The foot's in the other shoe

There’s nothing.
Nothing is gonna change.
Go on and change, nothing.
Change, nothing, and prove me.
Prove me strong.

How to wake-walk (don't sleep)

To simulate somnambulation
is an ambition, when you can’t sleep
but you can walk. Not far. Close enough.

The first step is instructional. Eyes
distant. Not focused to avoid both
ambivalence and stimulation.

Then comes. A stub of revelation:
shiny objects at rest are better
practitioners at simulation.

When yellow is brave

Spring winks small and wild
yellow flowers. They tease dead
leaves, crowding clover.

There are moments (everyone wishes they were somewhere else)

The wooded hills would give
a prodigious shout to shake
the humdrum from pedestrian clouds,
but they’ve been stilled by brown
water. It soothes and it slaps, small
falls striking an inattentive stream.
The insect smog where they meet
buzzes in anticipation of antic
aerobatics. One fussy fish
might just follow along; it’s swept up
instead by the gentle flutter of leaves
a breeze puffs off sheer slopes.
It’s a freedom that lends them
omnipotent airs. This lack
of agitation should be apparent
to everyone. Not the harried stones
who've relinquished closely harbored
preconceptions. There is no necessary
conclusion to a docile journey
downstream where a supercilious
tortoise scoffs at such received wisdom.
Far away cold puddles are mired
in a fallow field. They imagine
the tickle of a flow with sunlit speckles.

---

For NaPoWriMo Day 4, I've taken up the Wordle prompt Brenda Warren so generously provided. Check out Brenda's poem Fish Basket, and the comments to read what others have done with the prompt.

Albumening to meet you

There's egg on my face.
It's a gooey place to look
For quick sustenance.

I could dive right in

The river was and is
curious shades of shy.
I can't say why
she calls me in,
her husky tone rippling
with hints of verdigris.

Our downward gazes are looking up

​​It's plainly a checkerboard plane
..... That's a jet leaving cotton candy 
​with green and brown boxes boxing dots busied bopping,
..... ribbons. It has a clear destination, 
​but there's one wondrous dot not
​..... pushing its snow-cone nose so purposefully
​caught up in their squared-off games.
​..... through the Kool-Aid sweet sky. 
​You know how I envy its open-ended refusal.
​..... If I could only tag-along agreeably on its closing-in...

(Happy NaPoWriMo!)

Rocks and stones will take me home

Gray streaked with white chalk,
this pebble not quite rock
has pocks and fissures
to coddle slow whispers.
It tallies secrets –
a brittle wish, I’ll tell it –
with a crumbled math
passed down the aching earth.

Between an occasionally well-placed environmentalist and an enduring rock

I slip on a joy – fully sightless
this dusk-dawn for an hour,
for an hour.

The blindness comes and it becomes
my better half, when I turn,
then I’ll turn.

I sip on the play – fully warmed, less-
steeped in it, for an hour,
for an hour.

The coldness spreads with its deadening
crystalline breaths, when I tilt,
then I’ll tilt.

I lip to a mind – fully fearless
haunts stoppered for an hour,
for an hour.

Wilderness goes with bewildering
waste, hand-in-hand, when I round,
then I’ll round.

I dip down the need – fully wantless,
in my wanting this one hour,
but one hour.

Listlessness sifts down from drifting
clouds, brown with ash. My bulk shifts,
their footprints lift.

When your cup runneth over, the serviette gets stained

He fills up the gilded cup
enough for a palsied hand
to fumble it. This stumble was
expected, though it wasn’t planned.
It brings low gasps, and he grasps
the gravity of their mood, yet...
Color-drained lips slowly drip
purplish blots of pretend. Blood gets
wiped clean. How about sins? He’d grin
but the snicker can’t sneak clear.
For untold deathless days they’ve prayed,
when the present grows too dear.

An Adult Primer worthy of a prim adulation for the primacy of its adulteration

Anguished alabaster alien abstractly accepts abandonment.
Bluely burbling balladeer bedevils bedraggled brigands.
Christened critter cracks chromatically creamy chrysalis.
Deliberately diapered dilettante dangles dastardly delights.
Elusive epistemological epiphanies elide egalitarian eventualities.
Fractiously flagrant fabulist force-feeds fragrant fragments.
Garrulous gourmand greedily gobbles gristly gossips.
Histrionically hampered haberdasher hems herringbone hallucinations.
Indiscriminately injected indigo induces inky indiscretions.
Jasmine jester's jape jumbles jive judiciously.
Kinetic killjoy keenly kicks kaleidoscopic keepsakes.
Luxuriantly locked Lothario lugubriously laments lassitude.
Meticulously monochromatic mosaics mythologize mellifluous metamorphoses.
Nattily naughty nautilus natters navigational notions.
Observational ornithologist obviates ospreys' ornery objections.
Pulchritudinous panderer painfully posits plangent prescriptions.
Quantitatively quivering questers question quantum qualities.
Robot's religiously restless receptors reactively recoil.
Sniveling sloth strenuously stifles slobbery sneezes.
Temporally tampering tenors tender tantalizing tremolos.
Unctuously uppity undertakers upbraid umber upholstery.
Varyingly voluminous vassals voraciously vacuum vermicelli.
Wondrously waisted wastrel welcomes whispers warily.
Xerxes' xenophobic xylophonist xeroxes xanthic xylographs.
Yesterday's yammer yearningly yields yeasty yawns.
Zesty zither zealots zigzag zippy zings.

(As you can see, I like to indulge in my own invented word games. Most letters could yield lots of fun variations, but those pesky end-of-the-alphabet characters don't offer much to play with. If I can sustain the interest, I may try to illustrate these for an actual "primer" book. I'm not sure whether to create it as a real or virtual entity, however.)

World Poetry Day

The sunshine is in slanted rhyme
with our gazes. Leaves, broad and green,
brown and lean, are assonant and
consonant with the gripping grass.

Blended they recall our shy bend
of fingers, held mid-reach. Murmur-
mothering creek echoes the pool
and flow of voices carried off.

A day walks by us on bare feet.
This season, a coupling couplet,

teaches us the chorus we’ll bear,
repeating its re-treating song.

Luna ticks

Super moon
dupes her mood –
loopier, rude.
Stoop here. Spoon
soupier broods.

Lessons from foreign gods (Part 1?)

The elephant in the room is Ganesh.
Atop his cramped altar he reminds me,
full belly pushing sing-song speech,
There is no room. Don't look. You'll see
broken tusk in hand. Emptiness can teach.

(perhaps I'll do a series of these...)

Disappointment is always duly rewarded (with more disappointment)

"Abandon all tropes," the sign read,
mischievously painted.
Absentee souls, re-acquainted,
enter there faulty – hopes shed
with blistering gait, lips puckered.

