It is not inconceivable
some smeared and blind thing,
like hail or perhaps some top spun
cue ball, maybe some blunt
beaked bird wary of our passage,
or a bullying stone,
unchaperoned in a spiraling sandbox,
or a slap to the back of the head
by the swift palm of a correcting mother
for some thoughtless remark -
a child's tongue unrestrained...

A child's tongue unrestrained,
naive, precessed, tethered
and dragged, star-eyed and still
reeling because I said "hell"
in Hecht's men's department
on a Thursday, because I didn't
want peas, because I wanted
pudding and said "hell"
and she smacked me,
just stiff enough to tilt the axis,
just enough to shake loose the leaves,
freeze those vanilla puddings.
Yes, that must be the reason for winter,
the start and wobble of all things northern,
cold-shocked by the sun's glancing blows.

I am stuck between Sweatro and Gingerman,
stuck out by the dumpsters, ****, and toothed butts,
scrubbing concrete for roaches, hands stung
out with brown shards of Michelob bottles
between shots and lines.

I am stuck in the batlamp, stuck in the felt,
stacked like quarters by the rail, waiting my turn
at the game, my turn at the trough,
hailing drinks like cabs, two fingered,
absolute and limed.

There was a girl there once,
square-shouldered, brass-railed
and flickering. There was an eye
to an eye, a mocked dissection - yes,
a cutting - a splendid humbled nothing.

Yes, those nights bled fast,
slumped down to Campeche,
burrowed into beans and red rice.
Yes, before the fogs wore off,
before the graystones went gray,
before the foilman don't like that,
out there in the dumpsters,
where I found a roach,
scarred my lip, spread glass,
spread lies and conjured a time
high in the **** of discard,
high in a nothing called mine.

If I
had not leapt upon the weathers,
I would not know the rain,
neither the soil soaking violet rain,
nor the mountain rounding violent rain.

A train upon a scheduled track,
rarely derails. It is calculated thus.

If I
wonder whether leaping forth or falling back
into safer briars leaves fewer scars,
exhilaration would be a foreign land
of laughing fools with burnt hands.

Gain versus loss is the work of accountants,
profiteers and venture capitalists.

If I
had not turned away from her,
turned from evaluations of with or without,
turned from the doubt, the wish, the one last kiss,
my hands would never have found yours,
and blue upon hazel unite in the faint
few seconds, standing on a cliff,
together, above a deep and narrow pool
into which we plunged unthinking.

He seemed modest
until he ran a zip line
between the cell tower
and the high tension
wire.

She was a slim volume really,
a short read, an afternoon
in shades of cypress, conceived
on her own costly parchments.

She prefaced a day a warning,
that if any eye should scan her
lines to her own bleak skin,
to her own terse margins,

to the limbs akimbo nonsense
implied by her scrawling,
there would be a price to pay,
found blank beyond the epilogue.

But she was a slim volume really,
a short read in shades of cypress,
grass and thick with bugs.
And there, pocked by her words,

torn by such strongfrail inks,
torn like a hyphen dangled
at the bottom of a page,
ripped from her tongue

I hung on the breath of an epilogue,
A few faint phrases:
"All that you have read here is true.
All that is consumed here is you."

I ain't seen no crow do no killin',
never in a day.
****, they ain't even a squabble.
I seen a lot a' crows
on a lot a' roads,
courteous as squaredance,
bobbin' over ****, skunk,
whatever red,
always cool to clear the way
and wait fer a passin'.

I ain't seen no dead crow neither,
not a one.
I seen 'em harried though,
hammered like B-17's
swattin' one o nines.
But that ain't no nevermind.

Pigeons, yep. Lotsa pigeons.
Slapped a few sparra's on the grill.
Never took a pheasant
but I seen 'em,
all broke feather
and bonnet in the ditch.

Baldies?
Now that's a bird that's got one
helluva marketin' department.
Proud one that.
Eats the eyes and *** first.
Runs off the competition.
**** things don't know
bumpers from blimps.
But wha' d'ya do?

A con-vo-cation, yep,
that's what they call 'em -
hell, we almost snuffed 'em
clean out and now we call 'em
a convocation?
Seems a bit stilted to me.
But there you have it -
a convocation a'eagles
a ****** a' crows.
Just goes to show ya',
them namers don't know.

