Musings and Meanderings

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Energy better used on effort, dark-energized.
Xanaxed muses power off their xylophones.
Counting the written over unwritten--contretemps.
Useless verbiage tracks across the screen, usurious.
Salient points lie unmade, lost in vacuumed sentience.
Elective abstention from composition spurs no elegies.
Sometimes the work does not work--excuses sum time.

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If a Myth Fails in a Kelp Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

Soft-shell lobstermen listen
to the catch in the sea siren's
quick-pincered voice, puzzled
at her veiled cross-references to
post-Byzantine, haremless life
and orthodox triune espionage
conducted beneath Mediterranean
subfloors and among Phoenecian
ruins excavated for touristic use,
shrug and return to setting traps.

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A Pattern of Breaking

Change is the pattern life follows.
She would like to change that pattern
for a few years--long enough
to recover, rebuild her life.
But change is the weave woven here
in this mortal, suffering world,
despite her dreaming, her wishing.
Change: the pattern she must weather.

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Tweet, Tweet

Commute mentor water-captures story taste.
Reasons, sleep-deprived, imagine strikes.
Intensity, storm, galactic discount, hacked
forever--bullet hands out evening wonders.

We lost choice.

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Just Call Me...

Failure smiles and gives me a long, warm hug.
Self Doubt laughs, orders me a Shiner Bock.

Hopelessness slides the bottle down the bar
to where I hunch, draw invisible knives.

It's damned easy to get comfortable here,
where every negative state knows my name.

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Ravenesque

I ponder forgotten daylight;
the ghost floor borrows
a surcease of shadow angels,

nameless in silken sadness
fantastic visitors entreating
entrance to my silent soul.

No longer forgiving, gone
with ungentle door knocks--
darkness here, there, filled.

Immortal dreams play unbroken,
echoing echoes, memory's throes;
back sweep burning caw calls.

I lift my arms, shadows coalesce,
black-feathered blurs surround me;
all thought ends, feather-smothered.

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Poetry, Later

Ten minutes--
the time I have
to write a poem.

Not a lot of time,
but I’ve written
poems in less.

I’ve also written
poems about
writing in short

periods of time;
I’m reworking,
recycling work

to get something
finished in too
short a period

for a glint-new
poem--this one
work-wiped anew.

This is what comes
of writing a poem
in a small window:

okay
stopwatch
poetry.

I comfort myself
with the knowledge
that I can revise

later.

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Terminal

She makes a batch of sugar cookie dough
just to eat it all raw--so very bored.

She wraps her hands in purple bandages
and spends an hour pounding a beef slab,

slices off a filet to roast over
her backyard fire pit and feed her wolves.

She juggles seven rusty daggers
until fatigue makes her miss a quick-toss.

She sits, surrounded by six fallen blades,
and stares at the dagger piercing her palm.

She doesn't call 911; she doesn't
remove the dagger or staunch the bleeding.

Her wolves crowd close, whine their concern for her.
She smiles, tells them, soon, soon she won't be bored

any longer.

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Slumming

Light's daughters ride to earth
in photon chariots,
stop in a sushi bar
at 12 Lavaca Street,
flirt with red-faced waiters,
as they incinerate
roll after tuna roll
and vaporize highballs,
discuss the sexual
prowess of Titan's sons
in disparaging terms,
then leave melted globs
of gold and rare metals
as payment and tip both,
on their way to burn down
a few dance clubs and sear
their images across
hapless human eyes, minds,
before riding off Earth
to play asteroid billiards,
taunting UFOlogists,
and confusing NORAD.

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Breached, Broached

A contract breached: immaterial
dynamics oscillate in distilled
hubris; depressive episodes lag
amongst the jet-setting crowd
funders and heliophobic funeral
urns left unsealed and half-filled
with acid rainwater, lime-twisted.

The futility of production quotas
gums up the creative juiciness left
of right and somewhere northeast
of center field, built for kingdom
come lately and garishly hawking
its green and dirt wares to uninterested
buyers of winter hay and alfalfa bales,
both crops guaranteed free of bacteria
of the harmful and hopeless varieties;
the cows, come home now, don’t care.

But back to the contract, a contract
found wanton in its sniper scope,
a contract the judge rewrites in iambic
pentameter and opaque ambiguity,
leaving the parties high on stimuli
and utterly spent financially, ethically;
settlement is broached--mutually defeatist.

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