I used to sit and watch them drink
the prairie had sculpted lines in their faces
that told tales of time and its erosion
and how every dry wind
became the sculptors chisel
their dirt stories resurfaced as a
prelude to old scars and pain
and some of the things I heard… hurt
they kept pushing money across the bar
and drank more than whiskey back
I order another for my old friend and I
he drinks his quickly as if it were something precious
then he tells me an old ***** thirties story
he heard in the old bar
the one that stood here before this one
he talked until the wind outside made him mad again

~
Elegies
entering the lists,
in absentia,
the prayer of blood
broken at its spine.

Ah, how minding days
trampoline and joust,
like those days beyond recall
thrown into the fire.

The persistence of memory
is a series of F-stops,
the fountain of youth
a spring of well-being
and then forever nothingness.

We've reached the prophetic day,
I feel the coming wrath
in the whites of their eyes:

I dream of wires
and sleep by godless windows,
the sound of untamed rivers
chanting passions misplaced
and of the absence of belief

—the true ***** of man.

Take one last look
at the structure of morality
before it closes down.

One last look...
~

if someone were to hold me open
to that last page
where I stood alone
on the precipice of
love and its pain
then a story could be told
or a poem could be written
if someone were to hold me open