Biting Down

Cracked like a candy, butterscotch schism,
two halves of the same sweet circle,
now as sharp edged as they always hoped.

To a Lady Seen for a Few Seconds in Westwood

My watch has long since called all clear, since your
book-long vigil cut down to my logline, this
careless seed of yours sowed my synopsis,
a script unwritten since the rights were more
than my company of one could afford.
That basket your assistant silence knew
I'd shortly pour my sorry morning into,
wicker thick with slots for swords pointed toward
central emptiness, my seat, straight on through
one eye and out the other, you a needle's
point oblivious to her train of thread,
and me the same specimen, some beetle's
business pinning himself in the case, as dead
as any time that needs accounting for.

fragment the first

happiness keeps her to the same old haunts
the pain lets her go wherever she wants

Memory's Nest

The crows are off by a block, convened
to mock up today's editorial,
the same black letters with bylines preened,
facts scraped from earth's face, now arboreal,
as high as the king's whispers, green branch ends
as court benches, the countless shoulders of a god
as absent-seeming as his consort: ancient,
dissolved mother stone, who bore roots that have trod
upon her since their wandering father's
lack of presence inspired their star-high aims.
From two omniscient croakers descended
a gabbling pack of wisdom vendors, there's
no place unpaved by word-thieves and name-claims,
no magic left the alphabet's intended.

fragment the second

impatience is the father of reinvention
and the world turned out man
to make the wheel in her image

Burning Both Ends of Every Spoke

Dark by Doppler, receding by spiral,
she fritters her light away, rays and bits
lost to her purpose of looseness, she flits
from shoveling the love of her viral
gift of self to shedding one more aura.
She won't rest, she wants to waste her wattage,
divest her reserves, divulge her voltage,
to dim and feel the bright rise no more. A
blinding light makes a poor doorway, she
knows the white portal is just an effect.
She wants to be opened, not open, she
hopes to collapse closed, burn out, disconnect.
She knows her own happiness is the wrong key,
and the lock in the knob is not a defect.

fragment the third

she digs through her shellshock for a pearl
he stares down the monstrous clarity of the modern
two seeds cast on concrete

Shall I Sell Thee for a Sandwich?

Comparing sonnets to commodities,
the feet trading floor and hypertension,
buy sell, buy sell, the rowstroking bodies
counting their line-item quotas, henchmen
lug-limping under their master's title
the same stripe of plow-straight, unshared language,
dragging dart-sharp thornspeech dreaming vital
tongues will harrow their marrow with sanguine
seedlings of the lost garden's money tree.
Shall I assign each set of rhymes a fee?
Or does the happy, standard price of free
keep words from usurping the place of work?
A grindstone too fine a poem would be,
and the grind is a trope you can't shirk.