lapse

I am all written and every word is a scrawl

and when black as birds are there are still grips

and canvases without a single stroke of flight or

feather and when too many conjunctions creep 

together to glue down a page and crack and

crop and corrupt and and 

and watching, watcher, is not the creeptone 

trembling far enough?  Are not the many

miles crawling with wires and coiled about

cold feet formula enough? And when 

sleeping on evening air heavy with

cold stars and breezed over with

cannon sounds from indiantown gap,

 is there anything

left to look at?

fabrication bias

When I lie I lie with utmost confidence, knowing that
when I have said the right lie the right number of times
and have blessed it with bluster, a perfect smile, and
a canny crinkle to my eye I can know, it will come true
it will have been that way forever and the sayings I have
said untrue will all turn around and open up and be
(as they always were) real

I tell you this, and note my belief

sevenly

kitted in crisp licks lacking luster or even creaked handles

where, once in languid splay there skittered and stepped

stones and flat bottomed they skipped and on the water

wrote circles that expanded until crossed and surfaced

with rippled crease the pondway warped into waft and

weave of little undoings, disturbances, in the small

peace where rock least recent stopped there sat the 

seeming still and under it all skipping stones piled

A lake filled with smooth stones and young boys practicing

wrist-flick, stone lift, the sidearm and frisby, the 

careful 

communion of pressed fingers and the warmwet rock

a beach growing out of practice and as the water 

slimmed and hid among the filling pebbles there skipped

stones in the tens and fifteens and, once, in the summer

of 96, Eric Martins counted 42 skips and his stone

spun all across the pond and pegged the far shore

and he marked the spot and kept his rock in his pocket

long after 

On the order of

In silicon spans, over gaps guarded by the boundary

conditions of physics and last september, when I 

called you by your name and wouldn't look at you

I didn't mean my words, only their emptiness

and in cathode rays there were little sparks but now

pixels clean everything and decompose them down to

single-colored boxes for light

I am always amazed by how much green goes into faces

and how much yellow is in a summer sky

kited inch by inch against the wind would the stars remember

would they recognize old dust transformed and tracked

through void and pyre and plow and finally beaten into

clearing pipes to track away enough lines for finally fetching

lifting, and heaving to

Opening

Warrens spill
My brothers and I have had another drink together and
if tomorrow is coming
it is coming to quickly and with the ominous rush of
skidding trains and a great
heavy front of air is pushing up against my face and
filling my nostril with
pretension... the scent of poetry
unable to write real webbing whorls of unready, tired,
too young

I am not old enough and may never be

Untended (warmup poem one)

sound is split line by line

out of beowulf with seem

striped in neat typographic 

casts, some printer placing

piece by piece, blocks of

poem and wondering what

monk mashed together this

song and story and made it

full of God and giftgiving and

why grendel, and his mother

and noise filled with pain for 

the soft ears of some lonely

native all piled together to make

a diptych story tracking in parted

stanzas on a printed page the

creep from old gods to new

and through what door was

the break-in, and by who

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