You curve our love
Like a tattooed vase
A mythic tale
Made perennial
Our scenes, our frills
As art for gazing
Fixed by glazing
The passion of clay
That you reach for
To hold fresh bouquets

Halloween Cahoot

Clowns carouse carelessly
On streets drunk with insane
Dandies dance while dainties
Bare bosoms unabashed
Tempting nosferatu
To clinking, "na zdravi!"
The nocturnal awake
Levity drawn out with
Multi-colored levin
And beats exhaling mad
Benevolence.  The King
watching with wonderment
Revels the rabble's reign.

When they go away
The days are not days
And the nights are voids
To be crossed on sloops of scotch
Each awakening surreal
Until the first breath
Reminds the soul that
It has been dragged
From red to gray
Along the pavement
The injury is permanent
And the world moves without its magic
It has never been clearer
This place is not a home
It is a hostile hostel
For youthful spirits
With nowhere else to go

The wheels were made of iron
Attached to a creaky old frame
A solid meal mule rolling
Decades of fifty and twenty-five pound feed bags
Today it wheeled me
Up and back along wheelworn planks
Powered by an ancient man
I instantly shone as the center of attention
The center of the store, the town and the solar system
Nodding their satisfaction were the other creaky venerables
Watching as Saturn gave Apollo
His first ride across the heavens
On an old wooden feed chariot

My Date with a Caterpillar

From goblet wine whispers whirl
A pain on full display, raw
The hid creeper crawling out
And gripping fear for fall, cry
A blessed urge to fly...fly

What tempo the rain
That beads and lingers before
A long glissando

Reflect the world?
I cannot reflect the world.
I deflect, redirect it.
I move as stealth, unseen through the air, surface and below.
I am the biologique until pinged
Shaking the hull of the world and every sailored soul within.
I am the gap the universe must traverse,
The unmused singularity,
Somebody else's problem.
Immortal until born,
I presage rot
I am the birth of doom.
I skip through desolation
I dance through fiefs of fumble.
I swim through spectacles of secret suffering.
I cry at cherry trees
And laugh at rats
With rubato from Adlestrop.
The three pointed star has blinded me.
The crown's coruscating carbon
Edifies my mind's own patois
Piercing the shadow clouds
With cathedral clarities,
A harvest the beast must endure
And yet cannot consume
Because I have no tongue.
I can only nourish through absorption
In still, shorn silence
Save for the nasally exhausts of thought-breath curling over the deep.
Who dares to dip a toe in that cauldron?
Who dares to bathe in the root,
That basin of tears
That pail of crocodile swamp
To, half-drunk and quivering,
Stir the i
From its sequestered curse
And bless its reverent vices
Giving a menacing body to a sauntering thought,
Limbs to smear its blood.
They say they found a skeleton
Writhing between the walls
Who leaves the trench from time to time
To tremble with tenderness
That which must be leaped and sung.

The fish are speaking Cantonese
Repeating themselves and staring
Mouths moving until they are blue
Or yellow or gold or orange
Pleas of "please" from saam such as these