Monday, October 30, 2023

All the heather and the madness.

 All the heather and the madness,

All the heather and the madness,

All the heather and the madness,


Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Guys.

 Trouble isn’t trouble til

The hem tears and it’s trouble.


Look at me, not quite fit to come in,


But not entirely turned away. I’m the middle of the night 

The horses will begin to kick the stable walls, and a cat your family loves


Will tip over an ink well. I’ll still lie in the peace of the grave

While you 

Discern kinky butterflies of your own undoing.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Lusitania.

The dream that followed served the first one:


Skulls disintegrated beneath the pearly 

Teeth of an earthmover.


Meanwhile, gladiolas rose in an effort

For peace.


The world and where you work is substandard,

So everybody


Figures fuck it. One day all the dog fighters

And dogs will die in this eminent domain 

Of peace we feel in our bodies.


The swale in which the lively bathe, and the dust in

Which the sedentary sit share a border. But


There, distant past, we worried ourselves breathless 

Remembering history’s Lusitania

And grief crept over us like sunset.


You might never have felt such captive culpability for

Your own breath, but I have.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Ingenuity

 Fewer and far between,


You dropped the house key in the well

To keep it safe.


But later you started to realize you weren’t

The first one with this idea.


That’s the problem with ingenuity. It’s covered

With thorns and it feels like a victory to

Actively avoid them.


But what about the rest of the time. 


You look down into the clear and pure looking water,

And you see your own purple eyes in the poison and the key.

Monday, October 9, 2023

Utopia

The bigger dream has been eclipsed by moonlight

And rotten ass doo wop.


The lesson covers love, old age, and eventually silence. Every 


Great song points us back to the indefatigable 

Globe of a thing.

Bobby soxers get together around me.


I’m nobody, but they see the cosmos. And

In their heels 

And in their malevolent 

Let’s let go,


As if decided at a party for everyone.


Monday, May 15, 2023

The kiss of life.

 I have no responsibilities to tell you about,


This isn’t my job, so if I slip up,

And I’m amateur hour 


It won’t affect my pay.


Maybe I should open myself more to risk.

I love the smell of motorcycles,


And once I saw a gargoyle leaving his post

For swimming water.

Thursday, May 4, 2023

30

One of my headlights is out.

The road clears its own throat:


The radio once I get to a certain point on 30 is 

Satanic gospel.


But when I come down the mountain the 

Sun is there to shine on a world superstitious of loss.


They bake their fallen leaves.

They reimagine the dead in uniform.

There’s a Gulf station in Art Deco

In need of an army.


There’s a duck no one ever saw before but me;

But everyone sticks up for him.


Monday, May 1, 2023

P,Q,R,

The alphabet was made out of mystery. 

I’m sure it wasn’t perfect; I’m sure there were 

Hard feelings shared between

The P and the R people.




But  someone in the Hawthorne village anticipated

The wilderness of their thinking, and A became A thing.

And everybody followed.


The R lost its trunk and the P became 

A predicate form. When the two looked at the Q


They imagined breakfast on their day off.


It was as if in begging, the tongue of

Humanity spoke and did its duty for once.


It was as if the people said for once,

Let us speak for ourselves.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Dr. Faucci.

 The scientist is so weird—and he owns this place:


The beakers burning, and monkeys bouncing 

In their cages. The next magic is in here somewhere,

He says.  But is he really the guy?


He’s handsome, and women find him sexy at lunch.


Lightning bends as it crosses the window on his ceiling,

And it raises the sleeping skin in the green of his

Greenhouse..


He grows things, this dashing prince.


Where are you from, patient zero? 

What brought you in to us today?

The flag flying above the clinic is ours. The fly

Is infectious. You, through the archway, which is Gothic,

Must dream of a life without all this science,

As you look ahead.




Sunday, April 2, 2023

Spring.

 The hill burped when the toad stirred.

The sky shit on me in Washington D.C.


It was a pigeon, it was rain.


People gathered around a wet, dead baby doll.

As they dispersed one could be heard


Cursing humankind.


She was already crying. On the bank

As a kid she saw the toads shake off


Winter as if waterproof.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Tintoretto

 Your friends love you but

They’ll never grow into your thistled shoes—

 The suffering you show as you lean into the window.


Up against the sun—they feel small, too. 


