waiting in your lawn chair

if i could shift my body
collapse like water,
face east first then west
i would shift, and let the
heart loose, and empty every
gaze on to you,
i would harden against
my life story, resist each
photograph, replace the image
with heat, not a warm copy
but a smoky blouse unbuttoning
like will, like V after V
of autumn geese flying, a
wilderness of longing,
driving me in one direction.

girltalk the azure hope dweller

what will i learn in the
wake of her music, what will jam
in my brow, what
cruel animal, will
grow, born of wind and wild
bloom fluid as ruined periwinkle,
broken as a chewed rose,
thoughts like knife fights,
and water forever
water,
the
necklace crystalline, the
cobalt anchor love,
stops the body's head
its broken arm nests
the heart in a sling
like over night
like a clean fill word-
all day and in to the blue
wilderness bright
with blood rubies
and coagulated Easter
hymns blazing the end
of the world,
my hand holding her hair
hopeful, beast, the
creature wanting , a
harpsichord
shattering, the saw against
the circle sky
but
it is just a kite flying
a
glass of noon, filled with tea
with lavender,
no tarragon,
no mint,
longing for sage, for meat
glinting heady beads,
and
mysterious graffiti,
the past so fat and empty now,
it fills
the bloated moon,
it
is not a woman at all,
but a shadow hiding
among the osprey and vacant lots
of downtown night
and milk weed release.

the lie about mist

the portion is
abundant sown
bellow the creature
bleeds out
brown, winter wheat fields
love
taps
golden
apples
or
pears blushing
in late August air
tree branches reach out
tenderly they
scuff the
wind, and lay
articulate rust, and choice
imperfections
there
pouring
all sin, wine and fire
in to it's
collecting cup-
it
becomes the relationship
and the faith of
the believer
like hard seed
thrown in
unidentified fields
has found
purchase, a harvest
of careless words-
lost, found a living mouth
quoting the
shut up dead.

try in october, say more

where current becomes rapids
it splits the blood beat, and
all of history drains in to
the ventricle, the muscle takes a
breath, then leaps, in sacrifice
and survival it tears its self apart
to preserve, to continue on, to witness
its lifey madness real, and
red in the dreaming sun,
its strength, fills concrete, broken glass
beach glass anything solid
and able to transmit light,
so in that moment strength touches its own
shadow, its toe turns to moth-cinder,
ash, smoke, ascension.

morning vends the after glow.

i bend down at Haeberle
the smallest strip mall
facing east, it
greets the sun with me
i am open to this
temple
wall of pharmacies
Chinese to go, clinics
and coin operated laundry
empty at 6:30
ghosts of the city,
hoof, to foot, Portage Road is
printing man, man, man
over history just scraping through,
endlessly indifferent
to the domino rowed
head stones, populating
the asphalt's undiscovered shore-
empty markers spider still capture
this slice of time,
this Gaussian morning
in their gaze, and sink
its holy moment in to
granites torpid gravity, as
my own living hand lets go
the living thing
listing words around invisible streams
at Haeberle the Plaza fills
with prayers not said, but heard by me.

talking, her lips, are eyes are body

minor aches today are
likely to pay off
handsomely tomorrow
-fortune cookie

this pertains to the
heart, the deer
in
the woods, the
wisp of smoke
the
hidden one,
i know the owl, has
spoken all night
on the vicious
and obsolete deaths head
the canny mushroom filled
with the potent mouse
the cloud stuccoed to the
roof
of the critics mouth
it is spoken from
the branch, as if
it where an orange
ledge
the recipe for this
and many other catastrophes, hard
as the wildebeest
screams, even harder
the side walk ends
in and empty field
near a water park
and a casino.

pieces, clap the fish

motion over the
double yellows, collected
a retrieved
junction,
now the
wheel lists
these
constructions within
the small
glove box skull
methods
of translucent carburetors
fueling v8 love, and w/no
0-zero-0
efficiency
burning every
old ancestry every, fern
laying under
the forgotten brow,
I know the forest here
under my pedal foot, pushing
the loam down into the
darkness it hopes for,
to the roots, traveling
the turnpike up to the
clover leaf, swaying
in the breeze like a leaf
ferments a million
years burning, quietly
in the hold of an
innocent devouring
machine.

fin, fur, feeling; fine

i.
we have been blessed
with 13 love affairs, under
the broken bells, now
only pa recordings,
our small small
town woos away the
last summer days,

ii.
stroll no
thought out to the
gray forever winter,

iii.
roots
are strong for
this ending, for
brutal
catastrophe for
desolation,

iiii.
lovers under cherry blossoms,
monks, and tight lipped
nuns with in the frozen mansion,
collecting wood, collecting lovers
the things that warm us, turn to ash
and send us out to gather again,

iiiii.
smiles and scents in pocket are replaced
by silence, and our hands become busy
collecting prayers written
on the fallen leaves,

iiiiii.
and humming the insect sexual chant
of June,

iiiiiii.
watching Decembers river choke
in her ice flow.

The wilderness calls the pigeon, become- dove.

the spine
my spine has become
the Grand Island Bridge,
the rusting
blue blinking
water lounge
the
span of a life
tripled
and divided, while
other constituent parts
physically
form to memories
false flag stories
things that had
never been the gallant
shudder, the fish rising
to shake a real hook-
the English boy stuffed
in the trunk
smuggled
in to the country,
the
felon carrying
a load of
dope
the hope, of
the run away
wanting
to
make it
to
eventual Florida
i encountered
and found
again
these dreams
all
muffled under the
mornings shard
the rainbow pierced
American Falls,
where the
perpetual
world is
on view, under the
mysteries and
the quiet suicides
the Orpheus
solution, the singer roars
and the 4th sees
quarter sticks of dynamite
lit by uncles
just drunk
sun burned happy
inhaling
black powder
smoke
like fresh unfoiled pall malls,
rolled in stained sleeves,
boats bring us back
and
forth under
this thing now so mine
that i
am no longer any thing at all
this
past,
the
echo name
of
friends
only death makes them important,
art
fades in sexual
delinquencies, drugs booze- old,
leave only this
ball
and
socket
on
which to dwell, and
like true potato folk
i dwell,
digging
with my fork
handle, and tine, tine , tine
in to the
graveyard
ground
to find, the stones are worn
as if this
where the shore
the place
where life blooms
like flowers, like mushrooms.