Adjunct

Strangers barking in the ear
of anger and the second year that
only speaks to those who hold
their flowers

You are the one who cannot be
reminded who is lost at sea and
learned the truth is meant for
sanitation

The people we hold to the sky
who let us know the day we die have
left us for the promise we
abandon

The angels of the luncheon room
who sweep their life with broom and pan
lift their skirts and taste the life
worth living

Tomorrow sparkles on the tongue
that latches to the ladder rung and
swings across the clouds and lifts
your mattress

Sister Lily

Don't tell me that you're looking for
the mat you leave at the door
the only sign of this,
some form of shelter

I paid for it with my own blood
as rainfall turned the ash to mud
and you stabbed me in the chest
and begged to suffer

There is no word for your life except for torture
You're just some fast enduring form of torture

You wonder why the men you know
treat you with a manner low
as you sit and curl
in their possession

Your face is frozen, lost in time
within your gaze I cannot find
the simplest trace
of some discretion

Those who listen close hear devilish laughter
Your tears are mingled in with devilish laughter

Placing blame is what you do
upon the ones who stole from you
the grave where lay
forgotten lovers

But you have laid upon the grave
serving him as though a slave
defiling holy grounds
just to recover

There is the smell of graveyards from the corner
You're just some foul-mouthed trifle in the corner

serendipity

twelve balloons
floating to heaven
unburdened
have more meaning
than a thousand
old books

stunt

I would
like to
curl and
dangle
across
the sky
and then
the sea

unrhymed couplets are a bum deal

Oh you know that I needed to be around you
because I am a thief of radiance

But then I learned that you are filled
with exuberance and some inner glow

I circle my life with rings of paint
to signal where you should land

I have found myself completed
some artist's masterpiece

And then when I compare my happiness
to the illumination that always dawns

I wish to, in that full-faced grin and eye-roll
lose and find my mind and self

But that's okay, for we can define
"to give," the infinitive

the catastrophe (or, how I bought the very last Stretch Armstrong in Baltimore)

stuck-up travelers-by-trade tell of a distant land
where all the people are bright orange
and their tongues explode with treacherous
half-truths that are baking in the warm
diseased mind of the salvation army

dunno about all that, but his friends
call him shaggy

Bumping in the turntable

I hear you
I hear you
I - - - - you
I you hear
h-h-h-h-h
h e a r
you you you