Playing with Fire

I remember the initial gratitude
Surrounding a time when the light of amity
Permeated the murk that was my psyche
And how it held fast through
Profound debates over tea
Doleful venting over meatball wedges
And indiscriminate chop-busting at all times

I remember the diverse soundtrack
To a time when problems were mulled over
With a ball and racquet
A time when befuddled strangers
Pilfered Polish pastries
And shameless jaunts all over creation
Were essentially commonplace

I remember the perverse disregard
Of a time when vacuum cleaner advice
Wasn’t at all hard to come by
A time when a nickel and a grand
Were roughly the same thing
And screen names ended in numbers
That immortalized purchases

I remember the grave sentiment
Behind a time when a deceased car
Inspired the re-writing of funeral hymns
A time when the tangy aroma of cigars
Seasoned the upholstery
And speech impediments
Were fodder for too many laughs

I remember the theatrical pretense
Coloring a time when actuality
Was replaced with credible fantasy
A time when fishing and drowning
Meant a successful evening
And ludicrous pseudonyms
Made proper nouns more chic

But the one thing I don’t remember
Is how it all managed to slip away

Ignorance

Falling apart at the seams
Fading and losing their shape
Marked with empty words
Tied up in maddening knots
Slow to unravel
Harboring an indistinct funk
Filthy and scuffed
Torn
Battered
Ridiculed
They’ve seen the world from a worm’s eye
And shrink some more
With each attempt at renewal
These shoes have a soul
As black as leather
As squalid as dirt
But somehow march on
Without a second thought

Apocalypto

What happened to
The feeble race
Aboard that trivial rock
When the lights went out?

Their nimble fingers
Were rendered powerless
Their words struck mute
Without plastic translation

How did they relate
To each forgotten other
As the waves rose up
In the exanimate stillness?

With bright crimson rage
Scathing their faces
Irony festering in their eyes
They all melted down

Once again embryonic
Floundering mercilessly
They awaited its return
But were never redeemed

A Child No Longer

Life is a playground
Littered with challenges
Contorted metal forms
Spiraling upward
Looming and daunting
Horrifying yet exhilerating
A little battle
With every strained reach
For the next rung
Holding on

It is a place that steals innocence
With every cut and scrape
One where woodchips
Aren't always there
To cushion the fall

In this playground
Not every acrobatic feat
Is within our control
The ups and downs
Of the see-saw
The high-flying thrill
Of the swing
And the inevitable fall
Down
Down
Down
The slide

Dear Outside

To be seen
And acknowledged
Even in passing
To be heard
And understood
Even on rare occasions
To be aided
And guided
Even the wrong way
Is a gift

“You are here”
It says on the card
And for that
I am thankful

What I See

I see a
Plastic bag
Translucent
Weak and insubstantial
Quivering in the wind
Ready to take flight
To depart
From the cold pavement
To be whisked away
And escape
The breaks and tears
Of taking on too much
At once

I see myself

Things that Make My Morning

Sacrifice is an Oreo
Drowned on the fork stick of gluttony
Temptation posing as confection
Torn asunder
The fearless chalky morsel
Splaying its creamy innards
At the altar of every child deity

Reality Never Existed

It is Venice at night
A city with the streetlights shot out
With fog rising up and filling the streets
The blood of imbeciles
Along with the fantasy
The dream
Pools at the center of a fool's arena
It is the color of lonliness
It is the image of my life
I toss that aside

Digest

Psychedellic colors
Reeded glass
Double-sided sofa
Happiness
Orange lips
Taper at the edge of bright red candy
The giraffe sips juice
Snowfall
Purple hues
Majestic spectrum

Distant vista
Lavender-licked in flight
Still crystal freeway
Into softly-illuminated
Gracefully buoyant
Chorus of shadowy golden oak
The mighty flame
Highlighted wonder of
Alien-green luminescence

Guernica

Consumed by the jaws of chaos
With their impossibly jagged teeth
Reaching up in anguish
A shrill scream to the heavens
As if to say
"God help me"
Clawing at thin air
In the bitter darkness
Groping frantically for a way out
The narrow portal of promise
Well within reach
But impossible to pass through

Evening in a Coffee Shop

When I get to be an architect
I’m going to build me a city of
Evening in a coffee shop
And I’m going to put the prettiest buildings in it
Rising from the tiled floor on iron stilts
And melting through the glass of picture windows
I’m going to put some tasteful artwork in it
And the scent of coffee
And the strains of jazz
And green velvet chairs
And the faces of strangers
And amber pendant lights
And the vast black ceiling
Of conversations past
With friends remembered and forgotten
And I’ll put bursts of song
And bleats of hysterical laughter
Stifled for the sake of public decency
Moments of understanding, the mortar
Binding one to one
In that eve of design when I
Get to be an architect
And build evening
In a coffee shop

Bravy Grain: My Life as a Goat

My brain is gravy
Put gravy in
Take gravy out
Communism?
Life

As a Swing Set

I don’t always have the best intentions
I don’t practice what I preach
I’m addicted to disillusionment
You won’t always get a ‘good morning’
And I find no promise is written in stone

