Solar Power

after John Farmer

Fair Phyllis takes her photos hot

and feeds the trash her cold receipts.

As Amyntas weeds the forget-me-nots,

She logs on with wolf's deceit.

Her inbox stuffed with men,

Phyllis is looking to be lost again.

Chronic Pain

I extinguish the leafy, warm lamp.

Behind my daughter’s elemental

mind, a second

mind spins; it captures

that moment’s pig, squeaking

with a voice that separates worldly love

from a spiritual love. You can’t compare it

to the drown and out medication

sinking her like the bricks

of Atlantean streets.

Flickering stops

quickfire thoughts; development curls
the branches of a Trinitarian tree over her

sleeping pillow, wipes everything new,

hushes the furnace of

each aching synapse.

Her night bear stitches the

seashells to her pain. You can’t

show this type of love human 
to human. Still, sandy blonde matted,
eyes marbled, she clenches a Roseart yellow

crayon in her vengeful teeth. She swings

the monster’s club,

observes my heart,

discovers lost cousins

in the indian forests.

More of Yourself

the morning laboratory stirs

the bluing moon with a red brush

a coyote’s yelp stretches

between the centuries, a prediction

of silence is the desert’s own reward, the fire

roads zig their old canticles

of saws and cracks through the saguaros

juggling—bloom, flickers,

blossom again, flycatchers, bloom,

fruits, and savage stillness

time washed ribs play

like sonoran flutes, they touch

the heavens, not with music

but the instruments themselves, asymmetrical

deeper than utterances of paradise

the Carnegiea gigantea are throwing

their weight around the world, peculiar

how they will know

the ending, while we

misread their scars

PreApproved

On that brittle page, old tyranny

songs were handwritten by orphans

who would stop their gypsy hand

slapping game to find their parents’ faces

in clouds and chimney profiles.

In an evening, they could watch

an old western movie

where VanCleef would stare down

marauding rattlers, snakebiters

waving their offer for credit, vacations,

money to use in any manner.  

Wringing their chins,

they won’t be back again, and the children

slumber into a disappearing static.

In the morning, they would find their fathers,

corralled by scorpion-hooked men  

leading their blood-nosed dogs.

Draped in snarling vestments,

they march the bankrupt men

through the town.

The derelicts see their children

in brackish water running

between arroyos of cobblestone.

It’s the narrative they imagined:

the one-shot eye of a brutish tourist

spurs their buckets, hangs

in blue steel smoke until the echoes

of reunions fade, and he vanishes.

Arizona Threshold

An old car cranks it up over a curious brake-riding back road

on the sawed off edge of Gallup, New Mexico.

An angry man chases his bus schedule in the wind.

The auto-spirit of short hair America

and wild dreams of ultimate speed roam furiously through

the hot sands.  A Grand Torino, adorned

with a Good Sam Club decal and a Boycott Jane Fonda:

American Traitor Bitch bumper sticker tears over

the Arizona threshold of giant yellow billboards, World’s Largest

Tee-Pee, real Navajo rugs woven for real.

The divided lines of a broken highway mirrors

the landscape at 85 mph, and rising. There is

momentary shade from a Mayflower moving

truck whooshing by to neon the west.