Mistaking Snow for Sugar Bowls

Train tracks of our marriage bed
made clicks like loaded 45’s.
Tree-lines of your need for love--
signed, sealed, delivered by gloves
with deep respect for foul moods.
Like blood that meets a sack of flour,
I owned no ways to stop its clot.
Phallic tabernacle choirs:
I dry-cleaned all their uniforms,
wrote long checks to pay large bills.

Swelters of a svelte excuse
for working hard at playing sick
you memorized like Richard Burton
doing justice to a play.
Promises were crimson herrings
signing up stupidity.
As every Eve in terror’s grasp,
I mistook the falling snow
and ice around a treasure’s lip
for welcome lumps in sugar bowls.

No such thing as “ouch-less
Band-aids”over Hell’s apology.
Poetry is stogies in a candy dish--
pages are a rash of rhyme.
Like deer so deep in forest trance
of bright light white naiveté,
I wear callous same as bumpers--
leave this earth in silent thuds.

Bleeding Rainbows

Your youth (I flatly, smugly,
wrong presumed)
would always grow
black healthy hair.
A trumpet rolling off a truck,
laughter had that brassy ring.
Flesh around constriction’s neck,
those wrinkles matching
earth awaiting rain.
A shoestring on the verge of snap.
Drooping shingles on a barn.
Salty eyes meet curled toes--
smell of death like knuckled shrimp
that cannot breath retorting air.
Rings beneath a coffee mug,
your love in gloves I lose and find.
Seesaws of our memories.
A diet of developed grief.

Quilts of money left me warm
and time to write--
liberated from the fear
that ends unmet will swallow
clocks and stop a watch
I plunge in blue aquariums.
Money is a shoe with laces.
“Walk it. Use it. Lead its hand.
There are no better days to bake.”
Syllabic candles drip
on desks and window seats.
Drop their little chunks of coal--
nearly kiss inherent fire.
They crave a flame.
They grab a torch.
So this is how a rainbow bleeds.

Checking Passports

Pecking on a paper wall,
I look at passports
of our lives as tubs of
home-made applesauce
that prove good things
a seed can do.
I found a man
with yellow yolk
unselfishness
who doesn’t need
your Lipizzaner luxuries
to witness ways
the moonlight curves.

Doesn’t need
a stack of drinks--
lace ballets of wallets full--
hands with bricks
of hollow jewels--
to play his pilot in a storm.
His conscience cleaner
than his car.
We’re blessed in ways
we chew our food as if
it were conclusive meals
of cherries from a final tree.

Pillow Moves

Love argues for warm comfort zones.
Pride defies its pillow moves.
How can I explain the shame
without indulging pity’s chew?
A canon cannon loads itself:
dependence isn’t luxury.
Getting dressed without my leg
(despite its rubber countenance),
the Emperor without his clothes,
borrows smiles to cover-up,
then barfs a batch of poetry.

Objection has such brittle glass.
I know you’d rather carry me
than idle watch like station wagons
far too old to climb a hill.
Giving in a tiny notch
will lead to losing other things.
A temperamental checkered cab
of bones that know
what they are not.

Sitting in a rolling chair
is living way below the sea
where anger’s fist lies
curled like shrimp
awaiting cayenne pepper eyes,
a bestiary vestibule
of rifles that I did not buy.
Suffer’s sick safari sucks.
War wounds touching Siamese twins,
love shares taste and try and feel.
Because it sees no other choice--
because it hears no louder voice--
Pride’s unfinished quatrain lives
biting off what fate destroyed
like hangnails on a hand removed.

Pure White Blind

Liquor’s acceptable opiate
steps on toes--
interrupts mad smoke alarms
and lie detectors of the doom.
A walking stick
in pure white blind
with anesthesia as the goal.
My body craved a reformation
somewhere down skin’s beaten path.
Ink I use for pecking wood
on caskets of engaged regret.
Grief’s valediction.
Need’s conviction.
Placing pens in empty bottles--
scissored bitter castaways.

So much shame. So much shame.
I turn lost legs to instant coffee,
drink the way their bitter feels.
Librettos of libidos down.
I settle for accepting eyes
and observations of the dark.
Sit dormant at a river’s lips--
lick myself with poetry
like old gray cats
who know their screams
will drive away with art
beyond the call of pain.