EMPIRE OF SLEEP

Its’ shorelines are jagged,
its’ inlands smooth,
just like ours, but there,
the impressions make impressions
of themselves, and the leaders
are endless; the handshakes
and name-checking lasts forever.

There, knives draw milk,
and the pitchers pour sorrow.
There, they light up tent stakes
at dawn, and say goodbye
to the insect-winged shiver
of shelter’s promise.

There, they pitch funeral pyres
into the surf at a newborn’s
broken wailing, and consider
every alphabet sanitized
if it can get past, “Hello.”

There, a smile is like
the whale’s rib, curving
continuously downwards,
until its’ very weight
is the point of breaking

RECAST

Can’t you see the horse-drawn cart
before your eyes? How you traded
in your elders for some flash and pan?
Can’t you see you’re a stone’s throw
away from being recast as the first
stone ever thrown? That you’re
the missing link to the misanthropic isotope?
That the narrator constantly re-shuffles
the deck and starts again? Can’t you see,
my fine, neutered rebel, that you’re already
part of the bait and switch,
of this hollowed-out shell of a game?

SLAVES

The slavish wantons are already claiming
that you’re a lost down payment
on what we hoped for,
that you’re already the sum
that’s less than its’ parts,
already a discard, a mask,
a skin better settled,
a gift that breaks apart.
The slavish wantons, with tongues
tied like rust-gummed railroad tracks
to a past they haven’t noticed is behind them.

JOE THE DECIDER

I don’t live in a straight line.
You’ll never trace my scent.
The arc of history descends
wherever I says it does.
You’ll never take me alive.
I never said that.

I’m somewhere between
where the flame starts
and the seal is set.
Don’t give up.
You’ll forget me yet…

SPUTTERINGS

Has my tongue been registered
in the coming convergence?
Has its’ oscillations been properly
adjusted for? I keep hearing you
named in the wind, off in the distance,
howling like we were born to do.
I keep wanting to parse one second
from the next, stripping you down
to the barest signal, that teletype
between breaths, that lip
of a grin just abandoned,
that structure I wrote off
as unsound…

DIAGNOSIS

I am willing to accept the diagnosis
of my most maladied doctor.
His pacemaker runs off low-grade
plutonium, he should be able
to hum a few bars, and keep a tune.

I am willing to accept scurvy
as an unforeseen side-effect,
and degradation to the outer hull,
that social niceties are the first to go.
I’m willing to accept that.

I am willing to accept that I’m less
than completely on message,
that escape clauses only have room
for one, that this sickness
can’t be wished away.

I am willing to accept that
as I’m tied to the mast,
plunging into storms that only
know my name, I will be the last
one left speaking it…

POTENTATE

You called me the golden calf
but I ended up with a silver tongue
where the knife has started
that’s where I’ve begun
no shortness of breath
no palpitations
this corpse immaculate
upon inspection
I speak no further than this body
and I need no further reach
I’m the bankrupt slaughter
every fear that’s ever slipped past
I hold the lease