INVERTED HYMNAL

I draw my dark ancestor
into a dance through
my own many mistakes

A cheap hymn we all
keep time clumsy fingered and
I come back to bite

A cheap hymn we all
are drowning and glad for it
rising off the dashboards

A cheap hymn
the hungry hunt and peck
A cheap hymn

When radios sing heaven

CONSTANT MAP

Map is what they
call your face
I remember a time
when we didn’t precode it
when the altars would break
upon your breath
when I was willing to be lost
on these broken shores
and not ask for any shard
to replace it….

COLLECTIVE

Summer collapses upon itself
We hold up torches in protest of heat
The burning ember-ribbed monolith
The quiet cupping of the hive’s eye
The lightening bugs rim our scattered sight
We beat the ground in unison
A tide ferociously dry
We have lived past our hour
Now we are just a rattling
In the throats that follow

TRAIN STATION, 1 AM

Oh, the scabrous humanity,
the hunt and peck, hungry
for an afterbirth. Faces
mutter to themselves,
study religious pamphlets,
Us and People magazines,
schedules and missed connections.

Between the thrumming
of trains coming and going,
a lone cricket chirps
amidst the trellised iron work.

JUNK

This world is so full of junk
our veins can’t open enough
to absorb it

Waiting at the station
a freight train pulls through
bells laboriously clanging
open-ended bed after bed
filled with grey, shaled
rubbish, from some other dream
hollowed out, made weightless
trundling the past past

As we look on
glaze-eyed, late night
waiting for our next connection

DIAGRAM

Thirst follows no tunnels, no maps. Thirst is a harrowed arithmetic, stuttered and freeze-framed.
Thirst is the snake swallowing itself
and we are the pilgrims shedding
a burnt offering, a chastened ember
to glow upon the bed of the tongue
and make stronger.

Thirst is the last word
gone up in flame, easy kindling.
Thirst is a release when nothing is left. Thirst is the dotted line
when you have no name to give.

MOON

You offer a stream
through towering, misted
elm trees, a shaft
for me to lay my last dance in

All I can ask as I stumble
toward your bone-white light
is forgiveness

SELF-RELIANT PUNCH LINE

no you in fact are
the one where the monkey dreams
he is a monkey

GOD’S AN INSECT

those starved and bug
eyed ferocious with neglect
who are we to make

OLD SELL

A mosaic of shattered interfaces!
A being of pure appetite seeking its'
sutured center! A time we said
we were wasting; broken down
to seismic plates and the approximation
of a smile…a billboard, redundant,
leaving off the details of that last mile…