Bicycle Wheels, Empty Parking Lots

The spokes on the wheels
spoke of hyperspace tunnels
we could fall into forever
suspended in orbits
circling, circling.
We spoke of forever,
how short that is.
Spoke porcelain
bowls smoked joints
made points
in German accent jokes.
Spoke grass tones.
Spoke of bed
dreams of bed
in red made-up languages

we woke we spoke we
never learned we
joked we hoped we spoke
our smokes I watched
you smoke we
sucked lips
(turpentine kissed)
all that time we
spoke smoke we

don’t speak of that now

 

(originally published in Beechwood Review – July 2015)

Work of Man

Gruesome scarecrow bore into me, wicked carrot limbs, dried snowman. This farm is seeped with the blood of the farmers but the cows are all right. Have you seen a cow’s smile? It crumples the yellow Mississippi into a zagged horseshoe. Forever we’ll remember the first game we played. The hoof felt like hardened slabs of discount deli turkey, art deco. No one won. No one is winning. The larger the city, the truer this fact. You can almost feel the weight of a tower’s collapse in its shadow, bogged shirt. Hemp gravel lines. I see the kinetic potential of kindergarten, a kinder garden than which you cribbed your tomatoes in, so stabbed by the wanderlust deer. We dug those tiny crevices with conveyor shovels. Wickets, wickets, and did the terrain ever grow out of itself like the work of man– ah, did it ever.

 

(originally published in Ping Pong, October 2015)

The Universe Necessarily Sends Metaphors

Swathed in bedbugs, draped
in the gloom of willing hearts
in collective song maddeningly
swept by enkindled starlight obscured,

fate sprouted flowers along
marshy graves and windtorn spokes
of the ethereal wheel of coincidences,
salvos brisk and violent, precisely when
the window-dead moth inched baby-bug steps,

when you plucked a magic eyelash
from a crook in my face, the numb
morning heat of your breath whispered,
in translation, morose and umber.

Now we wait, sanely, eyes closed,
for all the other things I wished
to bear gold in streets we walk
at night, hand entwined in yours.

 

(originally published in Glassworks, Fall 2015)

A Walk Through Palms

When there’s nothing special about a sunset
lined with palms, there is nothing special.

Trees jut from behind roofs
like green skinny beanstalks extended forever.

Every plane a UFO.

Breathe the collective breaths of everyone.

Walks should be alone,
watching crows circle majestically
above stacks of garbage
bags in shopping carts.

Soon there are words:
first a sweeping hush,
a low hum.
Then the revving of neighbors
and their chatty sportscars.

The emissions enter the brain.
Then the atmosphere.
Whatever that is
is not what I am looking for.

 

(originally published in The Quotable – 2015)