Within his paw
smeared bloodied red
by a deliberately mocking thorn
sat a
blanched ripple-y
guarachera strip of cloth
confined narrowly
between the love and the life lines.

TWO ROADS!

what remained of her
remained of the underthings
beneath

fluffing rows of silk
the heavy skirt had been raised
above the ankles
the creases no longer hidden in shadow,
one leg hoisted over the back,
the reigns held expertly.

Hey Beauty!
As it happens, the card numbered Eight is
Strength (also Lust)

She had surely fled
She has surely flown
through the trees and away
Not on foot at-all
while the three saw her pass.
great speed.
The two sisters
with that prince vulgaris looking on
curiously
Three daemon goblins watching from a distance
a disturbance
a smallish crashing
and afterwards
a scrap, sleepy and unfurled, relaxed
within the leaves that shudder
and give up the delicacy, slyly
into stubby fingers

Lovely
Dark
Deep
The Woods are Laughing!
Did you notice any scent?
Did it linger between
the thumb and the ring?
the remnant of her flowers,
Petals flouncing, swirling
in odorous potentiality.
a scrap, yes
a deep seated souvenir
Can we re-fabricate the whole from this little thing, you think?

we want her.
there are things that we want to do with her.

dangerous, they lean in close, nostrils flaring slightly
searching for the ambergris or the sticky  jasmine
sweet,
settling instead to gaze upon
the still clutched
still a little springy
sprightly, o! the remnants of her liveliness
and ***** and yet
No memories

3: at least let us show you the stage that we’ve built
with a clean sheet for the curtain,
paper cut-outs
and some sticks.
it’s called acting.
the wine and the wafer.
hidden in the trees’ darkening
‘the mattress’ lays where
the leaves will crumple

meanwhile, he’s petulant:
- why, if you’d just get off of that high horse!
- how long are you going to resist?
- are you STILL angry?
- why won’t you just let me stick it in you?

she telegraphs her response, cough:
‘you do know that in this
particular scenario
(fingers pointing downward and across
as if to suggest
that the scenario
had a specific location)
You are the wolf, right?
The wolf...

I, the girl,
am in the forest with my basket and
I have got a
cute little
blood red
crushed velvet
swing coat
With matching hood and a single task
And YOU
(with those other two *******) have decided
to bore ME with this ****?
Daresay slow ME down?
Of course I will get rid of YOU.
Wait, who am I talking to?

Let me also add that
there never has been any
high-stepping on my part,
nor ankle twirling,
no mandate to impress a stale balcony,
no sign of gaslit
illuminated
pink bows
that lay down flat
perfectly upon the straps
that snap
perfectly at the thigh,
NOT to be slid off a buttock (mine)
NOR crumpled into a dubious ball, ripped and torn
and yet I know that
that determined creature,
a hairy monster
more faithful than Argos,
is prepared
to wait a lazy eight
at grannie’s cozy house
in a sickly corner
over-eager and overwrought with
pandered fantasies
and explosions of once sort or another, irrelevant to me.

What I WILL admit to is
that the touch of those grubby fingers
transubstantiated at my waist
invisible
approach
as usual from behind
impatient and
impractical,
always too quick to make himself a beast
to rid himself of being a man

knowing how way
leads onto way
but I doubt if I should ever come back’

I keep writing the spaces between heartbeats,
I keep touching the things that aren't real,
I keep saying how I'm going to change into something,
I keep erasing the lines that I've written before,
and when will I write for myself.

it takes skyscrapers filled with polaroids
it takes little white lies and telegraphs
it takes reflective puddles of gasoline
it takes armfuls of daisies and paisley print napkins
it takes princes and paupers and slurpees and silver
plated bracelets and philosophical books and memories
of people sitting on cracked green-brown bus seats
it takes things I knew and throws them away; it takes crispy hot nights
when cheekbones are sweating and boys who know nothing
of what they want filling their hearts up with and euros in pennies and sitting
on six clouds of old medications and basements with just too much dust.

it's a matter of time,
it's matter of perspective,
it's a snapshot hold-back parallel circle of constant irrevocable dimensions of porch swings
and merry go rounds undeniably irritatingly provokingly making me sick.

swish swish go cassette tapes I keep within reach
I can pull out their insides and stretch out the tape to reach to the moon
past the treetops and over the sun and into my head while I sleep.
someday I'll tinker with those that dream nothing,
and someday I'll write for myself.

there is a straightjacket noose man
                   gauzed inside my chest.
breathing with inside fever and moving
around the edges with a mumble and
a shuffle he crowds the walls
                      with blue light.

the tapes fuzz and hiss when
his hands raise up to the glass
           the security operator is crying
            into his wrinkled shirt collar
and the wind whips itself
to a frenzy, the tapes fuzz and hiss
when his mouth opens up and
crawls a gasp straight to
the shout the shout rises like
sharp pockets of steam

            and the director is shaking so hard
            the pens on his desk chorus like
a thin drum choir, the desk is too hot
to touch, the noose man slips
      to strands then to particle
           then to simple sugars and
                                    energy like light
right through the floor and the ceiling
                                     and we are live
so live.

the glass once slow flowing moves faster
and sand is everywhere and
his eyes snap and chip into the
locks and the tape.
           he rages in the deep the
           lightbulb left, in the dark desert,
                                            the red dust.

he lights like sparks and rises again
       until my every muscle trembles
and the mothers chatter and my
teeth chatter and the director shakes
and the neurons shake and operate
                                  like telegraphs.

