sleep fells me with a sucker punch
to the head: I fall for it
forfeit a waste of days in favor
of elephants dreamed—

a pachyderm herd
gray hides a tracery
trunks a tidal wave of gray—

awake: rays nail me to a pillow: yellow
spreads across my sham. Another damn—

egrets perch, smears of white
on swaying gray—elephants as fodder
for a bird of parasites: tusks
as weaponry—

my lids don’t close: I am nose to nose
with elephant: a tusk nudges
my skull: I am not
my scars, I say—

elephant’s eye-glint
impales. Her ear’s a ragged flap. Scars
are us, she answers back.

That hotel I keep promising to build on top of some devil’s

backbone about to tumble into the ocean

is no brothel. No one

gets paid to discard used heroes into the fire               ring. Send them over.

The light is empty of stitching,
of bright weather, bees not opening
from a hole in a tree.

That tongue has a mouth’s worth of teeth
and each one hangs with ice.

In winter
I am the cat with three eyelids,
each one unscrolled to veil
a different feeling.

What I mean is,
the gallery exhibits its own empty walls.

What used to be a voice blew under the door;
outside, one degree of temperature

is a lonely thing to feel.
It’s a small world, after all.

pressure-coated in panic
i say it’s the weather that’s got me nostalgic
or perhaps the druggie music
i saw the singer fall down
one balmy night
with the palm trees
unbending
“music is a precocious mistress”
he nodded and cracked a lozenge in half
all straight-faced and tragic.

Patient is
a heart
in slow endure

noise a cacophony,
smell what tricks

the light in
switch to off

inch by inch
in slow it moves

where to put the things
that have no place
in do it now

the butterfly moves
even with torn wings

The day was September, oxygen oozing from the dying wildflowers.

Cease beeping, we said to just about everyone.

We hung a sign outside the church: Park your car, forget your anger.

The leaves clattered metallically onto café tables round as coins.

To be kind, you wished the leaves might fall in water.

A little absinthe, and I felt like a rose revived by aspirin.

No one expects a reward just to ease getting older.

Even though there’s hell to pay.

A sweet bee in an old bell.
Tone of what’s made

silently unmade

During
these
pewter
days,
maples
deftly
juggle
starlings
but
sloppily
drop
their
harlequin
clothes.

 

halfway through the walk       watering the juniper

 

weathered into fine grit       the years

 

a golden shovel incorporating a Bashō haiku

The stillness

of night wings, the gentle piercing
of dark heavens, the
soft echoes of this terrain of rocks.

A high desert mesa, the
stars: quiet has a sound.
Fleeing the past in the silence of
now, it returns, droning like cicadas.