The Problem Is Looking Down

Radios split open my dream. Before the intervention, behind a mansion, fierce of any inner fire. So rusty chickens won't go under even when it rains.

Silt sparkles in rivers less than rips and whistle. Below tobacco fields are still not planted. Six hot-dogs, three buns, many hungry protesters.

My mouth, old sweat sock, the lamp in the corner of the bar. Socialists and communists feel at home here so huzzah. I was dogs nosing through asparagus.

The coffee table with milk paint and stencils your mother gave us dying. Paper torn beneath a pine tree so empty. Nearby old tires barn smell in sun.

Ferns slick with night rain will do dart back. Losing my banister down four stairs and right knee. Moonlight between spokes, puddles.

Merely public crucifixions with local anesthesia. These things are the problem between dragging tail feathers. The problem is looking down is no solution.

And: this life is no bargain. I'm not the only one.

Adventure Is A Sign Of Spiritual Hunger

In the end a rain blurring world soft colors. Apple, lilac, sapling and sky. The first time with a special fondness not sexual.

Bow often and sincerely. Know that the aphrodisiac of moonlight may be used only once, after which it signifies unwillingness. Adventure is a sign of spiritual hunger.

Years ago the sea sucked its broadness on the beach. Not like anything but itself. May you find the street I found years ago.

Swans rise off clear canals to greet you. I stood for hours thinking blood signifies change. There is a second heart coursing to be silent.

Your voice a clear hills, like water hitting water. I set the fullness of my life into a vault. A slant of light would fall weeping.

The journey back, giving up forty years. Cold Aegean, abandoned cottage. A young bull or the bull's mother and then the long vowels.

In the months that came after I learned when we kissed. Crying when I told you you were beautiful, strength I remember.

Two Crows, One Bird

Gun shots across house lights through trees. Dusk comes on like a glove. Two crows, one bird.

Walking cloud banks trail the dog. Tangle slowly and laugh herself to sleep. In pockets of snowmelt and beautiful.

How sweet to talk with you still. Rain in December skies, no wind. We drove through a child, burned out mill towns, Massachusetts not Vermont.

I wink as I go trying not to be scared. Terrible kite-flying weather, yeah? Alone when I most need a dream of doors.

The umbrella, shots, a box of old holiday cards. All this anger after so many mountains. Tracking unfamiliar dogs to something else.

Going north through snow squalls and coffee. The doctor comes. Stars, bear scat, certain other songs.

Joy comes to the fool who predicted less. Learning how to pat a dog when it's asleep, last I heard.

That Once, That We

Who has accepted my challenge? They gathered to dedicate the new bell and almost immediately fell into coughing fits. A funeral, conducted with sufficient gravity, in the shadow of a familiar maple.

I once had a similar fondness for rabbits, sir. She pushed her wet hair back. What's that?

An autumn job left undone will rankle all winter. One after another the chipmunks were disemboweled by the neighbor's cat. Coffee stains standing in for decades.

But it really did happen that way! A ladder fell, a neck broke. Day after day after day.

Rewrite this. A long walk in somber light, contemplating new spellings. They sipped whiskey naked, never allowing themselves to kiss.

Or for a better setting! In this case, it's the timing, or should I say pacing. My ribcage folded like a broken accordion.

I never write to you anymore in the present. But hold a thought, always dreaming, of that once, that we.

A Little Becoming Fiction

An odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. Spinning by the fire with a row of apples roasting. Dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homeward.

He loved his daughter better even than his pipe. The funds of rustic waggery. Clattering up to the school room door.

He rode with short stirrups. "The small birds were taking their farewell banquets." Dainty flapjacks, well buttered.

A tractable, well-broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit. Not a fibre about him was idle. Enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction.

Among the graves in the churchyard. For some time rattling along the hollow roads. So lonely and dismal.

Fearful are the feelings of the schoolboy. Jogging along on the blind side. Just beyond swells the green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.

A hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin. A melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes.

The First High

A note said don't look so of course I did.

The first high is the best high.

We drove to Framingham Massachusetts hung over and discouraged.

Someone was always making excuses for me.

