four poems

 

 

CRAWLING GROWTH

Sealed like a love letter
And visibly desperate, you may not
Leave this place, Insect-Sun, in an envelope,
Nor scorn the shapes
Of my higher head, its
Murky sewer laser beamed
With love and strewn with chewed up
Carnations. These exposed crocus beds
Are a rhizomatic perversion,
The grass handlers gift of
Heavy ropes and highway.
I only hear this now
Because of the infiltrating breeze’s
Turned-down gift of righteous flesh.

 

 

PSALM OF THE ALGAE BLOOM

Every atomic second someone goes to the water
To give it all up, catapulting on wings of green-green,
Descendant to the clear horizons of onlooker crumbs.
Because the river is a taker and the ocean a folding leaf,
The archangel still smokes as the farm-shaped world
Blossoms with headstones inscribed to youth gone
To water. Bitter great, stone tabernacle defiantly
Offered to a life of railroad tracks and steamer trunks,
The delirious rubber neck of disputed memory mailed
With insufficient post to the fresh candle flickering
In the hurricane heart. There, a forest dream in the last
Thing I ever saw. I am last century’s hand grenade pin,
Twitching to pump out the levy. Wet earth in descended shapes
Smells like hands rotten through chains.

 

 

PRUNING

The TogetherBomb unwinds
Between streets. Some of us
Are still travelers un-usurped by grief.
Others are insurgents to the flower’s will,
The pose of blossom, wounded
Hibiscus in blue shades around your face,
Arching across the stream. And the cactus,
Turning in their rock beds, sing
Of ripeness to heat. In the metal strip
Of sun on water, Caucasian tongues
Drink eyes with nothing left then go
To navigable destructions. We’re taking
More, more sky, more walls transfixing
Disfigurement. There are no omitted doves.
The wires circle tight the strips of words
Geyser-ing up from the Laundromats
And tickled fissures in everything I see.

 

 

TRAFFIC LEAF


It’s your turn to look at the road wreck. Stay.
Collect your bits, your un-voweled prayer
To the shroud of yellow tarp.
Give rise to this wound, oh flowering meaning:
Words on branches stick to your shirt as you pass,
This changes you from angel to violin
And there’s nothing you can do about it.
The new sound learns to live in its impotence.
The linden tree cakes palms of pollen
Across the already streaked arch of the windshield,
The comic eyebrow weeps yellow tears
In synchronized clusters, these gooping eyelids
Return the brightness of sleep the way a candle
Waving ghosts makes the attention slow down.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   
 

 

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