Monday

Monday, (put my head down on my desk for a minute, when no one was looking)

                 

One more paycheck, one more nut

One more two-weeks to ceasing this inescapable rut

Idle bodies mouthing the difference between food going in

Prepared by whose kitchen

Hand-carved, grilled, chopped, prepared, not

Services for whom, dollars indifferent to pandemic astringents

Logo-therapy, purpose, meaning

Struggling, commuting, breathing

Release inquiries, indifference to the response

Sign the paper independent of if the answers fit the form

Fall asleep drift into the oblivion of chatter-less Monday mornings

Alone, retired staring at the Price is Right audience sycophants

Bartering for cans of tuna fish and motor-coach crapulence

Showcases of marketing lures for the unemployed

At home, subsidies and soy beans mixed in the drive-through lane

An opportunity to escape, press the pedal and plot a date

In the future to pray for work, to pray to quit working

Undulation of keeping a head in the yoke

Hunting a trophy chucked in the trash with the television remote

Upon return to the domicile, prepare dinner, box the meal

Noodles, steroid chicken and sugar-charms sparkling in cola

Eat the enamel in a modern dystopia

Stare at the concrete, suck up the straw, milkshake missing

The tax return starts to gnaw, the marrow of one for the fat of another

Churn the decision of staked claims, flag holes and beautiful stains

Blurred in the UPC code of robots at the factory, import the cohorts

Brown hands, yellow hands, white hands new

Brown dogs, yellow dogs, blue dogs, red dogs, who

Ill suited to climbing a tree full of cats, pawing and purring

In a leopard-skin habitat of pill box hats

No faux sliced off the beast cover the covers and carnivores need meat

Salivating

Red State

Red State

Behind the curtain interwoven, stitched in rations

Of self-allocated logic swallowed in pathological

Addiction to the allocation of fate by self-direction and God

Simultaneously as if fortune and burden are in no way systematic

War is a proving ground, a righteous act of musts

No debate, because the monsters are forcing the bishop

To take the pawn, threaten the queen and the knights play along

Revving pick up trucks, rattling gun racks

White-tail trophies bagged in Iraq

Rural jobs programs for military sacrifice

Justified like a prayer that every son and daughter comes home tonight

Honest love and swallow the cause

Like bacteria in the bread tinting the yellow on the front lawn

Eat this in remembrance of me

Those that died so that you may breathe

The Trojan horses are coming to fell our buildings

United airliners gas tanks and squealing

Memories on loop newscast playback

Moses hold up his hands over the Amalekites’ attack

God’s favored people

Exodus social programs, not in my red state

Atlantic cross to farm cotton rows and clans formed

Williams, Johnson, Smith, names assigned after the ship

Generations divergent, put a tint on the culprit

Failure, poverty, tragedy, society,

Flip the script empower the hint

Of a constitution being trampled

Founding fathers and amble

Wisdom from aristocratic slave-holders

Who framed the scenes,

Billion-dollar corporations lobbying the means

Of production, health care, retirement, stock price adjustments

Externalize the mathematics and find home in the blame tragic

White-out of logic, pray to God, for a lower tax rate for a prospect

Of the pie is so big I might just get to taste

Apple-flesh-skinned blood from the red state

Mexican building my roof, off-the-books labor

Booming cheap Texas land

Californian debt apocalypse over promised

Terminated and characters amalgamated

Into one face blue or red castrate

The one-party system pachyderm or jackass 

Procreating in assumptions that we could never see each other

In the other

Voting against our self-interests

Based on a marketing campaign and Jack Abramoff

Promising congressional staff options once this payoff has passed

Muster on the floor, no vitriolic filibuster to detour

The flag of freedom, everybody pick a color, claim a spot

Because we go told all you could choose was a dot

Think one way, pick a side, moral obligation

Ideology of the mob, self-identity morph the illusion

Question the capacity of a pickup truck to a prius

Resources and delusions, of doing more together

Than apart, bickering for benefit of puppet strings

That profit from a billion hands supporting a single shoe

Keeping the barrels pointed, two men standing 

In an elevator aiming at each other’s forehead

Books quoted, lights flickering, pockets empty

Close camera security monitoring the whole thing

Standoff, two-thousand and twelve floors

Up and down, up and down

Wires shaking, but the men ignore the sounds

Thump to the basement free fall in place

Trigger fingers itching and at the last minute

Over the intercom in comes the phrase,

Pardon me sirs, the election results are in

Presidential exchange democracy again

You sir get a free shot to peg Mr. Red in the leg

When we get back to the top Mr. Blue you get to do the same

Repeat, reload, repeat, reload, new names, same show

When the hell will we exit the elevator and see the purple in the penthouse?

