Oh Panic

Change looms at elbows and slithers around ankles

waiting for a calm in the air before it rankles

and destroys a peace barely even met.

Mouth dry. Strands of hair, tangled in knuckles, blow wet.

Misty air weeps with me. Belly clutching. Belly rumbling 

terror at tomorrow. A wail on the wind. Tumbling

speckles— Blind, angry sky and foreign thump-thumps.

Half moons on palms and red white pumps

blossoms of blood at the corners of my eyes and

dark monsters lurking on the rise and

felt fingers dragging over knees and 

deep fear of nothing but the leaves

creeping at the windows,

tickling at the green Dos

Equis bottle that shivers

as my heart delivers

little fears,

hot tears.

Tight gears:

Spiked spears.

formaldehyde

a mile abreast
and pause to rest
thick neck and chest
shirt, tie and vest
until he spoke
in jest i took
his every look
from 'neath a book
fragmented pair
segmented stare
intent to share
flesh is fresh fare
because the wide
shoulders abide
a pow'rful tide
God save his bride

After a Hard Winter

Because we cannot fall much farther now
We sit inside our cold enclosure. Trees
Encamped around us wave with withered bough
And dance to memories of sun and bees;
Because the last crisp leaf has blown afar,
And synchronated sunbeams signal morn,
Because the waxing crescent sends a bar
Of white across the inky sky, forlorn,
A single songbird whistles something fresh
And night's grim darkness sheds its weariness.
Because each day remakes young nature's creche
And green begins to brighten and to bless,
At last we yawn our hungry mouths agape
And breathe new air that spring has shook awake.

Selfie with Dad

A Sonnet

He lives in silence. Fiercely keeping taut
his tongue: his eyes, his shoulders tell the truth.
Some speak on his behalf, but this is not
his will. Without explicit words, the proof
of his intent lies dark within his eyes.
The dent beside his jaw speaks louder than—
intently louder than— the thousand lies
that fall from mouths of histrionic men.
He lives in silent truth, above reproof,
beyond the laws and judgment of design,
without pretense and perfectly aloof.
This man, whose soul is dark but still benign,
is noble, beautiful, and too above
the mortal plane to feel my paltry love.

On Capulin Mountain

O Capulin! My Capulin!

From your precious heights I see

Three little volcanoes,

Erupted long ago,

Worn down by the ages of wind, water, and grazing

Animals.

O Capulin, I see inside you,

A small lake, scattered cinderstones,

And in my mind’s eye, caverns of petrified horror:

Stalactites and stalagmites of insect burrows,

Eaten out from the inside a million years after erupting.

A metamorphic mess.

I see steam rising, O Capulin,

From my own arms

In the cold desert air.

Creatures a mile away can smell me.

All the mosquitoes in New Mexico are not half so far away.

I see the black red stones pushed aside

By green chutes and stems.

Yellow, orange, blue, and violet

Delicate petals (tiny craters)

Reach toward the burning sun.

I see my own flesh, grizzly pink and glistening, sticky-hot.

The cattle with nothing much to graze leave steaming floes on the lava floes:

Mock miniatures of their scenery

Dotted on the dry land.

It’s so hot and cold here that I can see the temperatures, O Capulin-

I see them hovering midair.

Night's kiss

Imperfect veil of viölet velvet 

Across the sun's face strung at night, A sea

Of stars establishes, Our fears curtains

Misdeeds we would not do under the gaze 

Of watchful days. Instead we wait. We wait.

Until the light may shield each sin (we wait),

For night to say the things our weak hearts think.

We wait until the veil falls 'way; We wait

To sing and wear our innocence (why wait?)

Like a blinding halo. Woe head, woe heart:

Both ache in daylight's lustre. Still I wait 

Because both heart and head may muster night's 

Blue gloom. And then may love begin to heat:

'Neath freckled sky and all the sin we greet.

Evil Nonsense

I remember as a child

Playing on the lawn

How once I caught a wild

Bird to be my pawn

On the painted chessboard

With seven missing pieces

Allegedly pilfered by Lord

Fortesque's young nieces.

One of them tapped the bird

With one intrepid toe

Shrank back without a word

Brought the other girl to show

The gruesome thing to

Half dead, it couldn't sing to

Them or else wise entertain 'em

Until a game of badminton

Became their jeu du jour

I'm calling this one done.

