Drums on the Far Shore

pooled ink pulses by tripped fountain pen
where in the air was that thud
heavy, laden almost with- and there pulses again
and almost rhythm almost tomorrow wrenched
through sound and siphoned to taut ear skin stretched

another word scratched, even etched, a heiroglyph to
distraction with each line a glance away and a slip
streamed from empty consciousness and not as Buddha would
in form, perhaps, this:

Thorns thrash. ash lips lift over brush fire tips
Tracked another outfit flutter with
wind expanding. Sound, slow to meet, now slips
lark tongues tremble now bowed. sound slashed myth

No? annotations tell of, well, crafthands marching over
pages, pulsing pressures on key and cranium and drumming
skulls and there it is again that creak sneaking over
water that wracks and warps with wind, waves on seabirds
to their nests, above the waterline. A scrawl of claw
marks, etchings submerged and blurred under ocean encroach
marred markings:

Thunders torn. taught and longing in measure
Hammers sweep the air and flatten sand shapes
orbits on longitude, birds cry pleasure
and fish glisten like live silicon apes 

Candid and yet sly a balanced polit
Backing bluster and cracking chestnut jaw
thorns sucked thumb by bloody thumb, the dole it
cart by carted now wear and tear gun-law

no? clash another color, purple green and orange admixed
on the tide and is that ash the wind carries as far as
an unfinished poem
wired through bit breezes and lapped on each digit shore

My Apartment is Clean

dusted, no motes idle,
catch, and flash when the sun
lances my window - its final
thrusts before evening leaving

Lazy Tides

I don't read enough poetry, it's
easy to tell that reading perhaps
enough is not quite right, what is
enough but what I meant was poetry
is not always echoing about my head
and, well, sometimes it hurts to be
without words and when broiling in
brain play some thoughts think clearer
in a stew of sounds and syllables
cast by clearer tongues than mine

- a vein of ore pulsing with old thoughts calcified by time and culled of unsustainable sentiment -

But perhaps, on reconsideration, I find
that I am not just not reading enough
poetry, but also not thinking enough of
my own poems and saying enough of silly
rhymes and where o where are the notebooks
of my youth and why am I afraid to be trite
and why don't I take the time to mine

- the tongued tangle of sound pressed through the air on each meeting of people and pressing of hands and each whistle and pop of that most fascinating human organ, the mouth -

it's not the mouth though, is it? it's something
like the voicebox, like, hmm, vibration and sound
and wasn't it a swede who found all the shapes to
make each vowel. I wonder if poems are allowed
links. It seems like that would have been a good
place for one

On the end of poetry

curled with veined tongue twisted
and another thing - I will talk with three mouths
creep, clutter, tongue touched stutter trip tagged
lip lagged - the definition of stutter tongue, which tongue
forked around the oldest flames and

was I subtle?

Nowhere whispered another airy echo and ellipses contaminate
those enclosed spaces tripped parentheticals all of grammar
collapsing under its punctuated weight and
another thing

was I bold?

bluster tongued badmouthed bullish and big what say you to that?
In triplines stepped and steeped looking long and laughing with
even those
who laughed when the dark was first being born from nothing and the
seas of shadow were finding within themselves shades of slightest difference
and what is least noticeable is the movement of an eye as it
crosses a line again and if I built all poetry I would cast that eye and
spasm it across each page and every eye would spin like stuxnets spinners
and cycle until, gasping, no reader nor eater would clutch fork to tongue
so surely again, kinesthetics aside what hammer would hit
an unseen nail so hard on its head so was I bold, was I subtle, or
are you just too tired to notice anymore?

Too Drunk to Sleep

on another evening there was smokescreen

and sleep wiped like water with windshields until nothing but waking and darkness dwelt together

and in waking, darkness dreamt, and in darkness, waking wept, and so was kept the balance of things

though perhaps not quite balance

perhaps a grain of weight mislaid or a careless dullard denying the scale its daily maintenance

waking darkness dreamt and dreamt of darker things, and weeping wavers in the balance it brings

Tom Nikon. Tired, named for a lens he had nothing of and lost to an inheritance split too many times

It is a tired time Tom tells us, sitting with hand on camera lens and leaning forward, too close for telling of tales too far for touch or lipped tongue taste

It is a tired time and one empty of ambition

where few are willing and many are weak - flesh and spirit

and too Tom answers Mary Monet

who asks him

"But what of the new and unexplored

but what of me?"

Tom, taxed in twee response coaxes tired words to loss

and Mary Monet, who is not tired or twee, answers him unlovingly "Tom tired and taught, twee, unloved, untaught sleep now and do not bother me"

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt he ought

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt taught, stretched to breaking, unbreaking stretched to bending, unbending stretched to lord of infinite abyss and there to die, but for Mary Monet

who rescues with word play and crafts a seat of puns and net of nouns and sleeping cats and cradles, towns employed in lingering story stretching to the other shore the way of things on the sea to rhythms of wave and wind and Mary Monet with quiet content knows Tom has nothing and will soon be spent

as here, again, he goes

crying "I'm tired and out and roundabout and emptied through the nose, and when a husk, through myrrh and musk I'll leave and not suppose / that underhill and undersky and steep though course may be, a tired man with stewed brainpan will not a poet nor great bard be"

whiskey and toothpaste

Tonight I poured a glass of whiskey

As I sometimes do on nights

And though I had looked forward to it

As I sometimes do on nights

I forgot it

As I brushed my teeth and minted and all and 

annointed my tongue with Pyrrhic listerine recalling

peat moss by its total difference

So now, in bed, I sip some aged oak liquor and 

write a poem about nothing at all

Caravans

Tonight there is travel on the wind 

and in the old earth there is stirring

sleep will drift and another wicked

wash of light and sound might 

make an unexpected shift

inthick the trips and tacks caught one

and another and another like tongues

tied together by fumbled and

failing thought and when inthick the 

slips lisp together and out