Things We Cut umbilical cord, my mother’s kite string. pine tree bark, the saw blade hungry for heat. foreskin, our first offering, sin, sacrifice. birthday cake, the sugar’s tragic reminder. hair, this should be more difficult. wrists, plump with fear. bread loaf, thins slices of salvation. wing tip, the caged animal’s final passport.   May [...]

For Peter Lake.   I still see you — haze of tweed, loafers, and cake running towards the pub, rain pelting your back, hair already fading white when I blew out the candles how does it feel to be young; I could not answer   that night — noise, free beers, every man watching me [...]

You are a memory. Like a wildflower in the pages of an old book, like a monarch hanging in a shadowbox above the fireplace, like a Polaroid in an album under the bed, like paisley wallpaper yellowed with smoke, like sand between our toes where a mountain once stood, like an old star in the [...]

The Nameless All summer I wander the cemetery between the fenced-in family plots and the ornate stone mausoleums. Occasionally I find my way to the nameless resting in the north corner; orphans, tucked away a century before in that one place where the sod struggled to take root.   There the markers are little more [...]

783: invention becomes the mother of the incandescent   in here beneath the hum and rigging all wires and false senses of places to go   invention becomes tired of itself tired of reinvention tired of movement and political traction   invention all folding back in on itself   reminding us of history   those [...]

A change could be a bloom as well as a withering.   Her half‐world suspended between two superstructures: a mystique of waxed floors and shattered mirrors, spiderwebbed with cracks.   On the rim of her sky were only hints of sunrise, like goldfish swimming in ink.   No one was disturbed by the clicking of [...]

I am riding the spooked horse through a world of shadows –   In my visions, there is nothing but ghosts of all things.   There is another world behind the one we live in. Everything I see here, is a shadow from that world.   When I am riding, things I see before me [...]

My mind does not sway like awkward young lovers slow dancing at their high school prom. My mind does not run up and down a beach like water carried by the tide. And my mind most certainly does not billow like a branch in the breeze.   My mind is erratic and sporadic, It’s fantastic [...]

I sweat while I hack up dust balls in the oily smelling morning –5:09 I pound the coffee grounds into the receptacle and wait an empty stomach grows like a hybrid monkey I ignore it and read another Isacc Babel story –that horrible war and lumber to the cinema books there is a picture of [...]

Under cover of night The fiddler in blue gave the slip to a toad of African proportions. Toad wanted the fiddle. The big silver whale walked out of the water took over the bandstand   and the angel folded his heavy wings. In the soft light of loving consequences the dragonflies sat quietly on shimmer [...]