Amen

We were talking it over,
content and smiling.
Nothing of consequence.
Blessed be the Lord.

Symbols and reminders,
Joy and hope and friendship
We can never lose them.
Blessed be the Lord.

Then we all were singing.
Don't know where it came from.
He will build the chapel!
Blessed be the Lord.

A Trace Of A Lifeline

Recaptured sparks of city light would haunt me,
Hurt me, Hand my hands to my eyes and burn the palms,
Drown the palms, return their mermaid memories to
Solid, swollen, swallowed life. Wallowed in pity,

Deep canyon, pity, river slithering down,
Old as the city and older than memory,
Cold as the city and colder than frailty,
Makes its mark in the universe, makes its waves.

Recaptured, restrained, regarded as insane,
I thought it over in a crater in the field.
Exasperated and overrated, clever,
I determined, swore oaths: Never will I yield.

Did your mothers tell you where a demon's dreams
Will take his life when or if they all come true?
The Milky Way is not a road, stretching out in
Magic concrete, sparkle bricks and gingerbread;

Remembered comments, tightrope stretched across Styx,
Scrambled barbs of poison blurbs and ragged fly wings
Gleaming, sickly sweet, cloying drunken angel's bleat,
Solid, foiled, broken. This life would haunt me.

These lights would always haunt me.

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.