_______


From the thatch of a bird's chest
she came looking
already I have paid someone
to express it through dancing
riots happen in supermarkets
because of the bright colors
where does the train crash tonight
barking orders from nowhere
into the back of my head
when does commercial grandma
come with cookies over the glazed green tiles
when do all the metal mouths slip shut
and flesh have its holiday with unseen guns
noises of ships and submarine engines and

From a chromium epistle, peeking, she drew down
the last impenetrable sense.

~^~^~^~

Robins clench, lines hum to the mountains
under a swing-set, an awning in the sky
scrap-heaps that collapse into liquid light
your aunt with her tremors
crossing words into twilight
and the wide-open cancellation,
what's born unseen
survives

:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:

Clouds thick white tinged grey
people who have made love a thousand times
and no longer speak to each other, that's us.
Thawed for green
tops of trees that send no spike
into the sky.  Injured bridges
all follow to the same place.
That's us at a crosswalk,
bandaged onto the earth like a landfill,
collage.  We're hoarding our watercolors
and filling the house with smoke
we're sending the envelopes early
through another disintegrating home
all the little dishes stay intact
In this mid house
the spark is scourged early
light comes only from refrigeration.

(~)(~)(~)(~)


Impact craters, sculpted from clay, ivory, and bone.
Crowds receded from soft-lipped outskirts
then came flooding in, a feast of blood
and mere verbal numerology;
then it was all long grasses, and the mouths
no longer waiting there

far removed from fashion, clinging to the hillside
temperature-tower of baked brick
the many beautiful fountains
with the city laid out neatly beneath

((((000000)))))

In covered-wagon
I keep missing that foaming ship
can be made only in light
but I struggle in its hull
in my imagined rowing
a garden spider spins

Here is a female this is the land
this is a portal streaming
the redwoods will give

||()()||

Nothingness is not in the woods
newts underside of a log
never seen sleeping
never seen eating anything
just coloring the raw dirt
soft glimpses of cousin flesh
woods without gardens
often with mirrors suspended

If you pull it up by roots
you put your name on it
in a vacuum, any star is reproducing
your shelter

()()()()()

Core is awake to her
come a great opening
sky stripped over the lots
fence-jumping, the footpaved brambles

To fall from a crabapple circuit
for the thorns, the fires
reaching from broken bottles
a garden bed to hold
the fragility of memory
ants in a wasp nest's hammock

The rhomboid ship
coming over the jagged hills
cloaked in phonograph of forest sounds
lighting a chain of ponds
with deeper ponds
black-fingered
driving the caves deeper
in a kingdom of velvet rot
saplings in a rut, some dancing
waver on only one course
to her after

)0)0)0)0)0)

Only to reinforce the defiant mystery
her cry breaks on the water rocks
the lenses go running
burnished by tides, waist weeded
loose from the wrecks
to a fortress wall of burnt butterfly
graffiti in violet
on the emergency tank
the filtered water growing and the sun
to fall through the blasted court
the concrete center, a single lace
the sniffing of dematerialized creatures
around a flower basin

|)))}///>

The sirens cut cloud from leather
dolphin blood playing at the foot of a slide
stem duct at the bottom of your mind
trying like an embryo

Monitors have forked tongues which branches
grow in whorls around
from the living rock, straight to radio or television
which dangles a wormlike structure, the attack
of its inner wing to vortex behind each
thrown about in the eddies, thus air creates
an enlarging spiral and the golden eagle,
in which the upward sweep of beauty and the surf
only one star was visible

(((((<<<<<,,,

The stage is a sand-dune
plateaued by an airplane
a necklace of amphitheaters
stunned against time into marble

The anima is pierced in three places
one to signal magma from the interruption of earth
one to focus the gaze, past imprints remade
by her ember feet, strewn among dances
or nomadic; one to draw from me
tremors city-web wide
held back by a single bead
she's painting the feathered domes
that clamor around her

