Brothers

wind up
a deep breath
depth charges inhaled
exploded
exhaled
a quick belch burst from
not quite fear
from a belly weight of shared primordial soup
the sacred strings of A G T &c that
well, we are brothers

On the loft I count wingstrokes
count breezebreaths
count the tastes of the sky on my eyes
on my slipstream tumble

I have this ballast in my belly
I will not be rolled
I will not be rolled

Tonight when I "roll in" on four lumpy tires
sleep-eyed. I will not see them

Tonight, when I "crash" in mine, the third bed,
the welcome mat for each mornings sun-stretch,
I will not see them

And when morning comes a-crawling, a-clawing at
my sleepy eyes as it cat-stretches stark sun
over my pillowed head
I will perhaps not want to see them
I will, perhaps, turn over
cover my head with my old sheets
that used to be dinosaur sheets
that used to bulge under the deformed nose
of a purple pterodactyl, and the sickly
yellow of
well, they were perhaps an artists interpretation

But I will wake, eventually, and stretch as did the sun
and remember the bones of it all and see them, my brothers,
pillowed in their darker beds
where, perhaps, the sunlight has not quite yet come

Lingering

Heavy, now, with stuttered steps
a syncopation of slip drag stick
and

Humming in the slightest shadows
hovering under frequencies tense
beneath the threshold of perception
beneath the warmth of a small hand
left like a paperweight
heavy as the last dark before birds
wake and warble

if the weather changed
if the slip slacked, stuttered

what make we of this? Which of these sentences tangle into the
triptych of turnkey pleasures, into the catacomb of cordial tongues,
into the tak-tak of skull thunder where each of these sentences tangle?

Another thrum modulates listening ear
more cracks than solid stones
A gore ring wraps, wrenches each
tone from tongue, each clipped
consonant from cut lip, each
drop of blood flecked from
chapped and charred mouths
menacing the crimson ground
till it is one mouth
one maw

Undersun

In the belly of the burns
where, without subtlety, there are sick
thorns of fire, spewing and mawing and pawing
at pools and sunspots

Where thorns at click distance. Mouse hovering
flickering back. Recoil recording last minute
indecision. and here, in the belly, there clutch

tongue teams springing and spouting up tower walls
and burnrings spreading through london and chicago
and if spewed under sun, if thorned from click, if
recoiled in spews, clutch belly and paw

I iterate

On water there is this to say
uncensor, unscreen unundo there is so much deleting
there is so much deleting I cant
ugh

There is a certain amount of text that comes from your fingers before you have a poem

There is a certain amount of text that must come from your fletched fingertips before they strike out, in tandem, a poem

In the clatter of fletching fingertips, poems
pressed, plucked, pummeled. I cannot write this yet

In the clatter of fletched fingertips. I remake myself streamlined
I remake myself cut from finest wood, smoothed to glass smooth surface, sanded
(sand and lighting make my smooth black glass, coarseness and cutline fire forming
fastened sheets of starred glass shard) Glass
is a metaphor for poetry as it
slowly seeps from seaming sharpness to soft amorphidity
look, now, at your windowpane. In a million million years it will
be a slumped glob of glint and glisten. remember wordsworth
I am unsharpened already.

If each poem packs printlines too dense to untangle from glass glob
if each poem prints packt lines, cluttered into
I break and fall, and
where is the structure to it all?

Back on Track

I'm fed up with being so far behind on my poem a day schedule. I'm amping it up. I don't know if I'll make a poem a day, but I know I can do better than I'm doing now. Ready, set, poem.