You are as a fish
stuck in the same little bowl
and though it is
a nice bowl,
rife
with all the trinkets
that a fish could ever need,
it is just a bowl
and there is such trouble
leaping out.

Instead, there are lungs
to be had, and claws
to be grown from fins,
for to climb atop a small stone castle
and leap so very gracefully
from the bowl-rim to counter-top to
kitchen sink, which is
not much better,
but
at least you can
flush on down to stream that way.

There is a New World Order
but it deals directly with french fries
at fast food chains and I
think I’ll have a large if you can manage.

The Gods are being dug back up
and in equal parts tacked on sandwich boards
and being hung out to dry, for to prove
the points meandering that nobody
knows anything and everything
is ending, and soon anyway.

but that’s okay, ‘cuz
even if the seas rise up to swallow us,
or the winds blow everything down to Texas
(What could be a worse Armageddon, after all, than to wake up in your own
home but down in Texas?)
, with all these things I’ve done and seen
I’ve had a pretty good run, it seems,
and even the very End Times can’t
take that away from me.

One was asked permission to breathe,
the other granted,
and soon they were huffing and puffing along
as if they knew what to do
with these intricately overcomplicated bodies
of theirs.

One felt is if they were falling,
the other as if they were
The Walking Dead, and together they
made a pair of fools with
too-high a limit on their credit cards
to be healthy.

Then they got to jostling and one,
he bumps in to the wall, and the other,
she falls over, and it’s all
his fault but she’s the one that
takes the fall and now everyone is screaming
and now everyone is slamming doors and
now everyone is leaving
and now everyone is gone except for me,
With only enough nails to board up
half the broken windows.

It’s been 36 hours
and with all
the smoke
and haze I
can still
smell you
on my fingers
but you’d
think it’d have
rubbed off
on the car
door handle
by now,
or the
cold side of
my pillow or
the shirt
I wore that
day.

He was a Career Man
and a Red Cross Volunteer
and his life read just like
a bottom-shelf dime-store novel
with all the characters stuck
in all their own little worlds
and the two-tracks tying their
countryside together would freeze,
every winter, and split,
right at the seams,
but he drove a giant pickup truck
and didn’t abide by snow-drifts
or stuck tires, and the folks he knew
hardly knew him at all, hiding
behind kitchen cabinets and
dead-locked storm doors. No,
they won’t be joining him.
Not any time this lifetime.
So he drives to town each night
and crawls inside a bottle,
waiting for the dawn to break
it open so he can drive
back home again.

I have no use for February Snows
or the salt on the half-iced roads,
and there is no great love with me
for plowblades or 2-stage abominations

But when I breathe that iced serenity
and I know that all the bugs are dead
I can let some ghosts be bygone and
prepare to bury all of the rest
under snows so directly-metaphorical
it makes my fingers cold to even
think of them.

And as his
eyeballs
run from his skull
and the thicker parts
are cooked instead
of liquified
and beasts crawl out
from beds and closets
to feast and flay
and lay to waste
him and his and
God Damn it I
wish there was something
that anyone
could do because
God Damn it I
would do it
but there isn’t
and I can’t

The lights come up and
these transient souls start filing
out every door, the walls
of this dark place veritably
hemorrhaging human life,
pumping it in to icy streets
and flooding our Fair City
with cancer.

Their bloods will be poison
and they will cut it from one-another
and every being will drip into nothing.

But the King of the Mountain
will stand unmoved, watching
and waiting until he is still
the King of the Mountain and
the only one on the Earth

I have spoken with your elders and
the ‘ayes’ clearly have it and
I am not quite qualified
to practice in your hallowed halls
nor play the psalms you hold so dear;
the sounds I am you will not hear.

But I can rest so foully deemed
and easily too, it’s true.
I’ll spend my time making music
and you can do whatever it is you do.

His family, a gang of dishwashers
come to make their fortunes from the harshest
fields of Hungary so many years ago. His kin
kept clean hands and a tight ship and
not so many amenities, save for liquors
to burn out the bits that made one
Socially acceptable on Friday Nights.

He hardly knew a day of rest and slept,
for the most part, atop a stack of rags
collected from his travels through the city.
His teeth were yellow and his hair near black
and the scars across his cheek and arms
made obvious his penchant for knife-fighting.

