when it spits at midsummer darkness
the killer rests in the porch lit damp,
nothing in shadow on wing tonight,
nothing to prick in the sticky moist
and nothing flits to wrap in kisses:
brief para-diddles of windless flash
stroke the rushing clouds with silk.
The wheel tuned out dry clay carved
and red splattered at the weedy edge
of a rump drive came to a tuning end
when the dream stop of potting screeched.
I saw that with my own two eyes.
I did not see the giant that soaring dream
crushed in the oily distance that saw these
phone pole legs kicked and pine pitched
and still all possible sawn is listening still,
tarred to the dawn birds at the bare apron
of stubby grass gnarled at the car park edge,
an abandoned bottle label obscurely turned
into sinister maps that are deciphered black-
now all pain and all joy eternally gold in me.
An eight cylinder dose of splatter
just over heaven’s yellow lines
heaves salvation when it matters
becoming then just memory of want
then just a memory of memory of want
that happens at the end of memory
when the neutral bits that mattered then
then are rinsed in pink and swiped away.
The sphincter of a smoke ring collapses itself
into a candle of Rome that whispers the night
in a rainbow gouache behind gray lids,
a lone maple barking its perhaps lesson
brazen unaccosted by chimes of leaves.
The surfaces of a Toynbee tile
wear away to reveal its cut scroll
left handed jeweled facets coal black
finger crude cuts of dancing hands
that cymbal between the tropics only,
places in the chiming rhyme of solar night
with the ritual pomp of a secular madman
at the year’s worst time and all that matters
just implied by the glare of dust on goggles.
Collecting offerings discarded or often lost
by others to deliver to a streamside chorus,
a chorus barely worshiped enough to weep
yet feared enough to arrive obsessed
in the fiction of a continuous cycling mind,
the most common of these being things
that have fallen in transit and things
that have been washed through the gutter
by a twilight rain that rose up skulking
and auburn strands caught in mirrors
and storm drains clogged with leaves-
twelve cents worth of grimy temptation,
two pennies and a dime trumpet
a halt to running washed to source
by the iron grid of unlucky rushes.
Though it often seems that way at first
the miss of silver that plinked the rubbish
bounced off from there is your pleasure
in the gathering of fetish for water idols-
plastic bus stops are barren of breath,
but with candy wrapped and flat air blues
ragged pine tree shapes easily pass
through the extra ripe of lemon bitter.
The girl with the mandibular grill has gone
to ground leaving an endless roll of box cars
to rattle frame a dry and dusty boredom-
the convenience store is hardly eponymous
though it might seem quickly enough at first-
when you have to come right out and say it,
it probably isn’t true.
