a wink of memory

These tales she tells are as real as rainwater under the next day's sun,
and still she tells them anyway

the way a film developer flips through your pics and imagines being there

except these pics are too volumnous for one head to hold
so she selects the grandest three - the water buffalo, of eating discolored apples,
ordering buttermilk because she loved its two ingredients -
and repeats them like mantra

for she knows memory is fallible
for a long time she held grandfather's scent
once lost it could not be relearned

hence each telling of each tale reminds her anew
of our lie that humans have roots

jinmen 1978

footsteps echo through
dank caverns lit by lonely bulbs
that played off the eddies in these

canals beneath jinmen island
where ships once hid in caverns
and shells contained leaflets

of propaganda for fatigued sons
of the ones who built the caverns
and knew that bombs would fall

every monday wednesday friday
and in turn sent out shells on
tuesday thursday saturday

to tell the other side about 'jinmen'
just as the artillery shells addressed
themselves to 'citizens of quemoy'

What Che Never Did

Revolution leaves holes and
trenches once packed with earth.
Then the fun begins
as those who dug decide on
how to fill these sudden spaces.

Lagoon

I wonder what happens when what
we imagine does not manifest,
shriveling without warmth and withering,
neural tree limbs gone unwatered and
gray yet hanging in the air, still.

If dead thought sprouts dead limbs
then there's work to do in metaphor:
revolution a hole in the ground
freedom your average bird without wings
and hate springs from nothing but a flower

The wind blows west across the sharded
beach on which I sit and think and ruminate of
the heavens, with trees not birch but palm and earth
not stone but sandy. A rounded dream-piece
catches my eye and on buckled knees
I reach down, down to where fingers brush
against the earth and its grit worms
into the gap between nail and index finger

as I bend the end of it and encircle my
geological find, this oval worn smooth by waves,
in the crook of my index finger,
taking care to keep my thoughts as my arm
extends, the rock skips away, another dream
sent skipping atop the tides.

Revision

What to say about revision?

Revision wakes up day after day and tries to do better

Revision will know where this poem begins - and ends

Revision re-writes to be re-read, says Andre Gide

Revision moves your pen like a Ouija board

Revision turns a pet
into a dog
into a retriever
into a Golden Retriever
into Molly, whose golden coat was so lustrous
that you almost forgot her breath smelled like
the steaks you left to thaw on the counter

Revision is Emmanuel Kant claiming that man
is the only animal that strives for perfectability

Revision wears out pens and makes you reach desperately for
Post-Its and bar napkins all in pursuit of
the most slender sentence
the most on-point clause
the most perfect word

Revision does not replace 'defiantly' with
'definitely': that's editing

Revision brakes and swerves to avoid
a crash on the causeway the same way it
hunts down fallacies in a research paper

And not revising is perilous - it produces
marriages to the same bastard who hit you
before, lifeless classrooms,
forty year old boxers who refuse to
retire, and Danielle Steele

Revision sends you to a place you didn't know
existed, into an abyss to fight the
leviathans inside your own mind

Revision does not apologize because it knows
what comes next is best

Revision pulls soda cans out of garbage cans
to turn that 'fixer-upper' into a
brand new house

Sometimes revision flings your pen
across the room in agony . . . go pick it up . . .
revise some more

Revision sails out of the harbor and into the
horizon with no idea of where it's going and
a two-day ration of corned beef hash

Revision fails like every single one of Thomas Edison's
light bulb experiments, crossing out and trying again
and then the bulb lights

Revision bites the nails of complacency

Revision is your yo-yo diet, the crush whose eye
you cannot catch, the loose tooth you just have to
wiggle, or that spark in a dreamer's eye,
way
way
past midnight

Revision changes the sparkplugs in your car and
the light bulbs in your apartment - unless you
want to not move and sit in darkness

Revision cures boredom, wears a cape,
and fights cancer with a single stroke
o' the pen

Revision breaks your heart because you know
in your heart that your favorite line, like your
old shrunken jeans, just has to go

Revision keeps every single draft and
every single journal entry so when it reflects
it will be amazed by the journey

