1(Ilove dreaming.)2Why do you love dreaming?1because...1it helps      me.hah,decipher what to make of what god has given to me,.212Do you think god shortchanged you?1(laughter,sigh)1A little.2Are you dreaming?1I'd like to think not.

It is hard to get friction on the oil
It is hard to slit the leathery rind
The inside sees daylight for the first time
Like a mysterious jewel
And when the skin is gone you come apart so easily

it could be the end of the world. a cataclysm or catastrophe churns and the city could be a smokestack. with all the silence of a vacation cottage when it’s not vacation. even the people on the radio are gone. you enter the apartment and find one (1) four-legged entity. breathing slowly and wounded in the shower stall. she came in here looking for food but she didn’t eat any because she’s gonna die. she came in here to find a place to die. she chose your apartment. in the shadows, you wonder how (dogs? coyotes?) would get this far into the city streets at a time like this? a time like when? who did this to her? the clock is ticking, or was it the cross nailed to the wall staring you down? her ragged breathing disappears as if you calmed her down or let go of two smooth quartz stones and let them sink in cold water. you wake up.

feeling of a dunkin donuts parking lot
just after they closed on a sunday night
or feeling with my arms crossed
at the bottom of a pool

with all this heat
escaping
in all this cold
"it smells like something’s burning in here"
good

stiff is the flesh of rubbery, unripe watermelon,
strange and flexible as frozen laundry.
I dispose of it in the apartment garbage.

unnerving is the sleeping, sleepless city
eerie as an adult edition of I-Spy and equally unsweet
suspended indefinitely, creeping subtly in between
Christmas and New Year's Eve.

it was swell to think the city’s smell is less sickening
than the soulless scent of pressing forests of bristlecone pine
fertilized lawns now sterile with nature’s pesticide,
the crystalline flesh of some cold, lonely comet.
the forests silent and silicate as the moon’s lifeless surface
trees packed, cartooned and phobic, like salted fishes hanging
with no throb of night-dwelling insects to hasten dawn’s arrival
no sidewalk nor always-lit subway maw as a means of escape.
cause of death? no depressive episode could match such exposure;
the mood-numbing nocturne of the inaccessible semi-suburbs
marching off between the sentinel forests of the northeast.

twin gulls at the ready!
resting and fidgeting atop a rock outcropping
sister galactic spaceships from cowboy bebop
ancient cutters of the sky, cloud divers and dividers
efficiency is key, swiveling in crisp circumferences
feathered razorblade acrobats
mother nature’s surplus fish-killers
spend their days as lazy air athletes
never in the sea deeper than their beaks