Sunday, September 19, 2010

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.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

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.






Monday, September 6, 2010

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.