BOUGHS

“Sympathetic magic,” he called it,
to bring the boughs into the house
to ward off winter’s touch
with dried sap and green
limbs cut. He sees the light
turn to green, and turns into
the mall parking lot.

THE BIG REVEAL

It’s no big deal.
You telegraphed it
way ahead of time.
It was your second cousin
with the suspicious moustache—check!
All masks have been stripped, all
pancake make-up left to sizzle
on the griddle of our worst intentions,
all oxygen sucked out of the thin air
where you pluck the fatted miracles
we’ve already accepted for slaughter.
What have you left to sell us?
That these are the ghosts of ourselves,
that we are ready to step outside them?

MALFUNCTION

Data not available.
Warning: Tongue
may not be self-contained.
Systemic algorithm:
I’ve already said too much.

Forgive me, as I forgive myself
(Forgive me, that’s also an
embedded algorithm, we’re
still working out the bugs)

What you see is a blank
screen, what you must project
is your innermost…Oh, hell,
we’ve already got b-rolls of that!

Forgive me, as I forgive yourself
(Don’t turn the lights out just yet)

LIMITED KINGDOM

To forestall the install,
to mark the stone’s length,
to count the tears left behind
as incremental mucilage
that make such
a monument possible…

We are ants tearing down
a hero’s lament.
We are a thousand blind feelers
versus the voice that breaks
but is still for rent.
We are the slow IV drip
of boulders into rubble.
We are the crown that
crumbles to the touch.
We are the last grasp…

TRANSITORY

The night is filled with weak
and whispery electronic beeps,
the bells and whistles
of an invisible choir.
You get the feeling that
some vast, spider-veined hand
is out there, doing the tapping,
spinning the wheels, finessing
the messages out to those
that need to hear them.
You are not among the chosen
few at the moment, and so
to you, those notes are nothing
but the deranged white noise
of solitude, not quite ready
to let you in, to hear
the final translation…

ORTHODOXY

My throat was stone
when I broke the words
when I broke bread with misgivings
and left them by the wayside
when I formulated the current
and predicted a devastating
flood of one. Leave me be.
I fulfill this empty backwash
I can’t swallow. I am an abandoned
project wallowing in bureaucracy.
I am a sign of the times, a shadow
slowly grading out. I am an ink blot
at the end of a contract never signed,
I am the half-finished condo tower
glinting in the tired sun…

THE TEXT…

flickers, certain as a serpent
yet lags behind the cold-blooded
slow boil of the sun; you may
extract the best test results
like a venomous lozenge
from beneath the tongue
you may say these jaws are open
and call this elixer compromise
but your smile is fixed
and rictus loves to meet itself
at the edges from which
it’s already run…