POEM

A glitch at any stage of

seamlessness in this ghostly

cocooned state is a landscape

that a Rolls-Royce would

struggle over, going kaput.

“America the brave” in the grave,

citizens living on covered bridges

of illusion, a grave “to have

and to hold” like Percy rising

from the Gulf of Spezia

with a crochet netting

to conjure up Mary Shelley,

as if like a wide-eyed Ebenezer,

eyes as bright as lanterns,

Harriet Shelley appearing

from the Serpentine to stop him,

rubbing her still plump belly

with hands of silver scales,

a landscape moaning with

gravitation: chilly, yet warm

to the touch, like a moon

ringed in fire. Who would dare

walk it now? An expedition

for scenic flights and ballooning,

or destitute sharecroppers

in Depression-era South;

a landscape stubbled with

quietude, the bones in our

bodies undisturbed, rings wildly

for our era, naked and challenged.

HOUSE

I alarm myself
when I walk
into someone’s house

that, at first,
resembles a
sugared peach,

sweet as
Orient Miscellany,
burning incense

of air,
to then discover
radical change;

sweetness
disappearing
like a rainbow,

as noticable as
a midnight
velvet sky

that is like
the black-toned
Bagheera.

Change of air,
like walking into
a morgue,

as unsubtle as a
sledgehammer, or
like being between

the hammer
& the anvil.
It is then

that I find that
in some manner
of peculiarity

I am unable to
walk away
from the house

that is like
a putrid litter-box,
somehow

unable to move,
as if I were
standing on

a sandy isthmus,
contemplating
both sides

of the coin. 

___________________________________________

I framed another void of thought

to watch it reveal another wall

behind another wall’s blitzkrieg

where I still clutch the clinging vine.

I would like to know the dead,

to squish through that void—soft,

moist as a sponge, nearly Play-Doh-like,

eject myself from this Mental Seat

for once, for a time, not reducing

but rejoicing, like a pilot in a burning

aircraft. What is the mind without

Abstraction? If I were a bird,

I would be a clay pigeon. A Cloud,

backlit by the clockwork of the

evening light—pink-orange magma.

It is difficult to juggle what is not there,

but detachments are necessary,

like standing in a thick forest—dark

as the insects as they watch from

the trees, the animals as scattered as

pointillism, every vein in each leaf

like the anatomical remains of

Henry Thoreau—the gaps in the tops

of trees could be me, or could be

like great nasal passageways, where I

breathe, undetached, going about

like the rattling chassis of a prancer.

___________________________________________

Some days you are the unfulfilled
cenotaph, & your heart beats like
the cadaver carrier tool that is used
to move corpses to morgues from
hospitals, showering a rain of melodies
that retreats like a troubled knight.

Do you see me as one of the
alternating sequences of your life?
A filmic parallel where the sun
is really amaigrissants stockings
stretched around the dust-bones
of the universe’s “sweet spot”?

What I am trying to say is that
we are all carrier pigeons, un-extinct
like catching a ghost in a lie about life,
but you cannot always expect
the flavor of life to be extra-crispy
on the bottom, like paella.

I will be here for you, please know,
like pears in the spring, like a raft
in a river of ice used to save the
drowning fisherman who caught no fish
that day, who has, himself, become
the fish, holding on for dear life.