2 mysteries 3

a leaf chases
a pretzel bag
like a bird
after a squirrel
these dead and
empty objects hear
weird music woven
into wet spring
where young die
and thrive, shell
game with out
the pea, no
hand in the
glove that raises
them up but
their dance is
one of lost
souls and survival
coursing through the
air like unborn
dandelions, daredevils a
shriek stained by
sun, blue, and rare
now not forgotten.

fastest car early in town

i dreamed i was the
murder innocent
sent to murder
a idea- belief,
i have crowned in
solitary coronation,
my own head-
and mortified my
green cranium- moon juiced
and swimming i
transmit the channels
of all the reckless dead
until you feel my
faithlessness and stop
asking me why i can't
kneel and can not stop
mouthing words in to
the vacant ear of the world
silently.

25

i remember the rocky shore
of Lake Michigan- full of
vodka and still morning- yet
just steady enough to make
my next 8 hour shift hustling
100 dollar bottles of wine, and
4 dollar pepsi's- summer on
Mackinac drawn up and down
by horses, or my transport
a red Schwinn found in upstate
garbage, lowercase new york,
a prize I cobbled together
to save fare, and make it to
the store for more beer, I
wanted more, love or the smell
of its meat, its inexhaustible flower
crushed to simple sent, I know
I wanted something more- the
world sent letters to my reckless longing
and prayers for all ten lubricated
knuckles, that sought relief, of their
own envy or anger, stumps at the
end of my arms linear time, grave stones
marked and dusting in the shop waiting
to be planted in to dry wall or moist earth-
thoughts that limped downward,
to the shore, navigating by bridge lights
and stars, moons and morning sun
hiding there, the way beauty is unbearable
and secret, the way each day organized
its self with such stunning gravity that
I was pulled to a past that never happened,
that now fills me complete
with its dream and impossible yearning.

we were asphalt and the sea; the upper river

the suns irritate the the lawn
mower obliterating each delicate
lemon headed lion
under blade and disinterest-
butchers wine out in to the air
salad of days and days,
that collect and form rooms in my
brain for gods,
rocks
and
birds as bones
that
dance and try to take wing
but of course can not, the fish found are
found dead and huge-
the ever moving gut blown out
but other wise the whole machine
is intact and not gray, with the
exception of the eyes
and here over the dead body
i lament nothing but the emptying of my
own lake, the diverted river within
powering turbines of anger,
masked lust softened to look like love
and dangerous passions
that pump in to my heart
effluent PCB and other poisons
more deadly.

dead mans pen ; dead woman fills the instrument

dead womans ink
so truly past dust
the sun obliterates
her bones to sand-
a reconstitution of land
I witness Niagara Street
bottle caps gleaming like
coins and feel the
partials of a past sun
pass right through me
and on to oblivion, where
my bones tropism toward
sand grow the city's
brownfield geography larger
as it has grown its sweet
toxicity deep in to the bones
and arteries of me.

twice measure the dress for wounds

so the heart full becomes a tired word,
knows each intersection the city
raw after vivisection,
a full life story, no new ink
the page as small
as a single man steering through
midnight, trouble
is the quantum mechanics of
greatness and house hold
gods sweeping up the corners of
an unfinished attic room
all messed up she said leaving
and dried the blood rag against
a blue forehead, ablation,then
camphor and rage a shark swimming
becomes one as
antiseptic as cartilage,
filled in the frozen land with longing
the heart greens to gold and darkness in to
a violence un-perfected, a blunt ax
braking down doors to a house not yet
on fire and so a crime and not a hero at
all but an address flowered with poppies
- madness, and the flimsy dead

build a new fire at midnight

there in the gray change of spent yesterdays,
a new vocabulary waits to be spoken
where
the red fox paired in spring, visits
a solitary man, clothed in smoke and trees
and dream for him in pictograph, the wilderness, and
the full palm of his
hand to reach out
and pencil electric sticks in to being
to circuit the mind with embers and ashes
laid out in twigs and leaves, a cartography of
branches, matching the forest that meets us
at the edge of silence and meaning.