Two Unequal Things

Three-fifths is not two-thirds, my friends,
by eye the difference almost blends,
and by grace of estimation mends,
but by the fractious law not quite;
to three-fifth's point six, one must lend
a score of sixes without end:
infinite decimal dividend,
for one pie slice's absent bite.

Untitled Seasonal Worry

This one turns wine into water,
he walks on the ground, changes
his money respectfully and tells
everyone how much to put in
for the fish sandwiches.

His donkey is himself, or so
he proves he is able to say,
he eases Lazarus' suffering
with death and helps Mary
understand the ethics of pain.

Above all, his wisdom is in knowing
that the poor victims need
someone to throw the first stone for them.

Elemental Triangle

Water has three sides,
they are shape-shifting,
self-leveling and
enveloping.

Three-sided things
come with three points,

they are the sharp
of the slapping wave,

the cloth-piercing soak
of the gentle droplet

and the stinging sight
of the merest puddle's
self-healing surface.

Shiny Idol Void

Darkness needs no proselytizers,
she keeps no preachers.

Still, she is full of followers,
dark-handed lanterns all.

No anguish intensified for her
nourishes her, or earns return.

No depth claimed for her
is not already her own.

Still the seedlings dig back in,
greens refusing to believe
they are not roots.

Beside the Frame

Surrounding her picture are:
a coin, numismatic carpet-bomb of detail,
minted intricacies and all its dings particular,
a flashlight black and standing upside-down,
like an inverted, reverse values lighthouse,
a mug shouting in capital letters
each time in the same color,
the native contingent of indigent wires
and a desk full of workspace the home game.

In her picture is:
a background motion-blurred,
the world's proper place as an indistinct filler
surrounding her eyes focused so crisply open
on the camera standing in for the viewer,
smile unnecessary to mention,
hair seeably soft as the squiggles halo,
ending blending out into the rushing world.

Instead of her picture,
there she is, herself,
over on the couch, the real her in real time,
sitting there unobserved, perhaps unobservable.

Wordy Gurdy

When choosing a conjunction,
he prefers but over and.

When choosing a preposition,
however,
he puts under before over.

After all,
his habitually dependent clauses
are caused by his reverence
for the exceptional nevertheless,

meanwhile,
modality minces all possible
moments for trays of meat-pie
slapstick face-plants
for every choicy maybe.

Lost and Frost

Some say their days will end in darkness,
some say in light.
With a physically honest starkness
I await the plausible darkness.
But if the truth were less uptight,
I think two pennies could be tossed
in for my casket's freight, for light
is worth the cost
and no less trite.

Two Possibilities

Fairies having long failed their appointed observation,
the only moral of those reports must be starvation,
a horror proper to the responsible human failings:
deforestation and poor domestic box office.

Dire need should and would preclude flute and fiddling,
forcing an uptick in baby-snatching, milk-filching,
waylaying of disillusioned business-class travelers.
Lacking such statistics, we prudently conclude
the poor, good people have outlived their immortality.

They must eat something, that's just good science;
our hunger crunches multitudes, due to the small
percentage our guts can make use of.

Barring some unexpected exception,
like fairies evolving as more efficient omnivores
than us, capable of consuming gross distortions,
sandwich crusts, fictions, editorial content -

Then the lowest slaves of their race
would own mansions, castles, hotel-casinos galore,
estates of riches safe from human digestion,
with hedgewalls taller than mere Beverly Hills houses,
security hired from a pool of illegal alien nightmares,
toasting our toil for their majority stake,
they thank us, and with the respect due to servants,
forget we're there.

While the Gray Keeps the Rain

Wet has dripped transparency over everything,
a drape of sheen puddled in each low,
holding down what glisten there is.

Wet has drooped the roses, stems near
to snapping under heavily tinged heads,
some thorns getting a lesson in limpness,
some pointed now at their own kind.

Cushions have their plumpness trimmed
with water-weight and ornamented
with moist stick-on leaves,

hammock ropes pooch with a baby's weight,
the underside of the water-proofed green cotton
umbrella is still that boring store-bought color,
instead of the topside's emerald wet.

The bricks sport tidemark lines,
beach-long curves across their grid,
where the run-off swamped bits of yard.

Wet has also licked two sandals,
laid claim to the top-side's purpose,
like the mat they were left out on,
functional things now as
wet as the rest of the glory-drenched mess.

There is No Angel of Irony

My friend announces
his dreams are assignments.

I wrote that in a story,
since I once wished it.

I'd ask for an introduction,
but I know that agency,

they hate me. In fact,
he may be best placed

to defeat the demon
they know I dream I am.

Poured Through Ice, No Ice

Cold is good for rushing,
warm water is too slow.

Old enough to know
rest is for the young,

rain pelts a winter day awake.
Hibernation has been bred out

by hyperactivity, the caves
are full of things to do,

even the paintings move now.
Blue sky takes her break,

in her cumulative dressing rooms
she thunders on and on that

no-one is really watching her
anymore. Yet her costume

and costumier, the clouds,
still reinvent themselves,

as unique as their own signature
snowflakes, while our collage

of accidents fascinate us
into speeding even when we're still.

A Selection of Unused Watchwords

Blokeism: the philosophical cultivation of the everyday
Blockism: a more simplistic form of reductionism
Blackism: a cinematic movement eschewing blue-for-night
Blakeism: a sociopathic affinity for flaky names
Blickism: a milder, but chronic, form of Bluckism
Blechism: inability to stomach vegetables or opera
Bleakism: a culture-wide preference for news parodies

Mountebankable

There is a spell
for making things the same as they are,
it's any words, in any order,
spoken by someone who seems
like they know.

