Buck knife Between Men

4 Quatrain Stanzas/4 Couplets Stanzas

Sitting where a buck knife protrudes from squishy river bank mud

Two men lower catgut silver string to depths where fish flaunt space

Zagging circumnavigating the prankster-hook-bait they chuckle

Chasing earthworm cuttlefish tackle box and doom

The wind

Caused in tandem

Thought; where

Do dead fish go

In natural death,

They never float to the top

One turns to the other lighting the half smoked cigar smiling

He loves the sun much more than Frank the Irish one

Who engages the breeze in intervals of sighs and leaves falling

On the oily spread lazy consuming restless and holy

Stillness

The illusion

Preys upon

The balancing word

Time is earth

Better captured by refrain

‘What happened last night Frank’ gripped words in smoke

Insult the manner of negligence here to be virtue

The line casts plunking, a look arrives ‘screw you Jack’

Forward remorse bleated eyes, an envy and abyss

In matters of honesty

Nothing more than the moonrise

At four

Gives men trying to be friends

Something

To look at

‘Tommy at the Watering hole said you hurt him real bad’

‘I did, is that so’ winding his jaw moving light in his whiskers

How calm all this violence is when the season is a frame

A small snag one rod Jack and the chance to look him hard

The buck knife

Has spread

Stringy roots

Apart

Cigar in dirt smokes

No fish caught

Poem for the Morning

And to the morning

Why not to you

And nothing else

To be green in upbringing

The new soft exchange

So many miss

And what of it

If you do

You might ask

To sleep and rustle

In a lover’s breath

Or warmth alone

Are we not justified

In getting rest

When we are weak

Even to miss this

Thing you pace upon

Called a morning

Why not to the day

Why not to that

And nothing else

Is the specific

Your excuse

For being a poet

Must you eat

Each grape

Nodding mmmm

Should you

Do anything

Other than praise

Why not sleep

Why not to that

And nothing else

Jackhammers with Dreams

Seeing darkness, honey-like enough

To gouge with an eye tells us

The technicolor remains are hung

Sky-paved with Clementine disaster

But in comfiest shoes longest yawns

Flat lining telephone poles and velvet

Our heavenly heartbeat can precipitous

Be unwholesome when confronted by night

Feathered in its blackest spray paint gown

The somnambulist buzz trots

The slow hoof over brown grain roofs

And angels fit with Cartesian axes

For earth-spouts to prosper

Dead gorgon juice

Flow soda fuzz in men

Disdainful, in love

And unhurried to work

I know this madness like I know

My aches are born virgin, composite

Restless enough to rebuild Chartres

Should I decide not to invent a dance

Or design shovels with wings

Pitchforks with arms

Jackhammers with dreams

Why are the children not bombing the moon

Snapping equal signs with hopscotch

Moxie, identifying with waves

Little Nannas never becoming

Natarajas sleep behind scrims

Draped of alleyway gilt

In the Xilbalba of our hour

[Identity] For: Sarah Jo

Perfume I’m Gone

I could never tell if I was more whiskey or you

If this fibrous clad tomb was ever honest

Or if it was a million ephemeral moths

Drunk and painted martyrs searching for neon crosses

Electric lip-gloss kisses or a fuck before death

Whatever it was we shared it

Perfume, I’m gone

I could never tell if I was more shelter or you

If the hidden fortress was more than memories

Or if it was a city of castles built of fingernails

Desperate stone tulips planted on our grave

Holding up the sky we once believed in

Wherever it is the ivy has taken over

Perfume, I’m gone

I could never tell if I was more bed or you

If the wetness of our dreams was ever more than tears

Or if it was a quilt of skin sown together with

Past lovers sweating heart-drops of our unborn children

Whenever it was the scent of our disaster is flesh

Perfume, I’m gone

One Line Poems

When do you have your midlife crisis when you’re immortal?

Half way through the sentence.

The Toilet;

Monastic brown boxes

The little autumns of life

America;

At least you can still have a BBQ

My dream of you was so dirty

It was condemned

When he tells you he loves you

I mean it

How many gods does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Depends on if the light bulb really exists.

For Emily Dickenson:

If god is the weight of my brain

Satan must be 6 inches tall

If I wasn’t such a fatalist

I’d turn bunt toast into croutons

I mean it this time

I mistrust you

Together we are tuberous

And cassava like in tapioca life

She didn’t pretend to like Robert Johnson

Come on into my kitchen she said

She entered from the dining room

I entered from the bathroom

Her black dog humped my leg

I hope they have high school reunions in heaven

I’d love to see who died first

Or who died most successfully

If this were a metaphor it would be

God

Lipstick on the barrel

Handguns don’t go well with love

Parmenides on Psychotropics

An Eliatic Ate Mescalin

(And came down with a bad case of Heraclitus)

If I said

Nothing matters truly

I’d not be

Trumping the deck

But rather asking

Has it

Till now

Been hiding

Somewhere in the

Wear

Or

Meanings

Gathered like blood

For beauty

Tulips for grue(l)

Still blue

Still

Bleeding

As in Mercy

Just now

For now

Just sleeping

I'll scream

(He screams)

But

For wanting

It to matter

Now that matter

Must

Mean something

Or is it too

Oblong

Spreading towards

The desert

Wondering where

It will end

It’s good that

Endings are forever

If I said

Nothing matters truly

I would be

Begging the question

To kiss me

With Its darkness