May the willows grow through your dog cages.
May the mice die and rot where they lay.
Half-moons of black dirt once filled up my fingers.
Prayed more than once for owls to carry you away.
No longer my ritual to clear sludge from the spillway
as your orchards grow barren
weeds cover your everything,
And mushrooms lay seeds
in your brain.

It is angel impact bullwhip vivid
Stampede fingers landscape obedient
Jail bust escape laughing run
Spillway thought stream fuzzy essence
UGG boot toe tubs and water stings
Earthquake tyrant Celsius fools
Pin lake petrol ice filled deserts
Spiky flames in outer space
Sculpture freak show withering exhibit
Fathom emergency breathe and ****
Nut shell gorillas invisibly cracked
Cow fed nirvana BBC
Shades of zero audio cauldron
Same vein madness virus mansion
Culinary horror infection procedures
Geyser rich nutrient pea-pod turmoil

The spillway
Is the only way left
For it
To flow

Stop with the daydreams
Of wet ******* unicorns.
Stop with the dam spillway
Of "undeserved tears."
Stop looking in the rear view mirror
And start looking at your **** rear.
Stop the inverted visions,
Need help?
Walk the streets of Calcutta,
Better yet,
Pitch a tent with the homeless.
Stop the mindlog.
Stop the driveling outlog,  
Just stop.

This one absolute truth she was the embodiment of peace and grace they speak of guardians in
Childhood with such sweetest words she created fairest order if the day was mean and reproachful
It wasn’t known I think many children knew one such as Marie a soul so gentle we played in the coldest
Rain herd the thunder sound like great rocks were falling off a wagon being driven across heaven cold
And shaking we would regroup on her front porch she seemed to shake off the cold and her warm
Words were so comforting I believe I starting thinking she is special she is taking us beyond childhood
She possessed a central framing to her thoughts they seemed beyond her years and they instilled
Questions childhood wonders were many and it’s nice to stop now and cast our mind back to that time
Just maybe things are a little too hard at this moment in the lives of some the tremble she did win over
It was beyond her words it was her inner nature released through the heart and eyes of a small child
She was a stillness that calmed invited you to spill with her over the spillway of running water not be
Upset not to get entangled take the strong wind and use it for winging your way to heights that it
Afforded she taught ineffable lessons by just simply turning of her head you followed a little force of
Nature that was attuned to the spirit she spoke often of wanting to be a nun her boundless soul
Would have served her well she possessed a quiet command of life and what it was all about how she
Stirred your heart and emotions it was a hard and fast rule that all parents weren’t and didn’t meet the
Dreamy expectations of being Ward and June Cleaver at low times I don’t think she called the blue birds
Down from the trees but she had to be on intimate basis with them hard difficult problems were
Dissolved favorably when you hung out with her she had an ability to draw power that empowered
You wasteful and hurtful matters turned from glaring to a soft shadow that mixed into understatements
They shrank to a size that you could think on them and then turn aside and play her great help was her
Unflagging optimism it was the greeting you met when trouble flared she was centered in loveliness
It was like you were entering this misty cloud she had the uncanny ability to see life with sweetness
And you were pulled in underscored by it a dance was called from a far off place and your feet glided as
Your heart was filled with delight adult life was more alien childlike innocence couldn’t throw of the
Cancer that came and claimed her life at a young age she left a devastated husband and five precious
Little girls I wish they could read this and know their mother as the rich and precious child that touched
And gave us a shelter that was made from tenderness it bides us well on days that assail instead of
Giving encouragement she was always on hand to do that for us truly life is a mystery that it would
Reward her with such dismay but I bet if she stepped out of the shadows her words would be the same
As they were in childhood there is a place a man told of when you are there you love your family for the
First time the way they should be loved but you couldn’t make it to that high ground you want to wait
And anticipate their arrival to such a place of wonder he said that when you walk through nature’s
Grassland that it has intelligence no longer do you have to walk country lanes and you provide the
Stirring no now stimulating wonder is in every living thing you blend you are entrusted with richness
That captures you on every level everything contributes speechlessness occurs in two ways you are so
Overwhelmed words are arrested but you don’t need them communication is by pure thought do we
Not yearn in our speaking to be heard and understood an fall short not now Marie just caught up to her
Childhood that had perfection that was limited now all limitation is removed

Undercoverism, teenage soot inside of dry and crusty eyes. When the morning begs alarms to die, and she brings that familiar rain again. Some one that unknowns us, sheds a brutal light. Where the hole inside each child's head, may be disarmed across a deck of cards. In an anti-climactic exposition, where aces climb the sleeves, young Caucasian children find themselves in minorities.

