Some love song pleads
while the silhouettes of three
palm trees has me wondering
about the barn owls I only ever
hear as I fumble through the dark
yard and I listen as the last crows
call their alarms, so long
these fields of risk and glory,
goodbye another day wrested from
the clutches of danger and
consequence. There’s something left
that I’d say if...
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Dusk arrives just the same,
the goodbye light tilted high or
the shadows standing up
tiptoed to stretch skyward as
I smoke and spill head to heel
with my back to the so long sun,
staring into the tide of night.
The moral of the story, the lesson
left on read, has fallen from
it’s nest. Broken pieces of
some meant to be, a body...
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I wonder where the crows are
going as the car grinds the curb,
another set of eyes entangled in
the flesh and bones of this burned
down day, each breath a delayed
payment, sentience a beat down
the moment you wake, the child
holding my hand never mine as
you walk away from your kin and tribe,
as if fleeing was all that’s left, coils...
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How ridiculous these stubborn buds
boring through the barebones
limbs that drowse and sway,
chill winds and deific sun
chattering away, the dull deliberate
badinage hammering away at
this day’s brave facade. So it
goes along as it comes, detail to detail
the memory is marched to the top,
this lived on died on hill, mingling
the lifelong and the tossed aside,
your name still...
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It is nothing but something
you remark on, like the weather or
the predilection of the falling
swallow, the drag of the moon,
the drawl of the tide. Each day
the collected works rather than
the greatest hits, played and replayed
until the world skips and pops
about the stylus of your
sentience, the one and the next one
a story told in leaf and...
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No more the slab to
hide the bones,
the roots and shoots
split the stones resting
tenuous upon plot and curb,
the sidewalk cracked, the wide
wasted drive spitting
green and wild in this,
the warming world. So
there’s nothing to be said
these words and phrases
claimed as exception
only a rule of thumb,
what is and what’s to come
urgent only to the...
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It doesn’t matter whether
it’s a spell or a poem
these things we scatter across
the roads that run around
our minds left there
where the branch is broken
the windshield’s feathered
impact site, a plume of steam,
a stack of stones, shapes spent
within this witness, branches
tied in squares or triangles,
a circle of salt or soot.
The hawk that watches
through your...
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It’s never been about me,
the litany of the undertow
a literature of the outsides
the scheming between skins,
a story worried away in scrapes and
whittlings, this voice of wounds wormed
through the earth, this want for
words and reason. It isn’t as if
I knew, unaware as I am of
the endless implications,
how it seems or sounds,
my laden tongue and untuned...
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Down to the dregs
at the muddy bottom of
the bandwidth, down
this narrow passage between
streets and intersections,
water birds above the tree line
some bright reminder how
the sky gets to be that blue,
kingfisher and egret, a sheen of
green, a sweep of white,
these reminders of the transitive
nature of the map, the signal
sent symbol to symbol,
a poem you...
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Plant yourself against the earth,
push your eyes deep into the sky.
It has been Friday forever—
bits and pieces chewed,
the unity of bark and bite
your blocking upon the boards,
cast by feckless fate and
archetype (the role your costume fit).
It has been winter so long
your branches bow,
the cold weight of your crown
coming down, the heavy curtains and
the...
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