TURNCOAT

I’ve turned mine—have you turned yours?
The fuse in the bunker has been lit.
I am my own worst enemy—
and I refuse to exist.

OPEN THROATS

A throat thrown open to sing--
A circus trampling the dust
of day-old post holes in their rush
to clear the next horizon.
I’m sorry. You may have
forged oxygen into a commodity,
out of thin air made even thinner,
you may have hard-wired the choir
down to the spine, but these breaths
we take are no longer stolen;
they are our own.

SANCTIFY

Do I live by the altar
of water meeting water?
Do I die by the tide it makes?
Am I less if I don’t drink of it?
Am I more if I stand away?

PRAYER

My lips can’t say it enough,
my arms can’t lift the air enough,
my eyes can’t strip-mall the nearest forest
to get the word out on the front page
fast enough---I pray that this new shore
breaking on boulders and shards can be ours,
that our thirsts can be answered, that we can
turn a page that leaves behind a blank testament,
that we can fill it, end the sentence, start another,
begin…

INVENTORY

The owl finds his perch, and what other song
can I hear, but, “Who, who, who, who?”
And the trees splay dead-strangled fingers
to the sky, thwarted capillaries
drained white against the porch light,
as I pace back and forth, trying to measure
a shadow to its’ course.

SHAMBOLIC

To walk upon seas that were once
oceans, oceans that were once
perforated pavement, pavement
that would crack upon impact
of a suspect dream.

To see it all before me
in shards, to see it all
like stars gleaming,
like the strip-tease
before the cops bust in.

To see it all, in the moment
before impact, breathing.

EXILES

I could take you out back and give you a whipping,
I could set fire to the postage stamp of our
long distance ancestors, I could claim no kin
in the frothy blood. I could erase everything
I’m about to say, I could say, “I’m penniless!
Redundant!” And you would still lay this key
to a forgotten kingdom upon my tainted brow…

NAPOLEON OF DUST

Oh, of course, the smudge
on the fine print wasn’t meant
as a sign of disrespect, or a misnomer
of your net worth, or a totem worth
building just for the burning in the back field.
Oh, that net isn’t even worth catching.
Oh, you have portfolios that will
sail you far, far away from this,
my bejeweled, beheaded prince…

ROOT CAUSE

Despite my drawn breath,
this moment still awaits us.
We are triggers left yawning,
pistols without punctuation marks,
diseases without causes.
I’m so far gone from where I started—

this close to the last word.

ABSOLUTES

You can declare anything, can’t you?
Your thirst never falters in wine-dark seas.
There is a bureaucratic redundancy
in your wish list of tidily apocalyptic
end-days. Your story the last story,
to end all others, all storms, your word
alive only in the shroud of the last
innocent animal you skinned to keep
yourself warm.