i’m obsessed with horses
in paperback novels.
i’ve never read a novel with horses in it.
chairs have four legs
but no eyes.
trees devour the forearms of the moon.
trees devour the trembling branches
of a dandelion’s lip.
even if it’s not, so why not anyway?
even if it’s not you,
i don’t remember anything.
i am obsessed with paper horses,
the sounds of their hooves on pages,
the whispers
of their coarse fingers
apple unicycle bird
barbarian heyday song
sighed the rain in ghost shoes pilling dark rocks on the horizon
ray guns and eyebrows
volcanoes and arrows
are such things sink
their claws into falling snow
not say a word
a silly sleep of fire
turning over like a dream
is something like geometry
but with laundromat eyes
rattles with nonsense
and aboriginal wind
We’re very serious when we are 34
Alone in our culpability
Reassured of our coming
And going like daffodils sniffing
Cocaine stars
A boyish fear trembles us
We are seriously naïve pitilessly
Stricken with joviality
The sun pockets my brain
Leaving only the brilliance of parting
To keep me company
A poem
Black as a match head
Vigilante as applesauce
A wink in the thunder
A thud on the daisies
An illumination
Flipped
On its side
Some poems find their way onto the sale rack
At the thrift store
Others for the piracy of sadness
Some the dusk
Gridlocked between trees
Taking up a yelping defiance
In the defense of joy
The brush burn of dusk. The abstract knuckles of the soul. I square root solitude, but I never grow weary of distance’s forearms.
And if I pause, here, at the ditch before the moon, to sum up
The piles of self greedily practicing the baton.
The shadow of a square root
As I fitted my boots with abstract feathers.
Shapes of self cannot keep pace with a gutsy widening.
The pain is such that we will have to wobble home
Uncanny with size.
The beauty you have
Like cold fog on a pane
Peonies under a stupid moon
I lugged this debacle
Chasing your fastidiousness
I massed a mess
Of sails and picked up the wind
As one would a bottle cap
Or turn on the radio
Now do I have you?
I call out my memories
Onto report cards of joy
A pillow case of flames up against
The upheaval of the sea
Life is a sure match
Of waves against waves
And you are gone
in the spaces between words some find a footing. on a silence there is no getting one’s head around.
so let them cashier us let them muddle thoughts and beg our wants but never the soil will not ring with the footfalls of clumsy angels.
the hot night of the hot hotel of the mouth.
because I quit this tenement of capital.
