a visit from off the slope.

i come slinking down the mountain with characteristic lupine felicity. you breath heavy the possibilities and we arm and arm through town on our way to the riverbed, you smiling like the boy you are and me winking, blowing kisses to passer-bys aghast our bouncing cocks. when in our wake they flood jaw-flopped i whisper the demand into your bumblebee brain to squeeze my ass, and you do so reluctantly as is to be expected. i retaliate your trepidation, your freezer feet, your fucking fumbling finesse with a bite on the cheek. you snap away and push my rib cage from yours. i spin and fall to the mud, parting the valley to peek at you through my knees. “well then,” i announce, “what’s it gonna’ be boy? you’ve got me where you want me.”

conducting.

she knows what to expect, sitting across the table from volcano me. abstemious for show, i know the way into birdbaths, geothermal pools, ocean ice, or any exquisite semblance of antagonized aquatics. faucets, flirt fingered, flow when i want them to. like drift of night avalanche onto a little gasping girl at the foot of my mountain, arms reaching on either side and unavoidable, cast cold, cool, obdurate in knowing the only way out is through.

try to shake free from my tree, little leaf, you will wither without me, dust and disappear.

hold tight with all your life, and hear now… what discordant orchestration is not without beauty, in this day of end times?

a pair of crutches in a prism.

little gnome i am, cringing. little gargoyle with knees pressed to my chest, resting blowing kisses off the roof into the rain. bitter old curmudgeon hell-bent on sympathy, tapping every trunk and waiting patiently for it to flow into a stock enough to boil down in the final house, the descendent one, spent alone with a syrup spoon.

a little goon, glutton glowering away the chance to catch what might sit and sing into the evening, if singing is what it heard midday.

the (ever) ending.

hot off the best kept secrets, minute by minute men wade out into the swirling pool of silver and hesitate euphorically before dipping below the surface. circumference halo hummed, hits the third eye from a thousand miles, from ten thousand miles and all of existence comes walking to the center, the tunneling tension promised to cave the consciousness, to terminate the tedious wonder in exchange for super-sonic sips of silence.

the kitchen clock cries every hour on the hour glass opens the cabinet of its own accord and falls to the floor.

the man with the deepest pockets.

the man with the deepest pockets keeps his head high. he laughs sincerely, it seems, when we make jokes, and we appreciate that about him. we never question his influence; we feel ourselves reverent of his profundity, admiring his universal acumen. depending on the night, and clarity of the heavens, the humidity in the air, he will save us a seat at his table, warming it with his hand as we finish our shift and punch out. we stink of kitchens and of bathrooms, film of grease labor on our skin. he puts his hand on our thigh and calls us sweet things like cupcake, or darling, and we rest our head on his shoulder. he feeds us delights from the corners of the world we can only dream of, tells us of souls in those places much like our own, tells of bodies in similar toil, makes the feel the universality of us, the infinite xeroxes of we spread across the globe. through the eyes of our twins, we see every terrain on the planet’s dulling face rolling with dust and ants, with one sweating brow and aching back mirrored into them all. as he sweetly curls our hair around our ear and, knowing well the answer, asks us where we are staying tonight, we feel the ubiquitousness of we, and also the singularity of he. we are lucky the sky is clear, and the humidity low, for it is on a night such as this that we have the chance to rest on the shoulder of him, to sleep in his pockets.

willow st.

powdered post midnight has me wishing i remembered the feeling of missing a pet.
i remember watching one die on a veterinarian’s table, foam along the gums exposed by the fantastically taunt lips of terminal arrest.
there were pangs of domesticity in those days. one bedroom flat with three souls sharing a bed, one at the foot and two full the length. i played the patriarch, keeping cool while the youngest failed to function, while mama jerked with sadness across the room. she threw herself recklessly and my frame, built with flexibility, utility, and dexterity, was there to catch with meditative, monolithic calm. we drove home and together missed the imprint at the foot, the little place on willow st. one soul down and two to go. time phantom scratched the bedposts until we warranted pack our things and leave down the narrow staircase with one turn, convinced we were capable of jilting loss. the success of which is measured in this yawning fog by my inability to find the echo of hurt anywhere within me.

expert collisionists.

ergonomically incompetent. drunk as ever on wheat wine, prime time we bust a bevy, batten down the brash blistering boys and teach a lesson taught to all in time. don’t be so sure you’ll make it out without a scratch. the fact you’ve yet to get pinched, means little more than your time is coming up quick, your number is floating to the surface. odds are, odds aren’t in your favor any more than they were in mine, three times thrown from a bike seat into oncoming traffic. advice comes in dribbling, “a windshield acts as a cradle; it won’t shatter as easy as any other window.” good luck netting, rubbing buddha’s belly every time you pick up your take out. knock on wood… woulda’, coulda’, shoulda’.

book ends.

in the twilight of my existence, i will stand on my head and reevaluate the good things. the trees will flower in the underneath, their crowns drowning in the blue. swing set dead arms stiff toward the ceiling, waiting out my sympathy for an on-coming camaraderie. sensing the nervous anticipation, feeling something like premature arthritis in my desire to ignore it, i brace the inside of my skull with little white and red dressed jellyfish who, at the sound of my reverberating distress, have slowly floated up the sea of me to color my face pink, and prepare to puncture the bounds of belief, to slit wide the safety of science and see free my sense of me.

plum tree.

a little plum tree which has yet to ever produce fruit on its own, a cutting from a larger life supplanted in soil far from home, is taken from its root over and over by the mower blade. every week the fault anew, this week it was mine and next week you will forget the place we planted it. each time the growth is always upwardly. still we, fantod fed, bite nails to raw pink diurnal, our arms around one another’s rhythmic breathing, checking for pulse, listening for beats. hedge-hearted, we don’t cry too often to feel it. rolling thunder down the palisades, and that in mind, we are planning a visit to the mother tree. to that hearth which gave to us life as a swaddled thread of herself, moistened in paper towel, we come with the intention to thank her by simply pressing our hands against her, lovingly on her trunk, and to seek empathy within ourselves for sacrifices so minor and mighty. we sit and turn these things over, chewing our fingers until she lovingly drops a fruit into our lap.

kicking cocoon.

when she smokes, the breath out of her nose smells of metal. her body expels the poison almost as quickly as she stacks it and she wakes with anxious pupils, apologizing for a limb laying over my restlessness, struggling against her own contradictory sense of fashion, of satiation and indulgence. a huff of impatience, and pronouncedly she rolls over, clinging to the wall. her body curls to keep away the cold, to see her through hungers, to clean her blood of scent of rusting. she holds onto an empty book of matches, running her thumb across the flint in nervous meditation, wishing she were flammable.

when i am her envelope, she slows to a stop and sleeps still.
i slip softly into her ear, “this, and all other things, will fade with time.”

i feel her smile wink weak into deep sleep.