When life gives you lemons, take the hat

The sit down is a stew.
It’s a slow stew on the stool.
What’s with this song?

This song. It’s been
been played too much,
too much to the point
to the point it’s not just lost
it’s not just lost, it’s oblivious to
oblivious to whatever appeal
to whatever appeal it had. Once.

Once. It appalls him.
Appalls. Is that too strong a word?
Permit me to say no.
Permission granted. No.
May he? He may. He might win
back its appeal with few subtle changes.
Might he? Let’s see. Let’s.

“Let bits flee, let bits flee
where there’ll be no answers.”
It’s funny – funny strange –
how he made the cliché more,
more absurdly clichéd.
And it’s funny... funny.
How? Funny how
after all this time
nothing’s changed but the faces
– theirs not his.
His was always the clown’s... odd.

Oddly, time didn’t stop, but it did make a loop.
Time looped in slot-machine cherry,
orange and lemon.
It whirred by
and it doesn’t stop, not even
when their faces blur.
They aren’t even faces now.

Now? What are they?
They’re blurs,
blurs nothing more
nothing more than blurs,
and what’s funny
what’s funny strange is so
so is he. A blur.

A blur and nothing more
nothing more than a blur until
until he picks up the hat.

He picks up the hat
the hat he didn’t wear here
he didn’t wear it here but he’ll take it
he’ll take it with him
he’ll take the hat with him when he goes
when he goes now.
Now. He’s gone.

Lie down and let her guide you

Why bother mother
earth? You slip silent sister
moon's cool shadow one
hour. The next, fall praying to
father sun's flash of temper.

Drinking in the first blush of spring

He'd grin through green
gulps, if his gulp could
gallop with a grin
strapped to its back.
No time to try.
Let trickles trace green
creases on flushed cheeks.
Grins jump later.

Thumbs are best used for twiddling

He couldn't own, but
he could control, at least
his brutish strength could, or
could it? Fear played dirty
tricks on them both, both
propping up and thumbing
down. He thumbed. For years
he thumbed, but the propping
came to feel too much
like propping – empty. When
the thumb slipped, and slip
it did, it couldn't do
anything but slip. But
did it, or did the thumbed
throw it off? He had
become not so much
flabby as tired – tired
but hopeful – hopeful
the thumb on him could
also slip. Couldn't it slip,
what with the wear of years,
and his own undercut?

At the bottom of a stained porcelain cup are leaves strained for the future

It's what the tea leaves –
with tasteful chatting, polite
discretion – left out

(I like the ideas of a poem shorter than its title)

When I sensed, the world was a lie (a pretty one)

There is no creek,
but there is a burble,
and both burbling
and the mud- and rock-cracked
creek (though not here)
could be clearer
if not for the small, hunched raccoon
that while absent appears
cheeky as it troubles
the creek’s bottom (not)
to conjure crawdads (also not).
Its imagined blur of paws,
(were it here) would
feel much better
than any imaginary eyes could see
(ours and its included),
what with the mucky clouds
it kicks up as it shifts
slime-licked pebbles,
to make the seeing harder.
Those eyes (ours not its)
would grow tired not seeing.
They might pause unfocused
and feel the puff of a gray flapping –
an unseen bird’s flaps, perhaps
a dove, that lacking presence
can only be heard, and felt.
Then it disappears
(the flaps, the raccoon, our eyes, the creek)
into the burbling of soup-thick air
as if none of it was
ever here (it wasn’t).

Not all can go to the mountain

The beat-up, long-used-up mountain
bike kick-stands close to the stationary
bike. As they stare out the window, she wins
his respect by exercising
his dreams with her recollections of flight,
mud thrown back, and occasional toppling.

Missing the forest for the trees

Forests can be seen as darkly
forbidding as we bid them be–
horrors. We've bid. Uselessly, I’ve wished them be
more than the threatened lesson we,
for us, bade them be.
Lore has it we,
or they, long before we
born to cities came to be,
wore threadless cloaks born of trees.
Torn branches went with us, spitefully
shorn of their leaves. Millennia later, we,
born to cities, can't leave them be.
Born to cities, we,
bored by leaves, still tear them from trees.
Torn by us to cities
born, their sticks are now lifelessly
born afar to the cities we
bored out from their trees.
Torn from them then born afar to these cities,
more lifelessness sticks to what we see.
Born to lifeless cities,
more sticks are wistfully
torn for our wishes life could be
more than what we see. When no more can be
torn by it, maybe then we’ll be
born less by our life-lessening wish for a more-to-be.

Dame Freedom escapes her keepers' over-protective clutches

One day, maybe today
her sweet voice will sweep in
unaided by your crutches.
It's then you’ll lift away
like those dewy drops steamed
by the sun's lightest touches.

In the confusion of voices

I’m partnered with whispers.
Disquieting their partner, they whisk her
voice unasked through my dial-bound trips.
Daily they gaily needle me with their tip
to need her voice nonetheless.
Nightly I feed them less and less
detail, but they grow and they mock the endless hem-
hawed denials, I’ve tripped again.

“Check this box. You know,
the four-squared lines around the hollow
of our white space.
Yes, there’s no phrase
next to the unchecked box. It doesn’t matter.
We’re only here to gather
a positive response. We’ll fill in the rest
later, and we’ll attest
we could see through
your glassy hush, as we saw through
the stone trying not to dwell
on those bits of crushed shells.”

The shells. Those damned bits
of shells she left minutes
before she left. Shells already
discarded by some small medley
of slimy unnamed things
somehow both alive and living
out in the dead-calm lake. Those shells lost
or more likely tossed
aside but lightly, as delicate dishes
are gently pushed when finished.

“We’ve heard you tell it.
The green-brown waves rolled to deposit
them on that spit of coarse, cold sand where
your toes slipped from shoes and care
to taste the ridges
of their gently sloped backs and smooth-worn edges.
She took them home then
and using nail polish she painted them
shocking pink faces and round eyes in various hues
of red. Glitter-glued to blue
construction paper they bubbled
her winking verbs, which troubled
you as you re-read
them and deconstructed
her intentions each color-
less visit to the refrigerator door.”

I’ve told it
and much the same, but when I hear it
their words
become less mine than hers.

A dying bird defies gravity until the end

My dear friend nooshin shared a lovely and moving poem with me, and I couldn't let the opportunity pass to write a response to it. The top piece is nooshin's, and mine appears below it.

.

the bird was severely wounded
it needed no food
and no water
no medicine
and no shelter
all those who watched its flights
or listened to its songs
left
except an artist
who painted it
with its wings wide open
soaring in the blue sky
he knew a dying bird
only wanted to be remembered
in its flight

.

