Frame Story

Why did I reflect your red?
The flames just meant to burn
and not be read so deeply,
because beneath could be seen
through illusion, a shape--
a man.

The trees could feel it--
the electric blast from violet fire;
it split one of them in two, and
one half fell one way right away
but the other took weeks and weeks
to fall the other.

There there's a boy who waits
and waits
and waits
for the end of days...

A Paper Lens

Here's where the soldier burns his chains
rewriting every loss--
a frame of mind,
he focuses on fusion
igniting life to flare up fear
around whatever else there is to burn.

In the trenches fear was the little death
we died ten thousand times before washing
in total obliteration--
this lentic strange wave sea change grows tidal,
furious when the inner eye is blind.

The nightvision scope reveals hurricane
after swirling storm after august tempest...
He is enchained by the hum of the
bomb as it devours him and free.

Is everyone then the Other
just waiting for America
to say they know how things are
and make them to be true?

An Incomplete Moon

I am no buck--for before I was big enough
I was torn apart by icy teeth,
a hoof remained.

I was hay, once,
back when I had things to grow,
but such ideas are fleeting and far off.

The thunder I am not rolls out as weakly
uttered words of no recourse.

All this denial
toes curled under,
circling fingernails...

Love leaves either lost or found--
the cracked glass of paper lens
shows pieces of the desert
past, but not the full scope
of light and water.

Excavation 1

Inhibition
made-up words
orbiting hum
Things like gravity
obsessive thoughts and
Money, sand...
silent tiny pieces of the sun
we can bend the light
into the Time slip
gasohol
the spice
nihilists
accelerating across space
to wake up among the magma
religions.

when i was deader
in the storm of armor plates
i had no matches.

señor chameleon
dark matter and
a single,
isolated,
graviton.
shove nothing
I hate it too
television
the pink moon
whales & volcanoes swim and burst up
from oceans to speakers
leaving twisted fragments
of underground city #4
7 kettles singing
"the power is out"
and the deader than dead walk...

thank god for generators and shotguns.

fear haiku

when i was deader
in the storm of armor plates
i had no matches

A Layman in a Monastery

today i held a book of rumi
in translation from arabic
and fell headfirst into a mosque

at noon I imagined a phoenix,
a mosaic of irregular canvas
cement and such a solar color
with 'apocalypse wave' in the tail...
but the feathers
disintegrated into seasons
and 'house on the hill'
and 'i remember the road' are there
so small at the tips you can barely tell

in the sideways sun
one of the more random rounded showed
the mind of the mind choking on sand
and the movie spread to the other pieces
corroding the reds
the oranges bled
and the yellows--dust to the dusk wind, but
'I remember the road' persisted,
away...

an excavation awaits.

blueberries (the uncertain quality of light)

the light explodes across ultra & 8 minutes--
8 thousand trillion more,
charges out to flare the biggest wheel, uncertain truth,
and burns chlorophyll to feed the bush like a flashbulb

the great grope in the dark for more than is there
compels dissemination oblately
and the deep blue of the what if machine chugs
dry air into a tiny city on a leaf.
a globe on a stem spins off into my hand.

in the city my perilous love song goes unanswered,
it plays in empty rooms and people turn on their radios
as they slip quietly out of cars
so that it may defeat itself in silence--
junkyard boomboxes blare it
from garbage barges on their way out,
but the only thing that hears it is mostly water...

somewhere between all this light, water...
i'm alone and free and alone and free
and all the cool sweet froze over--
something i could see in your eyes caught me with blue.
your heart escapes me triumphant with closed ghosts, but
you once said everyone is already dead
and i didn't call you a nihilist.

instead months later i'm in the field picking
blueberries for you...
the globe falls past the cut plastic rim of a maine spring.

everything senryu

here is money
nothing is everything
here is nothing