Same dull knife that ain't been sharpened in years.
But the fingers conform to the worn familiar grip,
between the sweat seasoned tang
and the callous building heel.

Same old blade, same old balance,
that once never bled the eyes
with blasts of sting onion vibes,
now cuts with a thump,
the panic of propane
clings to the nosehair,
with each successive
crossgrain slice.

Same old blade, same old balance,
used to slice garlic thin as almonds,
now gotta lean heavy on the clove,
snap-busting compounds as unstable
as this thin crust hand cracking
the sulphur vents of Vesuvius.

Come to me vagrant, O Death:
starved of bone, starved of lung,
dime-eyed and savage.
Do not come to me gorged and gorgeous,
for it is only when you have known
true hunger, withered to a stalk,
submitted to beggary and stale breads,
you may come to my door, my table.
It will be then, O Death, that pity
becomes you - it will be there
in my clouding eyes you bear witness
to what makes grief a giving - it will be
there in my dry cracked palms held
empty before you, not a partaking of life,
but a share of a hunger assuaged and willing.

Cowled and eyeless,
the slouched friar on a slow mule
Dispenses Gospel to the road.
In the shallow fords and mountain clings
He loafs, the hooves of the mule
Sure, certain as bread and crisp water.

And after a bend, a scent - a smoke -
Affording comfort, at least for a moment -
A shack to weather the evernight.
And there, before fire, with crackling eyes
The deaf one blazed in a spectrum,
Unseen.

And what was a matter of course,
Became the matter of hands,
Testing the blisters of a moment,
The friar engulfed in the palms
Of the deaf one’s guidance.

And there in the flurry of fingers,
“Here is the tongue, here is the ear,
And here is the way forbidden to the blind.
Give me your hand that I may place the hammer.
Give me your hand that I may place the stone.
Give me the Word as exchange for the World,
And each we’ll find our own way home.”

Am I thus soiled by envy and toil
or bettered in a blind groped striving?
I will blow a hole through a massif
not to defile its majesty, but to carve,
to carve and cut my own dark passage,
below the harrying slopes, below the treeline,
over which ice ever bars my way.

And as you push on to the summit,
short of breath and vague before the wind,
I will burst upon the nether *****
and stand, caked in the grit of digging
long and veered off from the clear true line
to find below, a mist soaked glen,
hunched beneath a hesitant dawn
while your eyes are stung white
in a naked unyielding sun.

Up there, in the brevities
and rifting cloud something
lured my eyes.

For this dog is a blacker black
than a slip moon night, but here,
on this morn, the dim prevails.

And the bending of wet leaves
beneath her paws wager green hope,
but they're brown. I saw them yesterday.

Yesterday, before the rain came winter,
before the now the sea plops
from a rust split gutter onto an ice pick.

But this is what wanders
when a blacker black dog
is hidden in black.

This is what wanders
when wet leaves mute her paws
and I wait, for her.

But up there, in the brevities
and rifting cloud allured,
a dust cut the night briefly.

And briefly, so briefly,
there was a moment assured,
but uncertain as daybreak - I and a dog.

Dirt don't call the lightning
blue or femoral.
In a furious upstroke
my mushroomed spine
explodes in the crown,
splinters of bone
and black lit pumas.
Driven to hell
through a straw
and all the trees
are dead on the road.
My dry lip
adheres to a dry gum
and my teeth are broke
and purple.
The lyrics are garbled
and tongue-spoke.
Guttural curses
cling to my head,
both hands holding
back the temples
of past myths,
lies and discontents.

Marriage of heaven and earth -
strike down, down, down,
that I may shut you up.

How many schisms
does it take to change a light bulb,
that gray irritant in the shade,
that fray behind diffused glass,
incandescent once, but burned,
but burned out?

Twist the *****, **** you,
dare you take the **** thing out
and pop it on the floor,
such joyous crack, this glass ever thin,
this wire-mocked glow, exploded
as air seeks to neutralize the vacuums,
seeks to restore among the vacuous,
these lumens built to fade.

