--For Charles Burchfield, Aaron Copland, and Jason Pierce
1
February tries to be everything and
fails.
Fails at everything but black snow
and dead skin
tossed by chill breezes over
economy-grade Appalachians
eroding from awe I owe the sky with
deep gratitude.
Gratitude, now burned away like
Camels’
poisonous ash that gave so many moments
of bliss
unavailable to the brain chemistry
of brownshirt kooks in my jetstream.
In a sense I am being interrogated
by a sewing machine---
searched for predictions of the
future by a critical object
looking for weakness in me and
finding oh another memory---
a dancefloor of trapdoors where the
outcome of my fall remains known/unknown.
The future waits. One day you may
find it came too soon.
One day more and you may find
yourself freer than a red balloon
absconding with a crystallized
rainbow blazing in the sky. Kaboom.
2
Nothing is happening. Yet if you look closely
it’s clear how everything could. If and if.
It promises 66 and sun. But there it is, 44 with rain.
People standing in the airport waiting for the train.
Out of yesterday’s
truisms, it might do me good to shut-up-lately.
I know someone else will fill the void with gunfire mandate
argument stalemate
logistical nightmare TV
timeout and darkweb consumer piano
wafting with the scent of incarcerated hamburger.
Tune in tomorrow.
Silence cedes itself to jeers. Born again like a cheerleader in tears
the great gray flower of the sky reappears with
mandalas.
The dripping oak would strangle me without a qualm if
Destiny said yes.
Nothing is happening that I can see, and yet, as mumbled
Galileo-considering-torture
it still turns. Observe the liquid
sunset. Sip the limoncello.
Examine how you see me. Who am I to dream about tonight?
3
Bitter wind hisses up cold rain/hot sun
cold sun and lukewarm fog. You can’t decide how to feel
just yet
though you swore you’d never be so indecisive again.
Or would you? Life amounts to random integers.
Lemmeget 2-2-8 a
pintah nottyhead three Black Rhinos anna Hunnert Gran!
It’s 37 and feels like the raven is looking at me hard.
The forecast reads 68. Everyone around me is full of hate.
It hurts me so, I understand Pilate’s consignment of mercy
to soil ice and blood. As cold as midnight. As cool as
noon.
Bright as Destiny looking back like an innocent moon.
Overeager dandelions turn too soon in the
schoolfield/parkinglot.
Everything bad about me is all-you-have-to-croon.
Am I a few steps
out of the mainstream and a little more asylum?
Is my ultimate
reincarnation not the frost?
4
Seven weeks ago December lit the abandoned church.
The church beyond my backyard neighbor’s hill
now obscured by bare sycamores, utility lines, and dead
waste.
It was pretty, but in February it’s neither dark enough to
dream
nor light enough to drive home safely in a downpour.
The church has barred its doors. Fascists linger, convicts
dash
and one wonders how does a three-legged raccoon limp home
through rows of torn dripping trash? On TV, Christine
Amanpour.
Is it 59.99? No, it’s 35. I remember Matthew 4:
Jesus plays Satan with myself as the spiritual gamepiece.
The devil offers me whatever I desire most: Destiny freedom
and islands.
Jesus offers stark administration as his counterfolly.
Way to go mumbles God, but to
Christ or Satan I’m unclear.
We hang by a thread on President’s Day.
5
I let the white boa of winter wrap itself around me
like the ouroboros of an alchemist who has found platinum.
Accidentally, it’s not winter anymore. It’s a shameless
rebellion.
A rebellion that ends with prepubescent meltwater
curving in channels to break on wet leaves
with self-consciousness about it all. I see the shame in
your face.
Anxiety confusion and trust. Sleet tears a wind of energy
and
seagull-blue, the sky and bay make bloodfrost.
Less than a year from tyranny and exile
spilling oil rainbows into ponds of a
pollution-nicety
our date is set for damnation/salvation. I’m not sure I
can be servile.
You never give me a blue moon though you say you will.
