Late December

.



red clouds like
torn scraps of onion,
fraught with plangent thunder
over


the silo rearing white and thick
as your thigh from the earth; yearly
flaking the accumulation of its days,
as though the giddily spattered afternoons
I gave were unwanted.
come summer I will not paint it
white anymore.


the fleshless tree simulated atop
is no good. every blue light
has gone out, and
no
pliers in my truck will do the trick:
like a swarm of lanternbugs painted
by one refusing
to render things as they were.


I had to string them
with one pair of hands.
I guess from a distance
they can still fool you.



.

Kitchen Girl

.


simper
of the strobing halogen bulb,


warm teeth on my knuckles,
the blood between them:
all waiting
is violence.


I hear the engine
spear the morning’s blue ribs,
fumble


for an old record but the growl gutters away,
and here
I am
with a black
flat vinyl,


like holding two
ragged eggshells,
the yellow idea of the thing
dripping
floorward.


.

A Year Without Rain

thirty years of my ripened flesh
has gotten you here,
crabbing across the linens
and nightly
loving you,

for which I had
expected
to clutch today
my flabby pink
drop of god’s drool,
rather

than to
pet your gray arm,
making motions with hands
while nurses gather their tools.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke (3)

I knocked on the firstfloor window she
opened bathrobe said
not today.
I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air
had
gnawed away
sensation.

my hand on your lowest rib:

this white roseflesh is close
as can
be
to breathing you,

the blue morning
thrashing
against
my fingernails and against
your ferret-belly,
harrying
with soft vulpine hunger.

then you coughed
a foxtail spume
into the fiveohthree air
like an early train:

a single engineer
spooning into the fire’s mouth,
gleaning
no satisfaction.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke (2)

I knocked on the firstfloor window she
opened bathrobe said
not today.
I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air
had
gnawed away
sensation.

this white roseflesh is close
as can
be
to breathing you:

my hand on your lowest rib.

the blue morning
thrashed
against
my fingernails and against
your ferret-belly,
harried
with soft vulpine hunger.

you cough a foxtail
spume
into the fiveohthree air
like an early train:

a single engineer
spooning into the fire’s mouth,
gleaning
no satisfaction.

After A Still Winter Night I Awoke

A recent composition; I have been experimenting with chaos lately (form fits function, after all). This is only a first draft, and not the final realization. I have little time for it, but this release will help compel me toward the fatal birthing.

I knocked on the firstfloor window she opened bathrobe said not today. I reached
through the gap and felt what I could feel; the fiveoclock air had
gnawed away
sensation.

this white roseflesh is close as I can come to breathing you,
pink-flecked with disease. you cough a raggy foxtail spume
into the fiveohthree air
like a train (the pistons do not touch and yet the earth trembles),
and it smells
like your red throat.

my hand on your lowest rib
the blue morning
thrashes against my fingernails and
your
ferret-belly,
harried with soft vulpine hunger.

The Sweet Lonely

cheekbone moon I slouched by the tracks

hearing the
wolf-eyed

moan.

your slender line
clattering off like empty
freight cars
to
unlit burgs,

leaving
rusty cries amid smoke
and
dead
joyous
air.