{+)>/\<(+}

The dog rolled in a puddle's dried bed
svelte shoulders to trim rump
coated in glitter of mica
the water from cracked foundations
pipes guarded in reflective glass
her trail through the orbs and doorways
of great ruins
a tin mask to breathe out of
and eyes no longer frantic in copper
when the bath was a quarry of indoor glamor
steam flowed over arabesques
love-partners without noise
welled up in twin cultures
filed out from deep perfumed corridors
to lose the clatter of their tech suspicions
on the skirts of a bonfire
thin frame of new things
rustling red to grey
they lost their shell scrolls
their varied blueprints
on a hot glacier that climbed the pyramids
to the pineal core of a stone head
weather deposited
the small dog is mussing the tracks of many bicycles
that figure-eight with give of rubber
around the ramps and ribbons
the aristocrat trapped without money: a few urchin faces
the jewelry of days pulled taut
by the craving system
deep in its yank as dead stars
thieving strands of gold
to pull the silver from a dachshund's back
they mill around on wheels
a monolith trove of decorative honey

{+)>/\<(+}

_-_-_-_-_-

The serenity of playgrounds abandoned
with all their teeming ghosts intact
as light fingers the eye leather
of aging faces
a newt swims through the air
by puffballs of bombarding summer
to swallow the alertness of an eagle
guns made holes in cars cars kept moving
the life in pendulous urges
two robins on a slide
breasts filled with the ink that rides behind the calendar.

O>

Civilization's tired
all evening's worth
is sounded from
birds on electric

~^~^~^

Frontispiece of undeniable daylight
melts to a hearth all needles and sap
coals under smoking leaves
ship's sides in flower
the landing pad, on earthless shore

GONDOLA OF MAN-HIGH


precise areas will be kept as wilderness
the surplus of water encircle them
disputes between vassals along the mountain crests
exterminating the brutals
created in a basically sterile outer world

(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)

The bells went wild to come loose, one morning
water reached up to join
sweet pyramids of the empire's best apples
daydream knocking against other daydreams
burning a hole right through your throat
watching the birds.

They rang all at once
a glamour screen fell
people moved around shrouded
in dark hair and fossils then
it was all glam again
in the dancefloor wall
a hallway opened into Miami
a pillpopper in skunk boa
mirrored to a fortress
nudes outstretched on cellophane air-cushions
and a light that fell and fell
until you were shawled in soot
from its fiery passage.

Technology that melts in your grasp
and blood that cries out
marrow aching for chaos, the complete

(-)(-)(-)(-)(-)

PRE-NATAL SPACE MEDICINE MACHINE AS HERO


I am of a dimension that is not seen
and the outfits that resemble designer underwear
shows of bloom and fiery fall
bone-thin clothes racks animals in motion
lilies and other water plants
troops that crushed the commune

your shrubbery screen
eels observed by lopsided spectators
fragrant white flowers all dark blue berries
claws of some horned larks
the reputation of the army
your out turned eye at this hour

~0~)`)

She knelt repeatedly
on the thin paths between rice paddies
the ink that'd found her body connecting
to lily pad stems eelgrass
and cattails, periodically
her long hem pulled up for the crushing of oysters
shells on the dock big light in the sky

the bases of so many islands trembling
through the core and like a caress
over and along the tracing weeds
her womb like a computer filled with ashes

~0~)`)

~`~`~`~`~

More and more feathers
for the dirty archangels who don't
make it in

Shovel the doorway clean
to the bombed museum

At the edges of the harbor on fire
more and more will flock

The city is nerves ablaze pulled upright
by the winged whispering

Hind paws on the rocks in heaven's dugout
they chew and spit hot pepper
and tobacco, the instant healing
of their tongues

Who looked upon the daughters of

~`~`~`~`~

gone home


Chickens in white grass light
each cluck is a cone sound
burrowing through afternoon
toward twilight

Shingles are home to a spider
tar wet with heat
the roof beams and floors
tilted to kitchen
are a living organism
the ferns feel it and the beaten paths

0)))))>>>


Night seethed, then settled
for a whoosh of quiet energy
in every street


In your left shoulder your right eye is aching
in your right skunk your left eye
is mulling a tin escape


Send letters into the hush
maul through video walls
with the force of receiving womanhood


Let the snake skins left off
in the roamed and roaming sand
route a map to the fly's bones on your eyes


the circuitry of forever, in a small mesh box
twinging.  Scaly heads  over the sunrise
let the dead oceans teem and send breakers.

0)))))>>> 

(0)


The monuments were filled with squirrels
you were perched on the edge of an antique bedframe
summer was hitting on the bench
in the steep grass,
you were holding a mandolin
you never strummed it.


