
Lovers,
Something overwhelming,
Undefined,
A path not going
Anywhere we haven't been
And yet tonight--
Good earth our destination--
I see you and cannot
Reply,
Except to say,
As simply as a stubborn fool,
This is what we are.
And knowing that
Is far too much
To leave behind
Or otherwise believe.

Got room for your good time, pushing
Love like a street corner prophet
Needin' a place to lay his head
With an hour left before dark
And the wind picking up.  Why you
Would listen is the world,  innit?
The mystery of a woman's ears
When I can only mouth the words.
Some flowers get along as weeds,
Not needing cultivation or
Much more than a few drops of rain,
Dirt of course,  but it's still had cheap
If you don't mind the location,
So I'll be here where you're needed.

Could be coffee or
The cat's indigestion again,
Looks like islands
On the vast yellow page,
The lawyer's pad,
Hispaniola with its stark
Divide,
Jamaica, Cuba,
A rhythm section of suppression,
Questioning the rights of man,
Woman, trans, some progress
At a price
Unknown.  Love,
The color of the sun,
Suggests itself in shadows
And reflections.

it comes in late, at the witching hour,
at the time reserved for drunks waking up
and losing sleep,  the road outside slower
and the light from the street lamps just enough
to slant the shadows of the shuffling
raccoons that scavenge what has not been picked
already in the busy afternoon,
it comes in strange and strong, it comes in thick
as hoarded ink that must be spent before
it's wasted, dry as a salvaged headstone
from the old yard give way to new pasture,
roses fusing, vining out ancient bones
as i--awake now--wrestle with the fear
of reckless words i hesitate to share.

Your husband called again,
While we were making love again,
This time in my dream.
The room was showing light already,
Cats perched on the chest of drawers
Like vultures but expecting--
Insisting upon--
My resurrection,
While a little foggy
I'm wondering whose fault
This is.
I can't be responsible
For everything,
So next time--
I'm asking in advance--
Please turn off your phone.