Pound
Eliot
Yeats — fascists all.
Would you
?
disposed to such selfsame superiority
make of art
such grandiose assessments
of what is right and pure?
Would you,

in your unpeopled landscape,
gold with harvest,  place
the blemished hound,
the doting mistress, the penniless waif,
and the long bent road
that they invisibly stride?

What can I say?
I was a bad sunrise,
quick scudded to cloud
and withholding.

Look at it this way,
it was a great day
for pictures,
unshadowed,
no hotspots
to burn away
in a dance.

We were a function
really, a shallow
angle of incidence,
a glancing blow,
mathematic,
not prismatic,
no split beam,
just one garish
morning thing,

and a slow
overcast
trundle
to a setting.

wake
that one
eye may find
in your creped hip
in your rippled spine
in your slumber damp palm
in your night braided tresses
in your too hot for sleep dresses
on the floor with caresses and socks
reason to stand against time's august clocks

We called him Mr.Chins cuz he had four of ‘em.
We called him The Chizzler and he hated it:
Always chugged a brew before playing the rube,
And taking the *** for himself.

He whiffed a’ porkrinds and blackjack,
And his lip ticked for the snow.
He ****** down the Jaeg like a hunter,
Too loose and obtuse with a bow:

Missed his mark -
Like he missed his mom -
And his dad was good for the whoopin’s.

He was straight-shot in the flatters,
But took a cab home alone.
He said he gambled for the ladies,
The ones he’s never known.

He had a keen eye for the rail run,
Cued low for the buck and the lie,
He was a stacked-quarter hustle,
A con that went glibly awry.

Cloud came no closer than that,
but I tried.

Emboldened and primate I tried.

Scurried up the elm to bring night closer.
But the limbs got thinner,
thinner there and sapling.

****, the stars are wounds,
and the moon's a gaping.

And what swoons below
is a lark, a laugh and a flaking,

like skin ripped in endeavor,
like skin that is ripped with want,
ripped with gravity, like fingers,
pale with just hanging on
as the growing tip breaks
and falls before magma.

Gimme swill,
not one for smooth liquors,
I cannot fathom velvet.

Jigger me a burlap,
stir me a drink
in low thread counts,
course cottons and twill.

My throat itches for wool
and stiff denims. My throat
itches for loose weaves,
warped lazy on a loom,
distilled with a towel,
stiff on a rail in some
damp and arid bathroom.

Must we sing the round ecliptic?
Must we suppose a star immortal -
Must we trace these patterns of us - up there -
While we, down here, know death?

What a noble self-loathing -
To presume upon the unthinking night
Our disdain for cloud, to swell
In our own black vision when a new moon
Unmasks oblivion, when a new moon
Denies a shadowed path.

Stars must die in their time,
Must crush upon themselves
As we wither and lust eternal.
But what can never pass,
Like a low and clever fog,
Is the mute unknowing
Bestowed upon a log.

The bereaved must sing to the passed,
must wail upon the deaf skies our frailty.

Given just moments upon this crust,
like toothsome bread to savor until swallowed,
we must praise the baker his craft.

There is not a noise we make
more truthful than the chewing,
the soft crumb yielding to the jaw.

Put an ear to the loaf to hear
the children's song of the womb
in faint wisps of steam and contraction.

Yes, the bereaved must sing,
must wail upon the crust and the crumb,
must howl upon each sawn slice,
must sob, perhaps stoic and silent,
upon the torn, chewed and swallowed frailty.

You ain’t no butterfly.
Forget them wings.
Ain’t nothing but worksore,
blister and things.

Ain’t nothing but cane -
we ain’t nothing but cane.
Come out that cocoon, baby,
come stand in the rain.

Come out from the womb.
Come down from the bed.
That Sickleman needs us
in the barrow instead.

Smelted down,
A pool of rendered gristle,
Slick on the floor,
That’s what a day leaves us,

After the tethered heaves
Of this most sought production,
Blendered the dawn news,
The hooved mews, cool dews,
And all that smelled like gravy.

A slump line to the drink
Of old business not attended,
Piles as laundry, clean and otherwise,
Crowding the table, the floor,
And all the chipped dishes between
The sink and my mother.

But now, after all is taken away,
The fingers curl
Between the heel and the ****,
And crisp leeks yield to the edge,
Celery snaps and rains -
Carrot - thin as harvest moon
And a fume of crushed garlic.

