___________________________________________

Two beautiful blondes
drove by in a
magenta corvette

as I stood there
on the street
where blood

had once poured,
& who knew
that this moment

made me lesser
of a pixel?
The ground

should have
very well
just opened up,

swallowing me
whole. 92 degrees
in May,

too uncanny
of a resemblance
to July, & like

that honeypot Circe
who transformed
Ulysses’ companions

into pigs,
this heat
could make

a house transform
& die.
Earlier, I saw

a couple that
looked like
they had the

battle-lines drawn,
two humpty dumplings
falling from

the wall--
about as romantic
as purchasing

a slab of bologna. 
Without spats,
some people become

a spent force.
No matter,
I am in

my din
of childhood
where I

take the place
of the texts
of the present.

The present
is no match
for the past,

where I have
swallowed
the awkwardness

of youth. I could
have been the wind
that blew through

the hair of a former love,
but the burn-spots
left in my eyes

pierced through me,
everywhere,
the Great Core of

every matter
always stretched around
the clock,

a great fidgeting
of the mind,
lissome as

an unfull belly,
where the cache
keeps mounting

in shiny fallout,
disjecta membra.
Love-loss as

an art-form.
In the early 60’s,
Forbes was

attempting
to help prove
that business

& artistic expression
were not
mutually antipathetic,

& perhaps
it’s like the hero
that always refuses

an offered happiness,
bringing hardheadedness
into flower,

as poignant
as a flowerchild
in a wedding,

as vulnerable
as an egg in-hand.
& then there is pain.

Pain, like the
white rib
of a blue whale

lodged
into one’s pink
stomach.

This poem will
never end, like
the Pollock-movements

in my jumping-spider
body.
Will you wait for me

to release the snail
from my hand?
Will you catch it

before I drop it,
before the shell cracks,
before the eyelid

of this moment
blinks out?

___________________________________________

The clouds,
white-grey,
thick as a

Slavic accent.
The upward tongue:
imagine a cowlick.

This is the sun,
behind the overcast,
or a deleted scene

from a dream.

Some people
are soured

beneath breath,
leaving trails
of fallen stars;

a wounded elixir.
If we could
merely squeeze

the horizon together,
forced to a tunnel,
would this be

where Method begins?
Imagine expanding
to the limit

of your eye.
The way that
fog “holds” light.

Lozenge under

tongue, I am
the lozenge under

Tungsten
this night
like a still-life

& every time
I sit here,
whether incidental,

or consequential,
there is always
a purpose

for misleading
the eye, as if to
temporarily censor, to

add spirits, to
squeeze the citrus
from my heart,

a brewery for taste.

Out of the window,
cloudcover-low.

If the fog
gets any lower,
heaven will become

a halo
over my head,
Language tearing

through me
like the power
of hydraulic rams’ horns,

& there is no city
of comparible size
to that of the

poet’s heart;
his swollen crest,
universe-wide,

panorama-vast,
everywhere in motion,
in one guise

or another,
feeling as strange
as Hiroshima Day.

The light
within my soul
is far different

than sunlight. My eyes
sweep across
the sky

with tender ovations.
It is as if
this air were

vox, et praeterea nihil,
& that very voice:
as light-heavy

as a wishbone
tweezering
the heart.

__________________________________________

My heart reflects the colors of my brain.
I would rather have a broken heart than
a broken tripod. I enjoyed it when our hands
were like tripods in our hearts,
like new pressures, like a bodyguard
falling asleep while the gun is being loaded
in the distance.

The face is a camouflaged makeup where we
vanished through the tremors, leaving leftovers
for aimless objectives. I am often a typo, a static,
an interval veering into rhetoric supercedings,
therefore why should I ask myself what
I resemble & reflect when your third eye
always tells me what I do not ask for?
like a paranormal television turning itself
on & off, waiting for me to “make a move first”
& secondly:

I feel strongly about your spookiness
like a desire that reverses itself because you have
forgotten what it meant. I feel clung
in the teeth of a star, while you glide by on a meteor
resonating with retinal-blinking, your limbs
like taking apart an umbrella, like admitting
the bandaid didn’t work

& my heart still reflects the colors of my brain,
as if a rainbow sneezed, letting go a mass extravagance
that nipped every person on earth, turning their
darkest secrets into multicolored reminiscences of beauty,
enveloping the senses, the way that you elongated
every horizon with your smile, where I found myself
in those moments between image & self.

___________________________________________

What time should echo is the thing

that lets there be no mistake in the intention,

as last worst seen, barefoot.

In the woods I left the light to walk its own path.

Like Geronimo, I made no attempt

to count my own footprints. There were none.

If these windows breathed by comparison to

the flower's breath, we would cut ourselves

on the motionless surface of the night.

As a boy, the train tracks were a way

to meditate on the strangeness of youth.

Fastened to their intrigue, somehow

they always revealed new sets of

thought-patterns, as if with a spectral analysis,

the words still, even now, linger like thorns

around my ankles.

______________________________________

The obscurantist doctor
replaces the word Death for Life

with a resonance that builds
a framework of immediate

positive reaction,
but changes his tune

like a corruptible
one-man juggernaut,

taking on physical thrills
by ignoring wholly emotional

vulnerability, re-arranging
a room's glee, watching it flee,

& then reporting the real news,
then listening to all the shuddering,

the inner-vaccuum that
spins the energetic wound

of the Moment, like
a burning star, erupting,

unspooled from the cosmos.
& then, like a new gear moving,

there is a bright glow
left in the hospital room

where the loved one's spirit
has left the body: a perfected relief,

a pin-on mise-en-scène
where heart-thumps are assaulted,

left in silence, a memory
like a papier-mâché mask

incapable of being feverish
like family & friends

that eventually resume
their daily routines, a void left

like abandoned railroad tracks,
or like the branches of a fern bush

left bare from the sliding pinches
of a child's unknowing fingers.