Bubbling voodoo-hoodoo, soda water succumbing the Oro-Quincy spillway until the men have wept and every other woman gleans her brow. When we wake up in the poppy garden, when we've fallen asleep to one hundred cowardly clowns lifting themselves off the heap of a Volkswagen Rabbit. On Broadway heading to 14th Street, avoiding the sidewalk cracks via a jog through alphabet town. There are self-righteous no-ones, famous, auto-inflicted vicious inextricably ordinary and sub-par, barely scratching at their own averages, and hardly shaking words out of their id-sized corner offices at Avenue B & St. Marks.

By the shivering hands can tell, of which lowly smoking dactyls accentuate their currish farce, and amidst a stack of newsprint and cardboard, boxes and the bothersome, the most personal stranger no person should ever greet. Nor mahogany or oak manifold shall ever be select, and the hollowing sheath- Earth in her brilliant hues of green should forever keep unbeknownst to any selves heeding their milky skies' retreat.  

The oder fresh, from digits bending, collapses on the archway round the bed. Its hardened crime, it fails in pretending, like a lust in a sand plume, an eight-shaped glass ornament, arenosely erupting in a drizzling circumstance. We call it time.

It is a noise that summer caught on to, a broken heel, running up ways and ways to concrete squares, like California was only just pretending.

Goodness knows. Godness never around us. Healing can't be done, no book or prose can satisfy her, inasmuch as she belonged, creeping up eyes leapt to their suspension. Nibs erode into the conchoidal zone, some pressure to the ilia fossa. Some work furnishes settlers to the hips, cool wool and linen make an aperture of threading. Dreaming when the moon begins to permeate a looming glow, in an arc during achronychal silvery mists, withering beneath this flume of fancy.

Some of the wet cuts a hole-mess into  us. Wethered nymphs introduce the suffix of their succubus, is this the surreality the ethereal vapors make for our nexus. Beasts in a bold way, crimsony gore-dom, comes dominating greens to overgrow in this show.

Water soaks into the empty breath of words wrapping up tonight's syphon. Some hours of the past inside an alarm's sound torture. Hidden by inches, filling up the glass, every minute, every poppy, all the numbers seemed to help her.

Covers that fixe anew such random sleep, brings the devilish horror to pervert absent beeps. Until  the dots begin to close on us, and in slumber we rotate the words to assemble an acute understanding of being sorry for  sleep that will always continue to be out of reach.

The wheat yellowed, the wind chipped and chipped
until the wheat lay cheapened in broken mass;
I steered my tanned corpse through the scattered wheat.
I came to the well.
Instead of dropping a coin,
I tore a stitch and threw it into the blackness.
Instead of making a wish,
I cleared my flattering secrets from my throat and yelled.
The yell echoed downward,
bouncing off grandmother stones,
until it richocheted upward
only to have the wind carry it away like a swarm of lies.
I watched my secrets yellow like an ancient photograph,
I felt nostalgia chip and chip away,
clearing the spillway for fresh pain.
I spread my arms, a self-crucifixion,
a savior of no use.
When cruel regret and cruel change
finished with me,
I stared at the bluebird flying overhead,
just beyond him a cloudless sky.
Joy is for the living,
myself I'm kidding,
I close my eyes,
and
I'm carried away.

I can see hollow places in the hedgerow.
There are voids from stalk to stalk, but they shield each other from the outside world. An aegis of natural kinship forcing me out.
Safe, inaccessible, inviting, shadowed loam hints of escape.
Keeping to the public path is compulsory.

