We cursed the dark
but woke the cold plague wind,
cracked summer's 'crypted spell,
talked the pretty into hell.
And so the show begins.

Black cat's-paw on bleeding-stone;
two speakers in a field of bone
bite down a forgotten kiss.
Whispers from the too-full skull
laugh in the pumpkin's cut-out hull,

but never the voice I miss.



~October 2017

Today is an old day,
leaking
the passed night's rain,

almost with its dawn already
yesterday,
faded replicant of yet another supplicant.

I'd throw it away, used-up as
a broken comb, a flared match fired once to
light something gone,

except
the birds
greet it with such celebration,

singing their
soft explosions
above the autumn seeds.

September 2025

In the Amazon there's a moth
who lives by drinking the night-tears
of sleeping birds.

By day she's folded asleep
deep in green minarets where purple frogs
sweat pearls of poison.

If she dreams, it's only by accident.
At dawn the birds fly up, eyes
opened by song, tears given

without intent or knowledge
as I give mine, silver life
to the mouths of memories.



March, 2024

After
the explosion
I found
pieces of you
in all my poems,

embedded shrapnel,
unclean words,
full of fever's fester.

I scrubbed the wounds,
massaged the scars,
repeating,

autumn is a doctor,
winter is a nurse,
night's blue sky body
arches over
the surgery of the gods,

poppy-soft, ocean-deep, capable
of illuminating
even
your lies.




~October 2013,
revised May 2014