relentless, the country keeps doors and walls reverberate all but rest in summer’s heat

I remember the dawn and dusk – the open palette, gradiented above opposite a front overtaking me, on the 4030, tilling terraces ’round the North 180

growing here is not a war with Earth, but a chronological board game, won by the punctual and patient

I am neither of these, but I am fond of a good emergency

and it all plays out for me; the torrent released in Missouri haste big drops turn to steam on the labored muffler too much to do; getting it over with, God cries in heaves, quickly, around here

#poetry

listen now, wrinkling husk of the wheat:

now or then, it did not matter, but forgone, it comes back around again.

come down out of there, now. tend to that mess before supper – no chance to get out of the house, again.

the disarray! standing, splayed - overgrown, lonely, half-awake.

blasted, or washing away. words aplenty, nothing to say.

through his night where even demons find the story mundane, starving for knowing before dew and the shakes

#poetry

and in those open spaces, you would fly your flag of adoration, frustration, miscommunication, and mutilation

slicing proud, there - lashed to the stern of the vessel Hateful;

her keel lain by callouses of home - hands & feet stiff (long ago, they hauled barley, by bushel down a gravel road)

but an instant of that rarified quiet stays the haze's obfuscation, faltered: our sisters lie lynched on dire alters

our homesteads, crypts; shrines to delirium the chords of our songs left unresolved in imposters' inrequiem

plastic for stone; fiberglass for coal stale rot for flesh, cut with nothing to our bones

mirages in the mirror, darkly: devil's imps roost on red Remingtons, limp

plugged, our ears in mute

terror's gluttony, stripped down furrows of falsity's fatherly fugue truth: our souls seethe in the dark we are drowning in our own deceptions

in excess, we are barren we parade nothing but the lies which proceed the whole of Earthly pain

breathless, we are foolish monstrosities - the incongruent Lords of amplified insanity

resolute, we are the hearthen hole into which all eventually fall, famished for youth

manic, we are the monopolized manufacturers of mantra; an ambient, discordant dirge

patriotic, we produce only pervading paternal plague

nostalgic, we are the fundamental erosion of human wellness

abrasive, we are needlessly suffering - the listless harlequin of a nation

~the world is growing weary of our emergency~ and the humongous expenditure of its petty insincerities

#poetry

see what we have asked of this land: juicing zea jabbing through chapped flats

see what we have asked of her soldiers: contentment, submerged alone in nuggets of petrified human safetyglass

shower of obliterated abstracts; white like love, but no shards large enough to make out a face

#poetry

we have watched ourselves closely, most of our lives for the first time.

records kept, exponentially clarified.

I will be immortal.

doubling, said Moore, but not what, or what for.

give me any date, and I'll tell you what I said, then, but not always who I was.

notably – just about anything; begun on my last priority

notably – not whom or how I've loved.

I've said and say words; too many, maybe

not a one need leave me, ever

blessed, an accumulate film of noise. there to wash, and me knows how.

but if I do, then who is left? less the weight

#poetry

is it in-between, where I am?

nowhere at all?

is it blessed, where I am?

ragged, thoroughly chaste?

do you think it's beautiful? I can't decide.

can it be truthful, if all manner of friend insist that it's hiding?

I am Here, at least. speaks and walks

Present, for the time being.

#poetry

eighteen dollars will buy you an hour's passage on the worn & weary Mark Twain

the same stretch under Lover's Leap, an idle paddle wheel dragged cyclically, on and on by her diesels

costumed so long, moored not far from horrid wax figures, similarly fated who bare old Sam's names with the rest of them, the Hannibilians assuredly assuaged by their sounds, so heard

the ambiance of the little town, shrill with tourists' wonder, depression of the damned, envisaged waterborne toxins

despite it all, I departed her as a newfound touchstone, knowing she's just up twenty four, eighteen dollars away, no time soon to break her jaded rhythm as a forgotten timepiece, buried in a rank cellar

supposing she'd ease most crisis that could ever befall me she and her unsalted captain, who has not aged (truthfully, I do remember.)

#poetry

I must hold on to glad to be home

Returning. now, let go of the wood

to the thunderclouds we're under, always apart

to omission.

to new meanings to the feeling I've only been able to find on one short strip just East of Kansas City that I am small in a dirty daunting

to coverage of the Be Beat

to frontiers of periphery and the Knowns we never see the wicker bowler atop the landscaper who's trimmed every week, the yard across the street which I've canvased in every imaginable state which's since Mrs. Tanzay's first grade, Remained.

to Inherently Exhaustible Knowledge

#poetry

horns down June's gulley were the Wicca of my little abdomen, predominant of age

ever I dreaded the wait's weight so crushing on that island of a lot that is really amany, but my memory…

how many times would little me imagine me now, remembering?

how would we - before the gulley - become so bleak as to miss completely the words spoken to stay so long?

the fear of impermanence the visceral reality the simple notion:

nothing is forever nor can it be nor should it

#poetry

clever in sharp through it all my holy communion my reference tradition now sometimes witnessed and lamented if only all these had been told shut out! shut up! just listen

my companion met me two nights in a row in front of the Heidelberg and said twice she loves me and of course it's like me to begin to read in but when nobody else does, she loves me I don't quite note his particular personification

more impressively trained, definitively with a stack of charts – some his – on his noggin but when he'd finally play, I'd pity because he must ask first and his fingers are well-read but they must ask first and every little passerby draws away his eye so delicate, his attention for she that loves him

#poetry