Shelly in Silence

One day I will recognize your face as my compatriot

With skin like a cresting wave trickling fingers

Dribbling from the bone below my iris sliding down

On a curvature to connect with the partnered apex of my smile

Joining a semi circle completed in your own

I will see you stepping out of your car taking off your sunglasses

And looking up at the sight of me on at a table shadowed by an over-sized patio umbrella

On a Wednesday afternoon in spring and you could just drop everything

To spend an afternoon approaching June with me

Sandals and a summer of grass blades

Unafraid to lay down and roll

While who-ever looks, because optics are partnered 

Not in juries crowded on the extremities of every word

Censuring the tendrils of your soul until their burden

Bears weight like cannon balls plummeting from a newfound distance

Bombing my world, you are free from such yokes of thought

For when you see me, you see a peace complete

And when I touch your hair you stare like a mermaid kissed with new found legs

Raised from the everywhere that I could never witness

Below the ocean of her maelstrom of judgment

Calmed with a slurped exit upward from all of that which is now behind me

Appreciation falls like rain on my deserted beach

Stranded and landed with other flotsam and jetsam

From out on the slopes of the cradle of placid sway

The waves grew rambunctious under her hurricane

Long held torpedoes of resentment fueled by guilt

Blasted holds in my vessel and sent me a drift

Oars and silence have brought my face upon a seashell staring at the sun

Grit and grain of time laced with a salty line

I spit her out start a fire and time

Smoke signals when I am ready to rebuild my own boat

Set sail for a mermaid and my own dreams

A clouded day but a perfect sky because no one wants to feel half way alive

A year a group of months clumped and piled on the end of

All of this, how much time is fine to know you have severed and are

Ready not to infect any new body with your old host

How do you know your fracture is set and won’t sever in the movements?

Indeterminate schedule until a foot is pushing and a lung compressed reconnects

Roadside Asphyxiation

Asphyxiated body of a marriage, breathless as a ring in a soap dish

Stranded on a countertop for a voyager on a highway

To an interstate of a life with a thump below the treads

Of the followed footsteps of a gray rover that pulled over

With red finger tips in the grip of my lungs leaving me pumping and out

She runs, hitching a ride for her time in a u-turn direction

Story teller of an escape for a better-place from a Grendel face

Of a man struggling to breathe staring at the random roadside forest

A sun and no keys to get the movements back in his shaken knees

He hears whispers from the trees on a wind of her words

Wasping back like counter attacks for a war he is not ready for

And suddenly there is an axis against him of her family trying to pretend

You broke some vow and here and now is how

I must stand, dust off my ventricles and soak in red the air to get the

Blood back to my head, out the ditch and foot the path that I must tread

Church Sight

I imagined your voice responding, your face concentrated on my lips

To ask you if you would like to reduce the width between your knowledge of me

From two pews to one, to know me in growth rather than casual sight

I had put off verbalizing anything into air, because of this hazy unknown

Sequestering my everything and then I had to look at your left hand and even

Though you sat alone, there it was like a lighthouse to shield my hull

From the inevitable jarring, a rock on a harbor I can not find port

And so I will export my thoughts to exclude the waves of your body

From my siren stitched into the fabric that I will set my sail

To go back out there and try to find that white whale, whispering on the bottom

In bubbles pelting the surface like letters strung on a hymn to a song

I fear I am growing deaf to the depths necessary to sing along

A row boat on a tidal surge undulating like bungee jumps

With worn elasticity and questionable concern over the consequences

Sadistic Intent

Heavy sledge like a thud-club mallet dragging the road’s surface

Cracking concrete forging a mini-canyon of segregation in rubble

Of a black depth divided with the extracted gray crumbled chunks

Heaved haphazardly to the left and onto the right

As if the consequences were dispersed in some sort of random reality

But no, justice would say this is not a weapon of mine,

Nor instrument of progression towards an intended outcome

This is cumbersome cubic abandonment in flat weight hurled and wielded

With devastating intent held in the hands of the rodent queen

So innocuous to public’s perception and thunderous in her private conceptions

Of reality like Raiden on hormonal swings I am scorched and reverberating the

Sizzle of segregation with steamed tears of a mistaken present

Her say affects my now every day and I don’t want it to.

Flogged Monkey

How I yearn for her arms like sheets of silk and a chest to lie upon

Like a cushion of time to hold her like cotton stitched in a towel of time

To wash away this insecurity of partiality of where the real me begins and the version

I must retort in courts of externally imposed postponed verbalization

Accuse me of being. 

