Friday morning

no shade is like my own
my leather chair
my birth
for what it’s worth I’m older now
and coming closer to the road
what hold do you have over me now?
Only in memory do your daggered whispers cut me
And that’s shunting off too
(to better shores).

No trade is like my own in words
it’s dew
over the mewling mouth
of eager does
whose hooves extend into my house
and yours

drink it
and fly

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How The War Began

Somebody said something to somebody else,
the gist of which is lost to the fogs of time.
Newspapers were filled with bathing beauties.
Strangers grinned. They gushed over the weather.
In a dark room someone else, someone important, drew a line.
He claimed it was a map, but a map sketched on wrapping paper,
the sort one tears to shreds on special occasions.
The wind was blowing west to east and back again.
Angels were reportedly sighted, and their flying machines.
They’d finally invented a gun that shoots only diamonds.
Children were dragged out of their homes and beds
and taught how to laugh and breathe underwater.
That’s when the bigwigs declared they needed more ice.
More gold. More elbowroom. More blondes, the bombshell kind;
women with large breasts, who didn’t ask too many questions.
We hate that, they said, lighting their foot-long cigars.
We don’t like questions, and we don’t like answers either.
Authorities got the OK to build more walls and tear down houses.
If papers weren’t being shuffled they were being signed.
People drained their swimming pools and burnt their money.
The family pets were given degrees in law and finance.
The enemy, chosen for their swarthy complexions,
were aiding us in the manufacturing and distribution of weapons.
Giants were said to have been stomping across the land;
huge three-headed brutes bent solely on our destruction.
A woman on the television smiled a heavenly smile, then lied.
Experts put their faith in the study of disillusionment.
A kind of lassitude set in, akin to half-baked existential dread.
You couldn’t go six feet without tripping over a headstone.

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Occupant Apartment 2 D

His days marched in place
days like tin soldiers each one
pushing the next aside.

Hurry, hurry before it is too late…
inside a gaping hole to be filled.
More and more of the surface
of his life was covered by dust.

The hallway gave off a musty odor.
Night after night, lights burned.
Busted dreams heaped in boxes.
Black marks covered floors.

Less and less energy to clean up.
His body betrayed him, both his
bones, his breath betrayed him.

One edge of his room spoke to
the other. His fan purred all summer,
basement furnace heaved all winter.
This incessant sigh gathering dust.

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having a job sounds like a lot of work

I keep forgetting how to write cover letters and I
don’t have a CV or anything on account
of how much responsibility scares me. It shouldn’t though
because I already pay for my own Netflix
subscription and that’s what being an adult is
I think, that and taking my vitamins
when I wake up at 1pm.
I feel youngest when I’m being pushed around
near a playground while waiting for the curry I ordered.
I wonder what having sex with someone
I respect would be like.
I wonder what having sex with someone
I like would be like.
I think it’s maybe like having a job in that
I’m responsible for something and the higher-ups
keep asking for my references.
I want to be pushed around
but also left alone, if you can manage that.

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Ant Spider Moth

Mid-June.
Ants line up like opening night.
They look like spilled beans.
One of them carries an entire fruity pebble
on his back. A yellow one to
be exact.
Well done, small thing.
How strong, how impressive.
What admirable work ethic.
Ant women should tell him that he is
a good man.
He should get a raise from the foreman.
His weekend night should consist of a
dining out. A show if he is
into that sort of thing.
A couple of drinks if he is so
inclined.
And a chance to retire because he
has lifted his colorful boulder and held
it.
He did his job.
Ant, you are your own hero. Your
own accomplishment, if only for that
one pebble.
Later that day, a spider has grappled
with a moth, and the spider has
gotten the better of that tussle.
The moth’s wings are soft but
he was bullied by the spider,
more physically minded.

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Selenelion Oregon

The moon in the valley mist shimmies upon the Manor roof:

a lady dancing in a veil, gauzy and seductive,
in the space between night and day.

She
weaves
in
and
out
of my Venetian blinds.
I am alive in her blue light.

My words
play
hide
and
seek
between the slats of light.
I am alone
and you are so far away.

“Can you see the moon?

Does the desert dress her differently?

Does your heat rise to cradle her body
suspended in liquid sky?

Do her shards of light
slice
your
body
sleeping ‘neath the Pinyon Pine?”

I would be that light,
catching my hair on needles:
a shadow dancing on your tent wall:
The light
shimmering
from my fingertips,
caressing,
your face in sleep.

We are impaled with light,
the luminous flux,
spanning the Mogollon Rim to the Rogue Valley,
between Northwest Willow and Ponderosa Pine,
basking in her light bars: the earthlight cold in our morning breath,
inhaling air glow in the flutter of REM sleep.

She
sets
with
a
sigh,
a whisper of movement across your face,
gliding
down.
behind tall mountains.

In that moment:
Selenelion.
You and me on a horizontal eclipse.
A refraction of light fading to daylight
and then gone.
I am alone
and you
are
so
far
away.

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Centipede

In early spring
a centipede crawls
across a branch
next to a bird’s nest
of blue eggs,
its segments aligned
like well-edited films
that seem so natural
to my eye.
It must be
a barely augmented
inspiration for
families or lovers,
moving separately
but together
through this tree,
and then forests,
pulled toward sunlight
and greenest leaves,
leaving behind
nests of blue eggs,
the chatter
of hungry robins.

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