Wilderness

Old day fades

and a new darkness fills my room

While an unknown pleasure

surrounds

my prostrate body

in 5.1 ways

White lines pulsate

from my belly as

Ian Curtis emerges front and center

His shadow plays tricks

on the crowd as he

dead fly dances on the stage

Hook, Sumner and Morris

restore the old order

of melancholic rocking rhythm

Shearing my sinews

leaving them waving

detaching muscle from bone

creating another bloody disconnect

Curtis breaths into my open sores:

I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?

These sensations barely interest me for another day

I've got the spirit; lose the feeling – take the shock away.

Suddenly he falls ill again

He twists as Hook turns again

He writhes as Sumner riffs again

He drops like Morris' sticks again

His epileptic episode is my episode of tears

Too many years spent in the wilderness

Too much truth fallen in the shadows

Too few bother to look there

Another bloody disconnect

Immigration Reform

November is a necromancer: each year he conjures a perennial haunting

He sends October's spectres to pluck the apple-red,
Valencia-orange, lemon-yellow leaves off the trees

Then he beseeches the buried dead to
corral the indigenous fallen close to their roots

Finally he summons Jack Frost, a foreigner with a heart as cold as ice,
to blow the colorful natives westward along a trail of rain, sleet, and snow

Oktoberfest

Where the hills are green
The pumpkins are orange - beer
turns brown at sundown

Fatal

September is the month when things begin to die in bulk.

Costco Sam's BJ's Wal-Mart: where we can buy one-cent conversations and call it a deal.

Our relationship is a tree is a traffic light.  Green leaves falling.  Yellow turning.  We've run the red.

Fuck

Another 

Talk 

Another 

Lie

The Watcher

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.  For some they come in with the tide.  For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.  That is the life of men.  - Zora Neale Hurston



By eight every morning
the secrets of the Golden Hour hide themselves within the earth
or else evaporate into the heavens leaving me bereft and bemused by noon never satiated:

a wrinkled remote raisin in the sun
The same sun that beckons to me every evening:
the orange octopus that prods me with its tentacle rays
hoping to eat me alive ere it descends into the depths of the West

On many a night I wish to be taken
to drive through the night without reason because few things rhyme in this life

To drive as an insomniac
through state after state of being forsaking
everything I've seen want to see and wish to see again

To arrive in time to see the octopus give birth to another sunset over the Pacific

***

I walk under a sky
rife with ruby yellow topaz and aquamarine
into a sea scintillating with emerald sapphire and amethyst

In the distance
the sun shines through my ship's sails
with the clarity of a diamond and in this moment
I am surrounded by life's precious gems with my wish within reach

To drive

To arrive

To swim and find my anchor

To drown and find the jaguar shark

Influenza

We've run through the gamut of symptoms:

The high fever when we first met
      flushed in the face with watery eyes
            feeling weak in the knees with elation

Then came the incessant headaches
      short-winded grumblings after each dry cough
            sore throats from yelling cursing and suppressing tears

Yet we carry on bed-ridden skin-soaked
      stuck in a perpetual state of hot and cold spells
            feeling frayed tattered and torn like the first Farmer's Almanac