Not fair— her dear swishing body,
The cling of shearing Indian cotton,
Cool nights of wine pouring shoddy,
Broken truths, laid to rest, forgotten.

Left home, ended alone,
Many travails, trials that cut,
The odyssey of his lashed life,
Took a tremulous toll of atonement,
This lamb whose only consolation,
Being left over at the jeweled altar,
The merciless downing days of droll
And loss, the cruel, blanched turnings
Of uneventful fated choice into ruin,
Never actually knowing his target,
Throwing darts at the sun.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

Sparkling veins, eyes cast,
Thunder bolts from darkling skies,
Night and day— blinded.

I left the house of the tempest brewing,
Spinning like a rod, spun into flame
And came upon the redwood forest,
Eternal, shouting out heavens name.

The sun was indifferent, the creek shuffled
Its lament, the birds fluted their dirge—
I was so small, in the red giants grove,
Yet, felt so beloved, my pain was purged.

And I warmly came to see again—
My eyes, through the needles drove,
What a trifling is ones fleeting mood,
How true, heroic, immortal is my love.

I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue *******
and showed them to her and
asked "are these yours?"
and she looked and said,
"no, those belong to a dog."
she left after that and I haven't seen
her since. she's not at her place.
I keep going there, leaving notes stuck
into the door. I go back and the notes
are still there. I take the Maltese cross
cut it down from my car mirror, tie it
to her doorknob with a shoelace, leave
a book of poems.
when I go back the next night everything
is still there.
I keep searching the streets for that
blood-wine battleship she drives
with a weak battery, and the doors
hanging from broken hinges.
I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.
a confused old man driving in the rain
wondering where the good luck
went.

Our time flicked with drops of summer,
The numberless nodes, mellow cicadas,
Pixelated a world swirling of music—
All dates, sweet tabulations of primes,

The savours swelling in fragrant breeze,
The still waters of pond mist and flame,
How your eyes, with mine, gazed into—
O sleepy windows of eyes being born,

Flowers made a bed and we drank it all,
The light of the sun as it passed in grace
And the birds sang songs of remembrance,
Water fell but once from mothering skies,

Wind whined, such days could never last,
One flesh of burgeoning— moon in the grass.

Words, utter, deconstruct,
Pure truth is now, tainted.
Always two ways of seeing,
Right is mighty and written,
The blinking stars, warning,
Over heads of manly stone,
Silent testimony unheeded.
Faith, the hearts perdition,
The exquisite supplication,
The tyrants dream so freely
Spun for turning heads tips
As baubles do when moon
Is full or the sun is searing.
Is the world really flat? Are
The angels already among
Us or do birds surely winter
On the moon?

Crow perched on gable,
Dark border of cottage house,
Mountains smoke beyond.

There is no awakening.  Outside the cave
Light shadows in the sun, a blinding
Muck veils desolation in the vein-bled,
Good men, stumps of the naked forests,
And bird song drowned by the droning dead,
Ignoble, this is no country for old men.

In the open, all lie freely, lacquered clean
Sunning social graces, shine pornographic,
Know truth is real yet, embalmed by speakers,
Pages, their flame a cross, churning in a mire,
Our glass cities run time mendaciously silent;
The euphony of the untruths, the bent sign.

In Catatonia words are watered but never
Change, sapped of meaning, seasons fall
By the handy green, the spring leaves, tipped
Off balance scaled to autumns teeming news;
The barren shores, breaks, bless the vacuum
Tubes, and pray a curse, fawn the head lamps.

In the homeless land anxious creatures divide.
The concrete utterance is picked to rubble.
The stones ground into sand and we ringing
In delight, moving mandrake, mobile cadavers,
Orbit to satellite are digging babylon down
In the false hood, ****** by the mortar.

The ruin architects mark, fork millions
Of tongues in tributary, as does a great
River from a stony source.  The sterling
Feed their stock with tainted food, plants
Regenerate the mangled codex twining-tare;
Throws the babe with baptismal waters.

In the soulless land children peak abandoned,
They fall on temple steps by the golden mean.
We pattern the sky in the bold fabric of pity
And mercy but the strands fade out running;
Our cruel and only kind would rend the stars,
Would fallow Elysium, bleed gold to the vein.

How did we end mortal under the divining
Sun?  Down base our provident ways watching?
We wave in fealty to the dominion of spins
And shadow, gussied Gods so proudly made,
Desolate, vain, air escaping to whisper;
We are sailing from Byzantium.