So smooth and piquant then. Remember?
Our love a puree of roots and bitters,
quick peppered, swift boiled
blobbed up and sulphurous.
Melting the ladle, melting the ***,
smoking the burner, firing
the whole **** kitchen down.

Yes, it still stings my lips,
***** on my uvula, something
never fully swallowed
but scorched on a hard palate,
peeling skin on the blistered roof
of a recollection.

It was tough then, I know,
making soup last for days,
for weeks, for years.
We were young then
and fond of quick eats,
grabbed before a cab
and shoveled whole,
gulped like a snake
teasing eggs -
unhinged and transient.

But savor these broths unclouded, love,
clear to the windmills, blue and Dutch
at the bottom of the bowl.
Draw the spoon, gentle and away,
lift and breathe softly, eyes closed,
and take what remains, what lingers
velvet on the buds and nourishing.

Again today a study
proves our immortality.
To run, however long,
reduces the risk of death
by twenty percent
in a sample of two hundred
fifty thousand.

And now they are running.
Running against the certain stone.
Running on the slim trails of hope,
gathering ticks as they brush
the closing blades.

The path gets thinner, old friends,
Narrows to a deer-path.
But the whitetail seeks only water,
forage, such sweet leaves -
never the headlamps, no,
never the headlamps
that creep up the road.

She had a long bore smile,
a smoker's laugh,
and a posture born of whips
and taking it.

She had a red onion mind,
a carrion wit,
three prison-ink vines
on her hip.

Her scent - a pudding
of ash and caramel,
hints of road ****,
burnt rubber and mint.

She'll cut your face
for a dime of truth
and slim recognition,
but not a penny for dancing.

She read Proust
and hated it,
spat on the spine of me -
dropped me a notch.

Soft-shouldered for gizzards
she was, taut in her loves,
tight with the greenbacks -
she called them gloves.

I lay a palm on a wall of quartzite,
red, unhewn and beckoning my lips
to count the strata, number each
compression from heel to nail,
down below the rooted fissure
up above the quiet smirk of a creek -
one hundred.

And as I drag my eyes upward,
to where the scrub oak and juniper
mangle an ash blue sky I am taken.

I am taken there beneath my palm,
pressed metamorphic on rock,
to become a thin bent line,
hardly a hair's breadth,
nary a bone remains,
beneath the heat and pressures
of grass, trees and all things -
all things crushed after me -
all things reordered and tendered.

Sing forth the treasons,
the seasons have been sung
long before revolting - D minored
the winter, G majored the spring...
Bah, the seasons never heard
these grovelling breaths,
but ****** them deaf up.

Give lung to the unbreathed
rumors squat below the bridge,
that the tumors unskinned,
revealed pulsing on our red,
white - blue tunneled drums -
these cancers defiling the myth of us.

The fall does not applaud
the clapping of leaves, but
strips us to bone, and the
blown away come to us cardboard,
cornered in the cold sun, unsung,
mocking the radio comforts of disdain.

Our own unmaking, unmasked
and riven with lies - lies and all lies
reinforced with steel and striped beams,
stiff on a pole, snapping as whips
on a cotton bent back - crowed
as every patriot hymn
fades in a grumble.

Such joyful music this treason,
this treason not treason,
this discomfiting strained ensemble
sparing neither breath nor ear
the true screech of anthems -
beat, immobile chords,
chained and ghetto thirds,
cast-off tritones, contrapuntal,
scraped on gut and strung up,
and over the laminate woods of us.

At the still axis of revolution,
about which our tortures churn,
the pure and toddler self remains,
present and young,
uncoiled, unlearned.

Such that a top, spinning,
poised gyroscopic on a point,
traces a path on a floor,
spiraled to the delight
of a child's fresh gums attentive,
must wobble in the end,
must with those most
stupendous frictions fall.

Neither the lean nor
the circumference, dead on the floor,
succumbed to turmoil,
defines the top, no - it is the axis -
that about which all things turn -
stiff spindled, silent, and spun
by the pink and toddler hand,
in the wonder that is yours,
in the wonder that is ours.

Herefords lying down,
***** to the wind - this bodes of rain.
Cloud gray and anvil,
clobber shot and some ways off,
a cliff falls precipitous.
There's manure in the air
because it's November
and the harvest is in.
There's manure in the air
for the fields need a feed
before snow tangles the greeds
of Autumn, and the Aberdeens
crush stubble leeward,
beyond the spruce breaks.
And there, atop a shaved hill,
a misthrown cone of gold,
shoveled by the shade hands
of gamblers in the **** winds
jangle in a pickup.