Monday, February 27, 2023

BAD TRIP

Striped owl's head turning
killer of ladybugs
deep in the swine wind
where we are burning taffy,

tongue's flame catching
in hourglass pools,
forked flame where we end up
taking our sins out on each other,
each cemetery glade
a sunset bouquet

and lasting aftermath.
That Black Sabbath moment
you thought you wanted
came and took the coat
from your artificial sanity
and sealed your soul.

Bestow moss on the stones
that spoke slow.
Heave up a fresh barnacled anchor.
Put hammer to shore.

Watch the sparks gain red
their quadrant of yellow,
let blue have green
let the copse rain magic objects
let the colors seem.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Alone in these hills
without wife or child
I will die apart, grasping
at the roots that left behind
my sleeping heart
and the waves of sun bright pollen
will come above the tallest trees
with a script of days,
with an architectural chain
of platformed clouds
and crowns of solitude
in wandering I cannot share
and the blades are birds
betwixt an infinite fist
and the hollows of the burden
lit by sacrifices
deeper than molecules
of a vagrant water,
of the deer's kiss of cautious eyes
in a puddle-split distance,
breeze working enlivened grass
where she won't lie down
but I keep the lines tight
as crucifying dawn
the lips of a lingering fracture
a spider's nest of roads
traversing stone.

Friday, February 24, 2023

I am haunted by the images of love
no longer accompanied.
By days gone missing their frame
of hours and faces.

Torn sheets cloaking
an angry cloud
a yawning mouth of cracked stars
limbs of glass
and sunrise teeth
clutching a raw gemstone.

Monday, February 20, 2023

I have watched the gaze of love
go down to hell and pick its flowers there,
I have seen all the love die.
And watched all else ascend
through aching whirls of sky
that felt more than the falling body.

I have watched the clouds
come pluming upwards through the streets
I have seen them spell no name at all.
Bright arcs of leftover sunlight
ride with them in my memory
and resurrect my soul.

The scroll of lost days
grows wider and wider
on the paving sheen.
The mirages bloom.

I find her behind a shield of vines
I find the long walks on a thin stem of concrete
I find the rustling paper of a dream
I lost from her
that she wrote in a glass hour
from a streetlight's answer
and a bronze caged alley sigh.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

I give my glories
to the wind
that takes them away,
I give my seeds of light
to the darkest soil.
Manifest in veins of breakage
the hilltops sneeze with fire.

Liquid bright gymnasiums
dissolve on riveted horizons
the sighing in rows of chairs
bells rung from a high computer
netherworlds mapped in the snakes
of some alien covenant
the heads of helmeted steam
that overlook the bureau;
no thinking thing,
no decisive fragment
can overcome the wrath of days

let the hymns fall fast intact
and the depth of dammed rivers
govern.

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Her face opens a wound
it rubs itself deeper.
I was a corpse walking
until I smelled her scent.
The breeze is a language
that makes my bright cold orbs
bleed.  The removed world
of past loves gone
makes the flowers move.

Around my soul
I play the dizzy animal.
In the gardens of lavish rot
I am the watermelon.
Coins land in a fountain
far from me.

The marble sneezes.
The sky froze
open wide.  I want
the honey in the center
of the hive.

Monday, February 13, 2023

I dreamt once
what it might be like
to be a man.

Years roll over that outline
crush by crush
and the brush rolls
dark lanes over my soul.

Miles past the spilled gardens
I planned this desert
for lonely architecture
long planes and bright nubs
of denied sun
long blades of a walk that circles back
for no searching echo.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

I love the kudzu coated trees
and deep sweet hills of Georgia

honeysuckle blooming
in the dark gray night
of moon bathed moss
this painful song that I
am dawning with

the face in the chopping block
blue and bald and gold
into the carousel of twilights

window's beams where we are in chains
across the yawning sheets
the plains I am a grafted part of
scattered on the tousled earth like sweetgum

blank stare of a granite owl
atop a gravestone
feathered square in a ring of fire.

Saturday, February 11, 2023

The eclipse when she looks away
leaves metal in its shade
and sparkling outline

blue stones colliding
in a lit gray sky
sure footed statues
on a boiling edge

bricks of hot television
tumbling down an infinite throat
stars pinched like salt
in a wreath of speaking fingers

the lines of light cross like heavy rain
her hair and her face are overtaking
the fullness of dawn is a slice
of the firmament's mover

alleys eating marble and rubber reels
arcs where arrows marked the footpath
new floor of her standing smile.

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Tumescent flesh
growing around the outskirts
of a banished soul,

body partaken with
the mouth of mountain lightning,
a frail shell and its licking fibers,

talk dancing on a gun sight,
a train of smooth bright shells
crawling over planetoid dusk.

Sunday, February 05, 2023

I know the dark
from its beginning
the fragile waves
dispersing splinters
in the glad light
soaked springtime overcoming
one wood grain
and ripples all.

I know the rain's shelter
curves of tar and rail
lit ranks of rising floors
soaring from a blasted swamp.

And under the mudwasp nests
pursed liplike on concrete
clutched with a pen
by a hand of thorns
I rise up
and launch my bloodied remainder.

Thursday, February 02, 2023

Bring your pearls and lace of ancient ways
the goblet with tornado force
suspended on a floating square
bring mirror furs
and thriving purple octagon
to the dance of silver necklaces
in an expanding eye.

In the rings of ascending birth
where I keep turning up
like a bad penny
meet me halfway to earth
on a shapely cloud
with juggernaut armchairs
lilac lasers that leave glowing marks
and the underwear of Saturn.