Beauty is Jest

Beauty is jest
Is simply gross

Beauty is the long legs of evening
But for an overcoat of dreams

Joy begins to fill in
Where there are no lines

We are left naked
Except for the sea

I carry the clouds and sky
In my beard beneath my
Fingernails

Dynamic Simplicity

I carry a paper bag of flowers, the petals are blue, yellow, and orange,

Early flowers, the bag is a sandwich bag, it’s dawn,

I put the flowers in a basket and bike home, the sky is blue, orange, and yellow,

My wild face, in momentum, how is the dawn somehow starry after all the stars are put away?

How is it, just for a second, this wild face among the stars, on a bike, with flowers

For the dining room table, to be with books, and pencils, and to have breakfast with,

Encourage me to open the windows, they are the better part of me, for a few days,

In which time, I’ll write what seems to be stream of consciousness poems, better yet,

I’ll put on my canvas shoes and walk till my stomach growls

For the fire and fever of tasteless stars. 

You Will Know

There is a shape
When nothing’s there.

Open it
Or close it.

It’s just as round.

Leave it
Or carry it with you.

You cannot spend
What it does not lack.

There is a shape
When everything is done.

And you will know that.

You will know.

What the wind uses for thread
And needle.

The Poem Is

Like a broken guitar,

A mini golf course for
A syllogism.

Why are beginnings so important?
Why is a broken guitar a disaster?

Is the grave coming up short.

And though I think all of this is folly
I am glad of its sometimes kindness.

A poem
Is a belly flop
In handwriting

By an angel doing a handstand
While going backward in time

The Ambition of Dusk

In a simple sweater, a jawline like a lyric, is the ambition of dusk.

Against the aquarium of stars.

A simple ghost, like a pair of bashful feet in the corner.

The high wires of power lines, the moon like a spool with no thread.

Words in a notebook, coil bound, from the drugstore, do angels tattoo humans on their arms?

A jawline like a stampede, an aquarium of ghosts.