Crow and Owl

Night was a novel wrapped in a whisper

Sinking six hours to emit past two a.m.

Staring eyes to the ceiling, head to the edge of stairs

Tumbling towards the ecstasy of reverie

As if this emission never happened in but a dream

Alice floods the room and sails in sight

Through the doors blind knowing that the sheets are white

The dodo bird flies to the shore rotating counterclockwise

The cogs inside like a bank time release

Vaulted oven the baker’s scent seeps through the crease

Spoken and folding the flour to return to silence

Time to raise yeast set the gluten aside to not stretch the strands

Too quickly in the batter’s arrangement in wheat

The sugar intoxicating alcoholic seeds

Root the bar top in a column

Constructed here like an ancient

He rings the doorbell like Jason for the fleece

Knocking and the rabbit’s hound barks the gate

Hers is trained, wouldn’t be so out of control

Going out and she is in the blind

His red t shirt looks to him like a rag to wipe his face

As she looks like a 1920’s Clara in a bow wrapped and damn

Off to fly the maple’s leaf on oak to park in a church

If she knew

Only an anecdote not needing an antidote

Walking for a dance hall crash and the vibe is slowed

The old man’s bar is asking for a conversation in the haze

Of Tom Waits ghost wishing he was in New Orleans

But this is smoke-free waterhole week

The garbled haggard emphysema petri dish for the sidewalk gawkers

Is but mist like a mannequin in a street window

Busing in some garbage for hipsters to ogle on their way to Jacques Imo’s

Tonight he and her draw circles, two centers with expanding perimeters

Evaluating what to do with the areas of over and not lapping 

Thankful each it taking time to sip because the shotgun sex in the air

Might drown the roots in too much too soon

She starts to count to six from two and how she prepared for the worst

Offenders in the system, bribed in some shoes or just a guard’s mistake

Sliced down a man and she watched the reel that these

Were the men she was to deal

Preparation for the limitations of the police

Coming to enforce the priorities

Of breasts and boudoir founded in her quests

With Joplin’s lover as her dance-mother doubled over from the bayou

Trumped like every story has a twin, parallel world to another within

Mothers, fathers, sisters, selves, asking, dancing, muting, tells

As if she was doing this or that on Bourbon poking the tension

Seeing her curl her feet inward in his kitchen

The three hundred pound blues guitarist and the hyper white boy on keys

Covering funk with a sparse audience that she sees, cannot dance

With an authority that makes him want the darkness

To conceal his arms and legs, as shoe heels and accustomed angles

Are on the verge to appear halfway ridiculous and the ball of energy

For a drunken piano was just that, awkward

Because he knows by the way she stands, walks, and glides

That she just might eat him alive

And his toes feel out of practice like wizened heirlooms of folk tales

Of wanting to see that air of understated empathy that he knows is in her

But he’s wary of women pulling the rug and the rabbit hole underneath never stops falling

For arms up above, mind gone into the blackness    

Pausing confident like that column knowing she does not have to be a writer

He does not need to be dancer for the world to make sense

He smiles like an early bird meeting a night owl like his lady hawk

A wolf in the dark howling for Ginsberg, Howl! Howl! Howl!

