Poem: Home Right Here

rain took me to the ground
bent the trees in me
all the way down
my knees in supplication
on a concrete promise
the man with the withered hand
with the surprise of “Buddy, I’m
home right here,” &
a Costco’s worth of life
in the prairie went
flashflooding by
them creeks was full up
full the rain in my soul
full the margins of error suspended
full the prayers of thanks
lodged in my throat
simple pleasures turned inside
out, as we burglarized
the air right out from under them
a town sliced too thin for comfort
smack dab in the middle of
Jesus’s calling cards
genuine tribulation
promised land in the catcalls
darkness raged down
a long dark soul
long dark highway
in the passing
all came home
set up and set to
the pilgrims at the pump
paid the blessings forward, so
my angels were waiting
for me in the rain
when the Lord said,
“Him, too.”

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Poem: Verdigris in the Rubble

septimus crimes,
valedictory of the torrid obligatos,
ransomed filigree,
the nascent bloom,
corrugations down the alleyway,
sallying forth, the infidels
rising, no bloom,
no sepia, a sanpaku
behind the turbulent
despair that rides
the tradewinds of diesel
separations. Tried by
the rule of thirds, benedict
whispers into the plastic miseries
of the heart, blasphemy your
only way out, last retreat, last
frozen enterprise beyond
country, beyond ego,
angling for the fellowship’s
clouded doom, live long &
fast, love in drearier times,
age when only
the dreams come tumbling,
a burnt umber’d soul of threes,
wireless, terrified,
all teeming hairless bluster,
every ghost in the fall,
to her he seemed happy
not going to the roots
of iteration, a Samson-ized
catalog of gloom, pint-sized egos,
trenchant reminders of services
unpaid. kneel, as the savory minds
erase, effacing all but the minor
in the rubble – how cast for higher ground
in this mortuary sadness? – you
who in the whirring years,
mourned by the tempest,
cast fate and glory by the wayside &
settled into cottage worry,
sampling distillate joys in
a verdigris unmined,
this crazed medium
sitting in practiced meditation,
souring the image
settled & marred,
nay, the jest was
wearing, and the tumble
was prey to the whims
of time spent in his friend’s
tiny prestige, prime cut
of the fondest worry,
moist juncture of
the tedium brigade.

Poem: Star Inborn

the quest for love
opens time’s vaults;
need vanishes in the exiled
inventory of lost hearts.
memory ascends:
after the joy of rediscovery,
restlessness in the bones as
island wounds heal,
eyeing the blue feathers of the western star,
inborn calculus of
noon in the palm of your hand:
patience mends, life gains purchase,
arrayed in the theater of dreams,
recompense for desert’s exile –
acacia dreams
dromedary dreams
incandescent dreams
soothsaying the nouns and vowels and cormorants as
evening gathers her prayers to the radiant night.

Poem: Barrelhead Moonbeam

Get swole:
leading advice & tips
for the modern man,
& Yellow C is on the trail
of funky Goa-fish for Andy,
slipstream connoisseur of the Fab Five
nostrums, salivating himself into
beyond the swole, capsized
vegetarian asphalt grinder,
a midstream motion picture all
knotty pine and effervescent
ergonomics, cash on the barrelhead,
moonbeam soul dance, papiroflexia sounds
so much less predatory than
all the short poems that bend
in your hand, old Bill
with this patient fingers,
the Joaquin Stick of two-sided
papers, dream worlds of valley &
mountain, squash, rabbit ear,
& petal, “I was a kid
& we put a fifty paise coin
the railway track,” dreams
into Mendocino and Doug &
Frank, Augie & misery – someone’s,
anyway – but Andy likes the Bombay dak,
his Mumbai pocket watch tick-tocking,
a girth-boy beside slender Yellow who
insists on naming the flow,
a Yoshizawa-Randlett astrolabe
of party food, we crossed the Mandovi
to Goa heaven – feni, jevan, vindaloo,
Yellow took my hand, swamped
the actuarial vedas, scrimped
on the dovetailing passion
in her coral pink, &
hooman, xacuti masala, & the narrow
roots of time, & a waif-like pretty girl
riding her horse on the Candolim
beach, Ondaatje country only not,
not at all, so the cinnamon dream
this time is yours and yours
alone, the timing
recedes, the work
of history is to efface
the writhing, sample
the dreams of eventide,
quell the din
of dark & inflame the violet
light.

Poem: The Fugue of You

nut brown mist glides past
dead brown leaves
golden cat stretches
in the green grass, orange
sky a carnage lost
in a bliss that curdles
the temporary hearts, why
this glimpse of grace
in a tendril’d morning,
why the evasions,
the Hempstock witchery,
the whisper of Lettie’s hand
upon a boy’s memory
shades fused with
turning the right sides
to the mirror
are we simply ocean fodder &
for how long, why this grace
why a charmdrop
why a diligence
why this golden sheen
why the evergreen grass
why this river of pearls running
cinnamon castaway
that pearl your dream
of another grassy day
another lakeside moment
another gathering corner
call the late-filled shimmer
answer without tremor
the grace that sits beside you
feline amplitude, pauses to shine
your day back upon you,
pauses to ask the plight
seeming wisdom in limbs
wandering down
the fugue of you.

Poem: Salvation Down

crash-landed in the blooms of
vagrancy, cast iron pot full
of dime-store dreams,
indentured engravings bequeathed
beyond the lively tendrils
of the corner post,
the meaning that suspends
all that glistens:
rode back from the light’s edge,
ambered in the limbs of you
& me, a cautionary tale
only to the wide wonder,
jejune pathways in the broken
lighthouse, mudras of she who
wanders, minstrel-stepping
mead-gypsy marking time &
territory, blitzed by the sun
in April, the last-place
anthems in the heart’s rigor,
she rode west to find us,
languishing in the grass we
knew who she was, we knew
the stir of her, the foot in the stirrup,
the indelicacy of her questions,
the by-your-leave prayers
that glistened in her eyes, & my
eyes were kneeling, they could not leave
that something that quite vexes
the cozy ritual of tea & salvation
down by the river,
a blistering of the soul
deemed jealous & unrequited.
we fight because it feels like
work, the grief that trails
the sadness of the hard to follow,
the knowledge of greening rooms,
the anonymity of water in the lungs,
soul-strewn labyrinthine freedom
when the pleasure’s not.

Poem: Worry Just Muddles

gallaglog,
the derivational motion of foment,
the tracking of the end-lines,
the smooth white marble taste of entropy,
the journey through veins
of nascent commentary, the heart’s
distal vagaries, trampling the wastelands,
the sprawl of yes & cordial goodbyes
mining the striations of heartbreak,
the listless configurations,
broken sibilance,
annotated sequestrations of the miraculous,
we amble to time’s weak pulse,
unbalanced renegades in lemming
profusion, carrion connoisseurs,
broken sad thunder as
the boughs break –
pebbles how I long to touch –
portuguese wayward pilgrims,
the tongues of memory,
the crash of saints through
the vain portals of vain nebulae,
past the range of elongation
I cast the every riven sanctuary,
pestilence trumped
with peasant grace, in the shine
of the missing sister, the missing
daughter, there was grace
in the pushback, the seams
of glory rained down in
the aftermath, calculated worry
just muddles the plaintive
epistle, tis a covering wound
that apes the sense of time’s
simple boon, the fingertouch
in the third and fourth,
a song sung to
the fifth and in the sway
of blessed negation
the blue-eyed worms of praise
gather their blue-eyed
siblings to the noble feast.