Hum, for lack of a song

Industrial Nomad - the shiver-shinned gypsy bluster-blown through smokestacks and red brick ruins, blackened

A cast of one.  On another inroad, another shift of frame and through a heavy sky crashes, red-waddled, the rooster god.

As it is industry, the rooster god is headless and spouts in great ash flecked fountains the arterial blood that once powered its tiny seat of omniscience.  In the sea of blood one might find some sign of sentience, some indication that the powerful heart of the titanic fowl sprays its contents with purpose and divine ingenuity for now the scene is painted red as a fur coat and draping its drippings as if curtains spread from stack to stack and all about the soot has fallen flat and been pulled from the air and the industrial nomad who, for lack of better occupation, begins to clean the side stacks with a lone mop and bucket, or perhaps a toothbrush, or perhaps a zamboni.  Unlikely though it is, she soon has clotted all great gouts and in rusted piles stacked each platlette patty for the vultures of midday and morning-after to take up until, like a "turned" hotel room, all that is left is the uninhabited hollows of all these artifacts strewn about

With wind crisped on finger tips and crystal crust thickening and each square foot another degree cooler another spreading of and cooling of and when I need to be empty I spread until I am zero degrees and everything stops and I fall apart into the densest clump and another thing, why are you trying to see through me?

Driftwood figures are fishes and carved like totems into the skin of and bones of and when I'm out of conjunctions I spit to stick my words together and when I can't walk no more I swagger so I don't stagger I can expand at a thousand feet per second I can spread until I am all around and when you seem to see through me it's just into the back of me again and why, really why are you doing that anyway?

Cranberry wine is the color of my secret which I have told to be vacuous and under ever meaningless word and into each empty phrase it breathes 0.001% of chlorine gas so no one man must be a mustard and I am not always breathing death.  I think Smaug went flying because he was tired of the underside of the mountain and really didn't mind much that his horde was hobbitted and Another breastplate hole is filled when I am too tired to talk through things and even my autopilot poet cant find another word

Fiction

On december 21st of the year of our lord 2017, the first frosts clumped and crystaled among stretches of silicon waste.  The sun rose, and frost films warmed, melted, and evaporated.  Left was a dry stretch of silicon waste.

Langley

Will anticipate canonical agreggate nitpick corbotonic calcify model trap catalog of annum marble fascinate contour trench faulty tours trip down national anthem nobody needs this ninja

Filled.

In the background I have taken to playing cliched music.  It has a rough baseline and crunch guitar licks.  SOme singer describes his angst in mildly obfuscated terms.

The even light is eeriest.

I see the signs and I wait still longer

what color is cold on fingertip
tarmac
augury green
anesthetic seeps or drips
it never floods


When greeting the day
augury grey
another will creep and clip
a lock of morning
from your hair

In an Echo

a turned wrist accounting for all
but one stretched tendon
its particular curl reconstructable
only in the event of
a more formidable turn of events
perhaps a twisted finger
or rapidly torqued thumb

I am still a Patriot

flag snaps the air in anger
taught, its striped back stretches
furls
and springs, whipcord

were I still starred
and straight backed
coddled over the cobbled
streets of

were I still spangled
spattered with the
cold darts of winter
starlight

I would walk on the crisp ground
and leave heavy prints in crystal
and leave heavy water molten
and roiled in my heavy tread
and softly, stick swinging in arcs
once circumscribed by
Finn, and Saturn, and all those

you might remember what was said
when the first lines lashed
with this winded page
when the first lines lobbed
and lo'

there might be my shadow
there might be a ripple under my shadow
that twins me and my distortions and
there might be my shadows shadow, which is all light and
lingers on my back in brightness so I cannot see
it and my shadow but it
and my shadow steal glances
of one another over my shoulder
and play footsie beneath my feet

and, when I am distracted, I
think they hold hands behind me and
confuse the lovers of light
with their twined fingers of shimmer and shade

but I am not the only one

FYI

So I'm doing a thing to make my writing better. Here is the thing.
Every week I'm going to write a couple poems. Every six months, I'm
going to publish a long posts with revisions of the past six month's poems.

Hopefully they will be less bad by the time they show up the second time.

This isn't the first time I've posted a bunch of revisions of previously posted poems, but before I had classes to motivate me to do so, whereas now I'm doing work that's about as far from poetry writing as can be reasonably imagined. Anyway, I hope it works.

bad poem 1

In the awful hollows between
stars and planets, I wonder if there
is stretch, or torque, or some other
non-trivial force on
sedentary helium

which brings me round to my question.

In the spaces between
the breaths
of our
shared
sentence

what torrents and vortices have
coupled?

Perhaps another day will find us folded
or stretched like disks among the stars
as Aasimov imagined.

I am candid

Dash and Clip
Collared.
On Aberdeen Avenue, at the intersection with the purple stoplight
but another time, maybe

full air

The most important coffee invention of the 21st century.


Recommended by Experts.

When used properly, produces a remarkably good espresso-style coffee and an excellent American-style cup. In fact, it produces a better espresso-style coffee than many home machines that cost twenty or thirty times as much.

The most important Experts use properly.
When recommened, produce a remarkably good and excellent cup, in fact.
Better coffee. Many home cost twenty or thirty times as much.

What nipple of tongue tip. What track of the line.

Listed, shirked.

One day Experts will crave to be recommended, be left because they cost twenty or thirty times as much, will drink in the dark bitter draught of their, well.

A better espresso-style coffee than many.

someday-saplings

Foulmouth, remember the
trip of tongue, the stale
taste

Not paired, or barely brusque,
bands of dark stone stumble
bads of brusque pears and peach pits
(bads: pl. groups of grotesqueries, holding not much appeal beyond the morbid)

With a thin knife, the slip-slit
with a snicker snack the apple, cored for consumption,
deprived of seed,
Reduced to fruit, food, from the pulpy womb of
someday-saplings

crisp, like the taste of autumn, and
like autumn, folded in faint must, is it strange
that while spring smells at first of rot and winter
stabs the nostrils with the blank tang of steel and
there is, about autumn, only the musk of age, as if
grandfather had empty his pipe all across the
summer and mothballed it to scent it (like he used
to do for our cedar linen chest) and winter
only came when Anya, the cleaning lady, lifted the
cushioned lid and emptying it sprayed febreze and
mint and bleached each
and
every
sheet blank