What next? You may ask.
The permutations of evening
And stew are yours to taste,
To take and wander -
To simmer and wonder -
To plunder what soothes
On the tongue
And melts the fat of wages.

I lost something that night,
after the play where the gun
ground across the stage toward us
and stopped.
The final movement
in the final act
before the dim
and applause.

It never grew old,
a ****** comedy,
with ****** songs
of prisons, ***** and ****.
It was our fourth time
at the Annoyance Theater,
where we could smoke,
laugh, bring our own beer,
trip on acid, sit on pillows,
and laugh.

Trip walking home, a yellow cab backfired,
you ducked behind the mailbox,
Clark and Belmont,
"That ain't no backfire, *******.
Get down."

But I froze.
A boy screaming "Pendejo!"
through a hole in his thigh,
thrashed on the pavement,
tires screeched, pigeons jumped
to distant perches, and everyone
was running, running,
running away.

Nothing broke east today.
Night simply collapsed,
feral and bloomed
with hard ******,
dollar-a-rack billiards,
two-buck-chuck chardonnay
curling my tongue
like the tillerman's fist
that coffees, highbeams
and bitter jaw breakers
can never wash clean.

I'm not thinking grim,
but those beams only grant
fifty yards of reckoning
into the blob of night,
that gaping maw with gumdrop teeth
and ditch green eyes.

Many tongues blithering
explode like cattails,
like plug cubans,
chewed and cancerous,
like doghair teasing my uvula,
like that five second,
twenty foot,
across-the-bar romance
with the square-shoulder girl
spending no time my way,
long drawn out and vagrant.

Your coffee's getting cold, my love.
Bella curls into your knees
twitching.
What are you dreaming, my love?

Copperheads tangle in withering steam,
and I'm fifteen again,
fifteen minutes late again,
hoping the first words
on your lips are a
good morning kiss.

If not for the hair
caught in the corner
where the broom
cannot reach,
I would never know
that you were here.

And if not for the corner
where the broom
cannot reach -
if not for the moulding
that pinned it -
if not for the wall
and the ceiling’s crease -
if not for the rafters
and shingles,
there we would be no hair.

And if not for the hair,
there would be no fingers,
no soft care to tie a single knot,
then carry it to the window
and release you there.

And if not for the window,
if not for the wind,
if not for the wake -

A nest and blue eggs come April.

They hung laundries like prayers,
these women, there, new to pants,
between Beechfield and Brisbane.

And all the actions were in the alley,
the zipper between, where we,
young thuggeries in our dungarees,
plied bicycle trades on summer days.
Even flies shunned our manes.

Fists and spit and baseball cards.
Skates and snakes and fenced-in yards.
Each these swinging statues,
thrown, frozen, spun, fastened
to concrete and rash.

And yes, there, the women,
the mothers, pinning towels
like code, pinning sheets on wire,
glancing through a breeze, they saw it all:
saw us, the young and barely criminal,
rang it up the chain.
And yes, oh yes, these mothers,
there'd be hell to pay,
there'd be hell to pay
come dinnertime.

I stared the crowd down squinty,
always squinty,
a jaw tooth grinding, neck vein
throbbing squinty.

I ****** the mike like a baseball
and spit the windscreen drenched
with naive codified lyric.

They took it all in.

The blender chewed them
to a fine puree of sweat,
bodies and stomped glasses.

And I eyed them squinty,
angry less at Reagan,
angry less at their sheepish
individuality, less
at proliferation or the grim
disparities of class or color -

more so at the soap
in my hair that gave me spine
and drooled stinging into my eyes.

Burnt in the steam of crab,
there was no in your eyes.
There was no on your fingers,
peeling the apron,
splitting the shell,
scraping the devil,
digging the claw for meat.

I found someone came like a mallet,
but it was you walked away,
bored in youth,
bored in the shell of love,
met on a crab lunch hesitant,
in an inland cafe,
where they only steam female
not thrown back to sea for spawning.

But what else could I say?
If honest is the plate of love,
then I served you well.
But what came hot,
like a platter of crab,
was quickly indulged,
and all that remained is the no:
the no in your eyes,
the no on your fingers,
the no on your lips.
the no that always lingers.