Just promises, alimony, and something extra once in awhile.
A 29th explanation of what went wrong in your
experience.
6
The daffodil is here, in theory, crisp and cold.
Cold
solid and smooth, like a horrible thought/nascent autocracy.
Destiny soon will be turned to record-breaking highs.
Time keeps on reaching its conclusions, amendable
and sold to the only prospective buyer at a noncompetitive
cost.
Weather reads 67, maybe 70 degrees. (Why are police on the
avenue?)
Ah but it is really 42 again and feels like 26.. (Don’t
read the polls.)
Wintry mix in the afternoon forecast. Satan does not need
tomorrow.
Just affirmation of your fire. Destiny’s form is your
desire My Epicure/Skypilot.
Hot covers that smell like her body and tea. A
galactic hairtoss
lost in a signature of snow like the asparagus forest of an
insane dream.
I never stand a chance when I do not question everything I
see.
Or so I say after visions of 45 years/60 shades of light/spinning at high
velocity
seeing I
ride on the edge of the point I break back.
7
No amount of my sorrow can comfort those I sent
back to the wilderness to die. A sad dog waits in the
pound
wondering why he’s still alive. His sad sound lives in me.
His name was August. No flower lives in pristine sorrow.
My childhood gave me ways to survive
looking for permission to be fascinated in the throes of lunacy
and godhead.
Now, at the end, Satan wants to give me everything, and I know
what is out there.
The problem is, Jesus has offered me advice and consent.
I have many things to reconsider/forget. I am no apostate
nor a man to step through your illuminated gate without questions.
Broken as the windkract pine I question out of life.
Respect to the wet avenue softly in moonstone echoing laughter.
The laughter of Satan crashing his Camaro in the street. Night
without frost.
Tonight I found a snake in the oven who’s woken early but still
needs heat.
8
Is it snowing again? Will it quickly warm?
What really is the forecast for me? I did nothing with my
wherewithal.
A valentine of orchids cannot forget the perfect recall---
that I drove to hell, disappeared, and lost myself like
eyes wide shut.
How many enemies have I actually made? Don’t answer that.
Looks like a storm, but it stops. Time pulls the curtains.
Time stands still.
Time stands still. Time ends in a cell. Time will tell
the enemy to plunge the dagger down and say there is no
April.
There is indeed no April. But there is no option either.
Just a king
who defiles me, steals
back everything I’ve got left inside
offers a crude joke to
his homunculi, shits on the floor like an animal (don’t dehumanize me!)
and dies by lava soil
fossil fire bone and tooth.
Who is stirring in the
bullpen to fight the liberation/original slavery from untruth?
This atrocity/wonderful cliffhanger is
cutting-edge life-at-its-endgame.
9
The molten blue cracks
and weeps like mourning wounds.
Morning joins another
day to my collection.
The congressman
compared women to sea turtles. (Again?)
Thirty-four when it
should be 68. Locked inside myself like an inward-facing face
I see Destiny’s hips and
long arms shift, transported to a place
in the Canaries where we
make love to the apocalypse.
She bleaches her hair and I pass the cold bay
without fearing its destiny to drown me in the future is
my own.
Yes, the lone wolf
will make a cameo on behalf of unknown unknowns.
I’ll do the legwork on
subscriptions for the pay-per-bread-and-circus
and hope the wand of
starlight makes hell heaven with its spell.
I’ll wish for things
that cannot be (62 or 63?)
with a smile of broken
teeth and a lack of hindsight
foresight or the ability
to remember/a quarter past midnight.
10
Memories are
trapdoors to the only imagined/deeply desired.
Memories remind us
of what we seek, if only to relive a sweet bonjour.
Memories of how
it’s been and how it was in Mom’s boutique
when the soft cool
steel of night became backdrop for words spent sub rosa.
That is to say, one
thing that meant another. Or vice versa?
Pleasures of spiritual egress
approach my bodiless freedom, and all-ecstasy
I gain
absolute mind-absolution by declining a legacy.