To trust like a treasure trove of crystal-laced words

Of love and concern, reciprocal and symmetrical fragile and held in care

So unsure if that place will ever exist but in my own hope

And such fear of a vapid landscape to explore like a wanderer into a shadowed moor

Of crag and murk with soaked steps of regret knowing the banshee behind the shawl

With all her misplaced aggression, like I am some cursed monstrosity bellowing

At the nadir of our private moments a rage and a demand on our everyday

That her perception berates me into submission like a flogged monkey taught to fetch her playthings like prismatic chandeliers and white-painted porches with this canyon moat

To guard my entry from infecting their beauty. 

Back in the cage, and we will all be silent dictated from prissy privileged positions 

Faded Parchment

A decade to explain of where I went inside the silence

Of the parchment faded out with ink that isn’t linked to any

Varied color on the page, to leave each other with ghost like

Specters of decision to imagine where the other has been living

Inside of a movie of a present that has faded into a memory

You may never know or never show, but project up on the screen

Drive in theater of a labor of communication held out on mute

It may refute some fact we never saw all of that,

But at least I know it goes to show somewhere out in America

There is a girl on a beach on the Atlantic somewhere between

Florida and Maine, I have to train my radar of perception to detect in

To call out her fluttered name, and once a friend I’m trying to send

A reason for a crease in this emotion just a ledge upon a word

To hide a sliver of my sensation to allow for another turn

To tell you about my travels and live out where it matters

Come and grab me, come and find me or at least send a signal,

Like a flare that you are there inside a purple haze on a night sky

Sitting there by the shore line with a pinkish hue on the aura of the

Ring around the thoughts that I still exist in your stories like an

Adjunct sort of man somewhere mentioned, somewhere scripted,

But still necessary to your plan of life held out in logical equations

That to get to where you are I was a variable of need, without which

The path would fold out into a different place, a separate craft upon the path

That my words were of comfort, of friendship, of a sight that in that

Atlantic pathway hued in pink the color would not shine as bright

For my syllables had impact in a way I hoped they might, but

Alas I can not find you, the footprints of your name have washed away

I will write you in glassware, scrolled and corked and wait

Test Fire

A pass at mast held like a beacon for renegade love songs

Held out in teenage assembly high enough to ring notice

Like a newly elected cheerleader buzzing the hive of the

Hallway verb strung like a vibe between her and I

And if only I could reverberate the swarm like

A maestro on the maelstrom with the pulse in the pantheon

Of high school cock-strong and intertwined with the lines

That matter in the chatter, but all that echoes is silence

In the wave of a movement veiled in insecure protrusion

To know she notices some inflection in the way I pronounce her name

With inquiry and declarative stance simultaneous execution

Of statement in appearance in test fire just below the surface tension of the water

Firing ripples in her eye lashes like a brush of wind across the Kansas wheat fields

Like a match scrape flecks of black ignite in her iris in such a swelling sea of blue

A dilation detected and a boy abrupt enough to speak

Oral History

Anxious and full with a grunting pit bull belly

Ready to act and thrash in eloquent explanation of injustice

And ration out the retribution for false imprisonment

In lemon juice drops of sentiment peppered in memory

To draw out the ink washed into exile in her crocodile tears

On the parchment of an oral history, shared yet severed

Into a warzone with a third riche and my newfound swastika eyeballs

Barreling down on my own daughter to trample her spirit like a crazed automaton

Set on perpetuating isolation and stealing ice cream cones for sport

Hypocrisy expounds upon the annals of tempered reality

As I sit in my mummified silence waiting for a judicial appointment

To retort the asp and her twittering tongue entwined upon

The puppets of my unlawful relatives to cast me a bastard pariah

And all I want is a reprieve to have my child and see a life

In slalom of fatherhood and soloist echoed in transposition

Between the extremities of memory and the truth I know as a

Center line to guide the focus of my path upon a love for her

And all her innocence wrapped in the snow flakes of her humanity

I can not howl in vengeance or punitive movements to banish her mother

For abandoning our triad for this hybrid existence with her self-placed pedestals

To conduct the last nine months as an explanation of extradition of her soul from our marriage like a whisper on a pillow of a lover in the morning barking back death threats

In the full voice and tone of a lioness roaring for a mouthful of wide-eyed sockets of skull

To lick the blood from her lips and barge out the door to sleep in a new den

But I know my daughter needs her in her partitioned life, actress upon the stage

Saboteur and zealous sweetness icing upon the proving ground of pageantry for

Mother of the year and I will repress the albatross of resentment like an anchor

On the ankles of the fresh path that I must forge for a life anew

Basket Case

Up at the bat and it is stacked with sixteen strikes allowed for you

What is a man supposed to do when it is

One for me up at the mic and I’ve got the end in sight

Talk, talk, talk until it is time to walk to that courtroom and have

The world listen to you go on and on about what you fear

An innocent face with a bodyguard, why can’t you come in without the alarms

Going off blaring in the backgrounds, stealth fighters come in for a beat-down

Hand grenade in you pocket going to chuck it across the room

Slap in my lap, what’s wrong with you?