Honey grahams, sugar smacks.

The sun rose on a jack rabbit's corpse.

What was it about certain men that kept them on the periphery, their arms folded?

Fear of hunger.

As usual, Newsweek provided the necessary details.

There was a piano somewhere, up the road, I could hear the notes.

As the butt of many jokes, may I offer a bit of advice?

One does not want to flatter Christ by accident.

Repetition is inevitable.

He spread the Daily Hampshire Gazette on the kitchen table so I could see how the war had ended.

There were lines everywhere and more often than not you were left to find them on your own.

Bad things do happen on dirt roads.

A very specific degree not attained.

Olivia Newton John sang Greensleeves over and over.

Why not the best?

He looked behind him for reassurance in vain.

Rain Obscures Route

Burlington was because you were gone stubbornly beating. I crested the lake dead. Before too.

But then it was my first Albany. Heat beat a sharing the bench. Your funeral, my life.

Waiting is subtraction. Coming away with my back. Her and you.

My voice broke looking wasn't love only. Even now. Sunlight turns.

The room filled with architects for door. Chickens push the roiling sky. It might as well be said.

Rain obscures route. Waiting for Jesus is feeding cats bread. That saint rubs his thumb on my eyes.

Don't think I care about quantity. Other words I cared enough to write.

Tame Ravens

Dim first light reveals a dead cottontail, frost on outstretched limbs. That tree which gazing East revealed a thin line of blue I imagined was the sea. Paul, David, John and me.

Cattle skulls were piled to mark the farm's northwest corner. Rain falling off the barn eaves was a dream. If I carry this rock that far what will you give me?

We are no longer a family farm. Most of the kittens died and we found their bodies, little felt pockets, on the driveway. But everybody else has a tire swing.

Little gnomes here and there. West was the possibility of big, like dinosaurs. All boundaries are measurable, knowable.

Not all smiles are reassuring or affectionate. Of all the rules, that was the one I learned best. Nobody knows much about Joseph.

Cast iron crosses, rosaries that when laid out were bigger than a small boy. The male mallard in sunlight is proof of God's love. Tomatoes as heavy as baseballs.

You can tame ravens, you can feed blind baby mice to your snake. Sunshine on my shoulders.

You See A Saga Composed In Pieces

No pirate will ever pursue pyrite! Surrender to the urgent faith characteristic of all newcomers. You can hear the trucks downshifting on the four lane, a mile or more away.

Take all the time you want, he said, meaning a few minutes and no more. Switchbacks faded into mist as they tied the horses and prepared to bed down for the night. It was, you see, a saga composed in pieces.

Consider the birds, the flowers. A mission that was not accomplished, despite heralds on the rotunda, surrounded by busy cameras. Yeah, I remember him - he was everywhere until suddenly he wasn't.

A screed or a poem, both of which would matter. Up late on the couch, discussing their next move, she confessed at last. When he closed his eyes he saw colorful banners on another continent calling him.

Incongruity, a word I must remember to use more. There is no "I" up there, it's more like a pool in which a lot of beautiful fish are leaping and falling like little rainbows. Open advocacy always makes me happy.

Possibly tuna casserole, possibly a donut. The dry leaves like mummified corpses were a chore nobody cared to undertake. The noun became a verb and it was okay because it worked just fine.

But me, I just can't sleep, can't find the right dream. This sentence is a beating heart.

Against A Purpling Horizon

The detective held up as a man in control, unafraid of unraveling the most incestuous of webs. Six white horses fell in the mud! I looked forward to killing the capons, I really did.

We are no longer a family farm. A friend of my father's came over for spaghetti and left his copy of Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, I guess that was the first. At night you could hear the river like wind in the trees.

Traveling was okay, you were always between. Hansel and Gretel, understood at last as a cautionary tale for adults who have issues with longing. A shower of gold leaves but no wind.

One should sit when removing their belt. I wondered at a world in which the broad mirror over my parent's dresser could also function as a door. We shot but never cleaned our guns.

Lyn next door painted my sisters but not me. Bon Scott had been dead a year when I started listening to AC/DC. He favored certain pronouns as who in that age didn't.

