At 8:32 AM

Her last movements –

removing her opaque stockings

to cleanse the darkness of the night,

were captured furtively, yet precisely

by

a looking glass,

(READ “a mirrored skyscraper”),

and a newly fired worker,

leaving an adjacent building,

glancing upward.

Behind the glass sat a

mutual acquaintance,

(READ “a businessman”),

who saw both the woman and the man,

and

wondered which

he would miss more

deeply.

Glancing upward

and focusing on the looking glass,

he became uncertain

whether his image was

reflected or held

hostage.

The Orange

The voice, realizing it was forever lost,

shouts into a bottle and quickly seals itself.

Cleverly, it elects burial at sea.

The voice tastes plasma tinged with electricity and velour. 

There is no expectation, only a recurring dream,

(without awareness that dreams can be interpreted).

The voice imagines the girl at the back of the class would

someday swallow it.  Together they could overcome

grandmothers’ words: “you are basically good”,

hesitation between the syllables in “basically” to inflict

optimal pain.

The voice in its shiny glass coffin crests and falls while

The girl at the back of the class marks her time silently.

One day, an orange touches the bottle and seems to want to

stay nearby.  The orange mumbles something the voice does

not understand.

The voice wonders if the orange chose its fate too, then chides

itself at the idea of orange consciousness.

Finally, the weight of waiting causes the bottle to sink.  Once at

the bottom, the voice lets out one final shattering scream.

The barnacles take no notice as the plankton move with the

current.

Geriatricity

Perverse, super-low currents of piezo electricity

eke through the minefield neurons of

my wife’s near-silent mother,

and our placid diabetic tomcat,

resulting in torrents of non-sequitur memories.

Neither shows rage which is left to those of us who

want more for them, and for ourselves.

Neither resents the routine asylum

from which they can’t escape.

-Only one of them has forgotten that males urinate standing upright,

Neither acknowledges the other,

fearing perhaps, the resulting

static charge.

Autoclave

this word somersaults through my mind

in my illness

“Auto”: short for car, celebrated mode of liberation

compactly enveloping our youth.

moving crucible of sex, power, and music

“Clave”:  not “enclave”, but related like water and lily

- past tense of cleave.

separate, intrusion-less whisper of our futures

“Autoclave”: a vessel which holds inside something changed

forever.

heat pressure, then purification

The dichotomy of merger- resolved

Iolanta

Imagine this message as pure whisper,

You can use my voice or any man’s voice,

But do not picture my face,

whose fear would tell a different story.

I will build a runway and buy an airplane,

(Alhough the neighbors will certainly complain when I lay the tarmac),

Ensuring faster reunions because moments apart echo

The weight of those we can’t lift.

I will unload sunshine from my attic,

(Stacked heavily in loaves, - the color of brazenness),

And arrange each ray submissively as a giant animal, now tame,

placed at your feet for your rainy days.

I will hide you deep in a forest,

(With guards so fierce they no longer care about hunger or truth),

If the lie is too bold, they will tell it again and again until spring comes,

ending the winter machine.

When I am old and repeat these things,

(With the candor of a cane and a conifer memory),

Will you hear these whispers as they sound today? - as miracles,

Or simply wish for a younger time,

craving only my speechlessness.

Dreamscape 11

There are eleven men in a car all facing forward.

Five are headless though opinionated.

I am in the back, but no one has seen me yet.

They are arguing about you.

They don’t look at each other.

The small one in the front seems to have the final word.

Still there is much controversy and point-counterpoint.

They know things that I do not.

The car stops.

You are beside the road, motionless, wordless.

The men get out and surround you.

They say things that I do not understand.

A fight ensues through only you move.

Slowly making your way to me -

becoming older yet more breathtaking with each step.

New Year’s Morning

Southeast of Taos, North of the Red River, on a ridge nobody visits, stands a frutescent

Pinyon Pine casting the universe’s only perfect shade just after sunrise each New Year’s morning.

It has painstakingly arranged each cone and needle to bestow a laser-sharp ellipse of squint-less grey.

This tree knows the past; ancestral jet-stream travels scented with far away spices,

and wonders if its progeny will ever understand its desire to provide perfect shade.

It feels peace not knowing the future but proud of its New Year’s Day gift.

The sun longs to touch the ground near the base of the tree and each year tries

in vain to create some wind, a wildfire or an internal flare to the right.

The sun does not understand mortality, nor the Pinyon’s peace of accomplishment.

Beneath the tree is buried a nomad.

The tree struggles to imagine a path chosen,

but offers the annual gift of this moment

anyway.

The Limit

there is a limit to how much

rain a soul can absorb

until it becomes winterlike

- this is not tragedy,

so the soul embraces sleep

hoping dreams will bring

clarity of being

- this is not truth,

the dreams are always

an adjacent person’s epiphany

though nobody knows exactly who’s

- this is not love

then we tire of wondering

who we will become

but we marvel at what our lover sees

- this is not expected

later the enigma you call “me”

touches your soul deeply

replacing the need for self-insight – with sturdier stuff

- this is not a bad result.

Ricochet

God created evil unconsciously one day,

while distracted by an uprising in sector 8.

(Which begs the question: can any good come from an unconscious act?)

He considered it, and decided it was fortuitous.

Not malice exactly, but something to impart consequence.

In its original form, it was only given as a gift.

(Handed down from the clergy to the clergy,)

thus, ensuring comfortable eternal

separation from mortal man.

The gift mutated given the gift of time.

Then Amazon got a hold of it, and it was everywhere,

ricocheting like the weathers does.