genesis

My name was never Lot. But you are always looking 

back. There were distances to travel, footsteps at 

the edge of miles of desolation, borders of barbed 

wire and high velocity rounds. I wouldn't flee the 

devastation of depravity. And It's not that I 

never left but the DMZ was too narrow. Now I am a 

faded pistol, blue worn through to rust, the brass 

shells rubbed softer than the memory of salt. And 

hammer blows are only a raising of whispers

.

wound

My hands are loosing blood again, charity singers linger in prayer, but my eyes still track movement against the noise. A curve of hip and some soft grace. Blackness surrendering to a static background. A brief narcotic haze. I probe the veracity of the wounds, doubting myself

. 

yet again

lost in the tangled concrete ribbons of interstate and the contrails of the knotted sky, somewhere between here and a deathbed. the hard edge of the horizon decides what might be blue. words sing themselves out the side of my mouth sliding past a mangy cur of a smile, a bit of humanity at my fingertip. goddamn! it's my lucky day

. 

taken

There are two moons, a celestial glow, the offspring found in your eyes. twin pinpricks offer no glimpse of memory under the dark stars. Nights submerged in the river of your flesh have left me no closer to you, no trinkets to adorn any future. You have taken from my breath promises, seeping between us, something assigned value by its theft. I will return for the chance to remember, perhaps there is truth in the agony of the tangible

. 

insistant

Three swallows from the tail-end of a bottle; I am anxious to slide the face from the clock. To close the hands of a grasping past or a future on repeat.

The sheets are cold, they are always cold until I wake in a fury of sweat and the cheap stench of booze. Dreams still raw itch in this uncertain consciousness. 

 

That last kiss was a punch in the teeth, a necessary violence, something beyond symbolic. Your lips were blunt and smeared with meaning. What demon were you trying to instill or exorcise? Even in this I fell short and only bled as the door hung motionless in the silence.

It is February and the neighbor's bottle brush plant insists on turning green. Pushing through the dead of last year

.

Awash

A fogged mirror, a television

in another room, a camera obscura

of shadows, a yellowed living room

from a dark street. Your skin inseparable

dissolves into white noise, eyes darkening

into indiscriminate pools, the feint

jewel of you lips settling into a milky sea.

Precipitating. The last fruit

drifting into the first snow.

Hands becoming air

 

tick tick...

I spend all night counting the wind.

is it a prelude to rapture, the tree

rubbing itself along the fences picket.

the tick of wires.

night bends around bodies whose gravity

deformed the flow of the rubble.

a breath to be held.

a hand grows on another bomb. death is cheap to the dead.

it is a red dawn, some birds ratchet into the billowing sky.
thunder will come after the prayers



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