When the eyes are denied a surety,
trepidation beats between cicada wings
and the snore song of leopard frogs,
loud though the singers are small.

For what or whom does the gray owl call,
perhaps, perhaps the end of us all.

We've built upon fire
mechanics of light unrelenting.
But night does fall - never rises -
and with it roars the unrepenting -
a shadow on the wall.

A floorboard creak,
a screendoor unhinged,
even a clock ticks louder
to the brave cowering ear,
counting indifferent
to the sum of our fears.

Nothing more than wiper slap -
smear light on a ***** windshield,
starbusting streetlamps through
pitted glass sliding
greasy on the bridge:

Every billboard passed,
every sign every whine,
every slumped leaning
off ramp neighborhood,
a blurred jagged vision
of what it is, what it was,
what it might be,
gone.

Though some hazy refracted,
gray on gray beam,
from out there, back there,
through the pupil to the retina,
focused occipital,
turned again into a shape
that wasn't hers to begin with.

But there she is,
behind a salt-crust window,
half-eaten by the blinding slats,
a perfect, distorted slouch
in a booth of vinyl bygones
off exit eighty nine,
with a bucket of fries
on her hands,
while I spit by
on a wet highway
to who the hell knows where.

Stumbling into morning,
vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance,
or a glancing blow to the jaw.

Stay cool in the thunder room,
soft pressures of mine
and mine alone,
impugned with the round
ticks
in a chipped cup
thick with lip
and quivers.

Vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance
or a glancing blow to the jaw,
I must take that first uncertain
step into a quickening,
allow the hinge its creak,
allow the sun its stumbling gait,
that I, busted on the jagged even,
may return and find myself
vague, unremarkable -
alive.

Sun-dogs lope over the bloat of a rise,
and the nocturnal kills freeze in the ditches
waiting Spring’s decay, crows or an inmate’s *****.

What is strewn there: husk in the fields,
cans in the fields, bags in the fields,
stiffen as strata before next-Autumn yields.

Smoke plumes flat from the chimneys
of those at rest for a season at best,
and all the green tools are put away.

Long-fingered frost blooms on the limbs,
threatens the wire, renders each
these gaunt and barren things
a hard-crust and promise of fire.

The harrier glides down close to the ground,
Long-swept with hunger to catch there a sound.

We came upon the delta, we, brothers,
split out from the blue wide river,
contrapuntal and lost among cypress,
moss, muck and brute-teeth jangles.

And though I never carried a tune,
I carry the tone of your faded fifths,
your deviled tri’s and slip-foot riffs,
an octave less than finding you gone.

But in these stale bite-fly airs,
in this green moss-dripped fiction,
better hoped than hung as fourths
for a firm resolution - I know

You perch upon a stone, not lay beneath it,
and pluck the roots of black mangrove.

Sun go down in boxcar blue
Swing arm crank go down them dew
Flash eye drag with horn and load
Coupling break for sorra’ stowed
Side dump **** and tank car ****
Jag the night-black knuckle jump
Jump the rise and run the moon
Next town down be falling soon
Loco Pilot spark them strikes
Wrest the ties out from them spikes
Second howl coyote song
Mayday brake air long ere long

I make shadows with my hands:
some birds, Nixon,
a spider on the wall, a barking dog.
I make shadows
with my hands — momenta,
false tales of you sitting flat
by the harbor, the ease of your legs
dangled beneath a pier. And I make water
in the shadow, some creases on your feet
and you laugh. I made you laugh.
These hands, disrupting sunlight,
know only the loss of you, your neck
and the fictions of some other tide.

My mother loved the dogwood blooms -
each spring a fresh crucifixion.
And when it flushed wild in the clearing,
where our new house stood,
on a stripped skull, quick to erode,
my mother would rush to the dogwood,
take each stained white blossom
in her hand and said "forgive, forgive."

She never went to church anymore,
never again touched her cold dead Mary,
never again begged favor or grace,
not after that first spring
bloomed dogwood,
not after the twisted
cursed and giving lumbers
first sprung upon her eyes -
a crucifixion, multiplied,
a hundred times, a hundred Aprils
on the limbs of a retribution.