But I’m no eternal pit of gloom
I’m not always terse and uncompromising
I don’t always mean harm
My thoughts aren’t always elsewhere
And sometimes I do give a damn

My face is not a symptom
My writhing hands are not a cue
My tongue is not my mind
If I turn away it’s not a signal
And when I laugh it’s not always funny

Clichés

Teal and black stripes
Slick German hatchback
Informal coffee and elegant tea
Freedom forever

Waning heather sky
Cheap Swedish cable-knit
Soaring atrium and orthogonal streets
To nowhere and back

Withering olive canvas
Obstinate Polish blood
Paperback thrills and purple blobfish
Gravy brain

Rainbow lacking gold
Intimate Canadian strains
Mango and sing a song
Holy hell

What You Don't Know

Cynical son
Disparaging ocean tide
Hiding
In the salty air
Enveloped in thin linen
Abrasive cocoon in which
Empty words ring hollow
Fire rages in another room
Bitterly unbeknownst
Told of love and hope
Through a megaphone
Armor against the ally
Cold and heavy
Shame and trepidation
The sting of peroxide
Bursting at the seams
At times
Itchy with timidity
At times
Itchy with expression

Winter Field

The winter field is not the sharp young man it once was
the field of summer lost in snow: it is clouded by a lifetime of failures
another thing, a different thing. With a long white beard
“We shouted, we shook you” you tell me, but there was no evidence
only the running faucet and the ringing telephone
After they’d pierced a layer of obstinacy and fished me up, my face no longer sought the floor
after they’d reeled me back they packed me under qualifying statements and rotting floorboards
The summer field, full of vibrant life
has its many tasks; supporting its lush green empire
the winter field speaks in tongues
For those hours I was alone
and my body began to deteriorate. That
which you have long loved well past the expiration date
did not love you. I hear the sirens coming up around the bend.

Stewardship of the Unknown Strand

Once in a fifty-four
On no one's highway
The small red sports car
Barrels down the nostrils
Splitting atom from atom
In a fiery display
Of vinyl
Metal
And saliva

Fanciful and cunning
The broadsword

Childish laughter
Resounding
Through empty corridors
Of Hail Mary
And faded colored pencils

Switchblade
Of morose beginnings
Swaddles tin-plated
Anniversary dinner
Bathed in amber
And baptized in bleach

Make-up and velvet
Seen by the heart
And the undead survivor

Plastic licorice
Snapping spines
And seething the nerves
Of an entire zoo
Full of bureaucrats

Chimes of Lady Justice
From the
Full-throttle ice cream truck
Aimed straight
At your curves

Masochism
Jaundice
Love your neighbor
As the tornado
Loves the supple breast
Of feeble aspirations

Changing forever
As you cut short
The hair
Which grows tired
With every lap
Around life's
Murderous
Three-ring circus

Gentle
Boiling
Suffering
In the bloody bathtub
That is
Emotional immaturity

Wait and see
For mice
And men alike
Will pounce
At the mention
Of the sweat-soaked crust
Surrounding your
Crystalline womb

On Cigars

Refinement tastes like saliva
Pooling in your throat until you must spit
To save your life
It scathes the nostrils like drought
And floods the eyes

Refinement parches your lips to slivers of tomato
It floats around you like a swarm of laughter
Swelling the atmosphere in wispy silver tendrils
Peppering the dialogue
Atop parking garages and lakefront moorings alike

Refinement sweeps across forbidden parkways
Burrowing into your upholstery
And hitchhiking in your overcoat
Inciting you to lie in cheap deodorant
On your way home

Refinement resides in metal drawers
Thrives as a school of diminutive suns
At the edge of a bloated cinnamon galaxy
Dies as an exanimate molehill of soot
From which we pray no mountains will rise

It is the air you inhale
Which determines the life you breathe

Invisible Sofa

I don't believe in Japan
I have no faith in mathematics
Meaning has no purpose
And purpose has no meaning
Without the words you haven't said

The oyster of my trepidation
You've assaulted with the hammer
Now held high above your beautiful head
With a secret of untold magnitude
Hidden within your pearlescent eyes

Scraping at my spine
And robbing me of exhalation
Each time I check my email
What a foolish tapestry you weave
Such a forlorn smirk your picture wears

If I could smell that sweater
And ruffle that ruffled hair
To swim in the tidepool of those four walls
If only side by side in the grand sense
Meant side by side on this small plane

Millenia could be minutes
And whispers could shake mountains

Dressing Up

Offering up a voice
Two, three, four
And running out of breath
In the frozen atmosphere

Continuing down the helix
The art of a decade

Poised at the edge of a short stair
A stair leading to fried foods
Dumplings perhaps
And a wealth of discounted garments

Here we stood
In the umbra of the monolith
You can't miss

Unveiling, layer by swath
The initial interior
Unbeknownst to teeming hoardes
Of fallacy and "bundle up"
Where by webpage and ether
Love is almost certain to bloom
And when judgment sings
By silence and anonymity

A striped sweatshirt
A bare chest
The lure by which to reel
The beginning
Toward the end