Tableau of Realism
Her barely tended fire
The furniture in gold raiment
Windows yawning
Into the gaping hole of night
Scourged by street lamps
Eyes shut
The wood veneer everywhere peeling
Him burning alive bellowing
Tag: poem
Ultraviolet Mafia
Ultraviolet mafia
exacting private taxes on the air.
Oxygen is an independent element.
Yet shrieks when hydrogen is rended from it.
Hi.
I am a neutron.
Hi.
I am an imaginary number.
Hi.
I am dark matter.
Light blows this way
then that,
a cheap exotic dancer.
Contortionist.
Extortionist.
And always the ultraviolet mafia
is skimming some off the top.
Black Pink
Black pink
Space in a coma.
Sugar up and down.
Sour Sundays stay out of sight.
We are not as rich as we think we are.
Yet I have an untried umbrella,
a love of picket fences,
and black pink.
From Generation to Generation
In the room with the low light
and the high shadows
she says hello to her grandmother,
her grandmother’s sin,
and can’t see Heaven for all the Earth that lies ahead
on her head.
Like Fish
The machinations of weeds often go unnoticed
but I can feel the dandelion’s dark intent.
Inside my computer are vices I can’t explain
and virtues I won’t.
What battles for more are fought silently
in a world of less and less?
I was born in a gold mine.
Gold is a poison.
like fish we die far away from home
in houses that will immediately be given to someone else
Godless
On an idolatrous planet
a gold vessel waits to be filled with something better than itself.
Throngs love themselves.
A yellow leaf on a lonely planet
crunches beneath a confused boot.
Cinderella
Seasons of castles, cathedrasl, fortresses
go by.
Pride with his transparent wings buzzes outside the window.
What if Cinderella was as awful as her step-sisters?
The mortar between the bricks says,
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Beneath the cathedral floor princely hands wring desperately
to extricate themselves from a promise.
Fair Weather
My friendships are all pastel.
Neat
Trim.
Tidy.
If I do not hold them close by their mint fingers,
children in a meadow of death,
they will fly away.
Mania
Frazzled fire
licks me frenetically.
My mind is the Monday after a holiday weekend
that meandered into a new month,
and the paperwork in me chafes and squeaks.
Behind my eyes I am filing.
I have begun 178 projects.
177 are exactly what I have been needing, what I have been waiting for.
1 is even better.
My eyes,
my hands,
my judgment ache,
and all I can hear is agitated paper.
Scrape scrape scrape.
Watermother
My watermother holds my heat for me
ambles through my mind reminding me
Hair won’t comb itself.
Yellow cables radiate sunshine and trigonometry.
I think about all the weeds in the sidewalk cracks
of the neighborhood where I grew up.
One woman planted roses,
A confused cloud asked no one in particular,
What does it mean to rain?
Watermother is tender.
She helps me take off my aluminum slippers,
my slummy makeup,
her mind an ever-growing equation like a cancer.
Miniature Moon 