Revision is a wide-eyed spectacle:
a child's first circus

Revision is writing

Revision is life

Revision is

Chinglish Clumsy Love Poem

Duimian de taitai kan guo lai,

zai taiyang de xiamian. Women

zai tiaoqu when the moon

rises, zai tiaowu when dew beads

on our cheeks and in our eyes

because woman tiaowu le, we

have lived another night

together

bone and sinew

it is very very hard to bleed upon a page because you
must be willing to apply the knife to your own skin
with the right amount of force a pressing which neither
gores nor scratches but slices clean through so anyone
who desires to peek can see just what is in there clear as
bone and cut as sinew and then truth has to ooze up in these
patterned little drops to represent what made you write this
truth in the first place a truth that whirs through you
as you lie in your own skin on your bed in the cool of darkness
and reconcile the world to the rhythm of your beating beating
heart

Balance

perches atop a fulcrum

in skin-tight leather which may or

may not shield it from the

reckless rocks of the road

and seeks only not to fall off

the Harley

Rotisserie Chicken with Roasted Vegetables: A Rearrangement

Preheat the
oven to
400 degrees.
Remove the woody
ends of the
asparagus by gently
bending each stalk until it
breaks (it will naturally)
snap off at the
right spot.

In a baking dish, toss
the vegetables
with the
olive oil and
season with salt
and pepper.

Roast for twelve to fifteen minutes,
until the vegetables have a
light
brown
crust.

Serve ----------------------- Reserve the
half ----------------------- other half
the vegetables --------------- for
with the chicken and a -------- later
simple mixed- -------------- in
greens salad tossed with ------ the
oil olive & vinegar ------------ week

Nausea

staggers sideways through the doorway

oblivious to the black ties and table placards

and hurls on the maitre' d

Imperfection

totters into the picture

with olive slacks pulled to the sternum

and tufts of hair sprouting from its ears

Balances: What I've Learned From Tim Rich

with each breath
Tim is always
balancing

as we juggle our spouse
against our daughter(s)

or one set of tasks
against another
(only to fill our balance sheet)

eight ounces of water
to a single scoop of truth

or rearrange the couches
so granola heads can hold hands

and recently I've been thinking
whether he's trying to show me something

'cause my wife and I used to hang all night
and pursue the dawn together

and now I started
(as a reaction to what I've seen)
to move toward
the pleasure of such messiness
against the sting
of being alone

-- with apologies to "Balances" by Nikki Giovanni

Sorrow

shuffles into the bus station

wearing hand-me-down jeans

and takes a bench as a pillow

a thought

Sidewalk chalk equals YouTube for children. And the Net is their CNN.

The Trance of Habit

Japanese has this word, kaizen, that tricks you
the way the air holds water. You wait, it hangs,
the storm clouds accelerate or dissipate but
don't propigate a drop.

My friends fall into patterns, superstitions
no different than shrinking from black cats or
wiping your inner screen of them, circling you,
mewling before you.

Both confuse move with improve - the way
a derrick rigs, a piston fires, up and down.
Up and down. Up and down.

When was Part 2 ever better than the first time?

You are mine. We are one, I will direct
the rest to you.

Perhaps you should be us, cursed universal;
thus, we monkey through forests by the same
worn steps that were, once, chosen.

This is neither philosophy or poem but hope
for the fall of the Rome you have fed yourself.

Let it burn, mythed bird, and rise anew.

Intriguing

I am reading a book about a man who
was sent to prison a gentleman
bank robber, scaled a wall in the midday sun
and lammed to India where he fell in with
slums and thieves and loves,
freedom fighters and expats and forgers,
smack addicts and prostitutes and
fell in love,
only to have love betray him
because he had never accepted himself.

Those last two lines - the last
two parts interest me
because one can predict all the rest;
most folks run like jackrabbits or try
and corner the world at bay before
any one of them will accept the mirror, before
any one of them will trust another,
and when a person commits
that's when the world opens up
and the unknown floods in,
a phenomenon scarier than prison
or addiction could ever be.

New Year Morn

What's left of the cool air pops open my eyes
in time to slide on sandals and amble into
the stone courtyard, the corner housing
chickens with sticks and barbed wire.

A noise floats across a field of silence -
pip pip pip - the sound of escape, the sound
of new, chicks sprung from eggs on the
morn of the new year in the

same place that my father will later ring
with firecrackers, sending forth black smoke
that kindles the mirth in his eye,
his giggles a reminder beneath the pop pop pop

of youth. I envision the night, smile, then crouch,
yellow feet wobbling across mortar, chirping for more.

Dog Fog Days

Even canines know things that have slipped from memory
like a straight razor across skin. Consider your
hometown. All flop-eared and flea-chewed, a dog will plod through fog,
removing that grey veil in steps before the nose perks, twitches,
smells a familiar, finds its dampened dream-house,
ducks under a redwood doorway, turns around
once
twice
thrice
and eases its bones down to a pillowed earth. Meanwhile
its fog-bound master roams, searching for an ideal
as elusive as dew drops while man's behest friend
lies right where birth found him, close-eyed and feeling
he would and will gladly die there.