Destroy us all, decapitate the family, three-heads, just to constrain me

Out on a porch wrapped up in the issues, sticking to a liars nest of tissues

Crocodile, pan a smile and wipe away those cross tears

Crucify yourself to pander up false fears

You claim to have, in the net years you snared yourself

Marriage like a basket case to plant your image

Up in the vines of cables and chains, do you even have a footing to stake your claims?

That I was the boogie man.  I was the jigga-man crunching up the food supply

Crowding out any breath to survive, in this hostility fucked up humidity

You’ve got your head plastered in the clouds of a Cinderella dream

For your right to be happy, ever think a mirror had the view that needed to be slapped,

Please, thoughts on cracked, stabbed me in back with that rock of your finger,

Knocked me to the mat, Crunch me, scrunch me,

Pull your lip over your head wide enough to munch me, up in the belly of your

Asp-faced beast venom injecting to stutter my speech, Wiggle out the rigor

Brush off my shoulder, ah life in my hands you should have told her,  

Coming back from this mummy-time with my cross hairs crossed

Right left to your eyesight so look it up on the wall  

Projected up to all that the movie is playing in an Imax style

Seven-stories high with just one truth, this is when your chickens come home to roost

Squak, squak, squak, like a robot, lies you hatched have boomeranged back

I’m at peace to your passive aggressive war lingering penitentiary can’t hurt me any more

Hostility on a key ring to lock me out my own home, tell me again those vows I must have said on my own, you walked out, abandoned me and now you hold me hostage financially,

Up in the castle we built for you, sipping on a Sunday I carried you

Out of the waters of this vagabond storm, to rebuild a life on you Pa Pa’s old farm

Herd in the sheep and pin up the pigs you got mud on your dress and sin on your lips

Cuckold-a-doodle-doo, what’s wrong with you?

Did your mama every teach you how to lose?  

Keep your pupils up with the twinkle in your tiara, sight gone distracted because I think you broke some laws, huh? Legal system rules, but what about this family,

Is our daughter really going to believe you had to strand me? 

To save her little spirit lost up in the loam,

Dirt got flung on the walls of her own home,

So quick to disparage, pitch out this marriage, saying you’ve been struggling for years before the crash and why don’t’ I believe you, oh because I was there, to hear every word and carry every care in the halls of my heart like a petal on a pillow, but you burry your head like a rancid armadillo down in the dirt of a mound of hurt you’ve shit out yourself, yet deny you exert

Had to be me that took off the smiles like Mr. Potato head swapping out styles

Angry, Angry always trying to name me, Grendel-mental monster bound crescendo

Always asking, always passing the buck to me, honey why aren’t you happy?

And I tell you I am somehow in this dodo land,

Smiles never add up to the quota in your hand,

I trusted, must have, to keep my heart in park past, ten years no fears

That married life had put to rest my eyes for other skies

To go to sleep each night knowing I had found my pasture in the nape of your neck

Spoon like crescent moon holding my breath,

I had peace you’ve burned to solace of a one-sided love you’ve shredded to sawdust

Escape my caress with a Judas kiss, silver on a Bible in the living room

I know you missed the symbolism in the collision of them remnants of a life you were throwing away

Living alone in your palatial estate,

Rearrange the furniture and claim it an escape

Uh oh, he goes on through the window of time you had planned my demise

Only to see the flaws of your life out on display and now I can play out on my own and you can ramble on, but your message is starting to drone, on and on and on

Of hard times come and gone,

With my extraction you got a divisible fraction

Of one, one lady on a hill, with a pimped-out golf cart and mouth full of swill

So go play 18 holes all by yourself, get your own damn ball, because this caddy isn’t coming to help, no more dinners on a plate with a semblance of class, no breakfast in the morning or telling you your ass, isn’t that plump like truffle hunting swine,

You’ll need a little make up to get back on that line for some one to submit to all of your will to be the leader of the row boat at a stand still, How can you grow if you don’t let any body in?  How can you breathe if you blame me for all of your sins? 

Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to leave?

Why did you have to start a war when I only wanted peace?

Bunk Port

Do you know what’s waiting a mile off the shoreline?

What ships drift without sonar or sense of when the fog will lift?

