Winters grow worse in
days of plague and war,
the next disaster and
the cupboards gone bare. Lights
strewn about the neighborhood
burdened by the branding—
nativity tableaux surrounded by
Santa and Frosty and Mickey Mouse—
all the claimants to that gloried throne
crowding out the senior myths
as people bemoan their quarantine
isolations in silver and gold.
A year of new names for each...
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It is there without so much as
an inkling of thinking,
before all the dreams are gone,
before the work of waking has begun,
your name like breathing in
some wondrous lilting bloom
thick with heady pheromones or
that hook of a song repeated like
a mantra, the phrase clinging
to the muddle of being, a righteous
ringing out. Your name, then
the litany of...
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Broad daylight and nothing to see here. Middle of the morning, dying slow and painful. It feels like old news because it’s variations on a theme. It feels like forever, but it’s only been decades. The day all a haze as the earth exhales, house sparrows in the yard and Canadian geese taking to the sky. The words are running out, the returns diminishing a...
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The body doesn’t do much to
warrant the distinction,
the system closed all breath and bone,
the muddled heart beating away—
the closed fist, the empty vessel.
We think we know the where and
what, spark and spook and
a whiskered chin slick with
steam and spittle, the cracked
fortune cookie, the fairy captured
inside a punched hole lidded jar.
We cleave to meat and...
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I dance limpingly along from song to broken song, the hobo’s reel upon the sinking stones, the fool cavorting in the lowlands with the waters rising. I take the sticks, I take the stones, lumping along in these lonely bones. The pain, the wounds, the days a waste of smoke and prayer. Ashes brushed off as the next station is taken. The past elongated with...
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It’s all about the ashes falling all at once. It’s all about the pavement changing color as the rain ensues. The cracked tooth static fuzzing up the embouchure, the fucked lungs, and the glacial rate of change meaning something different as the glaciers come thundering into the sea. Gray days and the goodbye sun soft and golden where the sun gets through, until it’s up...
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You get a fix on the instruments, a place to hang
the calculations, something to mingle with
motive and map, the slap down tabling
the winning hand, the algorithm laying it on
thick to keep the machine busy, the star
at last found to further the reason
this sojourn continues sojourning along—
all these heroes minted to get sent stepping,
the stories still warm around...
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For a moment it is the combination of
glistening constellations beading
cosmological swirls in the black coffee
surface eternity and the enchanted noodlings
in my ears, that singer you favor
as the sciatic clench and the dead flesh
ache consume the remnants of my attention
the lyric and the litany awaiting
this next frustration, the next
rat maze dead end to your weak
thesis, this...
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Again the thoughts go traipsing through the squalor, the spent senses, the used up feels. Again the glasses are smudged and the vision is poorly, the strain to see almost worse than the strain to say, the assorted pains and the day to day. Written off at last, extinguished in every realm. Nothing but the growing pain, the looming void.
Just another game to play,...
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The bets all placed
the steps now staggered
reeling from feel to feel
moving from face to face
this absent dance,
this scramble across the parkway
the lights flashing out a four way
stop on some rainy yesterday
the slide unto impact,
another day saved for dreaming.
It won’t return, that
gleeful bleeding mortality,
that triumphal turn
fighting back from the incessant edge,
now fly...
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