But he was a Gentle Man overall, with a
quick wit about him and a too-soft smile
that could send a gal to fainting. And though
his hair was only cut so often, he kept
the toes of his boots clean, and the hems
of his cloths were never in much disrepair.

His repute was not so bad and not ill-founded
and not so existant, save for the weekly
game of cards he’d been known to take to
with his brother-in-law. He never won too much,
but he never bet too much either, and so
was not to be scolded when he found his way
to buying another bottle.

When last I saw him he was still a Dishwasher’s
Son, but his head was held high, and though
he never said it, he was proud a man as
any I’d ever knew.

It is a trifling discomfort to know
that somewhere, out there,
in the great wide world,
you are still alive and able,
at will,
to speak.

Would that I could silence you
till thy kingdom come, you’d
be as silent as death, or
the warning letter that fell
from the post box yesterday morning.

Your shoes would be buried
in a square you’d hated
with a shrine for all you stood against
erected atop their grave.

I would dance there, most nights,
and conjure curses against your
Family Name,
with a book of strong words in one hand
and a bottle of strong spirits in the other.

But you walk still,
and breathe and speak
and though it is a discomfort,
’tis a trifle and nothing more.

The music played all night
it was late December if I recall
and the spread on the dining table
was glamorous and all-inclusive
the moodlighting was spot-on
The frost on the windows made
picturesque
by dancing candleflames and
sparking camera flashes
and the dances were slow
rather tedious in point of fact
with hands on hips and feet
hardly stepping but it looked right
and the music played extensively
yeah, it never really stopped at all

Each if their daggers is kept so sharp
and they are despots all
and they will cut the others to keep
their secrets safe and
while he brings his blade to bear
and cuts from time to time
he just can’t be okay with that
but he will continue, to keep
his secrets safe.

It was cold in that basement
colder than anything,
I could tell from my
frosted fingers,
Could see the smoke of
freezing breath
(I was told as a kid
it was my soul escaping)
and I
felt just like
I was going to die.

You were with me then,
and you assured me
there was nothing we
could do about it.

Then the ice grabbed me
and locked me and
my heart for an eon
it seems, and as I gauged
the passing seconds
I tried to cough the ice away
that was slowly stopping
my throat.

I think I heard you tell me
that you’d wait for the Spring Thaw.

It trickles and leaks down the steps in to cracks
in the stairway to fill up the basement
and eat the foundation
and drown all the life out of
everything, everything
we’ve kept around for so long
and as long as
the bilge pumps are broken,
and the kinder words spoken,
the stuff will keep dripping
and grips will start slipping and
soon enough everyone’s
dead

Carved Top
Country and Western
12-gauge
curved Bombshell beauty
With the black-streaked
blond and the
highlights here and
there and how I’ll
how I’ll Hate to
see you
go

Words are true and honest.
Meaning what they mean
and maybe a few other things
and no more
until they bend beneath
the heal of a heavy-footed bastard
and arsonist.

He will burn us both and crack
the boards in the hallway
that separates us. He is
a fool and a bastard and
I’ll pay any man a fine sum
if they find him dead.

He sows his seeds incurably
and perfectly and smiles and
stands so far back as to
watch his work but
only once or twice has he
been caught in it, and
it burned us all. His scars
will hopefully
never heal.

Days
stretch on as
the halls of a mortuary
stretch,
leaving guests
and grief to
wander in to infinity

but the nights,
they seem to burn like
paper on a candle
or a devil
in the sun,
sleep and solace lost
among the cold, unruffled
bedstuffs

but,
one day
I hope to have a night
and, after
easing my days
from the stretching,
perhaps
I’ll take my night
and call it one

She spoke Thick German
with an accent that felt
like it’d get caught in her throat,
and it worried you.

So you worked so hard, your magic,
mixing concoction after potion
after cure-all, but your whiskey
and sour mix and snake oil only
goes so far.

So her tongue lilts ethereally
floating past your ears and right
in to the core of you and
now you have to stop and stare
and perhaps mix up a Wonder Tonic
for your own benefit

They found the dialogue
engaging,
and especially from
half a dining room away.

Words carried on lips but
twisted on fingers
with that
BODY LANGUAGE
waltzing in the candle-
light

And in all the spit and
sputum I
found no cause to fear,
for my blades are kept
sharp
and my tongue just as well
and for just such an
occasion
as eviscerating our dinner
‘guests’