And there are parched things here maintaining their drought despite the deluge as the fountain grass keeps watch o'er the spillway below their wall. The rainwater doesn't wash out all the antiquated, little, abandoned pennies discarded there with facades slowly being worn away.

A dozen blunt faceless men stare up at the bridge with no mouths with which to share the careless, one cent wishes which flung them here to be forgotten.

I know it's wrong.

But for a second it smells like wild onions--like home. Life's intoxicating perfume floods, impairs good sense. Amidst Cassian's Choice, October Skies above, below staining a gray skyline with hidden life--

I had choices to; decisions too late to undo.

I uprooted myself from that silken touch and holy embrace. I remember the first time I felt lace. Now a cassock hangs void hinting of a bypassed path. Now I lay fallow like a spillway waiting to be stained with another year of shadowed hopes.

There are hollow places in me the rain can't touch. An aegis of broken kinship keeping the world out.

The other night you reached up to the sky for me
And pulled down a handful of stars
To keep in my pocket
You gave me the North star on a silver band
To always show me the way home
To remind me that home is wherever I’m with you
You gave me the key your dead-bolted heart
And I will carry it with me everywhere I go
On a string around my neck
Or in my pocket full of stars
So as not to let it slip through the
Sidewalk cracks of my hands.

I used to see the stars from my window every night
And send my thoughts across the reservoir to you
Like the winds that blow water into waves
Tears welling up over the spillway
Pouring over onto cold cement
Pounding like my beating heart
A storm in a teacup
A tempest inside this body of water
Inside this body of mine
And with each ebb and flow it swells
Knowing so well this whirlwind of feeling
Spinning tipsy through my soul
A gentle hurricane, a familiar flooding
Of safety and contentment and longing and warmth
Rocking me to sleep when I can’t
Curl up in your arms.

They say that all the bodies of water on this earth are blue
Because they reflects off the color of the sky
So I went down to the reservoir
With my pocket full of stars,
The ones you picked out just for me, and
Set them free, one by one,
On the waters’ edge with
Wishes tied to their backs in the hopes
That they’d make their way
To the night sky above our wondering heads
In the hopes that they’ll shine beyond
The milky light of the moon
That creates a film across the darkness
With the promise that I’ll carry your heart with me
When we part ways for the night.

These days when I lay down to sleep
My ceiling’s full of holes from fallen stars
That I’ve wished back into place
But didn’t give enough time to grow
Their roots back into the sky.
I wake up with stardust in my sheets,
Empty space where your body should be
And the water from the tap just isn’t as blue
As the reservoir’s on a clear day
And the city lights stay on too long
Keeping me from seeing the stars
When I look out my window at night.
But I still keep the key to your heart
On a string around my neck,
Resting just above my own beating vessel.
And I still wear the North star on my ring finger
To lead me home again.

For now I am your latchkey kid
Sitting on your front steps
With the key to your heart slowly
Growing warmer in my grasp
Knuckles white from mid-October wind
Rushing through my jacket.  Here I sit
Watching dusk stretch it’s hands across the sky
Looking for the pocket full stars that I set free
Waiting patiently for you to come back
And show me the little tricks to
Unlocking the door to your heart,
The way you have to turn it just a hair to the right
And push against the doorframe
An un-exact science I haven’t mastered yet.

I can picture you now, behind your counter
Selling liquid stardust in pretty little bottles
Packaged painkiller in a clever disguise
I imbibe in the hopes that stars will fall
At my feet to grant me one last wish.
And at night when you return from the closing shift
Smelling like hard work and strangers’ *****
Find me on your front steps, shaking in the cold
You take my hand in yours, guide the key
Watch it do its job, the hardest worker
Letting me into your tired arms
Where I can feel your beating heart
Crash into mine like waves.
We’ll sit here on your front steps for awhile
Watching the stars slowly float away from each other

In the reservoir of the sky.

Locked-legs.

Smooth to the touch, intertwined,

In the most innocent of ways.

Strong against frail

Breaking pale against pale

Meows of week-old kittens that paint a smile upon our faces

Serotonin overload, charisma can’t hide

Charisma won’t try.