What makes this bird die
a bird? It wasn't
what they hinted
with their hollow words
about her meekness
of beak, at bone,
or feathers they caught
with owning-eyes,
wishing to keep her,
keep her from flight.
It was deep down,
her why, he observed –
the resilience
of a graceful will
to take wing despite
the weighty wounds
and their whisper,
"Without us, you're not."

.

A trusted give and take

I’m not trustworthy,
but I'd put
a world's worth of trust
in your words
no matter how not-
worthing trust
they seem, simply put,
if you'd worth
a new trust in me.

In its coming, glory-less, there will be no lord

Blind skies have gleaned
their stories from the strumming of the bored,
but they do change them.
They rearrange them,
their outcomes, slightly,
and, when they retell them,
the words fall back to us lighter,
delightedly so, than they were before.

“It’s just us.”
We’ve heard.
“It’s just us,” more called,
and they shared this secret:
“Those blind skies aren’t blind at all.
They only pretend
not to see, as they bend
the wind to help us.”

They let us think,
“The movement’s thanks to me,”
when we tell our shortened tales
where the Lord doesn’t deliver us.
We tell them to no-one
and anyone in particular,
by pecking our thumbs with an irregular,
scratched-out beat.

It happens too when they slow us down,
and we punch-in our excuses.
“I would have gotten here sooner
in fact, but the tactless crow I followed
took a crooked path.”
That’s when not-blind skies wink
and they lift our rhythmic letter-breaths
to become the stuff of linty pockets.

Some day, one day,
not a spare hour or minute
but the splittest second before
a glory-less death,
our stories will snow back on us.
We’ll hear them
and the words will feel
familiar, though a little more gray.

Then the smallest voice
we’ve ever heard,
somehow both ours and theirs,
will say, “The gist is got
but the endings are not
quite right. Yet,
I admit they’re also righter
than my telling’s long-ago was.”

My Valentine gift to you

If this hallmark of a romantic gift
I give
is a bit fumbled,
and its professions of heartfelt wishes
feel
slack in their graham-cracker-box repackaging;
If the candy-coated wrapper’s fit
is left
misfitting around its dented-in red corners,
and the lippiness of its stick
has come
unstuck at each crushed-down end;
If the pink bow
stands unbowed
and frowns as unpretty as any crime-scene picture,
while it raises
a frayed end with the victim’s gone-through motion
entreating
death for its last tug free;
It could be
my feeling heart’s once-bold youth
isn't
entirely found in it,
or it could be
the entirety
bound in it,
my heart,
couldn’t find its way out.

This crime more ancient than the mariner's

Albert Ross was at a loss.
He couldn’t gloss
over the dull fact hanging
lifeless like the near-homophone
about his neck.
It’s a pretty neck,
this long and slender neck,
with the impeccable lines of its smooth cylinder
broken only by a smallish apple.
Eve would’ve refused it.
To sea. To sea.
There he’d see
with its wide vistas
the feathery visage of this polar white
visitor riding astride his black cloud.
“Rain, would it please you to rain?
Are you allowed
to open up and drown me?”
Is how he’d phrased it
in his mind, countless times.
The hardest rain would be welcome,
but this constant threat,
this ponderous yet,
this threaded pendant swinging
as fast and steady
as a winged pendulum might,
was not. It tightened,
that knot deep in the pit of his stomach.
He’d done no harm.
Harm wasn’t his to do,
or undo. The harm came before,
at the hands of a father,
who gave him such
an ill-spoken name,
and the Father before him.
He, ages before him,
deigned to make us this world
where a bird’s no more
than a bird or any man
with the want of a soul.

In memoriam

This is it.
Your "He was,
was he not?"
collection of lazy
reflections.
You'll project it on
those fuzzy
"Or now was he?"
recollections
and reject them in favor
of a rock solid
first impression.
He was, after all,
with those strange,
even dangerous
inflections
and his oddly arranged
affections,
just a guy
you kinda knew.

A wink and a nod

I'm a willful blink rushing to its close
but a few languid lashes lag to break
the black line and savor their fractured pose

Goodbye, hello

To be very blunt, this isn't working. I'm out of whack. A ghost, with a fading voice and a haunted step.

I've invested much of myself in this virtual enterprise, with absolutely no expectation of a return. It's helped me in many ways, and I don't regret it. I could never abandon it completely, but the time has come to change gears and seek balance.

Being of the world, I need to go back into the world. I've tried to be so totally available here in this simulacrum of a world, dedicated myself so thoroughly to it, that I've withdrawn too much from the real one.

What does it mean? What's next? I won't stop writing. I could never do that. I know. I've tried. But I've come to recognize that what I write is lacking too much of the real world too. There will be fewer posts. Fewer tweets. Fewer Facebook statuses. Fewer blog visits.

In short, I can't be as present as I am here, and also be present "out there." And being totally present here is damaging me. There are big changes going on in the world right now, and I can't just be a spectator to them anymore. I need to participate.

I'm lucky, in a sense, to be alone. I have no real obligations that tie me to a particular location. I have the freedom (though maybe not the funds) to wander, and explore, and discover. I only lack a plan to put it all in motion.

An apocalypse will paint beauty we’ll never know

I was there, but I wasn’t
where snowy wisps skitter
across the beige-brown sand,
and skim-milk rolls
stand frozen, no longer
struggling to reach the shore.
Gulls wheel high and fall back.
I couldn’t hear them calling,
“Here’s the beauty
when life stops, and then goes.”

---

I don't have a camera, so this is how I captured the wintry landscape along Lake Michigan in the aftermath of the recent blizzard.

Oh, Ophiuchus

Oh great Ophiuchus,
you stand there mighty above us,
all nights, collapsed in the collapsible
container sky. We do
look up to you, Ophiuchus,
as other-worldly worries nestle us
into our nested doll
worlds. Though Ophiuchus, we must
ask again, what it is you can give us
while your sculpted arms keep
a coiling beast at bay? Go on,
let go. Let go of it, Ophiuchus.
Your strong hands can point us
back, just when our need walks forward,
to a stone-laid patio where broad browns
empty into vast blues,
and our wise Hypatia sits
nose in books. Woe it is, Ophiuchus,
she’s so oblivious,
to those shouts of a smallish mob,
their small minds squeezed by greedy Christian lands.
They pad to her on paws
well-provided with ostraca
claws, and next morning the mourner jackdaw
will refuse to withdraw
its usual caw from a flawed
maw that couldn’t warn her, the time’s off. It’s now
it seems, Ophiuchus,
the day’s come, though the daw’s left us,
when clay heads will fall at golden feet. But
Ophiuchus, do please
tell us, can we focus? After
these many centuries, Ophiuchus,
can we learn to focus,
and on our own keep the constant
nips of the present-preened serpents at bay?