After the pops we watched,
from the window. Rabid
or not, the raccoon flailed
like ribbons on a demo fan,
life pushed out like pulled air
in the driveway. Two more
from the cop to secure an end,
a spectacle, a gathering.
Five cracks in the driveway
to bring the neighbors out
for a killing. The mowers wind down.
We watched in awe the last
few pulses of agony
slow run to the gutter
where the last leaves
unraked on an afternoon,
mingled with road grit
and hunks of can,
were soon washed down
by the firemen
and their hoses.

I told Luke about it by the iced cream.

I like burnt coffee,
the black half cup in the ***,
evaporating into syrup,
tongue-rejected but swallowed hot.

I like bent smokes,
cracked at the filter,
pinched and squeezed,
dispersing joyous poisons,
some to the lung demanding:

Each day begin bitter, imperfect,
stiff into addictions of dawn,
into the drawn curtain ways
of waking.

There's a brown leather sofa on the curb marked "free"
There's an '87 Jimmy with a flat tire and rusty fenders
down on Dows marked "runs $200 or best offer"

There's a new stop sign at the bottom of Center
that nobody's shot up yet. Sure as **** county
gonna be lurking around behind the daycare around five

That wanna be a cowboy that runs the Jesse
installed some slots a few years back, now he's selling *****
where the DVD's used to be.

I don't know his name, never did anyway,
but I bought a couple ugly Bics from him today
because nobody steals ugly lighters.

Seems like things are looking up at Splitrock
a lot of boats in the driveways. I always wanted
a boat. But I got a lay-off instead in '09.

Got a hunk of plaster, though.
Just clinging to the lathe above the coffee machine.
Gonna crack my head wide open one day.

Gonna crack my head open when I pour
when I pour that first cup on a grit-eye morning
on a grit-eye morning still dreaming of boats.

Endymion shrieks,
For what is beauty if hidden,
hoarded, if posed in youthful sleep?
None forever in plump symmetries
Held a stone and cast it thus
Upon the cool and clouded lakes
Below thunder, and sought
The bridled stain that looms
From under. But there, there
In fragile dispurpose cut
Below the eye - the frailty -
The red gleam indistinguishable
From the fly that laps upon it,
Indistinguishable from the crust
That makes a scar, ripped
From vain slumber to bend
Before the wind, to break
Before the white lightning hand
That takes each our pink clays
And molds a chasm
For the drain of days.

"Fifteen miles as the crow flies"
So let's break this down.
You're telling me that a crow
cruising a straight line
at 30 miles per hour
will take a half hour
to reach the tree.
Well I'm cruising at about 70,
got a detour for construction on I-90,
some snail farmer in a combine
thinks now is the right time
to hit the county roads,
and I gotta drop down
to 20 because the paint
and the rise say passing
is no bueno, and he ain't
waving me by.
The crow,
on the otherhand,
is getting mobbed
by eastern kingbirds
not liking his shadow
on the nests.
And yes, that bloated
skunk is fine feast
for a crow flying
as a crow flies,
hopping to a fence
when the implements
pass tall and reptilian.
Given that and some quick
calculations based
on what I remember
from my high school
geometry class -
Pythagorean Theorem
and all that -
the crow and I
should arrive
at precisely the same time,
******* and hungry.

The tabs are listening still
manila bent fat folders
past due bills and debt remitted
collected stuffed and sorted
in the freeze of a moment
when I wasn't a friend
when I defiled a trust
when I spent the last
thin dime of integrity
on a dust filed upstairs
with the titles  brittle
invoices and expired
warrantees.

The phone may ring
to renew the service
between me and you
and I'll drop the handle
into the cradle
of a familiar voice
without a word
without a thought
our crisp linen days
pushed away
while a rusting washer
screams another load
and a cabinet drawer
inches out a little bit more

Mrs. Ringenroth taught
us a sorta furrowed brow
squinty eye kinda readin'

Makes ya look intelligent
scannin' the horizon of a line
for them steepled ascenders
and dots like dead crows
stuck on a cloud.

The educated boy
don't move his lips.
The educated boy
gets hung up in the crease
closest to the spine
until the book slams shut.