Hypothetically Tragic Parameters

For every brain, a colon.

For each sense, a sensitivity,
for each skill, a set of expensive tools,
and
to each trick, the fools who use it,
to each spirit, these same three dimensions.

For every love-red heart
a blood full of stop.

Flowers Aging in the Kitchen

Remaining on the table,
a two-weekend old arrangement
reminds the eye of when
they were fresh, and to be fair,

they need not bear close looks,
standing in for their previous selves,
color suffices that peripheral purpose,

color which they still retain.
Crinkled is the word, not dead,
themselves decapitations,
and yet uninterred,

color sustained in that murky tea
the vase makes from stems.

The glass is also borrowed,
clarity suspended in brittle
memory of heat burning out

the history of sand and branding
in the highlights that tell
you transparency's there

both cup and contents on loan
then, from that original of banks,
the patient and only earth.

Original Rescinded

What if god got a day behind
during the creation?

Eight would be our lucky number,
our day of rest,
months thirty-two days long at least,
the moon that much farther away,

and since the ends can only number two,
a six-day workweek between them.

In the middle, a day of penance,
where we all have to make up
the hole in time,
the worthless hours charging renewal,
redemption every single
once and again there is -

- a burden drawn into the blueprint,
a bottomless depth of beginnings,
the gift of being seeds
but never trees.

Pods Unswept, Maculate Concrete or Detritus Bound

Crippled seeds, dry-socket horrors
wrinkle-dead-faced beginnings

folded back in, right-to-work
rescinded, viral dreams of burgeoning
denied their burial, racked

by the winds, a century-long
cremation by dry-tongues,
baked by incremental exposures,
days upon an earth drained,
moisture replaced with structure.

Poor salvo unexplodable,
triggers wiggling like tails
rattling a measure repeated
in endless decrescendo

of
I know I can
until
I could have beens

lose their last tragic hint of beauty's
purchase and just become litter.

If At First You Do

The toes would know first
what the nose knows too late
if the shoe didn't step in it for you.

Red is the flag of rage and result,
blue waves the same trough,
a swell banner for pity-tattered-tales.

Senselessness is such a hog,
insensitivity lives in sugar-glass houses,
and incense smells like smoke.

The present is an itch
the future can't stop scratching -
the past is a snitch
worth the risk of killing.

Bird Bath

Clay bird, feathers unfoldable,
molded into a fat dollop,
happy-scalloped, a baby-round icon,

sat on her legless flat spot
on the chopped off upswell center
of an artificial penthouse pond,
a fifteen inch diameter chicken-fryer
sized pool on a concrete pedestal,

water stagnant enough to look natural,
rust-brown and lichen green and three
types of spicy leaves complete the soup,

tan quarter-penny floaters,
yellow dead-slug sinkers
and one half-foot
of stick and greens fresh
from above, straight
down, plop,

but no birds. They prefer
the plastic dog dish.

Image-aright

Orange looks wrong on a December rose,
a hot, jaunty tone, a too-juicy variant,
a shade too tart for the shallowed out air,
a hue too sweet for the dried out light,
bright sherbet ice less apt to melt but
unappetizing in this bitter, lost-yellow
chill,
where are the

Cocoa roses, comfort-food brown, tips
dipped creamish, marshmallow-frosted,
steam-scented,

wooly roses, blanket-hairy-thick,
flop-eared petals all pilly,

fire roses, candle buds and flagrant -

- wait, those would be orange.

Two Kinds of Clean

Some outside had gotten in,
clumped like scar tissue,
branchlets complete with green leaflings,
as dead as the couch they reposed on,
as dead as their own wick-dry middens.

Chunky like a wing, not just the feather,
sections of tree, collected by soft scraping,
armrest olive against sweatshirt black,
where fleecy friction or magical static
glued sticks thread thin and berry-small
leaves once properly scattered,

now deposited along the cushion's crevice
where keys, coins and dog-hair
have vainly attempted re-inventing soil,
now a proper material has arrived,
slumped in the crack's corner
like rakings wind-kicked
into the old hard-to-sweep places,
a foothold soon enough for roots.

But no.

Scooped up like food waste,
innards, skins, shells or seeds,
cupped in a clean hand, dumped in a bucket,
now with the plastic-wrapped trash
destined for the black bin,
no longer awaiting the gardener's blower,
the broom, and the compost's green-bin.

Cycle

Yeats made poor Red Hanrahan to wander
a whole poet's history of aimlessness,

for an omission mistook for a blunder:
a wish he failed to make or miss
for the four card-faced mouthpieces,
or their words or who spoke them before.

Since a share of fairy doom never decreases,
theirs is despair to spare and more,
delight in those who guess wrong their demands
justice carried on from their creator's care,

with ignorance both created and damned,
defects deserving punishment, not repair.

What the Cipher Said

irridictable,
redactile disfriction,
stopper lozenge
tripletathon scoopular
deepsteeped decoction
blocker-ade with slippery-
elm-slope-disease and insist
upon tifferent right-choice difficolt
fortiattilattisiderealistickling
lishcoristhmuscuebellicost
saving, time saving,
efficisenseless than if
wishes were boondoggie moon
shiner conventible headhunterless
baby bunting in to first running
offistle, offencing, indefreezible
unexconscienability

oh mad weird wideness
if I could describble you
before I die
you'll still prescribe
my proscription as scraps:
just another thingamawhoevermore
or less.