The crow calling loudly outside
the front window is the same
crow hopping through buds and
blossoms about the boughs of
the front yard tree reaching towards
the bright blue cool spring sky
stretching itself a path to the sun.
Those black wings warning everyone
heaven is farther than it looks.
Like the shape we call a star
marked like art across the firmament,
it...
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It’s the numbers I assigned to see you in the repetitions, it’s the name I wore down to letters and lore. Something to fondle in fist and fingers, something left to leaven the dreams. The weary report of the body, the circling of the thinking as the batteries give out, the mystery you give and the mystery you get. Always wandering from scene to scene...
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It’s a song you can’t recall from some 70s FM canon, it’s the slip of the trick up the sleeve down past those same old razor wrists, cradling some plastic handset in the crook of shoulder and neck in some middle aged memory. The soundtrack of blackout conversations taking on the tenor of intimacy, a tension all but expired in the continuity you’ve acquired, a...
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I’m down to nouns as the day runs long, all bleak grays and dull rain and gulls cutting across the storm. With my crooked spine oriented vaguely to ley lines strewn haphazardly throughout the landfill the signal runs from rote to riot, ache and inflammation this last vocation as the vessel feathers and splits. I chain smoked the dread from the litany of days and...
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The moon still full, gleaming on the bones of the moment
the earth aglow in the imminence of this bare
albedo— a called bank shot over
the sun’s shoulder, the forlorn witness
to late winter’s wringings the truth known
hand to hand with the here and there, this machine
a dreadful sharpening, a narrowing by number
naming the graces of the ricochet once
the race...
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The cold touches its toes as
the song soaks through,
the sky so blue as the winds
animate the tantrum,
livid palms dancing in
the storm struck sun. This flavor
crisp with struck match
scratches as you taste
the incantation as sparks stretch
clean from your teeth
smiling as it slips,
the words off my tongue,
the ink on your skin sharp
down your shoulder,...
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The sky goes gray slow, the turkey vultures turning the atmosphere to oil, gliding low as to float steady in the level of sight. The air fogs slightly at both ends of the lens, the anointed smoke uncoiling beneath the eaves as the cold dances enchantments ring a rosy around every bone. The unloved dusk and the quarter moon take the west and I watch...
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The sun sets soon, if it hasn’t already. A rectangle of sunlight claims a patch of the neighbor’s rooftop, a thousand word parcel in the picture puzzle of transience as the rain dark skies close ranks, the sharpened cold holding my lapels tight in its fists. The neighbor’s roof already one shade again nearly as soon as it’s noticed, the moment always missing before the...
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There like a coat abandoned to the drape of a chair, the bitter laid flat out across the palate, the uninflated phrase warm in the warrant of the breath, this framework of a name unspoken. The stormy evening, the warm cup black with incidental ink, porch chimes at a cantor in the revenant winds. There with the sounds that walk through walls and tap at...
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The day goes gray as the days are wont
dusk comes with all the fixins, swift wings and
furtive rodents, fast traffic shaking
the walls with the songs left
thumping in its wake, the note held
too long, too much sound to leave
much for the music to be. It stands to reason
there will be some shifting in the sands,
what passes for castles...
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Dusk settles in early, with the Queen of the Night strolling up the disassembled driveway, passing through the closed gate by yard dogs and vivid greens. Never quite waking the words go wasted as they tread tooth and breath, hot animal extensions of the spirit expressed against the stress of atmosphere and organ. We go this way, or so I say without thought beyond the...
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Soon the bones are always speaking
tossed by meat and prophecy
the needling of bent practice
ends in shrugged collapse, never now
a matter of repetition and paradiddle,
the reason to rosin the bow
evaporated as the trickster
makes the stakes, the spirit
wishful all the while
the flesh presents the evidence
unwound, the stuffing torn
from hope’s rag doll
the deal broken by the...
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