(0)

<<<------>>>


When they departed the wide field
grass was singed by other visitors
A football flying through the air
brought raving lights,
and they filed, like more than two people,
into the strongest section of the old forest,
what time casts off like leaking fuel
followed them in, along with the brownbunnies
and foxes, all arrayed
in a terrible alertness.

When they left the car lot flashing
and aching with money,
or turned off the storm
in a backroad wedding,
they carried bands of liquid metal
around each finger, what they call the spirit
arrested, strumming an auto harp
in a prison cell.  They dwelled in it
until the plazas broke into the frontyard
scraps of eternal receipt
stained with wrathfulness and computers,
the city hall of embraced madness.


<<<------>>>

(^^^^^)


The savagery of kittens at play
heavy heat on the deck, nerve-wires
slipping, the deep waters so long converged
careening past from a hurricane or on their way
to a hurricane

(^^^^^)

)()()()()(

The bastards are in a curve,

to make troublesome raids now familiar, stimulus

so completely out of touch,

dominated by the famous ruins

a bridge of solid ice as a metaphysical force

making the shrine the moving object

these powers to itself

a bullet, a wind

for the earth

Ella


She swaggered into life
a lollipop on stilts, all other worlds
cooly wavering.

---___---___---

Put me on a long couch
(there's a dead bird on the porch)
where I can hear the most soothing
sounds of empire

but I can't stop listening to the sirens
(its wings wet and bare of feathers)
the raunch of days run past the sacred
(I'm kneeling at its side while walking
up the stairs)
the cushions are burning

I'm alone in a hallelujah
the strands of uplift violins
and thin bones crackling in the ears
(was there ever a bird that fell,
a bird that flew)
the eaves fall down around the draining world
of which I am
the siphon sprouting horns

~-~-~-~-~-


A familiar mystery
sends out its ribbons
whose sticky ends tug
at granite cornerstones or what squirrels gather

epics unborn, that still simmer in the blood
what doesn't come forth, is wielding somewhere
a whole landscape of the unfettered, who fell
and the weight of ascension

the halves of a shell are many moons
even light, from heat only, is pliable

you'll find that gravity has
its flowers in ripples
a reaper in the backyard with eyes glazed
the years felt in a foot
that pulps the garden
vine dangling from nowhere in particular
will not be grasped by a hand
spiders would move that way on the hearth
of the end of spiders
the life in chalk-white eggs
longing for universe

-------------

Back in the gentle anarchy of
robins delicate on a compost
pile and kittens crawling
from a propped window glass
the ruts in logging roads are filled with drinkable water
naked from a tent, or feeling the compress
spine weary from sleeping on a marble bench
the raw sap flung deep beneath the afternoon
phone lines chirping in the nerves
a friend who ate the wires sleeping on the floor

Platforms climb to red plateau
the train rides blood to peaks of Arizona
places are not held in place
the day rakes claws across tectonic plates
we'll walk the river swell to a shot-out car
unhinge our naked selves from pleather banks
and the point of a stigmata's fervent beam
caught on cobweb in the backseat

~)~)~)~)~)


Leaping, say red is the color of passion
and with you it flows most
smoothly to the damp within,
legs carrying more and more
lightly and lightly
the red rock mountains dip
a vast white tongue
in the solitary air.

(^)(^)(^)(^)(^)


The heat code rasping from a naked belly
time-shaft suspended by sunlight
an archway of minnows and hummingbirds
steps collapsing into the garden
for the file cabinet in a mental hospital
and the letter opener that bears no trace of blood
on the desk every morning
all the creatures in their familiar positions
a door deep to the outside, a stairway
the shoplifter's girl follows
mirrors all over the store laughing
in a maze where the blueprint burns
summer was bursting into twins
with two couches on a gravity highway
with two burnt spoons for the road wavering
with two jellyfish knapsacks on the front seat
an hour before the invention of rock n' roll
down on cigar corner or french-kissing
in front of the police station
the stillness of summer wets, the land on stilts
the lunar seasons interweaving
with the dry inside-outness of a raw farmer
who waits flintlike in a cave
grinning and groaning
for the flocking of hours
the momentum of impossible events

<><><><><>

Frantic chirps
from the high green
the low green
fecund suspension

~~~~~

woolen tigress
when nothing could make you out of existence

you sprang, nonetheless