In this bunk port town with hobo flash lights burning the night

Flickering remnants of messages sent but left in floating glass

Wondering what she might have said in response if full disclosure policies

Had been implemented when concern was still in the harbor

Like a naked child bemusing herself over playthings oblivious

As Eve and America’s pie there for her taking and she mashes it in malice

And chucks the chum into the harbor with red peels straggling

Of an uncooked ready-made meal and all I needed was a hearth

And time to scintillate the structure to expose the content

As sweet and warm and comfort expounded upon lips like

The mist lifting over this town and vision extended for decades

Through a collection of mirrors that gather light permitting the direct

Observation of distant objects in her hands of my ship sailing into port

But the hour has past and the wind has severed the mast

Like a match stick cracked in a failed ignition attempt

And the harbor is in slumber and my vessel is asunder

Out here on this odyssey with no home to return to

A wet deck, a maelstrom in sway and I will wait for the sky to part

Acacia

Run, run, and all the sum of these days piling up on my shoulders

Like the phantom image of you hunched over invisible but heavy

On my back like a caravan of regret and pent up mess of your legs

Entangled over my torso and asphyxiating my neck with a sadistic faceless glee

That you could stay with me despite my shakes and stutters to break the lines

Of where you and I entwined into one another as a one-of marching onward

Carrying and kicking sand frenetic to discard your dead-fish hands

Flapping against my cheeks as your skull knocks my ear lobe with nefarious placid energy glued on like a bullet lodged from time-bombed shrapnel clogged

Up in my bloodstream segregating the momentum of a completed circuit

Off I go and how I know I won’t ever get to go inside a tomb of us to exhume the

Rooted crux of why you anesthetized the body of our marriage left your half pale

And flaccid with my legs bowing out from the weight wanting me to crash it

Like a Hindenburg still deflating from where I thought you were leaving me with

A parasitic memory of a shell to contain your guilt like a moment of duplicity

And off the acacia flies exoskeleton into her southern night,

Antebellum porch retrained sipping her elixir’s deranged, she escaped this weight

Like fluttering wings and sent a solo explanation to hum the duet of a violin sting

In tune with the hum on a Louisiana summer night

From a cypress tree she was finally free

But memories are spectral and shift upon the breeze as I sped these steps to shed

The sentiment off like a crust of sawdust pulverized in time the bones of you

Remain inside your own body up on that porch stoic inside the part,

You’d rather forget, but calcify in time and broken in nine

The marrow infested with a hollow joy that an ersatz escape could not find

Magic Marker Jesus

I’ve got some false confidence bundled in a bottle

Knock it back and swallow all of that

Which makes you swell up inside to know everything is going to be all right

Tell you before you go to bed, let those dreams winter in your head

Government blanket parental arrangement

Marching in a voice of assumed production

Where is the purpose of consumption?

Give you a dead man’s name, chant the refrain

He’ll fix everything, because he’s got the magic name

Say it in consensus, wave your hands and pretend to bless

Your magic marker Jesus, speaking in permanent ink

No need to question as we’re on the brink

We’ve go magic marker Jesus, He’ll fix everything.

I’ve got some false confidence bundled in a bottle

Knock it back and swallow all of that

Which makes you swell up inside to know everything is going to be all right

Tell you before you go to bed, let those dreams winter in your head

Let the lemmings herd and roll, just tell me you’ve got it under control

Too many kids and too many bills, taxing out thoughts to quit assuming the will

Is there to overcome that collective blank stare

No body answers and no body asks

Magic marker Jesus tell me about your magical plans

In my own voice

Gorgan Mask

Convince me of an apparition

Squish my heart between your toes

With the permission of a jester in mage’s armor

Stomping off for a crusade for your father’s honor

Retaliate as if I were to commiserate the sentiment

Of your exit from pasture to battlefield

Light the fires of briars grown around your aortas

Ventricles pumping sewerage of blackened quotas

Measuring up equations of a vengeance exhorted

Upon our home, upon my name,

Paralyze my arms and put a sword in my hand

I will lay it down and pray for a divergent stand

To speak my voice and pray my task

That is not blood thirst but a broken heart

That raises my mast, on a mission of bloodied cheeks

I see your barrage.  I close my eyes and breathe

A charred smoke into my lungs, a shattered portal

For a man who has been stung by your lancing blows

Remembering who he keeps repeating he use to know

Out there on a blazing specter barreling down the bolts

To my open chest absorb it all, because I have nothing left

Martyr or pariah for my own nation, abandoned yet standing

And yet you question, if you really did hurt me

Even with the Gorgan mask, unfeeling bastion of certainty

That you are right and I am wrong

That because you could not open up, that my feelings were throngs

Of non-belief pent up in a box, false mistakes you could crush

Upon the rocks you would stone my name and face me with scribe

That you could re-write the years of our lives

With cannon balls and moon shots of fired-up charges

That my knees would buckle to your endless barrages

Of passive aggression with poisonous spines

Urchins buried in the dark corners of our life

Hoping to prick my temper abrupt to show the world

A monster corrupt, lashing out at an invented truth

I trust my patience and you will lose

Implant

Treading on liquid and looking back over the lake

I know I got here but did I walk across or have I sank

To the bottom in a hallucinogenic haze

Puzzling a past in fragments of days

I know I lived them but were they all misplaced

Until now looking in a mirror’s reflection of time on a beach

Sand and the grit of all these broken teeth

Lost ago and replaced implants

False bights too insensitive to detect what might

Be artificial sweeteners and a fractured life

Out there on the water like ice cubes bobbing

Has the solar effect melted the footing?

