WINTER WANTON

I know you are
like paper and that your skin shivers
under blue sweating lidless moons, dry sheaves.
Salty bite hissing up against the leeward side of the wind,
the bareboned white of your shiny lips,
the cedar in your dollhouse hair.

The breath of yours
that slithers between my teeth
and expires in a frail shudder on the cusp of my throat
does not remember its bellows, no patience
with the slow weep of the sun’s bleeding fire
across the uncurled fields languishing smoky and green,
their ruts hushed and expectant for the
silent-jawed movement of cloud driving cold
between them.

I know you are
like paper and your skin shivers
and is soaked in blind ditches sluiced open
with rain. I don’t want to disappoint baby but
your ink has run about under your eyes
and made you appear
so wanton.

White pianos belly up red when
the sun breaks like shivered ivory
into the horned foothills:
I know your mountains
and your music

White piano players belly up sad when
their eyes shine salty red
like seaweed been rubbed under
their delicate eyelashes:
I know you.

Sunday drifters in Sunday best
hammering rail spikes and picking their teeth
in white belly up sanctuaries with
redly-wrought stainglass
like bruises between the stones:
I know me,
and you don't know me.

When the gaps stretch raggedly open, small tears in the fabric of rush-rush, you wonder what happened to your friends. You wonder what the price is for their absence, what immense gains you'll have made without their distractions. What grandiose things I'll do without you, right? Without love, without true laughter, without your petty liveliness to draw me away. Right?

Man cannot live on visions alone.

Pummeled and sanded down by these hours; the days are so tiring, and this music cannot redeem my soul. Can't trade it in, can't pawn it for the silver of untroubled sleep.

Damned near stomped the snake in my hallway to death this morning before realizing that its head was a buckle. One of my sister's belts. What was it doing slithering out there in the dark?


Meet me out back behind the rusted flaking spear of the water tower, I feel close to you, want to carry you, ascending. We will remain, pressing our ears to her peeling red-brown skin, listening to the waters within creak like old warriors, their aged armor rustling with the punctured bellows of their shallow ribs, pocked swords in hand, point-first into the powdered cemetary dust at their feet.

Meet me out back where the barbed wire sags like long quivering violin notes. There you and I will confess, I feel close to you, want to hear you breathe against me and leave fear strung up on the exhausted strands of barbed wire that limp toward the far bloodstained foothills.

Meet me and I'll watch the moon sling up and rain still white fire on the curve of your neck while distant bobcats fling yowls rattling through gap-tooth shuttered houses. Yellowed piano sheets stir on ancient countertops near unbusied pots scented with the silver cities of spiders, tremulous.

Exhaustion.


The hand of night slides into the skirt of morning--they run right on through in a tangled willowy brier of smeary colors, washed-out violet limbs streaking in sweaty spokes through the gray gold of dawn's cold hips, her moonward parted lips, white with the gilt of lunar dust. She breathes alabaster.

A red flare hissed on the cheek of night.

Whether dead or not I don't know, a violin rustled beneath that dark brow and became a thorn within that eye. Christ, what they found was better than what I had, tension coiled under my tongue, a rattling in my hands. Give me song, I begged my embattled instruments, and they cranked up into an estranged melody. She breathes alabaster, they sighed through their clenched teeth.

what you want
I want to breathe it
breathe that alabaster,
chalk in my eyelashes, so foully rouged that I'd unbutton my cuffs and curl the dust into damp clouds with hot heels,
what you want, well what you gonna do, dame morning?

I could speak and see my veins wilt as that music sapped out to dry and stain.
no sir, no ma'am, night's palm is silhouetted on her alabaster thigh,
what you gonna do, dame morning, your lips fragrant with the song of night,
the hot heat of my hot heels harrowing the bent-backed grass, I cannot speak
and do not feel the need for it,
not for words like a red hissing blemish on the face of this tumbling deep.
am I not clear, dame morning,
that we are tangled and your alabaster is on my lips
that you are moonward and white
and that chorus is ascending, I feel that
like disquiet and the kick of my passion.
This is restless.

what you gonna do?