Eye of the Chord

The window is a door to whirring whiteness
The door is a window to blown-out scenes unbelievable
And nailed there in the middle:
an instrument to rescue tears from the storm

Dog Songs

Wrapped up in my lap with eyes as round as hugs
The kind that tugs at your shirt sleeves after the embrace is done
I glance toward the ceiling where the chipped paint drizzles low
Where did the clear walls go with their freedom of reach?
I’ve got you zipping love songs round and round my feet –
that’s the distance I know

Mirror Fatigue

The octopus plant is angling its arms
in a table corner horned with a gaping mirror
Every time I stare I fall right in but its
spirals dangle there without tumbling

The reflection only gives its point of view like the
hard-mouthed friend or a mob of lit strangers
More or less the self
stroking its existence on cue

The potted plant can’t mobilize and thread its path
and even a person can’t bend through everywhere

Watching the locked pot I admire its silent growth
The love that never expresses its explosion until
the mines are laid and the treasure is chosen and
the change registers itself through the heart’s entire field of bloom

Enough of my pink face
I want to face the grizzled terror of the moon

Floating Castles to the East

I’m walking eastward on flat grass and
waves of pavement that unroll like pageant carpet

The dogs are there with their owners brisk and barely buttoned
What happened to the frost-witted months due to pass
as the wind’s sharpest remark nips me in the ears

A giant’s shoulder is buried up ahead
Flicked with bands of green pear and prickly hair
My first sense of curiosity leads in with a lick or two
The log-laid limb tastes of rain and soggy bread

Ordinary and ordinary the sky spreads gray to blue
and yet there are these moments – the raw unhinging –
that invite the strangest interpretations

With the preciousness of our eyes and the swiftness of our seconds upon us
silly-seeing seems the truest line again and again

I think I’ll go for a swim in the floating castles to the east

Tightrope Walk Through Twin Peaks

The first scene in the shower
where I convince myself the split second

walls scared black and legs trembling fat above
the smoothness of a steady tub
is really just a pantomime of hippos at the zoo

Another daydream bullwhips me from the back
and gives me the standing impression of falling
upward out of bed

Puffs and bites and claps of disorientation
as I aim to steady myself on the track
while looking twenty times into the mirror

Balancing has finally become an act
The drawn curtains tell me to piss off and pretend

Okay friend

Here goes nothing but the walks in which I crack

Collaborative Paint Party

I could not paint the planet on my own
Asked ten friends to join me in the task
Teardrops turned to blue whales
Sand to blood
Streams of neon stresses in the flood
How to shine the shit and clean the crud

Their strokes compelled my color to complete
its stomps upon the wall with tiny feet
until the dent of footprints sank and detonated
dreams into the sand come blood
Beautiful blips dripping in the bath

But I cannot warm the waters on my own
Could drain my desperate heat and still not raise the temperature

Angel Hair

Wooden strands of angel hair
A cracked egg ooze of sun
circling the square

I guess the wings were camouflaged
by folds of scattered blue
Voices too

Hidden in that thermal dance of locks
across the sound and across the
loss of features of time-fed folks

My hair will burn or shed to dirt
but what a pose the angels took
with dazzling knotted shots

As the leaves amplify always in green

As the leaves amplify always in green I must believe
the noise I exhale does not sour and stale my relationships

If I knew my breathy hopes were mean what chance would I
have at outlasting time’s persistent gales?

The vines ravage any host of material left long enough alone

Two choices then

Open my colors to your blackened grief
or add to the ashes my bones

Chain of Light

All feeling creatures are infatuated with light
Especially when the light is tender and touches their spikes
though there are those who believe this embrace is too much

Any feeling being that’s been shaped in the
magnetic mold of a giver’s beams can’t help but
add their own light rings to the chain

We all tie this knotted rope and dizzy flame of comings and goings
but we pretend our path is apart from
the infernal webbing that vibrates journeys and their roads

Soft light from the mouth has a particular way of conveying

we’re standing in this line of rubble together
may as well squeeze close

More Wire, More Wheeling

I am too big where I was once much too small
Too brittle where I was built like a fire-ironed brig
Slower than the fifty yard dash kid

I am grey-cheeked where I used to glow red
though no less elastic in the head

Having hopped off the tricycle and the stepping stool there are
other guides that continue to pull

Mostly it’s the fleshed out forces I surround myself with at fences

They materialize by my side and say
don’t be afraid of crushing the crooked trim that was built to
suffocate your distance as if vermin escaping for holiday

It is easily uprooted with two gopher hands and a gardener’s vision
Sprawling through the next patch of wire and

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