THE FALLEN SNOW KINGS…

…fall at my door, the sun’s gold forehead
shows in the slow, gristled thaw, the mining
of grit from this boundless blank arithmetic.
Faces fall at my door, swollen with echoes.
I choose not to step outside, to let winter’s cull
take me.

OVERTHRONE

From sorrow’s throne, a smile
was made, this rictus split open
like fruit prone before the blade,
scattering the seeds’ teeth,
signaling the easiest breach,
the damp, blank earth still unbroken.
We will say what we have to say,
we will curse this ground to its’ marrow.
We will claim these ruins fallen and gone,
but never that we are its’ bastard young.

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…