This priest when he gets going on injustice is something else. I was affected by many losses, an inflection that remains. You could enter the forest by two paths, one for hunting and one for picnics.

Against a purpling horizon a warm body. Those long walks meant the world to both of us, right?

Copulating Moths

Jump, tether ball, shadow tag. Andy's tumbled rocks held me forever enthralled. Gregorian chants that lingered in my ears like copulating moths.

A fascination with glass began at that window, wondering how did I look looking out. The bread heel used to hold the giblet stuffing in was later fried in blood. I stole chunks of butter and ate them dipped in sugar.

A green fluid for drinking you might see at a friend's house. Did it really happen or are we talking about a photograph here? The tyranny of Pyrite yields up again!

"Childhood is a dream from which I am trying to awake." A can of cream of mushroom soup in that moment only was perfect. In one nightmare, Bigfoot stood in the side yard just gazing up at my bedroom window.

I'm as slippery as a trout! The bitter adult would be neither loved nor understood for decades. In the shoebox under the bed, that's where they are.

Talking as if anybody would. The loose tooth which signified death, the body's obvious inclination to disintegrate. Scratch a rhombus, reveal a plane.

Christ was splinter thin, which was a virtue. On that leash for so long.

Left Behind Stunted

The little garden in front, the bigger garden out back. The chain saw's growl that remained in my ears much longer than you would have expected. There's a bear out there, can you hear it?

My heart was the color of sand and about that solid. A laugh is an anchor and a shepherd staff. Coming to to saltiness, warm in the back of my throat.

My head hurt most when she stopped hitting me. A sled could cut you deep, send you in for stitches to the doctor. We tried to be quiet watching tv in the front room while they fucked in the other.

I found a pearl in the rocks out back. Growing up too fast means a lot gets left behind stunted. Grounder equals grinder, ha ha.

You can do things with words that nobody else can. His heart lifted, enfolded in the tune. Please don't hurt me please.

But then nobody likes a beggar. Did I ever tell you what my father said about God hating cowards? The years passed like pickles down a pig's gullet and nobody worked as hard as they could have.

Because in truth, nobody wanted to be there. There was a ghost horse that lingered in the front yard looking for a rider.

The Dust At A Whore's Feet

You are not your place. Or else. David's nose bled and when I asked why his father had hit him he answered, because he hates me.

We watched lightening in the distance, it put me in the mind of sutures. At night the coyotes howling made it hard for us to sleep. One of the cats died when the grass whip found her dozing in tall grass.

The white fence, against which we stood in homemade poncho's. The cows were named for my father's side of the family. He walked to my house to visit me, carrying with him a coffee can filled with worms.

Nobody but me appreciated the jade cocoons of the Monarchs. Nobody was allowed to tell Scott that another chicken had hatched. We ate glue as who in those days didn't.

I could have sworn I saw you running through the school yard towards me. Don't ever touch a resting racing pigeon. Rather than copy a flag, I invented one.

Detective stories were best because they offered some assurance that order was possible. Poor Richard Cory. Cinnamon jumbles were the best cookie, everybody said so.

A longing by which you would at last be defined. Jesus with his stick, scribbling in the dust at a whore's feet.

My Heart Changed Shape And Left My Body

The blue Buick was crushed by a falling maple tree in late Fall. Connie S. threw out the first pitch and we all listened on the radio. Soda with peanut butter and jelly stirred in turned out to be worth a beating.

Someone once planned to build a garage there. Once we mixed maple syrup with snow and the disappointment lingered. A cast iron pistol hung in the hallway.

With apologies to those missing from this text, I hereby state my intention to continue neglecting them. One combs their hair before visiting the doctor, even after suffering head wounds. Kiss albums were ferried through town on a star-spangled Huffy.

There were holes in the wall where the plumbing would go. A bruise can be explained, easily. Head, a melon, cement stairs.

A plethora of love letters were hidden in my closet. Looking closely, one could see their reflection in a bead of sweat traveling down his bicep. And to think that sex was only just beginning to shape my sense of myself in those days!

