These Days

And Our Lady of Scrap Paper
Playing the guitar for the dappled pigeons.

The 5 cent poems the clerk at the laundry sells
When not making up her own postage stamps
To give away to whales.

A wind lost before speaking or the metaphysics of standing on one leg
Choreographing a weathervane.

Clouds think in hieroglyphics and pull calligraphy
Out or their bellybuttons. So go
The yesterdays of the future.

I Know the Names of My Conditions

The last of the morning fog on the pane.
The full-spooled
Moon for a handkerchief. A sweater with feral seams.
A bicycle that is in love with the sea.
Boxcar sounds in the distance.
A feeling of general unease
Beautiful as ditch flowers and
Make believe tattoos.
The feeling of turning a corner
That never goes away.
And there is nothing else to
Eat, only the flowers born from volcanoes.

Summer Song

A summer
Song sans sense, in electric red,
On air guitar.

And the blue afternoon
For pocket change, a terse notebook
Jotted down in a shirt pocket
To keep poems.

But whatever it is, even the typography
Of space travel,
And if you can, do not
Hold it at arm’s length.

The Malady of Wing and Antenna

You took to the railroad lines like a fiddler to a roof.
And the hours out walking, an aficionado of being
For the wind and for the horizon and for the fields.
You took home the sweat of summer,
And into the night, the dimpled ribbon of the moon
Unravels along an airy topography. You are enlivened
By the malady of wing and antenna as the butterfly
Tops the ironweed. Like the evening dusk piled on the blue sky,
And above that, the night without any currency
Of its own giving away everything.

A Feral Letter to a Stray Friend

We should begin with
The moon, have your cat draw
The circle and its glow and its marred
Demeanor. Why don’t we stop
For some tea and enrich ourselves
On the rain-smell of the coming storm?
When the cat has finished,
And the moon is just right, and over the rooftops,
We will draw up evacuation plans
But they will all be forgeries
Splendidly like puddles or these
Journal entries. Truth be told,
The cosmos is a drum roll not unlike the smell
Of lilac,
The cosmos is also a strummed guitar the color
Of a lonesome whistle.
We should finish our evening by returning to
The moon, where we left it, have your car draw
It being swallowed by our sun
Now a red giant.