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