My impurity is imbued with glass
imagination magic and haiku.
In the night I dream again with a
glass of sarsaparilla---
unstoppable
beauty, shopping for hope in the graveyards of Alexandria
an
eyelash of moonlight in the look Destiny plays
for the pyramid.
The
sleet the cardinal tests without intending to
torn harder as he sings his malediction. I’m dead inside.
You too?
Let me be the sunshine falling slowly on your back.
11
We are headed down a path loaded with disease---
the icy path of neon trees,
twisting, wet and black
on a carbon slick of industry
and moons with no way back.
I asked Destiny why did you change your name?
She said it was a sensitive issue, and I chewed on every
last mistake.
The doctor asked me to stop doing that, but I found a
different doc who won’t.
There’s a demon at the end of the hall with twisted mace
in his knotted forearm
who wants to fight for my life.
My life. Which tried so
hard sometimes, though not as hard as you
to never surrender our most compromised rook. Stop doing
that!
Ivy to the neck as the sun descends at 37, conjuring from
reflection
some contraception of the man I must destroy/become.
I become. I brought
the jazz at your party. I spilled the Asti Spumante
I cried on your Hemingway apron
and feared the end of stare decisis.
Everything’s as dirty as it can be, and three fawns appear for
arrest.
12
Satan
makes me believe he wins this time. Furthermore
he
has declared the game over, now and forever, and I never existed.
Never
existed, don’t exist, and this is what I wanted---
a
twilight full of Russian joy, a Judas figure in desperate straits
thinking
on the dinero. O can I get to Canada? It has nukes, right?
Is
it always cold like this? I am absolutely ready to atone in Calgary
and
put myself on the tao to what goes on in Saskatoon.
How
high will traitors hang above the local theater, prompting a
brief-police-shutdown?
Wet
snow falls in the window and I falter, eating oranges.
Satan
enters, scratches his head, says
Look
I’m sorry, man. I thought you knew this was bloodsport.
It
dawned on me he’s going to rip out my heart. Do you like doing this? I
asked.
No, the devil answered
with remorse. But you must feel frost in Gethsemane.
On
an orange blossom that dies deeply, to flower bright.
13
I died deeply. To flower bright. It didn’t happen.
The sun is waiting if I work through February.
The moonbeam on a still-forming planet of mushrooms
brings the dew from an alien forest of starbreath and
undeath.
Dew as reinvigorating as the mist you have forgotten.
The world is rotten. As the purifying kiss that
may/maynot exist.
Twenty-one when Destiny should be 46. Is that not normal
these days?
Yes, my friend. That’s
normal these days.
If anything, it’s abnormal how normal it is and all
that’s going to change!
Radio stations broadcast salvations with arctic prophets
of bland hits.
Destiny said I am her bestie. Her breasts stood out
beneath her sweatshirt.
I said Jesus, I give up, man. He said Let It Go. DO
NOT DO this.
The night filled with sick heat like a bag
of peat moss bloated in the marshmallow rain.
Something turned last night. Metaphor clarification
innuendo and proof.
I am unfrozen-as-an-untruth. Beyond sane when the frost
bites hard.
14
I think I see a bud in hard reality. I will accept the
score.
Destiny known as Peter knows it, denying in a doorway, or
turned upside-down.
Something turned last night. I
wish I could sing/have-never-heard-of the blues.
February. Made me forget breaking/terrible news.
The game demands I never know the sunny high. The jenesaisquois.
The quotient ending when I asphyxiate rock’n’roll
and ambulate like a dervish danced in confusions destined to
surrender.
Like myself, endless Earth bound by law and the core heat of
magma.
You know, I can remember every memory I lost. And how
badly.
It doesn’t sadden me. That the problem is, you know me.
February. A bumblebee. The earth disturbing
the adjudication of freedom to a stupid law lost like a
bumblebee across the windowsill.
Everyone is exhausted in the warm chill. I’m sorry
But it’s 76 in the street so come love me right here.
