Music Enough to Make One Mad

i walk in a line and shoot and shoot i walk in a line and shoot and shoot i walk in a line and shoot and shoot i walk in a line and shoot and shoot i walk in a line and shoot and shoot i walk in a line and shoot and jump and shoot and jump and walk in a line to music decadent in my brain on a loop a loop and through the gates it follows wherever i go wherever i slide i slide i slide inside and walk in a line and jump and shoot and walk in a line and jump and slide and the music is always the always the major key hooks and bridges no matter my life the music the same and i am so close and i am so close and i walk in a line and jump and

miss

 

(originally published in an alternate form in Dangerous to Go Alone! – a video game poem anthology)

Theory of the Universe

Did we learn ourselves from the mirror
after we studied constellations
in ragged almanacs… we rotated mechanical
with a hiss of the so-slow
slowing axis…

No equation… can yet rebirth
a cooling star’s impending supernova

If the family cello were given to you
as it recovered from basement dust…

the bowstring part of me
moves… without asking
to the crescendo of ripples…
and F-minor weeping, the lake
awake not as often at night

the big bang must have stemmed… from a desert string
nervous tremolo through the ages, expanding
like a lung just before that first breath–
whole note for the endless meter…

 

(originally published in 99 Pine Street)

The 2 A.M. Pacific Retreat

nights cold near the ocean
whispers reclusive invitations

       Chautauqua, Chautauqua

Andrew Bird’s Q-tip acoustic fills the ears
the long voice pizzicato plucks cluck pluck
scratching, say, the sand munching feet,

the seashells and their blue-moon breath
breathe into your ears the eternal secret
of the ocean, quiet all these sleepy years

How do you leave the wet sand after that?

 

(originally published in Loveliest – Issue #1)

Hyacinth Rose

there are many flowers come across paths
alongside apartments but nonesuch like the

hyacinth rose wrapped tightly as such stands
outside a tiny market in view of black-grim

graffiti reading with a smile worth at least fifty
fifty-cent avocados because spring lays beyond

the peel of skin like waking up to jumbled
white sheets with the knowing of presence past

white walls hanged with stationary song which
would sing if only strings could strum themselves

 

(originally published in The Bitter Oleander, Spring 2015)