Seeds leap over backwards for a word in edgewise

Attempting to control this spillway, it cannot be safe

For a cat like me

In a city of your pace.

Pained Change
Blades of grass
Dunes of sand
Hope seems crass
Lost western land
Venture was always
The great pleasure
Mountain, desert spillway
Heartfelt must giveaway
Thrills and stills
Break up time
You’re the chime
Every mood known
Body soul rings
Outward it sings
Treasures now blown
Flat turgid bands
Constricted lifeless stands
Prairie poverty endless
Vistas are beguiling
Nothing enlarges loss
Sea’s beauty emboss
Will ever haunt
Expectation endless searching
The soul taunt
It feeds silently
Body nourished plentifully
Mindless without resources
The spirit dutifully
A lost observer

'Brownleaf Chestnut giants rattle like Spanish dancers , maracas crackle in the changing wind , do perform auburn 'Lover of Autumn' before the plenteous , frosted daughter of Winter , before Sun sprinkled dale , fig , lilac
Atop the red-rock spillway , as the piping martins , the whippoorwill
question , the wild goose direction
Voice of the swallow , of tenderness and regal griffin
Coppering , flint sparked showers upon the grindstone , mesmerizing  
twilight orbs , polished gems , starlight Guatemalan priestess* ....

4107 by beth lindly

                                             4

i have been born into a southern city twice,

once to parents that counted and once to those that didn’t.

twenty-one years and i haven’t ever sat all the way

through a game of football, or soccer, or anything

except gymnastics. southern life is the same as

gymnastics – you don’t have to know the rules to

know when someone messes up, when someone falls,

when someone scrapes the length of their fingers trying

to pull themselves up. there is a spillway by the house where i

grew up that wasn’t full this morning. when my father

drove us to school in the fall, through those blurry mornings,

i could see a small rhombus of sun shining on lake tuscaloosa but

it was only in the fall and only in those mornings. i am proud

to have noticed that rhombus. we lived in a different house

until i was five years old.  i had a sesame street comforter

and we didn’t have cable. all they ever taught me was the

cockroach on the wall does not exist if you can’t see it.

(or, at least, i haven’t seen that cockroach since then. who’s

to say.)

                                             1

the death of fairies is something that has once made me sad.

i thought there were some behind my elementary school’s quarry

but they were just honeysuckle, and it was november when i went

back, anyway. there were never any fairies around my house.

i checked in the herb garden my mother grew in our front

yard, with all the mint and oregano that went into the soups she made.

my ex told me to stop calling it “my house” because the room

that saw me stay up past 2 a.m. to talk to him now sees my

sister write on the walls. but someone else wakes me up now and

my home can become whatever i need it to be.

                                             0

i had a dream last week about my dog dying and i remembered

it over lunch with my parents with such a horrid suddenness that

i thought it had happened right then. “no, beth,” my father chuckled.

“millie hasn’t died.” “she’s doing just fine,” my mother agreed.

but she has, i thought, i saw it clear as anything.

my dog’s brain has been recently deteriorating, the pieces

taking with them her ability to hear. our family has taken to stomping

on the ground so she can feel the vibrations of come get your food,

come outside, just come here. i am proud that she can feel the vibrations

that call her home.

                                             7

the fog that exists separating me from my dirt and blood has yet

to be predicted by james spann – a 70 percent chance that when i’m seventy

i won’t be able to remember how my backyard looked without the deck.

i am twenty-one and soon i won’t be and it will continue like that until

my memories have cateracted into a milky blur of greens and purples

when i was a child and maroons and blues when i thought i was an adult.

my hope is that i will start an herb garden and plunge my hands

in the warm earth and feel the vibrations that might call me home,

if they want to.

Nyctophilia

Undercoverism, teenage soot inside of dry and crusty eyes. When the morning begs alarms to die, and she brings that familiar rain again. Some one that unknowns us, sheds a brutal light. Where the hole inside each child's head, may be disarmed across a deck of cards. In an anti-climactic exposition, where aces climb the sleeves, young Caucasian children find themselves in minorities.

