sometimes a seated posture

greetings remind me of collisions,
that jolted moment when cheek meets
glass. how to convey the texture
of surgery while standing
above an ampitheatre in a gown of moss?

legs are stems; feet uprooted
from native soil. we just keep
adding syllables to the gauze
we know as life.

there is never a cure
for what we fear most.

Master &

Master,
your lashes exhibit
such lofty restraint,

I am humbled, bunioned
reduced to a fleck
on corporeal chain

Should I kill
you for your kindness
or forgive all those quirks
that transgressed into stains?

religions clot
only to bleed
in their own lonely ways.

undoingness

enough—
backstroke to the empty
vignettes:

snuff the hot coals
slow, the caviar dragons
spotting your delicious loneliness.

artifice and artifact

numbered days. lettered nights
your trajectory waned so complicated

I  dusted off the catacombs
of former lives, my selves
always so much the same,
never at fault yet often to blame.

Exceptional Death Rattle

You may be the exception
to every rule: burning roses
in June, the death rattle
after the cure

your quest for emptiness
trumps nothing, yet you never learned
the intonation of mu

in Old Tokyo
we sojouned.
I was besotted with Osu.
the concept of nothing and kindness.

I take your hand politely
after tending your home site
a grave you share with three greedy wives.

time slips
shoddy and my feet are ruined
but high arched.

No one cares; it matters not—
such a cold and lonely afterthought.

 

flutterby night

tricked by unseemly
light, cave creatures blink
once, then twice.

this is about the book
you have yet to read, pages
flapping—oversized moth wings

the actress invents the curtain
for the stumbling diplomat
who forgets how to lose

between tense chapters,
your future scolds your past
for those sullen little lies you told
when you hoped I would be watching.

I was.

in the corridor of many returns

door after door,
my fingers leave prints,
smudged reminders
of a slipshod quest.

I claim this pause,
an intake of breath
remembering, not remembering
the secrets we spent.

the ballerina and the moth

blindsided by a fate
too pale to protest

ballerina and moth
collide inside
an eaten quest

skin pressed
against wing

modifiers and ribbons
tumble, laundry refuses
to come clean.

the gardener demands
a confession: who has chewed
all of my June-thriving weeds?

Not I!

the chorus complies
with denial; I am weak,
tricked by artificial light,
lunaticking toward
airborne respite.