American Spirit

If each breath is an affirmation of life then
each smoke is a bow to its opposite.

Flying

A swing reveals to a child how it might feel
to spread feathered wings and gloss the air,
if only for a few precious seconds.

Rotary Phone

A black rotary phone is modern noir.
An old rotary is corded, rooted back
when people were trees.

Craftsman

God damn good woodwork is smooth, with fingers
eroding the grains the way glaciers cut grooves
in the earth and leave only layered beauty behind.

The Only One on the Dance Floor

A jukebox is the soul's release -
for only a quarter.

Kawai'i, Dawn

Waves are our Creator's attempt to
cradle, to gather the air and the odd
human, whether it be errant or brave,
into a love embrace. How our Creator
can hug so completely and then
dissipate is a trick only she knows.

The Freire Farmhouse

A farm at its best is unity,
between the land and man,
between man and animal,
ordered so that things rise
and fall, live and die
in our closest approximation
of the way things
ought to be.

Pre-Word

Walking sole to earth now
with soil squishing gaps between long-curled toes
carries me to the beginning
when my emotions bubbled boiled frozen rose
a purity unmarred by words
a strength revealed by vehemence
a simple movement capturing
the energies of the world
and if you were looking at all
you could only see it
in my widened eyes
staring at the ground
feeling its wet blood
reacting to the oozedirt of the earth
climbing the knife edge of my parafeet
creeping over my outstretched toes
bare metatarsals clothed
in wordless soundless joy

Beginning

Once ungrounded,
rootless, filled with
helium, tendons unhinged,
doubts sprouting in tendril-clumps
I rooted down during my black earth days,
letting the universe spread,
emanating from my center
like panels of a fan,
mandalic panels
on which coming is going
going is coming
where every thing
shimmers and
changing currents is
as simple as selecting a paradise
as free as earth working through you
as basic as turning your cheek to the dirt
laying down the grass
signaling the clouds
and walking through aboriginal strands of time.

On The Eve of Turning Thirty-Three

Thighs churning, pistons pushing torso
across hillsides bruised brown and it's only
by looking left,
looking right that you finally see
the wheat of your childhood has been threshed,
that your soles slap
against soft earth,
the echo rippling across the plains.
an invocation against the creator yet
these rolling mounds
hold only you
and to point an accusatory finger
at them is flat useless,
for these waves of ground yawn to the horizon
and now, on the eve of turning
thirty-three, it is clear:
this land, this nothingless
betrays its own solitude
by birthing up force so salient
that your vision buckles, you blink your eyes,
and you swear each step carries you
to an oasis. Then gravity pulls,
yanks knees downward, buries
them in earth, your hands cup,
pooling water, you throw back your hands,
oasis water made real,
the liquid washing your skin like baptism,
one you only know enough about to cry for, the salt
tears rivering down
your face and mingling with the earth
which was, once, outside of you.

Love In Its Bare-Knuckled Beauty

Sounds snap, eyes cut, words clip, neck aches, exhale -
just a squall late Saturday night
as the walls buckle and foundation stiffens
in a house that has seen countless viral fights
in its a hundred-odd years.

The lovers, this time, are pugilists
held up by more than simple pride:
held up by imaginary ropes woven
from words that spin like disco globes.

Now they retreat, take precious seconds
to rest in corners before stalking anew

to uncover echoes of negotiations past -
perhaps from fathers, friends, and mothers -
yet these first blurs are in their own heads
the way sunsets and car crash linger and
juxtapose with
quick-pumping lungs and
flinching of lips that neither anticipated.

Passed-on scripts and well-wishes
dissipate the minute they hit the air,
a dreamscape abandoned at its peak.
I wonder if these dreamers know the alarm
will sound
before it does.

bring down heaven, bring up hell

via negativa
the sonorous ah
rises from earth
through foot-bound
soles upward, vocal
cords go vibrato
as arms extend
like a weather vane
for energy and
charged neurons
drip from fingertips
as the ecstasy grips,
holds, a cry to
bring to heaven
to release the
(im)purities into velvet
air that will dissipate
them the way the heavens
once broke
into ten thousand
fiery stars

barnes v. cinncinnati

the docket, hidden in manila,
reads Barnes v. Cincinnati,
a file thick with paper-cut
edges, results in a one-hundred
fifty thousand dollar judgement,
immediately appealed,
and I wonder whether the
two sides, this entity Barnes
and that entity Cincinnati,
could have saved an armada
of legal motions and five
dollar per diems by sitting
on the stone steps of the court
house, this Barnes and that
Cincinnati, buying each other
polish dogs from a street vendor,
and coming to agreement
about the perfect orange
of the leaves in late fall

In My Dream

Wolves flecked with gray lie in wait amidst birch trees
that are on their side, trees that will not betray their brethern
but I feel the molecules exhale from lupine mouths
into mine, and am afraid.

