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

Wasted

There are two few letters on myp keyboard and another time might mourn mmy finger's passing my misttype tonguelines tripped and wandered over clatter keys with one too few letters and symbols and unequivocally there notes and sings and zebra striped extractionsmock and mange the hallowed folds and I have used them all now.  I have used each and every sound  and crept in twos and threes and multiples and manifolds until the chimney weeps me up and out and I mispelt everything today and tomorrow and my hadnds dont remember thir right way and my veined hands dont recall the proper punctiuation or spelling or clatterstep is that the right work dclatterstep and another thousand tyupose from now where each hand strikes independent and loud and makes neat choreography on the clatterboard I possess another virtue, the virtue of distraction the virtue of you will always know the right name for this gift that I am ungiving and taking away the last words will leave you with just myp own and my own fingers formulated into refuse, language clutter and chaff

Made

Matching is marking is craft and creeping and cold is a color
white is a winter long forgotten and since when is there
another bond that bites deeper and brings closer and makers
are finders of shapes things dreamt of being long before they
warped and lifted through branch and bow always thinking
of what craft hand will realize such seemings

Feelings fit better into baroque descriptions

rupture tongues marking skylines sound shivers rumbling

masticated by moments of force crumple zones packing one into another

see inextricable babushka corrugated on lines long etched in engineering notebooks

collapse, creak, cornered

On another note there is distance and though heavy heads hang there rests both

above and below a viscous air abundant with buoyancy and bowing brings bower up

but still, what is a pain in the throat or an empty hand or an idle day spent walking

when in another colder country skies open only to sputter snow; leaving clouds conspire

with cancer

Stage I:

enclosed hard knotted in subtly damaged folds fermenting the flesh

Node:

in fistules reaching poison, fever flecked blood and bone brackwater

backed and too taste in mouth

Stage 3, 4:

If staged, exit left, no curtain fall and an audience sits until tired, disaffected

or empty themselves they walk, leaving one who may have fallen asleep

waking hours later to a lonely theater a spotlight shining on unattended

Finding door locked and alarmed is it guilt or wonder that prompts him

not to call but rather sit, still and staring in his lonely seat until morning

crawls from its heavy waters