Going With Ghosts

Ghoulish women crowd dark corners.

Light glistens on my breath.

There is an evil menagerie beyond the gate.

I am dancing motionless.

There are many cathedrals waiting

to be unearthed in my garden.

 

I want to remember exhaustion

Sex,

Monday mornings,

Gratitude.

I hate Complacency

and the way he makes everything pale

and organized.

 

I’m packed and ready

to follow the ghosts and learn

what they know,

but I dread the low opacity

the cold

being unchallenged

and unchanging

Designing My Own Destruction From Glitter

The road curls into

a ring I wear on my finger.

The humid spring air squeezes through

my open window,

fat

sweet

and loved.

 

Somewhere out there I am a baby

Writing great epistolaries in brooding vomit.

 

In the center of a field,

I’m ignorant,

sophisticated,

too generous,

my senses plundered

by clouds of venom

 

I can’t go back to the day I left

My universe of birth

and I don’t want to.

I rinsed the dust of it from my hair.

I glow pure yellow into the waking calendar,

designing my own destruction from

glitter.

Economics

The graph is depressed,

its lines dragging down

into the gutter.

Do you hear Wall Street shiver,

Main Street shutter?

 

I feed the red line from my hands.

An IV from me to a neighbor

when I buy a frivolity and they ring me up.

It is not enough;

my fingers are shreds of paper.

Our island is sinking into this sea.

Who can we grab

that we won’t drown

 

alone?

 

Pulling on a gold that won’t come.

 

I have a card.

You have a card.

Our leader has a card.

We have no eyes.

Hear the world run.

 

 

My Disease

A little thunderstorm runs around my feet

Then skitters under the sofa.

He is one of many.

I see them in my cabinets sometimes

and once walked into millions of them in the attic.

They scattered.

 

A feral book leaps off his shelf and

onto the lonely sofa I no longer sit on

because I cannot linger.

My disease watches me all the time,

nestled in my skull.

It will attack me from the side

Rip my smiles open and empty them out.

 

I work all day to stay on the move.

Light is always trying to hide behind the future

so I am constantly pushing millions of beams forward.

The shy scent of water cloaks me

as the desert outside the window searches for me.

More bones are always needed.

 

My disease sings.

My disease plays.

My disease paints the back

Of my eyelids with sand.

 

The thunderstorms feed

on my crumbling tears

Third Eye Witnesses

She harvests roses,

rivers,

righteousness.

The world watches her sleep.

Birds peer through her window

like so many anxious dignitaries in a

court of intrigue.

 

She wears the scent of sun

in a vial around her neck.

He will hunt her better nature.

color his prayers with her name.

 

This is yearning –

to be jealous of the air

because it can touch her everywhere at once.

 

In his suit of wool and guilt

he watches her pick bouquets of breeze,

spinning in a plain of demolished satisfaction.

 

At night, he whittles mathematics down

to an immaculate paste of 2

and rubs it over his body

Tomorrow he will wait by the light

and draw her in with his want song.

Mother Luck

Mother Luck

 

Be kind.

This year is sticky and sweet.

My weeks are rotting out.

 

In the canals the water fishes for teeth.

Tuesday is bare backed, draped

over a settee –

too generous with its mornings.

 

My yellow, savory evenings are limpid with trust.

To die like the day does –

More and more color then stardust….

My body grinding its gears

like a Wednesday jealous of Friday.

A Love Story in Math

7 is in love with 0.

0 is lovely,

has the DNA for heaven and Earth

and whatever the Hell my old job was.

7 is proud and strong and knows he is luckier than 6

or his ex girlfriend 8.

But he roams into the rafters of primacy,

of sharp eyed division,

and the comfort of 0 –

the way she gives of herself

and doesn’t exist,

is missed by him,

who can see only her perfection on the page

her gift for making others greater.

But beneath the tired eyes of mathematics

.000001 is also in love with her,

and is much more in reach

and glad to be.

The Dream is Dead

Ok, so the dream is dead,

or not dead really,

but dying

under this beautiful house that loves me,

with her feet sticking out of the crawl space.

She was from the East,

and wanted to go further,

to every palace and battleground in Europe,

to be hunted by crocodiles and lions in Africa,

to waddle with penguins in Antarctica.

 

So what if things did not go as planned,

if the mice cry in their nests?

Who cares as long as the man is good,

the mind has its medicine?

And, anyway, someone else will have the chance

to slurp up the Earth’s beauty,

when Terra Firma

is older and even more graceful;

she will have my place when she is older

and more graceful.