Undercover

It's the only story you really want to write -
an anonymous source
between the dented cans and
ground level dust:

Headline: we’re all just renting the planet
in blacktop lease agreements.  our
genetic signatures drying
in the bony limbs of children.

the rest are squatters--
estranged business casuals dragging
their tv dramas and hair entropy

to places permanent as
a status update.

Migraines in the Middle Ages

I keep thinking how the monks would find me writhing
in the scribes’ corner, aura shimmering neurons
like a bad trip on Damascus Road, ink bled out on calfskin when
they haul me out
to a death rattle of rosewood beads at the hip as

they whisper to me in-between pirouettes of the cross that
I had the audacity to fail Satan’s test, to let mortal flesh
roll snake eyes on my soul, and finally there’s no more pain
as infallible steel whistles down its just absolution...

...if they only knew that now we find salvation
from devils in white coats
handing out little tablets
swallowed down
like forbidden apples.

Blind Faith

 

Its been five years since surgeons
Lifted the eyes from
Hazel the Pomeranian.

They say Glaucoma can't win a game
If there's no board to play on.

So her sockets took balm in
Crop circles of brown hair
That grew in her valleys like
Slow questions for ghosts.

Five years but
Groans still hint at pleasure
When a quick tail shivers
Puddles in song.

And when the wind finds her
Sitting petite Buddha on a hill

Hazel

always
b l i n k s.

Winter Fade

Car exhaust beats
wisps of cauliflower
hard on the salt.  staying

in the lines, of course.  don’t want
to break the order of
manicured asphalt.

The snow dunes sit high--
beaconing themselves--
on the brown grass.

absorbing that brown tinge
of a season’s edge.