Thoughts Ephemeral

A cold flame licks tepidly at my

thalamus and hazy, distended memories

Reflected on brittle glass statuary, its orange

shattering into countless facades

A fraying, tangled spool of thread tumbles from my

hands onto cracked and yellowed linoleum

It catches on a tightly coiled spring, so coated

in rust that it cannot budge without a tragedy

Fingernails coated with a fine layer of salt, an irritant

to my red, cracked cuticles and gums

A dry and brittle piece of driftwood sits discarded by

the empty shores adorning my backyard

In the distance rocky outcrops jut ominously from

the water and its endless tide receding

While fog cascades downwards from

the mountains of my birth, washing and obscuring

On the Modernity of Life in Numbers

Stifled beneath a mountain of digital readouts I struggle

for air as my lungs are filled with pecuniary fibers

I grasp desperately for any handhold, hoping for a quick exit

But every flash of red I see is not an exit sign, just another readout

I built this hollow facsimile of Ryugyong these many years

But I am not an architect

And these damned handholds I designed are far too precarious

Even without their tendency to crumble as clay beneath my weight

Beneath my grasping digits and stuttered breaths

Smothered by this overbearing mountain of regret and concrete

I somehow built myself of integers and symbols

I had never stopped to look at the alignment of the elevator shafts

And these damned numbers for the handholds are all wrong

Cement Geese

Adulterous housewives behave as homely fuckmakers

Inviting studs dripping with machismo beneath naked sheets

And Betty Crocker buttfucking in the kitchen next to the stove

Pounding out ham in between hot folds of schnitzel

Draped with a thick white slab of Swiss in the middle

Pounding out and in again until she’s got that cordon bleu

And puts it all away in her hidden place while she goes to get the kids

Meanwhile the business-suit-happy husband prowls in his car, on his mobile

Abandoning his semblance of static domesticity for the wooden

Mask of a nomadic shark, circulating turgid waters

Waiting for some naïve chum to fall down through the liquor currents

He abandons the last metal bonds tying down his homely consciousness

* * * * *

He goes back to his family for the evening

Pats his empty children on their brittle clay heads

And kisses his wife’s semen-filled cheeks good night

From a Mojito

Your breath is sharp as mint

on the edges of my mind’s desire

Mingled with the softly fizzing water

playing on the edges of your tongue

Cool as ice upon my lips your eyes

caress the fervors of my longing

The thickly saccharine syrup of your gaze

snagging my attentions staid

Ideas burn hotly like a Cuban rum

as I swallow every sense of you

And bitter as lime the knowledge

I cannot have this love in kind

On Loss

I

Like cracked glass my tears fall

Heavy as the teeth against my cheeks, enamel chipped

On the anvil of my fears I may not see you again

II

These tawny dunes soak up

The physicality of my time

As my dust-hand wisps towards her

III

Your hands and teeth and nails and tongue may dry and split

But you will always be ready to take a trip to Wakulla in my mind

IV

The dying chemicals of a photograph fade slowly to a blurry mess

Then the memory of the film itself severs from our consciousness

Leaving an empty artifact with no Rosetta Stone

V

My tears fall still like shattered glass

From the recesses of my fears against the anvil of my loss

Like cold water on hot glass they crack again

VI

The oxygen tank clanging against your hospital bed

Like some medieval death knell as they wheel you

Down the hall, it is the only sound I hear

Stairs

Hairs splitting and boots knocking on tile
Cold with the first falls of autumn
Men made of barley knock on thick, wooden doors
Behind which our teeth chatter incessantly
On grape seeds and tomato pills

Fabric striped stretches between shoulder
Blades numb with impassion

She goes down the stairs one at a time
Same as always, dust puffs up
Beneath her heels spiders and crickets run

The ingrown follicles of a million words
Dot your tongue like thick taste buds
Scarlet stems struggling to sprout from each of them

Away from the tree in which I've built
My home erect against hurricane winds
But roots brittle, starved for salivating
A crow's nest atop its limbs from where
I can watch you leave the stairs

The Poppy Blossom

A poppy blossomed from my lover's chest
So I got my gardening gloves, my gardening shears
And snapped it off at the sternum

In our musty dirt-cellar I ground the seeds
Chased my lover through saccharine dreams

We were on top of a hill when I put each foot
In front of the other simultaneously and jumped
Forward, across and over the tops of pines,
Landed on a rock plateau and snapped my toothpick bones,
Starting with my ankles and ricocheting upward

Until my neck turned to jelly and bent sharply forward.
The dead weight pulled until the skin of my neck
Snapped in two like toffee pulled thin by bickering children.

My head came to a rest in her sternum's cavity
Where the poppy stem and roots had rotted, making way
For beetles, nightcrawlers, and my lilting tongue.

The Rules of Poetry

I
Thoughts do not come often in streams
But fragment, tangentially and otherwise
Ramming their prows against each other's confines
In fits and starts they form and stop
Like the shards of a gemstone menagerie
Some clear as photons pass through them unabsorbed
Some cool and blue like the depths of the Keys
And others absorbing every photon into a sheen of white madness

II

Death comes in a monocle and sex in a top hat, raging from the id
Coming toe to toe with my condoms and a dialysis machine
Dispatched from the superego to fight my pugilistic ego
Red, slippery, and supple yet firm like Carolina clay

III

One should always come prepared for the overarching etiquette
Ever-present and effervescent  in any social situation
"Should I wear a colon, or is that too revealing?
How about this scarlet semicolon? Bold and exotic, yet reserved"