ACCURSED TONGUE…

…always speaks its’ mind.
That’s part of the Money-Back Guarantee.
Do not taunt Accursed Tongue.
It’ll come back to bite you.
Do not try to second guess or use
reverse psychology on Accursed Tongue.
It’s up on the latest tricks.
Just sit still and bless your Maker
that Accursed Tongue doesn’t know
where you were born, cuz it would hunt
you down and burn you out from the roots,
motherfucker. Accursed Tongue
just wants to get along…

GERM OF MERCY

Tiny, imploded bloom.
Shrapneled petals.
Hands clasped asunder.
In our smiles are a
riotous extinction.
In our turning away, water
we cannot cross, though
our thirst for it saves us.
Your hand could be my hand,
but every palm opens empty.
What small mercy still
lends me something to say?

MOST WANTED

I stole that mustache off
the most wanted poster
and posed with a few pilgrims
along the way. I offered them
a salt tablet and a couple of
compromising positions
with their favorite mammal.
I opted out of the most basic line-up.
Y’know, the one where the monkey
standing next to you is the second-guess
fall guy in the evolutionary process,
stuck in an ill-fitting suit,
the short-straw in the mix.
He’s spun an empty chamber,
an itchy trigger-finger,
always on the draw.
He’s the studio audience,
laughing ahead of the curve, a little
too ready to turn the gun on himself.

BACK FROM THE DESERT

Toward such a thirst, you would not falter.
Toward such a thirst, you would not know.
A tongue makes for shaky infrastructure,
through the ellipse of your tunneled logic,
past a back narrative you hold tent stakes for.
It could move at a moment’s notice.
Fold it down. Repent. Reinvent.

STRIKE

Bird song at dawn,
as militant as any
artillery strike, or
ham-strung symphony.

They gather their voices,
the night edges into
diffused blue. Who are we
to make any sense of it?

BELIEF

Diligent into the sun we face
another evening’s gathered shade,
full of rain, pestilent whispering,
floods of solace we haven’t yet
learned to say…
To lean upon a cripple
at a cross roads, to have
his shadow point the way,
a sextant we cast to the ground,
hymnals we know by heart and flip
through their skin-lisping pages.
Oh belief, I am as far from you
as I am from sleep.
A silence turned over
for lack of a beginning, or end.

REMAKE

The open window,
the antic crackling bug crunch
of a cigarette butt being put out.

A silence complete in its’ fullness.
The shadow of your last self
just lost in first light.

CROSS-TOWN

Riding the lonely, late-night bus
from Queens back to Brooklyn;
just me, the driver and a young
Latino boy slumped in his seat,
grasping a diet Pepsi like a drunk
would his own elixir of benediction.

Off in the distance, the Manhattan
skyline, a wilderness of mad, endless
expansion. Video billboards flash
like tarot cards telling someone else’s
fortune: a distant cousin’s, perhaps,
or maybe a visiting head of state.

I remember seeing “Bladerunner”
for the first time in high school;
taking in its’ vision,
hushed, dry-mouthed, dazzled,
and can’t believe how quickly
the future has come to claim its’ own.

EXPATRIATE

I take my razored fingers to the seething
multitudes, pulling up stubborn roots
that proclaim their hold, stuff visages
into black burlap sacks, send them off
to some sanitized legal limbo heaven,
and no, you, in fact, are the one
who first mentioned the word guillotine.
I have a report right here that proves it…

ELEGY

The frail pinwheels of fireflies
play out across the open meadow.
I draw my dark ancestor into a dance.
She cries against my shoulder,
recites a litany of dead names
that mean nothing to me;
a deaf-mute second cousin, a minister
who mended split-wood fences on the side,
a one-eyed sod farmer who bottled
personal misery. She asks my forgiveness
for all of them, but I am left
with open hands, too many
of my own mistakes, and the aching
code of dying light.