Bubbling voodoo-hoodoo, soda water succumbing the Oro-Quincy spillway until the men have wept and every other woman gleans her brow. When we wake up in the poppy garden, when we've fallen asleep to one hundred cowardly clowns lifting themselves off the heap of a Volkswagen Rabbit. On Broadway heading to 14th Street, avoiding the sidewalk cracks via a jog through alphabet town. There are self-righteous no-ones, famous, auto-inflicted vicious inextricably ordinary and sub-par, barely scratching at their own averages, and hardly shaking words out of their id-sized corner offices at Avenue B & St. Marks.

By the shivering hands can tell, of which lowly smoking dactyls accentuate their currish farce, and amidst a stack of newsprint and cardboard, boxes and the bothersome, the most personal stranger no person should ever greet. Nor mahogany or oak manifold shall ever be select, and the hollowing sheath- Earth in her brilliant hues of green should forever keep unbeknownst to any selves heeding their milky skies' retreat.  

The oder fresh, from digits bending, collapses on the archway round the bed. Its hardened crime, it fails in pretending, like a lust in a sand plume, an eight-shaped glass ornament, arenosely erupting in a drizzling circumstance. We call it time.

It is a noise that summer caught on to, a broken heel, running up ways and ways to concrete squares, like California was only just pretending.

Goodness knows. Godness never around us. Healing can't be done, no book or prose can satisfy her, inasmuch as she belonged, creeping up eyes leapt to their suspension. Nibs erode into the conchoidal zone, some pressure to the ilia fossa. Some work furnishes settlers to the hips, cool wool and linen make an aperture of threading. Dreaming when the moon begins to permeate a looming glow, in an arc during achronychal silvery mists, withering beneath this flume of fancy.

Some of the wet cuts a hole-mess into  us. Wethered nymphs introduce the suffix of their succubus, is this the surreality the ethereal vapors make for our nexus. Beasts in a bold way, crimsony gore-dom, comes dominating greens to overgrow in this show.

Water soaks into the empty breath of words wrapping up tonight's syphon. Some hours of the past inside an alarm's sound torture. Hidden by inches, filling up the glass, every minute, every poppy, all the numbers seemed to help her.

Covers that fixe anew such random sleep, brings the devilish horror to pervert absent beeps. Until  the dots begin to close on us, and in slumber we rotate the words to assemble an acute understanding of being sorry for  sleep that will always continue to be out of reach.

I've seen limonade spilt down the sewer
and down the drain. (life limonade)
These limons have long past rotten.
Stale, and forgotten; limonade spillway.

I wouldn't be satisfied with the quality of that limonade.
(not at all)

Your indigo crystal aura spins through the meteorites and rock matter
Creamsicle wheat, gold aura'd
The golden freed, guild and greed appealed. As if

from up the causeway of some starving and scary ghosts. If Shel Silverstein had ghosts their ghosts would be still too decent.

In the tired eyes of friends and their declarations- I have no cyn to give nor cywm to live. Tired am I of breezing through narrow rills in Hidden Creek the obvious spillway ditch of our not even near immortal wealth that weighs on the souls of the outlying suns.

Realize that active sight, only breathes from active mind.
And until today I never realized that I don't mind child. My child
My sweet sweet child of the radiant and crimsony misty blue and white skies through divine amber and aurulent lights, that twinkle acrosss such

Incredible sea-green and robin's egg blue colored ocean sized eyes.
From these Ides whereon I've drifted supine, lost, scattered and random
In the weeping tide's of Alice's watery eyes.

The lake is full now.
Lapping the spillway. Under
Water, last year's beach.