~~~~~

{*}{*}{*}{*}{*}{*}

I am a hydra
an animal belonging
like miniature light bulbs 
eggs fall to the bottom of the lake
hermaphrodite
a letter to the editor arguing


that fury has learned the truth
simply to be caused by his having nowhere
else to go
water was an entrance
shot all the other scientists
ancient nameless
for any but the hero
an endless source of beauty: the ultra-hydrating

..........


the mouse lay next to the bundt cake
his chin on the saw knife, needless teeth
his rear torn by cat and brambles
panting as almost everything pants
or seems to
he didn't sniff for a crumb
it was difficult to tell how many holes
were in his side, his groin,
strange mouse parts misplaced
I pushed him with one foam plate
onto another
took him out to the best leaf-laden place
I could find in the warm shade
there is a light that cannot enter
because I am conscious
of all the saccharine material
that has come before

WE VISIT FISHMAN ON A HIGH FLOOR


If conscious orbs travel the knowing galaxies
all will be unprogrammed there
the social webs that don't reach the ravaged
heart attack in a public park
will be relentless on that clutch above the ribs
a kitten's fluff of mange on the cracked chin
the beard that grew wild from a frenzy made homeless
lonely my adrenaline no longer
travels past his crushed legs
or visits his orchestra of hospitals--

citizenless, the country floats,
the bearer of DNA trinkets
potatoes magnetize tobacco in a wooden bowl
he is gesturing among the observers of television--
hasn't glanced at the news once, is most aware of it--
is precarious, spare chested
at the edge of a star pattern
telling us how the cold tug of war
between our two mother countries
pulley dredged an ancient nation state
out of the sightless fishes' depth of habit

to bring a multitude of kitchens
and their secrets roofless
herbs into the aggravated modern sun
the lovejars of a mason lost to official history
himself the descendent
here with a fork of tubes in the nose
the snake's tongue, he explains and explains
of our reptilian medical industry

leave my upper jaw in the daffodils
mantis and ants plow fire of cancer
through the lukewarm mulch
my lower plate teeth the texture of barnacles
leave with that nurse knows how to handle my buttons
she washed my blue flannel

my friend with forty ounces three-fourths drained
crooked under his denim
rode me down the elevator, skinny vegan arms taut
hugged and shoved me against the floor map
he said how I hate the system that killed him
I thought of our own shared knack
for doing that, but don't worry he's on his island now
rubber-edged doors opened
the ocean, the vast cafeteria
his grin halved
and the lack of even that.

Empyrean Ashes

Light pounces
from bookseller to blood
from money quickly to children
and from your emerald amplitude
to the network of woman form
that lurks in all my grasping
to be brought openhanded and full
to the banquet of refrigerated breads
where the insatiables are grinning
light prowls and prowls
shark meat on rye
cups tipped to clink
at plates edges
the moon flakes away and does not--
next course--come back,
the brass knocks, elite populations
scatter to keyless rooms
the teats in a plastic sheathe
the blister burning through a machete's handle
seed-pods of spiderlike fluff
hacked loose into an exclusive wind
the force of green on a roadside
squirrels hidden for the thunderstorm
and pigeons tucked away
I think of the kindness of
your eyes, and hope it preys.

INFRAPOEM


When the infrastructure holds, the world's a quick study.
Everyone all day walking around the fountains.
Samples detected where samples shouldn't be.
All day long I have sex with antimatter.
All day long I find the tractor parked
in the wrong spots of the yard.
All day the yellowjackets pocket in my sleeves
making me sing for my labor.
All sidewalk day long the sun sets on the greymen

When the infrastructure holds you still feel like a peasant
Holding the reins of a summer rain
in a sad cockpit
Because muck is alive in you your sister facepaint
blooms without breaking the mirror
With little Jupiters on a comb's handle
You go off making your lovely ways
across the bombed airport, the crushed kiosk on fire
with sausage spilling from its belly

You look cute as hell as you walk across the infrastructure
My grizzly belly is hungry for the infra
structure will attack a tree
Or a mousebox grandma in a little doorway
to get what it wants from the vault
behind the family photo
Infrastructure will roam
with a gate and a radio
The original man's chant, professor's nimbleness in speech
are skating on TV across the infrastructure

~)~)~)~)~)~)~)

Inwardly sordid nights, pre-war child,
one clings to the Vivaldi on stereo
to add some uplift to all the drowning;
eel-chains, white tusks of rapid water,
most imagined, seagulls neatly on a series
of rocks, necks gulping the last
fuming embers find somebody's script
in the whole reimagined twilight
(somebody slays in a brothel) the underbelly sings
in a pantsuit, in an oily harbor,
a collapse on the foodstuff
the ancient swimmers, guide to me
the works of fallen submarines, let me
into the quadrangle
for a holo-lit supper, a renaissance
in shades on shades of weaponry.