I go clutch a book from the library but diagnosis is impossible,
I am not flying, or crashing, or being tangibly chased yet
dark eyes follow my footsteps, noting how I wear
grooves into my chosen spots loam, just around nightfall.

Now and then, I can
hear branches crushed underfoot and, somewhere
between the snaps of wood, a sound,

a low sound, rumbling from the earth's guts,
a sound that twitches my thighs. I picture ears upped
bodies unhaunch, creeping nearer as they time my gait,
preparing to spring as mountains
blot the sun, their trigger my feet
pressing into the same worn earth

then I leap over one such spot
and break into a dead run
alone
weaving in and out of trees

A Philosopher Misses His Creator

Eye sockets pulsing
and eye hollows darkened
the philosopher kills the backlight,
feels the years fill his marrow with
goo that slimes and oozes
out in the form of eye
boogers that cling to old skin
the way a thirty-eight year old man
still needs flannel sheets tucked in
by his frame-hunched mother.

And the philosopher moans

while outside the wind blows
from down to up, lifting
snowflakes by its dint of touch,
each flake unique and
each one a created gift
as a higher order - the one
looking down at you right now -
does whatever can to prevent this
old man from peering
into the mirror

at his own eyes

Mean Streets

She thought she done taught me a lesson
on the black streets of Richmond - these
niggerly, miserly, stagger lee streets -
opening her eyes so I could see the yellow
'fore I hit her again,
another shot dropped her, maybe
breaking a hip in the fall, her purse now clutched
in my punch-stung hands; yet she rose,
thanked her lord, her tongue lolling. I got
curious, done asked her why. Pause. She says
help just won't come for folk like you.

Shudder

Eyes closed, I become Coyochauqui,
whose brother threw her Aztec celestial self
down temple stairs with disdain so unimaginable

I shudder that one's voice can be lost
so quickly. She was dismembered,
relegated like Palestinians who crouch

behind bomb-wearied walls, left
to speak of tears and truths but caged
by foes that disregard these cries

into silence. Others work til cotton bleeds
red, teach til labeled 'not red enough':
identities dirtied by authority, paved over

by history. Yet flowers still sprout from
between cement cracks where the headstones
once stood. I imagine such morbidity shies

from light because nothing cowers one human
like the timbre of another and our waking
hours birth voices like pinpricks of rain -

only in a quiet midnight can anyone hear
lost voices. And who am I to receive forgotten
fruit, these cries left out of the dialogue:

whipped pyramid builders, hand claspers,
drunks of union, labored by a fate that
darkness whispers into my consciousness?

Eyes closed, I see her arms and legs
left like omens for those who dare,
people with whom I share molecules of air

and I can not sleep,
can not sleep,
can not sleep.

Of It All

Sprays of flowers bathed within shafts of sunlight
reminds me of a time when my head lied, sandbagged,
unsure whether I would ever see spring's true rays.

This moment of not-knowing crept up on me,
stalking like a butler, an uncertainty in my blackest
nights that served a thought darker still.

In those cold moments I had to imagine my daughter rise,
my wife grow old with grace, and wonder: does voice alone
convey such things? Will it be enough?

Now awakened by my child's puppy breath, battered
by her arms that flail in dreams, I am amidst blue pitch,
stand up, let the dawn pump life into limbs, walk

out to where pines are sentries, feel its needles,
ones browned by the August heat, let them puncture
and redden my pink skin, and revel in the sight

of it all.