The comportment of waiting is based on people who are kind

 and willing to wait.


They don’t understand the fraction of a cat’s life.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

The pink.

This, I thought, is the only dream

I’ll ever have:


Blue purple

Blue red

And the faithful grey binding a short-lived shadow

Of humankind to the green of home.

Strange dream.

 In an unexpected clearing

I heard the voice of God


The moonlight laid bare

And the silver trees all took a side

To where I was.


The voice said, love is important

To love songs. And so love is important.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Memory game.

 I dream present tense.


The past is August— a series of memories

Mt. Fuji from thirty six points of view,

Wheat fields,

The blue and yellow skin I never

Quite saw.



Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Cataracts.

My science class memory of the Universe, it always

Begins in the dark. There are pinholes

Of misleading promise


—but that could be my eyes.


Have you ever seen a dead sunflower? The kernels

At the heart look like mummy teeth—the backwards-

Withered petals no longer canary yellow.


Instead, they curl away from the earth, like a vanquished

Coven of witches looking elsewhere.


But the point is 

It—the Universe, I mean, always moves to the light.



Act III

 Once and always to the dawn’s light

Where the water balls up

Like mercury at the bottom of a thermometer.


Where the leftover animals get reacquainted.


The bronze leaves break up because 

They’ve been given no lines.

Monday, October 31, 2022

The riverrun.

 The bean from which we get chocolate is good.

And milk is good. And the rivrrrun of everything

We get from milk is, too.


It’s good. But silence appeases a

Different set of Gods. No age, no

Gender, no celebration of appetite.


This embarrassment of riches is different from

The rich folks you know.


They hang out in truckstops

And undo the eating of their own souls.

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Curtain.

Love, be a movie.

Love, be a neighbor.


Show your familiarity to me.

The muses speak.

 How do we understand what they’re saying

In moments of ecstatic undoing?


Think of it like a volcano erupting:

Some folks will run away,

Other to the source of the explosion

To find the others. But everybody runs

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Good luck.

The country must have looked like a person once.

Someone landed and said,

You, you remind me enough of home.


That’s how the globe was formed

And little by little the idea of home learned to travel—

And develop its elusive slang,

Saying to the foot, not where you go.


Saying to the letter, maybe.

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Violet.

 I want to see everything, hear everything,

And share it all— how the walls start to smell moldy,

Violet in the drying light.

And no floor could support a living soul

This may only be the beginning;


So, here I am—I want to feel everything.

The clover filling in the blanks

Between the grass,

And the sky tumbling down the wild, clean hill.







Wednesday, August 3, 2022

On the waves.

 The poetry you lose seems wasted

Because you failed to externalize.

For hours maybe even days you continue to feel that

Lost opportunity, as if reaching off an empty pier


To pull aside the fog— a chance to see

And let them see you. But when you pull it back

Not even the miss you missed is there.

You are wanted,


But you want the miss. 


So, with the curtain in your hand you ignore the future

As your guts shake the bottom of the sea to life.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Moon wobble.

 One or two trees with roots behind the horizon 

Slouching away—gatekeepers to another life, as the

Dead tried to leave, left.


The sun came—unrest went quiet, and

Orange light held court on the grassy shadows.


The first was the Elder, but the

Closest had one foot on the sunny hill

I saw.

Monday, June 13, 2022

Reverse sign language.

 Human pearls look like toes,

As they sink into the edge of the curly waves.


We know reverse sign langauge,

We spend a lot of time working on our backs

Torsos and tesserae,


Come by and look where my works begins.


Look: it’s disappearing: a reason

Or reason for pearls.

 

Saturday, May 28, 2022

The middle ground.

Keep it.

For a few nights salt lay before the purple sea.


But for the rest of the time

Despite the taste and its 

Buoyancy


The one closest seemed farther,

The impossible nearer to me.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Below the heavens you go.

 Language could learn a lot from you—

Because you meander—


You get lost so easily.


You aren’t good, 

You hook and you have good adversaries.


Speak quietly and especially slow to me

How the rose rises from the exit wound

While the earth and heroism

Sleep.



South

 Are you warm enough, now?


Is the poll incendiary or the

Polder smoldering for some 


Supernatural reason?


Are you hot because life jolted you hot?


Were these feathers left on the floor to remind me

Of you—you, the Angel,

Me, the disoriented  bird?

