February 23

 --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. Although if you look closely

it’s obvious 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.

But 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? No, 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 29^th 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. (Who are the police on patrol?)

Ah but it is really 42 again with rain. (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 always 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 the 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 castrates me 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 dyes her hair sunshine 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

Memories of how it’s been and how it was long before

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

falls 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 shitpath--- 

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

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 that is what I wanted---

the 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 path 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.

Letting questions eat themselves. Even Satan scratches his head, says

Look I’m sorry, man. I thought you knew this was bloodsport.

It’s 54 but it should be 54. Can this equivalency/be hyperbole?

It is now. There is an orange blossom, like the gardens in Gethsemane.

There is a frost on the nightmare. Die deeply, to flower bright.

 

13

I died deeply. To flower bright. Somewhere. 

 

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. And the night spilled clouds with sick heat 

 

akin to a bag of peat moss bloated in the marshmallow rain. 

 

Something turned in my repudiated metaphor clarification innuendo and proof. 

 

But everything seemed ok for a moment though I was frozen-as-an-untruth.

 

14

I think I see a bud in hard reality. I will accept the score. 

 

Destiny known as Peter knew, denying in a doorway, or turned upside-down. 

 

Something turned last night, wheels turned upside-down.

The Countach or the Camry with no bumper at 6 AM/breaking terrible news.

Who decides the sunny high? The jenesaisquois?

Who decides if you live and breathe/asphyxiate rock n roll

born in the soul of a future simpering hegemony destined-to-shit-upon-itself?

Or a sadder world bound by the economy or my own boundless charm.

You know, I can remember every memory I lost. And how badly.

The problem is, you know me. If you didn’t, it would only bring me February.

But there is more. A bumblebee. The earth disturbing

the resolution brokered on the cross as the game continues in the heat.

Something turned last night. It was nothing but the chill.

Nothing but a warm draft in the windowsill. It is 76 in the street.dowsill. It is 76 in the street.