Song for the Black Moon

Surrounded by dying, death, and dementia you
still set the coffee up: black roasted beans give
a smell of normality. Another dawn breaks new
to wind chill choke the rose-fingered will to live.

Who the fuck knows? Dinner about a lover spurned
is tender and not right but kofta spiced right amuses
his tongue, distracts an opiated sordid story earned
by drug fueled tales of blackly hid nostalgic abuses.

Life goes on. Salt-crusted cars in a parking lot, muted
colors in a winter palimpsest. Wiper fluid perks alert
and then subsides into normality. Tight pixels booted
into view: a half-full bucket with a joyed white squirt.

It's the month of the black moon: inside, gray stairwell
landings are already cracked sole outside a tolling bell.

Chet Baker rhapsody

The night after the morning of the day before closes
in blue wisps that can only be grasped in moonshine,
ghosts trail pinkies across a dim sky that dimly refines
night following day. A smoke ring drifts past red roses

and bounces across her chest. Is it only a blue dream?
In summer there is white longing to visit peaks remote,
to pause before the vastness of valleys that, open, seem
to invite a gasp. In the kitchen, pears brown in compote

are at an ecstatic bubble. Vanilla ice cream on the marble
counter softens. A chickadee begins that familiar warble,

almost blue. Almost doing the things we used to do.

There was a place called nice before the bells

Rosy pink limbs contorted at grotesque angles
the hound of bells lopes in circling arabesques
narrowing the confines of a dark heavy prison.
The arms and legs are leaden, the air trapped:

A pot-bellied man with one crossed eye under a trilby
smokes, self-satisfied, a foul and cheap cigar, smugly
confident that his disfigured wife will always obey-
a melted duck ornament fell from the festive stove
and burned her neck and shoulder. Childless she remains.
He walks the blue streets alone, out of place and grand.

The hound of the bells brooks no dissent in pink
limbed contortions, their wet snarling corrals all
the heavy inmates into a tiny inner hellish grove
where blinded the baying echoes from the blank fog.

Those Locrian chords bellow distant. Thin man.

From start to

The darkness feared is the darkness pursued in claret's
deep scarlet legs sanguine, a stemmed bowl also light
and shimmering stands collapsing in reflective sunset,
gray smudges heralding the inevitable escape of night.

It's hard to remember there was a meadow passerine
when everything is broken: the maiden corrupt in blue
and the crone coruscating in a thread-bare robe lined
with tissue shreds. I had once had dreams uplifting too.

I want to ball my fists hard into my armpits and fly away
or gnarl my hands and play the gargoyle cloaked in nice.
In soft breathing she dreams of leading the child to play
through sleet snow in a grey granite quarry clothed in ice.

Bring me the Russian hat lined in fur, my head is cold,
and I'm worried about the marinade.

We laughed, she didn't

Purple purple hills rise above the daily quotient,
little peaks of man-made spires grouse through
bare trees in winter just past white solstice now
silent still like an old song promising redemption

but there is no redemption now only icing white
on a cake that will soon collapse upon itself
complete. Not as bad as it seems, celebration
often lifts the mood, always creates a moment

of noise profound in its distraction. We blow the
noisemakers to confound the laughing children
in a closet with two sliding doors, mayhem from
the packaged diapers strewn on floors, blowing

a cheap plastic horn to torment one gleeful sleeper
on a tan bear stuffed, a purchase that annoyed her.