It’s like sleep is treason. I disembark from a loadstone
and revolve around an endless disjoint.
It’s like being exposed to the radioactivity of a dead god.
but with graven images on your hands
and the milk of human blindness
in a butter churn -
you never ****
with.
udders are like fountains of wane
when your thirst is preternatural
and your tongue
as tethered to
Tantalus
as every hour at beck and call
is only listening to you breathe
through your mouth
when you have
nothing to say.
It’s like sleep is treason, gussied up in pinched gold filings
and rust burnt daffodils. it’s like  not attending the beginning -
but claiming to be a witness. more a rumor fog-
on your windshield...
telling the curve of the world that your road
leads to answers.
sleep is mocked by the hemisphere we believe in.
unraveled and plucked from-
dim glories to face the brutal happening
of being Alive.
sleep
is how having no choice
tells you how to be awake
when the time comes to be asleep
through a war you can’t win
until you betray the comfort
of your Albatross-
and your world-class indifference
to the Mystery
of You.
Sleep can never lay siege to the tyranny of your Illusions
but can always discontinue your savage love
as it Is.
within you.
this species of sleep has all your tears in a box
and all your hope in ivory towers
of Strange Rodeo.

summer is sputtering out and fall
is fluttering forward with hammock eyes
swaying in the riddle of sunlit caverns and dark fires.
in my bones i can feel the changing of the guard.
how a sun is plucked up
from a yawning chasm of noel
and black chandeliers.
comets that pray to the ellipse
and never the cause..

but the season rumbles and laments
any aspect of the other.
with the rain pining for blue skies
or blue skies dreaming of gray.
we are joined in the calamity of
marching against Being.
by Being so hard that a link in a wound
is more an iron pillow than a spirit
of Morpheus, Day-walking with a
communicable
Flu.

Before You Flew.

Jim has a crow that barks like buckshot
and little men duct taped to kazoos as baleful
as a siren on a beached whale’s conscience.
a blue slug addicted to krill or be krill.
That crow has a talon as wide as the world
and a song stripped of hymns like flesh
from a bone of contention.

II

I can’t breathe. but my
last breath
said so.

death and taxis
avoid eye contact
to delete you.

III

growling softly...

In the doll spot the violins in your eyes
are not the choir i was looking for.
merely the shell of a silent scream
in semaphore *******
lavishly devoid.
Pondering the revels of Last Things.

I came upon your homicide by chance.
tripped over your open wounds and hung lights
on your bones to find the empty wells
yawning with grief invisible… and all the secret storms
of your tepid furies. i read your mail.
in a sense.
i saw the background of your foreground
as the planet you believed in.
and waved at you “ Goodbye”
because backwards
Day.

No slumlords in the orchard, only the good Lord’s bounty
heaped upon troubles and shimmering defaults.
where life has loaned you-
a lemonous sun, as ashes belie the anthracite
smoldering in clandestine doubts and rarified hope.
This world is teeming with life without irony. Teeming with you-
like a vestigial immortal, entranced by a wasp
in an apple tree.

tipping the scales at half past a vanishing point to an argument
we’re like a tribe of unbridled huckleberries, spoiling for a jam.
but then… we lose the wind to a terrible storm far beyond our sphere
and labor overmuch to assuage the curdled grommet
of our foisted  appeal to an unvoiced fear.
we slip into our rainbows and swim unfettered until a wing breaks
to sing an anthem to gravity’s callous law. gobsmack in the perilous nativity
of your awkward alliance with the Mystery that conceived you-
as a Lost Boy.

you’re always the Beforeigner.

So Now.

So Now.

So Now.

On the Northside of a very private Southside-
where a Midwestern Daguerreotype
of Some Kind

[ Eastbound ]

On Pure
West
Business.

Had mine eyes fallen
upon worlds
between
wheels.

Having learned much from toil-
and extravagant galas
my appetites subvert
the meringue
as an infinite feast
unfurls.

breaking bread in an alcove
of cinnamon stars
in a pitch black white
that goes with everything
you’ll never Know.

like a flawless gauze
wrapped around
an itch.

II

In the telling of Sunfish Fables
one must contort the bend
to render a skeleton key
to a locked Rune.
Ya gotta foil the fates fancy
with turbulent renditions
of inner hurricanes
that cast such spells
as to weather you.

even at the bottom
of the sea.

you gotta burn rocks with your teeth
because your tongue is busy .
sleep after death
because Now is too soon
to forget how to be
Alive.

And too brief to
believe
Until it's
True.

what are your terms?
can I offer you a drink?
is your cocoon luxurious?
do we  have an understanding?
are you one size?
is there a wormhole that you prefer?
or all about the deep end
of ending this?

what are your terms?
do you have songs in your mittens?
are your balloons delirious?
do we have an answer as fancy?
are you quantized?
is there a Dirge that you were
that your life  forfends?
or is it bliss?

what are your worms?

when you stay, i assume that god has a plan
and she knows your name.
when you leave, i resume my urchin joy-
delirious with yearning on boil.
i applaud the next day
as you descend to me
unadorned
to disavow my lonely
with your passionate
Heresies to thwart the gospels
of my Doubt.

the way you always do
when you
sublime.

a dandelion with a crown. the sun.
it hovers in the up above
suspended in perpetual expanse
the darling of our prayers
anointing our cavernous dark
with unprecedented
sprites.

the way it’s glory is removed
is intoxicating in the least paroxysm
of our motionless spasms of inertia.
the way it hangs ‘ore pavilions
twilit on blast in the void
summing our notions
of an opposite happy
with a subtraction
of an actual
fulfillment.

we rise to the occasion with our wits
floundering in the spoils of dead logic
rebuffed by impractical magics-
as savage as a plume
of empirical evidence
that Nothing
Happened.

we dawn as the sinking
extravagance of our ascent
implodes.

ginning the loop of so many delusions
it’s a promise we might be Human
After All.