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Icarus and Daedalus.

 The greater dream must look impoverished 

On the hill,


Beside the cows and rows of corn and

Sheep we count.


Once we fall asleep and the agriculture of sleep

Falls asleep too

There may be a moment—but just one and 

It’ll pass quickly—below—


You will grow from a seed to an aching tree

And the sun will set inside of you.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

The Blue Commandment

We don’t remember everything.


But when we meet it’s awkward, and there’s a

Lot we pretend to quietly understand—


We go home and dip inside ourselves, trying to

Pry it out, like change from the seat of a recliner, 

Or hair from a stopped drain.

There was an eleventh commandment

And it had something to do with the color blue:


Perhaps it was the pailletted aura of the sun and

The possibility that it was 

Point A in the whole sky.


Or, more likely it was how we ought to grieve. How 

The heavens should fill our eyes all the way,

And how our eyes should blink, too,

And thank the heavens.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Spring.

This dream is more science fiction

Than the others. 


I meet a camel on the road to Damascus. He falls

Apart instantly, and I’m like why!?

Pretty soon the humps start convulsing and it’s dark

Outside. Blood everywhere.


I throw a saddle over his

Shoulder.

It’s gonna end. I’m gonna wake and he’ll be

Ok.

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

You are born grass-tall.

 I keep thinking about the glory of love

How it has holes in it.


And as higher functioning organisms we’re

Drawn to those holes.


We are and the light from outside is.

You are born grass-tall. 

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Minnaloushe.

 Where did we leave off, and what were you saying?


I was holding my fingers in a damp bundled cloth, and Yeats—


One of us was destined to pass out from the intensity 

Of the afternoon color. 

Friday, January 7, 2022

The string section.

 I keep having the same funny dream—

I’m trying to grab a giant pearl

In the ocean but it’s greased and the waves rock against

My will. And I’m just dreaming, anyway.


It becomes a kite. And I wash my hands.

Down from ten I count to zero,

Each blue ribbon tied to the string,


And each spindrift of sunny daylight

And more strings. Even stuck against solid things.


I am no longer looking ahead or behind.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Fragment.

 Chop me up into smaller orange parts, saying,

All will finally be revealed.

Take a look as the sun drops his damp bath towel

On the floor of his private field.

Friday, May 7, 2021

Hardly moving.

 Where it is either still

Or hardly moving the water —black beside the light,

Appears to wait. Visitors keep it to


Themselves, knowing if there’s a story nearby,

And it’s told right, they won’t 

Have to sacrifice the dearest part:


Simply, I came here to get away from my job.

And because it didn’t rain or charge a late fee

The gold at rainbow’s end.



Saturday, May 1, 2021

The invisible tide.

 Some people live their lives to stockpile:

They amass grain silos of ramen

And basements full of bullets—

They’re going to be ready for the invisible tide.


But they’re not: the grain rots in a column and the gun

Powder dampens beneath the hail of magazines 

And sandwich crusts—lives are lived

Upon the dampened plans for surviving.


I thought about it recently when I couldn’t sleep:

Feathers in the pillow struck out from the inside, the

Harder I twisted it—the harder I tried to find

Comfort


The better they poked me in the eye.


It’s as if they were telling me something in death the goose couldn’t say while she

Was alive.

Sunday, April 18, 2021

There is no big mystery.

I’m adjusting to minimum wage,

Green, but cold, gloves, scarf.

And bare feet—there is


No big mystery, Four-Eyes.


The cardinals flip as they

Climb an invasive vine,

Grazing on the stuff in the high neck

Of a tree.


It is as if, this evening, the dead are rising

From their graves, blood first.

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Moon letters.

 The C is a moon.

And of course the O is always a moon.

But the S is one, too—


See the smoke of laughter 

Climb that starry staircase, and

Fill in all those cosmic rooms with bent

Walls and blue windows...


This is where a dreamer’s letters all get answered.


And the canceled stamp has a rocket

Lodged in its lemony eye.

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Rusalka

You get two chances every day, and

A lot of time to think about it.


The sun encourages work

The moon does nothing.


But, I dreamed about you: You were piling

Greens and olives in my arms. I was stubborn

But I didn’t say no, exactly.


People endure awful things just to learn the color of 

Their own shameless moon.