Lying here broken and wondering

Was there ever there something she could not live without?

Or was I always an accruement to an appendage

Dangling like a bracelet, optional for wardrobe changes?

Was there a space built forever to place a foundation

Insider her caverns of her life’s manifestation

Of a future, a home, a reliable partner to share like a bone

Of her body without which she crumbles

An organic machine grown out instead of constructed

Yet I feel like a jettisoned mechanic’s component

Replaced from a box, pumping on pistons while my

Old self continues to rot, out here on this shoreline

Without knowing the plot.

Yet I know as I stare into the impending show

Of dust and past of grains gone in miniature cyclones of sounds

Waiting on the breeze that one day with my gray hair

And one day where you are not there, but buried deep

I know my tears will not halt to weep for a part of you breathes in me

Even if it’s a place I would rather seethe in anger, bubble out and expel the stranger

Folded up inside my being interlaced with all I’ve seen

My child, my wife, the broken wings of my life

Crippled in a corner, longing for a former shoulder

To cry upon in tandem to have my words have a landing

As if there was some pebble of compassion still left in you

Of hardened love, of elemental proof that one day at one time

You loved me some place outside of mine

So in retrospect I move in sloth

To scavenge the ground for that pebble that I pretend is lost

And as my feet get rooted into this shore, I must implore

It is just another grain of sand, gone slipping through a water gloved hand

Incapable to hold because it has never known a place in real life

Our balance was imbalanced from the beginning

One girl taking and one man giving

Appreciation mystified and where was I to bellow the smoke

And hope the waves of you would wash upon my face

Refresh my faith in all the days I felt taken for granted

For a stepping stone never demands his

Day on top, and so I thought I knew you, love excused you

And know it is melted and I have felt it, your dribbled soul

That there was never much to you when I step away 

Pebbles in your pocket

Pray upon my words like breadcrumbs

That you were out there scavenging for sentiments unfolded

On hinges like a doorway properly oiled with an elixir of movement

Not contingent upon a stranger’s arrival but free

To welcome or to exit or to bolt again on whim

The lessons of yesterdays like pebbles in a pocket

Shiny, blunt or scabbed with rusty crusts of stone

Tendrils of differences wrapped like blankets of memory

Slow and polished with inexact chemistry

Potions and motions explaining purpose in movement

Unfurled like a daily desktop calendar with inked notations

Denoted expected actions and meetings

That may or may not have ever come to fruition

But there was hope, acceptance, and growth spread upon the pages

In candor and in time based in a life expounded in flesh and blood

I wish that my smile or scent had merged in a second gripped

Like magnetized inertia to capture the momentum of sane placement

Of kindness to split the silence between my knowledge of

The pebbles in your pocket like fresh marble wrappers unsheathed

In juxtaposed inquiry like napkins dried unfolded and used

To trade secrets and wipe away the fog of normal passers by

I will give you my name, my second grade year running out to recess,

My eight year old bike ride and eleventh grade prom night,

My studies and professions of lost faith and newfound solace in inner strength

With circles of glass and carnival dances unmasked

Knowing you are ready to listen with life’s discriminating balance

Assumption Combustion

Circling in supposition, hovering for a landing place

A runway amongst the traffic of honking goose-down accords

Soft in sight and commonly distant and taken

Fresh lips stuck to other moving men

An arm, a ring finger, a glance while standing alone

For a motion to the counterpart approaching

In my deaf silence with mouths undulating messages

Into smiles and welcoming kisses drenched in censure

To my approach of another shaken thought clenched

Under foot to stamp out projection into an open countryside

With a roadway and a passenger seat occupied

With the shoulder belt abreast in line to the curvature of

A sentiment expressed without sound belonging to another

But a sound heard inside my own eardrums

Bursting in connection that the radio had competition

But delayed landings continue as the weather dries out the winter’s grip

Fog shrouds the chatter hoping for a soap box

To stand before the spectators as applicants

To rip open the words inside rib cages

Like stretched plastic bags of frozen vegetables

Of concealed greens, yellows, and oranges pent beneath

The frames of commercial marketing and dietary factoids

To unleash the content of a soul’s story read out in the light of the sun’s caress

