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
