the blackout

Waking too late in the afternoon, the room is

A cavern of questions, darkened by pulled shades, elevated on empty bottles of wine and torch lit

Fire should be licking up the walls, bringing it all down around us, but like the devil

The walls are too wet to burn, too dry to boil, nothing  but our innards left to steam

Not a crack for the vapor to escape through anyway, so the air becomes too still, paradise happened

And too much noise, must have erupted into hell

When I knelt down to wonder if the blood splashed on the sheets is yours or mine, your fingerprints

Put rings around my neck and they blossom, stretch inward to swallow hard around stone

The mirror showing swollen yellows and purple, behind ballooning glands together a 

Royal primrose, to carry me further down the road

Snail Jar

Its vision is of light and air
Breath drowning in silver light, hinged on
Sleepy shimmers under an eye
Rolled back against seeping white
Black shelved into the horizon
Where the stream puddles to pond 


Troubled is the old man, telling
Outside the door in the wolves steady howls
Shape fading behind cottony grays
Sprung and knocked over metal coils
A higher tide, soothed 
Shattering clay on rocks, pulled deeper 
In fleshy embraces, noise 
That sometimes sings of a better world 
Even out there, behind screens
And loosening rabbit ears 


Forgetting, in trembling clouds 
As punishing and soft as the gods 
Crumbling stony path, ripe fertile dirt 
Meaning in yellowing green, slithering
Gnawing, beastly boneless mouth  
Of the anti butterfly 

Untitled

Surrounded by pillows, we laid
Cupped in our quiet nest
Tented in white---
Your skin raising goose flesh
As it shivered under my hands
Your face passed over my shadow
Like tics on the mantle clock
Hard as oak, pierced in wet silk
No, not yet you, not yet
Till finally set free, painfully good
But reality apparently
The enemy of the dream 

Some Things Borrowed

O dear hearts

How many are getting scribbled on

Scrambled, torn and blown away

Flaunted, soured, stoned

For lack of mercy, perhaps

I was born this way too, kneeling

Strobe lifted on a soaring dream

Not exactly my own though

A ribbon, always standing

Straight backed, motionless at attention

Folded and holding, like troubled

Fidgeting hands

Fingers weaved within fingers

Webbed ready butterflies, amber

Sticky and slipping, from root to pulse

Forced through invisible tubes in the arm

Growing swollen, polyps

Poisoning purplish domes

Getting hard as rocks

Something else then,

Mourned from the dark in a surrounded

Wakeful sleep, becoming thirsty, obscene

Even so its kept and held there, a moth

Under the bulb or steaming

From baked clay

Pinned through the black hole

In small birds eye, darling even so

Its little to do with wanting

Tasteless pain, blisters risen so heavenly

In this sin, your features shaded, sick

Under uneven lighting

Like what walks away on death heels

Even with the memory of the heart

I felt once, hatch like an egg in my gut

And even so the children

Are going to get served anyway

Glued with thread to the platter

And down came the ax, through girdle and lace

Bastards, that kept digging

Digging in for seed, for the prize

Drunk static across a screen

Forks twirling buttered flesh

New loves sprouting everywhere

Like noodles and yellow peppers

    

Square Peg, liquid window

You should have gone back to bed, sleeping
Faster, rather then invade parts of private thought
Where I turn--- turn and forget: reality
With a few remaining words, raw
Alive in form, wet and still curling from their
Dirty little holes and (invisibly) straddled, a


Fertile paper door that staples shut
The places where our heads swim into fish lips
Coming undone, as we escape the vine
Ripe, pregnant and round, juice behind
The thin skin of an early summer plum, just
To be bound, tighter then ever
Twine around hips, then pinned against
The sway of a branch, silver water


Some offering to the moon
As we linger there… under the sky’s dark awning
An invented equinox, that burns the bottom
Of the pot like dried corn
A tumor trimmed back against its tender vein


And its not loud at first, you and I
Just the crinkle of a snake shedding in a wooden bowl
-- black and pink neon, that flickers
Abandoned beams down to a walkway… leading
Leading… this way to our side, pleasure and pain
The wings of greenish moths, zapped into circles
Of vaporized sulfur, your eyes


Through waffle screens, as you continue
Changing clothes and skins

The Rage

We were the vapor held in under blondish light

Smoke as it shattered and rolled under the door

Moon kissed and turning like a page

Turning, through last nights brandy, spicy

As our eternity… passion drunk

And blood starved for miles flat against your ripe lips

And a sudden electrocuting emptiness

That split me apart, sending me a thousand ways

I was dizzy in white dust, a sprout growing

In a full day of sun

But its all going black now, let out

Frost spiked into ever so slightly

-

Under an even glow

Of spinning stars

 

Flossy Lines

We draw our way through journeys, lifetimes
Productions of places and things with insides that
Indulge, breathe and become lost---
Cloud’s rafting, swimming, changing, going to
Places built from bone
Restless and blind we stir, in some limp hope
Beginning long before we met, from the first
Long drop into someone else’s life, at birth


Matrimony: to the horizon, smaller glimpses
Running deeper into simple things---
Tornadoes of sand spinning, stinging
Blooming into dark purple moons that ring
Under the eyes, blood and shrill voices that drag you
Through halls with their ghosts


Shortly we’ll be engulfed by more nonsense
Night wings that tickle and prance
Beyond the wreckage


Time fluttering home on threads of light
down, down... into curtains of the deep