Lady Nature on the Lethe

I had her for a thousand months.

She was my finest patron,

a nymph with leaf-golden hair.

She'd bring me the fresh pulp

of bodies gnashed by rocks,

faces blackened by storm.
She quickly forgot them, licking

the sockets of my skull,

thrusting a hand through my robe,

tugging on my mortality,

glistening the vipers of my lips

with the balm of her fingertips,

a frost like failing autumn.
Every morning her garden was
withered and grey, dry as my bones,

though every night it rained.

God Save My Queen

"I'm slowly edging you into adulthood. Or dragging you into it, whichever you prefer."

I prefer being prodded,
the way a lucky patch of seaweed
is edged out of the ocean by
a few months or years worth of waves,
until it washes up on Cape May.
That radiant sundown shore,
where you learned what it meant
to have kindness kiss your face.
Ornate as a promise written in sand,
your nose and mouth and eyes and hair
flared with the cleansing fire of summer.
When our lips first met
in the black hours of dawn,
not even the bright wash of the screen
made you any more illuminated
than you were just as the sun went down
on that beach of Cape May.
This is my way to say
that nothing built or born
will ever rob you of your royalty.
Nothing can desolate your dignity.
Your grace cannot be displaced.
You are the waking wind
that chases leaves through the courtyard
and into my bedroom window,
splashing the good light of day
across my face. Such is when I wake
lying next to you, my queen of diamonds,
my unmistakable other.
There is no need for bridges
when the rivers we cross
turn warm and calm
whenever we like it.
And when we kiss beneath
the white rapids of our
garden-punk rage,
it is the only time
I have kept my eyes open
underwater.
Now you grow older,
and some sinister, unseen force
twists you away from me,
as once we've twisted away before.
You have taught me
to keep my head, cool my tongue,
to wet and dry my cheeks raw.
I have learned as I learn every day
that time and distance avails not,
as Whitman would say,
at least when it comes to kings and queens.
We could have a reign never before seen,
conquering doubts and debts
not as two children might,
but as a man and woman should.
I have learned a thousand kindnesses
are not the same as kindness.
And that kindness rides fast
on a dying mare,
tramping through the green fields
of your good heart,
which for all its trials cannot fail.

My Honorable Scythe

Forged from the feathers of Ra
and salvaged from world's end.
I found an artifact so ancient
only your mother could comprehend.

One good look, you're toast.
One skin prick, you're screwed.
My scythe dumps animal excrement
all over your new leather shoes.

I cut clean the gum from my eyes,
I threw the scythe into the churn.
It crawled back to me like a baby
in a blanket bundled with scorn.

So I'm raising it as one of my own,
'till it reaches a wisdom as mine.
I've taught it so well, my son from hell,
whose only last lesson is dying.

The Deck of Socrates

I have watched the stalks
as they pop up each year.
In shadow, a chipmunk
broods over a flower,
smelling a spring so dismal
he wonders why he even
bothered fattening himself
on his stores. Noon comes
round bored, bringing the
hemlock to burn away
the fog in my throat.
Each time I wipe the sweat
from my bottom lip,
the stain on my shirt deepens.
Past the fence, a few boys
turn a snake inside-out
with a firecracker,
tossing the punctured
exoskeleton into my yard.
They think this is funny.
Then the chipmunk hides
beneath the deck, weaving
the cold shadows with
fragments of scales,
until it almost lives again.
Planted firmly, the
stalks of suffering
sway gently during rain,
but otherwise do nothing,
and after so many springs
I have seen enough of them.

I Had Some Quarters

I had quarters through the slots of my fingers.
I had quarters whispering through my shroud.
I had quarters chipped with the lies of bankers.
I had quarters fallen from the banks of clouds.
I had quarters form a shivering sound.

I had some quarters.

I had quarters lost to the cough of day.
I had quarters stomped into the cemetary.
I had quarters rolled into the catacombs.
I had quarters for coffee and laundry.
I had quarters the color of falling.

I had some quarters.

I had quarters for bread and sugar.
I had quarters for damage of the brain.
I had quarters strung along my puppetstrings.
I had quarters the smell of rain.
I had quarters longing for greedy exchange.

I had some quarters.

I had quarters as eyes without empathy.
I had quarters as seasons without change.
I had quarters formed like stars from my breath.
I had quarters as a bedazzled cage.
I had quarters as my shiny visage.

I had some quarters.

