Poetry

Skyscrapers

Night’s glass towers, Rapunzel’d by the sun, still stand at attention when the work’s all done like dragon dogs guarding the Mahayana heavens, or sentries at the outpost, leaning, nodding. Solariums of labor, they’re useless to the moon, pitched punctuation without any words. Harbors of security to paper-clipping functions now rest in darkness as mute…

St. Francis at the Fire

Sludge heart. Pot-metal heart. Scree . . . Some leaves fell. Schlock heart. Chil- blain heart. Piss-stain heart. Gelded heart. O heart incontinent. 24-carat electro-plate heart. Cicadas were silent. Bumper-sticker heart. Foul-mouth stink-bomb heart. Black. Black. Black. And I sang all day. Drop-dugged wolf- bitch heart. And held birds in my hands. Thistle heart. Briar…

Atonement

What happened to sweet heat, the sneezeweed, the luna moth and gingham sleeve, sipped Slurpies and reedy kayaks, the sponge-bathed trees? Why are the nights so flustered and furrowed, dusks crimped by crooked V’s of snow geese bored with palmettos? Why does the full moon pinprick the draft, neurotic winds reentering therapy, the light, an…

Certitude

(July evenings occur as a name repeated.) Strange benefit of geography. He studied me at mirrors but recalled only photographs and houses leaning seasonal (a deluded shoreline). Ascertain bird or cicada near. Awaken to a darkened background clouded North by noon. Here is a reverse. We take of gales and a landscape of driving rain….

[Girl] [Eyes] [Foreigner]

A circle of young: vicious. A circle of young: smells like sugar. A circle of young: why such organization?                               Around what? Around how? And into the circle is assimilation. Meaning: The girl with blue eyes is a foreigner. Xenophobic is a fawning. It smells delicious, of lavender and his mother: He slept with her….