Jurt, she (or, how I take inspiration from word verification prompts)

Jurt, she
curtly spurts out
and stops
not knowing if
she’s going to
continue to
speak unknown tongues
or if
this emanation, this
interjection,
spoken on strange
impulse,
is Icelandic
or Bosnian
or Serbian,
and if
the middle one
how not the last,
when they both mean
the same thing, Yurt.

When small hurts linger...

Into the quick and quiet
 white 
nibbles the quibble
he requites

Orbital fantasy

Not all tilts are
quizzical ... some ponder
with a dull ache to shake
elliptical pulls and escape
guilt-free ... where jilted straits
spin beyond her

I pal around with a drone

I pal around with a drone

who hums honied palindromes

home to his hive. "Wed did I?

Never even I. Did dew?"

He'll buzz as he dives from view.

Prayer of this never-sainted Francis

Lord, if you exist and have ears
(neither of which
proposition is entirely clear yet),
let’s make a deal.
(I know prayers ideally aren’t
supposed to involve bargaining,
but this is really a poem
so I’ve got some wiggle room to niggle.)
Bring a little peace to these instruments
who call themselves your kids,
and I swear by all things you deem holy
(since you made everything,
I guess that’d be the whole shebang)
to give myself up to your wills and won’ts.
Of course you’ll have to clue me in
where there’s a Will,
(the won’ts are pretty well covered)
whether buried in endless musts
thrust thus by musty books,
or hidden in plain-sighted laws
governing the broadest range of spirals
from when the first shoot knows
it’s time to poke its budding nose
above an earth that’s lost the frosty bite
to when our yellow dwarf explodes
and grows a giant with nebulous arms
stretching outward to catch its dying breath.
(I’d cast a vote for the latter,
but my still-small voice has long been
to the far reaches, outnumbered.)

Small revelations need no deathbed

considering how
I watch a considerable number of films
at least one most days
when those days aren’t too demanding
though the films mostly are
confined to my laptop screen
trips out to the theater being savorably rare occasions
it’s not a complete surprise
I might jumble things
now and again or is it then
misgiving an actor’s given name
transposing disposable plot points
but how could I confuse a film’s coloring
and transport its content to a another continent and time
first I should retrace my missteps
worst foot forward back to the trailer I see-saw
hyphens mask bigger blanks than I imagined
I remember paying half my mind to coming attractions
coming too many before a full-priced feature
I’d rarely occasioned out to see
some do come to attract my attention
it began with a pretty girl
they pretty much always do
she waltzed through frames clearly drained to black-and-white
then the same girl still pretty sitting atop a horse-drawn waggon
it put an older period to the piece’s full-stop
hop skip and jump a week
later to a movie reviewed on crisp pages
I hold up against my dog- eared mental note
its flap obscuring all but the letter W
deduction is a wonderfully productive art
agile assumptions can work the nimblest tricks
but my convenient leaps inelegantly escaped a niggling
dissonance to connect this pair of widely ranging narrow dots
a girl and a jagged shape
it’s how I came to mistake Winter's Bone for White Ribbon
months later I’d see the error of my daze gone by
and this stubborn pig of a world with all its pigments restored.

The names I whisper are always imaginary

I’ve known
several women with the same simple name,
but this morning she’s the one who came
to mind.
I whispered it softly –
her name – just once
(I wouldn’t repeat it),
and you didn’t –
you couldn’t – know
the same name held clinging
dirty-blond curls,
the interrupted curve of a bitten lip,
the upturned twitch of a switched-on nose,
a sparking flame at the center of midnight eyes.
Did I make it all up,
what I saw
when I whispered
this same name...
what I saw
when I whispered it,
your name,
just once?

Paradise (POW)

Paradise is small–
our own small version
of everything.

Everything given–
the cool sea,
the shaded sky,
the windy fields,
the high fig,
everything–
had been
had been
had been.

A long, clovered pause within,
and the sweet heat of should
sweeps.

“We held more than this...”

---

For this week's POW prompt, Rallentanda asked us to use the following passage from George Johnston's novel "Clean Straw for Nothing":

...we had been given our own small version of Paradise...everything had been held in a long pause within the sea and the sand and the winds and the high sky,held in the sweet heat of clovered coastal fields, the lantana, the cool-shaded fig trees,the sorghum sweeps. Should we ask for more than this?

I decided to do what amounts to part erasure, part a jumble of the words, rearranging them to find a different intent. I made a couple tiny changes, and some repetitions, but otherwise everything comes from the source text.

The stories ghosts tell

Phantasmagoric,
today he hovers
caught up by the taught
shadows, but there was
a rhyme ... He’ll tell you
when his sought smile stayed
to weight the night scape.

dialog...

The following is a collaborative poem I wrote last fall with my good friend nooshin. It's cross-posted over at Flashing By.

---

dialog...

by nooshin azadi (odd stanzas) and Francis Scudellari (even stanzas)

.

1
she opened the everyday window
a cypress tree was descending
the mist-covered hills of faraway

2
He strode through the humdrum flat where grays played
above and below. One watchful bulb pushed amber
smiles between patchy leaves and shamed an absent sun.

3
a black bird detached itself from the cypress tree
deliberately dissolving in the never-dissipating mist above
she turned back facing the rampant rug down below

4
The troglodyte cherub long dwelling in his dull
damp sensations, stirs to feel the creep-down warmth
of these lesser beams brimming a lost possibility.

5
the wavering rays of a meager lamp were lost in the silent symphony
of the colorful knots as she faced the opened window another time
the mist was not a blanket anymore but a web with a billion eyes

6
A fledgling finding its wings, he sought succor inside
basket-woven branches where the leaves now thickened red.
Their thousand tongues each wagged one warning: Your journey’s
just begun; beware the powerful snare of these mirages.

7
the black bird reappeared out of the blue
it kept appearing and disappearing again and again
as if stitching two worlds together

8
“Aren’t you just a figment too?” He asked, feeling devilish.
“I’d rather fly forever satisfied with airy lies
than be grounded by rocky, hard-to-discern truths.”

9
she knew both worlds were lecherous lies
always taking something away from her
she lived in the giving truth
a membrane between the two

10
All their disquieting peace had already been spoken,
and from an empty rustling one seed twirled, twilit
to sow dissonant hues between what he see-saw felt.
With eyes eased shut and breast bumped ajar, he left.

11
all day long she could hear some footsteps permeating through the membrane
they came dizzily and left hurriedly never lingering more than a smile
and when they were gone, a new eye in the mist would open

12
Afoot in a distant squint he spotted the humped backs
of hillocks, whose gently sloping slides he might climb
to change his stride and find more knowing whisperers.

