Infantryman

Angus blooming
hills unhid and bald out like eyes.
A pen, a wretched claw,
a carbomb, a sickled sky.

Crow black bursting starlings
of funnel cloud into
the tracers by the Blackhawk air.
Daybreak mosque,
the morning prayer.

Rubble swallows, mudnests
among the dead.
When you return, I will lick the glass
out of your forehead,
tuck you whole into the light.

Hope Street

New York has a street named after everything
I have ever walked past, pretending not to see.
Humans are traffic, trading scars.
I’d cross the East River, but it is only an inlet,
saltwater frozen for the winter.

This is a city weary of being told,
an old woman who just wants to go to sleep.
Although she is frozen for the winter
I will find a way to live through this season,
not quite frozen, not yet made of salt.

Still Life with Nabisco

I.

It was lying there
a breakfast square
cool glazed stripes
a sugared crust like
a scab from the severance
disconnected like the bouquet
of fetus filled balloons at the back door
rising
anger
pumped out flaccid
the tongue
like a tongue
or a breakfast square
portion of satisfaction
squared


II.

Pi
Three point one
forever a portion of a circle
like the plate
bisected by a dessert fork
on the Rhode Island Red chicken
plate with crumbs of quiche
made from the eggs and cow teet drippings
blended with pig belly and flour.
Camillia coughing flowers
bud on the linen covering the
table that was once the world.
A fur lined tea cup
incongruous to the scene
in front of the Quaker Oats box
Mise-en-abyme
I was holding you like forever
then the image went flat.


III.

Division
of household goods
that the chair bodes well
that the bench will sit another family
that the paper ending reinvents the wheel.

Sapphic Verse-

She could pull me into her softness
hair warm like bread and breasts rising
She could say why and know why and i could
put my mouth over her and know all of the words.

The man,lost in a maze of deception could only
tuck a verb, hide lie and try his
mouth over me but couldn't get the words he couldn't
know why or say why and only wanted back inside.

The man inside the woman can see the beauty of his self.
The woman and the woman can be beauty and all beauty.

My tongue on the table ( After Chandler)

My tongue on the table, yours held

Mine was bad and learned to slither down the neck and over the back and around to softness and need, I learned to fuck like a life depended on it. Secrets of your desire tucked inside me. The deeper you wanted to bury it the deeper I wanted to take you in.

Yours was truly, then it was Taking on the take while you dragged your self up the tower, while the bower became wraith and wound around until light was shut out. Me, like the bird on a path inching forward. You like the man who can’t find his way out.

Your own light blind at the top of the stair.