Gin soaked parchment paper, robbed of  words
wrung red from split fingernails guiding,
sliding back and fro
to the irrhythm of distended lobes misfiring  
a useless tome, of uninteresting characters
and the sun that burns them crisp, their lips tiring
cigarettes in the candy dish
the southerners, wrenching wrists about their red clay alleys,
the tinted beer glass stashing tobacco juice  
their words playing loose with the sanctimony of animals, raccoon paws
and muskodine snaps and the rusting 1953 Crosley metal lawn chair
rocking away the synapse.

Some summers writhe beneath me,
the skin stretched across the petri
kept away in the ribcage, beating against the bars,
Wanting stars,
the ether burned off as sand staunching my toesteps
and Saturn rings tossed afar

Stargazer fish, of tactile scope,
a firm apparatus of sullen sail taking on watercrest
and nests in song,
in rivaling storyboards hoping children read along
of the pirate’s appendage - the moonlight, the claim rights
and every night cries for a villainess
to war the heart,
bombards and the plunder,
scuttling poetry under foamy humpback water
melted from night sky,
arriving in tides named for our stride

Machine-learning people, memory blossoms of consonants
Walking all on their own
Like the ants on the pebbles their grub held above their eyes
The surprise is that they Know at all

And their Death is an alabaster tea
Or singed teeth greasing the universal works
Swimming beneath rumpled covers of earth
To be Memory,
blossoming petals
and me

The common blow fly, the
Adults, feeding off nectar and
Animal carcasses
All Forensic protozoa
Owing their
Fine structure of mid-gut
Epithelium to an alchemic
Grand Master,
Razing his glass knife
across alabaster and
buffer acetones as
These  larval Celestials
Intone
As gendarmes of Cyrus and
Cassaiopeia vibrating
The metronome
Honed with memory,
In my ear
All of it History

Tumble quasar roaring blind, caustic stick etchings of candle wicks
carving starlight into unkind creatures
Clawed, aligned
Rivulets between the rivets, precession,
Your star, Our star the finger of another constellation
Advising wayward comets to deflection
I watch tadpoles in the pool
Swim a spherical galaxy
Sun and the earth and the moon alive
Deciding
That gravity is company

The sing song of a child
Aghast face making
Wretch, guard, gild, hone, smelt, style
The seasons snapping our backs, wild

A love affair with God
Bodies old as cast wax
Stuffed with junipers, natron
The future I regret; my past I laud