He’d been away for any number of years,
Days cascading over the spillway of time
Into pools of weeks, oxbows of months,
And though the town was much as he remembered it
(Though a little more tattered and careworn:
Another broken windowpane here,
A wall in grave need of paint there,
One or two more storefronts gone to plywood)
The cemetery was all but labyrinth to him,
A corn maze of granite and narrow drives,
The plots having metastasized, the stones having spread
Like so much crownvetch overpowering the simple grass,
But he’d been able, after any number of false-starts,
Uncounted instances of double-backs and do-overs
To locate his father’s marker
(The man gone some forty years now,
Taken by…well, who knows what
His mother, stunned by the prospect
Of having to step into the dual role
As nurturer and breadwinner,
Too stunned to even think of requesting an autopsy.)
He’d come, ostensibly, to make his peace
(Whatever that hackneyed phrase entailed)
But he’d ended up, if not as mute as the stone he faced,
No more than a cow-country Caliban,
Haltingly sputtering bits and bobs of half-phrases
Concerning the implacability of accidents, the vagaries of chance
The coffin-lid limits on mere men and women.
He’d given up the ghost, finally,
And as the daylight slipped away on the bumpy old horizon
He’d simply brushed some dried bird guano from the gravestone,
Then picked the dead bits from the flowers
Doing their level best to hold on
In the urn he’d wrestled from his mother’s ancient station wagon
Two, perhaps  three, days ago
Before settling back into the car to try to divine the way
Back to the main road
(He’d found it in surprisingly short order,
And perhaps a quarter-mile or so down the road,
He’d come upon a small rabbit,
Frozen mid-lane by his headlights,
Finding himself in a world not of his making
Not knowing whether to flip or fly;
He’d missed it by mere chance, nothing more,
And he wondered if the poor thing
Would be so lucky with the cars behind him.)

It was the season when a young man’s fancy
Turns to hunkering down as the land around him locks,
When the envoys of the abyss
Stalk elderly relatives and spindly late-born calves.
He’d happened upon her
At Aubuchon’s Hardware over in Gouverneur,
Picking up bits and bobs to tie up those projects
(The endless caulking, the pitched battles with plaster and lath)
Which had trickled over the spillway of spring and summer
When she more or less materialized,
Like the sudden bloom of some ill-timed crocus
Popping up through fallen leaves.
She’d quizzed him on the merits of levels, cup hooks, and spackles
(The story being she’d leased a gerrymandered third-floor studio
Over the Rent-A-Center on Clinton Street)
They’d chatted in the middle of an aisle for a half-hour or so
When she tittered You know, I could really use a beer about now,
Which became several, then burgers, then his house and bed
Where she settled in for the duration
(She’d had her suitcases in her trunk, and he came to surmise
That an apartment hadn’t been in her plans at all.)
He’d learned about her what little she chose to share:
A nut allergy, a borderline prodigal capacity for whiskey,
Certain boudoir practices and positions,
But her whos, whats and wherefores an admixture
Of carefully chosen quarter-truths and outright fictions;
He’d noticed, inadvertently,
That she had a half-dozen driver’s licenses in her purse,
And she’d been furiously tight-lipped
About where’d she been and come from,
Save one drunken mention of how she’d lived down near Ithaca
Just long enough to stand on the very precipice
Of one of the town’s plethora of gorges
Before deciding not to go headlong over the edge,
‘S no real point, she demurred,
In anything that puts a period on sumpin’.

There was no question of some Snow White happily-ever-after;
She melted away as abruptly as she’d arrived,
Leaving on an implausibly warm late-February day,
A deceit of sunshine and southerly breezes
Which belied the month-plus of hard slog ahead.
He’d cherished no illusions
Of going after her, of tracking her down:
There was small chance she’d given him her real name,
Assuming she knew it at this point,
And she’d changed her cell number in a matter of hours.
He’d done his best to simply chalk it up as a lesson learned
Or a hell of a hell of a story to share with the boys at Nina’s Hotel,
But she had become (or, rather, the notion of
What she might have become,
As all faithless acts require acquiescence to the existence of faith)
A giant hogweed in his very sinews, invasive and implacable,
All but impervious to destruction and subsequent reclamation,
And the throes of her remained as confabulations
In his mind and heart and groin
All through what turned out to be
The longest of long North Country winters,
With flurry and sleet enjoying dominion over new blooms
Until well into the middle of May.