13
the eyes were all as silent as a seed
either flickering agitatedly with a story
or simmering down in a dream
she sat all day long looking into them
running the golden thread of the stories through the pearly drops of dreams

14
The picked road chose to imperceptibly dip
before it would ever-so-gently rise. In its subtle
sagging sat a toad of uncompromised bulk,
and he crouched to hear the wisdom of warted sighs.

15
there was no end to the stories nor to the dreams
thus no end to the threads running through the pearls
she hung them in her window where they swayed in the breeze
and the passers-by could hear their songs - if they listened

16
From the throbbing pouch of its throat came a rumbling
mishmash of a song. “Not all sounds sing, at first hearing.
Nothing grasped can be held long. The prettiest
stones are also the most slippery. We’ll all dive in.”

17
she was watching the pearl hangings in the breezeless window when she heard
a distant song with a bumpy rhythm and a pebble-in-the-pond ending
she knew the song and the singer but not the silent listener
another eye in the web, she smiled wryly, or a web in the eye?

18
Then the toad’s muted brown shape fizzled to drown
in the ripple-blown glass where, once again becalmed,
small milky spheres appeared to hang and point his gaze
back toward the hills, their magically hidden denizens.

19
there was a long silence then
brimming with pulsating little waves
torpidly traveling through her
just to die in the now singing pearl hangings

20
The steep he climbed with slow but steady steps
as the sun slid behind far-off twin bulges.
Hushed by crimson shadow, they hinted at lively
cheeks, a blushing face to tease his picked-up pace.

21
the waves
the songs
the pearls
the threads
the stories
the dreams
the mundane membrane
new foreign footsteps
her gaze followed the hills stretching over the usual misty horizon
the descending cypress tree was now so far away from them
for the first time her mind couldn't only watch
she wished the footsteps would never arrive
or if they did, they would never leave

22
Clumps of weeds and grasses ate away at the road.
Trunks, both straight-backed and curved, joined
bushy greens to gobble down the once-thick air
and prop up a big-top canopy, where
a kaleidoscopic chorus
whistled,
tittered,
squawked,
and chirruped
so he wished this walk would never end
or if it did, he would never leave.

.

september 19-28, 2010

A video haiku

There’s a where ravens are taken (the rebirth of POW)

My myth-maker’s made
a sunny place-setting
and he sets it politely there
where I sit not wearing boots.

With black squawks he came
from out-there not smitten,
and he tells me tall riddles of let
blood’s sleepy seeping home.

“You’ll notice many
cut-cross paths can get you there
to the next where, if you know
what’s not here you’re not getting.

“It’s there, where and when
you’ll come in, approximately,
to uncover hurt never.
Ever met cures before.”

He stays there beside
and with unwary wings pushes
twice-worn boots where my feet
were yet, unprepared to go.

---

This poem was abstracted from a context you're unlikely to decipher. As part of the renewal of the Poetry On Wednesday (POW) prompts, Rallentanda posted a passage from a book (see it here). We all make our own myths, but I like mine to be more in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Bullwinkle and Dr. Seuss.

The end of days may be sunny

Would that four and twenty were all
red-wing blackbirds rejected by the sky.

For each one wonderment’s pie-pleasant fall
down open pockets full of why,
ten thousand unsavory more tumble
I’d prefer my thumbs fumbling missed.

Can you hear it? Louder than a stomach’s rumble,
here comes some-when-else, timely this
time where-ing unaccustomed particulars’ shine.

Buzz with me there, Honey,
although I’ve got no hive in mind.

The end of days may be sunny.

Let’s not hide, but heal what’s broken
and bask in the deep void’s coquettish gaze,
mutating us one short step toward then
with its white wash of cosmic rays.

Disquiet of a troubled mind

This why hounds
It travels ... Bounds
rubber-restless
An unspoken
"Not yet. Not yet."
Lay it down dear
Lay it down soon ... Here
at my feet, yours too ... Hours
are profoundly still
How?

It all comes down to us (a frog's goodbye)

The last golden frog waved
a stilted goodbye to what's wild
as the human hand slipped
him inside a plastic baggie.
He chirped, but he couldn’t cry.
The why-tinged tears he’s left to us.

A pluck of false strings

Toxic mimics, they stand
on polyester strands
and sip at their trickle-down dew,
all the while tickled by the thought
there’s a web tying me to you.

Five breezy pieces on the winter of white

I re-worked these five snow-themed vignettes into a single piece tied together by the themes of black and white.

---

I.
White’s imprisoned gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

II.
The sun's amber frown of diminished light
slides down black branches
a blundered slight,
but when it hits the ground, it rides
wonders of uninterrupted white.

III.
Steamy columns of warmth
slip through the crack,
pawed open by blue purrs from his white cat—
a tonic wash, to welcome.
slush-slicked, black boots back

IV.
Nuzzled, from the muzzling of a drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap, brown earth bursts
through what white patchwork's left, to cure
her forbidden tramplers with a slurpy
and black-mouthed, aubade kiss.

V.
Winter’s white makes shallow breaths,
and exhausted she coughs black
complaints about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane orange cat with a close hold
on his shorted stock of shock-
yellow crumbs, and the assorted other
man-made matter mocking
her color, but never her,
wherever they stay.

Rearranging the present

This sense-maker makes
pretty nonsense in creases
of her mirrored smile,
draws droopy eyes back to where
his petty youth could explore

Do deck a hedron, but don't make it jolly

There’s a fifth elemental
bottled up inside,
and I’ve found myself
in biomimicry
light as the airs
lamenting
that this too too earthy flesh,
no platonic object,
of fiery desires,
could atomize and rise
to the watery dote,
where true hearts float
and all honesty lies
with a fine print of boasted
bullet-points
and side-splitting effects:

• The meaty much we do
  means little
  mixed in the cosmic stew

• Arms are best for putting round,
  but when putting right’s left out,
  it’s better to put down

• What cleans a surface,
  even tears, can also stain,
  given enough time

• Take the cleansing solution,
  and wipe them
  down to their gleaming steel

• Then weld the twelve
  couple-less, cautionary signs
  to fashion a finer form

I could pack infinity
into that very finite dodecahedron,
with this one simple observation:

The glow reflected on your face
is the most beautiful
my light has ever been.

Snowscape V (the end)

The winter white takes
shallow breaths
and exhausted she coughs
grey complaints
about the crushed
green of popped-down bottles,
a cellophane cat
holding his short stock
of shock-yellow crumbs,
and other man-made matters
mocking her color
but, not her,
they don’t fade away

Snowscape IV

Nuzzled
from the muzzling
of a winter's drowsy-
days-long muslin wrap,
brown earth bursts through
what white patchwork's left
to cure forbidden tramplers
with a slurpy, foul-mouthed,
aubade kiss.

