He's part artist, part alchemist,
but a full-on con, self-professed with post-
graduate degrees in mixology
and the god-given sense to know which
smoldering home remedies will catch fire
(give or take an occasional legal glitch).

His healing pitch is grifted on the easy
comparison of queasily lowered brows to
their indistinctly raised betters. You'll doff
the scoffing face as he pulls back a masking
caparison, and your fever gallops hotly
hoof-in-mouth with an uncontrollable itch.

Tinctures, colloids, salves and potions,
they all have twisty caps, blithe boxes
bubbling over with hypnotic patterns
fashioned to cure your urge to avoid
his futility. First'll come the ******, then
the crumple followed by purse strings loosening.

Don't consider it capitulation.
His assortment of fluid manipulations
bear a singular branding at 100 proof,
and after the recommended daily dosing
(two jiggers with each meal), you'll feel
you're **** erectus made sapient.

~
Saturn Jupiter Mars,
three blind mice running
up the clock to find freedom.

starlight stairs in abyss,
cities of the interior ring
carry a dangerous cargo: citizens.

t-minus one/this is fear

I am no astronaut,
I'm a refugee, bleeding hands pressed
tight to the barbed-wired fence.

we play charades from the window,
lunar phases keening
in the tender light of these infant wars.

t-minus one/this is fear

farewell threshold on laudanum,
the grifted gift of the Joe Blakes
painted from memory.

the far off observation
telescoping my fear, leading me
to believe I'm hiding in plain view.
~

Sun comes up,
she goes down
on some upended main drag,
if i were an archaeologist
i still wouldn't dig this place,
every other day she dwells
in tedious, empty cafés,
but on the weekends she flashes
her "license and registration"
to oncoming traffic,
hoping for grifted furlough
to wear as silken, shiny beads,
and so we ride
this merry-go-round,
because moving in circles
is far better than being trapped in a square,
we've stopped climbing the calendar
in search of higher elevation,
she used to pour it on thick,
stirring drinks inside my head,
i used to shake
worries from her hair,
now with bitter orange marmalade
low in the sky, and stacked against us,
it's home before dark,
lest our eyes open wide to see
we are nothing more
but strangers at sundown.

Hound-dog swallowing poly-coated pills, filling up, bloated, falling off stage, and into a more permanent and lasting Graceland, to be surrounded by another’s verse.

I only enjoy what comes from my own head, a modern Samuel Johnson, no matter what happenstance brought about to be said, a cage free Bronson. Hearing false verse through a syllable count, hoisted onto adverbs easy to mount. Congratulate a lesser mind, reaching commonalities most could find. Ease in creation, opens floodgate doors, distributing specs of grace through misworded spores. Life, love, and the pursuit of vanity, leaves simplified lumps of prosperous thought riddled with anonymity. The invention of despair overwhelms those ungifted, and leaves them erecting stale forgeries they grifted.

In the wee small hours of escaping light, a crooner steadies his hands as he falsifies his originality, reading off the music from another’s sheet.

A change in topic is something to hold as worthy, though in a modern context of prosaic prose, such good fortune can be exceptionally elusive. Broken hearted symptoms shared through a hash-tag, rerouted and worded, to fit an illiterate youth’s lesser diction, reposted to approach validity, only to be called forth as an original soul, one to revere, and hold as an entitled fraction of logic.

The piano man knocks out a tune, hit in stride with vocal conduct, inspired and laid in pen by a lesser man propelled by better wording, given up for another’s career.

Market’s over-saturated with teenage sonnets, weeping over cut wrists, ended (Victorian inspired) trysts, refreshed and brought back around until sentimentality vomits. Themes used to run rampant with fresh ingenuity, made extinct, occurred in a blink; now every poem has some congruency.

The grapevine got entangled, getting involved with a troublemaker, providing the soundtrack, using another’s words.

The dinner was made, but something was wrong,
She tried to eat something, appetite, gone,
The view from the kitchen was a sky black and grey,
She got under the table to get out of the way.

Even moms home made cooking couldn't beckon her out,
For she knew fine and well, that a storm was about,
Such a crash, then a light filled the kitchen completely,
Then a hug from two arms,"Daddy please dont you leave me".

As her body was lifted to a warm loving place,
Daddy wiped away tears from her four year old face,
Then it seemed as though nothing could hurt her somehow,
Not the storm, not the flash, not the terrible howl.
As the storm grifted by, daddy hushed her to sleep,
Snuggles up with his baby,safe and warm for to keep.

We got there in the early afternoon
By a car low on gas and a bad back right wheel.
It was Thanksgiving, and I wrote.
My name down on the back of a Whole Foods receipt
Because I was having trouble remembering the
Double-clap and the lazy double L.

I have been trying to read more poetry.
And yet
My stanzas
Still come out like that.

The royal, we appreciate the energy.

There was my grandma's newly painted house.
There was my father, and I's grifted palm tree.
There were my uncle's five cars.
All parked on the ****-filled crack and mild sidewalk.
There was the sound of the neighborhood dogs.
All fighting for the honor of their owners
Who only really loved one-fourth of them.

I started to cry after I put the car in park.
I was terrified. This shocked her because I was one.
To only cry when I was really drunk.

"Are you really drunk?" she asked me, patting me on my back as if I was choking.

"I feel I'm saying hello and goodbye at the same time," I said.

Then I opened the door and said, of course not, not yet.

The gate was creaky, and the young black dog.
Was excited
Like they always were.
The one white one, the one my uncle got took from my neighbor,
Just stared at me with the absence of something.
That knew they wanted to love
But didn't know how to ask or even receive it.

My grandma wrapped up because of the wind.
She was all smiles as she talked about being ready to die.

Being forced to be outside in nature
Is not always pleasant, especially when the alternative
Is killing from an accidental posture.

I had two beers for the price of one.
And listened to bird sounds on Youtube.
That my uncle explained brought tropical birds:

"The really fancy ones," he explained.

Then he pointed to a dead pigeon a hawk
Had left the day before
And stripped me of my Esquire magazine perspective.
Of fancy
And recalled where the hell I came from.

For some reason,
I brought up Veterans Day.
A ripple of guilt
Snaked over the glass patio table,
Over the leek and chive stuffing,
The Pilsner beer,
The homemade cranberry sauce,
The too-thick gravy and the burnt turkey, only to land
On my uncle's ears, who said:

"Dad always told me, When I'm dead boy
You go and **** on my grave! Man like me
Needs a shower whatever way he can get!"

I nodded as she winced, and grandma said nothing.
My dad was inside cooking as usual.
One of the dogs, the young small black one
Excitedly mounted the brain dead white one
And ****** and ****** until the black one realized
He wasn't ready for physical love.

An anecdote spilled out of my mouth
About how I traveled to Normandy and saw
Art of the boats and the men and he, my grandpa,
That drove on D-Day.

My tale fell on deaf ears.

"Yeah, I went to Dad's grave," my uncle said. "And I beheaded him and skinned him as he asked. The man had a lot of requests."

"No, he didn't," Grandma insisted. "He no do that."

"I put a new skin on him," my uncle assured her. "Ain't going to leave my man skinless."

We had bad pie and left ten minutes after.
We didn't hug, so don't ask.
As we waved goodbye, I noticed a smudge of food.
On my dad's bulbous gut.
He had been very excited about his new couch.

"It takes up the whole living room! You and your sister can sleep in every corner of the thing and not touch feet!"

I did not cry as I pulled into the street but
I wept at home
In the shower
Scrubbing away the off-chance or the possibility or the
What-if-I-did-this of that

Family-packed afternoon.