Cake Walk

words are known 

to gravitate towards graves

and chalkboards, slate

canvases ripe with abecedarian

scratching, billowing dust 

floating over the lesson 

soaked in stone, students 

and warm shovels, and always 

the work is present, the spirit

part law, part trick

crosses itself

stepping over the mound 

the fresh little mud loaf where 

dirty hands perform for answers

and tiny feet shuffle, elementary 

festival cake walk theatrics, daring 

the lucky one, jumping on twenty-four 

to rip open the shredded 

shirt, rend his ketchuped guts 

and collapse

to the asphalt, shrieking

“t’was the Baptists, 

the Baptists have halved me…”

the iced pumpkin muffins

outperform the pastoral 

scolding, he nods 

off in the back seat, hooked 

to death and conjuring

Houdini’s free falling alphabet

Friday Writings #201: On Halloween

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It’s in the sitting, the unstudied control 
of your bent frame for the light, the eye

batting hair unblown 
the aerobatic housefly’s 
derring-do, unswatted 

all the world zigging, it’s all 
in the sitting, the sitting

for the generational blessing
of a stern visage with flock
unattended, ten minutes

of unsmiling photons 
weaving silver waves, clashing 
on copper plates, a one hundred

and eighty year wait 

for just a shade
of your face

Friday Writings #200: To the power of 10

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Unpenned

you could say we lost our child
or heaven gained an rogue, or parents’ bodies
doubled and shaking mimic the broken stalks
of a species native to hell, or say Christmas 

cards languish unpenned 
in shamanic silence, tucked 
in a box of locks 

you can say we gained a PIN code
pecking out grief’s numerology, attached 
to every account, every transfer reborn 
and wet like fine hair freshly emerged

but, whatever you say, say enchiladas 
are still enchiladas, and music
is still loud enough to stir the ash
and see the moon and say, “the moon!”

say statistics are coughs, and say we
are side-eye dancing, glancing 
into oblivion, you could say

when hands are held tightly
to keep ourselves up, it’s the guts 
that punch back, or you

could say that is a bold face
for a lotus in December 

_________

Friday Writings #199: gut-punch 

Allhallowtide

On the horizon, thin and without reason

October scribbles across the sky in empty limbs

        a pinch from a preseason tyrant—the month                 coughing like a blade retracting

behind a black curtain, disease haunts the stage

shadows long, so certain, so long, everybody 

        burning summer’s sickly sonnets

                in fires barely hot enough to choke smoke

the children contemplate half-emerging skeletons

on the beach, they do not know their parents

or which few of them will pull through

        as the tide pulls back, October reveals 

                bony white reflections in the salty water

there is no votive, no hymn 

for their wordless struggle

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Friday Writings #198: October Writes

Tools

we’ve all been goat-shrubbed
bearded with salt, brothers in gray

eventually the night will be enough 
to delight our empty bowls
after all, what’s left

for four common subjects 
who will one by one step off
this green pedestal
from which we peered
into each other’s years

dad’s yard fading to beige
what did those tools do anyway

who will hide his keys
the snub-nosed .38, now
who was whose keeper

Friday Writing: Poets and Storytellers United