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The Art of War with Myself

You breathe in ocean pink gills,

telescopic blue out—

such was the holding

pattern cha-chinging starlit

brands of sun-drowned sauce.

You cost over-price regardless

of stamped-on time. I sold genuflect

group-hug schemas.

Six ideas waited watching doubled-

over ripening pigs. A minx blends

the wheel of national flavors for

nothing corrupts anymore,

wasted anti-corruption.

Easter flings the heat off her

holiday wrapper, etching eggless

bonnets. Screams the creampuff

of scandal: broken yolk whites,

bruised-shoe donkeys shuffle

off in search of horses, mule babies.

If there’s one thing to recall,

the odds are flowing in gutters be-

neath us. Not the pinch-hit never-

mind who doesn’t like the dice

enough to trade them into penchants

for the latest dynasty lazily

discovered working the land,

which often means writing

salted words until after bed.

Baby makes scriptural crossings

that much smaller with what labor

slants the pen her eyes must carry

a rather brief kite, a rattle for pride,

older then under, until after words,

we’re done and tucked into her iris.

Lip-Synching Day into Night

The day our urgency took flight, I sat handcuffed

in a Brooklyn basement with a flower vase for one,

wooden chairs blocking corner pockets. The game

didn’t hold its usual snapshot flow. On either side

of Sunday, I prefer a tidy room to false prison

walls on postcards, so much so that typing out

your resume, we spoke in sutured tones of local

rivers, of the Hudson and the East, accessorizing

favorites. One doesn’t actually flow, but our guesswork

overlooked the concrete flubs and corked nature spirits.

I noted there are more contests to dream about than

suicides-in-need. You agreed, “All experience is sin.”

I felt ill prepared, remote in broken hand. She, myself

as third person, entered with the potential of a dirty girl,

who moved us both in sexual directions. By avoiding

clitoral crossings, we exited left. We opened

a modern gymnasium to soothe the bait. The sole ethic

motto lay capsized in birthing rites, “No miracle

required for machinery of body, for skin and touch

to retain her phantom proof.” For instance, the night

the wall stood still as cloning water was Berlin’s

puddle, a tear on the sobbing cheek of our red meat

hearts. We blame such organs for dew the soul

wrests from gravities of tender houselights.

Morning glories keen their Vaseline sweetness.

We drank together in an airtight jar, dabbing at paw

prints left by lives more over than behind us.

Next door, our bodies dined alone. Of course,

the vocals took place in accordions tied neck-to-neck,

triggered words of lip-glossed synapse in burlap.

Declarative Substance

I never draw, but my hand moves in cobwebs

where your face imitates the way radiation lingers.

This sterile era talks us awake with painted-on red

educations, the tattoo art of definition in bulk.

Canyon depths glow green neon signs of snow-

covered tribes huddled and built from legs the king

Walks with televised drugs in his vehicular afterhours,

by which the masses want the hobgoblin of consistency

To point out what to do next. What happens is as good as

Where do I fit into God’s manufacturing plan?

See-through hearts do not reveal more than potential

cuts from our editing room’s blood-caked floor.

She Writes To Her Soul

Glamorous endings I can’t confirm

come to me in dawn-shaped night,

in that place she marked her name as

“Are you the grave from which I came?”

Wrists on the verge of beaten-down

nubs bite the strings of production,

our nation of media teeth

and clamorous humanities

built by butchering wheels

of misfortune spun

to dream in non-directions,

at once and nowhere,

like the homes of the bubbling pots’

duller poor, heads afloat and praying.

I get suspicious of intent,

which is a way of killing

the rose before the blossom,

calling the judge at home, mid-thorn.

Notably, the morning mirror

depends on your system processing

tolerance and your need for a Cinderella

deal. Sometimes even I get what I

don’t want without asking, and looking

fast ahead, deny the owner’s cost.