Contrary to later assertions, heavy metal was appealing not for its manifest anger - a fundamental misapprehension of the genre, by the way - but for its power. Running into the woods after to hunt down fragments of skeet. When she followed my heart changed shape and left my body.

A garter snake in the marigolds swallowed a toad which cried piteously. Yet another secret that can never be told.

A Specific Distraction

The other night when at 2 a.m. both dogs woke me. The moon bathed in wool settling through trees and far hills. The snowy yard now with yellow tunnels of piss.

Rain makes its peace with this winter. In Advent we learn we are broken. Redolent with mud, wind, peppermint.

Sometimes we sing. I do, I dedicate these alms to you. There are maps and cities, some of which I've actually seen.

Had he mentioned his umbrella there at that point? A pilgrim with broken hands? There are places yet where night never ends.

The florist played quietly a sonata while his daughter listened. Like that, but different. To this point anyway I have managed to listen.

A saga reduced to documentary informed by poetry. "They knitted with yarn in the family barn." Fiona wore a pink slip and ate apples.

So forgive me. You were on my mind to a specific distraction, this one.

Be More Useful

Why are you afraid of hunger when after all you eat. Does ice on the window adhere to a logic least susceptible to identification. If you feel you can't pray, then be more useful than you once were otherwise.

The light of any new day is that of which it is easy to be fond. This poem or any other contains no map but can be said to be receptively an immensity. Open is a word that presupposes a container.

Recall that self means not only this moment repeated but also a glorified obsession extremely focused. If blue is your favorite color then why fear hunger in one way opposed to another. Certain poems encourage space in a way that is duplicitous. 

The appearance of maple trees budding redly in is it late winter will cause grave concern and rightly so. To a black bear the idea of hunger is not much of one at all. A container is a large opening in a previous blue.

The lake we recall from childhood ascends as well. If you are having difficulty praying that may itself be a sufficient result. Or else are we going to continue considering hunger a matter of an argument for grace.

Authenticity of intent is always a matter of words. You cannot eat a color no matter how hungry your poems indicate blue. If it is held within narrative then it is a list which is to say primarily an instinct towards the archival.

A comma is incapable of holding anything as pauses ever were. Although being hungry can causes certain valuations to be new.

Their Own Bodies Pitched Against Them

Your punishment will be infinite, the point made forcefully. Those before him in similar plight were "cast down" into destruction. One can't say, can one, from moment to moment, whether they shall stand or fall.

Walking over the icy lake it occurred to her that on such slight and slippery ground one needed only their own weight to be thrown down. Thus were their own bodies pitched against them. Always exposed to destruction.

He couldn't procure any rest at all for those he loved. You shall endeavor in vain, in the "ineffable strength of your torments." For all it was worth, it was chainsaw-wielding angels who handled most of the torment.

He fell. He fell without warning. Without being thrown the hand of another

Restrained by no other, firmer obligation then. Words that would have implied an infinite dread were they able, capable. Not harbored otherwise in a case beyond hope.

The cries of the torn were of extreme misery, perfect despair Oh, they said. You are here in the land of the living.

But the House of God. How dreadful that must be.

Sweet Accord Lifting

Across the meadow voices rose in sweet accord lifting with them her injured heart. The Motorola on four wooden legs was a rather undemonic opiate. Who remembers their first dream?

Beyond blue eyes then, beyond the raised fist. The putter dated back to at least 1940. Days of yore were all there were.

A bag of donuts, spotted with grease. How's your love life? In late winter I practiced swinging in the basement.

Or else was the everpresent, albeit unvocalized, threat. The best strawberry jam I ever snuck was in that stairwell. Waking up to eat saltines in the dark, afraid she would follow me.

A downstairs is not misleading. When cold we wrapped ourselves in blankets, crouched by hissing radiators with books. Pheasants mewed past the side yard maple.

The green men were opposed to the blue men. Farewell notes were often found tucked beneath the mattress. In winter, snow crept through the windows and formed a narrow line at the foot of the bed.

I last saw her on Valentine's Day in fifth grade, made a mental note of the white star on her forehead. You fell, that's all.

Where the Sweet Spot Was

Light in the bedroom pale blue like milk before a storm or dawn. A crow, crows, a black jugular crown. When looking at snow how one thinks about the sea.

