1 New Poem

Regression Lines

A return of sorts:

to warmth and checkered-line patterns,

to flickering flashes of cathode ray,

to pre-packed bread and wick

burning of candy cigarettes;

the kind I trust in half-step.

Faces too stern to attempt a static,

weakness besets the bravery notion:

the luxury of defeat proffered to

scholars and men of careful tithe.

Far tempting is reflection: on

and on the whistled tune of many

more manuscripts for dissection's eye.

And I give in easy,

lanky as untouched rag doll,

and bordering the calm collapse

of solitude tears.

1 New Poem

Trinities

She was born as sea's seventh daughter,

carpentry's flash-fluttering fingers

gave a springtime's animation to corded bone.

She was a past's great grace about her,

not ours but one woven in mist-riddled

novella, more shaped than life could be.

And future's good fortune, too,

wraps a stranded first band of

set carousel finish gilding upon her.

In the open door porch planks,

soaking rain wet in penny-cinema style,

I ran up to confess in knowing

this becomes all history in the end,

the filling pulp of mite-bitten shelves,

selective pages rare to meet fingerprint stain.

But so too does fortune, the stopped spinning

of hobby horses on the pine to show

it is only now that is worth the living.

1 New Poem

Stage Faces

Light and heavy-roped curtain,

wear of painted plaster cast

construction, the roughly dots of

makeup spinning weave tales in

past-dawn dreary mindsets,

cups of arak and a few suit jacket buttons

from divine possession.

It is then you make those kind

eyes with your mouth;

it is then you make those whispering

cries out to forever's embrace.

And the morning retouching comes:

the fix stitches grandmotherly, imprecise

knots hook-hanging there in

ticker-tape typing as 21^st century

ink ribbon.

You think they must have been

so lucky at Berkeley back then:
Jimi & Janis on the hi-fi,

slogans and snifter of placard paint

on the breeze.

While you merely mimic the moves:

balletic, refined.

1 New Poem

Other Suns

There is a warmth heard in these late breeze nights,

kindle-crackling of Lutheran church pamphlets,

of New Republic back issues; the radical kind

of hope that flowers in threadbare stitching.

Up from ashen concrete, up from bloodied faces,

up from craven tempests of time

in their steel shackle indifference:

the kind that is more than hope,

more than mere caviar dreams,

the kind tempered in masonry making,

and made to glance centuries of refute.

It holds no mirrored repose of Urals' beyond beckoning,

stands on no Espejo hillside

for opportunist stock ticker suit-tie clatter:

it holds out only, in the bitter jaws of our winter's half-calm,

for chance of favoured weather

“and, perhaps, to bloom.”