41 Lines

The brightness of the sun has rendered these Gucci sunglasses
helpless. Oh I must sit down under the sunshade – it’s an
authentic Cinzano that Dave bought for me last time we
touristed Venice because it just fit so well poolside.
And the pool has just been re-surfaced, we’ve a nice
Mexican man who does a little bit of gardening &
trims hedges and such, and then, one day on a cloudless
day like this one Dave asks him what else he does and
he says . . . hey kids, stay in the shallow end, okay?. . .
your little one was out in big water there . . . he says,
in English, “I can do that.” So we have the man here,
sitting in that same deck chair that you’re in now, and
he looks at the pool and he throws out a number,
a number thirty percent lower than any contractor had quoted
Dave before. So he resurfaced the whole thing, from
sandblasting to a new fiberglass finish a week ahead
of schedule. Dave was so pleased. Would you care
for some more lemonade? Would the kids like some?
I can go inside – it’s only Country Time straight out
of the packet but it sure hits the spot, doesn’t it? Dave
really likes it when he comes home from the club . . .
no, kids, leave those floaties on . . . I know they’re
a bit bulky but they’ll help you go anywhere, help
you keep your head above water . . . okay? I . . .
No no, you don’t have to get up, the kids will do
what they’re told. Besides, I don’t think they
can work those floaties down the elbow and off the
arm anyway – I could barely get your son’s on
and this was before I slipped a little vodka into my
lemonade glass, you know what I’m saying? Just sit
back – the deck chair comes from our friend’s
catalogue business. He’s an inventor and developed
a deck chair that is balanced on a fulcrum of weight
distribution – sorry about the hiccup – so one can
lean all the way back until and not tip backward.
Hold it, I need to get some more lemonade.
Wait a minute. I see two floaties but I don’t see
Erik. Erik? Nikki, call your sister to stop
listening on her headphones and come out
here. Erik? Erik?
Erik?

Cafe Music

Left crouched by the gravity of years and the presence of friends
like warped reflections in a mirror, the aged at the adjoining table
lament

- the presence of five new wines
- the absence in one's collection of a true grigio
- antique mirrors sold ever more cheaply
- how decades had left Athenian digs ever more bare

barer, I'd imagine, than anyone at the table would admit,
as they huddle to catch the warmth embedded within
voices of friends who understand. As I eavesdroppe for clues
a path opened, the afterpatter of storm clouds; at most I would
pass on only experiences, backed by the same baroque chords,
with nary a story or a chord out of tune.

DMZ

Flags ripple history,
barbed wire blood
that runs in the minefield
on sun-baked earth.

Old men squint in the
bright shadow of star
striped bombers and
cry for the separated,

left unsung, forty-odd
generations severed by
a parallel, a map that
betrays the territory.

This is my DMZ.

Occam's Cherub

The ventral view of Occam's sprite
shows pure cherubity, fat-puffed
cheeks with size deigned wee.

Yet said cherub confounds appearances,
wailing down stars even with a swelled belly,
heirlooms and keepsakes nothings in its hands

and that smile, o fie, looks forsook
as jelly-stained hands grasp white
shirts, walls, eyeballs. Anything that

can be grasped is. You give
pause, reconsider the logic of spawning,
reassign youth to some devil

and then your sprite smiles, glows,
her eyes the clear blue of history, and
suddenly you are not so sure.

Meadow Vow

A vow. Wind rambles through birch branches, whisks the words away. Repeated. Again the avowals vanish like night bodies on a Nicaraguan roadside. With perspicacity unheard, heavy moments pass, fall on lichen rocks. One more treasure left in a meadow. The unspoken-made-real plays out to silence, the invisible of liquid time, shattering on flat stones.

Outhouse

On Day Two I met Lolette.
On Day Two I met my cousin.
I never learned his name.

Lolette's house on cinder blocks is
where my blind cousin lived,
his pupils an unfocused sea of green,
naked under these tin eaves that Lolette
had purchased with money squirrelled
from a stint maiding in Saudi.

For six pesos the local cola was his;
(seven for a Coke or Pepsi).
My cousin drank one. Then two.
Soon his body writhed. "Fire ants?"
I said. "No. Toilet." Lolette smiled.
The bathroom, made of spare lumber,
had been placed in the cow pen,
with breezes sweeping the
smell away.

I stood to open the gate,
Lolette grabbed my arm and held it.
"No," she said, scuffing playing cards
across a rutted table.
"If you do it, he will not learn"
she said, as he ambled toward the wire.

Careful fingertips first found the fence.
His arms and legs and every thing
crouched,
then paused,
then felt the air,
perhaps sensing the presence
of barbs, the eyes of cows,
the sun, and us as brown
skin shimmied into unclaimed
space, angling one leg
into air that by now held
dire expectation, then another,
moving his torso in slow-mo,
soft skin clearing thorns by the
width of an eyelash.

