There’s no light that comes
when the day crashes to the ground
and bruises.
It fades, weaving and gliding through
places where we once left
our ghosts.
Watch them; now they laugh,
now they mock our sullen eyes
and dance.
Watch as they soak up
the brightness of our minds
and fade.
They quiver, then vanish
from the hollow places inside
our heads.

my mother's jaw

for it
to become
my mother's jaw

for it to fit
both hoof
and hell

had to drop
not in awe
but dead

and demon

as a sack
of sticks
in a hunter's
heart

and for the deer
to free itself
that womb
of glass

had to bridle
its hoof
that human bit
 
with which
it barters
now
and limps

past small men
touching
stick to stick.

The preacher lifts his old hand,
“This is where we are meant to be!” and,
The geese croon overhead as the day turns around,
“Here in the country! A mighty place to be for men so small!” said he,
The preacher, or the carney, the very angry canary,
“Here is where the wind blows and whistles across the fields,
Making waves and currents that show early eidolons in the rye,
And here is where the willow trees make curtains
For mid-afternoon ******* with a sultry sweat on the brow!”

The preacher clenches his pink fist,
“Here is where holy work is done,
And God is surely watching!
Here is where the lilacs create a musk that staggers,
And leaves the devil in bewilderment!
The son of God is in your boot,
He is in the locked gun cabinet,
Which you threw away the key!”

A woman drops to her knees,
And I ask why, in which she replies,
“Of course! Of course! I love him! I hate myself!”

Ay, slow and easy,
Her lips took the scenic route.

God!
The ugly and plain,
With pouches and paunches,
**** a dime a dozen,
Come here to settle in the humid heat,
Of a thousand fields spread eagle across,
The American hot bed.

Yes’a, I thinks,
The boonies,
Is where I should be,
When God comes around.

The preacher points his fat finger,
“Leave the city for the gluttons!
Leave it for the sinners! Leave it for the lazy!
Leave it for the intellects of bygones,
And aggravated souls who are not just,
Content with what God has given us!
Leave it for the hounds! We have only to hear,
The gospel of sweet nature like honey dew,
Or golden sopping molasses!”

The sun came in through the stained windows,
Shooting colors across the pale flat faces,
Of the god-fearing townspeople.

Flickering like a tentative alpenglow corraded from profaned time
A whisper jostles through a crowded rumpus prescient of teleology and design
Jolting with pangs of panic a screech emanates from the brontides of tomorrow
A chagrin outpaces the gingerly apprehension of a peevish sorrow
Among the ruffled plumes quaffed from pedigree and put to disuse
A banausic electricity galvanizes the ****** of the amalgamated acuity pinched from the sordid, the obtuse
Refracted like off a darkened moon that clenches the darkness in an abstruse tomb
Combs through sentience of Saturn presiding over ineluctable doom
A silence louder than a plangent ****** of phantasmagoria debased
A looming victor erodes with the putrefaction of sworn and utter distaste
How to obtrude on the evening with triaged fulmination
Is an affront to the rudders of a piecemeal civilization in tatters with exacting doddering calculation
Graveyards bustle with the eidolons of scurrilous spite
Congregating around a blackened epitaph on an alabaster palace gilded in the swanky pinnacle of light
Scuttling the outmoded flanks of an abortive war
Against a henchman of state too ostentatious to hardly ever ignore
We clamber with insistence hoping on fortuitous deliverance
Yet we are deranged of the clasped distance between the crevasse of the clerisy and the satisdiction of futures passed with meticulous diligence
Absconding with furtive furrows on a wizened guild an entrusted world we helped build
We witness the silence creep over us like a trepidation contained as lethal killers of the cartel willed
That which frightens a self-fulfillment is a fatalism gone awry
Someday soon omens excavated from immolated tombs will beseech a more universal backlash, an alienated sorrow that will one day cry
But until that fetched disaster occurs
Let us meditate only on the process of emanation among wayward words
That dance with a destiny that the hegemony of momentary circumstance much prefers

we are back here again,
offering up prayers to the patron saint of lost things.

we are haunted by eidolons of past states,
snapshots of perfect moments,
lingering phantom pain.

the monument is
swept away by an ocean
of time and desire,

lost to the seabed
and laid to rest.

hit your children. my own, I love the way they look

before I don’t. every shadow

leaves its post

Blinded by a
tissue of lies
we meet our fate
with dewy eyes

Growing smaller
waning unbound
void of colour
and void of sound

Eidolons swarm
a host of hollows
shapes without form
nothing follows.