And a sorted placement could be arranged between

Strangers standing in silence to bask in such new-found nutritional content

To fulfill the famished with human knowledge of substance

Not bathed in glamour or candy-coated congealed fabricated frocks

But raw individualism stampeding outward with the tone of an open ended question

Perusing the concert halls of a previous alien’s identity

To channel Puccini and expand the embrace of a glance to entwine

The fingers of lips upon a shoulder to turn in correspondence

And welcome someone new into a life exposed

Three Days

Three Days in August and the sun melted the sky and so did I

Burst into droplets of a squished time frame

The weather dropped like an expired alarm clock

Ringing the tone of the debtor’s knell across skin and tax returns

Filings blurred across state lines, life altered in absolute collusion

Between water-logged suburban nightmares with grandmothers campaigning on rooftops

For a reallocation of governmentally dispersed orbital jetpacks

To fly right out of here with the haste of a buried assured future

Pummeled into the crater below heaped under mangled family wreckage

Of photo albums, roof shingles, and swollen purple appendages

Tied up by shoestrings to stops signs to keep the wake

From blurring the lines for gasoline and stability dribbling certainties

Over the sidewalk mapped out on Poseidon’s concrete

A trident breaching three-headed directions of family, funds and fear

In mangled nets of where to go from here

Fighting for justice from an indiscriminate enemy masked in

Insurance contract armor with molded speckled handshakes

Loneliness howls on like a Catahoula cur wandering

Beyond thunder or superdome scratching for shards of rotten

Freezer-discard under a felled magnolia with white petals floating

In drainage canals like a lotus primed for a harvest of hallucinogenic

Transportation into a Michalopoulos’ haze away from post-K

World into a second line of yesterdays marching on trumpet and snare drum swells

Of this mediocrity never fathoming the hell

Converging electrostatic storm fronts could twister

A city of families swirling down a sewer of mysterious pictures

Of our America out on display of flesh forgotten and human mistakes

Merging on a Friday evening after the fervor of the Ravens pecking the Saints

Many heard the first call to evacuate, some listened, some ignored

Waiting for morning and the call of the storm

Spread out like Armageddon riding the wind

Cramming and jamming a lifetime into truck-beds on highways

Contra-flowing into exile, a diaspora of sideways

Out into Omaha, Houston, and Camp Williams

A trailer, a prayer, and a catapult pulling decision

Flinging brothers from mothers and daughters from waters

Saturday’s gone sliding and Sunday’s done grinding

The coast of the gulf into a maelstrom of munching

Man’s housing crumbs on the Earth like crackers and fried chicken

Wood beams like toothpicks and roof shingles like napkins

To scrape the Chevrolets out her gum-lines and wipe the oil slick off her cheeks

Gulfport’s gone missing and Long Beach is long gone and

Sunday night has grown far too dark, but the City of New Orleans is still humming along

Despite the sway, the levees they stayed and in came Monday morning

A crack severed the bane of thousands of stranded in an out of the ring

Man’s failed attempts could not hold back this mosquito’s sting

And swell-up she did like a witch’s cauldron’s crab boil

The sheetrock, the groceries, and wedding albums started to spoil

Mixed in the dirty water the trees they all died

As Lakeview was renamed Oceanside

Complete with a garbage mountain five stories high

The helicopters plunked concrete back in the hole

As man tied to pump out the waters without extracting the soul

My city she lived in a million hearts

Dispersed on a cut close line in ten million parts,

Puzzles of pieces mildewed on a table

How will we reconnect a distorted face? How are we able?

To see a new future, to feel a fresh Brees

Without twinge of fear to take it with ease

That life could rebuild, with out recurrence

Of Kiltz-ing and Clorox and hammer to nail

What if the winds re-blast the sails?

What if my heart can’t make this bail

Again to expunge out the water and wait out the flood

What if my family just wants to run?

Abandon my home, my neighbors and friends

What if Dorothy has no place to come home again?

Living a lie out there in Texas

Our Lady of Prompt Succor please protect us

I pray to you now alone and a part

That reason can crawl out from under this wreckage

To shoot like a bean sprout with tendrils bearing a message

Of charity of man and trust in the stance

That the audacity of hope may map out a plan

To see human beings raw and exposed

Flaws and strengths in scars juxtaposed

White unto black and night into day

Comrade po-boys united for a collective innocent’s debt to pay

No body meant this or did this to us, but we are the owners of a heart and a love

Beaten and bruised barely conscious flopped on the ground

Gurgling the rising waters hearing the sound

Of Mahalia like a beacon marching the saints into heaven

But we have work to do before we can join them and share in

The joys of re-joining that holy choir

Now is the time to replant the flowers

My letter to Katrina

Sometimes I blame you

You inanimate twisted fcuk

Logic tells me there is no reason to use reason

To even consider the ramifications of your arrival

In the time frame of my existence as a personal vendetta

Or even a minor inconvenience compared to the massive

Level of clustered tribulations and overall bad ass cock-sucking rampage

You have besieged all the homeless, dead, and vagabonds

Left in your wake, however as a personal matter of selfish retribution

I would like to inform you that you suck.