LIZA

A wilting white sun bleeds out all his heat over the tranquil black deep

While the moon grins through a cloud, cold and clear, dimpling from ear to ear,

And white crests rise on the smoke colored waters under a slate dark pier.

There Liza sings about drinking Prosecco,

And Liza's voice in the dark leaves an echo;

As her own song sings her to sleep.

Glutted to burst on the sun's dying sighs and dancing like midnight vampires

The moon and the sea spin in lustful distrust, darting drunkenly over the shore.

Their awful push-pull on a lantern (half-full) spreads a horror around like a whore.

While Liza lies with her head next to mine

And Liza's breath keeps the rhythm in time

With my own and the sea's and the fire's.

There's the soft susurrus of lovers like us rustling far off in a rush;

The moon shuts her eyes and feigns to disguise that she chokes on the smoke in a spire

The moon's crying eyes deride and disguise red watery smoke floating higher,

Then Liza bites her lip at the window

And Liza sighs and sits: limbs akimbo

As her own voice laughs in a hush.

He won't come; he won't come! In a fury she hums with her head in a hot-hungry-haze. 

I watch as she stands with her hope in her hands to see smoke spilling into the air

A rat-tat-tat boom! and the pier lights the gloom as she screams her poor sailor’s despair.

My Liza claps and clutches the window

And Liza smiles to weep as a widow

While dark smoke blackens her gaze.

We'll be free; we'll be free! Now it's just you and me til the day you betray me just once.

I smile and recline while inferno flames climb over the mounting hot pyre

One kick and my Liza, my murderous doll, falls fast toward the flames of her fire.

And sweet Liza's screams echo out, 

My Liza's last ear-splitting shout:

A remembrance of lovelier stunts.

The shimmering seawater surges straight up in a blast of sulfurous fury.

The sky’s many eyes blink in surprise as the air sets fire to her hair

And I watch then as Liza, my beautiful darling, vanishes into the air.

Smoke ushers an end to disguise

And spreads Liza's final goodbyes
Just the moon: my judge and my jury.

The Apartment

She began to wake when the rumble of the engine disappeared, subtracting the white noise that had lulled her. The taxi driver was already pulling her bags from the trunk, causing her to scurry all of a sudden to gather her handbag and wallet. Once the cab pulled away, Jessica was left standing outside a moderately tall building with a crumbling facade that vaguely harkened to the regality of the nation's earliest days.

The trouble, as she stood on the too-quiet street surrounded by her smart set of matching luggage, gathering glances from men who loitered to smoke in doorways before and behind her, was that Jess had absolutely no idea of how to move from that spot. There was too much for her to carry in too unfamiliar a place.

She was on the verge of panicked tears when the building's door opened and two young men walked out into the heavy, damp wind. They stopped in front of her, assessing her and her trousseau.

"You going in there?" the taller one asked.

Muddled with apprehension, she took a moment to scan the pollution-stained building, the dented sign on the corner, the address on the torn awning behind the guy's head. Everything pointed to her being at the right address, but she couldn't convince herself now that she was in right place. Still, she'd come this far, and the wind kept slapping her coat collar into her face, so she nodded.

"Want help?" he asked.

This time she nodded without a pause.

The tall man thrust his right hand at her, "Chris, 3C."

"Oh," her hand in his, her feeling of shame at her helplessness, and her new uncertainty about her plans made her oddly shy. "Oh, um, Jessica, 5J."

He smiled. She hadn't let go of his hand. "Damn," he said cheerfully, "I was hoping to avoid the stairs." He pulled his hand free and, with smile still in place, he hefted the garment bag over his shoulder and grabbed the largest suitcase in his right hand. That left the rolling case, overnight bag, and the small case she already clutched next to her purse. The other man grabbed the overnight bag, settled it atop the roller, and pulled a key from his pocket. He used some complicated maneuver to jar the door open then he held it wide.

Chris, 3C, stood near the door, laden with the bags so heavy that Jess hadn't been able to lift them herself at the airport. She stared at him a moment before realizing he was waiting for her. "Ladies first," was implied in the smirk on his face. At that moment, at that smirk, Jessica suddenly saw how uncommonly handsome he was.

She went in. The smell hit her immediately and she halted, nearly causing the two men to tumble in the foyer. The dazzled smile fell from her face. The odors of a dozen decades of cooking, of wretched humanity, of sex, of questionable plumbing, assaulted her. Chris pushed in behind her so the other guy could follow.