Snowscape III

Steamy column of warmth
slips through the crack,
pawed by purrs from his cat—
a tonic wash to welcome
slush-slicked, black boots back

Snowscape II

The sun's diminished light might
seem blundered if not for the wonders
of winter's incomparable white

Snowscape I

White imprisons gray.
A black sole subdues
one red glove with a soft crunch.
There it will pause, fingerless
until the first thaw.

Christmas 2010

‘Tis this,
Christmas
morn at the end
of that clutch of days
Christians named 2010,
and the diffident sky
can only manage
one irreverent blink.

There they're here,
candy cane lights
with green-garland ears
and drunken noses
to point my way through
snow-drop-hushed streets
robbed of their rush-about
and vagrant shouts.

Then’s when
I’ll take it,
the harked-upon angels’
high stool, and make low
the hollered occasion
with a devilish wink
to swivel
their pin-cushion heads:

“Yay, I say,
for unto you is born
this day, in the city of laid
lids, a savor!
Look for true
love in the cradle
of your straw-strewn hearth,
and unswaddle it.”

Christmas can't come (soon enough)

Mom-hassling arm tugs
Earn him burning glares of "Cope!"
Ascetic calm falls

In the beginning, we got lost to our endings

The jelly-jiggling slop first had to flop
before it could waddle
ashore into this muddle of last gasps
and becoming
where middling deaths swaddled in gauzy breaths
emit a consonant-rich sussuro:

If you don’t recall the swirl-swept depths
where we furled it,
can you keep that promise in shallows pocketed?

So we began, and with the begetting
a rosy cloud plumed forth from our two
terraformed lips,
its delicately distinct petals mushrooming out
with a thorn-less, serif-soft voice
to bestow this frothy font of atomic confusion:

Let the forgetful sea rinse over now-handy fins
to hard-edge etch
their starfish straight lines in a slurp of soggy sand.

The mothering molecules haven’t lost
their smothering ache to forgive
our thickened skins
and they still cling to us, cooing about a lulled drift
past bye when we’ll climb the thinning links
back to homes cloaked in a sifted light:

The loves of your heart-filled heads, no matter
how starkly pled,
all waste away to join us in our timeless waiting.

Undomesticated scenes

There’s no life-
likeness in the dioramas
he meticulously pieces
together with stray remnants of lost
childhood, but there may be
an uncanny resemblance to truth

Ode to the winter solstice

He may be bits shy,
tucked in there behind
a ready excuse of clouds,
but from today he spreads
our pocket-lint days
with radiant smiles,
and lingers longingly,
beggar moments longer each time

A birthday wish

It's not that rocks don't
Feel. Keep still your eyes, look. See
Our shy smiles shimmer

Cupid's need for archery lessons

Can love's long shot con
us with its loft, drop
a steel tip to spark
flinty hearts, and burn
away sleeping stings?

I make up words, and they return the favor

If cupple were a word,
it would be
homophonically
linked to couple,
but there’s the small complication
it doesn’t exist, not outside
the confines of this poem.

Cupple (verb):
To gently join
one’s hands and hold
an object in a loving
and inquisitive manner,
somewhat cautious lest its essence
leaks out between the cracks.

Possible poetic usage:
Spy me, one tiny dot
spiraling up
a spiny staircase of crystalline steps,
until I’m picked, pinched
and cuppled by a darling universe
before she takes me off to bed.

Will cupple make a break
and elope with its old-world cousin?

I can’t say, not in a voice
convincingly heard.
You see, I’ve lost all taste
for those dictionary words,
a touch hushed within bindings, tightly bound
while my pretenders nose around
their glossy jackets.

It’s not that I’m wishy-washy
about cupple’s ambitions.
I’m just happy to keep it here with me
in my wish-washed state
where there’s no point
beyond the widening
smile of our gradual arc inward.

---

Special thanks to Kay at Immersed in Word for lending me the word "wish-washed".

The mind reels

Here's my latest attempt at an animation. I'm still making mistakes, and learning from them. I'm going to go back to the written word for a little while before I attempt another one of these (they're very time consuming).

Water on the brain

My hush-hushed secret,
rush-rush waves will tell you,
isn't a leaked taboo
of still, stale waters,
or worse, worry-wracked seas.
It's too simply my clipped
and unwary tale
of the calming ocean
I sensed when I waded
into the shallows
of your penetrating eyes.

A glimpse of things to come?

I've begun learning a 2D animation program, and I hope to use it to create short videos for my poetry. Here's a very brief attempt at animating one of my drawings. As I get more adept, the results should be a lot less primitive.

An apostate's creed

When I was spongy
soft and daisy yellow, my father poured
forth with piety his cleansing love
for god and country, and he poured
it into poor little porous me.

It was a sop I tried to hold
but just as gold wings go
and clay feet come,
so my faith in blindness was replaced
by a bookish seeking.

The small wrings and smaller
squeezes of his uneven hands
told me god wasn’t 'man enough,
and any bounded place was too cramped
a space for my odd inklings.

Then I found this upon the further
side of knowing: Nature lives and dies not
in our world alone,
but there’s a universe to breed
and spoil with my loving’s expansion.

It’s always cycling...
cycling before me...
cycling through me...
cycling past me...
cycling in spite of me.

Ever never blinks
and no quill’s ink tallies
those woes and wants
played out on the twinkling
stage of our weakling moments.

Outside the familiar
rhythms of my childish loves,
I’m left
pledging to do no heavenly harm
as I spread wide these arms
so inadequate for embracing the vast
elliptical clouds of intermingling
light and dust,
and in flying I’ll fall toward
but not reach
the core of my sunny belief.

Bunny swallows owl

Inside the bunny suit
my ears are still small
and round, and percussive
sounds come to visit me
costumed in white muffles.

Inside the bunny suit
a bead of sweat itches
my nose to rabbit fidget
and wiggle-twitch where
my fingers can’t reach it.

Inside the bunny suit
a thin layer of nylon dots
inserts its silky self
between me and everything
I fumble to touch.

Inside the bunny suit
the outside world’s broken
up by a half-dozen holes,
and green strands fuzz the focus
of each fragmented peep.

Inside the bunny suit
probing orange lights
make kaleidoscope shapes
through those same cut
openings. They distract me.

Inside the bunny suit
I can smile at and feel
closer to the fantastic
creatures who surround me
in their own decorous skins.

Night mares always look back

My night, marish, clops through
a mirror life
some mad scientist might
have coaxed to self-replicate
into an intemperate ooze.

