Wednesday, May 29, 2013

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.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

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.

Monday, May 27, 2013

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

Saturday, May 25, 2013

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.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

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.