Come Back

Haunt me,
my eaves,
my cellar,
my bed.

Rattle your thin golden chain.

Whisper in the shower,
you know the blood
from the walls.

Be, in your grace,
my phantom anatomy,
a ghost envelope
in my hand.

Watch me.

Be the shadow riding my chest
holding me calm
and still.

And still.
I will tend your grave
but never fill it.

I will lay flowers by your name
so that under my tongue
the taste of sweet violets.

You,
who made a candlestick
rise and float across the room.

You,
unseen fingers
haunting my hair.

In the dead yard of our silence
the stone will only
hold one date.

Til The Checkered Flag

I am slowly polishing up
My gleaming brain
In the tented light of a garage
Staring into the middle distance
Circling hand, blank eyes
Lobes like pink chrome
Shining but still asleep.

Taking The Beach

The dead wash up on shore
As if they know no other way.
In a daydream we
Walked by them
Smelly in surreal sunlight.
You point a light-gathering device
At their glistening bulges
And hundreds of thousands of
Numbers (values, they might be called)
Become remembered by something without a soul.

I roll over in the dark
And we are having dinner on a boardwalk
Out of a paper bag
Leopard-spotted with oil.
The severed heads of bright red roses
Bob in the breakers in mimic of lotuses.
I know there are wars in the world.
This shall not be one of them.

Painful blue sky snaps into view
As the wind takes your towel.
Riding the half-shell your hair is too short
To conceal what you are offering.
And I am Guido leaning back in his chair
Clapping like a melted tail of film
In the unattended reel
God left running when they figured out sex.

Now eyelids brush a lid in the black
And our elbows waltz into pine boards.
Oxygen grows into a diminishing return
But the dreams get heavier.
Names for two people mean less and less.
Out on the sea
Life exhales a cloud of roses
For the camera only after for us.

16th Day of Midsummer, 2013

The first cicada of the year
Calling in the locust tree
Across the alley
Like a death-rattle
And next door, a dumpster
And men and women in filtering masks
Emptying out the hoarder’s house.

Drunkspeak, Soberly Written

Hello, bunny,
I am a lost soul
Just like
All the boys from Texas
Crying out
Jolene in their sleep.
Or a transparent mariner
Sailing wrecks in the deep.
My heart in a jar,
Grave soil in my mouth,
The vampire
Barred from his youth,
Forever boy,
Bunny moon,
I became
A sun worshipper.
I feasted
In the Hotel California
On wine that never saw dusk.
I found
Without pain—with only a moth—
The ruby in the dust.
Yet bunny, hello
The sea laps cool
Against the coffin wood tonight.
Oar song fills me
And nothing takes me
Just because it can.
Forgive us the remix
Nineteen
And seventy-nine,
Heaven is mirrors on the ceiling,
The world is a cowgirl in the sand.

The Enigma Of The Jester

He is the shadow
He makes the light
He takes him down
The stars at night

He is the laughter
He kills the joke
He makes the noose
And breaks the yoke

He parts the curtains
He veils the stage
He lights the house
To end the age

You never know him
He might be she
He's everything
You'll ever be