com.position

Traffic jam blues
swerving from
all directions
around Chatanooga
work city in the
crisp summer
comes out to play
round mid-afternoon

Admiration

Mother Earth
A sea of green between
Which the world seems
To dissipate, axis unresolved
Distorted, out of balance
My universe is swiveling

O, loquacious rivers
Between which sense surrenders
A smirk, a heady wisp
Dancer, pure, and healed
Off the medicine
Turned on to knowledge
Yes, I dig it

I dream of a woman
She must be a dreamer
Her slender fingers tracing
The edges of crisp book pages
Pale, with wit and pain to spare
I adore her razor glare

And yet
She is
Taken
By both
Distance
And another.

left upside-down

For the young, love comes quickly
rising and falling in
glorious bursts of crimson light
sweat that rolls from
togetherness unearthed and
hold her by the back of head
double untold hopefulness
teaches moisture in omniform
enlightening and elevating as
eyes lock in perfect silence

manic word-storm

I encourage you to be battered
by the open frequencies we both knew
I'm sitting here, bleeding on this page,
hemorrhaging Kerouac as we talk
and your appreciation
is all I need to feel alive

the bridge stands up and shivers
looking into the evening gloss
there's a hard rain and it's
too damn loud and too fast
to see through the windshield

motorcycles dancing, magnetic
attraction to the trees and
a slip-and-slide mentality off
the starboard bough but
astronauts and cosmonauts
are cosmopolitan, cosmologists

hit the gas
we're going somewhere
anywhere that's not here
mannnnn, who cares

Station-marking-handbag

Something about the
way the wind
blows the silt into
my lover's hair
on the lush afternoon
meadow of memory
transforms the way
I look at her,
very Mexican,
kind of a half-Spanish
sort of thing
without the lisp

The Death of Heat

Love died on a Sunday in the small concrete pad outside her new place, some cheapskate house across from the university gridlocked in the college scene of the town. Something about the off-yellow siding and her violet drapes told me, in their own gypsy fortune-teller way, that the end was near, left wafting like black smoke out the side of a boxcar, but I, like all the great failures in history, treated the omens as child’s play and considered myself the hungry superior of the divine. Hubris was my sin. Retribution was soon to follow.

As I placed my two bottles upon her floor, one red, one rosé, I noticed that her eyes, those river-eyes that gleamed and washed so brilliantly along the rocky shores, those crags that she surrounded herself with, twin novas bursting in the black of space into the depths of my soul, where only eyes and hearts could decrypt her longing message, yes, those eyes were signaling a civilization long dead and hoping that my ancient, musty spirit could be conjured with the artifacts she had restored. Nothing about her perverse ritual dance should have excited me, and even the taste of dreariness upon her lips was intoxicating to my hollow soul seeking substance. Breathing, the smell of summer sauntering from her crazed floorboards, I found my own way out as I told her, without words, that I would never leave unless asked.

Two prayerful palms found their way onto the message she sent, leading me to believe that all our encounters were simply mistakes, that her perfect smile and too-crazy laugh were just the antidotes to anecdotes and nothing we were feeling was real. A simple gesture of the hand was enough to convince her, more powerful than a stroke of lightning tangling itself upon the rods of fortune, fairness, and fertility. I stood with my bouquet in the warm summer rain and promised to her, or maybe just to myself, that nothing in all the damn wide galaxy of ghosts and souls would ever compare to a breezy walk through the oaks with her, staring at the men in vests and their besotted others, nor the noisy breaks into civilization and cramped cafes that demanded caffeine to bear, nor a quiet bottle of Merlot shared under the dim orange glow of a beat-up midnight lamp.

Even heat must die. So life goes.

Composition #7

Shadows maul my waiting face, exposing me to sin
Destroying all my innocence and distancing my kin
Cotton sorrow stretched tomorrow, today will only shrink
Wallow, hollow, follow, harrowed, what will let me think?
A brink to sink, a link, a tinkered twinkling tank of truths
Will bate the breaking base of bastards born in drinking booths
Hit the switch that with a situation saves the sands
That teaches Romeo to know what love at last withstands