costume AND contest NOT context

I have been a bad boy,
squeals the bloody,
both mouth and hand up
pick me oh please oh I'm
so awful nasty wrong.

Walpurgisnacht it is not,
while the faceplay is for
wearing, no other invoked
within the circle of skin
we sport our spirits on

The safety of charades
without the masquerade's
intrigue; the release
of pent-up social grease
being this not-not-this
without the catharsis
of becoming; a ritual
made mere and menial,
another occasion
for the celebration
of what we do not know,
attended, as if an appointment
has been accomplished

I put in an appearance
in this appearance
in the appropriate genre or period
I not only played along, I played
and won my status once again

when I could have been instead
something else

The Days of the Walls

Around the ecliptic of her interior decoration
the sun hangs blue or bluish-green.
I count six symbols of nuclear-fused gravitation,
not quite a planetary alignment's worth.

There's one kiln-glazed shiner, navy hue,
he's a hexagram with such an abstract, fat-cheeked
happy that he must be the ancient.

One astronomical distance under the cabinets,
defined by the width of one steel kitchen sink,
is a texmexicali, landscape-faced sol, providing
twelve auspicious cerulean rays surrounding
the yellow and green and white of earth.

The compass of months is attested by two other orbs,
one fake-turquoise mock-Aztec demanding sarcasm
be sacrificed to his smile, and opposite him
periwinkle fairy-grandmother sun above the key-rings.

The greenest one has twenty-four frozen flames,
appropriate to his summery girth. The last
has seventeen, which they say is the least
random number, and true, here it is,

until

the seventh appears on a cross. I missed him
before, rust-brown, bent-wire metal in four
fleur-de-lys suggesting endings, and in his
center, the sun like a saw blade,
meant to cut free of his shape and mine,
into the blood, to burn where he belongs.

Chaff is for Testing the Wind

butterflies are no longer grist
proper to poems, maybe a grisly,
sanguine image of pile-high wings,
hand-plucked, hand-shredded into
a flat hash of flakes for a dash
of spicy color on oatmeal or potatoes,
that might sparkle sharp enough
to slip through the crowded rib-cages
of heard-it-thought-it-didn't help
to score a hit for the heart there
begging for one more tickle-pain
to mimic intimacy or maybe bees
in their hive of metaphorical labors
ground into a bitter pepper,
good on cucumber sandwiches,
no upper or lower crust just
a hint of biological slavery,
but that's the same comparison,
so back to butterflies and their
undiscovered publishable uses,
like keeping a bag of their beauty
full on hand for instant getaways,
toss cloud of dead symbols
in the eyes of editors and run
or confuse psychopompic sparrows
from delivering their singing
obituary notice or pin them all
above your bed to test who
only notices and who knows
why you flocked the ceiling.

Rule of Thumb

Roughly forty-five degrees
from eyes to treetop means
you're where the trunk will
meet the tangent. Less than
that angle's number says you're
safe from falling lumber but not
from all of father sky's descendants.

business aspect

today I checked my diary
against all the copyrighted diaries
optioned by the studios
so I could delete any similarities
as directed by court-order
and the advice of my lawyer
and my agent, who keeps
encouraging me to live
like no one else.

Easy Autumn; California

egg-brigades of ants are moving out
from their loamy summer crevice
to winter under concrete grout

fall is when the treetops fall
though not these robinson-crusoe roof-tile fronds
they crack and yellow is all

the hedges keeps their leaves on
like lumps of furniture they fray with age
having a year but not a season

for a yard without a pine or spruce
every green goes round both solstices

no wonder all the natives here
end up going grasshopper

Unlimited is a Another Word for Emptiness

Meditation is an ancient method
for discovering how much garbage
you're made of.

I've dredged the channels
for that sacred silence,
but there's no bedrock,
only bedlam all the way down.

Matter receives no absolute rest,
electrons draw no stately orbit,
why should a soul be more than static?

Underneath each stupid thought
are uncountable half-thought
stupid thoughts massaging
each other like proteins
trying to reinvent the cell.

Like irrational numbers each
examined emptiness is full
of pretty and prettier symbols
to describe the deepening.

Stillness is a higher function.
Silence is the sound of
sentences choking each other.

The Inside Card

Strength depends on lust,
I see the old fraud's equation clearly,
and despair.

I might sum it up as
be careful who you conquer.
If you have become death,
behold, you are but fit
to destroy worlds.

I walk this earth
(ramble rhymes with gamble)
unable to choose a table
because I can only wish
I had a fiat lux
up my sleeve.

As the lady rides her lion, ask
would you, could you
in a green dream be
the bit or the bitten,
bridle or pale horse,
the hand or the sword or
the word or the mouth
of the man that says quiet -

- back to work,
all together but the bonus only
for the bloodshot, sweaty best.