Which ones ever did not care after to remain in touch? Try this, try that but remain open. I did, I missed Gertrude Stein.

The envelope bled a few words as the dream itself grew a roseate blur. "Some of your sentences aren't." Sublimity he wrote was a but not the goal of found poetry.

A dead dog with its tail in the gutter. Vitamin debacle and a shovel blights movement. Keep your special deal, your flashing blue light special.

The game while high was name the three guys on the cover of Planet Waves. Some writers lose a windy stallion describing certain hills. The bibliography grew and grew until even backwards was it impressive.

Remember, a mirror must have a source of light in order to work. Pilgrims are simply individuals on their way to visit a location deemed holy by them and are found almost anywhere. He said to laughter how you were the straw that mixes the drink.

It was a lunatic mistake one has to blame on management. But you always knew where the sweet spot was.

Tyranny Of Pyrite

The plow rusted so we left it in the forest. Potatoes, always potatoes. And the blackened crust of roast beef was best, like salty leather.

To follow or linger, those are your options. There's a way in which creative minds can falter, let you down. I always took comfort in the closet, its bundled umbrellas and dark.

Kittens peered wildly from beneath the couch. "He's reading Friendly Fire." The drive to and from school was best, so long as whoever sat with me kept their mouth shut.

Squint and certain winter landscapes become lunar. A slope of hill that calls to mind the globe on which we are always spinning. Pumpkins symbolize wealth, pilgrims discipline.

In the second house we more or less forgot about the sea. Reading love letters while deer hunting. Green M & M's, a signet.

Hammer and nails, what would we do without them? The first time I saw her I was pissing at midnight and she was outside trailing her fingers up and down the willow tree my father had just planted. We honored a rich uncle for no other obvious reason.

Did it really happen or are we talking here about photographs? The tyranny of Pyrite yields up!

The Expense Of Desire

To cherish, to hold, to defeat in games of chance. Concordance was often achieved at the expense of desire. They were faithful, in the manner of dogs kicked over and over.

No buts, I just bought a new truck. Slick with wet snow, the driveway looked no better than the road. Her mind was on their first son who had died in the delivery room, a loss for which no pain wanted words.

A period of years, leaving scars and memories of surgery. You had your chance, don't whine about it now. He disappeared into the far field, after which her eyes hurt.

No soup is better than canned soup. He complained mostly on weekends and then only when his back hurt. The sixties and seventies I remember mostly in terms of laundry.

You never write, you never call. Have you considered a community with a strong arts and craft type of program. What was simple was never what was said, not ever and not there.

They looked awful laid out that way. There were fistfights after, bloody teeth bouncing over the gravel. Who could picture a future of white shirts and slain does?

There is no I where the circle won't stop. Sentence after informed sentence constructing a weary tale.

Lost Lumpen Nattie

Our lost lumpen Nattie will now sliver North its raw need. We fried our bagels in butter then smothered them with cheese and ate them standing up.

Tony snuck wine from the basement and after we smoked cigars where the river turned slowly in the balsamy summer night. Haircuts defined as a form of torture.

A desire for the sacred that was at times so secret it wasn't even accessible. Any piece of writing begins to gather around points of energy, accretions.

The dream of this or that always trumped the doing. Dungeons and dragons was perhaps the most perfect blend.

I orchestrated the firing of any musician who intimidated me. Bologna sandwiches drabbed with mustard stung the eyes.

I have no memory of diapers. David marched up the hill going home and my mother said I should get him but I preferred to let him go.

I thought knuckles were always scarred? Crossing Route 112 to Sam Hill Road was like stepping back in time to the nineteenth century.

You could enter the forest by two paths, one for hunting and one for picnics. Baseball was undoubtedly a metaphor in those days but for what.

He idolized the old farmers to detriment. One was always fighting a late hour.

Scales don't matter, it's the notes you play. Anything most certainly does not go.

Early As A Lifeline Of Sorts

Remembering goldenrod. Troubling events were put aside to make room for new ones. Life isn't a bowl of peaches and cream.