I’m standing there,
and then I’m not,
lost in its reflection
and aflutter with a flabbergasting abandon
at having met you
after a bushel of now grainy,
barren years.

It is me, and it’s not
or it’s both, I can’t say
who it is, who turns away
panicked by the befuddling
indifference in your voice
before it trails off
and tumbles into a cruel muddle
of swallowed gruel,
where I’m unable to skim out
the love I loved in you,
once, or spoon
one meager goodbye.

Sweet meets nothing, and nothing wins

The sweet-meets-
nothing, I said,
wasn't at-all
sweet but it was
nothing, unlike
the some-things-
said by better
for better-haves
sake, in their own
lesser-than-
less original rite,
and it's that
nothing-unlike
I'm quite fond of.

Miracles can wait

He whiles an Earth's worth
The saintly stone eyes won't roll
Servilely his way

I take a secret pleasure in being disabused of my fonder illusions

It was
put a bow on it pretty,
our democracy
with its polka-dot accountability
and its tissue-paper truths.

The discount-bin card arrived
separately, postage due,
and with a punctilious script
it promised us
a curlicued freedom from
antiquated forms of expression.

Our very love was
ceremoniously given,
but was it
ever right-
fully ours?

Let’s render up the flattering
notion of own,
as it's grown so fatty
lipped it wears a perpetual pout.

The gift was merely Caesar’s
grandiloquent concession
tagged liberally,
“To: Us,
a meekly over-entertained many
whose we, drained of meaning,
poses no coherent threat.”

Not yet.

Some compromises we do

Straight-striving, a white
............. oak sapling bends
.................. (it pretends) willingly
..................... to the lapping of grey-
......................... hound gusts. It knows
............................... the musts of a thin-
................................ skin (if and when,
................. it can endure) will loosen
........... some with thickening. Then,
........ well, the strength comes
....,. to laugh at always
in the passing wind.

Some compromises we don't choose

her brittle bones balk .... before
......... their daily battles
but for a living .... they give in

Ticktocks go away with the clock

In the gloom-heavy
looming of our preordained
hours, stretched minutes
lie with their alluring
promise, the endless
seconds to come

It's in our dreams we'll find the way forward

My inner tongue trips
over her yesterday
morning’s extemporaneous
homily and its retelling
rains down on me
temporal anomalies
through which I’ll slip the bleached
monotony chasing me.

Turn key,
return me
to the upturned
glee of a midnight macadam.

Unmanned, it’s where
the manholes open up to me
their traps of sunken yet
stacked wire-mesh baskets.

They’ve been left
to catch a refused few
turquoise-beaded strings
mixed with ash
feather-dusted by the lime,
tangerine and grape
wing beats of exotic birds
too meek to fly upward.

There the tensile tip of a sweet
and fecund smell grips me
and it squeezes out
visions of too-soon
dying in that bed
where a stripped truth lies
tenderly with the on-putting
of my put-off lies.

A low hiss heralds happy heat
and radiating pings rap me
down the shrinking-shadow hall
away from Hedone’s keep.

In the singular
pleasure of this rhythmic pluralism
my nouns and verbs find
their final agreement:
All we’ve known
is what a wanting wind’s foretold,
but its chilly, willful voice
can no longer hold us.

The shadowy projects from an enslaved mind

The moon, fidgety
Serf to lady earth, turns on
Dimly lit theories

The sickle that cuts

The silvery, sliver moon
snubs me with the stub of
her turning-away's nose

When the top turves

When the one spared treetop does turve

its cherished Cheshire won't perish

but the once persisting smile will

We honor the spirit of the season by misgiving

When we find ourselves
bewitched
by the once-again
betwixt a barest bare
season (of not-there)
and the rock-hard
reason (for there-is), let’s

Place the lemon-sour wedge,
where it can be tasted
with expectantly peppered
peeks and the snowy soft pines
for a gifted we we’ve been
too white-elephant
wary to unwrap.

There’s a transplant
future. We pretended
it (to-be
forever sutured to our bristly back-
then), and it meets the it
it was beneath a scrub-brush
Christmas tree we’ve stowed

Carelessly in the cramped space
where our sameness
lets crawl the other. Tinseled,
pre-assembled, past-
their-prime-time specialty
brands of static
clinginess have diminished,

But not-enough,
as the persistence of any-man
attraction shows,
would if it could bring
Whitman’s samplers
of sentimentality
to cuddly bear on a leftover

Choice (What’s-next,
warmed over and over). We
will stick to it,
fuzzy ornaments
on the crackly loud, paper-
thin present. We didn’t give
up but we did give away

Boxed-up angels
in exchange for one red-ribbon
day, its frilly bow tying us
so tightly to
the pressed-down rule
of our highest of highly
evolved thumbs.

Laminated maps make ideal umbrellas

A dead-end road of raging
sky grumbles
peculiar directions, then
dizzy drives
crisply crossed drops to their head-
long tumbles

Sometimes there can be fairytale beginnings

With a smack of tender lips
the sticky-stammering spell
breaks, and,
frog cleared from tricky gullet,
he speaks
the binding incantation

Relishing the pull of gravity

Quicksilver traces wake
elliptical motives
as string-less spheres take on
all the tuneful burdens
a black, gaper void won't
hole-heartedly embrace

The Prologue is Future

This is a bit of a mad experiment. Against my better instincts, my best experience, and anyone's good advice, I've decided to revisit an old short story and not only rewrite it, but transform it. I've kept the bare bones, but I'm giving it new flesh. I like it much better than the original, but it'll be a challenge to sustain the for the 15 chapters I've sketched out. This isn't a final draft, so more changes may come.

---

I.

Let's peek in where it all starts and ends,
at that moment of a single movement when

The head, once so deadly heavy,
is reanimated
to jerk up in a backward nod.

This jump lumped with the looking-in
may make your graceless gaze feel
like a twitchy puppeteer's hand, sadly
forgetful of the pulled strings. Get past it.

See the light.
His two blue irises gasp at that light.
They gasp at the spray of pallid yellow
light that washes over them
when he rears his reluctant lids.

Notice the ears,
his nicely rounded ears. Those cauliflower
receptacles are made more prominent
by the gleam of a cleanly shaved pate.
They receive the sounding waves
as his mechanical keeper regains its motive.

Watch his nostrils.
That pair of nostrils that have grown
fleshier with the facial widening of passing
years. They flare at first to gulp and then more
slowly sip the stagnant air
perfumed with a mix of sweat
and snow-wetted wool.

We welcome Jonas back to the jostle
of the boxing car in which he's stuffed.
It's a thoughtless train that carries him through
circular sentences punctuated by fits
and false starts, the small jabs and stronger
punches that toy with rag-doll chins.

