“I sneeze snot vapors out into the moon-lit
starry night and I swear there is a glistening
beauty in it.” From my journal.

I sneeze snot vapors out into the dark
world lit by a low rising moon. My eyes
squint at the way the light is split,
hanging in the air glistening in colors.

The vapors congregate, strengthened by the
timid wind, swirling around each other
in miniature hurricanes. Greasy colors
intensify in liquid drops of self-made oil.

The autumn colors droop, dangling in front
of my nose, so saturated with playfulness,
empty night re-drawn with tiny sunsets.
Beauty so compelling, unexpected, there.

My arms frozen to the ground, I can’t reach
out to the sky, can’t touch the scattered
drops of color painted against the starry sky
like a pocket universe of life, color and light.

My head inches forward, my tongue reaches up
to taste the beauty the life the colors;
immediately it retreats to my mouth in cover –
recoils at the bitterness, the sweet bitter

world of its own creation. I draw a wolf’s breath
and blow against the splattered universe, destroy
each color in the storm of my terrible breath,
adjust my eyes, smile at the black and white night.

The sun smooths itself against the water
still gold in the cerulean morning,
the green curve of the ground
like the gold curve of her legs and her hips
as they smooth themselves
across the blue sheets, white pillows
like clouds, cumulating their softness
under the red-stained lips of her smile –
ivory and light in Lethean drips.

I sit on the black iron bench of her gaze,
wagging my tongue the way a phoebe
wags his tail, pumping myself
for a moment in the gold morning sun.
I smell the scent of her clothes,
daisies still dripping with spring
and I smile with an itch in my nose.

The water is smooth and the light is low,
still saturated with amber.
The lake calls to me with its peace;
she beckons with eyes and a finger.
I stand and stretch like a tree in the wind,
firm but ready to bend to her laughter,
Knowing things only dreamt before.

I creak along the wood floor;
My weight lumbers like a fat king
Gnawing on his turkey leg bone
Dribbling fat slobber with smiles.

I wave my weighty arms at the air
Commanding bootless troops,
Growling at the empty chairs –
Crushing my hand on the oak table.

The water drips from the warped ceiling,
Heavenly answers for a parched soul:
My skin now soggy like a drowned frog –
A fat bullfrog stuck in a king’s suit.

I want to reach up and pull the soaked
Skin of my forehead, peel back the
Mildewed layers of my dreaded hair,
Whether ghoul or angel hiding there.

I sit at the table, empty and disjoined,
Reeking like a misplaced Humpty Dump.
My child tip-toes through the dawn,
Trying not to disrupt my snorzing slump.

I lift a lazy lid to watch her shift
Her tiny weight in quiet spurts on the
Wood floor, smile with furtive eyes
Spying me as she twists to open the door.

My breath is white as I talk
to myself in the March night.

The moon is bright and ballsy,
a deep sky aboriginal Monty.

Orion lies low on the horizon
beat down by Ursa Major.

His shoulder is red, bloody
as I toast the crawling dawn.

“My friend we will meet again,
perhaps soon, even September –

When the phoebes thrust their tail
Hungry for that procreating flight.”

I will miss your tilting, abrasive
stance in the cold night sky –

Threatening any who talk but don’t
Walk: touching them with Jacob’s limp.

I wish I could see Socrates or Jesus
reflected in the light of your distant

eyes. Perhaps I do. The twinkle in
Betelgeuse certainly disguises

The laughter of the incorporeal wise
who teach but write only in the dust.

Do I want to die in the cold, moldy
ground or ascend into the frozen sky?

Orion looks down with a slightly crooked
smile, remembering scenes mistold in our

Apocryphal history books. I want to look
down from the frosty sky and smile

Crooked, remembering that tomb there –
Empty, despite the correcting crowds.

You have cast my thoughts
Into drab colored artifacts
Buried in the overgrown backyard
Of my ground-ridden grandmother.

Once there was a lattice arch
For the grapes to love and grow,
Now weeds and splintered paint
Twisting my mind in bird shitted

Brain matter. Books lift thoughts
Like a breeze lifting a child’s
Paper plane, only to be let down
In a puddle or crumpled on concrete.

Where is the lonely mountain, emerging
From the green pastures of an Earth
Filled with the haze of a warm rain
In early Spring, morning light softly

Shining on its blushing peak, showing
Only dew and snow in simple streaks,
Shadows every bit as beautiful as the
Warm light, an orange kiss from God.

I intoxicate my mind to retain these
Recollections of a distant and dismissed
World, to conjure beauty apart from the
red-orange blaze of a rifle at night

Singing pain and death in a fun movie.
This world is still the world the poets
Of old laud and praise with elevated
metaphors, but still I see children 

slaughtered by sick and decaying spirits.
The world matters in all its swimming
Playfulness. Sunrise light means much
Whether bloody or soft on a snowy peak.

But the smile of a child at recess
Means more than any ray of light, God
Given or accident: the irrupted laugh
Of a child moves mountains and valleys

Like the word of a sleeping prophet.

I sing my faux songs
to the stale air:
untrained
unfortunate songs
sung out to the dead
air with yellowed notes,
tangled thoughts,
unkempt words – sad
intimations of warblers
in winter
singing out to the dead
earth their green notes,
hints of springs
wafted by olive wings
through a white land.

You hear the sounds
of my antique songs
and squint your eyes,
furrow your brow:
straining for the hint
of the winter parula
to instruct my waning
dim words.

Silence.

You would not be impressed
were I to fly to heaven
and return with the songs
of seraphim, melodious dragons
singing since creation
exploded in light bursts;
you will not cry
at dead repackaged words.

So I will not try.

Variation on a familiar theme

And the sun stretched forth his orange-yellow
hand, and groomed the city streets, and
followed the country roads, and even scanned
the island retreats for the slender hand he so
longed to hold; and finding none of his
desired worth strolling through the day,
He reclined – to reflect on Cabernet, and
determined to assign his son the task;
the son, who with his father’s borrowed light
patrols the undeserted streets at night;

And through the dank alleyways of beer-glass broken gutters,
his pale arm crept softly over our simple heads, and
under concrete bridges and over cardboard beds,
in over-populated three-in-the-morning bars, and
theatres filled with song and dance and weeping bards –
he filtered through those sound awake and sleeping
to find the earthy hand his father now desired instead
of the emaciated sky;
but nothing here on earth – and nothing through the sea
could be gathered to compare
with her infinitely finite blue supply
of cloud-swept grace and star-borne flare.

‘O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded Pools’
-Keats, Hyperion

Redowned in scrophulous hives – cloistered
in penumbral shadows of sacrosanct erudition,
she quivered in her slithy seat, and outgrabe
in tendentious fear. Her fallowed heart crooned
for a woofed gueredon to fulfill her scancious
dreams. Her hoary eyes creaked when thrown
around her doleful cubicle. Could she sing
in royal diapason, forsooth she would; Eftsoones
her vorpal tongue will skate across the aspy
Locrian scale with florid agility and rath-like
steadiness;- her mimsy boss is fondling her
thoughts again. Serpentine in his briny retreat,
he spreads an etherized smile across his shiny buck-
toothed mouth, and she returns a smile as
effulgent as the new moon.

the blue world now
a gigantic marsh
of beautiful serpents