"You get used to it." Chris's chin pointed toward the right, "Stairs over there."

She paused yet again. "But where's the elevator?"

The guy with the rolling bag snorted. Chris shouldered past her and shoved the stairway door open with an elbow.

She scurried behind him, afraid to be left alone in the fetid vestibule.

The staircase was narrow and steep. She watched the men ahead of her take the steps two at a time. Her shorter legs and unfamiliarity with close, stuffy staircases left her lagging behind.

The men waited for Jessica to produce the key. She'd received it in a padded envelope the week before when she was still in her parents' home, enjoying her vision of the wild city full of promise and of her mission to live like "regular people." This fantasy was romanticized, and when she opened the door to the furnished flat she'd rented sight-unseen, she realized just how unromantic the reality might turn out to be.

Guess the title of this new poem in a COMMENT.

Warm now.

At first it scalded

Satisfied a deep need.

The burn felt good—

A remembrance of life,

A promise of excitement

And energy,

Until that ambience died

OR WAS DISAPPEARED.

Greedy mouths turn it tepid,

Bitter and dissatisfying

In too short a time.

Still, trapped in its own

Memory, the lingering idea

Of comfort and wonder,

Cling on until the last drop

Turns to ash.

Cold now.

Maintenance

I think I fixed the subscription thing. Try it. --->

I totally have no idea how to fix the subscription thing!

Of Time and Faking It

     Filmmakers are able to capture and convey the illusion of a heart-stopping moment. They can make time stand still by precise placement of light and echo of sound. But you can only appreciate the genius of the scene if you've experienced it in real life and you have some basis for judging the realism of the acting, direction, cinematography, and sound.

     There are, as well, rare moments when the relativity of time is so vivid in real life that one feels that it could be swatted out of the way or dragged into focus with the right amount of concentration. Certain aspects of one’s environment slow down; others blur. Still other things fade out altogether like light left behind by a speeding spacecraft.

     By Sunday, I felt weary from long days of lingering rain and cool air. Heavy fog snuck in my open window and tumbled into bed with me while the sun clawed its way over the horizon. A few optimistic songbirds cheered the rising light, but blanketing clouds and sharp pellets of spring mist soon scattered both the sun and sound. Another day arrived amidst the whispers of wetted leaves.

     The morning fell away, quick and heavy, like wet cardboard left beneath an open window. I felt the tacky, damp uncomfortable scraps of soggy air, and my shoulders shuddered to slough the feeling off as duty set my pace.

     I swallowed pills for my breakfast before heading out in hope that some small sliver of the uninvited feelings might be waylaid and distracted if I could only clear or cloud my mind. I used drugs as a coward uses a blindfold before the firing squad.

     The odd thing about relativity is that it also offers safe harbor.

     I settled into a bizarre routine that day. I felt detached from my surroundings: detached from the ground I walked on, detached from my own skin. And though I was still compelled to greet the same people on the street that I always greeted, half of them looked through me. The other half was yet again divided between those who smiled and said hello (as ever) and those who scowled.

     Throughout, my mind revolved around an ache in my chest while my ears echoed with all my unsaid words, all my unshed scales. I’d hardly ate or paused or slept from the swirl in my brain, but through pain came clarity. I would take it as a lens through which to henceforth examine my life.

     Thus I went about my business examining each action, habit, and process and pushed myself to wonder if I were faking it. Was I faking my way through scant and skimpy meals, through roughshod work, through each very ordinary conversation that punctuated the hours? Did I genuinely care about the health of every person that I how-do-you-do’d? Did that even really matter?

     When I got home again, exhausted, I slept all the rest of the afternoon. Early in the evening, before twilight, I woke heavy and sluggish and absolutely ravenous. I lay suspended outside of time and place for several moments as each sense processed the world around me. The smell of damp air and the familiar musty mattress, the sound of chickadees chasing each other around the feeder- spreading seed on the ground for squirrels to enjoy - and the aches of a weary body too long at rest: stiff neck, slow knees, and a dull need to pee. I felt my sticky tongue drag against my lips as I rolled over onto my back and scratched my stomach.

     Moments later, before I knew I had decided to get up, I found myself in the bathroom with one long narrow window high up on the wall. Through it I could count the tarrying clouds on a single hand. All the pinks and reds and oranges lit them up like neon petals floating across the sky. The light dimmed as evening gathered her skirts for a sweeping exit over the edge of the horizon, ducking out to offer me privacy and stillness.