My best guess is you'll see a nuclear winter before age thirty. Rivers are the interstice of local history and time. He wrote early as a lifeline of sorts.

A bloody nose is a different color than sheep. It's called a breeching, son, and without it I'm stuck up here on this hill. The smell of apples marks a safe place, a happy place.

There was the night the warehouse burned and we all woke up to watch. So many pigeons coming from the old silo it was all I could do to keep walking. She looked sad on Harvey Road, less so in the school hallways.

Buddy on the farm, Buddy wins a prize! Iola slipped her arm through Joe's. Sucking a lollipop too long makes the insides of my mouth hurt.

Do you have a girlfriend? Blunderbuss was my favorite word. The mug's handle was cool and smooth in hand, a generous artificiality.

At times though it was like walking a gauntlet of invisible foes. My dreams became violent, more so.

Issues Around Desire

I confused "platypus" with "mole" and everybody laughed. Jeezum Crow indeed. The prism made clear that various avenues of escape in fact existed.

The detective held up in one's reading as a man in control, unafraid of unraveling even the most incestuous of webs. Six white horses fell in the mud. I looked forward to killing the capons, I really did.

We are no longer a family farm. A friend of my father's came over for spaghetti and left his copy of Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, I guess that was the first. At night you could hear the river like wind in the trees.

Traveling was okay, you were always between. Hansel and Gretel, understood at last as a cautionary tale for adults with issues around desire. A shower of gold leaves that continued even after the breeze stopped.

One should sit when removing their belt. I wondered at a world in which the broad mirror over my parent's dresser could also function as a door. We often shot but never cleaned our guns.

Lyn next door painted my sisters but not me which rankled for decades. Bon Scott had been dead a year when I started listening to him sing. He favored certain pronouns as who didn't.

Stories about sex were popular, no matter how unbelievable. He only cares about cowboys because of his Daddy does too.

In Terms Of Graves

What would eventually be understood in terms of graves was at that time not. The doe paused by the river and he froze on the ridge unable to think or lift his gun. Plans for a gallows were labored over just long enough to give one pause.

You don't have a brother, period. When will we be there, he wrote. Limiting Christmas carols to one season ought to be a crime.

There were never any good books in that house. There was a window through which nothing interesting was ever seen. For a few weeks everybody wanted to read what I wrote.

All the early poems included reference to a strange man with an agenda nobody bothered to identify. I have always been envious of soldiers and artists. Even before leaving was a real possibility it was important to claim little pieces of the place for one's own.

Calling Columbia House Record Club from the phone booth at the Town Hall. The first high is the best high. We drove to Framingham hung over and discouraged, bought flowers for our mothers.

Someone was always making excuses for me. Snapping those black wax discs while our boyfriends danced! The sun rose on a jack rabbit's corpse.

He spread the newspaper on the table so I could see how the war had ended. The human heart is comprised of muscle and cannot be broken.

That Kind Of Longing

The convergence hither and yon was all anybody talked about. In those days you could take fifteen minutes to eat an apple, seeds and all. The baby woke up on her lap faced with the sun.

Together we walked the field looking for pheasants talking about commas. Your headline is my nuance. The corner of the unlit room beckoned in the manner of obsession.

The formidable task had no name, but everybody had contemplated it at least once in their lives. A car, a hankering to get out and explore, an over-full picnic basket. It's getting better all the time buttercup.

Your salt is my fat content. He wrote, again, minimally punctuating. Have I told you yet about the pheasant I killed?

Scrimshaw as a hobby no, but saying the word over and over yes. He had no memory of that place - or rather, refused to let that place have any memory of him. There there's always more to come.

Expect both culling and blame. I find myself in the throes of an unexpected spiritual crisis. They butchered pigs all afternoon until at last she worked up the courage to announce her engagement.

Of all the voices, the one most missing. Demand vs. aggregate, that kind of longing.

One Fumbles

A field of frost, boot prints across it reflecting no goal. The tiniest blueberries were high on the bushes. Father's black and white pistol still haunts me worse than any ghost ever could.

Half a dress only, the rest a pale blur. Who knows the twists and turns of every dark road? The plastic wrapper unfolding disturbed everyone in the otherwise silent theater.

