Flowers lost in measure
At an outstretched hour
Born sightless in the once
Sacrosanct hedgerows
Picked belatedly

--And invisibly so--

Taken from their family
To unconditional surrender
Upon a cold stark table
Where those assembled
Finished off love with their meal

--And invisibly so--

It must be dark
out here in the cold penumbra,
where mile after mile
no one smiles,

dots and loops,
dots and loops,
a kind of blissful nullity,
beautiful and pointless,

wearing at the edges
it almost stings,
seclusion unraveling
at the underground in us all,

aubade aberrations abound,
challenging the orthodoxy
of the troublesome
morning road,

but should this near-life experience
hydroplane toward
another mineshaft, it helps to know
less is less, not more.

Shipwrecks
and underwater ruins

Dressed as shiny
moons and stars

That shimmer
for the sandpipers

When the sun drops her guard
and shows a little skin

Hello happy hour!
I see you're now reduced
to fifteen minutes of
soft drinks and
smiling depression:
simper and wine.
check that...Sprite.

But I'll drink to
nagging doubt anyway.

Cars are now a kick.
Who knew gridlock
could offer such joyride:
the drive home each day
my ******* sabbatical.

I wrote 3 letters the other day
(the handwritten, paper kind)
and feel a little
like Jane Austen.
I think she'd like Dr. Pepper,
but not Mr. Pibb.
Too foppish.

Then there's this:
the wax and wane
of life between the bed
and the couch.
There's six degrees
of separation
through the five layers
of this reusable face mask.

Speaking of masks:
"one for the money,
two for the show,
three to make ready
and four to go."

And somehow I know
I will never breathe it in
that way again.

Random curtain calls:
I'm so starved for someone
to talk to; the mail lady
had me at "hello."
I offered her a soda.
Mail order catalogs are king.
The Saturday Night Special
from the burglar alarm brochure
was my final good buy.

The blue boat,
white ships,
dissolve,
wash
into pastel houses,

                    sea foam,
                    evaporation.

The light passes through
the pigment,
reflects from the paper,
and passes
a second time through,

                    luminous, see
                    transparency.

From the windowsill,
a reeves box,
a splashing of color,
a loved one
in nature's hue,
drying her hair,

                    sight-seeing,
                    undressed rehearsal.

The painter,
walking his pathos home,
reaches for china white,
sprinkling his soul,
religiously
translucent,

                    murky sea,
                    christendom.

Waiting for his muse
to disrobe,
move into a pose,
make her body
an overwhelming
curiosity,

                    in a sea of watercolor,
                    naturally!

~
Moonlit angels keep turning the wheels of the universe

In conversations with God, they placed the Sun precisely in the centre

Alarum and escapement keep the gear train moving forth:

Astronomical clock, armillary sphere, lunar phases in sidereal time

All patterns of evidence -- releasing our impulses, advancing our hands
~

Kinetic energy
Without equilibrium

A fixed star
Collapsing in on itself

There she stares unblinked
At stellar remnants

Sprawled face up
In the dry aqueduct

Holding her breath
He won't return

I.
She waits in the shade
Of a best-loved oak,
Where he once carved their names inside a heart:
"This means forever."

II.
The heart needs tending
--she visits from year-to-year.
Her security, a vow.
His constraint, a contract.
She made to open the door but he detained her,
A perjury.
Pruning stems, branching
--cognitively speaking--
Dead or alive.

III.
The landscape has changed:
This place no longer holds water.
Listen now for love's addendum,
Measured in the signal-to-noise ratio.
(You'll hear it all the time).