We'll read into his tale and we'll find
this Jonas is a stand-in man perhaps
too cleverly named. And what is it,
this his tale? His is a tale of bellies, and being
trapped. The first and seeming

Everlasting belly surrounds him
now with walls crafted from cookie-cutter
steel. It's a strong-link drop, down
in the chain of silvery likes.

The time.
What's the time?
What's the day, for that matter.

The left arm wears a watch, but its skin,
pinned till pins and needles called,

Won't lift up. It's left to the right hand
to drag its partnered player to where
Jonas can read the scissor-splayed dial.

Seven o’clock.
It's always been Seven o'clock.
It may well always be. Square

With rounded corners,
the window backed by early winter
morning’s black, gives out no
further clues. Does it make a difference?

It doesn't.
How could it? Suspended
above the flash-bulb scenes
of troubled and troubling city blocks,
Jonas lets his mind again go slack.

With it, once-sharp voices
dull to indistinct mumbles, as if they were
spoken long ago, leagues distant
and in an incomprehensible tongue.
Jonas's head nods forward, and with it,
we slip away to darkness once more.

Make like a snake

Heat-addled and stretched out
flat on a desert stone,
he warns off god's coming
with a rattle made by his own
flayed skin, two pulled hind teeth,
and borrowings of bleached bone.

Making the best of it

What does the wind intend?
Our branch-bridge bends up to ask us
Let's pretend the answer's love

You (I wanted to write a poem starting with “Why”)

Why is it I
can’t? You leave it
alone, but I
know I can’t. It’s
the OCD in me
to rearrange everything. I
have sorted the sordid
big details of when. We
got together
by an ascending order
then. I
ruined it with a “Why?”
and “Ever since...” We
descended
numerically
back to one, and I
am still flipping
through the why’s.

Zero gravitas, or when I solve the fundamentals of time travel

If I could send
one message
back through time,
I wouldn’t write to beg
words off a writer
I admire –
be it Dante or Blake,
Yeats or Cummings –
and I wouldn’t warn away
the gazes of a to-be
lost love
or push the glad
hands of not-yet
abandoned friends.

I would write
to my yesterday self,
who lazily left
dishes for today’s
me to do,
and I’d rightly tell him:
“Please, reconsider
the sink-
me urge to shirk
was.

“These are citrus-
scented suds,
and if you let them,
they’ll tickle
a memory of 3
too-old oranges
forgotten to bother
the bottom of a wicker bowl,
which in turn
will return you to rethink
the how of when
a younger you
grew 5
times in those 10
years before the death,
and then
you stopped caring for the 20
since.”

It’s news of the wee,
menial
and non-consequential
tasks that gives
all of these me’s pleasure
now.

Impudently dancing to the dourest of beats

Wee hands
we tethered
and together
we skipped
the craggy face
of calamity's cliff.

More rumble
than chuckle,
it laughed to buckle
our knees,
and we laughed
right back at it.

Being broken isn't always a bad thing

The chrysalis crisp someday
cracks and crawls away
till its crumpled fills
a renewed creation

---

I'm struggling a bit with direction and next steps. I'll be easing up a bit on posting here for the foreseeable future, so I can concentrate on longer forms of narrative. I feel like I've reached the end of my larval stage. The chrysalis is hardening, and I'll begin breaking myself down in order to assume a more mature and fruitful shape.

I'm also giving up on the idea of submitting my work anywhere. It's become apparent that my writing really doesn't belong in any publication. My style is too crude and unusual, and it doesn't play well with what others are doing, so I'll take the punishment I deserve and continue to imprison my poems in this obscure and benighted little corner of the Internet.

Thanks to all my regular readers and collaborators, as you and your sites are what keep me going.

---

Update, Nov. 9: I've decided to convert my short story Belly to verse, which will consume most of my creative energies probably for the rest of the year (unless I really get cooking). I'm not sure yet whether I'll post the chapters as I finish them, or wait until the whole piece is complete.

The glass you gave me is emptiful

Watch me closely, God,
though you’ve seen it all before.

I’ve got the universe up my sleeve
and it’s itching for a sleight,
if you’re willing to be conned.

The stardust filling Aquarius
has poured for countless millennia
and it won’t brim the bottomless cup
of your oceanic blues.

That’s the warm-up for Lepus
who, lean and polar-white, leaps
out from my flipped-over cap
and is chased by the steel-plied
Orion’s hankering for roast hare.

Hunger-driven this heaven hunter
has a saggy belt; his sword’s tip drags,
slicing Gemini in two,
but twins can’t be parted long
and divinely grasping Pollux clasps
Castor’s pause anew.

Conjoined, they bow together
under showers of milky petals
kissing no-longer
furrowed brows till black
velvet curtains fall
and are followed by your eons of
endearing applause.

---

This poem was written for Poet's United's Thursday Think Tank Prompt: Magic

Prayer of the unsaintly

Would you banish me if I confessed
a secret thrill the instant
shrill sirens intrude,
rudely breaking in
to shove aside my trailed-off whispers
with a wail from which no earwax,
no matter how doughy thick,
could keep a modern Ulysses safe.

Maybe it’s this time
they’ll stop for me.

Maybe it’s this time
and there won’t come a knock.

Maybe it’s this time
the stale crust of hardening past
explodes to scorch a put-upon earth
or crack her open so we can,
you and I, slip through,
up among the slewfoot roamers.
Their heavy heads are down,
always down, down,
pointed down and they’re unaware
there are germs here.
There are puffs of dainty fluff floating
close above them here and hoping
to ride our slipstream,
to skip over those dreams
too drained of ambition for ever
to germinate.

Ignore, am I
the kind to ignore? I am
ignoring them right now,
and the dimpled facts
they’d dare be
if beggary wasn’t better served
than derring-do. Don’t
tell me you don’t see them too.

I’ve witnessed the self-interest
and I’m still abiding, dude,
but when, dear God, when
will enlightenment finally arrive?

Dampened spirits

From an icy blue
(remove) ........... INEVITABLES
d
r
o
p
chilling s-p-r-e-a-d wings

A political postmortem

In the yeasty yearning for
fuzzy was – its sleep-
deprived, batted eye trimmed with
never-were, prickly lashes
long-frayed from the thumb-on-thumb
of constant tugging –
we loosen our hug
around bugaboo learnings
and lose the gripping
way to clear but not soothing,
white-nighted will be.

A few photos

Here are a few photos from the reading I did at the opening night of George Kokines' Elgin Academy installation.

The "September 11" pieces (St. Nicholas, Ground Zero, The Sky Above)

Yours truly, reading

George and me

In/Outdoors

Wind sweeps up crushed-leaf
Curtains, strictly maintaining
Roomy illusions