I had quarters plumbed from my excess.
I had quarters bottled up for love.
I had quarters to push my agenda.
I had quarters to finance my bluffs.

Light Shopping

The cereal aisle is much too loud,
loud with the complaints of mistakes
the size of children, and the soft
humming of my indecision.
How am I to make responsible
decisions between sweet spheres
of corn, humble squares of wheat
or monotonous flecks of grain
spiced by the perfume of health?

I'm wasting an hour of my life-light.

I know that if I forego the milk,
which I often do, I am merely
eating popcorn for the elderly.

I'm not so prone to dying, darling.

I'm just a punk, considering cereals.

I'm a June bug baby, swaddled 

in fluorescences, stunned from the 

the enormous screen door loom,
weaving the worries of
that next huge world,
humming with a sticky apathy
only bugs are lucky to experience
for a whole lifetime.

My humming makes an organ
tremble in me, a deep plum sound
that one day will soften my
whole body to a walking bruise.
Then the decision comes easy.
Then I'll send someone for me,
fold their fingers around the
crumbling flake of my fortune,

tell them to buy me the best
health they make these days,
whatever damn shape it comes in.

Northern Ballad

On a white and blistered evening,
she set out for morning,
long fed from the fat of my skin.
Our sex had got boring

and she hated my growing thin.
I wrote down a letter
with the blood of a broken stem,
to warn that the weather

approached like a horde of men—
who, when seeing the fawn,
wet their lips and whipped around,
and forced her towards the dawn.

When morning fell, I held the sound
of her wild, glass-like "no".
The wounds of the sky were salted
with the snows of her sorrow.

meditation wash

In the hot, downward pour
of my private shower,
I reaquaint myself
with the notion of warmth.
I run my fingers through
the mop of my head
and peel away the balled
knots, which hang from
my skull like bats
in front of a hot moon.
That shower-head moon
casting shadow after shadow
until one colossal shadow
like a winter afternoon
falls like an amorous net,
catching my eyes and softly
closing them up, so that
I hear nothing but water
making rivers around my lips,
and deltas leading down my thighs,
and muddy basins between my toes.
I feel heavy like a dream
being lifted out of sleep, other-
wordly, alien to the shower
curtain sticking to my shoulder.
I feel the water passing, passing
over. It smells like sewage but
I hold my tongue. The shower
holds the rest of me in its
thousands of jetted arms.

one man's two person three page story

The first book written had no introduction. It had no climax, no ending or action, none rising or fallen. There were only two characters who lived their lives out on the page patiently. On the first page, they were wiping their cuts from another one of their fights. There was not nearly enough food. On page two, the sun comes up. This was an exciting event, and is usually seen as the greatest triumph of the book. On the third page everyone is dead, including our two characters. Critics have supposed it is a skilled, softly-veiled allegory of when the dinosaurs perished. Others impose that knowledge, being a seed you should never swallow, is what killed our two characters. They had no names for their bodies. Their faces were old-fashioned, stern and dry. When they held hands, the sky threw rocks down at them. This was not in the story. It is implied.

I think I wrote this book. Or, at least, I think I know it well enough that I am capable. If I had been born at the right time. I could have made the three page finger painting that sets in motion the whole wheel of literature. Sure, I know the characters well enough. They practically invent themselves. But the whole idea of it tastes like milk: familiar, but not my own. Indulgent. I wonder about the absent introduction. Could their have been an inkling, a stinging temptation to sculpt the scene, to triangulate the moment? And why begin a book in the dark?

Of course the dark sparks everything. Let there be light, an obvious man said. Then he filled up three pages and left out the beginning and the end. I have seen the pages smiling in the dust. Sometimes in my dreams, I meet the original architect, the first messy child, who combed the sky into chaos, the indulgent master, the one who said let there be light. We've discussed the book at long length, and our conversation is usually the same. You didn't do a thing, I find myself saying. The light lets in itself. 

grassbones

Green's mean, baby.
It's creeping at your door,
loud and celebrating.
It grabs your foot
when you get the mail.
Green is the battery
of overgrowth.
Snakes in mingling
look like arteries,
crossed at the neck
and pinched like a hose.
Green's dead, baby,
the color of moisture
and decomposing
architecture.
That swamp punk
Kermit knew
how to die, spring
back, make a few
million dollars.
He catches envy
the same way he
catches flies: with
the two green arms
of his forked
tongue.