Circular in the slow wake, head
hazed and day gazed
At the length of patients rotating
like talking-ghosts
Who speak into vaulted ears
sequestering secrets in a keeper more serious than black
So that days stack a library of
restricted volumes
Exiting a car for a watcher at the
door, noting the mental cloud
As a cushion in the lack of
initiating a physical touchstone to begin the evening
She walks around the passenger door
in the absence inquiring about coffee
He measures the space of that place
he has so often been
Where his body is standing,
traversing and yet contemplating an equation
Outside the present requiring a
reset acquaintance
To be in the moment and not in the
mind’s maze
As Glasser breaks choices, thinking
is labyrinth
Feeling is a thermometer and doing
is the catalyst for lightning to enliven growth
Where are we going again; asked like
a conifer descending its seed to soil
In time where we were once before
just a bit further on up the road beyond the levee
To see rebel souls and search for
the sustenance of New Orleans
Ticket lager on credit like
recognition of appreciating accountancy
In golden liquid circles recycling
paths for fold-out thrones to purview the Mississippi
Serenaded by brass blown denizens of
the night daring like immaculate vampires
To show outside of comfortable zones
of beginning before the bewitching hour
The orange sun sinks behind St.
Louis Cathedral and a casino
Where the gamblers parade and
dancers convene
Speaking of a cannabis cup
overflowing for a place a body prohibits return
Thinking of his brother leaping off
a stairwell and speaking in tongues
Years apart and the stories behind
the stories we are telling and hinting
Implications in what is and is not
mentioned
Like a remnant of Catholicism
strangling self prohibitions inking his skin
In the juxtaposition of atheist
years struggling with the gravity
Of objects adjusted by the pull of
one distant passing the other
Catapulting slings of every
experience leading to this instant
Placing this capsule and that as
such to alter the outcome of eternity
In forces behind the paradigm of
conscious light
Sparkling John Lennon and imaging
the rebellion between a girl and her mother
Of being told what might be if she
only applied herself, underachieving tattled tale
In a doppelganger career paired
between science and art, listening and dancing
In a two-sided war of the self
Drinking in the silent sky above the
banks like juiced nectar paired daily
To permit a full meal of uninhibited
volition and today she is indulging twice
As if the very act to imbibe this
moment is a measure of relinquishing control
I ask her if she loves herself
The personal like a pull-chain lamp
from the sunset to the darkness on the edge
Of a gargantuan oak enduring the
electric lights of man
She said she is scary; the tree
wants the sanctuary of the night’s veil
The aroma of what fear is wafts as
if this bubble of potential affection
Whispering into a room of
requirement may fall to the realities sitting
Like an army of clay soldiers behind
doorways
That if he sees the scars striped
against their cheeks or from their swords he will run
And that moment of vulnerability as
if such departure would transfer
From ambivalence to salted
melancholy may have begun to already pass
Lit like a wick sparking adrenaline
as his foot presses the gas pedal
In the roaring fervor of merging
lanes she set a fire as Springsteen beckons
Her music is plugged in past Antony
and the Johnsons metric
To measure where this is and may
become as the buildings burn
The night air piercing a mirage of
Auburn next and week of a daughter’s encampment
He has to see her
And her body feels like a catalyst for
lightning
Battling a war of day and night
seeking a time to let another in or not
God banging at the gate all at once
numb to the mosquito’s blood letting
Skin so soft and his mind wanders to
what monogamy means to him
As sex licks the air like a feline
arching her back purring
For the touch of the night in firm
hand bracing the nape
The world sinks away off her feet to
always see words behind his looks
Golden shoes bricked in exposed skin
for blooming petals calling one to live
The painted bear crawls out of
Houma’s hibernation to claim her place
Intelligence beyond the jeopardy of
her father’s trivial pursuits
In an ACT score and what constitutes
a woman defining who she is
Beyond swamp or desert, river or a
stage’s inherent mask
Singing like a vocalized hope beyond
the line
That the glitter and the nudity
costume the place others
Are not allowed more so than any
business suit
The intimacy of what he may see that
others may not
Disturbs her gravity of
contemplating adjusting a path
Of filled in days and nights,
juggling the spectrum of two lives
Encapsulated in twin naps and ten
watches to keep the time
Batteries exhausted and in between
the lines of speaking in the river’s curve
Boarding the freight of
contemplating his eight to five
He thinks maybe she is changing and
that startled bit afraid
Emotion like a root the priest and
Edmond Dantes spot tunneling out the Chateau D’if
Before the roof collapses and in the
crush the Count of Monte Cristo becomes a possibility
Willing to risk death in the bag of
a dead man’s passage into the sea
The sun beyond the stone, the bird
in the unreachable window
If only humans had wings and yet
kisses in the moonlight are given to fly
He knows neither has to know; just
hold on and see where this goes
If she is monster than maybe he is a
monster too
Waiting like her animus and his
anima to settle the beauty and the beast
Unconsciously awakened contemplating
release
