the stuff that dreams

Was it in a nightly rite of purple pique

that the wobbly stanchion light was lit

and gilded with a thin taut elastic strip?

Perhaps this was only light for quiet eyes.

So easy to be fooled by the early rings

of baked and boiled dough, day old moldy

but flash frozen first or so it's come told:

kinky perks, smoky karaoke in night's pane,

she tapped with evaporated paint exhaling,

that it's its own guard for an evening stance.

At Last was echoed through the rabbit count,

sweeping, dissipated, with incidental focus,

prone with one leg straight, one knee akimbo

to sail past yesterday and tomorrow's swirl,

unafraid to mark that evening sky as brilliant

in an inner teeming puddle of startled starlings,

where certainty is assured by uncertainty

and that feeder flock full of noisy finches

brings ripened grains fully chocked of nijer.

The slap of time that excites the nose

whispers go, little redwing, flutter past

the bales of dried grass that seeded winter

through the squawky radio static of geese-

it's hard to really see with eyes sewed shut

there is no way to crisscross court the warmth.

A good-looking man in tan pants and a blazer

enters the hive of commerce briskly strapping

with our Mary of the holy sporting harness

in the middle of a sacred sandwich half and

half again you can smell the perfume of ecstasy

and rejoice and let us squirt, again exhausted.

Thinking of dogs and a blackbird appears

prompting a peripheral pump of adrenaline-

this was not what we expected in early race

a chignon of meaning that almost teases time,

the roar of the manila leaf bag drifts into sky

past where is parked the crap-mobile this time,

not lashed by hair outside the serene call of nylon

repressed desire resolved in tinting windows rolled

begalia pollen a mark that is always washed away

it starts to get interesting right about now-

done in by ruminating ovine, moon equipped

and no longer sanctioned by a state of grace

he officates from two wheels screeching rust,

available inside delivery and liftgate service

sensing movement where there is none, whoa,

and a feathered fight for the last french fry.

To be the possum unloved by many at sunset

with a slinky tail that can prove delightful

but only when it's crepuscular and easy.

the prospectus is inscrutable

There is a smudge on my glasses

inside the dreams of the flower nod

which provides the landscape I need

as I imagine a foil scar on my left cheek

to enhance my appeal with the court

in a rebirth of the cool that occurs

three hundred years too late.

A model lighthouse in the front yard

of a Cape Cod fifty miles from the ocean

does not make me smell salt air.

If you want to get all brass tacky about it

I don't really care.

I practice the high art of giggling

at a point far removed from the whine

of pool filters in the morning.

The touch of my penis feels good in my hand.

I am a semi-animated object

barely aware of my own motivations

unable to escape things that are black and yellow

and all that remains is a figment

to be pawed and prodded in imagination only

no less visceral than the now

littered with carcasses at regular intervals.

What the mockingbird told me

is good enough for me.

The prospectus is inscrutable.

A bird chirping once is the sound of eternity.

I am the faint cosmic giggle of an unproduced producer.

a near catastrophe in mild blue

A burlap bag taut on a bony rack

awful parched and scratchy brown

jonesing for a warm rain's slake,

he was a sisal sack of unhappy tack

when I chanced on him that summer,

his pithy brick grafitti combed over

a stenciled canvas of regular weave

with a misty green branding muttered

through the gone meander of himself.

After calling for the quench he craved

overlapping ripples from silver drizzle

plinked on a puddle in the shallow rain,

and I looked down at my own damned feet

scraped leather telescoped a mile down

splashed clean despite roccoco splatter

in the muddy district of stucco walls

where two brooding chalk eagles

proudly guarded the cute nausea

of embracing faux patina twins

tinkling on kissed pink blossoms.

None of this was or is to scale,

he was a bitter pill in a bitter shell

behind the kitchen curtains daily

a shadow hinting at the blackened sheen

of biscuits from the oven crumbling.

Which was mystery and which explained?

Be happy, be joyful a mantra

of another kind of scarlet death

in the data points that mattered

through the rasping of his noise:

and I never crossed with him again

except years later in a buzzing dream

while dozing on a warm park bench

when I chanced upon that beveled glass

and whispered three short phrases.