Personifications

Birds sing, brooks babble, and trees sway
while the ax chops.
Hunks of tree flesh dance in a slight wind
and stick to the dewy bark
of a thing called man.

Sticky sweet blood runs.

Somewhere a blinking monitor
remembers the key strokes
regarding Marxists capitol
and Foucaultian power.
These heavens bear down on the man.
A sun too bright, a salvation too far removed.

A double helix composed of turned pages.

The forest howls at the loss of a friend,
a child, a mother, a brother, a life extinguished.
Here in the pulsing womb of creation
all falls silent when the slight wind dies.
The clockwork devil, unlike fire and trembling earth,
pauses to adore work and creation
before eloping with the corpse.

Imagine, now the future.

The thing called man and wife adoring
their things called son and daughter,
who like hurricanes blow aimlessly around
the cabin the thing called man built for them.
Unlike fire and trembling earth,
they pause to adore work and creation.
Not unlike bird, or brook, or tree
but for the ax hanging over the fire place.

 

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Movement of Past

I watched the tree
bend under the weight
of possibilities.
A bending deer head
reflecting as it breaks
the plane to refresh.
I see the hunter
hanging, spinning, sitting
in a knot around its neck.
Red like blood, like stop,
like face paint and strawberry jam
signalling a pass over.
He is He.
With a hand over his head
to shade the eyes
meant to eat and own
the meat of the world.
In a flash it is all past
all prologue
under the wandering wheels
of a rust colored estate car.

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Fight

Fight. She said
to bring life from ash. To stave
off dust from the beam of light
that cuts the attic cluttered
with abandoned objects.
He needs to fight the light
because she fears the darkness.
The universe is shaped like
two clasped hands – consumed
by the thing that holds it in existence.

The house has tracks
cut by her lagging finger. Why dust
with so much on your mind?
Speechless amidst a storm of words
in the kitchen she was helpless. She
wanted to say things she could never say to herself.
Things like I love you unconditionally,
like I forgive you and I want you to be yourself.
But instead she could only say fight.

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A Sentence Only a Free Man Could Bare

I awoke, naked
in a muggy apartment
room not uncommon
to the Garden State.
Her hand rested
over my ribs
as delicate as a feather
from Quetzalcoatl’s back
lost when he plummeted to earth.
She holds a still empty bottle
of tequila that we alternated kissing.

The worm did not alter
our shame, or augment
our nudity. It was merely
freed from a prison to enter
her mouth. If only it knew,
before it had been preserved
in amber some ancient time ago,
that it would become Woman.
Would it have fought against
such a benevolent death?

How could such an insignificant
creature find happiness outside
being consumed by nature’s cycle?
An inch is a mile in his world,
and happiness is merely the brief
satiation he feels while chewing
the fruit of a cactus plant.
But why pity the worm,
when you can love the woman?

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Outlasting Life

Make-up was her second face
for years. She lightly applied
blush for rosy cheeks. Perhaps
embarrassment or coyness.
A spent life being overturned
scrounging for seconds like change.
Another foundation, another skin tone
supplement to confer humanity.
His dead body survives for another night’s
celebration because of her art.
She kisses his cold lips and counts the remaining
seconds until work is over.

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You Can’t Blame Gravity

It would take a crane
to heft the weight
to bare the gravity of flight.

She bends, her sleek form
touching her toes.
Behind her, the ocean’s bending
turmoil is hardly a mirror.

The red palpable tongue
glues each crease
that forms the wings,
the beak, and the breast
of his lover.

She extends her arms like wings
to fly. From the folds between
each feather falls scraps of paper.

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The Highest Music

She sings
amidst artificial rain
to clean her.
Soap suds gossamer robes
and sterile acoustics.
A love song, her lover can’t hear,
it is a celebration of him,
a contemplation of their shared history
and it is for her dreams only.

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Saving Nations and People

He spins and spins
like the world,
around himself,
it has been a long day.
She eases her hands
against each revolution
allowing his momentum to
form him with gentle guidance.
She washes her hands of excess clay,
while he slowly realizes
what she has revealed in him.

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The Political Animal

He pats
a slow beat
on canvas so tight
it could be a drum.
His brushing fingers
leaving invisible
lines in the natural oils
of her body,
barely clinging to existence.
Creation and destruction
in the valley of her lower back.

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The Natural Object and the Adequate Symbol

He adds
layer upon layer
binding white paste
stretched over newspaper
headlines on health care blurring
with education reform on her stomach
on her face, that timeless and endless ocean.

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