Yard Ornaments

foot-wide nylon butterfly
no pretense to silk
daubed by factory hands
a garish monarch's orange
with an idiosyncratic
wing-tip schematic
no genetic sequence could draft

such sheafs of plans
tighter than microfiche
in the virus that built
me for a house

if I could bud cells
back down the tree, not up
halt the phylogeny's reciprocation
at any ontology I want
make an acorn or a bee
instead of investing in a half-breed me

I'd bleed in the yard an hour a day
to clone from my racial backlog
the closest match to that
fabricated insect decoration
so a pulpy mist of giant butterflies
can beat themselves against
that painted idol, dance and feed
the flocks of robins

The Citrus in the Garden

an orange goes drop
like a head to the brick
a plop that won't stop
the tree's next trick

of reselling the same misdirection,
juggling so many windward seeds aloft
the next missed out gets no attention

more oranges drop
like thoughts done thinking
an endless crop
of copies sinking

from floating ceiling to gravity's floor
where roots unfeeling throb through earth
for dregs of corpses of their own spoor

oh you orbs in your dying orbit

the fruit's the pod
in which to snare
the nature of the god

The Bush in the Brickbox

Today the pink rose is open,
while yesterday's white petals
flutter down like a seagull
bloomed by buckshot.

The pink scent has the most affect,
suggesting themes in nature's pallette,
or so she knows while knowing
it's impolite to notice aloud.

She keeps count of buds now,
since roses proper last just
one sun-burned afternoon,
an opening that never closes,
only more open, so much
more open that it's apart.

She feels bad for the masses
of cane and leaf and sharp below
so she tears green applicants
for arranging her transmutation
from purpose to pretty,
chlorophyll workers become flower.

Also, she touches the thorns.

Pretty and Pretty Big

blue sky misted whitish,
green tree-tops highlighted
gloss-bright hotspots
fluttering like everlasting
exploding glass

while lower, local green-stained
leaves wiggle their waxy sides
at the sun's height
all striving up and away
from the dark chemistry
of nutrients and need
toward the color washing
over, but never down

that baby-blanket periwinkle
giant iris sky whose pupil
never opens, that curtain
drawn between the stars
and work-hours so we
can stop looking up,
keep ourselves chin-level
steady to our earth-toned
spectrum of tasks

You can't go there.
That blue is only background,
it recedes, the product of scattered
white-hot, unstoppable day,
pretty, and pretty big
and as distant as any ending
you could wish for.

Untitled: "Oh, those reinforcing stories"

Oh,
those reinforcing stories
on heavy rotation through
weddings and pregnancies,
when even science-fiction
demands doctorates and worse,
the spirit of conquest,
why
shouldn't I prefer fantasy,
running red-rover at the
clasped hands of physics,
so the world can be
about more than gravity,
entropy and profile-height,
yes,
magic is chaos
and silliness is unsafe
but the world churns itself,
so,
I don't feel unfair
ignoring it.

Branch and Limb

Over the hammock, between the trees
two root systems
have sent their slow battalions
to carve space
into smorgasbord and darkness.

Two fronds unfold their colors
in hopes of choking the other,

one splashy green,
wide and houseplant-plastic-sheened,
a googly shape for
rain-dancing while the rag-lobed fern
stretches each possibility out
like a mold taken of
perfect suburbian tunnel cul-de-sacs.

They have no weapons
except their investments
in more cells
and their understanding
of the astronomical epicycles
churning butter-yellow and thin shade.

The two trees might be above this,
but by that no means noble.
Sixty feet up their parallel,
stately friendliness blooms
into forays and strongholds,
a volume veined by interpenetrating
teams of solar prospectors
staking their claim with life and

while the trunk arranges
to mortgage his low countries
for a new high rise factory
of pure potential that only costs
a percentage of shade charged
in progressive, meaning increasing,
rates on all of past production, well -
the central, sucking heart of sweet
doesn't have to care for it's constituents,
it knows the health of the whole
is a matter of statistics

and he has to claim that golden,
free-for-the-taking heaven
before that other pollen-bloated
wind-waver gets their misshapen
leaves in it.

Push to Talk

She stinks like clean,
we wrote that line together,
only dialogue could produce it,
only the scene where I
want her to sit still,
and she has a list of
twitchier time-fillers,
where I want silence
to describe to myself
her mishmashed scent
of shampoo and soap
and tee-shirt and neck,
half shower, half laundry
closet, and underneath,
the just-scrubbed-off
crust of girl left skin
barely able to bounce
back light and a smell
portmanteau words
wouldn't clamp shut on.

Which I can't say under
that heavy, white elephant,
the holy spirit we've made
room for between us sucks
the air into his trunk
so that messages are necessary
across this inch of distance
instead of just a
shared breath unsaid.

Untitled: "I dislike my dreamer"

I dislike my dreamer
so loose-fisted with
my slip-stream empire

I want to return
from my resting
with a return
on my investment

time is rent,
food is money,
so each sleep
is pay per view

any bible or other
self-help bestseller
will do,
or better yet
a myth
because those sell
the movie rights, too.