IV.
Oh, painfully leafless gray meadow.
Sufferance is a viable timekeeper,
When it storms the weak run for shelter.

Beneath the arch,
        among the branches,
      the maunder of her eyes
           finds noir in an afterimage,
every reflection is unique,
    explicit and indivisible,
        every reflection is her,
      there she looks close
       for gracefulness,
            in the essays of her skin
               and their brazen transparencies,
         she enters into her body fable,
      the shape of her resembles
           the tenor viol: where it widens,
                  where it narrows,
                where it digresses
              and monochromes,
           she reflects a fragile geography,
             a soft cargo, but
               an inkling of hurricane,
             rendering the fault lines
          beautiful and strong,
       in supplication tomorrow's explorer
will disturb the patterns
   until she's become her own lullaby

Tell me your secrets
unofficially
surreptitiously
on the quiet

whisper the unknown
off the record
behind closed doors
on the sly

between you and me
in camera
sub rosa
entre nous

let me be your one and only

~
faded mauve
butterflies
fluttering along
defeated
selenitic walks
the sound of
abandoned ship bells
in the far
parlor north
but the guilt of
wind is silent
like Venetian whispers
from motionless lips

us, then
inward and upward
one step too far
a house of strangers
tipping like boats
seaworthy as sleep
oars divide
the ocean
but framed pictures
and love letters
unite the walls
to this unstable floor
then, us
always, us
~

Broken flight

They went down somewhere
in the trees

The sky is sad
and full of remorse

But never Calliope

Broadway and 52

God knows
they got to you

She sings songs
of their misfortune

Decidely the muse and
mother of importune

~
Who can circumnavigate Avalon's depository and the palpable swoop down toward earthier terrain?

Yet, here I am.

Where is your gravity taking me, Kahn?

This building is an invitation, and I am humbled in this sense of arrival. The books are stored away from the light. So a man with a book goes to the light, the serenity of light.

And therein lies the hidden meaning.

But you won't let it become just a building; you want it to remain much a ruin; it's all somehow sinister in its celebration.

Occasional distraction is as important in reading as concentration.

And I'm reading between the lines in a corner carrel, looking out at academic crop circles; I grapple with each texture: it's this combination of imposing austerity and weathered familiarity that you seize upon to make your current landscape hospitable.

This building is an instrument, creates a sound in my head akin to music; and this music remains a glowing source of solitude, all driven by a desire to be hidden but sought after—a celebration of all things lost and unnamed.

Here I find closure by opening a book.
~

letter by letter,
     some of great lust,
     some of espionage,
     and secret meetings.

part film,
part theatre,
part fever dream.

we were woven together somehow,
      like we were characters in a book
      being read out-loud somewhere.

According to a new
Conspiracy theory,
The last season of
Game of Thrones
Never happened.

With a hint of death
mingling in the air,
the nocturnal snapdragon is
digging wells,
not just for water,
but also as final resting
places for friends back home,
in the garden,
deep within the soil.

Callous hands and feet
speak of insufficiency
and misery under the sun,
the one lone solace comes
with night,
and the partaking of
her body's delicacies,
bringing her innumerably
to the helve,
as she sings heavenly things
about the architecture
we creatures fall
so easily from.

~
It feels like the anesthetic is wearing off

This circus of machines

From coin-operated hostility

To wholesale apathy refineries

They tell us it's winter down in the subdermal

They tell us the foundation has grown weak

Dislocation is an incoming storm

Mirrors are distorted screens

Placeholders really

In a city without children

Even the statues weep

Snow upon the ground that was once blood

Now an empire without heirs

Even the trees hate us
~

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering,
along the edge of a straight razor … and surviving."
–  Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
~

Remember
the golden age, Wally ***?
And the songs
my mother taught me?

We sang about what was.
Or might never be.

Like permanency.
Distinction comes
out of stiff and frozen silences.
Take it with
a spoonful of disdain.
Take it in the eye.
Actors are like breakfast cereals.
They're obvious
and according to taste.
I stopped needing them
long ago.

Beautiful
Tallulah.
Beautiful,
"less to this than
meets the eye"
Tallulah,
dismiss me,
that I may be free
to find Tennessee.

Open windows
and closing doors.
Always a breeze,
but never a way out.
Right on cue
the cards shuffle.

Butter and cotton *****,
tricks of the trade.
I mumble to be heard.
I am legend
to disciples
of the Method.

I wear my friends to bed,
burn them like newspaper.
They call me "Bud"
—cigarettes at dawn
after devouring the night.
And now my song ebbs,
as the stylus hits the leadout groove.

Tomorrow, I'll be better.
Today, I'm just me.