his last gasp was quite lengthy
trying to go out with a bang as usual
a rationalist manifesto covering his face
accompanied by a cotton field work song
his grip went slack under the torrent of images
fortunes have been lost in that snapshot parlor
shook the money from the pockets
of many a surviving Siamese twin
blessed with a rugged set of mouse buttons
he pitched head first into the theocratic miasma
since a rescue by wisdom eluded his pilgrimage
and its inner parade of flailing penitents
he died to a real slow slide whistle tango
from a regrettable strangulation of debate
and terminally transparent eyelids
at least the ******* left me to my fate he mused
just as a legion of parachutists
crashed and tumbled through the roof
it was an Exist-o-Gram from my dear mother
but first a word from our sponsor
Hi there Mel Linger owner of Mel's Futon Corral
so jump in the calaboose and come on down
for a steal of a deal and a big gold tooth smile
clear and sunny in the lowland swamps
now for some traffic from overhead
fully awake after the reservoirs of hell broke loose
his mathematician’s mind calculated
how long until earthly paradise
it was a delusion but a lot of them work
time to risk the entire skin layer he fielded
searching for the trail to civilization
he shinnied up his collective unconscious
an optico semiotician on a paranormal safari
and began to read mom's holy missive
son your persistent mania for self dialog
requiring a frequent bath in statistics and terror
has left you under the juggernaut's wheels
for some fashionable occult mystery
humor him it's a mud fest in there
moms lips floated above and spoke
the Cherubs chirped and twittered
as he rowed over the spillway of oblivion
and stood before the ancient ones
boy were they ancient decrepit even
connected to great green bubbling flasks
by their bloated *** organs
apparently this made them really smart
the one labeled mom bubbled and spoke
the you you think is you is somebody else
later that day a marsh fire swept through Utopia
and a humming bird took nectar from his ear

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

Green-stroked leaf
over lapis door
with four panels -
black vinyl
perches shining,
a motorcycle,
a motorcycle.

It enters her eye,
the day's spillway
laid down
to beige page.
Color and form,
thrown from her hand,
thrown from her hand.

A rainy day brain bursting -
at imaginations spillway ..
For I envisioned antebellum visitors in period
vehicles nodding their approval here -
at the prickly close of day ..
Brown sugar November shrubbery
crackled in the scorn of winter-ways ..
Lead , case hardened steel , black powder-
and the corruption of the dead ..
Widows , orphans and city blocks afire
Put your religion & its army on my shelf
whilst I **** upon the fires of the liars and their wealth ..
Awakened in the midst of a cavalry charge ..
Thunder . Screams , stealth and brutality ..
Death celebrated with fried catfish , potato salad-
and baked beans ..
The laughter of children has replaced the cries of pain..
Chillbain lifted with the onset of warm July rain ..

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

Go to astringent hurled globs from killing viscous slop
The gaul if believed comes from the hearts inside cuts bruises and a broad scoff
Little prancing feet are the guilt and glee yet un fortuitous of the be all of deathly infinity
Old seeing eyes yearning for pancake morphing clarity
Live un calmed by the unclarity, the wilted force of downed dandelions and squashed dreams
What little I could claim to elevate still languishes in the unknown
For senses are not direction and habits are retro dysfunction full blown
Center your courtship finely crafted thinly set close minded abominations
As the ***** tightens the justice from ethereal destinations glosses over and you begin to believe your annihilation
Lude acts voracity pompous foes glassy couture freezes and begins once more
Can you believe that sands and forest, oceans and stream are behaving in synch with the world of next generation dreams
Or are you part of the cause and effect spillway a fink and a rat Sporadic memories are conclusive the  future shall remember you as that  
No cause for devolved world where special lives are cast to poverty that smiles in the new American systems for the grande scope of
jimmying the media ******* means...you shall rest on your silken pillows so clean
While the fishes rot the skies turn to brown in a pallor of drastic debased ******* scatter rashes burning lungs and causing health deprivation
The stupid pastimes become picnics in dust and the one free will for all and a self choice becomes oxygen masks on the denial nation

Somewhere off in the distant plumes of mountains,
Well beyond the verdant knolls and rural meadows
Of this broad and gentle countryside,
Down where the highway that peers the river
Collides softly with the city,
Your crystal lens discovers some bold new heart
That like a child’s toy gleams but an hour and departs.