Petrarchan Sonnet for the Swingin' A's

The shocking promise of dollars from Charles O.
Finley birthed a vibrissae at play
and lips from which strayed hair belayed-
seventeen 'staches of summertime growth.

Men nicknamed for creatures - The Vulture,
Catfish, Buck - and kid VIda Blue,
clad in green and gold of garish hues
as ambassadors of a rough hewn culture.

The league office hoped for clean-shaven jaws
not men torn from an old western past
but the Seventies would see no bigger winners

than men who, bound by byzantine laws,
fought their owner and the shorn to the last,
with the verve and animosity of beginners.

Why Did The . . . ?

Old man runs like a

cock, knocks you down, collides

with your scooter. Ouch.



Cars pay no notice.

He shakes his bald head. You grab

your scooter; he screams:



"Why were you here?!?" He

screams again, berating you,

as busses swerve by.

Waltzing our Problems

Easy beats: slow slow

quick-quick, slow slow quick-quick, as

we dance around truth

Black Lace

In the middle of the desert night
is the only thing going on,
its high plateau winds push open
the doors of a Winnemucca bar,
the dance floor wood warped with
sin and the last thing I desire
is the sight of this, peeping over
southbound walls of a
Wranglerized prison as I
serenade the waitress, a hint
of black lace.

I must consider that a cover
band blares CCR to packed packed
bar and people dance not in line
but arrhymically. She has to
work this crowd; she, the kind of
person having to pull the closing
shift: rent-needing, weary,
hurried, or plain beltless.

Setting the beer on my corner
table, for a brief moment
her smell, a faded vanilla
mixed with movement,
hits me. Lace brushes my
arm. Would the lace matter so much
if it had dots of tiny white?

Is this just the high wind talking?
The distance? She slithers through
a sea of jeans with dip rings
cut into the seat and belt
buckles branded into the front.
No nursing this brew; it slides
down easy as I wonder if there
is a pool room out back, ignore
the ruffian in me - at least the
one saying that pool tables only
lead to felt burns - and stand.

The Screamer Has The Floor

With a face as minced as parsley -
all crooked brows and eyes bulging
down to the milky whites, the
speaker's infective caused
walkers to venture off the curb,
caused suits to cradle their
cellphones; a deliveryman's
sharp glance had no effect.

Tell me not 'so' but 'what
makes it': there's a reason you
scream into the teeth of the
rush hour. If you lay in on me
softly, like a heirloom . . . this I
can more readily accept

than your spouting syllables
and rough living. Tell me
whose face you want to get
in and we're goin', away from
hatchbacks or hobo
jungles, dress you up in
Goodwill collars
and clean. Don't laugh:
it's my only suit.

And you seem too
committed for the abyss,
too prideful to be a
sandwich-board man,
so let's synergize -
the mere thought of it
curls the edges of my
mouth skyward.
Tell me what you see
. . . and I'll figure out
how to get it said.

ars poetica

So you pray by day? Midnight is my hour,
sending flowers to the universe with a
pen uncowered. It's a practice of love, pre-dawn,
in the dark, enraptured by silence that swallows the
the fallow and oversmart.

So what you say?
What am I trying to capture? This query's easy -
sadness and rapture. Whatever things that
make girls and boys feel alive, these moments
writers ride, things any scribe tries not to hide.

Why say hide? Must poets be courageous?
No, just the opposite will save us -
souls who sit only to words that could slay us.
Rather than blame or forgive, you have
to seek your self for what it is. Peek at what
scares you, then own it up and down.

I don't fret or clown but just listen to the
sound of my heart beating, breath
wheezing, heart beating, breath wheezing,
steaming in the bromide of the
three a.m. air, daring to scribble something
of which I was consciously unaware

but of truths, nonetheless, that were always lurking
there. Perhaps a better word for what I do
would be contagious; after all if one work
engages or enrages, it might even make
the sages, might get buried in the history pages.

If I write a something that lingers
on lips it's viral, colloidal, some coda
you can't just sip or chew that will make you step
back, appreciate and let my words do,
call it a midnight epistolary from me to you.

That's my floetica. And you?

How Freedom Feels To Someone Six

Lips upturn, eyes smile,

faces ruddy with prana,

bags zip: three, two, one . . .

Last Night

sweat flees
blood drips
down steam
borne legs

breath flies
coal eyes
dark sky
cries more

yins twin
with yangs
yours mine
and ours

stained glass
above
wood pews
below

this act
our church
fera
lity

once done
heart knows
never
again

later
ink night
wide eyed
you yearn