The Dawn Bells in a Ring of Meat


All barstools turning round on alien beams
I am connected, the seat of life
stained and refurbished, cut to onion heart
to fling out on capes, what's in the ribcage
the tug of smoke, to sprint with children
bony crests of town irradiated
trees to whirl, your face climbing
whose kindness is without era, the forces bury wheel
to sag and catch, the web to throw
a delicatessen shakes, the knife that knows,
to take the joints from limb on limb
and never dull, from memories of women and men
I am a train car on fire, the pierced olive
surrounded by water, a soda fountain's ginger mouth
where we are found unkissing, a slope of vents
past the pool's bottommost ledge
to prey on salted crystals, be twig dry
in the kingdom's wettest palace
to be separated, to feel deeply every streetsweeper,
touched rain of ashes, the sun beam dangle flakes
and feel a new order, dredged to widen
from an owl's croak to claws on birch
last night I was walking to view sex
the tapered lens, the lid's flame there is
no random world, instead I saw a baby bear
climb trunks with violence, snarl his way
and hid my shriveled scent in a construction site
waiting for his vigor shadowed to ease
our common timidity, a spectrum of rug
walking grandfathers

((((((((((((())))))))))))

If I watch from the distance of a city
or revolve on a tractor seat
and live the rivulets in soil
that machine makes but cannot control--
the breeze, eating, the magma heating--
as I watch you come closer,
the mystery only increases,
that is why I keep watching.

In cemeteries the the wonder of many
young faces lit up on a patio
keeps occurring, no need
to drive the graves deeper
the frost collapses
you and I have no you and I
to step out of, headstones lichen laden
a corroded living photograph,
the sky that the sun once owned
inlapsing vastation, the dark haired bird
leaves on a paper train, every time.

{(((<>)))}

Wind chimes in the hills
torches of slowly
expanding neighborhood
in digital velvet, circuits riveted
to the noosphere's underbelly
I fell--you put on an extra bracelet
or took one off--deliberately
into the peaking azaleas.