The lens that tells apart the other men
Dispels the tender fiction of your touch,
For too much love must down the spillway run
And pluck away the feathers of the sun—
When in the earnest shade of senseless night
Where only firework provides a light—no!
We’ve learned to tread each other’s tortured lines,
That still for wasted, novel hours pine.
So here to sit and idle on the frame,
Another desperate tablet carved in vain.

There is no road that takes me back to you,
Nor dressing that could swathe this weeping wound.
Wild partitions do in shadows bloom,
And bloom they also in light of the sun,
And never cease till life is done.

his last gasp was quite lengthy
trying to go out with a bang as usual
a rationalist manifesto covering his face
accompanied by a cotton field work song
his grip went slack under the torrent of images
fortunes have been lost in that snapshot parlor
shook the money from the pockets
of many a surviving Siamese twin
blessed with a rugged set of mouse buttons
he pitched head first into the theocratic miasma
since a rescue by wisdom eluded his pilgrimage
and its inner parade of flailing penitents
he died to a real slow slide whistle tango
from a regrettable strangulation of debate
and terminally transparent eyelids
at least the ******* left me to my fate he mused
just as a legion of parachutists
crashed and tumbled through the roof
it was an Exist-o-Gram from my dear mother
but first a word from our sponsor
Hi there Mel Linger owner of Mel's Futon Corral
so jump in the calaboose and come on down
for a steal of a deal and a big gold tooth smile
clear and sunny in the lowland swamps
now for some traffic from overhead
fully awake after the reservoirs of hell broke loose
his mathematician’s mind calculated
how long until earthly paradise
it was a delusion but a lot of them work
time to risk the entire skin layer he fielded
searching for the trail to civilization
he shinnied up his collective unconscious
an optico semiotician on a paranormal safari
and began to read mom's holy missive
son your persistent mania for self dialog
requiring a frequent bath in statistics and terror
has left you under the juggernaut's wheels
for some fashionable occult mystery
humor him it's a mud fest in there
moms lips floated above and spoke
the Cherubs chirped and twittered
as he rowed over the spillway of oblivion
and stood before the ancient ones
boy were they ancient decrepit even
connected to great green bubbling flasks
by their bloated *** organs
apparently this made them really smart
the one labeled mom bubbled and spoke
the you you think is you is somebody else
later that day a marsh fire swept through Utopia
and a humming bird took nectar from his ear

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

Capo 1st fret


F/ I will make you a cloud
C/    and send with the wind
D/    laden with tears
Am/ for your heart to mend.

F/ It's darkness you'll see
C/    silver linings can't be
D/    my branches are bare
Am/ I'm a lightning struck tree.

F/ No rooks here a rooking
C/     no bark or no leaves,
D/     but my acorn has fallen
Am/  right into the eaves.

F/  Trapped in a spillway
C/     still in its nut,
D/     my D - N and A,
Am/  may never come out.

F/ Oh but for a sparrow
C/     a robin or finch,
D/    just for one nudge,
Am/  it’s barely an inch.

F/ Into the outflow
C/     past the incline,
D/    my roots have all vanished,
Am/ a place for my kine.

F/ You carved on my torso,
C/     a cupid with bow,
D/    the love seed you planted
Am/ neglected to grow.

F/ The time it has come,
C/     a season has passed,
D/    an oak in the making,
Am/  its kernel unmasked.

                   Outro

F/ You carved on my torso,
C/     a cupid with bow,
D/    the love seed you planted
Am/ neglected to grow.

F/ The time it has come,
C/     a season has passed,
D/    an oak in the making,
Am/  its kernel unmasked.

F/ I will make you a cloud
C/    and send with the wind
D/    laden with tears
Am/ for your heart to mend.

F/  I will make you a cloud
C/    and send with the wind
D/    laden with tears
Am/ for your heart to mend.

                Fading

F/ I will make you a cloud
C/    and send with the wind
D/    laden with tears
Am/ for your heart to mend.


Ryan O'Leary ©