CORRUPTION PSALM

Looking out the train window at sunset,
the sky-writing overhead just starting
to dissipate. The lazy smoke curly-cueing
into indistinct eternity helixes,
or lost DNA strains. They’re trying to say
something. They’re still words,
just the same.

BREAKING SHORES

If the rain were a telegram
then I’d be talking to everyone
at once, all of us under
a singular, spreading touch,
as tires sluice, and cast-off
voices echo down slickened night corridors, as
the desperate seek same,and the quiet
keep their own company;
a litany of raindrops outside
their plain-framed windows, a certain memory made uncertain, wavering, tide-like, breaking
and unbreaking, never
staying the same.

IDENTITY DOCTOR

You’ve got nothing in your palm
but a hybrid abolishment witchcraft,
a flower bloom in reverse;
the seaming of lips, the erasure
of fingertips, magnolia blossoms
made blind to the sky.

This Spring time hypodermic,
a symphony you’d best euthanize
a lull to cash in on, again and again.
Rub a finger, start a fire.
God bless the combustion
at the heart of every engine.

Delicate amidst sharp
stones; winter feet
on summer ground

Sparrows shiver
on telephone wires
the first rain in weeks

Resting in the cool shade
of a graveyard; car horns blare
past the iron fence

TRANSCRIPT

The immutable few round up the check, split
the difference, shell-game our fates with dizzying
dispassion, set up road blocks and listening posts,
pay off the angels of our best intentions, detain
any second thoughts, flay our dirty dreams
for the last bit of stripped flesh,
solve the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile,
leave an opening in every conversation for,
“I’m not really into that.” (pause) “But I’ve got
a second cousin I’d be willing to sell out.”
They thread the camel through the needle-hole,
free up certain schedules, massage the truth
till it’s lackluster and compliant, moaning,
“Shiatsu, mi amore!”
We are all made up of what we give away.