You arrived a strong vision, and departed
an even stronger one, the playgrounds
felt your chainlink tracing fingers
the swings still pendulum leather
and I remain on the porch, waiting
for your form's imprint
to leave this fever and make a basket
that tows me finally outward into sleep.

~~~<<<>>>~~~

That man who wants to snip birds
into sad little pieces, I know him!
And that man who has swallowed
the government, and wants to puke it up
into a billion helpless
unstruggling things
I've met him

but I am a gardener dancing
in rows with twine and fences
I've twitched with well-done metal
all the stones this late morning

grace the path I've put down for low ivy
the mask you are for all dying things

mercy the cranberry mouth, the stem you hid
so many altered things to fall
against the inalterable.

LATE VALENTINE TO FRIDA SPRING


birds chirp in the shoulders
knees and elbows
but even your most hesitant movements
are hungering to break out
grown wild, a gypsy hidden
in a suit of business
wings cut out amongst the flock
for a one-man feast
in regimented riot
his children in full color your feet on the roots

solid light
training slick boulders
and the movement of impossible things
I travel sparse reaches, I can't believe
my passport is not a hologram
you will survive on chocolate
I will spank you awake every morning
birds atwitter in the propane tanks

A DAY MIGHT


gladness, a little dog
so many towering landscapes
the lick of water between stones
so many objects on fire
so much flesh and blood extinguished
to the rumbling of fountains
complaint is filed
in glacial shells, a little dog under
branches and wires, immediate moment
in collar

to the angry in their horrible hallways
or those appeased in science fiction basements
these sidewalks are a seesaw equally weighted
the church steps a place to get stoned
talk smoke under the leaves
of college streets where I've never been a student
always wafted in headphones, downstream
from where they've made a study of life
a worker in cheetah robe, finger pawing
the wet wreckage

and I curiously examine the water
to watch a curious little dog curiously
examine the water
and my entrails are in an unimpressive heap
next to the town pool
but my dreams my dreams are getting
a wave from the flagship

WHITE ANTS IN A TAR POT

Spillage of green theater
soldiers returning, but not all at once,
old guardrails wrapped in vines
stone slanting walls, moss ripped,
webbed tendrils soft with dirt
there are no skeletons
anywhere in this afternoon

Banquet was a wrung number
ruffled closets
burials move on without meaning
garden circuits open to the newspaper
closing their dimensions down
salt on a shovel

Pea pods will still carry the snap
of firm time, from a vat
or platforms of terra farmed
soil, conservatories where a certain curse
is heard less and less.

|||||||||||>><<|||||||||||


The six-story
water cylinder
mildew'd grey white
against green fresh hills
is not spilling
is life itself
and is not a secret

For those on four limbs here
some ghostly from war, or birth deformity
all hold our field of forced eyes,
impose the terror of plastics breaking
a pitchfork's staff
humming from a stab
stark weapon on the grain sack mound
it's stuck in, a cattle doorway rippling
with ten billion
leaves it looks out upon

~|`|`|`|`|`|~


He's trapped in a cell of manhood,
watching the ceiling crawl
with other prisoners.

The void breaks, there is some singing,
the panel of a harpsichord
fettered like a zoo
to the deep wall.

Under all the ophidian fields
someone is laughing in a cellar
nuked pillars and archways
learning to make love in dust.

///>>>>>>///


radio in the blood
faint hours, grow brightly
stacked apartments are wide open
depths refrigerate foreign milk
where a lover brought me, among strangers
daydreams punctuated by gunfire
drip off the porch, where a full moon
abandons the whole town

I'm not listening to your song
I'm hearing the building creak
I'm not pricing your shoe leather
I'm ducking blood-winged arachnids from lightbulb
you're not kissing fire
you're kissing a well-assembled heap of bones

budding from basements all over
mutant strands in the dip of the throat
your dark qualities used to be free of cancer
you were a dancer, now you hang out
in the dressing room
a rectangle of mirrors that you can't shake
backstage when that meteor rolls down the aisle
bricks slide to show jewels from between each other

..........


speech breaks, and it's only
so many dawn walks, so many
fenced fields, poppies
blown across the bricked-in cities
friends of panic
gather together where the surface
rises and breaks, speech

given a language, given an instrument
energies that fry their makers
murdered for making sex
born to carry trouble around
like a crate of medicines
the previously unloved

In the hard folds of a peach pit
or where astronomy enters the beach party
our conversation will come apart
because loneliness has made a cave
the human map no longer holds together
hyacinths spill from the gridplan

we discuss holiness, being unholy
we are learning the heat of a standstill

DESPERATION


I am a claw claw
turning against the light I love
my children in junk, feebly ejected
I should ask the heart shape
on a pigeon's shoulders, I should ask
anything that will not answer
for my foolishness needs silence
I am a claw turning to melt

Some dark agent stopped helping me
I leaned against the trunk weight
of a tree that held no burdens
the needles came down on clouds
no nurses were offering
I'd rather be the spatter than the wound
camped in a lampshade
love made in an armchair
a claw that forgot to scratch
nails turned inward on a yearless palm
the body inland or the body as a coast
let the waters lap around us while the kid's ghost
collects more ghostly shells

To die in the woods, where you were not born
some happiness sledding the cemetary
joint smoking on a river's rock
lichens blended with ash, in a blowjob dusk
enjoyments capsized gladly
in the tumult of the water cycle
dogs around a pond and the skinny dip disintegrated
drinking coffee on a branch
above a field of broken glass
while a battleship leans through stalks
wasps feather around their syringes
in an elbow of brambles

My friend wants speech to soothe miles
the cave where explanations cease
is growing damp, even the images there
are wet and wild with the blood
of many ages, he can feel
the arrowheads move as he rides the bus

=================

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/


The pineal aperture spills out
yellow and grey mountains
behind a sinking city's gelatin
someone making sandwich wraps at the foothold
exclaims that deep ice has cracked
in their head's rough center
the endpiece shines like waxed eternity

a dining room lonelier than a glacier
kiss of spines notched through a lip plate
approaches lashed together by leather shoelace
cut lettuce of eyes rifling
through fresh gaps in memory
where cube glass counters bury jewels
in bronzed wing falsities
eroding time left next to guardrail

The whole sacred cloak is a cluster of fingernails


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