In new snow, a dream of new beginnings. One fumbles one. A pad of legal paper, smiley faces.

John Havlicek was one ideal. The snake was thick, the color and texture of a burning tire. A moon in which the inclination to mockery faded.

With apologies to those absent from this text, I hereby continue my neglect. One combs their hair before visiting the doctor, even with a head wound. Kiss albums were ferried through town on a star-spangled Huffy.

Holes where the toilets had once been. Those bruises can be explained and I will. Cement head melon burst.

Across the meadow voices rose in accord with an injured heart. Go baby driver.

Smooth And Artificial

One fumbles, doesn't one? Those bruises are easy to explain if you'll only let me do the talking. An emotional regimen ceases giving only when you don't. He assumed defensively a demeanor reminiscent of medieval peasants.

The mug handle was cool and smooth and artificial. Like rain the piano notes fell. October weather renders apple trees helpfully discursive, especially when viewed from the supine - the post-coital - position. Always ask if it happened or was it just a photograph.

The tyranny of Pyrite my brother. Currier & Ives were an early influence. Kittens peered out from beneath the couch terrified. We cobbled together a kitchen, made pie, peace.

Hansel and Gretel at last understood as a cautionary note for overly ambitious adults. At all times gold leaves could be seen fluttering independent of the wind. One sits when removing their belt, doesn't one. In accordance with the foregoing, a pause.

My hand was star-shaped in pale light from the half-open door. Lost lumpen Nattie, his sliver of raw need North. Then there was a window through which nothing interesting was ever seen. Oh those black wax discs!

Beggings

Borrowings and stealings which are not beggings are in need of a new name. In that particular graveyard one was given to dreams of palimpsest. So let all meaning in then.

This was a time after the defeat of the Moors and before the Inquisition. It did lead, once we had finished our juggling lessons, to a typology of current practices. But remember, the desire for fame and fortune marks a definite infirmity of the poetic inclination.

Within the Capitalist framework of ownership I simultaneously am. One way to think of geography would be as a form of history over a long period. Whose intentions are you calling fugitive, sir?

There are, at any given moment, myriad possibilities. In fact, a new form of astrology is due to be created at any moment! And we will, at that time, begin altering the meaning of a word here or there, not to mention muting the tenor of the piece as a whole.

The former handler of the dead letters has become silent in a bland penal colony. Crude cobblings, roughly smacked together. Love is outside of us, bumps now and again into a him or a her, and then takes off again.

He found at last the real America. Of a savage wilderness one can be easily redeemed by the study of native flora. Is it simply in the end a beautiful and elaborately-staged simulacra?

Ruins were all the rage. It is not a lack but rather a blindness to the decomposition inherent in our biology regardless of how "new" one feels in a given moment.

The Same Old Rib

Let us say that at the last moment we were all set to reveal ourselves. The car bumped down the road at night like a soda can rattling downhill. The first ghost I ever saw was lime green and played a fiddle out back near the willow tree.

I need to show you the left rear paw which was injured in an accident. The kidneys quit, a bad sign. Dried-out goldenrod in the distance reminded him of childhood in a good way.

The train conductor ordered a bagel with jam, and wondered for the thousandth time why God had created him with the capacity for second thoughts. Twelve pennies after a fire make more sense. It was late Fall, there was still time all around them.

Asleep on his back which indicated a severe fatigue. Not even the Sunday bells could be heard, so thick was the fog that day. Land-locked, she said, and the obvious sadness made his knees weak and brought thin tears to both his eyes.

I resent nothing the way I resent the processed nut industry. The town fathers gathered in an attic across town and discussed the possibility of new holidays. The weather in October is like just the right blanket at just the right time, is it not?

If that saw doesn't work, try another. He came home late, his fingers stained with ink, and told us we had lost despite all our efforts the day before. The stack of loose paper I called my novel was as tall as my son, a fact that never failed to excite him even as it made me wonder what to write next.

I heard you whispering in the backyard last night, your voice like a new blade being driven through its sheath. The roseate light was reminiscent of shoulders, the same old rib looking for home.