Do the truffle shuffle?

Canonized With Paint


My eyelids have heartburn I claim
As I rub the reflux from my cheek.
My chin shakes with dry-heaving
Sshh baby, rest, don't try to speak.
Nursemaids with old fairy tales
Hold my writhing sides for countless weeks
And kept the lint from my tongue
Until her vacant skies are numb;
Yet dark with misty disregard
Still somehow greener than my black thumb.
There's life inside this poisoned rum
Leeching thin and taut, food from thought
And ridicule from religion.
Rolling paraphrasing from my skin
More alive than nearly scary
All angles and elbows, arms and shins
With soft misquoted reverence
And an embrace that smells of love.

Like finding a needle in a needlestack

Dingy, Sinking Dinghy

I sat alone in a peopled space
My prayers loosely forming fists
As if unclenched fists exist.
If I bare my throat in kindness
Are my sights above Your highness
Do You see me in this blindness
Are You answering with silence
Each desperate, graduated plea?
You must know I can't submit and see!
Are You drowning me in waves of sand
Or guiding me into wasted lands
Because You love me?

Or because You always find me deaf?

Am I so hidden within the cleft
And shadow of Your passing
That I'll never see where You are
Just lost among the fallen stars
Spinning freely from Your ether?
Another destitute with fever
Hallucinating hands extending
A beggar waking and pretending
That God takes notice of his fears . . .
Are You calming me with violence?
Is there sacred in this silence?
Are You reaching out in shyness
Crying every time it rains
To place the beauty in mundane
In my profane?


___________________________________________________
Spitting in the Wind


If we're going to set the world a-fire
Then we might as well burn it down
Hear the creak of guillotine sounds
Come to take the stress away.
Redemption is the endless tide
Repetition's erase divides
Or eloquently gathers up.
And we are the lens without scope
Still-life when capturing movement
We are the bridge, wood without rope
Finite blurs of self-reprovement
Pajamas soaked through with thunder
Anonymity stoops to wonder
Chaos finds us where substance passed
Camera shudders too slow to capture
All this chasing after rapture
Are we spitting in the wind . . .

Sooooo Tired

Lazy Can O' Corn


It was noon and the moon was rising high
And our horror plots were poorly written
While I rest against the fatal sigh
Shut my eyes, my faults are drawing nigh
Naive lies, no one's this snake-bitten.
Maker calling carvings; deaf, blind and numb
No one believes in patience anymore
The air-conditioned drum and hum
As raucous laughter mocks the dumb
Waiting, just waiting for the death of war -
Can't find the plot-line, fingers turning claws
Innocence sets sail, waving last goodbyes
The world handed me unlucky draws
I find excuses there for all my flaws
It's midnight, and the sun was in my eyes.

"What's the ratio of spiderman to moose muffins?" ~ Mark

Where Angels Cast Shadows


I wake and feel like blood clots in
Tornadoes, blocked and unrelenting
Swirling and churning with blacked-out despair
In a country of lead paint and consenting
Waste.  With garbage-pails of salad days
And quite frankly not repenting
Of our mindless belief in lust
In sweaty palms and dust and touch
And sand beneath and between
Our toothless fantasies, the sheen
And luster replaced by idle hate
While I pine to ponder love.
Love like free-falling screams and shrieks
Of helpless panicked jubilation,
Like thunder in squalls and reckless
Fear suspended in fascination,
Love in train-wrecked sensations
In thoughtless desperations
Until it only hurts to look away,
Love like a gale, that though I stay
Feral gusts carry the day
Steal me away.

Bounce

Deconstruction


Life does not exist in black and white
But in various hues of percolate
Of dark and darker blends, non-absolutes
Misogyny wrapped in coffee
A chocolate date with toffee
I lacked the guts to flip the trigger
I guess it goes to figure
Isotopes and dye
Weak kinetic ties
Allergies and wishful thinking
Stoned and cold and whistful drinking
Eyes are washed with lie, cleaning soap and lye
Careful children cry, but why don't I?
Life exists in capes of black, shades of lack
Window-shopping need
Hiding morbid thoughts with speed
Obese infatuations, obscene insinuations
A mist across creation
Some say the world will end in fire
Some in flood
And some when the gods blink their eyes
But most probably, if I can read the signs
We'll asphyxiate while doing lines
Hallucinating about the times
We held our breath for change.

p-p-p-po-em

Aurora


Formless and void . . . devoid
Nothing's expansive smirks
Expression tilts and spoke
Axis, expanding clerks
In dark cloaks of orbit
Spun of the naked man's
Journey into abstract
With flags to mark the span
And arrogance to spay
Or neuter each perceived
Obsession, whether fact
Or madness' hope conceived.
The licit rotates once
Angles, peaks, curves and rope
Anchor straining shoulders,
Tensed against graying slopes,
Heads rest on familiar
Habits, abbots, rabbits
Pulled from hats in keeping
Gravity at bay.  Mitts
Warmed at the blurring slide
Of great into the small.
Some see a juggler's ball
Some see a place to hide.

I Believe I'd Buy Whatever You Would Sell To Me

Mornings Spent Hacking Up the Phlegm


Sometimes I am weightless
But never in the proper order
Dark with flecks of light
Littering the unspoken eulogies
Of thousands of un-mourned
But well-buried beliefs.
Sometimes I see light in darkness
So secretly afraid
That it's only the patterns
The physics of motion
The induced psychosis of strobe
The effects of shadow
That I love.
And if the light would flood
Break forth and sink the barge
Of stranded deserters
And seek forth in absolutes
I think I would be mostly . . .
Disappointed (not to mention blind),
Become search and self-destruct
Another love in which to hide
Can the soul of daylight find
The luminescent terrors
That only ghost the mind?