(outside, I am a clenched fist.
a tired pillow,
the shadow under an open hand
and a closed eye.)

inside there is a crack and a moment
of confusion so brief as the smoke
clears and the neck has broken
on the noose man,
cut open by the speed of
       his own sharp snaps.

Here I am just for you
Telling you in Times New Roman
**** the placebo affect
Remember when I was actually alive
Before I started cursing in front of you
I know your secret little bird
You won't say it aloud
But it runs down your arms and telegraphs over and over
From your fingertips
It won't slip from your tounge
You won't allow that
But your eyes smile 300% lone signal lights
I braved the cold and learned to listen to the wind
And I found a great maw in the earth
So dark and deep I could not see the bottom
I stood before it listening to the snowfall
Until
I fell inside and was made warm forever

"Hindsight,
is 20/20."
As the tag-a-longs
And dingbats like to recite.
Well that's dumb- 20/20 is average!!
This is outrageous -even our idioms our idiotic-
So I propose a new saying,
And yes, who is the 17 year old white boy
To say anything about anything.
But hear me out,
How about instead, we say,
"Hindsight, the unluckiest symptom of consciousness,
and a hell in its own right"
Okay yeah, well, maybe it IS a bit wordy,
And yeah, okay, maybe it IS a TAD too cynical.
But since when has a teenager been anything BUT
A self-proclaimed cynic.

With stars too far to telephone,
And when telegraphs aren't a thing anymore.
We gotta make our own futures,
But when we're riding along through our
Generation of hate,
Or lovely liberalism.
Try not to check the rearview mirror

Oh how I yearn
For evening gowns and gloves
For hats and corsets
Oh how I yearn
For typewriters and telegraphs
For carriages and train compartments
Oh how I yearn
For a time of enigmas
For a time of class.

Brown cinnamon glow ,                                                                ­                
our hillside boisterous doe , telegraphs her moves by-
the early , jovial winter moon ..
Down tractor road , beside-
Zachary Creek , blend into the shadow ,
alert , curious and meek ..
Our favored evening dame
Slender and sleek
Strike a pose milady ..
Stoic and sweet ...

Scene 1: A Night with the Time-Bomb
We sleep under paint and plaster: impressionist probably.
I slaughter my feelings in my throat.
My heart sends telegraphs instead of beating,
but you prefer the silence.

I hate that I could never enjoy this.
I hate that they all love the stars.
The only difference between us and them is where we’re burning.
The only difference between you and I is who we are mourning.
I never thought it would be me.

For you I tear loopholes in my morality
And find suffering in getting everything I ever wanted.
I pick at the plaster,
wake me up when it’s over.

Scene 2: Lunch with the Comedic Relief

I greet you with defense of my mistakes,
justifying the difference of these dog days,
comparing a grenade to a grenade.
Meanwhile the real contrast is in now and who we used to be.

You’re not laughing anymore.
I haven’t been the punch-line in weeks,
It kills you to look at me,
And when you do I hate what I see.

It’s all a waste of good material.
Cue the canned laughter and suddenly it is sloppy sit-com.

Scene 3: After School Specials with the Stereotype

You run to me: lanky.
You yell my name: cracking.
You’re my dollar store Halloween.

You’re the only reason I’ll go anywhere today.
You laugh: choppy.
You read from the usual script,
I say my lines from the in-between.
You’re the only reason I’ll feel genuine today.

We’re screaming at traitors in voicemail.
Strangers dive in the unholy waters.
I feel how I should have all along,
and I fear this perfection is solitary.

Scene 4: Piloting a Corpse

I lay in bed listening to the endings.
I measure the distance between me, everyone and everything.
They love all of me, including my worst enemy.
They take the ugly and wait for the beauty.
I take this desolation and try to dazzle;
I ignite like sulfur.

I fall deeper into my temporary bed,
of my temporary house.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you how everything changes,
Tomorrow someone might form a complete thought.
Tomorrow I’ll tell them all how I feel.
Tomorrow I’ll give up after “I love you”.
Tomorrow I’ll try to glow like neon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/books/review/what-is-poetry.html

an excerpt…

“From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I find this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no effect. It does have an effect, the way putting more panes in a window changes the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain

That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. As for what is on the page, the language that changes the shape of the void, I’m of the opinion it can be almost anything. One of my favorite books that no one has heard of is “Survey Says!,” by Nathan Austin. It’s just a list of guesses ventured by contestants on “Family Feud,” arranged, most ingeniously, in alphabetical order by their second letter, so you get sequences like this: “A bra. Abraham Lincoln. A building. Scaffolding. Scalpel. A car. A card game. A cat. A cat. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.” We get the answers; the questions are missing. “Get a manicure. Get a toupee. Get drunk. Retirement fund. Get out of bed. Get ready! Let’s go with manuals. Get sick in there. Let’s say a pet. Let’s say shoes. Bette Davis.” The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it seems to be giving subconscious advice. Get ready! You must change your life.”

Oh,
I loved Zane Grey,
the way his cowboys
shot through each day,
the tinhorns and telegraphs,
funeral directors and their
funereal laughs.
It's not the same since
Zane went away.

The range looks grey now.
How
I miss the grits and hominy,
if only Zane had
stayed
we could have played
cowboys and Indians
for real.

There is a worm behind my eye
And it wants, it wants, it wants
Sending telegraphs down my nerves
Begging to be noticed
There is a worm behind my eye
And it wants out.