1 New Poem

Sweeping Up Plastic Cups

The discomfiting timbre of couch room

stained wall echoes about but for electric

boombox whir, pitter-patter drop of tindersticks

on digital ashes in digital urns swell

with the cold sweat of ages in tune.

Chipping clink of tentative wine glasses

held floating in bending whole

of human history in this moment,

when the sheet-sung string drops out,

leaving the sound of shoeprints,

the scrape of half-attuned ear.

1 New Poem

The Night Drivers

The orchestral tuning-up hum of

electrical gas lamps on promenade letters,

projections stream flinty, hard steel

breeze floating on shipyard currents

to the breathy kiss of interlocked

stone finish.

String pluck pulls on nervous

tendon shape, pushed back and back

again in mind, and tries to stumble,

triggers trip of gold coin glitter,

but settles, as it goes: dust to

bedded sea.

Pulse of heated breath too, paints

skyline bursts a quickened shutter-shock

capture of glass stains; a cross

of train-track crissing, a slim

wonder of brittle billboard Midwest

blesses us.

1 New Poem

On the Surprise of Silence

There is such grand freedom in shutting up,

in stopping the cool-heeled clatter,

the temporal stream of cloaked river-shade,

to stand supine in echoes of things eternal;

to know how little one's heart did

matter in heavens' long-lined blueprint,

to know the having not of nerve to

kiss her was nothing but humid summer

airs in the middle bit of one's life,

that time you can still remember of

being still small town kids in dreaming

of escape through the wicker-wire,

of being a twitch-flame from

tongue-in-cheek illusions

of drawing room hands in

clockwork spaces between notches of spine.

To silence all that, in spite:

some miracle.

1 New Poem

Pictures in Capitals

Punchcard rickety, the tram-clamor

of tiny feet in struggled shaping

to forbearing fathers runs over

as trench earth thought, turning about for

no recourse.

It takes the stormy motivation

to be something, someone, somewhere

but at this time only, to wake

again with thrice-brewed ashes,

again forlorn.

Still-life, you stand about single-brick

spaces, humdrum and humbling of

self; you bring new life about them,

bring memory to middle-brow

restaurant chairs.

1 New Poem

Ideals For Living

The handwritten shape of penthouse windows,

shaving light, soapstone carving knife

tumult of consecration curtain flap

upon the scene of city's midnight:

the capital kind of living.

A cracked screen slit of bicycle wheel

clatter on pavement funded by

downtown restoration committee dollars

perched in the abandoned brewery shadows:

the provincial sort of living.

Shaded cool, reflection of purpose-built

airport glass facade, tailoring shoes

to the globalized tick-tock of

AP wires on runway tram payphones:

the disconnected kind of living.

Mantelpiece portrait in hearth flicker framing,

the tortured run of boned finger across

skin still supple with springtime's fancy,

but too wise by the cold for youthful folly:

the closer sort of living.