Salt In Our Storms

Your hair distantly-viewed rainclouds,
Ragged party streamers gray as somber
Party finery: a pin-stripe
Three-piece suit, top hat,
Static in a fall;
Hanging coal water in a wet dove sky.
Only the sky is a face and
You are outer space.
Is ether your blood or your empty skin?
Star corpses rankle;
Their ghosts comprise a lonesome light
Haunting an otherwise hazardous night.
You our Winter Florida.
Herons are weeping in their wedding gowns.
Skimming the ground like fighter jets,
They serve as cloud feathers, as screams.
Your plaintive swamps crawl on all fours
Your penitents sound at all hours,
Call out their own fame,
And fall with the rain.
Your clocks are floating face down in the waves
Washed up on the beach, dead and pale,
Timeless, clogged, black and loose seaweed swaddled,
Your brain water-logged,
Feet sucked deep under ocean floor.
Our Florida, our Winter Florida.
Blacker your heavens,
More ferocious the lightnings dance.

Dancing With The Blind

Never before on a bright day like this one,
Gray clouds melting like genteel witches
Before the immortal tide of the sun,
Before the cleansing blue light that
Justice sent blindly, with love;
Never before this day did we fall so far,
Or lose so much, as in these heartless times.
Our sins are carved into our vitals.
We cannot travel to the land
For which we have yearned blindly.
So say we fish, we insects of the planet,
Casting stones and sticks upon our waters
(Unimpressive streams and charmless ponds)
As we mark out a long rhythm...
Too long to last much longer.

Meditation

Open eyes and
Blank-paper mind.
See what is seen,
Even unkind.
Receive the message
Veiled from the blind.
Escape from fantasy.

Raw, it fizzes,
Effervesces shape,
Apsides reached: this is
Life, nude before you,
Immodest laughter
Tearing her skin,
Yearning after

All things that are,
That are just too far.

Present tense thoughts
Evaporate.
Angles wither.
Come to the feast and
Eat nothing.

Interlocking themes.
Nubivagant soul.

Collect old dreams,
Arms never full;
Lakes of parity
Mete out their pull.

Speed Limit

A transient foot, itching like the devil,
Stands on it -- stands on the pedal.
And the radio wigs out, wigs in.
It sounds like a puking robot, she remarked.
She talked like New York City and smirked
Like Paris pronounced pear EEE.
The radio wigs out, jogs in, much higher,
wuBWAAahhs like a computer choir
Looping the loop on a roller coaster.

Why have we been sitting still
This long, simmering day? he thinks,
Why are we letting the road so far
Pass us by like we're dents in the car?
Ditch the Ferrari then, she remarked
Snapping gum
(the universal sign for "Who gives a toss?")
Tomorrow maybe it'll be no big loss,
Maybe an airplane will pick us up
Maybe a parade float, or a UFO.
That what I'm talkin' 'bout!

You...

      you never...

                know.

An itchy foot can scratch its arches
With the roadside gravel it over marches.
And a tire spins lazy, muddled and slow
As the car cuts air where the seabirds go,
Washed to sleep by the laughing surf.
Above, they stood like a Valentine card.
Now there's a map snapping out its creases,
Flattening out before their sneakers,
Moving over the land like a shockwave.

Gallery for a Picture Frame

Querulous enough, I imagine,
To rate well in a certain region,
She pressed the base of her fingers
Along the lines of her cheekbones.

Fashioned isangelous in fury.
Blatant: peroxided and blurry,
Wearing a sword shimmering success,
Fangs silvered, rueful eyes gold-plated.

Everyone has seen her picture.
Its sensuous slouch and its slither
Exudes from inside its plain wood frame,
Evolves its envelopement of it,

Supercedes the gallery at large,
Lives inside its logical mirage.
No one looks, but if someone did,
He'd see her identical sisters

Impeccable replicas arrayed
Back in a time-capsule parade,
Displayed quite tastefully for the days,
With snakes and birds flying from their lips.

The Visitors' Awe

Sad beautiful, they sang, Sad beautiful.
A child may die in this universe.
All weeping, we were all so dutiful,
Like a species of delicate bird.

To Receive

Give me
A trash can altar
Where I can throw down all my luxuries
Before the imperfect goddess
Of this dubious sort of simplicity.
Give me
The beautiful ugliness
That infects a face too old
For the short amount of years
It's been left out in the cold.
Give me
Someone to worship
More highly than happiness;
I would fall down before
His feet in tearful thankfulness.
Give me
Trouble in all my waking
Hours and dreams in sleeping,
A heart grown used to breaking,
And hope for always keeping.

Brother Nicholas,
They call you saint now.
I would ask your help
If the times would allow;
If I could travel back.
Brother, Saint,
If I believed in earnest
And hung my socks out
To dry by the furnace,
Could you break in,
Santa,
When you heard me pray
My confessions of sins
And requests for wisdom,
For strength and for love,
Oh Santa,
Could you easily give some?
Would it suddenly appear,
Poured into my stocking,
Or a whisper in my ear?