It's that mouth-breathin'
lip-readin' boy
that looks to the sky
before turning the page.

Passive frictions generate little heat.
Strike the flint hard into steel,
and let the kindling flare
to dispel the spell of darkness
of hate and the grim fuels
that burn without fire,
without compassion,
without warmth,
without the near spent coals,
still glowing,
that nourish the soul
with clear broth
in tough bowls.

I’ll send daisies
because they’re already dead,
bias cut for a few
last capillary pulls
of aspirin-tinged water -
soon to cataract, milky
in a lead
crystal
vase.

These are no “love me’s” or
“Love me nots”.
These are from he who knows
not love, but beauty - decay.

My darling little Aster,
this is the day of your death,
another year counted,
backward from a birth,
as each petal falls as love,
as paper,
as dust,
onto your dining
room
table.

Pull deep these gathered Springs
there, pull deep the wisp
of meadows once dreamt
soft beneath your feet,
and gaze into the yellow eye
about which all these
frailties
fall.

Think not me grim my darling.
Think not me cold and thin.
I am nothing but a florist -
the florist birthed within.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
to every hard to find
creek bank in the world,
there's a busted dinghy,
a forgotten sloop dream,
with a mudstuck sprung transom,
a sky beckoning bow,
tied to a cattail or some other
tenuous stem.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
the willows, reefed in a gale,
cringe in the rising crest,
and a busted dinghy
lifts on a swell and bellows
against the cleat to slide clean
to the sea, to a young boy's
landlocked dream of spray,
hard weathers and anywhere
but here night-watches.

All the colors of elsewhere,
the splendid regatta of the never-seen,
the gleaming spice and bent strange
tongues of the could have been - mold,
dip and sigh, lift and strain,
again and again,
upon a cleat,
upon a rope,
upon a cattail
or some other
tenuous
stem.

...Sleep conjured a small dog
with a granite eye, mats and mange,
Three legs and a vagrant tongue
That hung from the left of its snout,
A viscous drool that strung without
Shame, without breaking to the floor.
And I, though broken in a dream,
Shorn of hands,
Less a body than a thought,
Became a dream for a stone-eye dog
Who rolled belly up to offer its scars
And plump tumors.
We were one then.
We were one -
A broken man and a broken dog
For once thus calm in a dream.

On clear days it rains buckets,
swelling the headwaters
and the algae blooms gluttonous.

Rufous clay breaks into wider trenches
and the towhee flashes away.

You never flinched when I crushed your hand
on that first day on the ****** rise before a charging
buffalo sun, gnat swarming my wild panicked eyes,
giddy with each hill blue upon bluer receding.

I'm a woodland kid, baby, creek crouching
with roots and canteens of sassafras
in the leopard light and leafmold;
the wannabee Tarzan swinging
on wintercreeper vines.
I'm the scurrying rat in the stormdrain,
taking the shortcut home for supper.

But there you were, straight as loblolly pine
in the canyon lands of Chicago, prairie drifted
in with the drifters and the hawk winds
of winter to find the woodland kid dragged
blind before the gridiron sky.

Two rivers led nowhere, two rivers
and a chance confluence of running
merged and pooled in a one bedroom cave
on Belmont, hatching our tadpole dreams,
fattening the swimmers with mustard greens
and gaudy hotdogs.

When we crested the banks,
on the continental divide,
one to the woodland, one to plains,
the water ran as waters do,
and as in each great story,
the boy follows the girl,
to the ****** rise before
the charging buffalo sun,
where you held my hand
and I saw the sky for the first time.

I am prone to tracing crosses
in near empty ashtrays.
I don't really know why,
but this behavior, perhaps
a tick of the mind to the finger
tips me into some grievous
absolution while slowly,
knowingly, killing myself
smooth, drag after drag.

But that, in itself,
is mere supposition.

Perhaps I seek direction
in an ashen compass,
ringed with bent
singed needles
piled at the edges
because not a single one
found true north.

But that, again,
is mere supposition.

Down,
in The Valley of Fires,
where three rivers converge,
a cross on a rock emerges,
scratched stone upon stone
by a hand more ancient than known
to pass unto me a pattern, hard-wired,
affixed in all our yearning - to seek
that single point - home.

But that, too, is mere supposition.