Gitting in
to my skin
today
I had a thought
about you
while you
were reading this

I thought
How could
You know
This

Realized you
must also
have a secret

Spillway
of early morning
life rewriting

of last night
yesterday
and tomorrow

from their
classical
inhuman arrangement

Into
Spy vs spy
Intrigue

in leaping
Mad
panels

with satisfyingly
explosive
endings

Crave sense here
these unnumbered
fetchings

shaped
as a grayly rouged
visage

Wry wrenchings
Into
Place


Copyright@2019 Dennis Willis

Puget Sound in Fog
Flag drooping, wet, barely moving,
Tide out past the buoys;
The boat tipped,
Waiting water.

Drizzling mist of fog descending
No horizon but the pebbled sand
Herons move grayly in slack water
Hunting fish.

Ragged shoreline stretches to invisibility,
Battered logs, shells, a trillion broken things
Rest in exhaustion, uncaring,
Responding to unceasing chaos.

Tides rising,
Tides falling,
Delivering,
Destroying,
Grinding,
Removing,
Renewing,
Mo­ving to the pull
of earth
and moon
and universe.

In the early morning fuzz, a smoky inhale of life
the lamppost is lit and the trees are just waking up
Five Forty Two Am: the eyes of the sky are grayly
I hold my stave high as I begin my very first poem  

Bushes and creeks containing tiny quakes of light
piercing through a silent heaven, I feel alright
Sleeping in the room next door he is unaware
of the awakened altered state that claims me

Down the path of memories I go alone and safe
standing behind a closed window, vouchsafe !
Smoke blankets the city on this Friday morning
I can't touch the fire, I am only its town crier

as I write about the residue of the wildfires,  
                I can see the peeling back of its slight
                                 and know instinctively,
                                          It is daylight....

Shark Week plays on every screen
in the hothouse tavern; the barkeep

wears a Jaws t-shirt and doesn't miss
a single shouted order tho she stares

at silvered flanks grayly gliding
by the man in the cage.

He points his camera at hunks
of blooded gristle-head that lure

the black gape. Hey, says Tom
at the right terminus of the bar,

it's like my wedding photos.
His friends laugh, no one else

is quite sure how funny it was.
The diver doesn't flinch even

when the bars are tusked in
by hunger's muscle; I marvel

& consider that this is a proper
attitude toward death, even if

a touch more Hemingway than
I might normally prefer.

When I exit into wet-wire dusk,
an almost-green marine evening,

I think of how eagerly we anticipate
the remorseless teeth that make

no distinction between us and the bait
we lay in our endless desire to know.