You suck a sewerage pipe full of donkey shit intermixed with

Strands of discarded Aids’ patient syringes and clumps of home made

Child pornography video cassettes pumping out into Puget Sound

Choking orca and baby sea lions while spawning salmon give up

There kamikaze reproduction quests at the repugnance of your rancid stench

You are the chill on the skin of goose bumps rising in unison

On a mother clutching her infant child lost in the wilderness

As she is surrounded by a pack of starving wolves

Growling and circling a step before pouncing on her jugular

And the limbs of her newborn being torn apart like a rag doll.

You are the sound of laughter of a renegade pack mentality third grade classroom

Generating the crescendo of twenty-one eight year olds detecting the

Discoloration of khaki to dampened brown in the groin area of a little boy

Ignored by his math teacher that relieved himself in his own pants

Out of imprisoned frustration, ineptitude and embarrassment of nobody

Coming to help or allowing him to help himself.

You are the texture of an ass zit on Godzilla spewing acid saliva

Foaming at the mouth to devour a bus full of school children and nuns

On a field trip to see a play about the life of Mahatma Gandhi

That explodes out puce pasty puss in dump truck loads

Leveling the rafters of an orphanage and suffocating the survivors

In a bath of steaming lizard pimple slime that

Will cover the town in Bhopal-mold for the next decade.

You are the taste of the inner spasm of a bifurcating bacteria spore

Straddling a scrap of molded appam crimped under the gutter of an open

Air human waste drain laid out in the belly of Mumbai

That six starving slum-dogs fight over to consume

You are the sound of a thousand lies to a dedicated spouse

To cover up sexual infidelities

With the fifteen year old next door neighbor and seventeen different random acquaintances across the stitch-work of a marriage

Including a waiter at T.G.I. Fridays

That has anonymously transmitted

The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Across inundated impaled blood cells in a belated re-assurance encounter

During a Sunday morning church service to cover up the flood of prior transgressions.

You are the smell of the back of a 1982 Ford Fairmont of discarded

Burger King bags and mashed cigarette buts as a fourteen-year old

Girl from Kismet Kansas loses her virginity to the thirty-nine year old

Manger of the Dairy Queen name Raymond Blanco.

You are the movement of a needle injecting Mifepristone

Prompting a botched abortion attempt

On a third trimester child that is later strangled in a biohazard bag and

Hidden on a rooftop screaming to his own death in Hialeah Florida

You are the sound of a fourteen-year old boy named George

Who snagged his scrotum in his zipper,

Opening the door to the bathroom and calling his step-mother for assistance as the rest of his family walks in the front door from soccer practice.

You are the sound of finger nails scrapping bloodied concrete

Amongst a heap of intermixed soon to be deceased

Occupants of Dachau screaming out during the process of execution

Clamoring in stutters of broken Hebrew for God’s grace

Only to be drowned out by the laughter of indoctrinated Nazi bellows.

You are the sadistic grin on a lunatic named Dick tailgating an ice cream van

Patrolling a neighborhood, lurking and pouncing at the moment

A huddle of six-year olds lunge for their first bites into mutant ninja turtle popsicles

Only to push the midgets over to steal the frosty-stick reptile-replicas

Extracting a chomp from each frozen-head and smash them into the summer concrete

Just to see little faces cry thus scarring them from ever entering a

Baskin Robbins or a PETCO.

You are the smell of smoldering flesh in Hiroshima of melting newly-made orphans

That will grow up without parents and missing limbs and mandibles that will die of incurable cancer at the age of twenty-three absent of faith in humanity and always questioning why they couldn’t have just perished in the fallout

You are the sight of a wall of water barreling down a suburban thoroughfare

Chugging like a liquid juggernaut to leap up porch steps and pop windows like eggshells

To create blocks of pure humidity to turn photo albums into toilet paper

Prompting geriatric hold-outs to hike attic ladders with hammers to hold on rooftops hoping for a blind-eyed cavalry

You are the crest of a four-story wave arching with an engulfing claw

To drag everything but the slab into oblivion

Scattering random remnants of grocery bags and pajama pants to

Settle in the branches of two-story tree canopies as the tide subsides

You are the sight of a closing door in a thousand families broken apart

Because dreams were crushed under the pressure of your alterations

And tossed into a swirling toilet bowl of a future dammed to live on the cusp

Of Sisyphus style endeavors hoping upon hope that the boulder would just crush them.

I hate you for making us move and uprooting our little life.

For forcing no win decisions and promulgating suicides in drenched living rooms

And you are just water vapor moving in concert and speed without soul

Without remorse and in the cyclical silence you disappear

In a hit and run without exchanging insurance information

So yeah, you suck.