She’s a living-dare, walking-muse and she knows it

From the way she’s been used

He’s a living poem taking her home with a transparent window

He set the old fashioned glass two nights ago to simplify

Where his priorities lie

As if even words in context look like potential cutthroats

In plain sight

So he accelerates on the interstate in a quiet pulse hand on her leg

That he knows she knows the line where this night will not go

Because he set it, because she needs it too, doesn’t want to say the words

But appreciates his terms, so she can have the freedom and vulnerability

To be of all things, female

Pulling in the collages begin

Of dirty laundry on the wall and roaches scurrying

With nutrients and recipes like an alphabet

The turtle’s shell and circumstantial evidence

She soaks in that non-feedback way like a professional

For the football and the magic, the father leading the baseball alumni

To the music of black and white, jazz and stained gray carpet midnights

She retreats to the intersection of shadowed corners under the stairs

Like a lure for that moment where he will let the waters settle in non-speech

To pounce in the pull of a tiger to a tigress in the glade about the voyeur pane

Where she can look out and see it all coming

Finding intimacy sequestered

So that he will never look at that alcove of his home the same again

Below where something use to hang on the wall tumbling into forget

The cool darkness swallows him in like delightful madness in the maw

Of the universe crafting felicity in the bite of the vampire

Away to be something else

Like a clown fish pulled into the anemone he was built to take her sting

He asks if she wants to take the secret mystery stairs

She sees his novel like a beating heart behind glass open for surgery

Depending on the sentences where her eyes rest

Poems from 2010, the paint in blue lines and thirty-three colors

The symbols and words pair like Jungian archetypes

Above a weight bench, a computer and quotes from captains

She sinks to read, he points out his father’s favorite Nietzsche

Not upset for the lie, but that I can no longer believe you

E.E. Cummings sets her head to that hard pillow at the stair

He rambles in the slow shadow of how like an animal she finds her spots

Like a vagabond on the move finding fresh shelter each eve

In the torpid pace she breathes, “I am going to be vulnerable now.”

Childhood there were moments, but it was hard, pretty bad

Sure he had his, others, but she had hers

Maybe in love once, after that no

Dated men and women, they always wanted things

To change her or pull her like an interesting creature

Jean Grey like the Phoenix always in other people’s minds

Fire in her own, a burst, light the inferno to ashes

Because these tethers feel like immolation

When someone tries to wander in, unprepared, uninvited,

The house burns and she does not do well in the domestic, residential stereotype

Suburbia and its Jesus left for a spirt and a magic in the night

He thinks of thunder road and a graduation dress in rags at her feet

Of a girl wanting to be stripper like just what she was built to be

Beautiful and others want her, but she does not want them

That second part is segregated, emotions in a capsule like a split cache blunt

Callus staring at the world like a straight shot of whiskey

Burning gut, not cutting the liquid, full, the way life is

Prison cell or bar room, stage or patient’s face

Some people are lost causes can’t save them 

She wonders if she’s harsh; he just tells her empathetically

Some people can see the darkness like an aura on everything mixed with the light

Other can’t, when you see it, you can never go back to not seeing it

Real responses, pragmatism, truth: the best dirty words

Flooded in sunlight, some go blind, others stare into the star & say, “Is that all you got?”

Enough, pausing reveal, tired and a look to the watch

Marshmallow sheets and a pillow reprieve

She sinks the ivory and mingles with the blur of portraits

A lot of Picasso and art history feels like one of her pheromones

Buzzing his olfactory at how real a moment Frida Kahlo could have

Grown from the Earth in a full body cast

Where has she come from; relinquishing herself to stay over

Like permission that this might not end in a bus wreck

Texting sure her roommate knows, the way women do and men do not

Worries vary with what’s exposed just for walking down the damn street

He thinks, my God her body, but wants her to hear it in his eyes

In some foreign tongue 

He readies the blanket of night’s shroud; pulls the lamp

Nakedly endowed for a moment that she does not want him to see

Like a most beautiful un-dare it be conscious compliment

An audience may look, but that is not her, this is

A bareness maybe she has not felt in a while

Like the scent of a complement she wishes to preserve

Before the winds carry the permission she has given herself

To experience this, to open up and be, away

Swaying the press of skin like medicine and felicitous sincerity

Hinting something has him and her acting on the verge 

Hitchhikers on the road Kerouac’s searching for an engine  

Could the page turn; the man without a net learned long ago to let it be

He places his leg below her knees and cradles in

Glides his fingers across her back, pressing firm in alternating currents

The sun, the hours pass in a lazy Saturday morn, the flowers’ stems appear

He thinks of the thousands of words he wants to share

She says she likes to pinch and grab

Named after a song that is not even good

He used the word volition three times before the crow

Wary of anything everyone else seems to like

A person should always have a few enemies even theoretical

Like Jay-Z, Elvis, or Mother Teresa

Standards are important otherwise

We’re all popping bubble gum at funerals

She said she liked that he did not misspell words

And juxtaposed the responsibility of breakfast preparation

He smiled about how all the moving boxes have been picked up

She said she is very big on rules and wraps her hair around her finger

He thinks he failed school yard

And wants her to pull him out of his own head

She jokes why he is so serious like a bubble releasing as his insight into her registers

So he cuts a violet flower bloomed from a seed to match her dress

She asks how long he was married

And he cannot begin that sentence because the morning

Has rolled and the time of the question after will fold into fissures

Of time better for a morrow and she

Has yet to verbalize she was married at all

She knows he reads and that is all that need be said for now

Kindred and love is not forced or chosen it is a reaction

To the stimuli based on a path we choose (in steps)

For two birds to fly